by Susan Grimm

The dead crowd the table thickly, criticize our meat. They give
off a low dark buzz. Floating like stodgy balloons, they wobble-

perch on their usual chairs. If they could pick up a spoon,
add just a little salt. I want them the same, not purged

of their flaws. Their wrongnesses so small, you could hide them
under a plate.I would like to hear once more the underwear

argument (civil), the story of riding the pig. Witness the ritual
coffee slop. I’m glad I joked through their dying and their dead.

Oh, I could not be pulled into the well of grief or ever
get out. I saw it from the corner of my eye. All the water

of purpose and sweat and love, heavy and drenching.

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

beginning with an image from Ada Limón’s “It Begins in the Trees”

There is the blue blow up pool
filled with hose-cool water

& sand sticking to the yellow
plastic bucket years ago

put up on a shelf, red shovel
lost to the tides

& there is the wide wild grove
somewhere in memory

filled with poplars    perhaps
sunflowers bowing    or maybe

there is a field of corn late
in autumn    even the time of year

up for grabs    malleable
what the heart holds    it holds

despite rebuttals from blurred photos
home movie reels or grandma’s pshaws

& there are chrysanthemums
growing in the past

that move like a storm blowing in
& snow that puddles into smudged ink

no matter    the tilt-a-wheel of earth spins
on & on    & peaches keep returning juicy

so even your tired hands lined with age
become sticky as a map of wonder

Lana Hechtman Ayers has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The London Reader, One Art, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a former coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night. From her home in Oregon, on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon. Say hello to her @lanaayers23.bsky.social or on her website LanaAyers.com.

by Arda Ohannessian

On the slow deep shoulder of your hill
cedar tree moon silhouette and the bear’s
nocturnal climb is deliberate and slow

see little mole bump groundling here
or a cheek’s dimple in a sweet dream
as you soft speak in lolly-tongue sleep

the sun is waiting still past midnight
under its northern midsummer line

and the sky paling stars now awake
awake my love the dawn belongs to us.

Arda Ohannessian (he/him) lives in Ryde, Isle of Wight, UK. He was born in Jerusalem, of English and Armenian heritage and moved to the UK in the mid-eighties. The long Covid lock-down of winter/spring 2021 gave him the impetus to start writing poetry again, which he had basically stopped doing after his twenties and he hasn’t stopped since. His first publication was last summer in Figlet.

by Christa Fairbrother

I told him I’ve been
to Australia, pet
the koalas, and
they’re really not
soft, but scratchy. They
smelled like greasy, grey
linens. I described
the rehab center
where sick koalas,
rested, like a spa
day, then went home, back
to the forest when
they felt better. He
looked at these glassed-in
koalas, lumpy
small pillows asleep
on their fake trunks, leaves
taped on for easy
eating, the sky-blue,
blue-gum tree mural,
then looked up at me,
blinked. I might as well
have told him once, I
borrowed the blue moon
to play baseball with
friends. Why pitched-out, we
glued the moon back up,
higher for bright nights.

Christa Fairbrother, MA, has had poetry in Arc, Epiphany, Pleiades, and Salamander, among others. Currently, she’s Gulfport, Florida’s poet laureate, and she’s been a finalist for the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, The Prose Poem Competition, The Wilder Prize, and was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Connect with her at christafairbrotherwrites.com, on IG @christafairbrotherwrites, or on Bluesky @christafairbrother.

by Dustin King

Paddling out alone in the morning I watch a pair of woodpeckers
banging their bright mohawked heads against a tree trunk.
At home in my backyard I soak and scrub my feet
but the earth refuses to let me go.
Cardinals, too sinfully red to be so monogamous,
as wet as we were paddling the swamp,
tease one another, hop, shake off morning dew,
the crepe myrtles’ pink pom-poms cheerleading,
and morning glories wide-eyed, azure, waiting to wink
until the right moment just like you.

Last night across the campfire you said
what fun it would be to love men as much as women!
Man, you say all kinds of wild shit:
Eyes flame-lit, you insisted birds don’t really exist;
they’re drones, surveillance devices sent by the government.

But Jeff, I followed you as you followed a heron, flirting with her,
or him, olympian wings beating air as we slid between cyprus knuckles,
your kayak parting the glaze of neon algae still as time often feels but never is,
Spanish moss hanging overhead like clothes left on the line for centuries.

I watched you fall in love with that animal, Jeff.
And watching, I fell a little more in love with you!

You’re like the tick tickling my underarm.

Or one of the hundred or so mosquito hickies,
love bites stinging longer than they should
as memories of sweethearts often do.

Scratch one and the others fade.
Then flare right back up again.

Dustin would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When nothing good is playing, he teaches Spanish and exchanges dreams with loved ones in Richmond, Va. His poems pop up in Prism Review, New Letters, Marrow Magazine, samfiftyfour, and other rad spots. He is a poetry reader for Sublunary Review and curates the poetry and performance event “Yodel Farm.” His first chapbook Last Echo is now available from Bottlecap Press. His second Courteous Gringo will be out this Fall from Seven Kitchens Press.