by Matt Jakubowski

I think part of it was that some
of the things I saw as basics
you saw as luxury and if I ever
really wanted you know to cuddle
or buy a nicer lamp something
else in the house would have to wait.

So what ended up happening was
the curtains were left to the moths
and the part of my neck I most liked to be kissed
was waiting and wanting until such time as you and I
had scrimped up enough to afford something
to keep the dawn light out of the bedroom.

But I found out that even after
we’d saved up and waited to pay the
cost to finally afford this new thing
I still ended up waiting at dawn and in
the afternoon and just before midnight

for some moment when you might
finally lean over and kiss me along the lines
that lead to my heart, which was yours
one of your basics, left to spoil as if it were
some kind of luxury beyond your means.

Matthew Jakubowski’s erasures appear in 3:AM Magazine, his fiction is forthcoming from Milk Candy Review, and his latest piece of criticism appears in Hopscotch Translation. He is online at mattjakubowski.com and @matt_jakubowski.

by David Hanlon

You’re eight hours of sleep & careful folding;
I’m a mouthful of ulcers & grasping at hours
lost to obligation,
lost to obsession.

You’re made of granite & marble,
made for building;
you make

sheet music of my skin,
exhume a melody in me.

I’m chalk & sandstone,
used in paint;

I’m weak
because life runs through me.

I’ll move, I’ll go
wherever it takes me—

I’ll still
hold your hand,

sing my song,
brushstroke

our existence.

David Hanlon is a poet from Cardiff, Wales. He is a Best of the Net nominee. You can find his work online in over 60 magazines, including Rust & Moth, ONE ART & Homology Lit. His first chapbook Spectrum of Flight is available for purchase now at Animal Heart Press. You can follow him on twitter @davidhanlon13 and Instagram @welshpoetd.

by Lynne Lampe

Empty chairs line cracked concrete,
watch the sea for miracles. Salt

settles on canvas. Waves take sand
hostage but only captors return to this

beach so wide whales have room
to die. On a long ago vacation a child

sits in a chair far from the rest,
pouting. Stubborn as iridium,

she refuses blue water, squeezes
her arms tight against her chest.

She sees herself as crucible, not
contents. Kicks air out of her way.

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner (honorable mention–poetry), concerns mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear in many journals, including THRUSH, Figure 1, and Yemassee. A 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist, she edits academic writing and lives in mid-Missouri with her husband and two dogs. Visit her at lynnejensenlampe.com; Twitter @LJensenLampe; or Instagram @lynnejensenlampe.

by Millie Tullis

each december I pulled her
from boxes of christmas decor
set her beside my cd/tape player & watched

she did nothing
& still I remember her
clearer than any other piece of

childhood I remember her
smooth soft cold
coat

I heard her emptiness
when I rattled her nothing
knocked against the nothing inside of her

I tipped her upside down peered
into that hollow center
saw her

absent belly absent breath how the whole
beautiful bag of her body had been
emptied

being silent & pastless
made her more beautiful
& so I loved her

Millie Tullis is a poet and folklorist from northern Utah. Her poetry has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Juked, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online journal pushing the borders of sacred and secular. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @millie_tullis.

by Sarah-Jane Crowson

The lilacs watched us from the fragrant garden–
heavy and bewildered like a drowning.

That time before the world was boxed
in a whisper before…

before the darted glance, distorted.
Before eyes were moth-wings,
soft as charcoal dust,
like a land that is locked, or lost.

*

It came to her that she had been alone for so long
that she had become a statue.

*

She thought of all the worlds she had forgot.
The slip and haste of red clay,
the barefoot wild symmetries
and all those quiet words turning moth
to fly –decay in cold uncertain rooms.
They say the moon is silvered, a metaphor only,
loud and lone and tarnished.
They say I am distracted by wings.

Safe, lost in the dark woods the moths
whispered small decrees of dust –
the kind of truth that splits
fallen branches –ecstatic with decay.
And when she fell, like a twisted root,
they caught around her, uncertain,
uncertain, uneven, impossible

whispers of midnight, our hair unleashed,
rain-drenched, unpinned, unlocked.

This poem accompanies Sarah-Jane’s collage, “Uncertain Objects” – this is part of the series “Discontented objects of terrestrial desire” which can be seen in her portfolio.

Sarah-Jane’s art and poetry is inspired by fairytales, nature and her personal emotional landscape. It is informed by ideas of accidental trespass, surrealism and romanticism. She is an educator at Hereford College of Arts, and a postgraduate researcher at Birmingham City University, investigating ideas of the ‘critical radical rural’. Sarah-Jane’s images an poetry can be seen in various UK and US journals, including The Adroit Journal, Rattle, Waxwing Literary Journal, Petrichor, Sugar House Review and Iron Horse Literary Review. You can find her on Twitter @Sarahjfc, Instagram @Sarah_jfc or on her website at sarahjanecrowson.art