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.

by Ian C. Williams

After Mothman folded the Silver Bridge
into the Ohio River like a wrinkled receipt into his wallet,

like a paper coffin caught in a downpour, he turned away
from the twisted skeleton of steel and concrete

and walked home. He walked alone, his briefcase
full of mishaps and secrets he’ll keep from his family.

After all—what does it matter to them?
Why mention the motorists trapped inside

the open mouth the water makes for what defies it?
Why mention what buries itself below

what soon becomes a smooth line of ice?
He walks home. He opens the door, kisses his wife,

and never speaks of the bridge, the crunch of catastrophe,
the constant, quiet rush of the river in its bed.

Ian C. Williams is a poet and teacher from Appalachia. He is also the editor-in-chief for Jarfly: A Poetry Magazine. In 2019, Williams received a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University, and his debut full-length collection of poems, Every Wreckage, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2023. He currently lives with his wife and two sons in Fairmont, West Virginia. Ian is on Twitter @ianwilliamspoet and is website his iancwilliams.com.

by Jack B. Bedell

Things I miss: I’d start with Linda, but she’d need her own list, so I’ll go with breakfast, the unadulterated promise of coffee percolating in the Drip-O-Lator. I miss fresh, clean sheets on my legs. I miss the dog warming my feet. More than anything, I miss the feeling I’m running out of time to get things done. Now, time’s just a blur of moving and waiting and anger and searching. These days, time isn’t something I can lose, no matter how I try. If I waste it, the morning sun brings more, day after day. It just grows back like my hand if it’s ripped off in a fight. I miss optimism, too. You know, the chance that things don’t have to be what they are, that I might not be what I am and where I am, or that all of this might just be a dream.

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, Barren, Terrain, and other journals. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

by Todd Dillard

I tell my daughter I fish for dark
in the backyard after she falls asleep.
I heave a rock aside,
opening a hole to the center of the earth,
drop a fishing line into it
and pull up snarls of shadows,
quilts of black, rags of mist. I say
they swim around my head
in the foam of the moon’s spilled beer
before swirling back into the earth.
I tell her she’s my best girl
and she tells me I’m her best dad
and at the push of a button I summon
the monsoon on her sound machine
and leave her on dreaming’s infinite porch.
The next day she comes home weeping.
Her friend called her stupid, ugly.
She wants to see the secret rock,
the hole from where I pull the dark.
Nothing else will,
she says, console her.
But my love, I say, there is no rock.
And her face stills.
There’s no hole to the center of the earth, I say.
And she opens her mouth.
There’s no darkness
that ripples overhead
through the current of the night.
From my daughter’s throat a shadow unfurls.
Long and thin at first, black eel,
but it grows
limbs, it stands.
It watches us–
not in an unkind way
–almost soft, the dim
around a pulsing night light.
As twilight sweeps over us
and it turns to vanish
into the dark, I wonder
should I call to it,
ask it to stay.

Todd Dillard’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and Guernica. His debut collection Ways We Vanish (Okay Donkey Press) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. He is a Poetry Editor at The Boiler Journal. Todd can be found on Twitter @toddedillard.