Poetry

Alexandra Smereka

Lake Erie

 Scientists found “eating one [Great Lakes] fish in a year equated to ingesting water with PFOS at 48 parts per trillion, or ppt, for one month.” -EWG.org. In 2022, the EPA updated their health advisory to recommend safe levels of PFOS are 0.02ppt or below.

Some call Lake Erie Detroit’s
sewer. I hate it, but
they’re not wrong about all the shit
dumped by factories and chemical
companies upriver.

This lake doesn’t have seafoam,
it has PFAS from firehoses,
floating forever chemicals
that fill you whether you
eat one fish, or drink a month’s
worth of contaminated water.

We’re mostly water ourselves,
but told to avoid the beaches
when there’s algae bloom
and the lake looks like pea soup
or the largest kale smoothie
you’ve ever seen, but with
toxins that poison
both humans and fish.

Power plants on the lake
keep the water warm
year-round, encouraging
the algae to grow, but so
does the nitrogen runoff
from farms.

And it’s not just chemicals.
When the tide is low
I’ve seen tires and rusty
nails. As kids we wore
swim shoes in case
we stepped on something
the 2010 tornado had tossed in:
lawn furniture, cars, the top
halves of houses.

I know it’s gross, but
I still love this lake, how
it may as well be an ocean
since I can’t see across it,
how it holds so much
of what we lose or throw away
in case we want it back.

I see evidence it loves us too
in the way it returns
our broken bottles as smooth
glass jewels, as if to say
be careful, or you’ll hurt yourself,
and if you insist
on having sharp things,
I’ll make them safe to hold.

Alexandra Smereka (she/her) is an MFA candidate in Poetry at The Ohio State University where she is a poetry editor for The Journal. Formerly a tour guide on the Detroit River, she’s interested in what we choose to see and call attention to. She was part of Detroit Songbook’s “Song Portraits” project, and her poem from that project can also be found on the CD Sweet Dreams: Lullabies & Night Songs. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and has received support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

Jennifer Christgau-Aquino

Anatomy of a Dandelion

It's the end of spring when small things make their way out. At dawn, a
cougar cub is found summersalting on a thin road just a walk from our house,
between juvenile hall and the elections office. Dandelions creep in cracked
cement, each seed a covet waiting to be carried by the wind. A small clump
of blooming poppies tuck tight in a drain. A man in a flak jacket blocks the
glass doors of the detention center, stares down the shoots. Across the street,
the elections office waves a torn flag to vote. In the ditch, the baby rolls in
pinks before the blue of day & everyone is afraid. Warnings are issued to stay
inside. When the little lion leaves, people marvel at how close he got to town.
Days later, a female, likely a mother, is found splayed and sideways on the
freeway below.

Jennifer Christgau-Aquino is a fiction writer, poet and journalist who writes from her Northern California home. Her work has appeared in The Dime Show Review, BrainChild, Ruminate and WildRoof Journal, among others. She’s a 2024 Gulkistan resident and a former Craigardan resident. She holds an MFA in fiction writing and poetry, and is an adjunct professor of media studies.

Wren Tuatha

Funeral Road

Our steps on asphalt keep the woods right
and left but wildlife is paved over beneath
Chaplin-Taylorsville Road. Dumped kittens
are the only calls we hear. Picking each up
we think we can make the world right, that 
existence is a tree stump with kittens rather
than a churning sphere of cause and effect.
We ducked out of your dad’s funeral because
he never located the beauty in our queerness
and what he said about nature was unnatural.
I don’t believe I can keep seven kittens busy
and innocent forever. I don’t believe I’m so
different from the person who left them here.
If life is elegant while weather turns the soup
of us under, while kittens cry out, are we too
distracted by aching beauty to be beautiful
in our brutally earnest days?

Wren Tuatha is a queer, disabled poet who earned her MFA at Goddard College. Her first collection is Thistle and Brilliant (FLP). Her poetry has appeared in Silk Road, Hunger Mountain, Kaleidoscope, Non-Binary Review, Inverted Syntax, Lavender Review, and others. She’s founding editor at Califragile; formerly Artist-in-Residence at Heathcote Center. Wren and partner author/ activist C.T. Butler herd rescue goats among the Finger Lakes of New York, where she is director of Ithaca Poetry Center.

Margarita Cruz

The West Is On Fire

All secrets go westward,
drive into the eddies of rivers dried,
into the ashes of orange groves,
root themselves into the Ocotillo bushes
before they flame bad intentions.
Do you miss the cat? Before the skies darken
they pink before orange,
hide nothing between the slats of indigo sky and land,
nothing between palms but lightning strikes.
When the power is out, candle flames
remember a time before the stars disappeared under city lights,
mosquitoes in the front yard, sleeping under the arms of mesquite—
do you remember? Summer-baked citrus monsoons the backyard,
swells the wooden frame built by unsteady hands.
We sit inside, hope the flame does not bounce, does not
burn under the weight of its own necessity, does not
reveal the unsteady frame or ghosts we’ve tried to bury. 

Margarita Cruz received her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. She is a part-time educator, president of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, and contributor for the Arizona Daily Sun. She has received support from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, Macondo and others. Her works have been featured or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day series among others. Find more of her at shortendings.com.

Prairie Moon Dalton

Carolina In January

If you get hungry enough you’ll eat a rabbit,
but we never did.         Instead, she found us

a cold cottonmouth,                    asked nicely
for its wasted skin.             She said we could

split it.                        Diamond bracelets for both
of us.            When Carolina pierced my ears,

she sang.             Held a cotton ball to catch
the needle              and a pinch of first snow

to numb me.                               Like a magic trick,
I could not see her                   hands when she slid

these gems                       into my head. She is part
of me.                    Which part? She took her eyes

and left me                             nothing but her keys
on the table and that day, frozen as this one.

Flood Event

What’s the opposite of drowning?
When the water’s low, umbilical
drool tethers me to the bed. Whatever is wrong
with me lay in my cradle before I could, shined
cedar soaked and rocking with what would be.

Prairie Moon Dalton is an Appalachian poet from Western North Carolina. A 2020 Bucknell fellow and Neil Postman award winner, her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Rattle, Sprung Formal, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere. Prairie Moon is currently pursuing her MFA at North Carolina State University.

Aviva Lilith

unperfect

i don’t remember what i wanted
to      be   when i   grew          up
that     little     girl    had a lot of 
dreams          dreams of one day 
touching a cloud, dreams of one
day      living   like         Mowgli 
among      the                  animals

maybe        it was       something 
like a    dancer or a  veterinarian 
i wanted to feel           electricity 
through me              on the stage
i wanted        to be           among 
animals                         everyday
but now   my memories feel like
a claw machine     and i’m never 
able to grasp             the memory 
i’m after   so i’ll settle for any—
but the claw machine    is rigged 
and won’t give me anything    so 
i go      home                     empty 
handed          and all out of coins 

i stopped                             eating 
when i was twelve       then again 
at thirteen    started puking glitter 
and fairy dust,             Care Bears 
and dolls     and told myself   that 
this                        is my life now, 
today i’m twenty           three and 
my dentist             tells me     i’ve 
just about            ruined my teeth,
prescribed me special  toothpaste 
and now i brush my teeth      with
Ted Talks and grocery money for
my birthday    is this   adulthood?

i don’t know     if it’s     this town
that’s made that              little girl 
forget                her          dreams,
or maybe    this town     made her
into someone         more cautious 
a bird             with a tagged wing

careful  not to share my thoughts 
with anyone        or         else risk 
the world seeing         the real me
naked and vulnerable     my mind 
was too                            intimate 
my world         vs        their world
i  put caution tape  around myself

eleven years old   and brand new 
to my  town   daddyless and pink 
bandaged                        by mom
began  acting classes         maybe 
it’ll help         her    make friends
the teacher           is a man    who 
sometimes fixes the sink          or 
looks for ghosts  in the basement
buttered her    and mom           up
for five years                        until
cops came in                 found his
dark shadow            side business
pictures of me        of other kids i
knew         i almost saw our faces
as         flowers plucked  from the
dirt    prematurely   never to grow
back                                      again

Aviva Lilith is a Brooklyn-based hybrid poet and artist living, as equals, with her morose calico cat. Her work has shown up in various art journals, literary mags, and anthologies including Sad Girl Review, Indie Blu(e) Publishing, At the Inkwell, and Headline Poetry & Press.

Cora Anderson

I thought about titling this for Catholic fasting girls but I don’t want to pretend it is holy to starve

I am a priest at the church of being sixteen years old.
I am a priest at the church of all-my-friends-have-eating-disorders
& the church of morning, the church of teeth, of mothers,
the church of please please be kind to yourself, I love you.
My church is a series of letters to the cockroach
crawling across my bedroom floor,
she who takes whatever she can get & leaves no crumbs.
She who is killed & returns again in another form,
she who moves in silence but makes herself known & seen.
I know she isn’t but I like to think she is unafraid.
Strength in numbers. Most of my sermons are laughter, or try to be.
We are too sick to love each other well but maybe you & I
can eat breakfast tomorrow, maybe cake & share the crumbs.
Maybe we can build a church out of that:
a lifetime of breakfast & breakfast & breakfast, amen.

Cora Anderson (they/them) is a young queer poet and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. They enjoy language, love, music, and sunrises and are currently in the middle of five different novels.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento

my mother’s favourite food

but first
my father’s favourite
was fish & chips
a taste acquired in the 2 years he called

Cardiff, home/
fattening his engineering degree.
the potatoes had to be sliced into circles
crisped using my mother’s four step process

/soak the starch out/
/parboil/
/pat dry/
/double fry/

he liked it for breakfast
recovering from those nights he came home angry/
his fists greeting
my mother’s body

he liked it sprinkled
red with crushed chilis
red where his hands had left lacerations
where my mother leaked like a heavy cloud.

eating the sun with her skin/
singing into the fire
my mother recreated this favourite
best at fighting the grog in his voice

the morning after
we bury
my mother
he wakes up ravenous

/he takes his seat/
/unfolds his fists/
/cradles his face/
weeps.

& I never knew my mother’s favourite food

Mubanga Kalimamukwento was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She is the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2024), selected by Angie Cruz; the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest (2022), selected by Carmen Giménez; the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019) & Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, adda, Overland, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Young African Leadership Initiative, the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, the Hawkinson Scholarship for Peace and Justice, the Africa Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her editorial work can be found in Safundi, Doek! Literary Magazine, Shenandoah and The Water~Stone Review. She founded Ubwali Literary Magazine and co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop. When she isn’t writing or editing, she mentors at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Mubanga is a current Miles Morland Scholar and PhD student in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (Twin-Cities), where she is also an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) Scholar. Her debut collection of stories, Obligations to the Wounded, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Kelli Russell Agodon

La Gardienne des Sources/The Keeper of the Sources

After artwork by Leonor Fini

You’re standing next to a tree I don’t know the name of.
Darkness mixed with wine equals all the things we don’t say
in daylight. Nearby, a woman whispers to a fox, she laughs
as he kisses her. We know it’s not a fox kissing her, but under
this moon, reality is a trickster—like how I can’t see your eyes
and you can’t see me shivering, though I am wearing your
scarf, your coat.

You’re standing next to this unnamed tree and our friend
arrives, stoned and hating poetry. He’s searching for his
cellphone, or maybe the moon, maybe a fox. He is looking for
his lost wife and his Smiths album. We call him, The Seeker of
Lost Things and we sip guests, surprised at how much traffic
satellites around us. At midnight, a name-tagged man offers us
a piece of his paper world, but you're elsewhere biting twigs,
calling yourself a bear while I build a yield sign out of the
innocence of snowberries and name myself a fawn.

We’re swallowing meteors now, our laughter blackholing people
to new orbits—and I say obits—and we giggle nebulahappy. Our
stoned friend passes out in a field of sunflowers—a beautiful
tragedy as he is made of allergies. But it’s a stargazer’s carnival
where lovers cling to guitar strings and those who leave have
left their echo.

We’re toasting toxic stars and the venom of business cards,
misspelling fission as passion, a red whine of sad stories, a
photobombed life of ghosts. When I hear you say, Desire connects
two poet-spirits—you feel my tremble, tilting on drinking glasses
of overflow and I lean a little too close into craters of the
moonshine, so you grabbed my name to keep me from falling
in.

Kelli Russell Agodon

Poem Where I Send What I Love Away, But I Also Find Kittens

It didn’t help me to not date
a better architect and didn’t make
sense to build my home on a faultline
in the earth. We’re all at fault
here, for loving architects
because they build things
that will fall apart if we neglect
them. Like relationships.
Last night I had a dream
I let three stray cats into my house
because they were hungry
and there was a coyote
in the trees. I didn’t tell them
about the possibility
of earthquakes, the possibility
of how easy it is to become
someone’s dinner. Last night,
I dreamed I let my relationship out
of the house into the mouth
of the coyote. The coyote was so
hungry, of course it needed to be
fed. It’s hard to watch something
you love get swallowed,
but don’t I do this daily
with time? When the coyote
licked its lips, I knew it was digesting
my love, so I moved
the kittens away from the window,
gave them pieces of chicken breast,
a small bowl of milk
as no living things should have to watch
what is wild devour what’s left
of a heart.

Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet and editor whose newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) was named a Finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her other books include Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, Hourglass Museum, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (coauthored with Martha Silano), and Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry. She lives in a sleepy seaside town where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. Kelli is the cohost of the poetry series “Poems You Need” with Melissa Studdard. www.twosylviapress.com / www.youtube.com/@PoemsYouNeed

Sergio Duenas

Truths and lies in no particular order

A man’s heart is his shelter.
You’re beautiful when you’re laughing
with him. My father slept in a hut
made up of bamboo and dried coconut leaves.
Only sometimes.
A roof is a kind of shelter. My brother
tricked me into thinking I time traveled
after he put a box over my head.
I’m over it all, so don’t worry. I’m scared of heights.
The roof of my mother’s mouth
is so full of rosaries and prayers. I’m always
ears to somebody else’s story.
My father cried to me when he remembered
killing a gecko on Guam–sleep without starvation.
I still remember us.
Mom would rather cut off her hand
than to hit any of her kids. Dad never
cheated. Mom never convinced herself
that her kids still love her.
On the rooftop that night, I meant it when I said
that you’re just someone
to hold on to.

Sergio Duenas is a graduate from CSU East Bay with a BA in English, Creative Writing. He loves spending time (napping) with his cat. When he is not writing, he enjoys playing video games. His favorite genres include strategy, competitive first-person shooters, and role-playing games.

A. M. Goodhart

St. Lucy as Virgin Queen Ant.

St. Lucy pulled out her eyes when a suitor complimented them

Don’t compare my flight with that of butterflies, birds
with their feathers tightly woven into a neat veil aiding them
endlessly high, and feminine, why are birds always feminine?
my flight was unbearable, ham-fisted, my body held up
in the air like a cat by the armpits

flight itself was nothing remarkable, quick trip,
too nervous about landing to enjoy—the air cruel
on my still wet wings—I don’t want to discuss the fucking,

it wasn’t the brief snag
(so good he died over it) it wasn’t
that It meant anything to me at all

which no one will believe because later
when I was alone, I pulled my wings
off at the root. I know how to take off
what has made me beautiful
but no longer serves me.

A.M. Goodhart received their MFA at Western Michigan University. They have published poems in Electric Lit, Indianapolis Review, and Lake Effect. Their collection Neither Kind of Body was a semi- finalist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize at BOA Editions and the Pamet River Prize at Yes Yes Books. They live in Madison, Wisconsin with Molly Grue (the dog) and Garrett Merz (the human).

Rachael Sevitt

Time Machine

reverse back into mum’s driveway / rewind 5 years / 16 years / 63 years / to whenever that
thing in you cracked / put it back together / rename yourself a father / resurrect your failing
heart / undo the reckless deals / return the stolen money / revisit your mother’s home /
recover from your childhood / repay me mine / take back your empty offer / for me to visit
when you’re settled / wipe off your charming grin / remove it from my brothers’ faces
while you’re at it / restore silence to my fledgling chest / come back to my bedside /
put your arm back on the edge of the couch / return your hand to the hem / where my unicorn
t-shirt met my little arm / own the way you changed me / rebuild the Barbie house /
you bought with dirty money and guilt / feel guilty / please / unravel / when you find out
I wanted to disappear / to be like you / divorce me / from the shape of your eyes /
your gorilla-hairy arms / your cat allergies and your last name / recreate the memory of your
last day with me / because it’s fading / this time / choose somewhere better than a McDonald’s
car park to say goodbye / return me to your arms / my head against your stomach /
the wind wrapped around us / the grey asphalt under us / the motorway roaring /
change your mind / unboard your flight / keep coming back / until you’re worth missing

Rachael Sevitt is a Scottish-Israeli writer, poet, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2023 Andrea Moriah prize in Poetry, and an MA student in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Rachael lives near Tel Aviv, Israel. Her work has been published in Squawk Back, In Parentheses, Write-Haus Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at rachaelsevitt.com and @rachael.sevitt on Instagram.

Meredith MacLeod Davidson

Flammable And Inflammable Have Different Meanings, But Non-Flammable Is An Antonym To Them Both

We felt it numbing in the ovoid synthetic caverns of each of us, bubbling our
fluid. A fuel frenzied, forced phase transition into a state of froth. One of ours,
gripped in the fist of the woman as she shook it at the shopkeeper. Shouting,
I just needed a light, I’ll give it right back! We can feel it lurking about our register
display, the collective discomfort of each customer present, quietly permitting
the altercation to run its course. Neon fringe of a store title leaking through the
windows, sheening green at the woman’s feet. The shopkeeper is hoping the police
will come collect her. That isn’t how this works! He yells from behind his plexiglass
defense. You can’t just come in here and take whatever you want! You can’t. An
insistence. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Uniformly manufactured, then
packaged neatly in a broad slotted tray for sales. A lighter is an ephemeral thing.
We pass from factory to shop to user to user to user until we inevitably mosaic
beneath tires on tarmac, butane seep and a plastic shattering announcing our end. 

Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she earned an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Meredith’s has poems in Propel Magazine, Cream City Review, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere, and serves as senior editor for Arboreal Literary Magazine

Roy Bentley

The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News

If the anchorman got excited about whatever bad thing
it was, repeating the list of dead and injured, you knew;
mostly, that what happened was almost entirely on you.

You’d need a lawyer who resembled Abraham Lincoln.
Someone from the eastern-Kentucky backwoods whose
great-great-great-grandfather was shot at least 20 times

his final night on earth for trying to arrest a moonshiner.
Anyway, you fucked up. Big time. And someone died.
Someone else wound up a ghost from the waist down.

The death car, oodles of gore on the seats, a Plymouth,
there on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
You were famous. Which is to say, famously screwed.

Your nephew saw it—the fatal-car-crash screen footage
on the evening news. Complete with footage of the blood-
and-brain-spatter, the rest of the mayhem you had caused.

He ushered a son away from the TV. Offered a magazine.
Mercy was the Playboy opened to distract your kid with
breasts summoning like some kind of roadside signage.

Roy Bentley has published 11 books of poetry. He is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, chosen by Billy Collins as finalist for the Miller Williams poetry prize; Starlight Taxi, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, chosen by John Gallaher as winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council (6 times), and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, december, Rattle, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah.

Sam Spring

Hooves

Wild horses galloped down the boulevard
And laid waste to all things along
The flowing asphalt river.
We ripped this town to shreds,
One dry bottle, one white line at a time
— whether or not we will ever recall.
The hoof marks in the pavement,
The white drip back-draft,
The kicks to my brain
The next morning —
Moments almost remembered;
It all comes about in the daylight,
Where I lay the horizon
And white-knuckle the things that I’ve done. 

Sam Spring is best known for his songwriting work in the musical duo “Tennis Club” with their song, “Morning” eclipsing 6,000,000 plays on Spotify alone. The 27-year- old will have poetry and short fiction appearing in Passengers Journal, The Wisconsin Review, BarBar and Denver Quarterly among others this year.

Amy S. Lerman

Embryogenesis

With apologies to Gertrude Stein

What if no there is there and there is here,
just now, no chaparral beyond
the housing developments, no Atlantic
where the Intracoastal connects, no
cirrostratus above cumulus clouds,
no genes altering or transmogrifying
or transubstantiating, for that matter,
no trans or pan of any kind, no Lake
Michigan beyond the Outer Drive,
no tubers below the roots? What if
here is not even here let alone there,
and forget about everywhere? No more
“come here” or “stay there,” no more
cellular fusion, no more straddling Four
Corners, maybe there and here are just
this, particulate matter, atoms of oxygen,
hydrogen and carbon shedding our bodies
while sallow, cherry blossoms dust the air.

Amy S. Lerman lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press, 2022) won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Atticus Review, Muleskinner, The Madison Review, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Smatish Pace, Rattle, and other publications.

Samantha Imperi

You, turning forty

Turning sideways
in the long hall mirror to see
the curve of your gut
a new growth like an incubating life.
You draw your hand across it
like a waiting mother touches her swollen belly.
We laugh until we cry.
Later, I find you
in the dark
just crying.

Samantha Imperi is a Ph.D. Poetry student at Ohio University. She received her MFA from the NEOMFA program at the University of Akron in 2023. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Great Lakes Review, Sixfold, Allium, Pinch, and Canary, among others. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @simperi08 or visit www.samanthaimperi.net for more information.

Heidi VanderVelde

Remnants

A fence of hog wire and rust
clutches a splitting
but staid wooden post
like an old husband and wife
holding hands.

If one goes,
the other does too.

I hold the baby
while my husband rips the ring
that binds the two together
with merciless pliers.

My mate connects
the end of the old fence
to the beginning
of our new one,
straightens the post
with an impulsive kick.

The sound is not only
heavy sole to passive post,
but something more fragile,
a sound that feels
like a glass breaking
on the oak wood
of our kitchen floor.

We see the jawbone of some animal
the color of potter’s clay
a slender shape
narrow at the tip
like a knife’s sharpened
and ready end.

“Probably a hog”
he says,
calloused fingers
running the length of it
like he used to touch my wrist.

Heidi VanderVelde is a pediatrician residing in Auburn, Alabama. She was recently accepted into Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. Heidi is the recipient of the Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and is the winner of the Sand Hills Literary Magazine 2024 Poetry Contest. She has been published in The Thread and has a forthcoming poem in Poetry South.

Marshall Woodward

From A Deer Stand

I once was a bronze buck—no,
a bronze buck was the image
I carried between my sights,
carried all bronze until
he tells me to squeeze until

I’ve written this scene
from so many cameras:
gun, deer, crying boy,
variations on a father
(waltz, polka, march!).
The bodies bury one
another. I play the
tambourine over a dandelion
corpse. There is bird and bird
hunting.

Marshall Woodward is pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston where he is an Inprint Fellow, a Mitchell Fellow for interdisciplinary art, and an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He is co-director of Space City Medievalism, a project eliciting creative responses to medieval poetry supported by a Medieval Academy of America Centennial grants. He leads workshops for adults at Houston’s Museum of Fine arts and students at the Cy Twombly Gallery. He is currently working on a manuscript about objects of empire and the myth-making of medieval America. His recent poetry appears in Fence and Hot Pink, as well as a recent chapbook LAVA! from Bottlecap Press.