by Janice Bressler

You can tie your cosmos to a sunflower stalk,
grieve an old dog not long gone,
in morning soil black and wet.

Amend the soil with peat and sweat,
grieve your mother not long gone.
You can tie your cosmos to a sunflower stalk.

Scatter seeds and cast regret,
sing your mother’s favorite song
in morning soil black and wet.

Attend the planet’s etiquette:
plant your dead and water long.
Tie your cosmos to a sunflower stalk.

Worms and mothers eat regret.
They surface in the early dawn
in morning soil black and wet.

The birdbath fills with tears and sweat.
Pink morning glories wake and yawn.
You can tie your cosmos to a sunflower stalk
in morning soil black and wet.

Janice Bressler is a lawyer and writer living in San Francisco, California. Paper Crow, Beyond Words, and Gyroscope have published her poetry and her articles have appeared in the newspapers Richmond Review, Sunset Beacon and San Francisco Bayview, among others.

by kerry rawlinson

don’t explain… just sing, my suffering darling*,

sing. sing of the smile beneath the whiskers
of the tiger once more, that lick of red
on cheetah’s sneaky

paw; that feather poking from tabby’s two-fanged
grin. prescribe music to survive
one day more

in mortal alleys where cats of the night all lay
claim, gnawing on splintered avian bones
to sustain their cravings

just as we gnaw on grief. their nine lives mock
your brief one, & the torn wedge of flesh
in their claws

reminds & remains. canary tried to warn us—
but we never heard its throttled gasps because
our ears were blocked

by bliss. I mourn, little bird, now useless, now
lifeless—I mourn… & you know felines like me
will lick & lick at the tiniest

nick. so croon it again, songbird Billie, with a
voice like acid honey, & I’ll hum along to your
taunting, fickle refrain:

“Hush now, don’t explain
You’re my joy and pain
My life’s yours love,

don’t explain…”

* Cervantes, Don Quixote.
“Don’t explain” is a song composed by Billie Holiday and Arthur Hertzog Jr.

kerry rawlinson is a mental nomad & bloody-minded optimist who gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. She’s the recipient of several flash fiction, poetry and art awards and has been internationally published. kerry’s enthralled with the gore, music, brutality & beauty of the world, the edges of which she explores in her work. she still wanders barefoot through dislocation & belonging—and still drinks too much (tea). kerry’s website is kerryrawlinson.com and she is on Twitter and Instagram @kerryrawli.

by Joshua Zeitler

You won’t believe me, but it’s easy
to forget. Sure, digging a hole that size
is hard, but that whole business
hadn’t crossed my mind since…
Well, a lifetime’s a long line. Mine’s
weighed low. Not long after we dug, I fell in
love—same railway yard, after dark,
though we weren’t disturbed a whit
by any lumbering ghost. Strong wind,
I suppose, blowing through; yes, I see it
whipping her dress against her hips.
Those days it came on quick and vanished.
Love, sure, and the wind.
Her name was Mary, like the elephant,
and her dress a plain brown, well fit
to get dirty in, which I admit we did.
Parents waited up ‘til damn near dawn,
grounded her long enough to kill
any mischief in her eyes.
Hot, sure, but every day was hot.
I don’t remember breaking a sweat.
Used to dirty work. Wouldn’t do it again,
though, not at my age. Took six of us
a long while then, hale as we were.
Time we got done, the show was over.
Crowd thinned out like those high clouds
up there. They hadn’t let her down.
Once a thing’s done, what’s there to do?
I guess it must have been a gale that night:
when I picture her brown eyes, brown dress
flapping, that’s when I see it: the crane
listing like the whisper of a breeze
catching a weather vane.

Editor’s note: You can read more about Mary the elephant and her sad, tragic death here.

Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They received their MFA from Alma College, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Midway Journal, Stanchion, Syzygy, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter: @thejayestofzees.

by Audrey T. Carroll

1.

satisfying soft shell symphony
of exoskeletons gently guided
by cupped palm—less waiting
for an offered sacrifice
sanctioned by another,
more a hand gathering
water at a stream

2.

the opposite of a cat call
is a finch singing at you
as you fill a bronze bowl with seed;
they come to recognize the vague
shape of your body, signatures
of you that do not always
seem to signify

3.

spider silk crone’s hairs
craggy as a cliffside,
i n v i s i b l e
except in the right light,
and you must be looking for them,
like trying to find a seam
in the morning dark:
bumps of ugly monster stitching inside,
flat clean edges outside,
having to trust nothing
but the tenderness of your own flesh
to lead you

Audrey T. Carroll (she/they) is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024), The Gaia Hypothesis (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), and In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be (kith books, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Genrepunk Magazine. She can be found at AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter & Instagram.

by Francine Witte

And we just had to show up,
young and unwritten on.

Back then, candles would light
themselves, glittering even

as wax and time dripped
silent away. Flowers

around us everywhere,
but we didn’t see them

wilting. And every night
we’d pass a gather of tulip

heads, their open mouths
singing to an applause of stars,

the sound of all of that going
quiet and quiet as hours passed

into midnight, into morning,
the future waiting there, waving.

Francine Witte is the author of eleven books of poetry and flash fiction. Her flash fiction collection RADIO WATER was published by Roadside Press in January 2024. Her poetry collection is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She is flash fiction editor of Flash Boulevard and South Florida Poetry Journal. Visit her website at francinewitte.com.