by J.D. Isip

Mourning or pretending. Just one more
hour for Miami, listening to the raucous
revelers necking and pawing their way
down to the ocean, watching the fireworks
while you slept, oblivious to it all—

A balcony at the Hard Rock, waiting on dawn,
trying not to take one last look at you, your
naked soles, calves, thighs, all those marathons
for an ass that doesn’t quit, the plane of back
blade to blade, no space for me. I can’t quit

reaching. We know the answer before we ask.
There is too much wisdom, too much damage
to be impressed by how it fell so easy, just
another idol body, to lose oneself again, and
again. There’s a relic of me in Mexico, kissing

the wind, a man, air in my hand. One in Rome
says to read him something that cleaves me
as he drives deep the chisel, the hidden tang
thrumming the handle in his hand. I wasn’t
finished praying at the altar of artifacts, pieces

of us where I left the oddments, looking for
you to call me back to bed, you to be there, for
a way to see you clumsy men, your wreckage, you
and me as intended. Excavation is a belief that
there is more to see beneath the rubble and debris.

J.D. Isip is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015) and Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023). This poem is part of a new project tentatively titled I Wasn’t Finished, which will be released by Moon Tide Press in late 2024 or early 2025. J.D. writes reviews and interviews, and acts as the microfiction editor for The Blue Mountain Review. He is a full-time English professor in Plano, Texas. J.D. is on Twitter @JDIsip and Facebook as J.D. Isip.

by Adam Gianforcaro

Until it can touch or teethe or tear through,
the wind can try to wail all it wants.

Wind makes no sound on its own, not without
the field of sagebrush or a whistle of window

to leave behind its greasy fingerprints of song.
Not without a partnership I mean.

I too can wrap myself in the breeze. The least
we can do as bodies is to be a body

the air can brush past, to be a catalyst
for transcribing the tidings of ghosts.

This is what it means to write a poem
for the living: to find a field

and let the rabid-mouth gale
turn your body into open-air theatre.

Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day (Thirty West Publishing House, 2023). His poems can be found in The Offing, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Delaware and tweets at @xadamg.

by Beth Gordon

– after Andrea Kowch

Today the world is not ending. Our clothes infused with the ghosts of tulips. The loud souls of forsythia. A hidden vineyard. Today I am pretending that tomorrow is real. My darling. My infinite flower. You are the reason I dance. My ankles swelling year over year. At the bottom of the man-made path we find a crevice of water. A shimmering of fool’s gold. Mud & tadpoles & dragonflies & an impossible field of plum trees. We are not dancing to any remembered tune. We are not dancing in sync with the pink moon. Egg moon. Sprouting grass moon. There is a hurricane lurking in every heart. Board the windows. Collect the animals. Climb onto the roof & wait for lightning. Today I am a windmill. I am an emergency evacuation. The world is not ending. The world is ending today.

Beth Gordon’s poems have been published in Poet Lore, Citron Review, SWWIM, Pithead Chapel, Moist Poetry, Okay Donkey and others. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (2022, Variant Literature). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Twitter and Instagram @bethgordonpoet.

by Lindsay Clark

CW: Themes of child illness and loss.

Yes, a liver can say
no, too. I have carefully
considered your lymph.
The skin can yellow like
a neglected manuscript. No,
baby, it isn’t your T-cells.
It’s mine. Rejection can be
acute revelation. No, I cannot be
trapped in one body all the time.
It can be reasoned with. Or
it can fester chronically. Manifest
in midlife. Bile ducts caved in
like an ill-tended tunnel
system. Irreparable. The hollow
of a sternum can chug
the marrow whole only
to spit it out like Napa
Valley wine. No, no, not
this one. Not this child.

Lindsay Clark lives in California with her family.

by Alba Sarria

CW: Miscarriage, blood, and mourning.

The ocean comes out in mourning now
and I wade out, tepidly.
At some point you ceased
but I stayed black-veiled
and waiting,
forced hopeful
as the little red beads
crept down the curved inside
of my thighs:

Your life escaping me
one drop
at a time.

The pre-dawn fish gather,
mouths suckling.
If I cannot have you
then they will take you in—

You will swim the rhythm
of the tides,
extend your silvery scales
against the current,
feel the rush of strength
power
in a fin-flip escape
from gulls.

The ocean is ceaseless.
If the reef sharks have you
then every-moving, graceful
predator you will be.
If the whales have you
then ancient singing memory keeper
you will be.
When the scavengers and
the osedax worms claim you
then everything you will be.

Soon the morning sun will waken.
Her luminous fingers will warp pinkened waves
into blue,
shuddering away the aches of last night–you–
into memory.

Soon too, I will return to the rental
house of wave-eaten stone
to sit idle beneath the warming window
as my husband kneads, sings, folds
dough for breakfast.

I will tell him the swim was good
the dawn was kind,
the fish gentle,
the air hopeful,
and he will never know.

Alba Sarria is a horror poet and flash fictionist fascinated by all things eerie and disquieting entangled with folklore, who on occasion branches out to write more personal tomes. Alba s the 2018 CSPA Gold Circle winner for Free Form Poetry, the 2021 Short Fiction CM, a 2022 Pushcart nominee, and the 2021 William Heath Award recipient. She is on Twitter @albasarwrites.