Stone Circle Review

Don Simms Has a Message for You

by Darren Morris

My father, yet alive but without purpose,
loosens his mind like a botched windsor
or the rope of a dinghy on a lake at night.

The Boomers conspire to lose their sanity.
Nearing death, angels pepper his half-sleep
with air defense. His bombs dropped long ago.

Without throwing ourselves over their coffins,
couldn’t we still rise to the occasion of loss?
Or had we inherited their stark indifference?

Don Simms, my little league football coach,
would have something to say at this point.
He would whack you sharply on your helmet.

He would say, Listen up. Cut the crap. Stop
fucking around, dipshits. You are blowing it.
You ain’t doin’ yer job. So pay attention.

Distraction was the largest threat back then.
Not ability or lack thereof. We were small.
One kid was as talentless as the next.

Some were more sluggish. Some were
afraid of violence. Some had weak chins.
If we got hurt during the game

we were told to lie still so the ref
could stop play, and they could get to us.
The following Saturday, I got hurt

so lay there looking up at nothingness
the way I did when I played the baby Jesus
in the manger on Christmas Eve at church.

The whole game stopped for me and I felt
holy and wept a little at my holiness.
It was maybe the first time I remember

leaving my body and looking down on it.
The men finally got to me. My facemask framed
their heads in an iconostasis: Coach Simms

filled my left eye, the team doctor in my right.
What’sa matter? Asked Coach. I held up
one hand with my blessed finger trembling,

unbroken, and told them someone stepped
on it. At which point, the doc arose and Coach
told me to Get the fuck up. You ain’t hurt.

And then he cracked me sharply on my helmet
and down I came back into my body and walked
alone, not carried aloft, off the field. I was six.

Fifty years hence, my father is busy chasing fake
sex partner profiles online, in his dark, labyrinthine
archive of fantasy. It muddies his relationship

with reality. It takes his money. It infects devices.
Which he calls me now in a froth of despair, only
to offer some fix. Fretting, not over unpaid taxes

not over the destination or station of the soul,
but for the perplex of technology he does not need.
I need Don Simms to interrupt. I need Coach with

clipboard in hand, to slap my father hard
and snap him out of it. I need Coach Simms
to say, Listen up. Cut the crap, you baby.

Everybody cries now and then. But you
ain’t worth your salt, not compared to those
bastards that weep over what was lost.

Darren Morris is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His work appears in the current issues of The Yale Review and Willow Springs Magazine. His poems are forthcoming at the American Poetry Review.

The Editor2026-06-28T10:29:20-04:00June 28, 2026|

Errand, with Jar and Fox

by Lee Fraser

Based on Year 1 spelling list vocabulary

I am here to get a gift for Dad
with the jar from Mum
(the one for job day).

I go by pens, a cube game, a cat bowl, a big ball,
look at a map, a fun name tag, a grey cap.

Now I find a green book,
with a win stamp on the top page
like the kind at home,
but one he has not got.
I hold it.
I hug it
and as I go to get the jar in my bag

I see a kite.
It is red.
It has a sun on it.
It can fit in my bag, if I make it.

It tugs at me,
deep and big, in my guts.
My neck is hot
and I rub my lip
fold my lip
pin my lip in my hand.

No one can see but there is
a fox, low in my bag,
and it says I have got to get the kite.
It says the kite is the best
and we can take it to ride gusts,
tall and bold, up with the birds.
It says I am mad if I get the book.
And here, with Mum and Dad far,
with the jar and the bag
I can see it win.

Lee Fraser is from Aotearoa New Zealand and uses poetry for ogling life’s details, emotional archaeology, and comic relief. Her full-time occupations have included field linguist and parent. She has been published in Amsterdam Quarterly, Consilience, Cordite, Ink Sweat & Tears, ONE ART, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Thimble and elsewhere. Some of her work is at leefraserpoetry.com and on Instagram @leefraserpoetry. On Bluesky she is leefraser.bsky.social.

The Editor2026-06-27T10:11:42-04:00June 27, 2026|

Fugato

by Kimberly Hall

a Markov Sonnet / for D. Shostakovich

Morning, & the bird outside my window is not a ghost.
The light seems to break its bones, colors the horizon
red through the throat – wings beating like a drum.

***

The light seems to break bones. Colors the horizon
red through the throat. Wings, beating like a drum,
shudder a fractured chorus of dawn’s shadows.

***

Ready? Through your throat, wings beat like a drum.
Shudder a fractured chorus of dawn’s shadows,
half-steps heavy in the blood. Alto echoes soprano.

***

Shudder – a fractured chorus of dawn’s shadows,
half-steps heavy in the blood. Alto echoes soprano
beneath your fingers as they dance across the keys.

***

Half-steps heave in the blood. Alto echoes soprano
beneath your fingers as they dance across the keys –
so carefully, it is as if the music itself is holding them.

***

Beneath your fingers as they dance across the keys –
so carefully, it is as if the music itself is holding them
at knife-point – what secrets lie here? What wounds?

***

So careful – as if the music itself is holding you
at knife-point. What secrets lie here? What wounds
hang suspended in the distance between a hand & an ear?

***

A knife points at what secrets lie here. What wounds
hang suspended in the distance. Between hand & ear,
every phrase risks something. Every sharp edge, a loss.

***

Suspense hangs in the distance between hand & ear.
Every phrase risks something – a sharp edge, a loss.
Perhaps silence tells the safer story.

***

Every phrase risks something. A sharp edge, a loss
perhaps. Silence tells a safer story,
true – the same cord that tunes a piano can cut a throat.

***

Perhaps silence tells a safer story
than truth. The same chord may tune a piano or cut a throat.
Dissonance will swallow a pulse as easily as a tongue.

***

The truth: the same chords tune a piano & gut a throat
& still – dissonance. Swallowed pulse, uneasy tongue, &
still, still – the heart rebels against its cage. Sings for flight.

Kimberly Hall (she/her) is a queer and neurodivergent poet based in Southeast Texas. She holds degrees in psychology and behavioral science. Her first collection of poetry, Honey Locust, was published in December 2024 by hotpoet inc. You can find more of her work on her website: kimberly-hall.com

The Editor2026-06-21T10:40:15-04:00June 21, 2026|

Moral

by Tom Snarsky

How much electricity is there
in a sparrow’s heart, at rest
like no one, now, abetting

circulation, a thousand plus
bpm at its fastest, machine
learning how to fly and how

to die. I’ve gotta stop
putting god in these, he’s not
interested in the watch

once it’s shipped, only the putting
-together of it, the assembly
those lonely square faces

before the three black lines start
arcing around them, little
mechanical janitors

sweeping out days.
I act amazed but really I’ve seen
the trick before, I know where

the card goes, how it appears
on the other side of the window
like magic. I’ve been the assistant,

the cameraman, the gaffer.
Stolen all
that valor, crept toward death

wearing hats, how else.
The self is a Chris Fleming joke:
you have to talk and move

at the same time. Lying alone
won’t do, nor will hobbies,
poetry, gardening, the

late discovery of board games,
ornithology, ornithography
or volunteering with the wildlife

rescue. You have to be sick
and mean it, have to give
the mourning dove Patient

of the Week, have to trade
your early weak ideas
for late ones, convictions

ramified in the dark nights.

Tom Snarsky is the author of Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (Ornithopter Press), A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems (Animal Heart Press), and MOUNTEBANK (Broken Sleep Books). His chapbook Tired Light is forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing House in October. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. Website, social media: Twitter, IG, Bluesky

The Editor2026-06-20T10:28:04-04:00June 20, 2026|

technophobia/

by Beth Gordon

I don’t know what to do with the robots who live like cockroaches in my phone. This one looks like
my maternal grandmother: her mouth hinged: a squeezebox of monotone syllables & unlikely words:
a doppelganger of wrinkles. This one looks like the squirrel in my garden if the squirrel in my garden
was periwinkle blue. This one looks like my nightmare after watching Journey to the Center of the Earth:
lava swallowing me like a gnat. This one looks like my childhood beach if my childhood beach had
no rot. No jellyfish corpses. No empty beer cans. This one looks like a jellyfish corpse repurposed as
a fountain of youth. This one looks like a phone booth as if the new machines don’t understand that
the old machines have been dismantled: unassembled: melted into the lake of fire. This one looks
like a funeral procession: every pallbearer has three hands. This one looks like a sunflower grave:
yellow & deep. Every petal on the verge of eruption: every garden spider an ambulance in disguise.

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of five chapbooks, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press), The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press) Crone (Louisiana Literature) and The First Day (Belle Point Press); and one full length collection, This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books). Her second full-length collection, Alchemist or Arsonist, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2027. Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Instagram, Threads and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.

The Editor2026-06-14T11:42:26-04:00June 14, 2026|