by Alison Heron Hruby

this, from a Medical Linear Accelerator (LINAC)

I thought I could breathe well,
that I could draw in my ribs like an expert,
knew the fundamentals in my heart,
to exhale what I did not need.

But a basement machine was patient—
subterranean to keep
gears cold, beams aimed sharply.
Someone else’s idea of keeping life

moving,
as I first thought breath moved.

Metal, paper, thin,
and pleasant sternness,
politely saying:
your intimately held expertise,
you are now mandated to expose.

But say, (instead!) remain a secret, or, maybe
there is expertise more expansive,
it expands beyond your heaviest,
most luscious breath
(your childhood, lollipop breaths).

Those difficult music lessons, the clicking
of a metronome, a doctor needing
to direct me, open your ribs, retract.

The physicist readies a lovely, organ-sized
sphere to cover one, small part of my chest.
The machine murmurs like soil,
Only I know

where to find your heart.

Alison Heron Hruby (she/hers) is a professor of English education at Morehead State University and lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Her poetry is published in Thimble Literary Magazine, Red Tree Review, Sleet Magazine, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, and elsewhere. You can find her on Bluesky @alisonheronhruby.bsky.social and Instagram @alliehope68

by Megan McDermott

after Julia Margaret Cameron’s “2d. version study after the Elgin Marbles”, 1867

where contestants had to pretend to be living
statues, staying very still as pigeons landed
on their heads and arms. What grand traditions
of mimicry! Women mimicking sculptures
mimicking women – layers of pretend.
Here, these women, long dead, are young
forever, invulnerable to jostling or knocked
off limbs or even interruption from the husbands
and children that likely came later. Maybe
we aspire to be statuesque because we dream
of human appearance freed from our defining
places, times, and people. Though of course
these women aren’t alone, but solid in togetherness,
in softness. The touch of their bodies – I would
never think of marble. There is something liquid
even in memorialized life.

Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Richmond, Virginia. Her first full-length collection, Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, was published by Fernwood Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Woman as Communion (Game Over Books) and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating (Ethel Zine and Micro-Press). Her poems have been published in a variety of journals, including the Maine Review, Amsterdam Review, U.S. Catholic, and more. She is a first-year MFA student in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Connect with her at meganmcdermottpoet.com.

by Natalie Marino

I am standing in the corner of a clean
museum where there is a replica
of UCLA’s Powell Library.
With my eye on the highest
window I watch myself happy
sitting in a chair in the film room
watching The Marriage of Maria Braun
and I become a heroine too,
building a life of resilience in the rubble
and reconstruction. I am on a train going
somewhere, dazzling former soldiers
while dancing in a thin slip dress
and pink lipstick. I see myself
young and cunning because the war
is over and I can go wherever I want.
I walk away before the end
of the movie. Whether or not
you stay, the past keeps running up
against the present.

Natalie Marino is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and End of Revels (Bottlecap Press, 2025). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.

by Camille Newsom

everything water
and children swimming
when long lightning sun
splits mother oak in two

fish countries
with gold velvet everything
where walking heavy streets
fixes everything in the head

picnic phrases
like why believe and when
is soft-and-dead coming
to hold our stupid hands

silent minutes
with lake strangers crawling
and looking at striped insects
pleasantly still on stones

knowing nothing
and when asked gently
pointing at the geese
chatting under the tree

Camille Newsom is the author of the chapbook This Suffering and Scrumptious World (Galileo Press, 2023) and Purgatory Junkie (Main Street Rag, 2025). Based in West Michigan, Camille is an educator and land steward who weaves creative practice and curiosity into her work. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Terrain.org, and Southword, among others, and was nominated for Best New Poets 2025.

by nat raum

After “[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]” by Alejandra Pizarnik

soft crisp sizzle of slow destruction
rips across wood tonight and you are
the boards and i am the fire leaving you
expanses of charred obsidian after

my crackles and flickers and tears
like crumpled paper shoved into backpack
by schoolchild so passively suicidal
that the inevitable loss of homework

means nothing that anything outside
of death means nothing the vault
which contains me is dark and deep
and expands with each fatal flaw

i discover but i still know how to crack
the door like my kid self ditching naptime
to scarf lemon creme sandwich cookies
the pulse my body so spitefully insists

upon is surging and burning and twisting
through every vessel and then some
like sneaking out like letting go like violence
is the only thing i ever learned how to come

home to sob scream cry with such affect
i think the sirens outside must be coming
for us the night the flames the ash at every
angle it all must be coming for us

nat raum is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. Their writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Baltimore Beat, Gone Lawn, beestung, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.