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.

by Gail Zing

acrostic after a line by Judy Chicago

The lines of time copied over and over turned
sight on its side, skin slid off the tray
of her old age body hung in dead animal folds,
my world spun, my
mother’s tipped in a different way to the open
nakedness of youth, her wide surprise
jarred by the mirror’s stranger again and again, was that
me, a stupefied bystander, mouth firmly closed?
I listened to her stories of a crueller era again and
was confronted by my role, how it had turned, again
astonished at what I was already becoming,
at this cool eye of objectification
my strength, my weakness, my
own foolish longing to put to death, her
distress

Gail Zing is an award-winning writer from Aotearoa New Zealand and author of three collections of poetry, including Some Bird, selected for New Zealand Listener best poetry books 2024. She is widely published in places such as Poetry Aotearoa, Cordite Poetry Review, Blue Nib, Landfall and others. When she’s not dreaming up poems in the hills, she’s editing them at the kitchen table, or teaching them at Write On School for Young Writers.

by Vaneeza Sohail

CW: Implied gun violence

Vaneeza Sohail is a writer from Karachi. Her work has been published in Diode Poetry, Wildness Journal and is upcoming in Driftwood Press, Passages North, Lakeer and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, she’s taking photos of cats and flowers. She is on Instagram at @peacharchivist.