Stone Circle Review

A Long Beginning

by Ágnes Cserháti

Late last summer—
I remember well the lanky shade of love’s third moulting,
buttons scattered… nymph-like and lightsore,
breath touching breath, the low sun draping
over the arc of a fleeting dog-eared
cloud, your surrender
to fingertips and slow lips wet with soundless whistles,
a single reed struck through and trembling, long-limbed—
lying flat, flung, then furled
in the distanced space
between us.

*

It began with December and snow, your hands spread like ferns,
the small of your back curled into your knees, curled
between mine, adjusting
to the given space. I breathed in the arc
of your mouth,
pulled at your tucked shirt,
at time, unfurling and exhilarate, your spores
woken and keening, marked for one course alone.
Dishevelled, we caught for air,
collected our fronds,
taking in the hours
apart.

*

Then there was the proverbial barn, slatted with light
and silence, its walls of red hemlock roughsawn and yielding,
words dwelling among us (and we among them),
our heads heavy on feathered down,
your wooly eyes shut and reaching
into mourning. To borrow from you
was to shape words from you lips
swelling a soft touch,
sleep’s steady awakening
a long beginning.

Ágnes Cserháti’s writing has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, and the New York Quarterly, among others. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition and Vallum Poetry Award. She won the Hart House Poetry Competition twice and the 2025 John Lent Poetry/Prose Award. Her chapbook, unremembered, was published with Frog Hollow Press in 2019 as part of their Dis/Ability series and Pilgrim Vox by Kalamalka Press in 2026. She is associate editor for Amphora, the Alcuin Society’s journal on the book arts, and founder and editor of Rufus Books Publishing (@rufusbooks_ca). You can find her on Instagram @agnescserhati.

The Editor2026-08-16T10:14:16-04:00August 16, 2026|

Cry pretty

by Catherine O’Brien

I think honestly
I live dishonestly.

I play you
by and from the heart.
I am the water
that drinks the sun.

I lean on harmony.
I’ve dropped the tempo
and tickled the synth.

I comb the pattern
for its crime.
I taste the blast
of the furnace.
I drain the expenditure
from your sorrow.
I hit you with
the reason you are
abstract from fun.
I am a tornado that
upon impact chooses love.
I’m a liferaft when
you reach the shore.

Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. Her work has most recently appeared in Ghost Parachute, BULL, X-R-A-Y, Frazzled Lit Magazine, Irish Country Magazine, Washing Windows V and Bending Genres. You can find out more on X @abairrud2021 and Bluesky @catherineobrien.bsky.social.

The Editor2026-08-15T11:16:56-04:00August 15, 2026|

The Fruit Cellar Is Empty

by Selby Liebert

After Crisis Birds, Stella Snead (1950)

We are here, in a world becoming
desert, winter and summer,
and the green rise of spring already so distant, here
because our wings are clipped, a chorus singing
as the sea of wheat is stripped
to chaff, the branches of the forest bare,
so each note echoes.

Empty homes, not more than dried spit
and horsehair, brittle walled little hearts –
we are not forgotten,
only wrapped deeper, the seeds of an apple:
a little sweet, a little poison,
and still we are hungry,
in this slumbering tree
waking into hope, shedding the fruit of old sunsets.

Nature will preserve these fragile bones,
and the sky will bring a new day,
a reminder:
we do not come into this world
so full of limbs
to be alone.

Selby Liebert is a Great Plains transplant growing in the Pacific Northwest. When not writing she enjoys photography, cooking good food, and making music. Her work has appeared in Identity Theory, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Find her online at @sqliebert.bsky.social.

The Editor2026-08-09T10:32:54-04:00August 9, 2026|

It could be worse. Consider this:

by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

Asteroid, christened as starlight,

flames braid and hitch across the sky.

A dinosaur, cow-eyed, looks.
He has a nice family, all in one place,

he checks the falling steam

and hears bursting climate chaos.
The ocean drains; somewhere far,
Mars spills its jammy streams
toward nothingness.

The dinosaur, named, and with

family present, watches
as rushing light, with its whistling
melodies, maps a path toward its target.

Fireshine in many eyes,
necks crane—together,
they share the moment.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer and editor living in West Philadelphia. She edits HOOT Review, Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and was an editor for Lunch Ticket from 2015 to 2017. Jane-Rebecca is the author of the flash fiction collections Better Bones (Thirty West Publishing House) and Thirst and Frost (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), as well as the poetry collections Eleven Hundred (Really Serious Lit), Long Island Sad Poems (Serotonin Press), and others. She works as a paralegal for an immigration law firm, and likes cats and salt.

The Editor2026-08-08T10:28:22-04:00August 8, 2026|

Bite of Mordant

by Ann Chinnis

After Louise Glück’s “Wild Iris”

Although it was my mother’s
favorite flower, bursting

purple, I never was an iris.
My yard explodes with them,

short blooming period
from May to June.

I discharged
a young mother from the ER.

She returned the next day
and died. Brittled by failure,

I moved to an island. After a year,
like Glück’s wild iris, I made

a passage home from another world:
oblivion.

Unlike her iris, no great fountain,
no deep blue shadows. Lonely

rhizome. Papered skin. Hungry
for the water’s boil, the wringing, my

purple begged the pot for mordant’s
bite, repose of fiber.

Ann Chinnis is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, 2025 and the author of three poetry books: Poppet, My Poppet, I Can Catch Anything, and Love Song: Port & Starboard. Her work has been published in Sky Island Journal, River Heron Review, Gyroscope, Crab Creek Review, among others. She is a retired Emergency Physician and a leadership coach and lives with her wife in Virginia Beach, Virginia. You can find her on Instagram @achinnis. Her website is annchinnispoet.com.

The Editor2026-08-05T15:31:30-04:00August 2, 2026|