by Kate Efimochkina

The lights don’t go out—
it’s movement. And some places
don’t close for the night—
the airport.
A Greek man was smoking by the automatic doors,
no one around. I watched. I watched.
The plain and the tangled tree branches
in the distance.
The river under the bridge
sheltered swans and water voles.
It’s dark, and something is flowing away.

The saint fell into the water,
and a vagrant fell into the water,
and a bird died in the water;

in the morning, the ripples are serene and bright.

Kate Efimochkina is a writer and graphic artist. You can see her works in The Turning Leaf Journal, Outside the Box Poetry, Fixator Press. She is on Instagram @k081670. 

by Kathryn Weld

Eve is the small hours – as if hours have sizes –
large for embraces of a grandchild, the shocks
of grudge and grief; small with hushed movements –
a sigh, the stirring of a mouse beneath
the oak; it is owl-light, a turning from night
towards day, the half-light, hunting time;
is vespers – and prayer – is the start of crepuscule,
of dimday – pine boughs whisper, the pond lours
with backlit cloud. Street lamps turn on in a flash,
blind us to the peripheral. It is the point in time
at onset: cusp, threshold, edge. Someone
already inside the garden – (was there an outside
of the garden yet?) someone selling truth dangles
from the shrubbery and Eve opens the gate.

Kathryn Weld is the author of Afterimage (Pine Row Press 2023) and a chapbook, Waking Light (Kattywompus Press 2019). Her poetry and prose appear in journals such as The American Book Review, The Cortland Review, Gyroscope Review, The Southeast Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. A mathematician as well as a poet, she is Professor Emeritus at Manhattan University. Find her on Instagram @kathrynweld.

by Ben Starr

The dog knows his tiny onyx body is home to a multinational conglomerate of death, slowly boring for various ores and salted earth metals meant to erect a machine built to kill. Improbably small pickaxes pound away at marbled fat and ribbons of vigorous muscle. Microscopic palms wipe sooty brows leaden with a day’s morbid work. When we go for walks I can hear his cancer. The harmonic stomp of its cracked work boots. Shifts over for the day, dragging stained coveralls to the pub for pints of beer. Just one breath before it goes home to a wife run ragged by children more powerful than God.

Ben studied poetry in college and as part of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Dishsoap Quarterly, Bending Genres, Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, SoFloPoJo and other journals. Find more of his work on X @benjaminstarr and at benstarrwrites.com.

by Sarah Ellis

The gas prices glitter on the pavement. I pick
at the skin of my fingers while you drive

one hand on the wheel, one hand on the rose gold necklace
today earlier you stole. Allegories on the radio and

rain on the windshield, legs tight and twitchy
against the gravitational pull of the glovebox.

This car used to be mine. The brakes were better then.
Soon we’ll both be gone and she’ll sit in the driveway

forgotten. Better yet, they’ll give her away. The red hand
of the crosswalk light signals the end of something

I can’t wrap inside my fingers. You say to
skip this song. Your passcode’s still

the dead dog’s birthday. It’s alright. He’s my lock screen too.

Sarah Ellis is a chemist and graduate of Reed College who lives and writes in Massachusetts. Her work has recently appeared in Poet Lore, #Ranger Magazine, and Oyster River Pages, among others.

by Christina Tudor-Sideri

I want you to feel this
the way time moves through me
not as a line
but as a trembling interval
a breath before the word
a pulse after it leaves
I live in this pause
my lungs rise
my lungs fall
each inhale a claim
each exhale a surrender
learning over and over
how to dissolve
into flesh
into desire
into the vanishing of myself

I remember nights
pressed to sheets
darkness folding me
holding me
too tightly
abandoning me
and I feel it still
in the swell of the sea
its waves pressing
against my ribs
against thought
against want
its darkness a presence
a body I cannot touch

The instant arrives
it floods my veins
presses into my heart
into my thighs
and I know
I am undone
even in silence
even in longing

Sometimes it softens
a moment blooms
a forest leans toward itself
trees demanding shadows
trunks entwined
shade moving over shade
and I lie there
skin to wind
breath to leaf
I enter the second
as if time itself
is the touch I crave
as if pleasure
could merge with perception
without surrender

But the river returns
flooding me
desire stretching absence
into ache
into lust
love braided with loss
I wait
for the brush of a hand
for the voice that never comes
and every second
lengthens
my body shivering
with the memory
of what cannot remain
yet I want it still

I wander cemeteries
stones lean like lovers
cold beneath my lips
graves heavy into the earth
the forest above
leaves whispering
waves crashing
desire and death intertwined
skin pressed to stone
to soil
to tree
to memory
vanishing into flux

I linger in thresholds
doors ajar
always almost
never fully
haunted
by the girl I was
by those who vanished
shadows persistent
shivering against me
I press back
even as I fade

I write
write the trembling
write the wound
write from the body
that remembers
what the mind forgets
my hand slower than time
each word
like lips
like breath
fading into me
holding the instant
long enough
to feel it
to feel you

Time erases me
and yet returns me
to beginnings
again
and again
each silence
another attempt
another confession
my body worn
my body trembling
alive in absence
alive in hunger
alive in loss

And I remain here
haunted
trembling
alive
in the flow
that does not end
listening
to the music of disappearance
to the Black Sea tides
to the Black Forest leaves
to death
to love
to desire
learning still
how to endure
how to want
how to vanish
how to be
through what passes
through me
through you
through time

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue; the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, and the upcoming An Absence of Sea and Reliquary: A Phenomenology of Kept Time.