by Ronda Piszk Broatch

And by that, I mean I want a day filled with it.

Nothing.

Nothing, like glass of cold water
with ice and a slice of lemon in it.

I mean the kind of nothing where all the lawn
mowers, the cars and the sea planes, the jets

that fly over my house, low
as the crow flies, drowse.

I want the nothing-to-hear of owls in flight.

The nothing of guns stuffed with rust,
the kind that refuses to shoot eight straight

hours on a Sunday from two
different directions behind the nursery

with its fountain and two barrels filled
with petunias.

The nyctinastic quiet of petunias.

I want nothing more than the sleep of stones,
the fall-planted rye grass.

A lamp
with a genie in it

asking in sign language what I want on a day filled
with semis asleep in motel parking lots,

wildflower seeds and books of poetry tucked
in their boxes for the night.

The silence of earthworms.

Maybe the kind of nothing where you know there’s something,
but you can’t see it, and it doesn’t speak in words.

Smaller than point particles.

Nothing,
like an Amazon box chewed to bits by the cat.

Nothing,

and nothing to do about it.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), and Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

by Donna Vorreyer

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is @djvorreyer on Twitter and @djv50 on Instagram.

by Ryan Norman

I could still hear the lake’s wooden teeth
chewing at the shore a thousand feet below
on skeletons of volcanoes, each wave a spicy drip
to melt the early wintered air as the sun
starred through the pine canopy,
which burned both iris and retina
as I searched for orange paint sprayed on
giant crags, sharper than my eyesight
till she called out I’m orange! I’m orange!
So, I followed her voice instead and the lake
stopped chewing in favor of the roar
of its sister-fueled crash onto naked stone
glistening under a moon-changeling sun.
It was her mist that kissed my sore eyes:
each kiss with tongue till my eyes were
sloppy wet. I pushed the damp cloak to
see the tree’s roots, bigger than its pointed
skin, deeper than its circular heart; and I
touched it knowing that circles go nowhere,
but the evergreen made me smile at its
barbed strength, each needle made from star
food, the same nourishment that scalds my skin,
and that’s what I get for touching stars on earth:
hands that no longer bend from inelastic scars
the same as its branches, broken in the wind,
which carries no secrets when the water screams
louder than that man with the selfie, seven layers of burrito
in his hand, numbering each year stuck
mid-air as every step was a slip into nothing
but the shallow creek below. Keep going she said,
and I listened because I, too, am water­–
the wood has left me wet and
lost in its orbital eras.

Ryan Norman (he/him) is a queer writer from New York living in the Hudson Valley. Ryan enjoys swimming in mountain lakes and climbing tall things. He is a contributing editor of creative nonfiction with Barren Magazine. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, HAD, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He has two chapbooks I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A BOND GIRL (Daily Drunk Press) and CICADA SONG (Finishing Line Press). You can find him on Twitter @RyanMGNorman or ryanmgnorman.com

by Mitchell Nobis

“Who was your first love?” they
asked as if love meant more
than the unknown then, but
my first love was not knowing,
not having to know, having
people who did the knowing for
you while you dug around,
explored the woods & the world
with mud on your feet and
fertile soil under fingernails.
You watched birds fly–
barn swallows fast like blinking,
like wind & what the eye cannot see
but is there, moving, swift–
while you were supposed to
be shooting them. You’d use
the sight to focus on a sparrow
pulling loose its dead feathers,
its fluff drifting, caught on a breeze.
You didn’t know where it would go,
caught in the trap of beginning to sense.
To yearn for it, to know it, what leaves.

Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 teacher in Metro Detroit. His poetry has appeared in Whale Road Review, The Night Heron Barks, HAD, and others. He facilitates Teachers as Poets for the National Writing Project and hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series. Find him at @MitchNobis and mitchnobis.com or falling apart on a basketball court.

by Daniel J Flosi

In the parking lot behind the strip mall
swept under some seedless tree
we found a skull
as pitted and burned smooth
as a meteorite

about the size of a squirrel
or maybe a small dog

perhaps it drank poisoned walnut meat
and visions doubled
lost sight of line and limb
before tumbling to the ground

explains the crack
or maybe the neighborhood fox
got to it shook her kill
playfully then bashed it
against the mallet of that tree

we try for a while to arrange
all its holes
you look deeper into the depression
of eye socket and hear the bell
of birdsong in the hollow point darkness

then you ask to take it home
so we can keep trying
to bleach the truth from it

turning back up the hill
in front of the house
whiskey toothed peonies lean
face first into the soft furrowed lawn

Daniel J Flosi sometimes thinks they are an apparition living in a half-acre coffin within the V of the Mississippi and Rock Rivers. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Funicular Magazine, Olney Magazine, Rejection Letters, Feral Poetry and many more can be found at dkflosi.wordpress.com. Find his chapbook at BullshitLit.com Drop a line @muckermaffic