Alicia Wright

Good American Speech

It’s cicadas or it’s crickets

or it’s something else entirely—

it’s whatever a peeper is.

I lost it somewhere, mashed it to paste

between my teeth; no buggy, no crawdad,

nobody redding up the table for supper,

but something Mid-Atlantic—

crooked on the tongue and never fit

enough for the stage. 

We’re all Shakespeare in the foothills

here, damp clover clinging to our ankles,

but the crick bleeds in:

I can’t explain the night without it,

or the jellied mass of eggs sprouting limbs

and crawling for the hemlock,

can’t tell the truth about the water’s bite

or our clothes in wrinkled piles on the bank.

I can’t spell the name of the bone-white shells

raked by the palmful from the mud,

thin as fingernails,

quiet as parentheses.

No One Said Simon

She’s been trying to die for years

and here she is now, finally

but some gummy analgesic

has swaddled her iridescent—

I am my father in the doorway,

my mother, myself in OshKosh,

the violent shock of June,

and the arms dragging her

gasping from the pool.

I am not the neon frisbee

abandoned at the hem

of tide-wash.

I’ve seen the rippled VHS, seen

the Little Mermaid towel caping

her peeling shoulders;

press rewind and she is acid-

washed and losing a game

of Simon Says

and I am on my knees

at the table, humming-

bird cake beyond reach.

---

Alicia Wright (she/her) is a writer from Appalachia. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Antiphony Journal, The Inflectionist Review, River and South Review, Thimble, and elsewhere.

Bob Kirkley

The Prayer Within a Prayer

Let us bow our heads and pray

                   this feels wrong

Gracious Father

                   great white heron

Thank you for this day

                   that sprang from the mangrove tree

The beauty of nature

                   crackling branches

The food upon our table

                   unfolded its wings

Use it Lord to strengthen our bodies

                   almost six feet end to end

So that we may better serve you

                   and flew silently and alone

We ask it in your name

                  low across the flats

Amen                  sunlight on its back               Amen

From the Wilderness of Lapland  

You message me at 9:52 p.m. Central European Time,

a solitary photo without a caption. Stars are snow

falling through the lights of the aurora borealis, green

tonight—their normal state—magical and ghostly. You

feel haunted. Powder in the branches of the Norwegian wood

enhances the illusion of descending snow.

I type “Merry Christmas,” but don’t send it. You and I

sat together too long in a room without chairs.

You’re not in the photograph, and I know that you’re alone—

your natural condition. Even now, I love your solitude,

and, of course, I hit send. But what does it matter?

Anyone can see that the slush-covered road lies empty—

nobody comes from either direction—and, by morning,

it will be frozen over hard.

Commencement Address

You don’t have to serve the Holy Trinity

of electricity, air conditioning, and refrigeration.

Find yourself a boat, instead,

that hasn’t a motor,

that hasn’t sails,

that hasn’t dock lines,

and drift with intent to an island remote.

Drop anchor there.

Though it hasn’t a chain,

though it hasn’t a rope,

you will secure it soundly and float.

Live on the cay by yourself

till you’re no longer lonely.

A stranger will arrive soon after

on a bark without a rudder.

They will know by then the stuff inside the stars.

That’s how they will find you.

Greet them at dusk at the waterline,

honest and detached.

---

Bob Kirkley received an MA in creative writing from Florida State University. Since then, he has served for twenty-eight years as a high school English teacher in South Florida. His other pursuits include coffee roasting and paddleboarding. Dry-processed coffees from Ethiopia are his favorites because, while they are not flavored, some taste like blueberries. And he has paddled about 1,500 miles so far, mostly on his own in the Keys. For links to his published works, please visit bobkirkleypoetry.com.

Andrew Walker

Poem Before Blue Skies

It’s been bigger lately, that mouth, god,                    what a throat, so wide with song,

I’m yodeled lonely to its lips. No rain                     again today, humidity’s hand cupped

to keep sick down. Open air holds me                  instead. I am most whole when held

like an unpopped kernel on thirsty                     tongue, when peppered in salt and

soaked in saliva, when tooth-caught                  after shatter, shucked wet

from cheek, body’s husk streaked                    across the underside of couch arm,

pant leg. Some days, when the sky                    smiles wide enough to chubby bunny

popcorn clouds, I write still feel like                   dying in a notebook I’ll tear soon to

pieces, feeding an overstuffed bin                    little bits of me, crumpled but harmful—

a rock packed into a snowball, glass                    wrapped in the delicate flesh of a donut.

Most days, I think sky keeps me here                    panopticoned by the beauty of its breath—

how it dips despair in runny chocolate,                   leaves it to harden overnight. Tomorrow is

just another strawberry—just another                   fruit to let rot, to spoil the gifted

sweetness from damp soil, afraid to quench                  may I choke on pith, may I ruin

blue appetite, trauma tummy grumbly                  at the open lips of fridge—not hungry,

searching for something to rest within,                  held here in chilled light.

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

after Mary Ruefle

Tape an old family photo to the wall and throw a dart at it; if it does not hit the picture, try again until

it does. Find the person with the hole in their chest and interview members of your family about

them—What is their favorite color? Did they have any pets growing up? Which parts of themselves

have they molted in their aging? When you have compiled enough information, write a 750 - 1,000

word profile of them, highlighting the pivotal moments in their life. For extra credit, have the subject

read their own profile and record their weeping on camera.

---

Andrew Walker is a writer from Colorado living in Michigan. Their work has appeared in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, and Ninth Letter among others. They write weekly on their Substack, Observing Edges and have compiled a full list of their poetry and prose for your perusal at druwalker.com.

Gail Goepfert

Do-over

It is plain black

and white. The sign

that turns my head early

this morning.

Old pain. We recycle. 

Me. Me! my voice, soundless.

I want to participate—

could someone, anyone

put pain to better use,

cut it into strips

like in a video I scrolled—

an artist crocheting

designer bags

from Goodwill sheets.

I yearn for that

transformation.

To divvy it up—

surely an act of generosity?

In an instant I count

each pain amassed

in the jar of my brain—

countless

lightning bugs seeking

release.

Is it one second, two

before I reread

that plain old black and white—

Old Paint. We recycle.

Coming Clean

The windows in the storefront flaunt an orange neon Repair sign with blue-green

outlines of a loafer and wristwatch to say welcome in. I leave my father in the car, and

inside all indications that this was ever much of a store have vanished—a few belts

hang from pegboard J-hooks, a dozen watchbands drowse in a dusty glass case. A

man emerges from the back with a body-slouch just shy of hunchback. His dress and

language say misfit. Eccentric. “I need a stretchy band. My father’s 100-year-old

fingers can no longer fasten the clasp, and he likes this watch.” That will be $17 for the

band, if I have one that works, and $17 to remove links if needed. That’s much more work. Cash

only. But I can’t do that without seeing his wrist. Then silence. He fiddles, then couples a

new silvered band—could this task be this easy? I don’t want to have to pull out the

walker, launch Dad from the car. Where is he? he asks. I point out the window. He

glances. A sidelong glance. It’s going to be $17 you know. $17 more if I have to remove a link.

Cash only. Resigned, I head out to bring Dad in, but he scuffs along behind me on my

heels to the passenger side. There Dad sits, patient, in his button-down shirt and

khakis. The guy slips the band on Dad’s wrist—a flawless fit. The man warns him not

to twist the band, instructs him three times how to put it on. I pleat the cash into his

hand as he walks off, and he says, Most people his age are not.  He’s so clean. So clean.

---

Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, authored books that include A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018), Get Up Said the World (Červená Barva Press, 2020), and Self-Portrait with Thorns (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). This Hard Business of Living, a collaborative chapbook with Patrice Boyer Claeys, was released in 2021 from Seven Kitchens Press, and two photoverse books, Honey from the Sun (2020) and Earth Cafeteria (2023), celebrate fruits and vegetables with Claeys’s centos and Goepfert’s photography.

Tarn Wilson

The Grasshopper

I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,

how he kept his wife in a shell. Were her walls damp

and stringy? Did she carve a door? Did she set her elbows

on a spongy windowsill? I didn’t want to be Cinderella,

a princess in a pumpkin carriage. I wanted a tail: I wanted

to be a soft animal who could adjust her balance. My New

Age mother said I might carry bad spirits. I feared they

clung to my sweater or accumulated in corners, chewed

and gaunt and disguised in shadow. My mother stole

money from my piggy bank. Some summers, I lived

with my father on the docks. I loved the lapping water,

little fish, and dock cats. I had never felt such loneliness.

I wanted a red wagon and a father who would pull it.

I got lost in the swirly eyes of marbles. I collected quartz

from roadsides and trailsides and badly-tended lawns:

fairy tale jewels scattered. I feared vans with no windows.

My only strategy was retreat. I’d make myself long

and flat as a line so I could be mistaken for a horizon.

~

Now I’ve been colonized by little men with pointy

shoes and long to-do lists. Now, sleep is a delicate thing,

carefully tended. Now, I’m afraid to pack my suitcase:

I’ll forget what I most need. I still love yellow construction

equipment, deer eyes with big lashes, granite boulders

under my fingers. I’m in love with lava, melted rock from

Earth’s hot heart. I’m in love with this elusive miracle:

the little salt harvest mouse who eats pickleweed

and drinks salt water. I did not imagine, then, the wars

would keep coming and coming. I’m still afraid it’s my

fault. All of it. I still search for bits of quartz: sometimes

I buy polished eggs and shimmery spheres. I’m confused

about what to give God as an offering. My first

strategy is still retreat, but I have a few more tactics now.

This is what I miss: the grasshopper on my thumb,

heavier than it looks, gripping with its strange hooked

feet, the weight and tension of all that coiled potential.

Even My Ghosts are Rusty

Here’s my super power: give me a sip of your tap water

and I can taste

                            the rust in your pipes. When I was little,

rust meant docks and boats and salt air and a quiet horizon

and men with strong arms and hands, quiet as stones.

Now I have a dream house by the sea

                            which flakes away, bit by bit.

The edges of my favorite books have yellowed. My windshield

is pock-marked by bits of gravel. My desire is waterlogged.

Rust mottles the surface of my compass like shadows.

                            There’s rust in my lasagne.

Even my ghosts are rusty. They creak and move in slow motion.

They leave red-brown tracks on the stairs I chase with a vacuum.

Rust has no magnetism. No rizz.

                            But rust has hustle. You have to give it that.

It’s bubbling all the enamel on my new, cheap cookware.

Rust takes up more room than the metal it eats.

                            It frightens our foundations.

Still, there is something heavy and steady and slow in rust

that I like. The reminder that everything is a slow crumbling

                            and transformation.

                            Forever and ever. 

In my future, when it rains rust, what umbrella will I use?

---

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Assay, Brevity, Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work has been published in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in ONE ART, Only Poems, and Potomac Review.

James Kangas

If Wishes Are Forces...

Shit, dammit, hell—she’d had

a second son, she'd had

enough. Nipper, she said

(milking her clear chagrin),

I wish you had been born

a girl. Into the whorl

of my ear she pronounced

her burden. Like birdsong

then it flew from her mouth,

an impromptu refrain.

It became (my God!) my first

memory, except for

watching my father

piss in the tall grass

behind the woodshed one

indelible noon, that soft flesh         

unloosed from his fly.

When I got big enough

I tried to make her wish

come true--a blue skirt fished

from the rag box, a small

parade. But I outgrew that,

grew tall, grew hair on my chin.

Mother, wanting grandgirls now,

nudged me altarward: When

are you getting married?

In the arms of the best man

I've found yet, I think: Ma,

life suits me just the way it

turned out, thanks (or not)

to you whom some might blame

for wanting me in pink—

sackcloth I thought once

when nothing seemed to fit.

The truth is (well, some frayed

scrap of it)--slipping

into her wish, I found it

became me.

This piece first appeared at Chiron Review, Winter 1992.

Chart on the Wall

Reclusive almost, more than

wincingly shy (my eyes veering

towards a certain football player

I'd spot in the corridor), I didn't

date, I didn't think to

sham convention, I couldn’t have

faked it if I'd wanted to.

Come junior prom time, I had no

intentions—ostrichlike sank my

nose in Jules Verne. My chemistry

teacher got wind of this

and of Barbara D's datelessness,

kept me after lab and said:

If you don't ask her, I'm going to

do it for you. I protested,

and caved in.

              She sat cattycornered

from me, but I knew her only

as another wallposy, another latent

person.  I bought her a corsage

which dwarfed her breasts,

and we danced once, deadpan,

gaping mouths all around.

Of course she knew we wouldn’t bond—

we weren’t potassium and bromine

to be plugged into a formula,

Mr. Curie, Mr. Quack! And after your

public fizzle with our two incompatible

substances, I trust you took some time

(among your beakers, your burettes,

those twenty Bunsen burners) to mull

the periodic table of elements.

This piece first appeared at Chiron Review, Spring 1997.

---

James Kangas is a retired librarian living in Flint, Michigan. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Does It Have Pockets, The New York Quarterly, The Penn Review, Unbroken, et al. His chapbook, Breath of Eden (Sibling Rivalry Press), was published in 2019.

Beth Gordon

Question #1:

Have you experienced changes in your sleeping patterns?

I’m back on my bullshit again: watching murder television as a form of salvation. Cataloguing subgenres of violence & crime. Weaving my own small tragedy with strands of carpet fiber: stray eyelashes: observable traces of skin & blood beneath the victim’s fingernails. Saliva is always involved. A faint smell of bleach. Unanswered phone calls. Concerned co-workers. Frantic mothers. Indifferent & incompetent sheriffs who never seem to learn that missing certainly means dead.  The narrator’s voice is the cure to my insomnia. Turns out I’m not alone. Turns out that I no longer idolize the rippling of death: the river: the skyscraper: the open oven door: the razor’s edge: the messy exit in the form of tequila & Ambien. Turns out I no longer believe in the future. Turns out I can no longer fathom the past. I’m only awake in this moment: trying to convince my pillow to conform to the shape of my dread: dear God, help me: I just want to sleep through the night.

Memory of Sadness

I say that I remember watching the first moon landing. Cross-legged on utilitarian carpet. Inches from our neighbor’s console color television. Which sounds magnificent but was entirely inadequate to contain the hissing transmission of outer space. Also, the broadcast was in black & white. I never learned what colors swirl on that impossible terrain: 56 years later I still don’t know. I say that I remember we had been swimming that day. That my mother made us wait 30 minutes after eating charred hot dogs & soggy potato chips. She was/is a stickler for the rules and a child had drowned somewhere because of muscle cramps: overeating in the heat: a negligent babysitter who let him dive right in. Girls were required to wear swimming caps in 1969: a rule that would soon prove ridiculous in the face of long-haired men & short-haired women: the rising popularity of untamed androgyny.  I say that I remember grainy astronauts on the screen & maybe it’s true. Not all memories are re- cycled versions of someone else’s stories. Some take root: wrap their tentacles around your heart.

---

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother living in Asheville, NC. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press), Crone (Louisiana Literature), and The First Day (Belle Point Press). Her second full-length collection, Alchemy of Nests, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2027. Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Instagram, Threads and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.

John Dorroh

You Ought to Know My Face by Now

It’s an inch and a half between the inside corners of my eyes,

and three from the tip of my nose to the bottom of my chin.

The diameter of my mouth is that of a jumbo garden hose,

rather a small kisser for a man who makes such noise.

My hairline receded two inches in the time it takes

to read Ulysses 100 times. Sunlight reflects

off my forehead like a potato wrapped in foil,

a beacon of hope in stormy weather, the poster child

for managed fragility. Images in your rearview mirror

may appear larger than they are.

I share genes with a chameleon: Hazel eyes when I wear

green shirts, brown when I tell you lies. If eyes are the windows

to the soul, I must be dying in boiling water.

My head fits neatly into a square-foot box, but don’t forget

to punch some breathing holes so I won’t suffocate.

My face is one-sixth of a cube. It announces itself

so that you will never forget. Roll it like a die,

see what number comes up. You should have every inch

of it memorized by now.

On Opening a Jar of Vlasic Pickles

I’m good at opening jars for those who seem to find them glued

shut, tight like mouths in a fire. It’s not a particularly strong grip,

more of the way I hold my lips, such grimace, a parfait of emotions

all bottled up, squeezed like toothpaste from the bottom of the

tube. I tap it on the rim of the lid with the dull side of a huge butcher

knife, cascades of warm water under the tap. Sooner or later,

 it gives way.

This is one technique to reach a destination. This is how I do it

on stormy days. I don’t ever use a flashlight because the batteries

are always dead. I plunge forward in the dark, unafraid – perhaps

a bit anxious – and certainly not nimble. Those days are long gone.

---

John Dorroh travels as often as possible. He inevitably ends up in other peoples’ kitchens exchanging culinary tidbits and telling tall tales. Once he baked bread with Austrian monks and drank a healthy portion of their beer. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Others have appeared in over 100 journals, including Feral, North of Oxford, River Heron, Wisconsin Review, Kissing Dynamite, and El Portal. He had two chapbooks published in 2022. He lives in rural Illinois, USA, near St. Louis.

Anthony DeGregorio

Sitting in Putnam Hospital Center Lobby

Half the conversations in the hospital’s lobby today pause—

The passing speaker stops walking to sip coffee; fumbles for keys;

Turns to face the listener for emphasis or in surprise—

Then resume along with the hurried strides

Even more determined on departure, soles treading,

Tearing away awkwardly loud, aware with each step

Of the adhesions to a well-travelled floor,

And have, for the most part,

To do with eating and shitting,

The other exchanges mostly centering around fear, famine, death, and/or guilt.

It’s so much like being back at the dinner table when I was growing up

That I expect my father to resurrect himself, fork in dirt-blotched hand,

Cutlery still sanguine with tomato sauce, damp earth tone dark

With braciola, the speared meat and its guts

Shred between the tines,

Asking if I was learning anything in school, and reminding everyone

Before I could answer that the toothpicks and string,

Used to hold the rolled delight together, be saved for future use.

And my mother to ponder aloud in her chair

                                                                                                                        (as if I were not there)

When someone was going to cut my hair.

Her 180º dramatically subtle surveillance

For a coiffeur’s apparition, hovering

In a corner only she knew back then,

(Not unlike her own glow

In this lobby now) His

Hands slick with

Shampoo

Dripping, extended

Over a sink still warm

From drained pasta water

And coated in the milky trans-

Lucency of starch residue, adding

Italian special effects to this eerie scene,

As her eyes continued slowly moving, left

To right, from appliance to menacing appliance,

Her face and body contorting, exaggerated 

In silent movie mannerisms secretly un-

Folding before the green screen of

Our kitchen’s fruit wallpaper.

A crescendo of suspenseful music muted …

(The crackling chaos of memory’s bleary background reverberating with commercials and news pouring from AM stations and syphoned through a brown RCA radio suspended on a small wooden shelf adjacent to the classic Last Supper reproduction witnessing every meal we had in that kitchen, jingles for cigarettes & gum beer & Brylcreem manically upbeat preceding or following AP reports and local human interest stories of tragedy or triumph)

                                                                       … the sound of snipping silver scissors,

A strange metallic staccato conjuring imminent loss

Among my then-thick long strands,

A thatch of curly brown hysteria

Tremoring  #$^()_*%@!

Standing frizzily

On end.

I am hallucinating the smells of broccoli rabe and chicken z’armi,

The language of lost years and shadows, of insecurity and grief,

In the unseasoned aesthetic of a hospital lobby,

As the elevators open and close,

For visitors and patients;

Doctors on cell phones looking distracted as discontinued monitors

As they increase the pace of their gait toward the rear exit;

The lost faces of those holding no change of clothes,

No newly released book to finish, returning for a last stay;

The newborn wide eyes mapping a strange geography,

Bound and bundled bodies in blankets on a summer day.

All the while smiling volunteers in bright jackets at the front desk struggle to

Two-finger type long consonant laden names for room number inquiries.

The faint smell of disinfectant and oatmeal

From the floors above mists the still air

Stirred only now when a body passes.

A door is held open too long.  

An absentminded exit

Prolongs in

Pause—

Catches in a slowly revolving door.

Beyond its strained curved glass

A circling lane leads out off the grounds.

Valets at another entrance to the left 

Repeatedly leave and return throughout the day.

A vague humidity pressing upon the windows

Overcasts the view into the back parking lot

That I’ve blurred for forty minutes.

The roped off player piano begins a new tune,

A text vibrates a shirt pocket, a pant leg, into a sweaty palm

Bleeding the BiC-Blue of a paperless reminder,

A phone number, an errand, a name,

Scrawled into clammy flesh, smeared, lost forever

To anxiety-stained memory and primary hyperhidrosis.

How’s he doing today? Any better?  How does she feel?  Any change?

Same.                                                               :(                                      …

---

Anthony DeGregorio’s writing has appeared or is scheduled to appear in various publications including Mande, Yellow Mama, Yearling, The Raven Review, TheRavensPerch, Libre, Abandoned Mine, Italian America Magazine, Phantom Drift, Aromatica Poetica, Bloom, Nowhere, Wales Haiku Journal, Polu Texni, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He taught writing at Manhattanville College for twenty years, and in another life or two or three he worked in various capacities for the Department of Social Services, much of that time while teaching at night. Prior to that, and brief stints at a myriad of jobs in another century beyond time, is anyone’s guess, but please don’t let that stop you.

Ren Wilding

Resistance

                       After Rebecca Solnit

I am a penguin

with my back to the cold

I am a musk ox with horns

facing the wolf

I want my turn at the center

of a reindeer cyclone

protected as their young

inside a whirling ring

of bodies and hooves

I want to be soft

but I’m afraid

the inside of the circle

will be gone soon

how many laws

are you willing to break

to keep the predators at bay

or will you give up

join with the wolves

On January 20, 2025, I Thought of My Own Grave

I never wanted a grave,

just scatter my ashes

or keep them in a jar.

But if I die because

of government violence,

I want a fucking grave.

I want children to come

on school tours

and teachers to say:

the name on this headstone

is one this person chose.

They were openly trans.

They loved themself

and did not stop

even when the government

tried to take everything.

No one could take

their love.

I want trans children

to know someone fought

so they could be here,

so they could grow up,

so they could grow old.

I don’t want flowers.

I only want graves

dug when we die old,

asleep in beds in quiet moments

when our loves have left the room.

Loves who will put the names

we chose on memorial pamphlets.

Memorials filled with all our loves.

I want us to come, to live,

and go from life adored.

If this isn’t forgotten,

if we never go back—

You can use my body,

my headstone

to build this world.

---

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet who earned an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri. Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), The Comstock Review, One Art, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Red Eft Review, Tulip Tree, Zoetic Press, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, have received a Pushcart nomination, and are co-curator of the Words Like Blades reading series. Their chapbook, Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2026.

Sheila Wellehan

Breakage

I break things—

vases, dinner plates, friendships.

I stomp and I scare and I smash.

I pound what I love

into a fine powder with a hammer,

then grind the dust into the ground

with my heels.

When I sweep up the mess,

hours or years later,

I breathe in the vapor

of what I’ve destroyed.

It seeps into every cell

and swims through

my bloodstream. I break things,

then they break me

from the inside.

Heist

It looked like salvation,

or at least sustenance,

something to get me through the night.

The humble potato at the 7-11

was bathed in holy florescent light.

I studied the staff, overwhelmed

by the crush of midnight customers.

I watched other shoppers,

busy scooping up six-packs

and microwaving dubious snacks.

I placed my hand gingerly on the potato.

I wrapped my fingers around it, trying to hide it.

Then I whooshed the potato into my pocket.

I’d have food with my whiskey tonight—

if I didn’t get caught.

I wandered up and down the aisles,

pretending to scan them, pretending to consider

boxes of Hostess Donettes and cans of SpaghettiOs.

No one suspected my thievery.

No one acknowledged my existence.

No one noticed me at all.

Emboldened by my success in evading detection,

I snatched a mini-cup of Half & Half

at the coffee dispenser near the door.

I popped it into my other pocket

then casually sauntered out.

Walking home to my basement apartment,

I felt the haul sheltered in my pockets,

and smiled at my fortune, my wealth.

I caressed the potato’s smooth hollows

and mysterious pebbles, the Half & Half’s slick plastic ribs.

I’d harvested sustenance

to fill my belly and fuel me,

luxury to transform the staple into a delicious dish.

I felt ancestors from Sligo, Cork, and Kerry

nod approvingly at me.

---

Sheila Wellehan’s poetry is featured in On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, Rust & Moth, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whale Road Review, and many other publications. She’s served as an assistant poetry editor for The Night Heron Barks and an associate editor for Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. Sheila lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. You can read her work at www.sheilawellehan.com .

Lisa Low

Crush

 I thrilled to think how fast those hands

could pull me from a fire, but it was

what you said about Plath that made

you my god. Standing at the board,

dragging your fist down the chalk,

talking of the shock Emily Dickinson

gave you, I caught every come hither

look you threw. Poetry already had me

in its arms; already bent its intoxicating

lips to mine, but coming from you,

it was a new kind of love. I planted

myself in the front row and swung

at every fastball you threw, skidding

past home, skirt-up, to please you.

I wanted to catch your eye, then maybe

your heart, but you weren’t as clever

as I thought, and it was easy to make you

smart; easy to catch you in my crosshairs

and plummet you to something small.

I was young and I wanted to win, and

I didn’t know then, how much and how

dearly, I would pay for it later: my sin.

Henrietta

My father was always on the move

or on the run; fast-talking with strangers,

heading out for a beer; having no

time for us; showing up late for dinner,

my mother in the kitchen, stomping

her foot and saying damn that man; but, 

in his old age, my father fell head over

heels for a squirrel he named Henrietta.

He dreamt about her nights and kneeled

on the back porch to feed her crumbs.

Shyly, as if they were courting, she came

up the back steps; shyly, as if they were 

courting, he fed her acorns from his open hand.

---

Lisa Low was first runner-up for the Shakespeare Prize at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets 2025 and shortlisted for Ploughshares.  Her work has appeared in many literary journals including The Adroit Journal, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Phoebe, and Southern Indiana Review. Her first chapbook Late in the Day was released in July 2025 from Seven Kitchens Press.

Barbara Krasner

I Am the Grout of Tesserae Memory

After The Farm by Joan Miró (Spain), 1921-1922

 The red concrete porch floor grounded our secret annex,

the extension of the Manor house out onto the oak-lined

street leading out of town and county. From here I tie

a plastic jump rope through iron railings and make a swing,

elastic to hold my weight and I purvey my domain.

The mosaic mezuzah is the gatekeeper to the annex,

inside crouches its tiny message to bless this home. The door jamb

between then and now, now and when I took it

after my mother’s death and nailed it to my own threshold.

Like the bubble wands we used to create liquid magic,

like the shards of slate to create the landings

between red brick stairs of the white clapboard house,

like the jacks and marbles we tossed around

in circles while it rained, we remained protected

by the grout of our grounding, the caulking of our past.

A Poem about the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

The front brick stairs trip my new patent leather

shoes and I go flying to the slate sidewalk, my knee

ripped yet again. All I wanted to do was show

the girl across the street I have shiny new shoes

that make me feel more grown-up than a first-grader.

My father takes me in his arms and puts me

in the station wagon and off we go to the hospital,

his hands full of my blood. I’ve never been to this place,

with hallways filled with quick padded steps and beeps

and moans. The doctor stitches up my knee

and I will have this scar for life. He gives me

a cherry lollipop for being so brave.

---

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in more than sixty literary journals, including Here: A Poetry Journal, Nimrod, and Cimarron Review. She is the author of an ekphrastic poetry chapbook, Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025). She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

Alison Hicks

Dog Nose Solstice

Velvet dipped in milk.

Young dog, like the year, wants nothing

but to play.

All weather is of interest.

He snuffles flakes fragrant as fur.

Legs and body lift straight up, come down.

Paws stretch chestward, cantilevering.

Almond eyes ringed with black.

My son pulling me outside, begging

me to throw a ball.

Little boy, I cannot run and hope to keep up

I so don’t want to lose you in the snow.

The Gray

I was with my father when he crossed

into the gray between dying and dead.

His voice clogged and cracked

until it disappeared. I took an hour

to walk the beach, waded through pools

low tide had left. It won’t be long now,

the hospice nurse said.

I’d read the booklet, tried to fix the signs.

Recognized nothing.

Sun through skylights. How long

did we stand there? Sit?

I must have sat, held his hand

blue seeping under the nails.

With the dog of my childhood

I felt something pass out of the body in my lap.

What a beautiful death, the nurse said.

I held his hand, but I can’t remember.

Barbara and I on the couch drinking scotch.

That was after. I must have called her.

I was with him when. Memory skips,

running ahead to catch up.

Afterlife

Follow no body

sustain no need

eat same daylight

night planets & stars

same northern lights sleep

curled up in grasses like a dog.

The unknowing

bends & oxbows

depths shallows

marshes & fens.

It will widen

& empty salts

dissolving float inland

breathed into bodies

living out on earth before

the following.

---

Alison Hicks’ fourth collection of poems is Homing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024). She was awarded the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press for Knowing Is a Branching Trail. Previous collections are You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, and a novella Love: A Story of Images. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, among other literary magazines. She was named a finalist for the 2021 Beullah Rose prize from Smartish Pace, an Editor’s Choice selection for the 2024 Philadelphia Stories National Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern, Quartet Journal, and Nude Bruce Review. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

Kathleen Rooney

Cinquain For How, Because It Happened To Be On My Kindle, I Read My Man Jeeves By P.G. Wodehouse In India And Found It Hilarious

Wondered

whether, under

capitalism, we

are all valets to the idle

wealthy.

Cinquain For How When I Travel Abroad, I Think About Whether I’m In A Place My Mom Would Visit Or Not

This one?

Not. But if she

did? Peacocks at a road-

side pit stop. Chai in terra cot-

ta pots.

Cinquain For How, At The Taj Mahal, White Marble Monument To Eternal Love, The Guide Had Each Of Us Pose On The Princess Di Bench For A Photo

In the

scrum, someone, some

random creepy man, grabbed

my ass with both hands. Just fully

honked it.

Cinquain For How India Is The Most Populous Country On The Globe With 1.4 Billion People, Which Means That There Is More Of Everything, Including Poverty

Beggars

pointing spindly

fingers at their mouths, hawk-

ing statues—who they resemble—

of gods.

Cinquain For How One Morning, We Were Doing Yoga Outside And I Heard A Lot Of Little Birds Babbling In The Jungle, And When I Looked Them Up, I Learned They’re Called Jungle Babblers And Wondered If The Brits Were Overwhelmed By The Species Diversity In The Subcontinent And Just Felt Like They Had To Name Everything Really Fast

[Sees bird

pooping from tree]

Tree pooper! New species!

Write it up, gov! Jolly good cheer-

io. 

---

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press and her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023. Her debut picture book Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister, Beth Rooney, is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2025. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.

R.C. Hoerter

Torn Grocery Bag, Food Lion Parking Lot

I see you, my love, alone

at the curb’s edge, perched

shyly, brown paper fluttering

in this pedestrian breeze,

poised to take flight.

I forgive you before you think

to ask. Your modest gesture—

an outstretched, unglued handle—

incinerates my heart as only

sackcloth and ashes can do.

I only ask one thing: Lift me

above the swirling boil

of flimsy plastic skittering

across the asphalt, make small

the SUV rooftops and shopping carts.

We’ll ascend on a thousand

feathers, a surging hurricane

making ponds of parking lots,

reflective windshield glass

a silver dance of light.

You never knew your beauty

down there, beloved, but now

see with a lover’s eyes

your soaring conversion,

origami wings climbing

up and up and up,

the folded become holy,

the torn, immortal sky.

---

Reincarnation

A few years after the funeral,

Dad roared back as a '57 Chevy,

shifter on the steering wheel,

Space Age tail fins and curved glass.

Mom knew it was him

and she was not pleased.

Who could blame her?

Sixty years ago, she wrecked

his baby and he’d moaned

about it ever since. Now

he was back, not a bang

or a dent, gun-metal

gray a match for his hair

in later years, blame

thundering up as a coupe

with swooping lines and vacuum-

powered windshield wipers.

She wouldn’t even talk to him,

just blew town in her BMW.

“Why now?” I asked.

Did his chrome grill grin?

He opened his door

so I climbed in.

We tore outta there,

Chuck Berry turned up

loud enough to rattle

the solid steel dashboard,

cruisin’ and playin’ the radio

with no particular place to go.

---

R.C. Hoerter lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. His poems have previously appeared in Mid-American Review, Whiskey Tit Journal, Cacti Fur, and The Mountain anthology from Middle Creek Publishing. His MFA is from Colorado State University, where he won the AWP Intro Award.

Max Polenberg

Separation Anxiety 

I am an organ donor, and that should make me feel good 

but I'm already so used to giving pieces of myself away,

That I'm worried my death would feel like an average afternoon

I wish I could remain selfish in death and stay intact for once–

each piece of me holding tightly onto the next

But that little mark on my license

stands as a sinister little reminder

that I may never have the privilege of remaining whole

But it's the right thing to do, isn't it?

Like when I gave my favorite pen

to that boy in my chemistry class

knowing I'd never see it again

even though he said he'd give it back to me 

because that's who he is: the boy who loses pens

and this is who I am: the boy who gives him all my pens to lose

---

I Have Changed My Name Three Times, But I Still Don’t Know Who I Am

I have read the "Top 1,000 Baby Boy Names" twice over

But none of them suited me

Liam, Noah, Oliver

None of them conveyed how I used to cry at ASPCA commercials,

that I once tried to unlearn the English language

so I could remain a wild animal 

not limited by 26 letters

James, Elijah, William

But I am tired from giving birth to myself

Life breeding life, you see

Is only sustainable for so long

Eating away like the snake with its tail

Henry, Lucas, Benjamin

I chase after myself

A version that can be put into words

Something tasteful and polished,

And easy to understand

Something I can swallow 

and spit back up for you

Theodore, Mateo, Levi

But the words get lost in my stomach

They come back half-digested and mucusy,

Bloodied and mixed with baby teeth

'Cause I can't define myself

If I don't know who I am

Leo, Jackson, Mason

When I do nothing but wait 

with my hands folded in my lap

For the tragedy of my being

To become heartfelt and alluring

I am waiting so patiently

to feel fully formed

Sebastian, Daniel, Jack

But there's no name here 

that tells you what I'm too afraid to say

That I lie in my diary in case someone reads it, 

change my name when I'm scared of my existence, 

and try to unlearn the English language

so I can escape my own humanity 

and the need for a name to introduce myself with

Michael, Alexander, Owen

Humanity between my teeth 

is humanity nonetheless

So, I am trapped as I currently am—

my tail lodged in my throat

and needing a title to present myself with

So, I'll go back to the top of the list

Liam, Noah, Oliver

---

Max Polenberg is a 20-year-old college student studying creative writing at Hunter College. Writing since childhood, Max enjoys sharing his experiences as a transgender man. Find more of Max Polenberg’s work on TikTok: @givingthesinnerwings

Francis Luo

Self-Portrait As Young Love

            for K.N.

In December, my friend offered to murder me

in the Sierra Nevada, and I accepted. We drove

up crumbling mountain roads until snow fell 

off of trees and out of clouds: melting clumps 

setting the stage for next year's ruthless road 

erosion. The pine needles spoke cold silence. 

In a darkened snowy clearing, we set off fire

-works that gleamed like stars in the blank 

night, then went supernova. Ooh and ah. 

The anxious sun rose, standing over snow 

marred by black remnant ash that we ref-

used to clean up. I sent an ecstatic laugh 

or cry into the sky like a flare, luminant 

as it danced through the uncertain gray

pallor, and had to be symbolic of some

thing. Later, twig-thin rivulets of red 

seeped into crystal white, spurting 

forth from cold hands above snow

above soil where an earthworm

could fertilize growths of green

or flowers the following spring.

My friend drove back down to

the Bay alone.

---

Optometry 

"Your vision is like mine," says the optometrist

in his cream-white microfiber voice. Clanky

machines, pretentious whirring lenses, are waiting

silently in the corner of the room to be used. "Myopia,"

says the optometrist, "which is just nearsightedness.

Did you know that's what it's called?" An answer tumbles

like a pancake out of my mouth, and he cuts me off.

"Are you applying to schools this year?" asks the optometrist,

and I tell him I will be next year, and he says nothing.

The lenses cast their ocular magic over my eyes.

Click, whir, clear, blur.

"Do you wear your glasses while driving?" asks the optometrist,

and I tell him no, I don't drive, and he tells me I'll need

to bring them to my driving test. On the monitor across the room,

my eyes perceive crisp sans serif letters as the vague

orangey purple proportions of clouds at dusk, streaming gloriously

past the windshield during my crepuscular car ride

in the passenger seat, and I tell the optometrist, I still see

the retreating figure 

of the setting sun.

---

Francis Luo is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area who has recently been published in Echo Literary Magazine, the Incandescent Review, and Crashtest Magazine. He's constantly surprised to learn that he writes more poetry than he thinks he does.

Charles Leggett

This Happens

1

This is the evening sky of many statues.

Of dim, white archipelagos. Of floating

Rorschach tests. Of ghosts out on a haunt,

drifting in formation with a menace

that passes just as they do. Of we sleepers

in fishbowls of our mild yet urgent tide

of dreams. Elongating and thinning; fading,

some, from white to pallid gray. And those

directly overhead, like island nations,

caricatures of kings' heads on old coins,

or etchings of a withered Pantalone.

Behind them, curtain of a solemn, silty

middling blue that's punctuated by

a dozen outmatched stars and morning birdcall.

2

The news collapses in upon itself.

Headlines falling into ornery stacks

like floors of a disaster movie's star

collapsing skyscraper. Instead of billboards,

thumbtacks; numbing, numberless. One's own

hips balking at the weight they bear. A dark

thrilling, these failures. Wet farts foisted into

a cavernous, old toilet in an other-

wise silent if not restive building. Vivid

faces reassembling their details

as if in a collage. The wet-dream cock tug

of a cigarette's first drag. And pounding

and adumbrating and accelerating,

until the life's a wilding and slow-motion

crescendo of wet footsteps, honking horns,

squealing tires, take-downs, ownings, bleated

algorithms, strident belches into

a deep aquamarine that's scarred by stars.

A woman, unperturbed, October 1st,

who rocks a Santa coat and beanie on

a Light Rail car. How will it ever end?

October gray as uniforms of war.

A gray evincing bones, bent over, as

cloud-cover blanket. Under footsteps, whitened

swirls all round, and wails across the flashings

of red-and-blue. The clouds arranged like large

dogs on the pewter carpet of a living

room floor, awaiting what involves them next

with varying amounts of patience. Looming,

as with purpose – the odd satellite

or star conveying its disarming distance

before it disappears behind the hounds'

flanks – with intimacy of these living

room floors. And are there samples of such blue?

These cryptic mirrors have been teaching us

for centuries... O thick, white pelts, blues, grays,

what have we learned, whatever have we learned?

3

The sky, with many distant fires, growls.

Is this moon ripped in half by light, or darkness?

4

This happens, and we shiver, the demotic

conflux of living now foregone, sensations

spread before us like a mural – they

inhabit us, we don't inhabit them.

And held close, each, as though the sky had gone

clear, or what was going to happen that

would let one turn a page had happened and

the words gone sweeping by, returned to dark.

---

Layover: Empress Hotel           

outside Kuala Lumpur

This building rises nakedly up

from rows of yellow three-story flats

like an elegant wart from the crown

of a dentist's hovering knuckle.

Lurching half-hour's drive from the airport;

lobby and halls suffused in prayer

chants piped in through a subtle PA

system. "Help in Time of Need” leads off

the Gideons' list of "Suggested

Readings" from the worn Bible they've "Placed"

 – next, as it happens, to The Teachings

of Buddha – in what I'll call the drawer

of need. Now, techno dance beats debouch

from a stoop below, across the street,

next door to Naeshan Trading, where men

in T-shirts are hunched at card tables

under a naked bulb's margarine light.

An equivocal phrase, "drawer of need";

need drawn as baths are drawn – immersion;

or sketched, in lines of a face – mundane,

sweet, straining to become familiar

in a nakedness dressed to the nines.

This piece was first published in Scarlet Leaf Review, Toronto, January 2016.

---

Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA, and a 2022 Lunt-Fontanne Fellow. Recent/forthcoming publications include KINPAURAK, THE ENGINE(IDLING, Beach Chair Press, ELLIE MAGAZINE, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, and Anomaly Poetry's latest RITUALS anthology; his chapbook HARD LISTENING appears in the latest Ravenna Press “Triple” series edition, No. 25. Charles’s co-adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS premiered in 2024 at Intiman Theatre with The Seagull Project, and his poetry film short TO FONDLE NOTHING has screened as an Official Selection at film festivals in the US, the UK (Scotland and England), Portugal, Serbia, Italy, and Austria.

Hilary King

Shopping

My husband and I go shopping for a sofa. My husband brings a book to the store. I bring knitting, laundry, a stack of New Yorkers, and a copy of Moby Dick.  We want something firm but giving. The back is important. I like this one, my husband says of a low brown sofa. He read Moby Dick in high school. He puts his feet up on the glass coffee table in front of him and opens his book. I get up to check something in the kitchen but there is no kitchen, just more sofas and more husbands, sitting on them, reading, the wives wandering into the kitchen to check on something, the stack of New Yorkers growing ever taller, the knitting unraveling, the whale in Melville’s ocean still swimming. What was it I needed to check on in the kitchen?  I find a green velvet chaise lounge, which is like a couch with one third of a back. I lounge on it. Did they ever find the whale? I know I can learn this without reading, the way we could buy a sofa online, the way we could divorce, my husband and I, sit apart, or recline with other people. I covet the chaise lounge but it doesn’t fit where I live, and besides, the sofa is on sale.

---

Crawlspace

I had the wildest dream last night.

The microwave was broken,

so I climbed inside it, sat

in a circle and reheated the soup.

Then I lay on the roof and let rain

collect in my elbows. I put my hand

to the crack in the foundation

that’s always been there, winking

at me. This is the dream I thought

I wanted, to be the one to hold up

the walls. I’m not strong enough

to keep every brick in place.

My face won’t hang straight in its frame.

I wring out my needs, but my hands swell,

like clouds, like rage.

I lift the whole rotten house and toss it.

I am a tornado, spitting, spinning,

dreaming my own silver dreams.

---

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, and other publications. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. She loves hiking, travel, and ribbon.