by Anna Fernandes

There’s no blood spotted on my pillow.
No sand pouring forth or anything like that.

It’s just that sounds land dully
as if plopped into ashes and I think
somewhere in there my cochlea might be
a tucked-up prawn —
overcompensating, sussurating whispers —
stuck in a pin-sharp shriek.

In the pink dark, I see sound stumble
over patched and tender fuzz
where swaying stereocilia is worn
down to a brittle pearlescence.
It blindly corkscrews the eustacian tube,
whorling vast echoes round a gastropod’s columella.
Yes, there’s some distortion.

Through a grotto’s burnt-out membrane,
vivid liquids mingle in secret pools —
oil and sea-sick water.
When that happens I cock my head
this way and that,
dislodge ancient mineral salts, tumble crystals

until they shake loose —
a mute rock-fall
of filthy shale and ammonites
and pyrite trilobites and snatches
of songs and words unpronounced
and that’s when I
violently flail, float away.

I can’t hear very well
and there goes my blood
lapping the shore, that’s all.

Anna Fernandes lives near Bristol and writes about grief and chronic illness. Her work has been most recently published in Canary Collective, Ink Sweat & Tears and Dust Poetry and was shortlisted for the Laurie Lee Prize for Writing 2024 and 2025. Anna is on Instagram @annafernandeswrites.  

by Jeannie Prinsen

when I reach for it, fumbling, long before dawn.
they crackle in a blackness my eyes have not yet
adjusted to. no comforting shapes of chair, table,
dresser, so I go by feel, by the plush sizzle and
sputter between my fingers. synthetic fireflies
are surprisingly good company in the lonely
hours. don’t we all grope in the dark for a wink
of light, however dry and cold, for a soft
place to touch, as the blanket of night pulls
back, filling the room with stars.

Jeannie Prinsen lives with her husband, daughter, and son in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copyeditor for a news organization. Her writing has appeared in Dust Poetry, Relief Journal, and elsewhere. Find her online at jeannieprinsen.substack.com and jeannieprinsen.bsky.social. 

by Hazelyn Aroian

and so you float through the twilit cemetery. pink ribbons threaded along the horizon, pink ribbons tasseled through your hair. the sound of September wind through dry grass is not unlike the sound of graphite, frazzled chicken scratch on a baby blue exam booklet. if death is a prickly essay question, a headstone’s more footnote than thesis. and if death is a physics lab report, at the moment you’re workbenched, stuck fiddling with your pendulum, your balance scale. but enough of that. look to the cemetery oaks, orange leaves shattering around you like dozens of satellites. in the heat of a brief supernovan bloom is it better to study the wrong thing? to study nothing at all? look to the graves, knit in such tidy rows. the symmetry makes you want to pull your own chair back, sit down for class. as the neighbor boy pedals past the wrought iron cemetery gate, as his wheels spin, whir, flicker in mechanical tandem like the phases of miniature moons: recite your times tables, aloof as a runaway helium balloon. keep rising all light and airy up into that most intimate infinite. keep racing towards that starless blank slate, black granite.

Hazelyn Aroian lives and writes in Massachusetts. She recently graduated from Northeastern University, where she studied computer science, English, and philosophy. She has worked as a software engineer, grocery store clerk, and movie theatre attendant. Her writing has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and can be found in The Shore and Strange Hymnal.

by Brendan Byrne

I only watched it once: that video of you in the
stick-trees, cradling a 20-gauge in your arms like
a child, like melting snow in the palms of spring,

firing it three times, with the crow’s crows, into
nothing, although it could have been anything,
the frame only holding your body and the gun’s

hot steel, glowing like a star, like a constellation
bit come to ground, broken off or freed. And
years ago, drowning in your brother’s clothes,

lying on the late-winter bed of leaves, having
followed me into the dark, both of us afraid
of the morning, sun spilling over the horizon

like wrath, like a hound, soft kiss to my temple,
I wondered if this were a sign, a flood, a grave
robbing, for when your hair grew long–as I hid

still, buried with a thousand undaunted beetles,
first snow coming for me–that buckshot might
fill me like rain, three thuds like the slowing

of a train, the sewing of a wound, lips pressed
into a wooden comb like the nape of a neck,
prayer bound in the squeal of a weather-vane.

Brendan Byrne is a student at Hamilton College in Central New York. His work has previously appeared with Green Ink Poetry Press, the Hyacinth Review, and The Shore Poetry. He will begin his MFA in Poetry at Florida State University this summer. 

by Olusoji Obebe

for Lagos Market Fire victims

there are fires in this world/ that have blotted the skies/ with histories of dark/ fires, that breathe away/ the innocence of buds/ & squeeze happiness dry.

there are fires/ that are songs only the dead sing/ fires, that clean memories/ & leave the soot hanging in the future.

there are fires/ that are old &/ need a touch of water/ fires, that burn without ignition/ but slip off from the hand of water.

there are fires/ locked up in your body/ fires, that put you out/ without ashes.

there are fires we do not see/ fires we nurse into a mare/ that we can no longer tame.

Olusoji Obebe is a Nigerian creative writer and poetry reader at Fiery Scribe Review. He is a 2x BOTN nominee and Winner of the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry 2024. His works have been published in Brittle Paper, Pepper Coast Lit, Salamander Ink, Morrab Library, MUSE Journal No.51, The Shallow Tales Review, and elsewhere. He is on X @olusoji_obebe and Instagram @olusojiobebe.