by Ben Starr

The dog knows his tiny onyx body is home to a multinational conglomerate of death, slowly boring for various ores and salted earth metals meant to erect a machine built to kill. Improbably small pickaxes pound away at marbled fat and ribbons of vigorous muscle. Microscopic palms wipe sooty brows leaden with a day’s morbid work. When we go for walks I can hear his cancer. The harmonic stomp of its cracked work boots. Shifts over for the day, dragging stained coveralls to the pub for pints of beer. Just one breath before it goes home to a wife run ragged by children more powerful than God.

Ben studied poetry in college and as part of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Dishsoap Quarterly, Bending Genres, Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, SoFloPoJo and other journals. Find more of his work on X @benjaminstarr and at benstarrwrites.com.

by Sarah Ellis

The gas prices glitter on the pavement. I pick
at the skin of my fingers while you drive

one hand on the wheel, one hand on the rose gold necklace
today earlier you stole. Allegories on the radio and

rain on the windshield, legs tight and twitchy
against the gravitational pull of the glovebox.

This car used to be mine. The brakes were better then.
Soon we’ll both be gone and she’ll sit in the driveway

forgotten. Better yet, they’ll give her away. The red hand
of the crosswalk light signals the end of something

I can’t wrap inside my fingers. You say to
skip this song. Your passcode’s still

the dead dog’s birthday. It’s alright. He’s my lock screen too.

Sarah Ellis is a chemist and graduate of Reed College who lives and writes in Massachusetts. Her work has recently appeared in Poet Lore, #Ranger Magazine, and Oyster River Pages, among others.

by Christina Tudor-Sideri

I want you to feel this
the way time moves through me
not as a line
but as a trembling interval
a breath before the word
a pulse after it leaves
I live in this pause
my lungs rise
my lungs fall
each inhale a claim
each exhale a surrender
learning over and over
how to dissolve
into flesh
into desire
into the vanishing of myself

I remember nights
pressed to sheets
darkness folding me
holding me
too tightly
abandoning me
and I feel it still
in the swell of the sea
its waves pressing
against my ribs
against thought
against want
its darkness a presence
a body I cannot touch

The instant arrives
it floods my veins
presses into my heart
into my thighs
and I know
I am undone
even in silence
even in longing

Sometimes it softens
a moment blooms
a forest leans toward itself
trees demanding shadows
trunks entwined
shade moving over shade
and I lie there
skin to wind
breath to leaf
I enter the second
as if time itself
is the touch I crave
as if pleasure
could merge with perception
without surrender

But the river returns
flooding me
desire stretching absence
into ache
into lust
love braided with loss
I wait
for the brush of a hand
for the voice that never comes
and every second
lengthens
my body shivering
with the memory
of what cannot remain
yet I want it still

I wander cemeteries
stones lean like lovers
cold beneath my lips
graves heavy into the earth
the forest above
leaves whispering
waves crashing
desire and death intertwined
skin pressed to stone
to soil
to tree
to memory
vanishing into flux

I linger in thresholds
doors ajar
always almost
never fully
haunted
by the girl I was
by those who vanished
shadows persistent
shivering against me
I press back
even as I fade

I write
write the trembling
write the wound
write from the body
that remembers
what the mind forgets
my hand slower than time
each word
like lips
like breath
fading into me
holding the instant
long enough
to feel it
to feel you

Time erases me
and yet returns me
to beginnings
again
and again
each silence
another attempt
another confession
my body worn
my body trembling
alive in absence
alive in hunger
alive in loss

And I remain here
haunted
trembling
alive
in the flow
that does not end
listening
to the music of disappearance
to the Black Sea tides
to the Black Forest leaves
to death
to love
to desire
learning still
how to endure
how to want
how to vanish
how to be
through what passes
through me
through you
through time

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue; the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, and the upcoming An Absence of Sea and Reliquary: A Phenomenology of Kept Time.

by Frances Klein

after Jose Hernandez Diaz

I leave the church to find something to borrow. From the street I hear the band warming up, violinists and bucket drummers and flautists and spoon players all tuning to Concert A. I walk down the street in leather shoes so fresh they still smell like the open fields the cow called home. On the corner, a little girl is flying a kite. “Can I borrow your kite?” I ask, but a gust of wind pulls her up into the sky. The wind tousles my hair, which I grew myself. I go into the deli and ask the old man behind the counter if I can borrow his cufflinks. He says he stole them from a coffin, and it’s no kind of luck to bring dead gold to a living altar. He slips me a fresh Gala apple, which I tuck into the pocket of my tailored suit. At the tattoo shop next door, a biker is baring her arm for the needle. When I ask for something to borrow, she gives me her place in the chair. The tattoo she lends me is a glossy heart with mom in white script at the center. The biker pulls the apple from my pocket and takes a bite. The apple is the same red as my bicep’s borrowed heart.

Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of the poetry collection Another Life (Riot in Your Throat 2025). She is a founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, and editor at The Weight Journal. Klein’s writing has appeared in Best Microfictions, The London Magazine, Rattle, The Harvard Advocate, HAD, and others. She is on Instagram and Bluesky @fklein907.

by Ali Beheler

I imagine waiting, assembling a loom
for you—two upright arms limning warp. I
imagine you gone, across sea, leaving
me left. I imagine how I would turn
thread of weft at hour’s edge, up toward air
to one more row of thread, one more hour of skin

of shroud laid down where I lie, for you. I’d skin
when sun laid down that shroud, ripped from loom,
threads dancing through my fingers through air
like waves lapping ship, tongue to lip or eye
to lid—unsheathed perfectly. When stars turn
to sun, I’d rise, turn to start again, leave

no trace of yesterday. For you, I would leave
an untouched room, bed unmade, my skin
empty womb, open door. I imagine it, turn
over in loose workspace of bone—sponges, looms
where marrow’s hung—hour by hour red-thread the eye
of platelets wefting warp, carrying air’s

breath of matter, matrix, mother: network where
form is made, delivered. I imagine leaving
nothing but that red unweaving through the eye,
through the hollow halls—follow my inside skin
to the outside. Tear through that deepest loom,
empty room whose floors and walls are shed, turned

to red—unwon month, unwound: blood volta.
Those waves of undone thread. They fall through air
and lie there    puddled, piled, luteal.    Looming
without hope in trail. Sloughed. Snuffed. Failure left.
Led through lens, where outline lands on retinal sheet
pulled between upstretched arms of iris

widening, faint pulse like an ovary eyeing
what’s in front of her: line’s end, no return
of him, of light impressing that face on skin
of concave wall, holding, remaking him. To err
by omission, over-awaiting, taking leave
of lineage, letting possibility loom

full, fruitless. All those months, hour-lined, may be a loom
left behind, a womb: soft of bone whose inner skin
makes blood. Son of song. Stanzas held up to air.

Ali Beheler’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Harpur Palate, The Shore, Rogue Agent, ballast journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. Winner of the SRPR Editor’s Prize and the Milton J. Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry, she has received residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She teaches at Hastings College in Hastings, NE. Find her at alibeheler.com.