by Catherine Arra

You arrive in concrete clouds.
Queen of unstable conditions:
joy skyrockets, a lightning flush. This love.

Unruly winds, low-pressure dread,
flash floods spin me down ocean depths.
Queen of unstable conditions:

you flatten in silence, salty.
The weight of water welcomes no weight at all.
Flash floods spin me down ocean depths.

I flick my caudal fin, swell fish-gill cheeks,
shine glossy green eyes. Home in undulating tides,
the weight of water welcomes no weight at all.

Doze away days above. Mask the mood.
I curl into beds of coral, commune with sea lions,
shine glossy green eyes. Home in undulating tides,

the barnacled gold of vessels sunk.
You arrive in concrete clouds.
I curl into beds of coral, commune with sea lions,
joy skyrockets, a lightning flush. This love.

Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Unbroken, Impspired, Poetica Review, Piker Press, and Rat’s Ass Review. Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at catherinearra.com.

by K Weber

Ready the metaphorical sawback machete.
Back-track to scouting, campsite preparation.

You are the scamp of the earth-ends: been
through worst-ends; scrimped and scrappy.

Crimped posture-trudged, you made yourself
smaller than a pin’s head and just as quiet.

You have breath-held and lingered long
as an ellipses… waiting to wade across water.

But the cost was too high to keep things running,
electric, after you leapt through kitchen’s fire.

Then you coughed the singed crust of ovens,
this planet. Kept going. Started your own blaze.

Called it light despite hands that needed you
to know hurt. Backpack sags with red memories.

They drag along what was once a tube
of lipstick, credit cards. Now knives and knives.

They got too close. What stung worse when
they finally ran away from you running away?

What if the earth pauses, pregnant, but still-
born. We just wait. We plan our next escape.

A ripple might wash us away, muddily, uneasily,
to the next chance at survival. Or we slide away.

And that pin was pulled from a grenade.

K Weber is an Ohio writer with 10 online books of poetry. She obtained her Creative Writing BA in 1999 from Miami University. K writes independently and collaboratively, having created poems from words donated by more than 300 people since 2018. K has poems featured in publications such as The Hooghly Review, Writer’s Digest, Fevers of the Mind & her photography/digital collages appear in literary journals including Barren Magazine and Nightingale & Sparrow. Much of K’s work (free in PDF and some in audiobook format) and her publishing credits are on her website: kweberandherwords.com.

by Matthew Isaac Sobin

I’ve been threatening my mother saying I will write a poem
about her. She says I only write poems about my father. And I say

be careful what you wish for, wielding banter as a bewildering shield.
You have to be so vigilant around a poet, lest they transmute your grief;

seize the narrowest slice of life & blow it up into a world. Like how
he was always worse than his worst outburst. The stunned face of the kid

who throttled me on the school bus, the strange threat. If you touch
my son again, I’ll touch you. A violet of love. Or how close we hold

marital oaths as sickness descends, because even a starless sky is
reciprocal. Safeguarding heavy microscopes, turning old toys into centerpieces:

we are but one insect wing away, why idling is death for some
& breath for others. Because shutting down a spouse’s phone after years

means you can never learn anything new about them
from a stranger. How grief poems & love poems often inhabit

separate regions of the Venn diagram. Do we shade red or blue, purple
or gray, listening to the slow ring, the inhale before hello

Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from The Lumiere Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Midway Journal, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, MAYDAY Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, The Hooghly Review, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac and Instagram @matthewisaacsobin. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.

by John Walser

People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
~ Chekhov

Oh, Anton, the draughts
yowl right now:
February Vincent Street:
probably like Petersburg:
almost the steppe:
but without the wolves
that chase
the troika flicker lights
across the ice and snow.

Tonight I will sit
with the woman I love:
dinner, maybe some wine
we get out of our basement:
cellar cold:

and we will adjust
the thermostat all night:
the slow dry heat
that tries to seep
the slightest hope.

Under covers we will hold
each other: the steam
of bodies glowing with happiness:
but we will know it’s winter:

that belligerence of bitter air
that dropped from the boundary waters:

the hunched profanity
when we walk closed space to closed space:

the below zero windchill morning
when we carry the raw under our skin
sewn into the lining of who we are.

We take up that burden.

We will wake tomorrow morning
happy still
but cursing the snow blow
cursing the shovel and the plow
cursing the layers upon layers
upon layers I wear outside
even just to walk beside her car
as she down the driveway backs
to head to Wednesday work.

In love we still ask:
How long the frozen hands and toes?
How long the only bird shadows
the crows covering swaths of yard?
How long the agitation wind?
How long the gust thrash throb pine trees
like nervous uncertainty?

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit, and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie. John is on @JohnWalser5.

by Christina Hauck

In unison, half step back, shake of head—
sister, brother—eyes wide as I proffer
gilt box, pound of grey

ash and bone, all that remains—hands, feet
one arched eyebrow—Mother, grey as the day
as fog, as sand, and I turn, scooping

her out by the handful, flinging arcs of gray that
drift and settle, pale grey on darker sand
bending my way toward loud waves

sifting loosened arms and hair into sea’s
seething lap, slow pirouette, she sighs
and dissolves, and I look back to see through fog

ghosts of children who could not stop wanting
to touch her, mouth, ear lobes, hair
to burrow into her lap, eyes closed, sucking

stroking, kissing, who won’t touch her now
as she is, ash, and wouldn’t touch her as she became
bloated wheezing body of need I will never

forget holding even as last bits of her
arabesque through fog, grey into grey
I can never let go, fingertips and palm

rough with ash, taste of bone.

Christina Hauck was born and raised in the SF Bay Area, moved to Kansas in 1994, and lives there still. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Coal City Review, Critical Quarterly, and Monterey Review, among others.