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.

by Beth Sherman

Headstones break apart easily, crumbling to chalky dust. Names
disintegrate, letters disappear. Piles of sad markers topple over,
flat as gray pillows under careless skies. A rough-legged hawk
circles overhead, surveying the damage indifferently: None
of the ghosts say a word. Tomorrow the relatives will file in,
searching for clues. Where is Nana Sadie’s grave? Where did Uncle
Morris go? Tomorrow, the papers will call it a hate crime and give
year-to-date vandalism statistics at Jewish cemeteries. Tomorrow I will
get a phone call and drive out there during my lunch break, a place I only visit
once a year on the yahrzheit of your death. I had yew bushes planted behind your
grave, added a small bench. Nice spot, you would say. Plenty of shade. On my
annual visit, I bring a book and a brisket sandwich. Pablo Neruda poems we used
to read to each other in bed. Sometimes I tell you about the kids. Sometimes I
don’t say anything at all. Feed crumbs to the sparrows. Think about coming more
often. Tomorrow, I will marvel that I have forgotten how to cry. But tonight,
there is only the threat of snow and the rumble of cars on a distant highway.
The hawk departs in search of mice, the moon a pasty white nickel. You have
been gone such a long, long time that your voice has faded to nothing and I can’t
remember how your skin used to taste. The wind moans in the bushes. The first
flakes begin to fall. And there is no one to sweep up the broken pieces of you.

Beth Sherman received an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her poetry has been published in numerous publications, including Hartskill Review, Lime Hawk, Hawaii Pacific Review, Gyroscope Review, The Evansville Review, Rust + Moth, Silver Birch Press, Zingara, Blue River Review and Calamus Journal. She is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee who has written five mystery novels. She can be reached on Twitter @bsherm36.