by Lynne Lampe

Empty chairs line cracked concrete,
watch the sea for miracles. Salt

settles on canvas. Waves take sand
hostage but only captors return to this

beach so wide whales have room
to die. On a long ago vacation a child

sits in a chair far from the rest,
pouting. Stubborn as iridium,

she refuses blue water, squeezes
her arms tight against her chest.

She sees herself as crucible, not
contents. Kicks air out of her way.

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner (honorable mention–poetry), concerns mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear in many journals, including THRUSH, Figure 1, and Yemassee. A 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist, she edits academic writing and lives in mid-Missouri with her husband and two dogs. Visit her at lynnejensenlampe.com; Twitter @LJensenLampe; or Instagram @lynnejensenlampe.

by Millie Tullis

each december I pulled her
from boxes of christmas decor
set her beside my cd/tape player & watched

she did nothing
& still I remember her
clearer than any other piece of

childhood I remember her
smooth soft cold
coat

I heard her emptiness
when I rattled her nothing
knocked against the nothing inside of her

I tipped her upside down peered
into that hollow center
saw her

absent belly absent breath how the whole
beautiful bag of her body had been
emptied

being silent & pastless
made her more beautiful
& so I loved her

Millie Tullis is a poet and folklorist from northern Utah. Her poetry has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Juked, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online journal pushing the borders of sacred and secular. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @millie_tullis.

by Sarah-Jane Crowson

The lilacs watched us from the fragrant garden–
heavy and bewildered like a drowning.

That time before the world was boxed
in a whisper before…

before the darted glance, distorted.
Before eyes were moth-wings,
soft as charcoal dust,
like a land that is locked, or lost.

*

It came to her that she had been alone for so long
that she had become a statue.

*

She thought of all the worlds she had forgot.
The slip and haste of red clay,
the barefoot wild symmetries
and all those quiet words turning moth
to fly –decay in cold uncertain rooms.
They say the moon is silvered, a metaphor only,
loud and lone and tarnished.
They say I am distracted by wings.

Safe, lost in the dark woods the moths
whispered small decrees of dust –
the kind of truth that splits
fallen branches –ecstatic with decay.
And when she fell, like a twisted root,
they caught around her, uncertain,
uncertain, uneven, impossible

whispers of midnight, our hair unleashed,
rain-drenched, unpinned, unlocked.

This poem accompanies Sarah-Jane’s collage, “Uncertain Objects” – this is part of the series “Discontented objects of terrestrial desire” which can be seen in her portfolio.

Sarah-Jane’s art and poetry is inspired by fairytales, nature and her personal emotional landscape. It is informed by ideas of accidental trespass, surrealism and romanticism. She is an educator at Hereford College of Arts, and a postgraduate researcher at Birmingham City University, investigating ideas of the ‘critical radical rural’. Sarah-Jane’s images an poetry can be seen in various UK and US journals, including The Adroit Journal, Rattle, Waxwing Literary Journal, Petrichor, Sugar House Review and Iron Horse Literary Review. You can find her on Twitter @Sarahjfc, Instagram @Sarah_jfc or on her website at sarahjanecrowson.art

by Ashley Cline

for example: if you stand still enough / on a forest trail in late-february

a butterfly will mistake you for nature / pass so close

that you will hear the monsoon of her wings / in distant harbors—

picture it: the way the water laps at the hull of a ship / sounds like amen

in any tongue / cut to an event horizon: the 18th century

a ship leaves port, sets sail / with it a seed balanced in ballast waters—

history of the common reed / as intricate

as any prayer

An avid introvert, full-time carbon-based life-form & aspiring himbo, Ashley Cline’s poetry has appeared here, & also there. Once, in the summer of 2019, she crowd-surfed an inflatable sword to Carly Rae Jepsen, & her best at all-you-can-eat sushi is 5 rolls in 11 minutes. She is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry. Twitter: @the_Cline. Instagram: @clineclinecline. Linktree: @ashleycline.

by Renee Emerson

CW: Infant loss, intense grief.

I still look at pictures of my baby
that died, still have her clothes
shadowboxed like Snow White.
The notes taped in her hospital
room—hold her, sing—instruct
the silence gently, tucked
in the casket blanket. I do not
think about what happened to her
body—folding in on itself in places,
expanding past borders—both
too large and too small, a dress
better suited to another. I do not
think about what happens now.
I catch the thoughts like birds
in my fists, singing stone and pebble
songs, singing goodnight, Dearheart,
goodnight, and I crush them,
feather and bone.

Renee Emerson is the author of the poetry collections Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing 2014), Threshing Floor (Jacar Press 2016), and Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2023). She is also the author of the chapbook The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants (Belle Point Press), and the middle grade novel Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike (Wintergoose Publishing 2022). She lives in the Midwest with her husband and children.

by Cynthia Moon

The reverend told your mama God knows
the pain of losing a son. But God is doing alright,
sleeping soundly. Beside your body,
I held your mother and thought of Mary
on the ground, reaching, how she couldn’t
change a single law of gravity
to save her child’s life.

Oh these fools these holy men
identifying always with God –
with God who must go to his knees
for no one, God who has
begged for nothing.

Cynthia Moon’s poetry appears in Best New Poets 2022, minnesota review, DIAGRAM, Frontier Poetry, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is a therapist and lives with her beloved daughter and their dog in a small town near Lake Michigan. Cynthia was previously published under her former name, Cyndie Randall.

by Vic Nogay

if you could reach inside my body
through the pupils of my eyes that open
and close to the light like windows, i would open

for you, tear down the blinds, blind
my eyes in the morning sun so you could see,
so you could climb inside, touch

my memories with your fingertips,
pull them out, set them free,
hang each one,

deftly, on the low limbs
of an oak in the summer
by the river, to bleach out in the sun.

a toad perched on a rock
by the water and a dove swimming
in the leaves of the tree will pretend

not to watch
you leaf through me
like a sacred relic.

there will be no
museum or sterile box
for these.

shade the trees with memory,
honor me with sun
light—even if i burn.

Vic Nogay is a Pushcart Prize- and Best Microfiction-nominated poet and writer whose work appears in Fractured Lit, Barren Magazine, and Lost Balloon, among others. Her micro chapbook of poems, under fire under water, was published in 2022 by tiny wren publishing. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Identity Theory and lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find her online at vicnogay.com

by Charles Hensler

Every day you fall
from the same bridge. Each night
you swim farther upstream.

Houses and gardens in silhouette, the scent
of wood smoke rising, the water heavy
between the trees.

Was that a heron or a flag pole; a shimmering
willow or someone waving from shore?

Is it only the senescent light of stars
arriving weary, or a fragment of frozen moon?

How were you able to weather the guests
who came early, and stayed? There were too many to know—
their urgencies and trembling hands, their clarinets
that wouldn’t play.

So far upstream in the feathered dark
past the shore, the fences, the cottonwood—

is the house you find the house you knew,
the light your light in the window?

Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shore, One Hand Clapping, West Trade Review, Pidgeonholes, Parentheses, ballast, boats against the current and others.

by Kyla Houbolt

Butterflies go still in flight.
Tying neat bows in the once alive air.

I never know what shape
the birds will draw
as they arc across the sky and you think
oh scribbles but what if
it’s a code, and the birds saying
if only there were more of us
we could complete the message
and open the stars.

And I could dance on this cupcake.
Let me just go down the mine
with sharpened feathers and diamond eyes.

There’s beautiful Sarah, immersed in her sea
of pain, not drowning, emerging for a day or so
to feel the sun and then again
pulled back under. Look
how white the cliffs are today how
they glow. Singing all the way.

Sarah, say the birds in their secret
language, we’re trying
to open the stars.
She is back down in her boiling
and does not hear.
I’m putting a knot in the universe
so I won’t lose my place
when I die.

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener currently living in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. Her chapbook Tuned is available from CCCP Chapbooks. But Then I Thought is forthcoming later this year from Above/Ground Press. Surviving Death is forthcoming from Broken Spine, along with a re-release of her first chapbook, Dawn’s Fool, both expected in November. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet, and many individual pieces published digitally can be found on her Linktree.

by Corinna Board

After the shock of discovery,
I’m drawn to the body –

larger than life, broken –
a predator beaten at its own game.

I’ve never seen a buzzard
this close; its wings are splayed

like an angel; mackerel-striped
feathers intact, the rest is a mess

of plumes, dampened by blood
now rusted to a deeper hue.

The head is hidden under leaves,
only the hooked beak is visible;

clamped shut, useless.
I’m glad I can’t see its eyes.

Wood anemones have seeded
themselves around the dead

bird like a handful of stars,
as if the sky, too, has fallen.

Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in Oxford. She grew up on a farm and her work is often inspired by nature and the rural environment. She has been published in Spelt, Anthropocene, The Alchemy Spoon and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet is due this year. Find her on Twitter @CorinnaBoard or Instagram @parole_de_reveuse.