Naomi Stenberg

Jones Street

You once lived with a woman amused by mimes and a man who was half coyote. You all lived in a house, a group home, on Jones Street in Seattle. In the Fall. But only in the Fall. Only one month in the Fall. The leaves on the front lawn blew in until they littered the carpet. The woman amused by mimes said she liked the way they crunched underneath her feet. Like old scabs, she said. She laughed. She laughed a lot. You heard her laughing late at night at the mimes she said were in her television set that she could see only when she turned the volume off. Funny as hell, she said. Marcel Marceau. She talked to you when you both were in the yellow kitchen microwaving mac and cheese or making peanut butter sandwiches. The man who was half coyote drifted by in the hall. He didn’t speak. He wore a gray parka zipped shut with the fur hood always up. Fur around his face. You called him Coyote in your mind because you had to call him something. His brown eyes in the fur parka were afraid and not afraid. He was not interested in you. The few times you met him in the hall, you passed by him silently because you knew somehow to never say hello.  It was a year and a half after you had fallen apart in graduate school and three months after you had found the last couch of a friend to drift on to. You moved in with four boxes of clothes and a box of old valentines and Christmas placemats marked Seasonal. You had traveled for a year and a half and were determined to stay. You put red checked contact paper in the drawers in your dresser and lined up your two pairs of shoes, tennis shoes and good shoes, in your closet. I’m going to be okay, you told yourself. I’m going be okay, a recitation, a lullaby, you half believed. For a month in the Fall of your forty-second year. You didn’t know that a corner of the roof of the house was starting to cave in. Even the squirrels couldn’t get purchase. The city condemned the building. You and the woman amused by mimes and the man who was half coyote moved on to other group homes. You never saw them again. I’m going to be okay. 

Ice-fishing in Wisconsin 

On days like this you try for one sentence 

to bead itself together like the long loopy beads 

Janis Joplin wore, was famous for. 

You try for anything.

Your line goes slack with no fish.

Somehow you’re fishing in Wisconsin, 

ice-fishing with a Budweiser in your hand and

a few raucous men that don’t get it 

that you’re a poet 

and don’t like you either.

On days like this you’re eight again 

surrounded by other girls 

and you have to open a lumpy birthday present 

from your Aunt Lois 

even though you know 

it’s going to be the terrible underwear 

she gives you every year. 

You are trying to unwrap one sentence now and 

have it not be old-fashioned lacy undies 

but something you can actually love.

On days like this you push your pen 

like it’s an old ragged mop

and you’re a janitor who has just punched in.

On days like this you know 

there will always be days like this.

---

Naomi Stenberg (she/her) is queer, nuerodivergent and thriving in Seattle. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets, Sky Island Journal, Knee Brace Press, Soul Poetry, Teacakes and Tarot, and elsewhere. In her spare time, Naomi collects, on vinyl,  female rockers from the eighties, does improv, and runs with her dog.

Alice Haines

Kindling the Woodstove

My feet do have their problems, so I wear

wool socks to bed, slippers when I rise.

Five below at dawn means cold floors

and chilblains—a fire first thing is best.

He tears out squares of newspaper the night

before (better than crumpled for draw), 

saves me scraps of shingles in a bucket,

old porch molding too.  Flairs good

but paint could be white-lead… what I think

anyway. Don’t mind the splinters on

the splits but can’t load one-handed if the cordwood’s

left as logs; they’re hard to hold.

Fire can’t grab them neither. Come

to think of it, I’m gonna stack those out

to the barn—don’t know why I struggle

so. Now these long sticks, the firebox

door won’t close. He says, get a bigger one,

catalytic, four-pot top,

and an oven. We have electric to cook on,

Forgets it’s me cooking.  Long time since

he courted me with home-made soup.

Kale and red-beans. Got to admit,

he’s handy with dishes and kettle. That oak

he felled last year burns long and hot.

I’m fond of the rusty old thing for tea

and a fry-up; may have its problems, but a new one

would crowd out the kitchen. Warmest room

in the house, got to be able to live in it.

The House

Empty when it welcomed us in, we filled

it comfortably; even the dirty socks

had a place. The sea-breeze fluttered the crabapple

leaves and all the windows glowed.

We brought with us an unspoken doubt,

as though a piece of puzzle was missing—

had to skirt around the lack, a habit

like avoiding a construction hole.

The house, eager to please, shielded 

us, tugging us back like a game.

Things began to disappear:  

one red mitten, a growing boy, 

as if they’d fallen through a worn-out pocket.  

Fragments of our best selves hid

under the furniture—civility                                     

lost. Despite extensive search, 

all that remained were two thumbtacks

and a button. Finally, my husband vanished

too, leaving a sliver of soap

and a liberating loneliness.

The house clung to me and whimpered

when I left. Now it shies away

when I pass by, as though I smell

of fireworks—or sound like thunder. 

---

Alice Haines’ poems have appeared in Pangyrus, The Healing Muse, Off the Coast, Northern New England Review, Touchstone Literary Magazine, and Pine Row. A retired family physician who volunteers at a free clinic, she lives in Maine, where she enjoys nurturing native plants, birding and tracking wildlife.

Satori Good

Ownership

My house is dry & warm with
white adobe corners & sloped
marble floors. Her inner walls
flush & thrum like cello strings.

My house is all legs & shoulders.
Bamboo pillars grow through
windows & open her up & suck
her dry.

My house is mine & other houses flirt.
They lower their shutter eyes, yield
stones that fit like hearts in hands,
paint their skins white. The houses

think they can be anything but what
they are. Women, boats, mansions.
I tell bamboo the houses do not know
their place.

Bamboo says let me show you pleasure.
The pillars fill me up. I see my house
regal & still & hollow. How often
I accuse her of my own desires.

How often she welcomes me inside
overgrown & satisfied, recognizes
subtle notes of earth, turns to bamboo
& smiles.

 

Conception

This poem is a green balloon
held by two children

One has mascara on her lips
                           I am that one

the second is a waxing moon
I love unconditionally
on the condition you love me

I dreamed I was pregnant
with this poem
it grew for seventy weeks
We named it together

                                    you said
how many women do you think
own charcoal grills

I said at least ten, can I borrow
a tampon

You said how many women
do you think are buried
wearing tampons

I said

what kind of dirt do you
want for your grave

Why do children tell the moon
goodnight

What gender is a poem

---

Satori is a cat parent and speculative writer from Lawrence, Kansas. Their work appears (or is forthcoming) in the Baffler, M E N A C E, Waffle Fried, and elsewhere; they were recently named a finalist in fugue’s prose contest. They are (according to reliable sources) an MFA candidate at George Mason University and Editor in Chief of the intersectional feminist journal So to Speak. satorigood.com

Nate Hirschtick

Brotherhood of Snowmen

I remember my snow it was mine just cause

of the red in it we were kids afraid how / gentle

a snowflake falls and rests on a snowflake I once heard they might each be unique

we called them all snow / feeling my blood

dripping it flowed down my face I paused my heart

painted a portrait in the snow / it said no to us

or it said no to me when W tried to break ice

with my nose he mistook what he was holding for something gentle / laughing

in it choking and pushing S into a bank how brothers play

together / we spread it

in the house on boots or in edges of gloves where sleeves met wrists

leaving a cool red ring of numbed skin / ice scrapes

ice in my dreams I sweep a shard across the surface of a winter lake the sound

is something we would never hear / I left my blood behind

who needed it when we lived and slept in it we swam like summer

through snow

I remember you light snowfall

the way we laid

in it we danced completely

still in the black and white

hard pavement

was our worst enemy I still feel

my purple knees

my fingers melted

on my palms I swallowed

my throat my tongue

went with it

I didn’t know

what to do with my hands so

I gave them to you

your breath smoking

in the air a cool

reminder

that our bodies

are bodies

My Earth in Midwinter

I’ve clipped once so far. It’s telling

how little it means to see

the plant on my windowsill

dying and say oh well, it had its day in the sun

and it was gorgeous, breathtaking, green

as life, and take the plant with hands that have deprived

of water and left sun-empty to bring

to the trash, saving the pretty pot and feeling

nothing. I’m in the small season

of my life when I light my bedside

candle and watch the yellowing

flame brush my empty bottle of wine.

---

Nate Hirschtick studies English and computer science at Santa Clara University. You can read his most recent work in Trampset, upcoming issues of Beyond Words, and elsewhere.

Caroline Keir

In Virginia

I pick up hitchhiking houseware and sleep till noon,

exist on sriracha and raw fish,

bourbon peach smashes,

Mucinex and Aztec clay.

Exchanging lectures for leans,

I loiter in overpriced coffee shops,

carrying books I never open,

scheduling scoffs for splotchy spray tans,

mullets that lack irony.

I walk without a purpose,

feigning convenient cramps and aloofness.

I don’t recognize former relay teammates or middle school jazz aficionados.

At night, the news feels heavier, Lester Holt harsher,

stories more embellished, embellishments more storied.

Ambivalence is punctuated,

exclamatory and hard stopped.

Hanging on to every syllable,

I console myself with mummified consumption of teen dystopia,

thinned cardigans that are fifty percent off on Wednesdays

or forty percent off on Mondays

if they’re marked with an orange or blue tag.

McDonald’s Sprite will do the trick sometimes,

but only if I forget the big glass of water with my morning toast and vitamins.

My mom tells me to go to bed earlier,

I sit in the refrigerator overnight.

City of Lite

The space between gleam and grimace is wrought with rubber gloves, chive.

Stale smells slant.                                                        

Here, I am eating things to eat them.

I am drinking things to drink them.

You are saying things to say them,

hoping they make you good

and fair.

I hate, I think. The way your laugh carbonates.

I watch it take up, expand until it’s greased all my mirrors.

Yellow film contorts my lower back into a crystal punch bowl, cheap,

     but storied.

Quartered, halved, contractions have always left me ragged.

I like this like, at least.

I think I like.

I know I like.

I think I know I like                                                                           

the way your stray fingertips digest themselves in empty pockets.

Seeking raw weight unharvested, something to chew on:

receiving amber notes that waft towards the wall.                                                                                    

---

Caroline Keir is a sometimes writer, always writing appreciator based in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she primarily thinks about ways she can most effectively incorporate jewel tones into her wardrobe.

Robert Okaji

When to Say Goodbye

If all goes well it will never happen.

The dry grass in the shade whispers

while the vines crunch underfoot,                                  

releasing a bitter odor. A year ago

I led my dog to his death, the third

in five years. How such counting

precedes affection, dwindles ever

so slowly, one star winking out after

another, till only the morning gray

hangs above us, solemn, indefinite.

Voiceless. If I could cock my head

to howl, who would understand? Not

one dog or three, neither mother nor

mentor, not my friend’s sister nor her

father and his nephews, the two boys

belted safely in the back seat. No.

I walk downhill and closer to the creek,

where the vines are still green.

In the shade of a large cedar, a turtle

slips into the water and eases away.

This poem was first published in Oxidant|Engine, 2017.

I Praise the Moon, Even When She Laughs

I got drunk once and woke in Korea

with you watching over me.

Odd, how you spend seasons looking

down, and I, up. If I lived in a cloud,

could you discern me from the other

particles? Perhaps your down is

peripheral, or left, or non-directional. I can

fathom this without measuring scope,

yet I feel queasy about the possibility

of being merely one vaporous drop

coalescing among others, unnamed

and forgettable, awaiting the particular

atmospheric conditions to plummet to my

fate. As if we control our own gravities!

One winter I grilled pork tenderloin under

your gaze, unaware that the grass

around me had caught fire, and when I

unwound the hose and turned on the

faucet you laughed, as the hose wasn't

connected and only my feet were

extinguished. Dinner was delayed

that evening, but I praised you just the same.

I look up, heedless in the stars’ grip, unable

to retrace all those steps taken to this here,

now, but still you sway above the branches,

sighing, lighting my path, returned once

again, even if not apparent at all times. Every

breath signals a departure. Each is an arrival.

This poem was first published in Sourland Mountain Review, 2017.

---

Robert Okaji has late stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. He lives, for the time being, in Indianapolis with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper— stepson, cat and dog. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, was recently published by 3: A Taos Press (not posthumously, as it turns out), and his poetry may be found in Threepenny Review, Verse Daily, Only Poems, wildness, Vox Populi and other venues.

M. Benjamin Thorne

Tannenbaum

To mark the miraculous birth

we bring a live thing into our home

and water it with admiration,

provide a mantle of tinsel and light,

hang ornaments like sacred medals

from its boughs and adoringly sing

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

how lovely are your branches;

all so that it can slowly die,

dried out into a browning husk

shedding needles like desiccated tears;

then dumped, with all the pomp

of broke-down cardboard,

onto the street, a lifeless bum.

Exhibit (Oświęcim, Poland)

The room crowded with puffer jackets

boots, young, angled faces illuminated

by secretive flashes of small screens

all flowing past the exhibits like clouds

the glass cases containing dull dioramas

of hate’s detritus, so mindlessly repetitive:

Shoes, glasses, suitcases

Hair

Towers of suitcases

Mountains of shoes

Cities of hair

A civilization

ripped from context

anodyne with academic text

A heap of spectacles

no-one wants to see

---

A Pushcart Prize nominee, M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in San Antonio Review, Thimble Lit Mag, Last Syllable Lit, Salvation South, Pictura Jornal, and Heimat Review. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.

Tracy Royce

The Summer Before My Mother Descended into Psychosis 

I worried about my hair. 

It had always been thick, lustrous, 

and best of all, attached. 

Then I found clumps clogging the drain 

and my comb came away kinky. 

My part grew ever wider, 

a strip of pallid scalp exposed. 

“Bald is sexy,” my husband joked, 

pointing at his vacant pate. 

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a bald woman,” 

I said, stooping to gather the strands 

strewn across the bathroom floor. 

What, I thought, could be worse than that?

What the Books Don’t Tell You

After Mom receives the diagnosis, you read the books, attend the lectures, learn everything you can about dementia. You discover that memory isn’t the only casualty of the disease ravaging your mother’s brain. Cognition, balance, even the ability to swallow will eventually decline. But no one warns you about the animals. That someday soon, you’ll be unable to soothe Mom when she tearfully insists someone has snuck in and drowned several kittens in her sink. That she’ll mourn her babies, also imaginary, whom she thinks have been abducted and torn apart by wolves. That when your frantic mother believes a tiger has killed your brother, your sister-in-law will refuse to put him on the phone to provide reassurance. That after years of this, you will gaze at the reflection of your sunken eyes and sallow skin and wonder just what kind of creature you yourself have become.

Note: An earlier version of this poem was featured on the Brevity Podcast Episode #10: “One-Minute Memoir” (2018).

By the Side of the Road

If we’re to believe the billboard, the beaming blonde used to weigh more, before her procedure, her transformation. Now her arms are raised in victory, a slender celebration of her triumph over the scale. As we approach the intersection, you see her, then turn to me with hungry eyes—perhaps I too can be tamed, whittled away, made to take up less space in the world. I hit the accelerator, blowing past the billboard, imagining you too are behind me.

---

Tracy Royce is a fat-positive poet and writer whose work has appeared in / is forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review, The Fat Studies Reader (NYU Press), MacQueen's Quinterly, ONE ART, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies.

Victoria Melekian

On an Ordinary Afternoon in Late August, I Was Clobbered by Happiness

Happiness trumpeted her way

into the house, leading a parade

of gymnasts, drummers, and a juggler

on a unicycle through the kitchen,

around the island to the dining room,

up and down the stairs. She twirled

her baton, the gymnasts backflipped,

and the juggler tossed flaming torches.

At the back door, she tooted her whistle 

and I asked her to stay, but Happiness

said, “Oh, honey, don’t worry. I’ll be back.

This is just a burst,” and she flung her baton,

missing the ceiling fan but not my head.

Another whistle blow and she was out the door.

The parade followed her up the street.

I watched till there was nothing left to see,

then grabbed a broom and swept confetti

into a sparkling orange and red pile.

Open Your Eyes, Rhonda

                      after Help Me, Rhonda, song by Brian Wilson

Forever

on repeat

you help helping him,

this dude is needy trouble—

sixty-two times

“help, help me,”

no dinner date,

no pink peonies,

no sweet note,

nothing but

you’re so fine, Rhonda.

Sixty-two crybaby whines,

sixty-two crimson red flags

flapping on sixty-two poles

planted in your grass.

The Hesitation is This

after Kelli Russell Agodon

There’s always a good boy
waiting to nuzzle your palm

and stare into your soul. A puppy
who sits for bacon treats, fetches

his leash when you say walk.
Next thing you know, he’s asleep

on your bed sixteen years
until he can’t jump up anymore

and you’re guiding that sweet dog
to his dinner bowl at night, counting

checkmarks on the quality of life
questionnaire. I swear, Kirby

was the last: his crate, his bed, the leash,
the treats, his raggedy racoon lovey.

---

Victoria Melekian writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in print and online and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. For more, visit her website https://victoriamelekian.com

Jane Medved

Transit

My granddaughter is seven and an accomplished liar. She stole a Swiss Army knife, then pretended to “find” it. She fed her cousin’s goldfish until he died. When forced to confess, she admitted he looked too skinny.

Last night, before I left for the airport, she hid my cellphone in the bushes. As we tore the house apart, she shrugged and went back to sleep.

Seen from above, the clouds are their own kingdom. Nobody wants to join them.

They rule over cold air and shadows, a grid of order then reaction. Their subjects are well behaved.

In Rome, wheels travel the floor. They arrive in pairs. Anticipation. Exhaustion. A little girl cries on concrete.

I am waiting to share my ride with a stranger. I walk up to men. Ask them for their names.

Is wisdom a circle, or a path that wants to repeat?

From above, the clouds are also an old woman. Her softness is an illusion. Her whiteness is the absence of color. Her interest is temporary.

Tonight she’ll be a knife and escape from the box.

And because I love the tree, I’ll ask her to chop my house down first.

Ways of Being Right

                after Kim Addonizio

Like thorns that announce the petal.

The erratic kindness, a smattering of good deeds.

A morning destination sunk back into sand.

An eruption of thirst, drown in it.

Sometimes you appear like a far harbor.

Gasping boats swim to you.

Sometimes you are the baggage unclaimed.

The reassuring whir, a repetition that can only be mechanical.

You fall asleep missing the company of crickets.

Their mating songs calm you.

The abandoned attraction.

You check your reflection. Are you window or mirror?

That time you were yourself.

That time it was suddenly past midnight.

That time you resembled the exotic.

The smoke and the aftertaste, the scratchy respite at the back of your throat.

And, once a month, a bright penny of moon.

Be gracious, nobody else cares.

---

Jane Medved is the author of Wayfarers (Winner of the Off the Grid Prize, Grid Books 2024), Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press). Her translation of Wherever We Float, That’s Home (by Maya Tevet Dayan, Saturnalia Books) won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize 2024. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming in Plume, Swwim, River Heron Review, Ruminate, and Bending Genres. She is the poetry editor of The Ilanot Review. Visit her at janemedved.net

Linda Laderman

catastrophe *

you scream after you see

your boy slip in front of a yellow

cab, an ordinary taxi.

The slackening of his body as

it folds into itself while you tremble,

bewildered at the looseness of your

grasp—your inability to know why

you’re standing and he isn’t.

and though the medics tell you

it was no one’s fault, you yell for them

to stop talking, and plead with yourself

for a description of this thing that makes

you keen—a color, a piece of torn cloth,

an origami bird. you hear your wife’s howls.

she wishes it had been you instead. you wish

that too. your words mean nothing. you think

if you go back, you can wake him, like you do

every morning. you’ll cajole him to get up, get out

of that black plastic bag and get home.

*After How Fortunate the Boy by Alicia Ostriker

The brevity of warmth

The summer I turn ten I learn about definitions.

That normal means two parents whose last name

is the same as yours, that ordinary stands

for a Schwinn bike, a sibling, dinner at six,

and coming in when the streetlights come on—

that June captures the brevity of warmth.

I discover laughter can be a weapon or a salve,

depending on who offers it to you. That you

can know who you are even when others don’t.

Mother teaches me about secrets. She says

our dirty laundry is no one else’s business,

even when it becomes everyone’s. Play as if

neighbors don’t see the police climb our steps

to stop the quarrels between her and my stepfather,

or behave like no one hears his tires screech.

But I hear. She caws after him, a broken bird

singing from a porch swing, then sits and waits.

The crack in her voice panics me. Still, I want

to hold onto her hand. He’s found in a rented room,

slumped in a chair, a newspaper opened in his lap,

an empty pack of Winston’s, pistol in his palm.

In July, mother teaches me to dance. Wearing her bra

and half-slip, she wraps strings of my pop-it beads

around our necks. We zig zag across the floor,

her midriff and breasts, spongy, like the yellow cake she

bakes for holidays. When she plugs in the record player

and sings Swanee, I lie on the on the porch swing and clap.

I feel, your love is real.

Mother decides it’s time to leave. We move to a flat.

In her bra and half-slip, she dances in the doorway.

By August, I understand the meaning of shame.

---

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Action-Spectacle, Quartet, Gyroscope, SWWIM, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Scapegoat Review, Rust &Moth, and MER. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University, in Ohio. More work at lindaladerman.com.

Mathieu Cailler

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure Didn’t Spark Joy

for Delilah the way it did when she was young. Maturation, she justified on her dark drive home from the theater. But she thought of her friends, who were also in their thirties, laughing hard at the rerelease. When Delilah arrived at her condo, she plucked a flashlight from her glovebox and searched for her joy. She scoured a park not far from her home, where she used to play hide-and-seek with her friends, swing from monkey bars with her brother, even shoot down a long slide whose metal burned on hot days.

The light’s beam illuminated the park and vacant playground equipment. But as Delilah turned one last time, the flashlight’s cone lit up three small children at the far end. Immediately, she knew them to be her innocence, her imagination, and her inner child. She looked on and watched them as they sat on the ground, serving make-belief tea, in a make-belief pot, on a make-belief table. They didn’t even notice Delilah; they didn’t even notice the light.

The Cheetah

ran so fast its spots fell off. From a distance, I yelled, “You forgot your spots,” but it didn’t hear me. I collected the spots, and made some signs, and I left my phone number. In the meantime, I used the spots to teach my daughter about estimation. I filled a glass jug with the spots and asked her how many she believed rested inside the jug. “Fifty,” she said. I guessed seven hundred. We counted them together and were both wrong. The total was 2,149. No one ever returned my call, so we still have the jug on display in our home. Over the years, we’ve used the spots as furniture pads, for my daughter’s art projects, for lapel pins and brooches, even for the dark-colored stones in checkers. There’ve been times, too, when I have placed them atop my eyes at dawn to block the daylight and allow me to sleep until noon. When I do this, I dream of lush veldts, of mountainous terrain, of sprinting at up to seventy miles per hour through Africa’s Sahel.

Out of This World

The boy walked home after a long school day. This time, though, at the end of Juniper Lane, instead of the usual yellow Dead End sign, there was a narrow, metal staircase overgrown with ivy. The boy started up the stairs. When he reached the top, there was an elevator. He pressed the button. It illuminated, and seconds later, the elevator doors parted. Wiping sweat from his face, the boy entered. There were only two buttons on the control panel: an L and a 2. He pressed the 2. The doors came together, the inside light flickered, and the elevator rattled hard enough to knock the boy over. Then ding! The boy rose and dusted himself off. When he exited, he realized he was on the moon. The ground was rough under his Converse sneakers, the lunar rocks poking through the rubber. Earth was so perfect from here. Quiet. Cute. Swirls of blue and white, patches of green here and there, and little lights in certain spots that winked at him. He wished his phone’s battery wasn’t dead from playing Candy Crush at recess, so that he could snap a photo and show his grandma later. Above him, a comet burned and fizzled. Scared, he crouched, then stood tall again, once the tail was far away. After a couple of hours, he made his way back to the elevator. He learned he couldn’t dream while looking at Earth. He knew too many of its answers.

---

Mathieu Cailler is the author of seven books: a novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children’s titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Wigleaf, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He has received many prestigious awards, including a Pushcart Prize; a Readers’ Favorite Award; and accolades from the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festivals. You can connect with him on social media @writesfromla or visit his website at mathieucailler.com.

Mary Ann Honaker

OUR COUNTRY IS DYING

The ceaseless ants do not sense a threat, and

continue to build their mounds of sand.  Whom

should they fear?  Birds appropriate seeds, do

their tiered mating calls from tree to shrub. I

watch the leaves nod.  Time is only time.  Call

to the steep cliff; it will answer.  In my

house I have blankets, tea, no enemy.

Sky portions out its portions of rain.  An

unseasonal drought, the sky an enemy.

Who stuffs her reason under her fear?  Must

we?  The light drops a gear, soon we'll be

closed up in night's cloak. We are all worthy,

clocked in on the planet's time clock of

years.  Is there to be an engagement?

I will engage my skin to light. I

won't pluck the rose, because it's your turn

to bend to it.  Our years are clipped, so in

them bask.  In them scream.  In them nap, and the

rivers will flow from any direction.

My mind has an ocean in it, it's of

night, stars on water.  There I drown. The

night and day change places, hover. Sun

leaves us: but it still shines elsewhere, and

night, that huge bear, paces the globe.  We keep

still as night passes over, keeps walking.

We have loneliness in common; it’s

a curious bell jar.  In common we hold the

change of autumn light, winter's scrim on heart.

In common the earth breaking in spring, that

cracking that breaks us open too, asks

how much hurt is worth it to live. In the

summer, we buzz like trapped bees and question

less.  The moon is there and then it's not.

I look for shine and find a scratch in my

sky instead.  Full moons make us furious.

Do we listen to the heart or mind?--

a question we share.  Salt air, how the

scent of it humbles.  Immensity, heart,

pulses in the night, and the sea at night is

overwhelm.  Galaxies above, and the

deeps below.  They say it makes us smaller,

but I say we expand, we are cousin

or closer to the furthest blue star of

the heavens we can't with the naked eye, the

largest telescope, see.  We are the sun.

We are the earth, when it turns, we with it

turn.  We are the hawk's fine-tuned eye which sees

the chipmunk, and we are the chipmunk, and

no one steps to the edge of what she knows.

Everything is me; I am everything.

This goes for you too, and for the fly, it

goes.  All is One. Imagine what god hears!

God hears how my cat hears my smashing the

keyboard keys. God hears my tuneless gnashing

teeth in sleep, my teeth's vibrations, even.

God hears the tree's heartwood tremble as

the storm rumbles.  What is it?  We're all it.

Our country is dying, the nation hears.

The universe expands; the sun burns, the

fuel is limited.  To be is a blessing

in this iteration.  Others follow. The

cycles are endless, cold or fire a door.

Someone breathes a long exhale. We go to

the end of it. Then the long inhale. The

exhale has a bit to go, in my mind.

Of course there are things we all should.

Of course there's a right, and it's the only.

But let the sea-doors and air-doors open!

The doors of fire and night!  We can walk from

the world and still be of the world, of the

endless fixing.  Injustice hurts the  heart.

So we must.  But meanwhile, hunger. An

exquisite meal made by your enemy,

brought to table by your foe, who

you tip twenty-five percent. When he gets

into his car, a murmuration in

tune to the bass line, starlings taking risks

and just killing it.  Dusk rises from the

pavement like a mist.  He's in no danger.

Neither are you, the arugula of

your salad poised on your fork, becoming

a part of you bite by bite.  It's in a

country, this country, this happens, my friend.

Note: This golden shovel uses Joy Harjo's “This Morning I Pray for My Enemies” from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems.

---

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023), and the forthcoming Night is Another Realm Altogether (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, DIAGRAM, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, Tuskegee Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia. https://maryannhonaker.wordpress.com/

Alex Stolis

Mary Tyler Moore dyes her hair blonde

wants to look dangerous; Barbara Stanwyck

-Double Indemnity-femme fatale - cool.

She lives in a bright guilty world, rich,

rare, savage strange.

Imagines being called dame, slapping Rob

across the face, knowing it turns him on.

She gets to hell in her own way, chooses

her own circle; the shape of death

is a shadow cast by her embrace,

a noir moon burns bright, street lamp

flickers her awake. This babe means business;

the gun’s in her hand, the money’s in the bank;

she’s one dead-end alley away from freedom.

I’m frozen wonderstruck and cold-irons bound.

Mary Tyler Moore doesn’t tell Rob she fakes her orgasms

he’s sensitive in a way only a man can be.

She hates to make him feel less than.

He rolls over to sleep;

she brings herself there. He’s a tall Greek

or Italian, Michelangelo sculpted bad boy,

connected, dangerous;

his sole desire to give her pleasure.

Closing her eyes, she looks into his, drifts

away on the Ionian Sea.

She wakes in her own bed. 5:30AM

rise and shine bethehappyhousewife time,

put a flawless Good Housekeeping© breakfast

on the table. There’s an obligatory thanks honey

peck on the cheek. She clears the dishes, pours

a cup of coffee, a secret smile follows him out.

---

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections, Pop. 1280and John Berryman Died Here, were released by Cyberwit and are available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbooks include Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, (Louisiana Literature Press, 2024), RIP Winston Smith (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres (Bottlecap Press, 2024). 

Jessica Purdy

My mother taught me to love my body

by showing me how she didn’t love her own. Grabbing her thighs, she’d shake them and squeeze until the cellulite dimpled. She hated her stomach which I’d only ever seen after she’d given birth to two babies, and would grab it like the shoulders of someone who wouldn’t listen to her demands. I grew to love boys who gave me red roses, and when I was about to marry someone who didn’t, I left him before the ceremony. I moved to the city and became a detective. I spent my evenings picking gum out of my shoes. Interviews with suspects became like first dates. Each one I dissected, looking for truth. Picture the stark concrete room. Metal table, but with a cloth over it. A lit candle and vase of supermarket flowers. Who loves you? I’d ask. And does that person love themself? Over and over I ask. Even in my dreams I ask. In the asking I’d fill with helium and float over the precinct. Over the bodies of victims, as if that could help me see the lies. Could lies be landmarks with arrows? Murderers’ signatures written on the skins? What if I’d gone in the original direction? The tears staining my wedding dress evaporated. Each time I loved myself, I allowed it to take root. Like in early summer, how I’d rip open the thin skin of nursery pots to reveal the roots’ shiny white threads before plunging the tender seedlings into holes. No thought of how, far into the future, I’d be pruning and displaying cut blossoms.

My daughter writes a story about me after I’m dead

In it, her father and I have a great love. Even our bathroom sink grows soft as baby rabbit fur. Vines invade our empty bedroom. She doesn’t know we invited their greenery in when there was too much space between us. In her story there is no darkness or doubt. Though she notices our wedding photo tilts every time the train goes by. Twice a day, the beach we stand on in our finery becomes a new landscape. Once, it transformed into the rim of a volcano we’d never visited. She writes how the photo shows us in a panda enclosure. The pandas are doing somersaults around us. We remain as fixed as plastic. Me in white lace and he in a black suit with a blue ascot. Our closet never revealed the secreted gun. I never left a note.

Ghost Horses of Nevertouch Pond

In the dream I’m sleeping beside my husband’s coffin. The coffin is splintered and brown like a vampire’s. His bones rattle inside it when I twist on the mattress. There is nothing strange in this. It’s four in the morning in my childhood house behind Central Cemetery on Nevertouch Pond. I go out to the dock to continue painting. The sun isn’t up but I can feel it coming. The trees glow pink in the muggy silence. The pond drops into myth. Its depth is legendary and unknown. The paint on the railing peels and I scrape. The tool’s metal edge lifts the faded chips. My hand is satisfied. The old paint sticks to the sweat on my skin. The new paint is ultramarine. Lapis lazuli of Mary’s robes, blue of the headscarf worn by the girl with the pearl earring, blue of sky in the museum paintings I’ve restored. I’m accustomed to the softest brushes. I dissolve the soot of age. This paint is velvety as a dog’s tongue. Grooves in the wood fill with it. More of the dream comes back. A horse was in front of us in the dark. We had to wait. We were riding horses through the forest. The pond is smooth. A mist hangs over it. I don’t want to do another layer so I put the paint away. I take off my clothes, dive in, and swim. Under me in the water is a small dead horse. I can see its head and open eyes staring up. They look milky blue and unseeing so I almost don’t help. I think I’m too weak to pull it out on my own. I grab at its neck and it leaps out of the water. Fish on its head fall off. It runs, streaming water from its white coat, up onto the sandy shore towards Bathsheba’s grave, the oldest in the cemetery. There was a dead woman found submerged in a pond. They were drying her out after reeling her in like a caught fish. They tried not to look at her naked body but they did. She looked mostly normal but hung from a rope in the air. All around the pond’s oval other small horses are running. They must be from a family but lost from each other.

I swim. I swam. I have swum.

---

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND, Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press). Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in Gargoyle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. See more at jessicapurdy.com.

Ilari Pass

Surprise

Last night I recited some poems to my cat to practice for my big reading and this morning she left a rabbit head beside my sandals, saying, So, we’re even now.  Later in the morning, I weeded the garden and discovered a color gamut of vegetables and a crepe myrtle, only to stumble on a Belgian statue of some guy pissing all over them. I love the long beard of fronds on this palm tree growing outside my afternoon. I sit and watch the sun roll over my pink-painted toes, knees held in curves of my elbows.  

This piece was previously published in SWWIM, September 2022.

What It Means to Be Beautiful

There is a planet with a moon

inside my water bottle. A breeze

makes small faces, expressions

of surprising love, I thank you. 

Thank you for your nightly visits, 

your gentle birdsong. Borrowed light alone

can’t make out in this house. This clutter—

the catch-all for my life. I feel

your glare of disapproval.

Come closer. The night

in your eye is a shade colder. Why

does everything have to be beautiful?

I don’t trust it. Let’s go

Ruin something.

This piece was previously published in ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, June 2021.

On Following the Wrong God Home

                         —after Jenny George’s “A Childhood”

Having lost the hubris of prayer,

I feel no safety in the quietness

or in the darkness.

No place on earth.

Close the candle, quick

It’s too bright, I can’t see.

I forgot about the sun

how massive and calm,

sometimes crushing and on fire.

How pointlessly beautiful—the trees,

how peaceful the way they shade.

The graves and flowers alike listen

through the many ears of the grasses.

A hoopoe makes a hole in the air with its laugh,

the excitement of it vibrated in the flies.

You taught me there is nothing to be done.

The way dirt under this home can’t cry,

pretend nothing is delicate.

---

When Ilari isn't writing poetry or short stories, she recites Ayahs (verses) from the Quran and enjoys traveling with her family. A four-time Best of the Net nominee, her Greatest Hits appear or forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Cutleaf Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Pithead Chapel, Free State Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Paterson Literary Review, and others.

Andi Myles

Please exit

A list of found text

please do not knock

please do not disturb

please do not trespass

please do not enter

please do not walk here

please do not run

please do not talk

please do not talk loudly

please do not yell

please do not sit here

please do not sit on the edge

please do not move

please do not touch

please do not touch me

please do not play me

please do not lean on me

please do not scare me

please do not use me

please do not break me

please do not open me

please do not open yourself

please do not stay

A List from the Junkyard of Found Prose

(After In the Museum of Lost Objects by Rebecca Lindenberg)

“We never love a person, but only qualities." 

Blaise Pascal

Find unmarked cards obscuring what is here:

censored letters from a death row inmate,

lecture notes from a tedious professor,

a bamboo grimoire, and forgotten scribbles 

from a forgettable acquaintance strewn about the floor;

blank pages from an undergraduate poet mixed

with unopened letters from a distant relative.

You misunderstand the minutiae

of existence, tiny wildernesses

stand full of its mundanities—washing dishes,

waiting in line, shifting afternoon light and

outside this warehouse, full walls insufficient to hold

the unsent emails from a workplace enemy 

My friend, I have not answered the god

who requested a full accounting

of all the write-only documents I can 

never erase. Far away, a crowded forest 

quiets without the collection

of deleted texts from an ex unearthed 

after a long-concealed absence. You despair, 

but you have not discarded the shopping lists

I wrote for you. As for the rest, my atonement

was never meant for you.

---

Andi Myles (she/her) is a Washington DC area science writer by day, poet in the in between times. Her favorite space is the fine line between essay and poetry. She is the author of the chapbook Fractured Symphony (Cathexis Northwest Press) and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Rattle, Fourth Genre, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. You can find her at www.andimyles.com.

Tom Laichas

Thirty Distinct Damnations on the Moon

First. That the crater’s edge is steep. It’s an endless drop to its floor.

Second. That they taught you meditation before you came but heights still make you sick.

Third. That lunar dust eats spacesuit fabric like a plague of breathless moths.

Fourth. That you may knock all you want, there’s no one home.

Fifth. That your dog and cat would’ve died if you’d brought them.

Sixth. Your children too.

Seventh. That, if you import an atmosphere from Earth, the Moon will sigh it out.

Eighth. That from the Moon, you can see the home you’re sick for.

Ninth. That sound doesn’t carry without an atmosphere. You can’t hear yourself pray.

Tenth. That your bones are weak, your vision blurred, your ankles swollen.

Eleventh. That for the quarter million miles round your bed, yours is the only life.

Twelfth. That yours is a small room, the size of luggage. Every day, you hunch your back.

Thirteenth. That there are more stars in this sky than you’ve ever seen. Always the same ones.

Fourteenth. That even when you’re suited up, the sun can kill you.

Fifteenth. That you never bathe. Not enough water. You clean yourself but never feel clean.

Sixteenth. Why did you come here? What did you think you would become?

Seventeenth. That the moon awed you on the first day; that after a thousand days, it’s Barstow.

Eighteenth. That, from the surface of the moon, you can’t see the moon.

Nineteenth. That you walk the moon every day. You never thought you’d hate it but you do.

Twentieth. That you have no possessions of your own. You want possessions, more than ever.

Twenty-first. That the moon is a gray blunt planet.

Twenty-second. That you’re no hero, and you know it.

Twenty-third. That, looking up from Earth, the moon is there. But here? There is no here.

Twenty-fourth. That you know the truth: this is the last house on a dead-end street.

Twenty-fifth. That you cannot call it “The Moon.” It’s “The Hole.”

Twenty-sixth. That your media library, though infinite, leaves you restless and unhappy.

Twenty-seventh. That a friend calls from Mars. Says it’s just as bad. Your reply takes ten minutes to reach him; his reply to you, another ten. In one hour, each of you speaks three times. After a year of this, neither of you bother.

Twenty-eighth. That you dream in green and blue. Then the alarm rings. Again, monochrome.

Twenty-ninth. That you scratch a daily mark into the wall above your cot.

Thirtieth. That there are now three thousand marks. It’s the only art you make.

---

Tom Laichas is author of three books of poetry, most recently Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (FutureCycle Press, 2023). His latest work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Times, Plume, The Moth (Ireland), the Irish Times, BarBar, and elsewhere. He lives in Venice, California.

Bethany Jarmul

After a Rain, I Discover

the underbelly of a maple leaf,

a canvas the clouds splattered

with rain-paint. Each orb reflects

a tiny world. Several cling to the midrib

& veins like glass snails resting

on their slow journey home.

One misshapen drop dives headfirst

into the ever-present green, passed

from mother grass to daughters,

into the greedy ground. Once I dreamt

I dove off the edge of earth. I broke

into shards, dissolved into mist.

Root hairs draw in the droplet,

fueling arms littered with leaves.

When I woke, I found myself

whole, but translucent—

a once muddy window

penetrated by a sunbeam.

Essence of Adolescence

a golden shovel using a line from Li-Young Lee

I was 14 & lean, learning a different kind of hunger

a hunger that made my body needy & vacant

like a seedling in sun-baked soil waiting for a drop of

survival to sink from the sky. But I didn’t know that love

could either satisfy or poison, incubate or slaughter. Is

growing up always like a slap on the ass from a

boy who once shared his blueberries—a bittersweet confusion?

It’s Cliché to Wish for World Peace, So Instead I’ll Ask

for empathy to spread like dandelion seeds,

blown from our lips down to our fingertips,

sprouting new roots in every dirt-covered corner

of my newsfeed. For an end to collisions

everywhere, but especially on Route 8—

when we tuck our kids into bed,

the weee-wooo, weee-wooo of the sirens

travels closer and closer to home, covering

the wind’s howl, the branches cracking

under snow. For every bully to melt

like an icicle dagger into a warm puddle,

especially at my son’s school, where he’s learning

to tie his shoes and count by twos and pledge

his allegiance. For endless quiet

days on the radio, instead of the local DJ

reporting this week’s school shooting

in Alabama or California or Wisconsin

or on the other side of our city, as I drive

with my children in the backseat,

their Minnie Mouse and Spiderman

backpacks at their feet.

---

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks, and her debut poetry collection Lightning Is a Mother is available now with ELJ Editions. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, HAD, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul

elizabeth iannaci

ReaList

A single spaghetti is a spaghetto, a single macaroni is a

macarono, a single woman is “a drain on this country’s

resources”

Right now, there’s a woman somewhere walking two,

dogs, trying to reason with them. She’s making headway

Contrary to the going wisdom, dogs are NOT mercenaries

but will work for love

From era to era or decade to decade, the going wisdom

often doesn’t GO

Aristotle thought that rocks fell down instead of up

because they loved the ground

Einstein said that the reason we have time

is so everything doesn’t happen all at once

Physicists say there is still nothing new under the sun—

what appears to be unique is just a molecular reconfiguration

Crackers left on the charcuterie overnight become stale,

inedible. Cheese, left out, will harden and forget us

I told a twelve-year-old that there was a time when

suitcases didn’t have wheels. His response was Why?

Despite recent events, Civility is alive & well, but right

now, it wears a Groucho nose, moustache, & glasses

The exile of a break-up is a punishment

for putting all my eggs in someone else’s basket

Since 9 am, 2306 three-year-olds have put worms in their

mouths, while roughly 23 hundred adults managed to chew

& swallow them

Bad Signs

I should have known when he started listening to Hank Williams

when he mowed his yard all winter long

when he seemed relieved that I couldn’t go

when he hocked the camera I worked the whole summer to buy for him

I should have known when he told me to meet him at Baumanskaya metro

known when he said maybe I should read things that don’t upset me

when he was mean to me in my dream

when he asked me to say something in Canadian

known when all his tattoos were spider webs

when he asked if I wanted to get married anyway

when he confused crudités with crème brulée

I should have known when he mentioned the helicopter

when he asked me if I was feeling brave

when he blamed his whole life on his ex-wife

when he canceled our dental insurance

when he left me on the boat

when he put on that mask

I should have known when he bought me those rubber gloves

when he wouldn’t let me have a lamp on my side of the bed                              

when he told me that he wanted to meet in a public place

when he told me to go back to sleep

when he didn’t introduce me

I should have known when he was quiet for so long

when he said he wanted to rid my hair of all layers

when he and my sister bought the same Godawful hat

known when he brought up the term “absolute truth”

I should have known when he kept telling his cat that I was company

when he asked me if I trusted him

when he used my toothbrush to polish his shoes

---

Elizabeth Iannaci is a widely published SoCal poet whose work appeared recently in Does It Have Pockets, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Hole in the Head Review, Pratik and various publications. She earned her MFA in Poetry from VCFA, and is partially sighted, which may account for her preference to paisley over polka dots. Her most recent chapbook is The Virgin Turtle Light Show: Spring, 1968 from Latitude 34 Press.