by Arushee Bhoja

When tomorrow comes, she rubs her hands
in oil and parts my hair. Yesterday’s pain
blooms my scalp. I remember

the last warm night
on my grandparents’ terrace,
sunlight pouring

through a hole in the sky.
We pressed ourselves
against the waist-high walls.

In the garden below, open mouths
of clay pots begged for rain. The plants
swallowed hard

when the monsoon came,
and our first day back I couldn’t sleep,
our house still as the bed of a lake.

Now my mother holds me
on the floor,
plants oil in my roots.

I wish I could praise
my mother’s hands—

my grandmother’s hands,
which too knew a child, hair loose,
on cold ground, shocked

with pain. Blades of dark palms
flash in the heat. Hands reach to hair
to hands to mother to daughter to daughter

to child. Each night they sharpen
their bodies and brush off
the shards. She braids my hair,

softly now, a moonflower falling
asleep, hemmed between
morning and light.

Arushee Bhoja is a queer Indian-American poet from California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Dialogist, Dishsoap Quarterly, BRAWL Lit, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner and two cats, Frog and Toad. Find her on Instagram @arusheebhoja.

by Robert Hodkinson

She knows, like Newton,
an inexorable force compels
everything it grips
even as she sits, watching.

She knows, like Snow White,
the tenderest, sweetest flesh
was always going to block
a delicate airway.

She knows, like a willful thief,
her crime was in the fruit
as she reached for it; earlier even,
swelling on the pregnant branch.

She knows, like Atalanta,
as she handles this trinket
wrapped in its golden skin,
the race was already lost.

She knows she has already been hurled
from this garden. Just not yet.

Robert Hodkinson is a prize-winning poet living in central England whose work is preoccupied with themes of place and the passing of time. His poems have appeared in more than a dozen publications, including the Alchemy Spoon, Perverse, and Rialto. He also writes and publishes historical non-fiction. He can be ignored on X @MalvernGibbous and Instagram @Malvern_Gibbous.

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.