by Mark Saba

A memory that says I was there
even if you didn’t want to be.
Another version of self
that flip-flopped between what you were
and weren’t. A vague premonition

of a better future, even if
you didn’t believe it.
Rings of fire you jumped through,
the burns coming later
dried up into scars.

A checklist that followed everyone
but you. Following a way
that offered spectacular views
of foreign lands, climates
there to nurture unknowns.

And those times you strayed
holding your heart in calloused hands—
blood trailing—you were there
but once, and no one noticed
that you were gone.

A native of Pittsburgh, Mark Saba has been writing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction for 40 years. His most recent book publication is Flowers in the Dark (poetry). Other works include Calling the Names (poetry), Two Novellas: A Luke of All Ages / Fire and Ice, and Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines around the U.S. and abroad. He is also a painter, and recently retired from Yale University as a medical illustrator and graphic designer. Please see marksabawriter.com.

by Jared Beloff

follow the line
from the mallard’s bright foot

pointed skyward to its wing
tucked, head searching the calm below

confident as a diver and nothing
amiss—ignore the bitter fruit’s

protuberance, the shade of a table,
contrast of the kitchen wall’s ochre

or the great open wing
feathers ruffled, held by the hollow

bone, ligaments like thin twine
stretched beyond the thigh,

one leg left open
as if searching for purchase

or a reminder, even now,
of life’s cruel arrangement.

Inspired by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s painting.

Jared Beloff is the author of WHO WILL CRADLE YOUR HEAD (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and has been a peer-reviewer for Whale Road Review since 2021. His work can be found at Night Heron Barks, Barren Magazine, River Mouth Review, The Shore, Contrary and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @Read_Instead and see his website jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.

by Natalie Marino

A mess
of vagueness,

you are also
anything

you want to be,
a changeling.

You are a fortune
of fish,

a dying king,
an escaped

dove’s wing.
You hold

the moon
in your pocket

and camouflage
shy stars.

You are a young girl
with roses

murmuring
to the sky.

You grow
into a nimbus

and foreshadow
angry water,

making the rivers
quiver.

Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Atlas and Alice, Gigantic Sequins, Isele Magazine, Plainsongs, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Shore, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Under Memories of Stars, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (June 2023). Her Twitter handle is @NatalieGMarino and she is on Instagram @natalie_marino. She lives in California.

by Martha Silano

Sometimes a feather jumps around on the patio carpet
like some sort of nudibranch sent down
to amuse me, and I’m grateful.
Add to the list

that tomorrow will be cloudy, twenty degrees cooler,
that someone invented wine,
that the earthquake/
tsunami thing

hasn’t happened yet, the guaranteed repeat of a random day
in 900 AD, when the fault a quarter mile from where
I’m sitting rose twenty feet, the reason
so much of Seattle is hilly

or sunken, why so much fill dirt covers estuarine mud.
Add that my daughter’s terrible news is a sap stain
on her shorts, that the sulfur cosmos
I left out in the heatwave

isn’t dead. Add dark chocolate, ice cubes, watermelon, the rainforest exhibit
at our local zoo, so humid that when you exit you realize
it’s nowhere near as hot as Brazil.
Add a marine breeze,

squeals of kids as the sky goes orangey pink. The good fortune
of a dead-end street, neighbors who never blast ACDC
but bring us figs. The active volcano, fifty miles
from our porch, blanketed with snow.

Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Martha teaches at Bellevue College. Her website is marthasilano.net and she can be found on Twitter and Instagram @marthasilano.

by Lannie Stabile

If you want to be a good day, be Christmas two years ago. An
unseasonable 50 degrees. Not a wink of snow in sight. Big family
stuffed into too small living room. Eight folding chairs around a
six-foot card table. Bird picked over. Potatoes flaking. Gravy
graying in the old Country Crock container. A contractor bag of
discarded wrapping paper bulging by the front door, Mom’s
oxygen tank alive and hissing in the corner. But wait. Watch as
Mom unrolls her trove of one- and two-dollar lottery tickets with
an eyebrow wiggle. You gotta play to win, she tempts, pulling
Monopoly: Go from a Walmart shopping bag. An hour, several
scratching pennies, and a $10 dollar winner later, the pumpkin pie
is ready. The blue can of Reddi-wip passes from hand to hand.

Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. Her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything, is out now with ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.