Hubble
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
Conversation Hearts
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.
What You Were Saying
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.
This Season
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.
Apology Flowers
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.
Coming Storm
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.
A Rose Dipped in Gold
Because he knows cut flowers make me sad—
watching the bruised petals swoon
gauging when to toss out the bouquet,
not so soon its beauty is wasted,
not so late it’s a pathetic
litter of pollen and pistils–
he bears me home one white rose
dipped in gold
caught at full ripeness,
a bud just gasping open, each soft curve
edged in gilt, the whole of it frozen
In sparkly polymer. Worse somehow
for being white as a first communion dress,
or a pope encased in his glass coffin.
I turn its hardness in my hand
and see a loved celebrity’s
changed face, features
newly strange. For its offenses
the skin pinned back
uncanny, smooth, and nearly blank
as a badly erased page.
*
April Lindner is the author of two books of poetry, Skin, which received the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press, and This Bed Our Bodies Shaped (published by Able Muse Press). She has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies, including Contemporary Catholic Poetry (with Ryan Wilson) and Contemporary American Poetry with R. S. Gwynn. She has written three Young Adult novels, all published by Poppy. A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, she lives in Stockton, New Jersey.
Collecting Stones
Stalactite quartz I found in Ozark.
Gray galet with intersecting lines
I carried from Nice to Amsterdam.
And another from the afternoon
we ferry to Bellagio like lovers
in a silent film. I wonder,
crisscrossing Lake Como,
cypress trees to gazebo, terrace
to port, if we are those lovers?
Our hands wrap as we walk
cobbled, narrow streets
to the back of Hotel Serbelloni,
past candy stripe umbrellas
and garden statuary, gelato
and Limoncello, church bells
and window shoppers, down
a desire path to the rocky shore,
where we strip in daylight,
and a silver of skywater paints
your back as we crawl in shallows
until we are floating timeless.
You are not yet my husband.
I am still deciding who to be,
each of us a mirage to the other,
but our want holds us in that glacial
carving, a day so blue the edge
of my gaze blurs, histories
collapse, and like a fish mouthing
toward light my future splits
into a forward-reaching Y,
two bodies of water,
lover, not mother.
I do not know
the seed planted
this day, nor the weight
of an unspoken agreement,
but leaving the shore, I stop
to pick up a stone—
dark as a womb, light as a dream.
*
Leslie St. John is a poet with Arkansas roots and California wings. Her poems and essays have appeared in Apersus Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Indiana Review, Linebreak, Oxford American, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, and Verse Daily. She is author of Beauty Like a Rope (Word Palace Press) and Art of Letting Go, a freelens photopoem. Connect with her at proseandposes.com.
Gardens of Tulips
The way I feel about my mother is an old lilac bush
with robins gathering in the blossoms.
The way I feel about my cat is a child’s hands filled,
dripping with ice cream.
The way I feel about work is a dinosaur who forgot
she’s supposed to be dead, roaming downtown
hungry for cheeseburgers and fries. Moths gather
at her back like wishes.
The way I feel about myself is a library,
shelves so deep they fade past the horizon,
past the world, past the circulation desk,
past the sweatered children
with their book reports and jelly sandwiches.
The way I feel about you is fresh-cut flowers
waving from their water tank, colors more alive
than the brightest undiscovered stars.
*
Rebecca Macijeski is the author of Autobiography (Split Rock Press) and Apocryphal Girl (Pinhole Poetry). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, The Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others.
