by Natalie Eleanor Patterson

I told Hope it felt like all the cells
in my body had turned over & died.
So now they multiply: evenings I crave
red meat; mornings, egg yolk & candlewax.
Your voice through the phone presses its finger
into the soft hollow on my right hip.
Two hundred miles from you, I go sweaty
to bed, wake up rain-darkened & fertile.
The trees grow thick with distances & you say
you’re on the lookout for signs & wonders:
songbirds, damselfly, strains of old music.
September is wet & still hot. Smell of apples.
Taking you between my teeth. I see now,
why people leave their lives for this.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, CALYX, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press and a PhD student in poetry. Find her at poetnatalie.com. 

by Annie Stenzel

we have almost forgotten how to know you now that you arrive at less predictable intervals and also we never know how much you will deliver and often it is ridiculously little and sometimes far too much for the ground to handle so the angle of repose is challenged beyond its mathematical formula as it was during the first of the atmospheric rivers several years ago and up the street a whole slope beneath the perched house yielded to its burden of water and surged into the street with an extraordinary weight and a noise as though Jove had hurled great hammers at the ground which is not the sound I am thinking of right now because I think the trickling of the droplets is unignorable to those who are paying attention and the heft of a drop cannot easily be measured but how songful the sound when we have heard for so long only the silence of no precipitation and yet a raindrop striking a shapely oval leaf on the hedge sounds one way and its comrade striking the clay pot on the patio makes another sound but a droplet tapping the plastic tub in which the garden tools await their task is a slightly different perhaps more insistent sound until the tempo slows and what we notice is oh no please don’t be done already dear droplets we have been counting on you for parched months to save us all with our drought-fearful souls eying the sky avidly and doing something a bit like praying only of course we do not know to whom

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was published in 2024 by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including Book of Matches, Does it have pockets, Gavialidae, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, One Art, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, The Lake, Thimble, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay. Find her at anniestenzel.com, on Facebook as Annie Stenzel and on Instagram @anniebenannie.

by Natalie Vestin

An astronomer last year gave thanks
for filaments of gas that stitch the Milky Way
back to its dark becoming, more proof
that chaos is forestalled
simply by what trails behind.

Can gas have surface, ever be a thread? I ask
my dad, who taught me by a dark night’s fire
that all that was and is has curled
itself around the seen.

Stars are held in place
by their own gravity, he says, and liquid lies.
Its surfaces of vapor seethe in spite of all assertions
that its molecules attract.

Iodine, a solid sure, will fume
before your eyes, and you’ve seen
icicles—what’s the word?—in cold that cuts
to bone. Sublime.

Natalie Vestin (she/her) is a writer, artist, and infectious diseases researcher who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work has been published in Pleiades, The Normal School, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her Instagram is @natalievestin.

by Logan Garner

The diocese paid for my pilgrimage
to Rome and to Umbrian monasteries.
Barely eighteen, I breathed fervor.
Wept and sweated in crypts
despite the cold. Prayed
around rosary beads above Assisi
in a mountain cave. The priest
with me thought I’d fallen asleep,
shuffled off for his own quiet walk.

In Norcia there were boars’ heads
above every doorway,
or so it seemed. They were
suspended bodiless, jaws agape
and snarling, begging
for a monk’s breakfast of
coffee, apples, bread and butter.
I stood beneath one
opened my mouth
and breathed a prayer,
the heat dew on my skin.

I am whiskered now,
like a boar,
bristling grays coming on.
Like them I am bereft
of that notion of prayer.
As they went silent
so have I gone
from hymns and chants.
Yet
I am not deadened.

Mystery, sits with me
here on forest paths marked
equally by footworn compaction
as by the parasitized mushrooms
growing on their edges,
dense-fleshed and orange as lobsters,
whose flesh go to beetles
and pill bugs, whose flesh in turn
go to the rough-skinned newt.

Here, between compulsive waves
and the squatting coast range;
where marine layer fog
blankets all, a daily myrrh
shrouds the land in questions.
My prayer is a wild red huckleberry—
it cannot be cultivated,
yet it springs forth from entropy
into impossible multitudes.

Logan Garner is a nature-centered poet and essayist from Oregon’s north coast. Winner of the 2023 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize and one of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 poets (2024), his work has been featured in Orca Literary Journal, The Elevation Review, The Salal Review, Flying Island and others. He is the author of collections Here, in the Floodplain (Plan B Press, 2023) and The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). Logan can be found on both Instagram and Bluesky @logangarnerpoetry.

by I Echo

With a line from Ocean Vuong

There is something to living that repeats itself.
The body, different, but in the mirror of the world,
Something asks to be bent into an old likeness.
I watched a man make a field out of the belly
Of a bobcat. The wild animal tickled and kissed
Into domestication like an old love. A comma
Asked to be a full stop, and it is no surprise
How it takes. As long as possible
Like a cracked mirror. Lately, my accent is
As secret as the presence of my mother.
In the poem about love, I speak to my mother.
So many poems about love, I speak to my mother
And I am sure she is shocked to see her baby
Bruised by such a delicate thing,
So, after all these years, she finally has to just sit
And listen. What else can the dead do?
My father is as alive as a child’s tongue.
He asks if it is important I have to tell everyone
The truth of my mother. Where she comes from,
My own heritage, silenced by her nonexistence.
And because it is easier to forget a thing
When it has been beaten into the lesser thing,
It is a burden to remember even my own name.
At work, my boss calls me a nice guy and I smile
Because it is good to be paid for your niceness.
I am not old enough to forget everything
About my mother, so, at least, I remember
How she would empty a tray of fish
Into abundance. That tray emptied for her
Wide smile. You could feed a family out of
That smile. Isn’t it fitting
How I, too, am surviving with a smile, Mummy?

I Echo is the pen name of Ghanaian-Nigerian writer, Chris Baah. He has work in Isele, Ubwali & elsewhere. He dreams of exploring the world & its cultures. & oh, he is the Founding Curator of NENTA Literary Journal.