by Kelly Gray

Within your absence
I orchestrated

great obsequies within our church
which was a field.

I pulled grief sounds from the soil
beneath my feet up through my body,

my hands lap bound and rattling
to hold the memory of you

brining me a sweetness I could eat
while my knees were safely exposed.

When my wails subsided
I spoke carefully of your life

to a room full of strangers,
as if a part of mine had not ended

when we were both alive,
quiet to the way you fed me,

a thousand funerals in the shape
of our dresses.

Kelly Gray’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Witness Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Permafrost, Trampset, and Rust & Moth, among other places. She is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize from Passages North and the ArtSurround Cohort Grant, and she was runner-up for the Witness Literary Awards. Her collections include Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press), and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press), MUD~ Field Notes from a Juvenile Psychiatric Institution (Bottlecap Press), and Quag Daughter (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). She’s thrilled to have been selected to teach with California Poets in the Schools, and is hard at work creating a curriculum based on monsters, edges and lore. You can follow her wanderings at @_west_of_west and writekgray.com.

by Scott Neuffer

November 9, 2022
2:32 a.m.
Love, they’ve taken over the school board.
I wander our Nevada home and poke the rubbery pizza
in the fridge the same way I poke the ash-gray sore
on the inside of my jaw. My doctor was right
about politics.
7:37 a.m.
Love, a magpie dipped through the morning light
without a sound. I want to follow it to a new world
where the days are long forever. Tell our children
everything will be okay.

January 2, 2023
5:40 a.m.
Love, did you hear the icicles cracking last night
like old teeth? We are in the maw of winter.
As I guided you in your car out of the garage,
I thought you’d murder me, finally.
Justice is a red-hot engine.
6:47 a.m.
Love, how can we demand anything
in this feeble daylight?
The preachers have gone to the roofs with rifles in hand.
I am here, ground floor, a bag of flesh.

February 4, 2023
4:50 a.m.
Love, it snowed again. I don’t believe in God,
but I worry God is trying to kill us –
a touch of anxiety in the way I sext.
6:19 a.m.
Love, I like the picture you sent me.
What I mean is behind the image is a flickering
dark heart. I’ve seen this heat before,
at the root of the mind. It sputters like a kiss.
As long as I last I give myself to it.
The snow will melt in long glittering drips.
What I’m trying to say is I miss you.

Scott Neuffer is a writer who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founding editor of the literary journal trampset.

by Janice Northerns

Take the land in your hands
and cut along imaginary lines
drawn on a map. Cut deep enough
to fling the past over your shoulder,

a scrap you no longer want to keep.
You’ve been told measure twice, cut once,
but the cutting always comes before
the measuring of what you’ve done.

See how the outline you’ve scissored
is in the shape of a name—your father’s,
your grandfather’s—yours. Steal the deed
in your sleep and know as you register

its edges, the paper is too large
to smuggle into the light. Begin folding
it in half, once for the land your grandfather
sold to make a lake, and again for pieces

parceled to your father and his siblings.
Fold until you are left with just these few
dry acres, evaporating, but impossible
to bend into thin air. Keep creasing

this origami apology until
it is reduced to a hard white pebble.
Slip it into your left shoe. Let every
bruised step recall your ancestors’ heels

grinding into dust those who walked
this ground before locks, before keys,
before deeds. Will time to run backwards,
turning you upside down until

the pebble floats through your blood,
lodging between lungs and heart. Feel
the catch as each exhaled breath coalesces
into the persistent ghost of erasure.

Janice Northerns is the author of  Some Electric Hum, (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020), winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and  a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in Texas and continues to draw inspiration for her writing from her rural upbringing. Her poetry has been widely published and recognized with a number of awards, including a Pushcart nomination. She lives in Kansas and is currently working on a hybrid collection of poetry and essays inspired by the life of Cynthia Ann Parker.

by Mark Saba

A memory that says I was there
even if you didn’t want to be.
Another version of self
that flip-flopped between what you were
and weren’t. A vague premonition

of a better future, even if
you didn’t believe it.
Rings of fire you jumped through,
the burns coming later
dried up into scars.

A checklist that followed everyone
but you. Following a way
that offered spectacular views
of foreign lands, climates
there to nurture unknowns.

And those times you strayed
holding your heart in calloused hands—
blood trailing—you were there
but once, and no one noticed
that you were gone.

A native of Pittsburgh, Mark Saba has been writing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction for 40 years. His most recent book publication is Flowers in the Dark (poetry). Other works include Calling the Names (poetry), Two Novellas: A Luke of All Ages / Fire and Ice, and Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines around the U.S. and abroad. He is also a painter, and recently retired from Yale University as a medical illustrator and graphic designer. Please see marksabawriter.com.

by Jared Beloff

follow the line
from the mallard’s bright foot

pointed skyward to its wing
tucked, head searching the calm below

confident as a diver and nothing
amiss—ignore the bitter fruit’s

protuberance, the shade of a table,
contrast of the kitchen wall’s ochre

or the great open wing
feathers ruffled, held by the hollow

bone, ligaments like thin twine
stretched beyond the thigh,

one leg left open
as if searching for purchase

or a reminder, even now,
of life’s cruel arrangement.

Inspired by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s painting.

Jared Beloff is the author of WHO WILL CRADLE YOUR HEAD (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and has been a peer-reviewer for Whale Road Review since 2021. His work can be found at Night Heron Barks, Barren Magazine, River Mouth Review, The Shore, Contrary and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @Read_Instead and see his website jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.

by Natalie Marino

A mess
of vagueness,

you are also
anything

you want to be,
a changeling.

You are a fortune
of fish,

a dying king,
an escaped

dove’s wing.
You hold

the moon
in your pocket

and camouflage
shy stars.

You are a young girl
with roses

murmuring
to the sky.

You grow
into a nimbus

and foreshadow
angry water,

making the rivers
quiver.

Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Atlas and Alice, Gigantic Sequins, Isele Magazine, Plainsongs, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Shore, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Under Memories of Stars, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (June 2023). Her Twitter handle is @NatalieGMarino and she is on Instagram @natalie_marino. She lives in California.

by Martha Silano

Sometimes a feather jumps around on the patio carpet
like some sort of nudibranch sent down
to amuse me, and I’m grateful.
Add to the list

that tomorrow will be cloudy, twenty degrees cooler,
that someone invented wine,
that the earthquake/
tsunami thing

hasn’t happened yet, the guaranteed repeat of a random day
in 900 AD, when the fault a quarter mile from where
I’m sitting rose twenty feet, the reason
so much of Seattle is hilly

or sunken, why so much fill dirt covers estuarine mud.
Add that my daughter’s terrible news is a sap stain
on her shorts, that the sulfur cosmos
I left out in the heatwave

isn’t dead. Add dark chocolate, ice cubes, watermelon, the rainforest exhibit
at our local zoo, so humid that when you exit you realize
it’s nowhere near as hot as Brazil.
Add a marine breeze,

squeals of kids as the sky goes orangey pink. The good fortune
of a dead-end street, neighbors who never blast ACDC
but bring us figs. The active volcano, fifty miles
from our porch, blanketed with snow.

Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Martha teaches at Bellevue College. Her website is marthasilano.net and she can be found on Twitter and Instagram @marthasilano.

by Lannie Stabile

If you want to be a good day, be Christmas two years ago. An
unseasonable 50 degrees. Not a wink of snow in sight. Big family
stuffed into too small living room. Eight folding chairs around a
six-foot card table. Bird picked over. Potatoes flaking. Gravy
graying in the old Country Crock container. A contractor bag of
discarded wrapping paper bulging by the front door, Mom’s
oxygen tank alive and hissing in the corner. But wait. Watch as
Mom unrolls her trove of one- and two-dollar lottery tickets with
an eyebrow wiggle. You gotta play to win, she tempts, pulling
Monopoly: Go from a Walmart shopping bag. An hour, several
scratching pennies, and a $10 dollar winner later, the pumpkin pie
is ready. The blue can of Reddi-wip passes from hand to hand.

Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. Her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything, is out now with ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.

by Ian C. Williams

After Mothman folded the Silver Bridge
into the Ohio River like a wrinkled receipt into his wallet,

like a paper coffin caught in a downpour, he turned away
from the twisted skeleton of steel and concrete

and walked home. He walked alone, his briefcase
full of mishaps and secrets he’ll keep from his family.

After all—what does it matter to them?
Why mention the motorists trapped inside

the open mouth the water makes for what defies it?
Why mention what buries itself below

what soon becomes a smooth line of ice?
He walks home. He opens the door, kisses his wife,

and never speaks of the bridge, the crunch of catastrophe,
the constant, quiet rush of the river in its bed.

Ian C. Williams is a poet and teacher from Appalachia. He is also the editor-in-chief for Jarfly: A Poetry Magazine. In 2019, Williams received a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University, and his debut full-length collection of poems, Every Wreckage, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2023. He currently lives with his wife and two sons in Fairmont, West Virginia. Ian is on Twitter @ianwilliamspoet and is website his iancwilliams.com.

by Jack B. Bedell

Things I miss: I’d start with Linda, but she’d need her own list, so I’ll go with breakfast, the unadulterated promise of coffee percolating in the Drip-O-Lator. I miss fresh, clean sheets on my legs. I miss the dog warming my feet. More than anything, I miss the feeling I’m running out of time to get things done. Now, time’s just a blur of moving and waiting and anger and searching. These days, time isn’t something I can lose, no matter how I try. If I waste it, the morning sun brings more, day after day. It just grows back like my hand if it’s ripped off in a fight. I miss optimism, too. You know, the chance that things don’t have to be what they are, that I might not be what I am and where I am, or that all of this might just be a dream.

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, Barren, Terrain, and other journals. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.