by Zoe Davis

I watch as they throw babies

Into swimming pools on Facebook reels

How quickly they turn

And bob

Cork bodies

Buoyant youth determined

Bald-pated grizzle

It’s for their own good

That they learn

To float

To stargaze

The sky is just a different mobile

Placid water cot

Love has built walls around

They giggle

Swim back to the arms

That threw them in.

Zoe Davis is an emerging writer from Sheffield, England. A quality engineer in advanced manufacturing by day, she spends her evenings and weekends writing poetry and prose, and especially enjoys exploring the interaction between the fantastical and the mundane, with a deeply personal edge to her work. You can find her words both published and forthcoming in publications such as: Acropolis Journal, Strix, Illumen Magazine, Full House Literary and Broken Antler. You can also follow her on X @MeanerHarker where she’s always happy to have a virtual coffee and a chat.

by Han VanderHart

I circle the cemetery
to both schools, and back
say good morning
to the dead
lodestone among us:
silent, unsoliciting, present
hawks and pines
have entered my life before
as deep image
but now it is the night train
and its whistle
dream where I am lost
in a large station
train running beside me
on the way to work
and the dead
and their headstones
by the gas station
and the train
and the way
we are all travelling
circling the cemetery
in the winter sunlight
children in the back seat
fingerprinting the windows
living and tired
and needing
to lay their heads
on my chest
in the evening,
the light short
and the dark early

Han VanderHart is a genderqueer writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry podcast and co-edits the poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey. SM: @hanvanderhart.bsky.social

by C. C. Rayne

I have no one to hold
when I die, so I want
to hold myself,

hand in the hand of
my endless lover,
sometime child,
often sculptor.

This life has been
a possession
in that I owned it and
in that I was a body
and I often felt that
I possessed myself, naught but
a ghost, I possessed myself,

through my limbs and
between throat and hipbone
lived not a me but a myself,
and I was witness.

And younger, I felt
that death would fit best
if I was one of two skeletons,
those pictures they found
from Rome of two people,
all bone intertwined side to side.

But now, I face that I will die alone,
which is true, but not alone
for I am a body and
I am myself holding myself,
will be holding myself,
like a lover lowering down
the dear first corpse,
then carrying down their own.

C. C. Rayne (@cc_rayne) is a writer, actor, and creator from the East Coast of the USA. C. C.’s work tends to blend the magical with the mundane, and the silly with the strange. C. C’s stories can be read in such places as The Deeps, The Razor, HAD, Sublunary Review, and Demons & Death Drops: An Anthology of Queer Performance Horror. C. C.’s poetry can be read in Rough Cut Press, Soft Star Magazine, Eye to the Telescope, and moth eaten mag.

by Christopher Martin

Autumn piles up in the basket.
Light layered in silver scales, longing
for salt; sound
of a fillet knife sharpening
flat against stone.
Clouds prep white plates,
Hunter’s Moon polishes silverware
with damp breath.
Bulging eyes stare, hooked somewhere
beyond the coming and going.
I look directly into one—
it doesn’t blink.

Christopher Martin is a poet and Buddhist living by the mouth of the Tyne on the north east coast of England. His work has been featured in various publications. His debut collection, In The Likeness Of The Upper Air, is due out 2024 from The Black Cat Poetry Press. Christopher can also be found on Twitter @martintimation1 and Instagram @martintimations.

by Pat Hale

Try bread. Try water.
Try reaching further
than you think you can.

Hold your breath, close your eyes
and imagine that translucent sliver of bone,
how it arced and twisted and caught in your throat.

Imagine its movement
to a place of lesser pain.

Imagine you or someone
had paid better attention,
taken more time.

Think of how the tip of a knife
can cleanly dissect sliver from flesh,
a complete and perfect separation.

Imagine that before you started,
you or someone
had made a pile of the tiny bones,

counted them
and swept them all away,
each fragile, tenacious bone.

Pat Hale’s publications include the poetry collections, Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed, and Composition and Flight. Her work appears in Calyx, Connecticut River Review, Lily Poetry Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and many other journals, and is anthologized in Forgotten Women, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, and elsewhere. She has been awarded CALYX’s Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and first prize in the Al Savard Poetry Competition. She lives in Connecticut, where she serves on the board for the Riverwood Poetry Series.