by Karen Soans

can’t pretend

to love your penchant

for poison chasing

I do not want to spend

the evening

talking to your transformation

but we all have blades

we love to sink into soft flesh

the anaemic mind

will argue itself blind

to taste iron and find home.

Karen is an Indian scientist and aspiring writer living in Germany. She has a PhD in cell biology and uses the Instagram handle @doodlinscientist to share her digital art documenting the highs and lows of experiment and discovery. Her poems explore themes of childhood, anxiety, faith and most recently – motherhood. Her poetry is forthcoming in Penumbra Online, Nightshade Lit Mag and Identity Theory.

by Tom Snarsky

I say are you serious and my phone
googles the angry thing I meant
to say to the debt collector, who has me

on hold. I opened my heart to April
and became a serious liar, full
of dolls and music and more lateral

mistakes than I’m used to making,
five eggs in the from-scratch dough.
If you are invited to a party and do not know

the host, what do you bring? Not Jesus,
dripping with sirens. Not a lathe
even though you could offer to sharpen

every knife in the house.

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025, and the title poem is available to read on Metatron Press’s GLYPHÖRIA platform. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky @tomsnarsky.

by Taylor Franson

CW: Religious violence/trauma

To say it is mindless misses the point.
~ Camille T. Dungy

Resolutely

You think about that study you read about jellyfish. How scientists proved those
tender underwater clouds can think without brains. And how these scientists did
all that research, just to exploit their findings to make money off of programming
robots. You think, also, of all the last names who died with childless women.

How unused their empty wombs must have felt. Like the empty
heads of the jellyfish, capable of learning. This, of course, makes you
think about God. You grow a granite staircase up your spine. An arrow
branded on the nape of your neck, pointed up up up. The sun carved

into the flesh above one eye, the moon above the other. The fingerprints of His
emerald gospel ruthless along your retinas. Strings of pearls round your neck,
hanging down like tentacles. How as a child you, an empty vessel, were filled,
programmed, then at 23, had the last name you loved stripped in the name of

covenant. According to the tradition of your fathers you were laid bare—
another word for vacant. If the prophets were to study your soft body now how
empty would they find you? If they took their chainsaw hymns to the back of your
head would they find a way to interpret the holy text of your mind? Or see

only the silence they’re expecting. How many times they have called
your body temple in the same breath they called it theirs?

If the long lines of this poem are breaking badly in your browser, please click here to open a PDF file.

Taylor Franson-Thiel is a Pushcart nominated poet from Utah, now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She received her Master’s in creative writing from Utah State University and is pursuing an MFA at George Mason University. She enjoys lifting heavy weights and posting reviews to Goodreads like someone is actually reading them. Taylor is on Twitter @taylorfranson, Instagram @taylorfthiel, and Facebook as Taylor Franson.

by Vikki C.

I watch you filling a crystal decanter with amber
and only hope to leave with the simplest kinds of sorrow:

The one which rides every train south, past the cemetery,
the lakes out east oiled with an exquisite colour spectrum,
or the frost on violets in the valley you cannot cross.

It is like seeing the deer passing through a white field
that was not there before us. Or claiming a miracle.

Men travel away to grow into boys with a thirst for beauty.
Women stay put, waiting for lost boys to return.

Like a placeholder for faith or something immeasurable.
Like the sting of pine air near the station where you vanished.

Where we keep falling in love through wet carriage windows
— the yellow flax beyond, giving flame to a coldness we could not hold.

When I die, I hope to be surrounded by books of poets I’ve never met.
The doors to this end left ajar as life seeks me out again—
silk butterflies whirring above my face with caution.

Because I have not drunk in ninety days, this makes it a wilderness
with no bread or warm body to sleep with. The snow is cold aspirin for survivors.
I drink it with all its traces—of blood, salt and humility.

So that in the musk of my last hour, the bees will hover above my open mouth,
motioning of honey—without entering the place where the war began.

Vikki C. is a British-born, award nominated writer, poet and musician. She is the author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press) and the full-length collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in venues such as EcoTheo Review, ONE ART Poetry, The Belfast Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Dust Poetry Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, Ice Floe Press, Acropolis Journal, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Across The Margin, The Broken Spine, Boats Against The Current, Fevers of The Mind, Jerry Jazz Musician, Origami Poems, Mythic Picnic, Loft Books, Salo Press, Igneus Press, Lazuli Literary Group, The Write-In (National Flash Fiction Day) and various other places. Vikki is on Twitter @VWC_Writes.

by Kyle Newman

When the sun comes up
I speedwalk backwards
to a tall cover crop.

Sprint with my wife
through a life cycle of corn
just to slow time.

Order doctors to
cut out my mind’s
eighty-millisecond buffer
so now I see in pure azaleas
and dogwoods and

horses growing old
and breakable, sons
outgrowing gloves, meteors
flaming at random over
a weathered marbleyard

and an old man
sitting in the kitchen with
a gray dog at his feet
and bare wrists

and dawn streaking through,
daydreaming about
how long it takes
a fence post to split.

KG Newman is a sportswriter for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.