Shawn Nystrand CC



Calling Summer

Across this eastern hill road 
you may see curious wonders: 
cows splitting mud earth to drink
from ancient silt, deep buried coal, 
still-pink red-bud leaves and lime 
slivers branching— membranes on 
the rind mountain from where you’ll drive
to see me. Sharp trees, calling summer.
But now, you’re fire in a distant farm field 
in the one patch holding light. I wonder 
what the windows on your house are like, 
what are the ways your paint peels 
in beauty. My windows, thin screens 
torn from other people’s mischief. 
I say, when you come, let’s call 
summer. Us, a slow beating heart.

​


​
Us, As a Drive-In Movie

Under the arc of moving stars, my teenage daughter and I continue as a drive-in movie, play our conversation along the sky. We sit, the windshield a screen, our garage door a screen. We look straight ahead and build towards each other with talk, though we send our words outwards, towards the arc of night. This evening, she tells me about the Cold War from her history class, I tell her I lived the war, knew it from a touch perspective, and how strange. I will that her teenage years might implode into mine, but all I feel is stillness. I share that the construction at her high school has been such a surprise to me—the work’s sudden end. I say, I thought the orange cones and hills of gravel would be there until after she was gone from the school. When we were gone from there, I mean. The finish would belong to someone else. She says, you sound like a younger version of me. I wonder if she knows what we are. The stars wait behind light from our city and the meandering clouds. We make our movie, and I hope for her to tell me.




​
Alison Heron Hruby is an associate professor of English education at Morehead State University in eastern Kentucky and lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Juste Literary, Sleet Magazine, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Alien Buddha Press, and elsewhere. You can find her on X @aheronhruby and Instagram @alliehope68

Jeff Ruane CC




i went to chicago like everyone does, unprepared

but i was loving, and my coat was atrocious. and now? 
it likely floats in the ocean, undying, unlike everything 
i hold dear. i stayed for good reasons. it wasn’t
the cigarettes, being 28 at 2am, or even the blue line, 
not even the hot dogs. it wasn’t the endless rows 
of parking meters stacked parasitically as police
along lonesome asphalt lots cracked with indian grass 
in this big-shouldered, meat-grinding machine of bad
sanctuary, where every type of municipal violence 
has been imagined by near-dead unholy bastards, perfected 
for two million dollars a day. it wasn’t the cruelty. 

it was the way a place lets you see it: rotten 
with potential, ripened to the core with every sort 
of survival, story, laughing even, lightly liquored up 
and layered, one year at a time, a little more sensibly.
not much. we can leave what we love. bring a good coat.





we should go to school for breathing 

it took me leaving. everything. saying yes to stillness. 
what once was possum left four months to sink 
into the sidewalk, reclaimed long since by scavenger, 
pearlwort, bittercress, what grows where dying goes. 
dandelions, whose name i say sleeping. it took taking 
the only man i'll marry by the hand and saying 
what i wanted for once. to fuck under full moonlight. 
it took my nakedness. forgiving it. body on sunday, 
covered in mud. body on sunday breaking, baking bread, 
myself, late afternoon. god-sun in september. 

i wasn't born patient—i made me this way. believing 
the black birds show me. it took believing. when i say 
i mean faith. i mean—could you look at me now and not 
say miraculous? i call you just the same. my dove. 
i am telling you. take what you love close to you.
lay a blanket on the grass.

​


Kristin Lueke is a Virgo, chingona, and author of the chapbook (in)different math, published by Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in HAD, Hooligan, Witch Craft, Untoward, the Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She has some degrees from Princeton and the University of Chicago, and one time, she was nominated for a Pushcart for a poem about revenge. (It didn’t win.)
​

Nic McPhee CC





Pigeon Hill According To Sister Ignatia


Vicki says to get herself off the Hill,
girl needs a boyfriend. She don’t want to
end up teenage pregnant like her sister
got. Now she spends her afternoons at the college
Oztown, restaurants, shops, where there’s them that rattle
cups and them that sometimes hand out coins,
and sometimes won’t. But to get herself off the Hill,
girl needs a man. Ramshackle shotgun
house, on the porch that man drinks Jack from the bottle.
Next to him there’s a boy be skinning raccoon.
Garbage burns in a fifty-gallon steel
barrel. Bootleg timeline of Pigeon Hill
is moonshine, crackpipe, methmouth, opioid epochs.
Some of them fights you win, and some you won’t.
Fastfood job, drug court, Army recruiter ready
to take you down. You have to stand your ground.
Child prodigies prowl sidewalks, barefoot
and shirtless, a summer shellac of sweat and dust
coats their legs. They teach themselves to read
the cuneiform of situations. Supposing
you set your guitar on the stoop, supposing
you left a shovel leant against a tree,
sweets of pillage bank the coin of this realm,
Fear Thy Neighbor, currency and commandment.
Survivalist children, quick at coming to know
the ring-composition of the undertow:
make thy neighbors more afraid of thee
than thou be of them. No jewelry, heirlooms, paintings,
wine collections worth a fence’s dollars
in the Westmont Public Housing Complex.
The only sweets of pillage are Fear Thy Neighbor.
Flaunt your take with style. Cast the stolen
fishing pole with a practice plug in the street
for all to see, and coin of the realm lights up
the slot machine when neighbors fear being
your future mark. According to the buzz
of summer sky’s florescent lights, child prodigies
learn diagrams for fear’s assembly lines,
Rottweiler chained to honey locust tree,
pseudoephedrine chemistry, ammonia tang.
Pitch of limbs buckshot into the wooded lot
when police cars nose through Pigeon Hill,
survivalist children quick at coming to know
the ring-composition of the undertow.
Children tell each other the news of sex
they forage. The summertime man that fixes bikes
for free explains what sex words mean. He teaches
metaphor, how baseball glove surrounds a bat,
one kind of bat, but many kinds of glove.
Some like bat-and-bat or glove-and-glove,
you understand. The more he teaches metaphor,
the less these out-of-school children wonder what--
what it means when overhearing hard-liquored
men brag on the time back when they pulled
a metaphorical train on so-and-so,
ring-composition of the undertow.
Another summer more in want of love,
friendly group of boys and plenty of Boone’s Farm,
just boys who get you laughing at their mock-
innocent interest in what your pantszipper hides.
Supposing there is a fix for want of love,
their bleary persistence breaks that fix’s limit.
Squirrel nailed to a walnut tree
and pliered, another summer more in want of love.
Fight against the undertow, you drown sure.
So much perhaps depends / upon / a red
wheel / barrow, but if a tin can’s round ribs
contain the world, if sun and stars are sleeping
inside the tractor tire roped to a treelimb,
what opening is there for those whose circle
is too closed to the luxuries of a life
and language so uncomplicated and spare?

​


​
James Bradley Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Wells is the author of two poetry translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: Pindar’s Victory Songs (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Wells is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University and lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

John Brighenti CC




Past the dead end 

When the asphalt stops
up the steep hill, past
the last painted house,
the last neat yard, 
there is still a way.

If you are willing to step 
over fallen logs, sink 
into mud, navigate 
brambles, you can find
the whisper of a path.
No planks. No stones–
just a hint of feet:
human, deer, fox.

Around the ridge, a hush–
like when power fails 
and you realize what quiet is, 
absent an electric hum.

If you follow, leave 
everything behind. Bring only 
your eyes and ears, your lungs, 
your legs, a bit of paper, 
a pen tucked in a pocket. 
With these, remake yourself,
ready for anything.





Clock watching

3:33, angel numbers in
license plates, phone numbers.
Incant for one moment
what your heart desires.

There was a time when wishes
had names–now wisps trail 
forgotten–the turning of planets, 
metronome of cells. One moment 
to the next, broken glass 
in our hair.

In the middle of the afternoon
in the middle of the night, imagine
what would rend you, play it
like a movie. 

looks like cancer
                                               cuts on his legs
              workforce reduction
he’s gone 
              so quick 
                             he’s gone.

Angel, keep us safe just
              one
                            minute
                                                 more.



​
Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her chapbook, Alchemy of Yeast and Tears, was published in spring 2023. Her work has won honors including Best of the Net 2022 nomination, inclusion in Best New Poets 2022, and second place in the 2022 Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest (selected by Marge Piercy), and appears in Atlanta Review, Whale Road Review, Calyx and About Place, among others.

James Loesch CC




Losing Streak 

Took a Greyhound 
to Albany to lose
my virginity 
some creep 
selling t-shirts 
out of a trash bag 
tried to get me 
to jack him off,
sweetened the pot 
with the promise 
of handi-wipes.

I declined 
politely, feigned 
sleep ’til we got to 
the station, hid 
in the bathroom 
’til God_of_Jell0 
swooped in to save
the mistletoe 
in his top hat 
both a signifier 
and a curse.

///

A few hours later:  in his parent’s shower:  a pink streak on the wall.

///





Brother

Before you became you, every
man I fell in love with was you.

Veins full of horse, ectoplasm 
and dust: a litany of them

with see-through skin,
hands that couldn’t quite quit 

the twitch. First there was Jeremy--
cigarette smoke in his hair.

Skateboards and eyeshadow,
we were still young. Pre-junk.

Maybe some acid, a bunch of weed,
Mountain Dew, no big deal.

Then there was Johnny,
the whole hit-&-run of him.

Miles marked by bruises and past
Easter’s chocolate Jesuses.

Lastly, Clayton, with his cool Texas twang, 
now just a tombstone on Google.

I’m left here sifting through vials 
of ashes and alphabet crib sheets, 

poems written on Denny’s napkins,
safety-pinned T-shirts, baggies full of hair.

I’ve got milk teeth, mix tapes, petrified 
umbilical stumps. All that water-

logged Henry Miller bullshit. 
Your scratched-up Pennywise CDs.

I feel too young to have lost so many lovers,
                                                                    a Brother,

but the rings around my eyes remind:
It was almost thirty years ago that we

moved into the house of the hungry 
ghost. I grew that turtle shell, those fish 

gills, tried to summon an extra set 
of toes. I prayed for us; I really did. 

My knucks have the tiny moon-shaped 
scars to prove. When that didn’t work, 

I cracked open the cask and pickled 
my liver like a proper pig’s foot, too. 

A multitude of sins, Gran-Gran 
would’ve said, sipping a high-ball 

herself. The beasts in the backs of our 
cabinets have funny names: Zit Cream, 

Poppycock, Cohosh, Codeine, Step on
a Crack Break our Mother’s Back. Thicker

than water—more like syrup—time inches on, 
Jon-Jon. Out of your ending, we begin

                                                                                again.





​Tiffany Promise received an MFA from CalArts, where she completed a novel-length manuscript filled with creepily beautiful poetic fiction. Her undergraduate life was situated in New York City at Sarah Lawrence College and Eugene Lang College, where she immersed herself in women’s studies, literature, and slam poetry. After obtaining her MA from CIIS in Counseling Psychology, she has been working for the last few years in San Francisco as a psychotherapy intern--she uses her literary and arts background to inform her therapeutic work, focusing on metaphor, imagery, and the archetypes that link our internal experiences to a vast collectivity. She also uses her deep understanding of psychological processes and subconscious wanderings to inform her creative writing.

Tiffany has performed her poetry and fiction all over the United States, from REDCAT in Los Angeles, to back-rooms of dingy, indie coffee shops in Jersey City. She loves reading her work (whether it is poetry or fiction) and is looking to do more of that in Los Angeles. 
Tiffany's sensibilities are greatly influenced by  feminism, punk rock, trips to Disneyland, and the phases of the moon.

Paul VanDerWerf CC




Every Time Someone Reads This Ghazal, I Reluctantly Spear the Dragon

On Michaelmas, I am the saintly mother and I finally slay my dragon. 
(The dog, the cat, my children, too, but mostly the dragon.)

On the evening of my Sainthood, I throw wide every door to let out suffering.
In Dallastown, in golden light, there is finally a spear inside the dragon.

I am a wife in a dirty apron kneading to feel something softer. More flour than bread,
I wipe my hands on apron: Does she have time to slay a dragon?

I once was a wife who is a mother who knows she can’t express suffering to children.
So I pricked my finger on the spear each night to remind myself of the dragon.

At the market, I claim an apple from inside a wicker basket.
Above it, a chalkboard reads: apples red, apples red. (Color of the dragon.)

A gaunt store clerk walks his hands across a bloody apron: The butcher is working overtime
cutting meat for the women. I can see them waiting, smoking like the dragon.

I am not ashamed by the thought of the apple in my red coat’s pocket.
I smile for the camera at the automatic door and remember not to feed the dragon.

Memory: Baptist church in third grade. I’m at the well and cusping on woman.
In white robes we are told to pray to God. And I am remembering my dragon.

Pastor was kind about prayer and said our words could be anything to Heaven.
Say the words from your heart. Can God hear me inside the belly of this dragon? 

Chrissy, I remember you in those years. I used a photograph of us to remember.
80s perm of our hair in September air, caught in maple red, waiting for the dragon.
​




Conversion

The clang of grief stopped.
Only the sparrows left
murmurs on the curve
of my breath.

I see a tanager in scarlet dress.
She carries with her thimbles of sound
her lexicon an offering

air-drunk and spilling into
the hopeful grass.

But my eyes cannot be troubled
with every green fire of blade,

as if abundance is a language
that can fall to oblivion.

A bird’s shadow, dark
as the deepest jade, eclipses me. I am
carved away from the sun. Here comes

the flare. Do you see it?
It is threading G-d’s light
through my body of glass.

​

​
Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been featured in various journals, most recently Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, and forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Bibby Idyllwild Arts scholarship for poetry and placed second for the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee.

r. nial bradshaw CC




Settling 


Ever since my mother died I carry my body like her casket, 
like I’m wearing a sign that says “something dead lives here.”
And she does.

Grief is a possessive lover,
curling his fingertips into flesh
Snaking his arms, his firm embrace   
a hidden chokehold.

Two weeks before my mother died, I cocooned in her bed, 
the floorboards in the kitchen creak as she
Sways to The Goo Goo Dolls.
I don’t think there’s ever a way to prepare the people you love for your leaving.
There is no graceful exit.
Sometimes it’s easier just to open that door and 
throw yourself into the Nothing.

My bones are settling like the floors of her house,
here, where she's still swaying.

​



I Cover Callous with Bruise   


Some things, my grandfather tells me, 
are between You and God.
I wonder how many secrets he’s left at the altar.

We don’t talk about the years I spent away from home
or how I got there.
It’s an unspoken understanding
that we share;
Let dead dogs lie. 
Even if you have the photographs to prove it; or the road rash. 

There are things I don’t tell them anymore.
After enough screaming wolf, eventually
you just kill that motherfucker.
I don’t know when my metamorphosis happened;
when I shifted from daughter to megaphone.

I drape a wolf’s skin over my child head,
spend years licking my own wounds;
Maybe I am more survival 
than person.



​

In a Past Life


my teeth grind so hard in my sleep I wake up with craters in my gums, fight nightmares off so hard I have scars on my palm shape like the curve of my nails but I swear
they are not from me.

The fist sized dent in the washer? Not me.
The garbage bag of sweaters not suitable for donation due to blood stains, shoebox of empty pill bottles, coin purse chock full of Polaroids of people in varying states of inebriation? Not mine.
The busted lip, the rosey pink scar running diagonally down the length of my left arm? An accident.
Those patches of road rash that litter my body like distant countries on a map of bad choices were not my fault;

It has been three years since I launched myself from the door of my moving Honda and I still feel pebbles in my knees sometimes.
I am not crazy, that was just a Thursday.

These days I take my medication,
I pay my rent, do my dishes,
my dog sleeps soundly by my feet.
I have almost forgotten the words to Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor,
Haven’t written a suicide note in over a year. 

This morning I cried on the highway,
pulled off onto a dirt road and 
screamed until I saw somebody drive by 
then took a nap in my backseat.


​

Mike Fritcher CC




FOR SEATTLE, WHERE SHE MUST RUN 

I wonder where my sister is tonight
maybe under a cardboard box
or under a bridge
she always liked the troll from seattle
and the vintage dolls-
yes
she’s under a bridge. 

She posted on facebook today
some memory from five years ago
her hair is pink like the troll’s
but she's missing teeth and her cheeks
have started to sink
beneath her fragile bones
she's only thirty three-
And that was five years ago.

I hardly hear from her but
on my twentieth birthday 
she posted
that she loved me

A lot has happened since then
she said she got clean
went to LA and through recovery
tailed back to utah

I imagine her a hopper on trains
like London in the 1890’s
a Leon Ray Livingston bo-ette
but I know that's romanticized
she went to prison when she got home
“That’s how you stayed clean” mom’s
voice leaked 

over telephone lines

                              over the Utah-Idaho border

                                                                             over the family grapevine.





Jonny Shae Ransbottom is the author of several essays and poems, and has been published in Minerva Rising’s “The Keeping Room” and Club Plum. She enjoys writing all genres, and finds herself drawn to the raw and real stories of love and hardship, particularly those that speak to the feminine experience. As an educator, she believes in the passion of writing as a tool for connection and healing. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University in 2023 and continues to write diverse works of poetry, fiction, and lyrical nonfiction. @jonnyshae

Rob LeBer CC




Killing Off Weed Killers

You are a “corrupted” seed in the cracks 
of halves and fulls of truth,
but from your watering 
of suppressed memories and faltering 
in the grasping of wanting 
to fight the malevolence 
in your shaping,
a bird lingers to peck
your existence to death
to fill its belly for monstrous sustenance. 

Of which form, little seed, 
would you have taken? 
Of a cherry blossom tree or a weed? 

The crafter of your atoms chose the former
(don’t you wish you could have chosen the former?), 
yet “nature’s” beasts twisted your roots
to shoot out black vacuous attributes 
only for a cleansing hand to pluck you and discard you 
as a problem for their vision of gardenly beauty. 

But if you fight to survive as you are, little seed...
well, I like a little determination 
of self-salvation.

For God creates weeds 
as much as he does his pure cherry blossom trees.

​


Kristen Reid lives in East Tennessee and is an honors English and creative writing teacher at Cherokee High School. She spends most of her time writing folk horror and weird western short stories and working on her dark fantasy novels. She has fiction stories published with Broadswords and Blasters, Scare Street Publishing, The Horror Tree, The Sirens Call, and Springer Mountain Press, and she has poetry published with Anti-Heroin Chic and Bullshit Lit. Follow her on Instagram @writerkristenreid and on Twitter @Kris10BelleReid. 

Rob Glover CC



​
Wake Up

​the little girl drifts between the sofa and a coffee table littered with beer /  drinking the dregs from each bottle / her baby-doll face caked in makeup / her mama’s streaked with mascara / wake up the little girl says in a sing-song voice / her mama face-down on the couch / lipstick staining a threadbare cushion / the little girl tiptoes into the kitchen / drags a chair to the cupboard / reaches for the cookie jar / she teeters / dizzy / slips / ass planted on the floor / wake up, wake up she stammers / wipes the sting from her eyes / eats until her fingers are sticky with crumbs / the little girl twirls faster and faster in her tinker bell dress on a fairytale high / waving her magical wand / poof! she proclaims like she does when her mama is lonely / does her mama know the little girl likes when she’s lonely? / that sometimes when she has visitors–they visit her too / the little girl shivers / wake up / the toilet flushes / wake up / she tucks in behind Mama / wake up / the floorboards creak / wake up, wake up, wake up



​
Karen Crawford is a writer with Puerto Rican roots and lives in the city of Angels. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was included in Wigleaf's Top 50 Longlist 2022. Her work has appeared in Bending Genres, Emerge Literary Journal, Cheap Pop, 100 Word Story, and elsewhere. You can find her on twitter @KarenCrawford_ and BlueSky @karenc.bsky.social