CW: Implied gun violence
Vaneeza Sohail is a writer from Karachi. Her work has been published in Diode Poetry, Wildness Journal and is upcoming in Driftwood Press, Passages North, Lakeer and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, she’s taking photos of cats and flowers. She is on Instagram at @peacharchivist.
I entered with nothing but thirst.
The sand offered no room.
At the checkpoint, a man
with silver eyelids asked for my name.
I gave him three. He swallowed them whole.
Said I could earn one back by walking.
The sky wrote its riddles
in a language I almost remembered.
Birds flew—wings slicing sideways,
eyes stitched shut.
I passed a woman grinding glass
into salt. Her wrists bandaged in gold.
She asked what I came to trade.
I didn’t know what I had left.
The trees whispered
what I should not have known.
I stepped into shadow,
grew taller. Stepped out—
the world no longer fit me. The sun
doesn’t set here, only flickers.
A child held out fruit,
red seeping through her fingers.
She laughed and turned into smoke.
Not all lessons come clean.
At the river, I knelt to drink—
the water whispered a name
I hadn’t spoken in years.
It was no longer mine.
Somewhere behind me, the city folds
like a lung shot through. I don’t look back.
That’s the rule.
Keep walking. Even when
the road turns to teeth.
Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life. She was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, and others. Allison can be found on Instagram.
Were you in the dark?
The sun this morning found a hem of beads somewhere beneath white satin.
What was left after the smoldering: a jeweled bodice, seared tufts of desert grass.
Were you alone?
When the match was set alight torching the smooth taffeta between your fingers–
Your feet deep in sand while flames arose amid crisscrossed tracks of coyotes and rattlesnakes.
Tell me how your rage fell off a cliff and tumbled into this unlikely scene.
Tell me how betrayal is a brutal beast fit for uncommon consequence.
Even now what remains sparks a reflection of something passionate and beautiful.
You must have been a dazzling bride.
Paula Brown’s poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in South Dakota Magazine, Adirondack Review, Whitefish Review, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Anthology Nature, and Letters I’ll Never Send Anthology among others. She and her husband live in Arizona with a pack of dachshunds that run the place. Paula is on Instagram @yesvanillabean, Bluesky @azpaula.bsky.social, and Facebook @doxzen.
CW: Suggestions of self-harm/family violence
Recrank
the hot water knob
four times, five.
You’ve been hiding
too long, but
can’t stop,
picking
soaked scabs
of blood sap
from your back,
like a bear-scarred aspen
in your childhood woods,
thinking how you’ve
become
both trunk
& claw,
self-inflictive,
never healed,
still mostly you,
but partly him, too—
that bear,
downstairs,
who’s roaring at your
children again.
Who will not stop,
sweet though you plead,
long immune to your honey.
So you stay, door locked,
in warm water,
dig ever deeper
the claw-nails
peel & flay,
discard raw flesh
as floating bark flakes,
dredge deeper still
through cambium
& sapwood,
to forget how long
it always takes
for him
to tire & lumber
back to his cave
to sleep,
fat on the pain
of those who love
& loved him,
dreaming of
cubhood,
as you reach the
heartwood,
& know
you’ve harmed yourself
beyond repair.
Francesca Leader’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in One Art, Abyss & Apex, Broadkill Review, Identity Theory, The Storms, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and Best Spiritual Literature (2025). Her debut poetry chapbook, Like Wine or Like Pain, is available from Bottlecap Press. Find her on X and IG at @moon.in.a.bucket, or on Bluesky at @mooninabucket.bsky.social.
red balloons stilled on the carpet
afternoon light diffused with Billie Holiday’s “Summertime”,
beer and waiting for guests to arrive
ceremony in absentia
~
weeping at the bus stop
on my twentieth birthday
knowing my enthusiasm
would fray
~
IKEA pear cider
and another year knowing
you can’t feel full
from excess
~
these excuses to mark a day
how many clinking glasses do you remember
or cigarette breaks
I remember eating watermelon in the dark one night
more than any drink
or birthday cake
~
birthdays happen every day
even in clouds
shaped like babies
even endings that are beginnings,
like dropping the bottle
~
each year, read the chart for confirmation bias:
Taurus Moon
Leo Rising
extrovert with a foot in introvert’s mouth
bumbling through milestones
~
reading daily paper
death tolls
as assertions of life
there is no throughline
with so many endings
just a blue mood I sink into,
then keep going
~
ceremony in absentia
on the bus
the woman’s forearm tattoo reads
together we dance alone
Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet and teacher with an English MA and Writing Certificate from Simon Fraser University. Read her recent poems in The Malahat Review, Crab Creek Review, pacificREVIEW, QWERTY, CV2, and ROOM Magazine. Jessica lives on the land of the Halkomelem-speaking Peoples (colonially known as New Westminster, British Columb) with her little family and large dog. Her website is jessicaleemcmillan.com and on BlueSky she’s @jessicaleemcmillan.com.
