rising

by Samantha Johnson

for Gracie

The sun wakes – 

wrens flit-skim

wing in fennel. 

Alive, these two 

pick through mist 

weeping fronds 

bathed in dew. 

Magnificent 

and common. 

Soon I’ll make 

coffee, toast rye – 

in your childhood 

home, visiting. 

Your warm breath

is steady – soft 

body beside.

Fat pink worms 

ask nothing – 

peppercorn hearts

praise early, a day

undiscovered.

Samantha Johnson (she/her) is a poet in Melbourne, Australia, working on her debut collection.  Her work explores grace and grief – apron strings of time spent in the domestic.  She writes on the unceded land of the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation and acknowledges their elders, culture and creativity.  You can find her latest work in Kissing Dynamite and Rabbit Journal, and tweeting words at @joyandcorduroy

in the room with dust specks, flirting

by Spencer Folkins

an endless twirl of ascension
amidst the sunlight beam
like millions of tiny stars
held in a vacuum space, breathless or else

settled on a windowsill to collect, accumulate, wait
to be busted or used
as the canvas for some future young visitors’
childish artistic fingers, except

no visitors today and none expected
in the near nor distant future, if the current occupant
could hope to last so long despite

his waking hours and nights, continually persisting and
lonely, filled with a haunting, hollow
echo resounding from the past

attempting to remind him
of what never happened;
what never was

Spencer Folkins (he/him) has served on the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick's Board of Directors and on the Editorial Board for The Fiddlehead. Writing has appeared or is forthcoming in/on Riddle Fence, Feels Zine, Qwerty, FreeFall, HA&L Magazine, and elsewhere. Spencer is a recent graduate of St. Thomas University's School of Education (B.Ed. 2021). Tweets @FolkinsSpencer

my body is a house in winter

by Kerry Darbishire

Hope is a thing with feathers

– Emily Dickinson

latched in frost      veins     rivers      

stilled     and      slow   

as dying blood      skin 

pale as pale as skin can be     desire      

snowbound and words confined 

to lakes that cannot breathe

                                                     If I could fly 

through warm corridors      scented rooms      

a favourite painting to lift me to a house

where light and bowls we cherished      blossomed

on a table laid for spring

                                                     summer will

find me in a harebell sky     drifts of lightest rain

birds nesting without fear

sea-lapped curlews      singing

from new-moon beaks     

                                                   and summer 

will      beat these wings along landings          bright 

and scented as a Vita Sackville-West garden   

where the first roses      hollyhocks      peonies      

will be opening their hearts      

by a wooden seat in a yard      

nodding with bees  

Kerry Darbishire lives in a remote area of The Lake District, Cumbria, England. She has two pamphlets (one is a collaboration published by Grey Hen Press and the other is with Dempsey and Windle) Also two full poetry collections with Indigo Dreams Publishing and a third with Hedgehog Press due out in March 2022. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies and have gained prizes in competitions including Bridport 2017.

skin

by Annie Cowell

Birth gave you a strawberry;

its succulent crimson

fading now -

waiting for a lover’s kiss.

White line on your knee

   a 

     fall

          in the park.

The knuckle you sliced 

with an army knife.

That patch on your back 

which itches when 

the seasons change.

Your skin, my son, 

I know it like my own.

Annie Cowell grew up in Marske-by-sea a fishing village steeped in history and folk tales. Twenty years ago, she swapped a London career for teaching amidst the olive groves of Cyprus. Her agented debut novel, “The Moon Catcher” is on submission and she now writes full-time.

cat, unburied

by Cheryl A. Ossola

My dog found a dead cat by the side of the road,

flattened into the dirt yet strangely animate 

as if, hunting a bird or searching for sun

between ancient oaks that sentry the street, 

it stopped and fell over. 

A young cat from the looks of it, 

probably thinking itself a stalking lion,

struck down midstride yet unmarked: 

legs extended, gaze forward, skull intact.

I wanted to comfort this young hunter in its oblivion, 

stroke its cold-mudded coat, bury it among the tree roots

in the ground too hard to dig.

Four days later I am still thinking of this dead cat 

and of the people I love who are gone years now,

and of the five beloveds stolen from my friends last year,

and I begin to believe that if I bury the cat (if it’s not too late)

—if, in other words, I remove the evidence—

I can go back in time.

Don’t tell me someone took the small corpse away or tossed it aside, 

because when I leave the spot where the cat had been, 

climb stone steps to a medieval arch near a whispering church,

time spirals backward (eight hundred years at least, incomprehensible), 

and I walk lion-silent in search of warm grass, a foraging bird, 

inarguable proof of life.

Cheryl A. Ossola’s poetry and prose have appeared in After the Pause, Fourteen Hills, Switchback, Writers Digest, Dance Magazine, and the anthology Speak and Speak Again, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Wild Impossibility (Regal House Publishing), won a Nautilus Prize in Fiction. She lives and writes in Italy.

construction paper

by Will Davis

you become a motion

in a collection of motions

a cartwheel, a pursed lip

circle, square— unbroken

tracing the outline

of a hand, a negative space

a peacock stretched to heaven

its display reaching the terminal

points at the side of fine

pale wrists against the weather

outside, the chill of dense fog

tracing a finger at the window

a beckoning, that hither motion

the bird from your hand

stretches, yawns upward

Will Davis is a nurse and scribbler of small things drifting southeasterly. Further scribbles @ByThisWillAlone. 

picking flowers of the self from the selfless world

by S. T. Brant

Vitality has died. Its remnants are the calyxes 

we find on sidewalks or the petals

That love us not in roads; worthwhile carnations

pressed flat in books, 

Reduced from animate examples to resurrectless

tropes. Life has been made a word

Scanned quickly on a page and checked as read

as if completed and ingested

And defeated; so we become characters

in life’s text, meaningless to it 

As it to us, and go on fuselessly through time, 

our days wasted rays of sun

That aren’t enjoyed, aren’t taken in, unvitamin’d.

Life sees us burn to zero from its window.

S. T. Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. Pubs in/coming from EcoTheo, Timber, Door is a Jar, Santa Clara Review, Rain Taxi, New South, Green Mountains Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Ekstasis, 8 Poems, a few others. You can find him on Twitter @terriblebinth or Instagram @shanelemagne.

this morning

by Jose Hernandez Diaz

After W.S. Merwin

The sun comes through the window like a bird to a tree

I rise bloom again something free for once it can’t

Change this time I’ll hold tight the steering wheel

In this moment between a star and a galaxy we

Part when I go downstairs to make scrambled eggs

With tortillas and ketchup like a blue-collar Mexican-

American coffee no milk just sugar I remember 

The words my mother said when she was going

To start a new job she said a challenge is not something 

To fear walk through the door with your head 

Held high learn but lead soon it will be routine

This life like truth like love is a puzzle

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, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry, 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.

2 poems

by Beth Mulcahy

watch the world melt; hear it crash

Under the glimmer of just enough February sun glowing out of the pale barely blue sky, we watch ice glisten into water as it drips wet from the trees like a slow motion rain. We watch the world melt though you remind me that it was never solid to begin with. We look at each other at the thunder cry of cracking limbs dislodging dangling icicles crashing down all around. We hear the world crashing though you remind me that it was never not crashing to begin with. We watch the world melt. We hear it crash. 

the fog of it

your senses shut off

and you’re left 

with your thoughts

too loud

to see clearly and

you can’t hear anyone’s voice or

look in anyone’s eyes and

you can’t touch anyone’s soul

or feel anyone’s love and

you can’t smell anything at all

or taste your food and

you can’t sleep on purpose

or recognize beauty and

you can’t sit still

or stop thinking and

you can’t see a point but

you can’t stop existing because

you can’t stop 

breathing

you can't stop

breathing

Beth Mulcahy (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and writer whose work has appeared in various journals, including Full House Literary and Roi Faineant Press. Her writing bridges the gaps between generations and self, hurt and healing. Beth lives in Ohio with her husband and two children and works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. Her latest publications can be found here: https://linktr.ee/mulcahea

I straightened a stubborn wave

by Mary Kate Nyland

I straightened 

a 

stubborn wave.

I flattened

a

fault line.

I starved

a

stark, bucknaked child,

strapped braces to her

legs and set her down

the straight and narrow.

and then

I squeezed top and toe

between

hydraulics, squeezed through

the

moving pathway

between

its vinyl gridlock,

my

hair curly

my

ellipses swelling.

Mary Kate Nyland is an Irish American writer, currently pursuing a Master's degree in Creative Writing from University College Dublin. Her work focuses on questions of gender, relationships, and technology.

april

by Joseph Hamel

Because the night is mild 

I open the back porch door 

Again awake so late  

Walking in the misty grit 

The pavement fresh with rain 

My footsteps sound like kisses 

The clucks of teeth and lips 

Not happy, unhappy, or hungry 

A gentle deflation of purpose 

Compared to the warm, delicate breezes 

Exploring the still naked trees.

Joseph Hamel comes from Detroit, MI and attended Wayne State University His has been published in Portland review, Litspeak, Barrow St and his play DEPEW, a modern verse adaptation of Moliere's Tartuffe, was a 2019 semi-finalist for the National Playwrights Conference.

wreck life

by Jude Marr

at ocean’s surface, spinning buoys signal 

their distress: as ocean’s aspect alters—sullen chop

agitating against rocks, water bottles bobbing at the feet

of piers—wreck life endures

below

              organic

matter—manifest of deep-sea creatures—mixes 

to mulch: snapped  

masts and crusted funnels grow as cuttings grow, grafted 

at life’s socket: an ancient rope, hempen 

and heavy, hangs suspended in dense water, waiting

for the seahorse, yellow as a child’s imagined 

sun, to anchor, tail as hook, and graze

                                snout down

above a rumpled ocean bed

                                                 among the reefs and rocks

plankton are less these days, not yet

scarce as toilet roll pre-hurricane, but winnowed: while

each seahorse vacuums, snout intent, polythene

packaging with a picture of a shrimp

                                                                drifts past

carried by currents warmer than a dying planet’s final

breath.

Jude Marr (they, them) is a Pushcart-nominated nonbinary poet. Jude’s full-length collection, We Know Each Other By Our Wounds, came out from Animal Heart Press in 2020 and they also have a chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds, published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Their work has appeared in many journals in the US, the UK, and beyond. A native Scot, Jude recently returned to live in the UK after 10 years of teaching, writing, and learning in the US. The transatlantic connection remains strong, however: Jude is on the masthead at Animal Heart Press and they will be a Poet in Pajamas for Sundress Press in June 2022. 

engraved

by Megan Jones

I am sculpted by waves

ripples carving out the parts of me

worth saving

flakes dissolving excess 

molecules caressing a thousand

liquid droplets

grappling between wanting

to be contained and

spilling over edges

asking the water to

etch my narrative

Megan Jones is a reader, writer, and linguistics graduate from Yorkshire. She is currently pursuing a Master's degree and is always looking for new ways to admire words. Her fiction has appeared in Reflex Fiction, but this is her first venture into poetry. 

the shape of god in my mouth

by Bernadette Martonik

I yell God 

at the gold-plated icons on the living room wall

where Mary and Jesus have long thin faces and narrow noses

like aliens.

Below them is a small wooden table

that is actually an old sewing machine table

covered in a red velvet-clothed book

of the gospels,

a tabernacle,

and two candles in red glass

which we kneel around each evening

and pray to Our Father.

I don’t really yell God

because in my mind, when I yell God like that

I am squeezing my eyes closed and clenching my

fists and glass is breaking all around me

and sparks are flying.

Do not take the name of the Lord in vain, my father said.

He didn’t know how my mouth longed to form those sounds, 

how I had no control when they pushed up the back of my throat

and caught-

the guh, guh, guh, a tic on the roof of my mouth

or a release latch

letting itself ping off and open up into the all-encompassing

ahhhhhhh sound

before quietly landing on the tip of my tongue

duh

To say it backward was as innocent as Dog.

A word that never forced itself to spit up from my belly and swallowed back down.

I have to stand with my nose against the door

and squirm as I study the places where brown shows

through white chipped paint,

trying to imagine kneeling down

in front of the long-faced Jesus and

long-faced Mary,

looking at their alien long fingers,

hers wrapped around him,

his pointed at the sky,

their stern, sad eyes,

taking a deep breath

before whispering, God.

Bernadette Martonik lives in Seattle, Washington. Her work can be found in Oddball Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Pithead Chapel, The Manifest-Station, The Extraordinary Project, Typishly, Vox Lux Journal, and Stone Pacific Zine. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @BernadetteMartonik

wobble

by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger

As Earth’s axis leans lazily back from the Sun,  

in easy duality North and South Poles  

diametrically tug at Earth’s in-between.  

Molten iron rises toward crusty outer skin,  

then oozes back toward center, making Poles shimmy  

and shift, their movement teasing magnets and maps.  

As glaciers and polar ice soften, melt,  

move as liquid through surging seas,  

our spinning orb wobbles, jounces  

and judders, unsteadily trundles  

through space and time. Like a tottering toddler,  

puffy, pliant legs quaking, vibrating,  

straining to move through the world. Like the jittering  

of hand-cranked film, or the doddering, jiggling snow  

just before the avalanche plummets, carpeting the valley  

in suffocatingly shimmering glitter. Like my mother,  

when her comfortable, overstuffed-chair world  

quivered, when her brain wobbled and wept,  

when the life she sought  

became the life she dreaded,  

when her daughters, polar opposites,  

became her North Star.  

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger’s poems reflect both natural and constructed worlds, often describing interactions with family and friends. Her regular essays on poetry appear in Blue House Journal, and her poems have been published in District Lines, Thimble Literary, Blue House Journal, Green Light and Paper Dragon, and in four anthologies of Yorkshire poetry. Her prize-winning collection of Yorkshire sonnets was launched in Britain 2021 at the Fourth Ripon Poetry Festival. Shari is on the board of Alice James Books (alicejamesbooks.org), a poetry press committed to producing, promoting, and distributing poetry that engages the public on important social issues. She lives, writes and rides her bicycle in Washington, DC.

the school gates

by Karan Chambers

They stream through –   

a wave of bright blue,  

crashing. Here  

and there one tries to fight 

the tide, clinging desperately  

to arm or leg — reluctance  

in every line. A butterfly topped 

braid wobbles, bobbing 

up and down above shaking 

shoulders: driftwood amid 

dragging current. There’s so much here 

that’s unfamiliar. Adult faces  

too are uncertain — what if nothing 

ever changes? We're all marked; 

seeing history reflected 

in small faces, wanting 

so much to be different  

for them. I watch you, hesitant  

but swept along. I hold

my breath as you swim 

out of sight. 

Karan Chambers is a poet, English tutor, and mum to three boys. She studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and has been previously published by The Mum Poem Press, The 6ress, and The Winnow Magazine.  

the lengthened, light-filled days

by Kathryn Sadakierski

the clouds are cherry blossoms

floating in the sky

with fading wisps of spring daylight.

their reflections flicker like swimming fish

in the water of the reservoir

as though ruffled by wind.

a mirror image, an illusion 

is just as fragile

as the down of dandelion.

it changes just as quickly

as the colors of the trees,

which are like snakes that shed their skin,

butterflies in a constant state of metamorphosis,

red-gold wings like apple slices

descending to the earth.

Kathryn Sadakierski is a 22-year-old writer whose work has been published in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals around the world, including Agape Review, Critical Read, Halfway Down the Stairs, Literature Today, NewPages Blog, Northern New England Review, seashores: an international journal to share the spirit of haiku, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Yellow Arrow Journal, and elsewhere. Her micro-chapbook "Travels through New York" was published by Origami Poems Project (2020). Kathryn collects vinyl records, vintage books, and memories, which inspire her art. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. and M.S. from Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

my children will be dead before their 50th birthday

by Sarah Groustra

You never know what you’re going to see until you’ve seen it

“and isn’t that the way?”

There will be, someday, 

the chocolate ice cream and cotton candy of perpetual youth

but for now it’s just another night, seeking solace

in the emptiness

in the wonders that are not for me

“You must be this tall to ride” 

I don’t want to feel guilty for craving fullness 

but I was born too late

“and isn’t that the way?”

Sarah Groustra (she/her) is a recent graduate from Kenyon College in Gambier, OH, where she studied English and drama. Her writing has previously appeared in Funicular Magazine, Lilith Magazine, and the Jewish Women's Archive. Her plays have been workshopped or produced by Playdate Theatre, the Parsnip Ship, Grub Street, and Playwright's Workshop at Kenyon (PWAK). Sarah is originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, and her favorite thing in the world is breakfast all day. You can find her on Twitter at @ladypoachedegg.

it flows

by Kasturi Goswami

My abuela bled in the colour green

Her ichor - divine and destined

Worshippers gathered every moon under the old oak tree

Offered prayers with sweet honey and peaches

Words of faith sought redemption 

They placed their oaths on her shrine

Blood and sweat ramified for the eternal truth.

My mama bled in the colour blue

Her body-sealed within the caves of a prison

A prison called haven

Here, haven skimmed out abundant pastures

Ones that ran through to the horizons

And fields brimming with wildflowers and trees,

Swarming with the admirers at large.

I bleed in the colour red

Haven welcomes me - burks and censors

My hide decorticates and forges a new me

Scraggly limbs and chipped nails peer out in between bars

Charred knees and thin thorax hold up a pale and raggedy mug

They chant my name and lay bare 

In a place outside a prison called haven.

Kasturi Goswami is a blogger who features on her website colourfulingrey. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter.

“the cockroach grind”

by Ben Nardolilli

A communication is what we call 

ourselves when together, 

don’t take it from us unless we invite you,

go join a clique, a gang, or a murder

or be part of something that bleeds

until faces and limbs are lost,

a tribe, a nation, one vast enterprise moving

along to what goes without saying

our game is to get exhausted

going over variations on possibilities, 

it’s no doubt too much for you,

especially if it never leads to a shared bed

Ben Nardolilli currently lives in New York City. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, The 22 Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, The Northampton Review, Local Train Magazine, The Minetta Review, and Yes Poetry. He blogs at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is trying to publish his novels.