In the early dark the city is a lung learning its own weather again— steam lifting from manholes, a soft animal breath that fogs the streetlights into halos you could almost touch.
I walk past the bodegas’ bright fruit, their oranges stacked like small suns held in place by netting, and the florist’s buckets— tulips sealed in clear sleeves like letters that won’t open until morning.
Somewhere above me a radiator coughs and begins its long persuasion, metal warming to a low hymn. The pipes talk in ticks and knocks, a code for staying.
On the corner a man salts the sidewalk as if he’s blessing it, white grit scattering like crushed shells. The salt remembers oceans even here, even now, even between brick and subway grates.
At the bus stop, strangers become a little family without ever looking up: the shared choreography of shifting weight, the way we hold our phones like talismans, the small courtesy of making room for each other’s coats and breath.
I think about how winter edits everything— strips the trees down to their sentences, makes every branch a question asked in black against the sky. And still the sparrows persist, pinpricks of life stitching noise into the cold.
Later, indoors, I peel off my scarf and the room smells faintly of wool and heat. On the windowsill, a glass of water has gone quiet and perfectly clear, holding the last light as if it’s something borrowed.
Then the building settles— one deep click in the walls— and the water in the glass shivers, a thin ring traveling outward as if a fingertip touched it.
Outside, a siren unspools and thins, somewhere a door slams, somewhere a train passes underfoot and the window gives back a faint tremor. The light breaks in the water, recomposes— not mercy, not lesson— just proof that even stillness has a pulse.
*
Elena Rotzokou is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York and a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research focuses on Romanticism, ecocriticism, and the ways poetic form registers environmental change.
My son does not want Anne of Green Gables to make any more mistakes. First, a blunder sends
her best friend stumbling into drunkenness— the raspberry cordial which was really currant wine.
Then, the mislabeled bottle of vanilla which she, daydreaming, did not think to sniff, resulting
in a lineament cake. He tells me it’s disproportionately unfair, and asks me what Marilla’s word scapegrace means.
All week, he’s been trailing misery and missed assignments, wadded bits of paper, hiding in his
long red hair, too aware of his deficiencies. His thin frame bows and quivers—drawn.
I find another definition. Let Anne take off her apron, walk out into the air of late October, thrill to see
a Scapegrace Loon unfurl its wings and lift across the pond, the fire at its throat a crimson arrow in the dusk.
*
Alison Hurwitz (she/her), is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com
It has been a privilege to curate this anthology of very short poems. During a time of strife, these gems shine like shafts of light in dark ocean depths. In a time when our attention is constantly fragmented and broken by a constant stream of information, social media, etc., poems such as these allow for an authentic encounter with the senses and with feeling.
I wish to extend special thanks to Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART, for his devotion to poetry.
Julia Caroline Knowlton Guest Editor February, 2026
~~~
heikko huotari
Among Hummingbirds
Out of the incandescent into the fluorescent, rhinestones try. The crises of identity of former flying saucer pilots and the fascinating resumes of runners up. Whether I’m in the hot or fun house or immortal isolation, I’ll cast off no causal chain.
*
Vidya Premkumar
Daily Circuit
Sunpetal orbit, the morning loops me through marigolds.
At its hem, saffron and ember unfasten the night,
starseed light holding my gravity.
*
Hildred Crill
Agitated
Scarce on daily bread For butter luck, a silver coin The churn’s straight wall of wood Fat in water turns to water in fat The sour should part from sweetness The weight on the churn staff The twist on the downward plunge
*
Cynthia Misicka
Life Unto Death
I kneel in colored light to swallow wine with solemn wafers, they melt on my tongue, swallow wine— to be saved.
I break chocolate into pieces, they melt on my tongue—make it last.
No matter. I have been wicked and good. I still fear
I’ll be locked out of this chandeliered room, and the next.
*
Vikki C
[untitled]
I held on once, because you showed me the yellow scaffold leftover-lore braiding lumen-high bees before turning stone broke against the pantheon’s teeth still I—waste I—refuse the nature of ruin contaminated by a shine worth jading.
*
Nadia Arioli
Hope is a many-legged creature
but they’re all different sizes, all different shapes,
so unsteady’s the gait, and often—O Emily—too late.
Every morning the scare-owl fools me with its eternal second.
We haven’t chatted in weeks. Living here in the same house,
close together as stars.
Everyone looks out of their selfies with the same broken-openness.
Before this I never knew how much
I needed to show my face to you,
clear and open to the sun.
*
Jeffrey Skinner
The Impossible
Poetry wants to nail aria to idea—it’s crazy, can’t work, useless—
a shoeless man running a marathon, a dog who’s forgotten what
it’s barking at, a mansion of memory abandoned in the jungle.
*
Julia Denton
Silver
Sometimes the tone of hatred in his voice is more than I can bear. I have no choice to leave or not to leave. That’s just a myth. All those who love as we do know this truth.
We move together webbed in tensile threads that loosen, if at all, when we are dead. We dare not do without. Our vow is with, to wear the bond so lightly donned in youth.
*
Kingshuk Sarkar
Whole
If love could be bought I would have bargained or got it for free.
But it came yellow and black with the sunflower it left black and yellow with the bumblebee.
*
Kenny Likis
April Rush
At daybreak, I rose Red, yellow, white. I lily all morning, Azalea through lunch. When the forsythia lilacs, it’s time to tulip. Sun Flowers! Pink hydrangea!
*
Carla Schwartz
Let me off at the next light
and I’ll walk into surgery— no gurney for me, sorry— just splay me with a spinal and chop out my bad knee.
Pathology has no want of words for what they pull from me— a stoplight that never turns green— eburnation.
*
Thomas Daley
How
How I walk the path. How “How I” is still used in beginnings of today. How tonight you’re sleeping in your threaded moon… how I run with violet elms of beautiful tendencies beneath it.
*
Cynthia Misicka
Life Unto Death
I kneel in colored light to swallow wine with solemn wafers, they melt on my tongue, swallow wine— to be saved.
I break chocolate into pieces, they melt on my tongue—make it last.
No matter, this wishing. My tongue
has been wicked and good. I still fear I’ll be locked out of this chandeliered room, and the next.
*
Dana Holley Maloney
Wail
Facing east and huddled deep beneath these blankets, I think if only we were whales you would hear me miles away.
*
Ruth Groff
5am
There must be a word for it that quiet shift to almost-morning when a light, blue-grey cast appears all-at-once in place of the ubiquitous dark marking the edges of a first ambrosial night with one’s new-found or long-lost love
*
William Palmer
Zoom Face
When I joined a support group on Zoom and spoke,
I tried not to watch my head move up and down
like an old marionette with a string cut.
I learned to hold handlebars I could not see.
Often now I let go and glide.
*
Betsy Mars
Blink
The story of the milkman, this someone I call stranger.
Bottleneck slide, suddenly all hell broke loose, bright stain – all that wasted fruit.
A map of shadows, the man in the black coat turns.
Author’s Note: This poem is composed of poetry book titles.
*
Nicole Caruso Garcia
Half-Life
Heart is an acreage shyly consigned. Ode is an elegy still on the vine. Flirt is a play-acted slap with a glove. Grief is an isotope long-lived as love.
*
Jane Miller
Stillborn Child
I fell through stars
my body a comma where my head and extremities
took shape. I grew large as a sponge animal
in water. My fins and hair stayed behind when I escaped
all the grudges and sorrows you would have passed onto me,
your footnote.
*
Rebecca Maker
April’s fool after the fire
I watched my dog roll on her back in green, green grass, the wind so strong I lost my hat while walking. Later near a star jasmine thicket, that awning of honeyed lemon blossoms, windy gusts: fan paddles turn, a ghost’s trick, dog cowering, backyard chimes ringing a constant alarm, children streaming capes, hair as they peel downhill— it all makes me think of that night. Mountain now, bald from terror, beginning of green.
*
Nathaniel Julien Brame
Fall
Here is the day, wrinkling heavy on this season’s vine
More of us huddle in our knots of solitude
The scrape of wings parting and departing
Here is the brittle bachelorhood of autumn
With its bright corridors, and always leaves
*
Ellie Samuels
At the Burial
In a small group of mourners, air pinpricked with mist,
she obsessed over seeds, resurrection, the sylvan musings of Hesse.
Wind ebbed through the orchard, dripped deep sleeplessness hints.
How to ask with only two hands for membranes of days, pink ash.
*
David Eisenstat
In Prospect Park
Beneath the ginkgo tree, a hoard without a dragon. Fan yourself: the gleam is real.
*
Diane Silver
The Uneasy Feeling I’ve Forgotten Something
The kitchen faucet. Still running?
Keys in the pocket of my other coat?
Or myself abandoned
Like a scarf caught on a branch & left behind
In the unholy rush of the day.
*
Ann E. Michael
Something Like Analogy
to pick up a stone is to harbor an outlaw to take the wrong turn is to barter for silver to promise your love is to break a stuck window whatever looks empty may be full of loss didn’t you say you were tired of your labors now you can ponder your errors at leisure to relive the past is to drown in a puddle take up your paintbrushes render the moment in all of its subtleties all of its flaws
*
Theodore Heil
TESTAMENT
I grew up never knowing what it meant, to be a child laying down with an imprint heavy in the center of the white carpet while my mother took turns with the garden explaining the death of things.
*
Lee Fraser
Isobarlines
a cumulonimbus clears its throat thunder claps, hail drumroll
leathery magnolia leaf applause fades in the vinyl crackle of rain
percussive intro: tussock shushes, boughs creaking in the seasons’ breath
pressure, atmospheric, prevails over the mortals
*
Anne Eyries
She didn’t tell
anyone about the pebble in her breast; no one guessed
her skin marbled green & brown like earth beside cut turf
flesh dark as slate, dead weight pressed to her chest
cankers wept in silence quiet flowers nurse her stone.
*
Patricia Bollin
A MEASURE
The brush, mouth full of paint, and a hundred tongues, comes to feed the parchment.
We bring what we have. Never enough. And that, love’s burden: the weight of empty.
Knowing, if I let you go my shoulders might ease but night
would see it differently. Enough paint to cover the paper. Then nothing left.
*
Kelly Sievers
Poet’s Mosaic
Mosaics are a way to organize your life. — Terry Tempest Williams
Break it up. Mine. A Piet Mondrian Fox Trot. Make it new. An up-tempo Django jazz kind of thing. Salal’s pink bell tilt on a blond beach. Orange slithered above gloam. Try it. A flint of rose to mend loss. Throated desire in bubbled amber. Bebop clouds dusting glass shards.
*
Janet Harrison
Bait the Hook
with darkness.
How else tempt light?
*
Geraldine Connolly
And Still Thoughts of You Linger
— for Mark Strand
Rare but golden as a peach shining in the sun of a summer afternoon or a cold sunset fading in a vast field. Your seat at the banquet is empty and soon mine will be too. Your absence, like the absence of snow, lingers. And my sorrow is a feast in the meadow of losses.
*
Julien Strong
Late Summer, Drought
A wilting flower is still a flower. Even now,
their bent heads promise sweetness. Damaged love
is still love: see how the honeybees come.
*
Karena Benke
Pistachios
He’s at his dad’s for the holiday weekend. In another town, I sit on the kitchen floor of a condo complex for divorced women and open brittle shells with my teeth, scooping out green hearts, adrift in a sea of my own making.
*
Tiel Aisha Ansari
Conch
is the bone house where sunrise lives. It opens like a hand, fleshy fingers in armor; it’s a trumpet that calls night across the surf and drives away evil spirits. Fierce defender of coral; it devours thorny arms that scrape reefs bare. It is succulent flesh embedded with chatoyant pink stones, all cased in bone. It shines dawn, sings dusk; it eats, is eaten. It is the shell and the creature that makes the shell.
* Kirk Lawson
Kintsugi
Vase falls and shatters into fragments,
pieces of a former friendship.
What happened? I ask Nothing. You offer.
We don’t need kintsugi you say…
I learn to accept Brokenness
*
Anna Boughtwood
[untitled]
let me shed all language
and burn
*
Julietta Bekker
Character sketch
How spring moves in one body is your mystery. When I see you—petals in all directions. You are the seeking trees, dew-eyed but not new. You are their restlessness. Your hair: swaying fronds catching sunlight. Your thoughts are birds whose wingbeats I can feel in any room. Be still, I yell, from my warm nest in the ground. Your answer is a rain of tenderness.
*
David Lee
The Surgeon’s Window
Under magnification, the cataract flares: a collapsed star behind the cornea. The surgeon says softly, We’ll make a window. Blue, gold, and sea-green spill through the iris. When sight returns, the patient weeps: the world too bright, too beautiful to bear.
*
David Lee
The Waiting Hour
Four chairs face a window rinsed by siren light. Consent forms breathe: thin lungs of paper. A magazine lies open to an ad for mercy. Someone’s name vibrates in the fluorescent hum. Outside, dusk fills its syringe and lifts it skyward. We sign. The hour dissolves without sound.
*
Douglas MacKevitt
Souvenir
I never wore the Tubeteika anyway, hard won though it was from a market next to the mosque in Tashkent. It never really fit, neither physically nor spiritually, and might be misunderstood by strangers on the street. On my cat, though, curled up in his corner and snuggled underneath it for the extra warmth, it looks perfect.
*
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
The Music and After
after the poreless impermanence of a first cotillion, the crinolines and wrist corsage, the tremble, you can never match that part of you that’s dust now and will go to dirt later, the part that’s water, forever going back to the sea.
*
Arielle Theobald
I waltz home
from salsa dancing around 2 a.m., dripping in ten men’s colognes. Not one did I kiss or strip for, yet they cloak me as I crawl into bed; with the tease, the taste, the smell of a harem of lust and sweat. A personal blend of magnetized breath. I cuddle my own skin, smile as I drift off to dreams… a satisfaction that can’t be shared.
*
Emma Aylor
Planning the Trip
To drive alone west from west Texas is to empty out: find
replies not close by and lushly green (as back home, far east)
but strung in ranges far from reach, humble reach stumbled up in broad sky
a person can, for once, see all the daze of—a person is, for once,
all eyes. An edge accepts me, and I can’t touch it.
*
Melissa Studdard
Design Naïf
A daughter can balance like a teacup the color of bone. Don’t leave her too close to the edge where the dish ran away with the spoon. Like a broken faucet she will leak over the rims built to contain her. She will slip like a question from the blue throat of night.
*
Barbara Ungar
DECEMBER SONG
Silhouettes of birds flicker past the window like poems just out of reach like you Leonardo loved birds dreamt of flight all his life drew devices that wouldn’t soar for four hundred years when he walked through the market he bought all the birds in cages and set them free we’re trapped in our timelines but are you not as in your poems happily singing on the wing
*
Grant Hackett
[untitled]
around one candle the whole of november has gathered. a lost bird from the dark flutters against the window. the eyes of the watchers feel like seeds from the oldest branch of night.
*
Meryl Draper
Sonar
Bat wings clipping, cutting the heat of the night sound like just-cut wheat blades baked and bristling under invisible forms, like a crackling bowl of Krispies. I am alone at the breakfast table, trying to remember where I begin and end. I am the sonar ping echoed out into the August moon Passing my lives and rebounded back, alone again.
*
Vidya Premkumar
Daily Circuit
Sunpetal orbit, the morning loops me through marigolds. At its hem, saffron and ember unfasten the night, starseed light holding my gravity.
*
Chrissy Stegman
Family Portrait at Dusk
The street lights flicker on illuminating the pietà of cyprus trees politely holding the sky hostage. I am muddy with the syllables of quartz and light. My father releases the syllabus of October. And that was when I pinned the moon, like a photograph, to the hornets nest of my childhood.
*
George Bandy
[Counted down]
Counted down and left to tick in uncertainty, I fail, again, to account for the least of things: a book unread, a baffling lack of light and my own presence.
*
Mattias Apse
Sorrows
Sore Eros—zero rose.
*
Lisa Munson
the way
surgery is imperfect
cancer creeps by chance
cells left behind spread worry from your body to mine
*
Erin Murphy
Notes from Underground
Cicadas don’t disappear for 17 years. What you hear is a lifetime’s labor, from rice-sized eggs sown in grooves of bark to mites feeding on plant juice. So much tunneling and shedding of former selves. They emerge a final draft, fat as a man’s thumb. The Latin root for cicada is cicada: etymology and entomology, a winged pun. Each offers a song from his own body’s hollow drum.
*
Erin Murphy
Tides
What I love most about sunrise over the ocean is not the sun itself but the way orange-pink light glances off a gossamer of water before it seeps into sand. I don’t understand tides, something about gravity and the pull of the moon, a choreographed mystery. So reassuring, as if the planet has only one conjunction: and and and and and.
*
Douglas Fritock
TICONDEROGA
It’s a worn-out number two pencil, with a broken point, a chewed-off
eraser, and a trail of bitemarks running up and down its length,
scars from a lifetime of withstanding the gnashing of teeth. It knows
its best days are behind it. Break me in two, it seems to say,
and remember how the shining words once spilled from my soft gray heart.
*
Andrea Potos
TO WRITE ONE WORD
Over and over, not as punishment like the olden-days child at the blackboard, but as summons to forge some change, absorb the word and make it true within you. For instance this morning while cold rain hammered again on the roof of my heart, I wrote Evergreen, Evergreen, Evergreen.
~~~
~ Contributors ~
Sufi warrior poet Tiel Aisha Ansari has been featured by Measure, Windfall, and Everyman’s Library among many others. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions. She formerly hosted Wider Window Poetry on KBOO Community Radio.
Mattias Apse writes poetry from Moh’kinstsis on Treaty 7 land (Calgary, Alberta, Canada). He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied literary criticism. He reads poetry for filling Station and PRISM International. His work can be found in GLYPHÖRIA (Metatron Press) and Grain.
Nadia Arioli is the editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Nominated for ten Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes across essays, poetry, and artwork, Arioli’s work can be found in Permafrost, Hunger Mountain, Rust + Moth, SWWIM, and others. Latest books of poetry and essays are with dancing girl press and Fernwood Press.
Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in Nacogdoches, Texas.
George Bandy’s publications include War, Literature & the Arts (USAF), New Millennium Writings, Blue Unicorn, Broadkill Review, Sangam, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Broad River Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Vol. IX, Virginia. His poem ‘Return from War’ won the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award.
Julietta Bekker (she/they) lives with their family in Portland, Oregon. Their poems have been published by Pile Press, Oyster River Pages, Querencia Press, Flat Ink Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, Gather, orangepeel, and The Yesterday Review among other journals; more pieces are forthcoming from Free Verse Revolution and Ouch! Collective.
Patricia Bollin’s poetry has appeared in print and online publications including: Clackamas Literary Review, The Fourth River, Gyroscope Review, Tulane Review, and Mezzo Cammin. Her recent poem in Passager has been nominated for a 2026 Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as Board President of Soapstone, a non-profit dedicated to promoting women’s writing.
Anna Boughtwood is a poet and zine enthusiast living in Albany, NY. She is the author of several zines, including the BREAKUP ARCHAEOLOGY series. Her poems have appeared in Heavy Feather Review and Voicemail Poems. Find her posting about zines and elaborate knitting projects on Instagram (lotsa_livres).
Nathaniel Julien Brame is a queer poet from the Great Lakes and lately the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Main Squeeze, Ouch! Magazine, trampset, The Pierian, and Blood and Thunder. Alongside poetry, his other preoccupations include cave paintings, choral music, and jumping spiders.
Vikki C. is the author of three books, a Pushcart, BOTN, Best Spiritual Literature nominee and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize 2025. Her work appears widely in venues including The Ilanot Review, The Inflectionist, Grain Magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, Sweet Literary, ONE ART, EcoTheo, IceFloe Press, Black Bough, Cable Street, and Feral.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and six chapbooks, the winner of the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Poetry Prize and has been nominated 16 times for the Pushcart Prize. Find her work in Atlanta Review, Terrain, Rattle, About Place and a selection at: http://www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com
Geraldine Connolly has published five poetry collections including Instructions at Sunset (Terrapin Books). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, and The Georgia Review. She received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Breadloaf Writers Conference and the Cafritz Foundation. She recently moved to Alameda, California.
Hildred Crill’s poems have appeared in Field, Poetry, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, among other journals. Translations include Compass Bearing by Per Wästberg (Marick Press) and The Sons by Anton Svensson (Little, Brown and Co UK). She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
Thomas Daley (22) is a poet in San Francisco.
Julia Denton grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and now lives in northern Virginia. She is a widow, the mother of two adult sons, and a retired librarian who earned her MLIS at the University of Hawaii in 1996. She recently completed her Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University.
Meryl Draper, formerly of New York and now based in Dordogne, France, is an advertising executive turned writer. Her articles have appeared in MediaPost, Campaign, and Huffington Post. Draper is a novice poet whose work explores themes of womanhood, motherhood, memory, and rural life, and this marks her first published poem.
David Elliot Eisenstat has contributed poems to THINK, The Pierian, and Rust & Moth among others. The Managing Poetry Editor for Variant Lit, he lives in Brooklyn. Find more of his work at https://www.davideisenstat.com/poetry/.
Anne Eyries has published poetry in various journals, including Amsterdam Quarterly, Consilience, Dust, Emerge Literary Journal, Humana Obscura, Ivo Review, and Paperboats. She lives in France.
Lee Fraser is from Aotearoa New Zealand and uses poetry for ogling life’s details, emotional archaeology, and comic relief. Her full-time occupations have included field linguist and parent. In 2024-2025 she had 50 pieces published, and has poems out/forthcoming in Cordite, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbooks and Thimble.
Doug Fritock is a writer, husband, and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Rattle, Prime Number Magazine, and Whale Road Review among other literary journals. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective
Nicole Caruso Garcia’s OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) won the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Plume, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as a board member at the Poetry by the Sea conference. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.
Ruth Porter Groff lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, but her heart (and soul) belong to northern Berkshire County, MA. Two of her favorite poets are William Carlos Williams and Lucille Clifton. She almost added “—after Denise Levortov” to the title of this poem.
Grant Hackett. Author of short poems. Retired indexer of books. Lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Publications include The Inflectionist Review, Right Hand Pointing, SurVision, Heliosparrow, Half Day Moon Journal, tiny wren lit. https://lostwaytothesky.blogspot.com/
J.M.R. Harrison studied poetry at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda MD and graduated from the MFA program of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. She has published in Ivo Review, Pensive Journal, and numerous anthologies among others and was featured in Fluent Magazine and The Good News Paper.
Theodore Heil is the author of Movements (Bottlecap Press 2026), excerpts of which have been featured in Hobart, ExPat Press, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
Heikki Huotari wrote his first poem the morning after the major died in the adjacent bed. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 500 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Florida Review and The Journal, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book prize (Star 82 Press) and two chapbook prizes (Gambling The Aisle and Survision Press). His Erdős number is two.
Kirk Lawson lives in Ulster County, New York, surrounded by the Shawangunk mountains. Poetry provides a creative outlet to explore and enhance meaning in living. Some publications include: Discretionary Love, Months to Years, Thorn and Bloom, Pulses, Healing Muse, Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Second Coming and Whiptail.
David Anson Lee is an eye surgeon and poet whose work explores perception, care, and the quiet intersections of science and art. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. He lives and works in Texas.
Kenny Likis’s poems have appeared or will soon appear in Duck, Paterson Literary Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and ONE ART, and in Early Innings, an anthology from The Twin Bill. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Douglas MacKevett is a teacher and writer based near Lucerne, Switzerland. His work focuses on shortform narrative and poetry. His course “Epic Europe” investigates myth, magic and medievalism in mythopoetics. When not crafting stories, Douglas enjoys the Swiss Alps with cross-country skiing in winter and hiking in summer.
Rebecca Maker writes about nature, identity, and belonging. She is published in Poet Lore, The Southampton Review, Superlative, and Villain Era and is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Southern California.
Dana Holley Maloney is a native New Jerseyan who lives and writes in midcoast Maine. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Lips, Tar River Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Paterson Literary Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Montclair University.
Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. With age, her poetry, like her body, is trending shorter. Betsy’s poetry and photos can be found in numerous journals, anthologies, as well as in two chapbooks. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.
Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her third poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, ONE ART, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies and six chapbooks. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at http://www.annemichael.blog. Jane C. Miller is the author of Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and coauthor of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals. Honors include the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and two state fellowships in poetry. She co-edits the online poetry journal, ൪uartet. http://www.janecmiller.com. Cynthia Misicka is an emerging poet from Roanoke, Virginia. She has a forthcoming publication in 3Elements Literary Review.
lisa j munson is co-editor of the poetry journal Fledgling Rag (IrisGPress) and assistant editor of I. Giraffe Press. Her work is forthcoming in Gettysburg First Friday Poetry 20th Anniversary Anthology and The Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
Erin Murphy’s most recent books are Human Resources and Fluent in Blue, a 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award winner. Her poems in this anthology are demi-sonnets, a 7-line form she created. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review.
William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in American Literary Review, Ecotone, JAMA, ONE ART, The Summerset Review and elsewhere. He has published two chapbooks: A String of Blue Lights and Humble. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.
Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Presence of One Word, and Her Joy Becomes, both from Fernwood Press. Her poems appear widely in print and online, including Braided Way, The Healing Muse, Windhover, Paterson Literary Review, Third Wednesday, The Sun, Poetry East and others. https://andreapotos.c
Vidya Premkumar is a poet, visual artist, educator, and founder of Jñāna Vistar, based in Wayanad, creating Japanese short-form poetry, essays, art, and books on gender, education, resilience, and wonder.
Li Ruan, born and raised in Beijing, China, is a Manhattan-based educational consultant, emerging immigrant poet, and writer. Her work appears in Restless Books, Assignment Literary Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Hamilton Stone Review, New York Public Library Zine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Cool Beans Lit, Shot Glass Journal, Panorama, New York Times, etc.
Elli Samuels is a poet whose work has been anthologized and published in numerous literary journals including Maudlin House, Pif Magazine, Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences, and Tulsa Review. A cookbook author and yogi, Samuels lives in Arkansas.
Kingshuk Sarkar is a Spanish teacher and translator from Kolkata, India. His poems have appeared in ‘Palette Poetry’, ‘Litbreak Magazine’ and is forthcoming in ‘Blue Unicorn’. He also writes in Bengali. His translations have appeared in ‘Washington Square Review’, ‘Circumference’ etc. and was longlisted for Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum)
Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, and other journals and in her collections, including Signs of Marriage. Learn more at https://carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos. Carla Schwartz received the New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.
Kelly Sievers work has been published in a number of literary journals and in ten anthologies. Publications include: Squid; Rockvale Review; Valley Voices; Plume; Prairie Schooner; San Pedro River Review; Rattle; and Passager. On-line: PLUME; Oregon Poetic Voices Project; THE PERMANENTE JOURNAL; Permanente’s LEAFLET; and SANA, Egan School of Nursing, Fairfield University.
Diane Silver is a poet, essayist, and retired journalist whose work has appeared in Ms, The Progressive, Mocking Heart Review, The Lavender Review, and numerous anthologies. Her books include the Daily Shot of Hope meditation series. She produces the weekly newsletter and podcast Poetry & Life at dianesilver.substack.com.
Jeffrey Skinner’s selected poems, The Sun at Eye Level, won the Sexton Prize, and will appear in 2026. In 2014 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He has published nine books of poetry. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Image, Fence, and Poetry Ireland.
Chrissy Stegman is from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, River Heron Review, Gargoyle, UCity Review, Okay Donkey, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, and more. She won the 2025 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Prize for Poetry and is a MVICW Fellow. She has multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations.
Julien Strong is the author of four books, including the poetry collections The Mouth of Earth and Tour of the Breath Gallery. Their poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Nation, and The Sun. They teach creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and live in Hamden, CT.
Melissa Studdard writes poetry, song cycles, and libretti. Her most recent book, Dear Selection Committee, includes poems featured by The New York Times, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Poetry Society of America. You can find her at http://www.melissastuddard.com.
Arielle Theobald is a poet and storyteller exploring love, queerness, polyamory, spirituality, and self-discovery. Her work appears in Backwoods Literary Press and San Diego Poetry Annual. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Cal State Long Beach and plans to query her debut memoir-in-verse collection later this year for publication.
Barbara Ungar is the author of six books, most recently After Naming the Animals. Honors include the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, Gival Poetry Prize, and being named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2015 and 2019. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Bulgarian.
John Moore Williams is the author of three chapbooks of poetry. An &Now Award winner, his work has appeared in Action Yes, Shampoo, elimae, and other fine journals. He lives in San Francisco with his partner and son and works with words, day and night.
I wouldn’t have been awake at 3 AM to see that bug
traverse our coverlet & watch the blood—mine?
his?—gush as I crushed it between finger & thumb.
The toxic squad wouldn’t have come &
sprayed our bed, treatment for which I also paid.
*
Testosterone
Ground down like a soft graphite stub in a hand-turned
sharpener, at night I count backwards to the beginning
of divorce till boredom overcomes remorse. How many
have been fired since cancer research stalled? Fools in charge
confuse transgenic mice with transgender men. My lawyer
Venmos a reminder to replenish his retainer. U-Haul boxes
accrue dust, pile up like debts beside my bed. Should I have
tried testosterone, purchased a magnifying mirror, plucked
my upper lip & wanted sex with my husband?
*
Shove
My cute nephew, a studious child, has joined a frat, lifts weights,
drinks protein shakes. Last week he shoved his mother when she
got up in his face—my little sister isn’t asking for advice. I offer none.
Now’s not the time to say the man I married hit his mom. What’s
worse, a husband or son’s shove? She hopes he finds a girlfriend soon.
*
Boomer Beach
I’ve only met you once, for Thai, but you live on a beach & I watch waves to meditate, so I lie to my therapist, drive to your gated community. The surf, gnarly before an early
Nor’easter, churns up the Jersey shore, its seawall higher, reinforced since Hurricane Sandy. I take a picture— not of us—of the wild rose hips, their easy sway that says we’re all fair game, but we’re still here.
After two glasses of Sancerre, you talk at length about containing hydrogen—not arrogance, I think, just a man lost in his work. You say you levitated in your youth, show me a star-shaped scar
in your left palm, stitches between finger & thumb, tell me about the house in the California hills you didn’t want to sell, but the wildfires burned closer every year.
*
Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016) and Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014). Originally from Indiana and a longtime Brooklyn resident, she is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program within the City University of New York.
Not like venison that hangs from the rafters of your cellar, not like deer that walk regally down their path and startle
and leap away when your foot scrapes the front porch of the cabin in Julian, not like the lovey- faced deer that nuzzle up to Snow White—no,
someone shaves these deer’s antlers off so they can be hand-fed cookies that you buy on-site. They’re aggressive, elbowing
their way forward, circling the tourists, closing in around them. Sometimes, they mistake a flyer from the earthquake museum
for those crunchy mouthfuls. Sometimes it feels good to destroy. It smells of petting zoo, like rabbit pellets in a dirty hutch.
I imagine my brother from Indiana making short work of these brash animals, picking them off, easy. Enough venison
to last the hard winter, enough to share with family and church, enough to squander. Even here, I’m American.
*
Vietnam 1966
My father volunteered to be a radio operator. Maybe suicidal, more likely, oblivious, thought because something bad hadn’t happened to him that nothing could. It’s said that the Viet-cong picked them off first, broadcasting their location with glinting antennae that reached up to the heavens. A close friend of the family, an officer, saw what my future father had done and got him transferred which is why he worked callousing his fingers on a manual typewriter, we’re sorry to inform you instead of being the one it was written about. Story of white privilege, story of connections, origin story, my coming to be.
*
The Dentist Tells Me I Have a Fighting Tongue
One that follows the scraper around and pushes its way between the scaler like a mother when her child faces an abuser. He depresses it, still it slinks around and sticks to the asp- irator and isn’t it better to have a fighting tongue, than a pliant, cowed, submissive one, one that lies blank as a sheet of paper to be written upon. My tongue will not be subdued, even when it’s cut with a drill, even when the dentist places a bit in my mouth. It undulates, it protests.
*
Anna Abraham Gasaway (She/Her) is an emerging disabled writer published in Frontier, Zone 3, Poetry International, ONE ART, Mom-Egg Review and others. She graduated from San Diego State University’s MFA program and serves as a peer reviewer for the Los Angeles Review. Her chapbook My Mother’s Husbands is due out from Finishing Line Press in 2026. She can be found on Instagram: @annagasaway.
You were never in the Epstein files the letters of your name fell only inside my body
The island you so often frequented was my room with its small shelves and bed partially sunk in the center
now when I look back I see scattered paper and torn envelopes with a suicide note never fulfilled
I was the lone reporter standing there without a note pad standing there with my skirt half pulled up
I said a quiet goodbye to you when you went to work each morning after breakfast you’d go to the driveway and retrieve the morning paper
but our story was never in the headlines you died in the same town, twenty-five years after we stopped talking
all that’s left of my past is the old flannel night gown I used to wear as a girl and my story redacted
like your face blacked out in a dark room
*
Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, & Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her second full length book, “Prime Meridian” was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press) and was a finalist for the 2020 Best Book Awards. Her most recent books are Between Twilight from New York Quarterly Books and Broken Metronome from Glass Lyre Press. Broken Metronome was the winner of the American Fiction Award and NYC Big book award for a poetry chapbook.
Gary D. Grossman enjoys sharing his poems and essays, published in 70+ literary reviews. He doesn’t enter contests but his work has been nominated for the usual awards, i.e., Pushcart, Best of Net, etc.— no wins yet, so meh, right? His graphic memoir, three books of poetry and gourmet venison cookbook all may be purchased via his website or Amazon. Gary enjoys running, fishing, gardening and playing ukulele. Website: garygrossman.net
All’estro? Fussi matto. Io me lo covo dentro casa er foco de forivia a ogni cantone trovo un monno novo chiuso dentro a le cose serrate ne l’istessa istessità fiume dell’ore e una foresta d’aria la porvere imbriaca dentro a un tajjo de sole a la persiana… E ppoi chi je lo dà dda magnà ar gatto? All’estro? Fussi matto.
//
Travel
Abroad? You’re kidding, right? I’d rather sit at home stoking the fire of desire for travel, in every corner a new world of things inside closed drawers in their same sameness river of hours and forest of air the dust drunk as it pools in a column of light by the curtains… Besides, who’d feed the cat? Abroad? You’re kidding, right?
*
Er tiratore
Cocci, ciappe, bottoni ner tiratore. Odore tiepido e attufatello de cose bone, fumo e pane antico: casa de nonna. E foderato d’una carta a fiori come er zinale chiaro de mamma che sapeva de latte e de viole. M’è nata primavera dentr’ar commò.
//
The Drawer
The drawer is full of buttons, bric-a-brac. A tepid, musty odor of good things, tobacco and old bread: grandma’s house. And lined with floral paper like mother’s apron scenting of milk and violets. Spring has bloomed from the chest of drawers.
*
Me sto zitto
Da che er sole s’appolla in celo a che tracolla diluvieno sur monno le parole. Ce ne fussi una sola che va in panza alle cose, che dà in culo alle stelle! Cara, vecchia parlata: pietre, breccole, serci, sampietrini. Mo in bocca l’acquapaola. Parlate voi la lingua. Io—pe dispetto— me sto zitto in dialetto.
//
My Mouth Is Shut
From the moment the sun is perched in the sky to the moment it dies a rain of words assaults the world. Would there were a single one that got to the heart of the matter that catapulted out beyond the realm of the humdrum. Dear old vernacular: flint, rubble, stone, cobblestone. My mouth is full of fountainwater. You people speak the language. You can have it. I—out of disrespect— am keeping my mouth shut in dialect.
*
Mauro Marè (Rome, 1935-93) wrote in Romanesco, the dialect of the people of modern Rome. A notary by profession, he published six collections of poetry in his lifetime. His early work was deeply influenced by his predecessors Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Trilussa and Mario dell’Arco. In his later work Marè developed an idiosyncratic, deeply personal language which has been compared to Joyce and Gadda for its bold, modernist experimentation. His work remains largely untranslated.
Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and winner of the Joseph Tusiani Italian Translation Prize), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Apple Valley Review, Bad Lilies, The Shore and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.
For years I’d been Susan. My real name unpronounceable to them, a dry “r” they wet and sloth. Saliva spilling into my coffee.
Then the wait was so long at this one store that I used the app to pre-order. There was a cup waiting for me, small non-fat cappuccino, with my real name printed. I reached but recoiled.
I looked around at the other customers, wondering who else was under cover, who laid bare. I grabbed the cup and tossed it, discreetly.
Then shuffled to the long line, gaze on the ground, to order a small nonfat cappuccino for Susan.
*
Communion
He would place it on my tongue with reverence; he was a holy man, no doubt. No eye contact—he knew all my sins— bound on earth.
I would do a one-eighty, return to my seat, kneel in the hard chestnut.
Downcast gaze, the tip of my tongue slowly peeling the wet wafer from the roof of my mouth.
This is God, stuck to the roof of my mouth— nothing else was coming loose.
*
Dolo Diaz is a scientist / poet with roots in Spain, currently residing in California. Her work has appeared/forthcoming in ONE ART, The Summerset Review, Third Wednesday, The Lake, among others. dolodiaz.com
To the Livestock Truck Broken Down On the Side of the Highway
All I can think of are the pigs, cold in their stalls, wide flanks bare to the November morning, the little hairs on their backsides blowing in the wind.
Some might say they are built for it, but I think we all appreciate warmth, the comfort of a closed door.
*
Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, ONE ART, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.
In the basement of the converted old factory, boys cluster and chant in gray light, which enhances the glitter of their skull caps, embroidered by aunties in Bangladesh.
For years the elders feared posting signs and the mosque hid its face. But finally they settled on a small green plaque overlooking a vacant field. Few wander back here
without a reason. As a neighbor, I bring over cookies and books, often sitting with the women to sip chai, cross-legged on a rug. I try to tune my ear to their language.
At first they thought I might be a convert but one spring I brought macaroons and matzoh so they laughed. I tutor the children in English after prayers and watch their faces open like flowers.
This fall I missed two months. My mother entered hospice and I stayed by her side. Returning to the mosque, the children circled me. One pats my sleeve, says they’ve been praying my mother’s soul will reach paradise and won’t wander.
*
Nidhi
The imam’s youngest daughter can not be found. A shriek goes up as mothers and teachers weave through the playground, rattling boxes, searching for a pair of braids, the exact brown eyes—Nidhi.
Might the child surface in months, cooing like a dove above the landfill?
A tiny figure kneels at the far fence.
Annas pumps his wheels over blurred asphalt but finds only Karim, piling sharp scraps into rows. “Bring him!” shout the mothers, unwilling to tempt fate.
Something stirs today, some wind.
Annas says it’s a curse brought by the oldest boys, who play tricks. Later in class he repeats this, convinced. I say write a poem about it.
In this city, children wheel freely and trucks speed their freight: pipes, jagged steel. Drivers’ eyes flicker, they survey.
Something stirs in the alley, white ruffle. We turn, but it’s only plastic and paper scraps.
After an hour, Nidhi at the men’s door silent in the light, led by her father, who’d left her rolling among the rugs while he discussed a fine point of the sermon.
Surging forward, we can’t reach her fast enough.
*
Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. She helped create the We the Poets program (www.theartwell.org) for children from diverse communities. She teaches poetry and painting to children and adults through local venues, including Ritualwell (https://ritualwell.org/) and Cerulean Art Gallery. Her poems appear in literary journals and four collections: Camera Obscura (2017, Moonstone Press), Etching the Ghost (2021, Atmosphere Press) and Sparks and Disperses (2021, Cornerstone Press) and Murmurations (2024, Moonstone Press). Three of her poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her artwork is available through Cerulean Arts Gallery (https://ceruleanarts.com/pages/cathleen-cohen).
It was contagious, our unproduction. Before we even stopped our minting of our pennies, we disregarded dimes. Then we gave up money altogether, then time, then the names of animals. We didn’t look at any flying thing and think bird, or gnat, or honeybee.
When we left our husbands, wives, all our pets and mail and children, we thought cloud. We could touch what we lost and watch our hands go through. We thought phantom, helium, anything unfirm. Anything that wouldn’t, couldn’t stick around.
We fell down in the blades of brown because it felt absurd to water lawns. We moved out of our homes in droves. We threw off the ecological balance, then threw off our clothes, which grew mold till our collective sickness ebbed. Then we made it all, again, our own.
*
Thomas Mixon is a fiction reader for Short Story, Long. He has poems and prose in Pithead Chapel, Rattle, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. He sometimes writes at inanorchardsoftwithrot.substack.com.
We have invited all contributors to ONE ART’s ‘In a Nutshell: An Anthology of Micropoems’ to read their poem in this celebratory gathering on the day of the anthology’s virtual release.
A carefully curated selection of poems that are 10 lines or less, transcend ordinary language through sound/symbol/image/metaphor/simile, and that hold or contain compressed poetic language as sustenance.
About The Guest Editor
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
In the drift of winter, going is the gift. To leave this cobbled house of needs, wrap the woolen scarf around my mouth and nose, breathe the mentholated mist of my undoing. To walk the miles, skaters scratching freedom into ice with cursive blades while I plod, wondering if this night will hold me in the way that I desire. To be set free in some way. Grateful
that the bell rang true. That I did not cough. That my New Year’s fortune was divined with sticks that set me on my path. That when I emerge, the streets are plowed, the night is clear, the stars are out. That I look up.
*
My First Last People once believed that the last image seen before death was recorded on the retina.
This might be your last pap smear, my doctor proclaims as she bends the wand light, props open the folds of my vagina with the cold metal speculum, and peers at my fleshy parts. Looks good! Just like a cervix should in someone your age. I don’t ask for a mirror or a more nuanced description, but imagine the wrinkled portal to the place where my daughter lived for a while 30-odd years ago. No other tenants. No regrets. Is this how it starts then, the end my days? Small good-byes and losses. My first last.
Should I buy cupcakes, confetti? Throw a party? Invite neighbours and friends? I remember driving my father to his golf club at the foot of Mount Bruno near the end of his days. Could see in his eyes, as he looked out across the autumn greens, not sorrow, but a gathering, as if to imprint this vista on his retina to take with him forever.
What will I take? This slice of river— how it bends at the bottom of our street then runs straight to the Kichi Zibi, my daughter’s head thrown back in laughter, my husband’s gentle hands, this earth that has held me, will hold me when I’m done.
*
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, Poetry Northwest, SWIMM, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
he could hear people clacking like adding machines, a long roll of numbers never adding up. Sound was whiteout when snow obliterates a road, or chattering of locusts after their twelve-year emergence.
He kept searching for one sound among a blizzard of silence. One noise shattering limited possibilities. He did the best he could with a hearing aid failing him miserably.
If he heard God’s voice, would it be a bluejay, or a column of Roman numerals, or first snow and the way it’s always soundless and soulless? Dreams tell us truth or fears, but we never listen
or forget them, or vowels linger the way a bluejay lands and folds its wings, or sound vanishes into a crowd of unrelenting voices. I speak for the hearing impaired.
I too, lose my hearing. I can’t say that listening closer or harder helps. It doesn’t. It just exposes me to this harsh reality:
I can’t hear you the way I want to. And all of us deserves to be heard. Even my father, who never knew what I sounded like, or if words were merely patterns of dreams.
*
Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian that 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 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 27 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 “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “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). Forthcoming books include 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize, “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace;” “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (Main Street Press, 2026), “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).
Sometimes my father was a slapdash carnival, mercurial, dangerous, and still my house of mirrors.
He was the thing built up and then torn down, reinventing himself time after time.
He thought I would be the second coming. But when I was born a girl my mother finally realized he needed to be hospitalized.
I kept my father’s blanket folded in a closet and rarely spoke of it. Would it soothe me to put my apocalypse of the heart into words?
Not an ending but an unveiling of something that was always waiting inside me, the thing I was most afraid of because it runs in the dark hollows of my blood where I keep my secrets. The thing that made me crumble as it unfolded over my son.
*
Laura Denny is a retired kindergarten teacher who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She is a docent for Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. She loves to hike and forest bathe in the Redwoods near her home. Her poetry has appeared in Pictura Journal, Sunlight Press, Remington Review, Last Leaves Magazine, Orchards Review, Amethyst Review, and Macrame Literary Journal.
Anthology Publication Date: April 17 (International Haiku Day)
Requirements: Previously uncurated, though sharing on personal sites (including social media) is great! Simultaneous submissions are allowed; just please add a note in the Subfolio submission manager to inform if work is accepted elsewhere.
What I’m Looking For: Despite what so many of us were taught in school, a three-line poem composed of five, then seven, then five syllables is not an accurate definition for haiku. (For more on why, please read this article by Michael Dylan Welch.) A haiku IS NOT defined as a micro poem with 17 syllables. Contemporary English haiku are constantly evolving and stretching the bounds of how much poem can be packed into a tiny package.
So what are haiku? As he outlined on our episode of The Poetry Space_, Timothy Green defines haiku as “two worlds in one breath,” which I haven’t been able to improve upon! Excellent haiku hinge upon the juxtaposition between two entities in an astonishingly quick amount of time—without the need to arbitrarily count syllables. The best haiku enable you to see at least two worlds with a deeper understanding.
With that in mind, please do not submit 5-7-5 haiku that lack the juxtaposition at the heart of what makes haiku beat. Modern Haiku and Rattle are excellent sources for what constitutes the fascinating scope of contemporary English haiku; and they are a great representation of the kind of poems I curate for ONE ART’s anthologies.
I can’t wait to read your haiku and in the meantime, find me over on Facebook and Substack.
“The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.” ― Clarice Lispector
I love how we send words away to rest having done enough work for now. Yours, the silence of canyons in the heat of the day. Mine the silence of animals in shadows of trees. Together we are the rest notes of music, the empty space after thunder, the gap in the conversation of weather.
Turns out, each moment is not waiting for a sound to fill it. Whole hours await the arrival of nothingness. That is us. Pause and Caesura. We are the vacation of language. This is how I will remember you. By all the things you did not say. And all the ways I did not answer you.
*
Elizabeth Cohen lives and writes in New Mexico and Costa Rica where she lives with her dog, Layla. Her poems have been published in Patterson Review, Blue Mesa, San Antonio Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, Yale Review, and other publications. She is the author of The Family on Beartown Road, a memoir (Random House); The Hypothetical Girl (Random House/Penguin/Other Press), short stories, and six books of poetry, most recently, Mermaids of Albuquerque (Saint Julian Press), a 2025 New Mexico Book awards finalist.
I keep daydreaming of alternative homes, ways to define a room of my own. I’d take that run-down, L-shaped, rural motel and turn it into an artist retreat named “Rhymes with Oranges”. Each room, a different flavor of citrus. The former owner’s two-story quarters, converted into a common space. Maybe I’ve watched too many remodeling shows, but every abandoned retro, cinder block gas station feels like an opportunity.
*
Running the Roads
The place I think of, most often, as my childhood home was off a paved, two-lane road.
To us, this was a “major” road. And it did, in fact, connect the whole neighborhood
to the four lane highway about five miles away. My father “joked” about the road,
telling us to go play in the street, when he wanted us out of a room. Or, he’d remark at how he’d run
over Santa or the Easter Bunny, maybe even the Tooth Fairy, to explain why they would not be visiting.
I didn’t walk along that road as often as the side streets. I liked to wander, sometimes closing my eyes to see
if I could walk in a straight line. By the time I could drive we’d moved away from that road,
into a more structured neighborhood of unlined roads that argued for slow speeds and polite “you go next,
no you” activity. Either way, I still wanted to wander. My father called it “running the roads”. He never understood
why I’d want to drive into town (about five miles each way) to pick up ice cream for a snack.
But, if I was going, he’d always add to my list: dog food, cigarettes, a newspaper.
As I grew older, I pondered how differently we measured distance. He’d drive across the state to look at a piece of land
he wanted to believe he could afford, but he wouldn’t drive the same distance to visit me once I’d finished college
and settled into marriage and a career hours away.
*
Jessie Carty (she/her) is the author of eight poetry collections including Shopping After the Apocalypse (dancing girl press, 2016) which was nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award. Jessie is a part-time freelance writer, teacher, editor, and full-time Instructional Designer. She recently got back into blogging about her travels to visit all 100 counties in NC: (http://notjessica58.blogspot.com)
She lifts the spoon to the lips she has kissed for forty years, wipes the soup from his white beard, steadies him as he rises from the chair.
Ours too is a love story, she says, especially now, so many years after they said I do, lived each vow, and now reside permanently in sickness, not in health.
Ours too is a love story, she reminds him as she rereads his favorite poem, retells stories of their shared past, retrieves him from hallucinations.
Ours too is a love story, she says, of the love that endures even in moments when her face is the face of a stranger.
Ours too is a love story, she says, as she sits at the kitchen table sips tea that has grown cold in the cup, listens for his voice down the hall, studies the nursing home brochure.
*
Deliverance
As I walk the long hallway to her room, I hear the carts delivering meals, the nurses delivering meds, the televisions delivering news.
I find her sitting in the wheelchair that has replaced the car she once used to deliver groceries to a homebound neighbor, To deliver her grandson to Little League practice, To deliver herself to the church where she prayed for eighty years.
I sit beside her in the stuffy room Delivering a small bouquet of supermarket carnations, Delivering a hand to hold while we watch a Hallmark movie, Delivering the only thing she wants from me— a loving presence that says you are not alone.
*
Future Tense
Some days, the future is too hard to imagine. Today, standing at the sink rinsing the breakfast dishes, my future tense stretches only as far as tonight’s dinner.
Perhaps tomorrow I will feel strong enough to knit the edges of today into a promise for the future. Perhaps then the gloomy shadows of dying light will break.
Perhaps I will recall some persistent but forgotten hope. Perhaps I will make chicken instead of shrimp. And perhaps something sweet for dessert.
*
First Reader for Jim
Is it the smell of coffee wafting down the hall that stirs you from your sleep? Or is it the way my step quickens as I carry the steaming mug to you like a sacred offering on those mornings when I wake you with a sheet of paper still warm from the printer, and thrust it into your hands before your eyes are fully open?
Or do you already know what’s coming when you roll over before dawn and find my side of the bed empty— A sure sign that I am up and working on some poem that has poked my ribs in the night and simply will not let me fall back to sleep until I let it stretch its limbs across the page.
Never perturbed by the abrupt awakening, but never inclined to simply skim the lines and say it’s perfect just the way it is— even when those are the words I want to hear. That is why you are my first reader, the one who sees me in all my unpunctuated imperfection and still believes in the promise of the poem taking shape.
*
Confessions of a Freshman Comp Teacher
There comes a time when every red-pencil wielding grammarian must wonder if she might have single-handedly derailed The American Literary Canon.
“Emily, what’s with these dashes? Comma or period, please. If you want to get fancy, you can throw in a semi-colon now and then.”
“Walt, these run-on sentences have to go. Yes, I know you contain multitudes, But must they all be in the same sentence?”
“And you, Allen, have you ever met a comma you didn’t like? Honestly, this essay just makes me want to howl!”
*
Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.
I need a Hubble telescope to take majestic pictures of your heart. Galaxies drifting away. Dying suns. A screensaver for when we’re frozen and there’s nothing left to say.
*
Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Exacting Clam, Subtle Body Press, minor literature[s], 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more of his work at kentkosack.net
Do you remember those candy hearts that come in little boxes around Valentine’s Day? They used to say things like SWEETIE and CUTIE PIE and then they updated them to say FER SURE and FAX ME. Now they say ADORBS and LOL, GOAT, and BAE. My teenager and I make rude ones to place around the house— CAN U NOT, UGH, AS IF!, and WTF.
Not only do they look chalky– those sickly-sweet pastels– the candy hearts taste like chalk too or how you imagine chalk would taste. Have you ever licked a piece you found, white or yellow— resting on the metal shelf underneath your teacher’s chalkboard? You could pretend to smoke a stick instead of a cigarette, trying to look cool as you clap out her erasers during recess, coughing— a cloud of chalk dust hanging in the air as the bell rings, calling you back to class.
*
Angie Blake-Moore has been a teacher of 3- and 4-year-olds in Washinton, DC for over 30 years. She’s had work published in Potomac Review, Green Mountains Review, ONE ART, and like a field among others, including the anthology Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin 1984-2001. She had a poem chosen for a competition in her hometown of Arlington, VA, where her poem was displayed in county buses.
If the world should end while we are on one of our walks, I won’t complain or use my last minutes to imagine All the places we could have traveled or all the things I wanted us to do together. Instead, I would sit On the pavement or lie back on the grass, and as the sky Burst into white and red and orange, I would take Your hand and tell you I could not have wanted A better life than the one I’ve had by your side. And if the dog should be with us, frightened by the noise Of exploding stars, I’d unhook his lead so he could Chase a cat or some ducks one last time before The ground opens beneath his paws and we stare at him Falling helplessly into eternity, which is the same As nothingness or the past that no longer has meaning. If the world should end when you and I are talking, Remembering a Borges short story or a poem By Thomas Hardy, I promise you our conversation Will still have mattered. Our words, even if cut off Mid-sentence, will hang there in our ears, more intensely Than any declaration of love. The parking garage At the mall will collapse, just like the new supermarket Across the street. The ocean will rush back into the canal, And airplanes will dive toward the earth like meteorites Cast down from the stars. It will be an ending without Angels or trumpets, without prophets or evil kings. Just fate, petty, nitpicking fate, inexorable as arithmetic Or the end of vacation. Poor, thoughtless fate, Rolling across the green felt of the billiard table As palm trees burst into flame. If the world Should end during one of our walks, perhaps In late spring when bougainvillea is blooming By the sidewalk, and bleeding heart vine Flowers red and purple, I would not look at either. I would only look in your direction. Quick, mi amor, Finish what you were telling me about Borges.
*
George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including the recent A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Individual poems have been published in The High Window, One Art, Solstice, Nimrod, Rattle, New Ohio Review, and storySouth, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day.
A stone kicks up as I walk, lands as a heart. I turn on a trail that cuts into woods looking for quiet, the quiet of wandering a path packed by deer hooves. Pushing through brush I find myself back at the road and recognize my hope. This is the season bluebirds flock in the village, chipping at feeders, twitching in shrubs, flicking over the iron fence of the cemetery across from the hayfield. Yesterday eight perched on the edge of the barn roof gutter, plump and rust-breasted, backs and wings a sky any of us would be happy to wear.
*
Birthday
Juvenile hawks scream overhead, complain at not being fed now that they’ve fledged.
I don’t want to feed anyone since my mother gave up.
She stopped eating after her final birthday when I made her blueberry pancakes for dinner.
She said it was all she wanted.
I used her mother’s recipe the pancakes golden domes in the pan sweet and soft
in my mouth and hers. I knew she was no longer hungry but was happy to ask for something I could make.
*
Grace Mattern’s poetry and prose has been published widely, including in The Sun, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, and Poet Lore. She received fellowships from the New Hampshire State Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center. Her book “The Truth About Death” won the NH Readers’ Choice Award for Outstanding Work of Poetry.
After an argument, he buys her a grocery store bouquet. Two weeks later, she tears apart
his apology flowers—the pink roses, white lilies, purple and yellow mums, the red-striped
carnations—trying to salvage what has not decayed. She carries the bones of them
out to the garden—the spent blooms, the limp stems. To the winter garden
of stubborn dirt clods and dry stalk stubbles. They never got to enjoy last summer’s sweet
corn. The raccoons got there before they could harvest anything of worth.
The bouquet grows smaller. Today, she lifts the last rose from its tall watery grave.
She finds a smaller vase, fills it to the brim with fresh water, fluffs the fading flower
heads. Wipes away the fallen petals.
*
Jessica D. Thompson’s poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as ONE ART, Verse Daily, Thimble, Gyroscope Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Eclectica, the Southern Review, and are forthcoming in Critical Humanities (Marshall University). In 2024, her poetry collection “Daybreak and Deep” was shortlisted for the Indiana Authors Award. Her poetry collection, “The Mood Ring Diaries,” released in 2025, was a finalist in the American Book Fest Best Book Awards for Narrative Poetry. Jessica has worked as a carhop, led groups into wild caves, answered crisis hotlines, and was a recruiter for a global corporation before retiring to a small cabin in the middle of a hardwood forest.
My four-year-old asks, What is this? points to soy beef chunks in lopsided lasagna. It’s meat, I say, ish. He burps, says, Excuse me ish.
These days, all I crave is ish—the forgiving spaces between, where nothing is this or that—here or gone. Pure ish. Unrecognizable, undefinable, shape-it-into-what-you-need-able.
I made dinner-ish. Here’s a bowl of wind topped with butter and birdsong.
My mother isn’t really dead. She’s dead-ish. She visited today, my blood pressure high, again, and a belly bigger with each checkup.
Instead of down hospital hallways, I walked to a café at eleven-eleven Central when a ladybug flew right to me, landed on my chest, almost knocked me over.
We are all here-ish. Sure, some touch the ground, and yesterday’s breath becomes breeze for wordless land.
*
Pumpkin Patch at the Pier
We sit on haystacks by the antique truck for a family photo. My mother called me pumpkin, and now her pumpkin-bell earrings jingle from my lobes with my every move as if to dial Mom, because as soon as the stranger in burnt orange pants snaps several angles of stills, my mother’s favorite song Leaving on a Jet Plane soars through the patch like a grand reunion— —I raise my daughter from the nest of my lap, we sprint to the mouth of song and discover a speaker on a tall pole— beside it, a bubble machine. Bubbles! Ella in her pumpkin costume wobbles through the swell of song with outstretched hands to pop iridescent planets as my palms collect the powdered-sugar-magic of absence— I stuff my skirt pockets with spirit till I’m lifted by the scarecrows from the soles of my ground-kissed shoes.
*
Sara Ries Dziekonski (she/her) was named Runner-Up in the Press 53 Poetry Award for her manuscript, Today’s Specials, which was released in September of 2024 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. She is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We’re Open, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor and Marrying Maracuyá, which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others. Ries Dziekonski is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services.
As you kneel, cautious of your knee, your bum shoulder, as you reach into the mess of plumbing under the sink, your shirt pulls up, a few inches, a few vertebrae, revealing your back, you say, hand me the wrench, and I see your boyish self, the curious one, the fixer who cannot leave a problem, or a broken pipe, unresolved, they say that some are dandelions, who thrive no matter the soil, I see the boy who rose from ashes, dandelion bright.
Later, in bed, we are young again together, I think about the paradox, to know we are old, to feel young in the dark.
*
Kathryn Temple teaches at Georgetown University and lives on the Chesapeake in a small town south of Annapolis. The author of two academic books and many academic essays, she has also published in The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Superhighway, Petigru Review, Metaworker, and Streetlight, among others. Currently, she is working on a poetry collection entitled “Parachute,” and her third academic book, Ambivalence: the Invention of a Modern Emotion. You can find some of her personal essays and some writing advice here: Bits & Pieces. Her CV is available here: Academia. When she’s not working, she tries to keep the ducks off the dock.
Sunday, March 1, 2026 ONE ART x The Poetry Box Featured Readers: John Arthur, Katie Dozier, John Wojtowicz, Laura Foley Information & Registration via The Poetry Box Tickets are FREE! >> Register Here <<
You can learn more about The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, which is open from February 1st thru March 15th, at ThePoetryBox.com/chapbook-prize.
About the Poets:
John Arthur is the author of Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide.John is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Frogpond, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, and many other places. He has worked as a valet at a casino, a waiter, a Ferris Wheel operator, a cook, a pizza delivery driver, a fast food delivery driver, a landscaper, a journalist, an editor, a librarian, a library director, a manager, and for one long, hot day as a guy going door to door asking if you’d like to donate to the Sierra Club.
You can purchase John Arthur’s winning chapbook at:
Katie Dozier’s love of poetry first bloomed as a child. She memorized Robert Frost sitting on a tree stump and bathed in Edgar Allan Poe as an adolescent. While studying words at Florida State University, Katie also played with chips and became a professional poker player. She’s passionate about encouraging others to discover and share contemporary poetry—through her social media, Substack, and NFTs. Katie is the author of All That Glitter; Watering Can: a Month of Poems; and the co-author of Hot Pink Moon: a Crown of Haibun and Did You See the Moon Honey. She is the creator of the top-rated podcast The Poetry Space_, the haiku editor for One Art, and an editor at Rattle. Katie lives in The Woodlands, Texas, with her husband Timothy Green, their four children, and way too many books.
John Wojtowicz, author of No Lightsabers in the Kitchen, grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey” with his wife and two children. Currently, he teaches social work at Rowan College South Jersey. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable and the Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Podcast. Several of his poems were selected for Princeton University’s 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices exhibition at the Lewis Center for the Arts. When not writing, teaching, or rolling around in the yard, he enjoys monitoring bluebird boxes, volunteering at the Cohanzick Zoo, and flipping horseshoe crabs.
You can purchase John Wojtowicz’s winning chapbook at:
Laura Foley, author of Ice Cream for Lunch: a grandparents handbook, is also the author of ten previous poetry books, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow. Her book Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review and an Eric Hoffer Award. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others. Her work has been included in many journals including: Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, Poetry of Presence, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. She lives on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire, and romps with her grandchildren as often as possible.
Near closing, a bagboy scans my beer and chicken wings, throws them into a plastic bag that will soon be outlawed, and he drops a beer bottle a few inches above the conveyor belt, before throwing it in along with the rest of the junk that reflects my double chin. I think of the minimum wage increase to seventeen dollars an hour in the coming year, he looks at me with disgust, overweight with a stained white shirt from sloppily eating barbeque during my lunch break, and him, handsome, fit, ready to be observed by beautiful things, but for now, he grimaces at the rose scented bath bombs, one-dollar Christ candles, warm plastic bouquets made for a distance, eventually he smiles as I slip him three bills, and I think of him later stuffing my face into a bamboo pillow like an old dog who did it again.
*
Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.
The clematis vine was wrapped so symmetrically around an ancient stump it seemed some human hand had done it. I’ve sat on the stump countless times since I saw it decades ago. The vine’s still there too. I sat on the stump this morning. I tried to stop brooding on the costs of old age. Things are what they are. The sky poked through the canopy in shards. You’d call the place more dark than bright, but you wouldn’t be there. I’ve seen no other human track than mine in all this time. The last visitor probably felled the tree.
*
Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.
and learn howling and crackle are common to both the sounds of longing and the sounds of losing – like fire snaps, like this needle-kissed hiss that warms the quiet before that Saturday Night Fever bass starts strutting. He kept that album. She had forgotten. It was buried for years, among his discarded Consumer Reports, bifocals, and dog-eared bible, next to his pillbox, “Sunday” left full. It was lost. But lust and mourning share a conjuring power – like dueling flames, like the whirling table on his old beloved, big, wood-finished Magnavox – both burn off time, both spin life back. “He won it,” Mom says, “In a bet, playing golf. No – we couldn’t have bought it – no – not back then. We couldn’t make it fit in the Pontiac trunk. He put it on the roof! Without ropes!” She laughs, “But – O – we really did love disco then… He wore tight, plaid, disco pants…” But now – two months since Dad died – a warp in the vinyl stalls the siren violins, holds their feline dip too long, forcing, for a moment, the hustle to limp, breaking the spell. I look at her. And the stereo, the pills, the wheelchair, the books, the rolodex cards for plumbers and roofers, the putter, the scripture, all sink in the whirl – crackle, burn, blaze away, with hi-hat rage, with wails that sear. She just stares. Their untold stories – their secrets never shared – are flares and cinders, drunk, dancing in her eyes.
*
Evan Leslie grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and now lives in Houston, Texas with his Husband, Ryan, and his rescue pit bull, Rimbaud (formerly Rambo). Evan is a cellist, arts educator, and the director of the University of Houston’s Community Arts Programs. Evan is the former Artistic Producer at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. His poetry has been recently published in The Pinch and Troublemaker Firestarter, New Verse News, and forthcoming in Vita Poetica.
I hope it’s classic rock with grind & sleaze, wailing voice of an ET diva lamenting deaths by supernovae of ten thousand suns.
None of this boring jam- band trip of natural explanations like pulsars, quasars, cosmic bounceback of radiation, remnants of the First Note,
Big Bang. Let the sound be hardcore funky, putting a tune in our tone- deaf ears. Don’t say it’s nothing, a loud lie from the heavens.
We need a roar with escape velocity to understand how a song can be the most important evidence of life.
*
Ace Boggess is author of eight books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025) and My Pandemic / Gratitude List (Mōtus Audāx Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, is forthcoming from Running Wild Press.
My brother found it in the most stereotypical way possible, with the Peace Corps digging wells for impoverished orphans in a rural Tanzanian village. Remembering it, he looked wistful, overusing phrases like “higher calling” and “the greatest good.”
My best friend Jenny quit her six-figure consulting job After smoking ayahuasca to become a bikram yoga teacher at a Costa Rican resort for stressed CEOs and capybaras. I told her it was a stupid decision. She’s never looked more radiant.
I almost had it once working summers at an ice cream shop. Every Tuesday, the old folks from the home across town took a field trip for scoops of pistachio and rum raisin. I greeted them all by name, asked after grandchildren, gossiped about
their strapping new chaperone, flexed my biceps to hoots and hollers. And I passed each of them their cones with utmost gentleness, taking care to smile, checking they were held firmly, before letting go.
*
Vivisection
after Nicole Sealey
You watch the hibachi chef sharpen his knife, and the blade reminds you of when the barber sliced your ear open. Warm slickness spread down your neck, different from the sour warm slickness that trickled down your inner thighs as your sister gripped your neck while clutching a fillet knife after you cracked a joke about her temper. What you would sever if it meant you could forget. A finger. No, an arm. Yes, your left arm twisted from its socket, tendons fraying then snapping. Like the string of the piñata from your sister’s ninth birthday. “I was just getting started,” she said, candy spilling like viscera from the piñata’s bludgeoned body. Memory, you’ve read, is like moonlight, an ocean, a sieve. But, what memory actually is—a slender, serrated knife.
*
Stephen K. Kim (he/him) is a queer Korean American writer and educator in New Jersey. He enjoys spending time with his husband and his cat. His poems appear in Ghost City Review, Neologism, Thimble, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee, a student and teacher at the Writers Studio, and a reader for Only Poems. He can be found online @skimperil.
My clothes are second hand, Even the brand new ones Held a different person Just a few months ago But on the other hand You’ve become just a stranger And when I look in the mirror— I see another looking back.
*
Jesse Finch is a twenty one year old butch ammeture poet and writer from Alabama. When they aren’t writing little poems or working on editing google docs you can find them at their dayjob or with friends at the small Irish pub down the street. Jesse writes about their complicated relationship with sexuality and guilt, as well as working through their own mental health struggles. Sometimes pretentious, but always introspective, Jesse wants to share their story in small bite size pieces with those who may feel seen.
Loquita, I take my phone into the shower to watch Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl teaser while I bathe, swing a hip under the water, let it mingle with the tears on my cheeks, happy for how happy they all look to be matching each other’s moves in the mirrored recognition of being. We are each at least 50% water, together a stream, and church is understanding that the flood is what’s holy. And baptism is Bunny’s hand on the cowboy’s back in tender backwards dip. I’m not religious, but I believe that those who weep are blessed. I believe it’s through the mist that I’ve seen the world most clearly. Clean and barefoot from the tub, my footsteps fall in 4/4 time, in other words, in love.
*
Talia Pinzari is a poet and public relations director from New England living in Austin, Texas. Her work appears in Poetry Ireland Review, Salamander Magazine, EVENT Magazine, ROOM Magazine, West Trade Review, The Shore Poetry, SWWIM, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.
fleeced inside the cell, undefined violence flashes purple. still chain-smoking on his balcony as windows close for bed, the new neighbor, a slapping flag, a Marine retiree vanity plate. I know the barometric plunge, whipping white the maple leaves. he snaps beer tabs, snaps at a family unseen, snaps at his dog. lightning takes a long time lacing its boots downriver to us. he’s not much older than me, and how I remember Fallujah, old men and boys crying on the curb, the forbidden from leaving, who never left. and rags after. low-res red. phosphorous Pompeii. does he still feel under-boot the crushed chalk bone, insensible explosions wherever he goes? snapping. memory a flash bang. from my bedroom I monitor the first-degree face, mulch-pile chest smoking uncontrollably, turned by pitchfork, drifting wind over water. the storm rolls in on caissons of thunder.
*
February 14
I lay on the floor trying to unhear screams, the city screaming into its elbows to stifle what it knows. The neighbors rise fighting, and I’m afraid to seek answers to the questions I have. Google, can AR-15 bullets pierce a brick wall? How do hiding mothers keep their children quiet? Is the screaming in my middle ear or a fold of nervous tissue? Is it me? Is it only me? Car doors slam and engines ignite and I remain on the floor, keeping close to the world without beds, those born and born again shivering pink each morning waiting to receive spring’s augurs. Geese shadows labor over the window so low I hear their wings threshing. None cry out.
*
Two-star Hotel, Myrtle Beach
look I don’t want to catch anything don’t want to kill the ocean creatures, only stare at my feet for hours, collecting beautiful bones
be first, or fiftieth, to comb the dawn beach while the water’s out taking care of its salty business is that too much to ask?
a domestic situation ends in handcuffs pleas break the boardwalk crowd outside the Bermuda Sands but the lazy river goes on
Black & Milds in the kiddie pool, sandy beds I rate this hotel five stars for the riff-raff for they come by it honestly, no bugs in my room— no, spiders do not count
barnacles barnacle, I shell shells, terns turn over a pink plastic carnation decoy bright as sushi, what once was a revolution, plastic, now an island
in a vortex visible from space how must it loom to turtles below a jellyfish or ominous mushroom cloud, the manmade tropical depression
named for each of us in time, we’re attached to our disasters if not multitudes, we contain teaspoons of colorful beads
in our brains, micro-plastic’d, sad, bedraggled as the streets after Mardi Gras a man in the lazy river laughs like a cough or coughs like a laugh, what’s the difference
at rock-bottom, where the party is a sickness the sickness is a party
*
Edie Meade is a writer in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been recently published in Room Magazine, Invisible City, The Harvard Advocate, JMWW, The Normal School, and Litro.
Before my mother’s death, my heart and mind lived five states away / and when she died they lived three states away, and when / I left my marriage, they moved in together / living in different rooms, but close enough for one to hear / the other crying or dancing to music / that moves through the house like a soundtrack / – not the original heartbeat, but a remix / think the beat of one song / behind the lyrics to another. // My mother’s death revealed my mother’s song / a death that could be mine if I choose to inherit it / lament with little groove / life I couldn’t have because I refused to take it.
*
My Heaven
I know you said I’d see you as a black cat with yellow ribbon, but I saw you as a marigold
next to an open field that looked to me like heaven. You were off to the side, away from the crowd
of wildflowers and grassy hills. You were, as you were in life, doing your own thing. I know my heaven looks nothing
like yours. You prefer tall buildings and busy streets. You want to travel in slink and shadow like an alley cat
unbothered and unattached, but today you came rooted as a small flower with yellow leaves sparse – just enough.
*
Farewell to All the Hypothetical Lives I Refuse to Have
Mississippi girl on horseback, good gumbo. New Yorker, trendsetter. Midwestern mom with the warm home. Farewell to that life, and the next,
and the next, like water that makes the river I frequent. Goodbye turtles, sunbathing on rocks and heavy, broken branches.
Shiny silver dollars. Farewell to the only child, the background singer, the lonely wife – whose only touch she feels
is from the steady linger of the fading summer sun.
*
Shonté Daniels is a poet and game developer in Maryland. Her poetry has appeared in several publications, including Puerto del sol, Ambit, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Her essays on gaming has been published in Vice Gaming, Kotaku, Deorbital, and others.
I Study by the Candlelight of My Ex Girlfriend, When I Move to My New City I’ll Join a Gay Kickball League and Pretend I Like Beer
I am on my way to being a hot shot lawyer or a burn out by 23, a different girlfriend once told me that not everything is worth a poem. LSAT questions, professor recommendations, the way my expensive study course is definitely taught by a lesbian. The candlelight catching to a match my friend got at his aunt’s wedding, the baby she’s expecting in May, the carefully curated living room bookcase posted on Instagram every few months, as if we could forget. My Joan Didion collection in someone else’s house, the organized meet up to get my stuff back, saying goodbye to my favorite sweatshirt of the past seven months. My mom’s recipes I cook in a new kitchen, my inability to ace a chicken thigh, the burnt meat rotting in my garbage. My sister’s new life, my sister’s fiancé, my sister’s house. The fear of being forgotten, the act of forgetting, the journals I read once a year to remember the hurt. The pickle brine, the act of brining, my alarm clock waking me up at 7:40 am to be a capitalist. Corona in my throat, Corona in my cup, Corona in my stomach. The first girl I loved moving to the River Arts District, the second debuting her sleeve of tattoos on Instagram, the third asking me for coffee whenever she gets the chance. The taste of green apple Hi-Chew, saying goodbye to my Grandad for the very last time, my dog going blind and starting to bite feet. Isn’t it worth it?
*
Niamh Cahill is a recent graduate of Kenyon College, where she received distinction for her Creative Writing Senior Thesis. At Kenyon, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the college’s first and only chapbook press, Sunset Press, and has had work published in Spires Magazine. Currently working in law in Washington, D.C., she is continuing to write and refine her craft outside of academia, exploring how the rhythms of everyday life inform poetry.
The fat plastic bag blowing across the road is evidence of the earth’s breath.
What else might be invisible until given shape by another?
*
Re(d)clamation
I want to reclaim red: sunlight swimming in a glass of cabernet. Not that ruined thing of sparring wings, not that spilling bull’s blood in the cheering ring. But instead give me the carnelian horizon ceding to the darkening sky at night. Restore the blush to the coral in the reef, now bleached. Give me the ruby of cherries, a flushed cheek, wind-chapped or lovestruck, let me hear the Beatles sing of strawberry fields and imagine fruit glistening all the way to the horizon. I want the soft comfort of lips warm and yielding, childhood’s flashy firetrucks at rest in their quiet garage. Elmo. The homey sight of a fresh-painted barn, a covered bridge, a welcoming door, a jar of jam, my mother’s favorite polish, reindeer’s scarlet nose circling the globe. A cardinal on a snowy limb. Please return my reds, untainted. I’ll gladly share my blues.
*
Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Calul, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Additionally, through her publishing venture (Kingly Street Press) she released two anthologies, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and Floored. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.
It’s like watching something crawl out of the heart. — Andy Einhorn, musical director, on Audra McDonald’s performance in Gypsy
When Audra McDonald performed the final song in Gypsy, Rose’s Turn, she said the audience watched her go all the way down to where the iguanas play. I’ve known those iguanas.
And I want you to know me, but these lines hurt. I don’t want to relive my first husband leaving me for his sister-in-law. So I’ll only tell you that he died a year later, and I argued with his new wife about which font to use on his gravestone.
I could tell you how I moved across the country for a married ex-heroin addict. We broke up before the wheels of my plane touched down. I had two young daughters still grieving their dead father. We were in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I, their mother, was a bereft fool. A widow, not a widow. No job, no friends.
I didn’t look for danger, but isn’t love always dangerous? Like when I fell for my 17-year-old student, how we wrote emails to each other for two years. No one believes a high school senior could have a crush on a 60-year-old. Believe it.
In this moment, I’m like Rose, shattered and standing in front of my audience. What will I do next? Take off my clothes? I’m already naked, something crawling out of my heart.
What do you still want to know? Did I ever touch the student? I did not, though I still imagine those possible sins. And yes, the second wife let me choose the gravestone— a line in Garamond from The Little Prince, You will have the stars as no one else has them.
I wanted a pretty ending to that story. But that isn’t life, right? This is, this unholy, savage poem. All my iguanas. For you.
*
The Last Woman
Years ago, a man smuggled the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre. What did Vincenzo Peruggia think he could do with it? Hang it on the wall of his Paris apartment? Women’s mysterious bodies have always confused and fascinated men. Our miraculous woman bodies that can make humans—like gods do. The way gods do. Men have tried to imitate us. Remember Michelangelo dissecting cadavers to study their design, so he could spend years chiseling and polishing a slab of marble until a statue emerged from stone? But women are much more than vessels, more than blue figures trapped inside bell jars. We are more than breasts and legs dancing on stages, in cages, bought and sold for men’s fathomless desire. And when do we admit those cages were forged from men’s terror? When the last woman on Earth weaponizes her own shattering? When heaven drops the constellations, sugaring the land with stars?
*
Valentina Gnup’s poetry collection, Ruined Music, was published by Grayson Books in 2024. In 2023, she won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry and second place in the (NYC Yeats Society) Yeats Prize for poetry. In 2019, she won the Lascaux Prize in Poetry; in 2017, she won the Ekphrastic Challenge from Rattle; in 2015, she won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award; and in 2011, she won the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including December, Brooklyn Review, Nimrod, and The New Guard, and she has two chapbooks published by Mille Grazie Press and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She lives in Mill Valley, California.
We open our doors, our hearts is what your parents read we said—
you who were turned away at the gate, infant Iranian girl with holes in the walls of your heart.
You whose parents believed what they read about America. Some of us worked harder,
like your heart back then, carried your case to Senators and secretaries, anyone who’d listen, beating doors, spelling it out
until they let you in. Doctors said the operation went much better than expected, you’d survive,
but the travel ban is back again, Iran’s gone dark, and you have long since vanished from the news.
Four months old then, you’d be 9 now if you’d thrived. In the next world, we might live
on our reprieves—a currency of grace— but there are bills to pay and groceries we can’t afford and bodies everywhere
the protests have not eased. If your heart fails yet again and you dream of sanctuary,
any hint a heart remains here in this country we once believed we knew, you will find us next to the free lawyers in baggage claim,
our signs with your name, our arms open.
*
Sarah Carey is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Grief Committee MInutes (2024, Saint Julian Press), and Bloodstream (2026, Mercer University Press.) She is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program and lives in Gainesville, Florida with her family.
We are in the third act. We are observing each other’s curvature. We are breathing down each other’s neck like a needy fanblade. Starting the day with socks on the ground, I wanted more and I realize now that there’s only a dead leaf in the picture. Here is your catechism where the only rule is releasing the metaphorical fire hydrant. I’ve let go of things, a lacuna in the catalog of the body. So, given that, this must be history in clockwork— I parcel you up like an heirloom, you divine thing. Today, I’ll be selfish. You’ll see me in a strange display. You will not stay with me for a while.
*
Jaiden Geolingo is a Pinoy writer based in Georgia, United States, and the author of How to Migrate Ghosts (kith books, 2025). A finalist for the Georgia Poet Laureate’s Prize and a 2025 National YoungArts Winner in Poetry, his writing appears or is forthcoming in diode poetry journal, The Shore, The Tupelo Quarterly, Writers Digest, and elsewhere. Jaiden is the editor-in-chief of Hominum Journal and a Best of the Net nominee. He is currently working on his second manuscript titled Hymnal of Hourglasses.
We got it backwards. The dead don’t haunt us. We haunt them. We follow them around in our bathrobes, with our votive candles, our palms offered up to clouds, waking them at odd hours to dredge up the past. Did you love us enough? we ask. Did we love you enough? we ask. The times we laughed together they no longer find funny. The times we cried together stir up nothing. Staring into a sink or looking up from a mattress, we torment them with our irascible questioning, our milky moods that skulk through the deserted playground of our minds. Still, we beckon them watch us weep into our pillows. Who can blame them for hating us and our petty desire for answers, for forgiveness, for closure? They look at us the way me might look at insects trapped in amber, wrapped as we are in our heavy loneliness. We are more dead to them than they to us. They have better things to do than mope around the house. They’ve gotten over us. We’ll never get over them.
*
Henry Israeli is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Our Age of Anxiety (White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), and god’s breath hovering across the waters, (Four Way Books: 2016), and as editor, Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books (Saturnalia: 2022). His next collection, Between the Trees (or the Lonely Nowhere) will be published by Four Way Books in 2028. He is also the translator of three critically acclaimed books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies including Best American Poetry 2025. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books.
Driving a dark back road near home in the boonies of Vermont, hilly, winding, my thoughts competing with their own dark turns concerning our country, what one can possibly do that would matter in the face of such division and cruelty. An oncoming car interrupts, we both make the shift from brights to low, and I wonder what if this were intentional? That turning down the glare became a blessing, a prayer for safe journey, safe home, a caring for a passing stranger to be passed on to someone else, a blinding light lowered allowing us to see what really matters— all of us do, everyone, every one, and turning to that holy truth begins a new brightening.
*
Dan Butler is known primarily as an actor, having played major roles On and Off Broadway, on tv, and in film, as well as writing, directing, and producing in all of those mediums. Dan’s poetry has been seen before in “ONE ART” as well as in the anthology “The Path to Kindness, Poems of Connection and Joy.” His debut poetry chapbook will be published later this year.
First I took their dignity and they did nothing. Then I took their minds and they did nothing. Then I took their hearts and they did nothing. Then I took their songs and they did nothing. Then I took their poetry and they did nothing. Now I have their words to write their story. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. To be or not to be, that is the question. I wash my hands. It wasn’t a genocide.
*
America, Singing
America, you sing of doom with beauty. America, you lift the kings of division. America, you howl your hymns of affliction: the heart-throb’s car wrapped around the telephone pole, the glamorous suicide on the hotel bed, the wide-eyed stars who burn too bright to live past youth, and wish to die, and do.
But what about the other side of wildness? What about the couple in their work clothes, alone and goldless, but dancing in the kitchen, in a love that lasts, in the middle of the mystery? Where is their song? Who will be our singer to praise the heart that doesn’t crash and burn, to find the wise, to make just one thing whole, to tell the doomed that this is beauty too?
*
Power
A poet is sentenced to death and brought before the Leader. Between them is a map of the world. Can’t you see? the Leader asks. You’re powerless. Name one power you have that I do not.
Very slowly, the poet lowers her head and lays her ear on the map. I know, she whispers, I know, as if she is comforting someone, as if she is hearing the voices of children.
When the guards take the prisoner away and begin to beat her, the Leader is alone in his chamber. He looks out the curtains, straightens his necktie. Very slowly, he lowers his ear to the map and closes his eyes, and listens. Silence. Silence and paper.
*
Lorca after Neruda
Because I was a poem, my country hushed me. They knelt me on the cold stones of a roadway and even when the guns had touched my body, I heard the birds, I heard my heart be strong.
Listen. You have to go on without me. You know what my triumph was, my victory? I was open. I stayed so wholly open that I heard the birds and the gift the Spring is singing.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song. They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
*
Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His most recent books include The Teacher, The Last Song of the World, and The Swallows of Lunetto. His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is celebrated around the world for what the poet Ilya Kaminsky has called “its lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments.” Fasano’s work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, an educational resource aimed at “empowering the whole human being through philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual work.”
The sound of true quiet is the last bus home, that endless harmony, the melancholy of people tugging on the stiff iron wires, trying to go home. I didn’t know that Oakland was so beautiful,
red and yellow lights everywhere, haphazard jewels of endless night, I see the kids I teach running away in the spotlight dark, (I hope they are okay, I hope they do not
). We have no inferences, no hate. The trees recede when Berkeley dissipates from view, greenery shrubs, clotheslines rise from humble apartment buildings. I walked to a friend’s house from the 88, the seats were colored with stickers and the yellow-green afterwheeze of spit. It was dark, and the cars echoed that iron music:
(sapphire alarms, that wheezing breath, the ¾ sway of things going wrong). Quartz lights bedazzled the spectacular west: I hope that the boys I teach are doing okay.
*
Yuna Kang is a queer, half-deaf, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She loves postcards, crows, God(x), and cats. Kang is also the recipient of the 2024 New Feathers Award.
Explore New Poetic Territory ~ Find New Meaning & Connections Using Found Poetry Techniques – A Workshop with Jennifer Mills Kerr
Break free from your usual poetic groove. Very often and without realizing it, poets slide into familiar language and images. In this workshop, Jennifer will guide you on how to restructure, remix, and recontextualize words from other texts in order to break into new poetic territory. This class is a creative kickstarter for all experience levels.
Bring at least three inspiring texts you’d like to explore to class–whether historical documents, novel passages, your favorite poems, or all of the above. Choosing your source materials prior to workshop will allow you to immediately jump into our writing sessions.
Workshop Leader: Jennifer Mills Kerr Date: Tuesday, February 10 Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local time. Duration: 2-hours Cost: $25 (sliding scale)
Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Sonoma County. Say hello at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co/
Once, as a small child, while walking with my uncle, who happens to now be dead, I picked up the only sand dollar I’ve ever found on the edge of New Haven Harbor. There was a small piece missing and I threw it back, certain I’d find one better.
*
Mona Lisa
She spends her time behind a bullet-proof window but she can’t stop your looks inside. I’d like to tell her what I’m thinking over drinks and something vegan — the Florence that she knew is not today’s. By now she must be tired of all the ogling and the custard pies. Still, I’d like to kiss her in the ear with my tourist Italian. I’d talk about the moon, how we used to walk where she once gazed, how we’re not going back there very soon. Everyone believes she’s just an old-school NFT, but she’ll outlast the glaciers if some of us can swim.
*
American Prospects
The ocean only proves the yacht is brother to the wreck. It doesn’t matter what you’ve planned — Malibu is burning, and the stilts of your beach house aren’t high enough. No one ever saw a star inside the Stock Exchange. You need to be outside for that. The sky is a hat that is never out of fashion but often despised. The ocean lies beneath it, and the wrecks are farther still.
*
Letter to America
I cannot hear my own accent. I cannot smell my own bad breath. Familiarity works against us, and the world beyond our headlights is mysterious and dark. It won’t be easy. In the olden days they drew monsters in the corners of their maps. They felt safer on a ship with the land in sight. Listen, I know I sound funny to you, and the distance between us is startling and vast, but a coat left out in the car all night eventually makes us warm. We need only put it on.
*
Charles Rafferty has published poems in such places as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. His most recent collection is The Appendectomy Grin (BOA Editions). He is also the author of the story collection Somebody Who Knows Somebody and the novel Moscodelphia.
Icy. Dicey. Watch your step. Frozen footprints. Define permanence.
One guy bent in half leans toward leaving. One arm sways stiff.
Part of a bigger story. Clock face obscured. Seconds meaning
less. I half-believe he will half-rise from the half-dead.
Me, I’m a volunteer ice dancer taking the fresh air.
Should I call 911? Define emergency. Strung out. Wrung out.
Getting his money’s worth out of a bad trip nowhere. Define nowhere.
Me, I walk here often. Afraid of my own frozen footprints.
Well past him, I call no one. His spray-painted message, indecipherable.
Or maybe a clear call for help. The day after the shortest day, and he’s
making it shorter. No boats on the river or bikes on the trail.
Define hope- less. Would I call if he fell?
Define choice. Outside my street nearby in an old church
turned into condos another man squats beside an outlet
phone plugged in for the power. He isn’t talking to God
though today is Sun- day. Though, who am I to say? Define cold.
It could be colder.
*
Private Limbo
The hammering repetition of blues mimics our own with slight variations like the pierogis made by old women in the basement of St. Vlad’s church that I can almost see down the street by leaning out the window of my church, St. Matthews, repurposed into condos. I want to find the holy water font and dip my fingers in, to expand my definitions of water, font, holy.
* A train hits its horn tentatively not sure there’s anything ahead that wants to be warned. Many do not sidestep. Many face it head on. Why not just jump off the trestle and be done with it?
* I am either ten minutes early or a lifetime late. I never finished the list of all the things I’d missed and the people I’d disappointed when drunk and stoned or trying to stop. The list dangles from a chain like a phonebook in an abandoned booth.
* Pop the hood and let’s look into limbo. A recent Pope said Limbo doesn’t exist. Just like its clear definition. When you take out the s in exist it makes exit. That’s something I think about in my private limbo. Sometimes you can capitalize Limbo. Sometimes a shrug is as good as a drug to a blind man’s bluff.
* I was encouraged to believe Limbo was where unbaptized babies hung out, a giant nursery in outer space, one big wall of wail. The limbo is an especially limber dance that I’ll never come close to mastering. Limber— take off the er and add an o. O Limbo, I wish I could go lower.
* The blues are a limbo with tinted glass like the drug dealer’s car windows as it idles out front, waiting for a prostitute. The 61A Bus to Limbo passes by. It is full, and it is empty. A neighbor measures the square footage of limbo with an eternity measuring tape. Ask him about it, if you dare.
* ENTERING LIMBO Speed Limit Up to You.
* Above us all, on the trestle over the river, a train slows to follow a deer across the tracks taking its sweet, old time.
*
The Pine Tree in Front of the Old House on Rome
now dwarfs the house, the whole block askew with its spiky spine. Nobody had much success with trees then, everybody building cars, the city in love with steel.
Nobody bothered to have a theory. We cut down dead trees and planted grass to fill the messy graves, create the illusion of symmetry on our ordinary lawns.
Or we threw another tree in the ground on the same stubborn spot. Plain was alright. No time to mess with trees. Impractical, without benefit.
If the trees lived, hell, there’d be leaves to rake. No extra pay for that extra work for factory fathers with grease-rimmed nails. Then my father went rogue, digging up
a tiny pine from up Michigan Up North. Planted it in the open middle of the yard since his four boys had all outgrown that small space. The spiky point:
that knee-high tree grew over thirty feet and wide enough to brush brick, trespass the sidewalk. The tree now stabs the sky. Too late for new owners to cut that sucker
down. Imagine having to hire somebody to fell that tree between roofs and wires. A Tree Service. All those needles killed the grass around the tree’s prickly edges.
Everybody wanted a place Up North. My father couldn’t afford one so he’d stolen a piece and brought it home. No old neighbors left to wag their middle
fingers at its absurd height. The man loved the smell, and the idea that something stayed green. Today, we idle in the street out front to take a look after years away. At 96, he’s embarrassed by the work of getting out of the car, much less knocking on the door to confess
he’d planted that monster. He opens the window and twists his head up to see the point. He takes a whiff.
*
Color Theory, Detroit
Our streets echoed shades of gray our dull voices scraping cement vainly searching for sparks.
Okay, it wasn’t that bad. My mother drove a lurid orange Maverick and struck mysterious poses with cigarettes.
My father practiced the fine art of slamming doors. He funked the thunk. Street dogs applauded.
We believed in Crayola’s eight orderly colors and the correct spelling of colors, despite our proximity to Canada.
Dimmer switches were unnecessary. On and Off sufficed. Like Pregnant or Not Pregnant. We had no faith
in rainbows and too much in streetlights. Blood was no stranger, but a form of punctuation.
*
Cold Comfort
Talking to Benny, his last living friend, on the phone from Arizona, my father stares at his grilled cheese cooling a greasy stain into a paper towel, desire wilting. A slab of pickle laid out beside it soaks through. Benny won’t let him go.
I read my blind mother the church bulletin, scanning for familiar names among the sick, dying, dead.
My father keeps saying, but Paul, but Paul—the other friend they’ve both just lost. Benny’s not letting him finish a sentence, still in ice-cream-selling mode, though no customers remain.
I’m guessing the but has to do with finding Paul on his floor, surrounded by scattered empty bottles of his last hobby, picked up again after forty dry years.
When Paul’s wife died, I guess watercolors just didn’t cut it anymore. At 68, I’m guessing it all, full of relative youth and special intentions, unwritten bulletins of future eulogies. Pray for the repose
of the soul of…. The black spot in my mother’s vision is not sin. I hope Benny’s not onto the Gospel of Bomb Pops again, Epistles from their Old Neighborhood in Detroit
obliterated, abandoned—thus, oral history, thus, preaching to nostalgia’s choir. My father holds the phone away from his ear. He points from me to the sandwich. Eat it, he mouths.
*
Jim Daniels’Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems was published in January by Michigan State University Press. Other recent books include An Ignorance of Trees, nonfiction, Cornerstone Press, 2025, and The Luck of the Fall, fiction, 2023. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
We make poems because poems are the best (sometimes the only) ways to express the things we feel and experience. And so often, those “things” we try to express don’t have words for them. Poetry helps us say the things that can’t be said otherwise. It puts abstract thoughts and ideas into a shareable form and allows other people to experience those ideas through them. In this generative workshop we’ll look at ways to take the abstract and give it form. You’ll come away with some starter poems to continue to work on, and strategies to create more.
About The Workshop Leader
Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.
Like that landscape painter who pushed his goat hair Brush across canvas for hours until two Coors Cases were empty beside him and he passed out, Waking to see some lonesome countryside more Beautiful than he’d ever witnessed himself, as if In delirium angels took pity, touched his art With their golden fingers. How one morning he felt something give And pulled three teeth from his skull. He keeps them in a cigar box, The landscape hangs over a stranger’s fireplace.
Like my neighbor who only drank wine— “Like Christ Hisself”—gallons at a time. How he could turn gnarled stumps Into foxes, honeybees, angels; how when he was carving A crucifix for his parish he lopped off his left thumb With the adze but never panicked. Now that left thumb is in a jar on his windowsill Catching light all day beside rosemary He keeps trying to root in creek water. The crucifix is still in the church, blessed now, Where people come and kneel before it.
Like me—the nightmare I keep having. Strapping my boys in the car, my breath Toxic enough to blow a fuse. Colors blended and beautiful but twisted As a cottonmouth about to strike. How I get in the car, despite the wind, the light, My own flesh and blood tugging me back. Then I turn the key.
I’m not blessed to make anything beautiful, Not a landscape or stump, Dust, and awaiting return— For now, blessed only to wake.
*
IN A SILENT WAY
My wife digs her hands into black soil, Flesh scraping against meat of the earth— Brown loam speckling her pale, slender fingers, Veins blue as heavy water, she takes hold of a root and tugs Heavenward, commanding the earth by some grace Bestowed by the very dirt she digs and tends. The soil—like me, it writhes for her.
She runs a finger across a ring snake’s scales As our son lets it slither between his fingers. She dusts dirt from skin, gathers beans, tomatoes, And sun-bruised flowers in her hands. She touches my hand and says nothing. Watches the garden, our boys— She thinks of something I’ll never know.
She draws me from clay. Her breath expands my lungs, And how I wish I could grow roots, Tree myself into this very ground Where she will be tomorrow, And the tomorrow after.
*
THE HILLS ARE QUIET BUT IS IT REST
It’s not the hills to blame for shrugging into hibernation. Regress is grace, knowing when to be quiet, When to raise your voice, given intention mirrors the divine. But who’s to say buck-a-roo— Now’s the time to make peace with worms, my grandfather said. I wasn’t born bleak as him. Grace is only slippery in greasy hands. Drive enough nails and you’ll hit a thumb, God knows. It’s in the picking up the hammer with broken hands though. It’s in closing eyes and gasping a thousand feet deep. Just know nothing is ever as imagined, not the weight of snow On the cypress boughs, not the finger held over candle flame. The worms know though—when to feast and fast. The privilege is knowing the line that holds us, Knowing when to still soul and close eyes, When to unfold knife and get to work.
*
RUMORS OF WAR
I can’t stop thinking of the time coming when men will go mad, Kill whoever isn’t insane like them. My father used to tell me nothing good happens After 10 p.m., he used to say drive like everybody else is drunk and on drugs.
He used to get up every morning at dawn, hair muskrat-wild, Praying far deeper than the roots of any Judas Tree For mercy, redemption, and mercy again. I think about the mad people saying, “You are mad—You’re not like us.”
How they’ll bash skulls against curbs like drums Keeping time to a rhythm droning in their ears. All the way down, turtles and madness— Except my old man, quietly escaping three wars:
Hearing, speaking, seeing. How the one he keeps fighting—the one never Televised, the one no one will ever tune out— Rages in the heart.
The trick, he says, is to sit alone in a quiet room, The room will teach you everything.
I’m a good citizen of this land. I do my part. See—I pick up this inchworm, move it from here to there on the dogwood leaf.
*
Spencer K.M. Brown is a poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is a finalist for the 2023/2024 CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and Flying South Prize. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Salvation South, Scalawag, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. His novel Recommendations for a Departing Soul is forthcoming from Regal House, (Fall ’27).
Watching the end of the movie, I think the actor played a touching role. As the credits roll down the screen, I’m enjoying the orchestra music playing, which causes tears to sneak out of my eyes. The music triggers thoughts of my son’s loss, and he too, had a lot of disappointment in life.
It was just before he left us that we had an honest conversation. He shared for the first time that he believed his school problems began when we moved him across country twice at eight and ten years old.
I’m left with regret realizing that I was part of his problem. My eyes spot the words, The End. I nod knowing that now it is too late.
*
A Visit
I wake up talking with my husband, I look to my left, and his side of the bed is empty. I think he’s getting ready to go to work Then I realize it’s just a dream, and has happened several times.
Listening to a podcast, a medium, who hears from the dead explains, that it is a sign from your loved one he is still aware of you. It’s a reassurance that he’s there. My dreams disappear into my night time world, but I know I’ve been visited.
*
Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. She was twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her latest poetry book is available at Amazon along with her novels. She is a veteran of Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop.
AFTER TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS, RUNNING INTO AN ESTRANGED FRIEND
It might have been a play, an audience of souls:
me, waiting beside the wide picture window of the inn, where the Candlelight Dinner Hour
would soon begin. You emerged from the fireplace room
where no fire burned, to step in the space where I stood.
Your gaze turned inward, you glided past me, off the stage, again you stepped out of my life.
*
Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com
We’re catching just the edge of the hurricane here some rain, some wind and we’ve got a garden now full of squash flowers and chickweed and sparrows and a smooth-backed stone to sit on and smoke a cigarette and pretend it’s only ever the edges of the disasters that will catch us.
*
In addition to ONE ART, Patricia Russo’s work has appeared in Heimat, Zin Daily, Wild Greens, Eulogy Press, Hex Literary, and Crow and Cross Keys.
My uncle’s yard was a riot of toads. They appeared to me for the first time, bursting out of every inch of lawn like rolling bumpy spheres. I was a child who had never seen brown lumps that sprung and hopped.
I froze in place as they surrounded me, their front fingers clawing dirt, their stout back legs pumping. They frantically burrowed into the ground, fleeing under clumps of grass, purple clover, and ragged dandelion leaves.
Through thick horn-rimmed spectacles, my uncle’s childless wife was studying me, her cotton-white hair twisted in a tight bun. She said that if I were her daughter, she would put me in a tattered gray dress so that no one would want to take me away.
It was then I felt the dread of being small and at the mercy of someone bigger. The toads were diving between my feet, forward, backward, everywhere I turned. I wanted to disappear from sight and hide with them beneath the earth.
*
Donna Davis lives in central New York. She has been published in Slipstream Review, The Comstock Review, Third Wednesday, The Raven’s Perch, Tipton Poetry Journal, Gingerbread House, Raw Art Review, and others. During her years as a small business owner, she had the honor of designing poetry chapbooks for clients such as The Comstock Review, Inc., including Ted Kooser’s book At Home. Donna was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a contest winner and featured writer in various magazines. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, such as Slipstream Review and the Anthology of the Wildflowers by Tiny Seed Journal. She has a deep love of poetry, art, and music, and recently learned to play the violin in fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
Six and barefoot, you falter along the rails like a phantom
in limbo, though you´re very much alive. Virtually unscathed,
reporters will say, despite the wreckage around you.
Despite the bodies, writhing like unanswered questions,
or still as a billion-year-old mountain. The bewilderment
of limbs you crawled over to reach the broken window.
At what point in your search for your family does your mind
ramshackle, fracture under the dead weight of despair?
At what point are your thoughts launched off their tracks?
Maybe when a barn owl screeches, or a big rig thunders
past the tragedy that will define the rest of your life. Soon,
all of Spain will illuminate you in halo. Miracle girl, they´ll say.
As a civil guard leads you away, maybe you hear voices
among the debris—your cousin, your brother, mostly mamá
and papá. At what point will you understand they´re phantoms
now, crashing towards you from the wrong side of the divide?
*
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com
Again the time of replenishing, the slowing down to rest — low-angled sunlight, early darkness, late dawn. Repairing all that’s been used hard: screen doors, work gloves, the mind with its lightning-fast calculations, your heart’s wide roaming, so steady, pulling you along. A calm to oil the gears and joints, smooth the planes, recover contentment and satisfaction, practice not racing anywhere, sleeping late. Restoration, synapse and cell. Your body and its hunger for solitude.
*
Presence and Silence
For a week now, Red-winged blackbirds in their hundreds swarm the un-leafed-out-yet Blue oaks, their trills deafening and neither color visible from where I stand looking up though I know the names, and what can they be eating?
A storm, the first in too long, is pretending to roll in, the sky darkening and then alight again, fickle, indecisive. How long will I stay rooted in the driveway? Nowhere I need
to be til 4:00, memorial for my friend who died too young, which I’ll attend for my friend, his mother. About death, I have nothing left to say to anyone. My living body in the room supports whoever needs to not feel so alone.
*
Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her historical novel-in-verse, Walking Wheel, will be out in April from Red Hen Press.
She went to lunch today by herself on her birthday.
She told no one, ordered an expensive red, tipped 25% instead of her usual 20.
Choice. It was her choice. No singing waiters, no phony candles
no phony wishes. An unbidden kinship with silence.
Better than a floozied night out eyeing the cellist because she always eyed the cellist
unless she saw a ring, then she moved to the saxophonist— all tight jeans and long hair.
Her birthday present to herself would never ever ever be another woman’s man. So tip them big, say nothing,
head home in the rain-darkening sky. There’s a pint of freezer-burnt butter pecan at home.
Happy birthday. No candles. Many wishes.
*
Tobi Alfier’s credits include Arkansas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cholla Needles, Gargoyle, James Dickey Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, Louisiana Literature, Permafrost, Ragaire, and Washington Square Review. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (bluehorsepress.com).
How do you begin a poem when you know How the story ends? Even with a dog, Joule! who traveled everywhere with him, Even with his student whom he taught to listen To each human heartbeat, to open a central line; Even caretaking U.S. Veterans and with just one Small camera curled in his right palm like a charm, he— A kind man (in each account) an activist, Minneapolis— Light-skinned, bicycle fanatic, in a resonant voice he keeps asking Are you okay? helping the woman being pepper-sprayed up from the cold street, making sure she can breathe. Even then.
for Alex Pretti, 1988-2026
*
Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor/editor of three anthologies. Her recent books include Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds,Blue Atlas, and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. Susan co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems with Kelli Russell Agodon and co-edited, The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders with Ilya Kaminsky and Brian Turner. Her other poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award. A winner of the Crab Creek Review Prize, Times Literary Supplement Award (London), and a Fulbright Fellowship. Rich’s poems appear in the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.
ADC consistently remains in the Top 50 Fiction category on Substack. Even more impressively, the Top 50 Fiction paid accounts. So how does this happen?
Well, as you’ll learn from our discussion, it’s partly a grind. That being said, Kolby and ADC are also well-loved by the literary community.
+
From the After Dinner Conversation website:
Rated “Top Editor(s)” for Literary Magazine 2025 by Chill Subs
Rated “Most Popular Fiction Magazine 2024” by Chill Subs
Rated #6 “Most Popular Literary Magazines of All Time” by Chill Subs
Rated #20 “Fish List – Finest Indie Story Houses” 2026 by Fish List
*
In this conversation, we talk about newsletters with an emphasis on Substack, and generally how to grow a lit mag.
It’s not really surprising that part of this conversation focuses on marketing. In a world maximized for engagement, we’re competing with other sources (some far better optimized than the written word) to hold your attention.
It’s also not surprising that we talked about the struggle to fund a lit mag and, in turn, a publisher’s ability to continue their mission.
I hope you enjoy our conversation. We certainly welcome constructive feedback.
Everyone’s arguing about something in this Waffle House, about whether the corned beef is good for anything or not, or about whether the hiking trail down the road is really three miles. One guy says, it’s gotta be longer. I’ve walked five-mile trails that have felt shorter. And his wife’s looking resigned, nodding with the air of someone who’s heard this a couple-and-a-half times before, eyes on the hashbrowns. Beside us all, just outside, a doe trapezes into a bush and if we’d have seen it, we’d wonder how it bounds into it all without worrying about getting snagged the way we do, with our poly-cotton blends, our skin cracking under the Carolina dry. Well, anyway, eggs are coming sunny-side up, now. Afterwards, we’ll all head back to the motel six, Dream we’re wildebeests, dipping our heads down in honor of a water-pool
*
Dim Sum Chicken Feet
As if contemplating the act of mating, there is no way to do this delicately, I think. No place for fork-and-knife etiquette between joints, tactile kind of indulgence with the lip and tongue— rooting around, slippery muscle against skin, giving way, sucking tender matter off the bone. All comes apart in tendon and avian hardness: callback to biology class where finger bones sit as indelicately in my mouth as does the word phalange, all knobby and cloddish:
lean down and spit, lips lacquered with saliva and residue fit for coagulation, and clink-clink-clink, finger bones go, ravaged, in my plate to where they lie, scattered, the picture of a kill-site of chop-licking mammal, still-life arrangement in a portfolio of the grotesque. As if performing the act of mating, I should be mortified in this half-foreign place of too-close claustrophobic round tables and high-school grease-hair and uncoordinated side-stepping and cigarette burns in the sticky-stiff cream-colored tablecloths and scotch tape disguised as remedy and hobbling oriental men fishing God from between their two front teeth, I think, but I am not. Feet in little metal dishes find purchase on too-close tables, curled and soft and glistening, docile creature-things. The Japanese man behind me, all fingers and teeth, bites that fleshy ball of a chicken’s palm with zeal. I wipe my mouth in solidarity. We were never meant to be so sanitized.
*
Alyssa Gao is a high schooler hailing from Atlanta. Her work has previously been published by her school’s beloved literary arts magazine, Silent Voices, and has been recognized by the National Scholastic Press Association.
A bucket of water tossed on the frozen streets of Minneapolis for the ICE agent to slip on while running at the crowd of protesters;
a river of souls streaming through the avenues chanting Renee Good’s name, waving posters of her sunflower face;
a tsunami of people all over the world sending money and encouraging notes to the ones buying groceries for the ones who are hiding,
afraid to go to work, or school, or the store; everyone marching together in zero degree weather, scared
and defiant, weathered activists arm-in-arm with new-to-this Gen Z kids– those with nothing to lose, those with everything,
blowing their whistles, following the black SUVs, banging pots and pans outside the Hilton where the agents are trying to sleep,
saying No, not in my neighborhood, saying MacBeth shall sleep no more, crying Murder most foul, sleep no more;
What is this outpouring? Where’s the source? Will it be enough? Today, we’re all Minnesotans, from California to Maine: we’re tired,
hoarse, footsore, at the ragged edge of endurance from getting up before dawn to protect our schools, our neighbors; still, there’s no stopping this
outpouring of people, in all the states and every weather while the sky itself pours snow and sleet all over the blasted heath they are trying to make
of our country. Outpouring of disgust at the mad king and his masked army, a united swell, an upsurge, a tsunami of courage and outrage
flooding the streets and highways and byways with humanity declaring itself human in the face of the faceless,
singing Hold On in four-part harmony, testimony rising up and pouring forth in faith; a cascade, a deluge, a torrent of love.
*
Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.
For Renee Good, mother, wife, sister, poet. Rest In Poetry
It is always the troll, rude and despicable who posts the unfathomable comment:
She should have stuck with poetry
after she, the poet, the activist, the lover, the mother, friend, sister was brutally gunned down.
She should have stuck with poetry,
but the poetry she stuck with made her who she was that day not angry, just trying to resist, to be the voice that poems are made of.
She stuck with poetry, or poetry stuck with her, that’s why she was a woman who loved a child who strived in the world she hoped to make better, who resisted, spoke out about right and wrong, she stuck with poetry, so her words can stick with us as she rests in this poem.
*
Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1
How do you define a ghost? One poet wrote “she sees ghosts before breakfast”. And I wrote that my mother was a ghost librarian. How would she catalog a ghost? Under Parapsychology? Haunted stories? A misty manifestation of what you do or don’t want? Does everything always come back to want? That even if we let the plot meander and spiral, it will eventually release, maybe not with a climax, per se, but perhaps with a wave.
*
“Imagine small talk when the weather is perfect”
after Emilia Philips poem titled “The Queerness of Eve” from “Nonbinary Bird of Paradise” the title of this poem is a line from that poem
Time bends a conversation like a double rainbow.
I ask if you can tell where indigo
meets violet but you hear
violent. An arch can crack
from subsidence; from poor
initial foundations; from a shift
in temperature; from the placement
of a hand.
*
Jessie Carty (she/her) is the author of eight poetry collections including Shopping After the Apocalypse (dancing girl press, 2016) which was nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award. Jessie is a part-time freelance writer, teacher, editor, and full-time Instructional Designer. She recently got back into blogging about her travels to visit all 100 counties in NC: (http://notjessica58.blogspot.com)
A lady in my neighborhood screams at me, when I rain fury on the New Regime. He’s your President! Get Used to it! Stick to Poetry and Art!
It would please me to stick to poetry and art.
Perhaps the screaming lady has a point. Perhaps she’s read John Keats: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all ye need to know
Sadly, it’s just not true.
We are not mere figures etched upon an urn, but living creatures watching beauty burn.
*
Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.
It will not be an accident. It will not be premeditated cold-blooded murder.
It will not meet a violent end. And it will not be suicide despite all the threats.
Poetry will die peacefully, alone, at home, of natural causes. Its heart will give out, and it will just be gone,
like the spectacular roses we didn’t take care of. Poetry will die the way old men do on park benches.
No one will notice it’s missing at first, but after a while, someone will notice a bad smell.
No one will claim the body. Its next of kin, music, having died years ago.
*
Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Probably a good thing I never had kids. Good for them too. Besides being uncertain whether I’m capable of unconditional love beyond tiny bursts of time, if two or three popped out, I doubt I could keep a straight face, like all parents do, when saying I love them all the same. I’d be more like Dick Clark standing in front of that Bandstand chart, revealing the week’s top ten hits with a bullet or two, shooting for the stars. Could I ever forget which kid’s nice and quiet, funnier, smarter, more comfortable in her own skin? Which one will care for me when I’m old, smelly and dying too slow? While that other one sucks at sports, is too naïve, likes Mom better, has unforgivable taste in music and is so damn annoying it would be impossible not to give him a good smack like my father did to me when I probably deserved it.
*
Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC who managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. Poems have appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Vox Populi, The Raleigh Review, Chiron Review. His collection, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and his new book Here On Earth came out 1/26 on NYQ Books.
The egret lurks in the hedges near shore, webbed feet feeling over stem and leaf,
white neck shimmying, leaning into green crannies, hunting geckos that hide there.
Flopping across sand in my flippers, I fall into the sea and kick, sounds of breathing
whooshing in and out as I swim through the sea. Below a cliff, a huge turtle tilts
side to side, sunlight gilding bronze and gold the scrapes etched on her peaceable planet
of shell. When she heads toward the open sea, I follow, enchanted, as she leads me
on through the deep, until I stop to see how far I am from land—where I think
I know things. I’ve no choice but to turn, return to the beach, where I remove snorkel
and fins before diving to rinse in the water. No longer hearing the swish of my breath,
I suddenly hear squeals and whistles that I’m sure must be whales. Whales calling
in their world, singing unearthly songs in a sacred language I want to learn by heart.
*
Between Worlds
I watch the solitary cormorant glide through the white-grey water in the white-grey mist.
It’s impossible to tell one world from another and, for once, this doesn’t feel like a problem.
When the cormorant suddenly dives below, not a single trace remains to say an animal
was just here. A dark ribbon of cormorants comes flying low, single file, out of the fog.
Will the lone bird surface, will it take wing, running, flapping, on the water to catch up?
Yesterday, I found where they go, hundreds perched, two or three on each oyster float,
lined up like long strands of barbed wire. What guides them to find their way from
a rock in the ocean, to stand together here, wings extended, as if to give a benediction?
What drives them back to the sea at day’s end, pausing to bathe before heading into the night?
*
Winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, Kathryn Jordan’s other honors include placement and finalist positions in the Atlanta Review, New Ohio Review, Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey, Connecticut Poetry, Sidney Lanier, and Patricia Dobler poetry contests. Her poems are published in The Sun, New Ohio Review, and Atlanta Review, among others. She loves to hike the trails, listening for birdsong to transcribe to poetry.
Sometimes, when you get what you want, you find yourself ready for sleep at 4 PM, sated
on the candy of recognition and praise, too full of everything to even think about supper.
But it’s also like being a ghost, frayed, grayed out, about to disappear. The air is heavy with
maybe-rain and early winter smells oddly like spring. Just go take a nap, my husband says.
But I’m hoarding that desire. I like wanting something that’s not quite here yet, maybe
the weird, lucid dreams I’m trying to hold off. The floral scent of rotting maple leaves.
How lonely I still get for no real reason. The sabbath. This wide, white, impossible sky.
*
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have been curated there, in ONE ART, as well as in Rattle, The McNeese Review, Glimpse, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The After Happy Hour Review, Silly Goose Press, and other literary magazines. She is the author of the full-length collections Unforgetting and the forthcoming Why I Don’t Take Xanax® (Kelsay books)–as well as the chapbook Before the World Was on Fire (Bottlecap Press). Her time-traveling young adult novel series, The Bean Books, is on Evernight Teen.
Sexual violence as taught to me by 2009 Wattpad romance
and when it happens to you in a club bathroom/house party/dark street, your love interest will tear you from your perpetrator’s grasp, beat the violence from him, save you then hold you, like a mouth holds air.
The perpetrator disappears, returns to shadowed corners, never again seen at the dinner table or beside you in a classroom.
The fantasy is not in the absence of violence, but the simplicity of it. You are just too desirable. Irresistible.
The fantasy is not in absence but the idea that someone will help stop it.
Everything is just and we all move on.
*
Rose Ramsden is writer based in Surrey, UK. Her work has been previously published by bathmagg, Propel, 14Poems, and rejected by many more. She has a masters in Creative Writing: Poetry from Royal Holloway and a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. In 2024, she was a winner of Switchboard’s 50 Year Anniversary Poetry Competition. You can find her on Instagram @RoseRamsden.
~ a bouts-rimé sonnet, after page 89 of frank: sonnets
Dear sonnet, I am borrowing just this once your end words. Remember how even oxblood would icicle in that chemo room (though Phoenix summer waited outside to sweat-slick our hair when we exited the elevator)? Which nurse rocked the AC in that third-floor room of dripping bags? My gawd. Was it intentional? I needed antifreeze, not a thin blanket. I shivered like I was terrified. Flesh rippling into indigo goosebumps. A xylophone of bones, bunch of ribs clattering. When C saw me shaking, he opened his arms and wrapped his entire being around me. I felt it warm me from the inside. No words. Silent tongue. He just held me. Torso, shoulders, heart, palm, thumb.
*
Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ who needs to write to stay sane. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She teaches Wild Writing inspired classes on writers.com and 27powers.org and is the author of four poetry collections. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet
Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia.’
―Queensland Brain Institute
I’m the one who’s cursed with remembering it all. My first sight, the light bleeding through the blinds.
What I felt, what she felt, in the moments after birth. We were a woman in pain, turning towards the wall.
Memory, the attic that enters you, is never cleaned. Memory is like furniture you can’t take back.
The light, when it flowed, was like milk for the eyes. I knew myself only as the seer then, and not the seen.
*
Birthstone
When I was thirteen, everything was a metaphor―maybe half a metaphor, the other half still a riddle in the heart.
Money, another metaphor, was everywhere in our house. Scattered in kitchen drawers and on countertops.
In discarded dishes where we kept those unwanted coins we call change. “Take what you need,” my mother said.
Who knew what I needed the day I went to the neighbor’s auction and found, displayed, a pair of amethyst geodes.
Stones with smaller stones gestating inside of them. I thought it must be what they meant by a motherlode.
Stones sliced open like soft Anjou pears, exposing their litter of lilac crystals. Shards of purple light rising like stalagmites,
or like the glistening booty tumbling from pirate chests in comic books, their lids agape, their gems laid bare.
Someone at the auction must have driven up the price that day. Must have loved them as much as I did.
How eagerly I shelled out my two dollars and fifty cents, innocent of whole new anxieties heading my way.
Over dinner, my father told me I was an easy mark. A girl who’s taken advantage of―who splurges on the first
garish rocks that come her way― unpolished and raw. The day after the auction, I had to knock on our neighbor’s
door and beg for my money back. I had to learn even beauty can be a commodity: can be mounted, carved into facets, twisted around a finger or delicately broached, those little gold prongs pinning it down.
*
A Thousand Doors
Who said, The day opens with a thousand doors? An image conceived by some compulsive smiler who springs from her bed each morning like a startled doe.
Someone who doesn’t wake slowly, as I do, a half-forgotten dream roving up my shins. The door a stage mother ready to steer a sleeper
like me into the troubled world. Tell me the image of a thousand doors isn’t the nightmare you’d get from being forced to watch that old game show,
the one with three doors, repeating in a perpetual loop, or those scenes from old movies where the Nazis or the Stasi are beating down doors.
Or that photo of a bombed-out building, its one remaining door opening onto empty air. And then there’s the door I almost overlooked,
the one in the Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas, The way it reveals a lone courtier standing in a slender flag of light, the only one seeing
the room from the rear, as if in freeze-frame, because we know time stops for a second whenever you open a door. Or close it.
That man in the back of the room reminding me of my father in those sweet childhood goodnights of ours. How he stood in the door light
as it framed a silhouette of a round head, ears with small, furled tips, his slender form familiar yet otherworldly in the dark,
lingering there long enough to show me that there is only one safe door in the world. And I left it long ago.
*
Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.
The military mags can’t get enough of Hitler. How many times have I seen him invade Russia? Their headlines ask, “What if?” The war he started is covered like a game of dunks (not Dunkirk), power plays, goal-line stands. The sports mags flank left on the long rack. Beneath them: all the covers plastered with guns and knives, essential hacks for fighting back.
I scan the other side of the rack: A female pop star gazes from a dozen glossy journals plus a coloring book for grade-school fans. Long hair, long legs, a prize for winning the finals or the final battle, and someone to sell on defense—smaller Glocks for smaller hands.
*
Robert Lowes is a writer in St. Louis, Missouri, whose second collection of poetry, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books), was published in April 2024. His first collection, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), came out in 2020. His poems have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, Southern Poetry Review, One Art, Tampa Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Modern Haiku, and December. He is a journeyman guitarist on a long journey.
Among a thousand tourists, three-deep And more along the shore of Key West, We watch the winter sun perform, setting At the advertised time while someone Plays Amazing Grace on bagpipes, Plaintive for a few dollars and change. Those closest surround us within such Solemnity that my wife says the bagpipes Are wailing Taps as if the sun were A flag being lowered like a coffin.
Just now, eyes forward, everyone agrees Upon the vanishing point, applauding As if, without our acknowledged awe, The sun will refuse tomorrow, dissolving Us with darkness in this low-lying place That the brochure says is paradise, The sky clear, the water, in the direction We are facing, appearing endless.
*
Gary Fincke’s latest collection is The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53, 2025). His most recent collection of new poems is For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books, 2025).
Daybreak brings an overflowing of swirling birds without purpose or plan.
My face ripples with that swooping wing movement.
I stand at the gateway of whatever will happen next, light quivering as day begins.
I lift this message in my hands, feathery-light, and offer it to you.
*
Someone Killed the Bluebird of Happiness
Each tomorrow erases you further from my heart, every day rips memory apart, splits time into unequal slices.
This earth itself seems speechless about whether or not you were real, or vague fragments of hesitation.
Useless words torment as black rain, because someone killed the only bluebird singing recklessly about happiness.
It took a minute for you to leave, a rending of sheet music, a disturbance of sound being murdered. You left behind shards,
pieces of words too late to apologize, and now my tongue blackens from untying grief. Tugging never untangles memory.
*
Martin Willitts Jr, 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 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. His 21 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 “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “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); and “Love Never Cools When It Is Hot” (Red Wolf Editions, 2025)
The winter the snowplow ran over our dog I sealed the windows against the cold with cellophane.
We couldn’t afford new storm windows and it seemed simple enough an idea, but the sheeting tangled and balled up and stretching it across the large windows and getting it to stay long enough to tighten with a hair dryer was like restoring virginity. I kept thinking
if I don’t pay attention I’ll smother in my own ill-spun chrysalis, and always with the crinkling and sticking there was this carnal sidebar of death and meat and the sick practicality of preserving something for later.
I managed to make most of the sheets as tight as membranes but found that the least sound from the bare woods would drum on them and amplify what truly didn’t need amplification: sonic booms, the scratching somewhere of small dying things.
It was the year my wife mastered the gesture of touching her throat when she had doubts, and it was the year I wagered on everything.
Now that we are here in a warmer place and time, we don’t have the winter need to whisper, and yet I like to whisper. I remember the important sound
of a twig snapping somewhere at 3 A.M. and waking and waiting
with dread and hope for something else to happen. I whispered and she slept and the birch bones rattled.
*
Michael Smith’s work has appeared in several publications, including Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Northwest Review, Pembroke Review, Water-Stone Review, American Writers Review (finalist), Phoebe, Blue Unicorn, Avalon Literary Review, Bicoastal Review (forthcoming), Synkroniciti, Blood and Bourbon, Anacapa Review, Mad Persona Magazine (forthcoming), among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona and lives in Pomona, CA.
A couple of guys at work liked to play the Death Game. The rules were simple. Whenever someone famous died— like a musician, actor, or politician—the first person to hear the news would dial his friend’s cell phone. As soon as the call was answered, the caller uttered the name of the deceased, then immediately hung up.
They didn’t keep any kind of score, it was just a way of showing who was more in touch, or had quicker reflexes. The news had to be delivered in real time right to the ear. Leaving a message was not allowed, as there was no way to determine who was first with the ghoulish news. Nor was there any conversation beyond the person’s name.
Although the game could easily be adapted to texting, it just wouldn’t be the same as hearing Death’s human voice.
*
The House We Almost Bought
I drive by it now and then to remind myself how different life would be right now if we had gone through with it. Tina absolutely wanted to buy and was willing to bid above the asking price, but I said no.
Our marriage was in trouble and purchasing a house would not have helped the situation. Instead, it would have simply added the stress of a huge debt to our already fragile circumstance. Less than a year later we were moving into our divorce, and she was physically moving to a new apartment. I stayed in the house we rented, which I could barely afford at the time.
If we had bought that property, we would have inevitably had to sell it and both look for places. Or worse, I would have ended up buying her a house. Probably not, but you can never be too sure.
*
John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared in One Art, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slipstream, & Tar River Poetry.
The bird bombed itself into the kitchen window, repeated calamities against the glass – beak / blood /
beak / blood. As a result I cannot come to your party. I am too full of elastic and stinging nettles. My arms are shot with feathers
out of sympathy for the cadaver, its neck stabbed backwards into its body, its wings a broken protractor. There are reasons
the birds are throwing themselves away like this & I’m in charge of none of them. My role is to witness
using almost obsolete technologies. Think of the man who built a library of creature songs in California,
who lived long enough with water bottles and escalators to see his tapes ingested by fire. Recently, I will not name things –
not robin, nor Mohammed, nor Olivia – because I hope the unnamed may proliferate. Ask me how I know
about the Zayante band-winged grasshopper, its buzz that sounds entirely like plastic melting.
*
Defences
He says, you must locate the heart of the enemy. You must pour boiling water
onto their queen. You must watch the steam worry the sunless morning. What a morning.
What a honey trap sticky with ants. He says, probably the ants are farming the aphids.
Probably the ants have nested under the bath. What a forest of rose-fists knocking
on the bathroom window. We refuse to kill the ants because we believe
in the sanctity of bodies clambering for a future. Because we know what we will
become. Let us cloister inside with vinegar. Let us sign a petition. The petition
says, please: not me, please, please, not me.
*
Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London (UK). She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Ambient Receiver, amongst others. Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.
She is all girl, chestnut waves, freckles, cold-pink cheeks, and this is the closest she’s ever been, all doe-eyes and eyelashes as she snuggles into my side, places her gloved hand just against mine. For warmth, she says. We sit on a frosted boulder at the overlook, river below. A passing hiker could see us, our knit layers the only space between our bodies. She knows I am queer. This is her first time in these woods. I know how dark, how cold it can get here. I know the wolves that stalk, growling low, the hunters that jeer through their iron sights, but all I hear tonight is her contented sigh as she settles her head into my shoulder. I push aside the thought that someone could see to make more room for thinking about her. She lifts her head to make a little joke, pointing at something below, already giggling at her own wit, a leaves on the breeze laugh, and I kiss her. I kiss her on accident, on purpose, on the instinct to kiss the girl you love, but mostly because of that laugh, her brown eyes glowing like warm honey. I kiss her so much we snap twigs, knock pebbles loose. I let my guard down to draw her closer, to melt into the curves of her body, to hold and to be held. I quiver like the tree line, branches parting as something, someone, hears her soft breath against my neck, the skin too hot for hair to stand on end in the gaze of such a threat. I kiss her and it shows them where to aim.
*
Cayla Garman is a poet from Pennsylvania and a graduate of Penn State Harrisburg. Her work has previously appeared in From the Fallout Shelter as the 2023 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and in The Milk House.
This poem is too new to be out unsupervised, too new to know that it’s substandard, that it’s missing it’s mark— too fresh to know it should be humbled by its shortcomings.
This poem is not ready for prime time with its rambling pointless lines, lines that can’t pin down how it feels to read the headlines every goddamned day, lines that fail to state the sense of fear, chaos, and impending doom.
This poem should say something shocking— something, anything to save us in these turbulent times, steel us from this tense political climate— something stunning— but it’s mute.
After all, on a clear, snowy January day, a woman, a mother and a poet had her face shot off by an ICE agent who muttered as he strode off, fucking bitch,
and the country goes on, as the machine churns out lies for an alternate narrative, as we each wait for someone else to step in, or for someone to save us.
I want a poem for her— but where are all the words that should come easily— words to rain down justice and humanity? Words to raise a candle in the dark?
*
Eileen M. D’Angelo, author of several books, including “The Recovering Catholic’s Collection,” (from Moonstone Press, 2023), is the Executive Director of Mad Poets Society and former Editor of Mad Poets Review, has coordinated over 2000 special events in the tri-state area and was the subject of a tribute event and anthology by Philadelphia’s Moonstone Arts Center. She has twice been nominated for a PA Governor’s Award in the Arts and Pushcart Prize, and published in Rattle, Manhattan Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Drexel Online Journal, Wild River Review, Philadelphia Stories, Philadelphia Poets and others. Additionally, D’Angelo has commentary in an anthology from WordFire Press, Shadows and Verse: Classic Dark Poems with Celebrity Commentary, edited by NY Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. She judged open auditions for the pilot program of Russell Simmons’ and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, at New Market Cabaret, as well as conducted workshops and performed original songs and poetry on WXPN’s (88.5 FM) World Café Live, BCTV (Berks County Public Television), at the Painted Bride Art Center, at South St. Arts Festival at Rosemont College, Hedgerow Theatre, St. Joe’s, Montco Writers’ Conference, Kelly Writers House, Manayunk Art Center, Delco Community College, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and Delco Women’s Conference, Philly Fringe Festival, and other venues.
Mastering the Epistolary Poem A Workshop with John Sibley Williams
Instructor: John Sibley Williams Date: Monday, January 26 Time: 11:30am-2:00pm PT / 2:30-5:00pm ET Please check local times. Duration: 2.5 hours Cost: $25 (sliding scale)
Please note: This workshop will be recorded for those unable to attend in real time. The recording will only be distributed to those who sign up for workshop in advance.
Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter,” are, quite literally, poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured. The subject matter can range from philosophical investigation to a declaration of love to a list of errands, and epistles can take any form, from heroic couplets to free verse. In this intensive generative workshop, we will explore the many facets of writing “letter poems” through poetry analysis, active discussion, and a progressively challenging set of 6 writing activities that touch upon both our internal/personal worlds and how we interact with the larger world around us. We will study diverse poems from classic poets such as William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes and contemporary poets such as Victoria Chang, Rebecca Lindenberg, Mai Der Vang, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Melissa Stein to see how they successfully explore relationships, internal reflection, political/cultural struggle, and landscape details by using the direct, evocative form of “letter poetry”.
*
About The Workshop Leader:
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.
For more information about John and his offerings:
We board with our senior passes, then we’re five Brearley girls chatting, remembering Mary who lived on 86th, loved everything horses, and that movie we watched at her house when we were eight, black and white, with eerie music, two climbers on a rock ledge, one pulls a long rope to find his friend on the other end, dead… Artist Sarah remembers Ellen’s magenta bedspread, as she points to a lady near us with a corduroy coat just like it, all of us imagining Ellen’s leaf pattern— Ellen, who lived on First, and moved away, who owned a Vermont bookstore, and died last year, and now I’m remembering her childhood apartment with the elevator button NS, how we pretended it stood for Nancy Snow, her little sister, but I knew it was really Non Stop, and how they had a basset hound, what was his name?, with prostate problems, everything hanging low to the ground, and now we’re roaring, five senior citizens giggling as we cross town on a crowded bus that takes us through our lives, until we get off, at different stops.
*
Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.
There are no mothers here but when your daughter invites you, you go and sit on the wooden bench, grateful to be there, after months of silence. You sit next to the girl holding the ring that fell from her septum the night before while your daughter’s in back, getting the stud in the cartilage of her left ear replaced with a thin gold hoop. It’s a rook, she’d explained before the dark eyed piercer with the sleeve of tattoos called her name. She’d traced the map on the wall, showed you the geography of all the ways an ear can be pierced. Conch, orbital, daith, helix. Snakebites, the name for the silver studs dotting each side of her lower lip. The post jutting through her left eyebrow looks like it hurts, but it doesn’t, she said and you remember other waiting rooms, pediatrician, orthodontist, math tutor, ice rink, the ER when she was five, fell out of bed, and broke her collar bone. The nurse pulled you into the long corridor so they could talk to her alone, so they could make sure it was not you who had done the damage.
*
Alison Seevak’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Sun, Literary Mama and Atlanta Review. She lives in Northern California.
Grant Clauser’s latest book is Temporary Sheltersfrom Cornerstone Press. He is the author of five previous books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven and Reckless Constellations. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review and anthologies including Keystone Poetry and The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. His books and poems have won numerous awards including the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He’s an editor for a national media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. More at grantclauser.com
Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball,and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and soon-to-be professor emeritus of Environmental Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University.
J.D. Isip is a Pushcart and Bet of the Net nominated writer and professor of English, originally from Southern California, and currently living and teaching in South Texas. His full-length collections of poetry and creative nonfiction include Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015), Kissing the Wound, and Reluctant Prophets (both from Moon Tide Press, 2023 and 2025). He is currently editing The American Pop Culture Almanac, forthcoming for America’s 250th (Summer 2026) from Moon Tide Press.
Kari Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) winner of the IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals and the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.
Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He taught writing at Lewis & Clark College for forty years before retiring and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2020. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has written about his poet father in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, and his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place won a special citation for excellence from the Western States Book Award. His most recent poetry collections are As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024) and A Proclamation for Peace Translated for the World (Little Infinities, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. In a call to writers everywhere, he has said, “In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and stories by those with voice for those with need.”
The day my son was born, I worried whether or not I would be able to teach him how to walk. I knew I would have to hold his hands and lift him off the ground just enough—but not all the way—so that he could still feel the earth beneath his feet. I knew, too, that I would have to let him fall from time to time so he would come to know the joy of getting up on his own. I knew that there would be pain and frustration and anger at me for not always protecting or helping him. And over the decades, he has fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten mad, and gotten up again, all on his own. But today, after he picked me up from another in a series of nasty falls of my own, I’ve begun to worry whether or not I can teach my son the proper way to die.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.
Do I recall what I did with your scar your text pleads, decades gone, scars ongoing. I had my own: my belly sliced open
like melon, the heavy suck from my gut, boy child pulled to air, still you want to recall my tracing your scar.
Then they box cut my scarred tissue again, pulled that burst wormy organ from sickened soil. I had my own: my belly sliced open.
You opened me too, my Green Beret, piercing blue, thirst for you, oceans inside me swelling. Do I recall what I did with your scar?
Iraq was on your back. I traced it, you said. I tongued its ridges, tasted blood. But what did you do with my belly sliced open?
We spilled out of beds, hiked from our homes, found ground to cover, forests to sprawl. Yet you ask what scars I might recall as I think back to my body, open.
*
Seen
Six years old, I stand between them, two brothers swapping stories over beers, sitting snug,
traffic headlights peering through our bay window into Saturday night living room football.
Shampooed, pajamaed, I come to the men when called from my bedroom, good girl
giving hugs and kisses to my uncle, my thirtyish dad gesturing behind me.
He fast pulls my bottoms to the floor, my butt, bud pink pudenda smooth, bath bright.
My face flashes red, folds in pain, their laughter landing all over me.
The last of thirteen kids during depression and war, my small father learned
to prank, to clown, to get seen. He stayed that way. Sometimes when cooking
dinner for friends, drinking, hungry for their howling, I’ve flashed my breasts
to surprise them, danced alone to Nora Jones, my arms snaking around my head,
legs laced in spidery black, shimmy to the kitchen to scrub every dirty dish in sight
*
VA Smith’s first two poetry collections are Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters (Kelsay, 2022 and 2023), followed in 2025 by Adaptations (Green Writers Press) and coming in 2026, the chapbook Urbanity (Seven Kitchens Press.) Her individual poems have been published in Southern Review, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Calyx, SWWIM and dozens of other journals and anthologies. She currently serves as River Heron Review’s Poetry Editor. Find her cooking, baking, urban walking and country hiking, loving on friends and family and resisting authoritarian oligarchy.
Dust Rag Blues For Renee Nicole Macklin Good (d. January 7, 2026)
Steadying the globe, I thumb Caracas. We snatched Maduro and we seized Caracas? Our Thug-in-Chief’s illegal orders mock us.
My index finger rests on Minnesota: ICE shot a mom (unarmed) in Minnesota. She dared stand up to goons who have a quota.
These men stretch latitude—our country reeling. I clean the hemispheres, set gently reeling, And smooth the strip of red: equator peeling.
*
Nicole Caruso Garcia (she/her) is the author of OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press), which received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award, won a 2021 Best New Poets honor, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at the annual conference, Poetry by the Sea. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.
To shrug the draft, he leapt a university ladder, shaking the rungs of math, piling numbers on his back. At a karaoke bar under an overpass, she belted the best version of “In the Pines” he’d ever heard. He tipped his hat, tugged a red feather from the cityscape, slamming a double vodkashine at her feet. He scribbled poems, metronomic rhyme schemes, serenading her at Dustbowl rest stops, the jukeshacks along Highway 61. Fine, she said, buy me a BBQ dinner. He ordered five ambrosia plates, dropped to a knee over espresso. Roses burst from the walls, critics leapt from their stools, applauding as she stammered, ok yes. She whittled her tunes after-hours in a relative’s giftshop. He dissected The Myerson Conjecture on a circular whiteboard. They juggled cars & newspaper subscriptions, insurance policies & wardrobes, gigs & tenure. Picnics in the Louisville grass. A photo shoot at the Taj Mahal. Scrabble & parcheesi under the Eiffel Tower. Days passed like W2s. Eggs for dinner? he asked. How about Barbados in January? she replied. In a balloon over Hollywood, she coughed her best Judy Garland, as he yelled, bravo! bravo! She slept eighteen hours straight. Christmas morning, she forgot her best friend’s name. Later she left the stove on, left her purse in a birdbath. He found her wedding ring in the freezer. She had no idea how it got there. They drove for hours to a condo on the Pacific. The sunset draped over a flowery sofa, painting the white walls orange. He woke at 2am, doors & windows gaping, he staggered to the gray shore to find her rummaging in mounds of kelp, looking for a credit card. She couldn’t recall his touch, if he was the one who unzipped her dress in the hotel dark, cheering as she sang for the moon. He heard a voice whispering in the dunes. The air brimmed with fractals & pop choruses, that convulsion of stars. He turned back to her, but her impression in the sand had already been flattened by the tide. He figured it was her out there laughing in the waves, but he couldn’t be sure.
*
John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.
When an Alpaca Gives Birth It’s Called an Unpacking
My children, when checking in to a hotel, spread their stuff from corner to corner. Their bedrooms at home are little dens of shed items, hoodies, baby teeth in molar-shaped containers, flattened volleyballs, autographs on rumpled school forms. Of course, when they were born I left pieces of myself all sorts of places, locked like wings in amber, measured in forehead wrinkles, angled in jaw lines, height marked on walls like cave paintings. I understand laying out what makes us. To be so full of the world, that it gives us place, says I know, I know I am here, I am undeniably in it.
*
In Years Ahead
I find an email draft of baby names we didn’t use. Some my husband didn’t like and it’s funny to think of our arguments then, before kids, how young and vast the world stretched. How much time we let drift without christening it ours. Certain names didn’t seem to fit once something so pink and alert was placed slick in my arms. Some we assigned to loss, which always makes me think of January. Looking at the list, we chose well, though. Because I close my eyes and it is the real ones I behold. The girl on stage, their old crib, the boy who loves hashbrowns, the bunny she sleeps with, still. Anyway, it’s just a draft, stored only in a cloud somewhere it’ll never rain or break. In my imagination, they are wearing new shoes, blowing out birthday candles, jumping in gravel-deep puddles. In real life they exist nowhere but the outline of what we imagined.
*
To Have / Be a Teenager
is to worry about the minutiae of things and yet, throw caution away accidentally. My daughter sometimes stares bleakly at a screen or a steamy mirror. Sometimes questions everything, worrying out every option but the most obvious. And yet I see her eat the cheese danish I bring home. I watch her feed the dog and it is like seeing a neighbor I don’t know yet through a bright window. Just yesterday morning, she watered plants in a square of light, and I heard the sound of singing. It was so beautiful even though it was a song I could not ever hope to name.
*
Katy Luxem lives in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and has a master’s degree from the University of Utah. Her work is anthologized in Love Is For All Of Us (Hachette, 2025) and has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s, SWWIM Every Day, Sugar House Review, Poetry Online, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books, 2023).
Flat green like a fern or battle tank out of place in the grass, peal-drum loud on suburban afternoons— the lawnmower my father bought at a yard sale that Virginia spring.
I didn’t mind mowing our shade-patched yard, free to cut patterns around sweetgum trees, around the flowering dogwood my father loved— circles one week, clean lines, straight as a music staff the next— scanning the street with hope and dread Lisa Lange might walk by.
I was drawn to the menace of the touchy machine, its wind-up starter and manual choke, grime at the seam of block & deck, a blistering exhaust pipe I touched too often.
Unable to adjust the wheel height, I ran the mower high, exposed my shins to missiles of stone and wood, dog shit hidden in a curbside minefield— still, far better
than practicing string bass, stuck inside our green carpet playroom, thirty minutes of scales clock-watching my way through arpeggios, the perpetual tock of the metronome.
I was twelve that summer, each day a rehearsal, and the lawnmower was something that made things happen— let me buy baseball cards and bottle rockets with abandon,
led me down sidewalks to the Moffitts and Silversteins, sometimes the Gritzners, and the house that never seemed to sell, where the realtor paid fifteen dollars to cut the weeds every other Saturday.
*
Off to the Star Party
A whip of stars— we’ll later learn it’s the tail of Scorpius— and perhaps this time I’ll remember.
We’re made of the same stuff, after all.
Fallen apples cobble the path through the orchard, night vision more memory than sense.
An illusion of stillness. Even without wind, everything is on the move—
the remains of a dry year’s snow, shadow-clung north of the pines, odds and ends of the sea this used to be.
Trace the mesa’s perfect plane as if a blade cut earth from sky,
and when I say the air is the temperature of silk, I mean I can no longer tell skin from night,
am unbound from day’s unease, steps sure and light.
When we finally arrive at the ballfield— a sculpture garden of telescopes between first and third base—
you whisper,Look, a shooting star,
and the whole universe snaps to attention, including the amateur astronomer in the red headlamp—
No such thing, he says. It’s called a meteor.
*
Tim Raphael lives in Northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande Gorge and Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his wife, Kate. They try to lure their three grown children home for hikes and farm chores as often as possible. Tim works full-time as a media consultant to environmental nonprofits and writes poetry early in the morning after walks on the mesas surrounding his community. His chapbook, More Earth Than Flame, was a finalist in the 2025 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest, and his poem, Prayer of a Nonbeliever, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and won Terrain.org’s 2024 poetry contest, judged by Ross Gay. He’s grateful to have had poems published in range of literary journals. Tim is a graduate of Carleton College.
Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including her most recent book Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and Gell Poetry prize, and has been published in ONE ART, The Sun, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Hayden founded and directs the interactive poetry performance group No River Twice. More at haydensaunier.com.
Let me be laminate, like the prototype pinned to the wall at the doctor’s office, body glossed in primary colors. Let captions speak clearly for me, as for that flat man, organs outlined in white balloons around him. Make me a model for others to look to— map of evident vessels uncovered to science in lustrous, alive-looking branches. Let me not be a problem, a puzzle, pileup on the morning commute, no discernible source and no exit. All waiting here stare at the horizon’s thin slit, sealed in the distance, as though we might will it to speak. Any breath, any answer seems better than none, any wreck we might tunnel toward, the stunned aftermath we might finally inch our way past, peruse for our own lives within. The specialist’s named Dr. Paine, no joke, which reminds me of Crusher on Star Trek. She had some kind of scanner she’d wave over her patients’ abdomens. Just that, and their innards would sing out their secrets. Nothing unknown in the light-zooming future. No body beasted, animal in a snap trap, fractured and thrashing its dumbfounded hurt in a crawlspace, pinned with no coat of miraculous plastic, no words to speak with, no admirable shine.
*
Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Terrain.org, Foglifter, Valparaiso Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, West Trestle Review, and The Comstock Review, among other publications, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her at claradmclean.com
The flock a shawl flung into the air wings catch the sun all flash green at once, signaling I am at last in the right place at the right time
*
Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, no longer lives for Art but still thinks about it a lot. Work has appeared recently in Chiron Review, Mobius, B O D Y, Offcourse, and The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.
Here in the shadow of the world’s joy let us find calm Let us cool our blistered skin in joy’s sweet shade Among time’s soiled leaves let me find your hand For sorrow is a common thing and joy its common underside In this moment at least let us turn the coin of our time to where the shadow of the world’s joy moves aside and lifts us giddy into bright and laughing air
*
Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.
The term comes down from Old French, its Latin root meaning bile. It makes mine rise on the spring morning he recounts an old story— three cops surrounded him at a community pool, claimed he stole a watch at the local Target. Cuffed in front of everyone, he was hauled off in cold, wet trunks. They withheld evidence, put him in a cell. He shivered until his wife arrived with that month’s rent—the bail. He says he’s innocent but took the plea because he didn’t know better. Now, he needs work but can’t get hired—and here I thought that full-time father was his calling, not fallout from a system’s tricks. He’s still the man I meet for playdates at this park, who brings frosted flower cookies for the kids and trusts in me, I who have been untrustworthy in my time, have broken the law more than once, by luck or demographic never caught. I hold his secret like a bright green moth. Next week, we’ll go camping, we say, sprawling on the mossy bank. We watch our boys pitch rocks in the creek.
*
Confession
The guy outside the club wearing a dirty priest getup and patent go-go boots says he likes my clutch, its red pop against my black dress. Calls it fetch.
We take drags from my cigarette and I tell him it was once a makeup bag, stolen from my sister when she went to rehab. He raises an eyebrow,
I explain that we were teens, it was her third try at sobriety. So I nicked it, plus a flimsy blouse and necklace, beads the pink of a baby’s lips,
pendant a ceramic hibiscus. And birth control pills— I mean, she left them. I just downed them for my own protection. I wanted to make something of myself,
and it sure wasn’t a parent. It wasn’t my fault she returned pregnant. Her CDs stayed zipped safe in their case. I never liked Dave Matthews, Oasis,
all those jam bands ripping off the Grateful Dead. I wasn’t grateful living in that house in her absence. Without her comparison, I was the bad daughter,
getting all our father’s bad attention. If I could, I’d give it all back. Pilgrimage to where she still lives with our mother,
having never quite gotten it together. I’d lay my plunder at her feet, give her a pedicure, beg her forgiveness for being callous,
for being a bitch to her when we were little kids. But we haven’t spoken in twenty years. It isn’t because of what I took—no.
I can’t tell this priest it’s what our father stole from us when we didn’t know it. What we let him get away with once we did.
*
Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the forthcoming chapbook Missing Woman. Their poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Rattle, New York Quarterly, Southeast Review, Stonecoast Review, The Baltimore Review, and ONE ART, among other literary journals. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the 2024 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices and are pursuing their creative writing MFA at Spalding University. They live in Durham, NC. Find out more on Instagram @morrowdowdle.
F. says he’d like to give himself permission to be a dick, just for once, just for play, and he demonstrates how he’d strut, chest out like a gorilla, like certain politicians, and we laugh and cheer him on because in real life he’s a man who sits quietly with the broken-hearted, and there are very few people who can shut up and take in another person’s soul trying to sing, but he can and somehow we’re used to the idea of Man riding roughshod over everything, like that’s what masculine is supposed to look like, and I wonder about the dick inside of me, the one who likes to swagger and brag, and plow everyone out of the way– but then I think of real dicks, their softness and shyness and sometimes awkward enthusiasm, the way they make their feelings known to a listening hand or mouth, and I think of the good men I’ve known and what we were all told about how men needed to behave to even be considered men and I get it, we can all be dicks sometimes, the ones of us who slop around in our cynicism like a pair of old slippers, the ones who grasp at every glittering thing, or cling to ancient hatreds like useless coins from a conquered country. And maybe the dick is just something we just have to reckon with since it’s at the base of western civilization– even god in the old testament acted like one, smiting people and demanding tribute like any bully. So yes, I think we’re just like that god we invented, who was so jealous and capricious and vengeful. Maybe He’s just a reflection of us at our most power-hungry and scared, and we need to own that part of ourselves, offer it cool water and a place to chill, but we sure as hell don’t have to get down on our knees and worship it.
*
Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.
I see you crouched behind a bush, hands cupped around some countryside bug, whose name and composition you´ll pull out of the air as if the sky was a library, earth´s most bizarre curiosities housed on its shelves. I used to fret over stings and bites. Poison. By now, I´ve learned to trust the knowledge hived in your mind. I see you, sitting alone on a bench, your bicycle flung on its side like an argument you refused to lose. The park is abuzz. Other eight-year-olds wham soccer balls, somersault off bars, play tag or play-wrestle, but you stare at the grass, building Lego towns inside dew drops. Or maybe you´re mapping out uncharted paths in maple leaf veins. I see you on deep-read days, the way your name doesn´t catch the sound waves travelling to your eardrum. I, too, know what it´s like to journey to the center of the story, the red-hot plot scorching any urge to return. Sometimes, nothing temporal matters, does it? Not your unmade bed or half- reassembled gadget parts scattered across the floor, not even your meal, whose flavors have vacated the plate like a reunion gone awry. At school, you discover a galaxy in every lesson, chase comets through your teacher´s explanations. I foresee the consequences of your cosmic-quick wit, the jokes and jabs you´ll have to dodge, the laughter. Corners you´ll color in camouflage, quiet as a phasmid. The asteroidal scars you´ll bring home. Dear son, rise above the bullies! Grand Marshal our town´s first bug parade, naysayers be damned. Build a road network rooted in leaf patterns, a rocket ship powered by dew drops. When time writes your story, know that every word of it will shine.
*
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com
Bus Stop in Front of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer
It’s the usual ruin— shelter of scratched plastic,
torn schedule behind smashed glass. The cement’s stained where someone
dragged themselves after a drive-by. In the empty lot beyond, one
shoe’s been set upright in the weeds, encircled with shards
of busted bottles that catch the late light. You wait
while cars and lives pass, wanting to believe there is a bus,
that you can hear it coming from a long way off.
*
Kim Addonizio has published over a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton). Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life was published by Penguin. Her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. She teaches Zoom poetry workshops in Oakland, CA. https://www.kimaddonizio.com
