by Grant Clauser

Say there’s enough ruin to go around.
Say the song the bats keep to themselves
is a song of longing, calling out
to the night’s open palm when the difference
between a palm and fist is what you know
about words. Like ruin – the kind covered
by decades or weeds, a word that changes meaning
when the land changes hands. The news today
says kids are breaking. What they know
is the ground is shaking underneath them
and believe that’s all the future has for them.
Not the answer to the bat’s night song.
Not the way grain in an old silo
will sprout or mold depending on the whims
of weather or whether this abandoned farm
means someone picked up and moved, or
curled up and died alone like some cryptid
only fanatics truly believe.
We can’t move on. The world’s smaller
than a palm now. It’s only when evening
over this forgotten place starts seeping
up from the ground and cloaking every color,
every sound hidden by another,
that for an hour you can’t tell
the birds from the bats
but for their song.

Grant Clauser (@uniambic) is the author of five books, most recently Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. He works as an editor in Pennsylvania and teaches at Rosemont College.

by Jessica Coles

I drop love letters into the river
to dissolve ink

minerals surrender to water for the joy
of a journey they can leave any time

water surrenders to the subtle tilt of earth
rolls, ripples, riffles dictated by ground travelled

placid winding across the prairies: a sly secret
of curvature that tips love under the ocean

under the sun, water surrenders to the atmosphere
my meditation app compares the sky to a smile

that compares my fixations to clouds that compare
my thoughts to love: water converted and puffed

open for anyone to imagine into horses or ducks or
angel wings. My love amasses drop by drop and surrenders

to the thirst of foxtail barley growing
between the cracks in an unused parking lot

edging an inky river

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and editor from Edmonton, Alberta, A (Treaty 6), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Crow Name, Capsule Stories, Full Mood Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, EcoTheo Review, and You are a Flower Growing off the Side of a Cliff. Her chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate, is available through Prairie Vixen Press. You can find Jessica on Twitter @milkcratejess.

by BEE LB

find a body of water big enough to show your reflection
and too shallow to drown in. look at the water

but not yourself. remind yourself that ophelia lived only
in a book you’ve never read.

remind yourself you own no drowning gowns.
step into the water. feel the chills race

from the base of your body all the way up. do not move
until you are covered entirely in gooseflesh.

remind yourself of odette. see odile from the corner of your eye.

step further into the water. this is best performed without cover,
but if there is a chance of eyes present, wear something thin and dark.

ensure it is more than one layer. ensure it will cling to you without
weighing you down. remind yourself you are not here to drown.

if you’d like, let waltz of the white and black swans play
while you step into the water— but the sound must exist only in your mind.

the water may not reach above your knee. you may not let your body bend
beneath you. go to the water at any time, but you must stay until dawn.

if you stay through the night, you must dream only while awake.

if there is salt in the air you will feel free, but you will be too close
to the ocean. find yourself far from home.

let your body adjust to the cold. notice exactly the amount of time it takes
to become comfortable, then notice how long you can last before you begin

to ache from the wet. convince your body to last til dawn, and then
step out of the water.

stop thinking of the ballet. think instead of the width of possibility.
think of how far your two legs could take you, if you let them.

let them.

BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Roanoke Review, and Figure 1, among others. they are a poetry reader for Capsule Stories. they can be found, on occasion, @twinbrights on instagram. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co

by Lauren Camp

Good night, good night
from the grip of the world.

Having so long bundled into winter, and woke and slept complicit
in my indoor vault. Watched the forecast.
Then through summer’s holler,

took every one of its hot, identical hearts.
Having finally to learn the gravity of space. Having the lens
and wavelength to know night

might unfold me to the tender scheme of the planet. So much I had to want
before I could get here: the magnitude. My own

reflection and doubling. So much peering. So much waking first.
The moon is wryly waxing crescent, building a curve
to its littlest spill. All month, down and up
until it is padded with the full
flex and diameter of its off-centered softness.

Origin shows up as ink, paint, countless vessels. I want my mind
dozing on wings and secret feet. Want the noble
clamor of Milky Way as it sieves over the earth. Darkness can be

a persnickety vapor, but I’ll hang my steps
to any path that will fit me to
sky-time with its glittery wardrobe. The night I can sever my shadow, sure,

I’ll let the universe cut through me. Far-flung, all the lights
twisted silver. Perhaps I haven’t told you any secrets, but I’ve begun
to prefer to crease into the edges of constantly whole.

The hours without their effulgence. Looking off, I can skim the almighty
rain with its fancy nest to the north. Watch its long legs
engineer the horizon. The wind has arced again and certain birds
whistle their blue-calloused ballads.

Lauren Camp is the author of An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023), among other titles. She currently serves as Poet Laureate of New Mexico. Lauren can be found on Facebook (LaurenMukamalCamp), Twitter (@poetlauren) and Instagram (@laurencamp).

by Alina Stefanescu

One is born from
what has borne your
idea, or pinned you to the pretense
of its bleached shore.

Ingenuous shame—as in the leaf mistaken
for a feather, or the ambiguity
misconstrued as mystique.

The Angel of Clouds is also known
as the angel who has no other name
which is not the same as being the angel
who remains nameless.

A poem can only sustain its blissed
meta for a whist’s fist before
sound seeps out the corners.

Every image in script
wants to be endless. Wilderness
in how an hourglass
is just a yard being conquered
by its limitations.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.