by Cynthia Moon

The reverend told your mama God knows
the pain of losing a son. But God is doing alright,
sleeping soundly. Beside your body,
I held your mother and thought of Mary
on the ground, reaching, how she couldn’t
change a single law of gravity
to save her child’s life.

Oh these fools these holy men
identifying always with God –
with God who must go to his knees
for no one, God who has
begged for nothing.

Cynthia Moon’s poetry appears in Best New Poets 2022, minnesota review, DIAGRAM, Frontier Poetry, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is a therapist and lives with her beloved daughter and their dog in a small town near Lake Michigan. Cynthia was previously published under her former name, Cyndie Randall.

by Vic Nogay

if you could reach inside my body
through the pupils of my eyes that open
and close to the light like windows, i would open

for you, tear down the blinds, blind
my eyes in the morning sun so you could see,
so you could climb inside, touch

my memories with your fingertips,
pull them out, set them free,
hang each one,

deftly, on the low limbs
of an oak in the summer
by the river, to bleach out in the sun.

a toad perched on a rock
by the water and a dove swimming
in the leaves of the tree will pretend

not to watch
you leaf through me
like a sacred relic.

there will be no
museum or sterile box
for these.

shade the trees with memory,
honor me with sun
light—even if i burn.

Vic Nogay is a Pushcart Prize- and Best Microfiction-nominated poet and writer whose work appears in Fractured Lit, Barren Magazine, and Lost Balloon, among others. Her micro chapbook of poems, under fire under water, was published in 2022 by tiny wren publishing. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Identity Theory and lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find her online at vicnogay.com

by Charles Hensler

Every day you fall
from the same bridge. Each night
you swim farther upstream.

Houses and gardens in silhouette, the scent
of wood smoke rising, the water heavy
between the trees.

Was that a heron or a flag pole; a shimmering
willow or someone waving from shore?

Is it only the senescent light of stars
arriving weary, or a fragment of frozen moon?

How were you able to weather the guests
who came early, and stayed? There were too many to know—
their urgencies and trembling hands, their clarinets
that wouldn’t play.

So far upstream in the feathered dark
past the shore, the fences, the cottonwood—

is the house you find the house you knew,
the light your light in the window?

Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shore, One Hand Clapping, West Trade Review, Pidgeonholes, Parentheses, ballast, boats against the current and others.

by Kyla Houbolt

Butterflies go still in flight.
Tying neat bows in the once alive air.

I never know what shape
the birds will draw
as they arc across the sky and you think
oh scribbles but what if
it’s a code, and the birds saying
if only there were more of us
we could complete the message
and open the stars.

And I could dance on this cupcake.
Let me just go down the mine
with sharpened feathers and diamond eyes.

There’s beautiful Sarah, immersed in her sea
of pain, not drowning, emerging for a day or so
to feel the sun and then again
pulled back under. Look
how white the cliffs are today how
they glow. Singing all the way.

Sarah, say the birds in their secret
language, we’re trying
to open the stars.
She is back down in her boiling
and does not hear.
I’m putting a knot in the universe
so I won’t lose my place
when I die.

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener currently living in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. Her chapbook Tuned is available from CCCP Chapbooks. But Then I Thought is forthcoming later this year from Above/Ground Press. Surviving Death is forthcoming from Broken Spine, along with a re-release of her first chapbook, Dawn’s Fool, both expected in November. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet, and many individual pieces published digitally can be found on her Linktree.

by Corinna Board

After the shock of discovery,
I’m drawn to the body –

larger than life, broken –
a predator beaten at its own game.

I’ve never seen a buzzard
this close; its wings are splayed

like an angel; mackerel-striped
feathers intact, the rest is a mess

of plumes, dampened by blood
now rusted to a deeper hue.

The head is hidden under leaves,
only the hooked beak is visible;

clamped shut, useless.
I’m glad I can’t see its eyes.

Wood anemones have seeded
themselves around the dead

bird like a handful of stars,
as if the sky, too, has fallen.

Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in Oxford. She grew up on a farm and her work is often inspired by nature and the rural environment. She has been published in Spelt, Anthropocene, The Alchemy Spoon and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet is due this year. Find her on Twitter @CorinnaBoard or Instagram @parole_de_reveuse.