by M.E. Walker

That was what the wild gnostics
called the orthodox bishops, with their dull rules,
those knife-sharp collars, that dried-up faith.

Me, I don’t mean it as an insult,
but simply as the cleanest description
of what’s happened to my own belief,
which neither slipped away in a rush of smoke
nor found itself cast joyfully down a mountainside
but instead, like some quiet waterway, drained
an eighth of an inch with each stunned and pained
expression I made when they asked me to defend it,
until at last the bed was parched, each conveying drop
slithered off into some prophet’s promising rock.

And yet, love, if my little river is gone,
then the treasures tossed into it
still stubbornly remain,
not just the eddies of dead fish
and the slurries of rank debris,
but a cork-stopped wine bottle here,
a parasol, dictionary, pocket watch there.

This rusty coin of intimate hope
Which still must count as currency somewhere.

M.E. Walker is a queer Jewish writer, performer, educator, and lifelong Texan. His poetry has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press and One Art, with work forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal. Find him on Instagram @walkertexaswriter31, or on what’s left of Twitter @texasnotranger.

by Hannah Linden

We watched ourselves, snow-clocked tidal
floes in a melting landscape. We were
crystals held together by the cold, our home
disintegrating around us. One by one

we felt ourselves dissolve, disappear
into the brine. The hardest of us
tried to hold on, hoped the sea would
carry us back to where we belonged.

Falling and rising, rising above the salt,
the memory of how much we had known
below the surface growling inside us,
all those pockets we’d kept locked, fizzing

into nothing, our rainbows melting into the blue.
And we added what we could, watered down
the salinity, brought what we could to the mix.
And for a while, we did manage to float above it.

Hannah Linden is a Northern working class writer based in Devon, UK. Her most recent awards are 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press) is her debut pamphlet (shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023) . Hannah is on Twitter/X @hannahl1n.

by Malene Lotz

there’s always
something
moving
under the skin

encasement is required
to feel oneself
against

the dark
will do

soft cheek
against a nightcurtain of sorrow

once a poet couldn’t
sleep
at night
on the wooden floor
of my apartment

she leaned into the nocturnal

her imagination
held
by thin skin

she wrote about butterflies
and wings
that cover
the bellies of birds

flying is never enough

the boats

with their black-brown
steep-iron hulls

they help

rubbing against the sea
at night
in dreams
like a Turner painting

fruits on board
ripening

with a lullaby
from dusk
into dawn

Malene Lotz has been a modern ballet dancer living and teaching intuitive movement in New York. She is Danish, currently living in Denmark north of Copenhagen, and is transforming into a poet.

by Wren Donovan

We choose where to dig
with soft brushes, careful,
string a polygon grid based on rumors.

Smoke-choked and salty, a stalker
in dark rooms, flashlight
over unconscious Eros.

Fluorescent light, stuttering
lays bare the butterfly
buried in bone and debris.

We seek fleshy red-scented certainty,
find only fossils and holes.

Wren Donovan lives in Tennessee. She studied at Millsaps College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and University of Southern Mississippi. Her poetry can be found in Orca, Poetry South, Cumberland River Review, Yellow Arrow, Ink Drinkers, Harpy Hybrid Review, and elsewhere in print and online including WrenDonovan.com.

by Darren C. Demaree

Toward dusk, together,
pulling apart the trout
we caught

at her father’s private club
only a hundred yards
from the building women are not

allowed to enter
except for Sundays, when
I suppose their gender

can be blanketed by an easy god
that can keep all of the lazy beliefs
of rich men safe, Emily

& I tasted the fish slowly, we
ignored the crackers, we left
the iced tea in the fridge,

we thought about how much
fun our children had fishing there
& before I could say all nine

problems I had with the club,
Emily spit out a bone in the sink
& uttered a rare fuck

& I, the truly profane one,
waited to see just what she meant
by that, because I use fuck

a dozen fantastic ways, but Emily
she offered no explanation
other than to dump the rest

of the fish in the trash
& leave the room a sleeve
of cheap crackers.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-two poetry collections, most recently “blue and blue and blue”, (Fernwood Press, July 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.