bright disguises

by Kelli Weldon

Delight in crisp leaves,

black cats, orange bows,

ghost clings in windows.

Kiki’s Delivery Service,

Hocus Pocus. Settle in,

enjoy the show. For once,

forget the mortgage,

that candidate,

this burning earth.

Instead be Sailor Moon

or Carmen San Diego,

or Dana Scully. Eat sugar

and cheer, listen, hear

laughter carrying into

a warm October night.

Kelli Weldon was born and raised in Louisiana and now resides in Texas. Find her poetry in literary publications including Black Moon Magazine, Boats Against The Current, Duck Duck Mongoose Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Frost Meadow Review, Remington Review, and Rewrite The Stars Review. Instagram: @kelliwritespoems

in the hot afternoon

by Haley DiRenzo

At a summer church wedding, having not 

worshipped in years, having watched 

the last glimmered prayers warble-cry 

and collapse unanswered,

my hands long to hold something 

love drenched and taffeyed pink. 

To be pulled apart while still clinging by a thread 

and a thread. 

Fan sermon pamphlets 

over sweat-beaded shoulders.

Bare necks. Dark wood creaking beneath,

I let the communion take me. 

Tongue pressed hard 

to paper thin wafer

roof of mouth. Soaked

in sweet wine and swallow.

Memory knots up like a clot 

in my calf muscle.

Not unlike times I performed

pleasure for someone else.  

Building and building and longing and aching 

for a rapture I was promised

that never came.   

Haley DiRenzo is a Colorado writer and practicing attorney specializing in eviction defense. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in January House, Thimble, Gone Lawn, and Ink in Thirds, among others, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Outside of work and writing, you can find her browsing in bookshops, drinking tea, and watching movies and live performance in the theater. BlueSky: @haleydirenzo.bsky.social. Instagram: @haleydirenzo

gravity

by Ashley Kirkland

All my life I’ve wanted to be smooth

as mud on the riverbank, washed clean

as a skipping stone, to be held between

two careful fingers with purpose & intention.

There is always the gravity of water,

the way I can’t resist dipping a toe

in the current, the way waves lick up

the shore. Magnetism. I am drawn

to what I cannot help, to an inescapable

pull of the unknown, the new, the small,

a bookstore, a dingy bar. All my life

I’ve padded softly through the kitchen,

gently kicking the crumbs off the bottom

of my feet, stealing a piece of raspberry

coffee cake from the counter. To indulge

is to live and I intend to live (in spite

of myself), to pull everything in, 

let the seeds get stuck in my teeth. 

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, ONE ART, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.

flowers

by Kezia Burgoyne

I wandered the graveyard today; 

It’s the flowers. 

They’re driving me into madness. 

It is sickening to see shriveled petals burning on gravestones. 

And worse are the live ones;

their colors mock the dead.

Kezia Burgoyne is from Oahu, Hawaii. She writes for the local newspaper and is currently an undergraduate student studying Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is happiest when skateboarding, talking with strangers, and scribbling poetry. 

someday we’ll find joy in New Orleans

by Kate Kadleck

My heart is a shotgun house

with the cracked pastel exterior

of macarons – pistachio, lavender,

passionfruit, rose water.

Its jewel-toned rooms huddle

together, murmur about the murder

that stained their floors and how,

ever since, the cottage swells & contracts

like an organ            ism.

I saved you my favorite chamber.

Kate Kadleck is a writer and relationship therapist based in Dubuque, Iowa. She earned her MS in marriage and family therapy from Northwestern University and is the author of a chapbook, Corpse Pose (Bottlecap Press, 2025). Her work can be found or is forthcoming in places such as Ivy Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, Moss Puppy Magazine, Cary Grant Died Here, wildscape., Tenth Muse, Thimble, The Indianapolis Review, The Garlic Press, and One Hand Clapping.

entropy

by Nicholas Olah

the morning is monochrome 

          grey on grey

a secret between us

sticks to the back of the breeze 

             bruise-colored         

                        acidity lining its stomach 

why does it feel 

as if we take up more space

together      than apart

when will the stubborn silence 

dislodge itself 

from between our teeth and become

something that can save us

Nicholas Olah has self-published four poetry collections: Where Light Separates from Dark, Which Way is North, Seasons, and You Are Here. Olah’s work appears or is forthcoming in Humana Obscura, Thimble Literary Magazine, Wildscape Literary Journal, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine, and more. Olah’s poem, “On the Drive Home”, won third place in The Poetry Lighthouse Prize in spring 2025. Check out more of his work on Instagram at @nick.olah.poetry.

murder

by Liz Pino Sparks

You said once, if someone could get a

murder of crows

into your backyard, you would

never leave. I thought then

when it came time, to ask you to

never leave, I would summon a

murder of crows to our backyard. Which 

is a bit, redundant, as, even besot 

in our first hours, I wanted to beg you to

never leave. Wrapped in you, in you,

in a night, eternal in its desperation

for permanence, I trace my finger

along my forearm, where I will tattoo 

a crow, someday, for you. For you. Where

I will trace my finger, around your

finger, around your vena amoris, around

the mythical line to mirror our mythical

love that some mythical god laid at our

unworthy feet, in a mythos of us, where

I would follow you into an underworld,

any circle of hell, any treacherous desert

of an endless and cruel summer. And each

would be beyond my periphery, because 

there you stand straight ahead, fixed, in my

sight. In an open yard, in the first chill of

harvest, you, stilled, amidst a murder    of crows.

Liz Pino Sparks is a writer, musician, legal scholar, and teacher. Their chapbook, Generic American Household, is available now from boats against the current.

of lighthouses & dock lights

by Sarah Wallis

after The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Centenary Year 

As if having the dock light at all 

didn’t speak of greenbacks, and hope, 

peace, no, not peace – 

and he was diminished by hope, for it gave 

him no peace, he stared at that green light 

in the dark so long... 

and once he thought he had her, his Daisy, 

the green light lost its great emblem 

of meaning – that had once meant everything 

to him – in his former hopes, his dreams,

of course, lived 

the beginning of his end.  

A lighthouse is denoted by colour 

and seconds count of flashes, known as 

the Characteristic, it is how sailors tell

which one guides them now, sees them safe 

through the dark and onto 

the next one, and so on, until morning 

or harbour retrieve them. Fewer lighthouses 

flash green, because the colour speaks 

to safe water, there is less need, more hope. 

But there was to be no safe harbour for Gatsby

that lived so long on his hopes, he had only 

an electric green glare, a steady, radial 

warning, as if the dock light were 

a glowing timepiece, throwing out a dare, well, 

he had dared, eventually, old sport, he had, 

and lost more than his countless beautiful shirts. 

Sarah Wallis lives by the sea not far from Edinburgh and has a chapbook out with Boats Against the Current, Poet Seabird Island. Publications this year include Frazzled Lit, The Interpreter’s House, Paperboats and Punk Dust, who will publish her Modern Sonnets After the Circus. In exciting news she has been granted a UNESCO Fellowship and a writing residency at Skara Library in Sweden to deliver workshops and work on her next collection. 

seasalt

by Zadie McGrath

Ocean Beach, 2021. We can be 

compressed until we sparkle like an old film

shot grainy in dim light:

Clear dash of highway,

beach laden with caution tape

to mark lines gauged out

to halt erosion. Those depressions

we raced to slide down.

Yellow plastic braiding and unbraiding in the wind, 

more of a welcome sign than a warning.

Maybe that’s why, for that summer and after,

I was gone and gullible.

//

ocean beach on the 4th of july.

illegible magic and a caution-tape mood,

that’s the kind of night it takes to talk to you. i say,

i’ll devolve into poetry if this continues any longer.

i say, you’re a sign of insanity.

regardless i whisper into my floor,

i could have been your best friend.

//

And maybe you’re the only part of that year

that really happened, but I smell 2021 bursting

into my bedroom after a three year hiatus,

attracted to September sun and early bedtimes,

quick as a poem I don’t have time for.

By which I mean:

it’ll last for life, 

this scent you could track me by,

of seasalt poetry laced with paranoia.

Zadie McGrath writes when she’s supposed to talk and talks when she’s supposed to write. Her poetry has been published in Apprentice Writer, The Basilisk Tree, and Backwards Trajectory, among other places. She lives in San Francisco.

2 poems

by Jenna Mather

woman as Icarus

When I was a girl,

I was too obsessed

with making myself;

I wanted to construct

some flying machine

made of bird-wing

feathers and duct

tape that would

transform unreachable

clouds into steps

for my small feet.

So I read all about

old plane cylinders

and bird bones, until

I learned I needed to

be hollow if I ever

wanted to be free.

afterlife

Some life I’ll have,

away from here.

Maybe I’ll dance

on the beach naked

& drunk until sand

fills my bellybutton;

I’ll eat pancakes

every morning &

butter them in sunshine,

chew raw sugar 

crystals without

ever growing rot

in my teeth. Or maybe I’ll

wish for the hard

ache of Tuesday,

cooking a thankless

meal on sore feet;

maybe I’ll envelop

my body in seawater

& wish it was you.

Jenna Mather is a graduate of the University of Iowa, where she studied English and creative writing. With her stories and poems, she aims to untangle the complexities of love, womanhood, and the writing life. On any given day, you can find her in a coffee shop—or online at @_jennamather and jennamather.com.

G(rammy): an ode to Skagit Valley summers

by Angela Heiser

For Geneva Rouse, known by the Barnard children as G

I'll forever hold you in a sunbeam of slippery

stellar star-sent radiation

so incongruous with our mutual memories of drizzling days

in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains 

where one is always acutely grateful to be sun-drenched for a change

Skagit Valley sun dappling and freckling the tulip fields

and the ferry dock in Anacortes

in the San Juan Island days

of my youthful summers 

I spent savoring the sight of your short-clipped grey-brown curls springing

as you and I ran laps around your idyllically overgrown

and European slug-infested backyard 

while your animated little lap dogs barked in unison

and you and I both screeched in shared laughter

 just as fleeting and impermanent as those sunny days

that too often ceded to clouds

so I’ll continue holding you forever in a secret sunbeam in my mind’s sky

slipping inside stellar star-sent radiation where our laughters can collide

Angela Heiser lives near Raleigh. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Carolina Muse, The Poetry Lighthouse, The Red Mud Review and County Lines. Her poem “Cornhusker” was awarded the Poetry Genre Winner for the 2024-2025 issue of The Red Mud Review. She is an alum of Writers in Paradise and reads for Abode Press, Wildscape and Libre Lit.

Instagram: angelacheiser 

please, spring

by Diane Stone

It’s one of those perfect days: 

a thick slice of paradise 

swaying on light’s full bloom. 

Our senses need 

fair warning signs 

on days like these. 

Slow: Fireweed in bloom. 

Caution: Warblers ahead. 

Something sketched the details right 

(turning leaves, hollow bones), 

but overplayed the major theme—

who really wants to ever leave? 

This denim sky, benignly blue, 

bravely wide, hides the murky stew 

of our beginnings. 

How far we’ve come, 

from random belch to this: 

colors bursting glad intent;

more seed, please, one more chance. 

We all want that—one more chance

to bloom again, to make amends, to fly;

one more chance to live as if it mattered. 

Diane Stone, a former technical writer-editor, lives on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. Her work has been published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Comstock Review, Minerva Rising, Chautaqua, and elsewhere. A book of poetry, Small Favors (Kelsay Books), was published in 2021.

birches know

by Jan Mordenski

that everything works both ways,

that sun-dried mornings lead

to moon-damp nights, that silent

snows engender songful days,

that rooting deep and latching on

is what can bring them strength,

enable them to weather

the winter’s tattering winds,

that keeping a diary

somewhere deep within

is what, years from now,

can chronicle a history, ring true,

that reaching out, stretching high,

is what can allow them to touch

the frayed fringes of the sky,

the opened palms of the stars.

Jan Mordenski is a writer and trained folklorist from Michigan who has had poems published in Canada, Ireland, England, Australia and Singapore, as well as in the U.S. in publications like Poet Lore, Comstock Review, Arete, and Worcester Review; on-line, poems can be found on Ravens Perch, Eunoia, Hamilton Stone Review and Bluebird Word. “Crochet” was also selected as part of Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.  Mordenski is also founding editor of Quadra-Project, a calendar of art and literature that is now available on-line.

long living

by Stephen Mead

Voices I know, just in from the rain, that sweet strange wet embrace, fingers on droplets, through glistening strands & mouths, eyes full, luminous, really all there is to want amid such pallor falling. Voices, I know, it’s crazy to be so enamored by the silvery, deep dusk husk of sighs, each whisper of whiskey somehow purely sensuous, an intrigue to die for. 

I want to advise you:  Don’t bother. Worship is tedious or, in any case,  the impressions made, honors won, all rather child’s play, be blasé,  have Savior-faire, though that’s the way fading queens may cover what means so much it’s sort of terrible. Yes, it’s sort of terrifying & hilarious, I know: voices, the excitable tango, that wilderness chase, hard-to-get, the passion’s hunger mark creating slave brands or partners in crime,  give’n take along nights, sonatas of wine, roses & days of comfort, vulnerable: re­quited, unrequited absorbed by all nerve endings.

All nerve endings absorb voices, journeys, I know, sentimental, searing, I remember a maxim: never think being full is not a blessing for so many mouths have died in real oppression, war, famine, have died not knowing what spirits may grow empty without, the savored bliss of lips starving even in the thick of necessities, meals well-prepared, well, so that’s the story:  voices, I know, at least we’ve had ours.

Resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, Stephen Mead is a retiree whom, throughout all his pretty non-glamorous jobs still found time for writing poetry/essays and creating art.  Occasionally he even got paid for this. Currently, he is trying to sell his 40-year backlog of unsold art before he pops his cogs: https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/stephen-mead

ridge rust & late summer

by Diane Webster

ridge rust

Ragged ridge of rust

spews particles

like molten rock

from a volcanic eruption –

a lava graduation party

leaden in confetti deluge

caught in a moment

of photography.

late summer

Grasshoppers clack

as I wander

through a wonder

of purple fireweed.

Voices of fishermen

drift up from the lake.

Diane Webster’s work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Studio One and other literary magazines. She had micro-chaps published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Diane has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart. She was a featured writer in Macrame Literary Journal and WestWard Quarterly. Her website is: www.dianewebster.com

blue skies across the delta

by Victoria Richard

I have not yet curled the obituary into my console. 

The man next to me asks about my week. 

My morning. 

My year. 

How do I tell him that bridges fall 

And strawberries rot and that 

Under my eyes is still the 

Mascara from two days past.

I was wearing jeans

Making mac and cheese 

Reveling some stolen moments alone – 

Now I am the support in gray – a concrete pillar that 

Cannot change. 

Against the coffin, the earth sags – opening her folds and 

Waiting. 

Now I am the bridesmaid in black,

Pulling a widow’s train to the side – 

Flashing headlights and leading sisters 

To the center of a tear heavy circle. 

Victoria Richard is a writer, gardener, and aspiring curator originally from Progress, Mississippi. In 2019, Victoria came to Jackson to study at Millsaps College - and never left. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, Victoria was involved in a high control religious group. This experience has provided her with a passion for bringing stories of hidden abuse to light. Victoria now shares her personal journey of trauma and healing on her Substack, Angels Over Presley Boulevard. Versions of her story have also appeared online in i got out and Tears of Eden. Her work to reconnect to her father's Louisiana heritage is forthcoming in Deep South Magazine. Whenever she isn't researching cults and interviewing survivors, she works to highlight local talent at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

2 poems

by Laurinda Lind

freelance

a word i wrote

on my c.v. as if

it was a stick to hold stories

& where they landed

maybe as i made lists of astrological symbols

& wrote my poems in shorthand in

that private way to budget the lies

by people arranged in rooms,

plus lay it down fast then

write it out an hour eight dollars,

like a row of crows taking off

from a stone wall & their feathers as they fell

sifting down black as ink.

how lovers are like starfish

Or are lovers like starfish

or where do they stick,

ashore would they find 

more of what they wanted 

from a sea or one another,

call it available space if 

atoms rearrange and agree 

to go again, and if what went 

missing mouths the words in

a chorus of rebecoming.

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country, close to Canada. Some of her poems are in Blue Earth Review, Josephine Quarterly, and The Inflectionist Review. Her first chapbook, Trials by Water, was released in summer 2024 (Orchard Street Press).

unbound

by Brian Christopher Giddens

I performed emergency surgery today on a long-forsaken houseplant. It sits in shade, unnoticed, like fading wallpaper. You see it, but you don’t. The dirt is parched, compacted, the leaves withered. I jab a kitchen knife into the soil-it barely gives. I jab harder, dig the plant out. The root ball tangled like a ball of knotted string. Using the knife, I wrestle roots apart, slash shriveled ends. I transplant what’s left to a new pot, tamping fresh dirt down around the base. I place it near a window where it will wake to morning sun. I imagine the plant’s surprised sigh as it drinks in a cool glass of water.

Where is the unseen hand to rip me out of place? To cut away my shriveled roots, separate my endless tangles? To slough off the dry, dusty clots impeding growth? To resettle me in fresh soil, reawakening my senses? I may not survive the shock, but better that, than this laborious decline.

Brian Christopher Giddens writes fiction and poetry from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his husband, and Jasper the dog. Brian’s writing has been featured in the New York Times (Tiny Love Stories), Sequestrum, Litro, Raven’s Perch, Bluebird Word, Hyacinth Review, Rue Scribe, Corvus Review, Roi Faineant, Glass Gates Collective, Flash Fiction Magazine, Glimpse and Evening Street Review. His work can be found on https://www.brianchristophergiddens.com/

downriver

by Cynthia Pitman

Thickets of palmetto trees

clench the riverbanks.

Water oaks rise,

dripping tangled curls

of Spanish moss.

My oars cut the water

as if it were sweet syrup.

Barely a sound – just a quiet splash

as each oar dips in then emerges

from the dark depths.

The canoe moves slowly,

sliding smoothly downriver.

Waiting somewhere there

is the respite I seek

from the metal and mortar

and crowds and heat

that surround me daily

as I pretend to live my concrete life.

All of its hard solidity

pinches me in on myself,

squeezing my breath from me

as I sweat away any hope of peace.

Only downriver will I find

cool water that reflects

with clarity the greenery

that embraces me.

When I arrive there and breathe air

that is fresh and free,

newborn life will stir again within.

Cynthia Pitman, author of The White Room, Blood Orange, and Breathe (Kelsay Books), has been published in Bright Flash, Amethyst, Ekphrastic, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem finalist), Saw Palm (Pushcart Prize nominee), and others, and in anthologies Pain and Renewal, Brought to Sight & Swept Away, Nothing Divine Dies, and What is All This Sweet Work? 

rest cure

by Jessica Holland

I am sick 

upon a seaside cliff; 

or so I am told. 

The sea creeps and calls

 to me 

from my 

bedside window. I long for 

its jagged crest 

to sink 

its teeth 

into 

the roof. 

To be 

buried 

beneath 

the sand.

Jessica Holland is a recent University of Iowa grad and has been published in New Moon and New Horizons magazines. They are an Iowa based poet and writer with a passion for the weird and speculative. You can find them in a hammock somewhere in the woods.