by Mark Dunbar

I put my foot down
a little too hard—crows
fly up in my face,
leaves shake, branches.

I hang my picture from a tree
and watch water fill
my footsteps.

How did they get so deep?
I don’t remember climbing out.
The ants have run away.
The geese have flown.

It’s time to start the bucketing.
The light says so.
Something’s there—I can tell
by the ripples,
the small, almost imperceptible
waves over a shoal.

I search all night
for the right bucket,
meaning years,
and you can believe me,
or not—
none of them were right.

So now I use my hands
to rescue what may be
a mess of honey,
a bed of nettles,
or perhaps
the frightful face
of some old god

its bone-lit inner fire
still glowing,
who says,
you may pass.

Mark Dunbar lives outside Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent, Corvus Review, Bicoastal Review and the Ekphrastic Review, among others. He attended Kenyon College where he was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award. You can fins him on Facebook (@mdunbar007) and Instagram (@mdunbar001)

by Andrew Kozma

The ocean at my door, the desert in my chest.
All of our letters pulped and ready for the compost.

Love was a question. The dark water’s the answer.
Everything in the sewers washed out to sea

returned with the tide. Dirty diapers, empty bottles,
enough nail clippings to build a snowman. A clip man. A man,

man. Disasters are easier to handle if you embrace
that the disaster was always with you, carrying your body

across the broken glass, one bloody trail of footprints.
Too much water poisons the water, flooded streets

unsafe to drink or even wade through. Is this love,
too? you ask, as I shiver uncontrollably, a fever

nodding my head. A hurricane plus a flood, a narrow breath
of non-water between. Buying groceries on a Sunday, unmasked.

Andrew Kozma’s poems appear in Rogue Agent, Redactions, and Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction appears in Apex, ergot, and Seize the Press. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at andrewkozma.net.

by Adam Gianforcaro

Gestation and chamomile flower:
I am my mother again. Notice now

how many times one can near death.
Birth, blood loss, someone else’s sick

pushed through, pushed into.
Which is to say: open window,

wind’s open mouth, a phone call
from childhood. The water is warm

and remains so. I sink into it,
think: womb again. A breeze

from the next room, a scythe
parting the drapery. I have learned

that panic passed down is a form
of survival: the gift of hardening

despite wrinkle-soft fingers. To perceive
far past the drip-drop faucet.

There’s an empty tub when the shadow
steps in, the water scarcely rippled.

Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day (Thirty West, 2023). His work can be found in The Offing, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Delaware.

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.