by Hannah Linden

We watched ourselves, snow-clocked tidal
floes in a melting landscape. We were
crystals held together by the cold, our home
disintegrating around us. One by one

we felt ourselves dissolve, disappear
into the brine. The hardest of us
tried to hold on, hoped the sea would
carry us back to where we belonged.

Falling and rising, rising above the salt,
the memory of how much we had known
below the surface growling inside us,
all those pockets we’d kept locked, fizzing

into nothing, our rainbows melting into the blue.
And we added what we could, watered down
the salinity, brought what we could to the mix.
And for a while, we did manage to float above it.

Hannah Linden is a Northern working class writer based in Devon, UK. Her most recent awards are 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press) is her debut pamphlet (shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023) . Hannah is on Twitter/X @hannahl1n.

by Malene Lotz

there’s always
something
moving
under the skin

encasement is required
to feel oneself
against

the dark
will do

soft cheek
against a nightcurtain of sorrow

once a poet couldn’t
sleep
at night
on the wooden floor
of my apartment

she leaned into the nocturnal

her imagination
held
by thin skin

she wrote about butterflies
and wings
that cover
the bellies of birds

flying is never enough

the boats

with their black-brown
steep-iron hulls

they help

rubbing against the sea
at night
in dreams
like a Turner painting

fruits on board
ripening

with a lullaby
from dusk
into dawn

Malene Lotz has been a modern ballet dancer living and teaching intuitive movement in New York. She is Danish, currently living in Denmark north of Copenhagen, and is transforming into a poet.

by Wren Donovan

We choose where to dig
with soft brushes, careful,
string a polygon grid based on rumors.

Smoke-choked and salty, a stalker
in dark rooms, flashlight
over unconscious Eros.

Fluorescent light, stuttering
lays bare the butterfly
buried in bone and debris.

We seek fleshy red-scented certainty,
find only fossils and holes.

Wren Donovan lives in Tennessee. She studied at Millsaps College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and University of Southern Mississippi. Her poetry can be found in Orca, Poetry South, Cumberland River Review, Yellow Arrow, Ink Drinkers, Harpy Hybrid Review, and elsewhere in print and online including WrenDonovan.com.