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.

Jeanne Julian

Self-portrait as constellation

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

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

They Never Said‍

They never said there was a chance

that I’d be what’s purportedly

an alcoholic.                                        I?

The parties made me nice

and shiny. There was no indication

I might be twice divorced, alone,

with kids still finding

their way when nearing 40,

heedless of me until

there’s a bill to pay. Don’t get me

wrong, I’m happy to. But I’m not

as flush as I once was. They never said

my mother could be dead

at an age younger than I am now.

I’m rather glad she cannot see

this blurry denouement, this ebbing.

She had a lot of dignity.

They never said those lifelong

friendships can go awry.

My phone calls go unanswered.

I’m not sure why.

They never said I’d have to try

to get around with no car

after the accident. Absurd.

They never said the pills that kill

the pain keep nagging you to tighten

their throttlehold on your brain.

They make you feel unclean.

They never said one might forget

those heartfelt songs. I mean,

I remember them, I just don’t sing. 

I bet they never said

she’ll wind up like the ones

who never had a chance,

the ones who started

with nothing.

---

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

Ed Higgins

slanting metaphors

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

                                                                        --Elayne Boosler

midmorning light slants

through the skylight

offering metaphors

in a theatric of shimmering

suspended dust motes

like thoughts wearing motley

smiling from the world outside

skewed sunlight making me 

a still life on the unmade bed

my female whippet sleeping

beside me on wrinkled sheets

our identity is always stolen

by the descending fall of words

what can I write about this slanting

light or these swirling dust motes

or my sleeping whippet for that matter 

the dung beetle

you won't find

this in a fortune cookie

but the true dung beetle

gives nuptial gifts

to his heartthrob

and this seems

quite appropriate 

since love depends

on so much shit

you'd think it couldn't

ever happen:

but it does.

---

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

Liv Campbell

Yard Baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give me normal God.

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

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

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

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

for the small tv, no grass beneath my feet.

Van Life

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

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

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

like COMMUNAL NAPKIN or DEATH IS GENETIC, likes to smoke

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

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

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

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

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

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

let go. Because we touch, and I love you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Christopher Phelps

Axiomancy

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

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

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

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

instead of just polishing the surface.”

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

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

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

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

hidden in doctored sight. Bright and flagging hopes

singing different songs at the same time,

and sound doesn’t very well overlap

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

enough of these waves waving in their bivouac to make

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

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

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

to gym class, where any fun or joy in discovery

was against the rules. The posted and unposted rules

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

twice the ensuing snickers. Everyone knows these snickers

come from nerves of new and nervous creatures,

whose skin is originally thin. Where thickness is learned

from invented contests that must be won since

we no longer have prey to hunt. Since

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

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

could keep track of debt? Since someone in a cave

or a hut was there to record what someone else did

or said? At least. Nobody could say for certain

why invention’s mother was calling kids and father,

maybe from all the way across the caldera

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

so animals get at that). These anemic beings

we’ve become, full of spurts and muscle

spasms, where once the sweet birds sang.

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

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

perhaps escapes our notice. Since we have been groomed

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

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

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

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

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

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

without a middle, and halfway back

from someone who never was

so stocked and stoked with purpose. Never was

so beautiful in the gloam and in the morning

when two stars become one wish for the night

to have been alright. To have been just a time

for the orchestra to grind through the tune.

For our sipped and slowing breath to catch us up.

---

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

Janet Reich Elsbach

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

Put a mark here to show the man

and another for the woman.

This X indicates the ancient maple tree,

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

Erase the X. Show the tree.

Show the taproot, root cap, region of elongation.

Show every tiny extension pulling

inward, reaching up.

Show what’s visible against

the sky, and what’s beneath.

The day is warm and clear,

so strangely warm for winter and why not

take a walk, he said.

Frame it that way.

A box can serve to place the house

across the sloping meadow

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

Inside the house the baby sleeps;

these concentric circles

around and around the basket,

those are for the grandma, the sisters,

watching him sleep.

This grassy distance here, (box to tree),

brown and dry,

is the widest expanse between

his tiny, fragile heart and hers

since the thought of him

bloomed in her mind

and the fact of him

took shape, among her bones,

and he slid out to face the full December moon

shining through the window above their bed.

Use silver for that light.

Indicate the grass with little lines,

a few—there’s no accounting

for every blade.

We will need a key; leave space for that.

How fast she could get back across the meadow

is a question mostly her breasts feel full of.

Move the mark

of the man into the treeline,

then adjust the woman.

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

she is awake, the only one awake

to hear the hungry, discordant racket of the coyotes

ricocheting up from the river against their hill.

That drunken cackling raises something primitive in her.

It’s so hard to gauge the distance.

One inch equals a mile.

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

as you must know,

having seen them in the light.

Deep inside the bark, despite the cold,

a network of alveoli

is still ferrying cargo between the soil and the sky

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

This thrumming should be audible.

Draw lines to show it, there in the understory.

Reverberations from the tree

or her heart, or her blood or the milk.

It isn’t enough,

he seems to be saying

as the fullness and the ache

of the milk thunder into place.

I thought the baby would make it different

--these words hang in between them now, so

use a vivid color for that—

But this isn’t enough.

It isn’t what I thought it would be.

Did you put a compass by the key?

The baby is still north

of where they stand.

Show that.

---

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

Colleen Harris

It Begins This Way

I

It begins this way: cousin

and cousin, Titan and Olympian.

Zeus—who also goes by Richard—

is a plunderer, a capturer of women,

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

tangled in his own tawdry desires,

needing and feeding on beauty, seeding

himself. Prometheus—who is also Chad—

by crafty counsel gives men fire to keep warm,

gives men clouds to keep warned

of the god-king’s impending rain,

convinces Zeus-Richard to take

the greasy dross of bones and fat

and forms men’s taste for the good meat,

gives them Clymene’s crockpot recipes

for pot roast and beef stifado.

The god who comes upon women

as a cloud, as a shower of gold coins,

as the whispered pledge of a new Brahmin satchel,

as the one who makes the strippers wince

because he squeezes too hard

and follows them out to the dimly lit lot

decides it should be a woman to level his cousin.

Pandora—who is always Pandora—becomes.

The ingredients for hell are hot hate,

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

II

After a new girl has opened all the gifts,

the party winds down to lyres strumming

Semisonic’s Closing Time,

half-drunk gods take Tupperware

of ambrosia home, except Dionysus—

Dio takes the leftover wine, only the reds.

The streamers droop. One gift remains.

A girl grows bored. A girl grows bold

and holds the forbidden jar in her hands.

It is heavy with content, or portent.

It could be filled with solid perfume,

or the silent regard of a parliament of owls.

Richard enjoys his frat house jokes,

it could be spring-loaded snakes.

The prize inside might be seeds stolen

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

A sharp twist of bangled wrists,

and the chaos of the world boils out.

Richard laughs until he retches.

Her seat tilts and the world grows black.

She runs outside, her curled hair blows back. 

III

A woman worries what lies beneath lids,

but a girl knows little of how hunger

draws the skeleton to skin’s surface

like curious koi from their pond,

how sickness churns upstream

in the marrow, how in death

the heart is not a heart

but a panicked rabbit leaping

into the teeth of frenzied hounds.

The girl has blood on her hands

even as she snaps the jar closed.

Washing the clotting red from her fingers:

girl becomes woman.

The music changes—war is the ring

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

melody half-lost in the wind.

Honey, open the jar again,

re-gift it to yourself. Here, hope:

sedate and slow to kindle to full speed,

sleeping on its paws at the bottom.

It is a needful pet that takes tending.

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

Teach your daughters to dance—

it will take the air in their lungs

to keep it breathing.

Leave your tears with the toys

of your girlhood.

Open the door to the mystery,

no need to wipe your feet of famine

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

We know. Drink your fermented cup.

We all open the jar. Remember,

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

---

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

CL Bledsoe

The Yips

after a line by Fitzgerald

It takes two to make an accident.

One to hold the map, the other

to work the radio. Someone napping

in the back seat and dreaming

of the World Series. I made a detour

for my good intentions. It was you

and me, the ants, a tree with our initials

carved in at the only rest stop with clean

toilets on the East Coast. Sobering up

at the gas station. Funyuns and Beef jerky.

Buying scratch offs and forgetting quarters.

I stole the keys. Drove us back to your

place. Night blindness and pedestrians.

It meant so much to get it right.

Inside, it was all Hoarders on A&E.

Lingerie the mice had gotten into.

You made me stand outside the door while

you tried to find the couch. You don’t

understand. I have to get home

tonight. You have no ambition beyond

the flowers dying on your coffee table.

Thunderstorm

Back in the days when I was a thunderstorm,

there was brief lightning after every

utterance. I fell and fell, water carpeting

my apartment, making all the boards curl.

Nothing could last without turning

into ruin. I felt no sun burning

through the haze. No warmth except

in my rain. Children blinked to see

me. The old just shook their heads

from their porches. Who would take the time

to run through my onslaught in the hopes

of finding warmth inside? It’s only water

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

since childhood. I waited for overcast

days when I could lie in bed and stay

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

I dreamed of someday drying out, finding

someone else to fall on.

Delilah

She was the best of us, secret

as an egg. One leg in her pants

and the other in the stars. Like all

of us, she only laughed at the absurdity

of existence or cats playing piano.

Like all of us, she just wanted to help.

But they don’t make potato salad

like they used to anymore. A hair

driven through a tree by heavy winds.

Somewhere that used to be fun done

up in church slacks. I miss talking

about the weather and really meaning

it, the correct portion of vermouth.

It’s only going to get better if you

give it enough time. That’s what

they all say, she used to say. Right

before changing the channel.

---

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