by Chiara Di Lello

First, know that I bear you no ill will.
Of all the things that have happened to me
without my knowledge, you are one of the kindest.
You will not leave me wrecked or vengeful,
second guessing quiet moments with a feeling
like shadow hands drawstringing my throat.
You and your swallowings-yet-to-come are a reminder
that we can say we love truth only to a point
after that it’s like the Woody Allen quote: I’m not afraid
to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Spiders, just see to it that I’m not there when you happen.
Let me enjoy my sleep and my recurring dream
where I float as if on one of your silken tethers.
When your delicate legs eight, seven, six
pass five, four, three between my lips two, one
make sure I don’t know a thing, wound up tight
in dreamlessness. When your tiny glints of eye
stare up the hollow of my esophagus like it’s Plato’s cave
as far as I’m concerned I know nothing of spiders
or secrets, no lines of insidious light beneath shut doors.
The truth is I envy you, spiders, even knowing I am your end.
I have walked out after a late, slow darkness fell
and found the night a living breathing thing
but only you will feel it grant that engulfing wish:
to take the beautiful sturdiness of your body
and swallow you whole.

Chiara Di Lello is a writer and educator. She delights in public art, public libraries, and getting improbable places by bicycle. For a city kid, she has a surprisingly strong interest in beekeeping. Find her recent poems in Variant Lit, Whale Road Review, and Across the Margin, among others. Twitter: @thetinydynamo.

by Jack B. Bedell

—after Francesca Woodman’s Eel Series, 1978

is what we can never be:
pure curve. Even in a simple
bowl, it bends itself infinitely, spirals
against itself forever, without
its lines coming to an end,
or to angles that find themselves
trapped in every part of us
no matter how gracefully
we place our bodies on
the floor surrounding it.
 

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. He has also had work included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

by Robert Okaji

Trigger alert: I’m dying. I am dying,
and nothing will change that, not philosophy,
not chemicals, not will. Not even the sky
nor the ground it beguiles somewhere out of sight.
Consider the horizon as loneliness,
as line curved through eyeshot and smoke. As nexus
of sun and diagnosis. Of relief and
slumber, pain and my wife’s smile when she kisses
me goodnight. I am dying, and I cannot
picture the universe without me, or me,
nonexistent, bodiless, simply not there.

Robert Okaji was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer. He lives, for the time being, in Indiana, and his work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Vox Populi, Big Windows Review, and elsewhere. Robert is on X @robertokaji.

by Candice Kelsey

Broken again, littlest
one throbbing
its fight song pink, loud
like hunger or identity
and the big toe shifts
like my father in a chair
at Sunday sessions
mandatory at the EDU
for a daughter in treatment
circle of silent wedges
father unhappy as
the neighbor’s cat Blue
who hates her home
bounds up cement stairs
where I sit with today’s
plate of oranges
halved she capsizes
a feline Michelangelo
painting the Sistine or God
and blots my toe
with a cool bingo nose
she too knows injury
touches the gnarled-speck
perimeter of my foot
now a flesh canvas
cathedral scene on a ceiling
and I am broken
by a hundred Adams
awful fools busy naming
the garden of my body—
it’s the world
that catches the fragile
on sharp corners
hobbles us unsuspecting
mid-step a broken cuneiform
tablet remnant
of private dislocations
and yet
like this little piggy
some of us make it home
somehow I make it
all the goddamn way

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist from Ohio and living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. Her work appears in Passengers Journal, Variant Literature, and The Laurel Review among others. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice is a mentor for incarcerated writers through PEN America and serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Find her at candicemkelseypoet.com.

by Susan Barry-Schulz

When I finally get my MRI report back the results
are unremarkable. No acute fracture. No soft tissue

mass. No evidence of disproportionate atrophy.
Vertebral body heights are well maintained;

lumbar disc contours preserved. Minimal this & that.
A quick nod to the exquisite forces of gravity plus

time and their combined inescapable consequences.
But nothing hitting a nerve. No indication

of anticipatory grief. No sign of a swallowed
sorrow. No traces of shrapnel buried in the heavy

muscle of the heart. No evidence of a course-
grained granite boulder wedged deep in the marrow

of the sternum. No suggestion of a foreign body
clamped across the frozen dome of the diaphragm.

No shadows of a crescent wrench cinched
tight across the base of the buzzing skull. Outside

the cool tube the technician inquires about my musical
preferences. No seventies, I say. I was a child

of the 70s. I don’t want to go back to those days.
Head-phoned and holding the squeezable panic

button close to my chest, I’m whisked in and out
of a thick thudding gleaming. On leaving, I want

to tell him I think it might be the undetectable
that’s killing me. What we can’t see. A holy

host of invisible spinning matter conspiring
to bring me to my knees.

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness. Her poetry has appeared in SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Rogue Agent, Shooter Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, Iron Horse Literary Review, West Trestle Review, and in many other print and online journals and anthologies. You can find her on Twitter at @suebarryschulz.