by Adam Haver

A train of geese
tugged
by an invisible
hand,
along a track
of stars.

They sound like
gossip,
if gossip had
wings,
and complained
of wind.

Adam Haver is a poet living in the Rocky Mountains. His poetry received the Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry and an award from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. His writing has been featured in Popshot Quarterly, Poetry Scotland, Ballast, and elsewhere. He is deeply interested in wolf conservation and enjoys exploring languages by translating their verse. You can connect with him on X: @ac_haver.

by Dr. Alice Twemlow

Droppings—green, chalked.
Goose duty for a morgen’s sward
of plush grass grazed
before arrowing on south.

Logs, bundles, tumble.
Unfastening into the brack water,
where salt meets sweet
and clay slip-silts its cycle.

Deposits dissolve.
Phosphates prosper, mineral milk spills
scud the puddles,
exchange with counterfeit clouds.

Soft compost, still strives
Though the third tide seeps, tithes due;
skewing skyward
with each plunge-suck of my boot.

Droppings—in suspension.
Solute seeds yearn to disperse
over the dyke,
boot-boosted to drier muds.

British-born Dr. Alice Twemlow lives in The Netherlands where she leads the Design & the Deep Future readership, a project situated at the intersection of design history, creative practice research, and the environmental humanities that seeks to contribute interventions and imaginaries to climate justice research. Twemlow is a member of the Amsterdam-based International Writers Collective. One of her poems was chosen as one of the seven Honorary Mentions in the 2021 Fish Poetry Prize. She is writing a series of poems about punctuation marks and a novel about a cantankerous octogenarian wild swimmer with a dark secret, which is based on the events of the Great Flood which decimated much of the south of the Netherlands in 1953. She is on Instagram @alicetwemlow

by Bobbi Lurie

don’t die so easy pilfering pills
still wanting to live hanging on
by a thread reprimanding myself lack
of courage brings deep regret service
to others is the first rule
seeing this homeless woman on the
street in front of me murder
me murder me murder me and
those who emulate but spare themselves
a letter such as this requires
so much silence inside me now
those who emulate but spare themselves
when the light goes down it
is best to keep your brilliance
hidden from view my broken body

Bobbi Lurie is the author of four poetry collections: The Book I Never Read, Letter from the Lawn, Grief Suite, and the morphine poems.

by Dale Cottingham

Searing, seared: where he shrivels from her
after trying one last time. One way the self, having
grown used to a surround, sees it—

suddenly, starkly, stunned by it—

for what it is.

Outside, cars, trucks on the Interstate
downshift, over-shift, make efforts to slow down,
speed up, heading to a future,
what can be bright, or painful,
yet to be written.

There’s a passing that we sometimes stumble
into, sometimes we think we know what to do. There are
shadows that come overhead, burden us for a time, then leave.
He lies flat on his back, silent but thoughts race,
more than electric, more than lucid, more like
hitting bottom, like he’s reached a crossroad:
how will he live now.

Dale Cottingham has published poems and reviews of poetry collections in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, Ashville Poetry Review and Rain Taxi. He is a Pushcart Nominee, a Best of Net Nominee, the winner of the 2019 New Millennium Award for Poem of the Year and was a finalist in the 2022 Great Midwest Poetry Contest. His debut volume of poems Midwest Hymns, launched in April, 2023. It is a finalist in the 2023 Best Book Awards for Poetry. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.

by Shome Dasgupta

Green and yellow—a sparked field
where we taped four leaf clovers
together, forgetting the meaning
of living at home and pondering
magical ways to steal ice cream
from the pink and purple and blue
truck coming around the turn—
we run with our hands together.
We run with pebbles in our palms,
asking for the cheapest cardboard
cups of vanilla with chocolate syrup.

We were royalty under the sun
—under the sun we were hidden
from shadowed jaws and crumbled
teeth. A melody to bounce in our
heads when the bed covers tore,
full of holes leading to our fears.
How one Sunday, with our faces
covered in swirls of amnesia,
I looked at you when no one else
was looking, knowing that once
upon a time in the future—past
rooster’s crow and beyond wired
knotted fences, cut from our own
skin, we’ll marry the moon’s tongue.

Side by side, that tune hummed
from our breaths—through windows,
a fox darted to the pond to amuse
minnows, where we once fished
for stars after a reckoning, years
ago. Fingers clasped and puzzled:
in the bronzed straw plain, hearing
our childhood tremors sinking,
diminished—to taste sprinkles,
a past echo resting in our mouths.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), a prose collection, Histories Of Memories (Belle Point Press), a short story collection, Atchafalaya Darling, and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.