by Bex Hainsworth

La Specola Zoological Museum, Florence

She hangs like a novelty lampshade
in this bright aquarium, sterile light
crimping into pale waves across

the bristled balloon of her body.
Immortalised surprise, perplexed piñata,
preserved at her roundest; I am her image

reflected across the meniscus of glass.
She is salt-sick, static, yet brackish lips
are pulled into a grin, stretched over

protruding teeth the colour of coral.
Once blinded, she has been gifted glass eyes,
hemispheres the colour of home. Two fins,

fanned like scallop shells, reach for twitching
bulbs. In this glistening tomb, she is surrounded
by other celestial bodies: clownfish, tuna, and tang.

They form a system, orbiting her spiny globe;
in this little tank of moons, she is the star.

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, and trampset. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by Black Cat Poetry Press. Twitter @PoetBex / Instagram @poet.bex / Bluesky @poetbex.bsky.social.

by Erik Kennedy

I stored my plan for world peace
safely in my coat pocket,
and then I washed the coat.

The days when I was writing the plan
were dark, the nights frosty
and full of agues.

I don’t know what will befall me
as I rewrite the plan from memory.
I even forget

to eat lunch sometimes when I’m distracted,
so who knows how I’m going to remember
what mechanisms I came up with

for the end times, for stopping
hungry children feasting on zoo animals
and dentists pulling the gold teeth of widows.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025),  Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Threepenny Review, and the TLS. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand. His Bluesky name is erikkennedy.com.

by Danny Rivera

In these first after-hours, while waiting for you beneath an olive tree
and lifting veils from our creased faces, the repeated shelling signals

the opening of another day: here is the battering, with their weapons,
launched deeply, forming a splintered arc into midafternoon;

there we find an oculus in the ceiling of the hospital, a gradual light
exposing a hand, open to the sky, extending from the rubble.

There is no music, or the striking of bells now, on the balcony.
Even the newspapers speak of absence, so familiar: Do you remember

being thrown into the sea, a casualty made and remade? Elsewhere,
on the handwritten note left behind, the broken scrawl of time:

the highlighted word, grief, arrives from the French, grever, to burden,
a reminder of the sudden weight before us. We now need an updated

list of the missing and the infirm, the restless and itinerant, a series
of names on walls, undone. Let us pray for more light to enter

the poem. Let us pray that every word from the acid-mouth carries
meaning; no words carry meaning when every voice is a conflagration.

It is like that first summer, when a bird, stunned and disoriented,
flew into the same house from which we were attempting to escape.

Perhaps this is how other animals fail to reach for language, express
a need. Perhaps this is how the body, forever this diminishing frame,

like history grinding into itself, continues to live without its own eyes.

Danny Rivera is the author of a poetry chapbook, Ancestral Throat (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, Epiphany, Superstition Review, and other journals. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Web: dannyrivera.co | Bluesky: @snareshot.bsky.social | Twitter: @snareshot | Instagram: @snareshot_.

by LC Gutierrez

In the color-singed folds of daybreak,
you’ll find the cold still living.

I dare you touch a tree and claim
there is something more real.

Seal and bear hearts beat
warm, though packed in ice.

They will swim towards it, not away.
The difference is that they know fear,

not cowardice, that fawn of warmth and comfort.
We are built to go the other way

and so we quiet winds, our walls
withstanding, grow soft in our shells.

Winter draws me to my self
when I refuse to steam my mirrors.

I walk the floors barefoot of a morning
my soul is not a shadow.

Cold and clear from the shower head to mine.
My soul is not a pit inside of me: we are one.

My soul looks down and through the ice
or blazing heat and this is good.

I have floated / in seawater
numb to anything / that wouldn’t have me whole.

To find a frozen place to stop it all
a silent start anew founded

in a suffering that is good.
My body is not a parasite of the soul:

everything that hurts feels better
when it ends. You are not dead

so listen and laugh at the stars.
Feel them sticking to the skin

of your body: that which won’t survive
the soul’s cold quiet hunger.

LC Gutierrez is a Southern and Caribbean writer living in Madrid, Spain. An erstwhile academic, he now teaches, writes, and plays trombone. His work is most recently published or forthcoming in Sugar House Review, New York Quarterly, Delta Poetry Review (Pushcart Nominee), Ballast Journal, Arkansas Review, Rogue Agent and Tampa Review. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review. His website is lcgutierrez.com.

by John Paul Davis

is a full sixty day later this year
than when it would arrive
when I was a child. Beautiful weather
we’re having, someone said to me two
weekends ago, when I, short sleeves
& bare legs, was walking
through a mild November summer.
Once I stretched a rubber band
too far around a long box
& I could see it get thinner.
Autumn has been like that, lovely
days over & over, too many
& I’m certain the seasons will snap
in two. Today when I could see my own steam
fog the world around me, I relaxed
by three percent. The cold air
like a long-lost lover, touching
me everywhere my skin was visible,
sliding its icy fingers up my shirt,
down my waistband, the flirt,
& I don’t zip up my coat
or tug my scarf tighter, I don’t want
a life that’s just one ride
down a golden escalator
after another. Something in me needs to die,
needs a long moonless night quiet
as a grave & a sharpened
morning wind clean & fine
enough to slice all the way down
to my soul, with the sun
shaking its mane
like always but the pond still ices
over & the air has teeth
but it’s a good bite, a wild bite, a holy bite
& I glory in it, I allow
myself to be peeled open.

John Paul Davis is the author of Climbing A Burning Rope (University of Pittsburgh, 2024) and Crown Prince Of Rabbits (Great Weather For Media, 2017). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Rattle, MUZZLE, Spiritus, Maine Review, and others. You can find out more about him at johnpauldavis.org, IG/Threads: @john.paul.davis, and BlueSky: @johnpauldavis.bsky.social.