by Kyla Houbolt

The Queen o’ the Cats asks “What do you wish for?” She rides on the back of a hummingbird, and is neither so tiny as that nor her steed so huge. You see them both clearly, or perhaps you do not. Again, she asks “What do you wish for?” and you try to remember all that you want but then she says “I may grant your wish or I may not. If I do, it may be good fortune or it may not. If I do not, the same. I give no advice nor do I pretend to wisdom.” You will not remember what she said. Time has imploded on itself and you are bemused by the brilliant white fluff on her breast that looks like a feather made of silver and crystal. The hummingbird darts at you, humming. There is nothing you want. The Queen and her steed vanish, having bestowed on you the only blessing there is. You know this is not a dream.

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener, living in North Carolina. Look for her full length collection, Becoming Altar, new and selected poems, forthcoming from Subpress Collective this fall.

by Justin Lacour

a kid from Agawam is arguing with a kid from Chicopee over the cheapest place to buy gas
in the year i stop selling knives door to door and go back to working in kitchens
the cook and i balance drums of grease at the end of each night out into the alley
out where the bears lurk and raid dumpsters for scraps the mom and her cubs all summer
Crowbar tries to get folks to call Williamsburg Mass. the “burgie”
and i go to a party up in Shutesbury thrown by the women who raise rabbits
in the year my ocd first flares up Warren Zevon is dying Johnny Cash is dying
and i truly believe my car will stall if i don’t play the same three Ryan Adams songs over and over
in the year i hallucinate that middle-age guy hiding in my bushes
who asks me to stand next to him so the cops will let him be maybe he is an angel
it’s always good to have an angel and a train and a hat and a graveyard
like those songs in my cold apartment “Engine 143” or “Stagger Lee” or “Delia”
that are my companions in the year the lost war begins
and the cook calls me Hollywood because i’ll be famous for nothing
but washing dishes and mopping floors and smoking two cigarettes at once
and the last time i imagined the middle-age guy he was waiting for his ride
so i stood next to him on Pleasant Street to throw off the cops
he said he worked at the velveteen factory near Spencer our smoke our breaths
rising up to the streetlight like we had souls to spare it began snowing we waited a long time

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry (also on X / Twitter).

by Ali A. Ünal

I refuse to name the animals I invent
part human, part baby kicks
established gods make fun of me
for having the beasts parse the music
or invent time before fire.

My brutes gnaw their chains into glyphs
escalating, escalating and
sinking in mud as opposed to gravity
or remembering forbidden falls
out of bliss, not of mild suicide.

Before the council of wizened lords
in the middle of death and debt
they bet on themselves out loud
jumping off worlds to split infinities
as far as the heart goes.

Then they learn how to celebrate the poet
in a language I know nothing of.

Ali A. Ünal is a writer from Turkey. He arrived in the USA with a fellowship to study creative writing at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His essays and stories have appeared in Willow Springs, Apogee, Third Coast, Quarterly West, Jersey Devil Press, and Necessary Fiction as well as in his native Turkish. He’s been longlisted on The Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2021. After earning his Ph.D. in English from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he teaches creative writing at Central Washington University.

by Annette Sisson

Sharp as a pen,
as an ink-tipped

tongue, a horntail
snail leaks

iridescence in soil
where huckle-

berry canes
long as antenna

lean into speckled
light. Seeds

spill from a coiled
brain, words

curl across a page,
unfurl, flicker

like bits of fig,
like sun pearling

the hilltop, spirals
of flung stars,

their dusty arms
a syntax of silver.

Annette Sisson lives in Nashville, TN, and teaches at Belmont University. Her poems appear in The Penn Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cloudbank, Rust + Moth, Citron Review, Cumberland River Review, Sky Island Journal, West Trade Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books in 2024. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2022. In 2024 one of her poems was a finalist for the Charles Simic Poetry Prize and two were nominated for The Pushcart Prize; in 2025 her poems were named finalists in River Heron Review’s and Passager’s annual poetry prizes.

by Amorak Huey

Twilight, a squall of geese winging noisily north.
Walking, I imagine retracing their path —
south, toward silence, summer,
a whole season in your hands,
my heart already on its way.
I ought be careful here, foolish to wish
away a perfectly beautiful day and yet
I have walked in this direction
nearly every evening for two years.
What else to say? It’s right here, love:
gloaming sky where birds just were,
a vacant lot’s dandelions gone to seed,
field of wishes awaiting your breath.

Amorak Huey is author of five books of poems including Mouth, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University. He is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is on BlueSky @amorak.bsky.social and Instagram @amorakhuey.