R.C. Hoerter

Torn Grocery Bag, Food Lion Parking Lot

I see you, my love, alone

at the curb’s edge, perched

shyly, brown paper fluttering

in this pedestrian breeze,

poised to take flight.

I forgive you before you think

to ask. Your modest gesture—

an outstretched, unglued handle—

incinerates my heart as only

sackcloth and ashes can do.

I only ask one thing: Lift me

above the swirling boil

of flimsy plastic skittering

across the asphalt, make small

the SUV rooftops and shopping carts.

We’ll ascend on a thousand

feathers, a surging hurricane

making ponds of parking lots,

reflective windshield glass

a silver dance of light.

You never knew your beauty

down there, beloved, but now

see with a lover’s eyes

your soaring conversion,

origami wings climbing

up and up and up,

the folded become holy,

the torn, immortal sky.

---

Reincarnation

A few years after the funeral,

Dad roared back as a '57 Chevy,

shifter on the steering wheel,

Space Age tail fins and curved glass.

Mom knew it was him

and she was not pleased.

Who could blame her?

Sixty years ago, she wrecked

his baby and he’d moaned

about it ever since. Now

he was back, not a bang

or a dent, gun-metal

gray a match for his hair

in later years, blame

thundering up as a coupe

with swooping lines and vacuum-

powered windshield wipers.

She wouldn’t even talk to him,

just blew town in her BMW.

“Why now?” I asked.

Did his chrome grill grin?

He opened his door

so I climbed in.

We tore outta there,

Chuck Berry turned up

loud enough to rattle

the solid steel dashboard,

cruisin’ and playin’ the radio

with no particular place to go.

---

R.C. Hoerter lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. His poems have previously appeared in Mid-American Review, Whiskey Tit Journal, Cacti Fur, and The Mountain anthology from Middle Creek Publishing. His MFA is from Colorado State University, where he won the AWP Intro Award.

Max Polenberg

Separation Anxiety 

I am an organ donor, and that should make me feel good 

but I'm already so used to giving pieces of myself away,

That I'm worried my death would feel like an average afternoon

I wish I could remain selfish in death and stay intact for once–

each piece of me holding tightly onto the next

But that little mark on my license

stands as a sinister little reminder

that I may never have the privilege of remaining whole

But it's the right thing to do, isn't it?

Like when I gave my favorite pen

to that boy in my chemistry class

knowing I'd never see it again

even though he said he'd give it back to me 

because that's who he is: the boy who loses pens

and this is who I am: the boy who gives him all my pens to lose

---

I Have Changed My Name Three Times, But I Still Don’t Know Who I Am

I have read the "Top 1,000 Baby Boy Names" twice over

But none of them suited me

Liam, Noah, Oliver

None of them conveyed how I used to cry at ASPCA commercials,

that I once tried to unlearn the English language

so I could remain a wild animal 

not limited by 26 letters

James, Elijah, William

But I am tired from giving birth to myself

Life breeding life, you see

Is only sustainable for so long

Eating away like the snake with its tail

Henry, Lucas, Benjamin

I chase after myself

A version that can be put into words

Something tasteful and polished,

And easy to understand

Something I can swallow 

and spit back up for you

Theodore, Mateo, Levi

But the words get lost in my stomach

They come back half-digested and mucusy,

Bloodied and mixed with baby teeth

'Cause I can't define myself

If I don't know who I am

Leo, Jackson, Mason

When I do nothing but wait 

with my hands folded in my lap

For the tragedy of my being

To become heartfelt and alluring

I am waiting so patiently

to feel fully formed

Sebastian, Daniel, Jack

But there's no name here 

that tells you what I'm too afraid to say

That I lie in my diary in case someone reads it, 

change my name when I'm scared of my existence, 

and try to unlearn the English language

so I can escape my own humanity 

and the need for a name to introduce myself with

Michael, Alexander, Owen

Humanity between my teeth 

is humanity nonetheless

So, I am trapped as I currently am—

my tail lodged in my throat

and needing a title to present myself with

So, I'll go back to the top of the list

Liam, Noah, Oliver

---

Max Polenberg is a 20-year-old college student studying creative writing at Hunter College. Writing since childhood, Max enjoys sharing his experiences as a transgender man. Find more of Max Polenberg’s work on TikTok: @givingthesinnerwings

Francis Luo

Self-Portrait As Young Love

            for K.N.

In December, my friend offered to murder me

in the Sierra Nevada, and I accepted. We drove

up crumbling mountain roads until snow fell 

off of trees and out of clouds: melting clumps 

setting the stage for next year's ruthless road 

erosion. The pine needles spoke cold silence. 

In a darkened snowy clearing, we set off fire

-works that gleamed like stars in the blank 

night, then went supernova. Ooh and ah. 

The anxious sun rose, standing over snow 

marred by black remnant ash that we ref-

used to clean up. I sent an ecstatic laugh 

or cry into the sky like a flare, luminant 

as it danced through the uncertain gray

pallor, and had to be symbolic of some

thing. Later, twig-thin rivulets of red 

seeped into crystal white, spurting 

forth from cold hands above snow

above soil where an earthworm

could fertilize growths of green

or flowers the following spring.

My friend drove back down to

the Bay alone.

---

Optometry 

"Your vision is like mine," says the optometrist

in his cream-white microfiber voice. Clanky

machines, pretentious whirring lenses, are waiting

silently in the corner of the room to be used. "Myopia,"

says the optometrist, "which is just nearsightedness.

Did you know that's what it's called?" An answer tumbles

like a pancake out of my mouth, and he cuts me off.

"Are you applying to schools this year?" asks the optometrist,

and I tell him I will be next year, and he says nothing.

The lenses cast their ocular magic over my eyes.

Click, whir, clear, blur.

"Do you wear your glasses while driving?" asks the optometrist,

and I tell him no, I don't drive, and he tells me I'll need

to bring them to my driving test. On the monitor across the room,

my eyes perceive crisp sans serif letters as the vague

orangey purple proportions of clouds at dusk, streaming gloriously

past the windshield during my crepuscular car ride

in the passenger seat, and I tell the optometrist, I still see

the retreating figure 

of the setting sun.

---

Francis Luo is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area who has recently been published in Echo Literary Magazine, the Incandescent Review, and Crashtest Magazine. He's constantly surprised to learn that he writes more poetry than he thinks he does.

Charles Leggett

This Happens

1

This is the evening sky of many statues.

Of dim, white archipelagos. Of floating

Rorschach tests. Of ghosts out on a haunt,

drifting in formation with a menace

that passes just as they do. Of we sleepers

in fishbowls of our mild yet urgent tide

of dreams. Elongating and thinning; fading,

some, from white to pallid gray. And those

directly overhead, like island nations,

caricatures of kings' heads on old coins,

or etchings of a withered Pantalone.

Behind them, curtain of a solemn, silty

middling blue that's punctuated by

a dozen outmatched stars and morning birdcall.

2

The news collapses in upon itself.

Headlines falling into ornery stacks

like floors of a disaster movie's star

collapsing skyscraper. Instead of billboards,

thumbtacks; numbing, numberless. One's own

hips balking at the weight they bear. A dark

thrilling, these failures. Wet farts foisted into

a cavernous, old toilet in an other-

wise silent if not restive building. Vivid

faces reassembling their details

as if in a collage. The wet-dream cock tug

of a cigarette's first drag. And pounding

and adumbrating and accelerating,

until the life's a wilding and slow-motion

crescendo of wet footsteps, honking horns,

squealing tires, take-downs, ownings, bleated

algorithms, strident belches into

a deep aquamarine that's scarred by stars.

A woman, unperturbed, October 1st,

who rocks a Santa coat and beanie on

a Light Rail car. How will it ever end?

October gray as uniforms of war.

A gray evincing bones, bent over, as

cloud-cover blanket. Under footsteps, whitened

swirls all round, and wails across the flashings

of red-and-blue. The clouds arranged like large

dogs on the pewter carpet of a living

room floor, awaiting what involves them next

with varying amounts of patience. Looming,

as with purpose – the odd satellite

or star conveying its disarming distance

before it disappears behind the hounds'

flanks – with intimacy of these living

room floors. And are there samples of such blue?

These cryptic mirrors have been teaching us

for centuries... O thick, white pelts, blues, grays,

what have we learned, whatever have we learned?

3

The sky, with many distant fires, growls.

Is this moon ripped in half by light, or darkness?

4

This happens, and we shiver, the demotic

conflux of living now foregone, sensations

spread before us like a mural – they

inhabit us, we don't inhabit them.

And held close, each, as though the sky had gone

clear, or what was going to happen that

would let one turn a page had happened and

the words gone sweeping by, returned to dark.

---

Layover: Empress Hotel           

outside Kuala Lumpur

This building rises nakedly up

from rows of yellow three-story flats

like an elegant wart from the crown

of a dentist's hovering knuckle.

Lurching half-hour's drive from the airport;

lobby and halls suffused in prayer

chants piped in through a subtle PA

system. "Help in Time of Need” leads off

the Gideons' list of "Suggested

Readings" from the worn Bible they've "Placed"

 – next, as it happens, to The Teachings

of Buddha – in what I'll call the drawer

of need. Now, techno dance beats debouch

from a stoop below, across the street,

next door to Naeshan Trading, where men

in T-shirts are hunched at card tables

under a naked bulb's margarine light.

An equivocal phrase, "drawer of need";

need drawn as baths are drawn – immersion;

or sketched, in lines of a face – mundane,

sweet, straining to become familiar

in a nakedness dressed to the nines.

This piece was first published in Scarlet Leaf Review, Toronto, January 2016.

---

Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA, and a 2022 Lunt-Fontanne Fellow. Recent/forthcoming publications include KINPAURAK, THE ENGINE(IDLING, Beach Chair Press, ELLIE MAGAZINE, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, and Anomaly Poetry's latest RITUALS anthology; his chapbook HARD LISTENING appears in the latest Ravenna Press “Triple” series edition, No. 25. Charles’s co-adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS premiered in 2024 at Intiman Theatre with The Seagull Project, and his poetry film short TO FONDLE NOTHING has screened as an Official Selection at film festivals in the US, the UK (Scotland and England), Portugal, Serbia, Italy, and Austria.

Hilary King

Shopping

My husband and I go shopping for a sofa. My husband brings a book to the store. I bring knitting, laundry, a stack of New Yorkers, and a copy of Moby Dick.  We want something firm but giving. The back is important. I like this one, my husband says of a low brown sofa. He read Moby Dick in high school. He puts his feet up on the glass coffee table in front of him and opens his book. I get up to check something in the kitchen but there is no kitchen, just more sofas and more husbands, sitting on them, reading, the wives wandering into the kitchen to check on something, the stack of New Yorkers growing ever taller, the knitting unraveling, the whale in Melville’s ocean still swimming. What was it I needed to check on in the kitchen?  I find a green velvet chaise lounge, which is like a couch with one third of a back. I lounge on it. Did they ever find the whale? I know I can learn this without reading, the way we could buy a sofa online, the way we could divorce, my husband and I, sit apart, or recline with other people. I covet the chaise lounge but it doesn’t fit where I live, and besides, the sofa is on sale.

---

Crawlspace

I had the wildest dream last night.

The microwave was broken,

so I climbed inside it, sat

in a circle and reheated the soup.

Then I lay on the roof and let rain

collect in my elbows. I put my hand

to the crack in the foundation

that’s always been there, winking

at me. This is the dream I thought

I wanted, to be the one to hold up

the walls. I’m not strong enough

to keep every brick in place.

My face won’t hang straight in its frame.

I wring out my needs, but my hands swell,

like clouds, like rage.

I lift the whole rotten house and toss it.

I am a tornado, spitting, spinning,

dreaming my own silver dreams.

---

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, and other publications. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. She loves hiking, travel, and ribbon.

Daniel James

Guided by Light   

At the top of Chilhowee, the mountain hums like it knows our names.  

The car door creaks open – an iron crow whispering secrets

and we pour out like uneven syrup, my son and I,  

spilling into the night, thick and unsure.  

The stars above us blink like they’ve been caught in a lie,  

their freckles scattered carelessly across the face of forever.  

He squints, maps their constellations as if they were  

buried treasure, though no map I’ve ever seen  

smelled so sharply of pine and gasoline.  

“You know,” he says, “the stars don’t care about us.”  

And for a moment I imagine him  

as an astronaut marooned on some soft yellow moon,  

eating cold beans and listening for my voice  

on a broken radio. “Do you copy?”  

But all he hears is muffled static.  

He stretches out on Chilhowee’s rocky back,  

his hair catching starlight like a spider’s web.  

I tell him that they aren’t stars but tiny lighthouses,  

each one guiding us safely through the vastness.  

He laughs. Says, “That’s stupid.”  

But I see he is stealing glances,  

as if testing my theory with his plucky, suburban heart.  

I keep quiet then, letting the air between us swell  

with everything I won’t say:  

like how I’d pluck the smallest star and feed it to him  

if I thought it would keep him safe,  

or how his laugh carries more weight  

than the anchors buried in my chest.  

Above, the Milky Way pretends to drift apart,  

but we know better – the seams hold strong  

when no one is looking.  

He’s falling asleep now, his breath  

a whisper escaping a house fire.  

And I wonder: does he feel it,  

this quiet hurricane of love,  

this impossible glow,  

this thing I’d never say out loud?  

I write it instead,  

in the fine print of every moment like this –

the silent contract of father and son,  

two shadows beside a car  

that talks like an iron crow,  

spilled out on a mountain  

that thinks it knows us.

---

The Peculiar Tale of Moonbeam Roads  

I found it dangling from the corner of my eye,  

a road stitched together by threads of moonlight,  

wobbling like an old waltz on a crooked gramophone.  

My first step made a sound like someone cracking open  

a pistachio shell somewhere in Nevada.  

The second step was colder, heavier –

a young man in a corduroy suit stopped to ask  

if I’d seen his lost parrot (I hadn't),  

but I told him it was likely debating linguistics  

with a tortoise in the grass somewhere.  

The road unraveled itself as I walked – 

the asphalt alternated between static television fuzz  

and a parade of glowing soup cans marching south.  

A woman wearing a gown made of smoke  

waddled by, holding the moon itself in her left hand.  

"You’ll need one of these," she cackled,  

offering me a matchstick dipped in honey.  

I pocketed it, though I wasn't sure why.  

Each glance burned with its own rules –

mountains folded like origami elephants,  

an orchestra of chairs played violins in reverse.  

The stars gathered around  

a kneeling dog who spoke Latin –

at least that's what it sounded like  

when I passed through the sound of it.  

“Redemption is a couch stuffed with feathers,”  

the dog whispered, his eyes imploding  

into constellations I recognized years ago  

on a cereal box I now couldn't quite place.  

I tried to keep count of my steps,  

but numbers warped, bent into corkscrews.  

I reached a cedar tree holding court with the wind.  

Its shadow offered me tea in a porcelain thimble.  

Inside the tea floated a small sailboat with three cats  

singing in French about the sun catching fire.  

“Sip,” the shadow encouraged,  

and a thousand miniature memories burst in the air  

like firecrackers laced with forgotten dreams.  

The moonbeam road continued forever, or maybe  

just until the moment I decided it ended.  

But who could end something like this?  

I crossed paths with the scent of lilac rolling uphill – 

a whisper fell from the sky,

“Your shoelaces are planning a mutiny,” it said,

with the voice of an old crow.

---

Daniel F. James is a Louisiana-born Army veteran now living in East Tennessee. After a 12-year career in journalism, he turned his focus to poetry, exploring themes of transformation and resilience through vivid, often surreal imagery. His work has appeared in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Tennessee Magazine, Appalachian Bare, and the poetry anthology Bayou Blues and Red Clay.

Naomi Stenberg

Jones Street

You once lived with a woman amused by mimes and a man who was half coyote. You all lived in a house, a group home, on Jones Street in Seattle. In the Fall. But only in the Fall. Only one month in the Fall. The leaves on the front lawn blew in until they littered the carpet. The woman amused by mimes said she liked the way they crunched underneath her feet. Like old scabs, she said. She laughed. She laughed a lot. You heard her laughing late at night at the mimes she said were in her television set that she could see only when she turned the volume off. Funny as hell, she said. Marcel Marceau. She talked to you when you both were in the yellow kitchen microwaving mac and cheese or making peanut butter sandwiches. The man who was half coyote drifted by in the hall. He didn’t speak. He wore a gray parka zipped shut with the fur hood always up. Fur around his face. You called him Coyote in your mind because you had to call him something. His brown eyes in the fur parka were afraid and not afraid. He was not interested in you. The few times you met him in the hall, you passed by him silently because you knew somehow to never say hello.  It was a year and a half after you had fallen apart in graduate school and three months after you had found the last couch of a friend to drift on to. You moved in with four boxes of clothes and a box of old valentines and Christmas placemats marked Seasonal. You had traveled for a year and a half and were determined to stay. You put red checked contact paper in the drawers in your dresser and lined up your two pairs of shoes, tennis shoes and good shoes, in your closet. I’m going to be okay, you told yourself. I’m going be okay, a recitation, a lullaby, you half believed. For a month in the Fall of your forty-second year. You didn’t know that a corner of the roof of the house was starting to cave in. Even the squirrels couldn’t get purchase. The city condemned the building. You and the woman amused by mimes and the man who was half coyote moved on to other group homes. You never saw them again. I’m going to be okay. 

Ice-fishing in Wisconsin 

On days like this you try for one sentence 

to bead itself together like the long loopy beads 

Janis Joplin wore, was famous for. 

You try for anything.

Your line goes slack with no fish.

Somehow you’re fishing in Wisconsin, 

ice-fishing with a Budweiser in your hand and

a few raucous men that don’t get it 

that you’re a poet 

and don’t like you either.

On days like this you’re eight again 

surrounded by other girls 

and you have to open a lumpy birthday present 

from your Aunt Lois 

even though you know 

it’s going to be the terrible underwear 

she gives you every year. 

You are trying to unwrap one sentence now and 

have it not be old-fashioned lacy undies 

but something you can actually love.

On days like this you push your pen 

like it’s an old ragged mop

and you’re a janitor who has just punched in.

On days like this you know 

there will always be days like this.

---

Naomi Stenberg (she/her) is queer, nuerodivergent and thriving in Seattle. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets, Sky Island Journal, Knee Brace Press, Soul Poetry, Teacakes and Tarot, and elsewhere. In her spare time, Naomi collects, on vinyl,  female rockers from the eighties, does improv, and runs with her dog.

Alice Haines

Kindling the Woodstove

My feet do have their problems, so I wear

wool socks to bed, slippers when I rise.

Five below at dawn means cold floors

and chilblains—a fire first thing is best.

He tears out squares of newspaper the night

before (better than crumpled for draw), 

saves me scraps of shingles in a bucket,

old porch molding too.  Flairs good

but paint could be white-lead… what I think

anyway. Don’t mind the splinters on

the splits but can’t load one-handed if the cordwood’s

left as logs; they’re hard to hold.

Fire can’t grab them neither. Come

to think of it, I’m gonna stack those out

to the barn—don’t know why I struggle

so. Now these long sticks, the firebox

door won’t close. He says, get a bigger one,

catalytic, four-pot top,

and an oven. We have electric to cook on,

Forgets it’s me cooking.  Long time since

he courted me with home-made soup.

Kale and red-beans. Got to admit,

he’s handy with dishes and kettle. That oak

he felled last year burns long and hot.

I’m fond of the rusty old thing for tea

and a fry-up; may have its problems, but a new one

would crowd out the kitchen. Warmest room

in the house, got to be able to live in it.

The House

Empty when it welcomed us in, we filled

it comfortably; even the dirty socks

had a place. The sea-breeze fluttered the crabapple

leaves and all the windows glowed.

We brought with us an unspoken doubt,

as though a piece of puzzle was missing—

had to skirt around the lack, a habit

like avoiding a construction hole.

The house, eager to please, shielded 

us, tugging us back like a game.

Things began to disappear:  

one red mitten, a growing boy, 

as if they’d fallen through a worn-out pocket.  

Fragments of our best selves hid

under the furniture—civility                                     

lost. Despite extensive search, 

all that remained were two thumbtacks

and a button. Finally, my husband vanished

too, leaving a sliver of soap

and a liberating loneliness.

The house clung to me and whimpered

when I left. Now it shies away

when I pass by, as though I smell

of fireworks—or sound like thunder. 

---

Alice Haines’ poems have appeared in Pangyrus, The Healing Muse, Off the Coast, Northern New England Review, Touchstone Literary Magazine, and Pine Row. A retired family physician who volunteers at a free clinic, she lives in Maine, where she enjoys nurturing native plants, birding and tracking wildlife.

Satori Good

Ownership

My house is dry & warm with
white adobe corners & sloped
marble floors. Her inner walls
flush & thrum like cello strings.

My house is all legs & shoulders.
Bamboo pillars grow through
windows & open her up & suck
her dry.

My house is mine & other houses flirt.
They lower their shutter eyes, yield
stones that fit like hearts in hands,
paint their skins white. The houses

think they can be anything but what
they are. Women, boats, mansions.
I tell bamboo the houses do not know
their place.

Bamboo says let me show you pleasure.
The pillars fill me up. I see my house
regal & still & hollow. How often
I accuse her of my own desires.

How often she welcomes me inside
overgrown & satisfied, recognizes
subtle notes of earth, turns to bamboo
& smiles.

 

Conception

This poem is a green balloon
held by two children

One has mascara on her lips
                           I am that one

the second is a waxing moon
I love unconditionally
on the condition you love me

I dreamed I was pregnant
with this poem
it grew for seventy weeks
We named it together

                                    you said
how many women do you think
own charcoal grills

I said at least ten, can I borrow
a tampon

You said how many women
do you think are buried
wearing tampons

I said

what kind of dirt do you
want for your grave

Why do children tell the moon
goodnight

What gender is a poem

---

Satori is a cat parent and speculative writer from Lawrence, Kansas. Their work appears (or is forthcoming) in the Baffler, M E N A C E, Waffle Fried, and elsewhere; they were recently named a finalist in fugue’s prose contest. They are (according to reliable sources) an MFA candidate at George Mason University and Editor in Chief of the intersectional feminist journal So to Speak. satorigood.com

Nate Hirschtick

Brotherhood of Snowmen

I remember my snow it was mine just cause

of the red in it we were kids afraid how / gentle

a snowflake falls and rests on a snowflake I once heard they might each be unique

we called them all snow / feeling my blood

dripping it flowed down my face I paused my heart

painted a portrait in the snow / it said no to us

or it said no to me when W tried to break ice

with my nose he mistook what he was holding for something gentle / laughing

in it choking and pushing S into a bank how brothers play

together / we spread it

in the house on boots or in edges of gloves where sleeves met wrists

leaving a cool red ring of numbed skin / ice scrapes

ice in my dreams I sweep a shard across the surface of a winter lake the sound

is something we would never hear / I left my blood behind

who needed it when we lived and slept in it we swam like summer

through snow

I remember you light snowfall

the way we laid

in it we danced completely

still in the black and white

hard pavement

was our worst enemy I still feel

my purple knees

my fingers melted

on my palms I swallowed

my throat my tongue

went with it

I didn’t know

what to do with my hands so

I gave them to you

your breath smoking

in the air a cool

reminder

that our bodies

are bodies

My Earth in Midwinter

I’ve clipped once so far. It’s telling

how little it means to see

the plant on my windowsill

dying and say oh well, it had its day in the sun

and it was gorgeous, breathtaking, green

as life, and take the plant with hands that have deprived

of water and left sun-empty to bring

to the trash, saving the pretty pot and feeling

nothing. I’m in the small season

of my life when I light my bedside

candle and watch the yellowing

flame brush my empty bottle of wine.

---

Nate Hirschtick studies English and computer science at Santa Clara University. You can read his most recent work in Trampset, upcoming issues of Beyond Words, and elsewhere.

Caroline Keir

In Virginia

I pick up hitchhiking houseware and sleep till noon,

exist on sriracha and raw fish,

bourbon peach smashes,

Mucinex and Aztec clay.

Exchanging lectures for leans,

I loiter in overpriced coffee shops,

carrying books I never open,

scheduling scoffs for splotchy spray tans,

mullets that lack irony.

I walk without a purpose,

feigning convenient cramps and aloofness.

I don’t recognize former relay teammates or middle school jazz aficionados.

At night, the news feels heavier, Lester Holt harsher,

stories more embellished, embellishments more storied.

Ambivalence is punctuated,

exclamatory and hard stopped.

Hanging on to every syllable,

I console myself with mummified consumption of teen dystopia,

thinned cardigans that are fifty percent off on Wednesdays

or forty percent off on Mondays

if they’re marked with an orange or blue tag.

McDonald’s Sprite will do the trick sometimes,

but only if I forget the big glass of water with my morning toast and vitamins.

My mom tells me to go to bed earlier,

I sit in the refrigerator overnight.

City of Lite

The space between gleam and grimace is wrought with rubber gloves, chive.

Stale smells slant.                                                        

Here, I am eating things to eat them.

I am drinking things to drink them.

You are saying things to say them,

hoping they make you good

and fair.

I hate, I think. The way your laugh carbonates.

I watch it take up, expand until it’s greased all my mirrors.

Yellow film contorts my lower back into a crystal punch bowl, cheap,

     but storied.

Quartered, halved, contractions have always left me ragged.

I like this like, at least.

I think I like.

I know I like.

I think I know I like                                                                           

the way your stray fingertips digest themselves in empty pockets.

Seeking raw weight unharvested, something to chew on:

receiving amber notes that waft towards the wall.                                                                                    

---

Caroline Keir is a sometimes writer, always writing appreciator based in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she primarily thinks about ways she can most effectively incorporate jewel tones into her wardrobe.

Robert Okaji

When to Say Goodbye

If all goes well it will never happen.

The dry grass in the shade whispers

while the vines crunch underfoot,                                  

releasing a bitter odor. A year ago

I led my dog to his death, the third

in five years. How such counting

precedes affection, dwindles ever

so slowly, one star winking out after

another, till only the morning gray

hangs above us, solemn, indefinite.

Voiceless. If I could cock my head

to howl, who would understand? Not

one dog or three, neither mother nor

mentor, not my friend’s sister nor her

father and his nephews, the two boys

belted safely in the back seat. No.

I walk downhill and closer to the creek,

where the vines are still green.

In the shade of a large cedar, a turtle

slips into the water and eases away.

This poem was first published in Oxidant|Engine, 2017.

I Praise the Moon, Even When She Laughs

I got drunk once and woke in Korea

with you watching over me.

Odd, how you spend seasons looking

down, and I, up. If I lived in a cloud,

could you discern me from the other

particles? Perhaps your down is

peripheral, or left, or non-directional. I can

fathom this without measuring scope,

yet I feel queasy about the possibility

of being merely one vaporous drop

coalescing among others, unnamed

and forgettable, awaiting the particular

atmospheric conditions to plummet to my

fate. As if we control our own gravities!

One winter I grilled pork tenderloin under

your gaze, unaware that the grass

around me had caught fire, and when I

unwound the hose and turned on the

faucet you laughed, as the hose wasn't

connected and only my feet were

extinguished. Dinner was delayed

that evening, but I praised you just the same.

I look up, heedless in the stars’ grip, unable

to retrace all those steps taken to this here,

now, but still you sway above the branches,

sighing, lighting my path, returned once

again, even if not apparent at all times. Every

breath signals a departure. Each is an arrival.

This poem was first published in Sourland Mountain Review, 2017.

---

Robert Okaji has late stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. He lives, for the time being, in Indianapolis with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper— stepson, cat and dog. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, was recently published by 3: A Taos Press (not posthumously, as it turns out), and his poetry may be found in Threepenny Review, Verse Daily, Only Poems, wildness, Vox Populi and other venues.

M. Benjamin Thorne

Tannenbaum

To mark the miraculous birth

we bring a live thing into our home

and water it with admiration,

provide a mantle of tinsel and light,

hang ornaments like sacred medals

from its boughs and adoringly sing

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

how lovely are your branches;

all so that it can slowly die,

dried out into a browning husk

shedding needles like desiccated tears;

then dumped, with all the pomp

of broke-down cardboard,

onto the street, a lifeless bum.

Exhibit (Oświęcim, Poland)

The room crowded with puffer jackets

boots, young, angled faces illuminated

by secretive flashes of small screens

all flowing past the exhibits like clouds

the glass cases containing dull dioramas

of hate’s detritus, so mindlessly repetitive:

Shoes, glasses, suitcases

Hair

Towers of suitcases

Mountains of shoes

Cities of hair

A civilization

ripped from context

anodyne with academic text

A heap of spectacles

no-one wants to see

---

A Pushcart Prize nominee, M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in San Antonio Review, Thimble Lit Mag, Last Syllable Lit, Salvation South, Pictura Jornal, and Heimat Review. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.

Tracy Royce

The Summer Before My Mother Descended into Psychosis 

I worried about my hair. 

It had always been thick, lustrous, 

and best of all, attached. 

Then I found clumps clogging the drain 

and my comb came away kinky. 

My part grew ever wider, 

a strip of pallid scalp exposed. 

“Bald is sexy,” my husband joked, 

pointing at his vacant pate. 

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a bald woman,” 

I said, stooping to gather the strands 

strewn across the bathroom floor. 

What, I thought, could be worse than that?

What the Books Don’t Tell You

After Mom receives the diagnosis, you read the books, attend the lectures, learn everything you can about dementia. You discover that memory isn’t the only casualty of the disease ravaging your mother’s brain. Cognition, balance, even the ability to swallow will eventually decline. But no one warns you about the animals. That someday soon, you’ll be unable to soothe Mom when she tearfully insists someone has snuck in and drowned several kittens in her sink. That she’ll mourn her babies, also imaginary, whom she thinks have been abducted and torn apart by wolves. That when your frantic mother believes a tiger has killed your brother, your sister-in-law will refuse to put him on the phone to provide reassurance. That after years of this, you will gaze at the reflection of your sunken eyes and sallow skin and wonder just what kind of creature you yourself have become.

Note: An earlier version of this poem was featured on the Brevity Podcast Episode #10: “One-Minute Memoir” (2018).

By the Side of the Road

If we’re to believe the billboard, the beaming blonde used to weigh more, before her procedure, her transformation. Now her arms are raised in victory, a slender celebration of her triumph over the scale. As we approach the intersection, you see her, then turn to me with hungry eyes—perhaps I too can be tamed, whittled away, made to take up less space in the world. I hit the accelerator, blowing past the billboard, imagining you too are behind me.

---

Tracy Royce is a fat-positive poet and writer whose work has appeared in / is forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review, The Fat Studies Reader (NYU Press), MacQueen's Quinterly, ONE ART, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies.

Victoria Melekian

On an Ordinary Afternoon in Late August, I Was Clobbered by Happiness

Happiness trumpeted her way

into the house, leading a parade

of gymnasts, drummers, and a juggler

on a unicycle through the kitchen,

around the island to the dining room,

up and down the stairs. She twirled

her baton, the gymnasts backflipped,

and the juggler tossed flaming torches.

At the back door, she tooted her whistle 

and I asked her to stay, but Happiness

said, “Oh, honey, don’t worry. I’ll be back.

This is just a burst,” and she flung her baton,

missing the ceiling fan but not my head.

Another whistle blow and she was out the door.

The parade followed her up the street.

I watched till there was nothing left to see,

then grabbed a broom and swept confetti

into a sparkling orange and red pile.

Open Your Eyes, Rhonda

                      after Help Me, Rhonda, song by Brian Wilson

Forever

on repeat

you help helping him,

this dude is needy trouble—

sixty-two times

“help, help me,”

no dinner date,

no pink peonies,

no sweet note,

nothing but

you’re so fine, Rhonda.

Sixty-two crybaby whines,

sixty-two crimson red flags

flapping on sixty-two poles

planted in your grass.

The Hesitation is This

after Kelli Russell Agodon

There’s always a good boy
waiting to nuzzle your palm

and stare into your soul. A puppy
who sits for bacon treats, fetches

his leash when you say walk.
Next thing you know, he’s asleep

on your bed sixteen years
until he can’t jump up anymore

and you’re guiding that sweet dog
to his dinner bowl at night, counting

checkmarks on the quality of life
questionnaire. I swear, Kirby

was the last: his crate, his bed, the leash,
the treats, his raggedy racoon lovey.

---

Victoria Melekian writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in print and online and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. For more, visit her website https://victoriamelekian.com

Jane Medved

Transit

My granddaughter is seven and an accomplished liar. She stole a Swiss Army knife, then pretended to “find” it. She fed her cousin’s goldfish until he died. When forced to confess, she admitted he looked too skinny.

Last night, before I left for the airport, she hid my cellphone in the bushes. As we tore the house apart, she shrugged and went back to sleep.

Seen from above, the clouds are their own kingdom. Nobody wants to join them.

They rule over cold air and shadows, a grid of order then reaction. Their subjects are well behaved.

In Rome, wheels travel the floor. They arrive in pairs. Anticipation. Exhaustion. A little girl cries on concrete.

I am waiting to share my ride with a stranger. I walk up to men. Ask them for their names.

Is wisdom a circle, or a path that wants to repeat?

From above, the clouds are also an old woman. Her softness is an illusion. Her whiteness is the absence of color. Her interest is temporary.

Tonight she’ll be a knife and escape from the box.

And because I love the tree, I’ll ask her to chop my house down first.

Ways of Being Right

                after Kim Addonizio

Like thorns that announce the petal.

The erratic kindness, a smattering of good deeds.

A morning destination sunk back into sand.

An eruption of thirst, drown in it.

Sometimes you appear like a far harbor.

Gasping boats swim to you.

Sometimes you are the baggage unclaimed.

The reassuring whir, a repetition that can only be mechanical.

You fall asleep missing the company of crickets.

Their mating songs calm you.

The abandoned attraction.

You check your reflection. Are you window or mirror?

That time you were yourself.

That time it was suddenly past midnight.

That time you resembled the exotic.

The smoke and the aftertaste, the scratchy respite at the back of your throat.

And, once a month, a bright penny of moon.

Be gracious, nobody else cares.

---

Jane Medved is the author of Wayfarers (Winner of the Off the Grid Prize, Grid Books 2024), Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press). Her translation of Wherever We Float, That’s Home (by Maya Tevet Dayan, Saturnalia Books) won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize 2024. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming in Plume, Swwim, River Heron Review, Ruminate, and Bending Genres. She is the poetry editor of The Ilanot Review. Visit her at janemedved.net

Linda Laderman

catastrophe *

you scream after you see

your boy slip in front of a yellow

cab, an ordinary taxi.

The slackening of his body as

it folds into itself while you tremble,

bewildered at the looseness of your

grasp—your inability to know why

you’re standing and he isn’t.

and though the medics tell you

it was no one’s fault, you yell for them

to stop talking, and plead with yourself

for a description of this thing that makes

you keen—a color, a piece of torn cloth,

an origami bird. you hear your wife’s howls.

she wishes it had been you instead. you wish

that too. your words mean nothing. you think

if you go back, you can wake him, like you do

every morning. you’ll cajole him to get up, get out

of that black plastic bag and get home.

*After How Fortunate the Boy by Alicia Ostriker

The brevity of warmth

The summer I turn ten I learn about definitions.

That normal means two parents whose last name

is the same as yours, that ordinary stands

for a Schwinn bike, a sibling, dinner at six,

and coming in when the streetlights come on—

that June captures the brevity of warmth.

I discover laughter can be a weapon or a salve,

depending on who offers it to you. That you

can know who you are even when others don’t.

Mother teaches me about secrets. She says

our dirty laundry is no one else’s business,

even when it becomes everyone’s. Play as if

neighbors don’t see the police climb our steps

to stop the quarrels between her and my stepfather,

or behave like no one hears his tires screech.

But I hear. She caws after him, a broken bird

singing from a porch swing, then sits and waits.

The crack in her voice panics me. Still, I want

to hold onto her hand. He’s found in a rented room,

slumped in a chair, a newspaper opened in his lap,

an empty pack of Winston’s, pistol in his palm.

In July, mother teaches me to dance. Wearing her bra

and half-slip, she wraps strings of my pop-it beads

around our necks. We zig zag across the floor,

her midriff and breasts, spongy, like the yellow cake she

bakes for holidays. When she plugs in the record player

and sings Swanee, I lie on the on the porch swing and clap.

I feel, your love is real.

Mother decides it’s time to leave. We move to a flat.

In her bra and half-slip, she dances in the doorway.

By August, I understand the meaning of shame.

---

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Action-Spectacle, Quartet, Gyroscope, SWWIM, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Scapegoat Review, Rust &Moth, and MER. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University, in Ohio. More work at lindaladerman.com.

Mathieu Cailler

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure Didn’t Spark Joy

for Delilah the way it did when she was young. Maturation, she justified on her dark drive home from the theater. But she thought of her friends, who were also in their thirties, laughing hard at the rerelease. When Delilah arrived at her condo, she plucked a flashlight from her glovebox and searched for her joy. She scoured a park not far from her home, where she used to play hide-and-seek with her friends, swing from monkey bars with her brother, even shoot down a long slide whose metal burned on hot days.

The light’s beam illuminated the park and vacant playground equipment. But as Delilah turned one last time, the flashlight’s cone lit up three small children at the far end. Immediately, she knew them to be her innocence, her imagination, and her inner child. She looked on and watched them as they sat on the ground, serving make-belief tea, in a make-belief pot, on a make-belief table. They didn’t even notice Delilah; they didn’t even notice the light.

The Cheetah

ran so fast its spots fell off. From a distance, I yelled, “You forgot your spots,” but it didn’t hear me. I collected the spots, and made some signs, and I left my phone number. In the meantime, I used the spots to teach my daughter about estimation. I filled a glass jug with the spots and asked her how many she believed rested inside the jug. “Fifty,” she said. I guessed seven hundred. We counted them together and were both wrong. The total was 2,149. No one ever returned my call, so we still have the jug on display in our home. Over the years, we’ve used the spots as furniture pads, for my daughter’s art projects, for lapel pins and brooches, even for the dark-colored stones in checkers. There’ve been times, too, when I have placed them atop my eyes at dawn to block the daylight and allow me to sleep until noon. When I do this, I dream of lush veldts, of mountainous terrain, of sprinting at up to seventy miles per hour through Africa’s Sahel.

Out of This World

The boy walked home after a long school day. This time, though, at the end of Juniper Lane, instead of the usual yellow Dead End sign, there was a narrow, metal staircase overgrown with ivy. The boy started up the stairs. When he reached the top, there was an elevator. He pressed the button. It illuminated, and seconds later, the elevator doors parted. Wiping sweat from his face, the boy entered. There were only two buttons on the control panel: an L and a 2. He pressed the 2. The doors came together, the inside light flickered, and the elevator rattled hard enough to knock the boy over. Then ding! The boy rose and dusted himself off. When he exited, he realized he was on the moon. The ground was rough under his Converse sneakers, the lunar rocks poking through the rubber. Earth was so perfect from here. Quiet. Cute. Swirls of blue and white, patches of green here and there, and little lights in certain spots that winked at him. He wished his phone’s battery wasn’t dead from playing Candy Crush at recess, so that he could snap a photo and show his grandma later. Above him, a comet burned and fizzled. Scared, he crouched, then stood tall again, once the tail was far away. After a couple of hours, he made his way back to the elevator. He learned he couldn’t dream while looking at Earth. He knew too many of its answers.

---

Mathieu Cailler is the author of seven books: a novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children’s titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Wigleaf, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He has received many prestigious awards, including a Pushcart Prize; a Readers’ Favorite Award; and accolades from the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festivals. You can connect with him on social media @writesfromla or visit his website at mathieucailler.com.

Mary Ann Honaker

OUR COUNTRY IS DYING

The ceaseless ants do not sense a threat, and

continue to build their mounds of sand.  Whom

should they fear?  Birds appropriate seeds, do

their tiered mating calls from tree to shrub. I

watch the leaves nod.  Time is only time.  Call

to the steep cliff; it will answer.  In my

house I have blankets, tea, no enemy.

Sky portions out its portions of rain.  An

unseasonal drought, the sky an enemy.

Who stuffs her reason under her fear?  Must

we?  The light drops a gear, soon we'll be

closed up in night's cloak. We are all worthy,

clocked in on the planet's time clock of

years.  Is there to be an engagement?

I will engage my skin to light. I

won't pluck the rose, because it's your turn

to bend to it.  Our years are clipped, so in

them bask.  In them scream.  In them nap, and the

rivers will flow from any direction.

My mind has an ocean in it, it's of

night, stars on water.  There I drown. The

night and day change places, hover. Sun

leaves us: but it still shines elsewhere, and

night, that huge bear, paces the globe.  We keep

still as night passes over, keeps walking.

We have loneliness in common; it’s

a curious bell jar.  In common we hold the

change of autumn light, winter's scrim on heart.

In common the earth breaking in spring, that

cracking that breaks us open too, asks

how much hurt is worth it to live. In the

summer, we buzz like trapped bees and question

less.  The moon is there and then it's not.

I look for shine and find a scratch in my

sky instead.  Full moons make us furious.

Do we listen to the heart or mind?--

a question we share.  Salt air, how the

scent of it humbles.  Immensity, heart,

pulses in the night, and the sea at night is

overwhelm.  Galaxies above, and the

deeps below.  They say it makes us smaller,

but I say we expand, we are cousin

or closer to the furthest blue star of

the heavens we can't with the naked eye, the

largest telescope, see.  We are the sun.

We are the earth, when it turns, we with it

turn.  We are the hawk's fine-tuned eye which sees

the chipmunk, and we are the chipmunk, and

no one steps to the edge of what she knows.

Everything is me; I am everything.

This goes for you too, and for the fly, it

goes.  All is One. Imagine what god hears!

God hears how my cat hears my smashing the

keyboard keys. God hears my tuneless gnashing

teeth in sleep, my teeth's vibrations, even.

God hears the tree's heartwood tremble as

the storm rumbles.  What is it?  We're all it.

Our country is dying, the nation hears.

The universe expands; the sun burns, the

fuel is limited.  To be is a blessing

in this iteration.  Others follow. The

cycles are endless, cold or fire a door.

Someone breathes a long exhale. We go to

the end of it. Then the long inhale. The

exhale has a bit to go, in my mind.

Of course there are things we all should.

Of course there's a right, and it's the only.

But let the sea-doors and air-doors open!

The doors of fire and night!  We can walk from

the world and still be of the world, of the

endless fixing.  Injustice hurts the  heart.

So we must.  But meanwhile, hunger. An

exquisite meal made by your enemy,

brought to table by your foe, who

you tip twenty-five percent. When he gets

into his car, a murmuration in

tune to the bass line, starlings taking risks

and just killing it.  Dusk rises from the

pavement like a mist.  He's in no danger.

Neither are you, the arugula of

your salad poised on your fork, becoming

a part of you bite by bite.  It's in a

country, this country, this happens, my friend.

Note: This golden shovel uses Joy Harjo's “This Morning I Pray for My Enemies” from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems.

---

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023), and the forthcoming Night is Another Realm Altogether (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, DIAGRAM, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, Tuskegee Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia. https://maryannhonaker.wordpress.com/

Alex Stolis

Mary Tyler Moore dyes her hair blonde

wants to look dangerous; Barbara Stanwyck

-Double Indemnity-femme fatale - cool.

She lives in a bright guilty world, rich,

rare, savage strange.

Imagines being called dame, slapping Rob

across the face, knowing it turns him on.

She gets to hell in her own way, chooses

her own circle; the shape of death

is a shadow cast by her embrace,

a noir moon burns bright, street lamp

flickers her awake. This babe means business;

the gun’s in her hand, the money’s in the bank;

she’s one dead-end alley away from freedom.

I’m frozen wonderstruck and cold-irons bound.

Mary Tyler Moore doesn’t tell Rob she fakes her orgasms

he’s sensitive in a way only a man can be.

She hates to make him feel less than.

He rolls over to sleep;

she brings herself there. He’s a tall Greek

or Italian, Michelangelo sculpted bad boy,

connected, dangerous;

his sole desire to give her pleasure.

Closing her eyes, she looks into his, drifts

away on the Ionian Sea.

She wakes in her own bed. 5:30AM

rise and shine bethehappyhousewife time,

put a flawless Good Housekeeping© breakfast

on the table. There’s an obligatory thanks honey

peck on the cheek. She clears the dishes, pours

a cup of coffee, a secret smile follows him out.

---

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections, Pop. 1280and John Berryman Died Here, were released by Cyberwit and are available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbooks include Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, (Louisiana Literature Press, 2024), RIP Winston Smith (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres (Bottlecap Press, 2024).