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.

Tom Barwell

somerset

i heard a tale this place is fake,

her poetry, her paint,

this gentle birth of hips and cheeks,

her quiet, mossy springs, 

as though each filament

had not emerged from tragedy,

and snowdrop couldn’t tell the tale

of death, collapse all hope, and

nuzzle its breath into the ringing earth. 

spring’s caress tempts wheaten fingers

from such sodden graves, their waves

atomically massage human witnesses,

overturning revolutions’ straight,

undoing critical urban planes.

bricks, in relief, become supple long leaves,

traffic lights turn into bees,

the thunder of bored offices

runs by in unrelenting streams.

her belly, under the ruffles,

takes in concern, breathes out,

skittering her lambs in morning

steam, heaves their carbon into

hungry crops, making oval loaves

from pure sunlight and precipice.

these fields are like the sky, passing

on all that london’s tried,

woodland eyes clock the shade with

mona lisa’s surety; not a speck of pretence

taints her poise.  there is no stab wound

in this acorn, no bullet in the songbird’s

tune, villages nestle in crook and brow,

churches tie a timeless vow,

hedges stitch and cattle low,

not in ideal dreamt, but stead.

while toxins flood these blue veins,

she remains immune, her art

blossoms, filling fruit-high hems, as

blackberries crown the dry stone walls,

apples flush alert,

and graveyards, peaceful as a root,

lay shaded by her ferns.

august crow

regarding, master crow leans,

then withdraws with a bead of my

belly wedged in his resin beak.

he doesn’t swallow yet.

he tips his head, incurious,

tugging at a ticket

machine, elastic skin tearing,

not quite severing.

a gentle exchange of potential,

no frustration, courtesy of my

pescatarian forefathers.

he adjusts a shoulder for grip, his

nimble fork, delicately clawed,

contemplates my tongue, tines

poised for piracy.

i know his wife: she’ll put my blaze

of turquoise around the rim

of her nest, and

save the burnt sienna for the

living room. our egg indent

will make a good sofa.

i appreciate the murder: a calming

sermon, delivered with undeniable

expertise, a distillation of

bright water. something decided,

this corpse was never home.

there’s a place i know, if

fortune’s feathers splay so far –

a yew a thousand years, a hollow

older than that, the other side of

a river that cannot break.

i’ll go to that glade, as i always have,

he to his broomstick mansion,

our lightning brushes together,

a gate releases its catch.

---

Tom Barwell is an English poet, psychotherapist and coach. He’s especially interested in nature, human nature and the relationship that implies.

Jane Bloomfield

Basic Instinct

Leonard Cohen made a cocktail called The Red Needle

Tequila, lemon and cranberry poured over ice, there’s

a coloured photograph of him in a day-lit kitchen

mixing three in fancy gold rimmed glasses

he’s wearing a short sleeve white shirt

dark striped tie top button undone

stabbing a block of ice with an ice pick

on a marble counter top ala Sharon Stone

in that movie she shocked the world with her

muff triangle. Leonard is tapping his toe in time

to his picks and humming the chord to a new song

he’s not really concentrating on the task at hand but a smile

sparkles in his eyes as he secrets the pick into a high cupboard

adds lemon twists to the golden drinks now pink with Ocean Spray

eight hundred and fifty cranberries per serve

Sharon winks and takes a sip.

Bob Dylan’s First Name Was Robert Allen Zimmerman

Once upon a small mountain town

there was a hairdresser who picked up women

in late night bars over whiskey rocks & promise

he took them back to his salon

to wash their hair - apparently

he gave heavenly head massages

whatever colours they had on their minds

the women stepped into the midnight

tingling moonshine scented scalps but damp

curly locks - they couldn’t wait any longer for

the world to begin while he longed to see them in

the morning light - they all said he looked like

young Bob Dylan

I recall his name was Robert.

Editor’s Note: This poem contains lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.”

The Definition of Affection

After dinner each night, my grandfather peeled, sliced and

cored an apple for my Nana, presenting it to her on a small

floral saucer in gentle act of affection. I can see him now sat

in the mid-century chair between chiffonier and side table

a smoked pipe cooling in his ash tray, a mother of pearl

handled fruit knife beside the ribbon of peel - a yellow globe

under the long skinny water colour of Gallipoli - worlds away

on the wall beside him. A smile lifting his face as she offered

him the last quarter.

---

Queenstown, New Zealand based writer, Jane Bloomfield, is the author of the Lily Max children’s novels. Her poetry and CNF are published in Tarot, Turbine |Kapohau, Does It Have Pockets, a fine line - NZ Poetry Society, Roi Fainéant Press, MEMEZINE, The Spinoff, Sunday Magazine and more. Find her at Jane Bloomfield: truth is stranger than fiction -janebloomfield.blogspot.com.  

Blair Martin

Editor’s Note: The first poem in this collection touches on body dysphoria & eating disorders. Please read with care.

Self-Portrait at 13

I befriend Ana

in a cookbook, whose

cheery print recommends

800 a day for ladies.

I, though no lady, round down.

Knit potholders to avoid the stab.

I fascinate on my two wrist

bones, pecking like a hatchling

still sticking with shell. Shame

worms in as I count each calorie’s

stitch. I have no sense that I shelter,

without feather or flight, in twigs.

The Bodies of the Dead

luxuriate as they decay.

Unhurried, no traffic cones

derail their commute.

They endure no disputes with neighbors

over the placement of fences.

Instead, they spill open in welcome.

Bacteria gorges on blue-black

flesh, the worm curls cozy

in an empty eye socket.

No one cuts them isolated

with a sharp judging glance.

They constantly commune

as their molecules whisp elemental:

the green in a blade of grass,

the taut raindrop before it falls,

the mushroom’s damp bloom.

When you trace the death date

on a tombstone, gather yourself

in envy. The living, alone, in the times

in which we find ourselves, suffer

when roots rot. The dead are already rising.

---

Blair Martin grew up on a small farm in Lancaster County, PA. They received their PhD in Clinical Psychology from Bowling Green State University and teach at Joliet Junior College. Their work has appeared in/is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, New Feathers Anthology, Redrosethorns Magazine, Knee Brace Press and elsewhere.

Catherine Arra

My Power

I’m twelve, blooming breasts, baby-bottle nipples,

clutching the shower curtain, a ring-like affair

in an old-footed tub, modesty wrapped,

head turtled out watching him

wrestle with the clogged drain, frustrated. My father.

Another household malfunction.

He looks up, scowls at my rising blush.

Oh, for Chrissake! Who do you think you are, Brigitte Bardot?

Frozen between who we are, who we would always be,

between my shock, his anger, wanting to please, to pacify,

I release my drape, dripping bursting girl-flesh,

silky mons pubis, tulip-soft wet skin. Punishing sexuality.

He looks away.

Goddamn drain.

Make-believe

Other little boys pretended cowboys, G.I. Joes.

Grew up to be pioneers, warriors, protectors.

You, fascinated with carnivals,

moving wheels, sweeping capes,

pretended a magician, then a knife thrower.

Grew up to trick your

whiskey-washed, cussing, smoke-choked,

dish-crashing, hollering, hammering, too terrified to breathe

world and pin it to the wall. By the hair, T-shirt,

black silk negligee. Wrestle it to the floor, stake it to the carpet,

only it wasn’t make-believe.

Ghosts wriggle free, voices tease, the cape twists

and plants you face down.

---

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter, when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals, both online and in print and in anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections and four chapbooks. A former high school English and writing teacher, Arra now teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at www.catherinearra.com

Kimberly White

The Little Girl Who Knows How to Spell Turquoise

 There is no silent beauty in her soul, it spills out loud.  Beauty of sidewalk chalk in Easter egg colors. Beauty of dandelions defying concrete, puff spores floating without need for breeze. Beauty of rust patterns on dented metal fence bars and mutilated cars which grow in the gardens of her neighborhood. Beauty in the hopscotch dance of her ten-year-old feet as she spells t-u-r-q-u-o-i-s-e with the dexterity of a forest sprite reborn on city streets complicated by competing thugs and decaying shades of stone and paint and yes, turquoise, where gunshot patterns bisect the hot air and bloodred burns into her sleep if there is any sleep in a hypervigilant world tempered by books and TV with stories of worlds which can’t be true and if they are, they will never touch her but it’s okay, they’re not really true, truth like that can’t live on her streets. The rough map of her street bleeds color shifts of black asphalt cracked into darker patch-veins betraying the dark heart of ground conquered by underground, shifts of blues filtered through dirty bricks and gray sidewalks and neon sparks and lit cigarettes and blinded stars until it is no longer blue but still blue, shifts to what was once green to what is now dead to that which resurrects in colors beyond primary, tertiary, more than what breathes into her lungs, sinks into her pores, pollutes her eyes and ears, more than her streets and her books can teach her, more than the name of any color can hold.

Author’s Note: This piece inspired by Law and Order, episode #398

Dirty House Poem

Springtime in my dirty house, and the corners are adorned with tiny cobweb empires whose silkroad strings flutter in the furnace breeze, still pumping against the early morning chill.  Who am I to judge these microcosmic worlds unfit to grace my home?  Next door, the dogs bark through the wind-torn fence holes, push their way into my yard to sniff and dig and make their own judgements about the dandelion blooms, the overgrown rose beds, the grass that is past its mow date.  I hang back, spy from the window shadows as they soak up the springtime flavors and textures to take home to unravel and interpret and compare to the sensory smorgasbord on their own side of the fence.  Seasons come fractious, discontented even when settling in for the stay they know is temporary, glorious and destructive with the bipolarity of the gods.

In my house, spring is an impersonal act, a visit from an out-of-town lover who forgets me as soon as he’s gone, displaced and replaced by the next iteration whose face is the same, different, the same.  The sedimentary footprints of spring mark the layered dust, my personal geology now bound to the season and its pollinated chaos and yellow air.  The open windows admit it all, cobwebs are stirred and reset with winter dust left behind, already braced for the summer layers to come. 

---

Kimberly White’s latest novel is Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, Skidrow Penthouse, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks, Penelope, A Reachable Tibet, The Daily Diaries of Death, and Letters to a Dead Man; as well as two other novels: Bandy’s Restola, and Hotel Tarantula. She also dabbles in other arts and spends most of her time in Northern California with her pens and papers and massive collection of Tarot decks.

Audrey Sachs

The Intergalactic Inside Out

They say it sounds different this time, train tracks

splitting to splinters, wooden teeth whirl-winding

to the skies, the entire enormous world yawning apart

from one minuscule particle.

The first time the universe was born, they say

it sounded like a tidal wave of mahogany pianos,

a chorus of seamstresses stitching to a ticking clock,

white satin gloves swaying in the mouth of the taxidermied

South Chinese tiger fixed above the mantle.

Each moment groaned as she merged into existence,

stretching long liquidus limbs sewn from time and crackling bones of change, and infinity,

human and inhuman desire.

The seconds blurred,

the stars oscillated up and down on the heat stroke of horizon,

laughing in chimes and pixie dust,

and from the dirt rose a single prisonous tree.

This time around, they say it sounds like tsunamis, the wail

of whole coliseums, colloquiums of liars, and psychedelic songbirds.

They say it cheats at poker, eats only celery, and lives in an old apartment in Warsaw.

They say it reads Kafka.

They say its Russian is very bad, but when it dances, the halls of Moscow dance back.

They say it could be so much worse.

They say it isn’t a saint.

They say it isn’t even sane.

They say it can only hear itself when it knows it’s dying.    

SHEEP SHEEP Through the Car Window SHEEP SPARROW SHEEP

There’s a person in the water wastes,

trapped in the fields at early dawn when the grey is bitten away by flecks of iridescence glinting off the glassy surface

They’re up early

Before the shepherds run loose, the birds sweep down low, and the afternoon thunderstorms trade voices with the accordion in the house below the hill

Early enough that you can see all sorts of things:

the green dipping into blues on the horizon

And little pink and white sails swimming out to sea

Little soot insects race away atop the drowned fields with every ripple of their big yellow boots traipsing zipping lines into the water

In a puddle, a white sparrow’s skeleton shows its fine bones to the bluing sun

But the person moves by, unwilling to break their sturdy stride

Past the roots, the forest, the garden patch

The fields of water feed into marsh feed into swamp

And in the forested wetlands

Boats of leaves do float with such density

That the ground appears blanketed

In a shifting mass of green carpeting

Turn left at the island amassed in petals

And find the ten thousand-year tree

Sunken. Beneath the surface of the world

The little person kneels, laying hand to the lowest branch

While it crumbles away

With the heat of a palm

Reminding the lone messenger

Of the soil

The trails

The drowning days

---

Audrey Sachs is an eighteen-year-old high school student from Los Angeles under the mentorship of Brendan Constantine. She writes poetry, short stories, and novels. In her free time, she brews green tea and thinks about jellyfish. She is secretly a witch.

Nicholas Barnes

 too much to ask

a wilson basketball thrown at my skull. life then was endurance. my best friend forgets how to spell my name. a pigskin catapulted into my spine. up against the wall, i see the entire school playing soccer, tetherball, and hopscotch without me. i recite all thirty letters to keep myself entertained. in the twinkling of an eye, i’m printing that same alphabet soup onto a photocopied lease agreement. a new apartment. the roommate says this just isn’t working out. a diet breakup, a minor severance. the first time i was dumped was a dear john affair. after a night of inhaling all the unlimited possibilities. the h bomb was face to face. surprise attack. you were always going somewhere and that somewhere was never me. and all the other brokenhearted guillotine psalms i held over my head. like bottlenecks of dewar’s white label, jim beam rye, and smirnoff caffeine muddlement. here comes one more swearing off, a fit of self improvement. a new fifth of london dry gin to take its place. to calcify my grievances. stronger than before the fracture. saline eye storms chased with grapefruit tonic. then, i lived in the mountains of my own making. busted peaks of high life glass pulled up from the earthquake plane. maybe in some faraway land it would have all been better. in another body. in another brain. maybe i would have been invited to a pickup truck bonfire. maybe i’d have fit in at the senior promenade. maybe i would’ve gone. maybe someone would have said cole, love me love me love me. maybe i would have said it too.

private beauty

bought a two-headed tulip: $3.99.

i don’t get out much to feel the spring sun

so i thought i’d bring the outside inside. 

now she sits on my molding windowsill

in a chipped peter rabbit coffee mug.

away from her grocery outlet of birth

into my domestic primavera.

only a mesh screen and a thin glass pane

separate us from all them bees abuzz,

sniffing the pollen and blackheart stigmas.

i thought i’d save her but it’s guilt instead

that rides me sidesaddle every morning.

parting the cheap white plastic blinds again,

i tell us this will have to do for now.

---

Nicholas Barnes is a poet living in Portland, Oregon whose work has appeared in over seventy publications including trampset, Juked, and Cola Literary Review. His debut chapbook, Restland, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025.

Austin Allen James

My New Girlfriend is a Vampire

All my kitchen appliances were white

before I met you. You, with your spiced

avocado toast, flush with the content

of buried lightning.  Coffee is served—

that Gothic Evangelical sort with a dark

roasted flavor.  Let’s paint the cabinets

in a 1970s sunrise glow— a vampire’s

curse holds no sway at dawn. Still,

I add glitter to my children’s pockets

so that they might float away at night. 

She is stubborn at daybreak as she crawls

in, covered with devotion and engravings

that spin her skin rouge.  At dusk, she fans

toward the gulf and disappears with the night.

Skin

I walked from home through my children’s

youth, to Spain and Magazine Street,

through every other southern state

in a string of red dots— Set my skin

free to roam the remnants of submission:

the alchemy of childhood.  I flow with gravity,

the Mediterranean, and a Mexican ship sweet

with vanilla malt; green eyes scan the shore

and skim the unconsidered parchment in a bedroom.

We are blinded by the pitched light

among cattails in the bog of boyhood. 

Love is captured in a child and does not cease.

I will follow you in time, as skin is left to

callus

and the memory of a father’s heart

remains present in each pearl of sweat.

---

Austin Allen James is a Visiting Professor at Texas Southern University in Houston, TX. He has taught at TSU since the Fall of 2012. In 2016, Austin and colleagues formed a committee to create a “Professional Writing” concentration, which includes five creative writing classes. Austin is also a visual artist, sculptor, and furniture designer.

Natasha Dolginsky

15th Story / Felix

Ding.

Whoosh.

She side glances his jawline,

a sharp geometric shape she once

learned about in school

but since long forgotten. Notices

Felix's emerald eyes

and ringless left hand.

Notes his broad chest, outlined by an ironed, hundred dollar tshirt,

invisible wealth

if you only know where to look. She does.

Admires distressed jeans that hug perfectly places she'd like to also.

Returns his smile, embarrassed just a little,

but not too much,

for having been caught

staring.

Hopeful their exchange is an invitation,

to a conversation, exchange of stories, they’ve each got them.

It’s been ages since she's seen someone

so

put

together.

But doors still open at his fifteenth story,

a story cut short.

Ding.

Whoosh.

Felix stops to admire

the cobalt bookshelves

he painted himself,

to say he did it himself,

on principle.

The cobalt bookshelves that reach the ceiling and

ones, that

not once, but twice were featured in magazines,

on shelf wealth,

yes, that's a thing,

with cleverly titled articles like Anatomy of a Bookshelf.

Hundreds of spines color coded and meticulously

ordered by height,

what other way is there.

Strategically-placed book

ends

shaped like sleeping dogs and pushing bears

punctuate genres.

No less meticulous,

maybe more,

definitely more,

the gray kitchen counter

sparkles,

diamond specs twinkling,

like city asphalt under the evening city lights.

Earlier at lunchtime,

as his colleagues easily, lazily waved away

the propositioned full drinks menu,

he knew.

He waved also, a white flag,

ordered a sparkling water.

Now,

whiskey calls,

as persistent as a spoiled toddler and as sly

as a practiced con-artist. It

feigns warm,

luxurious everything’s good with the world promise,

aggressively occupying more and more of his brain space, until nothing else is left,

but...

a tumbler in his hand.

Whiskey calls, just a splash.

When is it ever.

Hundreds of dollars of

mocktail mixes mock him. Oh how they do!

Just a splash.

Familiar relaxation after the first one,

guilt of the second,

itch for the third,

who gives a fuck

after the fourth.

Dominos fall rather predictably after that.

Ding.

Felix is startled by the sobriety app notification, he thought he'd deleted it.

Your target is 0 drinks today. Make it count.

Texts back with zero, but pours one.

Another one.

It’s never just one. But who’s counting.

We're at five now.

Five and counting.

Is that laughter or music or both

spinning,

why is the room spinning

and it burns

so good like it's cleaning

something inside or just burning

it away

she looked nice didn't she or was she just being nice,

everyone's nice when they

want something, like another drink,

or maybe it's the same one hard to tell

when your hand forgets

to let go should've said something smarter or just anything really words are tricky they slip through like water

or is it whiskey now

doesn't matter.

Emeralds, cloudy.

Vomit on the hundred dollar t-shirt.

Spinning. Spinning. Everything is

so.

blurred

together.

18th Story / Evalina 

Ding.

Whoosh.

Two enter, not a mother and daughter,

but could be.

One young and one older.

Or maybe just old,

depends on which one you ask.

Evalina’s silk blouse blooms,

a field of well-watered lilacs

and forget-me-nots.

As if one ever could

forget. Not me.

A flowery rebellion against the

monochrome of the other,

the one who scoffs at the

fucking kaleidoscope of the

old-fashioned fashion.

The one who admires her own slick, sculpted,

purchased hair

from the six month wait male stylist.

And slick, sculpted,

purchased skin

from the LA doctor. A minimalist look,

perfected by Italian influencers

and her own filtered friends,

trendy but all the same,

under the influence.

Ding.

Whoosh.

Soft click of the door, Evalina is greeted by

the entryway photograph,

so familiar,

her famiglia.

She remembers,

skinned knees, ignored.

Remembers,

darting through side yards

and alleys,

like sun bunnies, laughter mingled

with the breeze and halfhearted admonishments

from Italian grandmothers

of what they’d do to their hides

if their cherished tulipanos

were disturbed.

Remembers,

her own Nonna,

hands fluent in a dialect of

fabric and thread,

Italia weaved in every seam,

heritage in every hem.

Half the neighborhood clothed from her hand,

not quite loaves and fishes, but hunger just as avenged,

generosity not any less divine.

Even the mean girls didn't dare play

their scherzi cattivis on Nonna.

They smiled nice and

brought yellow limones and

sweet sticky fichis as humble offerings

for dresses

rivaling those hanging prettily in ricche

boutiques that like

bouquets

bloomed bright and beautiful

on the streets of Florence.

Ten at night here,

they're just waking. Nonna

brewing espresso and nonno

muttering critiques from

his corner,

same ones he's effused,

for just three years

short of a half a century.

The grounds are too rough,

tesoro mio.

There's too much steam,

mon amor.

That's how caffee loses its soul,

mia bella.

Nonna rolling her eyes,

throwing up those wild Italian hands

Americans think cliche

and embellished, fit only for the movies,

but ones that are a staple

of every true Italian grandmother.

Ten here, time to Zoom,

she hasn't forgotten when Florence

was a staticy landline away,

As if she ever could

forget.

Ten here, she's on first,

checks makeup, hair in the digital mirror,

adjusts the filters, they’re there for a reason,

updates background

to the one she's been asked to use

for the interview. Forbes 50 over 50.

Lifestyle visionary she's not,

but if the shoe fits

as Americans say, she'll wear it.

Ding.

Ciao, madame.

They smile,

make obligatory small talk about the time zones,

thank her for staying up late.

No problemo.

And then in earnest, we've been

following you for years,

you're a hard one to pin down.

More laughter at the clever, tailor-made pun.

More praise on the artistic influence she's had,

and more to come.

What an influence,

she is

in Florence.

26th Story / Sam

Ding.

Whoosh.

A man stands still, affronted by Sam in a blue canvas jumper splattered

with a constellation of paint and

branded with shameless audacity of a Dickies logo.

Proudly blue-collar.

The polar

opposite to the preciseness of thousand dollar Italian Armani threads

woven by hands

who know the pleasure of a siesta. He's not a jerk, hell no,

just knows his place and prizes silent boundaries that run the world

around the world.

His world.

Paint smells,

he’s nauseated or is it nauseating, he can never remember the difference, there must not be one.

Service elevators are in the back, facilities will get a call today with a reminder where servicemen belong.

Not here.

Ding.

Whoosh.

Sam’s roller drips indigo.

The acrid smell is not entirely unpleasant,

chemical, medicinal, a memory.

His mom loved indigo.

Her walls were indigo.

Always her walls,

even as their two bedroom house housed three and a half

generations of family members. He remembers,

the force of her love, when she came around for the final round of blessings, wishful thinkings, and goodnight kisses.

Patting down unruly hair, replacing thrown off blankets, thinking him asleep,

thinking him still her little boy.

At twelve!

He still

kept his eyes shut to savor the illusion.

For him or her, uncertain.

Her walls.

Barely peeking, like spring grass

beneath the final hurrah of a winter's snowstorm.

Walls holding up art or

was it the other way around,

maybe a home held up by art. A family.

Art from garage sales,

from college artists,

the striving ones,

 the starving ones.

Art from the neighborhood senior center art clinic,

misnamed or

misnomered,

but which healed much and many more than

canvases and

it knew it.

Framed rectangles of scenery never seen,

cityscapes dreamed and

not visited,

a mosaic of places far far and away

from Mud Creek, Kentucky. But what is distance anyway,

a formality when your

heart transcends space

and time and

your bank account and

your irritable husband whose idea of getting away is a bait shop a town over instead

of the one down

the street, what a bait and switch.

His mom loved indigo.

Hey love, it's time.

He nods, yes, yes.

Your mom would've been proud.

He knows, yes, yes.

Go break a leg.

He laughs and doesn't cry

again,

lets his wife hold him still,

hold still,

and pat his back because they both know lack of

actual tears doesn't

actually

mean anything.

Two blocks to MoMA, Sam’s face on

bus stop billboards, a breath of fresh air

among the gloating blue and red politicians

promising,

no promoting!

their next war on something.

But likely just war.

Sam’s face left unmustached by city youth,

they have better things to do, after all.

Exhibit line spills

and swirls

and bubbles like a happy spring

stream born out of winter snow’s death.

Whispers, sideways elbows, and clicks of

media cameras and clandestine iPhones,

chirp.

Sam stands by the didactic panel as his wife holds his hand,

still.

Oil, on canvas.

In remembrance.

2008.

Indigo.

---

Natasha Dolginsky lives in San Jose, California, with her husband, two daughters, and three beloved pets. She holds a BS in Political Science, has over 13 years of marketing experience, and a lifetime of love for poetry. Her writing explores themes of social structures and complexities of modern life.

Jeanne Julian

Succulent

I’ve kept this crappy cactus alive

for years, doting, respectful of its hardy

rigid presence, its nature: no water,

no fertilizer, only daylight’s embrace

while I faithfully kept my distance. Now

my pin-cushion pal relents on his sill, tilts

inward, away from our window, his source

of gusto. Renounces his solo public sundance.

You, my succulent musketeer, now needily

aim your quills homeward, as if yearning for

something softer. Less exposed, more intimate.

You lean my way, closing in on the comforting

shadows of my chaise longue, as if longing to bury

your sharp bristles in receptive crevices between

my pillows covered in clean contempo patterns,

to stick yourself safely into seductive luxe.

Well well, my spunky prodigal spindle: learn

from my mistake. Better to stay stoic.

Fend off the urge to relent. Appearances

can be deceiving. For instance. There’s a coverup

on that chair, a trendy trap: bright chic motifs

on an antique bespeak glamour, but camouflage

a hidden ugly stain. Best left

unremembered.

But okay, yes: I surrendered there,

once. Let down my guard, thought myself

a bohemian babe in bloom, silken and wanton,

fragrant as honeysuckle, mouthed like an orchid,

lithe and binding as ivy. But he left me. Split.

Vanished. I’m alone. Except for you, Mr. Untouchable.

You prick. I’d slap you silly, crush your canted

thick and spiny shaft, but it would hurt too much.

On Hold 

1.

On hold: schools, churches, the building

of a house, the source

of income, the going to the gathering,

time

No hold: on

the hand of a dying father,

the course of contagion,

the voice of reason,

time

Outpatient in extremis

holed up and on hold, waiting

for the next available person to assist

as my phone soundlessly counts seconds I think it will startle

Listen carefully,

as our options have recently changed.

For English, press one. Para español, oprima dos.

For anything else,

hold on, press on, press on, press on

me to hear a

healer’s hearty voice at last.

What will I say first after all these seconds?

_________ speaking,

(Behold!)

may I help you?

Yes, I am holding out

for whatever holistic

assistance

you can remotely bestow

that may make me whole again.

Wholed. At least, in part.

Any Patient Portal in a storm.

2.

Long ago letting go, falling

in love, on its threshold

I asked of you

would you rather enfold or be enfolded?

Your answer was the right one.

Hold me, hold

me and hold on

as the albatross borne on air

as the sequoia surrounded by fire

as the seed enveloped in frozen earth

as the turtle in the vault of deep water

as the embryo in the hold of a womb

hold on

3.

Listen carefully, as our options have recently changed.

May all that is holy hold on

---

Jeanne Julian once won Camp Wyandot’s tall-tale telling contest. She is author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems are in many journals and have won awards from Reed Magazine, Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review. Having visited every U.S. state, she lives in Maine.

Anne Graue

Night Swimming at Tuttle Creek

I remember that night. I couldn’t grasp my thoughts quickly enough to stop things from

happening. You acted as if being with me were a sideline to the real work of blues guitar licks

and buddies you were focused on like someone with a work ethic that wouldn’t let you stop, be

with me only, see yourself from inside, not through the eyes of other guys. Giving in to me was

giving up. In the water, the brother of your friend, kisses in water, the flash of a foot on a thigh,

an arm brushing an arm in weightless water so it didn’t feel like touching—in water nothing

matters. Later, on the warm car’s hood—no touching, only talk—I didn’t know where you were,

where you’d gone, or where you’d been. 

"Night Swimming at Tuttle Creek" was previously published in the Poetry Coop.

Dear Frank

I couldn’t have known you

your oranges gone moldy

wrapped in fuzzy green

and I miles away

from Fire Island

when I was 4

and you 10 times that.

If only

I’d been older

you’d been younger

we’d’ve had a beer

in the 80s in Brothers Tavern

in Aggieville   REM playing

“So. Central Rain” murmuring

dark     nonthreatening                        (I’m sorry)

the oaken tables reckoning

under the occasional

amber damp.

"Dear Frank" was previously published in Leon Literary Review, issue 21.

For Sale at the Art Fair

Picasso’s Olga

tubes of paint

Buddha statues

the etching of Poe’s house

and the frame it is in

velvet scarves

lamps in Seagram’s 

bottles & small worlds

in mason jars

watercolors

collages

truth

paintings of rabbits

abducted by aliens

the hours at the wheel

the clay beneath the skin

the crack in the porcelain

the shape of the nails

the tips and the moons

the plea in the terracotta

"For Sale at the Art Fair" was previously published in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, The Art Issue.

---

Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, (Woodley Press) and a chapbook, Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Canary, The Ilanot Review, Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Museum of Americana, The Wild Word, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal. She has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry, Neologism Poetry Journal, and the Origami Poems Project. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.

Tina Kimbrell

A Rattle from Somewhere

It wasn’t cinematic. There was no death rattle, no last sigh before the head slumped to the side,

no gentle lowering of the eyelids with a swoop of palm across the face. The tube was removed,

and we watched her slowly suffocate, her body already deflated, her lungs already done, voice

gone, skin dry. The body’s a drought as it prepares to die, a sandpit. The doctor said it could take

anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. So we waited and watched. Just last week she was

eating Lemon Heads from a box, sitting up on her couch, the candies clinking as she tipped the

box and rolled the sugary orbs into her hand, into her mouth. She was still in proportion then,

still made mostly of water. Lying down in the hospital bed, it seemed like her head was too big

for her body, a boulder atop twigs with an animatronic mouth. It kept trying to grasp for air or

open wide for a meal from a spoon, like the most inappropriate puppet show I’d ever seen, like

Pacman or like a Hungry Hungry Hippo. It was slapstick, almost, and it felt wrong to feel that in

that place. I breathed and watched her not breathe anymore. When she was gone, when her head

stopped opening the mouth for nothing, I felt a knot in my gut, then in my chest and in my throat

until finally I coughed up a single marble. Then another. And another. In my palm there’s the

little rattle of smooth glass glistening with spit.

Lightning Bugs

The lightning bugs are out. First I’ve noticed them this year. At the curve of highway ahead they

flicker and fizzle out, float up and fade above the ditch. Tiny beacons, beckoning: This way. This

is the way we’re going. Tonight, you are in the hospital with a tube in your throat. I am driving

your car to your house. It was once my home, too. Back then, we’d spend the summer dusks in

the yard and wait for the bugs to jut up from the grass and down from the trees with their

bioluminescent beats. While it was still light enough to see their bodies between the blinks, I

caught them, cupped them in my hands. Little lanterns green and glowing, pulsing. When I

started putting lightning bugs in jars, it took time to get the holes in the lid right. Sometimes they

were all dead by morning. Sometimes still a subtle thud of wings against glass, lightless in the

sun. Back then, I didn’t understand that the wonder was in the expanse, the backdrop of distance.

At the hospital your body is a metronome of air. An up, down, whoosh, hiss. Irregular in its

regulation. I know that you will never feel the humid sunset, see the peripheral spectacle of

glowing abdomens again. I know where this is going. I know how time works. I know that if I

filled a jar with anything at all it wouldn’t keep. In your car, in the driveway, I turn the ignition

and feel the silence of the engine, check the rearview mirror for what’s left of the horizon.

---

Tina Kimbrell is from rural Missouri and now lives in eastern Iowa where she works from home in the educational technology industry. She received an MFA from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, The Citron Review, and The Good Life Review. She loves visiting roadside attractions and hanging out with her dog, Frank.

Ewen Glass

Ilium (Holiday)

Render – by hip-bone – lines in the sand;

with heat of sun and complicit lung

they might be blown to glass columns,

a thermometer without mercury,

a cocktail stirrer with ache to shatter,

useless by shape of its creation:

a couple on a beach –

turning away from each other.

Recording Sessions

Minor-key moans across the ward. I hear in you an orchestra, and

want to record it. Can any of these machines do that? A mask edits

breath,  tubes clean the hiss from your blood; the smell of the

hospital is the space around the mic, a fetid admission cut with

alcohol. I was always going to be invited to this public arrangement,

poised perhaps to –

The time you share a bed or a hug doesn’t last long even if our

arms are ouroboros snakes like you said   your sobs during I

dreamed a dream embarrassed even me and I had to take you out

of the theatre so the rest of the audience could hear the show   and

tears turned to laughter between us sustaining an evening and

thousands more   your laugh is an oboe no sweeping strings here

bending through depth and demand to my basest safest place  

howl or rattle I always want to hear you   now the beeps count you

in          let me throw flowers

---

Ewen is a Northern Irish poet who lives in England with two dogs, a tortoise and lots of self-doubt; on a given day, any or all of these can be snapping at his heels. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Bridge Eight, Poetry Scotland, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere.

Laila Chudgar

A Word to the Wise

---

Laila Chudgar is an eighth grader who lives in Los Angeles with her family. She is a creative soul passionate about writing, drawing, and singing. Some of her previous works have been selected for poetry readings at her school. When she is not working on her latest sketch or poem, you can find her curled up with a good fantasy book.

Andi Myles

Expire means breathe out

Trees sprout knowing the day

they will die. They adore what tiny

romantics we are—recording their life

in rough rings only for us. Observe our sapling

our green love that startled even the sand

as it burned through plush fog to sweep

the boughs above. It, too, sings

of its death, silver beetles dripping from its mouth.

Estate

Dear laundry basket with the cracked handle

dear itchy, faded, crocheted baby blanket,

unused eraser in the shape of a palm tree,

loose Advil in a Ziploc bag,

dear copy of Where the Wild Things Are

with the torn page—the one

where they are howling at the moon,

dear soft green sock tucked in the back of the drawer

whose match was lost years ago,

dear pens that have just a word of life left in them,

length of ribbon with no discernible use,

stack of Harper’s Magazines,

dear teenage journals and yearbook signature of my high school crush,

dear size 2 pair of patchwork jeans,

unfinished application to study abroad,

dear phone numbers I haven’t tried since 2002,

21-year-old emails,

dear photo of me at 24, cigarette in one hand,

bourbon neat in the other,

dear me in that photo

days before a black eye she never saw coming

turned her into a person

she never thought she’d be, and could never unbecome

dear friend’s hand on the shoulder of the me in the photo

trying to hold me there, whole, a moment longer

dear friend who still fantasizes

about the unblemished me in that photo.

Dear things I cannot throw away,

but will leave behind.

---

Andi Myles is a Washington DC area science writer by day, poet in the in between times. Her favorite space is the fine line between essay and poetry. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Tahoma Literary Review, and Brink Literary Journal, among others. You can find her at www.andimyles.com.

Kelly Martineau

Catch and Release

After yoga class heat and hunger flash so fast I am peeling off layers across the grocery, stalking

protein, cracking a can of cashews in the aisle. My body hot with absence strikes out for contact,

the strike plate snaring my hip pocket, jerking me out of sync. Ankle turns, twists, falling

sickness onto splayed palms.

My daughters, nine and twelve, grow inches overnight, but

I am the one falling, felled by ungainly limbs. What fresh hell, what flowers for Algernon

is this? Aggression, regression, plea for estrogen. Every waver a wave wresting me, prey

hooked by the wild line cast from my core. I am caught, caught up, tossed back

a body re-leased

tumbling in reverse yet

still

stumbling

forward

The Evidence Against You

Sunday, October 3, 1993,

the date certificated in

ink; the details wholly vague.

The only accounting your passenger

(a notoriously unreliable narrator):

fleeing police on a gravel road,

your wheels met timber,

launched the red 323

drivers side first into the trunk

of a tree. Now what do we do?

you asked, as he was pulled from the car

for questioning. No one home

to answer the phone. The deputy encoded

the news on a 2-inch tape, unplayed

for 24 hours

you were dead

a full day before we knew.

---

Kelly Martineau is an essayist and poet. Her work has appeared in Thimble, Entropy, Little Patuxent Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sycamore Review, and The Florida Review, among other journals. Honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination, and her work has been supported by Artist Trust and Hypatia-in-the-Woods.