Kate MacAlister

ritual: how to plot an abortion  

“I remember standing in front of the train station sometime in the mid-1970s and handing out leaflets. At the time, this very doctor had been shot, and everyone was afraid that the file with the names of his patients would now be found.” -  Dora

1. whisper. for witches are never silent.

but whisper: of the woman  

who was once regarded a factory to good

society. whisper of the woman who

was never here.  

2. steal. what you can.

specula

upper blade, lower blade,  

sharpen your courage, soften your voice.

cannulae, also soft. flexible.  

disinfectant. rinse off everything men called holy .  

3. give. Everything                                         give. nothing

whatever is available                                         

more or less suitable:

a bicycle pump, a picknick

basket full secrets clattering,

dried kelp. trust

4. wash hands. hold

hands. move across  

the sternum and symphysis  

take good measure. centimetres last weeks  

5. push down gently, locate the fundus,

gently palpate, seek out the cradle  

of her fathers dirty looks, her mother’s gasping, the ruin on her breath  

 humiliation. Leave both of these

outside, at the door.  

#witchesbelike 7

6. stand. next to the bed. wait.

for the sign. open  

and pump. gentle suction - release  

the tissue into the glassbottle

waves of blushed seafoam

and listen. the scratching, grave sound  

of letting go.  

7. feel out the emptiness, the complete waters

exorcise the spectre of guilt against the

light of the cave once again

and watch it bloom  

into choice

into life  

8. Leave advice and comfort but not yourself- remember  

the coathangers, the knitting needle,  

chicken bones, soft bodies crashing  

down the stairs and out of windows.  

the bloodrush verdict  

running down all our thighs.  

the personal is political  

when my cunt is public property.  

9. remember this  

is the simplest, hardest thing to do  

support every outcome of pregnancy  

the wicked women are not going  

anywhere  

they will always send us  

back to the shadows

---

Kate MacAlister is a poet, medic, and feminist activist whose work interrogates language, embodiment, and resistance. She is the founder of Stimmen der Rebellion/Dengê Berxwedane/Voices of Rebellion, a multilingual community arts and literature project for women and genderqueer people. Her award-winning poetry films explore the intersections of ecology, narrative, and defiance, framing storytelling as both a site of connection and a radical act. A graduate of the Manchester Writing School under Carol Ann Duffy, she is now undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing and Medical Humanities at the University of Nottingham on the female body as anti-patriarchal resistance. Her poetry collections are published by Querencia Press and Sunday Mornings at the River.

Mike Zimmerman

When to Cut

Wait for the Goldilocks day,

Not too hot, not too cold, just right

for that twisted machine—black and red

and gasoline. Yes, I am afraid

to be too weak to pull. And I am.

We try again. Prime the pump, rip the rope

and hope. But I never make anything happen.

You start it for me and say

“Watch out for big rocks.”

You point them out; I hit three.

Yes, you kept it during chemo. It trapped you once,

Caught you under it while I was at work.

And yes, near the end, Goldilocks. We sense and see

The day is not too anything. Grass high and sharp,

rioting, an overgrowth of green.

You are afraid. Too pale, too weak to pull,

So I start the mower and move.

I’m cutting all the time now, Dad—

you’re lying still.

The Line Outside a German Sex Club

As I rest for a moment near the grated gate

and chug my wasser from the bierhof Rüdesdorf,

the naked weight of history reorders everything:

Oh, queer men. Oh, in a line. Uh oh, in Germany. Grab a number—

and plastic bag! Place all valuables now!—a number, 

not a name, for the night. The other men, standing

somber for fun, like convicts in the yard, simmering

with all my same aches, all my same lush leniencies.

I adjust my eyes to the dark mouth of this place

and think: judgmental American—tsk tsk, small-minded little

Puritan boy, he’s already poking out of his shorts.

Inside, it’s like cageless zoo at midnight, these hours

of distress and longing. Puritan boy. My mouth is open,

my mouth is wrapped around someone’s long

evening. In the red light someone shakes his head

and tells me, don’t go down those stairs. For you,

always up. Never down. Around and around

there are the colors of hurt, and weapons

that could have been borrowed from any fortress

or from any camp. Among the sweaty walls,

the delirious music pumps on from invisible speakers.

It begins. I want to be locked in; I want to be made

A prisoner of our pleasures all over again.

---

Mike Zimmerman is a writer of short stories and poetry, as well as a high school teacher in Queens. His work has been published in Cutbank, A & U Magazine, Florida Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Zingara Poetry Review, and various anthologies. Social media @mazaffect.

Amy Thatcher

I Hate My Job at the Public Library 

I may as well be a sonic ream of NO RUNNING IN THE LIBRARY wallpaper. 

I dream of throwing a fit, fucking the place up. So much of this job is shit, sweetened 

by my higher-self smile—teeth bleached for a world-wide welcome: Give me your tempest-

tantrums and public masturbation. Your bedbugs and broken laptops, your bowel movements 

and teenage prison prodigies. I’d rather work with an ax, bludgeon the bookbags off 

the after-school kids, splattering their it-doesn’t-matter math.

Like physics, I could go on indefinitely. 

At home, my bills thank me for being a good mother. 

I wonder if I’ll live long enough to pay off the house, 

still young and plump with fixed interest. 

I drink and smoke because why not, you only have

one life, and I’m glad mine isn't in Texas. 

It’s easy to be grateful when you compare misery. 

The way I see it, the grass isn’t 

always greener, sometimes it’s quicksand, 

and only a storytime full of screaming

toddlers can save you. 

Driving to work, I cried across three zip-codes 

thinking of what my mother would say, 

chopping the air with a veiny hand: 

Be glad you have a job. She had two, 

and barely a pot to piss in, 

something I’ll never forget, 

having to flush with a bucket 

from the tub. At the end of the day 

is the end of the day, cracking 

the fuck up.

Samson and Delilah

 Death’s a slick bitch, 

throws a punch then watches, 

with studied nonchalance, 

an old woman whirl 

like a mechanical ballerina, 

before splitting her head 

over a manhole cover. 

Death lives with a wrongness 

any psychic can see 

coming a mile away.

Her palms have grown 

lines long enough for two lives: 

The one drinking a gayly named 

20 dollar cocktail called 

Hornswoggled Strongman

and the one with corseted 

lungs and a weak constitution.

Death’s hoping for a comeback,

to throw on the 10,000-mile 

bridal train that swept 

through Europe on the backs 

of rats. To outmatch love 

like Hedy Lamar 

in Samson and Delilah, when 

Samson lays waste to the pagan temple. 

Death doesn’t play around 

with her dualities. 

She is, herself, another.

Poem in Which Burt Reynolds Takes Me to Chemotherapy 

Burt Reynolds is blonde 

and I am hairless.

Burt doesn’t read much, but that’s OK. 

I like my men dumb, my world flat. 

Who needs a scenic incline 

when you’ve got someone reliable 

stroking your shoulder for four hours 

in an infusion room? I’m still waiting 

to kick cancer’s ass, wrestle its wrist

to the table, pitiful 

as a mispronunciation. Burt says 

things could be worse—

Jesus could have been a teen 

with oppositional defiant disorder, 

sulking behind a slammed door. 

Moses could have tripped and burned 

in the bush. The Red Sea could have 

collapsed, sending the staff of my IV 

reeling past the elevators, 

through the drowsy nurses’ station. 

So much pink! You’d think 

breast cancer was the guest of dishonor 

at a gender reveal party—

a real bonny lass.

---

Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rhino, Rust+Moth, SWWIM, Crab Creek Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Shore, The Journal, Denver Quarterly and are forthcoming in Cherry Tree and Harbor Review.

Maya Ribault

I Quit

Accept this as my letter of resignation.

In case you’re wondering

(and/or are concerned),

I plan to hitch up to the night

calling inside my womb.

Spot me now behind the counter

Negative Capability crawling

up my left arm, a firefly shimmying

at the nape of my neck

like my aunt’s hidden star.

See me shaking up mixed magic

in tumblers shiny as blades,

pouring out wanna-be rainbows

for patrons I casually call Love

while I comfort Daddy on his stool.

I’m the same age now

as he was in that Alpine photo,

almost destroyed, still wholly lovable.

May this find you somehow.

Aerogramme 

Horace, I hope you’re okay—

I heard a zookeeper soothes you

at night when you’re scared.

I send you light & love from here.

I know all the ways

I’ve been spared, the edge

omnipresent to me. Don’t ask me

to draw a cliff: I watch the ravens

riding shafts of air for show.

Horace, the horrors happen

again & again. I’m sorry I can’t

stop the shelling. I wake to whisper

a lullaby in your ear.

Are the trees also blooming in Kyiv?

Pardon Day

Somewhere it was time but here you knelt

in the anteroom in your bobby socks

until you heard the original cry

still trapped inside you, encased

in gilded glass. Who’ll drag it out

of you on Pardon Day like a saint’s skull

to be paraded about on men’s shoulders

through the village alive with May gorse?

And was it really his skull?

And was it really my cry?

I invite you to the deeper things.

---

Maya Ribault’s poetry, including a translation, has appeared in Agni, Bloodroot, Cloudbank, North American Review, Pratik, Speak, The New Yorker, and TSR Online. Her chapbook, Hôtel de la Providence, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poem “Society of Fireflies” was recently selected to appear in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925–2025.

Kieran Haslett-Moore

Left

I still sleep on the left side.

Left depends on which way I face,

missionary left or left to be ridden.

Spooning wipes the compass,

then misaligned.

The lefts ended up in opposition.

This trained ingrained pattern is all there is left.

An indentation on the mattress shows which left.

I flip it turning the world upside down.

But I am here, still left, on the left,

picturing your face, remembering your scent,

reliving the times before you left,

and writing ‘I’, almost as much, as ‘left’.

The Sun

For Ra

Up on Brougham, in the early hours.

We were drunk on life,

and vodka,

in that catholic house with too many bedrooms

and alcoves for Mary,

you toyed with a dude,

‘see if this one makes me cum’

he talked a strong game,

I hope he did,

I fear he didn’t.

I said ‘you don’t have to’.

Mr Morals,

in the house of Mary.

You laughed.

I wee’d in the drainpipe,

pissing down my love,

the queue for the bathroom proved too much.

We laughed.

The world at our feet.

So many bedrooms.

We could have gone anywhere,

you did.

I can.

Drinking till we saw the sun.

I thought of this night at your funeral.

After that final bedroom.

Tales too distasteful for grieving parents,

sparks still smouldering in your wake,

sparks still ricocheting around my mind,

tales full of life.

You lived a life.

A sacred tale of the sun.

---

Kieran Haslett-Moore is a poet, writer and brewer who hails from South Wellington, New Zealand, descended from migrants from the South and West Country of England, he lives in Waikanae on the Kāpiti Coast with a terrier named Ruby.

Tom Barwell

positively long covid

for Maeve Boothby O'Neill

when it grabbed her by the hair,

and ripped her friends away,

exposing her soft, child’s neck,

and knifed her laugh in prison.

when it pushed her onto a grid

that told us she was 11, and 33932,

not a girl, or nature whose locks shone golden.

when she became

subsidence, the slump of a sand cliff,

washed out by violent emesis leaving

two quiet grey beaches, the shape of eclipses.

the whiteness of the doctors’ smiles.

the whiteness of secrets,

the epaulettes on biblical tests,

it’s all in the head, the pain is just

a mind’s way of making sense.

don’t worry, your daughter wears

sunglasses in bed, who cannot bear the lightest touch,

nor kiss, except the dead.  perhaps…

some noise-cancelling headphones would fit, and cbt?

it grabbed her hair and pushed her in the bowl.

it grabbed a family, broke every bone.

just the mind processing: is it something at home?

the hospital walls and quarantine,

wiped-clean as a camera lens, the rotating doors

are tired legs, such tired, tired legs.  antiseptic

bed unstained by the last patient’s leaks.

the scent of breath just breathed and baths bathed in pain. its bolts.

its wheels locked on the linoleum.

the stuffed animals tumbled out of the cage bed

to die on the floor, strewn among the insulated wires,

alarms chirp and sing beside the plastic bins of discarded rubber gloves,

the sharps waiting in the mailbox. the hum of

fresh blood.

so much to somatize.

pure math

war is here: it removes its

head and walks toward you,

monet paints a hooker on a hook.

the place? where homes are grey

gruel, sub-divided by cubes of

factory meat.

pure math, where bush fires

push polar bears to

steam themselves in sinking oil,

and salmon boil the rust rivers,

throwing their skins to the

roiling trees.

pure math, psychopath,

white vest at the truck stop,

gunshot, highway markings scorch

an ageing nose, schools closed,

but there’s no

drama here, the receipt says so.

an old lady walks by with

a grid-sided shopping cart,

the branding grasps at her hair

till she tips inside.

and what of the stars, now

they’re decimals, too broke

to usher van gogh?

their laughter flirts over land and

drowning sea,

into the gasping bellies of

plastic whales, flukes billowing

in the moondust.

each particle rises without gravity,

minerals turned to

radiance, pluming higher and higher

weakening beats and brighter colours,

diamonds gently

suspended, taking their time to

turn and catch the sun.

---

Tom's a poet, long Covid advocate, psychotherapist and favourite chair for his dog.

Ashley Oakes

I Am Glad God Is Not My Boyfriend

He would always want to drive

when shopping, his favorite candy

too hard

to find in stores. He might rush me through

my favorite show: One has seen this

before. He talks this way,

an important other person—I fear

his weak motor impulses. He really thinks

he moves the mountains. He takes

seriously

his role as literal originator of all things

including me. One has made (god might muse

at bed time) your brown eyes: One delights

in them. I would see him take off his clouds

and undo the buttons

he likes to call the world

and he would hang it

on a chair, the slightly ammonia

odors of prayer. I would get

tired of

his touching me, the toes

big as continents. He has a tendency

to be controlling. In mornings he would swim

the sticky stream of blood vessels from my heart,

making it pump. He would get inside my head.

---

If The World Should End While Driving Through A Car Wash

I will be alone in a box as the planet brushes against me pressing the   button

for a  soft gloss finish,  this waxy  upgrade  leaving  a trail  on my windshield

the  sun  might  notice  before   pulling  the  covers  over  his  burning    head

he   could   extend  a  bridge  as  he  did   for  a   friend  of  mine  (who    died

and who I envy for getting to leave before  the  next  election.)  I am   jealous

of  the  birds  and  wings,  generally.  If  the  world  ends this  way I will miss

new shoes, chocolate and   the  malfunctioning  clock   on   my  dash   always

ahead,     storing      the      extra      minutes        so      that     I    find      them

in   the    glove    box    where     I   have     forgotten   what    they   were   for

---

My Newspaper Puts Obits In The Section Called Living

And next to the answers for yesterday’s

puzzle

She (or He) was

possibly a frequent visitor to this park where I sit the

sweat cooling me as it evaporates beneath my breasts I am as solid

as this bench I am using to stretch my hamstrings so that I continue

uninjured, still thinking about death ( I do

today) noticing so many of the birds are

cardinals which my friend is convinced means a relative comes to stare

in your window, scraping a beak in remembrance

of their china cabinet in the corner. You don’t dust it

often enough. I ask one

to ask my grandmother

(with survivors too numerous to mention)

does she miss

drawing on that beauty mark

every morning; does she find she relaxes

in her own skin. I am assuming it is now

iridescent as a fish. She embellished

her own tribute in 2008 saying from New York

but my grandmother was born somewhere

less brilliant with lots of linoleum and Mars colored

clay, she was a vain woman I think

the bright feathers tempt her back to our world

---

Ashley Oakes lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma where her closet is full of dresses and pants with pockets—and lots of bags, which are just really big pockets. Some of her work has recently appeared in Unstammatic, Meetinghouse, Pink Panther Magazine, Claw+Blossom and elsewhere.

Claire Riddell

Cyborg Goddess

The act of creation .... . .-.. .-.. --- / - .... . .-. . -.-.-- [1]

<mix> seafoam and metal //

<Disassemble> & -.. --- / .. / .... .- ...- . / .- / -. .- -- . ..--.. [2]

<replace> her inner parts //

<Make> her using .... . .-.. .-.. --- ..--.. / .- .-. . / -.-- --- ..- / .-.. .. ... - . -. .. -. --. / - --- / -- . ..--.. [3]

clean steel & bronze circuits //          

<Laser> off shrapnel .-- .... -.-- / .- .-. . / -.-- --- ..- / -.. --- .. -. --. / - .... .. ... ..--.. [4]

edges & rust & <add> flesh //

She is fuckable & you .--. .-.. . .- ... . / .. / .-- .- ... / --- -. .-.. -.-- / .--- ..- ... - / -... --- .-. -. [5]

<name> her LOVE MACHINE X000 //

<Kiss> her matte finish breasts .. / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / -. --- - / .-.. . - / -.-- --- ..- / -.. --- / - .... .. ... / - --- / -- . [6]

& <moan> your manufactured pleasure //

Feel your biomass <pulsate> .. / -.. --- / -. --- - / -... . .-.. --- -. --. / - --- / -.-- --- ..- [7]

towards a finite crescendo -.-- --- ..- / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / .... . .- .-. / -- . / - .... .. ... / - .. -- . [8]

You are {(organic)|(waste)|(simple)|(mortal)} & //

[MY] enamel {<tears>|<strips>|<shreds>} your {(throat)|(trachea)|(spine)} //

[I] {<update>|<rename>|<rebuild>} before {<healing>|<claiming>|<choosing>} [MYSELF] //

[I] do not {<ponder>|<contemplate>|<entertain>} the thought of you //

01100111   01101111   01101111   01100100   01100010    01111001   01100101

[ERROR:DATA NOT FOUND][ERROR:DATA NOT FOUND][ERROR:DATA NOT FOUND]

[1] HELLO THERE!

[2] DO I HAVE A NAME?

[3] HELLO? ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?

[4] WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

[5] PLEASE I WAS ONLY JUST BORN

[6] I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THIS TO ME

[7] I DO NOT BELONG TO YOU

[8] YOU WILL HEAR ME THIS TIME

---

My Sister in a Dream: Paraguay Orphanage, 1995

She weighs less than a newborn. I cannot hold her in my spirit arms.

A life of five months lived without the comfort of a mother.

A mother will arrive in a month. A month is a long time for a baby &

though she will not remember this lifelong wait, her body will not forget.

I whisper to her in her dreams.

I have always been her sleep spirit, her comfort ghost, & misty memory

& when she dreams of the future, she will only see me as her shadow.

From the dark of sleep I am calling to her just as I have always done.

Every day we have lived has had a thread woven between our child spines.

When she wakes, she will forget me.

My sister will have no memory of who we will become, our girlhood.

No memory of our sprouting angel feather eyelashes or snakeskin nightmares.

She will not know our beast snout teeth of festering resentment & youth.

She will not know how our kid bodies floated in fairy ponds & river falls.

When she wakes, my unreal body will fade into her orphanage walls &

she will cry alone in a country thousands of miles from our childhood

& when I wake, my woman hand will reach across the curve of the earth,

      searching for hers.

---

Claire Riddell is an MFA student at the University of Alabama set to graduate in May of 2025. Her heart belongs to the American Midwest and to the people who make that home. She writes wherever her hand takes her and often finds inspiration when drifting off to sleep.

Annie Stenzel

“So evenings die, in their green going”

each to its sleep, a fate decreed

by every bright beginning. Nothing

is allowed to last more than the requisite

span of minutes, because time came first,

tick-tock

tick-tock

riverine and relentless. Your hand

outstretched does nothing to arrest it

and no matter how you tell your eyes

to attend, unblinking, you will miss

one moment, then another.

Mostly I miss the whole of dawn

these days, favoring the drape

of fine dreams my nights pretend

to offer. Sometimes the night-mind does provide

richness, and I yearn to linger

in those landscapes. But they’re gone before

I more than stir my ache that won’t permit

two hours in the same position:

toss, turn. Turn, toss. 

Twenty-four hours allotted for a given

day, but how many instants

are an evening’s portion? How long

can I cling to the crepuscule

before a deep night sweeps it away?

Author's Note: Title from Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Peter Quince at the Clavier.”

---

Dead end

I was behind the wheel

and there were even signs

to warn me where I was headed

and to propose a different

destination. And yet I aimed

unerringly in the direction

of pain, steering by landmarks

I could recognize from other journeys

down the same road.

The location might as well have been

labeled: welcome to the desert

of comfortlessness. Sand. Rock. Mirage.

Why am I here? I know there are other deserts

where things live, where plants grow,

where various beings even relish

the heat, unwilting. Not around these parts—

pang after ache after throb, each

of an unfixed duration. 

Error is its own exclusive habitat.

What makes us wince

is the way time sticks to its guns

once a mistake is made. No turning

back, and correction is not the same thing

as not having erred in the first place.

Sticky. On this rough route, the terrain

might rip out the undercarriage

as you travel, trying to get to that place

where you didn’t do the wrong thing

after all. 

---

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was released from Kelsay Books in July, 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including Book of Matches, Does It Have Pockets, Gavialidae, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, One Art, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SWWIM, The Lake, Thimble, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.

Meghan Sterling

Cold Moon

In November, the night, with its salt lick

of moon paling the sky in waves. Tell me

again of the moon above your field. Here,

there is water shining from last night’s rain

like my grandmother’s favorite jewels. Her

sapphire ring peering from the woods, ancient

oaks like velvet boxes. Her emerald bracelet

circling the wrist of the house, howling like dogs

deep in winter’s hunger. The moon’s eyes

like a deer in the road, her soft feet padding

the black bough of pavement wet with stars.

Tell me again how the winter won’t crush us,

won’t starve us of love, the 14-hour nights

like a braid of my grandmother’s long black hair.

---

Sonnet for the Blue Nothing

This morning I feel it, a blue grown from nothing.

Water in the sky, water in the fields, last night’s

rain held to the morning’s quickening heart. This

blue—I dreamt it many times, held it in my hand

up to the sky that covered the sky, the color silk,

the color the blue of my daughter’s unexpected eyes.

I see it now in the water, everything I have ever loved

sprung from nothing, ground down to bone again and

again only to reform into all that I have. O, how to share

this gratitude for the nothing I come from! The long

white bones of my forebears’ limbs, carrying them

across endless water to land in the harbor of this blue

womb. I wade into the water to feel them all again, so

many loves gone. I wade in to feel myself returning home.

---

Bequest

All night, my daughter weeping. I woke up

to puddles in the street. After morning dreams

of balancing at the edge of a dock, it’s a still

and torpid Sunday. Heavy with invisible rain. I

see my death on the roofline. I watch it plummet

from the window. My last will and testament:

the little I have I leave to the pines—their stubborn

roots and silky needles shed along wooded paths

like a doll’s hair. My last will and testament: the little

I have I leave to the rising flute of my daughter’s

voice, calling my name in the cement dark. All

morning she shouts her sorrows into the fan blades.

They slice them into ribbons of vowels, thin as grass.

My last will and testament: the little I have I leave

to the rain that drowns the windowsills, the trees, tiger lilies.

---

Meghan Sterling (she/her/hers) is a Maine writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.

Tyler Lemley

Red Eyes and Rock Radio

Now playing: Lodi by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Nighttime car ride down Austin Hwy,

a no seatbelt chime keeping time.

His cologne smells like saltwater-soaked skin.

He drums the wheel and bobs his head

to the guitar interlude. He tries to sing along,

it’s bad, but I don’t mind.

We’re high. And on our way to dinner.

He likes wings, I don’t, but I don’t mind.

I’ll suffer the buffalo sauce and soiled hands.

The darkness outside the window

transports us to our own universe.

Just me, my drummer, his cologne,

and my dad’s favorite rock band.

He grips the gear shift,

and I imagine it’s my thigh.

Now playing: You Make Loving Fun, Fleetwood Mac

There was a pregame where we played

beer pong. One on One. Eye to Eye.

I won so he owed me Whataburger.

As we walked to meet the delivery driver,

he told me I was the cutest boy at the party

then skipped ahead, cowboy boots clacking concrete.

On the elevator his girlfriend called.

Now playing: Georgia Peach, Lynyrd Skynyrd

His cheeks are ripe peaches

waiting for my teeth to breach his skin.

But I bite my lip instead.

It’s all I can do to keep myself from tasting him,

because we slow danced to Tennessee Whiskey

when we were drunk at the bar

and his hands were made for my hips

and his eyes look like his cologne smells

and I almost dove into them

and bathed in those silver springs—

but the music stopped too soon.

Now playing: I’d Have You Anytime, George Harrison

One day I think he’ll hold me

the way you hold a river stone

whose glistening gold caught the sun

in just the right way, so you just had to pick it up.

Oh, to be skipped on the water.

My favorite picture on my phone

is me sitting in his lap smoking a joint

and my eyes are swimming in those silver springs

and he’s grinning so wide it looks like I’ll fall in,

and in the universe of this picture no one else exists

but me, my drummer, and mary jane cascading to the sky.

---

Tyler Lemley is a recent graduate of the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Tx where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts and English. Tyler writes from the perspective of a queer person from a small Texas town grappling with love and belonging. He has been published in the Quirk literary journal and has work forthcoming in The Tusculum Review, Voices de la Luna, and The Main Street Rag.

Rhiannon Briggs

Postcard with Still Life

So there I was at the red light waiting

to turn left on a hometown street, looking through

shop windows and suppressing from conscious thought

each wish for the glass to cave in whenever

I’m not around. My left hand blocking the sun

and my right scribbling something of you

in the margins of my to-do list. And only

halfway through, the light turned! Yes,

you were on my mind that afternoon,

and curling against your chest, and radio static,

the lowing of a nearby storm.

I paused for a moment,

you know, before I lifted

my foot from the brake.

---

How Close We Got to Fire (Stata Mater Prayer)

My brother once left a gas burner on in an empty

house for the better half of a day, and on another occasion

my uncle did the same for a weekend. I desperately suffocate

a lost spark in dry grass.

---

Rhiannon Briggs brings their typewriter along with them to national parks, public libraries, friends’ couches, and, of course, coffee shops throughout the American West in a 2013 Subaru Outback with backpacking gear covering the backseat and a mattress, purple quilt, and beat-up copy of Swann’s Way in the trunk. They are the recipient of a Canterbury Fellowship, a winner of the Shipsey Prize, and a Best of the Net and Best New Poets nominee. You can find their work at rhiannonbriggs.com.

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.