by Mandy McHugh

The ghosts I made are loud and lost
but rarely lonely.
Holding the past,
I keep them
in my presence
slick and dripping
in a sheen of sweat-laced regrets.
I wear them around my neck
like the pearls I never owned
or the silk noose
of his tie.
I take them black
in my coffee,
neat in my whiskey,
but heavy in my crown—
the obsidian weight drowning
out their whispers.
Please,
they say.
Please,
I agree,
counting the stones again.

Mandy McHugh is an author from Upstate NY. Her debut novel, Chloe Cates Is Missing, was one of Popsugar’s Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2022. Her sophomore thriller, It Takes Monsters, is forthcoming in October 2023. When she isn’t writing, Mandy enjoys running, car karaoke, and experimenting with various recipes with her two children. You can find Mandy on Twitter (@WriterACMcHugh), TikTok (@authormandymchugh), and IG (@acmchughwriter), as well as her website, mandymchugh.com

by Jane Zwart

My dad complains that it is the same monsters
again and again. Almost everything, he says,
looks like an animal or a man. A dragon is a lizard,
a zombie the smear left of homo erectus.

There is so little in horror we cannot trace back
to an ordinary beast: shark, snake, doberman, bear.
Occasionally, the predator is mostly mouth,
of course, carnivorousness where speech should be,

rows of teeth at the opening of a tube that both
suctions and screams. But the best monsters
either look like us or like the dark churn
of something more gray than age or smoke or ash.

The best monsters: like us or like a sky hungrier
than a mouth. My dad is not complaining, really,
about our shallow imaginations, about the sameness
of the creatures we conjure to scare ourselves.

His grievance is with humankind: we are voracious;
thus most of our monsters think us meat.
We are voracious; thus the unthinking thing: it swallows
us up in an unbeing even less fitful than death.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. She frequently publishes book reviews and, with Timothy Liu, is co-editor of book reviews for Plume. She is on Twitter and Instagram @_janezwart_. Her website is janezwart.com.

by Rebecca Connors

Take that bag –
that 20 pounds of nightmare –
& empty it under the cover of night
while beetles & bats cling to hair or
imaginary numbers.
Release octaves
of hoarded photos, borrowed t-shirts, love
letters with abandoned addresses.
What happened before
is irretrievable. Drink whiskey till
amber-eyed, dare to throw china dishes
against the wall – a startled cat, fragmented
forget-me-nots, nicked wallpaper –
until the fever falls, my fingers cooled.
I’m moon hungry. I am the key of G.
I am years distant
in another constellation & I still can’t forget
all the times bed-rocked or land-locked.
I want to pound my knuckles raw,
my voice inside me tea-kettling.
I want the past to know my evidence,
see the way to resolution.
Tenacious like a city racoon
chittering underneath an open window &
scrambling through mistakes –
How can I accept all my
bents & burdens?
Drink up honeysuckle. Rest my head
against the world.
Know my home and know I am home:
parched grass, nightbirds
the delicate scream of dogwood petals.
 

Rebecca Connors (she/her) is the author of the chapbook, Split Map (Minerva Rising Press, 2019). Her poems can be found in DIALOGIST, Glass Poetry Journal, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She is the co-founder of the virtual literary arts space, The Notebooks Collective, and earned her MFA from the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. She lives in Boston with her family and two cats. Follow her on Twitter @aprilist, Instagram @aprilistwrites or visit her site at aprilist.com.

by Christina Linsin

CW: Medical procedure, patient restraint, and self harm.

Christina Linsin is a poet and teacher living in western Virginia. Her poetry examines connections with the natural world, the complexities of mental illness, and the difficulty of creating meaningful connections amid life’s obstacles. Her work has been published in tiny wren lit, and she has work forthcoming in The Milk House, and Still: The Journal. She can be found on Twitter @ChristinaLinsin.

by Kaitlyn Dada

A seascape to drown in
has rock walls to sit on,
individuals scattered,
perhaps sand farther down
it reminds me of what
came. Love is a wet word,
blossoming, with claustrophobic
vines, endless drops moments
unrepeatable, can’t
purchase a tear from a
starfish. A relief to
realize despite drowning,
because I’m drowning, wading
through waters fearing death
and absence of you, treading
water spitting something
stupid there is no shore
no hole no reason to
fear: faceless, smothering
breath, past suffocations,
eyes too focused on tears.
We met there I thought passing.
Here you are still, with me.
I sing of moments returning
to form memory. I
carry you with me my
mind in this sea, beside
me a boy holding my
hand as if only mine
fits, one moment lifts me
to the surface I can
breathe I can blossom isn’t
nature specific look
where you came ashore, slowly
beside me.

Kaitlyn Chisholm Dada is a playwright and performer utilizing memoir to embrace humanity through documentation. She began her love of storytelling as an actress and produced her first play in South Carolina in 2017 but most recently graduated in 2021 with an MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She aspires to be planted and present deep in the outskirts of the Windy City as she explores what nature has to teach her, and as a result of this philosophy is not active on any social media pages.