by Sarah Jackson

Once buried I thought you’d be gone,
tendrils crisp as bone, crumbling like charred paper.
But every night your soft hands find me.
I lie awake, listening tense
for the caress of your whispering filaments,
the first pinprick breaths.
Scared to sleep, then scared to wake
and tear myself free from the mesh of you
stitched to my skin in the dark.
I rise sick, drugged by our exchanges
sugars pushed through me
the things that you’ve drained.
I run and you catch me, leisurely
unrolling your milky fingers,
still speckled with the black earth
I hoped would hold you.
You are a net. Each night
I feel the threads tighten,
our merged memories, thin as hairs,
rustling, latticing
under my skin.

Sarah Jackson’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and Crow & Cross Keys. She is editor of Inner Worlds magazine. Her website is sarah-i-jackson.ghost.io and you can find her on mastodon as @sarahijackson@wandering.shop.

by Steve Sibra

up to the moment of his death
my father was breathing
he was pumping air in and out
even when sleeping

my mother had a touch
she had otters in her eyes
they swam in oceans of blue

years now they have been elsewhere
someplace beneath themselves
going about the business of worms
forgotten by all but plants and storms

as they dry and go to seed
as dirt fills in the spaces
which at one point were lives
laughter     movement     wisdom
others like me have been above
still filtering the air

still moistening an atmosphere
no longer of use to anyone
no longer drenching a universe
with meaning     no longer feeling

no longer feeding the dog
at four thirty each afternoon
whether he shows up to eat or not

Steve Sibra spent his youth on a small farm in North Central Montana, near the town of Big Sandy. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals including Flint Hills Review, Chiron Review and Crab Fat Magazine. Steve’s full length book of poetry, Shoes for Baby, was published in 2022 by Swallow Publishing. He resides in Seattle.

by Kelly Sargent

We liked Elena with her knobby knees,
halter tops and pierced ears
who shared sticky Blow Pops
swiped from the stuffy Madrid market
on dog days when Spanish yayas
grunted stern Nos to girls who asked
to pedal trikes along the grape-vined walls
that fed rats who stayed in the shadows.

It was Carmen who most did not like
with True Grit on her coffee table,
even though her VCR was broken,
and who had punched that toughie in the gut
when he called her little sister retarded
because she could not hear
and talked with her hands.
Stay away from her,
frowning, coiffed grandmothers cautioned.

It was Elena who whistled her way in the stiff autumn air
to the start of school one year,
round-bellied like her mama’s tarnished teapot,
and offered us a packet of cherry Fun Dip to share
as she leaned into the grape vines.
Open-mouthed, we eyed her shocking middle.
She shrugged.
Too many Pop Rocks.

A significantly hearing impaired writer and artist adopted in Luxembourg, Kelly Sargent is the author of two memoirs in verse, Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion (Kelsay Books, 2022) and Echoes in My Eyes (Kelsay Books, 2024), and a short form poetry collection entitled Bookmarks (Red Moon Press, 2023). Other works have appeared in more than eighty literary journals, most recently including Rattle, Chestnut Review, Eunoia Review, and Broad River Review. Honors include: Firebird Book Award winner, The Rash Award in Poetry finalist, Eric Hoffer Award nominee, Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nominee, and two-time Best of the Net nominee. She serves as the creative nonfiction editor of The Bookends Review. Kelly is on Facebook and you can visit kellysargent.com to learn more about her.

by Whitney Rio-Ross

I am the first lie your mother told you. I am two
tongues tied in a word. I am evening slur
and morning confession, love buckled
somewhere between. I am shattered chandelier.
I am cheated ransom. I am gulley, hillside, shoreline
stretched beyond your memory. I am forsaken
china, missed pills, a thousand unspoken apologies.
I am half-answered prayers from a flea-market rosary.
I am charred, kept, caught—the only truth
you’ve ever known.

Whitney Rio-Ross is the author of the chapbook Birthmarks and poetry editor for Fare Forward. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in River Heron Review, Susurrus, Psaltery & Lyre, So to Speak, The Pinch, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @whitlynnrioross and Instagram @whitlynnrioross.

by Shefali Banerji

I wrote my first poem as a foetus, traced a rhyme against mother’s body. It appeared on her skin, mimicking cobwebs running amok. I didn’t know her body was a stencil until I knew it to be home. The words had just begun to grow a little tall, a little wide, a little big, bigger still & I was impatient so I carved them upon clenched fists, thighs, knees, a new riverine each day bent out of shape, life, blood, form, meter, until I ran out of space. Mother taught me lullabies of her tongue & I, little fool, drove them out of memory; only to make way for silly kicks & out-of-order gods – while men of letters & flesh hung around the curb, watching the drama unfold. When I look back now at the half-drunk ellipses & expositions, I see how my spine became the sum total of every defiant line that ever could rebel against itself & run on into the next, pushed along until it no longer could find an end to its means or an anecdote, a verb, a catching of breath. I see how I allowed my ribs to heave & sigh beneath unformed breasts, weave tales of regret, draw in from the marrow a D-I-Y kit for disaster. Build it from scratch, nurture it, water it, tuck it in bed, kiss it goodnight, before the sun sets on all our tomorrows. I wrote my first poem as a foetus against mother’s body & just as it has happened every day since, I kept my heart’s voice to myself. Mistaken for a timebomb, they declared me a case of emergency, a matter of grave concern, Frankenstein’s monster within the womb, parasite-ing her way into mother’s life, for sure. Brought out their knives, their masks, their lights, knocked me open on the table and labelled me “premature”. That, my grand entrance was the last stanza of my first poem as a foetus against mother’s body. Wedged in-between the uncertainty of living and unliving, snappy gloves and wary whispers replacing the background score, birthing into existence a half-finished song.

Shefali Banerji is a poet-performer from Kolkata, India, currently based in Vienna. A PhD researcher at the University of Vienna, working on the intersections of poetry performance and theatre, Shefali has had her work published in or featured on Poetry Wales, The Bombay Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, ORF Niederösterreich, and elsewhere.