Christopher Phelps

Axiomancy

Some sort of fanciful word that came to me as I walked in the woods with my companion. My house-dweller and I, out for a spell. Out we dwelled for an afternoon well under treeline in the middle of late spring, the sun coming through and moving off, a breeze cool enough to sense was cold-adjacent, dry as hope for the meager accumulation of snow. Whatever snow there is to melt is fresh water for the tender growth to spin the wheel again. We talked only briefly, both in our heads, at rare intervals aloud. Listening with our steps, watching with glimpses of the way ahead. I feel like becoming a small-b buddhist if I’m not already — I think but do not say. I meander about, orbiting the mood that arises and moves along. (Not away, and neither like a latch I feel a need to touch.) This page we share, the leap we live. The gathered time in decades, the years beginning to count themselves, about the number one can see in a glance. Ten coins on a table, ten remaining seeds in the feeder, all fingers present and in working order. The found, sparsile stars, released as they are. As for our glimpse of things of value, here in the open air without a tag or sell-by date, I wonder if I could call it divination. In lieu of tossed lots or the look of birds; instead of know-me runes cut into aspen bark. Facing value as a being, not a flight, not a stepped-on step. Axios: value. Unknowable, however known, however much a walk from stump to stone. (Most of the walk around them, thinking of Weil’s notion of metaxu: every separation is a link.) Nobody’s, anybody’s, or some body’s arch or stipulated faith, value as a homemade kind of strength. A clutch of leaves, caught in idiosyncratic time. A stretch that doesn’t break into bits only to claw them back. No atoms, however intricate, that can tell you what they mean. A lingering respect for the mystery of life and the certainty of error. No mosaic but the music of two lives tandem-lived, overlapping everywhere — a spill from a cup and a hand to hold it up — one hand from each of two human stations, becoming no correct amount of familiar. Is there a recognition less about the head? Not a posted sign, less a phrase. A word I wasn’t searching for, fell. You-are-here, without the syllables; intact, lacking a map in front of us. Minus the fear of having missed something important along the way (where the arrows meet the words). Back up the long ramp of Bear Wallow, the last leg of the triangle of trails that were our travels that day, we walked with the breath we had. We dug a little deeper than we knew. At one point, stopping for water and breeze, one of us finished a sentence the other just unearthed:

These steps, they’re like — this steep had many children.

And If Their Depth Isn’t So Much a Cavern of Horrors and Delights

            In response to a Facebook group’s meme that read, “My kink is people who explore their depth,

instead of just polishing the surface.”

That’s alright. If it’s an encampment or an archipelago

or even a series of trenches, all out of order, like any litter of towns

that bring some relief from the landscape, that’s alright.

I can’t look at the mirror long. There’s so much burnished glare

hidden in doctored sight. Bright and flagging hopes

singing different songs at the same time,

and sound doesn’t very well overlap

unless there are waves that stand still, while others pass,

enough of these waves waving in their bivouac to make

a playground jump rope. Now that my knees are middle-aged,

I wish I’d joined those girls who I thought made me fear

my own clumsiness. They didn’t. I did, comparing them

to gym class, where any fun or joy in discovery

was against the rules. The posted and unposted rules

in their aura of do it right or you’ll suffer, once the whistle,

twice the ensuing snickers. Everyone knows these snickers

come from nerves of new and nervous creatures,

whose skin is originally thin. Where thickness is learned

from invented contests that must be won since

we no longer have prey to hunt. Since

we’ve been our own prey for some time now.

I take a moment to wonder how long. Since written records

could keep track of debt? Since someone in a cave

or a hut was there to record what someone else did

or said? At least. Nobody could say for certain

why invention’s mother was calling kids and father,

maybe from all the way across the caldera

(where the grass is green and the land is flat,

so animals get at that). These anemic beings

we’ve become, full of spurts and muscle

spasms, where once the sweet birds sang.

Sweet birds we rarely ate, because they’re small.

And something small enough (for example, a single pock)

perhaps escapes our notice. Since we have been groomed

to be prowlers of the present, all the while presentable.

It’s kind of gross, what we’ve learned to overlook.

Is it alright? Are we? Now that time is full of craters

we say we didn’t make. We say were here, well before

we lost our fur and shaved the rest, then stopped,

for a while, pretending we’re not halfway to nowhere

without a middle, and halfway back

from someone who never was

so stocked and stoked with purpose. Never was

so beautiful in the gloam and in the morning

when two stars become one wish for the night

to have been alright. To have been just a time

for the orchestra to grind through the tune.

For our sipped and slowing breath to catch us up.

---

Christopher Phelps lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he teaches math and interrelated mysteries. Queer and neurodivergent, autistic and aphantasiac, these twainbows underwrite his creative steadfascination. The author of a poetry chapbook, Tremblem, together with the full-length collections, Cosmosis and Word Problems, he has poems in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Broken Lens, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, and Zoeglossia. Newer and brand-new manuscripts, Salve Age and Nearvous, respectively, are questing for publication. Find more at christopher-phelps.com.

Janet Reich Elsbach

Note to Self: Most Tree Roots Spread Two to Three Times the Radius of the Canopy (and can extend five times or more in dry conditions)

Put a mark here to show the man

and another for the woman.

This X indicates the ancient maple tree,

crazy maze of the crown above, roots spiraling under foot.

Erase the X. Show the tree.

Show the taproot, root cap, region of elongation.

Show every tiny extension pulling

inward, reaching up.

Show what’s visible against

the sky, and what’s beneath.

The day is warm and clear,

so strangely warm for winter and why not

take a walk, he said.

Frame it that way.

A box can serve to place the house

across the sloping meadow

(arrow here to indicate the couple’s movement to the south).

Inside the house the baby sleeps;

these concentric circles

around and around the basket,

those are for the grandma, the sisters,

watching him sleep.

This grassy distance here, (box to tree),

brown and dry,

is the widest expanse between

his tiny, fragile heart and hers

since the thought of him

bloomed in her mind

and the fact of him

took shape, among her bones,

and he slid out to face the full December moon

shining through the window above their bed.

Use silver for that light.

Indicate the grass with little lines,

a few—there’s no accounting

for every blade.

We will need a key; leave space for that.

How fast she could get back across the meadow

is a question mostly her breasts feel full of.

Move the mark

of the man into the treeline,

then adjust the woman.

Deep in the night she’ll find herself sitting up before she knows

she is awake, the only one awake

to hear the hungry, discordant racket of the coyotes

ricocheting up from the river against their hill.

That drunken cackling raises something primitive in her.

It’s so hard to gauge the distance.

One inch equals a mile.

Greys and browns for the fur, yellow for the eyes,

as you must know,

having seen them in the light.

Deep inside the bark, despite the cold,

a network of alveoli

is still ferrying cargo between the soil and the sky

(blue for that; the day is really fine).

This thrumming should be audible.

Draw lines to show it, there in the understory.

Reverberations from the tree

or her heart, or her blood or the milk.

It isn’t enough,

he seems to be saying

as the fullness and the ache

of the milk thunder into place.

I thought the baby would make it different

--these words hang in between them now, so

use a vivid color for that—

But this isn’t enough.

It isn’t what I thought it would be.

Did you put a compass by the key?

The baby is still north

of where they stand.

Show that.

---

Janet Reich Elsbach writes about how things going on in the average life collide with making dinner on her blog, a Raisin & a Porpoise. Her book, Extra Helping: Recipes for Caring, Connecting, and Building Community One Dish at a Time [Roost 2018] addresses the most fundamental building block of mutual aid: nourishing the people near us. She teaches writing and art to adults with disabilities, spends a lot of time with dogs, and likes to play with words.

Colleen Harris

It Begins This Way

I

It begins this way: cousin

and cousin, Titan and Olympian.

Zeus—who also goes by Richard—

is a plunderer, a capturer of women,

a jungle of lust as eagle, bull, ant, swan,

tangled in his own tawdry desires,

needing and feeding on beauty, seeding

himself. Prometheus—who is also Chad—

by crafty counsel gives men fire to keep warm,

gives men clouds to keep warned

of the god-king’s impending rain,

convinces Zeus-Richard to take

the greasy dross of bones and fat

and forms men’s taste for the good meat,

gives them Clymene’s crockpot recipes

for pot roast and beef stifado.

The god who comes upon women

as a cloud, as a shower of gold coins,

as the whispered pledge of a new Brahmin satchel,

as the one who makes the strippers wince

because he squeezes too hard

and follows them out to the dimly lit lot

decides it should be a woman to level his cousin.

Pandora—who is always Pandora—becomes.

The ingredients for hell are hot hate,

a man, a man, and a girl new-born of earth.

II

After a new girl has opened all the gifts,

the party winds down to lyres strumming

Semisonic’s Closing Time,

half-drunk gods take Tupperware

of ambrosia home, except Dionysus—

Dio takes the leftover wine, only the reds.

The streamers droop. One gift remains.

A girl grows bored. A girl grows bold

and holds the forbidden jar in her hands.

It is heavy with content, or portent.

It could be filled with solid perfume,

or the silent regard of a parliament of owls.

Richard enjoys his frat house jokes,

it could be spring-loaded snakes.

The prize inside might be seeds stolen

from Hera’s far-west haunt, the Hespirides.

A sharp twist of bangled wrists,

and the chaos of the world boils out.

Richard laughs until he retches.

Her seat tilts and the world grows black.

She runs outside, her curled hair blows back. 

III

A woman worries what lies beneath lids,

but a girl knows little of how hunger

draws the skeleton to skin’s surface

like curious koi from their pond,

how sickness churns upstream

in the marrow, how in death

the heart is not a heart

but a panicked rabbit leaping

into the teeth of frenzied hounds.

The girl has blood on her hands

even as she snaps the jar closed.

Washing the clotting red from her fingers:

girl becomes woman.

The music changes—war is the ring

of steel on steel, old age is a thready piccolo,

melody half-lost in the wind.

Honey, open the jar again,

re-gift it to yourself. Here, hope:

sedate and slow to kindle to full speed,

sleeping on its paws at the bottom.

It is a needful pet that takes tending.

Hold it to your cheek, hum your Yaya’s tune.

Teach your daughters to dance—

it will take the air in their lungs

to keep it breathing.

Leave your tears with the toys

of your girlhood.

Open the door to the mystery,

no need to wipe your feet of famine

or bow to the rest of us, women like you.

We know. Drink your fermented cup.

We all open the jar. Remember,

not every evil was inside—someone had to fill it.

---

Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and works as a university library dean in Texas. Author of six full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Discipline of Drowning (Winner of the 2025 Broken Tribe Press Poetry Book Award, forthcoming 2026), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming 2026), The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), and The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025). Her poems appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and more than 80 others. Follow her writing at https://colleensharris.com

CL Bledsoe

The Yips

after a line by Fitzgerald

It takes two to make an accident.

One to hold the map, the other

to work the radio. Someone napping

in the back seat and dreaming

of the World Series. I made a detour

for my good intentions. It was you

and me, the ants, a tree with our initials

carved in at the only rest stop with clean

toilets on the East Coast. Sobering up

at the gas station. Funyuns and Beef jerky.

Buying scratch offs and forgetting quarters.

I stole the keys. Drove us back to your

place. Night blindness and pedestrians.

It meant so much to get it right.

Inside, it was all Hoarders on A&E.

Lingerie the mice had gotten into.

You made me stand outside the door while

you tried to find the couch. You don’t

understand. I have to get home

tonight. You have no ambition beyond

the flowers dying on your coffee table.

Thunderstorm

Back in the days when I was a thunderstorm,

there was brief lightning after every

utterance. I fell and fell, water carpeting

my apartment, making all the boards curl.

Nothing could last without turning

into ruin. I felt no sun burning

through the haze. No warmth except

in my rain. Children blinked to see

me. The old just shook their heads

from their porches. Who would take the time

to run through my onslaught in the hopes

of finding warmth inside? It’s only water

in there, the odd fish I’ve carried with me

since childhood. I waited for overcast

days when I could lie in bed and stay

out of the air. The wind was my only friend.

I dreamed of someday drying out, finding

someone else to fall on.

Delilah

She was the best of us, secret

as an egg. One leg in her pants

and the other in the stars. Like all

of us, she only laughed at the absurdity

of existence or cats playing piano.

Like all of us, she just wanted to help.

But they don’t make potato salad

like they used to anymore. A hair

driven through a tree by heavy winds.

Somewhere that used to be fun done

up in church slacks. I miss talking

about the weather and really meaning

it, the correct portion of vermouth.

It’s only going to get better if you

give it enough time. That’s what

they all say, she used to say. Right

before changing the channel.

---

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey and The Devil and Ricky Dan. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

David Eileen

Paracme

Internecine

---

David Eileen lives in the mountains of western Virginia. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Diagram, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Best of the Net, among others, with more shared at www.david-eileen.com.

Jordan Cobb

In Our First Lives

My sister is telling me her plans to plant

a willow tree in the yard in the new house in Kentucky—

a state I thought we had both escaped—so, to distract myself,               

I point out the gap in the chainlink,

the dog rushing towards it.

Watch her call its name.

The dog is the ex-husband's,            

like the baby, the tax returns, the divorce.

The legal fees & split seams of her dignity.

But the fence & the beyond, the dragonfly above

the late September creek,           

none have been touched by him.

She’s out past the cemetery,

the barbershop, just over the county line

from our parents in the yellow house

with their Sunday dinners & walks down Main Street,

complaining about the new builds near the Methodist church

making traffic worse.

Nearly October, so she packs us

into the old Subaru for a ride up 65. Says there’s a farm

with a pumpkin patch ripe for picking & a barn

with an attic of antiques foraged from quieter places.

We play I-Spy, spotting butterflies as we drive.

Haven’t seen this many in years,

not since the forests out in Arkansas, the days of fairy walks

& nights of witches hunts, long before the affair

led us here. & in the middle of it, the dim light

of newborn scents, the creaking rocking chair.

Caught below the bluegrass haze

& time gets split like hairs. I want to tell her I can see her god

hanging low in the stratosphere, his tongue thick

as he licks the condensation from the water tower

until the interstate is clean.

Later, when we’re in the backyard again,

finishing up power washing the brick, we spot the bats

that live behind her shutters flying back into the black.

My sister turns to me,

asking what she should do about them—

all that darkness & wrinkled wings. 

But I don’t have an answer to what she’s looking for—

how to make this place a home.

Land’s End

Poppies, spotted from the trail;                         hummingbirds & man made stairs. 

Breeze in from the west tonight,     no salt to scent the edges. Super blue moon

two days past                          & the sky,              half open or empty.

Call it golden,       this hour, this bridge, alive in its glory,                           

& across the bay,                                     the lighthouse, the steady pulse of warning.

A short list of unnatural heartbeats I have known in my lifetime:

companies in a court of law;            

the cells that lived inside my body                    before I willed them out;                                     

the last prayer I tried           that April night–                 

cut my tongue so deep,      I can't say when I stopped the bleeding.

Can’t find the rusted knife out here.               The vodka, the twin bed.  The nightmares.

No ghosts left to hide         in their barren tableaus.

Before, there was a time I came to cliffs like this–      hurled insults onto the overpass, overhead,                  

but here, it’s passing conversations along the evening mist,     barks from the unleashed dog,

flies & old horse shit.

It doesn’t hurt in the old way anymore,

but I remember the pain the same.

I think I am in love again.

I think I am afraid again.

Sleep & death in the same breath.  

What is a soul

but the secrets I was willing to tell?

& if I never cross the bridge to the lighthouse,

or learn the names of the trees growing around me,

or the anger still living inside me?

Below, rolling fog. The coast guard, the last ship left,                beating against the waves

at the mouth of the cove.                    & I, cliffside, hands cupped to my lips

calling out for an answer,                   like screaming into snow.

---

Jordan Cobb (she/her) is a queer American poet. Based in NYC, she completed her MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in The Shore, jmww, The Storms Journal, Rise Up Review, Jet Fuel Review, Camas Magazine, Outskirts Literary Journal, Cherry Tree, & Fugue Journal.

Rachel Beachy

This Is Not About Electricity

the Power has gone out. I mean, it’s turned dark.

Everywhere I look: pitch black. What else is there

to do? I keep wandering into rooms and flipping

the light switches even though nothing happens.

I don’t know when it will come back. I don’t know

if I’ll be there to see it. But if you are, if one day

the house is suddenly flooded with light, you will

know someone once believed it could. You will know

we never stopped trying.

Eight Women

There is a woman who walks around the neighborhood

singing aloud to the soundtrack of her own life. Another

who sits silently on the front porch, the echoes of girlhood

at her back. Still another who pulls weeds in the backyard

and rubs dirt on whatever hurts have been planted over the

years. There is a woman in the kitchen who calls her mother

for the family recipe only to find out nobody wrote it down.

The woman who greets him at the door and another who

pretends she didn’t hear him come in. The woman at night,

quiet but for the train of her thoughts, still but for the racing

of her pulse. Who dreams of leaving if only her bones weren’t

so heavy. And the one in the morning, who slips into her

children’s bedroom light as a bird, even though they roll their

eyes at her, even though they used to wake her in the dark

and she did not once turn away.

End of Day

When the children sleep, we sit around talking

about the water bill, the Johnsons, the gap in your teeth

when you were young, which we just were 

though we did not consider ourselves young

at the time and you did not have a gap in your teeth

then. Trust me – I stared at your mouth more

than you did the summer before you got braces

which was the same summer I got breasts in another state

but somehow, I can feel even those pieces of ourselves

in conversation, this history we did not share but have

in the years since closed with our little life, little deaths

at our own two hands, which you hold while I tell you

I would have kissed you even then and the faucet

goes on dripping in the next room.

---

Rachel Beachy is the author of Tiny Universe. Her poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Her View From Home, Does It Have Pockets, Mulberry Literary, ONE ART, Rust & Moth, Sky Island Journal, Thread, and others. She was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology 2025 and shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize 2026. She lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. You can find her on Instagram @rachelbeachywrites.

Liz DeGregorio

Magic

She tells you she danced to a Portishead song,

         the one everyone knows,

in a strip club in Alaska, bragging that no one knew

         she was still in high school at the time.

She trudges through the snow with you,

         one unseasonably wet night in the Pacific Northwest,

two pairs of soaked tights,

         trying to see the queer punk band in town.

Later, after a bad movie and a decent meal,

         she tries on dresses in the hotel room.

Black silk lace cotton

         (where to look?)

It's been decades, and try as you might,

her motives are still opaque:

just when you think you've got her figured out,

         she turns away, and

you're alone in the deep, quiet dark of that hotel room. 

Ophidiophobia

“Myths are explored, phobias cured, and mysteries revealed at this must-see Museum of the Southwest.” – The Official Website for Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tourism

I did no research before accepting a date’s offer to take me to the

Rattlesnake Museum & Gift Shop

in Albuquerque;

I pictured it like a small-scale version of the

American Museum of Natural History

in New York City:

Stuffed snakes arranged artfully in

life-sized dioramas…

perhaps some dangling from the ceiling,

looking poised and confident,

fun and carefree.

I was wrong because why would a museum

full of

stuffed

dead

snakes

exist?

The building was dark, damp for this desert city.

There were interconnected rooms full of not just

rattlers, but every other kind of snake who had leered at me

in my nightmares,

who had been present in that one episode of MacGyver,

where the most Renaissance of Men

had to overcome his own ophidiophobia

and save the day.

My date and I wandered from cage to cage.

He was no MacGyver.

I was not in or of my body as I looked into the

snakes’ eyes.

I grew numb:

creeping nearer to each glass tank,

examining the rope-like serpents;

their hisses drove into my ears,

wrapped around my brain.

Some snakes, they’d rise up,

their scales crawling up

the glass of their cages,

A nightmare come to life –

I didn’t trust the cages.

I didn’t trust the snakes.

I didn’t trust my date.

The snakes would lean back, then

THUMP,

their bodies hitting the clear glass.

I knew they wanted out,

they wanted to

eat me, devour me, consume me whole…

We went to a tea shop afterwards,

perhaps a kind of aftercare,

if you are the kind of person who views

a date to a building full of snakes

with a phobic woman as a sexual act,

and I do, I am that kind of person.

But he wouldn’t let me pick out my own tea,

and it was then that I rose up

the glass of my own cage,

rose up,

pushed out

and left the shop,

My skin sloughing off to release me -

My tongue flickering as I tasted the clean desert air.

---

Liz DeGregorio (she/her) is a poet, writer and editor whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Catapult Magazine, Bowery Gothic, Lucky Jefferson, ANMLY, SCARS Magazine, BUST, Ghouls Magazine, OyeDrum Magazine, Blink Ink, Dread Central and other publications. She's also performed at the award-winning storytelling series Stranger Stories.

Susan Grimm

Butterick

The best thing about curfew is breaking the law. The day

a dim envelope as you jump in the car. The girls who sleep

in a bra or always wear hose. Nowhere to go, that’s the trouble.

Rolling down the hill by taking off the brake. Stop

with the slams and whispers. The peter pan collars all face

the same way. Simplicity patterns bloomed from our machines.

Or Butterick. Seamless as our beauty because we misguided

the thread or it broke or snarled. Everything pinned, sharp

as teeth, and the paper see-through. The same chair and the same

door and the night outside over the long green lawns. All around

hard work and duty like lifelines or hymns without words. Parked

as if we were a car in a very safe place, the engine shuddering.

We were busy piercing our ears, deconstructing our underclothes.

You stepped over sleeping bags into the dawn, your engineered

(wedding) curls wrapped like a loaf of bread. On the edge

of the lawn, before the blackberries, the secret path to the ravine.

Shale. Rock broken like pie crust. Layers slipping like a tower

of plates. Topple, stipple, grapple, grab. Dressed all in white

with daisies. Really. The house left empty of all but dust.

Laborious

Driving to Hoboken in winter (talk about a word that’s difficult to rhyme). It wasn’t an omen 

that it snowed. It wasn’t an omen when we saw the burning truck which had slid off 

the road. Billboard. Difficult journey. Two birds gesturing like a pair of gloves. The shape

of K was being cut out of our lives. Her mattress and small tables and weighty piles

of clothes on their hangers stacked in the white van that caused B so many problems

in a parking lot with the police post-9-11. Snow shifted onto the ground like a yuletide

bakeshop scene. Fog. If I’d known the names of the trees. Robert Frost lets them ghost

as a wood, an obstacle to clear choice. I like his repetition of I. And I--/ I took the one

less traveled by but wonder about that either/or when he could have stepped down,

slipped between, ridden the rest of the way bareback. Sometimes you need an axe.

---

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, South Dakota Review, and Field. She has had two chapbooks published. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

Jillian Stacia

Call to the Void

I’m the type of person who can’t stand on the edge of a cliff 

and not think about jumping. Screw the view. I’m imagining

the slap of wind, the splatter of brain on the cavern below.

The masseuse says to relax, but I can’t stop picturing

her hands on my neck, the inevitable snap of bone, 

the ear-splitting crack of death. How pathetic to die in a spa, 

how boringly bourgeois. Blame it on my nervous system,

the way it stands guard against the world, a sad little sentinel

scouting out every threat, every curve of mountain. My body

has caught on, puffs out in hives to protect against 

an imaginary enemy. They call it chronically ill, but I call it

paying attention. Give it time. Everything breaks.

It’s hard to feel safe when you’ve never seen peace up close.

I remember breast-feeding my son, the bloom of milk 

each time I heard a high-pitched cry. Now I see a cliff

and my muscles clench. A miracle, really. All the things 

we do to protect ourselves. The way we’re built to stay alive. 

“Dinah Won’t You Blow Your Horn?”

In my Mother-In-Law’s retirement home, an elderly

woman sings “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”

and I want to laugh and cry and die right there 

on the polyester red carpet before I myself am sent 

to a rickety old house filled with nurses and Clorox 

and strawberry Jello topped with sugar-free Cool Whip, 

before an emergency button is glued to my door, 

before my teeth fall out eating corn on the cob,

before my back is hunched and humped and my ass

cannot be wiped without assistance from a nurse 

named Marge who is just trying to put her two sons 

through community college, but would really like 

to touch less butts if it’s okay with management.

Before my kids resent me and leave me to rot, 

and my husband divorces me for a younger woman,

and my liver fails from all that wine. Before all that, 

please just let me die right here and now while I’m still 

youngish and dewyish and punch drunk on the wildness 

of the world. Forget staying alive all the live-long day.

Let me out of this life while I still love it.

---

Jillian is the author of the upcoming poetry collection, Set the Bone, published by Arcana Poetry Press. She was selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize and short-listed for the 2026 Central Avenue Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for several awards, including 2025 Best of Net and the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and anthologies. Find her online @jillianstacia to read more of her work.

Carrie Conners

Keep Your Chin Up

To the person who put up the letters on the VFW sign advertising

CHICKEN PARM

& ASTA

dinner on Thursday night: nice work. You made the right call.

This Is Me Now

My eyes blinked from neon pink

when I opened the box of new running shoes,

not the modest burgundy I ordered,

a throwback to my preschool maroon

velcro Roos with the hidden pocket to stash

a quarter for candy at the Marshall Dairy.

These were a shade darker than highlighter pink,

enough to make you reach for sunglasses.

My husband, confused, “You picked those out?”

Even my dog seemed suspicious,

though she can’t see pink. It was the year

of Barbie, so I thought I’d give them a shot.

Maybe they’ll be safer. Get drivers’ attention

as I chug around the neighborhood at dusk.

Honestly, I just didn’t have the energy

for customer service. The pink seemed more

florescent against my normal jogging clothes,

blacks, deep purples and blues, like a bruise.

The effect was immediate. People gawked.

Made eye contact. Talked to me more, Nice day

for a jog. A car honked. I flipped the bird.

Hot pink’s an extrovert’s color. I’m not

cut out for it. I stare down at the concrete

or up at tree leaves to avoid anyone’s gaze.

But I still feel it. Flush pink as I bound down

the sidewalk. And, I swear to you, I run faster.    

---

Carrie Conners, originally from Moundsville, West Virginia, lives in Queens, New York and is an English professor at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY. Her first poetry collection, Luscious Struggle (BrickHouse Books, 2019), was a 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her second collection, Species of Least Concern, was published by Main Street Rag in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Barrelhouse, Kestrel, Split Rock Review, Killing the Buddha, and RHINO, among others. She is also the author of the book, Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry (UP Mississippi, 2022).

Samuel Day Wharton

After the Big Bang

at 2am

         lying awake

I imagine disaster

         a plane crash

an assassination

         bombs under bridges

(our sun too young to collapse / the universe expanding

         at speeds too fast to imagine

none of it comforts me as much

         as your hand at my side

your breath at my neck

         dogs at our feet)

as helicopters swirl in the night sky

What’s Your First Bird of the Day?

someone asks      & I look

immediately, though it’s mid-

day, out the windows

at the house-finch

it’s roseate likeness hanging

off the evening primrose

seeding the ground

around the fig tree. I look

with all my eyes      the ones

fully covered by salt-

moss & the ones my niece

gave me in hopes of clearer

weather. Inches away, steady-

handed D. takes a blade

to the straggling morning

glory in my hair. The furthest

I’ve been in this memory

is dawn      & there they are

every morning: the mourning

doves in pairs, there pecking

through the redwood mulch

---

Samuel Day Wharton makes wine & writes poems in Sacramento CA. Recent work has appeared (or will appear) in Stone Circle Review, the engine(idling, The Shore, Some Words, & Poetry Is Currency. You can find him on Bluesky here: @fakeourway.bsky.social

Lucas Wildner

Representations

Stacy,

baking was my escape

that first pandemic December.

Seattle’s Pacific Standard gloom

and isolation summoned

sentimental visions

of the Advent Jause

I was missing.

Every Sunday a candlelit wreath

on the coffee table,

joined by steaming mugs of frütchetee,

a platter of Vanillekipferl,

Husarenkrapfen, Lebkuchen,

Rumkugeln—all homemade

by my father, transformed

from the man who saved foil

in a drawer for a second or third use

into a baker in need

of another stick of butter,

another tin for the latest batch.

Nostalgic,

I was a good consumer.

The night the hand mixer arrived

my boyfriend and I

ate Husarenkrapfen on the couch.

They tasted like my father was about

to return from the kitchen

with a refilled platter,

like practice for the inevitable after.

They didn’t last a week. 

*

You bought a kettle

to boil water the Austrian way.

A chopper

to chop onions Austrianly.

For an Erdäpfelsalat, I assume.

I’m stalling

because I don’t want to say

how I learned your name:

the Notice of settlement email

a year after you became

Class Representative

for all who believed in Mueller’s

Austrian Representations,

the red-white-red,

umlauted distractions

that allowed the company

to overcharge us

for European quality.

Suffering,

the attorneys called it—

the cooks and bakers tricked

by Chinese-made products,

who needed Austrian quality,

Old World magic in the kitchen.

I never told him. I knew

he would have scolded me—

it hadn’t been on sale.

But news of the settlement

almost made me reconsider. 

$7.50 to make me whole.

It would have made his day.

Another Fraction

There were

                   years pretending

to read his birthday wishes,

handwriting as inscrutable as the German.

Silently you would count to eight

then Danke, Papa interrupted your smile.

The party could move on. 

Didn’t need much German            

to be grateful.

Decades later,

                        a first: in a card for Easter

addressed to you and your boyfriend,

you find your parents transformed,

twin territories held together

by boundary: Papa/Günter Mom/Mary.

That he can’t or won’t write Dad—

a joke possibly only to you,

one you feel guilty enjoying, but

isn’t this

               what you wanted, a boyfriend

and a relationship with your parents

that don’t get in each other’s way?

Part of it is how he sounds in English,

I hope that a visit in Seattle is on my travel plans.

Part of it is the retreat, again, from German.

Another fraction subtracted. 

You agree, the card is nice.

An attempt at gratitude.

Don’t need much at all.

Radetzky, Grant and Swan

Late night errand for conveniences

at the 24-hour pharmacy. I park

and my parents are waltzing again,

memories of Neujahrskonzert broadcasts

in the living room that fade

as soon as I step out of the car,

startled by the outdoor speakers

management has armed

with Classical, enough decibels

to discourage loitering,

provide an un-unhoused shopping experience.

A hostile hospitality

already half-forgotten

by the time I drive off

with my electrolyte packs.

Turning to the audience

the conductor lifts his baton.

The imperial capital claps along.

Victory, victory. In their hands

a sting sharpening.

---

Lucas Wildner (he/him) lives in Seattle. He is repairing his relationships to German and English and.... Ghost City Review published his debut chapbook Fluency in June 2022 and his chapbook [eyes emoji] was published by Hot Mess House in 2024. He can be found.

Laura DeHart Young

Truck Stop Prayer

Bless the smell of cinnamon buns,

burnt coffee, wet gravel after a

sudden rain.

Cigarette smoke and truck exhaust,

engine oil, garbage stench, and grit.

Bless finding a truck stop just in time.

Bless a strong woman

who studies the horizon,

doesn't bend or bow.

Weighs her words—

a fire in her silence

revealed through dusky eyes.

Like the woman at the next pump,

directing the flow of fuel

into a black pickup—

her glance straying

from the shimmering horizon

to my wrestling

with a jammed gas cap.

Bless the arm that reaches across

and twists it open

with a calloused hand.

A hand you want around

to open dill pickle jars

and strawberry jam.

“Where you headed?” she asks,

cowboy hat flapping in the breeze.

Maybe it’s a blessing I don't own

a western hat—just passing through

these foreign plains

where footsteps shed grief

and forward motion dulls pain.

I am good at running away—

from discomfort,

reckoning.

Shattered stoneware

flying past my head

in nightly dreams.

Bless glances that say just enough—

this woman leaning

against the pump,

asking with concern: “You hungry?”

Sunlight burns her shoulders,

streaks of gold woven

through brunette hair.

She must have noticed

the bruised cheekbone, stitches.

Bless the gravel crunching

under our boots

past license plates from states

I’ve never visited.

We order Buc-ee’s brisket sandwiches,

eat in the bed of her truck—

closeness I no longer remember.

Bless the wide felt brim

casting shadows across her face—

hiding softness,

voice quiet, but deliberate.

She owns a small dairy farm off 80 East

outside Lincoln—

runs it with her brother,

barely breaking even.

Her forehead is lined with hard work,

face tanned, shoulders sculpted.

She lifts me down—

presses a number into my hand.

“Call me,” she says.

Bless that.

What I Couldn’t Fix

There wasn't much visible

under the sink.

Laced boots and an inch of jeans.

Your muffled voice,

asking for the crescent wrench.

I study the same tool

in a hardware store off Route 66—

balance its weight on two fingers,

cold in my palm as I adjust it.

Imagine your hand reaching,

pipes clanking years ago.

The screen door slams for the tenth time,

never fully closing.

The store a dinosaur of time—

stuffy, organized chaos

with an inch of desert dust,

sharp smell of grease, and

tang of WD-40.

A lone fan spinning overhead

accomplishes nothing.

I return the wrench

to a faded pegboard

where it's likely been dangling

for a decade—

step over a golden retriever

sprawled in the next aisle.

Locate tire pressure gauges—

what I really need—

piled high in a plastic bin.

I remember using one on your Datsun—

you standing, hands on hips,

asking, “What is that thing?”

The same woman who could

fix a sink

was car clueless.

I pick up a handful,

let them slip back

through my fingers into the barrel

like I’m sifting

through old memories.

Kneeling on snow-covered ground,

testing tires—pressure low.

Explaining the readings to

a blank stare.

At the counter, a man in a stained apron,

informs me, “Cash only.”

Punches an old-time register,

indicator window displaying the price.

Bells chime, the drawer flings open.

I forgot what a penny looked like.

I leave this museum of spare parts,

each one built to repair something—

except what’s gone.

No tool has ever existed

to fix what happened to us.

---

Laura DeHart Young is a queer poet and novelist whose work explores memory, resilience, and the emotional terrain of relationships. Her poems have appeared in The Eunoia Review, Last Leaves Magazine, The Ravens Perch, The Bluebird Word, Book of Matches, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Burnt Toast and Benedictions, was published in October 2025. She is the author of seven novels from Bella Blooks.

JR Walsh

Celebrating our cheese anniversary

Here is a maze.

I drew the maze.          

Begin at start.                    Trace a line (use this pencil) straight forward until you are blocked. You are  

blocked?                             The maze is defective. I drew the maze badly. I authorize you to jump that

blockade.                          Here let me–                 Give me–                I used pen or I would erase the

blockage.                          Look here.             Go again.             Take back the pencil. Go until you are

stopped. You are stopped again?                                                                         Go back the other way.

The way you just came from.      There.       It’s boxed in a sideways L with some pencil scratches in it.

Start. I know those are yours. How can you see your next move with all that back and forth scribbling?

Here. I’ve crossed out that barrier.          Pretend it’s a pond. To wade through.             Drag the pencil

through.        Get your mouse to the cheese. I should’ve told you, you’re a mouse.

We’re mice. In the middle, that’s cheese.                   Swiss.                  See the holes?                    Those

are holes. I think we                                                                                                mice can swim.  

Swim the shallow puddle. A puddle from a much-needed rain. A puddle of our mistakes. Just go again.   

             Start from here.           You’re almost there. Give me the–                Look–

If you can’t–                 Give me–      You just jump these walls and you’re in the cheese. I know I know.

The pencil is dull now.                      Sharpeners are not in our budget.

Our bags were packed for us 

Everyone asked, Why don't you move

away again?

They were sad that we were missing out

on the experiences everyone enjoyed so much.

The vibrating noise! The specific smells!

& not necessarily in this order.

Every fun example free from our loss.

We didn't wish to be swayed by public opinion,

so we only half-considered moving again.

But you can't only half-

move even if you think it will be

at least or

at most half-

fun.

We moved to take a vote.

It was unanimous.

Fun didn't move us one bit.

The Semester Always Flees

Special thanks to Feiga Khutoretsky

“Happy Friday of Mondays!”

Collective shrug.

“Something I'm trying out. Tell the people.”

Near-collective mystification.

“Only two more classes are left, so today's our last Monday!”

Student asks, “Will Wednesday be the Friday of Wednesdays?”

“Absolutely.”

“When's the Wednesday of Fridays?”

Calculating. “About seven weeks ago.”

Unison mumble. “Would’ve been nice to know.”

Four days later, “Happy Friday of Fridays!”

The instructors face falls off, suddenly sullen.

Tepid faces. Fidgeting.

“Remember those first days, when I couldn’t remember your names?”

It’s different now, the instructor doesn’t say.

“You want a medal?” nobody says, not out loud anyway.

“You promised cake.”

The podium spotlight flickers.

Nothing new, but rather,

consistent like slow blinks

or iambs Chaucer dreamed of before death.

---

JR Walsh teaches creative writing at SUNY Oswego. He is the Online Editor for The Citron Review. His writing is in beloved publications such as The Greensboro Review, New World Writing, Switch, Litro, The Hong Kong Review, FRiGG, Bull, Flash the Court, HAD, Fractured Literary, 50-word Stories, 3rd Wednesday, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Esquire. More: itsjrwalsh.com.

Mark Jackley

Some Nights

my head’s

a jar of

fireflies,

more the

jar, not

the desperate

light, a gift

trying

to reach

the world

Kenny, Almost Heaven

survived

the wrecks

but walked away

from all twelve steps

whose turnips

taste like

cancer like

crumbled

mountaintop

so hungry

no one sees him

only

deer heads

in the taverns

staring through

the dimness

as he hunts himself

Cul de Sac Morning

I was sizing up last night’s dream.

But never mind the handcuffs,

the hacksaw, and the kiss.

Its remnants won’t exceed 

the size of tarnished keys 

to getaway cars that don’t.

I will stick them in my pocket,

I will jingle them all day.

---

Mark Jackley lives in Richmond, Virginia. Recently retired, his back aches from volunteering at a nearby community farm. His poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Sugar House Review, The Cape Rock, Tampa Review, and Does It Have Pockets.

Rebecca Michels

Moon Phase

Before I knew it

was the lunar eclipse,

I caught the reflection

in my kitchen window:

low and yellow. I was

searching for an email—

a discount for a lymphatic

facial brush; could I really

brush the burgeoning

wrinkles from my forehead,

lift my cheeks back up

where they belong—

I searched the words

I remembered, sorry late.

Instead, a missed reply

from my long-ago ex.

I hope you’re safe was all

I’d written. He’d survived the fires,

but, he went on, a week later

his brother killed himself.

I knew his brother—his brother

was a complicated asshole.

Years later, I’d write about him.

Years ago, he’d written about me;

a song about the hike

my ex and I took

on the tallest mountain in Maine.

On top of the razor’s edge,

I was terrified. He called it Loon.

I downloaded the attachment,

and he sang out my name,

sang about us pulling through

—we didn’t pull through.

His voice was tender, alive,

and the moon was high and

crystal-clear in the black sky.

Women’s Work

I know women have a lot to do,

says the woman in the next seat

as she holds mine down

so it won’t snap up. I’m overloaded

with the kids’ jackets and programs.

We’re here to see a musical

about the Suffragist movement

and half-way through I’m ashamed

to admit I learn a lot, like how

the leaders were force-fed in prison.

The washing machine breaks down

at my parents’ place while we’re visiting;

I wash heavy jeans and sweatshirts,

small cotton underpants in the tub.

Leaning over the edge, I move

the way I’m sure my grandmother did

with her washboard in the basement.

Are you a project manager? 

asks the plumber. Yes.

I make the kids’ breakfast, pick

white pith off mandarin segments.

Good luck, my mom says as she does

when I’m on my way out. I’m picking up

my shoes at the shoemaker.

He shows me my shoes, half-soled,

You didn’t tell me to do the heels.

I recognize the character actor in front of me

with her daughters, tap her shoulder,

I’m a longtime fan of your work.

She says, That means a lot to me.

I’m here with my kids too, I say, and

sit back down for the second act.

---

Rebecca Michels is a poet and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her recent work appears in Plume and Midway Journal, and is forthcoming in UCity Review and Grand Journal.

John Cullen

Seeking

I’m finding hope in strange places.

When I kayak, I paddle close to shore, the desert

of lily pads, the hilarious hair of young waterfowl

and the suicidal courage of an enraged swan.

Last week, I witnessed a Saguaro cactus

near Adam’s Motel outside Tempe, Arizona.

An elf owl peaked from a woodpecker hole.

Thunder rumored.  I understand now

old mystics who fingered innards

and washed the mandrake’s weeping

thighs with wine and incense

to discover in the red flow

the raisin of hope. 

On Your Knees

Watch a mouse negotiate

into grass after you shroud

him with a tea towel

and release, or deliver mail

to the nursing home and discuss

slippers with a failing patient

who wet his pants but calmly

awaits a nurse, or forget you will die

and feel the buzz reverberating

bones as you touch the power grid.

Renewed, you understand

forgiveness isn’t necessary

or yours to give.  But if it makes you

feel better, go ahead

and forgive yourself.

Bended knees is not about knees

but about levelling eye to eye

with mouse, diaper, and death.

Limon Libertab!

Bees on the butterfly bush clog

a stumbling foreplay to recreate

the world, pollen and nectar

pellets in saddle bags, each centimeter

the right direction.  Staring

out the kitchen window,

you too plan to stash and drink

sweet tears as a reward.

Behind your back, huddled

lemons in a bowl discover courage.

They felt the breeze sing,

and cry “Limon Libertab!”

A lemon’s cry is like a fly’s curse,

and yet there is a possibility

they will parachute onto the lawn.

because when you read those lines,

aloud at Starbucks or mumbled

in the dusk of your eye, you danced

with the bee and wed shy fruit.

This happens for the same reason

compelling anyone to stare

into an open manhole.

---

John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Recently he has published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly, Cleaver, Pembroke Magazine, and New York Quarterly. His chapbook, Town Crazy, is available from Slipstream Press, and Bass Clef Books will release the chapbook Observation of Basic Matter in 2025.

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice

Roar of All Septembers

She stood on stage, class president,

red boa round her neck, sparkly

tiara: raised her hand, and the party began.

Opening trumpets of Earth, Wind, and Fire—

and seniors burst like victorious fans

through double doors behind

teachers who lurked in back

for quick get-away, drank

forbidden coffee, fidgeted

with phones. Kids streamed

down aisles in slow motion,

spinning, striking disco poses,

progressing arm in arm,

a parade bugled forth

under the bars of September,

of life that can’t see

its end. Do you recall

summoning our memories,

faculty on our feet, pulled

into the aisles, too, reliving

ancient pep rallies in wooden bleachers,

roar of all Septembers, young bodies,

beads tossing hair pumping

palms bumping sweets flying,                       

tuba trombone flash of brass—

scrim lift and fall, we celebrated

the beginning of our end.

Trying to Transfer the Weight

1.

Fourth position, practiced at the barre, preparation

for center work. Shifting in plié, from back foot

to front, anchors the arabesque’s rise.

Travel in triplets across the floor, one-two-three,

waltz of the modern dancer, down-up-down,

cover swaths of sprung floor, launch

into a partner’s hands, which grip below hipbones,

rutch tights pulled over a black leotard.

When a man lifts a partner, she must

pull abdominal muscles tight, as if tethering

them to her spine’s inside, careful

not to give him all

her dead weight.

2.

My wife’s working air traffic again

in her nightmares, radar down, pushing tin,

no one answering her hand-off phone calls

from Atlanta Center to a faceless guy

in another underground bunker

in Tulsa or maybe Charlotte,

to hand off control of a plane

to a new airspace. Burden

of 200 souls on her back,

pulling her neck, already straining,                           

until she wakes up, wrenching covers

tight like locked seatbelts and

screams. I touch her arm, sweat

cold, press my palm

between her breasts. She

sits up, turns on the light.

3.

Knees pulled tight under chin,

arms hugging shins, a student

will sit close by, looking

at anything but me.

So, how are you?

And the stories inch in,

sit around us, fat full caterpillars

on the classroom floor, stories—

pills taken

or that should have been

an uncle staying

down the carpeted hall

from her bedroom

a sidewalk soaked

with a cousin’s blood

a fall down stairs

to take care of it

Today, my student leans

forward in a sage-green chair, sinks

back, eyes on a carpet square,

wants to tell me, but wants

me not to tell. I can’t

not tell. I’ll be fine, I’m fine—

She unfolds each leg, pulls denim

purse to her chest, shoulders

her blue nylon pack, book

corners jutting like fetal

elbows into her back.

---

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Literary Mama, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Lodged in the Belly, was published in 2024 by Main Street Rag. A long-time high school English teacher with literature degrees from Brown and Indiana-Bloomington, she lives with her wife in Florida. Learn more at her website: jhdracostice.com/

Colleen Harris

Funeral Shoes

for Shara

Your dress is black—dark, plain, cut

below the knee for the modesty

expected in a Southern church,

covering most of your tattoos.

Standing barefoot before the closet,

one more absurd decision to make.

You would go barefoot, you would go

naked if you could, the way she walked

out of the shower, unabashed,

toward the dresser with less care

than when you stood over each other

in fraternity house basement bathrooms,

safely pissing by turns and checking

that the rum hadn’t smudged your red lips.

The closet looms. Fifty-two pairs

to choose from: sedate Mary Janes

somber in black, platform hooker-heels

refusing all reality in purple and green,

sneakers, mules in classic brown leather,

ballet flats in a pink delicate as new skin.

Blue, red, leopard print, colors wheel

before your eyes, they blur like lights,

like central Kentucky college party nights.

Finally you choose—dusty purple

and yellow, with black leather bows

and witch-point toes, a muted whimsy

her contrary spirit would have loved,

would have stolen at the first chance.

The drive to Louisville takes years.

The casket is closed. There is an easel,

a poster-sized photo of her smiling face,

still alive, she could walk in any moment.

You walk to an open pew in low heels—

click clack, come back, click clack.

Hobbyhopper

First it was Red Heart yarn, when her mother taught

her to crochet. Hours walking craft aisles, choosing

colors, shades of olive, blues, and plums, she sought

every hue along the haunted spectrum of bruising.

After that, quilting. Ignoring fiscal sense, she bought

a Singer sewing machine, carry-case, sharp notions,

fat quarters of fabric in red, gold, and grey. She ought

to start small, stick to one hobby, but once set in motion

she is a menace, a fanatic, a woman demon-possessed

to find something—anything—to bring her mind rest.

Christmas Cake

Pine Knot, Kentucky

When the cake tin tipped

landing icing-side down

on the Tahoe carpet,

I ducked my head,

waited for my father’s rage

to spill from your lips.

Instead, you laughed,

said it would make the dogs happy,

and brought the hounds out

to sup on the sweet mess.

I knew then you would ask,

that I would say yes.

We arrived late, small

store-bought cake in hand,

sugar still on our shoes,

laughter like champagne

rising from our throats.

---

Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and works as a university library dean in Texas. Author of four poetry books and four chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback 2019; Bellowing Ark, 2010). Her poems appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and more than 80 others. Follow her writing at https://colleensharris.com