by Jeannie Prinsen

I hate winter rain, how it soaks
dirty snow heavy, sluices beneath ice
dams at the curb, how it seeps,
weighs. Get used to it, they say,
this is the future, no more
old-fashioned winters. As though
nostalgia for childhood’s red-
cheeked seasons oppresses me, not
the inexorable slide into melt,
humans glaciering slow
toward refuge, beasts foraging
in bewilderment while we choose
drowning, calling it progress, moving afloe
across a sea of our own design.

Jeannie Prinsen lives with her husband, daughter, and son in Kingston, Ontario, where she is a copy editor for a local news organization. Her writing has appeared in Barren, Relief, Dust Poetry, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @JeanniePrinsen and Instagram at @jeannieprinsen.

by Tom Snarsky

This is a treatise on the art
of wanting things you cannot have,
whether it’s because someone
else has them & won’t give them up
or because schools of fish
are becoming more and more
selective with time, the bigger pools
of applicants winnowing
slowly enough for them to get away
with certain trickeries––––
like a jut of metal near the stream
still appearing strong & straight
despite having witnessed
years & years & years of rain,
so an accidental deer-nudge
is enough to break it clean
in two and set the rust flakes loose

to brighten the mud. I end up
doing that a lot, breaking things
that aren’t mine––––the trick is
to do it like the deer does it,
not on purpose but just because
you were trying to get a drink
that, whether or not you knew
it, would put gross stuff in your blood
and turn you into a problem.
Cherry trees don’t grow here
natively, they have to be brought in
& can’t be shaded by bigger trees
or buildings. They need deep,
well-draining soil, six hours
of sunlight a day, and if you don’t care
if the fruit is sour that’s really it

Tom Snarsky (@tomsnarsky on Twitter & Instagram) is the author of Threshold, Complete Sentences, Light-Up Swan, & the forthcoming Reclaimed Water. He lives with his wife Kristi and their cats in the mountains of rural northwestern Virginia.

by Ronda Piszk Broatch

And by that, I mean I want a day filled with it.

Nothing.

Nothing, like glass of cold water
with ice and a slice of lemon in it.

I mean the kind of nothing where all the lawn
mowers, the cars and the sea planes, the jets

that fly over my house, low
as the crow flies, drowse.

I want the nothing-to-hear of owls in flight.

The nothing of guns stuffed with rust,
the kind that refuses to shoot eight straight

hours on a Sunday from two
different directions behind the nursery

with its fountain and two barrels filled
with petunias.

The nyctinastic quiet of petunias.

I want nothing more than the sleep of stones,
the fall-planted rye grass.

A lamp
with a genie in it

asking in sign language what I want on a day filled
with semis asleep in motel parking lots,

wildflower seeds and books of poetry tucked
in their boxes for the night.

The silence of earthworms.

Maybe the kind of nothing where you know there’s something,
but you can’t see it, and it doesn’t speak in words.

Smaller than point particles.

Nothing,
like an Amazon box chewed to bits by the cat.

Nothing,

and nothing to do about it.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), and Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

by Donna Vorreyer

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is @djvorreyer on Twitter and @djv50 on Instagram.

by Ryan Norman

I could still hear the lake’s wooden teeth
chewing at the shore a thousand feet below
on skeletons of volcanoes, each wave a spicy drip
to melt the early wintered air as the sun
starred through the pine canopy,
which burned both iris and retina
as I searched for orange paint sprayed on
giant crags, sharper than my eyesight
till she called out I’m orange! I’m orange!
So, I followed her voice instead and the lake
stopped chewing in favor of the roar
of its sister-fueled crash onto naked stone
glistening under a moon-changeling sun.
It was her mist that kissed my sore eyes:
each kiss with tongue till my eyes were
sloppy wet. I pushed the damp cloak to
see the tree’s roots, bigger than its pointed
skin, deeper than its circular heart; and I
touched it knowing that circles go nowhere,
but the evergreen made me smile at its
barbed strength, each needle made from star
food, the same nourishment that scalds my skin,
and that’s what I get for touching stars on earth:
hands that no longer bend from inelastic scars
the same as its branches, broken in the wind,
which carries no secrets when the water screams
louder than that man with the selfie, seven layers of burrito
in his hand, numbering each year stuck
mid-air as every step was a slip into nothing
but the shallow creek below. Keep going she said,
and I listened because I, too, am water­–
the wood has left me wet and
lost in its orbital eras.

Ryan Norman (he/him) is a queer writer from New York living in the Hudson Valley. Ryan enjoys swimming in mountain lakes and climbing tall things. He is a contributing editor of creative nonfiction with Barren Magazine. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, HAD, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He has two chapbooks I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A BOND GIRL (Daily Drunk Press) and CICADA SONG (Finishing Line Press). You can find him on Twitter @RyanMGNorman or ryanmgnorman.com