2 / Poems
Stephen Ackerman
Enchanted Ladder
When you stand
On the step stool
When you reach
For the book on the high shelf
I want to climb the enchanted ladder
Of you I want to pull the ladder up
Behind me to be alone with you
In the light of the nightlight
Our nightlife in the shadow of books
By the sleeping dreaming dogs
And the violet periwinkle stars
Of the periwinkle in the forest
I said it’s you who are the lovely one
But not the lovely one I love
Best of all
Petals arranged like a pinwheel
Pinwheel like a galaxy
A vinca of such delicacy
The pinwheels in the forest
Waiting for a wind
That will stir them
They will sway
In their slow vinca dance
That we will copy
In a demure vertigo of falling
Into sleep
One leg sliding
Against another leg a foot
Is it yours is it mine
Lightly tapping another foot
My lovely one my lovely one
I see you there
In the fog
Had you dressed in it
In the nightgown fog of a dream
If you wake before I wake
Wake me from my dream
Of you to you the real you
You who said I had the last
Of your beauty
Stephen Ackerman’s debut poetry collection, Late Life, won the 2020 Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2022. His poems have appeared in many print and online publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Manhattan Review, Mudfish, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Two poems from Late Life were set to music by Max Raimi, a violist and composer with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The settings were performed in 2025 as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music Series. Learn more at stephenackermanpoetry.com.
Susan Aizenberg
Elegy for Blackburn
(she/said I wrote ‘out-of-the-window poems’: it is true.)
— “March 1971,” Paul Blackburn
This morning’s all birdsong
and sunlight, and like you,
here I am again writing one
of those out-of-the-window
poems you admitted. Is this why
once more you’ve come
to me perched on the corner
of your battered desk
among listing stacks of books
and papers, an April day
like this one, the foolish girl
I was standing before you
in your Cortland office, this scene
to which I keep returning?
You seemed to me a kindly god—
how you’d have laughed at that—
with your mass of wild black hair,
your thick black glasses
and dark, dark beard, no sign yet
of the cancer devouring
your cells at forty-four. And here,
again, am I—oh, always the self—
nineteen and barefoot, ragged hems
of my bell-bottoms dragging
dirt and leaves on your sun-
warmed floor, all mans and likes,
anxious giggles. Someone easy
to dismiss. But here you are,
​
leaning toward me, stained pages
I’d torn from my looseleaf—
a suicide story, purple
with my adolescent griefs—
in your gentle hand. Here you
are, reading back to me,
as if my words might matter,
its final image—
there are three dots swirling, very hot
for blue, up out of the dark—
lines I still recall because you
called them good. And now
the birds—sparrows, my app says—
have gone quiet, but it’s not
symbolic. I confess when you
died that September my sorrow
was mostly for myself. As now
it’s for myself I conjure you
back home in New York City,
crossing against the light
at 7th and Bleecker, a paper cup
of coffee in one hand, a warm bialy
in the other, smiling, or even
humming, a cheap notebook
thick with your ebullient poems
beneath your still-living arm.
Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection is A Walk with Frank O’Hara (UNMP/Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series 2024). She’s also author of Quiet City (BkMk 2015), and Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002). Recent poems appear and are forthcoming in Plume, On the Seawall, SWWIM, on The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the VCU Levis Reading Prize, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Book Award in Poetry, and the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association. Aizenberg is professor emerita of English/CW at Creighton University and now lives and writes in Iowa City. She can be reached at her website: susanaizenberg.com.
Marcia Aldrich
Object of Spatial Manipulation
​
Unlike me, the snake shed all her skin at once,
Worn out, damaged, outgrown by what she had become.
Escape was not so simple as pulling off an old sweater.
Her eyes turned milky for the metamorphosis,
She rubbed the rocks and mulch in a two-step,
Contracting, expanding, to break the old near her snout,
And she emerged in a new radiance.
I found the old skin near the rock wall where I first saw her heating.
Curled among the nasturtiums, she had unsettled me,
Her sleek head resting in gold blossom.
And when she disappeared into the hole below my bedroom window,
Her new residence my indigo, she tested me.
I wanted her to leave, I admit it.
This is where she stepped out of herself,
Sure I would find her gift, pristine,
A sleeve of two feet or three in the shape of her,
The green lozenges that crossed the long ribbon of black
Turned into horizontals of cream and toffee.
I don’t know what any of this means,
Why the snake has chosen me,
Why she has left herself for me
Why after a lifetime of shunning
I have felt her heart beating inside.
She wanted me to bring her home, and so I did.
How could I pass by?
Even I who feel the shame of fear
Could not leave her there
For the rain to pound her,
Thin enough to blow away on the wind.
She curls over a span of driftwood in my study,
looking down, head pointing at me, though slightly lifted.
Imagine her look of transformation.
Imagine stepping out of your skin,
unzipping from one to another,
Leaving behind a litany.
My skin wears out every day
In microscopic flakes no one can see.
And when I look at her, I am afraid.
Marcia Aldrich is the author of Girl Rearing (W.W. Norton), Companion to an Untold Story (University of Georgia Press), editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia Press), Edge (New Michigan Press), and Studio of the Voice (Wandering Aehgus Book Award).
Grace Bauer
Mayday
Even the birds seem to be keeping their distance
this bright morning in this dark time. Spring taunts
with its annual spectacle, insistent on renewal
despite the lamentations of the morning news—
fatalities charted on a curve that crests
like a lone wave in a lonelier storm, a graph
that keeps track of the dead, but discounts
what living meant before they become
part of today’s sad statistic.
We’ve been taken into custody by fear, our sentences
still undetermined—could be another month of solitary,
could be the death of us all. For now, there’s uncertainty
and outrage about what, or who, might be out to get us.
You can’t keep us in prison! One protestor screamed,
which made me think of my brother, his years behind bars.
If he were still alive, would he find this new normal
pretty much like the old one? If he were out on parole,
would he mind this confinement or be too lost
in his familiar habit to notice. Or care.
I remember he said sometimes a square of sky
through glass was all he had, for days, of outside.
At least I have this yard to escape to, overcrowded
with weeds as it may be. The creeping charlie
has, you might say, gone viral— transforming
what has never quite been lawn into a purple haze
studded with little suns of dandelion.
The day lilies are already choking out the roses.
Still I recognize a refuge when I see one,
and since I’m the only human breathing in its air,
I can inhale without worry, even sneeze
without eliciting death glares from strangers,
though it does scare off the birds that started me
on this ramble—following an image of flight
to see where words might take me, the end point
as unpredictable as the pandemic lurking behind this poem.
Both will have to end somehow, sometime.
And the birds are already back. So, dear reader, linger
with me and imagine them—on the fencepost, at the feeder.
Revel in the scent of the lilacs that must be blooming
in some distant neighbor’s yard.​
Grace Bauer has published six books of poems—most recently, Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems. She also co-edited the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.
Stephen Benz
Variations on a Theme of Paul Tillich: “Mirrors of our Predicament”
1.
Up ahead, a crossroads without signage.
On the dash, a map with conflicting data.
In the rear-view, a pair of eyes posing
the conundrum: What next?
2.
Oh, honey, you’re in one hell of a bind, ain’t you:
her exact words, said with a smirk.
This in a bar up the Alaska Highway,
miles from nowhere. A bind?
I’d never been more unbounded,
or so I thought. Then I saw my reflection:
glum and somewhat worse for drink.
3.
The quandary K. described so well
in Either/Or—we were living it,
each day requiring indelicate decisions,
or perhaps delicate indecisions.
And you, always popping open
that compact case, studying yourself
in changing light, searching
for the right color.
4.
Seven years old, slumped on a block
in the barber’s chair, perilously
subjected to the humming razor,
I watched in the mirror my mother
flipping the fashion pages and saying
without a glance, Sit up straight, child.
5.
In fairy tales, magic mirrors
possess the wherewithal to
answer questions, resolve predicaments.
Wicked, conflicted, hard of heart—
these mirrors appear
to tell the truth
you want to hear
until they don’t.
6.
The pond, perfectly calm, reflected the world
all around—trees, footbridge, summer sky,
those continental clouds that presage storms.
It was time to make a choice, yet I sat there,
staring at the water-mirror, lingering in stasis.
7.
Mirror ball spinning, my cousin
on the dance floor, her mare’s nest
of a wedding day. Everyone thinking
amid the twirling spots of light,
Well, she didn’t have much choice, did she?
8.
Velázquez paints himself painting the dwarf,
the mirror behind him reflecting the painter
painting the painter who paints the dwarf.
On and on it goes, our certainty diminishing
well before we reach the vanishing point.
9.
At seventeen I was sweet on
a surgeon’s daughter. Visiting
the posh house, entrance way
a hall of mirrors, I saw myself
as they must have seen me:
janitor’s kid in need of a haircut.
10.
“Mirror in the Bathroom” was the radio song
that mocked my predicament: caught in traffic,
late for an appointment across town,
my fate already sealed.
11.
Tour of Graceland: a mirrored staircase descends
to the den where Elvis watched TV,
fireplace embedded in a wall of mirrors.
Then the game room lined with pleated fabric,
the jungle room’s animal totems and fetishes.
A porcelain monkey. A waterfall. Everywhere
reflections. How did he, the so-called king,
negotiate all these mirrors, seeing himself
in decline, in predicament, in dread?
The audio tour doesn’t say.
12.
Riddle: What is more pointed
than the horns of a dilemma?
Answer: A mirror hung
in the entryway of a funeral home.
13.
I stood on the sidewalk looking up.
The bank building’s windows reflected
the empty sky, the tower I must ascend.
One way or another
I would have to get through
the next hour, none of the options good.
14.
Isn’t the scene as Chandler depicts it
a marvel of subtext, saying so much
when so little is said? Marlowe;
the rich dame; the two-way behind which
the tormented husband watches
the cynical predicament play out.
15.
From the last pew, I listened
to the lector laying bare
the soul’s plight: For now
we see through a glass darkly.
16.
Take a moment, think it over
before giving us your answer.
Then the long walk down a cold corridor,
the institutional restroom, mirrors
above every sink telling me
I’m making a big mistake.
17.
Persistently, insolently, every mirror
we ever gaze into answers with the name
of the alter ego we can never be.
18.
Having been under fire
in the shellshocked trenches
of the Western Front; having been
hounded into exile by the Third Reich,
Paul Tillich, existentialist theologian,
late in life haunted the galleries of
the postmodern metropolis
and understood: one day we all
must come at last face to face with
the mirrors of our predicament.
Stephen Benz has published four books of creative nonfiction, including Topographies and Reading the Signs (both from Etruscan Press). He has also published two volumes of poetry, Americana Motel (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.) and The Ghost Owl Says Go Now (Steel Toe Books). His work has appeared in New England Review, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Boulevard, TriQuarterly, and Best American Travel Writing. He lives in Albuquerque, where he teaches at University of New Mexico. Visit his website at: www.stephenconnelybenz.com.
Tal Birdsey
Fragments
They cleared out the back field
and say they like the view.
I don’t tell them what I think.
My father forgot almost everything,
except Huck Finn.
My grandfather had big ears.
He could tuck them inside themselves.
No one can understand this like I do.
All I can think of is the skeleton trees.
Tal Birdsey is the head teacher (and co-founder in 2001) of the North Branch School, in Ripton, Vermont. They have published two books about teaching, A Room For Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont (St. Martin's Press) and Hearts of the Mountain: A Teacher, Adolescents, and a Living School (Green Writers Press). Previously, Birdsey published poems in various reviews and journals, including Kansas Quarterly, The Literary Review, Chattahoochee Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Poem, and others.
Sheila Black
Afterlife
An abundance—like dandelion fluff
filling the spaces.
To believe you are somewhere
eating vanilla ice cream, engaged in your quixotic
celebration of wonder—how about those
squirrels that run across
the phone lines, careless, consuming a single
bite of pear and tossing it away? Or that time snow
fell in May, and we woke to trackless alleys,
white crystals making the air gleam
as if alive, as if the flanks of a great horse—
galloping into the blue powders of day.
I unpack my chests of memory.
I want their humbleness—
the taste of roast meat, sheets folded in
a drawer, the privilege of ordinary time,
which hung on us like clothes we did
not know how to wear.
​
The Place of Parting and Returning
The many forms of life astonish still.
When I learned
the day moth has no mouth,
breathes in the flicker
of a few days or considered my own
shape, missing an enzyme,
and how it curves me.
Most of the time they ask
if I need help, but occasionally the quiet
hiss--louder now that even
the President complains of undue
burden, asks what does it mean
to have “these people who only
leach from the rest of us?”
A lump forms under my arm, not
cancer, my doctor says, but merely
a side effect, the body missing a key
vitamin has no other way of
processing the grease of moving
through. The lump gives way under
my fingers—sometimes I picture it
as my own hate. The time I thought
“I will show you,” when the boys
surrounded me on the playground.
They had the rocks. I had my hands.
I knew I could fight.
I did not know if I could win.
I think of the day moth and its
no-mouth brevity—maybe it is happy,
having so little, having so much,
the flickering of light and that it
widens, the curve of the horizon,
and a moment: Light seizing the
whole entire world.
Sheila Black is the author most recently of the chapbook For the Loneliness of Walking Out (Lily Review Poetry Books, 2025). A new full-length collection Cinnamon Fire will be out from Next Page Press in Spring 2026. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Crab Creek Review, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, and a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow with the Library of Congress, for which she was selected by Philip Levine.
Dmitry Blizniuk
Translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Ukrainian
The Milky Way
after shelling, an old man crawls out like a worm
from the garage pit:
and sees in front of him the Milky Way lying on its side,
compressed like a cube of scrap metal.
the garage door – if you look at it from inside -
is riddled with shrapnel, and through the jagged holes in the metal,
the faceted, sharp daylight is oozing in.
the smell of engine oil, nuts, and bolts.
the old man walks slowly into the deadly light of non-stars.
opens the creaking iron door,
which looks like a zodiac constellation,
into an unknown world.
is there anyone alive around?
​
The Anteater of War
remnants of a human shipwreck.
he read his to-do-list just to the middle.
he did not take his son to the dolphinarium.
didn't treat his cat for ear mites.
did not complete the renovation in the kitchen.
did not finish a book of poems.
did not come to his class reunion.
the creeping NEVER AGAIN catches up so fast -
the brown-red python swallows alive
everything he cares about, everything precious. Oh my God,
everything is precious to him.
for years, he’s been sculpting from fragments and shards
a funny silly statue:
the meaning of life -
a moving termitary with a flute.
but the anteater of war has come,
knocked out the windows and doors with a long claw,
ate everyone,
both sweet and sour people.
​
The Words We Have Said
the echo of the words we have said –
rippling reflection on the ceiling of the swimming pool of mankind
at the end of the day.
the words are alive above us, in the depth thrown up to the sky.
part of the wrapper sticks to the lollipop
and ants eat it, and they become part of the word.
we say Chupa Chups or Tootsie Pop or whatnot, and don’t look up
at the words we have said
but they float in the depth above us.
​
Each of Us Walks over to the Window
each of us walks over to the window one day
like animals of Africa to a water hole
and no matter who we are roe deer lions or hyenas
or someone else
in each of us there’s the breathing
of ancient stars
a gulp of eternity
a brief breathing in
and out
​
The Sound of Rain Outside
the sound of rain outside the window –
a violin wrapped in a wet towel.
our house is an elephant that
is sleeping standing up
rocking slightly.
the rain is over but the soul unlike the earth
is wrinkled
like the skin on an elbow.
the sunlight is growing through an apple tree –
the lemonade tree –
we drink the gilded fruit and branches
swallowing freshness.
the ripple of wind – the watery mirror-like roses in the puddles.
Michelangelo of simple
and short-lived moments.
the most fragile marble in the world.
and your impression
is timeless, eternal
isn’t it?
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine and many others. His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize and his folio had been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist. For more information, visit: http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk
​
Sergey Gerasimov is a writer, poet, and translator who lives in Ukraine. His writing has been published in Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Magazine, The Threepenny Review and dozens of other places. Since day one of the Russian attack on Ukraine, he has lived in Kharkiv, written about six hundred anti-war articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in Switzerland, and DTV; one of the biggest publishers in the German language, published his book, Feuerpanorama.
Peter Brav
Nickels (You Remembered When)
You remembered when
You ran around Brooklyn
With your brother,
Had no money but needed less,
You could go to the Loew’s Kings on Flatbush
And see Fay Wray for a nickel,
A hot dog from Nathan’s was a nickel,
Royal Crown a nickel,
Egg cream on the corner a nickel,
Everything a nickel.
You remembered when
They sent you and the other poor Jews
To the country, to fish, to swim,
To run through the woods,
Clear skies, clear air,
No Kings County haze,
No Brooklyn stench of factories and diesel,
Your brother, your twin brother, your other half
Was still alive, yet to meet the cruelty of chance,
Just months before the joint bar mitzvah
That never was.
I remember when
You didn’t like to talk much
Beyond the nickel movies and the nickel hot dogs
And the nickel movie queens,
Never about your brother,
Not a word.
Peter Brav is the author of the novels Zappy I'm Not, The Other Side of Losing, Sneaking In, and 331 Innings. Shorter work has appeared in Black Fork Review, GreenPrints Magazine, Saranac Review, Kelsey Review, Monarch Review, Echo Magazine, Assignment Literary Review, US1 Magazine, Mortal Mag, Bookends Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and many other publications. Brav is a 1977 graduate of Cornell University and 1980 graduate of Harvard Law School. He lives on a New Jersey farm with his wife of 41 years, Janet, a retired college professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.
William Camponovo
After Yayu
hearing “is anybody there?”
I put on my clothes—
the heat!
Yayu
the well-digger
comes out into the floating world—
the heat!
Yayu
“leaves, leaves”
cry out the crows
from winter treetops
Yayu
demure—
deer, pear,
ocotillo
*
evening wind
skimming hairs—
old man cactus
*
in the pampas
not one shaded thing—
coolness depends
*
eavesdropping, the feather
cactus, unperturbed—
the heat!
*
the vulture
becoming, again, a vulture—
the heat!
*
bocce—the petrified
wood learns new rules
with its body
*
“unpublished pieces”
in the Archaeology wing,
downtown Phoenix
*
picked from which cactus
she didn’t say—
the fruit! the sweetness!
*
Heat waves,
three, four inches
over the detention center
*
fruit flies find
holes in the screen
the sound of heat
*
insects at mealtime
inside the perforated cactus,
drought
*
keeping on
carrying on
the heat
*
unbothered, coldblooded,
horned geckos and frogs,
the high-flying clouds
*
discombobulated
in a dry riverbed
the mite
*
narrow road
monsoons, west,
monsoons, east,
and fast
*
a life of heat
can only be a life of heat
and now. . . and now . . .
William Camponovo’s work has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Seattle Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Best New Poets. He has studied poetry at Johns Hopkins University, Antioch University – Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and the City University of New York (CUNY). He teaches with the City College of New York.
Abby Caplin
Hunger
The first thought I have about the bee
sticking to the stucco wall is She’s dead.
She’s missing a leg, the others akimbo.
Hoping to move her body
to the bushes, I touch
a Post-it to her
and she falls onto the brick stairs,
stumbling, still alive, a few steps
before collapsing. I hear a scream
somewhere, is it her scream?
In the kitchen, I mix sugar
and water in a small glass.
Watch it dissolve. Return to the bee,
fill the bowl of a long-handled
ladle and offer it to her.
She cringes and tries to move away.
I splash some drops of it onto her.
This time she stops, appears to consider.
I slowly slide the spoon toward her
and she dips her head down
and I watch her sip.
When she doesn’t stop,
I worry I might be
making her sick, like those American soldiers
who opened the German camps,
pockets loaded with chocolate,
not knowing the survivors would eat
their deadly fill.
I pull away, let her rest a bit,
I am responsible for her now.
I encourage her, That’s it, baby,
drink up. Good girl! Her body
begins to shiver,
and I am surprised to see her
legs beneath her, all six, straight and strong.
We do this dance three or four times
until, in a sudden buzzing and flurry
of wings, she rises
up and melts into the blue,
leaving me.
Abby Caplin is the author of the poetry chapbook A Doctor Only Pretends (Ocean Light Press, 2022), praised for its wisdom, wit, and compassion. A Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Southampton Review, The McNeese, and New Verse News, among many others. Her second poetry collection on the climate crisis is forthcoming. A retired physician and counselor, she lives in San Francisco, CA. Visit Abby’s website at: www.abbycaplin.com.
Peter Cooley
Little Saint Minutes
“Out of used furniture
She made a tree,”
Anne Sexton wrote about herself.
I say
Out of my morning-night
To make a sun
Inside me,
One to rival
The light later,
Noon sun
Unfurling its stars
Invisible
Just like mine
When I let go
Of expectation,
My sun luminous
In moments
Leaving me
To come again,
Little Saint Minutes,
Crucifying
Each other
In competition
To resurrect—
Peter Cooley, the former poet laureate of Louisiana, has published twelve books of poems, most recently Accounting for the Dark (Carnegie Mellon, 2024). He is a professor emeritus at Tulane University in New Orleans.
William Doreski
Too Literate
Reading a book in watery light
I feel the text lift off the page
and adhere to me like a mud pack.
I become the book; the book
becomes me. When I enter
the kitchen for dinner you note
the mess and urge me to clean
my face before sitting to eat.
You scorn Jane Austen and Dickens,
Ezra Pound, Paul Valéry, Kant.
You despise any novel written
after the death of Scott Fitzgerald.
You laugh at poetry composed
of fragments shored against ruin.
You sneer as philosophy parses
words too common to bother with,
I pour the wine and we settle
over spaghetti, meatballs and bread
fresh from the oven. The day
recedes like yesterday’s storm surge.
A few scraps of text still cling
in the furrows of my brow where
knowledge and sentiment converge
and slowly decay into flesh.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals. His most recent collection is No Vacancy (2025).
Sean Thomas Daugherty
What is Left to Praise?
Between the autumn leaves
laying on the lawn, or the bare
branches reaching, the stillness
of an apartment empty, the school
where the children once shouted
or drew, or the rooms of this house
when everyone is sleeping, what travels
in the space between us.
I drive home from the night shift, listening
to the morning news. Working folks in Chicago,
or New Orleans did not come home
for dinner, snatched up on the street.
The absence grows like mothers with signs
on city squares. And what remains of missing
is a shape described by who remains.
Out of every absence these stories
that must be told the way a person
matters must be witnessed by the page.
The disappeared without a list of names.
​
On the F Train Toward Coney Island
a young Boricua man with earbuds
leaked Chopin, and the Asian businessmen
stood so straight as if not to wrinkle
their tailored suits. Madres held tight
to the hands of children, and Chinese teens
spoke in rapid fire laughter. Outside entire
neighborhoods the size of cities passed,
bodegas and projects, parks, and pizzerias.
And there by the door was a white woman
whose face was more of a smudge, and yet
she was so soigne, in a white blouse
and aubergine slacks and gold mascara
painted on the places her eyes barely
were and her nose not there, and yet
she looked serene, rocking and swaying
as the train sped through Queens
and then on into Brooklyn, and the people
entered and more left and did not press
against my body, and then I sat.
The woman was still there standing,
dressed like a Matre de in a very fancy
hip restaurant. Or maybe she could sing
and was headed to a gig? The rouge
of her mouth ruby red like a jazz singer,
and wearing a small grin, as she leaned
in the quiet piano keys of the man who
sat beside me, humming along with Chopin,
fingering chords on his bare knees
headed to destinations of the dreaded
or prosaic occasions we must attend—
Along the Liffey
The man in a yellow vest asked me for a smoke, a spare he said and gestured with an accent hard. We stood on the Northside of the Liffey, I said, I got you. I handed him a Newport. He said, American? I said yes. Humph he said. I said don’t hold it against me. He looked at me. Irish too? I said, mostly. Um he said. He said, I am from Poland. I come here to work, see there. I said, the building site. Yes, he said. I said, my wife’s family is Polish. He brightened, yes? I said many old people speak Polish where I live. He said, more of us here. I said, it goes ok? He said ok. The Irish are good mostly. I said, Americans are mostly shit. He laughed. We smoked and looked out at the rain far out on the Irish sea. You work good? I said, I’m a disability carer. I help folks who cannot work. He said, ah that is good. Poor wage? Here not much but good work. I said, the same there. Then he said, my daughter back home was born strange. Strange I said? He thought, No, that is not the right word. She is… careful. A careful child. She has to live in another home. I send her money. She is with her mother? No a home, but her mother cares too. I go back too, soon, before Christmas. I bring gifts. I bring her a bear, any animal. She will make lots of laughter. And he waved his hands. He said, see, and he showed me his phone screen, and there was a girl, hard to tell her age, maybe thirteen, her arms curved close to her chest, blonde wild curls, with giant eyes. He said, I keep her close as I can. I said, yes yes. The men were starting to get back to work on the other side of the river. He let out what sounded like a litany of swears in Polish, then said, I go back now. Thanks for the smoke. He stubbed the ash on the railing and put it in his vent pocket. I said in Polish czesc, one of the few words my wife had taught me. He looked surprised, said the same. He paused, as if he wanted to say something more but then kept walking. I thought of the miles he had traveled, how he moved across a continent many years ago. To leave one’s child and wife, to work for wages far away. The man was maybe forty, a shock of blonde hair still on his head. He sauntered back to his crew, his foreman calling out, and back to the building site. This was years ago, the way the light was here along the lake brought him back, as if we are still standing, talking as men will speak with short, brief words. Staring down or away mostly. It was just a few moments in this life. And yet. For what is time? A cigarette shared, a shard of a story, the smallest noticing of the light? Maybe it was something about fathers. I walked back to my room and waited for my son to arrive. Down below the Liffey rolled on slowly, and the rain on the Irish sea kept at bay. I think perhaps I am still there today—to be in two places and two times. Or that the man is here with me, or that he is finally home in Krakow with his wife and daughter, wheeling her down the street wrapped in a blanket as she kicks her legs and squeals, holding tightly to her new stuffed bear.
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s (he, him) most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. A longtime disability worker, he works the third shift as a Medtech and Carer along Lake Erie. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA) won the Housatonic Book Award and was cowinner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His other awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review.
Ziggy Edwards
Teenage Experiment
I took apart my X chromosomes,
made one larger and maternal
or at least tender and forgiving.
The small one suspicious, jagged
and adventurous—primed for
the circus except not a joiner.
​​
I made them talk to each other
and it was all about guys. Argue,
reconcile, embrace, repeat—
tedious as a couple of Barbies.
That's how small x described it,
anyway. Big X took a lot of abuse.
​​
Small x will enjoy perimenopause
—the stumpifying and shedding
of dumb desires. You might think
she wins then, but someone has to
remember to water the plants
and love pets as they die
and care about the people we fight for.
Ziggy Edwards lives in Pittsburgh and edits the online zine Uppagus. Ziggy's own poems and short stories have appeared in publications such as 5 AM, Dreams & Nightmares, Grasslimb, and Strange Horizons. Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange published her first chapbook, Hope's White Shoes, in 2006.
Benjamin Evans
Ekphrastic Triptych
(Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA)
*Juan Gris, Still Life with a Poem
What cards are you playing…
and your vices?
A life in fragments
with pink backing.
The door obscured
by all that is not entry.
*Georges Braque, Pitcher, Score, Fruits and Napkin
I quest on
the sweetness of peaches…
all my fog among them—
illegible words overhanging.
Voyeurs’ saliva like dew slipping
down to a moss-bedded cave.
All will be sated and slaked;
flesh eaten, juice perspired,
ripeness savored horribly.
Our awe, these clefts
gaped for some machine,
its depiction well-dried, unclear.
*Amedeo Modigliani, Jeanne Hébuterne,1918
Nothing more true, the mask—
ghost-lucid eyes inviting reflection.
Her lithe form pliant
to every need
of imagination still thirsting.
She knows why you’ve come;
why, here, she sits
admired, contorted, loved
through the fly-prism-trap
of your sight.
Benjamin Evans is a poet, actor and comic who lives/performs in California. The former editor of the non-profit arts review, Fogged Clarity and current head of "Light Lion Arts," he earned his MFA from The University of Oregon and has had past poems published in Colorado Review, Sugar House Review, The Cortland Review and RHINO among many other journals.
Charlene Fix
The Chaotic Class
I loved that class
though they didn’t love me.
We met in a room arranged for drawing,
tables hugging walls in an arc
around pillows piled
for a model’s sprawl.
We were there for writing,
and I was front and center,
facing freshmen,
young, unlike me.
On one side a fellow disappeared
into deep irony,
and near him sat a lad
who left his heart in Haiti.
Across from them a fellow came out
with co-eds perched daily on his lap.
There was a dancer, a working class Brit,
a loner, a flirt, and a fellow who threw
peanut butter sandwiches onto his roof
each morning to foil his policeman father’s
war against raccoons. Glad, sad, tall, small,
urban, suburban, a few farm kids, and me.
The acoustics were terrible. We couldn’t
hear one other, but we could see.
​
Drunk Driving
My friend had had either a baby or a breakdown,
I don’t remember which, but leaving the hospital
after a visit to her, about to turn right at the light,
I thought maybe left would be better, so I backed up—
it was night, no other cars—then pulled into the left lane.
O.K., so I repeated those maneuvers a few times,
which was probably why, when I finally completed
my turn, a cop, poised to pounce and poisoned perhaps
by Arabic stereotypes in lazy films, pulled me over
and tested me for drunk driving. Heck yes,
I’m claiming kin, for my hair was dark and long,
I was tan, and he freaked out when I reached into
my bag for the license he’d asked to see, shouting
show me your hands! then ordering me out of the car
to walk a straight line, stand on one foot, etc.
Seeing I wasn’t drunk but addled, he let me go. But
here’s the thing: as I drove away, I vowed never to
share this humiliation with anyone, but instead to
bury it deep inside. So naturally, as soon as I got home,
I dialed up my sister, then friends, all the while polishing
the story’s details with a rag to make them shine. Whether
she’d had baby or a breakdown, my friend’s art and her love
of poetry, especially Galway Kinnell’s, sustained her, as did,
I hope, the tender God, no fan of barrier walls, hiding
behind her stern one, the master tailor who stitches us whole.
Charlene Fix’s poetry collections are Habitat of Ghosts (forthcoming, Broadstone Books, 2026), Jewgirl (Broadstone Books 2023), Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat (Bottom Dog 2018), Frankenstein’s Flowers (CW Books 2014), and Flowering Bruno (XOXOX 2006), her prose homage/film criticism is Harpo Marx as Trickster (McFarland 2013). Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, co-coordinator of Hospital Poets at OSU Medical Center, Charlene is mother of three and grandmother of two, and an activist for social justice. Her website is: charlenefix.com
Michael J. Galko
Something that happened
walking down the N-Judah line,
the non-glamorous part of San Francisco,
with its rails and cement and plain clustered houses,
where people live while others visit–
this happened on a rare sunny day–
an open window,
curtains blowing in the wind,
and some brown hair too!
Hanging off a bed not quite visible–
but you look up not because
of the hair, though that is interesting,
or the curtains, though they are plain,
but from the persistent moans of love
that loudly carry out over the street,
and when you look up,
not sure what private delights you will see,
there is a leg in the air, a shapely leg,
visible through the crack in the curtain–
one can even see it is closely shaven
and there are green toenails at the end!
Reaching for the ceiling, the sky, heaven!
And you think– what wonderful abandon!
On this sunny day, to stay inside and feel
the wind of each other, to share little throaty pieces
of oneself with the wider civic passing below,
whoever they may be, making sounds that only
the streetcar
can overcome–
and here it comes, that train, to take you
to the ocean, where you will sit and stare
at the water, the breakers, and enjoy
the wind and the light til sunset and think–
two miles away they are talking pillow, and
five miles away Ferlinghetti is selling books,
and across the ocean they are eating sushi,
and across the central valley behind there are
cold streams running past Gary Snyder’s house
and it is surely wonderful to be alive,
on this day, when all this is happening so close by.
​
I don’t pretend to understand the mind
Flailing for a haiku,
with the morning espresso on board,
the phrase simply arrives–
‘It smelled like a Manila brothel’.
Why that? I don’t even know
what a brothel smells like
(though I can guess– stale cigarettes,
spilled drinks, sweat-soiled bedsheets)
and I certainly don’t know
what would distinguish a Manila one
from any other brothel.
I see slightly flabby girls
coming out of colorful shiny
shorts and bras that do not quite
cover what was really not meant
to be covered in the first place
and I feel a great sadness
for them, ringing like a bell.
Haiku is of the moment.
But this is not even mine–
not my odor, not my color,
not my great grief on my own
forgotten street.
Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review and the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contests. Recent poems have appeared or will appear in New Plains Review, Spillway Magazine, Hole in the Head Review, Atlanta Review, and Sky Island Journal, among other publications.
Benjamin Goluboff
Jean Charles Cazin, French (1841-1901) “Theocritus,” Oil on Canvas
The setting is a poor hay farm
that the painter’s contemporaries
might see as contemporary.
The light is end-of-day autumnal
and there are bare branches
in the poplar wood.
Cazin’s brushwork is loose
so we see his subjects indistinctly
as if through gauze or convention.
The poet sits in the foreground
with his head in his hands.
By his side, invisible to him
but visible to us, stands his muse.
Her gown holds segments
of the light from the west.
What does she sing to him?
Maybe she wants him to know
that the conventions have aged
but the fields and woods
are still contemporary,
that there is still plenty
of ore in the vein
and wood enough within.
Perhaps she is telling the old man
that she will not desert him.
Benjamin Goluboff is the author, most recently, of Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse (Kelsay Books). Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College and lives in Chicago. His work is easy to find on the internet.
Kevin Grouke
Effective Immediately
Every bus route and rail line in the city
has been given a new name or number,
all in the name & number of efficiency.
The old fifty-one is the new forty-two,
& the old forty-two is the new eighteen.
All over, there are signs in lemon yellow
& red, red & lemon yellow, announcing
this, but still we find ourselves lost at end
of day, dropped off at odd stops in broken
neighborhoods with unwelcoming faces &
unfamiliar names. Swampoodle. Fishtown.
Devil’s Pocket. The Airport Line is now
Let Us Praise All Our Many Future Dead.
We find our way home in the dark, uneasy.
Kevin Grauke has recently published poems in The Threepenny Review, Ninth Letter, The Louisville Review, The Minnesota Review, and Bayou. He’s the author of the short-story collections Shadows of Men and West of Destry, and a third short-story collection, Bullies & Cowards, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026. An essay collection will be published by Belle Point Press in 2027. He teaches at La Salle University and lives in Philadelphia.
Charles Grosel
In the Spirit of Akhmatova
​
I
There are not enough words for love,
My Love. Do these all mean the same?
I love this or that movie, that book,
that team. I love sunsets and ice cream,
pepperoni pizza. I love
single malt and my parents (though
I don’t always like them). I love
you, I’m just not in love with you.
That was never our story. With
you I love it all, dogs and kids,
the home we’ve built, now the empty
nest. I love how you still hum when
I kiss the curve of your neck
and you fold my arms around you.
II
That’s why more than ever now we
withdraw to love’s haven, brace for
the sundered country’s calamitous
change, not that old climate thing,
that has been wiped from the servers,
along with civil servants, women’s
health, and DEI, their newly
minted slur. Maybe it’s the height
of privilege to love while the world
burns, to eat, drink, and play, to work
these paltry lines. If that’s all we
can do, My Love, let’s do it in
Akhmatova’s spirit: to stand
in love, to witness and remember.
14
An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and now lives in Arizona. He has published stories in journals such as Western Humanities Review, Pithead Chapel, Water-Stone, and The MacGuffin, as well as poems in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Kestrel, Cream City Review, and Harpur Palate. His chapbook of poems is The Sound of Rain Without Water.
Jeffrey Gustavson
Crinks in the Furrows
​
That tractor came burdened off the lot
with an ornery penchant to veer
to gees and haws garbled out
in the blats and chugs of its own combustions,
taking unpredictable jicks off true
like a myopic old mule scared of rocks
like they were sudden fanged gophers in his path
one-track-minded to riddle him with bites
all up his sturdy old wobbly old legs,
like he’d taken shaky pills on purpose,
or put on, I don’t know, a slouch hat
wove out of panic grass
for no reason else but pure defiance
at another day of drudgery,
and rather being tucked idle in the barn
than garner keep he’s already earned
and then some.
Blame isn’t the point; I don’t begrudge the oats,
or, what’s parallel here, the gasoline.
But you can’t sit loose and steer knowing any second
here comes the next lurch to your sockets.
Worries like that chisel away at a person,
chisel and chivvy and nag.
Worry’s not happy till it’s chronic,
like a panda only eats bamboo,
or like a shy, jimpy, nervous kid
gets spooked by the high-noon shadow
his scrawn doesn’t even cast,
who you love because you have to,
from instinct, and because his mother
loves him, and you love her,
too bookish for a farm’s roughness,
and too much heart,
hewn more exotic than his brothers,
so you put him in charge of the lambs and calves,
and tell him they’re only for wool and milk,
pure soft wool and nourishing milk,
and he lets himself be fooled, though not really—
blamed if there weren’t mornings
he’d quinch in empathy for the bread
when you cut his toast!
But what’s got to die is the least of it,
actually, if you think about it,
taking a farm all in all,
green sparks so easy to flicker out,
and that boy I mean ended up
going on to an agricultural degree,
and got seven or eight big counties’ worth of crops
through blights I can’t even pronounce,
that had folks desperate, and him gaunt
for lack of sleep,
rusts and smuts and devilish funguses
you might as well toss money in the burn barrel
as attack by main force,
that boils down to cussed ignorance.
You might as well take a whip to cancer.
And he jinkered a pair of axle cuffs,
one harvest—
spent hours in the barn with a flashlight
and a crate of hardware scraps
we’d only ever joshed him for,
and come back to the house streaked with grime—
that tempered that jicky tractor true at last.
And my shoulders are grateful in old age
for the years of vanished pain
his cloud-cuckoo nazzlewhims bestowed.
Pride never didn’t come hard, and me forged
so leery to admit of it,
but it was there, and I did feel it, I guess he knew.
Life’s a book no one reads twice, that’s for sure.
Lord forgive a poor wretch who did his best.
Jeffrey Gustavson was born in Jamestown, N.Y. His book Turpentine Headache was published earlier this year by Ristretto Books. He has recent work in Arrowsmith Journal and Plume. He is the author of Nervous Forces (Alef Books), and has published poems in Agni, Bomb, Epiphany, The Fiddlehead, Grand Street, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other magazines.
Michael Hettich
The Bees
The last time we visited this friend we’d known
for years, a once-dapper professor now an old man
and master gardener, he told us he’d learned
to sing to the bees that slept inside certain
flowers at dusk, so deeply he could lift them
from their blossoms, cup them in his hands, there
in the darkening garden, feel their down
and breathe their flowery scent. Sometimes,
he said with gentle wonder, they buzzed
a little, dreaming, but so far they’d never
awakened while he held them, as gently as a human
can hold anything. Then he placed them back into
their blossoms, still sleeping, and went into the house
where his husband waited with wine and dinner.
He said they rarely spoke of anything that mattered
these days. We move around each other
like ghosts, which for some reason made me wonder
how he managed to place those delicate
insects back into their flowers without
waking them--and he must have intuited
my question in the way I looked at him then,
a few weeks before he died. I do it
by singing, he whispered, then hummed a little
tuneless ditty, there in the garden,
so quietly we couldn’t really hear him at all.
The Hungry Ghosts
In another version, you wake up instead
as a different kind of person, though you still look
like yourself, whoever that may be
for the moment. Then the moment passes
and you’re a boy again, polishing your dress shoes
and talking to yourself in the full-length mirror
while your mother sits smoking behind you, ignoring
the ringing phone in the kitchen.
When the phone falls silent, she gets up, smiles
at the back of your head, and leaves the room
as though you weren’t there. Her smoke perfumes
your hair and clothes: the feeling of a dream
as it vanishes. As you stand looking at yourself
in the mirror, you think you hear someone
crying in a strange voice. It is growing dark outside.
A few cars pass, pulling silence behind them.
Michael Hettich's most recent book of poetry, A Sharper Silence, was published by Terrapin Books in July, 2025. His previous book, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022, was published in 2023. It won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. A new book, Waking Up Alone, is forthcoming. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Visit his website at: michaelhettich.com.
Don Hogle
Monkey in a Red Fez
Each morning we’re jolted by the alarming
fact of another day. Little Monkey claps
his cymbals, and the show begins again.
In a diorama at the Natural History Museum,
hominids roast tapir over red and yellow taffeta
stoked into flames by oscillating fans, bones
of yesterday’s feast at their feet. An infant lies
on a mulberry birth sheet. Leopard blossoms,
plum-colored, yellow-tipped, loom above,
menacingly still. Have we not progressed?
Then air conditioning cycles on––a breath
wafts gently across my cheek, hope born
of nothing more than moving air. Restore us
to wonder, Lord, and your work will be done.
Don Hogle has published over 120 poems in journals in the U.S., U.K., and Ireland. A chapbook, Madagascar, was published in 2020 (Seven Kitchens Press). His debut full-length collection, Huddled in the Night Sky, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. He lives happily in Manhattan. Visit his website at: www.donhoglepoet.com
Ken Holland
Prestidigitation
What is it with children and their desire
to disappear, to stand behind the drapes
and listen to their mother call,
and though rare, the one child who turns
to watch the wind tease the lawn,
so when his mother pulls back the fabric
she finds her child already gone.
Ken Holland has been widely published in the journals including Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tulane Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His work has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. He placed first in the 2021 New Ohio Review poetry contest, and was a finalist in the 2025 Moonstone Press chapbook competition, which Moonstone subsequently published. Also a finalist in Bicoastal Review’s 2025 contest. More at kenhollandpoet.com.
Richard Jordan
Good and Loud
​
Every Thursday around 2 AM a raccoon tips over the blue bin at the curb and sorts through my recycling. He's almost scientific about it. Nut butter jars first, then the yogurt containers, finally the Coke Zero cans, which seem to disappoint him. I know it's the same raccoon because he has a notch in his left ear, probably from some territorial dispute I’m glad I didn’t witness. My neighbor Gary says I should secure the bin with a bungee cord, but Gary also yells at birds for singing in the morning. Which is to say I’m not aching for his advice. I've started leaving the bin slightly ajar. Not so much that Gary will notice, just enough to make it easier for the raccoon. Last week I left a glob of almond butter in a jar, placed at the top of the bin. The raccoon spent a solid ten minutes with that one, his little human-like hands going repeatedly from glass to mouth. I swear he looked up at my window afterward. Not a thank you exactly, more an acknowledgment. Every now and then, my niece calls from Seattle to ask how I'm doing. I say, fine, the usual. But I don't tell her about the raccoon. How would I explain that sometimes I sit by the window in the wee hours? That watching him work through my discards feels like a kind of communion? She already worries about me in this house alone. But I wouldn’t mind if she knew the raccoon is out there somewhere right now living his best life, maybe washing his face down at the creek. Or that I'm here at dawn sipping coffee on the porch, waiting for the chickadees to start their morning chatter. I hope they splash in the birdbath good and loud.
​
Beyond the Quarry
There’s a modest run I know that holds
native brook trout about the length of my palm.
I watch them rise for midges, kiss & dimple
the surface, dart in & out of shadows. I don’t
have it in me to cast worms or lures at them.
Their flashings are a miracle in this age,
as is any stretch of clear water, this one
a mile or so beyond an abandoned limestone
quarry overgrown with bittersweet
& briar. Sometimes I like imagining this place
as my secret, just me & the wildlife, though
I’ve seen shoe prints leading to the bank.
Today, at least, I’ve stood here undisturbed
long enough to witness the sky turn gold
then fuchsia. Now night birds swoop in low.
Richard Jordan's poems appear in Southern Poetry Review, DMQ Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. His chapbook, The Squannacook at Dawn, won first place in the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Contest. His new poetry chapbook, Spotting the Rise, is available through Rockwood Press. He is an Associate Editor for Thimble Literary Magazine. Visit his website at: https://richardjordanpoetry.com/.
Jeremy Teddy Karn
our girl, shelia
— for shelia and the unborn
dreariness is the afternoon’s sun—
no shadow in its faithfulness
follows the famished god
formed in me
i like how we can see—
where the river eats cracking concrete
satisfying its craving
musa points toward a shirtless fisherman
hooking on the other side
of the mesurado river
not yet carpeted with blood
this is how a country reduces a man
and proclaims:
follow me—i will make you a fisher of your son
playing tug of war with moist graves
and how shelia distracts us from it
with her story—
of being an americo-
liberian child
once caressing plastic toys
kicking soccer balls
on a congo town’s back road beach
then to a sex object—now
with a bump in a teenage belly
we are too small to know
what to do with it—
we tell her—
Jeremy Teddy Karn was born in Monrovia, Liberia. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received fellowships to support his work. He writes and teaches creative writing for a living. More of his writing and publications can be found on his website: www.jeremyteddykarn.com.
Rick Kearns
Online Ghosts
Joseph
who took his life
five years ago
still has a page
on facebook, death has
not removed his profile.
The fact that he
hung himself
at night
in a barn
has no bearing
on his social media
presence.
Are there ghosts
on facebook?
Do the dead
still post?
I don't know
I don't know how
to deal with
these cyber ghosts.
I played a siguiriya
for an old friend
who is long gone
but his page lives on.
I recorded it
onto Messenger
a PM to a dead friend
who use to play
an agonzingly
beautiful siguiriya
one of the old flamenco
songs that rose
out of the mountains
with the help of
duende, and sherry
and pain.
Do the ghosts
on Facebook
haunt the cloud?
Do they fly
through the air
on e currents?
I’d like to think
my dead friends
check their pages
But I’m not holding my breath.
Rick Kearns (aka Kearns-Morales) is a writer of Puerto Rican and European heritage from Harrisburg, Pa. His poems have appeared in over 70 literary publications and six anthologies in the US and Argentina. Three of his poems have been recognized in national contests. He was named Poet Laureate of Harrisburg in 2014. Rick Kearns and the Con Alma Quartet featured the blending of Kearns' poetry with established jazz tunes that typically included improvised interactions between the poet and the musicians, 2010-2014. Kearns is also a freelance journalist. As a journalist he has written for daily, weekly and monthly news publications since 1986. In the 21st century his work has focused on Latino and Native American stories. From 2006 to 2017 Kearns wrote about Indigenous Latin American issues for Indian Country Today Media Network, the nation’s largest Native American news publication. A few of his columns appeared in Pennlive of Harrisburg, Pa. in 2024.
Henry Kneiszel
Please Promise You Are Not A Robot
Please type the word “salmon” as depicted in this fucked up graphic
Please click every square with the image of a bicycle
Please describe the feeling of being in love
Pease invent a brand new metaphor for loss
Please take a position on “separating the art from the artist” that applies to all hypothetical scenarios
Please imagine a 5th century farmer laying in the same seaside grass as you and tell me: did it breathe the same peace into you both?
Please click on every picture that feels the same as sitting in a sunbeam
Please click on every smell that sends you suddenly back in time
Please click this little box
That's all
I can tell by way you move your hand
You click like a vibrating supercolony of microorganisms
You click like electric meat
You click like you know about death
Henry Kneiszel is a writer, comedian, and visual artist from Duluth, Minnesota. You can find their poetry in several journals including Star*Line, god’s cruel joke, and Mutiny! Their first full length collection, It’s All Too Much I’m Ready to Become a Canada Goose, is out now. For more art or information, find them on Instagram: @friendly.dirt.pile
Richard Levine
Mixed Mercies
As if passing through a pinhole-
camera or a needle’s eye, sunlight
pierced a cloud and set fire to a
building, like a lightning bug
flashing its bioluminescent
desire on the night. Then, suddenly
as flight, it slipped back into the
sexless gray garments of clouds
and fog, and extinguished the gold
leap of flames; windows were again
mere windows. From somewhere
high out of sight, but within earshot,
geese barked, as a light rain fell
on these mixed mercies of morning.
​
Romance Languages
We knew it first as a constant,
a pilot light under the stovetop
of all our thoughts and desires,
a whispering of light and wind
on night waters, soft as the brush
of lips, as shy as our first kiss –
in the kitchen, after an afternoon
movie, against the refrigerator,
littered with magnets that held class
and work schedules and lists of all
the day-to-day TO DO in
that two-bedroom apartment
where you lived with a roommate
and studied romance languages.
Richard Levine is the author of Taming the Hours: An Almanac with Marginalia (forthcoming), Now in Contest, Selected Poems, Contiguous States, and five chapbooks. A Vietnam veteran, he co-edited “Invasion of Ukraine 2022: Poems,” is an Associate Editor of BigCityLit.com and the recipient of the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Society Award.
George Looney
Of Crowded Inns and Sacred Mangers
after Walker Evans’ Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935
Is it that, dead, we still want to be
noticed? The way this rough stone cross
glares like a phantom with nothing
to do but erode the denial
those who live by this graveyard manage
to cling to. Consider. The cross
is the symbol of a god who claims to be
all about love, and also one of
the cruelest ways ever to kill someone.
Not to mention, in mathematics,
it’s the sign for adding to. The way
foundries thrust stack after stack
into a sky that seems to want
to blanch out every detail
over this city named for a biblical one
of crowded inns and sacred mangers.
Angels don’t sing where old women
cough at night between collapses
into sleep. The women pray, though.
The old prayers. And the only wings
they believe soar the heavens are
the pigeons they curse as flying rats
when they’re not noticing the beauty
of the near metallic shimmering
of their tiny, bobbing heads. Halos,
they whisper between coughs. Beauty
and death are easily mistaken,
one for the other. This must mean
something, they pray, trying to deny
the indifference of angels. The quick
and the dead aren’t out and about
to be counted. If pigeons are
angels, the dead are a choir,
dressed in white, singing for everyone.
George Looney’s recent books include The Visibility of Things Long Submerged (BOA Editions Short Fiction Award), The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible (Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize), and, with Douglas Smith, Birds of Sympathy: Correspondences (Apogee Poetry Chapbook Award). He’s editor of Lake Effect, and translation editor of Mid-American Review.
Raymond Luczak
The Great Pine Tree Flagged Majesty
in its aloofness. I never understood
how such a lone tree could withstand
the seasons when all the other pines
always clustered together. There,
on the front edge of the woods,
I circled around its base, looking up,
imagining how I could ladder myself
upward on its resiny branches
by rotating from step to step
into the mottle of thick needles
further into which I would disappear,
shedding my own humanness
into something else, a creature
unlike any found in the outdated
encyclopedia in my living room,
until I could crown myself king,
the surveyor of all below me.
Nameless and gold-beaked
and enrobed in iridescences,
the colors of which would glitter
even under the overcast skies,
I would perch always
on the cusp of creamy moon,
a dream full of milk.
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 40 books, including titles such as [Exeunt.]: Poems (forthcoming), The Language of Home: Stories, and I’ll Tell You Later: Deaf Survivors of Dinner Table Syndrome. His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Al Maginnes
How We Are
Star-fucked, famous in our minds,
we tumbled forth, scalded
into consciousness, myth rising
in the stew of afterbirth.
Our first ancestors were shadows.
We believe we know things
we don’t. This is why our waking
spends time sifting sleep’s rubble,
No soft whispering will
impress on us how smoothly
the barriers that divide
the dreaming world and the one
we believe we exist in
dissolve when we aren’t watching.
And once it had gone, there
we are, alone on the edge
of a large wood, postponing
the next step forward.
Al Maginnes is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently Second Line (Redhawk Publications, 2025). His next collection, What Is There, will be Seed Bed Press 's first release. He lives in Raleigh, NC where he walks a lot and tries new things.
Sean J. Mahoney
State of…
I read a blog post dealing with what is
already here, what will be coming: a dismantling
of the DOE…inevitably the inevitable systemic
crushing of the ADA. I know who this writer
is, have listened to him. I know his work, some…
his stories of being alone in this world.
He warns that maybe the ugly laws
will be returned to us unsung, us un-abled…
whatever that means. He speaks of Aristophanes
who cautioned times such as these attacks
on democracy. Our democracy. And what if
we, us disabled folk, were interned in former
drive-in movie lots and failed casinos. Interred
on a later date after disappearing while walking.
Or a supposed walk. A three-legged walk. A walk
of no particular consequence. Except for not
returning. Turns out I got captivated by the state.
Then bleached and shorn by the state. Uglied up.
Sean J. Mahoney lives in Santa Ana, California with Dianne, her mother, 4 dogs, and 4 renters. He believes Judas a way better singer than Jesus and dark chocolate extraordinarily good for people. He is the current prose editor at Wordgathering.com and a Zoeglossia Fellow (2020). Sean co-edited the first three volumes of the MS benefit anthology series Something On Our Minds. His chapbook ...Politics or Disease, please… is available from Finishing Line Press.
Peter Mladinic
A Dog Got Lost or Dropped Off
We found him on the abandoned airbase,
took him home, put him in the tub
and watched all the dirt run off.
He was black and white. He was old.
He loved going to the vet
and having his teeth cleaned.
He loved riding in the pickup.
We had no idea of his life before
that morning on the airbase,
out where the sky meets the horizon.
Peter Mladinic's most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.
Daniel Edward Moore
Glacier of Flames
If it takes what it takes for the body to be
at home with tender things
ponder something mercy might say.
Begin with the wound’s draped silhouette.
Think prickle of baby porcupines
behind the eyes of my zoo.
Think Hammerhead sharks eating dreams
from my body’s
coral cage.
We know there’s no shame in being reminded
of our mutual commitment to dust,
but if you’re convinced
you still need something only I can give,
think fire and ice and dangerous conditions.
Call me your glacier of flames.
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, North American Review and others. His work is forthcoming in The Meadow Journal, Welter Journal, Ponder Review, The Chiron Review, Novus Literary Journal and Rogue Agent. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
Una’s Story
Long ago there used to be a story book.
In its pages lived a drawing-boy called Una. There were not many drawings in story books then but a few were sufficient.
How long ago?
When I was a boy like you with a long ago forgotten face from a far away town surrounded by sleepy fields. And I carried the book around. And if I needed to tell someone something and everyone was busy with other-busy things, I spoke to Una the drawing-boy. And slowly I would turn myself into a picture-boy like him sharing the same story. I would still be me ….but with Una face and Una body just like the pictures. I would be in my town surrounded by fields but also become the pictures of Una walking across the desert dunes.
Will I have a drawing-person story one day?
When your skin can touch the drawing-person, you can hear him think in a picture, and you can walk as if you are him, hear his footsteps as if they were yours, you know your drawing-person’s story is your story.
Then the story will continue with you as more than a story.
And the drawing-boy Una in the book had a story.
And Una would walk in the story with his story-donkey miles and miles through the roadless tracks, through the ripples on sand to who knows where.
And in the story the drawing-boy Una would leave his footprints on the yellow dune for the goat herders to find them half erased, like whispers of a farewell song. He never looked back to see his village nesting under the sunset sky.
Una will erase himself from their minds slowly, and eventually.
There was a picture of Una and the donkey walking away, which I liked. I have never seen a desert. But I have been there as Una.
My eyes would see beyond the picture.
The trouble with a picture is it ends where the page ends.
In a picture you can just show so much!
In that picture Una and the donkey were walking at a distant corner of a page leaving their footprints behind. The picture would continue with a thousand more words.
Your thousand words should begin when the picture has nothing more to show.
Books, those days had deeper words. More you dug, more you found.
Did the donkey have a name?
I am sure he did. But the name was erased by distance and time.
Can we call him Plush? Plush the donkey!
We can call him Plush. It never mattered to the donkey anyway when he slowly walked away with Una.
What mattered was to walk as Una.
What matters now is how far to walk leaving a page behind, how to continue a story leaving the book behind.
Was Una alone with Plush?
Una never realized he was alone. You become alone when you realize you are alone. My picture- voice would speak to him telling him stories of the princess who was waiting at the other end of sky where the last star touched the shadow of the distant mirage. My grandfather told me a story of this amazing princess everyday. I told Una the story-boy about how the princess sat on a giant throne of pearls waiting for something only she knew of. How she never knew to talk, how she made up her own language everyday listening to the air and sand.
Did your grandfather tell you what the princess waited for?
He wouldn’t know either. There are certain things nobody can know. We can wait but not know exactly what to wait for. Waiting needn’t have any destination.
Una and Plush slept under the stars and walked under the sun and wind.
And many a caravans passed by. They offered dates to Una. Some offered to buy the donkey. Una wouldn’t sell Plush.
How did Una look?
How else? Una looked like a drawing-boy.
Years passed. Una’s drawing-boy shadow began to grow into a drawing-man shape and Una found the donkey too weak to go any further.
You mean Plush?
So Una left the donkey to the Old Woman of Forever who lived in The Land of Mirages placing a drop of tear on the donkeys erasing shadow.
Did Old Woman of Forever have a picture in the book?
How can there be a picture? Nobody knew how she looked like. You must find a face to draw a face. Everything needn’t show up with a face.
How did Una’s story end?
Una had walked all over the earth beyond the story. He saw busy bazaars, arguing merchants, he saw the sea and how the blueness changed with daylight, he saw shadows of palms waving around the oasis and yet he saw nobody in particular, not even the princess I told him about. Everyone needn’t meet in stories.
And Una grew old. The earth was not enough for him to walk upon. Yet he continued to walk along the starry roads of the sky through the shadows of the night to who knows where long after the book ended.
But he never walks alone.
My old man picture-voice continues to tell him the story of the princess who never told anyone what she was waiting for in a language she alone knew of. Una listens.
Everyone else is busy with other-busy things.
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay began composing poetry and prose when he was still very young, before he fully understood that words could become bridges. His first book, Beyond the Silence, was published when he was eleven years old. The National Autistic Society placed his words into printed form — a quiet affirmation that language could travel where speech could not. Since then, other books have followed: The Mind Tree, How Can I Talk if My Lips Don’t Move?, Plankton Dreams, Teaching Myself to See, and Creating the Faces and Other Poems. Each book is a continuation of the same journey — an attempt to translate inner weather into language. He is grateful to have been featured by CNN, BBC, Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, the HBO documentary A Mother’s Courage, The New York Times, People Magazine, The Telegraph (UK), and the Austin American-Statesman. Yet beyond recognition, it is the act of writing itself that sustains him.
Christine Potter
A Visit
You can take a selfie with FDR, on
the butt-polished bench in Hyde Park
where his life-sized-statue sits smiling,
and consider how this good man made
a martini so bad even Winston Churchill
snuck to the bathroom to pour it out. Or
stand next to Eleanor, who once in a silk
evening gown and gloves, ghosted a party
at the White House to ride the copilot's
seat with Amelia Earhart on a quick trip
to Baltimore—simply because they could.
She’s there, too, leaning forward, ready
to say something friendly. It bothers me
to think of those statues out in the rain or
snow. Or when the visitor center is dark
late at night—and the Roosevelts must still
be there, having just that minute looked up
from the books they were reading as they
waited for you to arrive in the garden. But
maybe they don’t mind. Maybe they’d just
stretch and get up, laughing, assuring you
it’s been this dark other nights and weren’t
you nice to come? It’s gotten chilly. Oh, stop
worrying! Let’s go inside and have a drink.
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have appeared there, and in Rattle, Autumn Sky Daily, The Gyroscope Review, Glimpse, ONE ART, BOOTH, and many other publications. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry is Why I Don't Take Xanax (Kelsay Books) and her chapbook, Before The World Was on Fire (Bottlecap Press) came out earlier this year. Christine's time traveling young adult series, The Bean Books, is on Evernight Teen. She, her husband, and the fierce but lovely cat Bella, live in an old and haunted house in the Hudson Valley.
Abby Rosenthal
Somebody’s Fortune
Now let me see
When you were young, you wanted to be beautiful.
You sued yourself because it wasn’t so.
Your lovers, like lawyers, argued your body’s case,
but never could convince you to forgive yourself.
That’s how you disfigured the beauty of your youth.
Now that you’re older, you wish to refrain from evil.
Although you are destined to row upstream
with the rest of your awkward kind,
you hope to perfect an oar stroke so fluid
the current won’t know it’s being used.
But what does water care if you are tender?
Keep rowing, please, you mustn’t fall behind.
​
It’s a fact, it’s here in the signs, writ large:
you’ll always botch things.
In the end you’ll pursue understanding,
you’ll try to explain experience,
you’ll be writing a book whose blank pages
were meant to be blank.
And then you’ll complain
you can’t finish it!
Well, that’s your life, poor girl,
from one end to the other.
Get on with it.
Abby Rosenthal is a once-wandering New Yorker who wended her way through Oklahoma, California, Washington DC, and Wyoming, lingered long enough in Tennessee to raise a family, and finally returned east. She earned a living teaching literature and composition. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Weber Journal of the West, JewishFiction.net, the British journal Stand, Nature & Language (Corbel Stone Press, U.K.), Carolina Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Chaffin Journal, and The Antigonish Review, among others. Her story “Birdman” was cited as one of 2019's notable stories in the 2020 edition of The Best American Short Stories. She's also the author of Ardor's Hut, a book of poetry, published in 1989.
Thaddeus Rutkowski
Hear No Evil
A girl about five years old
is sitting with her mother
next to me in a German cafe.
When they speak, I don’t understand them,
but I don’t speak—I’m saving a seat
for my wife.
When my wife arrives,
she and I begin speaking in English,
and the girl puts her hands over her ears.
“She knows a few English words,” her mother says,
but that doesn’t explain covering her ears.
Maybe she wants to hear no evil.
In the Courtroom
This man—you see him here—is charged
with stabbing someone with a knife
in Hell’s Kitchen.
The victim wasn’t a woman,
wasn’t related to the alleged attacker,
and didn’t walk away from the scene.
The weapon hasn’t been found.
There were no eyewitnesses,
and there is no forensic evidence.
It is up to you to separate,
fact from fiction,
based on the testimony you’ll hear.
Some people trust a police officer,
while others are convinced
the officer is lying.
Will you be able to say “Guilty”
if the prosecution proves their case
beyond a reasonable doubt?
Will you be able to say “Not guilty”
if the defense shows
the case hasn’t been proven beyond a doubt?
If your answer is “No” to either question,
please raise your hand now,
and you will be excused.
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of eight books, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions (New Meridian Arts). He teaches at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and at a YMCA. He received a NY Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a Best Small Fictions award.
Rikki Santer
Poeming Through
Pitch your tent inside a daydream
Practice walking on stilts through the tidal marsh
of your misgivings and unsaids
Toss words deep into dark woods
and savor getting lost
when you try to follow them
Try to be a garden or a lantern
or a rocket for the landlocked and lonely
Limelight that Gordian Knot,
the statement piece in every room of your memory
Adapt rhythms of sky-dancing bats
Prohibit your sonnets from taking too many selfies
Honor the theology of roadkill
Push pin your line breaks until they surrender
to the precision of a preacher’s tie
or until they sizzle
like an ant targeted by sunbeam
Respect the grammar of the weathered banister
as you ascend the funhouse
Pluck and rattle the cages of empire
Embroider the tissue of your stanzas
with pickup lines for the Muse
as she finishes her last dirty martini
at closing time
Be ready to exile one of your gorgeous moons
when your orbit gets too crowded
Admit you can never name all that could be named
Grip the tail as long as you can
but when it moans uncle
just let go
​
Libretto Gymnastics
Fellows Riverside Gardens; Youngstown, Ohio
Usually it’s a lot of people in costumes, falling
in love or seduction, dying in someone’s arms,
and of course, all that singing. Here in the middle
of the day it’s a cascade of bubbles egging on
a squirming toddler, camera-not-ready atop
a staged block of hay. And it’s the aria
of a mylar balloon waltzing in the embrace
of a tall pine and waving to the struggling
steel mill valley below. This hometown visit pulls
my awkward past into my present and suddenly
I feel all silky, finger snapping my way down
a meandering path of scarecrows each coming
to life with cartoon heads and straw-stuffed limbs
decked in filigree and angel wings. From the iridescent
dialects of crows, a surge of jubilee and the blood
and bone pirouettes of two chipmunks stirring a crispy
carpet of leaves. If this poem could Bahm Bahm Bahm
Bahmmmmm
it would and here I am restrung by the rhapsody of early
fall breeze and the perfumed vortex of grove after grove
of rosebush virtuosos in colorful rapture of bud and bloom.
Rikki Santer’s collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year and in 2026 she will be the Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio. Please contact her through her website: https://rikkisanter.com.
Caleb Scott
When the Loon
What does the loon
do on the lake
but break the water
’s mirror, shatter
the picture of
the steady sky
the silent cloud
travelling? Was
there a bird there
before, louder
more destructive?
Or was there just
the image of
the thing, lake, sky
steady and wait-
ing to be carved
and rippled by
those weightless
feathers? Surprising
there are swords
there in the under-
wing. What the
lonely lake must
feel when the loon
cuts into it.
This Too is a Song
This, too, is a song, if
not (of a bird
) drum beat-
ing, then of the leaves,
applauding the
storm.
Caleb Scott is a poet, playwright and performer. His plays and performance pieces have been produced and presented at venues in New York City and around the country. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Bellevue Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Public Poetry Anthology, Grist, American Writers Review, Lucky Jefferson, Ocotillo Review, and December Magazine; his first book, U.F.O., a collaboration with visual artist Jack Warren and photographer Alex Wright, was published by PowerHouse Books in NewYork and includes pieces of his prose poetry, letters and creative nonfiction. Caleb’s films have screened in festivals all over the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Raindance in London, and Cinequest in San Jose. He has been a Finalist for an Academy of Motion Pictures Nicholl Fellowship, a Recipient of both the Silver Palm and Carbonell Award for his work in South Florida theater, and his plays have been selected as Finalists for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the Eugene O’Neill Theater’s National Playwrights Conference. Caleb is a Recipient of the ENGAGE Artists Award from GableStage in Miami and the Recipient of a Heart of Art New Works Commission from the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. He lives in Miami, Florida.
Leona Sevick
Half-cocked
I can only see him from behind, his
hair graying, his thin shoulders bent toward her.
There are too many people between us,
and I know he’s smiling at my girl who
is too trusting, too naïve. At nineteen
I was an adult, in school and working
two jobs, my father’s warnings about men,
about the world, crouching in
my head. But she is still a child in all
the ways that matter. This man, likely as
old as my father, admires her, I’m sure,
and I am moving toward her, ready to
do, well, what? To rush in and then decide?
Sidestepping partygoers, closing in,
I recognize this man, married to my
coworker. I recall the story of
a child, no—a girl—killed while driving
her car. I see him now, his smile benign,
his body no longer a threat. I watch
him differently, read him like a sad book,
give him my blessing. Go right ahead, I
think, talk to my girl—still alive. I stand
back, but just so far. I am here, ready.
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, Poetry Northwest, and Pleiades. She serves on the advisory boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her second book of poems, The Bamboo Wife (2024), is published by Trio House Press.
Joanna Sit
Letter
Now that the spring storm has passed I write
To tell you about the dream
I had while overlooking the Himalayas, where the snow
Had disappeared completely but in my dream
I was sure it would come back. To be faithful
To my promise I will stop here
And let you go on to imagine what might come
Next. I suggest
Leopards wet with blood I suggest howling
of forlorn wolves I suggest a sprig
of yellow pushing spring into waking me
The terraced gardens coming into view, and the hazy
Reach to say I will always wait
For the sublime, the magnificent, the rapture
Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City, where she lives with her family. She studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer at Brooklyn College and now teaches Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. Her poem "Timescape: The Age of Oz" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. She is working on an ethnographic narrative called The Reincarnation of Red and another book of poems called Fantastic Voyage.
Jody Stewart
Closer
I am dying
of time and the air
haunts my skin, is not
always a friend,
When I touch the table
the book my pen
I enter the right room
and its moment
gathers like a bouquet .
I think of them,
well, not all but
the loose gathering, bloom
and stem of those I loved,
or tried to, of those
I could almost touch,
but never hold. Really
they were few. Each day
I ask again, trying
for the humility
to wrestle me back
towards that soft wall
of intention. Some bird
just flew by, flung
a splat on dusk’s window.
Now when I turn, or fall
against that soft
intention, I blush,
shift colors, bloom at all my edges.
​
What Now
Here is a book and birdsong a meadow and the Clark Museum
Here is your hushed canvas and the first week you held those skeins of handspun
with which you soothe winter dreaming of when you raised your own fine sheep
on that farm you and he homesteaded in Vermont. Now, the backyard solace of June
exhales its flounce of roses – cream and Victorian pinked brushed to taupe at the edges.
Your ragged lilacs are gone by, but the allium and snooty, circus-hued lilies
present themselves for a torrent of praise. Take the cast-iron brown smudge
from under your eyes, the bitten thumb nail – take them out of today’s story
if only for a breath. Can you turn from his anger, that smeared walker
he bangs through doorways with his fear which is always lashing yelling
how you never do anything right? How you must slip and sway through this day by day,
pondering that grey block of a building with its hard to reach, hard to leave second floor,
its tightly locked front door. Perhaps he’d get a bed nearest the window, be free
to look out on zinnias, marigolds, that bony hedge below a half-filled
bird feeder lurching in the breeze. How love both binds and shreds; is it still possible
to be good? This cold despair which you endure and share. Still, just now
one tentative black bee trembles, then lifts within this low hour’s unfolding roses . . .
Jody Stewart is the author of a number of chapbooks and six volumes of poetry as well as her most recent book, This Momentary World: Selected Poems 1975-2014, Nine Mile Books, 2022. She lives cheerfully on a retired farm in western Massachusetts.
Joshua Michael Stewart
Sunday Morning in October of 2025, Looking Out My Window I Wonder If It Was Worth Getting Out Of Bed
The Lord and I have an understanding:
I don’t bother them; they don’t bother me.
Instead of prayer, I draw a bird standing
in still water. More a pigeon on stilts
than a crane or blue heron. My altar
is a table with playing cards wedged
under one of its legs. All I want to do
is read a mystery novel, one involving
a cat and takes place during Christmas.
Not very macho, I know, but look at me.
I love music: jazz and Dvorak—thrust
devil horns toward the ceiling when I rock
out to Black Sabbath in my bathrobe,
but my favorite symphony comprises
four movements of whole rests.
Out in the garden, a chipmunk stands
as tall as it can on its hind legs among
the yellow petunias in a terracotta pot.
It listens for a screech in the distance,
lifts a sunflower seed to its mouth
with both paws, keeps a watchful eye.
Joshua Michael Stewart is the author of Break Every String, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, and Love Something. His work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Rattle, New Flash Fiction Review, and Best Small Fictions 2025. His latest book is Welcome Home, Russell Edson—a graphic novel & prose poem hybrid created in collaboration with illustrators Bret M. Herholz and Aaron J. Krolikowski. Visit his website at: https://joshuamichaelstewartauthor.com/.
Samn Stockwell
Little dog
We went to the movies to watch the screen circulate
men and women ripping guns from blue blazers.
I was sitting next to my wife of many years; she hadn’t brought the little dog with her.
Across the way was my stepdaughter and son-in-law.
I never thought the central task of being human is to help people live
and then help people die. Bitter that it reduces to kindness.
No matter where we are, kindness is the light on the screen.
It softens the soundtrack.
That’s not all I want to say, though. When my parents
were in their unbearable old age,
I chauffeured them to places they might like
and lost my temper rarely. You can’t believe
how frightening they were, a contagion of despair –
but I was the child most likely
to understand hauling a sack of dread and regret
along every avenue. To be human
in every miserable turn of life -- go back to the little dog;
the thing carried because everything else escaped.
Samn Stockwell has published extensively. Her new book Musical Figures is published by Thirty West Publishing House. Previous books won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir. Recent poems are in Pleiades, Washington Square, and others.
SM Stubbs
Fall
The man
in the tollbooth
off the turnpike
at Exit 116
sketches pictures
on brown paper bags.
He paints the sky
with shades
of blue marker
and uses berries
to lure the mosquitoes
he’ll crush
into the landscape
as birds.
The bloodiest ones
he smears
into the shape
of rocket flare
or distant comets.
Today he draws Icarus
scorched and burnt,
sharpening
his last waxed
feather, weeping
as he plummets.
A former bar owner in Brooklyn, NY, SM Stubbs was born & raised in South Florida. His first book, Learning to Drown, was published by Gunpowder Press in 2025. He has been a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best American, his work has or will appear in Poetry Northwest, Tar River, The Rumpus, and others. More information can be found on his website: smstubbs.com.
Kashawn Taylor
Unc Behavior
Lately, I’ve been using speech-to-text. It’s less accurate, but doesn’t strain my left thumb when I swipe across my screen. It takes me a little longer to stand from a kneeling position, and the rice crispy noises my knees make during flexion remind me of the cereal and gray hairs, which have sprung inside my nose and on my head and on my balls. Little white weeds among black trees. I’ve never worked so hard in my life, but I love my work as if I carried it nine months inside me. The clothes I own last longer; shopping feels wasteful when you understand the biology of matter deterioration. Besides, I wear my bruises better, their origin a task to remember. The latest trip & fall fashion trend. What matters is that my car just goes. And I am my car – straight forward, to the point: Where is your jacket? Have you eaten today? How much water did you drink? If the function starts too late – any time past 8 – you’ll find me at home, enjoying my rent, bundled up in a weighted blanket: a child in a makeshift womb clinging to the last warmth of dying youth.
Period. Send message.
Kashawn Taylor is a queer, formerly incarcerated writer and educator based in CT. His poetry, short fiction, and essays have been or will be published by such journals and magazines as The Poetry Lighthouse, Lucky Jefferson, Oyster River Pages, The Offing, Sequestrum, The Ilanot Review, and Poetry Magazine. His full-length collection of poetry, subhuman., was released by Wayfarer Books in March 2025. He currently teaches with Gotham Writers Workshop and works with Prison Journalism Project as the 2026 Audience Engagement Fellow.
Alison Townsend
For the Daughter I Do Not Have
(after Danusha Laméris’s “Daughter”)
I always wanted a daughter.
Which is to say I wanted myself
but recreated, from my flesh and that
of some man I have never known. All my life
she has lived, hidden inside me, so clearly
defined I can see the tawny braids I’ve finally
learned how to weave, the part in her hair
as she bends to look at something I cannot
see in her hand. She is a small church
where I take refuge in the belief
that what might have been is real as this day
filled with cricket chirr and cardinals
calling what cheer, what cheer, her body nurtured
by milk my body never made, her knees skinned
from climbing trees, translucent pearls of sweat
on her lip. She is the story of what I am not, a voice
I can sometimes hear echoing my own as I
echoed my mother’s and grandmother’s.
In this other life, my daughter’s speech
is like small birds flying into the light
from the pink canyon of her throat. I never know
what poem she will say next. She is the opposite
of all the shrouds wound tightly inside me,
time unspooling like the river it is not.
How is it the imagination has sustained me
this way, the word “mother” an invisible badge
I might have worn? Loss is the fullness
in which I take refuge, her hand warm in mine
for a moment, then pulling away, nothing
but wind between my fingers. The church
of my body is empty as the sound of a bell
chiming in the middle of the forest, no one but me
there to hear it, a lone believer bowing my head.
While my girl runs ahead, disappearing, the flash
of her blue dress like a piece of sky glimpsed
briefly between the trees, pulling me forward.
Alison Townsend is the author of a memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (shortlisted for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay); two books of poetry, Persephone in America and The Blue Dress; and a short prose volume, The Persistence of Rivers. Her third collection, American Lonely, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in 2026. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in numerous journals, such as About Place, Blackbird, Catamaran, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020. Awards include the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize, as well as residencies at Hedgebrook, VCCA, and other colonies. Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she lives with her climate activist husband on four acres of prairie and oak savanna outside Madison.
John J. Trause
Johnny and the Golden Fleece
When he was a toddler, Johnny had light brown, almost golden hair, grown in curls around his bright face. Although he could not see it himself, except in a mirror held by his mother at his request, he also had a patch of golden curls on his lower back, the only hair on his smooth peachy body. His mother, of a literary turn, called it his Golden Fleece.
Years later, in the summer between his second and third grades of school, Johnny attended a day camp in a nearby town. One of the features of this day camp for children his age was periodic trips to other sites, including museums and parks. One day Johnny accompanied the camp counselors and other children to Lake Hopatcong in western New Jersey to spend the day swimming in the lake. The children changed in separate undressing rooms for boys and girls.
Johnny dutifully removed his clothes until he was completely naked before pulling his bathing suit up. He heard some of the other boys snickering and gasping in amazement, pointing out that he had a big patch of curly hair on his lower back. Johnny, not sensing anything unusual, nonchalantly stated that it was his Golden Fleece.
Nowadays, advanced in years, John considers the patch of less curly black hair on his lower back as an oddity, as if the vestiges of a primordial tail, or the modern retelling of an ancient myth.
John J. Trause, the Director of Oradell Public Library (Bergen County, New Jersey), is the author of six books of poetry and one of parody, Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His book of wild poetry, The Box of Torrone, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in early 2026. His translations, poetry, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He is the subject of a 30-on-30-in-30 essay on The Operating System, written by Don Zirilli, and an author of an essay on Baroness Elsa at the same site. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N.J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.
William Welch
Shouldering All That
Let me explain how it felt playing the tuba
at seventeen—it was like carrying the school’s
unacknowledged shame. Or practicing for martyrdom.
You have to be there for everyone else in the band,
and know how to count, and when counting, feel
something mystical come through the numbers.
Yes, empathy results from shouldering all that
brass. The anxious piccolos, the soaring, egotistical violins,
the melancholy English horns—you feel what they feel,
the anxiety, and the joyeux d’esprit,
you feel what lies behind the quiet steadfastness
of clarinets, and the jealousy of trombones…
But these insights aren’t limited to the music room.
Everywhere, you begin to sense the struggles
people endure, their angers, and what makes them happy.
The tubular bellowing of your instrument even allows you
to understand the groaning of animals. You find
yourself able to interpret zebus at the local zoo.
Special bonds with cattle become possible. It’s strange
how wild and bull-like the sounds you make are,
as though you were the last of the aurochs.
Playing the tuba, even badly, requires a certain kind
of awkwardness that only comes with great strength
which has yet to learn how to use its gifts.
Playing it well demands more, a certain humility
and self-effacement, a willingness to be
the social opposite of the varsity quarterback.
Where is he today? Can he still hear the cheers
and applause the way I can hear the music?
It’s Bach’s cello suite. Number Six. I’m listening
to it again this morning. Twenty years later,
I remember the weight of that tuba,
I feel it in my arms and shoulders, I feel
the cold metal warming with my breath.
That was my life back then. After everyone left
for the afternoon, I would stay behind, alone
with that serpentine creature, wrestling with it,
fighting for every note. But I did it as though
the lives of my friends were at stake, as though
I could save each of them, and redeem myself
at the price of one exquisite, imperishable song.
William Welch lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared in Mudlark, Little Patuxent Review, Rust & Moth, Stone Canoe, and others, and is collected in Adding Saffron (Finishing Line Press, 2025), which won the 2025 CNY Book Awards People’s Choice Award. He edits Doubly Mad (doublymad.org). Find more on his website, williamfwelch.com.
J.B. Williams
Mnemosyne and the Circadian Rhythm Section
​
Night hits the floor with a
clatter at 4 a.m.: the leaves
pass conjure-hands over the window and
go still. You could go for a walk with no
sound but footsteps and maybe a car or two on
the overpass, but even the streetlights
are the wrong color these days and
the moon in the fogged window turns out
to be just a Burger King sign
across the road after all. The bed creaks,
somewhere down the hall a door slams,
quick laughter, a spike of voice, silence. If you
were here I could lie down with my head
in your lap and you could pull all the
rusty nails out of my brain. But you're not,
and it's 4 a.m. and the streets
rattle with emptiness, except down the alley in
a door-wedge of light: an aproned
shadow cups a cigarette-firefly
for a while, curses at the Burger King
moon, and goes back inside.
J.B. Williams is the author of Strange Kingdom (Hungry Goat Press, 2019) and the poetry collection Maps of the World (Alien Buddha Press, 2023).
Martin Willitts Jr
Harvesting
I am harvesting vegetables from our back garden
during fall’s bitter cold rain.
We had so much rain this summer,
leaves won’t change color.
It feels so miserable out here, pelted by rain,
almost chunks of hail, pinging off me.
I have to move faster before my bare hands get cold.
I am drenched as I pull out sweet potatoes
like a magic trick.
I never know what will appear or disappear.
I move slower now that I’m older,
but I still store dirt in hundred-pound bags.
I do not know how much longer I can do this work
of silent intention, planting seeds, harvesting later.
A chill settles into my skin like a squatter I can’t evict.
I have such an intense practice
of storing dirt in black trash bags, lifting
their uneven, shifting weight, high enough
to store in trash cans. Younger people would struggle
with this process, this muscle ache, and a person my age
could get a heart attack. Each year, it gets harder,
this environment gets worse. I can’t grow broccoli,
because spring season is too short
to make a broccoli head. That ended years ago.
I listen to fall’s warning as crickets go softer,
then, silent. This world keeps leaving me a step behind.
I rinse dirt off these sweet potatoes. Not so many this time.
Rain falls bitter and hard. Leaves falling are still green.
Life warns me about bitterness, shortness of seasons,
how ungraceful life ages.
I drop another hundred-pound black bag of dirt
into a trash can, a thud, echoing my breath
struggling to keep up, keep pace, keep
harvesting until I drop.
Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian who trained Librarians for New York State Public Libraries. He lives in Syracuse, New York. He is an editor for Comstock Review, and he is the judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition. He won the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022; and the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 28 full-length collections include the National Ecological Award winner for Searching for What You Cannot See (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and the Blue Light Award 2019, The Temporary World. His recent books are The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly (Silver Bowl Press, 2024); Martin Willitts Jr: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2024); Love Never Cools When It Is Hot (Red Wolf Editions, 2025); 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize, One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace.
Theodora Ziolkowski
Postpartum
To start, I woke up.
Not to be confused with floating,
still dreaming. Though I was,
in fact, still dreaming,
still pushing that translucent carriage
down the hospital’s long gold throat.
Every night, I checked the rise and fall
of his belly, placed my ear
to his chest or hovered a hand to his mouth
to catch the sweet heat of his breath,
unable to sleep unless I confirmed
that which I had brought into the world alive
was, in fact, still living.
Kettle: the name for a gathering
of hawks, which is what I found
the morning after we brought him home,
the snow replaced by vivid green
as, one by one, each hawk flew
from the tree and returned,
scouring the ground where I stood
watching, smaller than small.
The Campus Novel
It starts at freshman orientation.
Lime-green quad packed with sandals
and hammocks, the occasional cloud
of vanilla cigar. Pre-gaming before the concert,
the party, the afterparty in that unholy
basement where boys turned to brothers,
you danced on tables, tongue furred
with Peach Schnapps. You wore your best
red dress, then your roommate’s
(green like an old bruise). At some point,
the long pour of Goldschlager gathered
knots: the glitter of a chain-linked bracelet
caught in a throat. Later, you wore
nothing, your jaw a rusty hinge
when you woke in a bed
that wasn’t yours.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to tell this story.
No matter how hard I try
to get to the heart, I stutter, I stall.
Now, I teach fiction to undergraduates,
the snowy campus pocked with red brick
and fountains, a carillon tolling the hour.
From our house, I can see the tops
of The Towers, the dorm that keeps
the freshman who, twice a week,
show up in my class, drowsy behind laptops.
I divide them into groups,
thread my way through.
Today, we are talking about plot.
It isn’t always straightforward,
I say. Think about your own lives,
I tell them: The tension is there
always, but things don’t always
go up and then down.
Years ago, I saw the shape of myself:
Silhouette of a nineteen-year-old
girl splaying the floor. Together,
the students outline their stories.
I see my face in the window
to the soundtrack of their typing.
How often I long to give the lesson
it took years to learn myself:
It isn’t just the prettiest fruit
that contains the rot. Sometimes,
the rot is just there—
It’s there, and there, and there.
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella, On the Rocks (TRP: The University Press of SHSH), winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award, and Ghostlit (TRP), a collection of poems. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Short Fiction (England), Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, Oxford Poetry (UK), and elsewhere. She lives in Kearney, Nebraska, where she teaches creative writing as an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She also serves on the faculty of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, MFA Program. Read more at theodoraziolkowski.com.