by Noah Powers

My lover is now a termite munching tiny tunnels
through the woodwork of my insides. She’s
paving walkable streets for termite travel
with a word on the phone from six thousand miles away,
she’s establishing communes made-up entirely
of her clones. They tend to my heart. They water it
daily. They build tiny termite projectors and fire light
onto the inside of my eyes in the shape of her face,
all the versions I’ve seen so far and teasers of all those
expressions yet to come. In termite school, they learn
how to gnaw only at the places that bear no load.
When they have to work at a sensitive part of my brain,
they are gentle. Their mandibles peck like quick kisses.
All of the time, she is doing beautiful, incredible termite things.
And yet, every day without fail, I’m on the hunt for a solution.
I visit wizards in their high towers, witches in their covens,
scientists of entomology and anthropology. My Duolingo is full
of languages old and dead and only found on clay tablets.
I’m looking for a way to make her a woman again, to feel
her body pressed against mine like words printed to page.
Meanwhile, she’s composing termite symphonies of our favorite songs
so I can hear them all the time, learning how to tweak the frequencies
to scale. All these efforts crafted from nothing but our love.
However small or selfish. However full of hope.

Noah Powers (they/he) is a bipedal mammal first discovered near the Ohio River in what we now know as Kentucky. Their poems can be found in HAD, Ghost City Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, and more. An MFA candidate at the University of Alabama, they currently serve as a poetry editor for JAKE and as the managing editor for Black Warrior Review.

by Crystal Taylor

clocks the velocity of the peregrine’s spiral.
counts eagles rolling cartwheels in talon-locked pairs,
an air-slice dare to gravity.

derives secant lines, the angle of the furrow
under a raptor’s beak, scribbles physics
on the tilt of her glide, the precision of sly hunt.

sketches functions and patterns of passerines’
bob and dip, bouncing sine and cosine waves,
the pitch of their warbler-warn.

thumbtacks the moon to a paper sky,
draws a tangent line where the sun sinks
and a constellation rises.

approximates the chill of wind without the sting
of a backhand to the cheek on a jetty,
eyes gritty on a salt-hover dock.

communicates order, theorizes chaos,
but cannot hang symbols of geometry, physics—
on the senses of a witness.

Crystal Taylor is a writer and poet from Texas. Her poetry lives in Rust & Moth, Maudlin House, One Art, and other sacred spaces. When she isn’t writing, she is likely at work. Crystal is active on Bluesky @CrystalTaylorSA, and Instagram @cj_taylor_writes.

by Matt Uhler

Let us love this distance, since those who do not love each other are not separated.
     – Simone Weil

Because the little boy in the too big coat was looking up,
I looked up too. The late day sun lit the white underwings of
a passing gull and higher up, a plane
glistened silver in a sky that looked too light
and thinly blue to hold so many destinations
in one square inch of view. Even when we’re standing still,
eyes pointed skyward and squinting,
we’re all in that plane moving slowly from here to there
and from there to some semblance of home.
That’s when I remembered that without love
or this truant’s memory and saddled heart
whose gallop has slowed to a trot,
there is no such thing as separation. I had forgotten
how fond I’ve grown of these distances,
this late-day longing, and what it means
to point my soul towards thin, ambiguous clouds.

Matt Uhler is a writer, former book editor, and current nonprofit executive living and practicing kindness in San Francisco, California. Previous work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic. He occasionally posts and shares things on Bluesky: @matt-uhler.bsky.social. 

by Millie Tullis

My mother took apart
Ox-Cart Man
by Donald Hall,
carefully cutting
her favorite pages
to frame and hang
above the washer
and dryer, a well-
used corner of the house.
She loved the paintings,
the moral, the ox. In childhood,
I loved only sad stories. To read
anything was to try
and place myself.
Could I bring home the ox,
if I were the Ox-Cart Man? How
would I keep the millions of cats
from fighting, if I were
the Millions of Cats Man?
How I would keep them fed,
if I were his Wife. How
I would drink milk
from a porcelain bowl
if I were the only Cat
left at the end
of the book.
I’d wear a collar
and sleep through the night.

after Donald Hall, Barbara Cooney, and especially Wanda Gág

Millie Tullis (she/they) is a poet, teacher, and folklorist. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Stone Circle Review, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Their first full-length collection, These Saints are Stones, is forthcoming with Signature Books in 2026. Raised in northern Utah, Millie lives and works in upstate South Carolina. Find more at millietullis.com.

by Julie Weiss

That question again.
It orbits out of my daughter´s
chest after every death.
A beetle she finds, squashed
into a shape we name dismay.
Her grandmother´s canary,
tucked under dirt and rocks,
the wind warbling a tune
bluesy enough to bawl
her eardrum. Our jolly
neighbor with a weak heart,
whose promise of cheesecake
curdled on her tongue.
She wants me to turn the sky
inside out, show her those
ghost towns she learned about
from the pages of my lips.
There, her great-uncle´s
new glimmering villa. And
there, her grandpa´s favorite
floating burger joint. Welcome
orchestra. Confetti. The dust
on her cheek, a kiss. Daughter,
when is the right time to place
my own terror in your hands
like a tarnished heirloom,
rub the gold flakes off the fables.
When is the right time to say
I don´t know I don´t know I don’t know

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February, 2025 by Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was named a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Recent work appears in Variant Lit, The Westchester Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, The Madrid Review, and others. You can find her on Instagram @colourofpoetry919, Facebook, or at julieweisspoet.com.