by Kelly Erin Gray

From a distance I couldn’t make
it out, I thought they were girls,
younger maybe, but just like us,
helping each other stand, just like us.

I turn my neck like a phrase
to watch the way their pale arms
hold the moon like light, reflecting
off water even in a dirty gutter.

I’m too near sighted, too honest
in the eyes, prone to being told
life stories in ways I shouldn’t
ever know from people I never will.

But they don’t look. They never
lift their heads from where they
fall into each other, in thought,
in prayer, in the tall wet grass.

We cross over to the other side
as the needle sinks into the grooves
of their record, cycling around
what veins they have left standing.

It’s all warped over now, like I’m meant
to remember something other than what
we hear, the voice of my father when
he said you can never go back home again.

Kelly Erin Gray is a writer and instructor based in Boston. Her writing has appeared in Maudlin House, Up The Staircase Quarterly, The Shore, and The River. She can be found online @kelly_erin_.

by Tim Rich

I wanted to live quietly
in a white stone cottage
far down an unhelpful track
that twists and dips low
into old black woods so
unbidden guests will turn
back on themselves, not
getting to where the way
long after it leaves the map
swerves hard to reveal
a meadow by the reach
of a fast thick river and
nearby softly in sunlight sits
the place I’d wake each day
to make a fire, cook slowly, watch
smoke drifting from a low roof
over the in-love-with-itself torrent
lined with bright bushes sagging
under honeyberries, buckthorns
then beyond to maybe-glimpses
deer moving through poppies? yet
closer a weathered table for mending
writing, reading until the light
is right only for shrews, owls
when comes the moss tread
of the shadowless ponies who
half-ghost through to lap
from the pail I leave
by the well, while
unlit inside I wonder if
it is time to sleep
but what sleepwould I have falleninto there, andwhat dreams?

Tim Rich lives and writes in Hastings, England. Most recently, his poems have appeared in the book Dark Angels: Three Contemporary Poets (Paekakariki Press, London), at the Bloomsbury Festival, and in the 2024 Connections project with writers’ group 26 and the Barbican Centre. He has also guested on poetry podcasts such as Night Light with Tom Snarsky and Eat the Storms. Tim shares poems and lo-fi photographs on Instagram @timrichphotographs.

by Nicholas Pagano

The city slept while the air baked orange.
Florence, at midday, was 106 degrees.
I didn’t know how to be a tourist, never learned
the ease required to hold a language always
wilting. The time boiled down
to a search for benches cooled by fountain spray.
When a statue shattered, it was rebuilt
according to custom, the new shape
glowing in the alcove. No one could say why
ruin was ruin, not simply abandon,
if it meant slow wilt, an inward sag
to the cupolas, roads worn blue by wheels
a thousand years. While a crowd watched,
a pig was smoked in the square. Its grease slick
along the pietraforte. Wonder slipped to its knees
everywhere we went.

Nicholas Pagano has previously been published in Chronogram, Field Guide, The Windward Review, and elsewhere. He has work forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal. He lives and writes in New York.

by Justin Karcher

I’m stuffing my face with the best
Vietnamese food in Buffalo
when Chris tells me old kidneys
stay inside your body when you have
a transplant. He is skinnier
than the last time I saw him

and I wonder how many of us
will disappear completely
in the months to come.

After dinner, I walk by
the old KeyBank, which is now
a Trump pop-up store
and in the parking lot
shirtless methheads are hotwiring
what’s left of the sun.

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help (Alleyway Theatre). Check out his website: justinkarcherauthor.com.

by Candice Kelsey

I

Atop her stack of cascading bills and letters
like a Polly Pal paperweight or pink
and white gingham kenning its mylar cover

uncharacteristic of the middle-aged woman
gate-keeping my firedrake adolescence
this blond breaker of rings with curved bang

bowl-cut hair helmet as gleamy and round
as her ivory bracelet battle tusks from Thailand
an elephant graveyard stacked like slain

warriors pitching about the Valhalla of her
nacreous forearm and wrist this poached score
of my childhood was a cacophonous death rattle

II

Mornings brought finger snaps be quiet can’t you
see I’m on the phone and every brandish of her fist
heads will roll and the ease of her ball point

strike-through heavy and scriptorium-slow across
the pages moments after hearing the news
of the latest friend or relative no longer around

fingering A-Z tabs for names and addresses
like my godparents Peter and Mary Kunda
at 543 Prospect Avenue Scranton PA now gone

III

Into the earth and out of her cache of Ks they lay
near cousin Frances Klein and Dr. Koursh
each donning my mother’s skull and cross-outs

her casual delineation between the living
and the dead between Christmas cards and ancient
history swift as the tornado in ’79 descending

moments after I stepped from the afternoon
bus with Jane Connors when her own chimney’s
brick struck her head–I wanted to empty her

backpack and take her new supply of erasable
pens pooling like Freyja’s tears the only
hope I had against my mother’s hand in the Cs

Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a writer and educator living in Los Angeles and Georgia. She has been featured in SWWIM, The Laurel Review, Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, and About Place among others. Candice mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Her comfort-character is Jessica Fletcher. Please find her @Feed_Me_Poetry and candicemkelseypoet.com.