Issue 17 Full Text

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Jennie E Owen

Small steps to jump

Suspended a moment
the blue sky a crown upon your head
birds stars at your feet
You fly/flew/fell. 

Couldn’t you hear me?
Calling from my marrow,
aching that I could catch each
step mid air
palm to heel.
Down you gently
to the river bed.

You were never my creature.

You broke
in awkward places, I fear
            I could not fix this time
with torn knee kisses, tissues, lies.

Did you feel the wind
in your cape?
My pulse tremble under your wing?
In your ears, the whistle of my breath
between my teeth? 

I would have been that crown
            those stars
            this riverbed.

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Jennie E Owen’s writing has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches creative writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire, UK with her husband and three children. She is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, focusing on poetry and place.

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Pamilerin Jacob

Dark Fruit

Lick-bait, it hung, glaring as an instruction
in noonlight. I put the choke-pear
in my mouth thinking it a jewel. 

The warm gash of error, my face
filled with thunderbolts
dashing out of the red mutilation 

in threads of white. Let me be disastrous
this one time, I whispered, as his syringe
sneaked its lean arm into me. 

All the ways we plummet
into fire, all the precious, unnamable
ways we dip our fingers into dirt 

in hopes of planting, but come
up punctured, aching, animal.

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Pamilerin Jacob is a poet & editor whose poems have appeared in Barren Magazine, Agbowó, The Rumpus, Palette, Okay Donkey & elsewhere. He is the Curator of PoetryColumn-NND, a poetry column in Nigerian NewsDirect, a national newspaper.

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Milica Mijatović

In America, I learn about satisfaction

By the history section of the local library,
I watch as a man rubs his calloused foot
on the brick wall. The books behind him
flinch as his dead skin cells float to the dirty
beige floor. His toes are hairy, and his nails
are small. His feet are another man’s hands,
firmly shaking the grooves of the wall.
He rubs with determined precision, rubs and rubs
until the callouses are long gone, rubs some more
through his heel and ankle, rubs until his entire
left leg is erased, and rubbing still, he turns
his head to find me there, shaking my foot
to the steady sound of his crumbling.

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Milica Mijatović is a Serb poet and translator. Born in Brčko, Bosnia and Hercegovina, she relocated to the United States where she earned a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Capital University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, Salamander, Plume, The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Collateral, Santa Clara Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, War Food, won the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition and will be published by Southword Editions in May 2023. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and she serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Consequence.

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Nike Onwu

Wake II

for Philip

Unable to sleep, I follow the peopling
of memory around your body, too quiet
to be sleeping. That Wednesday I was soft
against the world but the call came anyway.
The cold skeleton of the bed burning
into my thigh, there I unlearnt the catechism
of grief, what no lesson taught me:
of craters drained of light, shape-shifting wound
the size of our life. Before Wednesday
I worshiped the neglect of small devotions:
missed your call—on purpose—read your texts
—did not reply—sealed the door and loved
the darkness thinking it the worst that could be.
Isn't it law, the inevitable unraveling? The thickening
plume that gathers like smoke
over a badly fed fire. Dirt tongue, and milk skin
over the eyes. Traitor body that wants
what bodies want, what the living want,
what you cannot have. Life still aches at me
its simple needs. I wade through the morning’s womb,
chorus of crickets, solitary dirge of a nearby dog,
reluctant purpling of the sky. I call the imminent day
by its name trying, stupidly, to tame it.

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Nike Onwu

Iwájú

The bones are in full bloom,
these years after. The full kiss
of their petals. Where
is the smell of decay?
The songless throat, cavern
of ravenous prayer? The psalm
undressed of praise?
Marrow fed on nothing fattens
beautiful, what feeds tomorrow
feeds me. Out of the eater, sweetness
better than the sting before.
I was a wretched world, wrecked
garden, if you can believe it.

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Nike Onwu writes from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work has been published in Agbowo, Isele and elsewhere.

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Frank Graziano

Turtle Waking near the Trampas

Hardly more than a stone
or some thrown-out thing
rusting in the roadside
muck, hardly heartbeat enough
to grow old.

A dead god, must be, takes in the dead
air yawned from the mouth
that eats fish, air too sluggish
for the steep slope
upward. 

I am trying to let days
harden in layers upon me,
like varnish, to see
my hope hardly more
than a stone or some
thrown-out thing coming home
from a loneliness
so long it grows legs
and walks, from a lie
that hardens around itself.

A dazed bird flies
from a wind-puffed shirt,
a beetle hides in a papercup
pierced by a fork, the air
aches inside a drying
pair of trousers.

And I think: Who am I, upright, hardly
more than a thirst to my name,
to not hide my head
inside my body?

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Frank Graziano’s early career included the publication of several chapbooks of poetry, as well as editions of works by Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Mark Strand and James Wright. Following a BA in poetry writing from the University of Arizona, an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, and graduate studies in Lima, Peru, Graziano received a doctorate in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico. He lives in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico.

Graziano’s research and writing have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Carter Brown Library, the Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays Programs, and the state arts councils of Arizona, Colorado, Virginia and Pennsylvania. He has been a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Fundación Valparaíso, the Millay Colony, the Wurlitzer Foundation and the Ucross Foundation.

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Samantha DeFlitch

These Going Days

November is the blank-faced month. Like an old woman
counting quarters at the side table, it gives away nothing
of what has come before. It is full of duty it cannot remember,
so the leaf-clogged Monogahela whispers instructions: turn left
at the cool-backed corn silo, come up alongside Rita’s garage.
Inside, you’ll find a young possum unclinging to its mother’s
back, and the possum is like a mirror as the ungiving year
meanders toward its natural conclusion. November: leave us
huddled beneath the car engine, and take the years’ final sounds
with you when you go: bare-limbed and inscrutable as rime.

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Samantha DeFlitch

November Eclipse

The bite, some scientists call it. The moment
when the edges of our world meet our moon. 

I am barefoot at the bite. Tiled floor, cold,
in a third-floor walkup in early November 

I make my life. I imagine remarkable things
just beyond the boundaries of the window- 

pane where the moon is swallowed, whole:
a saw-whet owl stares wide-eyed at the sky 

from her perch in next-door ash trees.
My neighbor in her nightgown 

watches me, watching the going-moon.
Mothman, lost in the dark, finds love 

in a flicking Sunoco sign. What if this is it?
Our loneliness is amplified in what we share: 

This backyard, fenceless and sprawling.
That gas station down the street. One moon.

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Samantha DeFlitch is the author of Confluence (Broadstone Books, 2021). A National Poetry Series finalist, her work has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review and On the Seawall, among others. She lives in New Hampshire.

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Divyasri Krishnan

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz

after Wallace Stevens

Even the cello, whose note is used
to lingering, has packed up. Is gone.
A symphony in New York is not
the same as a symphony in Pittsburgh,
I tell you, the music is all wrong.
It is like traveling a long way
to watch a death. See how the velvet
is ripped out, replaced by wood—
The chandeliers bearing their white fruit,
The stairs leading to nowhere
but beauty, so everywhere.
Even the mirrors they have taken,
an unforgivable crime, or else
they have taken my eyes.
So gone are the modes of desire.
No more music and no sight.
It was in the mirrors where I learned
to love you as a girl, reassured
by your figure in the silver,
a line of heat at my back.
O, second heart. I never looked back.
Now, the memory of your breath in my ear
its own movement—
Orpheus loved as a woman.
Who else could understand
the plucked string of fear, its eternal thrum?

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Divyasri Krishnan

Making Fun of Leonardo DiCaprio Dating a 19-Year-Old When You Once Spent a Summer in Love with Your 40-Year-Old Coworker

A little wine for your trouble.
In this heat, it is hard remembering
sadness. You are still young,
your friend a little drunk on 495
though she claims to be fine.
Death, then, seems so far off.
Everything sun-on-sea bright,
like when you cracked your head
and all the light in the world entered you.
His eyes, so blue. Above the dark
water, his hand outstretched,
you must imagine the opportunities
he takes to touch you.
Your name on his lips, not intended
for your hearing. Stretching
your nineteen years into the shape
of desire, something intrinsic
or else unconsciously committed
to memory over the years.
Always acting at an age
you never want to reach.
Still needing the oblivion of sweet,
pink lemonade in your Cabernet,
strawberry ice with your tequila.
If he wanted you, it would ruin
everything. The knowledge
of his goodness is what keeps you
whole. In dreams you love him
only through a window, crossing
your arms just under
your chest and his eyes
tilted up, receiving sky.
Everything blurred with desire.
O, what horror would it be
to see it bleed
into his brilliance. What shame
to have wandered dressed in white
to where lust blunts all things good
and bright.

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Divyasri Krishnan is the author of Primordial Knowledge (Bottlecap Press). Her work is published in DIAGRAM, Muzzle Magazine and elsewhere. Her work has further been recognized by the Best of the Net, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, Periplus Collective and Palette Poetry. She studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Michael Quattrone

How to Love

Dig a large hole, mind-sized; toss it in.
Write it down in felt-tipped pen 

on the crosshairs of a feather.
Begin with a stone. Boil water forever. 

Peel away each razor leaf
from the tough grass stem.

Hold a hummingbird between your thumbs. 

Make dinner of illegible light
and leave a window open. 

Tie a bowstring to the sun before it sets.
Let it pull you along the edge of night.

Yes, that is the fur of something warm.
Yes, that is the scent of birth.

No, I can’t explain it either.

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Michael Quattrone (he/him) is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006) and the songs of One River (Wolfe Island Records, 2018). His work is included in The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013). Recent poems appear in  Streetlight, DMQ Review and Muleskinner. He lives in Tarrytown, New York, where he reads poetry for The Westchester Review and Slapering Hol Press.

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Kelly R Samuels

Planets

Northamptonshire: extremely localized rain, falling on one field but not
another

It falls in this way, as if like.

Twelve minutes from where you are, where I am, where
I’ll leave from—heading back to where the birch I planted
has gone haywire.

I’ve said it seems as if the interstate serves as border, companion
to the weather front. 

Once we crawled for a mile along that road, hunched
forward, using all of our vision—

suddenly came into
what appeared brighter for the contrast.

Once we stood watching it rain in our front yard,
sun ablaze in the back, and wondered at distance.

Kept turning to see. Then, turning.

The cheap telescope gave us nothing
that could be identified, called known. 

What we searched for, too far.

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Kelly R Samuels

Spinney

Forestry: small wood, often thick with thorns

Trespass wouldn’t take long
but could be dangerous.

You were always looking down for sure footing
and would miss the stout thorn—the sharp stab of it

followed by welling and beading.

They used barbed wire to mark the lot
all those years ago when I was called a girl
and kinder. So I’m familiar with that kind of pain: 

the hook greater than the burr we would tenderly extract
from her paw late summer. 

This quick, cruel retort—what leaves a long, bright scar
that only pales with time.

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Kelly R Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, Court Green, MAYDAY, Opt West and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

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Farai Chaka

What l write about when l write about my city

Not what we thought was kindness coming into our cupped hands
like pigeons     striped white feathers     no, not that     not the naked
flame by the side of the road to remind that nothing was immune
not the armour l wore     pursed lips     hands buried inside the water in
my pockets     the word God on my tongue like both weapon and aftertaste
no, not the way the city burnt with heat     flooded with rain     spitting
out the extremes of each element at us     not even the days stacked
upon themselves like fruit ready for collapse     no, not that   rather
the way the city worshipped us into small gods     walked us down
tarmac streets to end us so we could begin     the way morning
light blew up front yards into technicolor films     how a blade
of grass became immense     the way summers turned cruel
towards what we noticed least     cyclists blow out in fatigue
squinting against the sky and pedalling on     the way trees looked
naked in dusk     stripped of colour but glorious in their silhouettes
etched against windows     the way you could love a thing into flames
and still keep it     hold it against the sun     the way you could cry
and still continue     continue

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Farai Chaka is a writer from Harare, Zimbabwe. He is an avid reader who enjoys long walks and horror shows.

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Melissa Strilecki

John Barth Phase

In a metafiction work on the short story
he cuts a paragraph to a line              a word                         a single mark of punctuation
Godlike                                               this concision
quiet economy                                    I am a font of want
body-bound                                         Desire                         unmakes me
Not to belabor the point                     but
I wrote all night                                  ;

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Melissa Strilecki has been previously published in Sugar House Review, Variant Literature, The Shore and others. She lives in Seattle.

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KG Newman

Drive Straightish until the Tank Runs Out

Imagine the banquet the engineers threw themselves
when they finished the highway: That’s what we need 

to be about, drinking instead to finding ways to snaking
an eight-lane interstate around city relics and stones
and other things we just can’t let go of. If we want  

a sign, I’m sure I can find one in the clouds. And
I am currently accepting applications for Fall Guy,
giving preference to candidates who blur the line
between compassion and assassin. As it turns out
there’s no pill you can give someone to cure 

being mad at the sky. So I keep biting my lip to speak.
I keep telling myself the worst case scenario is
a quiet kitchen with blank walls. Dry bowls of cereal.

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KG Newman

The Last Days of Anger

I built a prison out of stacked pennies
and then built a wall around the prison
just to graffiti it and then 

I tightened the tourniquet,
filled the tank, became the bird
lifting off the highway
seconds ahead of the semi tires 

because it becomes blissfully simple
at the end, the water tower
emptied, the sky folded up and
forgotten in my wing pocket.

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KG Newman is a sportswriter who covers the Broncos and Rockies for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.

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Susannah Lawrence

Counternarrative

In a field
I am the absence
of field
                                                -Mark Strand

in this field
we, too, are field
a fine silt of us
settles down
with every step
each exhale
a mist of self
each inhale
a sip of pollen
pheromone of bee
attar of vole

here we are—
unamplified,
on view
under a wilder sky
than we planned
visible from all
directions

under foot
nests lie
hidden cradle
the soon-to-be
airborne
innocent of intent
except to be bird

hard to hide
in a field we’d
have to snake-belly
through grass
exuberance
of damp clover
ragged robin
bedstraw—
let our faces be
freckled with petals
let our bodies
be stained 

even then
a crow a jay
might see us
flag our passage
better perhaps
to stand, be
surrounded

by what’s become of us
by what we’ve got coming

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Susannah Lawrence lives in northwest Connecticut. She is the author of a full-length collection, Just Above the Bone (Antrim House Books, 2016).  Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, The Cortland Review, The Connecticut River Revies, The Ekphrastic Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The MacGuffin, Nimrod, Poet Lore and the anthology, Waking Up to the Earth.

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Melanie McCabe

All the Signs Were There, Even Then

It was another midnight of bougainvillea, of air that beat
with swooping bats, with steel drums. I stood
at the southern tip of a rippling arrow of light across
the water; it pointed, but did not include me. 
Fuchsia bent its heavy pink into alleys I could not see,
filled throats in the darkness that were tipped and laughing.

That evening after the cork pop of honeymoon
champagne, a green lizard skittered over my empty spoon,
across the white linen, vanishing before I could exhale. 
My glass gave my mouth somewhere to go. 
Beyond me, windows were open to the wind
and the cobbled streets twitched with nameless dogs.

For hours after, I swirled the blue of my skirt,
my legs relentless and impossible. Above there had been
no moon or stars. Instead, torches trembled in shadow
and not-shadow, nets glittered with shells. 
Marimba made my breath come
differently-- my pulse beat, reckless and strange.

Later, from across the bay, I still felt those hammer strikes
in my bones. The breeze was a static of notes and invitations.
Already I found myself awake, alone. At the balcony railing
I leaned out into all I could see and all that remained hidden. 
Below, a man bent his cigarette to flame
and lifted to me his dangerous eyes.

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Melanie McCabe is the author of three collections of poems: The Night Divers, (Terrapin Books, 2022), What The Neighbors Know (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and History Of The Body (David Robert Books, 2012). Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Publishing Prize.

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Ellen Zhang

Couple Moments Beyond Ellis Island

You want to annunciate when wires falter, ask for help.
Instead, days of darkness in a damp apartment. 

You hang your first snowflake from the roof of your tongue,
search for warmth in unknowns, hum away electricity bills. 

Do you believe white lies from roof to roof.
Your own voice says that everything is fine. 

Your mother’s voice distances, cradling static.
Dial tones flicker of home, reminders of longing. 

Next to the other warm bodies in the factory, you
still feel only cold. Your forehead taunts with worry.

Hands sewing, every stitch searching for relaxation.
Such precision and tightness even with pin pricks. 

Sometimes, you watch the welling against finger. Taste
your own blood. This is the closest thing to anchorage. 

Cockroaches tease your apartment. They do not scare easy
anymore. They teach you more than anyone else. 

When you see parts of yourself walking down the street,
you do not acknowledge that you are lonely. 

Chicago air shuffling, you notice only daylight,
color of pigeons, ruffling of feathers intensifying. 

Fingerprints like visa stamps, flimsy film of ink lasting,
crumbling against corners of your lips. Taste of intrusion. 

When you close your eyes, feel that salt grazing
your arms. Reminder: no promises can survive that sea.

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Ellen Zhang is a student at Harvard Medical School who has studied under Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, poet Rosebud Ben-Oni and poet Josh Bell. She has been recognized by the 2022 DeBakey Poetry Prize, 2022 Dibase Poetry Contest and as 2019 National Student Poet Semifinalist. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear or are forthcoming in Rappahannock Review, COUNTERCLOCK journal, Hekton International and elsewhere.

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Crystal Cox

Ars Poetica, or, When a Bottle Breaks

Once you tell someone that it’s filled with bullets,
there’s no taking it back. I could say A’s hands
were dripping with them, bullets clanking on the floor
like a broken piggy bank. We had money in it once, maybe,
but it’s hard to remember a time when we didn’t dip our
hands right in. I do remember that piggy’s county fair,
and the Aunt who kept feeding the bottle-man dollars
on my behalf. Atta Girl, he’d say, not entirely unlike
my dad. Atta Girl, and toss me a bloated baseball in its
final stage of decay. I didn’t know enough to respond to him,
just that I couldn’t resign until I made sharded rubble of what
was in front of me. I threw a slugger, my Aunt’s words, but
when those glinting receptacles toppled, all they did was doink.
Plastic. I did learn that I can throw it straight: there’s a defeat
that exists before the body can even usher in desire. I couldn’t break
my addiction to A if I tried. The piggy bank was always plastic, too.
But it was never so much about a moment of impact as it was me leaving
the feeling of his warm body in our bed to tiptoe into the closet and check
the chamber of his gun, or, what awaited us tomorrow.

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Crystal Cox is a MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in Nimrod International, Kissing Dynamite, The Bookends Review and elsewhere. Her poem, "Self-Portrait with Dolly Parton," won the 2022 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Andrew Grace. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @crystalxcox

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Ruoyu Wang

Theories of Light

“As Mercury prepares to launch into flight, Cupid reaches desperately to contain him. Their bodies twist with buoyancy and barely suspended momentum, defying the heft we associate with bronze,” —The Met, on Mercury and Cupid by Franceso Fanelli.

The season broods, translates flesh
into fever. We crush 

hyacinths by a spoiled field,
thumb their purple skirts split

open. Behind us, dawn breaks

like a promise. & we return
before our altar; your face is sullen,

riverside. The trumpet tips into the back
of your throat like every scene drawn

lyrical before: silence
an omission, your limbs splayed

out like a bird. You waste no time.
Play messenger and sing

this ancient scripture of loss. Mercury,
I can’t believe in us.

In neither light nor its descent

but somewhere —we are
beautiful with a name

for this fervor. This quiet
cruelty. Twisting

towards the heaven we think
we still know.

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Ruoyu Wang (王若雨) is a young writer from Washington state. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in National Poetry Quarterly, Interstellar Lit and antinarrative zine, among others. You can find them listening to beabadoobee and Mitski or @wangwrites_ on Twitter.

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Ben Groner III

If My Physical Ailments Took a Road Trip

The alfalfa along Black Pine Road
is getting patchy, as are my eyebrows,
idiopathic ulerythema ophryogenes
uprooting those minuscule stalks
from sunburnt land. While we’re at it,
let’s not forget to properly position
the lumbar cushion for that most sinuous
of coastline curves, scoliosis that always
has my back. White lines stutter
on the blacktop, but it will relieve you
to know my right eye hasn’t wandered
since childhood surgery, though I’ve
retained the tendency to meander down
blue highways, open to a rustic barn,
a timorous pond. Epilepsy is the real kicker
here. Derecho that can knock out power—
though only for a few minutes—violet heat
lightning that can transpire in an hour,
a week, five years, never. I’ll skip
the electrocution, please, but keep the rain—
the reservoirs are running low. Grogginess
follows like fog scarfing Douglas firs
at daybreak. But there are problems more
pressing than one person’s rather minor
maladies. The aforementioned drought, yes,
screwing the ice caps on tight, keeping
rage and rifles on separate riverbanks.
A colleague once told me I have eight
seconds to hold someone’s attention
before it wanders. If so, I’ll gladly release
you, kind stranger, to your own concerns.
But won’t you look once more? Cliff
vertebrae dynamite into the sea, blighted
pine needles pelt their own sheltering bark.

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Ben Groner III

C Boarding Group

The gate attendant jokes
he’s saved the best for last,
like in Cana when guests
tasted the best in the last hour
and two thousand years later
we still can’t fathom such
a shrug of generosity.
When was the last time
we spoke with our neighbors
down the street? And what
can’t a son trace back to his
mother? Mine wept as I flew
two thousand miles away
to sizzling parrillada, vino tinto,
chalky canyons, freezing rapids.
As we all link arms on the rim
of the raft, the stranger’s hair
soaked and eyes sunshot,
our shoulders cool to the other’s
touch, we are transmuted into
a speeding O down the throat
of the land’s untapped desire—
afterwards, as we change
back into dry clothes
in the hostel, I have no need
for a miracle, for wine to be
anything but Malbec, for
water to be anything but river.

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Ben Groner III (Nashville, TN), recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination and Texas A&M University’s 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry, has work published in Rust + Moth, GASHER, Cheat River Review, Whale Road Review, Stirring and elsewhere. He’s also a former bookseller at Parnassus Books. You can see more of his work at bengroner.com/creative-writing/

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Ryleigh Wann

35mm Film

This    is    how    you    are    taught   to   develop   film:   in   the
makeshift     darkroom     of     someone     who     collects    old
things—    vintage      cameras,     records,     VHS     tapes.   You
swore   you   would   never   entertain   a   photographer  again,
not   since   the   last   one,  who   took   photos  of  your  naked
body   covered  in   paint,   said   the  word   goddess  but  then
got   annoyed   when   you   felt   insecure   posing.  This  one is
different.   This    one    shoots    the    Cape    Fear    Bridge    at
sunset,     the     mango     sun     saturating     sheets     in      the
morning. He says these are the steps when developing in color:
rinse,  developer,  rinse,  bleach,  rinse,  fixer,  rinse.  He   hangs
them   with   clothespins   to   dry,    negatives    showing    wide
teeth,    collarbones,    a   brown-eyed    dog    with    the   same
name   as   the   month   you   met.   He   explains  what  double
exposure   means,   how   it   shows   two   things   at  once  but
never    the    whole    picture    fully    and    we    all   know  the
metaphor   here,   sharing   stories    about   the   lover   before,
leaving   out   some   details.   This   is   how   it  begins:  like   it
does   every   time,   a   soft   smile   appears,   2AM  whiskey to
6AM    sunrise.    Soon,   you    will   take   down   old  polaroids
and   forget   the   ache   of   a  blank   space  on  your  wall   or
the  person  in   them.   He    tells   you   this   is    how   healing
happens:    the    clicking     flash    of    a    moment,    a    hand
cradling   your  jaw    bone,   and   your   tongue    grazing   the
back  of  his  teeth,  eager  to  capture   something.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She writes about music for The Alternative and is a blog contributor for Sundress Publications. She was awarded an MFA in poetry from UNCW where she taught creative writing and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @wannderfullll or visit her website ryleighwann.com

________________________________________________________________________________________

Savannah Cooper

Coin Toss

She says we could press our skin
together, leave a mark in the crease
of an arm, the bend of a knee. 

We could buy tickets to somewhere
else for a weekend, fly in a crowded
cabin, or better yet take a train, see 

the backside of every small town.
Forget what clouds look like, remember
every time we lift our heads. Stand 

on a rocky beach and look for life
in tide pools. She says we could write
over old memories, scribble them out 

like a ruined page, take new photos, walk
the balance beam of then and now. Meet
again in a bar, too loud to hear the music, 

catch the eye of a stranger and pretend
to look like someone else. Be my mirror,
she says, be the roots, a tether to all

the way back when. Know every line,
each step and turn. Coin toss and we drift
away, gunshot and we come back together 

like magnets, two ends of a tin can phone,
you and me and all the weight between.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Savannah Cooper (she/her) is a leftist bisexual agnostic and a slow-ripening disappointment to her Baptist parents. You can almost always find her at home, reading a novel or cuddling with her dogs and cat. A Pushcart Prize nominated poet, her work has been previously published in Parentheses Journal, Midwestern Gothic, Mud Season Review and numerous other publications.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Prosper C Ìféányí

Family Truck

We were listening to the forest, and trees,
        and gumps serenading past us, in that

blanch of waning imagery, like they were never
       there. Father's dead feet lodged on the breaks 

but not too firmly. Mother's face, a concave
        vault of dreaminess. The silence crackling 

in our bones, our ears, our tongues, was brewing
        fast. Unfurling, as the tyres screeched atop 

coal tars and cairn fragments. An omen? I don't
     know. But the spaces in-between reminded me

of a man trying to fit himself into the crevice of a
        wall. I am fast becoming a memory to my 

parents. The feeling is quaint with every blemish
        that comes with it. Today, I am lavender in 

my father's arms, tomorrow I am pulp. I don't
       even know what that means. When I close 

my eyes, I imagine I am stowed in the pocket of
       the azure. Somewhere my mother's voice

 cannot find me; somewhere the pastry scent of
     dough doesn't call me home. For I have eloped 

in more ways than one to find myself dancing to
      the susurrus of hunger which leads me back 

to my mother's kitchen. Twice, I had my things on
     me: brush, comb, and rag doll, sitting through 

bleak midwinter. Humming la di da to every
     stranger who knew me by my darkness. Bright 

colourful darkness. A road no one will re-take.
     Perhaps, also, the r(h)ope tethering me from 

a tumbling over. At this hour, all I want is a boy's
     symphony. All I want is to cram my ears with 

the buds of my index fingers. To bar myself from
     too much memory this trip has bestowed.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Prosper C Ìféányí is a poet, essayist and short story writer. An alum of Khōréō Magazine, his works are featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Parentheses Journal, Identity Theory, Caret and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Khoury

an edge | is like a separation without an ending

edges multiply into a galaxy
& wouldn’t i love

someone to press their
feelings all over my

feelings | forgive me i
threw out the bad news

with the bongwater | the snake
gets acquitted over & over | after

washing my aura opalesces
but my hair still smells of wood-

smoke | i add lemon zest
for a brighter flavor |

i fret like a bird i fret
like a horse — will i

ever get on a plane again |
coffee & cream is my

favorite flavor | or the sun
on my skin when walking

in summer | the carpet
looks cleaner in dim light

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Khoury (she/her) is a multiply disabled poet and a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow. She has taught poetry in high school, university and enrichment settings. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and edits Rogue Agent, a journal of embodied poetry and art. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Copper Nickel, Bone Bouquet, Dream Pop and CALYX. She has written two chapbooks—Borrowed Bodies (Pudding House) and Chance Operations (Paper Nautilus). Her debut full-length collection, Suites for the Modern Dancer, was released from Sundress Publications. Find more at jillkhoury.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lily Greenberg

After the Eradication of Brown Tail Moths in Deering Oaks Park

Red oaks glow parkside
in last light, me inside 

knowing it is not tree,
it is stranger. But 

it is tree: the thousand-year
acorn, the thousand moths 

within. The city said the moths
are killing you, but did we 

kill the moths for you? Did we
call the poison good? Oh dominion— 

to treat as we would have it.
To spare only the tree under which 

people sleep. In your dreams,
do we ever wake up? Dear trees, 

wrap your November arms
around our young bodies. 

Forgive us for thinking
we know you—all of you

who drop your skins wide
open to the earth without God,

without the slightest worship of God.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee and the author of In the Shape of a Woman (Broadstone Books 2022). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, On the Seawall, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Eco Theo Review and Cortland Review, among others, and she is the 2023 prize winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review National Poetry Month Contest as well as the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her work has been funded by Bread Loaf Writers, University of New Hampshire and Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Lily holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and lives in New York where she serves as Poetry Editor of Longleaf Review. Learn more at lily-greenberg.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Luke Johnson

May 24th 2022

Today the birds are gone
    & the grass (can you see it?)
smothers under summer’s
   thumb & tumbles toward

the street. Clocks consume
    the hours as my sons
stack cards & scribble in silence—
    daughter under her bed.

She too has heard the gunshots
    dreamt of blood the bodies
of friends’ gone rogue with static
    & wonders why when jackals

eat they watch the wounded
    suffer. But what of light
that lingers? Slants against
    the rotted gate & freckles

what the darkness won’t,
     a web or muddied mitten.
I boil water. Turn salt & bone
     to broth & soup & slurp

until my shirt’s wet. My
    lover’s quiet with her
breasts exposed & covered
     in the news. She tells me

of a woman who hopped
     a fence to pull her babies
through an open window
     of a father smashed

into the ground despite his
    daughter’s calls. So I play
Leanord Warren. Pace the yard.
    Pray. Sharpen the knives. Imagine

the last note lifted as his heart
    imploded, the Metro stilled
in its sound. Yet maybe it wasn’t
    his heart that gave out

but the burden of song built
    by sadness, every abject
terror. A scream. One looped
    melody. The head of a horse

& the buzzards who bored
     it. A barely legible tongue.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Luke Johnson poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Nimrod, Thrush and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Newkirk

Breach

“On many commercial dairy farms, it is routine practice to separate the calf from the dam within 24 h of calving. Proponents of early separation consider it economically beneficial (due to an increase in saleable milk) and ethically preferable (as it is thought to preclude formation of a maternal bond that becomes progressively more difficult to break.)”       

                                                       —The Journal of Dairy Science

The Farm

Because this work is who I am
and cannot be stolen
by storms or months-long fury
of sun or the sudden loss
of crops or cattle,
because this work is a ritual
of doing and undoing,
I know my place among the fields 

like I know my wife.
Some days she lingers
at the sink, the faucet running,
running, while she surveys from the window
her field of sadness curving
over the far hill and away,
the way I read each wrinkle 

of earth, divining
the mood of the soil, its want
for warmth or rain,
or track a blemish of clouds
across the sky's perfect pane
and the summer’s sojourn
in the pasture's slow paling.

The Nameless Child 

We carry her, still.
And on her first day,
she was still. 

The nurses bore her through their urgent rituals,
probing and gathering
data, numbers, values. 

How your mother bellowed from the bed
for days.

The Steal 

She had labored long, the calf a breech,
and stood for hours licking it clean
of birth and nudged it to its feet. 

I hefted it to my shoulders
as you would a sleeping child,
claiming the calf the way one claims

the warm weight of suffering as his own.

The Undoing 

She came at me like thunder,
a rumble of heat and hooves.
The thud of her body felled me,
her fury rapid, divine.
Mouthful of mud. A thrashing. 

From the house, a dropped pan clattered.
Slam of a screen door. A howl

carried over the hill.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Newkirk’s poems have appeared in The Night Heron Barks, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. She is editor of Medmic, an online journal for healthcare-related conversations and creative expression. IG: janenewkirk_writer

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Goodfellow

Issues in Pronunciation

Once there was a girl whose mother didn’t like her. Then the girl, who confused caliper with caliber, the instrument of measuring with the thing being measured, grew up. Still the mother’s judgments rang in her ears. Mouth sealed before exploding into plosives, she still couldn’t go from p to b. Though her lips formed identical puffing postures, she couldn’t move from voiceless to voiced. Emptiness being, necessarily, its own container. Its uncontainable container.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Goodfellow

Green as Fixative, When Nothing Else Stays Fixed

3D map of a mouse’s neural network
Jackson-Pollocking in citrines,
in cyans, and magentas. Zoom in
to a firecracker burst of brain:
synapses shimmering red and blue,
neurons flaming the same green
as the shivering northern lights. Zoom out                
to solar winds in pantomime with millions
of oxygen atoms, excited but in decay,
in return to their—zoom in—ground state.

This luminous night-sky green, chosen
to stain the brain slice on the glass slide
is the same harlequin green as a glass
bead off my broken bracelet, given me by
my love that so pleased me to see again-
st the inside of my wrist, once—my wrist
(zoom in) itself veined faintly green,
and throbbing, excited but in decay, returning
imperceptibly, inevitably, to the ground       
state.   

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Japan. www.jessicagoodfellow.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicholas Ritter

Plea for My Removal

After the storm, my father placed me
on the roof, or rather, demanded
I climb one ladder and then another. 

Too afraid to stand, I pressed my body
against the shingles, shredding my exposed knees.
I, still a child, crawled around like a child. 

He told me, “Get over to the gutter,”
and I must have. I hoped my legs, &
still soft hands would keep me balanced 

as my big head swung over the roof. My hands
shoveled wet leaves weather had begun
to decompose & tossed the mash off the edge. 

My eyes followed the falling leaves, sloshing
down onto my mother’s garden, separated from me
by our family’s home. There, a Japanese beetle 

landed on a leaf vining out from her rose bush
                                           —this hungry thing,
doing what it knows, ate away.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicholas Ritter (he/him) is a poet currently in the MFA program at George Mason University. He is a fellow with Poetry Alive!, a program that teaches creative writing at juvenile detention centers in Northern Virginia. He is originally from the woods in Brandywine, Maryland, and now resides in NOVA.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jen Karetnick

A Nocturne for Challah

When zephyrs begin to jerk the indigo
from the ragged hem of night,
Xeroxing every vast square of dye
until they all waft together, laser your

waning attention on sifting out flour
like negative qualities. Add sugar, zest of
moonbeams, and tablespoons of salt to gleam
it into existence. Make sure yeast jacks up

the dough like blunted tires, just rubbery
enough, pungent whiff of ozone, froth of
rising in one hour to be quelled, the proofing
smooth with olive oil, sleek with the exit of weight.

Keep it covered against cats who exist
to eat what’s inappropriate—jump rings of
bananas, shopping bags—whose hearty appetites
can’t be quenched. Abuzz with tikkun,

punch down, each fist making an amendment
in the fabric of faith. Acquire a woman
needy of this mitzvah: The favor of burning
the un-joined piece of dough. Then examine

her life: Did she discover her spouse? Find
fertility? Excuse herself from injurious
felines? Every week, these brisk petitions
to right inequities cozy up to eggs, poppy

seeds, lukewarm water, all parts ersatz poems
or prayers, equally symbolic, bonded to so many
women’s voices speaking bread into being,
exacting injunctions from plump, golden weaves.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (forthcoming), Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook, What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, forthcoming) and the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal winner The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020). Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center,  Wildacres Retreat, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, the Deering Estate, Maryland Transit Administration and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in The American Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Missouri Review Poem of the Day, Notre Dame Review, The Penn Review, Ruminate, South Dakota Review and Tar River Poetry. See jkaretnick.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher Blackman

Meditation at Colonial Williamsburg

You should try being radiant,
little brother. You have already
tried glib. Now stop treating life
like it’s a game show that you’re hosting.
I have thought about you a lot,
about learning to swim in the guppy group 

and the picture of the whale
unconscious at the bottom of the pool
in the swim safety class. A kid
drowned in that pool, you’ll remember.
Hit his head on the ladder and sank. 

In Chillicothe, they found a person
hanging from a fence by his sleeve.
Hours passed before they figured out
he wasn’t a Halloween decoration.
If there’s anything as pleasing
as its picture I can’t think of it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about cake,
but not just any cake—there was
a picture book when we were young
that comes to mind. I believe it was
Go Dog Go. No cake has ever tasted
as good as that cake looked.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher Blackman’s poems have previously been published or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Southeast Review, Booth and Rust + Moth, among other publications. His full-length manuscript has been a finalist in book contests by Tupelo Press, and Conduit, as well as the National Poetry Series. He is originally from Columbus, Ohio, and currently lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Grace Weldon

I sing the sound the dishwasher makes mid-cycle

and opera a response to my chair’s shriek
as it’s pulled from the table.

I can’t hear the name Dwayne without saying
Deeeee-Wayne under my breath and I need to know
how your name is spelled because my mind pronounces
Alyssa differently than Elisa or Alissa.

When listening to accented speech
it takes discipline to keep from lapsing into
unintended imitation, but gawd, is it wrong
to admit I love hearing you speak?

Sometimes, watching a foreign film,
I murmur an entrancing word over and over
delighted by the feel of it forming in my mouth.

I honk at geese in the pond and moo at cattle on pasture
the way people coo at babies – because they can’t not.

I do my best to keep from reading aloud
strangely-named businesses we pass, though
my inner voice repeats what I see. How can I
not savor improbable syllables snugged together? 

Today I learned all of this is called echolalia—
the way children learn to speak— but beyond
the earliest years considered a symptom
of psychiatric disorder 

while I believe it’s a way of dancing with sounds,
juggling rather than dropping them so they spin
a few extra captivating circles. 

Echoing the songs I hear around me
is a celebration. I invite you to join me.
We only sing on this Earth a short while.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Grace Weldon lives on a small ramshackle farm where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops and maxes out her library card each week. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com and on the twits @earnestdrollery.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Clark

To tap the core you should touch the crust

In college I almost
sold my eggs
sick with student loans
weak with long-distance
love, frantic to see
the boy I was sure
was slipping away
in the end dumping
the boy and joining
the army, another way
to sell the body
for an education
still I remember
taking the selfies
the company requested
a digital camera
a lamp-lit dorm room
long before the age
of perfected angles
and filters, I smiled
demurely, or tried to, 
then dumped it for a
scowl and scrolled through
my sap-orange options
I hoped the dull glow
did not suggest desperation
surely the client preferred
confident ova; coolly
they asked for a follow-up
I was already on a bus
to Fort Jackson
I wonder now about
the strained desperation
on the other end
the sort of yearning
that would foot the
nameless bills
of greedy little hearts
I studied biology
had a baby
concerned myself
with epigenetics
did it leave a print
all that want?
the longer I live
the more life takes
on that titian dusk
a filter called tarnish
no, I wouldn’t call it
quiet, any more than
the brown dwarf that festers
like a cinder
but crushes planets
to its amber breast
swallows the raw
material of kin
to miss it
you would have
to be senseless
I can think of
worse things
than a soft skull
melting like
mantle, crushed
through a
tunnel, vacuumed
like a yolk
toward a
tarnishing dawn
by a want
banished by
its own enormity
to the gray-orange
core of a dreaming
star

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Clark lives in NYC with her family.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alex Gurtis

Dead Birds

Finches used to perch
on a concrete block by my car
every morning when I drove to a job
I hated. I wasn’t married then and still lived
in an apartment with a woman
who drank romance out of glass flutes.

My wife and I don’t talk
as we walk to the park. The distance
between us is the longing
for the yearly song of the red-shouldered black bird
that migrates annually to the lake’s cypress skirt. 

We once dreamed of leaving to chase its contrail.
Now we sit in silence. My wife and I
melding into a metal bench
wondering where all the birds have flown.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alex Gurtis is a poet and critic whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Eunoia Review, Saw Palm, Rejection Letters and others. A ruth weiss Foundation 2022 Maverick Poet Award Finalist, Alex is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida and co-owner of the independent bookstore, Zeppelin Books.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Kitchen

we slammed the night against the sound

weave me into sky, the sliver moon.
show me what kind of bird you are.

the deer carry messages. orion’s belt of bright.
chaos of dream, throat catch of insides.

you move without physics without touch.
how i am almost not here, split near

clean of my edges, a wing painted &
stretched into silk, into mountain rust.

my flesh becomes owl call. pulse of
caught breath, bluish vein.

ghosts of mountain lions crackle in the leaves.
i see them in my sleep, unafraid.

these bodies we have to keep carrying,
can’t shed like the crisp of cicada.

walls do not matter once you are
without bone, without breath.

coyotes lean into tree. to be held again
by skin, that cell-song of hope.

i always dream you closer. breathe
the night of my name.

we all break. & burn

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Kitchen's work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, HAD, Parentheses Journal, The Penn Review, Pidgeonholes, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWWIM, Tahoma Literary Review, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado where she can be found rollerskating on the creek path searching for great horned owls. Twitter: @jillkitchen

________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor J Johnson

Breaking-In Grips

My palms are trapped inside performance grips,
the wrist and fingers strapped in leather strips

with holes and Velcro. I think of Aphrodite
wanting mortal men and how her mastered hands

ached in sheets and comforters. When I mount
uneven bars, the wind belts my circling hips,

skims my lips, the chalk upset as ocean foam.

for years this is my training: leather grips
bound to shroud my rips and calluses,

to give the gift of executing giants,
of straddled flight beyond blue whale

mats. After practice, the unprotected
skin strips in little see-through sheets

across my hands, bloodless with a sting,
despite a closed or opened fist. I know the pain

of holiness: fast flay of haloes turning
faded palms more permanent. To forget

the tender skin, I fantasize my fastened grips
stretching for the edge of my hands like fitted

sheets within the midst of my high bar routine,
chalk anointing pointed toes in the layout dismount.

and when I land, when I’m done resisting ground,
a cloud of chalk settles in the corner of my mouth.

I move my tongue. It tastes like salt.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor J Johnson’s poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Terrain.org and elsewhere. She received her MA from Texas Tech University and is currently an MFA student at the University of Florida.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Letitia Jiju

Gravity

—for Goofy

The first slate grey sky of December I imagined
a mole crab swept ashore. Carapace pressed 

against wet sand, her legs only know to tread
backwards even when facing seaward.

*

All that pinpricks our world tonight have
knuckled the empty that holds them:

gravity, as Einstein understood;
hard to effect love without consequence.

*

Harder to affect joy after
what colors, tipped suns you shored against my hand,

what I put away like a shell.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Letitia Jiju is an Indian poet who through her work explores the intermingling of mother tongue, religion & generational trauma. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in trampset, ANMLY, The Lumiere Review, Moist Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She reads poetry for Psaltery & Lyre. Find her on Instagram/Twitter @eaturlettuce

________________________________________________________________________________________

Meg Kelleher

Make Me an Instrument

Help me burn
what remains 

of my family.
Render their softness 

into a taper of goatseye
flame. The utility 

of a tooth is more
apparent in firelight. 

My brother’s boots
may be worth something 

in a trade. Others on my way
will promise kindness— 

stroking conies, hiding
the child’s eyes. 

These are the last
I should believe. Ones

who would waste
their own brutality.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Meg Kelleher is an English Literature Ph.D. dropout and licensed clinical social worker who writes in Chicago.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William G Gillespie

Pleasure

An autumn night
with you and I 

am in its thrum,
for days. Attuned 

like crickets
to your right small 

eye and the ease
of dawn. A monarch

butterfly stabs in a street-
light, north then south. 

The clock on the wall stops
ticking. It is nice 

to get up
and turn off the light.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William G Gillespie lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. His poems have appeared in Volume, Rust + Moth, Eunoia Review and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kai Pretto

Coming Home

The cemetery is overwhelmed
by crickets, thousands of them clutched
to tombstones
with names not our ancestors.
We tiptoe as we pass, sure their mouths will maw open
and consume us whole, swarm of wings
and teeth and vulnerable flesh.
It does not matter that crickets
have no teeth. 

Everything is sinister:
The piano player across the street hammers
on the keys, a blurry monotone of too far away sound.
We walk back to the house through the static
of impending storms. 

We try to carry
no resentment for the laundromat,
one block before,
that caught fire last spring.
Its blind eyes x-ed out with wooden beams,
we run our fingers over the siding,
convinced we can still feel the warmth.

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Kai Pretto is a genderqueer, neurodivergent poet whose poetry vacillates between the deeply surreal and the uncomfortably grounded. They currently reside in Western Massachusetts and value a quirky sense of humor, thunderstorms and good boots.

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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe

Firmament’s Crack

Frost fissures erupted
across the field.

Sod turned itself over
smell of dank earth.

But the firecracker
zinnias kept blooming.

Head in the stars. Our pain
was the best kind of invisible.

When frost took the rest
of the garden down to dead

you covered it in leaf mulch
as if this year was the same

as any other.

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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review. Her chapbook, Prayer Can Be Anything, is forthcoming in the summer of 2023 (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have or will soon appear in Split Rock Review, Ocean State Review, West Trade Review, Mom Egg Review and Catalyst, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Karen has been a member of Marge Piercy's juried poets group and a member of the PoemWorks community in the greater Boston area.

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John Barr

Hospice, Morristown NJ

For my brother

Tubing reaches down to feed
each still body on its bed.
Monitors report, report
the cowed persistence of a heart.
Anger...loving...grieving––gone
to only this: holding on. 

Wheeled out to the garden grounds,
they sit among the blooms and fronds
transfixed.  What they alone can see:
a mile away, a mile high
a glacier advances, filling its jaws
with rubble of all that ever was.

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Over the past 30 years, John Barr's poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry and others. He was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

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Arvinder Kaur Johri

Bowl of Fruits

Mother, I always wanted to be a nun
patched to a cross with my white veil hanging
with an upright spine like the intertwined
cables you knitted on my baby’s sweater.

The spaces between the legs on the cross
moved like threads pulled from my maxi.

What I wanted most was this sweetness of
penance to last. Mother, will I stay pure?

I scrub the floors. The bowl of fruits
is offered to me. Remember, you worked
at a hotel. The rooms were hot and damp.
The fans with their jarring green panes
calling you out for leaving the lamp shade
undusted.

I read one day that it is possible to forget
when mothers and daughters cross-stitch
their prayers on tablemats.

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Arvinder Kaur Johri is an Indian American educator and poet. Her early poems were featured in Sahitya Academi’s Indian Literature when she was 23, and she is again ready to send her poems out into the world. Johri’s poems explore memory, death, love and displacement. Her academic interests include inequities in education, intersectionality and writing identities. You can catch her gardening, reading poetry and learning kathak, a classical Indian dance, on weekends.

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Alston Tyer

Heraldic

In the year that followed
our family’s last cohesive
move, we sat together in
a wooden amphitheater
and watched a demonstration
on the feats of birds of prey.
The falconer, sweating through
his leather jerkin in
Early Summer, Tennessee,
introduced to us his charge,
though the bird’s name
is lost to us now. 

We watched the falcon unfurl
over our heads, due west,
saw it fail to turn when signaled
by its handler’s terse, dense whistle.
The bird, to our eyes, shrank
in the sky and disappeared,
as if it found a sliver,
a pale crack in the depths
of the air and wedged itself through,
as if it not only ceased
to exist, but had, to us,
never existed at all.

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Alston Tyer is a poetry candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was a contributing poet at the 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and her work has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Awards. She currently lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

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Vincent Frontero

Winter Break

For now, we are neither ourselves
nor anyone else. 

Beyond the bar’s faded sign, my friends are singing
and drinking as if ten years haven’t passed. 

My parents too seem less aware.
Happier, yes. 

My students ask how to sound believable.
I barely noticed the battering
waves during this walk along the beach. 

I am less sad, yes. 

Not quite magic, important
the deer eating clovers
tonight under the overpass.

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Vincent Frontero (he/him) is a poet, teacher and translator. He is currently an Instructor of English at the University of South Carolina-Sumter. His poems and translations can be found or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review MiCRo Series, Los Angeles Review, The Tusculum Review and elsewhere. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University. 

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Ruby Miller & Kimberly Turner

Art

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Ruby Miller is an artist based in Michigan’s upper peninsula, right along the coast of the majestic Lake Superior. Originally from Mid-Michigan, Ruby grew up in the Lansing area, earning a BFA in Sculpture at Grand Valley State University and an Associates in Welding Technology at Grand Rapids Community College. Ruby has shown work and taught in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York.

Kimberly Turner is an artist living and working in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Kimberly’s artistic education began at SUNY Fredonia, graduating with a BFA in both Photography and Illustration. Kimberly’s education continued at Indiana University-Bloomington, obtaining an MFA with a concentration in Photography.