Poetry

Chen Chen 

Quintessence: A Kid in Late 90s Western Mass

     5th grade Chen,
you were so in love with Pokémon
     trading cards because Brian G.
talked every recess about them, about that rarest
     of Staryu, the one

     with the ink spot
printing error, the one on sale on eBay for just
     under $700.
Why didn’t you have a job yet, Chen
      in the 5th grade

     at Wildwood Elementary?
Why couldn’t you work at UMass, where your
     parents were studying,
or at Herrell’s, where the ice cream was
     stunning? You knew

     all about ice cream,
so why not? You asked your parents, who said
     you were too little, focus
on your studies. But what you focused on
     was God, the one

     you weren’t even raised
with, couldn’t quite believe in, but overheard
     your classmates & especially
their parents beg or thank over & over—
     Please God, they whispered,

     Thank God, they shouted,
eyes occasionally darting upward to where He
     must’ve lived in His luxury sky
condo. God, you said, fuck you for not letting me
     have a job, I need to buy Brian G.

     that Staryu card,
fuck, you don’t even exist, but if you
     do, help me get Brian
that super rare Staryu with the ink spot
     printing error.

     O 5th grade pottymouth
of a prayer. O eldest son who spent night
     after night kneeling like the TV
people you’d seen, hands clasped & whispering
     so loud for Brian,

     who one school morning
brightly said, Awesome shirt, pointing at
     your one
Ash & Pikachu shirt, pointing
     at you. You prayed

     for him to get
everything he wanted. Some nights
     you prayed for him to get
a bit less awesome, to glow a little less
     totally. You prayed

     to get something
right for once, for your parents, who you knew
     could never know
that you had (you realized) what everyone
     at recess & on the bus

     called a crush.
Except yours was not sweet, not silly
     but sin—somehow
in 5th grade, in an agnostic at best house, in a hippie-
     ish set of towns famous for

      their poets, you knew
this. & if any of them found out—found you out—
     well, you just had to pray
your fucking heart out that they didn’t.
     But in case they did,

     in case your mother
& your father, you sunk even deeper
     into your kneeling,
you held your hands together
     1000x harder,

     you prayed
to someone far above God,
     some Star
infinitely more powerful & handsome
     that they wouldn’t believe it.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.

Rowan Tate

drought

god points his finger at me
like a sewing needle against skin
as i plant garlic and leek
in land he hasn’t watered.
i tell him that this is what faith looks like in the modern age:
making a home of
land you can’t afford
to own.

Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.

Julien Strong

The God in the Basement

is married to my mother. We know
he’s a god because what else could explain
how he makes the broken electrical outlet
issue a fizz of sparks from the black eye-holes

of the wall plate’s twin ghosts?
Or the way he replaces the water pipes
with lengths of garden hose,
or the kitchen faucet handle

with a brass doorknob? When we open the door
and a waterfall pours through the ceiling,
he turns back the flood with his hands.
He says the machines

he’s inventing will make us rich,
and it’s true he can do things with sound
that no one else hears. The basement is where
my mother has banished him, for reasons

she doesn’t make clear. Down there
he builds furnace ducts from air, forcing
the heat upstairs to the bedroom
where my mother sleeps alone. He tells me

I look so mature and he so young
that when we walk down the street,
people think we’re married. Some mornings
we find him on his knees, meditating

naked and aroused before the Virgin Mary,
whose hands fell off when my brother
knocked her over with the tire swing.
The god made the tire swing. He brings home

a cast-iron stove he found on the street,
small black creature whose belly is covered
with scrollwork and soot from the first
World War. When he hooks up the gas

and turns on the burner, flames flare
higher than our heads. We leap back, lit with
the fear the sane feel in the presence of a god.
His whims, his moods, his crying jags!

His gentleness. His lips are always soft
when he kisses me goodnight, smoky
and wet and awful as a campfire in the rain.
So as not to turn away my mouth and hurt him,

I turn to stone instead, a marble statue
in some city park, my features eaten away
by pollution and time. And time, the god
in the basement reminds me, is relative

and curved like space and can
unravel. Like a man’s mind.

Pop Quiz

Start with the number of inches tall you are. If you would
rather be Black Widow than Peter Pan, subtract fifteen. If
you can’t choose, multiply by two. If the buttonholes on your
shirts are on the left, add six. If you don’t know without
looking which side has buttonholes, subtract three.

On a scale of one to ten, add the degree of fear you feel when
walking alone at night. If you’ve ever dreamed you were
pregnant, add nine. If you would have kept the baby, subtract
eighteen. If you know how to change a tire, multiply by two.
If you thought it was going to say change a diaper, multiply
by three.

If you know the Look at Your Fingernails Test, subtract
twelve. If you paint your fingernails, add the number of polish
colors you currently have. If your toothbrush is a primary
color, subtract four. If you know which ear is the gay ear,
add six. If you are actually doing these calculations, add
seventeen.

Pick up the first book that comes to hand. Turn to the page
bearing your number. The first full sentence on that page is
your gender identity. Don’t like it? Set this page on fire; use
the ash for eyeshadow, a brand-new beard.

Julien Strong (they/them) is the author of four books, including the poetry collections The Mouth of Earth (University of Nevada Press) and Tour of the Breath Gallery, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize (Texas Tech University Press). Their poetry has appeared in many journals, including POETRY, The Nation, The Southern Review, Best American Poetry’s “Pick of the Week” blog, Poetry Daily, and RHINO. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, they teach creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and live near New Haven, CT. www.julien-strong.com

Katie Beswick

Wreathing

The night after she died
I flew to New York
on the red eye.

And now, she is still dead.
I feel her slipping
all the time

out of view — the way the plane
bobbed through turbulence,
wings flapping

like some great wide tin dragon
we were trapped inside.
I breathed panic.

The hotel poked up
out of the city
like a spear —

and in my bed on the fiftieth floor
I could feel, between my back
and the earth,

all the hundreds of meters of space;
the too warm air; the buttresses
between floors

holding me up. I lay still,
tears burning roads
from eye to ear,

oozing onto the pristine bedsheets,
washed with powder perfumed
like synthetic flowers.

Sour, somehow. Sharply fragrant.
Or maybe the sourness was me.
I hadn’t washed in days.

At her funeral, we piled flowers
on the ground atop
her grave.

It seemed impossible that under the dirt
her body, where I had curled,
inside and out

as a kernel inside a nut and then a whole person,
comforted each time by her warmth
was now cold as the air

in January. Dead as the trees whose
bare branches smacked
our faces

as we made our way from church
to graveside.
And now

she is still dead. I haven’t heard
her voice in years. Though
once I did wake

from a dream in a stone cottage by a beach
in the Orkney islands,
surrounded by sea

and it was as if her voice carried
in through the windows.
It was as if

she’d never stopped speaking, as if
the remoteness of everything
gave space to her sound.

The universe opens that way, sometimes
I find. Just as you are in the pit
of unbelieving,

harbouring a final quite solid despair,
a sound will carry on the wind
or some imperceptible

wall will crack in the foundations of reality.
Truth streams in, clear as its sticky self,
light playing like a god through trees.

After I gave birth to my daughter,
and they wrapped that baby up,
dressed her in a tiny hat

and lay her in my arms.
She smiled then and her
smile was not only hers.

Later, my brother handed me a blanket
he’d crocheted, from scraps
of blankets she

had made for us when we were babies.
It was for my daughter to sleep under.

Across the bottom he’d embroidered
a line from a poem:
We return, somewhere.

Katie Beswick is a writer from southeast London. Her poems have appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Dust Poetry Magazine, Atrium, Ballast and English: The Journal of the English Association, among others. Her debut chapbook is Plumstead Pram Pushers (Red Ogre Review 2024), in March 2024 her poetry installation ‘Being Slaggy’ was a sellout feature of Camden People’s Theatre SPRINT Festival. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Amanda Chiado

Rolling the Mask

At night she rolls her mask
into a cigarette and smokes
herself.  Little fumes, sweet
burning whispers through
the vents the odor of spent
beauty queens, paper mâché
final girls. You sneak to her
doorway cracked just enough. 
Slice of her sad moon mouth
lit by infomercials. You’re
pretty sure she isn’t dead.
Unsolved Mysteries starts
with the host’s haunted drawl.
You try to wake her. “Mom,”
but you are scared of her
unmasked face, ready spider
eyelashes, fists clenched
like fickle peach bombs.
You tiptoe away, cold tile
electric on your bare feet.
You pour a giant bowl of
Fruity Pebbles, too much milk,
prop up the black and white
T.V. in the darkest corner of
your room in the rocking chair
where your mother once made
you and your brothers hush.
Using a toothpick antenna
you watch the Twilight Zone,
soothed by the singsong
sound of your own chewing.
You can almost feel it,
the difference between
characters keeping secrets
and those inhaling lies. 

Amanda Chiado is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has most recently appeared in Rhino, The Pinch Journal, The Offing and many others. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. www.amandachiado.com

Rene Lytle

Fig Middle

My sodden body a clef left in her fig middle. Jellyfish sargasso just
off the bank, pod-dense under an indigo crust. Softly leaking waters
that taste like sweet loam. I wonder if others will recognize the
empty space in the shape of me at the center of her teardrop pome. I
watched my mother in front of windows facing the sea, salt in her
lover’s sink that she dropped herself in front of every night. Stones
in her palms every night. Stone fruit in the wood bowl every
morning. A kiss like peach-seeking leeches when it fades. The wasp
must always die.

Rene Lytle is a poet living in the urban parts of the Pacific Northwest. One of her latest poems, published in The Timberline Review, received runner-up in the Kay Snow Awards and was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. When not crashing local poetry groups, Rene is keeping bees and trying hard to keep her beloved Pink Princess Philodendron alive.

Kit Sibert

Once upon a time here

was a black cat who nursed a resentment if left alone wreaked havoc with the starlings
and jays and whose sleek napping body made couch chair bed beautiful

was a girl who charged through the house tossing blouses leotards shorts towels in her wake
played Enya talked on an olive-green telephone attached to the wall in her room

a husband who chucked cement encrusted work clothes muddy boots sweaty hockey clothes
on the floor showered dressed and clattered on his typewriter and whistled

a sister who visited demanded everything with entitlement praised the home generously
and cried a lot laughed a ringing hearty laugh

a visiting very old mother almost blind who could sneeze anytime by touching her nose knew
when it was time to turn the fried chicken by the sizzle coming from the cast iron skillet

I myself raced around wanting to cuddle the girl fight and make love with the man pet and quarrel
with the cat serve and struggle with the sister care and feed the mother

left clothes strewn sang growled cried laughed and arranged wildflowers like my mother
when I was growing up

now the girl has grown up a career and a marriage away the cat the man the sister the mother
they died

sister left lost to me mother angry cat fed up husband in a glory but left he did but
left they did

God! I miss them and God! the day is order is quiet is peace and on the kitchen counter the orange marigolds are clustered in a translucent blue vase.

Kit Sibert is largely influenced by a childhood Cuba and her years residing in New York City, Madrid, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. She published Dreaming Havana Home in 2024 a hybrid book about her expat childhood during the Cuban Revolution. She has two chapbooks: Beyond Me (integral to a multimedia art show at Maud Kerns Gallery), What You Have Become (Finishing Line Press) and a book of poetry and paintings How the Light Gets In (lulu.com). Sibert’s poems can be found in Passager, Cirque, Gyroscope Review among others. Artistic (poetry and visual) activity includes two solo shows: WIDOW at the PRN galleries and Beyond Me at Maude Kerns in Eugene, Oregon. She has been residing in Oregon for the past decades and spends these days leading her eclectic creative life painting, doing photography, writing poetry, participating in the Motel Guerrilla Movement and musing on the ever-fascinating existential mystery of getting old.

Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez 

Sunday

my mother bookends weekends
with pictures of nameless birds
she thinks i’d like to christen
like i did as a child
thumbing petals & crying at the break
her garden is regulated
if not for wooden benches feasted on
by mercenary termites
it’s their first time living too
today i take the easy route
shut-eyed under sanctioned negligence
cradling stigma between my teeth
i move through the world like a speckled mirror
the further you stand the braver you are
i’ve never felt divine on land
dying on the beach
blue bikini & beer-stained hands
just an hour & i'll be good
peeling & sunbellied below a wave
sheathed in white
like a rat playing dress up
repeating the mistakes of my mother
i check for exits wherever i go
preparing for an afterlife she pulled me into
i trust too much & then not enough

Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez is a Mexican-Spanish-American poet based in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in HAD, Variant Lit, X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, and Heavy Feather Review, among others. She is a 2024 Periplus Fellow.

SK Grout

Transcendental Attraction

During the break, I stand outside the café, mid-November sunlight
         striking and blithe, within a tight kernel of four gay men
swapping anecdotes about sexual encounters, what I mean
         to say is that I can place myself into this conversation,
my body is part of this proscenium arch, I laugh at their jokes,
         catalog their decision-making by eyebrow level,

but I cannot perform this language of sex with my own body,
         tawdry with curves and too many holes, and
once I’ve finished my beer, curiosity withers; I jam my fingers
         into my jean pocket, thumb never constant
sweeping skin to witness my body’s lineaments, for there it is,

that feeling pressing through me when I slide over my hipbone
         discovering rhythm in the closing of skin pulled tight
like the perfect tent, my hip bones prodding forward, demanding
         attention, scaling bone against the gluttony of skin,
so that I can understand desire by control of the body,
         that I too can understand this act of love

SK Grout (she/they) is a writer, editor and poet. She grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, lived in Germany and now splits her time between London and Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Her debut pamphlet, What love would smell like, is published with V. Press. They hold a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London, and are a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Their poetry and reviews are widely published in the US, UK, Europe and the Pacific, including 14 Poems, Cordite Poetry Review, dialogist, Magma Poetry, Night Heron Barks, Glass, Poetry London and Finished Creatures. Website: https://skgrout.com

Clare Bayard

Intergenerational

Recurring childhood nightmare: the Minotaur massacres an office party. I had never seen either
so how did this get into my preschool head. The adults laugh and drink while the monster
materializes from mist. Then: silence, a floor sprinkled with glass, colored elixirs, the carnelian
patina of blood as imagined by a kid who had only seen skinned knees. The raw why: the adults
didn’t notice anything before they were cut down. Later I thought it was about war. No armor, no
regeneration. No adults changing their ways while the kids upstairs screamed warnings, begged
for respite, went sleepless the rest of our lives.

Clare Bayard is a nerdy queer writer, parent, and organizer who has been working for decades to end U.S. empire in order to midwife a democratic and sustainable future, and for a liberated Palestine. Clare’s writing on demilitarization and racial justice has been anthologized and published in outlets including the Guardian UK, Common Dreams, and TruthOut. Clare has an MFA from the University of
San Francisco and apprenticed in grassroots community organizing with many mentors, fighting for the justice, safety and dignity everyone deserves.

Jen Cheng

A Waverly at an Asian Casino in Southern California

I should like to weave
Through the round lacquered tables
        to observe their dreams for prosperity;
I should like to blend in
        among the box-dyed magenta or blonde hair
Of the savvy aging aunties
        with their slyly scrutinizing gaze;
I should like to exist
        without judgment among distant genetic family,
Their poker chips clink percussive beats,
        their scraping cards sigh,
I should like to harmonize the collective atonal hum, hopeful
        as my own
            as my own
                as my own orchestra of belonging.

Would I be more than a motherless daughter yearning?
        Or better a customer
with no appetite for bets except for cheap late-night phở in their 1950’s-themed diner?
Would my lack of demure posture be the only sign they need,
       to know that I am not an immigrant nor have a husband
Wandering like I’m the American lost and found, fragments of Asian ancestors found and lost
        in their ocean of Vegas bright lights and lingering cologne in humble City of Commerce?
An appoggiatura without a resolution,
leaning on expectation without a cadence.

Jen Cheng is the current Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, author of a poetry collection Braided Spaces, and a 2023 California Arts Council Fellow. She is a multidisciplinary artist who blends East-West cultural influences as Feng Shui Poetry. Jen is the founder and facilitator of Palabras Literary Salon, a BIPOC-centered series. She is the creator of a site-specific interactive sculpture, Poetry Scrabble, to celebrate event themes and engage the community with poetry magnets to develop a collaborative poem. With stories for tween audiences, mystery detective fans, and queer love, Jen is a cross-pollinator and community curator. Connect with her on social media @JenCvoice or at www.JenCvoice.com

Rebecca Faulkner

Dendrochronology

Imagine painting men being felled, 
strong, thick roots exposed, a fragile 
beauty severed. With my brush I lay 
each trunk gently on its side, admire        
a tangle of gaping limbs. My canvas 
holds the swollen sky close as I gouge 
kindling with the sharp edge of my 
palette knife. Cutting cross-sections 
to locate growth rings, I ripen green 
oils, mark life-cycles in drizzles of rust. 
Working branch by branch I do not 
spare saplings, inhale their youthful 
scent. A single crow alights on my easel. 
I feed her four winterberries, watch fresh 
snow blanket bare ribs of a voiceless forest.

Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn. She is the author of “Permit Me to Write My Own Ending,” (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023) which was a finalist for the 2024 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her work appears in New York Quarterly, The Maine Review, The Poetry Society of New York, CALYX Press, Berkeley Poetry Review and elsewhere. She is a 2023 poetry recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, the winner of Black Fox Literary Magazine’s 2023 Writing Contest, and the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest. 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, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She has recently completed her second collection of poetry which engages with the life and work of five mid-century women artists. www.rebeccafaulknerpoet.com

Shelly Holder

My Hairdresser Asks What If I Meet Someone Living in Kansas City and Have to LEAVE Los Angeles

Dark mouthfeel of perceived sacrifice popping like bubblegum

out from her curved and painted lips. She’s tumbling the question

into the gleam of this salon as if with blow-dryer or curling iron

she can shape a future for me. I don’t know what sort of adjectives

she might place before that word – a landlocked future? a no more

flip-flops in winter future? a no glitz or glam but at least you found

your meat and potatoes future? And since I’ve booked this time

to shed something of myself, I play along with her. Reply that it

would depend on jobs, how easily either of us could be severed

from what we’ve woven during the years living as single people.

But this is too practical, lackluster. She clearly likes a more violent

coming together, the version where someone has to give it all up

for love. She’s snipping merrily at my hair, adding additional layers

and playing with how strands fall, and move, and settle into place.

“It’s good,” she says, and I nod. “Yeah, it’s good.” But she takes up

those scissors again, and this time she’s decisively wild. Chop, chop.

“Now,” she breathes out. But I don’t look into the overlarge mirror.

I see her hands, still busy and certain, grabbing dustpan and broom,

so eager to sweep ahead or clean up after, whatever I’ll let her do.

Shelly Holder’s first manuscript, Naming the Marrow, was recently announced as a semi-finalist for the 2024 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books. She’s the Associate Editor for Spillway as well as the chapter lead for the San Gabriel Valley branch of Women Who Submit, an organization supporting publication of women/ women-identifying writers, especially in top tier literary journals. Her work can be found at Iron Horse Review and Ponder Review, among others, listed in full at www.shellyholder.com.

Chloe Hanks

Anniversaries

—An imagined experience in matrimony inspired by the use of Aqua Tofana in 17th Century Italy.

Because her efforts to adorn the dining 
table with their wedding flowers were 
neverminded, 

and he was too quick in his undressing to 
notice the fresh silk on her shift, and again, 
too quick 

in his commemoration for memorialising;
she returned to her own chamber to sleep 
and he could not fathom out the why.

It is hard to single out the helping of 
adoration that is the one too many. 
Sickening him lazy.

I imagine a thousand untitled hers and 
decide to be a statue succumbed to crumble 
rather than flesh that bleeds sugar into his 
open mouth. 

Chloe Hanks is a poet based in York. She was winner of the V Press Prize for Poetry in 2020 with her pamphlet May We All Be Artefacts which was also highly commended in the Saboteur Awards in 2022. Her second pamphlet, I Call Upon the Witches, was published with Sunday Mornings at the River in 2022. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including the Elements Anthology from Fawn Press and the Hair Raising Anthology from Nine Pens. She has also been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears magazine. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Birmingham and is undertaking her PhD research with York St John. She is co-host for local spoken word open mic Howlers and sits as a board member for York Literature Festival.

Samantha Moe

DRUPE

You always turn me into canary melons when you’re mad, says her friend. Sabine doesn’t know how to respond. She has been turning her friend into canaries when she needs to speak with her. Sometimes she is a fleet of parakeets, a bundle of angry river herons, but never a canary melon. Would you like to be a clementine? Sabine asks. Her friend waves her arm in the air. You’re not listening, she says. Before she can walk out the swinging kitchen door, she turns into a bundle of gooseberries and falls onto the newly mopped floor. Sabine gathers the gooseberries in her hands. It is easier to speak this way. She tells the gooseberries she is tired of having nightmares about violence, she is tired of being a survivor. She doesn’t want to learn any more information about revictimization. No one believes her stories, so what does it matter. The gooseberries don’t respond. Sabine thinks about the times her speech was stolen. She never knew how to write about what was taken from her, so she turned all the men into lobster tanks and fisherman’s traps. Some of her exes are the ocean. Someone she is in love with is a breeze. Everything is so real, and it hurts so much. There is too much flesh, she thinks to herself. At night, she dreams about scars. Her blood turns to lychees and loganberries. The hospital trips are plums and prickly pears. No one will believe me, she thinks to herself, scooping out bits of her trauma and replacing them with pomegranate seeds. But do they need to? It is unclear whether Sabine believes herself. The gooseberries in the bowl have condensation, making them look like they are crying. It is early morning and grey sunlight hits the table through slats in the curtains. Sabine tries to turn herself into a pink parakeet, but it is difficult now all her organs have been replaced with seeds. She is tired of being strong. This is a familiar conversation. Though some will argue, she knows there is no difference between what was stolen from her and the way all cherry patches look like blood.

Samantha Moe is the author of Cicatrizing the Daughters (FlowerSong Press, Winter 2024), Grief Birds (BS Lit, 2023), Heart Weeds (Alien Buddha Press 2022), and the chapbook Animal Heart (Harvard Square Press 2024). Her short story collection I Might Trust You is forthcoming from Experiments in Fiction (Winter 2024). She has been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (2024) and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar, and Château d’Orquevaux.

Laura Theis

Volary

I have known for a while now
that I am in control of the birds

yes you have me to thank for the
dawn-chorus delay

but don’t praise me yet
I am also responsible 

for the black and white streaks 
of pigeon poop on your window

and the time that massive one landed 
right on your head on the way home from the salon

I also made them devour your cherry harvest
before you could pick a single red jewel for yourself

but don’t hate me yet
because I make the blackbirds 

and thrushes sing 
you to sleep I make the ducks 

form a little regatta on the river 
as you cycle past towards work

I always send you magpies 
in pairs but starlings in clouds and

the best shrieking
kites to make you look up 

from your phone and take in 
the maddening scope of the sky 

every feather you find 
is a message from me

and if the singing goes quiet you’ll know 
what it means

Laura Theis writes in her second language. Her Elgin-Award- nominated debut how to extricate yourself (2020), an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of- the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things (2023) received the Live Canon Collection Prize and the Society of Authors’ Arthur- Welton-Award. Her new collection Introduction to Cloud Care (Broken Sleep Books) and her children’s debut Poems from a Witch’s Pocket (Emma Press) are both forthcoming in 2025.

Matthew Murrey

Inside Little Boy

the critical mass
of Uranium-235 was fired
down the barrel into the core,
setting off a chain reaction
that made a brief blistering,
blinding white sun a half-mile
above the busy city.

Inside little Harry Truman’s throat
a peach pit got stuck.
The shape and point of the pit
were critical, how it lodged
so air could not get in or out,
but his mother was quick—
jammed her finger down
the barrel of his throat
and forced that seed loose.

Somewhere a thousand leaves fall.
Somewhere a thousand birds are startled into flight.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in Moist, Rust & Moth, Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for 21 years. He lives in Urbana, IL with his partner; they have two grown sons. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/

Elizabeth Callahan

SHIFT WORK

I work to dream and buy
milk, gas and paper

I work to clock in and out then in,
for credit to turn from red to green

I work to eat salads like a donkey on break
and chew on vegetables with only the back teeth

I work for enamel toothpaste
for talk doctors and fresh socks

I work to really feel my heels
and blow-out lifting crates with poor form

I work to wash the handprints off my jeans
from wiping my legs off on the job

I work to buy my own apron and gloves
then copay the burn cream with comp

I work for a man with two cars
who tells me when I’m on

I work for myself when I’m off,
wash the sheets and matchmake my socks

I work on sleep and hit snooze when it rings
to go to work to pay a bill to heat my bed

I work to have my own
I work to split the rent

I work to dream and buy
I work for the rest and the rest

Elizabeth Callahan is a poet, educator, and odd- job-er from New England. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Creative Writing Teaching Fellow of the Year, received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and contributed to the literary magazine AGNI as an Editorial Assistant. Elizabeth also holds a dual BA in English and Theater from the University of Vermont. She is a certified yoga teacher with a deep connection to the natural world and leads poetry and mindfulness workshops— most recently with the Appalachian Mountain Club. She is an avid traveler, paddler, and swims any chance she can get. You can find more of her work at elizabethcallahan.com.