by Gregory Crosby

I.
Everything feels so long ago, now:
even this moment, as the words flow out—
this text just the afterlife of a deadline,
its subtext the rapping at a séance.
Imagine the sly smile of Time’s Arrow
as it says, Yea, you can’t get there from here.
Imagine echo as a metaphor
instead of a metonymy (not that
anyone can ever keep those two straight).
Imagine answering no echo but
your own, & knowing it as your own,
the way your fingers somehow know your hand.
The past shimmers; the future moves through it;
between that line & this, don’t blink. Don’t blink.

II.
Although he died in 1995,
I met Donald Pleasance late last night,
in the dark bar of a midtown hotel
where, dressed in Dr. Loomis’s raincoat,
he refused the round I offered to buy
& seemed bemused that I recognized him.
Well, I said, this is a dream; it’s easy,
if unexpected. I really don’t know
why you’re here, I haven’t watched one of your
movies in ages. Then he smiled, not unlike
his character in Wake in Fright, & said,
It’s just because you’re the Duke of New York,
A Number One. How kind of you to say,
I said (it was embarrassing, really).

III.
On the knuckles of one hand, we find, tattooed,
Albert Camus’ famed line about that
invincible summer; on the other
hand, Winter is coming. There’s a chill
in the air no Netflix can conquer.
It can’t possibly be twenty-something,
can it? What will become of these fingers
when they enter that Mortal Kombat?
Time is the only god that never fails
to exist. Agnes Varda said, I like
the idea of being in friendship
with time; I’m trying, Agnes, but it’s so
one-sided. Shall I thank these strange days
for being a friend? As the words flow out—

IV.
In another dream I met my father
who in my dreams is never my father
but someone else, someone I might have liked.
We were driving around, in search of a
diner, not a Johnny Rockets knock off
but a real diner my father might have
eaten at, somewhere in the Fifties,
a place like the Sip ‘n Snack, simple, cheap,
where we could have lunch & impossible
conversations. We finally found one,
& pulled up in his Lincoln Mark IV
(the one with that little oval window)
& parked, & opened those heavy-ass doors,
& never made it past the dream’s fade out.

V.
I don’t know where I’m going with all this,
says the second hand as it sweeps, sweeps.
The duration of an echo depends,
I think, on the kindness of the chamber.
A dream is the place in which the nature
of consciousness is clearest. No such thing
as the present, except when you’re asleep:
even as the scene quick changes, it seems
everything you ever were or might be
is happening right now, & only now.
How funny that you’ll forget most of it.
How even the things that never happen
become memories; how you remember
your future, wholly, until it’s your past.

VI.
Once I was alone in an empty house
watching the white walls turn a rosy red
as an atomic bomb filled the frames;
it wasn’t the explosion but the fact
that I was about to die all by myself
that woke me into the glow-in-the-dark
of a bedside alarm clock. So vivid,
that red. I can see it, yes, but what’s more
I can feel it. I can feel what it was
not to die but to know. That dream, at least
thirty years ago. Hello, little echo.
I remember the kisses, too, but not
like those blinding rooms. The sex dreams dwindle—
it’s the bomb, that bomb, that brings me together.

VII.
Where is that arrow in this dreamtime?
Here’s the secret: it’s still notched in the bow.
Every night, the target moves further, farther.
I’m holding this moment taut, in tension,
like that poor astronaut who seems to wave
from the event horizon forever.
Is it true that everyone dreams of flight?
Funny, we’ve been in the air all along.
In the dream, you finally step outside
to measure the dimensions of the yard,
counting off your steps, following the wall,
& then the tally evaporates in
sunshine. In the time it gives, the dream
takes it all back: so long ago, so now.

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). 

by Isabella Mori

Write one verse, then another, a daisy chain of little white words with a sun inside.
Like my mother made. like my mother made when she was still an angel with
a halo around her raven black hair, her beauty shining into the June sun.
It was my birthday. Three birthdays, maybe four, maybe five, then the halo wore off,
from sunshine to gold, from gold to brass, then it brittled and fell down piece by piece
at our feet. Hers and mine. We spent the next fifty-three years staring at them.
Sometimes we saw the daisies shine through, sometimes the gold, but
mostly it was dust neither of us wanted to take a broom to.

She picked up the odd piece and crocheted it into a blanket, knitted it into a sock,
cross-stitched it into a tiny carpet.

Me, I crawled around on those pieces
and to my knees stuck words starting with B,
alliterations, sandpainting-stories,
and commas I had to defend with my life.

Isabella Mori is the founder of Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize as well as the author of three books of and about poetry, including A bagful of haiku – 87 imperfections. Their poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Kingfisher, Signs Of Life, Family Connections, and Through The Portal. Isabella was a writer-in-residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House. Believe Me, a book about mental health and addiction, was released April 2025.

by Donna Vorreyer

dents left by umbrella tips in a barrel
discarded by hands of hotel guests

blood drops on a gardener’s hands after
trimming the roses without gloves

drunken wedding guests slur apologies
for eating all the frosting roses with their hands

the silent syllables of a skull, its unhinged jaw
open like a mute and welcoming hand

a spider’s intricate web, its silken grids
and fine design destroyed by careless hands

my hand on your hand, connection, conjunction,
parentheses for language only heaven understands

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the new journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters. Find her on Instagram @djv50 and on BlueSky @djvorreyer.bsky.social.

by Anna Fernandes

There’s no blood spotted on my pillow.
No sand pouring forth or anything like that.

It’s just that sounds land dully
as if plopped into ashes and I think
somewhere in there my cochlea might be
a tucked-up prawn —
overcompensating, sussurating whispers —
stuck in a pin-sharp shriek.

In the pink dark, I see sound stumble
over patched and tender fuzz
where swaying stereocilia is worn
down to a brittle pearlescence.
It blindly corkscrews the eustacian tube,
whorling vast echoes round a gastropod’s columella.
Yes, there’s some distortion.

Through a grotto’s burnt-out membrane,
vivid liquids mingle in secret pools —
oil and sea-sick water.
When that happens I cock my head
this way and that,
dislodge ancient mineral salts, tumble crystals

until they shake loose —
a mute rock-fall
of filthy shale and ammonites
and pyrite trilobites and snatches
of songs and words unpronounced
and that’s when I
violently flail, float away.

I can’t hear very well
and there goes my blood
lapping the shore, that’s all.

Anna Fernandes lives near Bristol and writes about grief and chronic illness. Her work has been most recently published in Canary Collective, Ink Sweat & Tears and Dust Poetry and was shortlisted for the Laurie Lee Prize for Writing 2024 and 2025. Anna is on Instagram @annafernandeswrites.  

by Jeannie Prinsen

when I reach for it, fumbling, long before dawn.
they crackle in a blackness my eyes have not yet
adjusted to. no comforting shapes of chair, table,
dresser, so I go by feel, by the plush sizzle and
sputter between my fingers. synthetic fireflies
are surprisingly good company in the lonely
hours. don’t we all grope in the dark for a wink
of light, however dry and cold, for a soft
place to touch, as the blanket of night pulls
back, filling the room with stars.

Jeannie Prinsen lives with her husband, daughter, and son in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copyeditor for a news organization. Her writing has appeared in Dust Poetry, Relief Journal, and elsewhere. Find her online at jeannieprinsen.substack.com and jeannieprinsen.bsky.social.