Poetry

Roxanne Lynn Doty

Furnishings

My father was a rebel, a nomad who routinely packed up our meager possessions and headed down the highway 
chasing undefined, illusive dreams that moved too fast for him to capture and he should have known better than to 
let the American ideal snare him and his restless soul by taking out a mortgage on a small three-bedroom bungalow 
in a suburban development of identical three-bedroom bungalows and furnishing it with old furniture from my 
renegade grandmother’s apartment on West 74th from which she had been evicted because of urban renewal, but 
refused to go until they put her belongings on the sad street in front of the six-story, pre-war building slated for 
demolition.  He purchased two table lamps from E.J. Korvettes discount department store at Walt Whitman Mall 
wrapped in cellophane to be removed when brought home but he insisted it be left on as if his commitment to a 
settled life was embodied in those two lamps that had to be protected and preserved though the cellophane dried out, 
cracked, collected dust and became a source of argument along with all the other sources of argument until mom 
moved out, taking my sister with her while I stayed mostly because of the loneliness in his eyes and the tragedy of 
him burying his longing to wander. Sometimes when he was at work at Sam’s deli having quit the plumbers’ union 
because he didn’t like following other people’s rules and had also left the janitor’s job at Little Plains Elementary 
because he didn’t like cleaning up other people’s shit, I’d sit in the living room and watch sunbeams shine through 
the window, cut through the crumbling cellophane still on the lamps, rays of resplendent dust gliding on shafts of 
light and though I knew I was really looking at fine particles of soil, dirt, dead skin cells and fecal matter of dust 
mites built up over the years as deterioration surrounded us, I still marveled at the radiance and remembered my 
father’s face from his itinerant days when he sat in the car at some motel, studying a map, a smile on his handsome 
face.

Girls, 1969

In a city park on cold swings we smoked
Marlboro lights and dreamed of boys
with mysterious hands in wild black
leather their bodies perfect we twisted
the swing chains and spun until dizzy
the nuns at St. James told us
our shoulders would become wings
if we went to heaven they would thrust
through our skin and we’d be angels
and the crisp communion wafer
on our tongues was the body
of Christ if we were good he would smile
on our insignificant lives send salves
to soothe our young passions
remind us of what to cherish and hold
when temptation flared and beauty burned
the clean snow melted into ugly pools
of slush and we may have believed
for a minute but we knew we’d never
be good enough for those boys
our breasts too small or too large
our thighs too thick or too skinny
and we watched the last leaves flutter
on winter earth streaks of red and orange
snaked through them like bleeding veins. 

Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel, Out Stealing Water, was published by Regal House Publishing, August 30. 2022. Her first poetry collection will be published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. She has published stories and poems in Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Espacio Fronterizo, Ocotillo Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, The Blue Guitar, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, NewVerseNews, International Times, Saranac Review, Gateway Review and Reunion-The Dallas Review. Her short story “"Turbulence” (Ocotillo Review) was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart prize for short fiction.

Nadia Arioli

Tom Wambsgans Swallows

his own load. It’s what it sounds like. No, no it isn’t, it’s hot, though, right?
Closed loop, for once, things can be about Tom Wambsgans, including sex, because
so rarely is anything about Tom. But swallows wasn’t the right word, was it? Swallowed,
is more like it. It’s interesting. It only happened once. Headline is, it’s new, it’s hot,
it’s onanism with extra steps, as in elite, as in a special occasion.  Headline is, you can’t make
a Tomlette without breaking a few smegs. As in salty brine, a little on the shoes,
the loafers, the fine Italian loafers, as in Tom Wambsgans turned
wood into bullets into train, and the train came back into Tom’s mouth as
communion, as baby bird. Antichrist, thinks Tom Wambsgans, I didn’t think the Antichrist
would be so milk-fed, so Midwest, because, in a way, I am he, I gave backwards Mass,
I gave of myself to me.

Tom Wambsgans swallows ortolans in secret restaurants, more furtive and secret
than his own wife. Future ex-wife. Whatever. Tom Wambsgans pretends to like
the crunch, crunch, crunch, of bones in his massive horse-like molars, but really,
Tom Wambsgans is in it for blindfold, a little kinky VIP bondage. He doesn’t want
anyone to see his eyes are smiling. It isn’t polite. It isn’t done. Tom Wambsgans
swallows hot bird-juice, deep-fried bird juice, and imagines the song-bird still
singing on its way down his gullet. We paid you to sing. Fleshy cage for corpses.
Bought your own demise for a song. Tom Wambsgans genuinely enjoys
the taste, Tom Wambsgans tells himself. That’s why you do it. That’s why you do something so divinely cruel, so 
horny and god-like, that’s how to be rich in America.

Tom Wambsgans swallows spinach delicately, king of edible leaves, America’s strangest
king, gargantuan, capacious, the optics aren’t great. Again, the concern is the teeth,
the massive white chompers. Wouldn’t want to get wedged up in there, wouldn’t
want to cause a scene. Tom Wambsgans doesn’t like anything clingy being seen
on him, doesn’t want the association of hanging on, like he got himself tangled up,
cozied up, wrapped around, stuck next to, an incisor. Tom Wambsgans doesn’t
want to be an eyesore, an ugly agrarian.

Tom Wambsgans swallows casseroles when no one is looking, whole casseroles,
he even makes them himself, in his own kitchen set, late at night. Tom Wambsgans
so rarely enters his own kitchen these days. Do you know what? He barely
even knew where it was. He gets out the best dish, well, the worst dish, the
quality is terrible, but it has a pattern, you know the one, and it meant something
to Tom Wambsgans once. It’s the Wambsgans dish. So, Tom Wambsgans takes
out whatever he can find, in his fine silver kitchen. Canned green beans. Cream
of—Don’t be obscene! Not cream of Tom!—mushroom soup, he piles
all the stuff, the goopy, softboy stuff, in a dish, and puts it in the oven. Tom Wambsgans
watches it closely while it cooks, makes sure it doesn’t burn like documents,
burn like a synced-up loins, burn like piping hot juice down a throat,
burn like the Myspace of STD’s.

Tom Wambsgans swallows the wrong drugs in the wrong order and thinks
that the moon is talking to him. Imagine that. The same moon that overlooks
cornfields, dairy fields, fields and highways and rivers and boats. That same moon
Tom Wambsgans only pays attention to now in terms of cycles, his future ex-wife’s
cycles, to do something with batter, rather than have it go around and around.
That one, that moon, is talking to him, Tom Wambsgans. The moon’s voice
is as empty and remote and deep as a dial tone. Tom Wambsgans, says the moon,
You can ask me anything you like, a threesome, a onesome, even. I’ll castrate
you and marry you myself. I’m the moon. I don’t have a father, but, still,
all I do is shine a light back. Go ahead, ask. And since Tom Wambsgans has swallowed
the wrong drugs in the wrong order, he doesn’t even think, he just asks.
I think I’m so lonely because I’m hysterical. I’m always so keyed up, I’m always a lot,
and I think that’s what drive people away. Am I right? Am I lonely because
I’m hysterical? And the moon did not take the wrong drugs in the wrong
order, she never does, so she really takes her time to reply. She mulls. The moon says,
All I can do is reflect back, and, honey, my darling, you’ve gotten it backwards,
like you’ve gotten so many things upside own. Talking to the moon
isn’t poker, it’s tarot. You’re hysterical because you’re alone.

Nadia Arioli is the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Artwork has appeared in Permafrost, Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea, Pithead Chapel, Rogue Agent, and Poetry Northwest. Arioli’s forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press.

Sally Geiger

Kitchen I

      after Desiree C. Bailey

What I can I claim
to become in this ragged
button down   land of market   land of dead price

I find work as I’m expected   in the kitchens
back of house   I gremlin under the mountain
I every hour for sale   fingers
on fire   Dora’s cloche in the flames
in the belly of my keeper   what dare I

angel in gauds   body sleek with bile
coughed up   no given name to barter with
I crusty mustache girl walking into the cold morning
I shriek in drag   Was it then I heard mother’s call

spilling my name over the gutted fishes   Was it
her tiny   wail   against profit’s citadel   beckoning
this I   shard of little knowing   this I   girl with a dick
roasting in their ovens   girl marooned
in the body of a beast

Sally Geiger is an emerging poet located in Chicago, IL. Their work is concerned with transfeminine ancestry, love, and the end of fascism, and has been published in homology lit, TAB, and Brave Voices among other places. When not saying things, they can be found griping in a coffee shop where they make lattes for a pittance

Alex Rettie

The Gift

Calgary, 1976

How many evenings had he acquiesced,
gone showerless so he wouldn’t spoil it?
Frank was a fan of stale sweat on his chest —
Stiff from the faint whiff of public toilet,
he’d rasp his unshaved cheek on Kevin’s tits,
then bite a little. Kevin turned over
without being asked, gasping as the fist
pressed up against him. Clean sheets and covers
discarded on the floor. Then the squeezing
and the fingers and the spreading hunger
of Frank’s mouth. Teasing licks and the easing
open, and the lust that flushed like anger.
Next the last, entrancing frantic tonguing;
the warmth-thickened weight. And then the plunging.

Alex Rettie writes from Calgary, Alberta. His poems have been published in journals in Canada, the US, and the UK, including Raceme, One Art, the lickety-split, and Queer Toronto.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

absolute reality:

as vestigial/ as the uttermost process
of growing in pure biological
unfolding
changing gradually
from simple to labyrinthine

                                 as the mulch of larval mites feeding
on my skin release irritation-inducing
chemicals form a tiny straw for drinking
my dermis — a stylostome — to kill my cells
(as honest a piece of equipment as any
& always useful in conditions
of unconditional materiality)

                                 as brass tacks
scratching                a high priority in the moment        
& anything/ everything
else literally immaterial      & still when all’s said & done

                                 as much fact as fiction
this lie of flat earth I can’t see -– those countless
microscopic creatures from separate corners
rendezvousing
at my navel — the Delphian center where my panty line
firmly meets my waist
as stranger still how quickly
almost anything/ everything becomes
run-of-the-mill

                                 as the eyes at the back
of the thorax —— large & false for frightening predators ——
(I saw one for the first time this morning
the Eastern Click Beetle
—— that peculiar-looking thing
made me think of forever a comforting form
of Stockholm Syndrome) & never believe there’s anything
much more to attraction
to an insect’s inclination
than heat at the point of elastic pressure at my bra line

                                 as this solitary tramp
through a chigger-infested field
as the insides of my thighs & the hollow between
my breasts — these pimpling scabs that in the end melt
away & leave no trace — as anything
         everything
hot & thirsty            burns to scratch       a raw itch

Nostrum

as brim        or bream      the Bluegill is most common of all
the sunfishes in the pan fry family            crappie & largemouth bass
& look here             a long gone old man in a 5-horsepower

boat is fishing with his granddaughter (in a ratty plaid raincoat with too-
short sleeves I’ve by then outgrown) on the bench seat next to him

*

some might distinguish between the outer & inner self: the same remedy
applied to the skin/ rubbed on the affected part
or mixed as elixir    a swallowed panacea warding off disease

& some might believe that the bluebird is a symbol of joy
& hope                    & others                  that good news is soon

on the way               & still others might think that a bluebird’s
feather                     found & kept
connects the living              with the distant dead

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a poet and writer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Her publications include five full poetry collections: Lamentations of the Tattoo Queen (2024, Finishing Line Press, Winner, Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Book Competition), REAP a flora (2023, Shipwreckt Books), in the bare bones house of was (2020, Brighthorse Books Prize in Poetry), Eat The Marrow (2019, erbacce-press Poetry Book Prize/ UK; shortlisted 2020 Rubery Book Award/ UK), and BEAST (2014, Stevens Manuscript Publication Prize, National Federation of State Poetry Societies/ U.S). She has selections in generational anthologies by Southword/ Munster Literature, Aesthetica, Stony Thursday, and 64 Best Poets/ Black Mountain Press, and poems in key UK and US journals including Radar, Rhino, Tupelo, Cincinnati Review, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Magma, Abridged, and The Poetry Business/ Smith Doorstop. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, she has won or been shortlisted for significant literary awards including Arts University Bournemouth International Poetry Prize, Magma Pamphlet Publication Award, Gregory O’Donohugh International Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and National Poetry Society UK. Mara is a MacDowell Fellow and a fellow of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and she serves concurrently as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Morris, and Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts Philadelphia. She resides with her husband on their farm in the Blue Ridge Piedmont countryside of Virginia.

Kathy Pon

Preservation

You stash garbage bags and plastic gloves
in your trunk should you stumble
upon a rabbit or coyote killed
in a car collision.
Depending on time of death
you will pack the carcass
in the school staffroom freezer
for later transport.
Sometimes you must get a gorgeous,
but not-so-fresh roadkill
to the taxidermist
and report yourself late to work.

Your house, filled with preserved creatures.
The Cooper’s Hawk, wings posed in flight.
A black masked raccoon, paws raised
in attack. Even your late kitty,
tail vertical, ready to saddle up to your side.

Some say beasts should return to earth
in death. I love how you give them honor
reanimating their bodies.

I rent a place in town, you bring me
Gladys, a wheat-colored hen.
My guardian, you insist. Poised to strut,
feathers fluffed, wings lifted in rebuke.
Gladys’ glass eyes stare me down
like an evil warden.

I happily return your fowl friend
when I move, still touched
by your largesse.

Parkinson’s progresses, you move
to Oregon to be closer to your daughter.
Your light dims with miles and time
—— and deterioration
of nerve cells. Slowly,
I lose you

but still smile remembering
those mounted critters, imagine
even you might laugh
at the absurdity ——

preservation of dead animals,
easier than keeping friendship alive.

Kathy Pon earned a doctorate in education, but in retirement has turned to her life-long passion for poetry. She currently studies with Hugo House in Seattle. Her husband is a third-generation farmer, and they live on an almond orchard. Her writing is influenced by the natural world and seeds she finds in ordinary moments. Her poems have been featured in Plants & Poetry Journal, The Write Launch, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, Penumbra and Emerge Literary Journal.

Cristian Ramirez Rodriguez

Love in the Time of Social Stratification

Yo te soñé Xochiquetzal,
lovely tulip
with the eyes that brought
Tlaloc to tears
and the sun
to worship you.

Inside the visceral
pericardium
you made a byway
to my memories where
lake-water drips as fugue
from colored fingertips
beside deconstructed altars
to gods north of the Caranqui.

In the place where Pacha Kamaq conquered Kón,
a child of the Sun,
disenfranchised cantuta flowers
release saudade,
reversing their myopia through intertwined bodies.

Flowers anchor pollinators
on the warm foothills
of flesh on flesh
just as Enlightened Thunderstorm
sought refuge with Feathered Serpent.

At the intersection between the iris gaze
and the sacred flowers
let us vow
that our roots will not flee
like gods who change their names.

Cristian Ramirez Rodriguez is a 21-year-old Venezuelan-Canadian poet and physicist currently teaching Geometry and Algebra at East Bay Innovation Academy in Oakland, California. He is planning to return home to Canada for graduate school in the 2024-2025 school year and continue working on poetic forms that emphasize South and Central American indigenous traditions. Cristian would love to connect with you via Instagram @pray4cristian or linktree: https://linktr.ee/cristianramirezrodriguez

Jane Wong

晚安

I e merged a bat, echo locating a nectar
need,

my moth er clocks into night sh ift.
Generation after

gene ration, this trickle of juice shared. A mango sl ice on

a knife like a cre scent moon.

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Jonathan Everitt

The Little Room

The coast is clear, so it’s up the stairs and to the right. To this, the forbidden country. My sisters’
twin beds. Twin dormers. White and yellow painted dressers. First perfumes and powders precious
as Fruity Pebbles. My boyhood heart gulps the alien air of such sweet things. And there! Beyond the
bedroom’s dainty trim, a louvered door leaks buttery light within. The Little Room, they call it.
Holiest of Holies. Window-lit closet stacked to the eaves. Here, dolls hide away with their synthetic
silk locks, lace frocks, gaping baby blues and perky pink cupid’s bows curled in compliant grins.
Hands and arms ready to be posed for hugs. I cradle them and twirl their tresses, straighten their
dresses, then slip out from my discovery undetected—a secret I’ll keep of a secret kept from me.

what should and should not
be loved is a lesson too
often taught with shame

Jonathan Everitt’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Laurel Review, Stone Canoe, Superpresent, BlazeVox, Scarlet Leaf Review, Small Orange, Impossible Archetype, Ghost City Press, and the Moving Images poetry anthology, among others. His poem “Calling Hours” was the basis for the 2015 short film Say When. He has also led a workshop for LGBTQ poets and co-founded the long-running monthly open mic, New Ground Poetry Night, in Rochester, N.Y. Jonathan earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. He lives in Rochester with his partner, David Sullivan.

Liz Ahl

Wild

Perched atop the limp orange windsock 
at the ferry terminal: such a burly 
bald eagle, a bruiser, a broadness.
A gull tries to chase him away, fails, tries
again. Down below, some of us waiting
with our cars for the boat to Whidbey Island
point and admire, gregarious in our shared
proximity to a wildness unbothered even
by the ferry’s three horn blasts at arrival.

The driver of the truck in front of us
doesn’t pause to join the marveling
when he heads for the terminal,
the restroom, I guess. I drop my raptor vigil 
in favor of a new, uneasy noticing:

his black handgun, tucked into his jeans
where he must want it to be seen. He seizes,
without knowing, the prize of my fear,
has my attention, has me in the pocket
of those jeans now as he walks to the terminal,
and again, still, when he walks back to his truck,
and also he stirs my simmering worry,
still, in the belly of the ferry we drive onto,
him in his truck, and then us, behind him,
all the way across the water.

Liz Ahl's most recent collection is A Stanza is a Place to Stand, a chapbook published by Seven Kitchens Press at the end of 2023. She is the author of several other chapbooks, as well as of two full-length collections: A Case for Solace (2022) and Beating the Bounds (2017). She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire. She can be found online at https://lizahl.com/

Sara Lynn Eastler

The Delicate Art of Human Preservation

Jar of Peaches, 1866, by Claude Monet

I.
In artificial darkness the slide projector clicks
to Monet’s Jar of Peaches. The reflection glows

on the cold marble’s sheen, flesh preserved
in syrup, stems pointing to where their mother

vines used to be. Beside their glassed siblings
a clique of fruit sit plump — stemless and fresh,

enrobed in peach fur by brushstrokes feathered
gently around their unadulterated selves.

II.
Deep in the science building’s intestines,
a row of jars is backlit behind glass,

each filled with a fetal specimen in fluid. I wait
until I’m alone in the corridor to stare. It jars

to see my reflection in the tiny pink faces —
thumb size, translucent eyelids closed

to the world outside their vessels. One
is covered in downy fuzz, another blooms

a twisted bulge from its belly, a tangle
of undeveloped organs. One embryo

suspended in formalin displays a buckled
spine — it points like peach stems.

III.
What can we learn from this still-life,
in context with the traditions, she asks.

I say something about the darkness
surrounding the fruit and the contrast

between the fresh and preserved peaches.
Senselessly, I mention the stems pointing

towards light and life. The professor grins,
what you perceive as stems are cloves,

but the darkness, yes, what strange space
is this? In my notes I write: transience,

reflection is what makes this a masterpiece,
and what can we learn from this still life?

Sara Lynn Eastler lives in Midcoast Maine where she dutifully serves her feline overlord and a flock of treat-loving chickens. She is a recovering biochemist and MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte. Her work can be found in Stanza, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Voices of Decolonization.

Brennan Bogert-St. Vincent

Bird Transformation

  —after Ana Mendieta 

When I see the feathers that have blossomed

from her body see them ripple and rise with each breath

each sigh of wonder blown at her tint

the air a hue of saffron

I see that the transformation is final

and like many miracles contains very little

happiness and  like all miracles

hasn’t touched me hasn’t changed

my body cells burning as we watch

this new angel arranging themself

like a prisoner plucked finally free from gravity.

I wonder like all the others

if it hurts. Their feather obscured body beneath

the cut where  the shaft ends or breaks through the skin.

When I was a girl I thought with good luck

behavior or some kind of prayer      there

would be a re-carving carried out in sleep;

a harbor of softness laid out on the geography of me

that would be earned      not given. Not so easily.

We all remember the awful squawking

the wool shirt shredding off the hair & lipskin curling in

and then the dehiscence      the bursting

of a touch-me-not touched of a fruit come to pound

out its own flesh.

Brennan Bogert-St. Vincent is a poet, writer, and field recordist from lowa City, lowa. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her writing can be found in Anomaly, Bodega, No, Dear; and elsewhere.

Babette Cieskowski

Initiation

He said I can tell you’ve been dancing
to this song your whole life — his eyes like predation,
watching my body move like a carousel
of memories, memories polished and softened into
an absurd gleam. I don’t remember much. I remember
the rituals, the worship—genuflecting before entering
a sacred space, the bend of permission, stained
glass windows lit from above, a man forced open,
tired wrists. I want his crown, his worship, his name
echoed against the baptismal font that holds
my holy name. The music in the water, the sweat
of a sin confessed, a penitent dance witnessed by one
alone. He’ll be the death of me. I worship that too.

Babette Cieskowski is the author of the poetry chapbook Secrets My Body Keeps (dancing girl press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Zone 3, Frontier Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Juked, The Laurel Review, among others. Born in Oahu, Hawaii, she has lived in South Florida, Kitzingen, Germany, and Central Texas. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio where she works with The Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP). Grounded in prison abolition, the project works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated individuals within Ohio prisons.

Victoria Reynolds

Yard in Early September

Wasps swarm piles of apples
wind snaps the laundry on the line
and clothespins bob like buoys

Grape leaves not yet burnished bronze
the small clusters drying along the seams
moisture sucked by summer sun

My mother holds a rotting pear,
a hungry worm inside its skin —

within the year we bury her.

Victoria Jean Reynolds was born during the storm of the century in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University. She is the Assistant Poetry Editor at phoebe. She is never reachable in the group chat because she is always floating down the river in her canoe.

Katherine Riegel

1001 Nights

I tell myself stories in my sleep. Sometimes
I wake wishing for a donkey to put my arms around,

its head resting on my shoulder, its love
so loud the whole world knows.

In the afternoon I wish for hummingbirds’
aerial acrobatics above my head, sacred,
and me in my rocking chair on the patio

somehow significant. All day the bells ring
and someone wishes. Scheherazade tells her stories
to stay alive every night. The powerful always

want to kill someone. In my stories
everyone lives and treasure is everywhere:

afternoon light like a crescendo, mountains
bowing to one another across the valleys,
a new color discovered every day.

On screens small and large the beatings go on
but at night the stories come in like the tides.

Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir about her sister, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in summer 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag Press), the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress Publications), and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, The Gettysburg Review, One, Orion, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction. Find her at katherineriegel.com.

Dianna Morales

cherry tomatoes

In spirit of my mother’s spirit,
we eat fresh tomatoes, painting our fingers red,
cheeks flushed under a summer sun,
our world moves quietly, assuredly.
My tío is bargaining with the elote lady,
she’s wearing a dress she made from her home fabrics,
there are little red tomatoes etched on her sleeves,
I think of picking and eating them, my cheeks flushed in embarrassment.
With sleeves that have red acrylics on them,
an accident from all the laughter that came out on canvas,
my grandma is wearing a bright red earring as she hums along to Elvis,
our hearts are heavy with the loss of youth.
Biking in a small garage back and forth, a red rose in the wind,
tomato red blood drips from my ankle y mis primos are watching on in horror,
Papá tells me he’ll buy me ice cream if I stop crying,
after cleaning away the red, he says the cut will scar.
A side of a Rubik’s cube, my lips after I bite them too hard, my ears after she kisses my cheek,
the cherry on top of my ice cream float, my old jacket I wore when I was six, the picture frame
holding a memory, my nails after picking at them too much,
My heart beating in my chest, strong and constant,
reminding me of what makes me alive.

Dianna Morales is a young, queer Mexican-American writer residing in Austin, Texas. Dianna’s work has been published in The Field Guide Magazine, Chinchilla Lit, Dream Glow Magazine, CERASUS Magazine, The Rhizomatic Revolution Review, and The B'K Lit Mag. Most importantly, Dianna is also very fond of cats. Find more of Dianna on diannamorales.com.

Elina Kumra

Ferocious Curiosity and Vulnerability

Afterward you wore that high, spun out look
my son used to wear, when he let go
of my hand, his grip gone lax and his eyes
drifting and cloudy, as though behind them
the world was a carousel circling to fill his
innocent mind, that would sway on the fragile
brown stem of his spine so I had to grip him
tighter, in awe at the ferocity of curiosity,
which was nothing like the needing
to be kept safe, the wild flailing and crying
until he clung to me, made a knot binding
us firm, absorbed, drawing the life around
and into his being; no, this was his finest
stride, this yielding of himself, revealing
how his reliance could unveil how helpless
he was—that’s what I saw, that evening when you
pulled your mouth from mine and leaned
on a wooden bench outside a stoned synagogue:
a man who dared to be that vulnerable,
that simple and impossible to hurt.

Elina Kumra is a young poet from San Jose, California. She is Reed Magazine’s 2024 Emerging Writer, a fiction finalist for Quarterly West, Fractured Lit and TABC Poetry, 2022 Sunnyvale’s Youth Poet Ambassador, Honored by Scholastic Writing and published in over 15 literary magazines. Her primary goal is to tackle illiteracy by promoting equity and accessibility within the educational system. Elina is also an accomplished concert pianist and numismatist. She is currently focusing on A Brush on Recovery, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization she founded that promotes mental health awareness and opiate recovery through poetry. Passengers Journal, Cathexis North, TABC Poetry, Typishly Lit, Coffin Bell, Inlandia, The Blood Pudding, Quarterly West, Quibbly Lit, Cool Bean Lit, Reed Magazine, Writers Digest, Up North Lit, Peauxdunque Review, Nine Syllables, Up North Lit, Polyphony Lit, Paris-New York Review.

Lillian May Rothman

Somewhere, CO

never knew columbine as anything but violent
till I sauntered the high grasses
shadow etched the hem of violet ridges
let my legs dangle in the grey of underpass
I should have known better
than sticking my hand in so carelessly
just a little farther and everything would have changed
I read the Catechism, I know what happens
when ordinaries try to open that door.
I should have sung better when my vocal folds were growing
my lips ache when I weave lemon grass into baskets
I didn’t quit when I had the chance to
I choked on dandelion and made another wish

Lillian May Rothman (she/her) is a poet, scholar, educator, and perpetual learner. She holds an MFA in  Poetry from the University of Colorado Boulder (2024) where she served as a Poetry Editor for TIMBER Journal. Lillian graduated from Davidson College in 2021 with degrees in English and Philosophy. She  will be an adjunct Instructor of English at CU Boulder for the 2024-2025 school year. Follow her on Instagram @lilly_listening.

Candice Kelsey

Ode to Ms. Pac-Man

Both earthbound & profound
is how I view Ms. Pac-Man.
As ridiculous as she is 
rich like the process of becoming
a parent which shatters
so many parts it’s as close to self-erasure 
as humans come.
Like a maze arcade video game

centuries of women 
levitating down corridors
of hospitals in labor
dangerously close to death’s
tight corners & babies
joysticked through birth
canals marking a series 
of endings & remarkable beginnings.

Why is no woman’s labor
as famous as the death of Socrates
asks Louise Erdrich
in her memoir The Blue Jay’s Dance.
A strong philosopher
selflessly holding forth
with one glass of hemlock
hardly compares 
to the contracting of a thousand uteruses.

Each quarter in the slot
brings transformation or trauma 
like when I was ten
& for Halloween I was a salad
wearing a green polyester 
bodysuit. I became
a bed of lettuce drizzled & dressed
looking fresh with clusters
of sculpted croutons. Cute game
of cherry tomatoes 

& half a hard-boiled egg,
I had become
what my mother wanted:
if I could be the salad
then I could choose the salad
& if I ate the salad
then I would not be as fat
as she swore I was 
a girl out knocking on doors
for Snickers bars & Jolly
Ranchers my carrot

basket filling from each house.
Like Ms. Pac-man 
I couldn’t wait to eat
the fruits in my path. But
my mother was a ghost
whose semi-random movements
sent me down warp-tunnels
to escape the scolding
& find a way out of her canal
or die swooning. Original
Pac-Man would fold
into himself rather than faint.

At nineteen I folded
driving the maze of I-275
& State Route 27 from Cincinnati
to Miami University
when the truck of men to my right
honked for my attention
then flashed me 
their own joysticks firmly 
gripped like my toes
in the stirrups & my hips quivering
mid-aria open to the fruit
I needed to push out—
my daughter who refuses to wear 
that fucking red bow.

Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a poet, essayist, and educator living in both Los Angeles and Georgia. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books with another forthcoming. She mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Please find her at https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/.

Lissa Batista

How to Curse a Lover

My mother tends to a small bush of azaleas by the stumpy palm trees in the backyard. In her hand, she has a picture 
of my dad: he is leaning on a red convertible, in a jean jumper like a true American in the 80’s. This is a year before 
they will meet. He looks exactly like my brother does now. My mother spits on his face. In her other hand, she 
carries a frog. The frog balloons. Her thumb and pointer pinch its cheek and the frog opens its mouth for a second. 
It’s all she needs. You have to be quick for this part; your picture should be only of the lover, and spit like you mean 
it, like a damp log in a fireplace splitting open, popping. In that second where the frog has its mouth open, stick the 
picture in its mouth. This poem was supposed to be a portrait of us, but we don’t take pictures together anymore. 
Your frog will always be by the leg of a tree near the mouth of the man-made lake. Waiting for insects, almost like it 
was waiting for you. Its reflective red eyes hold up to the sky, a parallel to the red sun ballooning at dawn.

Lissa Batista is a Brazilian-born poet living in Miami with her sweater-wearing sphynx. She believes one day she can win The Great British Bake Off, learn a new language, and buy a cottage with chickens to attempt off-gridding. She is also a habitual liar.

Hannah Silverstein

Homesickness

Bad tourists in each other’s countries,
we gape and point from guided buses,
walk against lights, help ourselves
to busker’s hats, misunderstand street signs,
snap selfies from barstools that turn out
to be gravestones. And complaints! The roads—
too rough, the weather—too damp, what even
is that seasoning added to every dish?
If only the subways worked here. If only
the beds were as comfortable as home.
If only you weren’t off ransacking
my heartland for souvenirs. If only
I could go back to my lousy hotel room
and scribble a postcard: Wish you were here.

The Balcony

Last week my aunt’s surviving budgie
flew from her balcony

and never returned. Now
when the birds are leaving,

she studies the archives of their voices,
traces silhouettes on windows,

patterns her plumage
in invisible colors.

Leaving of course a euphemism
for the space left behind

when what filled it falls from the sky.
Children stare at such emptiness

and populate it with forms,
always moving, like clouds.

Every morning she——my aunt——
opens her empty cage and leaves

a pile of seeds. When memory falters,
all that remains is song.

Hannah Silverstein is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A 2021 Best of the Net finalist, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Barnstorm Journal, Dialogist, Orange Blossom Review, West Trestle Review, Cider Press Review, LEON Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and others. She lives in Vermont.

Dana Kinsey

Boss Babes Tangling in the Afterlife

clawed at her auburn hair in its tidy low bun, wrestled
a needle from her hand, the same one that recently etched
the tattoo on my skin, carved curved script into Hope,
“I dwell in Possibility” with a capital “P” & as she yanked
the artist’s tool out of Emily’s bony moonstone hand,
I saw the fresh ink on my arm suddenly blur to charcoal smear,
like Diane Suess’ eyeliner on an unscrewed-star midnight,
or smoke from her Greyhound Bus with a hollow-eyed man.
My little eye next spied Em and Mom licking bourbon from rims
of porcelain cups, violets twined around handles & one bee,
myriad clovers, springing green from their white lace gowns.
I’m fairly certain neither knew she was dead, so I pulled up a
velvet pillow with flies buzzing & Hades’ low-groan in my head.

Dana Kinsey is a spoken word artist, actor, and teacher published in Fledgling Rag, SWWIM, SoFloPoJo, The Champagne Room, West Trestle Review, Wild Roof Journal, and more. Her poem “Show Me, Earth, Your Day," was a contest finalist in 2023 at Sweet Lit. Her poem “Paying My Respects” was chosen by Oprelle for their Poetry Masters Anthology. Dana's play WaterRise was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Her book Mixtape Venus is published by I. Giraffe Press and was selected as a “Best Dressed” feature for The Wardrobe at Sundress Publications. Visit wordsbyDK.com.

Christian Ward

Good Boy

I've started teaching the sky tricks:
Fetch, roll over, stay. It brings me
winter’s bones wrapped in soggy
newspaper: a rotting log's carcass

complete with fungi entrails. Ferns
colonising a TV. The shark corpse
of a rusting Ford Mondeo repurposed
into a badger sett. Patio furniture

reclaimed by serpentine ivy.
The sky rolls over and the whole flat
shakes. Whenever I ask it to stay,
the sky purses its lips, extrudes

the clouds into puppy eyes. Weeps hail.
Once, I tried to get the sky to play dead:
It didn't understand. I spent the night
watching planes falling out of a child's hands
like every thought I'd sent skywards.

Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with recent work in Acumen, Dreich, Dream Catcher, Dodging the Rain and Canary. He was longlisted for the 2023 Aurora Prize for Writing, shortlisted for the 2023 Ironbridge Poetry Competition and 2023 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and won the 2023 Cathalbui Poetry Competition.

Ann Pedone

The Greenland

Other things will be true tomorrow, but today my cycle wants to fuck me 

It’s been in the break room on the phone with my mother for the last hour
telling her I’m no longer a virgin 

Say “unbodied” and another egg drops 

Tell me again about Whitman and his boys down at the docks
and my cervix is a lion’s mouth I convince the first man I see to
pry open and step right into 

Because metaphor is just another worn-out power dynamic

A cable newscaster who needs to be reminded again 
that Detroit is not the capital of Wisconsin 

I go into the bathroom but can’t pee which is its own kind of etymology

A somewhere that is not so much a between-the-legs, but closer to the mind 

Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53) and Liz (forthcoming from Tofu Arts Press) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Posit, Texas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, the Dialogist, Barrow Street, 2River and Tupelo Quarterly. She graduated from Bard College with a degree in English Literature, and has a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley. She is the founder and editor in chief of the journal and small press, αntiphony.

Melissa Tuckey

After the Clinic Bombing

Cincinnati, Ohio

I remember the keys in my hand
turning the bolt in the heavy glass door
flipping the lights on quickly
to scan every woken room
checking garbage cans for bombs
inspecting windows
and doors jambs, sill
and frame, listening for what moves beyond
the sound of my breath
the bass notes in my chest—
Flipping on the camera at the front gate,
signing in patients, many
carrying children tugging holding
cajoling—
their faces weighted
as they held the elevator open—
one to another
third floor, the waiting room
to your left
I studied for a math exam—
keeping an eye on the front gate
worried
the wrong someone would slip in –
sign my book—
take the elevator...

Meanwhile Anita Hill
was grilled
by the senate judiciary committee—
9 white men, all of them
older than dirt—

Are you a scorned woman, Ms. Thomas?

Melissa Tuckey is a poet, editor, and teaching artist who lives in Ithaca, New York. She is author of Tenuous Chapel, which won the first book award at ABZ Press and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology published by University of Georgia  Press. Her poems have been published at Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Witness, and elsewhere.  She teaches an online mixed level poetry workshop.

Becca Downs

Having a Cry in the Sports Drinks Aisle of the Grocery Store: Polyamory Edition

I’ve never dared ask for breakfast in bed–

to hold both this coffee burning my tongue and 
the cerulean down comforter pulled up to

one lover’s dining table, with the room temperature
Pinot Noir I poured them, full glass

brown eyes flecked with the kind of gratitude that couldn’t just be love, my blind

ness and a patience I yearn for. But one delivers. hope and all that bullshit I thought I’d grown out of.
Stopped longing for

an embrace and a clutch of red roses

habits of this one’s past, everything they cannot and
never promised to give.

when I am sad and ask for nothing, sometimes. I remind myself we only ever say we’ll make each
other laugh, and even that is

an imbalance. A course-correct every time one of us
is unreasonable. I change my mind, ask for a kitchen
table party

not a promise. I change my mind, ask them to make
me laugh and to cry

for every warm thing I cup in my hands–tea and
toddies and love that remains

out of my reach on thirsty days when I’m trying to
keep them in my palms
as a mug filled to the brim 
until someone changes their mind. Now I’m tired
from a late-night fight because I want my tears to be
recognized as nectar

we could sip forever. I’m walking down the aisle
in the name of love, overwhelmed by yellow price
tags and neon liquid in plastic bottles

and I realize loving two people sometimes means
being

in my own way, drowning, and if I’m doubly loved or
loving doubly–I risk

doubly heartbroken. Desperate

flailing for two hands to save me only to feel one

from my own undercurrent, for the spine to reach for
many beating hearts

or maybe nothing at all

Becca Downs (she/they) is a Denver based writer, editor, educator, and poet. She earned her MFA from the Mile High MFA program at Regis University, focusing on poetry and  scriptwriting. Her poem “Burning  Age” has been nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize, and her poems have been published with Twenty Bellows, Beyond the Veil Press, Flying Island Literary Journal, and more. In their spare time, they lead weekly creative writing workshops at a local brewery and read poetry submissions for The Rumpus. You can find  them on Instagram at @beccad___.

Stephanie Niu

Study in Blue

In French, duck-blue means green
gleam of a mallard. Blue applied to steak
means one layer rawer than bloody. French blue
is economical, multi-purpose as dish soap.
Speakers in languages without a word for blue
describe the sky as having no color. I asked Pierre
why blue means so many things. He said
We don’t have that many words.

青

Blue brick moves through
a green dream. Bluebells
in my beard. Fog in the mirror.
I dreamt a blue so green
I woke smelling eucalyptus.
A slim green can holds
vegetable ends. I peel apples
in the blue afternoon. The skin falls
in a perfect ring. I do not think
of my mother asleep. The jade
bracelet she gave me shattered
on a tennis court floor. The gift
of clarity is rare. Our bus climbs
air thinned to green. I wanted her
to forgive me without knowing I was blue.
I wanted to forgive her for knowing.

兰

Lapis. Lapels. Irish
calla lilies. Herbal
vanilla. The pearled
caves of orchids.
The years my grandmother
begged us to speak
in her language.
A tropical sky filling
with storm. The halo
around a fading tattoo.
The edge of a bowl used
to crush sesame seeds. A palm
blooming with bruise.
What I remember
isn’t blue but the sound
blue makes. The last sound
in my grandmother’s name.

Stephanie Niu is the author of Survived By, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Chapbook Contest. She is the editor of Our Island, Our Future: A Zine of Youth Poetry on Christmas Island. Her work has appeared in Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for community archiving research on Christmas Island’s immigration and labor history.