by Christina Tudor-Sideri

I want you to feel this
the way time moves through me
not as a line
but as a trembling interval
a breath before the word
a pulse after it leaves
I live in this pause
my lungs rise
my lungs fall
each inhale a claim
each exhale a surrender
learning over and over
how to dissolve
into flesh
into desire
into the vanishing of myself

I remember nights
pressed to sheets
darkness folding me
holding me
too tightly
abandoning me
and I feel it still
in the swell of the sea
its waves pressing
against my ribs
against thought
against want
its darkness a presence
a body I cannot touch

The instant arrives
it floods my veins
presses into my heart
into my thighs
and I know
I am undone
even in silence
even in longing

Sometimes it softens
a moment blooms
a forest leans toward itself
trees demanding shadows
trunks entwined
shade moving over shade
and I lie there
skin to wind
breath to leaf
I enter the second
as if time itself
is the touch I crave
as if pleasure
could merge with perception
without surrender

But the river returns
flooding me
desire stretching absence
into ache
into lust
love braided with loss
I wait
for the brush of a hand
for the voice that never comes
and every second
lengthens
my body shivering
with the memory
of what cannot remain
yet I want it still

I wander cemeteries
stones lean like lovers
cold beneath my lips
graves heavy into the earth
the forest above
leaves whispering
waves crashing
desire and death intertwined
skin pressed to stone
to soil
to tree
to memory
vanishing into flux

I linger in thresholds
doors ajar
always almost
never fully
haunted
by the girl I was
by those who vanished
shadows persistent
shivering against me
I press back
even as I fade

I write
write the trembling
write the wound
write from the body
that remembers
what the mind forgets
my hand slower than time
each word
like lips
like breath
fading into me
holding the instant
long enough
to feel it
to feel you

Time erases me
and yet returns me
to beginnings
again
and again
each silence
another attempt
another confession
my body worn
my body trembling
alive in absence
alive in hunger
alive in loss

And I remain here
haunted
trembling
alive
in the flow
that does not end
listening
to the music of disappearance
to the Black Sea tides
to the Black Forest leaves
to death
to love
to desire
learning still
how to endure
how to want
how to vanish
how to be
through what passes
through me
through you
through time

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue; the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, and the upcoming An Absence of Sea and Reliquary: A Phenomenology of Kept Time.

by Frances Klein

after Jose Hernandez Diaz

I leave the church to find something to borrow. From the street I hear the band warming up, violinists and bucket drummers and flautists and spoon players all tuning to Concert A. I walk down the street in leather shoes so fresh they still smell like the open fields the cow called home. On the corner, a little girl is flying a kite. “Can I borrow your kite?” I ask, but a gust of wind pulls her up into the sky. The wind tousles my hair, which I grew myself. I go into the deli and ask the old man behind the counter if I can borrow his cufflinks. He says he stole them from a coffin, and it’s no kind of luck to bring dead gold to a living altar. He slips me a fresh Gala apple, which I tuck into the pocket of my tailored suit. At the tattoo shop next door, a biker is baring her arm for the needle. When I ask for something to borrow, she gives me her place in the chair. The tattoo she lends me is a glossy heart with mom in white script at the center. The biker pulls the apple from my pocket and takes a bite. The apple is the same red as my bicep’s borrowed heart.

Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of the poetry collection Another Life (Riot in Your Throat 2025). She is a founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, and editor at The Weight Journal. Klein’s writing has appeared in Best Microfictions, The London Magazine, Rattle, The Harvard Advocate, HAD, and others. She is on Instagram and Bluesky @fklein907.

by Ali Beheler

I imagine waiting, assembling a loom
for you—two upright arms limning warp. I
imagine you gone, across sea, leaving
me left. I imagine how I would turn
thread of weft at hour’s edge, up toward air
to one more row of thread, one more hour of skin

of shroud laid down where I lie, for you. I’d skin
when sun laid down that shroud, ripped from loom,
threads dancing through my fingers through air
like waves lapping ship, tongue to lip or eye
to lid—unsheathed perfectly. When stars turn
to sun, I’d rise, turn to start again, leave

no trace of yesterday. For you, I would leave
an untouched room, bed unmade, my skin
empty womb, open door. I imagine it, turn
over in loose workspace of bone—sponges, looms
where marrow’s hung—hour by hour red-thread the eye
of platelets wefting warp, carrying air’s

breath of matter, matrix, mother: network where
form is made, delivered. I imagine leaving
nothing but that red unweaving through the eye,
through the hollow halls—follow my inside skin
to the outside. Tear through that deepest loom,
empty room whose floors and walls are shed, turned

to red—unwon month, unwound: blood volta.
Those waves of undone thread. They fall through air
and lie there    puddled, piled, luteal.    Looming
without hope in trail. Sloughed. Snuffed. Failure left.
Led through lens, where outline lands on retinal sheet
pulled between upstretched arms of iris

widening, faint pulse like an ovary eyeing
what’s in front of her: line’s end, no return
of him, of light impressing that face on skin
of concave wall, holding, remaking him. To err
by omission, over-awaiting, taking leave
of lineage, letting possibility loom

full, fruitless. All those months, hour-lined, may be a loom
left behind, a womb: soft of bone whose inner skin
makes blood. Son of song. Stanzas held up to air.

Ali Beheler’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Harpur Palate, The Shore, Rogue Agent, ballast journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. Winner of the SRPR Editor’s Prize and the Milton J. Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry, she has received residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She teaches at Hastings College in Hastings, NE. Find her at alibeheler.com.

by Sam Szanto

In the shade of the yews,
the other mothers,
a few fathers, fewer grandparents
and I stand in silence.
When the bell tolls, the air shifts.
The older children are first out,
running to their families
to be held held held.
Women in catrinas bring out
babies, one by one, carried like organs
to be packed in ice for transplanting.
The babies know us only by our heart
beats. My child is handed to me.
I press my face to hers and rock,
skin to skin, cradling and crying
and kissing and crooning.
She does not have language
but understands music.
One mother lights up a lullaby and
we all join in, tongues of grief
becoming twinkling little stars
of love. The cold space warms with song,
until it is time to leave
paper flowers on the graves.

Sam Szanto is a Pushcart prize and Best of the Net-nominated, award-winning writer living in Durham (UK). Her poetry pamphlet “This Was Your Mother” was published by Dreich Press in 2024; “Splashing Pink” (a Poetry Book Society Choice) by Hedgehog Press and her short-story collection “If No One Speaks” by Alien Buddha Press. She has won the Wirral Festival Poetry Prize, the Charroux Poetry Prize, the First Writer Poetry Prize, the Shooter Flash Prize and the Mum Life Stories Prize. She has poems in journals including South Carolina Review, Rialto, The North, Dust Poetry and The Storms. She has an MA in Writing Poetry with distinction from Newcastle University and is working on a practice-led PhD about absence and attachment in parenthood poetry at York St John University. Her website is samszanto.com and she is on Bluesky @samszanto.bsky.social, Instagram @samszantowriter, and Facebook @sam-szanto.

by Violette Smith

red velvet blonde curls sick as a bitch in heat
Well, I was drinking poisoned water and walking over honeybees,
as any saintly creature might.
Weaned on arsenic and dandelions
Sweet little princess like me!
On a Louisiana oil rig Daddy let a man down easy
All I had I gave, all I had I gave
And that’s just the way of this sad old world
the night was black as ever, Daddy’s hair was flaxen gold
You’re the closest thing to a girl we’ve got
And it’s lonely out here in the Bayou
Let ‘em down easy, Daddy taught me,
but don’t go down without a fight,
‘Cause there ain’t nothing special ‘bout a dead deer
save for the one who killed it.
I come from a long line of quiet beauties,
taxidermied alligators & abandoned daughters
Up late wishing for selkies and mustang ponies,
crying when the old truck broke down
You see, I never made it to Arizona
but I got bloodlines stretchin’ from Maine to California
So Grandpa pulled up lobster traps & crashed convertibles:
I held a fox beneath my dress & let it gut me
Let me tell you ‘bout that wisteria tree, how they cut it down
Men don’t let pretty things rest, darlin’
Vulpine angel, I was getting tougher,
choking down venison and chicken bones.
Little girl made of patience and miracles!
I must always be believed
Grandma took her crosses off the wall &
I dreamt of the dam breaking, a great flood coming
underwater apple trees, her arm in a sling
There’s no point in living if you ain’t moving mountains
No point in breathing if you can’t be done harm
They might write about this sort of thing in the local paper;
snow-capped pines & empty Januarys, Daddy rowed me over lost towns
Sugar, learn how to spot ‘em, (swift river valley, that good ‘ol Irish luck)

Springsteen through the stereo makes us all drive faster
Sometimes I prayed to a God.
There is no such thing as dying breeds.
black racer, milk, garter, ring neck, red bellied, timber rattler, northern water.
Generally speaking, I was quite beautiful.

Violette Smith is a multimedia artist from Massachusetts. Her work is centered around themes of gender, sexuality, desire, trauma, and modern mythology. She is currently an undergrad at Trinity College Dublin studying Archeology and Classical Civilizations. Her poems and photographs have been published in Icarus Magazine, as well as other chapbooks. For more art check out @violett7s on instagram, and @violetteforevernever on tumblr. She also contributes lyrics, vocals and synth to Violet Horror Show, a music collective.