Nicole Yurcaba

I Have the Urge to Embrace My Inner Trash Panda

There’s something about a trash bin piled high with cardboard boxes and discarded IT cables that makes you contemplate your mortality. After all, we die & enter the Eternal Dumpster. Is it the unknown’s (im)possibility? What landfill with the cardboard boxes populate? Which dumpster diver will claim the discarded charging cables’ copper wire? Who will slice their palm on the dumpster’s metallic smile? What foul fluids leak from the dumpster’s bottom? And where is that fluid going? Give it two weeks & this gel pen with which I am writing will find its home in the dumpster, too. Rest in piece(s), Supernova Pink. Last at this time, I pitched into a decrepit, spray-painted purple trash can the final bouquet of two dozen multicolored roses my ex sent me the week he dumped me after he fucked his psychology colleague after we had walked hand-in-hand through a psychedelic art gallery & he told me he didn’t want to die & didn’t want anyone else & couldn’t imagine a life without me & didn’t want to use a walking harness on our future children.

            I bet if I crawled into that dumpster that’s just sitting like a squatter in a halfway house outside my office window and dug beneath the sliced cardboard, the broken mayo jars, the snake-like wires & smashed computer monitors I’d find those roses.

            Or, maybe, that’s me just realizing that even a dumpster can be half-full.

‍ ‍

Even Translated into English, You Do Not Understand

what he means when he says you better come back to me he not yours you not his keep lying to yourselves disbelief denial disbelief denial what is real yet cannot be yet is & the sun’s shining in his eyes as he says it but he won’t lower his sunglasses he keeps his eyes on your face & one week later as you swim blue-green aegean waters you think about how he looked at you as he sat across from you at a table & how when you confessed when i’m with you I try to act like a lady, not an animal & he held his burger in one hand smiled asked am i an animal? you said no but you wanted to say all men are but you laughed mutter something about your father your father traveled to greece traveled to san antonio & your father said nika, don’t ever marry—a husband will take you away from me & you tell this man-boy-man-friend my father never wanted me to marry & you recalled one night ten years ago when this man-boy-man-friend stood in a hotel weeping confession i love you too much to use you for a one-night stand & half-hour later he drove through a thunderstorm to his house & emailed the next morning: i love you too much to use you for a one-night stand but i’m sorry i left & now he’s sipping an unsweetened tea: for example, if I talk to daniel & I tell him I met a woman & she’s the one—I don’t have to explain & you don’t understand you don’t understand you readjust the napkin on your lap & you giggle & say tato told me once he’d pay any man who wanted to marry me five-hundred dollars to not marry & this man-boy-man-friend stops chewing swallows wipes his mouth smirks—

I’d have told him

he could keep

his money.‍ ‍

---

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, and The New Voice of Ukraine. She is the author of The Pale Goth (2025), Have Your Eyes (2025), and Hutsulka (2026).

Marianne Worthington

Blues (ii)  

I hear my father’s voice in my dreams.

He sings the high lonesome, he sings

the stormy waters, he sings salvation

I no longer believe in but his voice

redeems me over and over.

He loved the chop of bluegrass music,

the dobro sliding, the voices of men

who sang like they talked with vowels

that stretched across their high-pitched

harmonies offered to the air like a spell

that could quell the bruised heart.

This morning the weather has cooled

and I sit on the porch with the dog

surrounded by green trees older than

everyone I know. We hear the music

of crows meeting down by the pond.

The bruise of my heart starts to lighten,

yellowing, the shade that takes

the longest to heal, faint marker of hurt.

Pop Quiz! Autoimmune Diseases—Lupus

1. Define Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and comment on the [undocumented] symptoms in a newly-diagnosed elderly woman.             (Extra credit: find a causal link and connect the symptoms to marital bondage)  

2. Which is the correct percentage that doctors will use medical speak to disguise what they don’t know when talking to family members?            

A. 67%            

B. 14%            

C. 92%            

D. 110%  

3. Urethral sphincter dysfunction is the medical term for:            

A. never being able to pee on your own again            

B. trauma to the bladder            

C. the urethra remaining open at rest            

D. the merciless news of a permanent catheter            

E. all of the above  

4. Describe “malar rash” without using the word “butterfly” or any other pretty little metaphor.  

5. Transverse Myelitis and Paraplegia associated with Lupus:            

A. is rare and severe            

B. has unfavorable outcomes            

C. has a poor response to treatment            

D. makes doctors employed at Catholic hospitals resort to offering religion as a cure

E. all of the above  

6. Where is the most likely place for a caretaker to be slapped in the face by grief?    

A. Standing in front of the deodorant at Walgreens            

B. At a crosswalk watching a young couple pass in front of your car            

C. In the middle of the night            

D. At the market looking at fruit baskets            

E. Nowhere: Society says grief is over in 3-4 days. Shut up and get back to work.      

---

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (UP of KY 2021), winner of the Weatherford Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, and Southern Humanities Review, among other places. She co-founded Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine that published writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia (2009-2024). She lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.

Veronica Tucker

Pine Needles in My Pocket

I walked the trail until the fabric sagged heavy
with resin and scent.
The needles crackled like secrets
too sharp for the trees to keep.

I kept them because silence needed ballast,
because my palms were still hungry.
Later, at the washing machine,
they scattered across the floor
like compass points refusing to agree.

I bent to gather them,
thread by thread,
imagining they might stitch themselves
into a map:
one line back to childhood,
one to the lost hour before dawn,
one to the version of me
who believed every direction
would end at water,
and one to the place
I will not recognize until I arrive.   ‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍

Instructions for Carrying a Mirror Through a Storm

Hold it close as if it breathes.
Turn the reflective side inward,
let the rain find only the frame.

Do not glance into it.
Lightning may steal your face,
may duplicate you in air
and leave neither copy whole.

Step carefully. The glass remembers
every slip of foot, every hesitation.
It is an archive more faithful
than any diary,
a witness that will not forgive.

If you reach shelter intact,
prop it in the corner
with towels beneath.
Only then may you look.

What you see will not be
your reflection,
but the storm’s ledger
of who you became
while crossing.   ‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍‍ ‍

---

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the human experience. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in ONE ART, The Berlin Literary Review, Rust and Moth, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, The House as Witness (Quillkeepers Press, April 2026), examines the emotional architecture of home, care, and survival. She lives in New Hampshire with her family, where she writes between shifts, long runs, and early morning quiet. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Jessica Purdy

My Gargoyle Husband

First time I notice him formed in concrete he is crouched in the corner of the living room as I try to watch my favorite new Nordic Noir thriller, Dead Girl with Blue Lips. “Is this what I have to look forward to,” I say, “a husband squatting on the rug with frozen dragon eyes and his tongue sticking out?” He’s good at not taking himself too seriously. He doesn’t answer, but I think I hear him chuckle. I try to continue watching my show, eating strawberry rhubarb pie with whipped cream on top. He never wants to watch shows I like, and falls asleep to the worst nightly news. Words like ferocity, violence, and precision trigger him into catatonia. Me, I just get nauseous when real people do violence. Give me the intrigue of ghosts, a naked blue-lipped corpse on a slab at the morgue. White pancake makeup clotted in the fine hairs of her cheek. The best is when the detective gets the corpse to Face ID the locked iPhone. They have to shock the dead girl with electricity to make her resemble herself again. My gargoyle husband doesn’t like to sit through a whole hour and a half episode with no resolution, can’t imagine who the killer might be. I’ve figured it out ten minutes in: it’s always someone she trusts. The man-at-the-top who nails her windows shut to protect her, but really he’s locking her in. My husband the gargoyle has wide-stretched wings, an open mouth with sharp teeth. A conduit for water flow. When it rains words from his mouth I pause the show and listen, asking questions when appropriate. Ten hours later, the final episode reveals how the girl was murdered, hit in the head with a stone statue. Grotesque. I have to bend down to get rid of him. It takes all my effort to heave him off the floor, but I waddle him outside like I’m helping a toddler walk, and mount him on the corner of the house to keep the rain out.

The End of Daylight Saving Time

The rim of my glasses hits the windowpane, I’m that close. Looking out just past dusk. It’s November now and hungry darkness consumes the landscape. A furtive branch shakes its secret. It’s hard to see if there had been a bird. Did it see me inside, here in my electricity? All day the wind took the milkweed ghosts from my yard. One of the thousands even got sucked into the house on its inhale. The door, the house’s mouth. The seed hung quiet in the lung before I snatched it and breathed it back outside. It didn’t go the way I wanted it to. Sun glares, runs fast, blasts. Now, the rust has been ripped from the trees’ fingers like loose receipts in a windy parking lot. Now, they are penniless. Now, the branches are darker than the dark descending. My eyes flick to see the neon red eyes of taillights receding, reflected twice in the neighbor’s windows. The way they move reminds me of childhood. Night drives. Rain coming. There are lives other than my own.

How My Mom Started Dating Elvis

My mom and I saw Elvis walk past our window one evening in spring. We could tell it was him even though he had gray hair and walked with a cane. What gave him away were his lapels. His chest hair was white. We lived on the second floor in a city apartment. Our ceiling was falling in and water dripped into a bucket on the floor. She yelled out the open window to him. Sing me a love song! He barely paused but when he looked up at us, we knew he wasn’t going to be singing. Instead, my mother started crooning Can’t Help Falling in Love. Imagine singing to the King after all these years he was dead. Oh, there had been speculation. Sightings. But no one had ever sung to him like my mother did that night.

---

Jessica Purdy is the author of six books of poetry including Lung Hours, chosen by Marsha de la O as a winner of Gunpowder Press’ Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize. Her chapbook The Adorable Knife: Poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press) received the NH Writers' Project People's Choice Award. Her poems and microfiction have appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Action, Spectacle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She lives in New Hampshire.

Jeanne Julian

Self-portrait as constellation

Usually lurking below your horizon, I-wish-I-may-wish-I-might catch your eye. You need to make an effort to find me, even when I do rise above upstart city-glow. But connect the dots—my faint, ancient stars—and you’ll soon discern my outline. In some cultures, a diva wielding a tennis racquet. In others, a crone offering a platter of freshly baked sugar cookies. Start by locating Rigel, in the left foot of lazy Orion. From there, gaze upward. You’ll see the star Avoirdupois marking my middle—with a magnitude brighter than Virgo’s brightest—ha!  Above that, Greylock, Cataract, and Rhytid, haloing my head. Lower, trace the sprinkling of twinkles forming torso and legs (Titanium, the dimmest, figures in the Legend of the Knee Replacement), and leading to Revlon, the red dwarf of my toenail. From where you are, these luminous waypoints surround an apparently empty black hole. But only because you’re stuck in place and time. Marvels swirl within, behind, my outer space: fecund nebulae, magnetic explosions. I contain multitudes—as Whitman said, rather presumptuously, at age 36. I’ve been around the cosmic block. Billions of years. Remember: you’re late to my light: looking up, you’re looking back. Old is relative. And I’ve never felt better.    

Note: This poem was first published by Stanza, the newsletter of the Maine Poetry Society, after winning first place in the Society’s 2025 poetry contest.

They Never Said‍

They never said there was a chance

that I’d be what’s purportedly

an alcoholic.                                        I?

The parties made me nice

and shiny. There was no indication

I might be twice divorced, alone,

with kids still finding

their way when nearing 40,

heedless of me until

there’s a bill to pay. Don’t get me

wrong, I’m happy to. But I’m not

as flush as I once was. They never said

my mother could be dead

at an age younger than I am now.

I’m rather glad she cannot see

this blurry denouement, this ebbing.

She had a lot of dignity.

They never said those lifelong

friendships can go awry.

My phone calls go unanswered.

I’m not sure why.

They never said I’d have to try

to get around with no car

after the accident. Absurd.

They never said the pills that kill

the pain keep nagging you to tighten

their throttlehold on your brain.

They make you feel unclean.

They never said one might forget

those heartfelt songs. I mean,

I remember them, I just don’t sing. 

I bet they never said

she’ll wind up like the ones

who never had a chance,

the ones who started

with nothing.

---

Jeanne Julian is author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems have won awards from Reed Magazine, Comstock Review, I-70 Review, and Naugatuck River Review. Her book reviews appear in Main Street Rag. She maintains a compendium of quotations for writers on her web site. www.jeannejulian.com‍ ‍

Ed Higgins

slanting metaphors

            “. . . if you’re not covered in dog hair, your life is empty.”

                                                                        --Elayne Boosler

midmorning light slants

through the skylight

offering metaphors

in a theatric of shimmering

suspended dust motes

like thoughts wearing motley

smiling from the world outside

skewed sunlight making me 

a still life on the unmade bed

my female whippet sleeping

beside me on wrinkled sheets

our identity is always stolen

by the descending fall of words

what can I write about this slanting

light or these swirling dust motes

or my sleeping whippet for that matter 

the dung beetle

you won't find

this in a fortune cookie

but the true dung beetle

gives nuptial gifts

to his heartthrob

and this seems

quite appropriate 

since love depends

on so much shit

you'd think it couldn't

ever happen:

but it does.

---

Ed Higgins' poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Part Two Review, Raw Journal of Arts, Ekphrastic Review, and Danse Macabre, among others. Ed is Writer-in-Residence at George Fox University. He is also Assistant Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. Ed has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek. A collection of his poems, Near Truth Only, has been published by Fernwood Press, 2022.

Liv Campbell

Yard Baby

At the helm of their ire in her little red and yellow pedal car, she gets at her

cousin’s ankles, though they are older and faster and good at sports. A small flash

of feet between plastic wheels. A jolt of cartilage and fresh knees. She is at the stage

of baby where they run drunk till they fall and come back to you for a tooth sized

bite of apple. I cup the fruit in my palms, my wait for her an afterthought

because she is losing herself in the yard, we are losing her in the yard. A tiny,

wild clamor, whose socks are wet from wading in the grass’ dew. How fast

she’ll settle into sleep after a swim. Her mother picks the dog up a couple more

times, as he is prone to walk off the deck. A Frenchie, which nature never liked.

A lot like us.The baby’s mother and I suffer from some undoing that stalked

us until it stole our shape. Totaled us. Our families brought us together to talk.

She looks at me and sees. We use fake words to make others comfortable. Alphonse

Daudet says pain is always new to the sufferer but loses its originality for those around

him, and this baby, her dream, her words, her proof of life, is a glittering, forever new

that stands, even when she falls, beyond love, at the rim of normal.

Give me normal God.

I hug the baby, hug her mother, give her the apple.

We are leaving for lunch. The yard dissolves into a backseat, and a kid

holds a pencil correctly one day to never doubt it again. Someone else

drives past the wreck on the right, and there is no dvd

for the small tv, no grass beneath my feet.

Van Life

I’m between a rock and a hard place: another rock. A chimney,

or what you and the guy who parked his van next to ours call two rocks

to get stuck in for fun. He looks like he listens to bands with names

like COMMUNAL NAPKIN or DEATH IS GENETIC, likes to smoke

till the Planet Fitness smells purple too, likes to call himself more of a carpet

guy when staying in a wood floored room, but he’s nice, and for two whole nights

never looked at me weird, though he snorts at the formations out

here, their resemblance to giant turd piles, and the hilarious crack of sun

with your face in it, dangling down, telling me to put my foot

there, telling me not to use my arms as much because they can also

let go. Because we touch, and I love you

every time, you’re pissing me off, so I put my foot way over

there, lose my breath to say fuck, and let Christian guilt

launch my body through ten thousand pounds of air with the velocity

of a thousand third graders who believe in themselves. I am

the gasp that makes it out, an outlaw of a swaying Earth, all

mortal potential, and kinetic blessings, my elbow, my gums,

warm, nicked with salted blue, and bleeding. In college I got high

enough to say something to a pilot, tumbled back to life, looking

up, cartilage whirring, the good things trying to break out of my bones.

I am returning, but there is no good place to land, not even in your good

hands. Past sound, I abandon any thud, you do not hear me shatter. I walk

on flat, unpiercing land, in my fist, a sharp edge of sky to cut the rope

when I get far enough, when I find a 7-Eleven and someone else to hold my weight.

---

Liv Campbell is a writer from all over, but most recently New York City. Her love for poetry was born when she started using a mic to read her stuff in random basements in Indiana. More of her work can be found or is forthcoming in Filter Coffee Zine, Triggerfish Critical Review, Big Whoopie Deal, and earworms mag.

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.