by Chrissy Stegman

In my blood, the chaotic hum. Waiting.
I inflate sentimentality with my mouth.

I only have so much time now.
Someone needs to tell my children I love them.

I’m someone. My eyes trace the hours
of borrowed graces. I want to be thieved

from fate’s brittle glass. My gaze to be softened
by the gentle siege of promised light.

I see violets in December and they’re beautiful. I think:
they’re the color of an affair, illicit in the dirt.

A message from my husband burns through my phone:
i want to kiss you

I think: yes. kiss me. before time embroiders us gray
The clock’s hands carve at me. I think.

Immense, breathtaking, an echo predictable.
The cool fingers of distant poles tease

my heart’s threshold. I see the storms,
self-aware. I skip a stone.

A fleeting spark, just before it kisses me
into the unseen dark.

Chrissy Stegman is a poet from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been featured in various journals, most recently Rejection Letters and Gone Lawn. Her work is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine and Anti-Heroin Chic. She is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Bibby Idyllwild Arts scholarship for poetry and placed second for the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee. Her social media handles are: Twitter/X: @pimpledrose; Blue Sky: @chrissystegmanpoet.bsky.social; and Instagram: @thegoosefaerie

by Hannah Grieco

Bilirubin like my heart used to
rise, code yellow despite these
worn-out thumps, these

elevated platelets, buttery
veins, weighted skin clinging
a depression of dermis.

When did I start feeling so old?
When did sleep become thin
become a test run

a preview, an old woman’s
afternoon nap, short and then
long, and then drugged, and then

hours of foggy wandering, when
did I start feeling so tired?
When did I stop looking

to you, looking for that
moment when the skin around
your eyes creased, your eye-smile

my love, those lines said: my
girl, that was me laughing
at your jokes, that was my

heart rising, red, an escalating
frequency of thumps pounding
yours/us, yours/us.

Hannah Grieco is a writer in Washington, DC. Find her online at hgrieco.com and on Instagram/Bluesky @writesloud.

by Andrew McCall

where have you been
this flame-tinged season?
A long drought
chewed wounds in the earth,
made you hole up, waiting
for another season.

I, too, stayed low,
choking on smoke from Canada –
particulate and savory, – caught
in the soft tissue of my tongue
leaving a tinge of barbecued
forests and singed duff.

After three days of rain
you remembered
yourself, rose and broke
open your hardpan
mantle; I smelled
the wringing out of your green
fronds and walked back into you.

I tripped over a cup fungus
still burrowing its way
from the underground, holding
new wetness in its mouth.

I stilled myself on a
ironwood branch,
moist and thick, like
my father’s bicep
after his work
in the fields.

I scattered the striders
flashing downstream
like thoughts
in a waking mind.

No big god cared
enough to clean up our ashes
and cinders.

Instead,
the swarming little ones
made the resurrection:
an old trickle in the woods,
ghost pipes
glistening and translucent,
the bold seed sprouting late
in summer’s hum.

Andy McCall as born in Missouri and teaches ecology, ecopoetics, and botany at Denison University in Ohio. Some of his work can be found in Canary, Lascaux Review, and 2River View.

by Sam Rasnake

“no thing, not any thing, not something,” Middle English, from Old English naþing, naðinc, from nan ‘not one’ (see none) + þing ‘thing’ (see thing). Meaning “insignificant thing” – Online Etymology“no thing, not any thing, not something,” Middle English, from Old English naþing, naðinc, from nan ‘not one’ (see none) + þing ‘thing’ (see thing). Meaning “insignificant thing”  – Online Etymology

Nothing happens No gains, no real setbacks
if you don’t count the sinus infection or cracked
tooth, but other than that, same as it ever was, or
so said David Byrne, and he was right The outer

reaches of there continue to slip away until one day
– not any day soon though – in the universal sense,
we’ll crash into Andromeda – another film for
Cronenberg if he’s still working then and all that

implies, since I’m sure he’s working even when he’s
not – we can’t see everything – but the crash will be
most unsettling to us and to Andromeda’s parents
who once again, because of beauty, will not be able

to withstand the destruction – but, in the meantime,
nothing happens, which certainly is something –
nothing but the slow crawl of what we say is living
and, of course, what we say is never what we mean

Sam Rasnake has published work in Wigleaf, The Drunken Boat, MiPOesias Companion, Southern Poetry Anthology, Bending Genres Anthology, and A Cluster of Lights. He has served as a judge for the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press), and World within the World (Cyberwit).