by Damaris West

The dame was ninety-nine, never reached
a hundred, or hatched the balled-up tissue egg
on the blue cushion of her chair.

It was serious business being my parents’ child.
I had a folding table, a wire tray
and a fat crayon, blue one end and red

the other. First: strings of loops like paper dolls.
Then croquet hoops between parallel bars.
Columns. Carrying and borrowing. Queuing

for ticks or crosses but the queue
could be dismissed for talking
to start again. Life was arbitrary.

Sometimes a gold star and a boiled sweet
from a jar, fishing for green.
Twenty-five stars meant a two-and-sixpenny token

that bought an artificial flower in Eden Lilley.
But stars could be “crossed off.”
At break in the basement kitchen –

a plastic cup of milk
and squashed-fly biscuits – there were
poppies in a vase. One drooping petal

dropped. I was accused.
Oh, the agony of forfeiture.
The grievance.

Note: Dame schools were a phenomenon of the UK, in which a sole lady teacher taught young children, often in her own home, concentrating on the 3Rs.

Originally from England where she worked variously as a librarian, tutor, and director of a tuition agency, Damaris West now lives near the sea in south-west Scotland. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications such as Snakeskin, The Lake, Dreich, Blue Unicorn, Ink, Sweat & Tears, and The Friday Poem, and has been placed in several national or international competitions. Her debut pamphlet is due to appear next year with Yaffle Press. Her website is damariswest.site123.me.

(and so slowly you unwind me ’til I fall apart)

by Ankh Spice

It’s decades since. We’d absconded from the ward,
two not-deads gone wanderwild. Some nights you hear
the unspool, the moment the hand lets go
of the ribbon. How each throw scribbles the map.
This spill seems a new roadway, an unjammed strip.
We drive moebius, then the wind snarls up
any forward in hedgerow, thorn. Rest highway, rest river,
gleaming brown with tarry light: we write music here
so briefly, ask those shining things to remember it
whenever we fear the erase. All we long-
haired boys, said that other kid travelling through
his cutting web of unwound, slow-leaking song. Story
in the corridor goes he made it to the silence and back
bewildered and bleeding and everyone just asked him
about angels. About light. I said we were music, I said
all along, we tried tuning to that original chord.
If we were patient, we’d sit and splice what we find caught
on the margins – stop pretending we have the same setlist
from the start, get everyone playing like we mean it
to last: come obsolescence, come the Next Big Thing,
come this unplanned encore. But we’re not.
One end’s a hard case, endless flip-and-repeat, stuck
to the wheel. The other’s some flickering score
of loose ends—unread fate-lines in the palm
of a roadside wind. Hey, before you let go—
it’s true. There’s always a hidden track.

Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa, author of The Water Engine (Femme Salvé Books, 2021). His poetry is mostly about the brief weirdness of being a person – but then, isn’t all of it? Ankh has co-edited at Ice Floe Press, been a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine, a guest editor for Black Bough Poetry, and is currently part of the amazing team at Sidhe Press. He shares poems, oddness and sneaky sideways glimpses of his brain vs. the world on Bluesky. Ankh is also on Facebook and has a website.

by Beth Gilstrap

You had beaten the cancer once, taken up the pink bunting of survivors, made it your whole personality—folks with borderline move through them like crabs through shells—unlike them, you’d never been bold in anything aside from drinking. They say hermit crabs get braver when they acquire high-quality shells and maybe that’s an answer to the roiling why because you never unpacked, not really, when you moved to the only house y’all ever had til the bank took it back. They say I come from a line of healers that stretches back to Scotland and that’s the word they use in circles where folks learn from haunted land and try to get by without healthcare. Weren’t many doctors around no ways. Not deep in Carolina in those days. Hell, Granny Viola, second youngest of seven, washed in leftover bathwater from all her siblings and parents besides and I don’t know, when I dug out one of those cherries from the shine I bought from a friend’s daddy who lived in a shed, undisclosed up in the foothills, the witchcraft came bubbling up and waited there in the sauce-burned roof of my mouth. Your son left to feed a friend’s cat, gone for only minutes, and it was just me and you and Ned and the dogs all huddled up on the couch and then I popped the second cherry on top of that prosecco I’d had with pie and like everyone who makes Christmas, I was worn out and sad about losing time, being the only one who knew the future. I cried, so hard and sloppy I couldn’t hardly breathe no more and yeah my accent is real and it sure as shit gets worse when alcohol-steeped and y’all were trying to get me to eat something, the Chex Mix at least, hon, but I pushed your reaching hands out of my way and stood, jar still in hand, my bah humbug Oscar the Grouch sweater making me sweat something awful because synthetic fabric and eczema tells its own story and I’m still choked for air but still talking about how y’all were all gonna die long before you got old, how there’d be nothing left, no reason to do this manufactured merry but I was wrong—I still make the pies and put up the tree only now I carry shells in my pockets and call them signs.

Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), Winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize and short-listed for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She and her house full of critters currently call the Charleston-metro area home. As a neurodivergent human who lives with c-PTSD, she is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.

by Kyla Houbolt

The beetle sleeps with her cheek on the branch,
if beetles can be said to have cheeks. She looks
so comfortable there, like a Christmas tree ornament
that has found its perfect place and will
refuse to be taken from the tree when that time comes.
She plots with them, the ornaments, and an uprising
is fomenting. They take lessons in how to cling
from cicada carapaces. They have not decided
what to do when the tree is, finally, discarded.
Perhaps they have not thought that far ahead.
After all, planning can only do so much to avert
unwanted ends. The strings of lights will be unplugged,
and the glass balls and baubles shattered in the
garbage truck’s eventual maw. One more quest
for immortality, down the tubes. The beetle sleeps,
unconcerned.

Kyla Houbolt writes poems and makes gardens. Her most recent chapbook, The Ghost Of It, is available here.  She is on Bluesky. More poems and links to her other chapbooks can be found on her website.

by Zoe Reay-Ellers

And I want to send him Siken,
send him Detail of the Woods.
He speaks abrasively and often,
scared the words are going to fly
away like any good bird
at cold, any bad showerer
at scalding. I want other lonely
people to be able to smell
my lonely like a post-gym-class
teenage boy drenched in Axe
and sweat. I want to tell him
this, to let him hold my brain
briefly. Gently. Want hands
on me in a way that won’t matter
to me like it will to him,
to be pedestaled for proof
of survival– holy and golden and
unfolded under shaky fingers
like a little kid on a stool, palm-up
in front of an old fortune teller.

Zoe Reay-Ellers is the proud EIC of the best dish soap-themed mag worldwide. She owns 20 plants and is currently a junior at Cornell. Her work has appeared in a number of places, including Kissing Dynamite, HAD, and Fish Barrel Review. You can find her on twitter at @zreayellers.