1. God invented strawberry [sic]
2. God invented the lie I told my grandpa right before he died
3. God invented the letter ‘m’
4. God invented my bed sheets being dotted with weird yellow crust that never sleeps and slowly appears wherever it pleases
5. God invented static electricity
6. God invented marrow to fill up my otherwise empty bones
7. God invented slaps to the face
8. God invented the unidentifiable white linty pill I swallowed that I found under the rug I hadn’t cleaned in four years that my mom’s friend whose name I forgot had given to me as a gift I begrudgingly accepted because she was moving to a new apartment after she lost her job and didn’t want to throw it out
9. God invented Norrbotten County, Sweden
10. God invented my triumphant achievement that everyone else either didn’t notice or doesn’t remember
11. God invented logic
12. God invented the lone beer all the way in the back of my fridge’s top shelf that I keep as a reminder to myself that I “don’t really drink anymore”
13. God invented Tic-Tac-Toe (also called Noughts and Crosses)
14. God invented swearing in foreign languages I don’t understand but pretend to
15. God invented rhombuses
16. God invented the moment when I found out that my best friend who didn’t actually like me had transferred to a different middle school
17. God invented 1946
18. God invented the sound of me sloppily chewing and swallowing cheddar and sour cream flavored potato chips while posting about it on social media
19. God invented motionlessness
20. God invented me marrying the love of my life and then took it back after deciding it was a bad idea
21. God invented chocolate
22. God invented you listening to me singing the wrong words to a song that I’m making up as I go along
23. God invented doorknobs
24. God invented lawless tech billionaires so that nobody in my condominium will run out of laundry detergent ever
25. God invented ugly hats
26. God invented my dog who isn’t real
27. God invented eggshell blue
28. God invented my six-year-old self becoming so terrified of a particular shoreline roller coaster that when I would return two dozen years later I would clench each of my muscles as tightly as possible holding my breath and trying to scream so hard all at the same time so that my brain might drive an impenetrable mental wedge between my senses and the world around me and hopefully knock me semi-conscious onto my ass where I would remain in a heap burning badly atop a scratchy beach blanket beneath the destructive rays of the July sun for the rest of the morning and three-quarters of the afternoon
29. God invented metal sulfide ore, in which selenium partially replaces the sulfur
30. God invented my bathroom
31. God invented onomatopoeia
32. God invented the woman whom I would see on the subway platform every so often on my way to work who leaped in front of a moving train while I was standing nearby trying to lick my elbow
33. God invented sea foam
34. God invented bumps so that things don’t have to be so damn smooth all the time if I don’t want them to be
35. God invented trust
36. God invented me over the course of 13.772 billion years
37. God invented the Id
38. God invented my mind’s capacity to tirelessly and regularly generate indelible nightmares but he didn’t invent the nightmares
39. God invented the planet Jupiter
40. God invented me getting everything I ever wanted just to watch me realize that none of it was bringing me any closer to happiness
41. God invented vanilla

Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Once the Night 
 
Once the summer night fell over the sky like a dark cloth,
or a black evening dress thrown across heaven's starry bed.
The hoo-hoot of an owl's complaint echoed from the branches
of a maple tree in the front yard. All else was silence.
The neighbor's unruly dog lay hushed beneath the porch. And a gentle wind, so unlike the fierce winds of winter, combed the leaves of the maple like so much hair. 
 
We had solace for our grief inside talk about love. 
You do not understand: my life always has been a puzzle,
a rune, a card player holding an unlucky hand. 
 
You drank what remained of the red wine 
knowing it was time to remember our dead. 
 
What I meant to say is: the music of your voice filled 
that stillness. And, in a moment of sudden, yet quiet revelation, 
a presence I knew to be my own dead father arrived to sit beside me. 
 
There were so many words I could have said to escape 
the labyrinth, your prison of language. 
 
I lean into the hour of yet another sweet farewell. 

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction. She has published three poetry collections and two chapbooks of poetry. Her recent poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025). Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals. 

Natural History 

I come at an an odd hour;
Before midday on a weekday.
I wander through the cavernous halls, 
The comforting wooden benches at the center, underneath the elephants, 
Beside the dioramas of apple orchards,
The white tailed deer,
The black rhinoceros, 
The rings inside a cut redwood tree,
I listen to my echoing footsteps—laughter from a school group somewhere not far off.

I was here once as a child.
I remember my mother, with her disposable camera,
My pigtails swinging
Her hands on my waist and then up 
Up on the platform in front of the woolly mammoth that
Wasn’t a woolly mammoth but was just
Organized bones
Looming.

I remember the photograph, now lost
And the voice of the attendant telling me to get down from there
I think of all the photos of dead things next to living things
Walking along the porpoises and penguins suspended in epoxy
To sit beneath the great blue whale.

I imagine being swallowed like Jonah 
Or crushed by the falling figure itself
Or buried under all of it
Buried, not erased
Bones on display
Just a skeleton in a photo 
While the living press on.

Alex Palmatier is a poet and educator from New York. When she’s not in the classroom, she can be found knee deep in her garden or at the playground with her husband and son.  Her work has appeared in Chronogram and Blood + Honey.  

For Sanity’s Sake

Tried controlling my life—
One poem at a time—
And it seemed to work.
But then a random stanza
Came to me in distress.
Said for sanity’s sake 
It needed more blank space—
Something about conformity,
And that was that.
Soon I found trouble
Everywhere I turned.
Caesura came calling in a cab.
Scared the dickens out of me.
I was a metonymical mess—
Alliteratively speaking, of course.
Chaos closed the door
Before I could even warn
The couplet kissing in the dark.
So I gave up verse entirely.
Never wrote another word again.
Not any worse for it—
Give or take an ode or two.

What I Can Do for You Today

Offer to dial it back.
Listen with my good ear.
Create a new diversion.
Predict the upcoming storm.
Do my impression of Churchill.
Agree not to sing.
Purchase a lottery ticket.
Play the piano backwards.
Take out the garbage.
Whip up a tart.
Wax the neighbor’s cat.
Fetch the Ouija board.
Joke about the stiletto.
Mix a White Russian.
Call off the goons.
Reveal a secret of mine.
Promise it will all be okay.

Splitting the Moon

The hour overripe, promising sweetness
that stings the tongue,
God split the moon in two.

Miraculous how cleanly
these cleaved halves
dimpled disbelief.

And what was there to prove?
What window was shuttered? What violence
had I not suffered?

Once sundered, we cannot mend it.
I am half-lit. Half-witted.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hand me a knife: I’ll slice
and you choose the bigger or the brighter.
Love, let’s split the moon.

If I Were Meant to Live

I’d be living in a wave-licked palace
with turrets hunched in sleep.
When they woke, I’d be able to see
as far as the ends of time, infantile
and crawling toward me
on all their chubby limbs. Instead,
my dreams are flightless birds.
They are well-trained,
could once swim
before I let their muscles atrophy,
but I don’t want to move, or choose
between who I was and who I could be.
If you call my name, I will say
it was never my name. Not a lie,
I tell myself, but a deferred
lifeline. I stretch it between two pins
like a red string and stare a while, hoping
to conjure some connection. Truth,
I’ve learned from all my idle watching,
is a disjointed and senseless conspiracy;
metaphor, a codependency. I cut the string.
I don’t think it would’ve been red
if I were meant to live.

All Night Waitress

Just her and me: she sits with her legs 
twined ankle to knee, her hand 
hiding the bruises 
on her cheek. She dangles car keys as if thinking 
about escape to some otherwhere without these islands 
of formica tabletops afloat in the neon Sargasso Sea
of two a.m. where I eat as quietly as I can,
not wanting to disturb her privacy
after she set down gently my cherry pie 
and retreated back to the farthest table.

The jut of her jaw multiplied in every pane
sets night’s teeth on edge
in the doppler whine
of truck tires fading far away.

Here be monsters wrote the ancient mapmakers
at the edges of the unknown world,
inking in rumored creatures 
with giant razor teeth, nightmare heads and bodies.

And here be glass sugar pourers, napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers floating, floating as if gravity had finally given up, each of us no 
longer 
nailed to lives that, as we drift away, keep going on without us. 

Do her bruises still radiate their tender heat? 
How edgy things get, every thought sliced so fine...
"Have a nice night,” she says, as I say it back, pay, 
and walk out to the parking lot. 

Back on the road in the insect dark,
giant serpents with lion claws hold up mirrors 
as they rear above the dawn, eyes squinting 
at their own faces which don’t look monstrous, just sad.

Overkill

Jet-black lager like domino on swan 
Toddler thoughts on the moon’s face 
I wrote a novel during the year I knew you 
Your casino watch and birthmark 
We curved evenings out of rigid anger 
You reminded me of a dead world 
which is to say my childhood 
I knew our time was baby time but I gave 
it away anyway, spewing dollars 
from buildings. As if no one could touch me 
if I closed my eyes

My Dreams Did Not Come True 

Eating peppermints and not fitting in 
Winter light in my cherry hairstyle, 
deerlike in my injury 
The lake froze into whipped cream 
What is the ontological status 
of inexistence? 
Is it science or sauce? 
There’s not literally a horse 
in my head, the horse is in the field 
So you just thought of it? 
Your eyes were like navy slacks 
I pulled on and off 
Is it going to go on like this for a while? 
Sawing the moon into neat pieces 
of Mylanta

Lush

Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces. -Middlemarch

I.

Shut the window to the garden!


When the paper blinds you had 
crinkled just so, not enough to keep light
out                                       	              or us—
 

When the blinds folded as accordions
were replaced—
 
          
          Not the cold room, chill in summer from
                        constant air…
          Not the empty apartment sans couch,
                        us long on the rug your mother mailed
                        by the cardboard table you painstakingly
                        constructed when you looked at me
                        and whispered
                        my middle name…
                        We’re czars, you said, Nicholas and Katherine.

II.

Now complex curtains hang,
(inverted Georgia O'Keeffe Above the Clouds I)
        	with just enough variation you say as I think it,
        	something that would be flowers in the Midwest intentionally skewed    	
abstraction
that means
              everything’s curated—
 

And I can’t see out the window anymore,
        	        	  
                    
                  just assume it is closed. 

To the Woman in Window 8 at the DMV     

I’m sorry I didn’t have what you called the original copy of my birth certificate. I did bring my official infant footprints. They’re nothing like my feet now, but it did say Certificate of Birth. Yes, it was a Xerox. 

Tell me, how can an original be a copy? 

Maybe you had a disappointing lunch. Couldn’t find a parking spot. Don’t even drive. I don’t drive. You could see that from my expired learner’s permit. I was only asking for a REAL ID. 

What is real, Window 8? It seems to me nothing could be more real than my 2¾ inch infant foot. 

I’m terrified of dying. Driving.

I’m sorry that, paying you for the useless-for-federal-purposes-non-driving ID, I saw you type in the wrong birthdate. I wasn’t born in 1931. You did ask me to check for accuracy. My father was born in 1931. If he hadn’t died four years ago, he might have made you laugh. But maybe he’d have been just another old guy at your window waiting to die. 

A few years before he died, my father had to stop driving. That was terrible. 

There were many terrible things in my life, Montaigne says, and most of them never happened. 
I would like to read more Montaigne.

When your father dies, I hope you’ll be with him, peering into his fogging oxygen mask. I held my father’s arm, thanked him for everything I hadn’t thanked him for as I stomped around in my glowering adolescence.

Have you tried meditation? Smoldering rage isn’t good for our hearts. It’s a heartbreaking world. Entropy. Dirty Money. They are bombing hospitals. Maybe you were imagining the Sixth Extinction. Even one is terrible. 

Have a baby anyway. I wish I had. With the right mix of genes and circumstance you could’ve been my daughter. 

Listen, someday what will be left of us—a few teeth, pitted bones—

Did you even look at my footprint? Miraculous, isn’t it? I wonder why prehistoric walls aren’t covered with baby footprints. Have you seen those caves?  Like giant hand-covered wombs. 

That woman in your head—there are ways to stop her. Anger can mask grief. So much to be angry about: proliferating viruses, economy seating. Screw the DMV, Window 8.  

I wish your window had a lake view, and cardinals singing their unmistakable cheer. A window needn’t be a cage. 
The phone numbers of my dead are floating up inside me.

I’m not sure I agree with Montaigne. Terrible things are real even if they happen only in our minds. 

I wish the birth of anything were so miraculous no one could ever bomb a hospital. I wish I’d been nicer, sooner, to my father. 

Suffering is a choice. If your feet hurt as you walk, the Buddhists say, think about the absence of pain in the foot that lifts. Focus on relief, you’ll feel relief. 

We suffer so much, trapped in our windows, thinking we’re looking through them. 

I’ll never see you again, Window 8. My dead friends? I’ll never dial their numbers again. 

Two weeks from now, when my useless non-REAL ID arrives in my mailbox, I’ll think of you and I will remain, always, ticket 4180                     

Clams	

The man has ordered Spaghetti with Clam Sauce. The woman is not fond of clams. In fact, she is not as fond of this man as she once was. The man begins to twirl the spaghetti around his fork, displacing several clams. He is frowning. She thinks of the expression “happy as a clam.” How happy could a clam be? She tries to imagine what a clam might look like, happily swimming around the ocean with the other clams, but she can’t picture this. They’d need fins—or legs—to even crawl. Maybe they just bob around like chunks of carrot in a soup. How happy is that? She wishes she knew what clams looked like still alive in the ocean before they were dead on someone’s spaghetti. So many things she’s never thought to imagine. She would ask the man, but he gets annoyed when she asks things like that. Things she should just know. He is not a happy man. She’d like to ask the waiter, but the waiter isn’t looking too cheery  either. She looks into the tangle of spaghetti, the juicy castanets in their parsley confetti. A gathering of smiles looking positively chatty! Still, she’ll Google it when she gets home. Clams swimming. She would like to know more about clams.

Donna Masini’s new book, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? (W.W.
Norton and Co.) will be out in Spring 2026. Her other books include 4:30 Movie, Turning to Fiction, That Kind of Danger, and About Yvonne, a novel. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, et al. She lives in NYC and teaches at Hunter College.

On the Fear of Dying

When I was reading about death
there was dying all around me.

In the park the bat houses 
circumscribe
the stadium lights.

On the floor I counted my moles
the nevus inside my eye.

Like expanding cauliflowers or a cloud chamber
hesitations in otherwise flat affect

benign, brown and flat,

The doctor is silent 
during the whole procedure.

The glowing light of the otoscope: 

//

The glowing the enveloping light
The vines that drop into the dog’s bowl 
The red green blue staircased plants
The grasses that grow the cat swallows in tufts 
The light in your eyes the mascara the mask I feared 
The green light of the PAX the way you looked 
in the bathroom the curlers the buzzer the bath stopper
the dog chewed 
To the west the smoke on the fire escape
The tables my lack of rhythm the projector screen 
The screaming the walking I became better though 
The lady Godiva walking for what purpose 
The gingko trees fanning the winter smell 
The difficult geometry the crooked 
leaves the car the blood on the seat the very cold 
dog the being alone so 
Everyone is alone sometimes the up the down 
The potted road the cold grey art on muddy Beacon St
The rash the distrust the oriental fan 
The diving loon the gold parrots the thing in the deep
The names of cheeses the sound of Greensleeves

//

If they saw me through you

If even when someone else is 
failing, you can work on 
yourself

If I hate poems about women and bodies
and plants

I am letting it go.

//

Our death: 
the striking image in the mirror. 

My death: 
when I first walk the dog after that first night
and every silence is my own.

Lev Xue lives in Red Hook Brooklyn with the dog Poopy Xue, and is learning to fish. He is finishing a PHD on the Politics and Experimental Practice of 20th Century Psychoanalysis at Harvard University.

A Perfect Peach

Picture a perfect peach,
with color both subtle
and bold, a shape perfect 
to behold, and a taste
like Heaven foretold…

Now The Stars Hide

I grew up in the countryside
on a farm with the nearest
neighbor a quarter mile away.
Every night the stars shone, 
unreachable precious jewels
adorning eternity—and I felt
very, very small and yet,
strangely, also very, very old
and more, oh so much more
than my daytime self drunk
on the petty and the mundane.  

Now I live on a quarter acre
with neighbors on my left and
neighbors on my right and 
neighbors across the street and
a big city so close it cloaks even
the light of night-born stars and
I am left only with the memory
of eternity….

Please enjoy these poems from J.R. Solonche and Katharine Diehl that examine intensity through art and thought. 

—The Editors 

Coltrane on Soprano
 
 
                                                                               His
                                                                            eyes are
                                                                           so closed
                                                                          they're op
                                                                        en. From the
                                                                        top of his he
                                                                      ad, he sees the
                                                                      music coming
                                                                      at him eleven
                                                                    notes at a time.
                                                                    He must squee
                                                                   ze them all thro
                                                                   ugh this narrow
                                                                  tongue flick of a
                                                                  horn, this squeal
                                                                  er, whiner, sopra
                                                                 no, diva of a high
                                                                pitched saxophone.
                                                                 Flurries of fingere
                                                                 d-key-fingers indis
                                                              tinguishable from eac
                                                            h other, strike the honey
                                                      from the stone. O, blurry pain
                                                    and slurry sorrow suck the merci
                                                ful marrow from this brass-gold bone.

Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Driving in the Highlands  

What catches the tongue in the throat like a loss of meaning?
What I speak of came into being
By means of brutal necessity.
What is not bartered or consigned.
Whose arc does not bend.
My subject is not the unsayable but the unsaid.
Now curse, now clearing.

Katharine Cortese lives in New Jersey and has published chapbooks with Dancing Girl Press and Typewriter City.

Poinsettias

I know you needed many 
                                           hours of darkness 
to bloom 
                                           you burned for us 
in place of  
                                           sun and usually  
you’ll re-green 
                                           then wither, but you’ll 
come back 
                                           in another 
year 
                                           if you are fed  
right intervals of night 
                                           is the brevity 
of your splendor worth 
                                           the blindness 
of your hunger? 
                           I think of all my friends

Woody Guthrie 

Which is missing –
The seed or the soil?
Which came first –
The wind or the dust?
I tried to cup the candle with my hand,
But the flame licked my thumb.

               *
Definite and unrecorded,
Darkness is ahistorical –
Erasing the horizon,
The geometry.

               *
Don’t despair
Of forgetting the shape;

A circle doesn’t need to know that it
Is round because it’s coming back around.
               
               *
I’ll meet you in the garden when it’s morning.

P.G. McNabb lives and writes in Minneapolis. You can also read him in Reap Thrill and SPECTRA.

I climb over my sleeping boyfriend to check for fires 

and I stare at the stove I have not touched in months 
all because of a fleeting thought that maybe 
my roommate forgot to lower the flame or that I ambled 
over in some Klonopin-driven haze 
to drowsily turn the knob myself. I allow a laugh 
to leak through clenched teeth—this worry of mine is unfinished 
until it infects all that’s important. Until I become convinced 
that my apartment will crumble despite a foundation 
that has outlived Presidents. 
A friend told me there isn’t a thought I haven’t thought 
to death. He said: I ought to learn 
that only books are bound to last. 
But there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to libraries 
destroyed. Alexandria’s. Ashurbanipal’s. Where I live 
is a mess filled with battered novels, sweaters abandoned 
over every stool. My drunk roommate snores 
from the auburn couch. My boyfriend’s toned arm reaches across 
my mattress as though he needs me even in sleep. What a privilege 
to have this entire library to lose. How lucky I am 
to love what is flammable and fragile: paper, skin, cloth.

Dialectics 

I notice what I didn’t before: 
sweat forming on your back or the pitch 
of your laugh. Where you like to be 
touched and where you don’t. This is what’s offered 
by the time we have now, 
time I don’t know we’ll have again. 
Hegel talked of the negation of the negation. 
A truth’s challenge challenged 
becomes something brand new. I am not 
who I was when I met you. I wanted to talk ad nauseam 
through what you hoped to abandon. We landed 
on conversation that never ended, that danced 
around facts—I mean, look at us laughing 
hysterically in bed. Our bodies bend slightly: 
a pair of parentheses trying to contain some aside, 
something secondary to the point.

Kevin Hautigan lives in New York and has had poetry featured previously in The Common.

Quarry Cub Sunset

Let’s love each other 
but never meet 
in the middle 

like a child’s hands
enjoying the polarity of  
powerful magnets. 

Eamon Keane is a poet and short fiction writer from Minnesota living in Bogotá.

Ode to Pteromerhanophobia

Word like a dirt packed mouth,
tongue forced strike of roof in gasp,
throat impinged in resonance akin 
to being buried alive:
Pteromerhanophobia.

Name as fitting as fear, chemicals
rush right past frayed nerve to terror—
There is no escaping an hour.
Who doesn’t watch birds stretch wing
and yearn to fly? Pity of a fear, really,
world gathered up in pleats and yet,

Everywhere is possible but my mind.

I do it anyway.
Walk through the terminal upright.
Like guaranteed, all semi-composure 
until I lose earth again and must await 
its return. 

Now there is nothing to do but crouch dread,
sight cased in small, oval haze. I learn
to antedate a din: a whistle of slacked wing, 
a jolt of pitched roll, an obtuse mechanical tremor, 
a turbine’s undulating moan.

We climb space to outlandish altitude
and I stalk particular precipice,
the place of cut engine where life really knots 
into one hundred bodies or more. 

And it occurs: somewhere between 
two and five thousand feet we are freed of some impetus 
and begin to drift. We hover sky’s curve and watch atmosphere
level—bird’s scale, Earth anonymous.

Air compresses instrument and up rises buoyant longing: 
an earth I wish to know. I plot it in section: 
circle, square, and shapeless contour,
everything manmade turned microscopic blemish—
man’s toils condensed to misshapen pools
and drab pitched roofs, lame blots on given majesty.

The architects remain unseen but are assumed 
marching, authoritative, to nowhere.
And to all of them I am bound! 
Even those I wish to disregard—
even to that withdrawn woman in 13b averting 
my pleading, panicked gaze.

Fear is really just a strain of struck epiphany: 
testimony of beating life. That is, until the fuel wanes; 
velocity is relentless, we cannot drift space for long. 
Matter must move: to hell 
with sudden ease and false confidence.

There is descent and well-worn panic. 
We approach ground in rapid fall to prayer: 
God, deliver me to Earth!
Which heaves larger now to swallow whole,
gulping green trees and jagged mountain terror, 
an ocean swelling vacuum—

a clucking drum, a mantra seeking moor:
though never closer to the living than 
when poised to crush from above…

Elizabeth Haddad works as a content writer and has a Substack called In Praise of Thought.

The Deer Come Down from the Mountains

When storms approach, the deer
come down

from the mountains. They stand in
people’s yards, they walk

through the Chevron station.

The deer look childlike and
amateurish, ears twitching

in the public park.

Gangs of them, five or six or seven,
they sniff the air, how do

they know the blizzard is coming?
Who among them

lives long enough to know the path
to safety?

The locals barely notice, avoid hitting
them with their cars.

But I notice, I regard
their intelligence, their forecasting

skills, their trust in the
humans who let them mingle

in their driveways, on main street.
It must be a nuisance, the deer shit,

when they get caught in your fence.
But the inhabitants of this

mountain town understand.
They accommodate the sheltering

animals, as prescribed by the natural
law of these lands.

Small Stack of Books

The night my father died
I sat in my office

And looked at the stack
Of books

I had authored, which I had poured
My life’s spirit into, but which

Would mean little to me during
My last hours

Just a stack of objects, one on top
Of another, easily removed

Biodegradable

Family was the one thing you could
Leave behind, which would grow

And prosper without you,
Not the thoughts

You had once, the stories you
Told, your particular point of view

Still, once my father
Was buried, I did not seek out a wife and

Produce the children who would save
Me from oblivion, I kept

Scribbling and typing and building small
Worlds in my mind

Which brought me
Momentary peace, it was all

I was capable of, by habit, by inclination

Now I suspect that either way, the result is
The same, you come into the world
And then pass out again, does the world need
More books or does it need more children?

The turning earth remains neutral
On the question

Blake Nelson previously published a book review in The Metropolitan Review of Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book.

Madame X’s Lesson

They say learning to draw is learning
     to see, but I don’t agree. It’s more

learning to let go, learning what to leave
        behind. Thin black threads, for instance,

or slowly closing doors 
	 fading into light

and shadow in the long corridor 
     of memory. It’s been years 

since I dreamt of wars, boiling
         sensation blowing white 

out the top 
	of my skull, a hole 

where otherwise there’s 
	    only the thin stroke of pain.

Sam Reichman is a writer, translator, and visual artist. His work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere.

Astronomy 

Moonrise over ocean horizon. My father
teaches me to shoot

photos through a telescope, craters and ridges
rise like pockmarked skin

beneath a fluorescent light. This was now. I loved
the night lilies. The tigers, too,

that grew in my father’s garden, the way
something was always

awake, waiting.

~

I gathered worms and black swimming beetles
from the backyard pool

into jars of water. Look at them dance! I told him.
They’re carnivores, he informed me.

What did I know
about cruelty then, how accidental it could be?

~

My father gives me
a thimble-sized light on a keychain

that flashes morse code for SOS
if you turn the head

counterclockwise. For emergencies, he says.
It was his. One night I try it

in a dark parking garage, let the strobe
guide me to my rental car. Spinning the lens,

the head detaches, and out pops
a small pale pill, a tiny moon

landing in my hand.

~

The Big and Little Dippers,
Those are us, I told him. Ursa Major

and Minor, he taught me. Soon after
that first night at my father’s house

a telescope appeared near the lilies.
That one’s not a star, he told me,

that’s Venus, the orange hue
coming into focus in the viewfinder.

My favorite star, really
our nearest planet. 24 million miles

away. We learned to love each other
through space. Decks of constellations
 
left on my nightstand. The stars
he hoped I would arrange into Orion’s belt

scattered haphazardly
across my ceiling. The telescope I tell him

it’s okay to sell.  What wouldn’t I give
to close that distance now?

Jamie L. Smith is the author of The Flightless Years and Trojan Horses: Voices from the Opioid Crisis. Her work appears in publications including Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Tusculum Review, An*dyne, Palisades Review, and elsewhere.

Carousel Animals Before Restoration  

Laid on their sides, my gloved hand
to torso, chin, neck, the other
with pick. Giraffe 4A is nine paint layers

stripped, neck narrow between fingers
a two-grit sandpaper routine ear-tip to frozen
tail flick—Horse 2C

with his left hoof crooked, muzzle
tucked and Cow, who I
sat before and found

empty—a wooden facade—like the boats in
separate wings at the Met. Reassembled,
built after arrival—or were walls cut

open to float each
into position and how many
gloved hands helped guide.

Jenna Breiter is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY.

The Cost of Thought

What I find
speared
on my fork is not
what was on my plate.
I fear
there’s been a mistake,
a miscalculation.

Each morning
I fast-walk
past camouflaged shelters
where
yesterday’s heroes hide from us.

In a better world
I would fall up
to meet this sweet rain
halfway.

James Sallis’ novel, Sarah Jane, was released in late 2023, and his most recent book, Bright Segments: The Complete Short Fiction, was released late last year. His sixth poetry collection is planned for 2027.

Departure Gate

Airports are where belief in progress still survives.
Everyone queues for a miracle:
transformation by departure.
The body submits to metal detectors,
the soul to delay.
Screens whisper your name in code.
You move when they tell you—
toward light, toward air.
In line, we are equal for a moment:
bare feet on cold tile,
belts coiled in gray trays,
hoping our faces match our passports.
Progress, that old faith, hums overhead.
A voice assures us the future
is only a boarding group away.
We enter the tunnel,
sealed and humming,
and rise—
believers all—
into the myth of elsewhere.

Brock Eldon writes Null Point and The Commonplace Book on Substack. His nonfiction will appear in the upcoming March issue of Salmagundi, and his poetry collection Dominion Ashes: A Book of Decline is forthcoming from Ballerini Books Press in February 2026.

The Old West

                              Los Angeles, 1975

Looking at her hair dancing
in the wind, you felt promise
in the place and all its dream

palaces. Your new name in
waves on the sand, a peaceful
easy feeling. Post-Nixon

vibes from the rocky brown cliffs
pinched by houses on stilts, a
coast that washed away all the

impostor selves. Rolling on
the 10, your wrist on the wheel . . .
just 20 minutes to the

Tar Pits then. Or maybe you’d
take Sunset: made warm
by the generous and unbroken
 
light, you’d fly past cottages
roofed in Spanish tile nuzzling
the hills that curved up
 
to castles hid behind gates and
big jacaranda trees where
jacuzzi girls waited with

tennis instructors and
open marriage counselors
beneath the benediction

of generous, unbroken
light. Then evening: The smog would
descend like an evensong

as you rolled inland. One
palm tree against the soiled
pink sky and you were smitten,
 
sailing to the cathedral
of the Sunset Strip, the high
billboards – Bowie, Diana

Ross, a Stanley Donen film –
standing over you like
ushers. After a pilgrimage to
 
Paramount (where they loved your
script), you held her supple hand
and crossed Melrose. Inside El
 
Adobe you saw Linda
and the Governor floating
in the candlelight like salt

swimming in margarita.
A glass of wine for her, then
home. It felt mellow making

your own life . . . hardly mattered
she was someone’s wife. Then, in
fall, the light turned lurid

as the mountains burned. You’d traverse
a hill and see smoke smearing
the sky, bleeding it in orange

and red as KNX ran
news about ‘The Slasher’
ringing his victims with salt

and blood. The fires burned
every year, you’d learn,
the wind rewriting lives.

E.W. Herman is a former newspaperman turned corporate consultant who lives in Evanston, Illinois. He worked as a reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Black Canyon Night

Stars hang like tears.
Your eyes, an open heart
watching the traveling moon.
I watch its pale light
on your calm face.

And the borrowed bitch lost.
We search, you and I,
   down the railroad ties
    up the stream
     round the deserted park
calling “Susie! Susie!”
all day, into night.

Years later, her loss
still
amid the guilty acts
we won’t remember.

Betsy Fogelman Tighe has published widely in literary magazines, including Rattle, twice, The Georgia Review, and TriQuarterly. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2025, as well as third place and first place prizes from the Oregon Poetry Association in previous years. Her full-length manuscript has received an Honorable Mention, been a semi-finalist for two prizes, and a finalist for another. Tighe retired in 2022 from her good work as a teacher-librarian in Portland, Oregon, and now is free to spend much of her time in the company of poetry.