the girls we were

by Irene Cantizano Bescós

We were immortal children 

in the forest’s golden glade.

Our skirts swirling in the schoolyard,

poplar seeds like falling snow.

Three half-remembered dreams

I caress every morning.

Here’s the last one:

Remember when I showed you Orion’s Belt?

The summer stars got tangled in your hair

I brushed them out - your thick black curls the night sky

I was afraid to breathe; how could time not stop right then, how did it dare?

You were so beautiful back then.

But when we went into the woods and tried to play,

our bodies weren’t ours anymore 

our hands suddenly too big,

we couldn’t recognise each other.

Then all these perfect boys I loved and hurt

because 

they weren't you.

Now, when the house is quiet

on the eve of the long summer,

I unspool my days onto my breast.

Of all the lives I didn't live,

ours is the one I most regret.

Irene Cantizano Bescós is a writer and immigrant from Spain lost between two languages. Her work has been featured in Amethyst Review, Moria, Black Hare Press, Five Minutes, (mac)ro(mic), and Tales to Terrify, among others. She is also a freelance journalist, and her reporting has appeared in leading Spanish and UK titles such as Huffington Post, El País, Telva, and Positive News. Irene lives in England with her husband, two boisterous toddlers, and two warring cats. You can find her on Twitter as @IreneCantizano.

youngsters

by Hiram Larew

Remember that

I peeked through the group kitchen’s door

That was ajar like memory

And saw you carrying 

Trays of tortillas 

To the oven  

You looked up for a split second

But were busy

Years from now

When you’re my age

And the tortillas are youngsters

Remember that I looked in 

For just a blink

Before the door closed

And then went into another room

As you will someday

Founder of Poetry X Hunger: Bringing a World of Poets to the Anti-Hunger Cause, Hiram Larew has had poems appear in recent issues of ZiN Daily, Contemporary American Voices, The Iowa Review and Poetry Scotland's Gallus.  His most recent collection, Patchy Ways, was published by CyberWit Press in 2023.   

roller skates

by Lisa Caroline Friedman

Stiff-legged, arms jerking 

like bent wings struggling 

to catch air, we inched up the driveway

giving first flight to our identical 

twin gifts from Grandma Rose.

We were four feet bound

in hard white leather with pink 

wheels and toe stops. We found 

a jagged rhythm 

as our wheels rolled over 

pocked and pebbled pavement 

then hiccupped at the lips 

between slabs. We hugged 

parking meters to rest or stop

a fall then hit the playground 

where we skated between metal 

swings and mostly dirt 

fields. We skated until dusk

then back to the dreaded 

driveway, now downhill. I reached 

the bottom upright and waited 

but your wheels ran wild  

and you skated into me – 

my body, your stop. We fell 

and first I cradled you. Then I yelled

at you, embarrassed. You skated

while I fake-limped 

the rest of the way 

home. What I wouldn’t give

give to cradle you now.

Lisa Caroline Friedman (she/her) was born in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, grew up in New York City, and currently resides in Palo Alto, California with her husband, daughters, and thirteen year-old labradoodle. Her first published poem appeared in the March 2023 issue of Pink Panther Magazine. She will have two more poems published in the Fall 2023 issues of San Pedro River Review and Rat’s Ass Review. She received a BA in English from Stanford University and this winter, will begin Antioch University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

she, her, and me

by Annie Tallis

She comes in the dark 

when I am defenseless, 

washes over my body, 

presses her fists down 

my throat and 

deprives 

me of my senses. I cannot 

sleep until I give in to the 

tidal wave of grief. Salt 

stings my eyes as 

tears race down my face, 

speeding, trying to prove

who loved her 

more. 

I wake, screaming,

drenched in sweat 

jolting at

the realization: I can 

never be hurt by her again. 

In my personal drought, 

I sit on the floor

of the shower, let the cold 

water run

over and under my pain.

Annie Tallis is a young queer poet living in Cardiff, Wales. She originally began writing poetry as a cathartic experience to process grief, trauma and pretty much any emotion! She has previously been published in Sideways Poetry Journal and Green Ink Poetry. She will have upcoming pieces of the new editions, both online and in print, of Inspired Poetry. 

easter 2020

by John Tessitore

The hands of the buried have dug to light.

Over night, flattened fingers pierced the leaves

that cleave to the loaming after the thaw,

clawed the soft ground at the margins

of the open yard, and spread to the heavens.

Soon they will be hidden in the bramble

of wild raspberry that chokes the edge

of this wood, in the glade where the oaks

stood tall, on this side of the mended wall

that once marked the limit of my knowledge.

No deeper had I ever wandered

into the wild than this outline of an old

estate, or a farm gone to seed, overrun.

A quiet garden must have grown here

with bulbs along a hedge, maybe a walk 

for girls with baskets, boys in short pants.

It’s still too soon for jocund company,

no blooms to twinkle across the gray sea, 

although the forsythia is powdered today

with yellow, like the shavings of a pencil.

Maybe the season prepares to write 

its way back to routine and tell the tale

of our returning. I may not be ready

to reckon again with time, if what I seek

is a pause in the cascade of days,

a frozen moment, since the ones we love

may not live a long tomorrow.

Narcissus always rises to remember 

this sorrow, and weeps as the season resumes, 

as the vines creep to claim dead flowers.

John Tessitore has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, and a biographer. He has taught British and American history and literature at colleges around Boston and has directed national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Boats Against the Current, and Wild Roof and elsewhere. He has also published six eight chapbooks and a novella available at www.johntessitore.com. 

old town portland

by Virginia Lake

The flier in my mailbox

said I could discover

Jesus in downtown Portland

I would find him

at the Garden Church a 

storefront church

of modest proportions.

To clinch the deal, if I replied with an

RSVP, I would get a $5 coffee gift card.

The Garden Church is not really

Downtown like the Standard Insurance and

Historic Meier and Frank building.  

It is in Old Town, 

forsaken by God

and the City of Portland

The mentally ill 

relegated to the streets

have made Old Town their home.

They are assailed by rats 

sleep in tents

surrounded by garbage 

they shout and howl.

I would love to discover Jesus 

in Old Town. 

Virginia Lake is a senior auditor at Portland State University. She audits literature and writing classes. In 2022 she published two poems in Old Pal Magazine. She was 77 years old. That was her first publication.

foghorn

by John Martin

Sea grey and flat.

Fog,

its greyness merging with the plate of water

in a continuous monotone.

Complete silence is an absence

between each foghorn drone;

distant and sad,

laden with amorphous undefined dangers

at unknown distance on the starboard quarter,

or perhaps ahead.

The anticipation of the next moan

brings both anxiety that it will not come

and fear of its imminence.

Then suddenly the far thud

of a warning gun in another quarter.

The two unknown distant dangers

Out of phase.

John Martin’s 2004 collection, “The Origin of Loneliness” was followed by poems in The London Magazine, Magma, The Lancet, Dreich, Trasna, Drawn to the Light and Ink Drinkers magazines. A former soldier, he studied philosophy before medicine and currently works as a doctor and scientist in Europe and the US. 

beyond the bookcase

by Tamiko Mackison

you ask if we should remove our shoes
as they did –

I shake my head.

a line of pilgrims, mourners of one that represents many,

snakes from bedroom to narrower bedroom
poring over what survived.

you gasp at the steep staircase,
grasping the steps with your fingers to rise

to the next floor where the original sink remains
and a sign says Do Not Touch.

silence hangs like flags in each worn room.
the tall, terraced walls are papered with sadness.

a shopping note from a coat pocket
is now encased in glass:
we preserve the quick, insignificant scrawl
which becomes sacred.

outside, cyclists and trams fly around the city
whilst canal boat captains entice us aboard.
shiny, broad-shouldered professionals
drink small pints outside bars, joking and laughing.

it’s a strange world.

for every basket of pink geraniums that tumbles over a bridge
I smile.

she’s taught us more than we can ever know.

Tamiko Mackison read Latin and French at New College, Oxford. She was the winner of the BBC Radio 3 carol competition 2021. She has published two poetry books: "SHIMA (Islands)" (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and "Seasons of Love Around the Rising Sun" (Broken Sleep, 2023). 

take a breath of fresh air

by Moriah Soriano

I want to ride the waves of the 

sea, fall off my surfboard

over and over and over and 

let the glassy sea 

catch me, embrace me wholesomely.

Though, if I swim back to the 

surface, I know, the water will 

accept me back. 

I want to drown my feet in the 

sand dunes, let mother nature 

kiss the bruises of my sadness. 

The grass on these sands

then sways to dance 

to the whispering 

sounds of the winds of chance. 

No, I don’t want to chase 

time, I don’t want to 

chase money – just want to submerge 

in the sublime that gave me.

Love so supreme better than 

you could ever give.

Moriah Soriano is an aspiring poet based in London. Her introduction to the world of adulthood forced her to have an existential introspection of the life she had pre-adolescence and the disquiet uncertainty of her future. This propels her to bleed those emotions into words as she navigates life with poetry on the passenger seat.

waiting for hummingbirds

by Eben E. B. Bein

We crouched in tall flowers

Mom and me, peering up 

petaled steeples against 

blue mountains, 

slow tumble of clouds 

from the ridge

             a vividness 

         born of waiting

a bumble bee’s drone 

set the spires 

                          swaying

                    without breezes

in a field 

where no one 

would be grounded 

There. The low 

ruby-throated whirr

of one—no—two

hover at blossoms

like beads         

                         suspended  

                   on a sky necklace, 

then zip away into

a sudden whitening—

the field cloudfallen

and I am still 

as sunshon mist

probing the nectaries

with tongue the length 

of our incandescent 

                                   body 

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook “Character Flaws” is out with Fauxmoir lit and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.

beatrice

by Tom Bennett

for the only dog to survive the RMS Titanic

First, the mum with gurgling heart unfurls

her linen jumpers inside a leather trunk

as bedding for two boys she stows like pearls.

Later, the stokers from lower decks hurling

their bodies of bread to the water’s spume

knowing that anything’s better than burning.

Last, the owner sat alone in his room

his pup lost in the browns of a lady’s fur

the last small sacrifice to sweeten his doom.

That this were the leg spasm of a dozing cur

too close to the fire and not the poem written

with words, like brains, blasted across the paper.

Tom Bennett is an English teacher from South Wales. His poems have appeared in Reed Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears and others. His short fiction has appeared in Litro and Pushing Out The Boat.

bespoke (a pantoum)

by Amrita V. Nair

There is a life out there. 

I will know it when I see it. 

And I will step into it;

And it will fit me perfectly.

I will know it when I see it.

I will not hesitate, not for a minute.

And you will see that it will fit me perfectly; 

Maybe you will even be happy for me.

I will not hesitate, not for a minute.

Even if this life here is softer.

Maybe you will even be happy for me.

Even if the new one is out of fashion, scratchier.

Even if this life here is softer,

There is a life out there.

Even if the new one is out of fashion, scratchier.

I will step into it. 

Amrita V. Nair (she/her) is a poet from Kerala, who currently lives in the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples (Vancouver, Canada). Her writing has appeared in Okay Donkey, Yuzu Press, Litmora, and elsewhere, and was included in the Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems. Website: www.amritanair.com. Twitter: @amritanairv

2 poems

by Jerome Berglund

frog’s toe

      gifts become burdens 

obligations, chores, distractions 

      right quick – grown puppy 

      King James’ version

or the Gideon’s

      take your pick, choice of translation’s yours 

      holds a lit taper 

when his heart gives out, 

      takes whole construction with him 

      manacles or straight jacket, 

severance package options 

      for family business 

      make a body, 

least have decency 

      stick around for cleanup 

bolt

haiga collaboration, photo by Theresa Berglund

Jerome Berglund, nominated last year for the Touchstone awards and Pushcart Prize, has many haiku, senryu and tanka exhibited and forthcoming online and in print, most recently in the Asahi Shimbun, Bottle Rockets, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. His first full-length collection of poetry Bathtub Poems was just released by Setu Press.

2 poems

by Yuu Ikeda

a wingless bird

Morbid intensity

gives her wings

to be free

from disappointment.

nobody knows

her loneliness is always lethargic,

and immature.

so she wears sunglasses to hide her emptiness,

then wanders in people who embrace

ripe loneliness.

Yuu Ikeda (she/they) is a Japan based poet, writer.

She writes poetry on her website.

https://poetryandcoffeedays.wordpress.com/

Her first essay “DROPOUT”

was published in MORIA Literary Magazine.

And her latest poetry chapbook

“Phantasmal Flowers in The Eden

Where Only I Know”

was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press.

One of her big dreams is to write while traveling around the world.

You can find her on Twitter and Instagram :

@yuunnnn77

my body for yours

by Vikki C.

On some train journey, I have known you. The carriage window a living watercolor shifting in the artist's mind. It is hard to keep up — a field of barley, then maize or flax, a sameness blurring past my concentration span. I'm waiting for a break in the scene, soft greens and fists of blue cornflower.

I want to frame them for my daughter to say When I traveled alone today, I saw summer through your eyes. That rush of finery that comes unplanned, the palette only four basic colors. Like the washed-out hospice room when you visited with a bouquet. How the scarlet poppies changed the air I breathed while looking out in rehabilitation. And here I am, doing it all again, but just in motion. Waiting for a better portrait. Something worth showing for all the time spent watching these crops of labor. Beige miles moving past, my own reflection in the glass – unspectacular.

Yet today, Van Gogh made me look twice. Seeing you running across those clichéd wheatfields chasing a red kite as it quivered in the gusty breeze, slowly evaporating – reminding me how blood itself can be so light.

Vikki C. is a British-born author, poet, and musician from London whose literary works are inspired by science, existentialism, ecology, and the human condition. She is the author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) – a chapbook of prose poems exploring threads of human entanglement through constructs of memory, heritage, art, and the metaphysical. While London is home, Vikki has lived and worked as an expatriate in Asia and attributes her artistic perspectives to these diverse cross-cultural influences.

serum sickness

by Candice M. Kelsey

Throat closing

fire pythoning these joints

lymph nodes rolling

broad net of spots capturing skin

as my immune system rejects

antibiotics swimming

into the cove of my body

like the annual hunts

called grindadráp in the Faroes

anyone can participate

in black-suited sprints down

gritty shores of Bøur & Tórshavn

toward horror’s netherworld 

roping and lancing pilot whales

hundreds stranded

no contest for men proud

in an archipelago of gore

weeks later I recover

run hands soft over my thighs

slick bulbous melons

of flesh at the shore of me

a fading remnant of hives

like blood-stained brows

Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist from Ohio and living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. Her work appears in Passengers Journal, Variant Literature, and The Laurel Review among others. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice also serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Find her @candice-kelsey-7 @candicekelsey1 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com.

from the garden

by Aarani Diana

Drunken sailor in the wind 

pink flowers falling away 

from home. In the 

flick of a butterfly’s 

wing there is a story I want to tell 

you — I want to give life to words and 

create worlds for you. 

There’s ash and 

dust in my body. A 

weariness from beyond my time. 

Sweet lipped bougainvillea, 

my bitter mouth. 

Cracked porcelain pots 

left in the dirt. 

When does a body become a 

home — and do I grow a 

garden there?

Aarani Diana is a writer and poet from Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Her work has appeared in Orange Blush Zine and  Journal of Erato, and she is a staff writer for Love Letters and the Incognito Press. She also publishes her own blog, sparkoftheflames.com.  

2 poems

by Peter Hamlin

the foam

at Imperial Beach

I walked back from the end of the wooden pier
watching a wave run gently below
I saw that
the waves are not water
they are the waves, and the water is a medium
until they break and they are both foam
somersaulting into the sand

Reaching the sand I looked back and could see only the foam

summer

You do not have to remember 

the soft itch of summer

backlit by the workday and the roaches

you stomped

back again from winter

their lives as large

as fragile

the stroke of a lover and the still

sweat of the bed

the fan in the heat

You do not have to remember

the way your life 

goes and turns around

the soles overhead, stomping

the stroke of a lover

Peter Hamlin is a writer, artist, and engineer. His work ranges from poetry to mixed media kinetic art. He is currently based in San Diego, California. You can find him on Instagram @peter.hamlin.

the coast

by Sarah Phillips

Atop a dune and drunken grasses 

Lazy sway fingered in slow circles 

Indulgent golden earth stretched beneath my soles 

From my perch a muted battleground 

Even gods shot down discover contentment here  

Perhaps I should have known

That the land, hot oppressive sky

Would be too much for everyone

With their bodies bared to the bright summer 

Slow collapse sunny striped anarchy 

There they were, spread at the edge of the sea

Out to beyond the proud horizon immune to time

Bodies laid out and baking 

As I watched I knew

That the horrible heat was

Sinking through skins, bleeding into cuticles sockets and cavities

To pulse like a disease this evening

Drifting off in bed, but a snake descends

Tender and red against the sheets hissing 

Drunk on sunlight 

Too hot to breathe or feel final quiet 

As I turn back, I know

I will die in cold black water

Far from that horrible heat 

Sarah Phillips is a rising senior at Conestoga High School.  She is passionate about exploring the interactions between the natural and social sciences, and is especially fascinated by the relationship between neuroscience and psychology; it is one of her favorite hobbies to pursue those interests through writing.  She has also published her creative writing in Teen Ink. 

late afternoon

by Robin Keehn

May I talk to you?

About the girl we met 

today on our walk?

You know,

the one who remarked

that you reminded her

of her long line of beloved 

hamsters?

You heard her say 

you were cute, heard 

her ask your age

before she pointed 

to your grey face

to the grey

taking over your head,

creeping down your back,

scattering across your chest.

No doubt

you heard her say

that eventually grey 

will take over your 

entire body

like it did her hamsters,

all of them,

who started going grey

and suddenly turned all 

grey right before

they died.

Did it bother you at all

that she gave out this information

with a lilt, a toss of her 

13-year-old head,

her cherry red hair

shimmering like a halo, 

before she skipped 

away down the street?

When I looked down at you

and you up at me,

I swear I could 

see you turn away,

hear you whisper something

about the grey at 

my temples,

the streaks (what I like to

call highlights) 

that seem to be infiltrating 

my head.

I know you wanted to say 

that I do not remind you 

of any hamster you have ever seen,

certainly not one 

stuck in a dumb cage

on a dumb wheel, owned by a dumb 

red-headed girl.

No, you wanted to say

that I have many, many 

more walks ahead of me,

many, many more

poems to write.   

Robin Keehn is a writer living in Encinitas, California.