by Christa Fairbrother

I told him I’ve been
to Australia, pet
the koalas, and
they’re really not
soft, but scratchy. They
smelled like greasy, grey
linens. I described
the rehab center
where sick koalas,
rested, like a spa
day, then went home, back
to the forest when
they felt better. He
looked at these glassed-in
koalas, lumpy
small pillows asleep
on their fake trunks, leaves
taped on for easy
eating, the sky-blue,
blue-gum tree mural,
then looked up at me,
blinked. I might as well
have told him once, I
borrowed the blue moon
to play baseball with
friends. Why pitched-out, we
glued the moon back up,
higher for bright nights.

Christa Fairbrother, MA, has had poetry in Arc, Epiphany, Pleiades, and Salamander, among others. Currently, she’s Gulfport, Florida’s poet laureate, and she’s been a finalist for the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, The Prose Poem Competition, The Wilder Prize, and was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Connect with her at christafairbrotherwrites.com, on IG @christafairbrotherwrites, or on Bluesky @christafairbrother.

by Dustin King

Paddling out alone in the morning I watch a pair of woodpeckers
banging their bright mohawked heads against a tree trunk.
At home in my backyard I soak and scrub my feet
but the earth refuses to let me go.
Cardinals, too sinfully red to be so monogamous,
as wet as we were paddling the swamp,
tease one another, hop, shake off morning dew,
the crepe myrtles’ pink pom-poms cheerleading,
and morning glories wide-eyed, azure, waiting to wink
until the right moment just like you.

Last night across the campfire you said
what fun it would be to love men as much as women!
Man, you say all kinds of wild shit:
Eyes flame-lit, you insisted birds don’t really exist;
they’re drones, surveillance devices sent by the government.

But Jeff, I followed you as you followed a heron, flirting with her,
or him, olympian wings beating air as we slid between cyprus knuckles,
your kayak parting the glaze of neon algae still as time often feels but never is,
Spanish moss hanging overhead like clothes left on the line for centuries.

I watched you fall in love with that animal, Jeff.
And watching, I fell a little more in love with you!

You’re like the tick tickling my underarm.

Or one of the hundred or so mosquito hickies,
love bites stinging longer than they should
as memories of sweethearts often do.

Scratch one and the others fade.
Then flare right back up again.

Dustin would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When nothing good is playing, he teaches Spanish and exchanges dreams with loved ones in Richmond, Va. His poems pop up in Prism Review, New Letters, Marrow Magazine, samfiftyfour, and other rad spots. He is a poetry reader for Sublunary Review and curates the poetry and performance event “Yodel Farm.” His first chapbook Last Echo is now available from Bottlecap Press. His second Courteous Gringo will be out this Fall from Seven Kitchens Press.

by Christian Paulisich

an odd September
haze obscures the horizon
but I can

almost make out
the bridge or the shadow of
a bridge, face to

face with your headstone.
Do I lay here
with my body

on the stiff cut grass
or with you — when I lie
and say you rise

through six feet of dandelions and dirt, the sewers
rushing through
you now like rivers and byways

to a place better
than this, or worse?

From the hill, I watch

turkey vultures
swarm, spiral through
the white eye

of a cloud to form
a tornado, feathered and ravenous,
anxious to make

a meal of what remains.

Christian Paulisich graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked on The Hopkins Review. He works as a therapist in Northern Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He was recently chosen as an honorable mention for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry and a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2024 Nature & Place Contest, and received a Summer 2024 fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Southeast Review, Salamander, Frontier, Literary Matters, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, and other magazines. He currently reads poetry submissions for Palette Poetry.

by Kimberly Gibson-Tran

ἦν δὲ ἡ ἰδέα αὐτοῦ ὡς ἀστραπὴ (Matthew 28:3)

A crack in the crypt, that jolt
against mortality, the way the iris
closes in. The air is a marriage
of mud and the fine fine dust
that spills in with the morning.
The women left with their ointments,
caught up in the idea of lightning—
This is why I walk gravely,
why I look, expectantly, around,
why I pick up my feet and hold
my breath. The idea of a breach,
that being perched on the stone
striking my life.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran holds two degrees in linguistics and has writing appearing or forthcoming in Baltimore Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, and elsewhere. Raised by missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling. Kimberly is @kdawn999  on Instagram and BlueSky. 

by Janis Greve

Yes, I am getting better now
after months of uncertainty,
my lungs, or rather the spaces
around them, filling with fluid.
I’d have them drained
and they’d fill right back up,
making it hard to breathe.
They wouldn’t stop,
and I imagined them
sobbing, a fit of hysterical heaving
that no amount of shushing
could rock away,
no country grandma
like my own so long ago,
the eddying dough of her arms.
Now the shots are working
and week by week
my lungs cry less.
They are finally settling down,
and everyone—
my doctors, my husband—
is pleased, except me,
who had gotten used to
the needle and catheter,
the dutiful warnings about risks
that accompany any procedure,
the awkward posture as I hunched
over the small, shifting table before me
and the doctor extracted the amber ale
no one would care to drink.
How could you, I want to say,
deprive me of this thing I never
asked for, but that gave me a strange
euphoria, a flood I could always count on
rising, silent, from the depths of me,
insisting on its right to appear,
doubly upset, unbalanced, unhinged,
so perfectly inconsolable.

Janis Greve is recently retired English professor. Her poems have appeared in such place as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Emerge Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, North American Poetry Review, The Florida Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other places.