Volume 3, Issue 4

Poetry

including work by Laura Ruby, Joanna Acevedo, Lisa Ampleman, Mazzy Sleep, and more

Shana Ross

Guilt, an elegy

When someone brings a handle of vodka to a housewarming
and drinks a third without even a hint of slurring, keeps going
after the mixers are gone, well, like it or not, there are choices
that need to be made. That night we felt so responsible, alert,
full of concern. We took keys and sent him home with a
friend. The next morning, when he came back for his own car,
he joined us for coffee and said he was doing OK, actually,
after the divorce. It was so nice to let loose a little, just for a
night. We believed him to his face. It seemed like the right
thing to do at the time. How do grownups responsibly worry
about other grownups anyway?It was another ten years before
he died, discovered in his bed by strangers. Ten years is
sometimes a very long time. So maybe that morning was not
the moment we failed in our friendship.

Shana Ross has done time in both a co-ed percussion fraternity and the PTA. She has just arrived in Edmonton, Alberta after 25 years in New England. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Phantom Kangaroo, Gone Lawn, Cutbank Literary Journal, Laurel Review and more. She was awarded first place in the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition, received a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. Her first chapbook, Heavy Little Things (Finishing Line Press) is now available. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets @shanakatzross.

Joanna Acevedo

[Poem With K-Hole and $200 Bar Tab]

I watched your eyes blur from the ketamine and realized how lucky
I was to be half-choking you with my arms in the front room of the bar.

In Chicago, an AmTrak runs over a deer. Later, in Nashville, him and I
argue over whose turn it is to use the shower. I’m not sorry, I’m in love

with you. Entertaining you, I tell you stories of how I used to be crazy,
how I’ll never get better. Get lipstick all over your mouth. I’m reckless.

I watch people watch us and know they want to be us, your face without
makeup, the city all around us in a slurry of neon. I’m going backwards,

but something makes me not care. Call it survivor’s guilt. Call me
a hopeless romantic. Far away, in another city, someone I want to

smother me in kisses is writing a story about yesterday. I hope I get to read it.

Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is the Pushcart nominated author of the poetry collection The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and the short story collection Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021). Her work has been seen across the web and in print, including in Hobart Pulp, The Bookends Review, and The Masters Review. She is a Guest Editor at Frontier Poetry, Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review, Reviews Editor for the Great Lakes Review, Reader at Taco Bell Quarterly, and received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021. She is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.

Dana Booher

Pearls of June

you could go a little farther
in the safety of the afternoon,
the grass like fur, the brush to either side
of the runway high enough to comb,
fine enough to look straight through,
the delicate necks of unfurling stems,
so new that they lean on each other to stand,
and the luxury, just up ahead,
where earthy smells emerge from shade like
startled ghosts– astonished to death that
they have been noticed– there is a sense of
things unseen, a sweeping whole hinted by a
shimmer of prickles across the skin, the
weightless glimmer gliding
though an unobstructed beam–
you could go a little farther,
toward the feeling that you are alone
with the front of your mind
pouring into the unknown, and the rest of it
counting steps back. the insects
hum in the thousands, dead branches write
in the language of cracks. with the light of
midday on your shoulders,
as if it had already passed, you could
believe that you are the only audience,
the last and lonely witness,
you could forget there is somewhere
else to be, nose to the shiny symmetry of
slick black bodies, stamped in half and
curled to sleep, and the simple fact of
tragedy, that a dragons flight on wings of glass
will split in the heat and melt in the damp. you
could go a little farther,
down dark ribbons of bare ground,
forget to remember to retrace your steps,
freak through the tendrils of invisible webs,
think of your thoughts as resistable
violence. You could wait for nothing,
then look away when it arrives, while the sun
turns the light into thin strips of fire,
you could go a little farther, imagine a waltz
of your tracks left behind, toward the feeling
that somewhere, unnoticed in silence,
the door has swung open– the last stall on the left,
in the pit of your mind– you could clutch
shame like an idol, and beg for a sign, halt
with the breeze for a spooked owl flying,
then go back to breathing after the sighing.
there is a half-buried cord, something woven
in the heat to the rhythm of lightning,
something rippling with the pulse of what
you’ve been denying– you cannot help but
lift the thing, and look at what is hiding.

Dana Booher doesn’t believe the rumors about what life is supposed to be. She is a 24-year-old visual artist and poet living in Bozeman, Montana, and a recent graduate of Montana State University. The themes of her work include family, grief, nature, and human relationships. Find her on Instagram @danatbooher

Bobby Parrott

I Say One Thing but Mean My Mother

The line between unburying you whole
and the hot nerve of my pent-up
unbuckling can be quite thin. This myth

of emergence brings Ravi Shankar's pregnant
gourd's restringing into a picture of you
I can never get right, though as my nexus

you still draw lines well past your saintly stint
on-planet. Your body, sunk in my verse, shows me
how my parts perpetrate this illusion of self, how

sometimes when I think of my cohorts-in-time
what I see is the charade venue's burgundy curtains
parting their velvety mass, on what? I only find

my selves, our various hats waggling heads onstage
through a subterranean window I can never
seem to pry open. Then there's the faint wobble

as one of my sleepwalking marionettes mishaps
heaven for the see-saw a pod of dolphins
cuts through the labyrinth, gray undulations

of Sigmund Freud heavy between Miles Davis
ears. Of course, cab drivers and astronauts
see this, but for completely different reasons.

I fight with my heliocentric tendencies all the way
to the beach, where we stall. Odd how clouds
threaten, gush in sheets their universal solvent

like a merciful wash on this and all our beloved
charades, and not only when my alternator throws
a belt to remind me. So I re-name my car, sway

into rhyme's way, sneak my mother back, even after
I've been rescued intact from the withered tree of her
preemptive myth-making, her coffee aroma smile.

Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but he's not sure for how long. His galactic arms are inside you and me, but sometimes he forgets. Please reframe this manifesto as a bio, and remember this queer poet's epiphany about the intentions of trees. His poems materialize on your inner screen at dreamy portals such as Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Diphthong, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. He lives as photons, right on the edge with his partner Lucien, his top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.

Sharon Charde

why

didn’t you call me my husband said when I told
him. I would have come for you. And he would
have but another man had already offered to save
me. OK I said maybe he was different didn’t
just want what the others had wanted, their hands
under my sweater or tee shirt or dress and then
the next place. And I thought I was brave to stay
where I was. He followed me to the beach lunch
and dinner and then to my small cabin that had no
lock and he said please and I said no and no again
maybe not loud enough and then I was on the floor
not rape really was it

Sharon Charde practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor, and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart award. The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, The Glass is Already Broken, from Blue Light Press. From 1999 to 2016, she volunteered at a residential treatment facility teaching poetry to adjudicated young women, creating a collaborative group with a local private school for eleven of those years, and her memoir about that work, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” was published by Mango in 2020. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut with her husband John.

Hope Houston

Love Letters from (Ok)Cupid

Hope (she/they) is a fat, disabled writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She loves playing a good game of pinball, collecting terrible Super Nintendo games, being a certified cat mom, and planting flowers for the birds and bees. In 2020, Hope received her MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where she was co-editor of the River Volta Review of Books (RVRB). A guest lecturer of fantasy fiction for the Saskatoon Public Library, Hope's thesis project was a middle grade, epic dark fantasy novel exploring grief as a spatial process. She has work forthcoming in Washington Square Review, and her prose has appeared in Mystery Tribune and the RVRB. Follow Hope on Twitter: @HopeWritesStuff.

Ashley Preece

Eating Plums

Not metaphor, but bodies, purple ones,
skin thin enough to pierce
with a fingernail.
How many times have we fed
ourselves? Laved tongues over hollow bellies
carved out
by the mouth of us. Again, there is wetness –
saliva? blood? Tell me to hold a piece of flesh
between roof and organ, and I will.
Taste is almost as good
as chewing. We know teeth,
and plums,
and rupture
cool stickiness over naked mouths.
Nothing (but space)
in an empty bowl. How brief
starvation
is in the presence of you.

Ashley Preece is a current MFA candidate at West Virginia University where she edits poetry for Cheat River Review and teaches rhetoric and composition.

Jennifer R. Edwards

Because darkness takes shape

still among the stars.
Why do you always write about your trauma?
Because everything reminds & reminds & reminds.
Because it finds me.
Because it binds its ridiculous rope to my heart.
Because today I considered things that hold other things
together & something,
         I can’t say what,
                     (social media, search engines, not dying)
brought me here to spit at me:
bond, chain,
not free to move,
coupling,
and went on & on still
blinking & building rage without range until
gag,
gut,
guy rope.
Because I could picture a guy rope,
knew a friend’s
without searching.
Because I looked & looked & looked at them
all those years.
Because I read DMs without reading;
         images endless & open as wounds
Because of pulling & gravity. Because elastic. Because band.
Because encircling.
Because fear takes secret & awkward shape.
Because halter. Because the poem at the iceberg’s crusted peak.

Jennifer R. Edwards’ debut collection is Unsymmetrical Body (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poetry won the 2022 New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received support from Beach Poetry Festival and Colgate Writers Conference. Her poems appear in anthologies and literary magazines including Mom Egg Review, Literary Mama, Snapdragon, Terrain, Tiny Spoon, Remington Review, and The Racket. She works as a speech-language pathologist in Concord, NH

Lauren Gray

Ode to bones under the overpass

What was, just months before, a masticated deer,
fed on by traffic snarls and one unlucky
glance off the side of a glinting fender,
smearing entrails cross-country
like paint-by-number on state lines,
a remnant of migratory flocks darting to and mostly fro,
this one, appointed January morning
like a ritual sacrifice for safe crossing,
still shapely and round, well-fed and
glossy, head skewed too far towards the left
shoulder, dragged or crawled, luminously
dead, frost-coated, discarded
but vibrant even in its decay, growing backwards
one iota of desiccated flesh at a time,
a host to carrion and rot, muscles
first, then sinew, bone slowly,
over months, like reverse gestation, enwombed
by passing snow drifts, christened by rain,
embryonic until the form
and the bones bleached roadside-gray
collapse like pick-up sticks,
observed now only by those who know to
look, briefly, in the rearview mirror.

Lauren Gray is a writer and archivist with the Kansas Historical Society State Archives. Originally from Kansas City, MO, her poems are influenced by her childhood experiences in the Midwest, as well as her abiding love of the American Southwest, where she earned her BA in Creative Writing from the College of Santa Fe and her MA in U.S. History from the University of New Mexico. Her poems marry her love of history with her reflections on what it means to be white and a woman in 21st century America.

Brenda Miller

Sacrum

They say it’s the last
bone to decompose—
and so it becomes holy—
such longevity. Imagine

this scrap underground, surrounded
by what cannot persist—flesh, ligament,
every last nerve, remnant of blood.
Or into the fire

glowing red
hot, a devil’s platter
for ash. They say, when the time
is right, this bone will allow

your body to grow whole again,
pelvis a starting point, a seed
for full-on urban renewal.
Think of starfish, who regenerate

a lost leg, and lizards
who drop a tail at first tug
of danger then grow it back again—
no sweat. But, you know, it’s always

been the case, our bodies
sloughing off cells every seven
years so you no longer hold
even a microcosm of that past

self. It’s happening even now,
while you’re reading
this poem, or taking a sip
of tea, a resurrection, whether

you’ve prayed for it or not.
Reach around yourself—
feel how your palm flattens
just so against this stubborn bone—

fits there, solid casement
for vertebrae that sway in every wind.

Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, most recently A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. Her collaborative collection with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, was the winner of the 2020 Cleveland State University Press Nonfiction Book Award She received the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award for her poetry book The Daughters of Elderly Women and the Washington State Book Award for her memoir An Earlier Life. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction with Suzanne Paola and The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World with Holly Hughes. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes.

Jacqueline Berger

The Aesthetic of Rambling Inclusion

Poetry of yammer and gab,
gathering snippets, stories,
ephemera rescued from history’s margins;
yes to the semicolon,
the comma and dash—by the end
of the workshop I considered
the garrulous poem my form,
though I’ve had, I suppose we all have,
silent stretches. In Hebrew school
I never spoke in any language.
The other kids played tag between trees,
why didn’t I join them?
Here my poem is going to narrow
despite my desire to ramble, include,
is going to hyper focus on the time
the principal passing in the hall
started a friendly conversation
and my response was to scribble
on the wall behind my back
with a pencil while he spoke.
Scribble that started small
but I could not stop my hand.
Of widening, I will try
to gather kids passing
that day in the hall and imagine
their dinner tables, the loudness
or silence thereof, and how they
played with their food,
shifting meat and peas on the plate,
or wolfed and asked to leave
or stealthily fed handfuls
to the dog under the table
and would later be treated for starving.
Language of bones, ways
to speak without speaking.
I hung a lead cloud
on the wall behind me
and had to wait for the principal to leave first.
Poetry of gush and jabber, natter and blab,
poem that does not end
but stops, how long
before someone noticed
the cloud and came
with a bucket and a brush.

Jacqueline Berger is the author of four books of poetry, including The Day You Miss Your Exit, published by Broadstone Books in 2018, and The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Selected poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. She is a professor emerita of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California.

Laura Ruby

Carcinoma, as Told by the Body

After torrin a. greathouse

-1-

In 2014, scientists gathered more than eight hundred nests of spider-hawks—solitary, ferocious wasps with stings so excruciating that victims risk pitching into rivers or running off cliffs. These wasps, as long as half an inch, prey on tarantulas and other arachnids, paralyzing them and then hauling them into a hole in a tree or a hole in the ground. The wasp lays an egg on the spider, then entombs the spider alive, like Montresor to Fortunato, except worse. The baby hatches and makes a slow meal of the spider. The spider only wishes it could run off a cliff.

-2-

Taphophobia is the fear of being buried alive. Phagophobia is the fear of being eaten alive.

-3-

The scientists found that certain nests had a tomb before the tomb, a foyer crammed with the corpses of giant ants. The scientists named the wasp that built these double-chambered graves Deuteragenia ossarium, or the Bone-house Wasp, after the ossuaries in which humans stored their bones—whole crypts of pelvises, catacombs domed with skulls, daisy chains of finger bones.

-4-

It is thought that the scent of the dead ants keeps the parasites away.

-5-

Other scientists have developed a concept called “fear ecology,” which is the study of how prey animals behave in response to terror. We are one of the most successful predators on Earth, which doesn’t matter one bit to a bear. Or to staphylococcus aureus. Or to a breast cell gone feral.

-6-

Trypophobia is the fear of holes. Teraphobia is the fear of monsters.

-7-

Should you be stung by a spider-hawk, experts say your best option is to drop to the ground and scream.

-8-

Imagine you are the Bone-house wasp and you are the spider. Imagine you are a ravenous baby newly born, and you are the tomb.

-9-

Pluck your ripe heart. Sing your bones down.

Laura is a novelist with eleven books published, including Bone Gap (HarperCollins, 2015) and Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All (HarperCollins, 2019), both National Book Award Finalists. Her short fiction has appeared The Florida Review, Pleiades, and the Beloit Fiction Journal, among other magazines, and I have poems published or forthcoming in Poetry Onl, Sugar House Review, Fantasy Magazine, Diode, Poetry South and The Dallas Review. I teach fiction writing at Hamline University and have an MFA in Poetry from Queens University, Charlotte.

Alyssa Froehling

Persephone Considering Cerberus

How much sadness is held in each head?

He’s never given me an answer, so I’ve made up
three. Cruelty left unclenched rots red
in the teeth. My jaw is closed

to other mouths with answers, clots full

of spoiled berries. If one or more of him
approach, then I’ll show my teeth. Dressed as the death
of a day, my nose bleeding into the snow,

swinging a shovel for anyone who leaves. A kindness

left unchecked manges around the eyes,
tunnels tombs to an end. On the day he tilts
toward his sorrow, I’ll hold mine against my teeth.

The Brass Ring

I turn it over and over until it multiplies. I am the same age
as you when you got married. You tell me the only way out

is forgiveness. I keep this like a vow in a matchbox, something to strike
against. I am made of enamel and metal, same as the 90s house phone

you threw against the wall when your husband ordered you not to curse
in his house. My brother and I hid under the kitchen table, whispering

against hinges and oak. I turned a screw until it popped off
and the shame was like a smashed gallon of milk. Listen, Mom,

I thought I was doing something right because he didn’t yell at me,
instead, he went quiet. In the beginning, he offered me a brass ring. It greened

every one of my fingers, a color that ripens to rot. Mom, now I can’t trust myself.
Anything I said or lived was forged, each memory interrogated as an imitation

of memory before he went quiet. Now, I turn his name in my mouth,
heavy headstone, jawbreaker. If my only way out is forgiveness, why do all my dreams end

standing in front of a house after he locks me out, my fingers
turning a matchbox, his shadow in the window haloed, multiplying, a miracle

I want to strike against

Alyssa Froehling's poems appear in Black Warrior Review, Puerto Del Sol, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Find her at alyssummaritimum.com.

Lane Falcon

Whatever the Cost

The doctor tells my daughter to breathe big balloons,
blowing out the bad as if it were bubblegum,

as if walls could contain it.
My sister suggests sliding an egg over my daughter’s eyelids,

down the centerline of her skull, to vacuum the thoughts
through the shell and into the unborn body,

then crack it in ceremony and let soak:
uselessness.

My daughter tells me why in loose change—:

I wish it were just you
and me. I hate my brain.—

I don’t know the worth of,
from a country I can’t travel to.

if my body could be her path back home,
I would barter it—

the golden trail between unmovable rocks,
a foothold in sliding dust.

Lane Falcon’s poems have been published in American Poetry Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, Harbor Review, The Journal, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Qu, Rhino, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and more. Her manuscript Deep Blue Odds was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and the Inaugural Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Prize. She lives in Alexandria, VA with her two children and dog.

Kes Maro

Three Tanka—notes on:

Three Tanka– notes on:

Fig. 1) squall swallows the street
softrazor apocalypse
soon it is glowing
sky cracked bleeding orange and
pink—god blood on blue rooftops

. a. Seasonal drowning.
i. New England in February.

Fig. 2) christmas movie set
glittersnow diorama
soft simulation
falls slowly—for a moment
endings get to be pretty

a. The abject on purpose.
i. Everyone is trying to martyr themselves and we’re pretending there’s
something beautiful about it.

Fig. 3) the air lost its teeth
defrosted it kisses cheeks
makes the dog giddy
so we run—this memory
is so old it now feels new
a. The sinking of a haunted house.

Kes Maro (they/he) is a writer and visual artist based in Lowell, MA. Their work has appeared in the SVA Visual Opinion and The Reed Journal of Existentialism. They received a BFA in Interrelated Media with a minor in Creative Writing from MassArt in 2022. When they’re not writing, they bird watch with their cat Sage. You can find them on Instagram @kes.maro.

Konstantin Kulakov

WHITEBOYJEEZUS

underlines leather bible like his father / remembers last supper at moscow

mcdonalds & ruskii jeezus eyes are sad blue sad / money made me

whiteboyjeezus / like redemption from popsicle sticks, glue & felt / be perfect

as your father is perfect / i don’t remember (clasps his hands to pray after

touching his privates) the mistake but the punishment / kneeling on the

hard floor of the coat-closet / winter lingering in those folds / & if he prays

na angliskam like jeezus you can fly all the way to california / winter never

in those syllables / always in the sad blue sad eyes remember / he kicked

over the money-tables, yeshua of nazereth in the sabbath school lesson /

newsprint comics-paper action-figure / but made to play whiteboyjeezus /

prays clasps hands na angliskam / confesses & is washed white in the english

/ don’t worry be happy don’t worry be happy / prays on soft carpets & plays

monopoly / but kicked the boy in sabbath school kicked his lips / they’d

shouted commie / confessed a sorry & the blood was washed by the sea /

scrubs white shirt because white things are as soft as american carpets / but

didn’t turn red hot, flip over the tables, his fake money stacked there in piles /

underlines his bible like his father / clasps the sea but whiteboyjeezus is

individualized / & will be broken washed in liberation theology / remember

to find yeshua of nazereth the professor said / redemption shaped from

solidarity care resistance / loss washed in the sea-like-crowd / & no crown

Konstantin Kulakov (he/they) is a poet and translator born in Zaoksky, Soviet Union. His poems and translations appear in Spillway, Phoebe, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, and Loch Raven Review, among others. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and are co-founding editor of Pocket Samovar magazine. They live in Washington, D.C., on occupied Piscataway and Anacostan land.

Mazzy Sleep

February

The crooked tree trunk,
holding up bare and twisted branches
sits in white, powdery snow
as the car in the driveway begins to rust.
Little echoes
scurrying through the walls of this empty house
start to twist the spine
of the lost wall mouse.
I tap the place on the window
where the rain used to tap with me,
but, of course, it’s February.
Memory sits beside me,
with its arm around my neck
telling me old stories
of when the world wasn’t a wreck.

Mazzy Sleep is a 10-year-old from Toronto, Canada, who began writing during the pandemic. She has written over a thousand dark fantasy/horror poems and short stories, as well as two feature screenplays and a novella. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle Young Poets Anthology, The Margins (Asian American Writers' Workshop), Barren Magazine, Geist, Maudlin House, Defunct Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Queen's Quarterly, and elsewhere. Mazzy was commissioned by the Lunar Codex project to write a poem that will be launched to the moon via the Griffin/VIPER mission in 2024. She was also commended by 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor in the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition. mazzysleep.com

Rachel Custer

Magical Thinking

In November of my 40th year, I began to believe
there was meaning everywhere. It started with marbles

leaching their sparkling ways up from beneath the lawn,
orange and red glinting in the sun, and me, needing

desperately something to mean. Those marbles
had worked back from burial. It was a message

from God: Nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed.
Did that mean the time I let a boy kiss me against

his Camaro, guide my hand to something I couldn’t
yet understand? The heat from his car burning my skin.

Some girls don’t come easy to grace, and I was one,
skipping through every wildness I came across. God

in me like a chipped tooth I couldn’t stop tonguing,
couldn’t stop cutting myself against. I wanted to be

fixed. Fixed, or left alone to push a girl against a car
and kiss her while she sparkled like glass in the sun.

Rachel Custer is a 2019 NEA fellow and the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, forthcoming). The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (OJAL), among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com. Find her on Twitter: @RachelLCuster or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100053711606618

Mary Wlodarski

Deconstructors

For as long as I’ve known them,
my boys have loved to destroy:
block towers,
book stacks,
Lego houses,
train tracks.

When we play in the sandbox,
they dig with their excavators
and dump with their rock trucks,
until they ask me to mold castles.
They hover over me as I pack the sand,
tip the buckets, and slowly cast the turrets,
a fine motor skill they don’t yet possess.
I plead with them to wait, my older son asking
Now? Now? until I wave them forward.
They crush with hands, stomp flat with their feet,
grinning, they jump asking for more, more, more.

Now, I see my older son,
push his little brother
for tearing down his blocks.
They both come to me crying,
tearful from the knocking over.

It is hard to let stand
something we cannot build
ourselves.

Mary Wlodarski has published poems in Tiny Seed, Water~Stone, Third Wednesday, Slippery Elm, Texas Poetry Review, Sleet, Shark Reef, Spry and elsewhere. She teaches English and Creative Writing and completed her MFA at Hamline University. She lives in Minnesota with her two horses, husband, and two young boys.

Lisa Ampleman

Tenuous Blueprint

          “The way things work
                        is that eventually
                        something catches.”
                                    —Jorie Graham

Speck of a specimen, mite of a maybe,
iota of an outline, every nucleotide
ready to sequence & seam,
to grow something or power it off, certified

and approved, curled in double
helix, your start & perhaps
your end encoded in the jumble
of enzymes. Phoneme, syllable, syntax:

the advance is staggering. Split
& multiply, cells. Poppy seed, peppercorn,
blueberry. Mystical sewing kit
and the garment itself to be worn.

Whatever you do, keep dividing. Keep
reconnecting. Heart, hip joint, cheek…

Lisa Ampleman is the author of two books of poetry, Romances (LSU Press, 2020) and Full Cry (NFSPS Press, 2013), and a chapbook, I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You (Kent State UP, 2012). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Image, Kenyon Review Online, Southern Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She lives in Cincinnati, where she is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.

Lily Lauver

Lily Lauver is a graduate of Knox College and lives in Galesburg, Illinois. She was a 2021 fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, and her work appears in The Adroit Journal and elsewhere.

Shlagha Borah

rebellion

Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge Winner

the outline of my chassis keeps growing in concentric circles —

brain fog, bulimia, bacne
pus drooling out of the obese purpleness
green sebum plugging out of my epidermis

the dermat says, call the butcher
you’re due for slaughter.
weight loss is the only answer.

one by one, the fibroids breathe
endometrium enlarges colon collapses
a magnum opus decay

if I had a lover, they would run their fingers through my spasms
& become ice. to touch me is to freeze.

my anxiety is an albatross. it flies for years
within my ribs. in my teens, I borrowed
faith from an elder. she shaped it into a stone
so I could wear it on my neck. can you tell she had a penchant for drowning

I practice mindfulness so the pus can dry. I am infected.
I interrogate my birthstone. I buy an amethyst ring. the astrologer loots
my family & prescribes me a chant. I am taught to breathe.
the knots in my temple tighten the nerves in my jaw snap
a rupture of blood feeds

my natal well & I try

to fool sleep. A large black cat paws my throat. It grows & grows & grows
a mole erupts at the bottom of my head, a rich shade of lava.

I cut my toe off and it grows back into peyote. It basks in shadows and I call it dance.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Longleaf Review, Rogue Agent, Nonbinary Review, long con magazine, Ninety Seven Poems (Terribly Tiny Tales & Penguin), and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and volunteers as a Poetry Reader at Grist. A Brooklyn Poets '22 Fellow and recipient of the 2023 Spring Fellowship from Sundress Academy for the Arts, she co-founded Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Instagram: @shlaghab Twitter: @shlaghaborah

Rebecca Faulkner

Armistice

Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge Runner Up

there are pieces of me in the bedroom
ribs exposed eyes rolled back

battle scarred between the sheets
surrender my armor to the August heat

limbs loll metal & sweat wait for you
to dismount oil my aching joints

where tin chafes bare thighs strip
my bandages I wave the white flag

you speak of truces tell me about survival
ready yourself to leave me I listen

it’s better when I don’t talk
visor down helmet heavy

I’m a trooper you say ripe for rescue
I gather myself into my throat

stagger back toward the trenches
this is what I am made of

Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet and arts educator based in Brooklyn. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals including New York Quarterly, Solstice Magazine, SWWIM, The Maine Review, CALYX Press, CV2 Magazine, On the Seawall, and Into the Void. She is the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest and the 2021 Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Her work has been anthologized in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. Her debut collection is forthcoming in the US and the UK from Write Bloody Press in March 2023. Find her online: www.rebeccafaulknerpoet.com or on Instagram: @faulkner_becca

Honourable Mentions

Robbie Gamble — What We Learned about Homeless Footcare

Brian Bruso — TMA

R. E. Ray - suffix

Poster design: Andreea Ceplinschi

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