Kelly Magee

Throwing Questions

At the parent coach conference

the two most muscular women

I’ve been this close to ask

if I have questions. I do not.

They speak of getting and landing

and throwing and casting. Bungees

would help my daughter’s air

awareness. I don’t know what

that is, nor a mat stack or a snap down.

I have questions, actually,

that I won’t ask, like what is

a no hold requirement and the difference

between a glide kip and circle skill,

and remind me what a kip even is.

Which is the tap flyaway and which

is the cast. What is a salto.

Is a whip on tramp what it sounds like.

My daughter interrupts her coaches

to correct a point: I don’t have

my standing back tuck. They say,

It counts if you have it from the board.

I nod and agree, of course of course.

Later, in the car, she tells me,

At some point you have to just throw it.

I think this means jump, like literally for her,

unable to see where your feet

will land. They call it a blind skill,

the mid-air calculus of gravity plus body

plus thin strip of beam or bar. Whatever

they call it, the skill is only and utterly

her own. My daughter, the coaches

began the conference

by saying, is very coachable.

‍

Layover

The sound of suckling woke me.

Nearby, new parents, a fussy baby,

and not the first airport nipple

I’ve seen, but seeing me awaken

sent them skittering away. My children and I,

our own little pride, lolling under

potted trees, fluorescent lights like slit

lamps bearing down. Behind us, the rise

and fall of the first flight, time mounting

itself, plane bobbling

through the jet stream. The maddening

suppression of urge: to kick,

pee, scream. Me in the middle seat,

sandwiched between kids who spread out

and colonized the armrests. Then here,

which is still not there yet. Between gates,

between zones, somewhere in North Carolina.

Someone else’s baby like a throwback plot,

disturbance of pleas I’m helpless to soothe.

My children sleep, flung

from me, heads thrown back, mouths

agape like they, too, are shocked by how

far they are from weaned. Two large

birds, folding and unfolding, sprawling

and spilling over, limbs askew. Bodies

like monuments to childhood. I’m merely among them

now, a position I fumble because the holding

of them is all mixed up in the release. My love

has turned into a tantrum of demands: be children,

for fuck’s sake. Fill up on crackers, scale counters,

clap. Stomp in squeaker shoes and be inconsolable.

Enough with the hair dye and the appetite.

Though I understand about time, I never

expected it would be my children

who would dare to take

my children from me.   

---

Kelly Magee is the author of the story collections Body Language and The Neighborhood, as well as several collaborative books of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Booth, Kenyon Review, and others. She teaches creative writing and queer studies at Western Washington University.

Albert Hwang

Coral

And I said it's time to return

that little piece of coral we took from

the sea, the day we got engaged.

They say not to take from

the land the ʻĀina

Not to make the sacred a souvenir

But I saw in it something ancient

Imagined its striations to be

fossils and caverns of memories and to be

jurassic somehow

like the tooth of an early world.

And I imagined it to be us, an old thing

that always was, was always becoming

a new thing, evading erosion

carrying the old bodies of stars inside us.

But these years, these years, these years

      this last year.

"Are we still?" you asked and "Now what?"

"Erosion," I said,

     "Like the ʻĀina.”

‍

Your Ring 

I wore that ring today the one

you got me.

And I felt

     three millimeters closer to

you for hours and you were

heavy on me like nine grams

or ten of anchor, anchoring me

to who I am.

And I could feel you every time I typed

"W" that key that clack that begins

every "we" every "were" every "were?"

And really you were again

     everywhere,

three millimeters nine grams round around everywhere.

---

Albert Hwang is a Taiwanese American poet from Illinois. He is a James B. Reston New York Times Gold Key winner (Scholastic Arts & Writing) and a Betty L. Yu & Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize winner (TaiwaneseAmerican.org). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Inscape Journal, The Lake, New Verse News, Unbroken Journal, and other publications.

Pratiksha Ahuja

In the dressing room, my friend says no man can love her back.

She turns, shows me her back:

its many dark eyes and soft dips,

freckles like a galaxy come undone.

At night in bed, she imagines a mouth

hot at her throat,

palms reverent on her hips.

She laughs, or sobs. Either way,

her shoulders tremble in the many mirrors.

I almost have the words,

but she’s already straightened,

called herself silly.

She returns the dress,

says it’s too tight at her chest.

‍

This, I know

My body bleeds every month, but

I don’t always live there.

Neither did my mother. Nor my grandmother.

Look too long in my eyes, and you will see them—

    it—

the exhaustion, the rage,

a frothing of women.

Where I go back into my past and change nothing.

Only hindsight gives this kind of audacity.

This brazen gall.

We’re only this cruel

with a couple good days in the pocket,

some memories to keep us warm. Otherwise,

we know the truth.

How could we not?

It sits on the throat,

squeezes out the song.

If I take one step into the past,

I run to my mother.

I grab her skirt, tug

till she looks up from her phone.

I fall to my knees.

I beg not to be born.

---

Pratiksha Ahuja (she/her) is a poet based in Goa, India. She grew up in a fractured home, crafting stories to survive and to understand who she is. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, PHIL LIT, Novus Literary, The B'K Magazine, & Does It Have Pockets, among others. Instagram: @storieswithpratiksha

Bri Gearhart Staton

Big Helper

Mary Goldfins, I called her. Mom said I smiled nice at family
pictures, so I picked her from the tank as my treat, swimming fat

with gold flecks like skipped stones across
her fantail. I fed her like Mr. Rogers did,

the beads of food sifting like sand through the slotted top.
Did you know I still overfeed the ones I love? Once,

Grandma came to clean Mary’s bowl. I wasn’t strong enough
yet to turn the kitchen tap. She called me Big Helper when I climbed

on the kitchen chair, rolled up my sleeves, Mary moved to safety
in a Cool Whip container on the corner of the sink. Grandma scrubbed

the bowl, let the water run hard. Just then, I thrust Mary
under the stream, cupped in my hands like an offering,

flooding her gills, her body riddled in the current
of my love. Grandma gasped and slapped

my hands down, spilling Mary to the rim of the disposal,
limp as a curl of carrot skin. I didn’t see the steam,

the scalding heat, didn’t feel it on my hands
just the sting of Grandma’s rings on my palms

and there, in the sink, the accidental casualty
of my boiling need. You just can’t help

yourself, she repeated. When I was fifteen, the priest
made the girls write letters to our future

husbands. I looked at the blank page and prayed, Oh God, please
don’t let him think I’m too much.

‍

Still Pretending

After occupational therapy, I go to the grocery store
and spend way too much money on pre-cut pineapple.
The shelves bewilder me, and the floor sways
like a child’s playground bridge. Oftentimes,
in my overwhelm, I find a life preserver
somewhere in my central vision, usually something
big or bright and about nose-height. Today, I find
the pineapple, and I heave the container to the bottom
of my cart. $4.99 a pound. The weight of a hefty
newborn. My husband is going to say 

something. I visit the bakery, the case with fancy
cheeses, the castle of energy drinks. The fluorescent
lights shriek in the freezer doors. Just an hour ago,
at the clinic, I forced my eyes to shift: near,
far, near, far. The clinic notes say “impaired
binocular function,” and I imagine myself
with telescopic eyes, focusing only when

I rub them at the rim. I bet this bionic me could
spot the taco seasoning from aisles away. I bet
bionic me would be incapable of crying.
When the cashier asks for payment, I’m still
pretending. The pineapple gets its very own
bag. I let it ride in the front seat. When
my husband asks about it, on its own shelf
in the fridge, I’m going to say
it just happened to catch my eye. 

---

Bri Gearhart Staton (she/her) is a South Dakota poet whose writing explores experiences that exist in the periphery. Bri’s poetry has been published by Button Poetry, Gather, FLARE Magazine, and more. A mother of two, her objectively hilarious children are the joys of her heart. Connect with her on Instagram @bristaton.writes

Robert McDonald

Today on My Walk I Was Thinking of Sparrows

all the kinds of sparrows there might be in the world, house sparrows, and wood sparrows, maybe beach sparrows and pine sparrows, or grass sparrows, and I thought of the untold millions, all the sparrows who’ve lived through all the long years this earth has known sparrows, and I thought of the wind, that sound in the trees, a green wave made of the small ghosts of sparrows—it’s their job: to turn the maple leaves over, green side to silver, I don’t make the rules, that’s what the ghost of a sparrow is born to do, that, and knock the blossoms off catalpas on quiet city streets. In this task they will be aided by the oncoming storm.

‍

City of Crickets

If I crossed the river I might be the train. If I were that river, I’d grasp the skinny hard feet of the bridge. If I were the bridge, you would marvel at my patience, you’d love my love for the quick arc of birds. If I were a train I would startle those birds. Shush, I’d say. Settle down, return. And the pigeons, after fleeing the whoosh and the noise, would fly back, sheepish, and smooth their feathers; they’d fix themselves in solemn rows along the trestle. Moments before they’d flashed in the sun, a wheel of angels, you might see them that way if you rode the train. If you rode the train I could be the janky tree of heaven, and plant myself in a spit of land bordering the tracks, a citizen who has emigrated to the city of crickets, founded in the widening causeway cracks. In the span of time between one train and the next, you will hear the one repeated note of our anthem.

---

Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon, is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in 2 Rivers View, Action/Spectacle, I-70 Review, The San Pedro River Review, The Madrid Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.

Michael Diebert

Directions to My Apartment

Two down, thirty left,

Rubik’s-cube-twist your torso

until it’s all yellow, backflip-

slither up the stairwell,

smash the ant, poke your nose out

the open window, be one

with the pre-rain chlorine air,

summer, long grass, your father

calling you, jog in place,

retrace down to ground

level, into the marble lobby,

hotel or mausoleum, follow

the kids single file no talking

to the lunchroom, two minutes,

hup hup, scarf that pizza square,

toss back that chocolate milk,

ask the track coach on duty

leaning against the wall, arms crossed,

where’s the nearest place to puke,

receive a blank stare, roll-step

backwards toward the lockers,

a little more, a little more, okay

stop, look out, glittering

arrow dropping from the ceiling

pointing that way, go that way,

be the trail which snakes

down the tree-lined hillside

until the covered bridge, take it

over the river, pass through

thorn thickets galore, almost,

you’ve surmounted so much,

viruses, malevolence,

climb the rope ladder, climb

the rocky jut, climb the steep

switchback up the rival hillside,

look for the jeep, jump in,

clatter over granite and sandstone,

the minute you’ve driven too far

is when you’ve arrived, magnetic

north, corn dog truck, jewelry

hut, dive bar, my apartment.

Helpdesk               

yes that download takes an hour

that bulletin board has disappeared

that news feed is yesterday’s yes

we are aware we are not

empowered we have no time frame

why your screen is telling you that

we can only guess we are not paid

to guess we are aware supervisors

come and go in this company is it

the lack of pictures? the funk

of something dying? that is a guess

yes we cannot guess do not ask

soon as systems are back you might

wish to find the answer yourself

we have heard yes our competitors

have left us in the dust we are sorry

we will be happy to try to walk

you through that reinstall help you

send a message to the grandkids

this is your experience we are told

the trends are pointing upward

like mountains little dips here

and there yes but broadly speaking

climbing toward a peak we do not

know what our prospects are

we get three minutes per call thirty

minutes to eat we take turns manning

the line whoever feels guru no one

has ever hung up from us and not

come away changed in any case

days peel yes from the desk calendar

maples which we have seen

while eating go on achieving

turn off your machine turn it back on

see if the problem repeats itself

a replacement is on its way yes

we are aware someone somewhere

is working nonstop to fix it

---

Michael Diebert teaches writing and literature at Perimeter College, Georgia State University, and co-hosts a monthly poetry reading series. He is the author most recently of Thrash (Brick Road, 2022). Recent work has appeared in San Pedro River Review and Apple Valley Review and is forthcoming in Sheila-Na-Gig and Rattle. A two-time cancer survivor, Michael lives in Avondale Estates, Georgia with his wife and two dogs.

Will Falk

Letter to E. from Sand Springs Station

Dear E.: Sand Springs has finally succumbed to sand. It took

a lot of wind. I heard your question about wanting to live

in that wind. It sounded like meadowlarks and April thunder.

It sounded like sea gulls in the desert. I probably would

if I had more old-growth sagebrush to hold, more pronghorn,

more rabbit brush to shade my lazy rattle snakes. It’s all

cheatgrass and it burns. Pinyon pines and juniper resist

fires better. You know I am neither. I am thirst and ephemeral

springs. Wet once does not mean wet again. Last time I went

out for water, I found myself forgotten and stacked like stones

in the ruins of an old Pony Express station. The Pyramid Lake War

back on and drunk militia men chased rumors into rabid

mountain ravines they never returned from. One day that will probably

be me. I heard there’s clean snow up there. Snow means something

to drink. If I had time, I’d send this by pony. I don’t. And, I’d rather not

ride good ponies into dust. It is easier, like you did, to send by wind.

Though I confess, this many lines in and I don’t remember

the question. Life? Meadowlarks? Sagebrush?... Please accept this:

I’m a desert gull searching for the sea. I drink. I fly. I eat crickets.

But, I still don’t know how to sing. Please send water. – Will.

‍

Letter to E. from Blanca Peak

Dear E., There is no blood in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. 

There are streams and they are blue. But the only veins here

are gold and silver. They bled out decades ago. I needed to know

if my blood still ran hot, if it could still make powder hiss. 

But I had no blade. No needle either. I was saved by a panther

-haired woman with ice for eyes. She wore a familiar fragrance

that reminded me of my first time in old, cold snow – the clean kind 

we don’t get anymore no matter how hard we bleach it. I knew 

she wasn’t you. I caught up with her where the Blanca glacier

should have been. We found the blanket torn from winter’s deathbed. 

There is no privacy for the deceased – not even 14 thousand-foot peaks. 

Tufts of black fur stuck to pock-marked stone. Rams were swallowed

by mud before they could decide who had the biggest horns. Yellow-

bellied marmots had stomachs stained brown. Fireweed burned purple

and shades of dirty gray. The ice-eyed woman tried to re-freeze 

the scene with cold, hard witness. She failed. Her gaze turned to runoff. 

We melted together, then. Water wants to mingle. I wish mountains never 

slept naked. Some things should never be seen nude. I knew 

she wasn’t you. I knew she was, too. Her name was Blanca Peak. Will.

Letter to E. from Redwood City (Post-Collapse)

Dear E., Nothing but a war lost is as sad as a war won. We have time

to grieve now. The fight held our minds together. The best died. The worst 

survived. Death is painful but this peace is excruciating. Babies will be born – 

kits, quail chicks, eaglets, chubby infants. They will not remember. We will

thank you for that. Amnesia is the mercy we fought for. To forget the scent

of scorched fur, the strange colors streams were stained with. Redwoods will run 

this city again. A few centuries to crack the concrete. A few more and all growth

will be old growth. Plastic will linger for more or less ever. Let it persist

as a reminder. Will I personally make it? I’m not sure. I’m not sure

I care. I never fought for the future. I fought for you. Do not speak of courage – 

only of compulsion. I fought because it hurt far more not to. Are you safe now? 

I’m not sure. Scars last far longer than wounds. Some screams stop 

and some screams outlive the vocal cords that loosed them. Acceptance 

is the last thing for me. Please don’t worry. I will find it. I think 

I see glimpses of it in these green burls and redwood seeds. Peace, Will. 

---

Will Falk is a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated poet, attorney, and community organizer. He writes poems while traveling across the US to offer free legal services to communities fighting against extractive projects like mines, pipelines, and clear-cuts. His poems have appeared through Chapter House Journal, ONE ART, Sheila-na-gig Online, and Wayfarer Magazine, among others. His first poetry collection is When I Set the Sweetgrass Down (Wayfarer Books, 2023).

Lena Kinder

Midnight Swim in the Lake of Metamorphosis

You said we should be mermaids, and so you

kicked your legs until they turned into a tail

with scales all green and green.  

I chose to be a crocodile and dove in the water

until I found a fish, caught it between my teeth,

their points all sharp and sharper still.  

When I surfaced, you sang, and I listened, eating

eyes and scales and bones, dove and rose and dove

and rose each time, my stomach, unquenched.  

I emptied the lake, and you floated on the water

its surface incandescent, its depths, an abyss

you did not feel the danger, but I did.  

I watched you from below, and my jaw

unlatched, opening wide with lust—

I pulled you into the dark with me,  

and we rolled until you broke in two

a mist of red, a taste of blood, a body now

halved. As I ate,  

I saw your human parts, a silent scream, and my hunger still coming.

Let Me Ask God       How to Reanimate the Dead;                 

how to break the spine of time, moon’s milk-light now a cold corpse,

a way to bring you back to me            with necrotic fingers, pressing earth and

my body, only half-alive, in the            sea, a rhythm of quakes and tides,

ligaments of two souls, now lost            bodies now brought back, resuscitated.

---

Lena Kinder has an MA in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Hollins University. Her works can be found in or forthcoming from Wigleaf, Salt Hill, Pinch, HAD, Flash Frog, Bending Genres, and more. She is the editor-in-chief of Folklore Review.

nat raum

crossing east 30th

perhaps an anomaly, old but not

very wise, as jenny mellor tells miss stubbs

in her living room when she retakes

control of her life—indeed i have

positioned my thumb and index finger

on either side of my circumstances’ trachea

but i am acting in self-defense. i was allegedly

twenty-one (really nineteen) this time

ten years ago, caught in the belly of night

and pbr and all four hours of funky beats

spilling out the doors of the windup space.

eventually we’d ruin it for everyone,

plastered on mixes of vodka and pink

lemonade smuggled in between left and right

tits in a brisk bottle, even tonight forced

to cross our fingers along with unlucky

uber driver and pray to whatever’s out there

that no one throws up in the back

of this minivan. i have climbed mountains

inside of myself since then. i have

snapped apart my bones and reshaped

my being out of the parts of myself

i have managed to hold onto. far too many

things i have known intimately enough

to love have slipped away, wreckage turned

gaping voids in ventricles. still i look

around and my peers’ footprints surrounding

me are the closest i have to a guidebook,

were only my gaze not still nascent. were

only my lungs able to avoid sucking their dust.

‍

throwing rice at people in a greetings & readings

After Steven Leyva

and other shenanigans at hunt valley

town center, harbinger of early-teen

chaos for county kids and current

workplace of my mother, who caught

teenagers in the back hallway doing

all the things i hid in high school. before

the era of being generally disruptive

in a dick's sporting goods, the regal

cinema at the top of the hill became

the host body of both my first date

and my first kiss. then we grew up,

graduated to double dates, cosplaying

adults with every paperthin h&m

clearance rack top and decisive slap

of flip phone slammed shut. who

remembers these things, really? the expanse

of parking lot, before they built joe's crab

shack. the movie where robert pattinson

dies during 9/11. the hot bar chicken

wings my first real boyfriend accidentally

stole from wegmans, back when he was

still the person i fell in love with.

---

nat raum is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the author of origin trilogy, journal of various worries, and many others. Find them online at natraum.com.

Gerry LaFemina

Postcard to Tim Seibles from a Godzilla Movie Marathon

Brother Tim, Godzilla is just a man in a foam rubber suit. Those trains he steps on–just HO scale models, his left foot stomping through balsa wood buildings. Just a man.  Haven’t I felt that large and bad ass?  Haven’t you? Once, frustrated, my son picked up the locomotive of his train set and flung it. He was five. Just once, haven’t we felt that way: wanted wreckage and ruin, wanted to breathe out nuclear fire? Let’s face it, Tokyo’s not really burning, but we can find giant footprints off the harbor, at least how I imagine it. In the end, of course, Godzilla—Gojira as they know him in Japan—is a hero when he fights off Gigan or King Ghidorah. He bounds away all spondees toward the sea. Later he stands off camera with his co-star. I’ve seen photographs: she’s wearing a bikini, giggling. He’s still got the monster head on, like every method actor, staying in character.

‍

Postcard to Peter Johnson from Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Peter, Everything here is about Mothman, which is to say everything here is about the prose poem. There’s a prose poem café. A prose poem festival. The prose poem, they say, has red eyes and ten-foot wing span. Witnesses place it at the TNT area. Mothman is no Big Foot, no Nessie. It’s real, the waitress insists. AC/DC low in diningroom’s speakers. I keep confusing Mothman with Mothra. Auto-correct keeps suggesting mother. My mother believes in angels̝̝̝̝—she has a collection of them. In Point Pleasant, some people suggest Mothman might be an angel, therefore the prose poem might be some lost text of the seraphim. At night, when the whole town pulls a comforter over the streetlights, you can hear bullfrogs belting out lullabies. The Mothman hunters stay silent. They see nothing. My mother has a collection of frogs, too. Angels, the waitress insists, sound a lot like frogs. Who am I to argue?

Postcard to Lynn Emanuel from the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Lynn, the light in the Steel City is a darkening indigo, and I’m sure you can see it, too, that color of dungarees in a night club. Here, they have a whole display case for Andy’s scarf and sunglasses, maybe even the ones he wore walking into Max’s Kansas City those nights you worked there. We’re equally a long way from Max’s and Kansas City, but the Warhol still celebrates the great Velvet Underground with t-shirts bearing Andy’s famous banana. Funny how we never meet for coffee when I’m in town. Funny how I’m sending this note only a few zip codes from here. By the time I was a rock n roll teenager, fake ID-ing into New York night spots, you’d quit that city, years before, and Max’s existed only in the stories told by older friends, closed for counterfeiting Ben Franklins by first bleaching dollar bills so the paper’d be correct. Mass produced copies: so Warholian in a way. Consider Elvis. Consider Mao or Marilyn. Those days, I’d move from punk rock to poetry and back again. These days I think how we’re all walking the same streets at different times—thousands of us. Ten thousands. Earlier, I ate in a diner that had butter mints by the cash register, and I took a few like so many others must have, like I used to do in diners all over the country. The candy became soft and crumbly on my tongue, the way language can succumb, the way memories fade, leaving only a subtle taste, a chalky, poem-like sweetness. Sometimes I’d stroll by that old storefront on Park Avenue South, and it’s as if the club never existed, the whole thing scrubbed from the city as if by Brillo.

---

Gerry LaFemina is the author of over 20 books across numerous genres, and he's edited or co-edited 10 anthologies. In 2025 Governor Wes Moore appointed him as a Councilor of the Maryland State Arts Council. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA Program at Carlow University.

Jennifer Maloney

Mom on Her Last Good Day

is seven in second grade walking to St. Josaphat’s with her sister. Pleats plaid knee socks braids a big boy rushes past knocks her down in the snow.  I’m telling Sister, Jimmy Connelly! her wiggly front tooth finally lets go

she pushes her tongue into the place where the empty space should be Patrick spooning oatmeal milky-blue into her mouth plop! on her clean shirt sigh. Spoon wipe spoon wipe. Blue green and yellow meds rattle in the cup cinnamon tablet waits its turn on the counter in its rose-pink coat

of lipstick at sixteen nervous posing in a black one-piece for her best friend Kay’s brother Jimmy in the army. It’s to keep his spirits up. Glasses out of frame she feels for them in grass shaved prickly as an army private’s skull scratching rashy on bare thighs eyes blurred as snow in the pines of the Ardennes so far away so cold she shivers and hopes the picture helps. Eighty years later the kids get the photo blown up thankful their father wasn’t

but now Daddy’s in the cemetery eight years dead. He’s at the store Mom, he’ll be home soon a grocery run that will never end. The piano keeps asking have you seen my have you seen my have you seen my new shoes to keep her from asking where her own father is saying she needs to go home

because at 20 she’s all they’ve got no mother no wife sister married and gone but chores don’t stop because people leave people die five boys plus her father working the mine and there are dinners and dishes and laundry laundry laundry carpets to sweep and rugs to beat to keep the coal dust down they bring it home they track it everywhere and she’s all they have when her father’s cough gets worse and her brother’s cough starts up. She keeps writing Jimmy in Germany he writes back asking will you be my sweetheart? and it makes her feel funny kind of fizzy inside buzzy like a coca cola when you first pop the top and when her brother Larry asks what are you smiling about she folds the paper up quick slips it in her apron pocket grins never you mind nosy parker and runs upstairs   singing   to

strip the bed each morning. Soiled linen in the basket, blue paper pads in the trash but Pat changes the Depends before he changes the sheets, like caring for a baby he learns not to invite trouble. She doesn’t fight him but cries and says don’t do that, no, and that breaks his heart he starts to cry so it’s hard to say I’m sorry, Mom, forgive me the brochure he tried to show her on the bureau the suitcase squatting like a traitor near the bed because this is the morning

she’s twenty-four and a bride. Looks at herself in the mirror misses her mother. Looks at herself and is grateful for her father brothers sister who taught her how to make a home but mostly grateful for Jimmy who asked her to be his sweetheart who came back from the war when so many did not Jimmy with his big mouth bigger smile so safe to be quiet in his arms. This morning a girl this afternoon a wife she’s packed    ready    suitcase in the corner   ready to step into this new life  with Jimmy   an adventure before them    and all the time in the world.

‍

Road Trip

We followed a beer truck, my best friend and I, as we drove to the town where her grandmother Rosemary still lived, the place she had grown up and watched her brothers grow up and watched her father grow old. The old place, the home place, the place where Rosemary’s mother died from the same illness that stole Rosemary’s hearing but did not steal music—it outlived the fever, that headache that drummed and crashed behind her eyes, polka’d fast, wild, deep and hot—music outburned it, songs born with her on the side of the mountain like the clouds that waterfall glissando down to the Susquehanna, tripping and trickling like quarter notes down the mountain, dissolving into the river that swings high against its crumbling, stony banks, lipping the highway with a trumpet pout, breathing and blowing, playing against the mountain’s face that tilts and demands, inquisitive, cloud-washed, the mountain pulling us up and rolling us down like a drunken soldier at a canteen dance, pulling us up, rolling us down till we had to stand on the brakes to Rosemary’s house, Rosemary waiting with a small glass of beer, Rosemary waiting in the house on Luzerne Street, deaf but dancing, laugh so big and ready, hands so small and clever and busy with her brothers’ breakfasts and her father’s dinner and her mother’s rosary and her granddaughter’s visit—my best friend and I on our way to Rosemary’s house, the old place, the home place—her grandfather unknown, just like her great-grandfather, dead from lives that faded beneath the mountain like a song on the radio, only Rosemary left, Rosemary, her daughter, her daughter’s daughter and me, unconnected but drunk on the mountain, the river and the descending scale of the clouds. Rosemary never a soldier, Rosemary unburied in the mine, Rosemary burnt but unbroken and waiting for us with small glasses of beer and silence in her ears but music in her head, sound and rhythm behind her eyes, music that washed away the fever and pain or perhaps subsumed it, consumed it, ensconced it, cocooned it, made it into and of itself like the Susquehanna drinks the clouds. Rosemary surviving her mother, her father, her brothers, her old man, Rosemary waiting for us, two young girls singing at the top of our lungs, following a beer truck up and down the mountain and into her arms.

---

Jennifer Maloney is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions nominee. Her work is available in Ninth Letter, Synkroniciti Magazine, Flash Boulevard and many other publications. Recent chapbooks include Maps of a World (Raw Earth Ink, 2025) and Red (Clare Songbirds Publishing, forthcoming). Jennifer is a parent, a partner and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.

Naomi Stenberg

White Coats

June, 1992

I am in a psych hospital, sitting down while a psychiatrist and his two male interns stand, all in white coats. It is raining outside. It was always raining outside when I saw them. The weight of the shrink's many degrees are framed on the wall. His eyes, behind his glasses, are boring into me. "I am concerned, Ms. Stenberg, that you will always be an institutionalized personality," he says, as if he is delivering an edict I should be thankful for. I am thirty-two years old and "always" is a long way away. I had been diagnosed with Bipolar 1 three weeks before. After a week outside, I had felt overwhelmed by the stressors of a new diagnosis and came back in. But "institutionalized personality?” I feel like a beetle pinned to a card by the shrink's scrutiny, by his irretrievable words.

Later I go to my room which I share with eight other patients, all women. I lean my forehead against the glass. Outside it is still raining. I say out loud the bitter truth I'm carrying, "No one likes me." Behind me, a small, certain voice says, "But I like you."

I turn.

It is Greta, a 17-year-old, whose mind has been damaged by an acid trip.

We lock eyes.

In that tender, ductile bridge, I feel myself slowly return.

Note: This piece was first published in the author’s chapbook, The Measure of Breath (Spring 2026).

---

Naomi Stenberg (she/they) is queer, neurodivergent and thriving in Seattle. A poem of hers was recently nominated for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards.  Naomi’s work has appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Soul Poetry, Sky Island Journal, Knee Brace Press, the anthology, Teacakes and Tarot, and elsewhere. In her spare time, Naomi collects, on vinyl, female rockers of the eighties, does improv, and plays apartment fetch with her dog.

Laura Denny

Self Portrait

I am as gentle as sunlight

on the rough bark of a tree.

It could be a hoax,

but I don’t think so. I am unsure

of my face in the bathroom mirror.      

I am a cricket on a twig

in the river, singing.    

I am a field of wild grass,

with heavy seed heads

bowing in the wind.    I hum             

I hum to the slow movement

of the dark clouds, gorgeous

and ghostlike, as I wait

for the sun to strike through,

to fall across this field

with its stark slant light.  I am 

I am the purple shadow of sorrow

cast by a mountain. I am comfortable

with all the sadness that lives in me

and stretches across the landscape

of my life. I am the unbidden joy

that comes in the morning.

‍

Please Do Not Park the Wow

Especially

in the bleakest of times

the Wow longs to be seen

It's the Milky Way

in the desert

a waxing moon

at dawn, the light

in the center

of a morning glory

and how the trees

speak a language of their own

and lean towards the sun

It’s also you, my love

and all the light and dark

that lives in you

The world wants

your Wow moving through it

as a witness to its wonder ‍

---

Laura Denny is a retired educator who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She is a docent for Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. Her poetry has appeared in One Art, January House Literary Journal, Does It Have Pockets, Remington Review, Pictura Journal, and Sunlight Press, among others.

Rita Malenczyk

Six Years After Your Suicide

You go everywhere on people's arms,

One version of you a cross, another

your death date etched in Roman numerals

where the muscles meet the shoulders

of three best friends. When they stand side by side

it makes the full date, one number on each:

day, month, year. Those are in black.

Mine is on the part of the arm where they draw blood:

a yellow rose, orange at the tips,

black and green leaves

with your first initial somewhere in there.

On your dad's shoulder sits your name,

crossed by hockey sticks.

On one brother's wrist the number of your jersey

and the clock time when you scored the winning goal;

on the other's chest a deer,

shot through with flowers, vines, branches,

as if it remembers where all things go.

---

Rita Malenczyk is a writer, painter, and occasional printmaker living and working in eastern Connecticut. Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Under the Gum Tree, Sugar House Review, JMWW, HeartWood, Brevity Blog, and elsewhere. She is professor emerita of English at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Paul Ilechko

Snow Queen

As a child he loved the Snow

Queen with a passion that was alien

to his normal state of being

and now he digs through decades

worth of notebooks looking

for a clue     why do his memories

embarrass him so much     he thinks

as he turns out the bedside light

and turns towards the sleeping man

beside him in the large sleigh bed

still feeling the effect of the gin and tonic

that the two of them drank earlier

that evening     and as he slides into sleep    

a memory creeps out from somewhere

deep inside him of a barn stacked high

with hay     and the children – teenagers

– sprawled across the stacks with

their sandwiches and sneering faces.

A Hard Bought Freedom

There were so many questions    

but possibly even more answers    

a rotation and a clicking into place    

mechanical teeth finding each other

with an almost elegant simplicity  

as the shadows of clouds would spin

across the horizon     and the woman

had her teeth replaced with the whitest

porcelain     that gleamed against

the blood of her gums     and even

though we knew about her treachery    

we pitied her anyway     there are only

so many people you can hate in one

lifetime     and we accepted the decision

to send her back to her family’s farm  

with her shaved head and sliced

Achilles tendons     and she lay

between the sheep and goats under

a trembling almost blue moon on

the first day of her astonishing freedom.

---

Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, Bear Review, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Laurel Review. His book Fragmentation and Volta was published in 2025 by Gnashing Teeth Publishing. His newest book, Post Moby, will be released in June 2026 by Sheila-Na-Gig Press. He reads for Marrow Magazine.

Jo Rigg

Resistance

We talk by appointment; a short preamble

and then at 3.06 I’m asked to show my soul.

But how did it feel?

I don’t know.

What about in your body?

I stare at the floor.

I hope it looks like I’m thinking.

Enumerating whether there’s a knot

somewhere, a flutter, a shiver.

I don’t know.

Sometimes I don’t even know

if what I’m saying is true.

There’s no weight of evidence.

Even boiling water didn’t leave a scar

and life went obliviously on.

I wonder what time it is.

How soon can I stop pretending

I’m dredging the silt from my system.

Stop wondering what I’d say

to make that girl feel better.

I have no idea.

There’s a tightness in my sternum.

(A bodily feeling!)

I probably should have said

Stop.

Things have happened

that have a sharp edge.

I blunted everything.

You talk about the window of tolerance —

mate, I can tolerate anything.

---

Jo Rigg is a web developer, writer, runner and general dabbler based in York. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in And Other Poems, Frazzled Lit, and the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology. She posts infrequently on BlueSky: @jorigg.bsky.social.

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.