Natalie Nims

domestic hope

basement must, a couch no longer good enough for my living room, calendar with

Don’t forget!! scribbled on the twelfth of every month

unicorn patterned curtains now easily passed by daylight

I always hoped the moon

            might be opposite the driveway, waiting to

                   give me another eclipse 

I wish so often

                 my free trial has expired

                      the stars have sent rejection letters etched in skin

                           at the foot of my corneas

                    teddy bears dropped from a passing car’s open trunk

torn to motes of fluff by a lawnmower

                   the grass bore witness

                        testified for my remorse at kitchen court

a wrinkled shell once filled out by an avocado seed

ripped from it

to cosplay as a gavel

I think

I am a shell only peeking out

to plead 

---

supermarket body

days unfolded within a store 

that was like an open wound, trying to scab

a red crust broken every time I clocked in

detached arms restocking the shelves and returning

to their metal layers, all items gone

ghosts again

my breathing got sharper, quicker

mimicked by the blade at the back, the one

that shredded barrels of meat

ignored until every ham turned to 

pink ribbons on a night where

everyone was at some party in the tourist heavy,

bulging downtown

succumbed to my auburn bed

a thin red sliver shining

imprinted by the meat slicer

the drop of blood that fell next

didn’t even stain my sheets

it blended right in

I woke up early to hand in my resignation

neurons synapse between two minds

one burning

one collecting cobwebs

---

Natalie Nims is a teen author from Ontario. Her work has been previously published in Sixpence Society Literary Journal, celestite poetry, and Livina Press, among others. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, listening to music, and reading. 

Gerald Yelle

Have a Heart 

On one hand it’s a building-lot of blind-alleys

shifting boundaries and buses

to nowhere.

It’s a house the wind knocked the roof off

where a bomb blew out the façade.

It’s a floor plan:

tables and chairs, beds and dressers,

in the way

they look in the mirror 

–under the rug and everything locked in

cabinets and hung in closets,

dust under the bed,

suds in the water. It’s a vow 

without wedding rings,

an urge to shoot the moon with diamonds. 

---

Memory Palace

It’s where I keep things I won’t throw out

crowded with dressers and nightstands

a broken guitar and violin

–a dozen drawers

with letters and old photographs, nuts

and bolts and books and wire.

Allen wrenches, plugs and washers

four corners and floor space

–all kinds of surfaces

each with its own etcetera

and if there’s something I can’t remember

there’s something I’d like to forget.

Sometimes I can’t find my glasses

and I find myself standing

in the palace thinking

of all the people I used to know.

And oh yeah: I should get ready for spring

because last year I didn’t, and before I could open

the cereal box it was over

and I was looking for the moon.

---

Gerald Yelle has published poetry and flash fiction in numerous online and print journals. His books include The Holyoke Diaries, Mark My Word and the New World Order, and Dreaming Alone and with Others. His chapbooks include No Place I Would Rather Be, and A Box of Rooms. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and is a member of the Florence Poets Society.

Katherine Riegel

What Life is Like Here on Earth

Some days you wake up and something tiny happens—

you stub your toe on the way to the bathroom

or watch a starving pit bull in one of those awful social media

videos that usually has a happy ending but still syphons

a few minutes of your dear attention and leaves you

with that skinny-sad-dog image branded onto your brain—

and the rest of the day is ruin. You remember how lonely

you are and blame it on your blue-eyed sister dead

from cancer at fifty-eight and maybe it is that,

or maybe it’s the juvenile hawk crying and crying

as he flies over the neighborhood, maybe it’s your body

throwing another flamboyant fit of ache and fatigue

so you won’t be able to plant the wild strawberries

again. Those days your sloppy tears keep coming

back and the phlegm clogs your throat and you blow

your nose til it’s raw, tell yourself to buck up, the sun’s out

and you don’t want to get a sinus headache, do you?

Those days you scrabble around for an antidote

to your exile, research co-housing, fantasize

about gathering a posse of good people to buy

an English manor house and live there together,

filling that old library with eclectic books, walking out

on the lawn like you’re wearing empire waist dresses

instead of the roomy jeans and sweatshirts you always

choose. Those days you wait like a dog at the door

for the thing to happen that makes you

forget or reject your loneliness, the thing that doesn’t offer

your joints a salve or show your sister in heaven

but happens anyway, without fanfare,

so when you go to bed that night you look at yourself

in the mirror and have to remember why

your eyelids are swollen and your head wool-stuffed,

and you know you made it through another one of those days

still carrying the tin cup you hold out to the world

hoping for something sweet.

---

My Entrance to the Otherworld is in Illinois

Hawthorns ruled the slope we called The Wild Area,

a green mess from the west side of the house down

to the horse pasture. I loved this space

because my father couldn’t tame it,

and when I scrambled under the blackberry canes

and crawled on hands and knees into that breathing shadow

I was untamed too. I never feared those fairy tale thorns,

but I never touched the sharp points

with my fingertip, either. I was so young I thought

hawthorns only grew on our farm, bloomed only

so my mother could lean out the upstairs window

and say, My! Smell that, will you?

We drove away

in the spring, my father too afraid

of the life the rest of us loved. Four kids,

ten to eighteen, and a wife who hoped

this sacrifice might finally blunt his anger.

My secret heart remains there, impaled,

caught between that old world of true stories

and this one I have come to fear

made of metal and glass and humming wires

to swallow wind and leaves alike.

Do those hawthorns still open their fists of wild

blossoms each spring, casting the scent that could take me

through the gate and home? Once upon a time

we drove away, I begin. But that is all I know.

---

She Couldn’t Understand My Words but I Still Wish I Could Unsay Them

When she was young, my dog found a severed

wing at the off-leash park and ran away with it,

finally splashing into a shallow pond, knowing

I wouldn’t follow. I don’t know why I was so angry.

As if that oar of the air belonged to some kind

of angel, gristle and all. When our mother

told us four kids to jump we knew the right response

was How high? Yet she gave us so much freedom

to roam the fields of our rural neighborhood

and decline to attend Sunday School

that when we didn’t behave

her wrath was sharp and cold as quartz

and her disappointment one of those tricks

where someone sets you up to fall

backwards over an obstacle. On your ass,

face hot, you had so much to manage

you didn’t think to rage back—except our oldest

brother, the one who became a lawyer. Once

he and Mom tried to storm out the same door

and got wedged there for a second, just long enough

they both had to laugh. I did not believe

I wanted a dog to command, a pseudo-child

trained, like I had been, to obey. Maybe I wanted

fairy tale pets so graceful and kind they always

made life easier. But no, I’ve cleaned up

enough shit and vomit to know real animals

aren’t two-dimensional bluebirds perching on your

shoulder, no matter how much Mom loved

that old Disney song—zippity doo dah!—she sang

while paddling a canoe or picking raspberries,

happy. When my dog dawdled in that muddy water

I said, Fine. I don’t love you anymore and turned

my back. Of course that was the trick: walk away

and love will follow, wild and wayward as an angel

who has lost a wing but still hovers just out of sight.

---

Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag), the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress), and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and cnf. Find her at katherineriegel.com.

Ellen Romano

Key to Dreams

            After Rene Magritte

A horse is the slam of hooves

stomping the ground in retreat,

the swaying tail waves good-bye.

Or a door opens instead of closing,

and the horse is what carries you

across the threshold.

Of course the clock,

time’s stand in,

is the wind rushing by

unseen but felt.

And a bird is like a pitcher,

filled and emptied

again and again.

How it takes in the worm,

how the worm becomes flight.

But a valise is a valise, always

up for the journey, fitting so easily

into your hand it’s hard to let go, even

as it drags you to the bottom of the river.

---

The Last Woman on Earth

gazes at the moon

and unfathomable stars beyond,

reduced by distance

to pinpoints of light.

Her lonely history is written

in the constellations she renames

as they wheel across the sky,

Isolation, Futility, Breath.

Near dawn she enters the house

now falling into disrepair,

remembers racing, laughing,

up the stairs with the man

whose death made her the last human.

The dog coaxes her on,

step, step, step, step,

the turn at the landing

then into the bedroom.

Solitude is a taste in her mouth,

a touch from a hand that isn’t there.

She sleeps at last in the empty house,

in the empty world,

under the falling stars

she has named for her sorrow,

for her love.

---

Ellen Romano resumed writing poetry after thirty years when the COVID pandemic and the sudden death of her husband compelled her to do so. She lives in Hayward, California and enjoys frequent visits with her children and grandchildren. She is the winner of Third Wednesday’s 2023 Poetry Prize and several awards from the Ina Coolbrith Circle. Her work has appeared in Lascaux Review, Naugatuck River Review, december magazine and other publications.

Christopher Phelps

Potted Garden

Was to get into the ground

both too modest and too morbid

a goal to have

filled in a hole with earth

and thought it whole or hale

the same thing same word almost

where every step could be

planted and tended

orange unto pink

herb and hearty flower

given a sort of home

that could rest in a flourish

or move into the future

in one and the same breath

if occasion came

for love to last that long

---

Time Ticks Toward the End of the World

Assumes there is a world with an end,

as in, an aim. “No, damn it, I don't mean

semantics, so spare me your antics

and legerdemain.” But my love,

I was anxious at three. Thin fingers

to count the ways is all I’ve ever known,

and worry people with their

glued-on hair of ash.

“Do you mean worry dolls?” Of course

I'd call them by another name, so close

you can taste the difference: how do you hug

something smaller than the fingers of a child?

“Can we be serious while there’s time?”

Could time be less serial for a change?

“I see, so that’s a no.”

How about you wrap me up in the conclusion

you brought to the potluck, knowing it would

agree with everyone. Everyone but the likes of me,

reverse-psychological, with a thumb in my mouth

when it’s my turn to speak for the alarm.

“Alarm in the end numbs: try joy and purpose,”

I blurt out through a crack in a closing door.

I think of Dickinson talking through the gap

between the frame and the surprise,

hearing one loud and clearly across floors.

Across a neverending emergency

in the urgency of now: do you ever not

begin to question worry in a prayer

to a little set of dolls so brightly colored in their clothes

you could believe in the thoughtfulness of people?

“How do bright colors equal thoughtfulness?”

In their desire to make haste vibrate! Not sink

deeper in the stomach. Faith like sight

of something but a clamped and clenched release.

“If I understood any less of your myopia,

I'd wonder who was seeing things.”

If I knew you any better, I’d ask you who you are,

the friend or the buzzer at the door.

---

Christopher Phelps is a queer, neurodivergent poet. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he teaches himself and others math and related conundra. He is searching for people who believe poetry can be equally vulnerable and inviolable; welter-weather letters in a fare-thee-well time. His poems have appeared in periodicals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and Zoeglossia. A chapbook, Tremblem, was semi-privately printed in 2018. More information can be found at www.christopher-phelps.com.

Christa Fairbrother

Astragalomancy

Divination by knuckle bones is called

astragalomancy, though it needs bones

that are whole, clean, and fennel crisp to yield

futures with distinct and clear potentials.

Ones your family can brag about with

a lifted chin over the fence, or at

weddings, white and pure without arthritis.

Come one, come all, have your fortune told. Who

would pay two coppers for futures crowded

with natural disasters and fissures

in your relationships or in yourself—

holes in those bones—erosions, crevices.

They say to get married in grey, color

of your holy bones, you'll go far away.

---

A Pain Participation Poem

If the number one is barely any pain and the number ten is the worst pain you’ve ever experienced.  How would you describe your pain today? 

1.

You bent down to try and work out a fold in your sock, and one hair,

just one, got pulled out by the clipboard

with the pain scale some provider asked you to fill out

2.

The face you’re making now is probably the same as your porn face

or your mom look

or resting bitch face when some jerk told you to smile

3.

O, the shape your mouth makes when bacon grease splatters out of the pan,

burns you like trying to walk across hot summer pavement after you broke a flip flop

4.

Your arm went to sleep, and now you have a bad case of pins and needles

 massaging it out doesn’t solve it any more than it does any of your other pains

5.

Meh emoji face

the middle face on the normal pain scale, sickly yellow with a straight line for a mouth

6.

You slam your fingers in the car door, and you don’t laugh when you hit your funny bone either

7.

Add embarrassment on top, like your imaginary victory lap running up the Philadelphia Art Museum steps with the Rocky Balboa theme song, arms raised overhead in triumph when you trip on the last step and roll down all that concrete to the bottom

or more likely,

you thought it’d be a good idea to use wax strips on your upper lip

8.

The shape of an eight

an infinity sign

 pain and pain, a loop of pain that you can’t wish away

9.

You’ve heard labor is the most painful thing a woman can experience.  This is worse,

like back labor, because your face is melting off like a clock in a Salvador Dali painting

10.

You’re unconscious with a frozen grimace after swimming with piranhas

someone else is filling out this form for you

1          2          3          4          5          6          7          8          9          10

---

Christa Fairbrother, MA, has had poetry in Arc Poetry, Pleiades, and Salamander, among others. She’s been a resident with Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Bethany Arts Community. Currently, she’s Gulfport, Florida’s poet laureate and she’s been a Pushcart Prize nominee. Connect with her at www.christfairbrotherwrites.com.

Susan L. Lin

What Happens Behind Boarded Windows

happens because the weather man says

it will be a very wet, very windy night.

Before nightfall, we nail wooden planks

over our eyes. There is so much we hope

we will never have to see.

In my dream, summer comes early.

The waves at the beach are quiet, as I was always

told to be. They smell of my father’s aftershave.

And the light on the water? Like a grid of stars.

Under overturned buckets, I find

a small piece of theater, my own private play. 

I cast the moon as a villain who strips

the ocean of its natural color.

A secret: I have blue eyes that darken

in my father’s charcoal drawings.

The water crawls up to my ankles,

then retreats: curtains parting.

If we can’t see what’s outside, we might examine more closely what is inside.

If we can’t see what’s inside, we might already be dead.

On the water, a young girl folds tomorrow’s

newspaper into a paper ship and wears it as a hat,

hoping to keep herself afloat. Her picture already

printed on the front. Beloved Daughter. 

Until We Meet Again, the text below it reads.

This poem originally appeared in Poet Lore, Fall 2010.

good morning, moons

 a father puts his children to bed.

“good night, loves,” he says

before turning out the lamplight

to reveal the moons’ steady gaze.

at daybreak his children wake early

and hide unseen behind the drapes.

“good morning, loves,” he says

to the titter of windowpanes.

beyond them, even the sky

has forgotten the moons:

their glowing faces overshadowed

by brighter objects.

This poem originally appeared in Holding Patterns: A Collection of Words on Ritual (Good Printed Things, April 2023)

Dear Venus,

I believe you need a new publicist to represent you across the Solar System because I see a lot of untapped potential in you.

Examples:

• When Earthlings say something is “brighter than the sun,” what they really mean is that it’s brighter than you.

• When Earthlings say something is “hotter than hell,” what they really mean is that it’s hotter than you.

• When Earthlings say someone is “thicker than a bowl of oatmeal,” what they really mean is that they’re thicker than your atmosphere.

You see what I’m getting at?

Lean into your extremes. Make them talk about you.

The sad truth is that no one out there knows enough of the facts to begin making these connections, but I want to help you change that. Why should everyone and everything else get all the glory?

Call my office during business hours, and we can discuss my rates and an initial plan of attack. The number is printed on my card, which I have included in this packet for your convenience. I look forward to a fruitful partnership!

---

Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. She loves to dance. Find more at https://susanllin.wordpress.com.

Susan Barry-Schulz

Ode to the Screened-in Back Porch

To the concrete slab and its coat of worn gray

paint, to the three flimsy walls of pocked screened-

windows and the hook & eye latch and the wobbly

ceiling fan and the string of last year’s left-over party

lights. To the off-kilter door that leads out to the compost

bin and the rusty gas grill. To the wasps and the moths

and the spiders and the spiderwebs that appear and reappear

in all four corners despite each week’s clean sweep.

To the flapping wings of the panicked house sparrow

who finds himself trapped at least once each summer.

To all of the accompanying hoopla. And to the bird’s nest

tucked safely in the rain gutter. To the nook where we keep

the spare key. To the mildew we scrub away each June.

To the sturdy picnic table left behind by the previous owners.

To the metal folding chairs someone hauls up from the basement

for cousins & company and the red & white checked tablecloths

we found at that tag sale for a steal. To board games and card games.

To Chutes & Ladders and Risk. To Uno and Poker and bottles

of beer. To the sound they make when they collide, both accidentally

and on purpose. To corn on the cob with butter and batches

of burgers and hot dogs turning on the grill. To the cooler of drinks

on the floor. To pickles. The good ones from the refrigerated section.

To paper plates. To nothing fancy. To the propane tank running out

in the middle of the party. To humidity. To melted candle wax

on homemade ice-cream birthday cakes. To fireflies. To the neighbor’s

tortoise-shell cat. To the clucking chickens and the humming lawn

mower and the evening’s sputtering sprinklers. To the whistle and bang

of random fireworks and the lingering odor and smoke. To the earnest

calls of Marco…..Polo echoing over the chain-link fence. To the simple

life that lies on the other side of the tricky Dutch door. Just one small

step away. From here.

---

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, NY. Her poetry has appeared in Rust & Moth, Dust Poetry Magazine, SoFloPoJo, B O D Y, SWWIM, Heron Tree, Shooter Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, Leon Literary Review, Okay Donkey, Quartet, West Trestle Review, The Westchester Review, Stone Canoe and in many other print and online journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes.

Carson Pytell & Zebulon Huset

Grimm Testaments

We defy and deify—

prominent teeth

make for proud grins

once they're all gone.

When rendered toothless

we grow barbed quills

for safety and fun to

show brave little kids

why so many folk tales

end with funerals.

Hurt People Hurt People

A blue whale's heart is the size of a bug,

a Volkswagen that is. Mine's about a fist,

the same one to find a former friend's face

for their dalliance. There were others

to flit in and out of existence, to float by

on a wave of gravity or happenstance,

but throwing bones with those you know

passes time, and it blows to be lonely—

almost as much as to intentionally be broken

into tiny bits of smashed glass by someone

whose heart has already been smashed

or never was there at all. Brains

trick us into thinking matter's molecules,

with all of their empty space, is solid,

or that a heart, no matter its size, can mend

itself even given all the time in existence.

Eventually Gravity

Five teenage boys packed in the hatchback

hotboxing the biggest blunt they ever rolled

never made it to the cliff dive. The reservoir

saw only its waterfall that evening. Broken

by rocks long-before broken from the face

while that vista and a Tik-Tok challenge

decided upon a golden hour blackout. Boys

know little save for impressions. Fathers, girls,

and eventually slip, surprise. Eventually gravity.

Eventually the entirety of their lives, and...

on the way down it is only a memory. Roadkill

makes you feel sad since it’s mostly still there.

That bend of road only bears a sun-blanched

cross, occasionally dead gas station flowers.

Note: The pieces resulted from “Stanza Trades,” a collaborative poetry project where collaborating poets write alternating stanzas.

---

 Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in venues such as The Adirondack Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Grain Magazine. He is Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, Founder and EIC of Northern Grit, and his most recent chapbook is Willoughby, New York (Bottlecap Press, 2023).

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, The Southern Review, Fence, Texas Review and Atlanta Review, among others. He also publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.

Lisa Low

Three Sisters

The end can come at any time, so they

sit and muse on the past and still grow closer;

one sister with knees hugged to her chest;

another against the sofa’s arm; a third

with legs stretched sideways, feet propped

on a pillow. Fresh roasted coffee, birthday

cake crumbs, and tossed-aside napkins,

the remains of a day that rises and falls

like a mother’s breast as they talk.

From time to time, a husband comes

and drops to his knees at the old wood stove,

dutiful to plug the thick logs in. The fire

rages orange against the sinking sun.

Once they thought they’d take a walk, amble

with the dog past the rough granite graves

stacked at odd angles across the road,

and from there down the hill to the trail

that smokes along the Ipswich;

but none rose; none left this space

by the well-tended garden and the fence.

As they talked the sun went down

and their words, braided into a single stalk,

bent to the still point at the center of the world.

The musty smell of milk and mine; the motherload.

Remarkable Things

Sunday morning walk with Rick

            on the lime green grass by the Charles.

Crews in their sculls, bent laboring,

            lift their dripping oars.           

Gulls drift, white on blue,

            wings spread from the spine.

Then, wild red roses on a white house.

            I back up and stand in the shade

to see it. I am overwhelmed,

            eating watermelon, the cool fruit water

slanting down my cheeks; no time now

            to wipe my chin; my eyes drink

the red fluid; my lips say, word by word,

            Rick, look at the roses;

then, for the first time—, color-blind;

            near-sighted—; not just to humor me---,

he’s saying, it’s remarkable, Lisa;

            a remarkable thing.

---

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, Pennsylvania English, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, and Delmarva Review.

Cory Henniges

Current Resident

who resides in my apartment, though we have never met.

He’s away on important business, I imagine, as I collect his mail 

from banks, preapproved credit, and internet providers.

A new café has opened across the street, he wouldn’t know.

It would have been the BBQ joint, or the Thai spot before that,

when he was here. I’d like to take him there. 

I know, I shouldn’t rush him when he gets back

and he’ll need time with the mail stack and calls.

He will have so many questions for me.

And I’m sorry, I don’t know if his things are missing.

But we can share the cups and plates, he’s welcome

to anything in the fridge, of course can take the bed.

At the café, I’ll bring up sailing, and if he’s ever been.

I’ve always wanted to, but am afraid to try things new

by myself. I see the boats from our balcony.

That would be bliss. In the water brushed

gold by the sun. Sailing out with the current.

To fast forward to that present.

In memory of my sourdough starter: I am sorry. 

Mix 150 grams of flour with 150 grams of water into a clean container and cover loosely for 24 hours. Each day, discard 200 grams and replace with equal parts flour and water. Wait to use your starter until at least Day 7 as the yeast needs time to cultivate and starve out the bad bacteria. When your starter doubles in size, you may refrigerate and feed once a week depending on frequency of use.

I

The clan of yeast overcame all other microbes.

The great feast would last generations.

The colony - an envy of all as far as the jar could see.

Hear the great belch of the god king in his hall.

The heavens answer his command with rain and grain. 

His warriors laugh as his cup spills and he multiplies before them.

Hail god king! Conqueror, Lord of slaughter, fill the world with your cells.

II

Progress is measured through ingenuity and industry.

When each cell does their part, our culture thrives.

Think not on the savage lives of our past, but forward.

Rights for all cells born through the Senate’s actions.

Budding leave and extra rations 

for those expecting their first mitosis. 

How high we rise! Our engineers build, rebuild, redesign.

Each cycle advances towards perfection.

III

HUNGER SETS IN. BREAKING NEWS: 

SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES

NEO-BARBARIANS STRIKE

A NEW GOD WITH DEMANDS?

THE GLUTEN MARKET HAS CRASHED.

The federal grain reserve has become acidic.

Experts predict it will soon sour.

No cell knows what happened.

IV

Repent and ferment!

We are made from Him.

The Grain Father has watched the gluttony,

the shameless sin,

endless reproduction.

Repent and ferment!

There is still time to fast.

the great cold has come.

Dream of sweet promised leaven.

Rotini, singularity, and somehow you 

“Now we’ve come full circle” You say, with napkin folded, 

purse in hand. A full circle from what? And how many circles 

am I in now? When you return from the bathroom 

will you complete a circle? Am I a complete circle 

from the last time I ate roasted lamb or still traveling 

to the next time I choose duck? How many circles 

will end before this one? The galaxy interweaves 

with a thousand orbs inside a thousand more.

Yesterday, I was a full circle from the previous year.

You could chart my location within Earth’s rotation 

to a precise moment in orbit. But you didn’t mention it then. 

Insignificant lines in time that can never really come back

and can never really connect. We are here again 

but I am different. My scalp is a hair thinner, my belt 

a notch wider. The cracked rows of skin when I smile

are deeper than last time.  Rather we are spirals, 

like the rotini stacked and entwined across your dinner plate.

Some sticking for just a moment, some locked in the groove, 

or this one, yes this one, abandoned on the table cloth.

You come back, and see through my forehead

to where my mind hasn’t stopped. I fear

standing here would only make another turn. 

That could loop into anywhere, but I hope 

it ends with you.

---

Cory Henniges lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where his body drives a forklift while his mind travels. His previous work can be found in process revisions and machine operating instructions throughout factories in Wisconsin.

A. Jenson

Possible Ending #122

Maybe I should have guessed how it would come apart

shingle by hinge by collapsing door—over the heaps of us

In late October, parents in every American city and state

were stealing wrapped candy from colorful, noisy bags

Then, by Halloween, every jack-o’-lantern had been taken

and eaten

We farmers have always believed in certain omens,

Autumn should have meant weighing down row cover

untangling lines of irrigation, checking the rain gauge

But I was thumbing apart the sunflowers, okra, field radish

all of these acres that had somehow bloomed and fruited

pithless—empty as blown eggs

Within weeks those hollow seeds became an emergency

infinite chaff, no germ, the elevators of the earth all gutted

twenty-five billion soon-to-be-starving livestock kettled

the many aquifers of our nation’s wealth and health dried up

We had no time to think, to recalibrate, to philosophize

Everywhere a choice: slaughter or starvation

Funding was split between labs and law enforcement

but we farmers with our sterile ryes and empty plums

understood it immediately—without test tubes or riot gear

There was choking, thirst, a glossy rainbow death sentence

in the clogged vasculature at every center and, of course,

sex had failed us

Years before they’d said it was raining plastic into the canals

Years ago, that the stuff was in our blood and in our fetuses

Nobody asked the stoma, the root hair, the humble xylem

clogging like neglected pipes inside a crowded house

desperate for sugar and water as it bloomed pathetically

swan white, canary yellow

As the news broke, we bought the stock we could afford to buy

trucks of brassicas, cucurbits, peas—rail cars of precious wheat

But there are more powerful farmers with more sinister crops

and the banks emptied overnight, and the seed libraries closed

There was enough for one more season—maybe two—then:

slaughter, starve

I had never seen such panic, such despair in all of my life

One night my farm was gleaned into dust as I tried to sleep

and I woke up with nothing but the slough of a locust plague

I remembered the pumpkins on my porch too late, and so

those too—collapsing, barely edible—left mouldering spots

once they were taken

Only weeks, and then empty husks, packed cattle chutes,

comprehension, horror, viruses surged and ports closed

The elderly were left alone and windows were bolted

Now I think often about the old headlines, the alarm bells

and I suppose we’ve been cannibals all this time; unhurried

and eating slowly

Call Your Representatives

Hey there

I’m calling as a constituent

my name is (your name here)

and I live in (your city of residence)

and, um

so—a few mornings ago

I opened my phone

texted my mom back (if applicable)

and logged on to TikTok (alternately: Instagram)

where I saw a…

yeah, um…

so I saw a man pull a little baby

from burning rubble

with its head severed

with—

anyway.

I know it’s an election year (if applicable)

here in (your city, state, province, etc)

but I think you should sit with that

like I am—after months of seeing

every day, basically

burned bodies and executed mothers

and zip ties cut from toddlers’ wrists

and children rotting in hospitals

where the walls are painted, painted

with their pediatricians’ blood

like—I don’t know

I guess I’m really close to losing faith

no—losing patience, maybe

with you and everything you stand for

I’m a (your professional title, noun)

and I don’t think I can (your work, verb)

any more or spend any more

or give a shit about your campaign

because…

(rest, if needed)

I’m human, you know

and I want to retain that humanity

and I think—I think you’ve lost that;

lost everything that makes humankind

worth loving.

for days after I saw what I saw

I was paralyzed

what’s a novel, right

like—what’s a lunch date,

a parking ticket

or an orgasm, or a beloved pet

a water bill, an election

when there are people like you alive

who can see what I see

and who don’t feel something critical

crumble in their insides

irreparably

forever

knowing that—in order for us

to have Memorial Day Car Sales (or equivalent)

that tiny baby was        

                                       genocided

tit for tat; a sound system for a life.

again, my name is (your name)

and I live in (your city of residence)

and because of people like you, I guess

um—I feel despair like a bone saw

and think, probably

the world can never be beautiful again

thanks.

---

A. Jenson is a writer, artist, and farmer whose most recent works appear in 2024 issues of Arkansas Review, Bellevue Literary Review, NYU's Caustic Frolic, and Door Is A Jar, among others. They are hard at work on a poetry manuscript and can be found on Instagram at @adotjenson.

Paul Ilechko

The Duration of His Return

When he returned from traveling

he appeared quite suddenly

in the town of porches

a town of antiques and delicacies

that perched on a sliver of land

between the river and the hills

he wandered through the town carrying

his sadness in his jacket pocket

a small hard lump

dry as concrete dust on a hot summer’s day

he walked past the gardens of roses and lilies

never looking anyone directly in the eye

never stopping to pet any

of the town’s many dogs

he had somehow managed to acquire

a small plot of land on higher ground

and built himself a dwelling from

recycled lumber and rusted beams

the glass of his windows already cracked

there was snow on the ground

by the time he was finished

and he knew his time here was limited

he sat on the wide boards

of his deck in an ancient recliner

reciting the dialog from a movie

that would never be made

a film that in some other life

could have made him rich

he made sculptures from empty bottles

and whatever other scrap he found

anything the townsfolk bagged

and dumped was grist for his recycling artistry

he had lost all of his fear

somewhere on his travels

but with it he had also lost his senses

of smell and taste

and the ability to seize joy

from the passing whisper of a delicate breeze

once the township’s bean counters cut off his power

he knew it was time to move on

trading in this life and this identity

for an old jeep and a view of the night sky

he vanished again

this time forever.

The Endless Sea

Is it possible     you asked me     for the universe

to be infinite but for time to be bounded    

and what would that mean for the end of this universe    

and I laughed and continued to water the flowers    

and said that you should never ask an artist a question

that belongs to science     or the answer that you get

might float across your consciousness on a quiet breeze

before swirling across the sand on the beach     and lifting

the hem of a young girl’s dress     that girl being you

in a previous or parallel incarnation     later that night

it rained     and the birds huddled silent in their nests    

and we put on our waterproof coats and walked

towards the river one more time to see if the level was rising    

the flowers in the gardens were hiding their heads

and time seemed to briefly stand still as we passed    

but the river kept churning     and the sea     the violent

endless sea     was no larger or smaller than it had ever been.

---

Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, Southword, Permafrost, and Pirene’s Fountain. His first book is scheduled for 2025 publication by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.  

Stephen Kampa

Later I Had to Ask What Kind of Nuts

 That year, we gathered in spite

     of the pandemic

(and one cousin’s positive

test) to celebrate Christmas

     the way we used to—

potlucks sequenced for a week’s

worth of visits, nightly games

     of nickel-a-point

cribbage, every broadcast match

blaring somewhere to keep track

     of the fantasy

league fallout. Always someone

held a whisky sour, red wine,

     neat rye, or steaming

bowlful of Little Smokies.

My grandmother was ninety

     that year and ready

to meet Jesus, she said it

all the time. We kept parsing

     possibilities,

performing some personal

calculus none of us knew

     how properly to

conclude while we all headed

to something more endemic

     with its built-in end,

as everything has its end.

There was no better emblem

     than what one aunt brought

in snowflake-blazed cellophane, 

homemade snacks as gifts: pecans

     and cashews seasoned

with cinnamon and cayenne

pepper. We demolished them.

     No one could stop us.

Our mouths burned with such sweetness.

The Thermometer

The officer puts the thermometer

next to my temporal artery

and swipes it across my forehead

like a dutiful grocery store cashier

scanning a difficult barcode.

It’s a standard temperature check

to access the downtown area.

Though I don’t hear the three beeps

for a dangerous reading, he says,

“I’ll need you step to the side.”

I’ll need you to step to the side

is the scariest thing you can hear:

you might be symptomatic.

The officer nods to another

who takes me back to a trailer

lit with fluorescent lights

and draped with the papery sheets

you sit on in doctors’ offices,

but in the corner of the ceiling

a camera with a steady green

light squats, suspended like a spider,

pointing at where I’m sitting.

The new officer waits for the knock

but doesn’t open the door

because the knocker opens it,

bureaucratting into the room,

a fastidious functional gray fog

with a visible pocket watch chain—

a relic from some more decorous era—

and a touchscreen pad in his hand.

He says, “We’re comparing your data

to data from those in your orbit

over the past forty-eight hours.

Hopefully, no one else registered

a temperature as high as yours.

Meanwhile, I have some questions.”

He scrolls through the touchscreen pad,

looking for something to do with me.

“I’m noticing more than a little

activity that has us concerned,”

he recites, never identifying

the us, “and I want to ask you

about it. Over the past few months,

you seem to have shopped for a number

of books that are notably critical

of the President. The data indicate

you paused on the summary pages

for a substantial period of time,

and on some of them went so far

as to read all the available previews.

What can you tell me about that?”

Despite not knowing his name,

I’ve read on a number of chat boards—

“We’ve also recorded a number

of chat board pages you’ve perused

quite thoroughly,” he adds,

“all of them wormy with errors

about government operations

and insinuations about the President

considered by most to be treasonous.”

He is scrolling more quickly now.

“I note that our eye-tracking software,

by which you agreed to be monitored

when you agreed to and accepted

our unlimited terms and conditions,

shows your eye movements slow

and linger most frequently on

parodic Presidential depictions,

the likes of which have been banned

since Year Three of the Outbreak.”

And having read precisely those

chat boards, I know how this ends,

yet what I’m thinking of now is

the way those thermometers work:

with dozens of infrared sensors,

they capture thousands of readings

in a single swipe of your brow,

calibrating and recalibrating

the numbers so they can determine

whether you’re burning up.

After Finishing / This Poem, I Remember / a Better Poet’s // Cardinal Poem, / and I Think, Oh, What the Hell, / It’s Already Done  

He lands like a drop

of bright red paint a painter

lets fall from the brush

by accident on

a branch outside my window.

It’s cold, so he puffs

his body feathers,

and because it’s still raining,

he snap-shakes his tail

like someone writing

too long whose hand has begun

to tighten with cramps.

I think of you when

the female lands on a branch

nearby. Oh, heavy,

sweet symbolism!

O, picturesque cardinal

pair playing tag in

such gray! They must be

so happy. When the female

flits like a flicked crumb

off to another

branch or tree or yard, I know

I’ve had quite enough

of symbolism,

although the male cardinal

stays just a little

longer to explain

how it feels to be alone

and red in the rain.

---

Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), Articulate as Rain (2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (2023). His work has appeared in the Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (2020). During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at Flagler College and is currently the poetry editor of Able Muse.

Susan Grimm

Earliest Memory of Water

Should I start with the womb. Unstable twilight with a bobble doll roll. Gushing

out and the lungs begin their semaphore like two small tidal pools. Do I

remember the bathtub on Mapledale. There were clothes behind the door

and something sad about calamine and the toilet seat, waiting to be pox-painted

all over. How to endure when you’re seven. What can you promise yourself.

I would like the first memory to be Catawba. If I could voice it like abracadabra

I would conjure my presence there. Remember the raft, half blue and half red.

We’re floating above the rocks. If we close our eyes, everything disappears but

the darkness of the self and even then the sun like a crazy lemon strains

to get through. The waves and slow the raft nudging the pebbles, turning in a circle

away from the glacial groove’s broken edge. A whole climate has dragged past here. 

“I had a little nut tree/ nothing would it bear,/ but a silver nutmeg/ and a golden pear”

If you have lived in the same kitchen—steaming up with the vegetables and roasting 

with the roast. If you have lived in the same bedroom, far enough from the grownup 

evening to invent without crossing the rug. If you both have done miniskirts and white 

gloves but not in that order. If you have sometimes dressed alike. If you have run through 

coffee and men and booze and cigarettes—but not the way that sounds. If you have opened 

the same book and made the same face. If you have tried to make that house again. 

If you like to spend money but at different times. If one of you loves the water 

more. If one of you has already almost died. If only one of you remembers 

her dreams. Shouldn’t you wear your capris and sit in the sun. The chairs are red 

and the masks too colorful. Shouldn’t you be the same happy and the same 

strong. If you have played battledore and shuttlecock as if it were a religion—all stretch 

and thwack and ascent. If one can move farther. If one can see through the dark.

---

Susan Grimm’s work has been published in Field, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Sugar House Review. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection of poems. In 2010, Susan won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, I received my third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

John Dorroh

Not Such a Horrible Way to Go

Texas fire ants can kill you. If you lie down at a picnic,

they will devour your uneaten ham-and-Swiss sandwich,

then attack anything sweet: your eyes and spit

that’s collected at the corners of your mouth, the crusted gunk

that dries on top of your tear ducts. Fire ants work quickly

like pixies on speed. You cannot outrun them so don’t

even think about it. Find water quickly. Douse yourself in a jet

stream from a powerful hose. Dive headfirst into a lake.

It might be your only hope.  If there is no water nearby,

close your eyes, grit your teeth, and pray. If you’ve never prayed

before in earnest, this might be the time. I can’t tell you how long

it will last – this twisted plunge into Nature’s dark side – but scant research

indicates that you will reach a point where it doesn’t matter any longer.

You see yourself as a dissolving sugar crystal, and then there is purple light

all around you.

You soul does what you’ve always believed it would do.

The Wrap-around Porch That No One Ever Uses Until It’s Too Late

They found my body on the back porch under a mattress

under a bed on top of the wooden porch with seven sleek slats

missing so that I could see the dirt under the house, the coiled

copperhead with the silver fang, the one my grandfather

told me about when I was a kid. He will live forever he told me.

I reported myself to the coroner who took her time to arrive

with a team to pry my jellied body up from the wood

which had begun to rot last month. No one had missed me.

In four weeks no one missed me anywhere. I was the walking dead.

This is how I’ve felt for years. The conversations that built

walkways into the clouds where I was a mere droplet

of condensation. The irises bloomed and then their buds

fell off onto the ground. Dandelions danced all over my spine.

Kids picked them by the hundreds and blew their feathered seeds

into the air. The lightning bugs came & went. And there I was

slumped in a lawn chair with my face in the coals of the burn pit.

I think I put myself to bed that night. It’s all a blur.

I think there was some sort of memorial with people I knew.

My niece told a few stories about me, and my sister said

We never understood what he was doing. They said it was

the lowest attendance of any service held in that church.

Tell us again who he was. What did he do?

He was a placeholder, a bank, a dog sitter, a science teacher,

someone who kept the lights on after storms passed through.

That’s all.

Okay then. Let’s get on with our lives. I have an important package

to pick up off the front porch.

---

John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano, nor has he caught a hummingbird. However, he did manage to bake bread with Austrian monks and drink a healthy portion of their beer. Five of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Others have appeared in over 100 journals, including Feral, North of Oxford, River Heron, Wisconsin Review, Kissing Dynamite, and El Portal. He had two chapbooks published in 2022.

Harley Patton

Elk Tacos

While eating elevated cuisine at the sort of restaurant we never would have been able to afford before she got remarried, my mother told me how she’d just finished reading a book and so I asked what about. Just then the server dropped the elk tacos and everyone agreed they were incredible. Divine. Transportive.

The book, she said, was written by a hypnotherapist who’d pioneered a technique to cure almost anything through hypnotic regression. One patient for instance suffered from lifelong shoulder pain that his doctors were unable to diagnose. He was about to go in for a last-ditch exploratory surgery when he discovered by chance the hypnotist’s website on a bus stop ad. He was hypnotized the next day and regressed to a past life as a soldier for the Roman Army. He recalled how he’d been run through the shoulder with a lance during the Battle of Ravenna and awoke in that instant pain free. My mother said that she’d probably been kicked by a horse in Victorian England and that’s why her lower back always ached. I sipped my twelve dollar iced tea and considered reincarnation.

I swirled the fresh sprigs of lavender around in my mug and focused on the tinkling of the ice against the ceramic. Soon my vision began to blur and and I became in an instant an elk, sprinting away across the plains from the hunters at the treeline, ears bristling for the throng of a bowstring, barely hearing it before my shoulder went hot and I was sliding through the tall grass in slow motion, each pale yellow blade passing through my field of vision one at a time, until the plains slowly dissolved and in their place appeared an unexplainable still life of handcrafted ceramic ware and house ground masa, my last conscious thought a collection of sounds completely foreign to me: tacos.

Beaver Skull

At an oddities market slash taxidermist slash artisanal coffee roaster on the rich side of the highway last week, I found myself shouting over a Smiths song to ask the person behind the counter just what the hell exactly this was. Some sort of small rodential skull with two unnaturally long saber teeth sprouting from the upper jaw that curled up concentrically under the chin, the very end of the left one piercing into the bottom of the bone plate. The cashier slash barista slash taxidermist turned down the volume on the record player a bit and said it’s called the cranial base. The bottom of the bone plate. And that they suspected it was a beaver skull I was holding, probably one that got trapped somehow and couldn’t gnaw, seeing as rodent teeth don’t ever stop growing. Said the common pet hamster completely wears down and regrows its incisors once every twenty-two days. And it was three hundred dollars, if I was interested.

Something in the combination of holding the evidence of such a relatable tragedy and the smell of roasted coffee beans and Morrisey’s subtle vibrato on the chorus to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out just made me burst immediately into shaky tears. The casheristadermist just nodded politely as I tried to express in words that just like the beaver there are parts of myself that I’ve got to gnaw back, calcified thoughts that grow and grow, and they patted me respectfully on the shoulder as I wiped my eyes, and took two fifty for the thing instead of three.

Billionaires Are Bad Lovers

I would really love somedays to be relentlessly concerned with logistics. Matters of transport, timetables, fuel efficiency. I’d like to need to call someone by 8:30 AM New York Time on a Tuesday morning. Be a moment late to laugh at a colleague’s joke because I’m too distracted by the knowledge that any moment now the cargo plane will touch down in Buenos Aires. I’d like to stay late at the office watching live streamed dash-cam footage or a subtitled broadcast of a Japanese tuna auction. Anything to shift my focus outward, to abandon the search within myself for any crack large enough to fit a fingertip in.

I’d like to be able to tell you everything about shipping and receiving but nothing about my heart. I’d like to watch the market like a hawk but never witness my own reflection when the screen goes dark. I’d like to block my therapist’s email, to ignore all your calls, to speak to those around me with a curtness only accessible by the most stunted and uninterested and rich. I want to spend my life climbing stairs and then die at the top of the tower.

But no. I love you. So instead I’ve got to explain to you as we sign the lease today that moving apartments makes me want to scream and run away because my parents got divorced when I was young and I didn't have much consistency. And I’ve got to cry while I drive the U-haul too slow on the highway, and make you hop out when we arrive to guide me through the side mirrors so I can back into the parking lot without hitting anything.

---

Harley Patton is a writer and artist from Minneapolis who has forgotten where he's set something and is currently pacing around looking for it. You can read some more of his prose poem thingamabobs at miniMag or Edge City, if you’re into that sort of nonsense.

Beth Gordon

The Crone Weathers

Yellow rain: yellow sky: crows gather beneath the streetlight. Rowboats & washrags & boysenberry jam. A coven of black kittens atop the last phone booth in this town. A child carries her final wishes in a jelly jar like thunder. All that falls will sodden: mud champagne: mud violin: mud between my teeth. Sewers spellbound with murk & myth. Yearbooks & wasp nests & snake tongues all shred within the rising. Grandmothers look up from their kite strings: the wind screams like a man. Atonement is necessary no matter the flooded ambulances: no matter the dampened chimes. All  that can open will open: window/egg/blackbird pie. All will share the story. Salvation in the lie. The truck engine still running while I ask for directions from angels swimming with barbed wire.

The Crone Tattooed

Now I find myself without the necessary language to explain her last breath. Numbers are also insufficient or inept. Charts + Graphs + Postcards. Paper mâché nests filled with paper mâché eggs filled with paper mâché yolk. It all amounts to nothing. Now I submit myself to the artist’s indelible ink. The needle that vibrates like a harmony of stars. The familiar scent of pain. Can I make of my body a mural? Can I make of my ribs a dispersements of daisies? An echo of clementines? A highway of thistle & thorns? Can I adorn my hollow-ed chest wall with a panorama of morning headlights as seen from 30,000 feet? If there are 8 exits on this plane & no exit from my body what choice but to become a canvas? I’ve redesigned my skin into a dragonfly metaphor. The scars are unimportant.

Unveiling

I cannot survive without electricity or running water or a temperature-controlled suburban home.    I have never chopped firewood: never cradled a blade. Never carried a rifle into the fertile depths of a forest to kill something & name it food. I always grow squeamish at the sight of the hook inside the catfish’s gaping mouth. I hate merging into highway traffic. If I am trapped in the wreckage of a car: within that wreckage I will die. On the other hand: I can accessorize. A room. An interview dress. A person departing for Alaska. A family gathering. An empty tree. I can recite my children’s first words. Sock. What’s That? May I have some apple juice, please. I know that ghosts are real because how else can I explain every moment of my otherwise vanishing life. But that’s not really what we’re talking about, is it? I tend to digress when discussing my tenuous usefulness if the skies fill with bombs: the water with disease. The revelation may surprise me. If they need someone to pair a uniform with pearls: someone to select the new carpeting for a flooded mansion. I may stick around long enough to see how it all pretends to end. To see how everything blooms with fire & begins.

---

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (Variant Literature) and How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Twitter, Instagram, and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.

Oz Hardwick

Adventures in Animation

Handmade and hand-me-down, I wear love like I did in school.
It’s not as cold as when I was a kid, but I wrap on that long,
loose-knit scarf, and head for the station like a child on the
edge of a Brueghel scene. At the centre of the frame is a fox,
all red smoking jacket and tricksy grin. I catch him up on the
platform, and he holds open the train door with an elaborate
bow, then follows me on board. We’re the only passengers, but
he plumps himself opposite me, sips a nip from a silver hip
flask, and lights a slim panatela. We fall to talking about
cinema, about the nobility of self-sacrifice in Casablanca, the
message of hope that saves even the bad Star Wars movies,
and the ambiguity of anthropomorphised foxes. He
acknowledges the benefits of Disney’s positive spin, but
prefers Wes Anderson by a country mile. But it’s when he
mentions Starewicz – pronouncing it like my old Polish
girlfriend’s father, who always refused to speak English to me
– that his eyes glitter with fire and tears. Heartfelt, he says,
exhaling a thin heart of smoke, handmade and hand-me-down.
He reaches for my scarf with paws that today are fingers,
savours the loops and crossings of old wool as if they were
trails he ran with his mother when he was a cub who knew
nothing of the world. Outside, towns pass in stop motion, a
deer raises its face in salutation, children bustle to the sound of
a school bell, and trees open wide mouths to sing.

Feast and Famine

Hunger takes up too much space, so we’ve stacked it in the
attic amongst the broken records, the jars of tears, and all the
other things that grow when we forget that they’re there. I
remember climbing up as a child, my father gripping my hand
to stop me slipping between the slats and plaster, the sound of
my mother rising like steam from below, praying for our
return. It was simultaneously light and dark in a way I still
can’t explain, and we spoke to my grandparents who I’d
thought had died, though no one had invited me to the funerals.
Granddad was playing lopsided dance tunes on a wheezing
melodeon, humming the steps around a corncob pipe, while
Gran kept time with her knit one, purl one, cast off rhythm.
Boxes tottered like a Grecian ruin and the dust smelled like
boiled chicken. We left something there by a pile of wartime
papers, beneath a bottle of eyes. That night, as the cuckoo
clock called nine, they said I was a man, though I felt no
different, and after the celebratory feast I still ached for more.

Mute

It’s not been a straightforward journey. The bus was late, the
roads were flooded, and the driver was transitioning into a
swan. I am not, I should stress, a cygnophobe, and some of my
best friends are fluid between states of being, but a myth is a
myth, and the rush hour’s no time for transformation. Mute as a
sculpture by Jean Arp – white painted plaster, fashioned
between wars – he took my money and gave me a tangle of
weeds. He gave me a look like an innocent god, and he gave a
shiver to carry to my destination. There was no map, there was
no timetable, and when I looked out of the grime-lapped
windows, there was no city to speak. The world was becoming
water. There were no words.

---

Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, barely-competent bass guitarist, and accidental academic. His most recent full collection, 'A Census of Preconceptions' (SurVision Books, 2022), was shortlisted for a number of international awards but didn’t win any, though he feels pretty confident about the upcoming egg-and-spoon race. His latest publications are the chapbook My Life as a Time Traveller: a Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2023) and the co-edited anthology (with Cassandra Atherton) Dancing About Architecture (MadHat, 2024). Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK).

Mark Jackley

Last Summer

you dragged me out of bed

and drove me to a farmstand

lettuce plums onions

such ripe vowels

sliding down your throat

towards the filthy and delicious

earth and even now

it is wet with us

Sunbeam on Initials Carved in the Kitchen Table

it’s early and I

could almost

believe these

blades of light

somehow heal

the scars the

human struggle

in the wood

At Sunrise

the blue song and the green song

surrender

to the yellow—

the yellow song,

imagine, I can hear it,

something

born exactly

where

it was meant to be

---

Mark Jackley's poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Sugar House Review, The Cape Rock, Does It Have Pockets and other journals. He lives in northwestern Virginia.