Cover Art: "Get Free and Thread Some Joy Into That Needle" By James Diaz



Editor's Remarks:

James Diaz


Poetry:


JoLee Passerini
Gabor Gasztonyi
Alicia Hoffman 
Kristin J. Kelley
Jeff Whitney
Christine Jackson
Jennifer Small 
Nicole Zwolinski
Melody Wilson
Natalie Wolf 
Michele Sharpe
Chantel L. Carlson
Amara Tiebout
Elisabeth Crago
Cassie Leone
Hanna Tawater 
Barbara Krasner
Susan Vespoli
Merrill Oliver Douglas
Winter R. Parker 
Denise Gilchrist
A.M. Hayden
Christian Sammartino
Wendy Miles
Linda Ryynänen
Tammy Smith
Bob Kirkley
Veronica Tucker
John Wojtowicz
Kate Young
Forrest Miller
Margeaux Templeton
Danielle Bacibianco
Eleanor Cade Busby
Richard Foerster
Alise Versella
Sonya Wohletz 
John Burke
James Finnegan
Ilyse Simon
Catherine Fahey
Cathryn Cofell 
Debora Lidov
Suri Deering
Scott Ferry
Jackie K. White
Louis Bourgeois
Christine Poythress
R.G. Evans 
Bill Howell
Angel Rosen
Beth Kanell 
Mykki Rios 
Christine Potter 
John Dennis
Tamara Stewart 
Alex Missall
Jason Youngclaus
Tiffany Pate
Ramiro Valdes
Abbey Lynne Rays
Jennie Lightweis-Goff
Dana Dickerson
Steph Percival 
Aideen Henry



Essays:

Chad Sullivan
Rebecca Schumejda
Carra Hood
Sue Ann Gleason
Tracie Adams
Jaclyn Frances
Em Marinelli 



Fiction:

Leslie Cairns
Benjamin Joe
Ben Nadler
Joe P. Squance
Kip Knott 


Artwork/Photography:

Nina Nazir
Jo Trafford
Patricia Bingham
Stephanie Bortmas
Kip Knott
Karen Cline-Tardiff 


Book Review:


Sean G. Meggeson ​

Joseph Gage CC



​
          I come here sometimes to pray. What I mean is: I touch the ground and it feels warm. Well traveled. Because I swear there are times when being an editor feels like a type of wordless holy. We do it for different reasons. I started this work as a jagged stone, the waters moving over me have worked me into something I can hardly name. Its closest sound: gratitude. Words save our lives. Nothing else matters. My reason. This new issue has a lot of addiction and recovery in it. Was always the theme, but here it is, bubbling to the surface more than ever. And funny: how it's just what I needed, more than ever. 

Because ain't nothin' mine, I keep walking this line between learning and leaning in. Listening. What a song did for me once, laid out on the floor at sixteen: said: hold on to things you can't see, only feel. It was real. Music set it off, then came the poems and the no-home and all the years I went missing. When you could not name what had been taken from you, you lifted the pen and the pen lifted the pain just a little, just enough, that something broke through, carried you.

Look, there's a real limitation to all this. It won't undo what was done, the things that happened are real. The pain is real. We can burn ourselves out on hope. Who says we don't need a little darkness? Too much of anything can be deadly. Light and dark. Hope is somewhere in the middle. Whatever I thought I knew I am unknowing. It's called growing. We're all just a bunch of word farmers mixing our pain and past into the soil, hoping, praying, that what blooms leaves a little room for the unruly to sing its song. 

That what is wild and unruly belongs. You. Me. We belong. And looking back on all that - hope like an arrow to the heart - we say yes to all of it. Pain is pain. And so is love. And being here still despite where and what we come from is a goddamn miracle. Give yourself a little grace. You ain't done planting them rows just yet. Let the past have the past. Here we all are, right now, in this one imperfect moment, watching a thing come to life in the good light. 

Until we pass through these parts again, just be all that you needed for yourself back then. And each other. 

In service, love, and gratitude,
James Diaz
EIC - AHC​

Bob P. B.  CC




Grammar Lesson: Indefinite Pronouns

Anything I touch will turn to flesh,
and anyone is someone to be mending.
Anyone is dreaming of another 
red-haired girl, one whose cheeks 
are hollow as the inside of a shell.
Anyone can learn to sleepwalk.
When you wake up, the sofa’s gone 
and you have a wooden swing.
Anything I touch grows legs and walks away.
Anything that no one loves 
gets buried.  I can’t sleep.  I dig holes
in the yard.  My dogs check them out
and grin.  I’ll dig a pit and bury 
the old brown easy chair.  It’ll be 
goddam triumphant – to lose 
something that big in the ground.
Holding a hammer, I mistake
kisses for nails.  What I want
is something I do penance for.  
Anyone can learn to say a prayer.
Anyone can take clothes to a shelter.
It’s easy to give things away.
It’s harder to give up.  Some people
sleepwalk into another’s bed.  What they 
want is something left unsaid.  
How I love the ones who take 
things that are broken.  The sign says: 
Small appliances, working or not.
Not all can be fixed, but here’s to trying.
I ask if anyone needs anything,
but no one answers.  I woke up at home
this morning.  Somebody’s couch 
was in the driveway, gently flaming.

​


JoLee Passerini holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and teaches writing at Eastern Florida State College. Her poems have appeared most recently in Rattle, Bellevue Literary Review, O-Dark-Thirty, DIAGRAM, and Shadowplay.

Joseph Gage CC




Viking Bob 

Light coming in from the Sunrise Hotel
softened at night even in the rain when
the outline of his beard moved in the mist
Bob remembered his sisters as they covered
him in summer grass beside the compost
heap covering his face and shoulders on
the wet ground.  Tiny dandelions filled
his pocket where he kept a book of names
of lost children and those who allowed him
to sleep in their room and touch the horn on
his gold-painted helmet.  Yearning to see
Jessica, he lay down at her door and spoke
through the keyhole, groaning all night, she
stayed silent, until they took him away

​




Rose

Rose lived behind a curtain in Jim’s
room, one bed on each side.  Hers lay farthest
from the window, near the door and 
wash basin.  Rose put heroin into
her arms like nuances of unfinished
dreams that kept her awake as her 
blood examined every particle
of memory, every outward scar
inflicted by knives and tattoo needles.
Jim an old man who carried shopping
bags of old bread and expired mushrooms
knew Rose was the only one that
loved him, and so he kept the curtain
open as long as she let him.

​


Gabor Gasztonyi is an award-winning professional photographer, author, and filmmaker who lives in New Westminster, BC, Canada.

His book A Room in the City, published by Anvil Press in 2010 with a foreword by Dr Gabor Mate, was a finalist for the George Ryga Award for Social Justice in Literature. Last year, he published Budapest at Night (Fekete Sas Kiado, Budapest), and currently, The Last Polio Children is due out this fall.  

Recent exhibitions include The Sudanese at the Surrey Art Gallery and two featured exhibits at the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, Portraits at Parkside Gallery.

His film No Way Out won Best Cinematography at the Harlem Film Festival in New York in May 2019.

Gabor is a polio survivor who has been an advocate for many years, including in Ethiopia, where he received a national recognition award for eradicating Polio.

Matt P. CC




Once Upon a Time 

There was a home made of broken glass.
Once upon a time there was a shoe that 

didn’t fit. Yes, there was a ball. Orchestra
and silk gown. And always, on the wall, 

an old clock ticking. Every tale, a re-
winding of time. Every fable, a reversal.

A return to. I want to reach toward the girl 
gathering summer berries near the stream. 

I want to shelter the lost fawn, reunite the lover.
Let me tell you about the fountain of all stories. 

There is a bird on a high branch cawing. There 
is a small mouse hidden in the eaves. This life 

will take your blood. So carry your rucksack 
of apples, your kiln-fired jug. Tune your ear 

outward. Listen to the language of the earth.
There is only so much that can be said of 

the dangers around the bend. Yes, goblins exist. 
Yes, too, to the witch. She pours her potions 

into the stitching of books you love to read 
about children lost in the dark forest. She turns 

you into a breadcrumb. She turns you into a worm. 
She spells it out so simply – There is a world 

not meant to hurt you. You must run before 
it gets worse. Only survival breaks this curse.

​




Trestle, 1992

We would follow the trail, littered
with empty Zima, past poplar and 
maple and nearer the muddy banks 
of the Schuylkill, more lyreleaf sage, 
sweetspine dogwood. The greenery 
came past our adolescent hips, grazed 
our midriffs as we found our way, climbed 
upward to the shirtless boys loitering
on the abandoned trestle. They would 
gather there, smoke Marlboro reds, 
double dare each other to jump headfirst 
into the river. It was dangerous. Legends 
of mysterious rocks, old cement dumped 
from the railroad depot, invisible under 
the current, ready to smash a boy’s skull, 
but that just added to the thrill. We were 
all there for the same thing, something 
we needed to take from that place, something
not easy to find. We were of one mind, baking 
in the August heat of suburban Philadelphia. 
We would eat ramen from someone’s kitchen, 
lick our fingers and trail them through sugar 
for dessert, thrust our hips and gaze into mirrors 
full of want. We were parentless. Aimless arrows 
and it was summer, so we egged on the boys 
as their perfect bodies sliced through the water 
twenty-five feet below. Us girls never jumped. 
It was enough to be near them as they whooped 
and hollered and we watched, combustible as 
a lit match. We passed a cigarette, the smoke 
permeating our permed hair, lips sticky with gloss. 
We were practicing a lot – smoke rings, the art 
of inhale, exhale. We were trying to breath fluidly 
through the smoke in our lungs, the growing 
suffocation of our bodies. We were in the air but 
we were also underneath the water. We were 
drowning, searching for the surface of our lives. 
We held our breath and closed our eyes. We held 
on to each other and somehow made it out alive.

​




Witness Trees 

Let’s start in uncharted territory. Some hazy future
void of hardwood. Let’s move like humans on a zip

line back past the last century, past bulldozer and 
asphalt, shopping mall, parking lot, megalopolis, 

airport runway, mountain fracking, firewalls. For
what it’s worth we saved so many species. Listen

close and you can hear the zoning board, the urban-
suburban sub-committee, the clean sweep volunteer

alone on the street with a trash bag and a pick-up stick
as we hit rewind, past the times that time stopped cold

as hard frost on a stately elm’s branches. We’ve all 
seen some things. In Oxford, Mississippi, say, where

the town square centers around a courthouse. Magnolias
drop blossoms in early June and you can hear the dark

past, the way the wind whips through the trees there 
are no need for plaques—or Paradise, California. Let’s 

start with the lack of water, go back to the lone man 
in the woods with a match—the xylem is a heartwood box,
 
the phloem is a bitter sugar. Run the tape again—pause 
the times where time imprints itself into vascular cambium, 

tannin, resin. Next time I’m outside I’ll listen to the surveyors, 
the sentinels. Yoshino Cherry. Willow Oak. My aging body 

coasting through this blip of time. I’ll start with my own small 
history and the vastness sprouting under the ground of a sapling. 

​


​
​Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the author of four collections, most recently Browsing as a Guest (Gnashing Teeth Publishing). Her poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Thrush, Trampset, The Night Heron Barks, Tar River Poetry, The Penn Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Typishly, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com

mogollon CC




Missing 

When we were small, our parents told me my eyes changed colors with the seasons. You bit all the other kids in the neighborhood. The slide projector smoked in the back of the basement, the dust in the light mixing with the memories we hadn’t finished living, spying on our own vacations. You said, "Holy shit—we had a happy childhood! I've been telling everyone for years it was miserable.”

I miss the perfect morning that disappeared while I slept for two hours. A single black coffee, red accents, anticipation. Orange spice and Marlboro Lights, I love you, I love you, I loved you. Once I walked through the building where I worked, in the city I was about to leave, and pretended I was a ghost. I floated through the day, amazed at the way people—and places—adapt to your absence. But I know now we don’t adapt, we adjust. You’re gone, but  traces of you inhabit everything: the sillage of candied florals, a warm summer night on the beach, fried clams, Moon River on the radio. 

I don’t miss alcohol. But I do miss the taste of fruit-scented bidis—or maybe just the heat of the summer I smoked them. I didn’t realize how much I missed liking baseball until I started liking it again.

I remember missing what I thought would happen. There’s a memory of that beach in Atlantic City—he’s standing next to me, the sunlight blocking his face. I just see wind-tangled blonde hair, freckles, skin that looks like it would warm your hand if you touched it. I'm holding a shell, sharp against my thumb; an iridescent piece from a dream, a snapshot, something that might not have even happened; I can't remember. I don’t always miss the life I never had, though often I wonder.

​


Kristin J. Kelley is a Boston-based poet and editor whose work explores grief, family inheritance, and the quiet imprints of loss and survival. She hosts and organizes a poetry reading series that raises funds for local charities. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arnoldia, Sky Island Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.
​

Alexander Heim CC




What Thou Lovest Well Remains American


You can be the center of your song but you can’t be the star 
says Willie Perdomo. I guess, if you like, you can also be 
the idea of a song, the blue ghost that haunts it, ten squirrels 
barking at the top of a tree. Which is a kind of stardom. 
Grow a terrible beard, the flock comes later. 
The game is write your own obituary 
and publish it in daily installments 
then call it your life. It’s Thursday, the dog 
is looking out the window like a philosophy
major. Yesterday for work I took a quiz that asked what words 
I identify with. Turns out I’m patient, conscientious, 
and a cooperative team member. Who is this for? 
is a great question to ask of almost anything. Like the word 
butyraceous, meaning to have the qualities of butter. In what scenario 
would you use it? My grandfather once guaranteed “One day you’ll wake 
in a different country, so better get funny.” “There’s a bull’s 
eye on your back and on your head so why not party 
til you’re dead?” And when I opened my door just now a hearse 
drove by with a novelty license plate: CU SOON. I bet 
the driver gets a kick, possibly something else, out of that. 
Like the married couple with death plots next to each other,
one with two dates, birth and death, while the other just a birth date, 
no death, and a single statement: “I won,” with the deceased partner’s 
in agreement: “She won.” A bench near a chapel says lift a thankful heart 
to god but after a while does god get bored of thankful hearts? 
Lift a chubby puppy, may be better, seven-hundred might 
do the trick. Or a cacophony of tarantulas. A realization 
of horses. My obituary says don’t love the world less 
love it different. For every well-funded military an astonishment
of flowers. A stupidity of flowers. “That’ll do, pig” 
of flowers, and god giving back our thankful hearts
bandaged and better. When presented two options find a third
a fourth, a fifth. An inheritance of flowers, a pandemonium 
of flowers. To not get swept away by the all-at-once-ness, the holy-
shit-ness, start with the first lesson from preschool or working 
customer service: if you want to say sorry, say thank you.

​


​Jeff Whitney's most recent chapbook is Good Things Are Happening (GreenTower Press, 2026). Recent poems can be found or found soon in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review. A recipient of a 2025 NEA fellowship, he lives with his wife in Portland, OR. For more info, visit www.jeffwhitneypoetry.com.

Warren LeMay CC




Hard Winter in Rooster Town

After our tragic autumn, we  
seek solace by moving. 
The warmest space in the crumbling
farmhouse is an east bedroom above  
the woodstove. Or so we think. 
The ancient stove makes constant 
demands. Another hungry infant. 
Each night we bend close to check 
its weak warm breath. 
 
On some mornings, sunrise 
gleams into our east bedroom. 
Nightmares stir memories. I need
a pillow to cover my face. 

Corrugated ice covers the yard
except for one shoot of rye grass. 
It hurts as I watch it struggle, bent 
and broken into this frozen universe.  

A rooster holds sway in the field out back.   
Its screech blusters over chicken coops,  
gusts through the ruined barn, sending
a shudder through the house.
 
We take supper in town, 
searching for kind hearts
only to find more roosters. 
Local toughs from a lost cosmos 
swill beer, filling Mac’s clam shack  
with brag and swagger after   
racing brash engines across the moon. 
  
If Earth listens to God,
the horizon bends an ear
into the screech of a rooster.

​


​Christine Jackson is originally from New England, now living in South Florida. Her poems have appeared in THE EKPHRASTIC REVIEW, VERSE-VIRTUAL, SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY JOURNAL, CHAMELEON CHIMERA, and WITCHERY THE PLACE FOR E POEMS.

Joseph Gage CC



The Architecture of Noise

First it was a tremor,
the porch light holding its breath,
the kettle forgetting how to be quiet.

Then silence grew seams,
hairline fractures of sound in the stillness,
a low drum beneath the floorboards.

Shadows learned vibration.

Noise rose like a tide inside your ribs,
each heartbeat another struck match,
static collecting in the corners.

You checked the windows.
Opened the front door.
Waited for something outside yourself.

Nothing came.

The air went bright with unsaid lightning
until the room could not contain you,
until the sky leaned down to listen,

until even the dark made space.






How Air Returns

Nobody tells you
returning is quiet.

No orchestra.

No revelation.

Only this:

one day
you notice you opened a window.

One day
you answer the phone.

One day
you laugh before remembering
you were trying not to.

You fold the laundry.

Water the plant.

Buy fruit.

And halfway through the afternoon
you realize

you have not been carrying yourself
like something breakable.

Nothing announces itself.

No before.
No after.

Only air

returning slowly

to rooms that forgot
how to breathe.

​



Jennifer Small is a poet and writer from New York City. She is the author of the self-published poetry collection Still Again: a collection of me and is currently completing her second collection, Those Who Touch Fire. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic and anthologies through Eber & Wein Publishing. Her writing explores memory, identity, and the quiet ways people survive themselves.

Igor Spasic CC




I COME FROM THE VARIETY

of Mid-Westerners who draw 
out long antennas from handled radios
and shuttled their children to the basement
as soon as the sirens wail.

They’d tuck us in with blankets, my Rainbow 
Brite pillow, the crackling radio that sounded 
like cackles, and leave us with one flashlight
to fight over.

Under the stairs, in the dark crawl space,
we’d listen as the footsteps stumbled
and the windows slammed shut, locks
sealing their lips with smacks.

The silence would whirl our panic
into frothy foam that would sizzle
fear and excitement, like drinking 
Pepsi with our cheeks packed with pop rocks.

As the eldest, I’d sacrifice myself to the storm
in search of our parents, and always, 
I’d find them, swinging in the wind
sipping a beer, my dad, not my mom

and watching the charcoal skies bloom
a shade of dark, I’d never seen before.
The breeze bellowing screams 
and bending trees, sucking the leaves

right off – bare, like a cartoon cat sucking the fish
to the bone. The clouds would curl and drop
like a curtain flat and the sky would shush
the audience still.

​




WHEN WE OWNED THE NIGHTS

Remember the red wagon, 
before it had rusted?
When time tumbled toward the earth 
and swirled around our ankles,
but didn’t chain us down?

Night was when fun started.
The slick sky a dark ink 
With matte stars like pinholes
in a faded shoebox diorama.

We ran through the neighborhood
and hid in bushes, shrinking 
out of the purview of the lamp light 
cutting through windows.

Fear never graced us while we played
flashlight tag, dressed in black and doused in bug spray,
adults not concerned with our whereabouts.

In slow motion 9:00 pm shifts to 10:30 and we give up; 
falling to cool ground and watching the stars,
searching for shooting ones while swatting mosquitos
away from exposed skin.

Quietly, parting ways after finding no wishes 
in the drape with no constellations, 
to surrender to sleep before morning.

The wagon waited, tipped on its side, 
on the dewy green grass 
blended with yellow dandelions 
as bumblebees stretched at dawn. 

​


Nicole Zwolinski’s first full-length poetry collection, Motherhead is forthcoming by Finishing Line Press in August 2026 . She has been published in the Feminine Collective, Firewords Quarterly, Alternate Routes, Effemera, the first Gather anthology and more.  She was shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry prize and has two poems featured in their 2026 anthology. You can find her on Instagram @nicolezwrites and links to all her other writing spaces there.