the only wedding that I desire

by Laxana Devaraj

I turn to damp petals

unfurling in the morning light, 

a flower ring on my finger. 

A perfect wedding with 

melancholy in silence. 

Past wounds unfold like 

black veils of a mourning bride; 

as stubborn as I am, they refuse to heal.

Laxana Devaraj is a recent law graduate living in Sri Lanka. She likes to write and read poetry. Her poetry is to be published in Ice Lolly Review.

3 poems

by William G. Gillespie

sunset in Guanacaste 

In the quietness of the peninsula 

I listen to the waves turn white 

against the cliffs 

against the sun brushing the porcelain sands with gold 

there is no sail in sight 

save the frigatebird

rising like an angel 

above the bay 

taken on a current 

I will one day know   

toward the mountain veils of green 

winter

I see the last of the plum leaves fall 

as a gust of wind whistles the end of autumn 

soon the shivering window hums 

with blue adumbrations of snow and solitude 

I chew my mandarin 

and listen—    

when I gather in my arms 

the cold winter winds

I rock to sleep 

the promise of spring

desire

The fisherman 

plucked a grape 

from the crown 

of a white wave 

but the grape 

round and sweet 

shriveled 

in the salt of his hand 

William G. Gillespie lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has appeared in Olney Magazine, Red Eft Review, and The Drunken Canal. 

carrying the weight

by Dylan Parkin

The sun-cracked snow,

A Grecian marble statue bent with light and time.

The sky’s a canvas flecked 

With dark and flying souls.

There’s freedom in the air

But still they weigh it down. 

Sleep is still unstirred, 

As the light is yet to reach

The splattered thoughts 

Of the day before.

But the rising of the sun’s the melting of a dream.

Another weight that finds its way.

Watercolours shape the world

And everything echoes another.

It’s seen in the pale frailties 

That pass between faces.

The sky is carried like a coffin.

No pity for the pallbearer.

Dylan Parkin (he/him) is an autistic creative currently based in Reading, UK. He can be found on Twitter @parkin1901.

adventure dog

by James Roach

Adventure Dog
loved being in the warm sun,
finding the perfect spot in the grass
or on the weathered wood of the deck,
splayed out like a frog
to soak in every ray.
She was a champion
adjuster of blankets for naps
on the light green couch
we got from a friend,
her husband’s back
no longer able to handle
the softening cushions.
But to Sage, it was perfect.
Adventure Dog
got me out of bed
with impatient whines
on the days my anxiety tried its best to keep me
hidden from the outside world.
She recognized the universe of my panic,
when my constellations were out of shape.
She learned the definition of divorce
when he never came back.
Adventure Dog
cared that I got home safe
from a night of drinking,
was always at the door,
greeting me with her forgiving eyes
and wagging tail.
She never knew there were so many times
my tires almost lost their grip on the road.
She never judged me
for the vomiting,
the hangovers,
the regret.
Adventure dog
has been gone since April 7, 2016.
Her eyes said she knew why the vet
had come the day she fell asleep on my bed
for the last time.
I gave her steak as a last meal
and cried into her brindle fur
while the sedative took effect. 
Adventure Dog
was made eternal in ashes
that now sit in a red wooden box
with her leash and collar,
that probably still smell like her,
on a shelf by the only window in my room.
When the sun is out
or when candles are lit,
she is surrounded by light.
Adventure Dog
isn’t here to witness me sober,
my joy for this new life.
Her snores are no longer the lullaby
I hear as I fall asleep.
Sometimes,
between wakefulness and sleep,
between my life here and wherever her spirit may wander,
I can feel her weight.
It is the heaviness
that will never leave me.

James Roach (he/him) is most creative between the hours of up-too-late and is it even worth going to bed? He dug up his midwest roots to live in Olympia, Wa., not too far from some sleepy volcanoes and beaches to write home about. 

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.