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May 2026 Issue #41 Poetry

featuring
Sharisa Aidukaitis, Joshua Barnes, Elijah Bayuk, Kelvin C. Bias, Lawrence Bridges, Jason Davidson, Mark DeCarteret, Livio Farallo, Veronica Fletcher, Doug Fritock, Jenna K Funkhouser, Émilie Galindo, Kiyanna Hill, Ken Holland, Stephanie Jones, Renee Kalagayan, Heidi Kasa, Jennifer Mills Kerr, Mark LaMonda, Samantha Landau, Evie Lucas, Mary McCarthy, Judith Mikesch-McKenzie, Bailey Quinn, Doug Ramspeck, Patrick T. Reardon, Victoria Jean Reynolds, Amy Riddell, Patrick G. Roland, Cole Roulain, Patricia Russo, Claudia Excaret Santos, Topher Shields, Jacquinn Sinclair, Sophia Upshaw, Jasmine Vallejo-Love, William Welch, Robert Wooten, Ellen June Wright, Gerald Yelle, M.J. Young & Trinity Richardson

Poetry Launch Reading Friday May 15th at 7:30 PM
Hear poets from Issue 41 - Please Register in Advance
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/z9NI5YkgSi6UE_LWuD9QeQ

3rd Annual Maureen Seaton Poetry Prize 2026 Winner: Remi Recchia;
Honorable Mentions: Camilla Downs, Virginia Kane

Sharisa Aidukaitis

double helix

I hold my child’s tiny fingers in the half-darkness
of the purple nightlight,
alive, because the collection of random chances at our births
didn’t place us in the path of a bomb tonight
didn’t cast us to the receiving end of seething hatred
didn’t render us invisible in the eyes of genocide-deniers
didn’t curtail her life before it began;
and I stroke her forehead gently,
medicine coursing through her veins
promising to comfort and heal
because arbitrary circumstances
didn’t place us in a city where hospitals are bombed,
or a camp where medicine is blockaded out of hatred;
I listen to the regular breaths of her fevered sleep
because air raid sirens and drones
are not keeping her awake in pain and fear;
I kiss the cheek that shares
all but a tenth of a percent of DNA with the children
who had different random chances at birth―
chances that put innocent hearts and dreams and wide eyes at the mercy
of those who would callously deprive them of
medicine
rest
limbs
family
food
nonchalant hand-holding
life
and I ache for my scattered kin
who are nearly identical to me―
the children who still sing and dance
and laugh and dare to hope
in the face of horror and cruelty
because theirs is the heritage of love and art and song
and their voices transcend the malice;
so tonight I hold one child’s hand
and hold vigil with the others
on my glowing screen

Sharisa Aidukaitis is a writer and college educator in upstate New York. Her poems have appeared in dozens of print and online journals, including Trampoline, Moss Piglet, The Quarter(ly), Metphrastics, Ivo Review, and others.

Joshua Barnes

Queen Anne’s Lace

- after William Carlos Williams

His body is not so white as
the clematis climbing his fence,
demarcating the boundary
of his insulation.
He ponders his fingers,
dainty as Queen Anne’s Lace,
jaundiced as the bells of forsythia.
He joins his garden in Autumn,
purple blemishes rising
where hands will no longer lay,
as the asters go to seed,
neither to rise again in the spring.

Joshua Barnes lives in Chicago with his husband. He is the author of the chapbook, Dressed for the Gods, from Ghost City Press. His poetry has otherwise appeared in Diode, Villain Era Lit, &Change, Snowflake Magazine, and more. When not writing, he can be found reading poetry, horror fiction, and comic books, and perfecting his handstands. He is on Instagram @jsb1800.

Elijah Bayuk

Bad at Looking
(for Camille)

Inside
me there are approximately one thousand
white beans and this is what I am
made of and when I run my hands through
them they are slimy but in the way of
snails or egg whites not in the way of
rot. I think you carry some
bit of the moon around
in your backpack, but not the rock, the
moon in the sky, the concept of
the moon, the one that glows and
tells stories. I am always tilting my
head at you like one
of those birds you see on
line, hoping to catch a glimpse of
that slice of it, but it's
hiding just behind you most of the
time except after a few glasses of
wine in a candlelit room. You wear very
soft sweaters and I have a propensity
for fibers. The first time we
truly spoke to each other, like a bad
omen, directly preceded a period of fruit fly
infestation so severe that it nearly
drove me to madness. I wanted to be
your friend anyway, very badly, near
embarrassing how badly. How do
I tell someone at a party that we know
each other through the strings tied
around our ankles, that we keep tripping
over each other? I don't know how
to tell anything to anyone, but somehow you
always seem to know what I mean.

Elijah Bayuk is a poet and general enthusiast from Coral Springs, Florida currently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the 2020 South Florida Youth Poet Laureate. He graduated from Emory University with highest honors in English and Creative Writing. When not writing, he can either be found mushroom foraging or reading on the couch, depending on the weather.

Kelvin C. Bias

BLUE BUTTERFLY ON THE LAST NIGHT OF HER LIFE

The last thing
I meant to carry was:
The blue butterfly.
She swerved into view
In the South of France
Like a velvet blazer
With wings.
She beckoned. A dart that
Filled my line of sight as
The sun set. Magic hour—
Magritte’s empire, interrupted
By a cacophonous clang.
The trash cans tumbled
Into tomorrow and
The butterfly into my
Outstretched hand.
There existed a smile in the
Folds of the left wing,
Imperceptible unless, like I,
Blood pooled in the palm.
We locked antennae,
Systems activated.
An aroma wafted to the sky.
We followed—the creature, the man.
There were tears.
Hers.

The first bank of flowers
At curb’s edge called.
It could not suffice.
Another, then another—
A row of possibilities,
Endless smells, hints of
Provençal lavender.
None mustered satisfaction.
Then, the sun splintered the
Horizon, its last gasp.
The butterfly said yes.
Here. Here I will die.
Here you will remember
The action of your
Bloodied hand.
You will preserve time
Until your own wings open
And you need it.

A longtime journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and Sports Illustrated, Kelvin C. Bias holds a BA in political science from the University of Arizona and an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU. His poetry is currently in FOLIO Literary Journal. This fall he was in the Cave Canem regional workshop in NYC with poet Samiya Bashir that culminated in readings at the Guggenheim on Nov. 1 and Nov. 22 in conjunction with the mid-career Rashid Johnson retrospective A Poem for Deep Thinkers.

Lawrence Bridges

We Live in Tragic Times

One ton, a life’s learning
put into the brank
by a country that forgets its soul
and believes its best minds
are its machines.

While I was away,
they painted the light post red
and made the streets one-way.
The bad neighborhoods they made quaint,
zoned gun ranges in basement shelters.

There's talk about history
rewritten now with core lies.
I can't imagine who this makes happy,
but they can grab you off the street,
even for this.

Lawrence Bridges' poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him on IG: @larrybridges

Jason Davidson

chop wood, carry water

(let us begin, then.) the first three times, I drove past him without even making eye contact. when I looked in the rearview, he had grown still, as if pausing to summon something on the verge of the highway’s lips. keep running, june-bug. you’ll be fast enough one day. the fourth time, I pulled over and he climbed in. his shorts were green. I couldn’t say what color his eyes were. simpler that way. once we were in bed, he put his laughter in a little bottle and threw the green shorts on the floor. once we were done, he talked with his wife on the telephone and rested his head on my chest. my drums played william’s overture. I did not wish to listen, so I thought of tetherballs and spotted things. you cannot count all of them. it is impossible. once he had pulled the green shorts back on, I handed him the bottle and the world. he chuckled softly and looked at the universe with his head cocked. hearts usually don’t stop when they’re asked to.

that night, I leave my bed. I think, in my spotted head, it’s for water, and it is. it is to wash my hands. my dead great-grandmother is sitting at the kitchen counter in the dark. you didn’t end up becoming a doctor. I dry my hands and try to meet her eyes, but I am only a jester. I am less than a mile from the summit. she takes my hands in hers. I’ve forgotten the calculus, the organic chemistry, the fact that god was sitting there in the room the night I met my ex-husband. I’ve forgotten that my ex-husband was in the room with her when she died. I was at work. always at work. before I can talk of all the wood I’ve chopped, all the water I’ve carried, she’s gone.

back from the lumberyard I’m driving, when I pull over into a wide field to piss. there are hundreds of trees in the back of the truck. I have been blaring the radio so that I don’t have to listen to them screaming. everyone faces loss. parts recover, parts don’t. as I’m pissing, I notice it on the road just a foot or so from the bike lane. back when it was still breathing, it had a name. I am certain of that. I cannot make out the face. I squint and cock my head like an old robin, but whatever this is, only a stranger. you slept with the man in the green shorts. you handed him the world. your great-grandmother watched you wash your hands in the dark. you lived with your own church-bells. you looked at me, covering the highway like a forgotten number. you cocked your head, shook your dick, climbed in your car and drove on. (let us end, then.)

Paphiopedilums

I dreamt last night of new car smell. Every time I rode in Steve’s car it smelled of fresh laundry, young lemon peels and the water of man. My throat would stick like a frog and so I would smile at him to hide the fact that I was nervous. I knew that Steve saw everything and I liked it better when all the humans around me were slightly blind. Suffering can be a small gift. Being a child is as heavy as a weather-vane. Steve drove me to nurseries to buy plants. His mouth would move but he was not speaking about plants. He said words about orchids and left his hand on my leg, heavy like hot mud. At night I would stare at the drenched desert on my ceiling and dream of him being my father. Scrambled like acid. The brain is a bad place. He had charcoal hair and twilight eyes. The best part of the dream was all the things Steve did not do this time. He did not pull the citrus car over to the side of the lonely road. He did not sing about the zippers. He did not close the door. He did not teach me about bass notes and throat choruses. He did not. He did not. He did not. In the dream, I throw my weak and skinny body over the side of the road, into the below. This time I float. I do not ever awaken from this dream. I am nine years old. A time later, the baby came. She was alone. No dollhouse. No way to turn her off. I wanted to play make believe and chase lady slippers. Her mouth was always sick with hunger. I was sick forever. I would stare into her blue-eyed sky. I was searching for Steve there. I wondered if all I knew of making babies was the greatest lie. Was this his terrifying affection? My wondrous penance? Someone told me that Steve had moved to Omaha.

Jason Davidson is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and performer. He's written and directed over 200 works of experimental theatre and his one-act plays have been widely published. His poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Pine Hills Review, Burningword, HAD, Hobart, Heavy Feather Review, Luna Luna, Rawhead, and other journals. Jason lives on California's Central Coast with his husband and four-legged children. Find him on Instagram at @jasonwriteswords.

Mark DeCarteret

The Year I Went Without Crashing

I was still scared of race cars. And their racetracks. Their rifle-like backfiring. And the sparks that shot out of them. Contained for a moment in the welder’s mask. Like the stars overhead. Which would never cease asking me. What I knew about engines. Or girls. All the space between things. And what escaped out of it. Not only was I scared of the sparks. But the smell of them. This mess of live wires and silver. Some evil emperor’s sweat. Oh, and also the gasoline. Doused by rags and then held to my face. Killing off sight and then sound. As if I was lowered down in a basket. Like fair food. Into this gurgling blackness. As years later I would struggle for air. This pain as intimate with my body. As the rain that spotted me like pan grease. And I was still scared of the announcer. How he crackled out speakers. We could hear from the freeway. Where the cars and trucks dueled. In this childish overture. All us kids enthralled by the rollcall of tires. And hauled away into a dream. Of clover beaded with oil. And oil doubling as rainbows. This moon as skilled with drawing out blood as a sickle. An uncle once showing me a scar on his chest. He got demolishing my father’s Buick. Reducing it to a cube. That would never be solved. I was scared too. Of the parking lot. All the hair. And the dark stains. That I prayed. They’d be better at hiding. And the inked skin. Hard selling some indelible fare. Like the sides of the lap cars. The ghostly lit signs. And the decals. Not to mention, the Port-A-Pots, restoring chaos at the edge of the forest. Where, come October, I’d be locked in a Haunted House, amidst the dimming sun, autumn cool. Amounting to less as the shadows were worded more slowly. Worlds away from any worlds I’d grown somewhat accustomed. To their causes for worry. Acts of violence. And yet I’d still sketch them for hours. My mother checking out the race cars I trafficked in at the kitchen table. Upset with the freaks. Who were driving the engrossment. These monsters whose eyes, rivered with blood, sprung from their sockets. Tongues as sagged as rubber daggers. Teeth, too numerous, to ever add up. As I sang them songs more tuneful and unfathomable than the moon’s. And all the omens it summoned.

The Year I Went Without Watching a Nature Channel

The woman ran after the crane and its infant crane. With a wand for a hand. And an orange cone followed by a camera/phone for a face. Making like a crane herself. Though her arms were not as smart as wings. Her legs too loudly angled. The crane was marked like it had leaned its forehead against the dawn. Entreating the earth to give up some of its dead. The infant crane not so much kinged by the sun yet. But still racing away. With its ungainly white folds. And its phony gold arcs. Like a creation myth in the making. An earlier rain had learned the details of a flower. And the clouds had solved something of infinity. The woman, late with a payment, was trailing off. Even mask-less the new light was finding her dull. Much too full of herself. To be anything else. A mower is now scaring up some insects. Into an illegible font. And the crane is lessening the air of their talk-singing. Till the infant crane catches on fire as well. And the woman’s child is capturing it all. With chalk on the pavement.

The Year We Went Without Watching the Wizard of Oz

This tree was awarded the sky. Where it stretched out its arms. And drew strength from the secrets we kept from the Sisters. Of Whom Would Show Us So Little. In the Way of Any Mercy. How we’d slur the nuns’ bridal names. Into blurs of radio broadcasts and stars. And the terrible art that they forced upon us. Stick-figuring Sons of Gods. Crossed with Ghosts. We apprehended on paper with paste. While strapped to a chair. Erased from our own stories. Some of us, hung from the tree by our underwear. Thunder sounding off in the distance, gunning for us. And some were chosen to race across grass. That only spoke a dead language. Some were turned into pinecones. Or recoined into light at the top of the tree. And some would just go for the ribs. Fingers buried complicatedly. Into the fists of a man. Word would have it, an upper grader, would trace out a door in the tree. Through which an arcade. Would call out in the dark. And that I would trade in my song. Lip-synched from wood that I’d painted. The red of technicolor rubies. Guaranteeing I couldn’t be lost in its shadows. Or eaten whole. By the actual trolls. Who worshipped it. At Mass one Sunday, some public-school kids stole our car. Out of the parking lot. The school and church shared. Only making it. As far as the tree. We prayed that my father, the Protestant, would come for us. In the unprescribed white of his convertible. And on our way home, we would hear how Saint Dorothy. Had overdosed on barbiturates. In that same bathroom. We’re all going to die. And I would think of that tree. Throwing its apples. At her and the Scarecrow. And then thank her. And Toto too. For dying. So that some version of us. Would live on.

Mark DeCarteret's 9th book Stop Motion Poets was published last month by Bee Monk Press.

Livio Farallo

the mosquito has no pity for the thin man*

like a large city,
the
worm has too many hearts,
and reads
whatever spills
                  out of library windows.
its cuticle is split
by a crust of snow.
a silent e-bike is a spy it won’t talk to
and apples are
        death traps once they’ve
                                        fallen over in rot.

i haven’t any
                 blood left
                 to speak of
                 since prehensile rain has stopped the wind;
                 since poltergeists became
                 cruel
                 and
not just bad commercials; since the american revolution
was won by the french and every parasite
is a fable
invented by a host.

under the net,
                          hours
hang like barrage balloons, muscles flicker
and the
night is more completely
conquered. in molting you lose antennae but
beethoven plucks on from the walls somewhere
thirsty and deaf.
small tears are always a problem.

__________________________
*an old proverb of unknown origin

Livio Farallo is co-founder/co-editor of Slipstream. His work has appeared in Brief Wilderness, Cardinal Sins, Misfit, California Quarterly, The Cardiff Review, and elsewhere.

Veronica Fletcher

Girl Museum

I am on your bed, hands in my underwear,
absorbing the mattress fumes as you play GTA on the carpet
and try seducing the hookers. Their pixel-black bangs swing heavy,
weight of a concrete curl, pistol-whipping girl who repeats
herself thrice, trilingual. Cyber-voice whines around how and hello.

I am un-gartered in the afternoon, easily naked like you’d prefer,
earrings the shade of constrictor tails, bouncing tendons and light.
You stalk a pink-haired streetwalker through the TV. I have two
fingers in my mouth, and am trying–– really trying––to keep it at two.
I am trying for good, for quiet, to temper the pulse of your lazy ceiling fan

drawing want through my shoulders, from my chest
to yours. Navy sheet fondles the floor, your fist
swirling the hem like seafoam, like the day your brother drove
us out to Clearwater, and you told me there will be pearls, but
there were no pearls. Sometimes I think you were just trying to get me

wet. In dreams, we are married in the sand courtyard with wasps.
I’ve been the fat pig pedestaled before, in the dusk of adolescence,
appraised by future soldiers with chestnut eyes,
long fingers and faces, teeth I have scraped as ritual. My boyish love,
bedroomed opposite the thin pool screen.

I am slow to realize things: I am unhoused. You are seventeen.
You’re epileptic. I am thirteen. There are ways to flip a mattress,
to hide a stain or smell. Behind your head, I become a Dalí,
Femme Couchée laid back with my low breasts to anchor,
skirt puddling between my legs, untouched, untouched.

We are very good when we play like this. I’m the good-est.
Posed to martyr like the walking woman I watch, toothless,
in her boxy sheen. You reach behind for my ankle while your thumb
inches forward into the ether. Footsteps on pavement, fingers
on the vein. I cry in your pillow, Christ-like in my wanting, and

you say, at least I can fuck something today. Cruel-vibrant
like a name. Your colorblind vision savors the scene
while I seep ember, electric heat, dark fabric like water at my back.
It drains and washes. I am fitted for a plastic frame.

Tallahassee Snuff

When I drank near the railroad tracks, nothing hard could hurt me. And how
fair a deal, I believed, to be 22 and ogled. Stripped-not-touched. In ’66, Pappy
lived with four boys atop a furniture store, and Tim would ferment beer
in their white tub, and Pappy would rush the Mormons with Tim’s gun
when they knocked, and nothing was difficult in their threatening or wanting.
And Grandma drove six hours on weekends to keep his bed made, kept him dry
and fucked with her fingers, lashing the lot lizards. A good woman, considering the state

of her work. And there is a homegrown Sunoco between the clusterous bars
where clerks let you stay behind the counter some nights, smoking out the metal
doorway to listen for the siren hum, colony cats on the speed bump like sphinxes,
a jester in his circus clothes coming home from the big tent, catching canopied
branches to toss. I ask Pappy about the acrobatics, if he remembers

their swing, and he says he might have. Doesn’t remember well. Everything’s
gotten so big. This red-bricked brutalist scene––and look at that Senate floor!
How clean swept by morning! No trace of my young Harrison, protest-tossing panties
from the gallery rail, knelt in zip-ties on the capitol steps, heartbeat bill
hovering the skyline, touched at his trying. His failing. His nights out

in the afterhours, working to understand. I am understanding
what I remember best. If it is worth remembering. If I should bother
pushing fluids, ephemeral chemicals, beat the chest of the homeland
back to life. I am in Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. I am losing

to red-faced Yale grads with pig snouts, fingers like link sausage,
JAG lawyers making Zion from the drained glade. I wonder if I should bother
with my saving. If the oak canopy is too heavy, water too rank, if the land
should be Dilauded-dripped. Hospiced. Hauled north as waste. And what counts, here,
as waste? I am arguing with drunk boys come down from Jersey City,
flopping over with ten-pocketed jeans, fumbling at billiards while they tell me

I am sorry. I am so sorry. I pity you all, down here in the mud.

And there is a flat grassland west of town, sparse fences, prescribed fires
each autumn for its health. I lay down in my business clothes. Domestic flights
coast low into town. I count what has changed. Between my fingers
are locusts, fattened in the sepia dirt, marked for carrying swift punishment

to a bedeviled place, the sunken horror slashed by hills. The new senatorial tower
is valleyed in white. Pappy buries his gun, full-chambered, in the concrete quarry
nearby, brown shoulders the shape of Augustinian spandrels, thigmotropic coils
grown around blank weight. It is so heavy in my hands––the wet perfume of rich men

and their greed.

Veronica Fletcher is a poet and writer from South Florida. Her work appears, or is forthcoming in The Shore, Rust & Moth, Gyroscope Review, and more. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. She works as a poetry reader for Palette Poetry and Grist.

Doug Fritock

ELEGY FOR MY FATHER’S HUSH PUPPIES

Maybe it was the brushed pigskin
uppers, breathable and soft,
not to mention Scotchguarded,

that came in a variety of mousy colors?
Or the crepe-rubber soles, the ones
that supposedly saved Keith Richards’s life

that time he accidentally touched his
guitar to an ungrounded mic. I’m sure
it wasn’t the award they received

from the CFDA in 1996, or the cameo
they made in that book by Malcolm
Gladwell. But it could have been

the endearing mascot, that droopy
Basset with doleful eyes and pendulous
ears who peers up solemnly

from the heel of every insole, as if
to say Woe as me in the humblest,
and most lovable of manners.

Whatever the reason, after he died,
I found a whole litter of Hush Puppies
snoozing on the floor of his closet,

some snuggled up close and piled
on top of one another, others slumbering
peacefully in the tissue-lined kennels

of their boxes. And since they were
too small to fit my own feet,
what could I do but surrender them

to the shelter of my local Goodwill,
where for $7.99 they could be adopted
and given ‘forever homes’ by strangers

I would never meet. Although between
you and me, now that Dad is gone,
I don’t believe in forever anymore.

Doug Fritock is a writer, husband, and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, and Whale Road Review among other literary journals. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa's Conscious Writers Collective.

Jenna K Funkhouser

Pompeii in New York

If I could start anywhere, I would start by saying
that the garden, that year, was impeccable.

If I could start anywhere, I would point your attention
to the twelve tomato vines with their scarlet-blooded
heirloom hearts. I would show you the arbor of grapevines
with their frosted clusters of champagne, the feathered tongues
of carrot stalks, the wide, dark palms of chard.

I would point to a man on a subway, to a book full of prophesies
out of print, to a woman with her hands streaked with indigo ink,
to a raven who watches this woman in the garden at dawn.

Look at the children, each making circles of paint on the brown
butcher’s paper. Look at the ripe oranges, the students
falling in love, the breakfast lying warm and uneaten on the table.

Maybe then you will understand what I mean
when I say that all of this was known to be ending.

The boats with their toppled sails
came and went from the left of the frame.
Trees, growing towards the light,
grasped it to their chests like a gnarled hand.

Jenna K Funkhouser is a Pacific Northwest-based artist and poet. Recent poems have been published by Penwood Review, Stirring Lit, and selected for the Ashland Poetry Press 2026 Broadside Contest. You can find her ekphrastic collection, Bright Inhabited Lives (Kelsay Books), and other recent work at jennakfunkhouser.com.

Émilie Galindo

Stream of Pointillism
Limp or lanky looking lines are ascertained / repetition their crucible / what’s loose is tightened lithe / Mo can’t help but wonder what his outlines look like / not so much tight / more like a snug turtleneck / yet disjointed / like his love of lists, bullet points and steps / now he has to connect the dots / his life : a series stepping stones / his mind in a perpetual state of ellipsis / it’s about time he pins himself down / otherwise his life will be a series of coats on pegs / empty of him.

Émilie Galindo: Growing up, Émilie felt that subtext & symbols loomed over her childhood. As she watched her family trip over their own patterns, she couldn’t help but become wary of what she loved most: storytelling (and its pretty patterns). That’s why her writing aims to question the myriads of surrealistic motifs, motives & mementos stowed away in our anecdotes or homespun narratives.

Kiyanna Hill

My Mother Performed Motherhood

            I mean you wouldn’t have guessed anything was wrong, I was always
            clean, scalding bath water & Skin So Soft body oil skimming the water’s
            surface—I mean I glistened—she scrubbed my scalp clean, too,
            sometimes I still use Luster’s Pink Oil Hair Lotion just for the nostalgia
            & add my behavior to the list of daughterly regressions to tell my therapist―
            I mean she left relaxers on for too long, told me to learn how to tame
            pain, she felt pain in every pore—all I knew was repetition, Shake & Baked
            meat with powdered mashed potatoes, frozen pizzas, I mean I grew
            my first garden at twenty-two & when I saw the young growth I almost
            cried—all I knew was manic episodes, late night trips to Walmart, once
            she was triggered by HGTV organization specials, every room in our house
            filled with piles sorted in a system only she understood—I mean she roamed
            the aisles, catatonic, nothing-eyed, lost me & I went from aisle to aisle looking
            for my mother—I mean I got tired & found a shelf to sleep on—I mean I woke
            up to my stepfather carrying me & my mother didn’t come home—I mean
            there’s a world with my mother living somewhere & I wonder if she tells
            people she has a daughter or if she says no & she can’t do anything to stop
            the howl unfurling from her throat.

Early Disappointment

My mother said my real parents
            are on their way.

She always told me I was adopted―
            never hers just

dropped off, swathed in a stained blanket.
            I packed Cosmic

Brownies, chapter books, Rugrats
            on VHS. I waited

on the porch. It was a real winter. Frost
            tipping the grass.

The wind whipping against the bare branches.
            I sat on my hands,

numbing them from the cold. I imagined
            new life. Bubble

baths that smelled like gum.
            Tropicana orange

juice. 64-count box of Crayons.
            I looked to the dark,

wanted to be blinded by the headlights of
            my real parents’ arrival.

They must have been lost. Confused
            by back roads, field

after field of wisping wheat. I lost track
            of time. Woke to

the mother I didn’t want at the foot
            of my bed. She said

I smelled of neglect, something scorched―
            the flamed branches

of dead redbuds. I stayed in bed, my tongue
            soured white. For years,

I saw bright flares. I learned to tame
            the ache of flight.

In Which WebMD Says It Is Likely I’ll Inherit My Mother’s Bipolar Disorder So I
Overanalyze My Behavior on a Tuesday

                                                                        WebMD tells me I build harbors of impulse―
                                                                        risky sex, tongue on cold frosted windows,
                                                                        speeding through yellow lights. Sometimes I walk
                                                                        in straight lines to feel steady. I keep a rope tied
                                                                        around my waist to tether me earthbound.
                                                                        Sometimes, I stay in my apartment alone for weeks.
                                                                        I see my friend and words rush from my throat. I choke
on syllables. There is danger in letting me loose.
                                                                        I hyperfixate. I keep 56 tabs open to learn how
                                                                        to do a 10-day juice cleanse. My MacBook burns
my thighs. Sometimes, I cry over things I can’t name.
                                                                      I dodge brick after brick. I don’t know if this
                                                                        is another wave of depression or if I’m sinking into
                                                                        my mother’s footprints. She built boats with holes.
                                                                        She went to sea and didn’t know how to swim.
                                                                        Sometimes, I go to the beach and let the water kiss
                                                                        my feet. That’s all I can handle. I don’t believe in
                                                                        diving into black holes. I barely trust what I can see.
                                                                        I only trust what I can crush in my grip.

Kiyanna Hill is Black poet from Virginia. Her writing has been featured in Porter House Review, Honey Literary, The Maine Review, and Autofocus. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University and is the poetry co-editor of Beyond Bars, a literary journal that publishes the work of those affected by the carceral system.

Ken Holland

The Hooves of My Conscience

I stubbed my toe against my conscience
            It was resting in the attic of my mind
I’d no idea how long ago I’d put it there.
            If I hadn’t been looking for I don’t know what
I might never have uncovered it, uncomplaining
            Inside its unmarked box spotted with rusty fungus.
I reached in to gather my conscience like a pudding or
            Custard pie, gently as with anything that has been abandoned―
Such as civility, or the vast array of silent stars of silent films.
            Through the attic window I could see the lower half
Of Pegasus, its starry hooves and brawny legs, though
            The winged disturbance of stellar dust lay just beyond my vision.
And so we lay, my conscience and I, side by side,
            Eyes turned to the turning constellation, ears pricked
For the cantering sound of flight, each of us wondering
            What the other might be thinking.

Ken Holland has been widely published in the journals including Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tulane Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His work has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. He placed first in the 2022 New Ohio Review poetry contest, and was a finalist in the 2024 Concrete Wolf and the 2025 Moonstone Press chapbook contests, which Moonstone subsequently published (Rust and Slag). Also a finalist in Bicoastal Review’s 2025 contest. More at kenhollandpoet.com

Stephanie Jones

Insides
After T.S. Eliot

How we feel
so wild & thrashing what we
can’t touch. Organs
always up for grabs. For
the first one who calls it. For
any hoarder who
crouches to enter this
crawlspace and begins churning
through cystic debris. I realize now
how easy it is for eras
of scar tissue to overwhelm
a membrane. Is it irony or nature―
collecting calluses
where they
can’t protect you
& it’s the loss of what was
soft & molded by
god’s hands that becomes
the next prognosis.
            Between the conception
            And the creation
            Falls the copay.
& I guess we’re
so used to sowing ash from bone
we hardly notice when
something breaks & we
can’t help swallowing the wind
because we’re desperate
to possess something
though it blows
dry through
our burning guts & only
spreads the flame.

Stephanie Jones is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a Mediterranean Jersey girl. She has bylines in The New York Times, HuffPost, NPR & elsewhere. Her poems appear/are forthcoming in The Santa Fe Literary Review, New Feathers Anthology, The Inflectionist Review, Entre: Magazine of the Arts, Nulla, Pine Hills Review, Reverie Magazine, & elsewhere, and as a commission for Blue Note Records.

Renee Kalagayan

Study with Fear and Pears

           After the Supreme Court greenlights racial profiling, 2025

I am shielding my pears with a white bowl, anxious that

                                                                                                    the gnats are invading my kitchen.

The pears simmer in the late fall

                                                                                                                          air. Overripe yellow,

bruising.

                                                                                                              Dangerously close to brown.

The gnats are a constant hum in the background.

                                                                                                           They can smell the sweetness.

Sugaring into syrup is the pears’ undoing, their peels

                                                                                                                        bronzing at the edges.

One by one the soft bodies will be torn

                                                                                                                 by teeth, cut into crescents

or otherwise consumed

                                                                                                                                 by rot. The bowl

stained with sulfur remnants,

                                                                                            a shadow of white. Completely emptied

of light.

Renee Kalagayan is an Asian-American writer and editor. Her work is featured or forthcoming in, among others, Euphemism, Relief, About Place, The Dewdrop, Carolina Muse, and the city-wide GVL Poetry Trail in Greenville, South Carolina. She is an MFA candidate at Converse University, where she is the assistant poetry editor of South 85 Journal. Find her on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, and Bluesky @rkalagayanpoet.

Heidi Kasa

Our Daughters’ Skin

The hush. A first intake of breath.
An awakening before a kiss ever said so.
Before any part of the body was touched
without permission. The room still dark.
The sun racing back down,
beckoning the air dry and still.

His first gaze on her. Swallowed
by his own eyes.
Steps backward two at a time,
a rush back to that first
male desire, the one grown
in trees surrounding the castle
and its dark dark wood.

To conquer and save, to grow
into a good good guy
to heal the wounds of a stabbed girl
and awaken a city forgotten.

The rumors. A whisper sucked back in.
Tales that lit desire untold.
Before we know the girl is a victim.
Her finger green and unpricked.

Her baby hands edging over
soft folds of blanket.

Heidi Kasa is the author of the poetry collection The Bullet Takes Forever, the flash fiction collection The Beginners, winner of the 2023 Digging Press Chapbook Contest, and Split. She received the 2024 Plaza Prose Poetry Prize and the 2023 Poetry Super Highway Prize for poems from The Bullet Takes Forever. Kasa's work has appeared in Barrelhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pinch Journal Online, and elsewhere. Find her at www.heidikasa.com.

Jennifer Mills Kerr

Vigil

Strands of smoke from all her cigarettes
gather at the ceiling, a trapped, ashy chiffon,
                                                                                                               and night
smudges the windows with charcoal crayon.
From the doorway, I spy on
                                                                                             the strange woman
at our kitchen table, drinking whisky,
wall-gazing a paper of white orchids,
                                                                                              climbing and falling
in decorative monotony. How tenderly she
touches her glass, the way
                                                                                                        some parents
stroke their child’s hair. She socializes
with my father’s abandoned chair–
                                                                                                             an absence
my heart tries to fill. I am eleven, their
only child, accustomed to bridging
                                                                                                               distances.
A whisper of spice–like the trail of cologne
from a male passerby–catches at my throat:
                                                                                               He doesn’t love us,
a lodged cherry pit that I can’t swallow
or vomit. I don’t want my
                                                                                                        violent father
back. Why don’t I miss him like she
does? So I take custody of
                                                                                                            her sorrow,
a soft clay I shape into a loyal daughter
figurine: posture soldier-straight,
                                                                                             mouth sealed tight.
I make myself watch as she slips
into trance, tilting like a rag doll
                                                                                       mumbling the minutes
away. He left because of you,
she claimed the day
                                                                                                      he’d vanished.
How did she know I wanted him gone?
I’d told no one of his rages or threats,
                                                                                                locking our secret
into a metal box now shipped to
his mistress. Yet the
                                                                                             dark-haired familiar
sags into night, smearing the table’s
scattered ash.
                                                                                                                    Alone,
at breakfast, I quickly wipe away
the graffiti-slashed grit with
                                                                                                           bare hands,
soiled fingers leaving a residue on
everything I touch–cinder from
                                                                                                           hidden fire.

Jennifer Mills Kerr lives in Northern California. Her poetry has been recently published in Right Hand Pointing, January House, & Unlost. She leads art-inspired writing workshops online and curates poems on the Poetry-Inspired Substack Learn more: www.JenniferMillsKerrPoet.com.

Mark LaMonda

The Light

I’m sitting at a light with my ninety-year-old mother.

Two men and three women are on the street corner,
bobbing up and down, shaking their heads as though in a fierce horse race.

They have been forced to stop jogging by the rules of the road, but they will not stop moving.

I do my best imitation of a horse whinnying.

My mother and I laugh and laugh. She is laughing so hard she is slapping my leg, trying to control her breathing.

I begin pawing at the dashboard to accompany my whinny. She is laughing and begging me to make it stop, but at the same time sounding like a little girl who wants it to continue forever.

The car behind me honks.
We look over and the joggers are gone.
We push forward toward the place she is living.

My Father’s Face

My father’s face became less and less expressive as he aged.
His lines, if he ever had any, smoothed out like an overinflated balloon. His face had age, don’t get me wrong ― He had a liver spot on his cheek the shape of Florida.

But oh…

The words that came out of his face could chisel stone.

To know my father’s age, you had to look carefully at the faces of those who dwelled with him –

Mother, son, daughter, oh yes…

even the dog with his ears starched back, cloudy eyes darting right and left, skin hanging loose on his cheek bones, white tail tucked far under his belly.

Mark LaMonda is an artist and writer who lives in Santa Clarita California.
His work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Ellie, January House,
Shadow and Sax, and is forthcoming in Tough Poets Review and ArLiJo.

Samantha Landau

“If even the stars – ”

『七夕や野にもねがひの糸すすき』
小林一茶
It’s Tanabata
Like strings of wishes in the fields
The pampas grass sways
–Kobayashi Issa (trans. mine)

Orihime fears summer again
Each year she can’t find Hikoboshi
Who too lays hidden, wandering
Behind thick haze, brilliant city lights
She can’t find soft grasses here -

Concrete doesn’t swing gently. It bakes hot,
Merciless. Wind chimes’ blue voices lost,
Adrift, unmoored in cacophony of cicadas sirens
Downtown traffic chattering commuters
Too busy to stop for stars,
Too busy for prayers.

But in certain corners sweating
Lines of penitents still gaze upward,
Tie their colorful wishes to bamboo stems,
Wait patiently for heavenly signs -
May the clouds swiftly part,
May the lovers finally meet.

I have my doubts. If even the stars
Cannot overcome, what chance for bravery
Have I?

Samantha Landau is an academic, classical vocalist, translator, and writer who resides in Tokyo, Japan, where she has lived for over two decades. She works as a professor at The University of Tokyo and is a co-founder of the Gothic in Asia Association. She is currently co-editing a volume of academic essays on Poetry and the Gothic. Her poems have appeared in Tiny Spoon Lit Mag, Judith Magazine, and Dust Poetry Magazine, among others.

Evie Lucas

The Shooting on April 17th, 2025 That Killed -
- Robert Morales, Tiru Chabba

Looking out the window at the cursing of branches
spitting in serrated goose-mother tongues,
laying each other bare to the flapping of wind

Middle morning. I have never seen a tree give shade to another
and live without a limp in its spine

It’s okay trees, it’s okay wind.
I’m not angry anymore, but sometimes
I don’t believe.

I want to run out of this metaphor.
I want to hold your hand and kiss you, dance.
I want to fly away on the cricket song of the horizon
rubbing against itself.

And he will not die until you forget him
And who will grant you rain
And have you ever seen—
you’re hurting my hand, dear—
Have you ever seen the sky forgive itself,
day after day
And look how it rolls off the waxy leaves

Evie Lucas is a Washingtonian/Floridian poet born in 2005. Her work has been published in the UW Historical Review.

Mary McCarthy

Dreaming of Jane

If by some slip of time and place
Charlotte Bronte lived here
on the intracoastal river
between the mainland
and the beachside
in steamy Florida
instead of the dreary
chill and damp of England’s
barren moors
where she was
orphaned by the great
Victorian plague
of tuberculosis that took
her family down
one by one- merciless
as the cruel schoolmaster
that starved and punished
his charges to their early
deaths -would she love
the heat of the air here
almost tropical, the endless
push of the river
the flux and flow of tides
the wild mangroves
thick with life
great slow sea cows
the manatees mating
in huddles against the mud
the astonishing stillness
of egrets and herons
poised electric and intense
watching for the flash
of fin and tail
the prehistoric shapes
of pelicans in sudden
Kamikaze dives
or the fish hawk osprey
swooping to the kill-?
Would the flash and dazzle
of the hunt -the naked dance
of hunger and satiety,
the sudden throb of the sky
darkening to storm
the taste of lightning in the air
striking blind and sure
rains ungentle coming down
hard as hail–would she rejoice
in this unschooled unregulated
rush–as her sister might
who could imagine lovers
all uncivilized without
confining them to attics ?
Would Charlotte marvel
at the elegance of cranes
the raw exuberance
of bougainvillea, the persistence
of earthy dragons,
alligators long jawed
sharp toothed and hungry ?
What stories would she write
after hurricane winds
howled and shook the house
for days- slamming down trees
and pulling up buildings
like loose teeth
swallowing lives like
a god receiving sacrifice
indifferent to such small
and temporary creatures
as ourselves? Afterwards
still alive, would she
take off her gloves
and modest collar
unbutton her dress
and step out skin to sun
hair unpinned curling
in the humid air–?
Would she go barefoot
in the sand and laugh
at dragonflies big
as hummingbirds
and dolphins playing tag
in the wake of motorboats
fearless and alive?

Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse living in Edgewater, Florida. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette Luzajic, and issues of Verse Virtual, Third Wednesday, Earth’s Daughters, and Caustic Frolic. She has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her collection, How to Become Invisible, an exploration of experience with bi-polar disorder, is available from Kelsay Books and on amazon.

Judith Mikesch-McKenzie

Butcher Paper

The bear comes to us in brick-sized packages
wrapped in white paper, then
dropped in the chest freezer like tetris, each
  aimed to nest against another
until the white mound against the bottom is
  like the bulk of the black bear
that hung from the cabin’s deck frame last
  year, shaking the frame until
all inside woke, sitting up in the bunks frozen
  in fear as the creature roared
and shook the deck frame so hard that the
  cabin itself shook around the
four girls, all except the youngest in their
  bleeding, as always, at the same
time, sitting ashen and shaken under their
  blankets.

When she told the story later, mother made it
  out to be a cub, small and hungry, and
noted how, when she opened the door opposite
  the deck and threw unwrapped meat,
dripping blood, as far into the woods as she
  could fling it, how the bear that
rattled the entire cabin had - in her words -
  ‘scampered’ after it, she watched
it disappear into the dark forest, she quickly
  rushed us all into the car, leaving
everything we’d brought behind, and drove
  to the road that took us back to
town. In her story, we focused on complaining
  about losing our hamburgers, as she
and her audience laughed.

….but every time after that, when her brother
  brought us white wrapped bear
meat from a hunting trip, as she settled each
  piece in the freezer, her eyes always
lingered on each package, especially the edges
  where red bear blood leaked out,
staining the edges of the white paper like the
  white sheets in the empty cabin,
where the scratches of the mighty bear marked
  the wood for years to come.

Judith Mikesch-McKenzie is a writer, teacher. producer and actor living in the Pacific Northwest. She has multiple publications of more than 100 poems in over 40 literary journals, including Plainsongs Magazine, Calyx, Hole In The Head Review, Clackamas Literary, Monterey Poetry Review, and more. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net.

Bailey Quinn

Postpartum Abduction

I didn’t expect to wake up one morning in full tilt screaming help me help me from the shower floor to
a chorus of “I can’t help you I’ve got work.” I’m worried I can’t hold the baby. If I hold the baby she’ll
vaporize. If I hold the baby she’ll fly away. If I hold the baby she’ll grow another head. The shower
drops into the bedroom & I’m naked & covered in sweat & crawling around on the carpet like an old
friend. Lasers beam from my eyes & throat. My husband misses work at the foot of a hospital bed. The
Doctor tells me postpartum can feel like an alien abduction. Or maybe it’s vertigo. One time this guy
told me we all have crystals in our ears & vertigo happens when the crystals are out of whack. I woosh
upwards toward the fluorescents. Maybe aliens messed with my crystals. The Doctor asks if I’m on
anything. He uses instruments to pump me full of fluids & Zoloft. He pumps my husband full of
don’t worry your wife will be fine. My husband holds the baby & his angry black pupils say, “Why
didn’t you tell me you were abducted?” I am carted to the car in a wheelchair & the parking lot is a field
of four-wheeled Toyota corn stalks. I check the baby to see if she’s breathing. She has not flown away.
She has not even sprouted wings. My husband asks when I will return to Earth. I count each
streetlight’s empty beam instead & recall how it felt to be scalped in half, left in a steel field.

Bailey Quinn (she/her) is a PhD student at Oklahoma State University, focusing on visual and material poetics. Her work explores the intersections of mental health, motherhood, sexuality, environment, and gender with a haunting, folkloric twist. Her poems have been published in Bat City Review and West Trade Review, among others.

Doug Ramspeck

Throwing Bones

Or say you grind up milkweed
and bittercress to make a potion.

Or watch the cyst of the morning sun
burning a hole in the sky.

Or wake at night to the music
of rain, the seconds opening

and closing their insect eyes.
And because the hours bleed one

into the next, you set yourself
the task of not quite disappearing.

And sit nights on the back porch,
looking up at the abeyance of the stars.

And know that the soliloquies
of grief are rubbed raw by overuse,

that the years become like the throwing
of bones. And it seems you keep climbing

deeper and deeper into yourself,
the accretions of your breaths

a kind of numerology, the hours
a slow strobe. And you listen

to the soft night winds, the sound
making you think of the first words

humans ever spoke, mute and gestural,
surrounded by empty space and dreaming.

Vertical Divider

The Skin of It

This we saw by day:
soldiers in the road,

trucks raising dust.
And at night we heard

gunfire in the distance,
the whirr of invisible

helicopter blades.
And it snowed in our lungs,

and we woke to buzzards
circling the house, to a glaucoma

of fog perched atop
the river. And smoke rose

from distant fires,
and the robes of day

seemed made of omens.
And we carried some finite

hopefulness inside breaths
that made their quiet pilgrimages.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of ten poetry collections, two collections of stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Dancing in Their Dead Mother's Dresses, is part of the American Storytellers Series from Wolfson Press.

Patrick T. Reardon

Jagged

The shoeless guy sleeping on the
McDonald’s bench along the north
windows is the god of still waters.

The unfocused one, rocking over
his Egg McMuffin, was once the
mayor of Akron, now el-riding
through the cold night, sneaking
rest in the blank before the morning
rush. The wraith they call Husk is a
laughing fool, devious and deceitful.

Denmark Jones was born of an oak,
saw first light from the inside of a
green stone. His eyes, of iron, as if
in a window dress model, as if in a
garden statue. He ponders the offer
of the one who can’t stand still,
selling steaks he stole from the
super mercado dumpster.

Denmark was named for the old
word “denk” which is to say “pain.”
He enters the ivory gate each night
to jagged dreams.

Patrick T. Reardon, a Chicago Tribune reporter from 1976 to 2009, is the author of seven poetry collections. His latest, Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, was the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans (Lavender Ink). He is a six-time nominee in poetry for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in Blue Unicorn, America, RHINO, Commonweal, Long Poem, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Burningword Literary Journal, and other journals.

Victoria Jean Reynolds

Two Truths and One Lie
                        inspired by Hajjar Baban

i.
The first time I kissed a boy
he was threatening to kill himself.
I have never broken a bone.
I cracked the cartilage in my ribs
and tears froze to the fine hair on my cheeks.

ii.
My father shook my mother only once.
I knotted her bandanas
into a rope so long I leaned
out the window to touch it to the grass.
Grandma was secretly bald and we fear what we inherit.

iii.
My mother’s fingers shrunk – became mostly bone.
I found a strand on my sweater - half brown, half silver.
I wore a wedding band all summer and you did not notice.

iv.
Pop ran around on Mimi until he couldn’t walk
                                                            and so he crawled.
The heart has never broken from discontent; it simply shrinks.
I hear her footfalls and walker in the hallway,
I know it is time to clean her wound.

v.
Being in love is a lobotomy.
Every time we are outside together,
I believe you are coming back to me.
            Hope was never something with wings;
            hope was always a dangerous thing.

Victoria Jean Reynolds holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her poems are forthcoming in West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Waxwing, and are recently featured in Salt Hill, Raleigh Review, Muzzle, & others. She was selected and served as an Isle Royale artist-in-residence during the summer of 2025. She currently works as the poetry editor for Stillhouse Press and Off Season Mag. You can find her at victoriajeanreynolds.com and on Instagram @toreyntial.

Amy Riddell

Hospice
for Jon

Remind me, then, how I survived that undertow,
how you dove into the jellyfish sting

of rough surf to save me. Kiss me, and say again
there is no end to our promise.

I remember when our bed became a kingdom
suspended above uncertainty, when and how

you would die, unknowns haunting the periphery
of our hours left together. You looked unmade

and rumpled, propped up hard against soft pillows.
How I looked, you never said.

When your mind went, I lost mine, too.
Could you recognize me,

squawking to be heard above of life’s fractures?
Remind me, love, how I survived

the drowning mystery while we floated
as if the limbo would keep you alive.

Amy Riddell is the author of three poetry collections, Prayer of Scalpel & Ash, a chapbook (Rockwood Press), Bullets in the Jewelry Box (FutureCycle) and Narcissistic Injury, a chapbook (Pudding House). A Pushcart nominee, Amy’s poems have appeared in various journals, including The Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust & Moth, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Orchards Journal of Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, Misfit Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review.

Patrick G. Roland

Bedtime Routine

Dad screamed himself awake,
chased by the same werewolf
up the same staircase. Every night.
My brother laughed himself awake,
his joy shaking the room.
He’d whisper
to the cat falling off
the same couch nightly.

I dreamed in red space,
soundless,
as if submerged
in slow-boiling murk.

At sixteen, I left the noise behind.
My first night alone,
the quiet pressed me flat,
its mass tidal.
No breath, no sound.
I blinked through five decades
of my grandmother’s rosary
until the pressure lifted.

I watched it cross the room
toward my Carhartt jacket and bibs,
as if remembering my shape,
then slip into the half-open closet.

I’ve moved again and again since then,
pretending distance mattered.
Now, when the weight returns,
I press back.
Pulse for pulse―
until the dark
remembers
where it came from.

Vertical Divider

Agualungs

His warm stethoscope bruises my back.
He drums weightless words into me,
murmurs something about my lungs,
how they gurgle like a song he once knew.

“Aqualung,” he whispers.
Jethro Tull in the pulmonary clinic.
My muddled translation:
aqua becomes agua―
a private mix of drowning and language.

I see melody carving greenish grooves
into lungs already etched with a death sentence.

I think about my grandfather,
his white hard hat dark with coal dust,
spitting black phlegm into the wind
before walking to the mine.

His history. My present. My future.
Even now, my breaths betray me.
Inherited mucus grips each breath.
Heirloom drowning.

My agualungs beg for froth,
zephyrs between gulps.

Night corridors polished to a squeak.
Each nurse’s shoes alive
with the rhythm of a bicycle pump.

I inhale black gravel.
Exhale.
Broken pieces of melody.

Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator living with cystic fibrosis. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Rattle, Hobart, Sky Island, A-minor, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. Twitter: @pg_roland

Cole Roulain

Filament

i stepped on a light bulb, which managed to
lodge its most sly filament in my foot.
it must have begun its migration soon
after, using my wainscoting to move.

it has begun to broadcast, grumbling in
my knee, receiving terror and comfort
in equal measure, indiscriminate.
i kneel independent of my own will.

that tower uses my transmissions to
decorate its ironworks – unusual
for a cage designed to remain vacant.

every antenna is intimate
with every other. it is in their
nature. it is nothing for you to fear

Cole Roulain lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma and writes poems about weather, inheritance, and odd machinery.

Patricia Russo

Water May Forgive

He’s wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt
and watering the lawn in the rain
and now his mother comes out
holding a big straw hat on her head
with one hand
to call him names
in a language he pretends
he does not remember.

He turns his back
arcs the spray of water up
higher and higher
until what falls to earth
is indistinguishable from rain.

Patricia Russo's work has appeared in One Art, Heimat, Zin Daily, Wild Greens, and Eulogy Press.

Claudia Excaret Santos

I Come From
after Dean Atta

I come from seafood in the morning
and nights of chocomilk.
I experienced migration through tears
but am happy with the home I built. I come from
many houses and one same home.

I come from afternoons of friends dying my hair.
I come from texting that never ends.
I come from Mondays standing under the sun
paying honors to a flag that didn’t honor me back.

I come from a Mexican passport
and an always-ready suitcase.(1) I come
from seasalt and coconut water.
I come from crossing oceans, which implies
always arriving at the beach.

I come from nights learning another language,
and then another.
In my mother tongue, my mother taught
me how to read and how to live.
But now in English,
I’m on my own.

__________________________________
(1) Under my bed, there’s always a suitcase.
Everything worth carrying:
● not the broken teacup
I am tired of always bringing broken things.
I’d prefer to bring a magical bird,
useless, made of paper, but complete.
I’d prefer not to have a suitcase under the bed.
I’d prefer to arrive and never to escape.

Claudia Excaret Santos (@claudiaexcaret) is a mexican writer, translator, and content creator. She received the PECDA Colima 2024 grant. She is a Sophia-FILCO Young Writers 2025 finalist. She founded the YouTube channel La secta de los libros and the podcast Libros y otras cosas fuera del transporte in which she interviews authors and reviews books in order to promote literature.
https://linktr.ee/claudiaexcaret

Topher Shields

Birkenhead

Birkenhead light
on the lino.

The kettle
thinking about boiling.

My mother
at the bench
not looking at me.

She says it once.

Christopher.

Not loud.

Just enough
to see how it sits
in the room.

You learn early
how quietly a house
can hold a name.

Outside
mā frost lifting
off the wire.

My father
closing the shed door
without letting it latch.

No one asks
why the name
needs trying.

Something
in the air shifts—

gravel
when water
moves under it.

Across a playground.
Across a roll call.

Here
it moves slowly
through the house,
the way cold
enters
through the smallest gap.

You listen.

No one tells you
not to.

A child listens
when the adults
have lowered their voices.

the world
has just begun.

Topher Shields is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. His work appears in Puerto del Sol, The Shore, Cordite Poetry Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the River Heron Editors Poetry Prize (2025).

Jacquinn Sinclair

Bug Bites

A blue light zaps bugs from summer’s air in the yard at night while he bastes chicken and ribs,
unbothered by the bugs’ burning lives. A crisp pop at the end of a short sizzle, like an egg fried in
hot oil. He was like a father figure; he taught me about life: how to cook, how to drive a pickup
truck, and how to bait and cast a line. We spent countless hours on the banks of rivers waiting for
the fish to offer themselves up. The fish, snagged by his hook, lay sideways like me, on the bed while
he groped the hope out of me. Singed like bugs meeting the bulb. On the porch, I sit trapped in the
moment, remembering, running my feet through the grass. Inside, I turn off the blue light from the
safety of the kitchen. Deliberate. Proud. Let him get eaten up for a while; it’s the least I could do for
now.

Jacquinn Sinclair is a writer based in the Greater Boston area. Her reporting and criticism work has been published in The Boston Globe, American Theatre Magazine, and on WBUR.org among others. Her poems and stories have been anthologized in How We Take Up Space: Memories, Stories and Poems on Spatial Justice, the International Women’s Writing Guild’s Heels Into The Soil: Stories & Poems Resisting The Silence, and New Jersey Fan Club: Artists And Writers Celebrate The Garden State.

Sophia Upshaw

The Record Always Skips

Would you believe me if I said
              this is how I remember us best:
                            with lidded eyes, The Doors spinning
              softly in the next room, your scuffed
Taylor leant against our bed,
              and the rain–-always, the rain,
                            July in Tallahassee, you know
              how it is. I hear it even
now: that rhythmic tap, tap, tap
              in 4/4 time, rapping its watery knuckles
                            on the gutter, live oaks shaking
              out wet branches like umbrellas
in the corner store—Back then,
              we always had somewhere else to be,
                            somewhere else to look,
              a couple of dark clouds tripping
over each other, a slow race
              to a horizon neither of us knew
                            would be our last―
              The first time I came over, you showed
me a picture of Jim Morrison smiling
              on a street corner and pointed—
                            it was your house in the grainy back-
              ground, a beat-up Oldsmobile in place
of my Altima, that same damn tree
              stump taking up half the lawn,
                            and there—a freckle just above
              Morrison’s left shoulder, your bedroom window,
the one we propped open with a chipped
              mug & our last bit of elbow grease,
                            the one I peered at through the bramble-
              wood of your hair as it pooled
across my chest like melted vinyl,
              like someone held a match
                            to all your best B-sides―
              it’s nice to know
that some things never change,
              or that change just hasn’t gotten around
                            to dealing with them, like scheduling
              a physical or tightening a loose bolt;
that under the awning of Meantime,
              we are safe from the storm,
                            my fingers still free to strum
              your ribs, pulled taut, to tap
the fretboard of your spine
              in search of harmonics, something,
                            anything, to make you sing―
              I only wanted to hear you,
but only skin answered, goosebumps
              sprouting like wild mint in the garden,
                            like white caps on a damp, overturned log.

Sophia Upshaw is a Tallahassee-based writer pursuing a graduate degree in poetry at Florida State University. Her work is featured in Al Dente, oddball magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Mistake House, and elsewhere. In addition to teaching first-year composition, Sophia serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Southeast Review.

Jasmine Vallejo-Love

The Dish at Denny’s Was Called Moons Over My Hammy

Your name being Hamara,
the monikers stuck: Ham,
Hambone, Hammy. Grown
men lovingly giggle & greet
you with big, burly embraces.
All my friends adore you.
I melt in the softness of your sisterhood,
long for your jazzy serenade.
The recollection of your loud,
effervescent laughter echoes,
vibrates my innards. God,
I miss you. 2500 miles of life
betwixt us & your heart is failing,
stopped up like a drain, at the mercy
of untrusted Floridian doctors who deleted
your mother’s life 5 months ago.
The familia can’t lose you, too.
I’ll cling to you, like our octopus hugs,
stretch my arms across states
to hold your hand. Ham, I only know
joy because you introduced us,
confidence because you hyped me up,
love sans pain because you modeled it.
I evaluate the world with your eyes in mind
& pray with your unwavering faith
that your breath lasts beyond tonight,
so we can dance again & dream
of retiring in Fiji, or Bali, or Phuket,
two old ladies on a black sand beach
cackling and singing under the moon.

I Am Not The One

I was in ecstasy,
when the smack came,
unexpected.
The buzz between my ears
reverberates until it morphs
into a light ring,
mmmmmmmm,
just out of grasp,
like the ring he’ll never put on me.
What is it about my face that says hittable?
What was it about Mom that said punching bag?
Witness to the bangs,
crashes & shrieks.
Here I am,
pattern repeating.
I hear her cries like a hymn,
hypnotizing me,
unfreezing my shocked body,
gathering the rage
that wells in my gut,
purrs, hums, gnaws
through my chest,
activates my self-respect
& my arm levitates,
straightens,
& whoosh,
smackity smack smack.
  His smile left askew.
  No victims here,
  clackity clack clack.
Body
  mobilizes
  whoosh
I stand ready to throw more hands.
  Stunned, he stumbles back &
  boom
  pattern undone.

The Ritual of Cocinando

We don’t have recipes; we have observation. No notes written
on index cards or laminated sheets. Nothing physical passed
down through generations. I know only to listen for the right
sound as plantains hit hot oil. To season by look, taste, scent,
letting ancestry embody me as I pour my lifeblood into lifegiving
meals. Mince the ajo, ajicitos, aceitunas, onion, cilantro, recao
to conjure Sofrito, the base of comida Puertorriqueña. Roast
pernil until it falls off the bones, simmer arroz con gandules
for maximum fluffiness of grain. Dance while I stir habichuelas,
singing loudly to Eddie Santiago, Hector Lavoe, El Gran Combo.
In the kitchen, in those moments, we are curanderas, watching
our sopitas revive our sick, our cafecitos embolden conversation,
our platos solicit joy. The sonrisas – payment for our labor.

Jasmine Vallejo-Love is a disabled Afro-Puerto Rican American poet and writer living in Los Angeles. Her work engages with social issues such as mental illness, domestic violence, addiction, and sexual assault. She is a Diana Woods Memorial Award finalist, Quippy Choice Award Winner, 2025 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow, and was selected for PEN America’s Emerging Voices workshop, the McCormack (fka Tin House) workshop, and VONA. Her work has been anthologized and appears in journals such as Pinch, Lunch Ticket, and Cholla Needles. Engage with her on Instagram @CafecitoWithJas

William Welch

TO COLLEEN ON I-40 NEAR LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

I wish you could have seen how the first light shown
on the spruces. You know the pair, the only evergreens
in that stand of maple and cherry north of the house?
We can see them from the bedroom. I woke
before sunup and sat watching the day begin.
Spring air came through an open window. This is how
my mornings passed the whole time you’ve been gone.
I feed the cat and make coffee, then return to bed
with a book. Today, Linda Gregg’s poems
have kept me company. So many of them filled
with loneliness—she’s alone in the Greek countryside,
the land of the epics, can hear bells
as goats browse on a hillside. The sun
raps its shepherd’s crook over the rocks.
Of course, it’s a metaphor for the landscape
of her soul, as the world depicted in poems
often becomes. The sound of bells gives that way.
Their dissonance is the right music for her
state of mind—archaic, random—occasionally,
it coalesces into a melody. When she goes into town,
she meets women sitting together with their needlework.
Her Greek is insufficient and they communicate
through other means besides
language. It’s the foreigner’s dilemma. Hospitality
comes from people you don’t understand.
All night, you’ve been driving through East Texas
and Arkansas, returning at last. It’s been months since
you’ve lain beside me here. I imagine what you must be
thinking as you drive beside road crews resurfacing the highway.
Steam rising from asphalt smears the sky, already wobbling
with a mirage of stars. The interstate stretches
into the distance. Does it feel like you are coming home?
Or does that word sound more and more abstract,
a word like “peace,” or “justice,” or “love?”
What do they mean? All of human history seems like an attempt
to answer that question. One by one, daylight revealed
the evergreen branches as I watched. And thought
of Penelope’s test for Odysseus once he finally arrived
in Ithaca after twenty years of absence. How the wound
on his leg was not proof enough. Everyone has scars.
Instead, she quizzed him. “Let’s move the bed.”
“No,” he answered, “No, it can’t be moved.
One of the posts is a living olive tree rooted in place.”
Only two people on earth knew that. He passed the test.

BEYOND DOUBT

You’re embarrassed to admit you thought
life would grow easier in some ways.
That with time and experience would come
more confidence, or less confusion…
Admit it. And forgive yourself.
Only in poems does Telemachus
leave home assured, knowing
he follows in a god’s footsteps.
And David’s kingdom is a countryside
of words. The stones he carries inevitably
kill giants, but try lifting one of them―
each is of equal weight
with your voice. Your world
is more conflicted than theirs,
(that is painfully obvious),
so, it’s understandable you would hope
one day to feel less uncertain.
Why you crave guidance.
Why your imagination invents heroes
whose struggles seem noble
compared with real suffering. Real stones
are heavy. You need both hands
to pick one up. The bones of a human skull
shatter like porcelain. The world of flowers
is also the world of corpses, perfumed
with both the scents of warm bread
as well as the rot of fish
fermenting in vats. Hunger
is its central problem,
not justice, not your need for love.
Its one god is the god of indifference.

And yet, you call it beautiful. How could you
unless, of all beliefs, that one wasn’t always
beyond doubt?

William Welch lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared in Mudlark, Little Patuxent Review, Cider Press Review, Stone Canoe, and others. His collection Adding Saffron (FLP, 2025), won the 2025 CNY Book Awards People’s Choice Award. Find more at: williamfwelch.com.

Robert Wooten

He’s Attractive

You had withdrawn into a corner of the room
to think about Shakespeare and the art
of thinking about Shakespeare away from others
on a sunny springish Saturday at noon.
As Ai watched you in the corner, Ai began
to think of you and how you smile too much
without thinking, Ai’d know this about you because
you’re always saying things that don’t
quite make sense, as if you were picking out
significant words,
constructing your own elaborations.

You withdrew into the dusty sunlight by an open window
and Ai admired you, noticed you
hadn’t even opened His book yet
had a smile on your face and a
faraway look on your eyes, fixed on
the light squirrels outside, perhaps,
that jumped from wet and leafy limb
to wet and leafy limb.

You had withdrawn into another room;
and my thought had something to do, certainly,
with how Ai perceived
your noble carriage.
And Ai stood inside a rapidly expanding sphere
of influence.

Robert Wooten attended North Carolina State University and earned an MA in English with a creative writing focus (1994) before earning an MFA in poetry at the University of Alabama (1998). He was awarded first-prize in the winter 2021-22 Dream Quest One poetry competition, and his poetry appears in The Southern Poetry Anthology; VII. He resides in Durham, NC.

Ellen June Wright

The Reverie of Dream Variations
  after Langston Hughes

I recall myself a girl twirling arms above my head
     as though there were no evil in the world.
The sun, a gift God designed just for me
     to whirl and to dance, to be full of glee
in my beautiful Black girlhood.

Six decades later, I understand joy better and the freedom
     of rest, the pricelessness of a cool evening beneath tall trees,
or sitting in a backyard rose garden with a good friend,
     waiting for the sun to set as life’s sun also, dips
in the sky. We make a pact that before we go
     we’ll fling our arms wide in the face of the sun again.

Silver-haired women now, hearts dance
     and whirl though days are passing fast.
We try to hold onto each one, but they slip
     through our fingers and bring another day
before we're even ready.

How many summers we have left is a mystery,
     so we sip each day, each month, each season―
try to make them last—knowing time's the most
     precious gift. And fear not the night which will
softly and tenderly come.

Ellen June Wright’s first collection, Angela, is forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books. Her chapbook, Laure, was a top 10 finalist in the Adrift 2025 chapbook contest. Her work has been published in POETRY Magazine, The American Poetry Review, North American Review, Plume, Missouri Review, Caribbean Writer, Obsidian, and is forthcoming in Callaloo. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and has received several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Wright also hosts a weekly workshop for Black poets.

Gerald Yelle

As Seen on TV

There’s a line you’ve been meaning to lay down for days
and you think remembering it might help you sleep
but it doesn’t so you think you might as well resort to
what they used to call the idiot box. It has all those
well-beaten channels, including the ones with vowels
and consonants and maybe trochaics. One has
a lightshow with an ape-fly and a festival of pranks
with a trapdoor straight to dreamland. Another gives you
a glimpse of the Norfolk biffin floating at the bottom
of the sea. Sometimes it’s like there’s too much
to choose from. For instance a fly-speck sideshow
and one where a dude lies on a riverbank with his arm
in the water swirling around near the bottom, feeling
for holes in the mud where catfish lurk till one of those
suckers latches onto his fist and he hauls it in.
Maybe the one about whales that sleep standing up.
You hear their voices but you don’t know what they say.

Gerald Yelle’s books include Evolution for the Hell of It, the bored, and The Holyoke Diaries. His chapbooks include No Place I Would Rather Be and A Box of Rooms. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

M.J. Young & Trinity Richardson

Things I’ve Thought About in Church

how long you can know a person before it’s ok to give them a hug,
how much my knees hurt, where my guardian angel is,
if hell is real, if I would go there, sex, baking a gluten-free key lime pie,
  how I want to ring the altar bell, if being a martyr would be worth the pain,
how poorly I slept last night, the book I’m reading, the book I’m supposed to be reading,
  what it would feel like to unbutton a man’s dress shirt, my thin arms,
if god loves me, if I love myself, if it’s blasphemy to love my mom more than god,
  how small I feel, what it would feel like to be nailed to a cross,
my mom, my cat, third places, the mulberry tree from my childhood home,
  if the old woman behind me would say Peace be with you if she knew I was gay,
Rhythm 0, empty movie theatres, my evil music teacher,
  how I want my body to be like Christ’s—a sliver on a tongue,
what it’s like to be in love, gender, how to be honest, nuclear fallout,
  where my mother’s guardian angel was all those years ago,
Job, what it would be like to be a dog,
  candles in cupped hands, wishes on stars, the view from the apse,
how I don’t understand party etiquette,
  what if I called the parish’s office and said I wanted to get married in the church,
Mary Oliver, every spider I’ve ever killed,
  how I want to wear the cassock, how I don’t want to be an altar boy,
mockumentaries, how-to guides, the smell of chlorine,
  if another Catholic church would marry us, how it could have been worse,
if I would have been happier as a lawyer, if my dad was right,
  if I’ll still go to Mass when I’m old,
if guardian angels exist,
  how I want to be held by a man who loves me,
how I want to be held

M.J. Young is a writer and MFA student at Florida International University, where he is a graduate instructor. His poetry can be found in Ninth Letter, phoebe, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. In his free time he enjoys listening to Philip Glass and exploring bookstores.

Trinity Richardson is a poet raising an evil cat. They are a reader for West Trade Review and Dishsoap Quarterly and the social media manager for The Adroit Journal. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their poems can be found or are forthcoming in Gulf Stream, Moon City Review, Thimble, and more. Outside of writing, their interests include Magic, magic, and claw machines.