by Lindsay Clark

CW: Themes of child illness and loss.

Yes, a liver can say
no, too. I have carefully
considered your lymph.
The skin can yellow like
a neglected manuscript. No,
baby, it isn’t your T-cells.
It’s mine. Rejection can be
acute revelation. No, I cannot be
trapped in one body all the time.
It can be reasoned with. Or
it can fester chronically. Manifest
in midlife. Bile ducts caved in
like an ill-tended tunnel
system. Irreparable. The hollow
of a sternum can chug
the marrow whole only
to spit it out like Napa
Valley wine. No, no, not
this one. Not this child.

Lindsay Clark lives in California with her family.

by Alba Sarria

CW: Miscarriage, blood, and mourning.

The ocean comes out in mourning now
and I wade out, tepidly.
At some point you ceased
but I stayed black-veiled
and waiting,
forced hopeful
as the little red beads
crept down the curved inside
of my thighs:

Your life escaping me
one drop
at a time.

The pre-dawn fish gather,
mouths suckling.
If I cannot have you
then they will take you in—

You will swim the rhythm
of the tides,
extend your silvery scales
against the current,
feel the rush of strength
power
in a fin-flip escape
from gulls.

The ocean is ceaseless.
If the reef sharks have you
then every-moving, graceful
predator you will be.
If the whales have you
then ancient singing memory keeper
you will be.
When the scavengers and
the osedax worms claim you
then everything you will be.

Soon the morning sun will waken.
Her luminous fingers will warp pinkened waves
into blue,
shuddering away the aches of last night–you–
into memory.

Soon too, I will return to the rental
house of wave-eaten stone
to sit idle beneath the warming window
as my husband kneads, sings, folds
dough for breakfast.

I will tell him the swim was good
the dawn was kind,
the fish gentle,
the air hopeful,
and he will never know.

Alba Sarria is a horror poet and flash fictionist fascinated by all things eerie and disquieting entangled with folklore, who on occasion branches out to write more personal tomes. Alba s the 2018 CSPA Gold Circle winner for Free Form Poetry, the 2021 Short Fiction CM, a 2022 Pushcart nominee, and the 2021 William Heath Award recipient. She is on Twitter @albasarwrites.

by Beth Sherman

Headstones break apart easily, crumbling to chalky dust. Names
disintegrate, letters disappear. Piles of sad markers topple over,
flat as gray pillows under careless skies. A rough-legged hawk
circles overhead, surveying the damage indifferently: None
of the ghosts say a word. Tomorrow the relatives will file in,
searching for clues. Where is Nana Sadie’s grave? Where did Uncle
Morris go? Tomorrow, the papers will call it a hate crime and give
year-to-date vandalism statistics at Jewish cemeteries. Tomorrow I will
get a phone call and drive out there during my lunch break, a place I only visit
once a year on the yahrzheit of your death. I had yew bushes planted behind your
grave, added a small bench. Nice spot, you would say. Plenty of shade. On my
annual visit, I bring a book and a brisket sandwich. Pablo Neruda poems we used
to read to each other in bed. Sometimes I tell you about the kids. Sometimes I
don’t say anything at all. Feed crumbs to the sparrows. Think about coming more
often. Tomorrow, I will marvel that I have forgotten how to cry. But tonight,
there is only the threat of snow and the rumble of cars on a distant highway.
The hawk departs in search of mice, the moon a pasty white nickel. You have
been gone such a long, long time that your voice has faded to nothing and I can’t
remember how your skin used to taste. The wind moans in the bushes. The first
flakes begin to fall. And there is no one to sweep up the broken pieces of you.

Beth Sherman received an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her poetry has been published in numerous publications, including Hartskill Review, Lime Hawk, Hawaii Pacific Review, Gyroscope Review, The Evansville Review, Rust + Moth, Silver Birch Press, Zingara, Blue River Review and Calamus Journal. She is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee who has written five mystery novels. She can be reached on Twitter @bsherm36.

by Grant Clauser

Say there’s enough ruin to go around.
Say the song the bats keep to themselves
is a song of longing, calling out
to the night’s open palm when the difference
between a palm and fist is what you know
about words. Like ruin – the kind covered
by decades or weeds, a word that changes meaning
when the land changes hands. The news today
says kids are breaking. What they know
is the ground is shaking underneath them
and believe that’s all the future has for them.
Not the answer to the bat’s night song.
Not the way grain in an old silo
will sprout or mold depending on the whims
of weather or whether this abandoned farm
means someone picked up and moved, or
curled up and died alone like some cryptid
only fanatics truly believe.
We can’t move on. The world’s smaller
than a palm now. It’s only when evening
over this forgotten place starts seeping
up from the ground and cloaking every color,
every sound hidden by another,
that for an hour you can’t tell
the birds from the bats
but for their song.

Grant Clauser (@uniambic) is the author of five books, most recently Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. He works as an editor in Pennsylvania and teaches at Rosemont College.

by Jessica Coles

I drop love letters into the river
to dissolve ink

minerals surrender to water for the joy
of a journey they can leave any time

water surrenders to the subtle tilt of earth
rolls, ripples, riffles dictated by ground travelled

placid winding across the prairies: a sly secret
of curvature that tips love under the ocean

under the sun, water surrenders to the atmosphere
my meditation app compares the sky to a smile

that compares my fixations to clouds that compare
my thoughts to love: water converted and puffed

open for anyone to imagine into horses or ducks or
angel wings. My love amasses drop by drop and surrenders

to the thirst of foxtail barley growing
between the cracks in an unused parking lot

edging an inky river

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and editor from Edmonton, Alberta, A (Treaty 6), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Crow Name, Capsule Stories, Full Mood Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, EcoTheo Review, and You are a Flower Growing off the Side of a Cliff. Her chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate, is available through Prairie Vixen Press. You can find Jessica on Twitter @milkcratejess.