by Mary Christine Delea

1.

because they have no curiosity, have said good-bye
to things, have left the flow of contagion
that is us. They know
there is nothing more for them here.

2.

Our doubt is our obstacle. The way we cannot let go.
How we want them to show themselves,
convince ourselves that the low creaking of stairs,
woeful moaning at night, small items moved
around the house are our loved ones reaching out.
Forensics be damned.

3.

Eager to unmask what we believe are their attempts
at communication, we are left back where we started.

Without them.

4.

And they never know, stuck in their yellow bog
of deep dead silence,
how we go to their favorite places,
cry when we hear their favorite songs,
ask the tarot reader at the farmer’s market
for signs of their departed devotion.
They cannot imagine how each night we hope
to dream their living selves back to us,
if only in our sleep, if only they could know
how much we want them back,
if only they could obey.

Mary Christine Delea is the author of The Skeleton Holding Up the Sky and 3 chapbooks. Delea has a website which includes a blog where she posts poems she loves with short commentaries twice a week. She also writes a Substack called Peeled Citrus Prompts, which provides creative prompts for writers and visual artists. She is a former college professor, social worker, Poet-in-the-Schools, and retail manager. Delea now volunteers for various nonprofits and leads poetry workshops in-person and online. Recent publications include Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Reverie Magazine, The Mackinaw, and Map Literary. You can also find her on Facebook and Threads.

by Purbasha Roy

Early morning the joggers
passed singing hymns in
chorus. The sound of light
mysteriously creeps inside the
bird throats. The scatterings of me
get linked again to each other.

Emptiness navigates through an
abandoned spider-web. No waltz
of dew on the web in this June
morning. The nervousness about
the ephemerality of possessions.

The bonfire tattoo on my forearm
now beyond the winter layering.
The flames neither warm nor cold
in my animal body. Just enough like
a blessed trajectory running through
the morning visions baptizing me for
a nameless good karma. A breeze of joy
runs through me. I am alive and content.

Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Margins, Strange Horizons, Midway Journal, and Notch Review. She attained second Position in the 8th Singapore Poetry Contest and is a Best of the Net nominee. You can find Purbasha’s website at linktr.ee/Purbashawrites.

by Jane Zwart

for Rachel Martin

What the stranger gives is in a thousand ways less
than what our kin can give—for instance, names
and new names, nucleotides and years. And if,

between people who belong to one another, it is
not as simple as deserving, still: a lover will belly up
to a sink and wash your hair for only the asking,

but strangers you have to pay. In magnitude,
in recurrence, what we call love from these people
who are ours, it dwarves the love strangers give.

No one will carry you as long as your mother did.
No one will think your laughter quite the medal
your sons say it is. Yes, and for the handkerchief

a passer-by presses on your distress, there will be,
seven times over, your brother, his shirt front.

But there is something about the handkerchief,

something about the door held anonymously open
by someone not beholden to you at all. There is
something about trying not to be seen needing help

and being seen. And about the love that is altogether
unobliged, something. So that remembering it,
we toss out, like a ball too light to throw, the belief

that a woman—not a teacher, not a parent, followed
by a gust of winter into a grade school: she spent
her best wish on a child—was an angel, or like that.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in fall 2025. You can track her down at janezwart@bsky.social or janezwart.com.

by Valeria Eden

so soon from now,
my womb will wither
and turn to ash inside me,
my beauty and worth
right alongside it.
my body, a graveyard
of missed opportunity
and my mother’s dreams.
i will be purposeless,
wandering empty-headed
and godless, like
childless women tend to do.
i have so very little time.
unfortunately, for my mother,
i will not spend this remaining time
chasing after a rich, older man
who can provide for me,
or obsessing over the wrinkles
of my smile lines, and no,
i will also not take this
tacky-cow-ring, also known
as a septum piercing,
out of my nose. instead,
i might take up bird watching.
immerse myself in the language
of warbles and trills and chirping.
i might even make a hummingbird
feeder out of a helmet and sit very still
in my backyard so that when my
uterus inevitably explodes from lack
of use, effectively killing me,
the last thing i see is the rapid blur
of bright, tiny wings; probably the
closest to an angel i will ever get.

Valeria Eden is a writer, editor, and crybaby. Her work has appeared in Variant Literature, Wasteland Review, and Eunoia Review, and is forthcoming in Arcana Poetry Press. She is the author of Tender Teeth (Jack Wild Publishing) and loves to write about the things that haunt her. She has three dogs, two therapists, one boyfriend, and her favorite color is green.

by Sarp Sozdinler

They said she was born
with salt beneath her fingernails
and a mouth full of birdsong.

They said she whispered to onions,
peeled secrets from their skins
until the kitchen was thick with prophecy.

She had the evil eye in her wallet,
a passport in five languages,
none of which she believed in.

On Mondays,
she dissolved into vapor
and reappeared in another century.

Once, she loved a man
who tried to draw a map of her body
but every time he reached her borders
they shifted, laughing.

Even the gods
sent her DMs
she left on Read.

A Turkish writer & poet, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, JMWW, and Normal School, among other journals. Their work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently working on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam: www.sarpsozdinler.com | @sarpsozdinler.