by Beth Gilstrap

You had beaten the cancer once, taken up the pink bunting of survivors, made it your whole personality—folks with borderline move through them like crabs through shells—unlike them, you’d never been bold in anything aside from drinking. They say hermit crabs get braver when they acquire high-quality shells and maybe that’s an answer to the roiling why because you never unpacked, not really, when you moved to the only house y’all ever had til the bank took it back. They say I come from a line of healers that stretches back to Scotland and that’s the word they use in circles where folks learn from haunted land and try to get by without healthcare. Weren’t many doctors around no ways. Not deep in Carolina in those days. Hell, Granny Viola, second youngest of seven, washed in leftover bathwater from all her siblings and parents besides and I don’t know, when I dug out one of those cherries from the shine I bought from a friend’s daddy who lived in a shed, undisclosed up in the foothills, the witchcraft came bubbling up and waited there in the sauce-burned roof of my mouth. Your son left to feed a friend’s cat, gone for only minutes, and it was just me and you and Ned and the dogs all huddled up on the couch and then I popped the second cherry on top of that prosecco I’d had with pie and like everyone who makes Christmas, I was worn out and sad about losing time, being the only one who knew the future. I cried, so hard and sloppy I couldn’t hardly breathe no more and yeah my accent is real and it sure as shit gets worse when alcohol-steeped and y’all were trying to get me to eat something, the Chex Mix at least, hon, but I pushed your reaching hands out of my way and stood, jar still in hand, my bah humbug Oscar the Grouch sweater making me sweat something awful because synthetic fabric and eczema tells its own story and I’m still choked for air but still talking about how y’all were all gonna die long before you got old, how there’d be nothing left, no reason to do this manufactured merry but I was wrong—I still make the pies and put up the tree only now I carry shells in my pockets and call them signs.

Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), Winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize and short-listed for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She and her house full of critters currently call the Charleston-metro area home. As a neurodivergent human who lives with c-PTSD, she is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.

by Kyla Houbolt

The beetle sleeps with her cheek on the branch,
if beetles can be said to have cheeks. She looks
so comfortable there, like a Christmas tree ornament
that has found its perfect place and will
refuse to be taken from the tree when that time comes.
She plots with them, the ornaments, and an uprising
is fomenting. They take lessons in how to cling
from cicada carapaces. They have not decided
what to do when the tree is, finally, discarded.
Perhaps they have not thought that far ahead.
After all, planning can only do so much to avert
unwanted ends. The strings of lights will be unplugged,
and the glass balls and baubles shattered in the
garbage truck’s eventual maw. One more quest
for immortality, down the tubes. The beetle sleeps,
unconcerned.

Kyla Houbolt writes poems and makes gardens. Her most recent chapbook, The Ghost Of It, is available here.  She is on Bluesky. More poems and links to her other chapbooks can be found on her website.

by Zoe Reay-Ellers

And I want to send him Siken,
send him Detail of the Woods.
He speaks abrasively and often,
scared the words are going to fly
away like any good bird
at cold, any bad showerer
at scalding. I want other lonely
people to be able to smell
my lonely like a post-gym-class
teenage boy drenched in Axe
and sweat. I want to tell him
this, to let him hold my brain
briefly. Gently. Want hands
on me in a way that won’t matter
to me like it will to him,
to be pedestaled for proof
of survival– holy and golden and
unfolded under shaky fingers
like a little kid on a stool, palm-up
in front of an old fortune teller.

Zoe Reay-Ellers is the proud EIC of the best dish soap-themed mag worldwide. She owns 20 plants and is currently a junior at Cornell. Her work has appeared in a number of places, including Kissing Dynamite, HAD, and Fish Barrel Review. You can find her on twitter at @zreayellers.

by Elizabeth Loudon

Beneath a chilly bathroom floor in Kensington
the District Line dragged its down-under bodies,
shaking the smallest bones of my feet
as I smeared poison around the rim of rubber
that stoppers the muscled anemone mouth.
It was that or the slack puddle-pouches
holding the ghosts of a million drowned babies
if I wanted to ride the see-saw swing of my heart
each month from deficit to deficit, hug tight
the moon-curve back-ache whenever I ran
on empty. I never let a single calamitous angel
slip through a pin-hole rip. Later I lived
in a house better suited to an estate agent’s camera,
and over the hills came a rented plane
trailing one of those MARRY ME banners
in pink. For a moment – unmothered, unmoored –
I thought it was meant for me. Love at last,
not sex! I ran outside in my nightshirt
to wave my arms, hoping to bring down a man
before I was shot dead, but the question
evaporated into careless blue. I’m sorry
to shock you, but everything passes into
the sky, baby girl. Even love, even you.

Elizabeth Loudon is an Anglo-American poet and novelist now living in southwest England. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Trampset, Whale Road Review, Amsterdam Review, Blue Mountain Review, and Southword. Her debut novel A Stranger In Baghdad was published by AUC’s Hoopoe imprint in 2023. She can be found at elizabethloudon.com and on Bluesky or Instgram.

by Daniel Findlay

And then sighs. I was in the game at one point,
she says, but I’m lapsed. Murky birds
wing above us, unseen in the cauldron-black night.

In my dreams Albuquerque is still raining on us.
The streets push you along like an assembly line.
A muffled din like love seeps out from locked windows.
Tell me you hear it too, she doesn’t say.
When I’m awake I remember leaving.

There are only two modes of being:
deafening annihilating motion and the other one.
A priest told me once, at least I like to say
that a priest told me once, that you leave sin behind
while in transit. It’s there, waiting at either end, but
the movement is enough to shake it off for a time.
Though this probably isn’t doctrine.

Daniel Findlay is doing just fine, thanks for asking. He lives in Oregon, where he writes poems while his boss isn’t looking. He is on Twitter (@mice_and_beans) and Instagram (@dfindlay579).