by Caroline Shea

Every three days, a beast like me
dies on the track.Starving, tangle-limbed,
I’m all legand bite. Pearl-grey gleam gone dull,
I run for no otherreason but the running. Long since lure-
wise, I play at predation.Clockwork jackrabbit. Gear-blooded hare.
The aim is not capture (impossiblealways) but pursuit. Something like the gravel
of a growl in the throat. Or the snapand glide of a body leaving earth
—however briefly—for the blue-starched strip of sky.
An instinct entered into memorylong before form finished with me,
unquestioned until the years and achesaccumulate, stopper movement like mud.
Not desire, but something deeper.Bred for the chase, I’ll always look better
in motion—an object in unisonwith its use. Don’t pretend you’ve never wanted to be
useful. Or rather, to be needed.A temporary prize: eventually, we’re all
incidental. Years from now, when my joints rustinto stillness, I’ll dream of the self swallowed whole
by its action, arthritic paws twitchingin sleep’s sunless hunt. Place your bets, gentlemen.
I won’t disappoint. Or forget.The sweat-stale pens. The crowd’s rough clamor.
The thin sheen between being necessaryand being used.

Caroline Shea is the author of Lambflesh. Her work has previously appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Narrative Magazine, and Rogue Agent, and was longlisted for the Fractured Magazine Novel Excerpt Prize.

by Garth Pavell

We sat in the April afternoon
waiting for the moon’s round
ass to fit into a blue sundress.

Neighbors I had never seen,
picnicked in the courtyard;
even the mail-lady chatted.

I saw a dog with solar eclipse
glasses contemplate the black
bird pacing a branch of a tree.

Perhaps they could not
express they felt pitted
dark dig inside the day.

Suddenly the bird was not
afraid to sing; we cheered
for the little guy in the sky.

Garth Pavell’s poems can be found in the recent issues of Epiphany, Ghost City Review, Hobart and Rise Up Review. Garth worked in corporate publishing where he learned everything is negotiable. He now writes with the sun in his eyes on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Connect on Instagram: @garth_and_the_unwieldys.

by Edie Meade

Pressed on through a drift of Styrofoam pebbles on my way to the beach.
Felt like crying but didn’t; cranked the radio to live with the burn.
Live inside the burn. The sky is acid-wash, fresh-skinned before the fade.
How profound the simple things are: sea, sky, death, it’s always death with me,
sussing life’s fractions out to the lowest common denominator.
By 2050, every seabird will eat plastic. I can relate.
Sometimes I think the planet seethes at what we’ve done; we had so much time—
but I’m projecting. Microplastics barnacle my artery walls.
No one wanted this. I wish we could repay the pipers with beach. Still,
container ships, quilted like shanty towns, wash to blue in the distance
and the shells look like Lee Press-Ons lost in struggle. A gorgeous crime scene.
Come a day I can’t find the beauty in the beast, I’ll cease to exist.
For now, the sea goes on tossing in her sleep, remembering, forgetting,
hot flashes cooking silver fish in the only world they’ve ever known.

Edie Meade is a writer in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been recently published in Room Magazine, Invisible City, The Harvard Advocate, JMWW, The Normal School, and Litro. Edie is can be found on Twitter, Instagram,  and Threads. Her website is ediemeade.com.

by Damaris West

The dame was ninety-nine, never reached
a hundred, or hatched the balled-up tissue egg
on the blue cushion of her chair.

It was serious business being my parents’ child.
I had a folding table, a wire tray
and a fat crayon, blue one end and red

the other. First: strings of loops like paper dolls.
Then croquet hoops between parallel bars.
Columns. Carrying and borrowing. Queuing

for ticks or crosses but the queue
could be dismissed for talking
to start again. Life was arbitrary.

Sometimes a gold star and a boiled sweet
from a jar, fishing for green.
Twenty-five stars meant a two-and-sixpenny token

that bought an artificial flower in Eden Lilley.
But stars could be “crossed off.”
At break in the basement kitchen –

a plastic cup of milk
and squashed-fly biscuits – there were
poppies in a vase. One drooping petal

dropped. I was accused.
Oh, the agony of forfeiture.
The grievance.

Note: Dame schools were a phenomenon of the UK, in which a sole lady teacher taught young children, often in her own home, concentrating on the 3Rs.

Originally from England where she worked variously as a librarian, tutor, and director of a tuition agency, Damaris West now lives near the sea in south-west Scotland. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications such as Snakeskin, The Lake, Dreich, Blue Unicorn, Ink, Sweat & Tears, and The Friday Poem, and has been placed in several national or international competitions. Her debut pamphlet is due to appear next year with Yaffle Press. Her website is damariswest.site123.me.

(and so slowly you unwind me ’til I fall apart)

by Ankh Spice

It’s decades since. We’d absconded from the ward,
two not-deads gone wanderwild. Some nights you hear
the unspool, the moment the hand lets go
of the ribbon. How each throw scribbles the map.
This spill seems a new roadway, an unjammed strip.
We drive moebius, then the wind snarls up
any forward in hedgerow, thorn. Rest highway, rest river,
gleaming brown with tarry light: we write music here
so briefly, ask those shining things to remember it
whenever we fear the erase. All we long-
haired boys, said that other kid travelling through
his cutting web of unwound, slow-leaking song. Story
in the corridor goes he made it to the silence and back
bewildered and bleeding and everyone just asked him
about angels. About light. I said we were music, I said
all along, we tried tuning to that original chord.
If we were patient, we’d sit and splice what we find caught
on the margins – stop pretending we have the same setlist
from the start, get everyone playing like we mean it
to last: come obsolescence, come the Next Big Thing,
come this unplanned encore. But we’re not.
One end’s a hard case, endless flip-and-repeat, stuck
to the wheel. The other’s some flickering score
of loose ends—unread fate-lines in the palm
of a roadside wind. Hey, before you let go—
it’s true. There’s always a hidden track.

Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa, author of The Water Engine (Femme Salvé Books, 2021). His poetry is mostly about the brief weirdness of being a person – but then, isn’t all of it? Ankh has co-edited at Ice Floe Press, been a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine, a guest editor for Black Bough Poetry, and is currently part of the amazing team at Sidhe Press. He shares poems, oddness and sneaky sideways glimpses of his brain vs. the world on Bluesky. Ankh is also on Facebook and has a website.