by Michael Boccardo

Only if God is a box
he’d fill with wind. If he
is the box. If God is
full. Only if he wears
me like a lover lost
to trauma, my throat
full of buttons. Ask me
again about his eyes,
those forests lush & cruel
& how with owls he’ll
crowd my leafless
branches. Or how we’ll
dust ourselves drunk
under fists of aster, then lick
clean the constellations
that spill at the small
of our back. At night,
he’ll dream in leather,
I in myth. My sudden
storm. My arched
cathedral. Our tongues
unburdened of every
oath like the slow
scratch of crows
clotting the sky. He’d
crown me his little
hemlock, his favorite
foxglove. His kiss
would say become,
say quicksilver &
eclipse. Together
we’d turn the rivers
crude, the stones
fanged. Behind us
chaos would follow,
a wolf who’s grinned
since childhood.

Michael Boccardo’s poems have appeared in various journals including Kestrel, storySouth, The Inflectionist Review, Screen Door Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Iron Horse, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Comstock Review, Nimrod, RHINO, and Best New Poets, as well as the anthologies The Power of the Feminine I: Vol II and Poetry Goes to the Movies. He’s been a finalist for The Pushcart Prize and a finalist for the James Wright Poetry Award. He resides in High Point, NC, with two rambunctious tuxedo cats. Additional work can be found at michaelboccardo.com

by Krystle Eilen

i.
Oh you virgin mother, most sorrowful,
you are the last breath of every prayer,
you are a withered flower crushed underfoot,
you are tragedy’s silent witness,
with eyes wide open like a grave,
you are beauty fully borne.

ii.
Oh you faithful leaver, most ambivalent,
you are the hell from which I derive my
energy,
you are what vitally destroys,
you are quicksilver,
you are the way of partial death
from which I take the long way home.

iii.
Oh my beloved spouse, most humble,
you are a simplicity that sounds
the deepest depths,
you are a dove rising from the mud,
you are the attempt to flee a death
not sacred, but of this earth,
you are music incarnate at the cost of blood.

iv.
Oh you divine androgyne, most gone,
you are the stillness within a rushing wind,
you are holy self-remembrance,
you are the love of the insane,
you are the grief that collapses the grave.

Krystle Eilen is a poet currently attending university. Her works have been featured in Eunoia Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, BlazeVOX, Poetry Life and Times, ZiN Daily, and Literary Heist among others. In her free time, she enjoys reading and making art. Krystle is on Instagram @iccaruso.

by Rachel Pittman

 a golden shovel after Rita Dove’s “Demeter Mourning”

Even divine wrath has its season. I know nothing
born of winter can bear fruit in spring. My mind turns
to sticky pulp. I let each fig kiss the earth and rot. The
reek of decay clings to my dress. I sow grief to harvest gold.
I sow fury, and the grapes wilt on the vine. I offer frost to
mouths that beg for bread. No more rye and barley. No corn.

Call me goddess of wither. Mother of hunger. Nothing
stirs in this soil but worms. O, ravenous daughter, is
your husband feeding you well? I sour every sweet
fruit in your absence. I fallow and spoil. I could dig to
your door, but the dirt swells with death. You know the
cost of your wedding is winter. Child, your milk tooth
always pinched me cold. All night I practice crushing
snow in my mouth. I refuse to let warmth in.

Rachel Pittman is a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University where she teaches writing and serves as an Assistant Editor at Five Points. Her writing has appeared in Whale Road Review, Strange Horizons, and Fairy Tale Review. Instagram: @rachelerinpittman

by Kyla Houbolt

The Queen o’ the Cats asks “What do you wish for?” She rides on the back of a hummingbird, and is neither so tiny as that nor her steed so huge. You see them both clearly, or perhaps you do not. Again, she asks “What do you wish for?” and you try to remember all that you want but then she says “I may grant your wish or I may not. If I do, it may be good fortune or it may not. If I do not, the same. I give no advice nor do I pretend to wisdom.” You will not remember what she said. Time has imploded on itself and you are bemused by the brilliant white fluff on her breast that looks like a feather made of silver and crystal. The hummingbird darts at you, humming. There is nothing you want. The Queen and her steed vanish, having bestowed on you the only blessing there is. You know this is not a dream.

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener, living in North Carolina. Look for her full length collection, Becoming Altar, new and selected poems, forthcoming from Subpress Collective this fall.

by Justin Lacour

a kid from Agawam is arguing with a kid from Chicopee over the cheapest place to buy gas
in the year i stop selling knives door to door and go back to working in kitchens
the cook and i balance drums of grease at the end of each night out into the alley
out where the bears lurk and raid dumpsters for scraps the mom and her cubs all summer
Crowbar tries to get folks to call Williamsburg Mass. the “burgie”
and i go to a party up in Shutesbury thrown by the women who raise rabbits
in the year my ocd first flares up Warren Zevon is dying Johnny Cash is dying
and i truly believe my car will stall if i don’t play the same three Ryan Adams songs over and over
in the year i hallucinate that middle-age guy hiding in my bushes
who asks me to stand next to him so the cops will let him be maybe he is an angel
it’s always good to have an angel and a train and a hat and a graveyard
like those songs in my cold apartment “Engine 143” or “Stagger Lee” or “Delia”
that are my companions in the year the lost war begins
and the cook calls me Hollywood because i’ll be famous for nothing
but washing dishes and mopping floors and smoking two cigarettes at once
and the last time i imagined the middle-age guy he was waiting for his ride
so i stood next to him on Pleasant Street to throw off the cops
he said he worked at the velveteen factory near Spencer our smoke our breaths
rising up to the streetlight like we had souls to spare it began snowing we waited a long time

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry (also on X / Twitter).