by Mitchell Nobis

Earthworms the color of oil spills
carry my prayers through tunnels—
some wild
will survive.

My prayers ride wild through a darkness
that has no word, has no light by
which to
contrast itself,

like the dark between galaxies, no definition
without what it’s not. Sinew & mass, sleep.
The deep
earthworm world

somewhere far under the pounding thud
we churn and wrench and build up here.
A wild without
and within.

My prayers slide through soil, fill on minerals & microbes,
alive. Some turn mulch but some of my prayers
huddle into masses,
turn their

tomb into a chrysalis—carry the formless dreams
of what we never became.

The others
I pray

May my prayers tunnel deep & deeper;
may my prayers seep into boulders
buried & left
behind by

glaciers that gouged this land when it
was crumpled together and carved.
My prayers
wait until

glaciers come back for them again.
My prayers wait
for glaciers
after Time.

My prayers wait
to someday slip upward
through the tunnels,
to someday see light again,
to someday whisper
Thank you. I’m sorry. It was beautiful. Thank you.

Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 teacher in Metro Detroit. His poetry has been nominated for things by Whale Road Review, Nurture Literary, and Exposition Review. His collection Beginning to Sense is forthcoming from ELJ Editions (2025). He facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series, and co-founded the NAWP reading series. Find him at @MitchNobis (various platforms) or mitchnobis.com.

by Jessie Lynn McMains

i.

Name me woman and I’ll open up my chest and show you the wind; April wind, its easterly flow.
Call me man and I’ll lift my skirt and show you the fly-trap dogbane,
its poison lilac threading the polluted riverbank. Call me and I’ll show you the river,
Kinnickinnic, the mixing-together. All the trash I picked and the fish, salmon and trout, their
return, gathering. Name me gathering-place and I’ll show you the place where the freights
screeeee past on the overhead tracks; the androgynous dark beneath.
Call me girl and I’ll show you the sunken tugboat full of sailor ghosts, the river rats,
the raccoons in their bandit masks, the little boy who played pirate with a sword-
stick. Name me boy and I’ll show you this mermaid, his river; this dark, the wind.

ii.

Name me. I’ll open. My chest, the wind—easterly.
Call me skirt and fly-trap, poison lilac. Polluted riverbank.
Call me river, Kinnickinnic. Trash-fish. Gathering-place.
I’ll show you. The freights, the tracks. The androgyne. Dark
beneath. Girl sailor. Ghost river. Bandit boy. Who played pirate?
I’ll show you this—mermaid. This river-dark. This wind.

iii.

Name me: April, early, lilac. Fly-trap. Trash. Fish-place.
Freights on tracks. The beneath. Place where pirates played
with boys. Mermaid-river. Androgynous dark. The wind.

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Jessie Lynn McMains (they/she) is a poet, writer, spoken word performer, zine maker, and artist, amongst other things. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently Wisconsin Death Trip (Bone & Ink Press, 2020) and Left of the Dial (Scumbag Press, 2022). She was the 2016-17 Racine Poet Laureate, and the July-December 2021 Racine Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Hal Prize for Poetry, and her poem “[Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember…]” received an Editor’s Choice commendation in the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. When she’s not creating, you can find her wandering her neighborhood, haunting the stacks of the library, or playing music with her husband and kids. You can find more at her website recklesschants.net, or on Instagram and Tumblr @rustbeltjessie.

by Alison Hurwitz

In the story no one knows, she gets up before it’s light, makes instant oatmeal, fills
her flask of water, unplugs and lugs her vacuum, charged and ready to inhale. The car
won’t start (it has been stalled a thousand years) and so she rides the bus to her department

of the desert, walks to where she works, Dustbuster bumping every hardened rut. Begins.
Drenched in sweat within five minutes, she thinks of Sisyphus, his gritted teeth and silicated
tongue, straining slowly up the rise. He’s held his rock so long, she thinks he has forgotten

her own name. For centuries, she’s been too tired to remind him, too busy sucking
and disgorging dunes to shape the words. Heat rises, breaking waved mirages
on her skin, the vacuum handle slipping, sweaty in her palm.

She squints through shimmer almost glass, almost mirror. If she let herself reflect, maybe
she’d be another woman, one who could unbind her hair and snake it free. What if
she could excavate until she found a buried voice, one loud enough to call herself by name?

Sand spreads out to meet the heat-bleached sky. Her filter’s clogged again. Sand in every
swallow. Far off, her husband’s figure goes on heaving up a hill. He won’t look up, see
she’s also trudging, also sinking, flayed by desert light. She lets the hours drift, their

dessicated bones. She could refuse to work, of course. But rent and food, and one day,
fix the fricking car. The grit of crystals stings her skin. Tonight, the rock will sit there silent
at the table, will roll with them to bed. Undressed, the wife of Sisyphus looks in the mirror,

sees a sand-filled hourglass. Particles cascade and shine around her feet, each one etched
a perfect shape, a tremor in the breath, a constellated wish. Later, she will feel her husband shift
to stroke her thigh, the burl of callus in his touch. In the dark, he’ll whisper how he almost

lost his rock and panicked, how it slipped away, went rolling, how he had to run to grasp it
back, scraped his hands until bright bits of pyrite infiltrated blood like stars. She wishes.
More than she could ever count, or name.

If the long lines of this poem are breaking badly in your browser, please click here to open a PDF file.

Featured/Upcoming in Rust and Moth, River Heron Review, SWWIM Every Day, Thimble, Carmina Magazine, The South Dakota Review, ONE ART, and Gyroscope Review, Alison Hurwitz is a two-time 2023 Best of the Net Nominee, and founder/host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. She lives with her family in North Carolina. Find Well-Versed Words on FB at facebook.com/Iambicreative, and read more of her work at alisonhurwitz.com.

by Drew Pisarra

I thought that we’d tie the knot and not
just figuratively but forever for real
because I was single and you were hot

and we saw one another as each other’s last shot
at romance, at soulmates, at a quasi-real deal.
I thought that we’d tie the knot and not

as a tie that binds but the kind that’s got
elasticity with hugging loops that won’t unreel.
Because I was single and you were hot

mostly under the collar, your anger shot
up and burnt right through us with vicious zeal.
I thought that we’d tie the knot, and not

that we’d end tied up in knots. I forgot
love can torture like a Catherine Wheel.
Because I was single and you were hot

we fell for each other on the spot
‘til our sweet-ass mush turned to cold oatmeal.
I thought that we’d tie the knot
and not because I was single and you were hot.

Drew Pisarra is the author of two sonnet collections, Periodic Boyfriends and Infinity Standing Up; two short story collections, You’re Pretty Gay and Publick Spanking; and two radio plays, The Strange Case of Nick M. and Price in Purgatory. His is @mistermysterio on TwitterX and Instagram.

by Colby Meeks

Smeared in dabs across your lips, like cutting too-sweet
berries. Like decorative and forgotten. I don’t want to tell you
for fear of watching you be gentle and genteel with a paper
napkin. I have a handkerchief in my coat, let me clean you.
I have a craving, let me clean you. Softly. Let me be gentle
this time. Let me be the one with tender touch and fingers
poised in polite and proper arrangements. Or we can forgo
fingers and dignities and unstarched cotton altogether.

Aren’t you tired of trying? Let me taste away the mess you have
made until we have forgotten why we believed either of us
dirty to begin with. Let me taste away the mess you have made
until I am only tasting you. And we can speak only in silence:
my coat fallen to the wayside, your fingers tugging on the hem
of my sweater, my nails rounding the edges of your shirt buttons.
Moving in something like slow motion, as to say this is worth
savoring. As to say I mean every single word I am not saying.

But if you want me to, I can say everything there is worth saying.
I can call you baby or darling or lover. Everything, if you let me.
How silly to think even a mess of something not meant to stand alone
can be so beautiful. How silly to think I could be silent with you,
as though somehow restraint is more sentimental than all of this.
Our skins and fingers and lips seeking out some total coalescence
is something worth saying aloud like I want to say your name aloud
like I want to say I love you like I love you, I love you, Iloveyou.

Colby Meeks (he/him) is an Alabama poet currently pursuing a degree in English from Harvard University. His work appears in Bending Genres Journal, Lavender Bones Magazine, Eunoia Review, and The Lickety~Split. His debut chapbook, DADDY, I’M SORRY, I CANNOT WRITE AN ELEGY, is forthcoming from Penumbra Press. He can be found on Twitter @babysbbreath.