​Cover Art: "You Ain't Seen What I Saw" By James Diaz


​Editor's Remarks:


James Diaz


Poetry:

Shareen K. Murayama
Elisa Carlsen
jade king
Wren Hanks
Cherry Cheesman
Taylor Swanner
Elisabeth Preston-Hsu
Jessie Wingate
Hannah Wyatt
Shaylynn Marks
Sarah Watters
Caely McHale
Mackenzie Carignan
Allyson Dempsey
Gary D. Grossman
Suzanne S. Austin-Hill
Laurel Galford
Marthine Satris
Lara Payne
Ken W. Farrell
Lemmy Ya'akova
Rebecca Ellis
Nate Darden
Deidra Greenleaf Allan
Amy Le Ann Richardson
Jo Angela Edwins
Kelsey Wermager
Kelly Facenda
Emily Rosko
Georgia Hilton
Beth Kanell
Bonnie Proudfoot
Gary Glauber
Shell Walsh
Laura Tate
Susan Vespoli
Katie Stimpson
MJ Huntsgood
Candace Kronen
Jesse Millner
Justin Karcher
Dinah Yohannes
Carol Parris Krauss
Megan Bresnahan
Rachael Ikins
Louisa Muniz
Elizabeth Joy Levinson



Fiction:


Frankie Galvin
James Hippie
Caressa Layne Miles
Colleen Nial
Elizabeth Rosen


Essays:


Sheila Clancy
Victoria Mikael
Sharon Coleman
Katie Stimpson
Rachel Newcombe
Jenny Catlin
Katie Stimpson


Artwork/Photography:


Susan Donnelly
Jimmie Allen
Jesse Leighton
Jay Shifman
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad


Hybrid: 


Sarah Hyatt
Yell Freeman & Nelson Vidals

'Edmund Garman CC





          Here's what I know. I am unrelenting in tearing myself to pieces. I don't give let up and I don't give myself a break. Not ever. I had a mother like that. And now, I have a mother who is dying. I don't know what to do with that. Also, I am an addict. So what I have often done is attempt to use the confusion away, even with a room full of other's around me trying to love me back to life. The confusion of a child who didn't understand why the people who were supposed to protect them were the very one's harming them. You cannot really love yourself in reverse. Only present tense. Only forward. 

So I struggle, maybe a little more than I have to, because it feels like I have to get to the bottom of something there is no bottom of. This thing just happened. You don't get what you never got. But you can give what you didn't get. Giving becomes the getting in time. I've always loved others a lot more than I have myself. Forgiven others more than I could ever bear or dare to forgive myself. What is that about? Probably I felt it was all my fault. 

It was like the world ended for me one day, but I kept on living, somehow, a dead thing in an undead world. Life came back in glimpses and moments. Art gave me hope. And then, when I turned to using, so too did recovery. I learned to be more gentle with myself. I became part of a world again. My life opened. And then I closed it. Quite a few times. The fact that I have not been alone is the singular fact that has kept me here. We show up for each other in unexpected ways. There's not much we can say or do, but our presence matters. 

When I feel adrift, lost up in my own pain-spin-cycle, spending time with the presence of others, your presence, the presence of your words, matters. I read something I needed to hear or hear differently. On a hard day it can be like a light touch of grace, seeing yourself in other people's stories. We're all invisible arms reaching out to one another. Healing is a motherfucker, is lifetime, is oh-my-god. But there is light in darkness. Light in death, despair, and all points of what can feel like the end of a road.

It's no light I've ever known. Been shown. Homegrown. We all have it in us. My god, why not let it shine. Just a bit. For the little while we're here. To not go alone in the thing that makes you feel alone. That's what I know. What works. You can't make a church of that. It is the thing that makes all that happened to us feel less heavy. Even if it's still there.

I feel less heavy. I hope as you walk through the work in this issue you'll know the feeling. It's there. It's alive. What a light. 

Much gratitude,
James Diaz
EIC - AHC

Mark Collins CC



Happiness Could Land on Anyone


My nephew’s eighth birthday is tomorrow and I need 
to pick up a gift. They say education begins in the home. 

I mean, is it only me? Wanting to give joy. I’m not sure
what that’s supposed to sound like—I love the sound

of the word “mitigation.” My teeth, tongue and jaw working
toward a common goal. A father circles his son, says, 

“Love you, boy.” And I want a different father. A bicycle. 
A fishing rod. A tennis racquet in need of strings. 

That could be a happy story, couldn’t it? 
When I think of touch starvation, I, too, want to be a car

dog’d by a chain, engine off, no braking. When I think of joy, 
I still want a different father. In black and white movies, 

a house will fall on the antagonist causing me to look up
to myself, say, “Love you, girl. You got this.” 

​
​

​Shareen K. Murayama is the author of three poetry books Housebreak (Bad Betty Press, 2022) and Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group (Harbor Editions, 2022), and The Mother Who Couldn’t Describe a Thing if She Could (Harbor Editions, 2024). She’s a Japanese American, Okinawan American poet, a Jack Hazard Fellow and educator, who lives in Hawai’i with her people and her dog named Squid.

Gerry Dincher CC





Peacocks


the winter breath 
pours out of us 
like warm Black Velvet, 
undiluted
we drive to the edge of 
our small, shit-town 
and toast the merciless hills

we are so gorgeous 
in our youth
our bodies angular 
and unconforming 
in bucket seats
sex-drenched and staring 
at the millions of years 
of eroded space, 

we know we are looking 
at a mirror inside and out 
that we are as vast 
as any desert plain 
and we could go anywhere
be anyone
or go nowhere
and be nothing at all 






Somewhere Near Trinity


our church is the high desert 
              in open range

in the pale blush 
              of a summer morning

underneath 
              an unbroken blue line

our blood
has blue sky in it

our circle 
              is an empty lot





At the Old 76


midnight in a beater car with Billy Idol 
and a stomach full of high fructose 
we pray on the neon beads 
hanging around the rearview 

howling incantations for the poor
white trash, chest heaving 
we are made of gods we cannot name 
we are made of gods we don’t believe in

​


​
Elisa Carlsen was born and raised in the high desert of Humboldt County, NV. A contemplative, her writing has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Trumpeter, Scapegoat Review, Carte Blanche, Argentum, and elsewhere. She is the author of Cormorant (Unsolicited Press 2023). Her poetry film, The Basin, was selected for the 2025 Nature & Culture International Poetry Film Festival in Denmark. She is the founder of Rabbitbrush.org

hnt6581 CC




If You Handed Me a Bucket of Whelks


I’d remember the ringlet of a shell or the winding
suckers of a crucified octopus, how you choke--

                                                                                                                       unable to swallow the unchewed
                                                                                                                       tentacles: the winding road
of sebum leaving a puncture wound. I’d liken it
                to my grandfather’s half thumb or the pinkened
St. George’s cross of a scar

​
perching on bitten lips. The promise

                                                                                                                                           of three toothbrushes,
                                                                                                                            stress dreams

or fractures. Boxes of chocolates
              with marbled patterns—swarmed
by hornets or your kleptomaniac ex-boyfriend’s


                                                                                                                                              sweaty fingers. Waking to
                                                                                                                                 check if you switched off the
                                                                                                                 oven or forgot
                                                                                                   the ginger in your mother’s favourite recipe.






After Finding Her Dad’s Mock Pigeons in The Garage, My Friend Slept with Them for
Years, Like They Were a Plush Toy Waiting to Be Saved

Walking home, turn down the noise
in your headphones, welcome the reassuring hum

of your own feet ahead of you, like a tealight 
sliding over a wet sink.

Above, planes blink their misplaced bravery
in leathery shapes & your wrist gloats 

two torn clovers, 
scrawled in black ink. The memory

of the man you loved, greying
all your best white
t-shirts. You ran,

not like colour, but a bird
startled by burlap. You are 
home, now, settling 

into bed & cradling 
your images. After the clawing pause, 

your dream breaks

into two perfect halves. Your father 
has come // to take

the needles from you, & everything is
yellowed with chlorine. As with all cartoons,

behind the sounds: simply a man,
stretching a balloon.




​jade is a dyslexic poet, editor, and muti-disciplinary artist from the UK. She is often told she “looks like a dog person.” jade is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln and her first collection of poetry, Sucker Punch, was published by Broken Sleep Books in December 2023. Other works have been published in national and international journals and anthologies, including 3:AM Magazine, Schlag Magazine, and Poetry Salzburg Review.

hnt6581 CC




Humid Heartaches

Francis hid the snuff of ambition, the halter tops and trellis tattoos, all the ways his existence particular-ed – from them he hid his sea and air, his humid heartaches.

He existed in quiet love, the first curl of a nepenthes pitchers, the first host of Ohio lampreys feasting to spawn. He existed in sea, atoms of air, in the churning loam, in the churning guts of predatory fishes. He existed as wolf spiders descending on small-town fruit baskets.

The sea existed inside him, as ever, lakes of salt : torpedoes of plankton.

They demanded to see his molars, my scars and nipples. They were always calling possibility abomination.

He salted his body for deer tongues and kisses from flies. He had an albino corn snake, but together they made a gentle chimera.

They demanded pectorals from which wolverines emerged, scarlet-muzzled. Hammers for hands,
but he grew epiphytes with furred roots. They demanded he love loudly.






PINK SPACE

I avert my man’s eyes    I pick the lint from between     my orchid sequins           I was thinking

about the crushing         pressure exerted on the un-      iverse by God’s love      Francis says

scrolling                               through iNaturalist                       Francis opens Scruff      with a dainty

fingertip                               Inside the mind of god                  a beefcake’s                       waxed chest

I kiss my man & we hold each other while I sip a soda with adaptogens, a chaser of small c catholic water.  Francis walks away, into florid clouds. The sun bursts behind us like a gusher. Francis makes time for god’s painted chariots. Francis makes time for blue dream shrimp &, once, an office chair made of dead mycelium.

I kiss Francis for two days straight. We hold ourselves precious behind each other’s ears, like wire daisies. We keep all our clothes on, a platonic dream of plate tectonics, two men as continents in lock-step. When I hold Francis I hold myself, across some cheesy continuum of calcium carbonate & Pleistocene moss feasts; shared taxa, shared beds of barrier reefs, peat, succulent soil, & unopened gas bills.

I kiss my man & the bottom falls out of the cricket protein market. All those orthopterans freeze and starved no more. The mind of god is gay & his gut is lacto-ovo, at very least. My man talks to blue fairies on Savannah nights, full of leg song, & I grow jealous & pick at my sequins.  My man buys me Leopold’s, & I lick Savannah Socialite down to the cone.


​

Wren Hanks is the author of Lily-livered (Driftwood Press), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and The Rise of Genderqueer (Brain Mill Press). He is an alum of the Tin House Workshop and the Lambda Writer's Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and he was recently awarded a 2026 Vermont Studio Center residency. HIs recent writing appears in Foglifter, No Tokens, Diode, The Journal, and elsewhere. He is an editor for smoke and mold and lives in Brooklyn, where he works in animal advocacy. You can find more of his writing at wrenhanks.com.​​

hnt6581 CC
​

The Tutor Goes Down On (Instead of Over) The Lesson Plans


​Then / one / day / it / just / happens / for no / reason / at all / he rolls up either end / of the
distance / like a sausage casing / strong eyes / grazing steadily / at her / all over / from across /
the heavy / desk table / and then not / the blue edges / of her / lucent fingertips / a field / a sun / a
stem / of milkweed / something / the sea has touched / but not / the sea itself / and yes Georgie /
is aware / that people / with good futures / do not / blow / their tutees / she has seen / the hole / a
man’s hands / burn into / a woman’s life / she has / woken up from / bad dreams / with the side of
her head / smashed open / the gaping hole in her head / shaped just like / the corner of / her
mother / ‘s china cabinet / the hardwood floor / melting into / a red / shag / rug / but in her / own
/ house / Georgie / is a sallow mass / of rolled-out chicken wire / and look / here / her coils are /
put to / good use / here / the sweet-chested / call of the sunrise-blue / steel / can be heard / from
every side / of every fence / from end to / placeless end / every / unrecog / nizable / landmark /
flush with / the heat of / a tempered / color / so bright / the color is gone / the sunrise turns / from
blue to red / and yet the sun / does not / change color / at all / and although / Georgie walks home
/ in the single-note / post-sunset / she could not / tell you / the definition / of a single thing / it
takes / seventeen blocks / for her to walk past / the busted sideview / of a merlot-colored sedan /
​and realize / he did in fact / leave something on her face.

​

Thomas and Dianne Jones CC




                                                                                                       i wish i were mt. zion. rd.

when my grandfather died, he came back as a sound. he came back as a vinyl record spinning comes back as a planet. dark and spherical, edged with wrinkles and worry. he came back as a chess board. he came back as the amber scent of bourbon rimming glass cups under queen-size beds. meanwhile, the record was curving under the needle, the child on the living room couch clutched with bi-panic, numb and vacant. and when the record stopped and impaled itself with its own needle point arm, the child sank into the moss cushions and someone else cried into their daughter's salsa bowl. that’s the one my grandfather sings to because it’s so vital. you read. and the piano keys come back like saturn’s rings.




Taylor Swanner is a writer from the bluegrass state who now resides in Florida, where summer is cruel and eternal. She writes about women’s health, body horror, unrequited love, and the month of October. Her writing has appeared in FGCU’s literary journal: the Mangrove Review.

Christian Collins CC




She cleans her dead parents’ home, her fatigue 

strung on a loom. She twangs a thread & waits 
for a wail. Instead, the thread hums an insect’s outro, 
finished in a grave. Chitin segments & barbed legs crunch 

into the space. Every morning’s humidity wakes her 
with the flies’ drone serving empty breakfasts. She 
revisits her family’s warp & weft. Each box 

rattles with shuttles, plaited fibers, argots 
from ancestors wrapped in worry’s threads. 
Puckered & stiff, a reservoir that cannot unravel. 

It takes time to undo the uneven weave 
of ghosts; no one person can untangle it. Port to port, 
a coracle insists on passage through this past. 

Place her hands on another mooring 
next to the banyan tree. Wait 
for the mycelium to gather.

​




Separate Territory

I'm out of the city's cist, into a widening syrinx beyond. I drive 
along the folded edge of farmgrid as sky turns into the bluest jar.

I've left the end rows of corn, the ones farmers plant to guide 
wanderers out of the fields. Neon sun tightens into dusk. 

Headed to rock and algae along glacial erratics 
and striped feldspar, serrations of trees revel in wind 

and stand straight in every season. DNA is impossible 
to destroy completely. I shed fragments of it everywhere, 

base-pairs in attraction. The trees know this, their roots burying 
bits of me for safekeeping. Fifty-six vertebrae are scattered

along the fenestrations of sandbar and forest. An animal 
with such significance should forever haunt me embalmed 

by torn greys, everywhere. Nature isn't human-drawn. 
It's whole, each foramen a portal for the next field.

​


​Elisabeth Preston-Hsu has published in CALYX, West Trade Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She won The Healing Muse’s F. Sean Hodge Poetry Prize in 2024 and Common Ground Review’s poetry contest in 2025. Follow her on Instagram @writers.e

Andrey Shalaev CC




Mountain Spirits

i saw a bumper sticker that read: 

your pawpaw didn’t run shine through 
these hollows for you to be a bootlicker

and it brought to mind men
polished bright as loafers,
their brazen spirits blazing out from behind

as they ran shining by. but then i realized 
they were talking men
covered in coal dust
day in and out

at night with a violent liquid moon 
strong in their eyes and smeared on their lips.
highly flammable humans lit like rags 
in bottles, ragged for the dab
that’ll do them in 

to their beds before the sneak of a blue dawn. 
the morning dew could bring bacon 
for the babes – just a little somethin’ extra –
even though extra on top of not enough  
is just ends meeting
their makers like gods of the woods.

‘cause lord knows what’s in the mine
isn’t yours in the deep hole
of mountain misery.
they may have been bootleggin’ 
but not lickin’ nothin’ ‘cept the snake eyes
of the law, lappin’ them shut, or lookin’
the other way. they covered

themselves in the thick 
dark of molasses hours and the still
frame of hidden seekers 
not wantin’ for trouble, just holdin’
on for the days when the dreams of old 
mother jones’d come to fruition.
she’ll be comin’ round the mountain, 
they all sung, to crook her finger and strike 

them from those pits where the hot fanged 
vipers of despair and defilement threatened 
suffocation. she’d deliver them 
to the vesper mists 
of the shenandoah’s wrists of green
and bless them their daily beers.
and maybe if the labor be softer, so then
be the drink, with time to stop 
and think on the week ends of fishin’

bits for quilts to stuff
in the beddin’ and battin’
one-thousand or at least five-hundred
‘stead of slidin’ into home with the specter
of the forces that be 
kickin’ down your back with the brawn
of their heavy boots. but they did pile 
it on, those paw paw men, like august tramps
juggling the balls of fate while doing simple
maths in their heads.




Jessie is a poet/mother/florist living on unceded Ohlone territory. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MA from San Francisco State (both in Art History). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Southern Humanities Review, F(r)iction, CALYX, Chestnut Review, Mother Mag, California Quarterly, Kestrel, and others. You can read more of her poetry at jessiewingate.com.