by Carrie Chappell

I know a bed can hold more than a sleeping body.
I know a body can hold more than a sleeping girl.
Parts of me, like branches, have always been erect,
Have never slumbered. Under this plaid comforter,
I have lain aroused. I have lain a construct. I have lain myself.
After I have come, after I have come to, I come again
And come to again. I know a body comes to thoughts,
That a fallen leaf, though low to the ground, still cups a heaven.
Sometimes I think all I have ever felt originates from this place,
My body alone, supine yet watchful, piqued by the idea of a tree
Outside the window. When a woman lays herself in this bed,
She lies with her first awakening. A hand she knows stokes
The box springs, a slimmer leg fidgets inside her own,
A thought she left here holds more than her past.

Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Carrie Chappell is the author of Loving Tallulah Bankhead and Quarantine Daybook. With Amanda Murphy, she co-translated Cassandra at point-blank range by Sandra Moussempès. Presently, she teaches English as a Foreign Language at Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM). Each spring, she curates Verse of April, of which she is the founder and editor. One of her newest ventures is writing Spiritual Material: Musings from My Second-Hand, Parisian Wardrobe, which she hosts via Substack. In 2024, she began the bilingual reading series Mnemosynes. Carrie is currently completing her doctoral work on a research-creation project on the poetic novels of Hélène Bessette.

by Natalie Eleanor Patterson

I told Hope it felt like all the cells
in my body had turned over & died.
So now they multiply: evenings I crave
red meat; mornings, egg yolk & candlewax.
Your voice through the phone presses its finger
into the soft hollow on my right hip.
Two hundred miles from you, I go sweaty
to bed, wake up rain-darkened & fertile.
The trees grow thick with distances & you say
you’re on the lookout for signs & wonders:
songbirds, damselfly, strains of old music.
September is wet & still hot. Smell of apples.
Taking you between my teeth. I see now,
why people leave their lives for this.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, CALYX, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press and a PhD student in poetry. Find her at poetnatalie.com. 

by Annie Stenzel

we have almost forgotten how to know you now that you arrive at less predictable intervals and also we never know how much you will deliver and often it is ridiculously little and sometimes far too much for the ground to handle so the angle of repose is challenged beyond its mathematical formula as it was during the first of the atmospheric rivers several years ago and up the street a whole slope beneath the perched house yielded to its burden of water and surged into the street with an extraordinary weight and a noise as though Jove had hurled great hammers at the ground which is not the sound I am thinking of right now because I think the trickling of the droplets is unignorable to those who are paying attention and the heft of a drop cannot easily be measured but how songful the sound when we have heard for so long only the silence of no precipitation and yet a raindrop striking a shapely oval leaf on the hedge sounds one way and its comrade striking the clay pot on the patio makes another sound but a droplet tapping the plastic tub in which the garden tools await their task is a slightly different perhaps more insistent sound until the tempo slows and what we notice is oh no please don’t be done already dear droplets we have been counting on you for parched months to save us all with our drought-fearful souls eying the sky avidly and doing something a bit like praying only of course we do not know to whom

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was published in 2024 by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including Book of Matches, Does it have pockets, Gavialidae, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, One Art, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, The Lake, Thimble, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay. Find her at anniestenzel.com, on Facebook as Annie Stenzel and on Instagram @anniebenannie.

by Natalie Vestin

An astronomer last year gave thanks
for filaments of gas that stitch the Milky Way
back to its dark becoming, more proof
that chaos is forestalled
simply by what trails behind.

Can gas have surface, ever be a thread? I ask
my dad, who taught me by a dark night’s fire
that all that was and is has curled
itself around the seen.

Stars are held in place
by their own gravity, he says, and liquid lies.
Its surfaces of vapor seethe in spite of all assertions
that its molecules attract.

Iodine, a solid sure, will fume
before your eyes, and you’ve seen
icicles—what’s the word?—in cold that cuts
to bone. Sublime.

Natalie Vestin (she/her) is a writer, artist, and infectious diseases researcher who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work has been published in Pleiades, The Normal School, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her Instagram is @natalievestin.

by Logan Garner

The diocese paid for my pilgrimage
to Rome and to Umbrian monasteries.
Barely eighteen, I breathed fervor.
Wept and sweated in crypts
despite the cold. Prayed
around rosary beads above Assisi
in a mountain cave. The priest
with me thought I’d fallen asleep,
shuffled off for his own quiet walk.

In Norcia there were boars’ heads
above every doorway,
or so it seemed. They were
suspended bodiless, jaws agape
and snarling, begging
for a monk’s breakfast of
coffee, apples, bread and butter.
I stood beneath one
opened my mouth
and breathed a prayer,
the heat dew on my skin.

I am whiskered now,
like a boar,
bristling grays coming on.
Like them I am bereft
of that notion of prayer.
As they went silent
so have I gone
from hymns and chants.
Yet
I am not deadened.

Mystery, sits with me
here on forest paths marked
equally by footworn compaction
as by the parasitized mushrooms
growing on their edges,
dense-fleshed and orange as lobsters,
whose flesh go to beetles
and pill bugs, whose flesh in turn
go to the rough-skinned newt.

Here, between compulsive waves
and the squatting coast range;
where marine layer fog
blankets all, a daily myrrh
shrouds the land in questions.
My prayer is a wild red huckleberry—
it cannot be cultivated,
yet it springs forth from entropy
into impossible multitudes.

Logan Garner is a nature-centered poet and essayist from Oregon’s north coast. Winner of the 2023 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize and one of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 poets (2024), his work has been featured in Orca Literary Journal, The Elevation Review, The Salal Review, Flying Island and others. He is the author of collections Here, in the Floodplain (Plan B Press, 2023) and The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). Logan can be found on both Instagram and Bluesky @logangarnerpoetry.