by Lynne Jensen Lampe

golden shovel after joni mitchell’s down to you

words can’t paint everything
this side of the glass :: blood comes
with its own poetry &
each line leaks iron & loneliness :: tangoes
till one pane cracks :: i choose pleasure
in strange skin or the give & take that moves
two souls :: held in the space between :: krypton
gas shields me from desire too
hot & ragged as new teeth :: early
chains prison the other’s pain &
in the space between we blue-light trouble
flicker off & on till one leaves
a heart fogged & dusty & opening too
slow

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s poetry appears or will appear in Kenyon Review, Okay Donkey, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), an Eric Hoffer winner and finalist for the McMath Award, concerns mother-daughter relationships and mental illness. She lives with her husband and two dogs in mid-Missouri, where she edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and is a founding member of Dame Good Writers. Lynne’s website is at lynnejensenlampe.com and her Instagram is @lynnejensenlampe.

by Susan Grimm

The dead crowd the table thickly, criticize our meat. They give
off a low dark buzz. Floating like stodgy balloons, they wobble-

perch on their usual chairs. If they could pick up a spoon,
add just a little salt. I want them the same, not purged

of their flaws. Their wrongnesses so small, you could hide them
under a plate.I would like to hear once more the underwear

argument (civil), the story of riding the pig. Witness the ritual
coffee slop. I’m glad I joked through their dying and their dead.

Oh, I could not be pulled into the well of grief or ever
get out. I saw it from the corner of my eye. All the water

of purpose and sweat and love, heavy and drenching.

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

beginning with an image from Ada Limón’s “It Begins in the Trees”

There is the blue blow up pool
filled with hose-cool water

& sand sticking to the yellow
plastic bucket years ago

put up on a shelf, red shovel
lost to the tides

& there is the wide wild grove
somewhere in memory

filled with poplars    perhaps
sunflowers bowing    or maybe

there is a field of corn late
in autumn    even the time of year

up for grabs    malleable
what the heart holds    it holds

despite rebuttals from blurred photos
home movie reels or grandma’s pshaws

& there are chrysanthemums
growing in the past

that move like a storm blowing in
& snow that puddles into smudged ink

no matter    the tilt-a-wheel of earth spins
on & on    & peaches keep returning juicy

so even your tired hands lined with age
become sticky as a map of wonder

Lana Hechtman Ayers has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The London Reader, One Art, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a former coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night. From her home in Oregon, on clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon. Say hello to her @lanaayers23.bsky.social or on her website LanaAyers.com.

by Arda Ohannessian

On the slow deep shoulder of your hill
cedar tree moon silhouette and the bear’s
nocturnal climb is deliberate and slow

see little mole bump groundling here
or a cheek’s dimple in a sweet dream
as you soft speak in lolly-tongue sleep

the sun is waiting still past midnight
under its northern midsummer line

and the sky paling stars now awake
awake my love the dawn belongs to us.

Arda Ohannessian (he/him) lives in Ryde, Isle of Wight, UK. He was born in Jerusalem, of English and Armenian heritage and moved to the UK in the mid-eighties. The long Covid lock-down of winter/spring 2021 gave him the impetus to start writing poetry again, which he had basically stopped doing after his twenties and he hasn’t stopped since. His first publication was last summer in Figlet.

by Christa Fairbrother

I told him I’ve been
to Australia, pet
the koalas, and
they’re really not
soft, but scratchy. They
smelled like greasy, grey
linens. I described
the rehab center
where sick koalas,
rested, like a spa
day, then went home, back
to the forest when
they felt better. He
looked at these glassed-in
koalas, lumpy
small pillows asleep
on their fake trunks, leaves
taped on for easy
eating, the sky-blue,
blue-gum tree mural,
then looked up at me,
blinked. I might as well
have told him once, I
borrowed the blue moon
to play baseball with
friends. Why pitched-out, we
glued the moon back up,
higher for bright nights.

Christa Fairbrother, MA, has had poetry in Arc, Epiphany, Pleiades, and Salamander, among others. Currently, she’s Gulfport, Florida’s poet laureate, and she’s been a finalist for the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, The Prose Poem Competition, The Wilder Prize, and was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Connect with her at christafairbrotherwrites.com, on IG @christafairbrotherwrites, or on Bluesky @christafairbrother.