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.

The tittering biddies in town
walked along State Street whispering,
That’s where she lives. All alone in that big house. 
Terribly strange. Never married, of course.

Maybe Edith had that comical indifference in the 1940s.
I saw it once in my great-aunt Ida after Holy Communion.
In her Sunday best, she laid on the horn and flipped off 
parents blocking the street for photographs.

Maybe Edith strode downtown with revered elegance—
kitten heels matching a taffeta clutch,
making small talk with town eccentrics 
before meeting up with the gals at the Opera House. 

I sit with her at Lakeview Cemetery 
between unkempt evergreen shrubs.
There’s no one left to leave flowers 
for the spinster socialite.

I ask, Edith, did you ever wonder if your soulmate died young
and that’s why women like us wander like homing pigeons
with all the remarkable memory 
and capacity for love with no perch to land?
Did marital woes of best friends make you realize 
you were, in fact, looking at their lawn all wrong?
Did you mourn the bloodline ending on your watch,
or did you shrug and sip your chardonnay?

I chisel moss from the serifs on her grave marker
using the key to the house where we share an address.
Unwrapping dormant earth, I push iris rhizomes 
into the soil with my thumb.

We must be meant to stumble upon 
the template we need to see.
My kindred spirit can plant peonies
around my stone someday.

Justine Defever is an Associate Professor of English based in Michigan. She has worked in higher education for over a decade and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University. Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, Great Lakes Review, Kelp Journal, and various anthologies.

The ultrasound screen at NYU Langone Obstetrics & Gynecology is as dark 
as the light years of space between Earth and Proxima Centauri b, our closest planet 

with any hope of water. It’s an exoplanet, harbored in the habitable zone,
it dances around a dwarf star from 0.05 AU away. The probe that will be 

inserted inside me is a spaceship barreling through battered flesh. What could 
live here? I’ve spent four months as a body alone, twelve

if I don’t count the brief visitor. Only twice did I sing him Joni Mitchell, 
captive on this carousel of time. It was almost like he was never here at all. 

Twelve months empty. The probe enters. What might keep life away 
from Proxima Centauri b is that it orbits a flare star—unpredictable, rash, 

it increases in brightness for moments, then dims. 
It would make anything that tried to live there a broken shard of ice. 

The nurse finds the baby in me—plays the heart, a loud hopscotch rhythm 
in double time. I count the beats—six, eight, ten. 

The photo of the curved spine makes my child more a bean pod 
than a baby. I, too, bend into me—if I can touch her, I can make her stay

this time for good. A decade, scientists estimate, before telescopes catch 
sight of Proxima Centauri b. More, before reflections of starlight off its hidden 

ocean might be seen. To be secret is to be safe. Deep in the dark here, 
I make a promise, a plea, but it’s just between her and me.

Christine Degenaars has work published in Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Epiphany, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She was nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize and in 2022 was selected as a semi-finalist in the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. She graduated from Hunter College with a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. Thin Glass, her debut collection, will be published by Fernwood Press in 2025. She lives in New York.

Inside the mother’s mouth was a fish, and inside the fish
was a grandmother’s wedding ring. You’d always believed
that the mother was a rock on the neck of a river.
That grandmother had been here is clear,

what is the flow crashing into now?
A stone mother sitting at the neck of a stream.
Who would have imagined a mother as stone,
a lode, a burden, a way, a course.

A stone mother sitting at the neck of a stream,
what wants the child? Only what was promised to her.
The child had been promised a lode, a burden, a way, a course,
something to be followed, a strong drink.

And most of all, her grandmother.
In the morning her jaws were aching
for holding the o of the gold ring.
Maybe she was the fish inside her mother’s mouth.
Maybe she was the golden ring.

Marcela Sulak is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, the National Jewish Book Award finalist, City of Skypapers, and The Fault. Her translations from Czech, Hebrew, and French have been recognized by the NEA and PEN. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing and edits The Ilanot Review.

Between the half-burnt
farmhouse and the sign
for Cherry Road,
my radio stuttered:

interest rates, dust storms,
tech wars with China.
Thirty miles to go
before the skyline flickered.

Students returning,
hardhats on the bridges.
A cracked smile
and handshake with the boss.

Then the low fog lifted—
a bear, sleek as Clairton coal,
tongue lapping puddles
from the asphalt.

Maybe she was scared,
or maybe not. My truck screeched,
skidded. Neither of us
knew which way to go.

Jason Barry holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and a Master’s in Applied Linguistics from the University of Oxford. A finalist for the 2025 Donald Justice Prize, his poems have appeared in Subtropics, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Poetry Ireland Review, Literary Matters, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Bad Lilies, Thrush Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Fossil & Wing, won the Wil Mills Award from the West Chester University Poetry Center, and his work has been featured on The Slowdown. He has been offered artist scholarships and grants from the Poetry Society of America, Boston University, Poetry by the Sea, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... —The Sound and the Fury

For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice. —The Futurist Manifesto

“Tarkovsky sucks ass except for Mirror. I find myself horribly bored by endless slow shots and I pray that my dissatisfaction isn’t linked to my own inability to focus. Things that used to fascinate — Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets, waiting for bluebirds in my mother’s wicker outdoor rocker with a sweating glass of lemonade, the long painful deadening silence of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony — seem like ash. Things that require patient breath I can no longer do. They say Gustav, hearing his inflamed heart pump without conviction, pulled down his spectacles and thought not of Alma........Nonetheless, I am plagued by Tarkovsky’s shot of his mother washing her hair, the sounds of the water and ceiling collapse.”

“Haven’t dreamt in a while — perhaps it’s the pipes knocking. Noticed another gray hair. I’m bloated from too much beer.”

“Today, an odd sense of grief. Realized I wasn’t thinking about M over morning coffee. This strange absence — not person, but thought....”

“Shot a series of still-lifes, that due to a camera feeding error, came out blank. Empty espresso cups on saucers with spilled grounds and ripped sugar packets. Wine glasses with red residue. Curious....”

In the apartment with the 
           windows facing
the bright white church, cross and 
solitary steeple, he wakes and makes a 
bed that’s too small and yet too big 
for the two of them, him and her,
in a city where she’s at home
and he’s not.

When she visits
he reads to her;
she cuts his
toenails, 
paints them pink
            reads chapters from his books, 
calls him “Maestro” and
“An American Master.” 
Not the first time
he has heard such comments.

Is she conning him? And is he
conning her when he says 
               “I love you” and 
“You’re beautiful.” 
He spaces out; it’s as 
though she’s
not there in the
fugitive fog. Today she says 
              “I want distance.” 

But isn’t that what he has 
wanted all along?
  
Alone in the 
ambiguous bed, 
he 
gazes out the window 
at the white church, the cross and
the solitary steeple 
and down at 
       the toenails
she has painted pink.

Jonah Raskin lives and writes and performs his work in San Francisco. The author of six poetry chapbooks, including most recently The Thief of Yellow Roses, he has written and published a study of Allen Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" titled American Scream.

I was in a crowd searching for your jacket.
The crowd was thinning, the concert
Long over, but still your jacket did not appear
Among the others. I wondered if we had,
After all, arrived together, if you’d been beside me,
Whether I’d lost you in the concert hall
Or some time before. 
                                       Through the double doors
I thought one fleeting second that I glimpsed
A jacket just like yours and raised my hand
As if I were in third grade and wanted
Someone to call on me, to point to me
And say, “Yes, you,” and then I put my hand
Back down. Not you, no. You were someone else. 

D. Eric Parkison is the author of a chapbook, No Arcadia, which was published in the fall of 2020. The Massachusetts Cultural Council awarded him a 2022 Artist’s Grant in poetry. He is programming director at the Gloucester Writers Center and lives in Lynn, MA. Find him at deparkison.com.

I’d like to milk a goat
one day, you said.
Well, how about now? The weather
is fine, a sort of deep comprehensibility
about it. Italy
sinks beneath the
waters and another country
starts moving
upwards. It’ll be too late
soon, mother
will return with
her kitten army, her conversation –
‘eat the tomato,
eat the potato…’ There’s no end
to a mother’s beliefs. They run along beside you
like children in a movie
planning some
enormous farewell.

Philip Traylen writes the Substack oldoldoldoldnew [poems, philosophy, diary, translations].

After the storm, from out where once had sat
Our roof: Cathedraled sky, the eye of God
A glacial blue beneath a heaving brow.
The thing had in the long galloping wind
Of morning peeled away like sardinha
From father’s early tin. The neighborѕ gathered
To see, upturned, bearing upward, that thing
That had girdled our lives’ innermost secrets,
Made public correlates of private lives
And private minds. We made it out easy.
Just two doors down, a massive oak had passed
Perpendicularly through a house
By gravity’s mute compulsion, as did
That evening slice in two the halves of childhood.

Erico Silva is a writer, high school teacher, and mathematician living in Philly.

is too cold to be heartbreaking,                                                                                             but contains within it                                                                                                                   a kind of dreadful dreamscape,                                                                                      impossible to access

all the years my friend lived                                                                                                        in her lobster town. When                                                                                                       we finally got interested in the Atlantic,                                                                         
every night changed.

My wish to be naked expanded                                                                                             like a flower and my will                                                                                               diminished. A nightmare is nothing                                                                                       to fear, but a dream foretells

the end of something. According                                                                                              to scientists, galaxies do not move                                                                                 through space but rather with space                                                                                       as it expands. How infuriating

to arrive at original thought                                                                                           through theory. One should arrive                                                                             anywhere through nautical imagery.                                                                                 Water triggers my desire

for violence, my inability                                                                                                          to remain calm for even a single                                                                                    second. Lo, the death skiff is calling.                                                                                    Let us leave this all behind.

Mari Pack is a writer living outside Philly. Her poems have been published in Poetry International, Brooklyn Poets, and Pigeon Pages. She was nominated for a 2024 Best of the Net.

Just as the wind leaves                                                                                                                No scar                                                                                                                                           On the river                                                                                                                                   So too do you stir me                                                                                                                    With your touch.

Just like the wind and the waves                                                                                               All night                                                                                                                                        We turn and touch                                                                                                                        And rise and touch

And in the morning                                                                                                                      We meet again.

Buku Sarkar is a Calcutta/NY and Paris based writer and photographer. Her first book, Not Quite a Disaster After All, is forthcoming in the U.S. this fall. Her first collection of poems, My Dead Flowers, will be out in December.