by Janis Greve

Yes, I am getting better now
after months of uncertainty,
my lungs, or rather the spaces
around them, filling with fluid.
I’d have them drained
and they’d fill right back up,
making it hard to breathe.
They wouldn’t stop,
and I imagined them
sobbing, a fit of hysterical heaving
that no amount of shushing
could rock away,
no country grandma
like my own so long ago,
the eddying dough of her arms.
Now the shots are working
and week by week
my lungs cry less.
They are finally settling down,
and everyone—
my doctors, my husband—
is pleased, except me,
who had gotten used to
the needle and catheter,
the dutiful warnings about risks
that accompany any procedure,
the awkward posture as I hunched
over the small, shifting table before me
and the doctor extracted the amber ale
no one would care to drink.
How could you, I want to say,
deprive me of this thing I never
asked for, but that gave me a strange
euphoria, a flood I could always count on
rising, silent, from the depths of me,
insisting on its right to appear,
doubly upset, unbalanced, unhinged,
so perfectly inconsolable.

Janis Greve is recently retired English professor. Her poems have appeared in such place as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Emerge Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, North American Poetry Review, The Florida Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other places.

by Gail Zing

acrostic after a line by Judy Chicago

The lines of time copied over and over turned
sight on its side, skin slid off the tray
of her old age body hung in dead animal folds,
my world spun, my
mother’s tipped in a different way to the open
nakedness of youth, her wide surprise
jarred by the mirror’s stranger again and again, was that
me, a stupefied bystander, mouth firmly closed?
I listened to her stories of a crueller era again and
was confronted by my role, how it had turned, again
astonished at what I was already becoming,
at this cool eye of objectification
my strength, my weakness, my
own foolish longing to put to death, her
distress

Gail Zing is an award-winning writer from Aotearoa New Zealand and author of three collections of poetry, including Some Bird, selected for New Zealand Listener best poetry books 2024. She is widely published in places such as Poetry Aotearoa, Cordite Poetry Review, Blue Nib, Landfall and others. When she’s not dreaming up poems in the hills, she’s editing them at the kitchen table, or teaching them at Write On School for Young Writers.

by Vaneeza Sohail

CW: Implied gun violence

Vaneeza Sohail is a writer from Karachi. Her work has been published in Diode Poetry, Wildness Journal and is upcoming in Driftwood Press, Passages North, Lakeer and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, she’s taking photos of cats and flowers. She is on Instagram at @peacharchivist.

by Allison Zhang

I entered with nothing but thirst.
The sand offered no room.

At the checkpoint, a man
with silver eyelids asked for my name.

I gave him three. He swallowed them whole.
Said I could earn one back by walking.

The sky wrote its riddles
in a language I almost remembered.

Birds flew—wings slicing sideways,
eyes stitched shut.

I passed a woman grinding glass
into salt. Her wrists bandaged in gold.

She asked what I came to trade.
I didn’t know what I had left.

The trees whispered
what I should not have known.

I stepped into shadow,
grew taller. Stepped out—

the world no longer fit me. The sun
doesn’t set here, only flickers.

A child held out fruit,
red seeping through her fingers.

She laughed and turned into smoke.
Not all lessons come clean.

At the river, I knelt to drink—
the water whispered a name

I hadn’t spoken in years.
It was no longer mine.

Somewhere behind me, the city folds
like a lung shot through. I don’t look back.

That’s the rule.
Keep walking. Even when

the road turns to teeth.

Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life. She was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, and others. Allison can be found on Instagram.

by Paula Brown

Were you in the dark?
The sun this morning found a hem of beads somewhere beneath white satin.
What was left after the smoldering: a jeweled bodice, seared tufts of desert grass.

Were you alone?
When the match was set alight torching the smooth taffeta between your fingers–
Your feet deep in sand while flames arose amid crisscrossed tracks of coyotes and rattlesnakes.

Tell me how your rage fell off a cliff and tumbled into this unlikely scene.
Tell me how betrayal is a brutal beast fit for uncommon consequence.
Even now what remains sparks a reflection of something passionate and beautiful.

You must have been a dazzling bride.

Paula Brown’s poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in South Dakota Magazine, Adirondack Review, Whitefish Review, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Anthology Nature, and Letters I’ll Never Send Anthology among others. She and her husband live in Arizona with a pack of dachshunds that run the place. Paula is on Instagram @yesvanillabean, Bluesky @azpaula.bsky.social, and Facebook @doxzen.