by Conor Gearin

If I was a
lavender seed, on
gravel or on good soil.
If I was a gull on kitchen
scraps or a pile of
confiscated weed. If I was
a weasel. Or trout.
Setting matters
as much as the species.
In a brook over
blue-gray stones or
the Cuyahoga River
between flare-ups. I can’t
picture a creature without
a place. Then I think of decisions:
where the possum that is me
will get the next garbage scraps,
where are enemies, how will
I hide. The place. The hedge,
the French drain, the tunnels
in the shrubs’ low boughs. If I
was another kind of life, all I see
is questions of where, and scarcity.
I don’t look at my wings. I don’t
look at my lustrous ursine coat.

Conor Gearin is a writer from St. Louis living in Omaha. He’s the managing producer of BirdNote Daily, a daily radio program and podcast. His work has appeared in The New Territory, Chariton Review, ONE ART, Frozen Sea, Mochila Review, The Oxonian Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He’s on Instagram @conorgearin.

by Mathew Yates

nerve-raw as ever you saw,
busted up blue & blooded

like the catfish on the dock,
like the predawn stumble of a

cooper’s hawk hatchling unto the underbrush,
thrust into a corner the color of sky,

falling even on the ground, buried alive
in clouds & condensation & rain,

the mud-flooded drain at the end of the street,
fear-stuck as you’ve ever been struck,

up to your chest in shadow & muck,
there is a cavern in a chasm underneath

the earth, where if you think alone long
enough, you can transform into dirt, or,

curled up green like a seed, you can
reach for the sun like a newborn weed,

or, nerve-raw, fear-struck, full-wept
as you’ve ever been swept, unsleeping like

a burnt log in a bog from an unanswered
sacrifice, like the corpse in the cress,

feeling like the first to ever feel a thing,
full on frightened, stuck-eye on the wall,

you can stagger in place
to no place at all,

rigid as the ridden obsession,
ragged as the wrong-turn road,

crumpled up & creased like the crust of the earth,
& fetched further in yearning than river for rock,

than shiver & shock for a comfortable body,
than the quivering stop for the start of a cry,

rigid as the soaring wing,
ragged as the last flooded dale,

here to take to task the rake
for refusing to let dead leaves decay,

here to worship the maggots in your wounds
for keeping you company in a lonely world,

to keep company in a lonely world
can be a kind of necromancy,

a kind of return, a way back, a recollection,
nerve-raw & rigid, ravenous, in fact

Mathew Yates (they/them) is a disabled poet & artist from Paducah, Kentucky with roots in Mississippi & Appalachia. Their poetry & art can be found in Protean Mag, Ghost City Review, Malarkey Books, Barren Magazine, & more. They live in Indianapolis. They are on Twitter @m_yates on twitter and their website is mathewyates.com.

by Karen Soans

can’t pretend

to love your penchant

for poison chasing

I do not want to spend

the evening

talking to your transformation

but we all have blades

we love to sink into soft flesh

the anaemic mind

will argue itself blind

to taste iron and find home.

Karen is an Indian scientist and aspiring writer living in Germany. She has a PhD in cell biology and uses the Instagram handle @doodlinscientist to share her digital art documenting the highs and lows of experiment and discovery. Her poems explore themes of childhood, anxiety, faith and most recently – motherhood. Her poetry is forthcoming in Penumbra Online, Nightshade Lit Mag and Identity Theory.

by Tom Snarsky

I say are you serious and my phone
googles the angry thing I meant
to say to the debt collector, who has me

on hold. I opened my heart to April
and became a serious liar, full
of dolls and music and more lateral

mistakes than I’m used to making,
five eggs in the from-scratch dough.
If you are invited to a party and do not know

the host, what do you bring? Not Jesus,
dripping with sirens. Not a lathe
even though you could offer to sharpen

every knife in the house.

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025, and the title poem is available to read on Metatron Press’s GLYPHÖRIA platform. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky @tomsnarsky.