by Camille Newsom

everything water
and children swimming
when long lightning sun
splits mother oak in two

fish countries
with gold velvet everything
where walking heavy streets
fixes everything in the head

picnic phrases
like why believe and when
is soft-and-dead coming
to hold our stupid hands

silent minutes
with lake strangers crawling
and looking at striped insects
pleasantly still on stones

knowing nothing
and when asked gently
pointing at the geese
chatting under the tree

Camille Newsom is the author of the chapbook This Suffering and Scrumptious World (Galileo Press, 2023) and Purgatory Junkie (Main Street Rag, 2025). Based in West Michigan, Camille is an educator and land steward who weaves creative practice and curiosity into her work. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Terrain.org, and Southword, among others, and was nominated for Best New Poets 2025.

by nat raum

After “[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]” by Alejandra Pizarnik

soft crisp sizzle of slow destruction
rips across wood tonight and you are
the boards and i am the fire leaving you
expanses of charred obsidian after

my crackles and flickers and tears
like crumpled paper shoved into backpack
by schoolchild so passively suicidal
that the inevitable loss of homework

means nothing that anything outside
of death means nothing the vault
which contains me is dark and deep
and expands with each fatal flaw

i discover but i still know how to crack
the door like my kid self ditching naptime
to scarf lemon creme sandwich cookies
the pulse my body so spitefully insists

upon is surging and burning and twisting
through every vessel and then some
like sneaking out like letting go like violence
is the only thing i ever learned how to come

home to sob scream cry with such affect
i think the sirens outside must be coming
for us the night the flames the ash at every
angle it all must be coming for us

nat raum is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. Their writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Baltimore Beat, Gone Lawn, beestung, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.

by Lynne Jensen Lampe

golden shovel after joni mitchell’s down to you

words can’t paint everything
this side of the glass :: blood comes
with its own poetry &
each line leaks iron & loneliness :: tangoes
till one pane cracks :: i choose pleasure
in strange skin or the give & take that moves
two souls :: held in the space between :: krypton
gas shields me from desire too
hot & ragged as new teeth :: early
chains prison the other’s pain &
in the space between we blue-light trouble
flicker off & on till one leaves
a heart fogged & dusty & opening too
slow

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s poetry appears or will appear in Kenyon Review, Okay Donkey, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), an Eric Hoffer winner and finalist for the McMath Award, concerns mother-daughter relationships and mental illness. She lives with her husband and two dogs in mid-Missouri, where she edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and is a founding member of Dame Good Writers. Lynne’s website is at lynnejensenlampe.com and her Instagram is @lynnejensenlampe.

by Susan Grimm

The dead crowd the table thickly, criticize our meat. They give
off a low dark buzz. Floating like stodgy balloons, they wobble-

perch on their usual chairs. If they could pick up a spoon,
add just a little salt. I want them the same, not purged

of their flaws. Their wrongnesses so small, you could hide them
under a plate.I would like to hear once more the underwear

argument (civil), the story of riding the pig. Witness the ritual
coffee slop. I’m glad I joked through their dying and their dead.

Oh, I could not be pulled into the well of grief or ever
get out. I saw it from the corner of my eye. All the water

of purpose and sweat and love, heavy and drenching.

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

beginning with an image from Ada Limón’s “It Begins in the Trees”

There is the blue blow up pool
filled with hose-cool water

& sand sticking to the yellow
plastic bucket years ago

put up on a shelf, red shovel
lost to the tides

& there is the wide wild grove
somewhere in memory

filled with poplars    perhaps
sunflowers bowing    or maybe

there is a field of corn late
in autumn    even the time of year

up for grabs    malleable
what the heart holds    it holds

despite rebuttals from blurred photos
home movie reels or grandma’s pshaws

& there are chrysanthemums
growing in the past

that move like a storm blowing in
& snow that puddles into smudged ink

no matter    the tilt-a-wheel of earth spins
on & on    & peaches keep returning juicy

so even your tired hands lined with age
become sticky as a map of wonder

Lana Hechtman Ayers has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The London Reader, One Art, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a former coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night. From her home in Oregon, on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon. Say hello to her @lanaayers23.bsky.social or on her website LanaAyers.com.