Ann Weil

Looking for My Bra, I Forgot

looking for my bra/ I forgot this morning/ to look

in my hand/ searching/ I remembered laying out

my containment/ mis-remembering/ I thought the

bed was where I’d laid the lacy shelf/ but now I

see my own self mirrored/ 63 years and still/

grasping/ I cling to the material/ to my binding

habits/ unnecessary/ yet too tightly held/ to let go/

even though my sieving mind/ seems keen for the purge

so many little birds

flying away

through open windows

‍

And the Beat Goes On

                        Palm Springs, CA

On Valmonte Sur there are fountains, at least one to a yard, that babble like exuberant carnival

barkers hawking their wares, “Step right up!” “Greatest Bath on Earth!” And the crowds flock—

towhee to starling, phoebe to finch, swooping down in giddy groups splashing and preening, all

the while watching the humans in stifling suits and sweat-smelly dresses assembling ahead of the

funeral, or rather, Celebration of Life, as these affairs have been rebranded. The cars lurk in the

drive, and they, too, seem uncomfortable, washed and shined, lights on in broad daylight, doors

hanging open like spread wings. I dread the journey and the day, ugly-cry faces hidden behind

dark sunglasses—everyone looking like past-retirement-age secret service—hands cramped and

damp from clutching sodden kleenexes. (Ugh. Think of the germs!) Nobody wanting to be there,

everyone watching their watches. I can’t stop thinking about coffins and confinement, how I’ll

feel trapped at the church by the chanting cantor, the choking incense, the rambling of a priest

who doesn’t know a thing about me, about how to celebrate my life. If he did, none of us would

be sitting sedately in stiff-backed pews. No one would wear black. Instead, we’d all be

technicolor—  mid-century modernists in vintage muumuus and Mrs. Roper wigs, splashing and

preening in the Sonny Bono Memorial Fountain, belting out I Got You Babe, laughing until we

pee, our wildness contagious even to the mourning doves who will eschew their coos for

whooping guffaws. And for the first time ever, I’ll be the quiet one, resting my eyes, keeping my

mouth shut. But don’t worry. I’m just thinking about how to get out of this damned box.

---

Ann Weil's poetry appears in Best New Poets 2024, Okay Donkey, RHINO, Chestnut Review, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. Author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow, 2023) and Blue Dog Road Trip (Gnashing Teeth, 2024), Weil is a former special education teacher, current kettle corn lover, and four-time Pushcart nominee who lives in Michigan and California. To read more of her work, visit www.annweilpoetry.com.

JC Alfier

Between Concealer and Desire, or The First Time a Makeup Artist Regards Me Credibly

You knew damn well

what the cis ghost would say:

Where do you even start with all this shit?

But fuck that doubter,

ignore his refrain
sung from a deadnamed shadow.

I’ll let this florid spectrum

of brand names,

once peripheral at best,

        consume me now

each one a hawker to fortune me
with soft convictions:

unguessed colors,

shades not found in nature,

but hungry for skin nonetheless:

rouge and shadow,

powder and paste

the legend of a map my flesh must learn:—

a thousand names for a face.

But when does a face belong?

Let’s say it belongs when I sanction

the artist

to make me the next woman

called to the sweet ache of strip-lights

           that frame her mirror,

                  to lure reflection into song:—                                           

changeling in blush,                                

concealer,

eyeshadow,

and that lipstick

named a deadly scarlet,

my mouth brimmed

with a promise, the kind

         that abides no remit.

              The kind that pledges

to lure a target

    easy enough to kiss.

‍

Transwoman Retreats to a Place Thought Popular off Bourbon Street

If I gaze toward the end of the barroom

most in need of light

a recently emptied and stranded shotglass

 holds a strayed hornet that will go airborne

 again if I can furrow the crowd to swirl the fading ice

 and pitch the watery mix

 into the funk of the sweat-rhythmed street

 I know she may yet survive

 breaking moonlight over her wings.

This piece was originally published at Noon Poetry Magazine, Fall 2024.  

---

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry is The Shadow Field. Journal credits include Copper Nickel, Faultline, Fugue, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, and Vassar Review. They are also a collage artist after the styles of Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, and Katrien De Blauwer.

Jeffrey Hermann

Life Being What It Is

We’re up to our ears in horsework. I mean housework. One of us does the ceiling and one of us does the floor. We meet in the middle. RIght now you can’t tell if it’s almost fall or almost spring. We decide on one and it comes true. I don’t mind saying I might have been born for caretaking. I like to make lunch and change sheets. I like to brush the coat of a large animal. We hold hands at the top of large buildings. Afraid of heights. I mean hearts. They say it’s one big muscle but that doesn’t account for anything. Living in a small house, I almost always know where you are. But sometimes I do not know where you are and that means you might be in the yard. I look out the window but it’s hard to see. Someone’s been breathing on the pane.

‍

If You Had to Describe Love as a Shape But You Weren’t Allowed to Say Circle What Shape Would You Say Love Is? 

You could be funny and say triangle. Ha ha. Or find a loophole and say oval. People who think about sex a lot will say rhombus. Which I get but can’t explain. If you say love is a hexagon or a pentagon I feel like you’re saying love is a trap. I can’t relate to anything with a lot of corners. Though I could see love as a parallelogram, a square someone leaned on. But the right answer is cone. How it begins wide open and comes to an end. Or the other way around and it starts at a point and enlarges, consuming everything. 

---

Jeffrey Hermann writes short fiction and prose poems in his spare time. One day when he retires he will write in his regular time. His work is out there if you look. His wife and two children and dog mean everything to him. He has two books forthcoming in 2027, from Unsolicited Press and Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Jason Davidson

Moon

I dreamt last night of party streamers. The possums put them up for their school dance. There was an uncanny play list for the night, but possums are not known for their taste in music. I don’t actually know whether or not that’s true, but it seems reasonable. The possum who wears green trousers wasn’t certain whether he would attend the dance, but he wanted to see his friend Fred, so it seemed reasonable. After his third cup of punch, he said to Fred: I’m really starting to feel the punch, dude. Fred didn’t want to tell his friend that the punch was only pineapple juice and hot pink cherries, so he swayed back and forth to the early aughts house music and closed his eyes, but not tightly. He thought this was another way to look cool. The possum with the green trousers thought Fred looked very cool. He wanted to kiss Fred, but he wasn’t sure if Fred wanted to kiss him so he said instead: This dance is kind of lame, want to come outside and I’ll show you something neat? Fred nodded his possum head, but only slightly. Outside, the possum with the green trousers took a slingshot out of his green pocket and aimed it at the moon. He said: Watch this! He launched a clean shot and the moon took a somersault from the sky and landed on the school’s front lawn. Fred was not impressed. He explained that he’d called in a bomb threat and now that was well ruined. The possum with the green trousers never kissed Fred. Fred ended up in a loveless marriage with too many children, too many bills and a nagging infection in his left ear that ultimately led to his early death. I don’t know what happened to the possum in the green shorts. No one told me.

‍

Dog

I dreamt last night of John. I am packing for us to leave this place when I find him sleeping in a box of old things that remind me of you. They remind me of deserts, Dobermans and hypodermic needles. They remind me of the death fairy and her faint kiss. Her blood whisper. John used to be a dog, but you filled him so full that one of his button eyes was lost in Boulder, one of his feet unraveled in the snow. You went to the mountains once with your three dogs, high out of your good mind. You lost them there. I hear them calling in the middle of the night and how I hate my barter ears. I do not want John to know this. I hold him close. I want to build a dam for John. I don’t want to put him back in the box, but I cannot look at him for long. The idea of going blind is scary. John looks sad like a summer storm. I whisper to him, Mother has gone away for a time, but I’m sure she’ll be back with the snow. Lies like gooseberries or dirty dishes or old roses. I hold him like you did not hold me. I tell him that I lost my dogs too. I am embarrassed by my grief. I am embarrassed by all grief. When someone dies, I dig my toes into the ground, wanting to be buried like a piece of time, wine that I drink now, things I cook when I cannot speak. John nods his head. He knows.

---

Jason Davidson is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and performer. He’s written, directed and produced over 200 works of experimental theatre and his one-act plays have been widely published. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Club Plum, Pine Hills Review, HAD, SoFloPoJo, Burningword, Heavy Feather Review, Stone of Madness, Luna Luna, Troublemaker Firestarter, The Mackinaw, and other journals. Jason lives on California's Central Coast with his husband and four-legged children. Find him on Instagram at @jasonwriteswords.

Lindsay B. Sears

My light is not sunlight

My security light

outside my dining room window

protecting the side yard alleyway

separating the front from the back

separating me from my neighbor

has stopped paying attention

to my movements. I stand

at 2 a.m. waving frantically

my arms scaring the moths

away. Seeing the wren pretend

bat-like clamped inverted

to my neighbor’s eave. Seeing

the cast shadow of the anemic

bush on my neighbor’s wall

seem like a more robust version

of itself. My light is not

sunlight. Though it can be

as bright as, but not

when it outshines the night.

I lose sight of the feral

ginger who poops under

the light so he can see

the buried traces of himself

making his way to the unlit

porch where he can eat

the food I leave unexposed.

I bargain with my reflection

If you keep the cat safe, I’ll

If you keep the wren safe, I’ll

If you keep the moths

attentive to the moon

flowers, I’ll    

let the bush bloom

like the ones in the front

with their showy snowballs

get the neighbors talking

what is that? they say

but anyway, they’re pretty

My neighbor’s roof disappearing

into the sky. No stars left

winking

at my inside jokes

‍

Posted, (_) Property

A swoop of swallows

perched on oak. Always two

or three at a time and one at a time

taking their turns dining in midair

with their forks flicking in quick twists

and turns and returning

lining the sign sitting perpendicular

to the one that claims there also used to be

elm. In the same way

I suppose there used to be a field

of birch and a grassy meadow with views

of fawn and a secluded depression

two hills and a prairie

that once caught fire

or was made to burn.

(Also known as a gulp.)

There may be some connection

between the myth of the theft of fire

and the way a rufous neck can steal

the sun, a wielded fire that can want

a prairie burned. The view of this place

from nature, reflecting

beyond us and signaling

our presence

posted at every corner.

---

Lindsay B. Sears is a poet, photographer, and a recent MLA graduate from Auburn University, Montgomery. Her work has appeared in About Place Journal, Metphrastics, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Shallot, and Yellow Arrow Journal, among others. She lives with her feline and human companions in Alabama.

Anna Crandall

Glass House

 Do you watch the sun set each evening behind
the roofline of your neighbor’s house and think you are safe?

The windowpanes turning inwards, reflecting one at a time
glowing bulbs of your little existence.

Each family member passes by, the oldest child with his face
looking out, the youngest seeing only his own heart.

Twilight wipes a soft rag across the sky. The neighbor’s roof catches
with a blaze. It could just as easily be wildfire; we packed bags
last summer as the smoke took one look around, circled, settled down.

Time hovers then shifts, each year seemingly plucked from suspension, dropped
down the run that speeds faster each round.

What is beauty but knowing this will end? To love life even though
the beginnings portend our cellular collapse, the loss of everyone and then some?

The universe keeps expanding as his watch now ticks on the dresser, unused.

Before too long, you’ll lose the stars, the smell
in his handkerchiefs, their small bodies curved towards yours.

It was his birthday yesterday, the years slipping seamlessly
from beneath you. You pulled your fingers through
the brittle grass, lit the barbeque, tempting fate.

Sparks glazed the air like stars that had already died.

You chose to hold it all to your heart. You tried.

---

Anna Crandall (she/her) is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has previously taught in Oregon’s Department of Corrections and is currently a high school Language Arts teacher. She is pursuing her Master's in English and Creative Writing and has work recently published or upcoming in MER Literary, Shot Glass Journal, The Pointed Circle, The Vehicle, and more. You can find her on Instagram @teacupsandghosts.

Tyler Lemley

Bike Rides With the First Boy I Ever Loved

The days of after school bike rides

through the cracked streets of my hometown, heat

sticky like honey, but we were too young

to care. He stood on his bike pedals and coasted,

letting his shoulders set into a posture of pure

release.

I remember staring at his hands, how the veins burrowed up

and around his arms as he gripped the handlebars.

I remember the long push of foot on peddle,

and the hair that hurried up his legs: the strong

oak trunks I was jealous of. 

I was often jealous, back then, of the girls

he brought flowers to, the girls with painted nails,

palm to palm with the hands mine yearned for.

Because he never touched me like that.

Once he took me under an unnamed bridge,

worn and worthless with weathered cracks, straight

to the huddle of dehydrated puddles-- the creek-- handing

me a crawdad on a white thread noose.

His arms, those burrowed veins, a fidget away.

His legs, those leaves of hair, a feather on my skin.

I’ll always hear his breath in my ear, and forever,

my skin is dipped in his sweet honey heat.

‍

Earth Needs a Death Doula

Someone to hold the Earth’s hand,

tell her how much good she’s done.

How strong she’s been these last decades.

She’ll be scared. But as our bodies do

this planet knows how to die.

Knows how to usher out the ecology.

And the doula will guide her through

her rising shores. Through the falling redwoods.

Through the slow slipping of oxygen.

And the Sun will be watching, of course.

And the moon will be there

like a dog lying at its owners feet.

So now is time for the death bed.

For the advance care directive.

For Earth to get her car title switched over.

For the passing out of her jewelry

and the picking out of a casket.

For her sisters to gather and touch her skin.

And for the doula to help us all grieve.

Dinner with an Old Friend at a Pizza Place in Town

Eyes burning from greasy air, we slurp

    stringy cheese. Get it stuck on our chins.

I have a beard now. Smile lines. The clawing

    crack of crow’s feet. She has red lipstick.

Blue highlights. The beginnings of insomnia

    under her eyes. She hums indie grunge

‘cause she’s a fan now. We get drunk in public

    ‘cause we can now.

Our first beer was at a high school grad party.

    Warm Coors. Offensively repulsive. We gurgled

it down. Stumbled around the party.

    The inevitability of fermented wheat.

Of using the empty bottle as an excuse

    to kiss boys. They were thrilled to kiss her. Re-spun

when it landed on me. Except the one.

    The hillbilly.  His hick hickies after beer three.

Back of his daddy’s pickup. His tongue

    thick with wanting. Cock gorged on desire.

No lube but he wanted to try. Spit. Strain.

    Slipped in. Lasted seconds. Told me he loved me.

At the pizza place, she tells me he’s dead now.

    Car crash. He was drunk. His wife

skipped the funeral. On his gravestone

    someone spray painted queer

in red, dripping letters.

---

Tyler Lemley is a queer, Texan poet who received their Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts and English from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Tx. They have been published in The Tusculum Review, Does It Have Pockets, Black Fox Literary, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in Fourteen Hills.

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.