Meghan Sterling

Morning Moon

and a room through a door. The wide wood 
of the floor beneath a woman’s feet. How often 
I have been that woman, near enough to know 
the soot in my mouth was what I called love. How 
often the me that I was had drifted into spring sky 
sodden as silk, limp as the cherry blossoms left to heap 
on the sidewalk. Who is that woman now, the one with 
toenails painted scarlet as an act against all the gray 
of the place she has made her home, where all that is bright 
is what she feels, looking into her daughter’s light, listening 
into her lover’s laugh. There are shadows where there was 
once color, moons where there were once suns, but the moon 
has a curl to its hair like she does, and its white nails tap 
at the window and shine a softer light across her hands. 

Meghan Sterling’s work is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry South, and many others, and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. Her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021 and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023. 

Amanda Ryan

Go to the Ant

Receive his coppery frame at your door. 
Watch his skittish saunter 
 
toward a spot of jam 
 
near the foot of a kitchen chair. It’s six
a.m. The morning light 
 
outside the window 
 
is extraterrestrial and by the 
looks of his focused strut
 
those sideways set jaws,
 
he’s probably swallowed at least three frogs, 
as Mark Twain once put it, 
 
before moving on
 
to dirty floors. Lil’ do-gooder, would-be
Fortune 500 prize 
 
winner. Did the queen
 
send you? Why insist on all of this work?
Infinitesimal
 
aim, with no other 
 
ants to help get it done, like eternity
beats in your ant-sized heart,
 
moving you along.
 
Strange how such greatness could be snuffed out by 
the swift squish of my thumb.

Amanda Ryan holds B.A.s in English Literature and Music from U.C. Davis and an M.A. in Theology and Letters from New Saint Andrews College. Amanda’s poetry has been published in The Orchards Poetry, Ekstasis, The Christian Century, and Mezzo Cammin. Born and raised in California in the Bay Area, Amanda currently live in Bellevue, WA, with her husband and children.   

Patricia Gao

China

I am exhausted by pulling the conversation back to the US so the next time I’m asked where I’m from I let myself be pushed back to China. They’ve painted the outside to look like a factory and the fumes it spews are so wretched I’m retching. Some of us Americans stand with big scoops near the entrance, clutching their noses but eager to collect the Chinese people who spill off the conveyor belt and pour them into molds for lower-level software engineers or exotic wives. Others wander in and come out with cheap business deals and qipao, and still others jab at fake buttons on fake walls shouting for the building to close as if it really is a factory (it’s not) and they command it. I must be a new kind of American because it never occurs to me to do any of those things, and instead I shout “STOP IT!” because I have seen the inside of China and it’s rainforest, knobbly road, broad street, verdant graveyard, not just smoke, and my people are crow’s-footed and liver-spotted in addition to hard-working and beautiful, but nobody listens to me. I am a real girl but somehow not the same as any human here, and the factory is imaginary but nonetheless still churning.

Patricia Gao is a happy girl. She lives in the mountains. You can find more of her work at nopatno.com.

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch

Under a Corona of Darkness

dawn births morning in blood and piss.
The moon, an afterbirth, sets in a slow, steady slide.
Below, the ocean writhes and spreads its rippling voices.

This is a day of death.
Nothing welcomes the sun as its head peaks
over the cervix of the horizon.

Even the gulls are quiet.

Sand drifts in dawn’s heavy breath.

The dunes wait.
Empty houses facing the ocean wait 

for light to touch windows and drapes,
for names, voices sliding
in rippling grief and heavy drift
of death, spreading, birthing

a new world writhing through
rising plague, morning still stained
in red, mauve, orange and turmeric smeared
across every landscape that dares to open wide.

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch’s poems have been published in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, The Atticus Review, Panoplyzine, Confrontation, Rust + Moth, American Literary Review, Apple Valley Review, The Red River Review, San Pedro River Review, Apt, among many others. Her books of poems, The Wrack Line, and Fleeing Back, can be found on Amazon.com or the FutureCycle Press website. Her short stories have been published in The Peacock Journal, In Posse Review, Sisyphus, Manzano Mountain Review, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others. Check out her website at https://pahanaho.wixsite.com/pathanahoedosch and Twitter @PHanahoeDosch

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

Brussels Sprouts

Harvesting the first sprouts
left us with sore knees
ground in with dirt.

This year’s crop is small,
little green marbles
in our hands. 

We pull back leaves
like loose layers of curtains.
to find the ripest specimens
near the base. 

Exhausted,
I fall asleep with you 
in the shade of the oak. 
When I wake, you’ve left
a sprout in the hollow 
of my neck, which I eat—


leaf petal by leaf petal
she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me

—before heading inside.


The first time I saw 
Brussels sprouts, I thought
they looked like tumors,
you said, with growths that close
to the body, the stalk.

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes was born in Harrisburg, PA and has a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has appeared in The Rumpus, Cartridge Lit, Gulf Stream Lit, Crab Fat Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her book, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, is out from Mason Jar Press.

Tara Tamburello

DREAM HOUSE

a nightmare mansion 
when I dream it, tattered curtains
billow ghastly by windows rain-beaten
bats roost in long corridors, feet 
hooked to yellowed popcorn ceiling
an aquarium of walls stretch the first floor
seagrasses and fish we can never maintain
so many rooms we never knew so many
bedrooms hinged to basements
a vinyl-tiled banquet hall, cafeteria trays
fill the hands of dressed-down visitors
milling about the fathomless attic
rotting beams, dark wood everywhere 
rooms leading into rooms, a puzzle
we purchased from ghosts 
their spirits transfigured 
into decadence, this house

Tara Tamburello’s fiction and poems have appeared in Bone Parade, Rust + Moth, Menacing Hedge, and anthologies by Vestal Review and Sans. PRESS. Her short plays have been produced in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, children, and cat. You can find more of her work at taratamburello.com.

Katie Schneider

Cypsela

I’m not sorry when my young hands

pull dandelions from the earth and your body alongside them because I don't hear

(the sound of seeds falling against meadow dust is so quiet, like raindrops or muted)

screaming. My hands tangle, like streams across your scalp and did you know 

how soft your hair is? Like feathers or childhood (Innocence: the space

between the top of your head and mine. I am so tall because of the years that I) spent 

with undamaged roots. Your body loosens like joints unclicked when I tug. The noise

is so hushed. If I sing loud enough, I won’t (hear the sound of seeds dislocating

as I float away with your hair between my fingers. You) stay in the field, a stem and 

an ovule left over. 

I leave this meadow each fall. When I come back, it yields itself to me in the shape of

(footprints. Each time you press yourself tall, I step on you with my older sister feet.

It’s easier if that roaring is just the river, so I don’t hear) your screams.

But years later, when the stem of your spine still feels tiny

in my hands, I look at you, (are so beautiful, did you know that? I’m sorry I

never told you sooner. I know you worked so hard to become) a small flower, 

the only one left. You have only three petals left but they are so golden.  

A miniature sun at the heart of this dead field.

Katie Schneider is a poet from St. Louis. She attends Washington University where she is a Nemerov Writing Scholar. Her work is published in Spires Literary Magazine. She can be found at your local lake at 3am or on instagram (@katie._schneider).

Rodney DeCroo

Language

When she pulls off her t-shirt
a black skull with crossbones
and burning eyes stares at me
from between her breasts. 
It’s 1984 and I’m eighteen.
I’ve never seen a woman
with tattoos beyond a small smudge
of a bird above an ankle. I’ve never
been taken home by one either. 
She finishes disrobing 
and walks naked around the room
to light candles. She pours two glasses
of red wine, hands me one
and sits on a leather loveseat
with her legs spread.
A black and white Death’s head moth
floats above her vagina. 
She sees me looking, laughs
and says As above, so below.    
I’m silent and look away.
Take off your clothes.
The red eyes of the black skull
Glare and the moth flutters
in the twitching light
as I undress. The shadows
open like a dark mouth 
as I begin to learn 
a language older than men.

Rodney DeCroo is a poet and multi-disciplinary artist based in Vancouver, Canada originally from Pittsburgh, PA. He has published two collections of poetry Allegheny, BC and Next Door to the Butcher Shop with Nightwood Editions. His third collection Fishing for Leviathan will be published in 2023 by Anvil Press. His poems have appeared in Canadian literary journals Event Magazine, subTerrain Magazine, Geist Magazine, Canadian Literature, BC Bookworld, etc. 

Maya Walker

false friends

Did you know that calculator comes from the same
Latin root as calculus, meaning limits, 
meaning the point at which something no longer
passes, meaning to generate an infinite number of
solutions that will never seem correct, meaning brief
failure towards the goals that never really mattered 
but always feel like everything?

Did you know that deus ex machina in Latin translates to
god from the machine, which means the ancient grandfather 
clock in your living room that never showed the correct 
time, which means the spiraling labyrinth of Daedalus, 
which means the burning candle wax dripping down from the 
feather wings of Icarus, which means the tears of the sky as he fell?

Did you know that I never forgot, never forgot the rise of
the wind as life danced around us in spring, never forgot the
early autumns where hope would fall, never forgot the
crestfallen winters between them? Did you know that I never
remembered the words left unspoken, the seasonal pauses in
friendship, the questions left unanswered?

There is a Latin phrase that I read most recently, that is 
dulce est desipere in loco, meaning it is a sweet occasion to 
play the fool, meaning it is good to relax once in a while, 
meaning it is alright to not understand everything, meaning 
the sweet instances before we are gone are always the most lovely,
meaning before Icarus fell, he was the first person to truly see the sun, 
meaning before you left, I was the first to understand you.

Did you know that in my broken Latin tongue there are two 
modes of pronunciation, so as to differentiate the Latin of the 
church and the Latin of the ancient Romans, so as to separate
the pope from Caesar and the Vatican from Rome. Did you know
that the difference is so minor that we still think of my broken
Latin tongue not as foreign but as dead, just like I think of you 
and your forgotten memories, you and your remembered silences,
you and your calculated moves, your limited love.

Maya Walker is an avid reader, tea drinker, and lover of words. She is the founder and editor in chief of Fulminare Review as well as an editor for Kalopsia Literary and a staff writer for Immortal Journal. You can read her work at Seaglass Literary, Modern Renaissance Magazine, Ice Lolly Review, and others, or find her at the abyss of ink known colloquially as the Instagram page @maya_whispers_words.

Larry Oakner

On the sex appeal of silver-haired women

This is not your ordinary grey hair
twisted into a thick argent braid.
This is the courage to keep from dying.
Beauty as she ages holds onto 
the secrets of womanhood.
I am aroused by her spirit and shine,
imagining the untangling of tresses
as we tangle together, unhurried 
with all the hours of a lifetime.

Larry Oakner is the author of two books of poems, including SEX LOVE RELIGION (Blind Tattoo Press), The 614thCommandment (under his pseudonym, Eleazar Baruch) (Blind Tattoo Press), along with a chapbook, The Canticles of Private Lucius Swan, (Pen & Anvil Press). His poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Red Eft Review, Red Wolf Press, WINK, The Oddville Press, Tricycle: Buddhist News, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lost Coast Review, The Long Island Quarterly and many other publications. Oakner lives in New York. 

Jonathan Manning

King of the Elements

Through the sliding
glass door the TV playing
slant to the balcony,

his chairs catch ash & keep him
close to life’s purchase. A bed big
enough for two considered 

wholes. Sitting in his
dentures and smoker’s belly,
not yet fifty. 

It was just life, he says, as in
just moments ago, not only.
The things that don’t

break down are killing us & all 
it takes to break something
on purpose for the first time

is noticing the tang on close
breath that smelling makes
you question if what you caught

was true. Smelling again, purposefully
now, that it might get truer.

Jonathan Manning is a poet in Los Angeles, and makes his living editing comic books. He is grateful for your time and readership. 

Madeline Hynes

RC Cola

Nobody told me we were poor— 
generic was name brand and Aldi
brand was generic. Our cereal came in
bags, and it was my job to pour the
sugar flakes into the plastic containers at home.
We'd get out the fancy calculator with the
waxy paper roll and pretend to
ring up all the groceries again while we
unpacked, scanning each barcode across
the green laminate peninsula, talking
in grown-up voices and calling for
cleanups on aisle 3.
Eventually the game got old and so
did the co-workers so they all went
to their rooms and future lives and 
I still had to fill up the pantry, take the
frozen pizzas out to the garage fridge, crumple up
the plastic bags and shove them into the 
bigger plastic bag.
The food got less bulk and less generic and now
my co-workers come visit and tease
me for the Pepsi I get to drink, but
I don't think they realize
how much I would rather be
back at that green peninsula
drinking RC Cola.

Madeline Hynes is relatively new to the poetry world. She recently left her job as a technical engineer at a software company to pursue writing full-time. Madeline grew up on a farm in Iowa, but now lives in Charleston with her husband, Alec, and their dog, Betty.

Stella Paukku

[the women in my family]

“don’t be so angry”

I carry the anger of three generations of women
Three lifetimes bitter like blood oranges
Groceries violently thrown on the floor of the hallway 
You know the rest

I am the anger of my grandmother
Locked in houses that were never quite homes 
for a lifetime
Children coming and going, some of them hers, some not
The house grew quiet, with the exception of the willow tits in the garden
Black suits, snot and tears in a church,
A simple coffin, the kind we could afford
And she unpacks her groceries alone now

I am the anger of my mother
The daughter of a proud, angry woman 
who never quite knew how to love her the way she needed to be loved
A marriage that spent years in a freezer 
and her husband is complaining now
about something mundane like the groceries
The children are covering their ears with pillows
You know the rest

I am my own anger
The daughter of people who never quite healed
who grew up in places that never really wanted her
A whore for your worries
because I was only ever safe when I was quiet and listening
With a stench of loneliness passed from one generation to another
like a sick relay race

I will take my anger with me to my grave
and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands

Stella Paukku is an aspiring poet and Environmental Sciences graduate. She is originally from Finland but is based in Luxembourg. 

Mirjam Frosth

AT Adams & Rains Upholstery /LP Builders / Fayette Depot

The upholstery shop spills over with seatless chairs    Grief is fifteen
sets of narrow blue eyes        Atlanta relentlessly sets you in and back   
The chewed white trees stunned into permanence    Each rotting
candywood house shakes with insects    The low brick buildings squat
down in the heat    We saw you in the office the day you left        The
tray of devilled eggs crushed the little sandwiches    Tremendous voices
pull the hat off the house     The sills lined with iridescent termite
wings        How much sand to stop the water climbing up the hill       
How many roads named Peachtree        How much longer until the
front door opens    Will it be 5 o’clock    Will it be 6

Mirjam Frosth is a Swedish-American poet, photographer, and amateur geologist. She used to live in Gainesville, Florida, but has since left. She can be found in her neighbor's garden, looking for rocks.

Randy Plym

Circles around my Circles

In the shadow's cloak, a cat's eye
in a fox's face.

Dragonflies anchor on the moon;
each crater a port.

The neighbor's smoke crawls through blinds,
potted plants like headstones.

Phone calls leak down, till cicadas
dynamite the quiet.

And I am here, walking circles
around my circles.

Randy Plym is a poet and author from Virginia. He is currently living in Frankfurt, Germany, where he's working on a novel. 

Emily Grace

To the naked women in the locker room,

with your chlorine-kissed
bodies drying in the air,

I am ashamed of your barrenness,
the graying pubic hair,

the sagging breasts,
your soft bellies gathering in a paunch.

I am brought back 
to the Loehmann’s communal dressing room

and my mother, still rounded from
my brother’s birth,

slipping on shirt after shirt next to 
a woman standing stripped,

staring at a dress next to another
woman wrestling on pants

while her walker held a pile
of crumpled rejects,

those wrinkled bodies
refracted in the endless mirror

prophesying to my child-self,
clothed and alone.

Emily Grace is a Maryland-based poet. She is inspired by walks, myth, and the child's ability to make meaning of the world through private paganisms. Her work has previously appeared in Bartleby. She is also a doctoral student at the Catholic University of America.

Emily Lott

Regret

I sat criss-cross in my chair
shoes tapping in the wind 
to the words uttered 
by my father — words 
I don’t remember, though
I remember 

his face: my grandfather’s — 
too white and too pink 
across the cheeks. A candle 
in a casket — if I touched him
he would burst to life: place
one hand on each side
of his wooden bed 
and lift himself 
out. 

Emily Lott is an aspiring writer who loves to explore the human condition. She is a full-time biomedical studies student residing in Canada. You can find her poetry on instagram (@myelusivewords).

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Guanajuato, México

When I was in my mid-twenties, fresh out of undergrad, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I visited Guanajuato, México, my parents’ home state, with my older brother and mom. I hadn’t been back since childhood. At first, I felt odd, like I stood out, introvert that I was. Then, I visited the mercado, full of locals and colorful piñatas. It was comforting just walking around with the locals, mi gente. We bought fruta in a cup with chili and lime. I bought a pirated jersey of my favorite Mexican League soccer team, León. Mis primos took me to different family parties, discotecas, and even to a local bookstore upon my request. The whole time I was in México, I felt like I was returning home, in a way. At moments, I felt like I didn’t stand out anymore, like in America, at least not physically. I was just another Brown man, Brown hands, Brown face, in my ancient land, but with an American accent. Some Mexicans did seem fascinated by my SoCal swagger and surfer clothes, though. When we ultimately said goodbye to our familia before heading to the airport, I was in tears, we all were. I haven’t seen my Guanajuato familia since then, in more than ten years. I’d like to return soon, but they say it’s dangerous right now. One day, I’ll return, though, I know it, like the dahlias in spring.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Journal, Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, The Moth (UK), Northwest Review, Pangyrus, Poetry, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry. He has a forthcoming full collection, "Bad Mexican, Bad American," with Acre Books in 2024.

Leia K. Bradley

In a Motel off I-95, Each Tooth a Bullet 

A pistol and a bible sleep together in the nightstand drawer.
The hairs on the back of your neck stand alert, ready to battle the whole world
I’d like to shave them all off with a razor blade 

Instead I lay like a corpse for hours so you can paint me 
as the jewel of your rough yellow prairie
the disturbia dark of your canvas beckons the unanswerable
—Am I more lovable because I am dying? 
Years from now, all you will remember of me 
is this painting
and all will you say is 
This is a painting of a long dead beautiful woman
maybe remember how
your brush bit deep into me; painted my hair like Americana doesn’t reek, 
yellow as amber waves of grain
but the rats have gotten to the harvest and we’ve all got TB

Back on the freeway but far from free: red driving gloves and lips to match all the blood
I drive the getaway car and you laugh with all your teeth, 
a fully loaded smile

In a dream: a locked room full of crows
Sins of vanity bleed forlorn colors
as I avoid all mirrors and bodies of water
I lie down in the middle of the dirt road, under a canopy of oaks 
lay under the leaves like a lover
expect the trees to embrace me just the same
but the difference is the trees never leave–at least, 
I never will be old enough to watch them wither away
they’re too big and strong for that 
Don’t point that gun at me, point me to an eternity I can wrap my fist around
and squeeze

Leia K. Bradley (she/they) is a Southern born, Brooklyn based writer and lesbian performance artist, as well as an MFA Poetry candidate at Columbia University. She has work in Poetry Project, Ubiquitous, English in Texas, Tarot Literary, Versification, Wrongdoing Magazine, and more, and can be found dancing through candlelit speakeasies or climbing barefoot up a magnolia tree with a tattered copy of Stone Butch Blues tucked into her dress. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley.