by Kyla Houbolt

It’s the canyon wren that sings
outside my window now. The
owl, busy with young,
is quieter. The ground
does not shake but my feet
are not certain. Trying not
to fall makes me long a little
for the animal grace to just
lie down on the earth. The
canyon wren makes a home
in the dead scrumble of briars,
it belongs there, it likes it.
Who’s got time for slow food
or slow facts? The juggernaut
of opinion marches on.
Do I need to say ask me
anything? Do I need to say
accept no substitutes? Oh,
my boundaries, how I
love you. Inside I create
a small safety; the outer
skin is learning
what the world is
when it’s at home.

Kyla Houbolt’s chapbooks include Tuned (CCCP+Subpress), But Then I Thought (above/ground press), Surviving Death (Broken Spine) and Dawn’s Fool (re-issued by above/ground press). Most of her published pieces can be found on her Linktree.  She is on Bluesky @luaz.bsky.social. Other details can be found at kylahoubolt.us.

by Amanda Auchter

Tear down the fence, and watch
as the yard becomes a field.

Walk the yellow
buttercups, the blue morning

glories. There will be mosquitoes
at your ankles.

Some will leave red welts,
but this is a voice

in the distance
chewing its way through

your tenderness. Touch
the tree charred by lightning.

This is you. This is how
you will come to be: fragile,

firestruck, fieldwalker.
You hold the sun’s bright

blaze, a snapdragon
between your fingers.

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, HuffPost, CNN, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a book reviewer for Indianapolis Review and Rhino Poetry. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram as @ALAuchter.

by John Greening

‘Who ever heard of a pleasant dream?
~ Robinson Jeffers

Once again, winding them in and about
the bare branches of our dead apple tree
across the dormant cherry and into an
erupting hazel, I thread buds on a string

trying to recall what pleasant thing
I was searching for in last night’s castle,
unable to retrieve from wherever I buried it
that story with its friendly opening faces.

I twist them up to hang there in the spaces
left by the squirrels and only a vague picture
(like those photos the light had interfered with
in our childhood albums, a ghostly smear)

of a crowd, of a woman taking a broom to clear
display cases, of a hurrying old man
inviting me in Arabic. It all
fades to darkness. But the dream was good.

And so are those pear-drop lights of childhood
that clunk to life and catch for me a distant
era of sweet carols and lit candles
balancing on spruce. This LED

obliterates what it thinks we need not see,
the real stars and their stories, hanging there
like so many irretrievable dreams,
follies a human sky can do without.

John Greening is a British poet, a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty collections, including two from Carcanet. The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor University, USA, ed. Gardner) came out in March. He has edited Geoffrey Grigson, Edmund Blunden, Iain Crichton Smith and U.A.Fanthorpe, plus several critical studies and anthologies, most recently Contraflow: Lines of Englishness. His essays, Vapour Trails, appeared in 2020 and his Goethe translations in 2022 from Arc. There is a forthcoming Rilke. You can connect with John at johngreening.co.uk, on Facebook (john.greening.10), and on Twitter (GreeningPoet).

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