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.

by Mitchell Nobis

Earthworms the color of oil spills
carry my prayers through tunnels—
some wild
will survive.

My prayers ride wild through a darkness
that has no word, has no light by
which to
contrast itself,

like the dark between galaxies, no definition
without what it’s not. Sinew & mass, sleep.
The deep
earthworm world

somewhere far under the pounding thud
we churn and wrench and build up here.
A wild without
and within.

My prayers slide through soil, fill on minerals & microbes,
alive. Some turn mulch but some of my prayers
huddle into masses,
turn their

tomb into a chrysalis—carry the formless dreams
of what we never became.

The others
I pray

May my prayers tunnel deep & deeper;
may my prayers seep into boulders
buried & left
behind by

glaciers that gouged this land when it
was crumpled together and carved.
My prayers
wait until

glaciers come back for them again.
My prayers wait
for glaciers
after Time.

My prayers wait
to someday slip upward
through the tunnels,
to someday see light again,
to someday whisper
Thank you. I’m sorry. It was beautiful. Thank you.

Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 teacher in Metro Detroit. His poetry has been nominated for things by Whale Road Review, Nurture Literary, and Exposition Review. His collection Beginning to Sense is forthcoming from ELJ Editions (2025). He facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series, and co-founded the NAWP reading series. Find him at @MitchNobis (various platforms) or mitchnobis.com.

by Jessie Lynn McMains

i.

Name me woman and I’ll open up my chest and show you the wind; April wind, its easterly flow.
Call me man and I’ll lift my skirt and show you the fly-trap dogbane,
its poison lilac threading the polluted riverbank. Call me and I’ll show you the river,
Kinnickinnic, the mixing-together. All the trash I picked and the fish, salmon and trout, their
return, gathering. Name me gathering-place and I’ll show you the place where the freights
screeeee past on the overhead tracks; the androgynous dark beneath.
Call me girl and I’ll show you the sunken tugboat full of sailor ghosts, the river rats,
the raccoons in their bandit masks, the little boy who played pirate with a sword-
stick. Name me boy and I’ll show you this mermaid, his river; this dark, the wind.

ii.

Name me. I’ll open. My chest, the wind—easterly.
Call me skirt and fly-trap, poison lilac. Polluted riverbank.
Call me river, Kinnickinnic. Trash-fish. Gathering-place.
I’ll show you. The freights, the tracks. The androgyne. Dark
beneath. Girl sailor. Ghost river. Bandit boy. Who played pirate?
I’ll show you this—mermaid. This river-dark. This wind.

iii.

Name me: April, early, lilac. Fly-trap. Trash. Fish-place.
Freights on tracks. The beneath. Place where pirates played
with boys. Mermaid-river. Androgynous dark. The wind.

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Jessie Lynn McMains (they/she) is a poet, writer, spoken word performer, zine maker, and artist, amongst other things. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently Wisconsin Death Trip (Bone & Ink Press, 2020) and Left of the Dial (Scumbag Press, 2022). She was the 2016-17 Racine Poet Laureate, and the July-December 2021 Racine Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Hal Prize for Poetry, and her poem “[Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember…]” received an Editor’s Choice commendation in the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. When she’s not creating, you can find her wandering her neighborhood, haunting the stacks of the library, or playing music with her husband and kids. You can find more at her website recklesschants.net, or on Instagram and Tumblr @rustbeltjessie.