Stone Circle Review

Black Tea

by Cindy Kurukaanga

Her morning ritual is to nestle
into her tumbledown chairwith a steaming cup of tea.
Through the bay windowa mother watches her kinder garden.
She traces branches acrossthe back of hands that dug abundance
into broody marl, charged earthwith buddings, nursed slips to full plumage.

She reaches for her cup,
secateurs clip brittle breath,sharpen with each stroke on her spine.
The faithful workhorse that tookthe strain of tilling over the barren,
tending fruit from the sterile,carrying child size bundles.

She steeps in fecund bliss
until her light is drawn.

Raising its hands to heaven,
the grass surrenders to grief,the trees lament, softly weep their leaves.
Mascara runs, smudges window panes,the sparrows transpose their song
to a minor key. Adornedin a mourning dress, the tea
is verdant in funereal black.

Cindy Kurukaanga (Ngāti Rangi, Te Āti Haunui a Pāpārangi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) discovered a love for creative writing later in life. She lives in the north of Aotearoa, New Zealand. She has work published with Broken Spine Arts, in takahē magazine, and was thrilled to get a special mention in Given Words 2025. She recommends Angela Janda’s “Reading Joan Didion in the Condo in Red River” from the Stone Circle Review archive. You can find her on Bluesky @kakapowhakatoi.bsky.social.

The Editor2026-10-04T11:36:37-04:00October 4, 2026|

The Unworn

by Aardhra Chandran

The pleats are iron teeth.
They close around her hips.

Six yards of starched cotton
draw her upright—
a coffin of cloth,
stiff with hair oil,
sour with old sweat.

Her collarbone, a fractured spindle,
splinters beneath the silver border,
each thread pulling like lead.

She does not speak of distance.
She speaks of salt going damp in the jar,
of evening moisture
eating through the baseboards.

At midnight,
the floorboards contract.
Wood cracks
like a small bone
in an empty room.

I feel her erasure—
jagged, lodged in my throat,
a swallowed needle.

A lifetime weaving a shroud,
then being made
to wear it alive.

Aardhra Chandran is a poet and postgraduate student from Kerala, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gulmohur Quarterly, Bloodroot Poetry Journal, Rust & Moth, Zhagaram Literary Magazine, Philly Chapbook Review, Punch Magazine, among others.

The Editor2026-10-03T10:44:50-04:00October 3, 2026|

In midlife,

by Kristen Holt-Browning

feeling reckless and suburban, we are tired of the pond
at the far end of the yard, the same old ecosystem as last year, stones

slick with repetitive moss, another snakeskin shed at the little shore,
another new reptile sated, sluggish, from the frog and mosquito buffet.

The water beckons but we will never enter, the algae depths a murky
mystery in this spongy-moth summer of our discontent, their hunger

a destruction, the leaves ragged and demolished, the constant crunch
as they eat and shit all day, all night. The devastation almost soothing,

a background steadiness. We seem ceaseless, too: we still wake up
every morning, although we are likely in the lateness of our lives

and like I said we want to do something impractical, unnecessary,
poorly thought out or not at all, so we buy a hot tub, a second body

of water in the yard now, this one a chemical cliché, but it’s okay, I’ve got
my back to the molded plastic and I’m thinking about Dante, and how

he constructed hell in layers, the devil at the bottom, frozen forsaken
in a lake, and I’m wondering when we melted hell, shifted it from cold

to burning, Satan moaning in the molten muck, forever gnawing cursed bones,
eating the sins of Judas and a Roman guy whose crime I can’t remember. I slip deeper

into artificial bubbles. This is how some people baptize those they think deserve it:
the body submerged, only to emerge into a fresh and godly new beginning—

look, even the two of us, when we get out of the hot water, we are pink as babies,
larval and famished, our skin both softened and chemically evolved.

Kristen Holt-Browning is the author of the novel Ordinary Devotion (Monkfish Book Publishing), the poetry chapbook The Only Animal Awake in the House (Moonstone Press), and the forthcoming poetry collection Watershed (Fernwood Press). She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State, where she works as a freelance editor. Learn more at kristenholt-browning.com, or on Instagram @theholtbrowning.

The Editor2026-09-27T11:49:12-04:00September 27, 2026|

Amphibious

by Dana Holley Maloney

Driving home in darkness, we pass patches on Webster Road
where spring peepers are shrieking like car alarms. We
can map the vernal ponds by the pockets of whistling we pass.

And once down our driveway, standing in darkness, the stereo
sound of this sort of symphony, high-pitched chirping circling
around itself, the tell-tale chatter of the wood frogs as overlay.

The pond beside us the product of what the land wants when
the rain arrives, when what was woods becomes puddled, overflow
heading for the brook with its minor cascades. For some time we are

an island encircled by flow and falls, water running, even babbling.
Then the rain slows, stills, and sinks, the soil audibly drinks. Below us,
water continues toward river and aquifer. No less than miracle,

this metamorphosis–water to land in one day, across a lifetime.
Not long from now, trees will sing.

Dana Holley Maloney is a native New Jerseyan who lives and writes in midcoast Maine. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Tar River Poetry, The Lake, Pine Hills Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Montclair State University. More at danamaloney.com.

The Editor2026-09-26T11:24:51-04:00September 26, 2026|

Why We Celebrate Birthdays

by Philip Venzke

So we can meet again
under that apple tree
which we hope to plant
sometime next year

and plot the harvest
we would like to eat
and discuss blossoms
we need to breathe.

Philip Venzke grew up on a dairy farm near Colby, Wisconsin. His poetry is widely published in magazines throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is the author of four chapbooks and one book of poetry.

The Editor2026-09-20T11:23:32-04:00September 20, 2026|