today is Rilke’s birthday

by Justin Karcher

and the café’s busier than usual. The guy

sitting at the table next to me loudly recalling

drunken heroics. Like the time he swam across

the Niagara River. His friend’s absolutely

in awe. There’s a very fine line

between being a hero and having your little life

come crashing down. A torso cut off from the whole 

worried you’ve wasted it all. Everything blooming 

most recklessly. How it starts in your bedroom. 

The loneliness is fever-pitched before it unravels

into syringed hands and barefoot candles.

Thousand echoes you want to gently push

in front of a moving car. But that’s where it needs to end. 

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Trick Is to Spill Your Guts Faster Than the Snow Falls” (Alleyway Theatre).

convergence

by Kristen Mitchell

for Sage

in the small of the light

a private conference of toads

do not touch this pool 

we are growing here

the trees hang onto sound 

acoustic players of the night 

I can’t sleep

shut the window 

my brain washes itself on 

8hrs of sleep

kissing

jumping spider

looking for the smaller flies

the killer mosquito

but the old toad who didn’t care 

for that dream you were having 

caught it

with a sticky tongue

Kristen Mitchell is a queer/ disabled writer living in Michigan. They are the author of The Wound (Alien Buddha Press) and their work has been published in Witchcraft Mag, Wanting to Die Poetry Club, Door Is a Jar Magazine, and others.

outside of the seven

by Daniel Lockeridge

A lake lends its balanced levitation

to another duck that sang like Saturn,

and the driving morning — more midnight —

is suddenly having to make room for planetary poesy.

I let it grow like a ring in the sun,

till it almost sounds, like the trillion wings

that split water only because you remember the air

and tell me to stop imagining your planet-sunned hum.

The lake rises as the earth cares for its revolution,

and in the extra rush I indulge your singing stares;

I hold the ducks like deservedness, while they soar.

I may not find another muse among the seven

remaining decades of fluttering, precise destruction

left by the ballpoint-sound whose slowness soaks the mind.

Daniel Lockeridge is a twenty-nine-year-old Australian who has self-published two collections of poetry as well as a collection of meditative reminders. His Instagram page – @danlovepoetry – has allowed him to expand on his love for writing free verse, especially romantic poetry interlaced with nature themes. His poetry has been published in Reverie Magazine, The Winged Moon Magazine and Free Verse Revolution. Currently, he is focusing on completing novels as well as additional poetry and spiritual books.  

2 poems

by Bo Rahm

the sinking ship

They are gentlemen

Top hats skin tight

Reservoir tipped.

The ocean plots to

Be filled and won’t

Stop until fully satisfied.

All the men in slobbering saucer eyed amazement

Take off their hats

Before jumping in.

looking at my niece’s painting

It is

The way a leaf is...

The way Jupiter is...

Everything has been said before,

Frightfully before. She says,

“All the colors of a clown

Are all the colors of the universe.”

And that is

It.

Bo Rahm’s favorite Poets include Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, and Japanese Haiku poets. Bo has earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. He is the latest bloomer in any group of people he finds himself in.

proposal

by Bart Edelman

There’s a voice in the ocean,

Calling out to you,

And you can faintly hear it.

It’s intended just for you—

Of this you’re quite certain.

You visit the shore each day,

Waiting on the water’s edge,

Watching the waves roll back and forth,

Straining for the proposal—

Buoyed by its presence.

Friends begin to worry,

Wonder where you reside

In this silent life you lead.

But you have a secret,

And intend to keep it,

Until the current sets you free,

Answers any remaining question,

Before you marry the sea.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023, forthcoming from Meadowlark Press.  He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.  His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Fountainhead Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.

on understanding daisy jones & billy dunne

by Melanie H. Manuel

there’s a man & woman 

in a hospital church, waiting 

for news, where they talk about 

god & what it means to come 

together. they sit there, side 

by side, only a breath 

away from touching skin. 

i think about last week 

when we talked about seeing 

each other. how we’ve always 

done this, looked past persons 

standing beside us, as if those 

bodies could stop this moment—

an intersection of lines, etched 

by time & chance, to believe

in this: the lingering, a kind of 

holding beyond hands, rather 

bodies—your chest pressed firm 

into mine, warm, steady, like 

a weight that brings my knees 

to kiss ground, you’re there 

to tether me to the expanse of this 

apartment. we hold ourselves 

pressed flush together underneath 

the technicolor lights & muted 

instrumentals to some song forgotten 

in darkness, another kind of falling. 

how in that is slick skin on slick 

skin, a melting between our 

bodies in an unbothered crowd. i dig 

my nails into your forearm after 

the second wave of unmooring. 

feel you tighten around my ribcage. 

watch you hold the light, the 

only one, pull me, back to center.

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She obtained her BA in Asian American Studies and English from UC Davis and is currently attending SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She has been published twice by Third Iris Zine. She has been awarded the Prebys Creative Writing Scholarship, the Master’s Research Fellowship, and most recently, the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship. She is currently the Production Editor for PIOnline and teaches in the RWS program. 

after the storm, silver and green (vault sky)

Arthur Dove, 1923

by Jesse Curran

We must remember he lived on a boat. 

We must imagine what it feels like to sway.

We must recall the sea is never still, even when still.

We should reminisce that we were once embryos 

    then tiny people, sheltered in amniotic warmth.

We should try to see the sound as a mattress, a watery bed 

    a soothing expanse of undulating rhythm. 

We might then sense that for Arthur Dove, the bay itself

    was a berth with a view.

We might image how it looked after the storm

   the clouds clearing and the moon’s reflection 

   cascading across the Cow Harbor Bay.

We might then learn that metallic paint offers a shine

    not otherwise possible with the standard earthy oils.

When we behold the painting, we might see ourselves.

We might stare out on our seas and feel safe and at ease.

We too might feel ourselves being gently rocked.

We too might remember that water 

    draws away 

    half of our pain.

Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Ruminate, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com

3 poems

by Chrissy Stegman

dear pine trees,

I have this desire to cut down the roses I see 

through my library window. The feminine urge to burn it.

Rip every last blossom off the branches & tatter

the pink into worthlessness.

dear PTBGK,

My right hand stopped working yesterday.

Today is better.

I do feel alive. I know I am consuming a starry sky

drop of poison

after poison after poison I wake

alive inside

a poison &

each morning, comments arrive in my mind:

Stop, stop, stop. Not another drop. Tick tock.

dear II,

My brother sent me a song.

The title was let our names be forgotten but

I will forever remember our middle names.

Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been featured in various journals, most recently Rejection Letters and Gone Lawn with work forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Red Ogre Review, Stone Circle Review, and Fictive Dream. She is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Bibby Idyllwild Arts scholarship for poetry and placed second for the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee.

you could never get my nose right

by Samantha Kelly

A monument to your potential,

squandered. 

Like the bottles of claret spilt on the floor. 

I suppose red was never your color. 

Dust covers everything, 

causing the light to scatter. 

It is a deficiency of humanity to only 

see things in contrast. 

Paint drips toward the easel

in the center. The heart – your heart.

With the canvas atop it like autopsy. 

It’s not a bad likeness of me,  

aside from all the cuts. 

Samantha Kelly is a student of the Warwick Writing Programme. Her poetry has been featured in Along Harrowed Trails, a recent Timber Ghost Press anthology. She was born and raised in a city with a lack of water and an abundance of cathedrals.  

father/firefly

by Nikita Kohring

I have never seen a firefly in person I would like to

hold one and watch it light a candle on its face

wince and flicker a sweet bug, molded with wax

its body will warp in time stomach cut open, sick

with leftover mistakes. my mistake for thinking you could change

me, a path of bruises into someone good

good and gold and Godlike. my father hates boys more than

he hates me or himself because he once was one and look how that turned out

he’s not mad at me, he just wanted to hold the world and he has only me

he’s mad at blue light bathrooms and he watches you, boy-bug, repeat the cycle of

me, loving me. our history, that of blue gray girls and matchstick boys.

we love each other but we don’t know how to love each other,

just like how I know what fireflies look like but not how one would feel in my palm.

Nikita Kohring is from South Florida. She edits for her school's literary magazine, Seeds in the Black Earth, in which she also has two pieces. She is featured in Bullshit Lit's second anthology and has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. You can find her @ratglrl on Instagram. 

2 poems

by Heather Ann Pulido

together at sea

Waves unclenched like dragon claws

Lightning cracked like spits of fire

Still, we braved the midnight:

Two paper boats

the kite to the tree

Seize me, gingerly

Cradle my wind-chilled body

Plant me in your bones

I glided above the seas

To dive into you, agape

Heather Ann Pulido is an indigenous bisexual author from Baguio City, Philippines. A longtime freelance journalist and content writer, she is a returning artist. Her poetry is in Yuzu Press and Sage Cigarettes. She has a BOTN-nominated poem published by JAKE. When she's supposed to be writing, she's on Twitter (@heather_tries).

farmer’s market

by Luís Costa

instead of allowing myself to be happy I keep trying

to find you exploring the tight curves of bell peppers,

your laugh echoing within the crunch of sourdough,

a smile lingering as the sharpness of sheep’s cheese,

hiding melancholia inside green olives’ salty brines,

ghosts tucked so tightly in the shadows of fig leaves,

hesitantly pacing between the honeys and the jams,

lavender bunches chosen to mask a grey loneliness.

I used to love you on Saturday mornings – now I go

to the farmer’s market and pretend you’re still around.  

Luís Costa (he/they) is an anxious queer poet featured multiple times in Visual Verse, Stone of Madness and Queerlings, as well as in Inksounds, Farside Review and FEED. Longlisted for the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry in 2022, his debut pamphlet Two Dying Lovers Holding A Cat was published by Fourteen Poems in November 2023. He holds a PhD in Psychology from Goldsmiths and lives in London with his cat Pierożek. You can find him on Twitter @captainiberia

2 poems

by Caitlin Upshall

peanut butter & jelly

On days when my grief is too loud, I put in ear plugs and roll away from her in bed but she finds me anyway and I wake up with a hand across my chest that makes it hard to breathe and when she refuses to leave, I decided to spend the day with my grief; see, they say you should feed a cold and starve a fever, but I don’t know which one she is so, instead, I make her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but I leave the crusts on and we go to a park but she pulls a shadow from the trees and I feed the ducks but she wails a swan song and I don’t want to invite her to my favorite places but she leads the way, knowing each one better than I do and eventually, when the sun has set and we are home, I fall asleep on the couch, a small hand resting on my chest, making each breath difficult and each one something to be thankful for.

flat

there are no mountains there

my Oregonian mother spends

months trapped in a paper picture

searching up

for heights left unconquerable

any perch for the gods

years after she leaves the paper picture

Washington breaks loudly atop a geological conversation

and my Oxfordian father understands 

why we do not yell

Caitlin Upshall (she/her/hers) holds a B.A. in English from Western Washington University and is currently based in the United Kingdom. When she's not writing, she enjoys most things dinosaur-related and trivia nights. You can find her on Instagram at @CaitlinUpshall or at www.caitlinupshall.com. 

if a bird would sing

by Caroline LaNoce

If a bird would sing,

amongst the terror and rage,

it was my sign to go 

I have thought about this many times you see – 

running away

as fast as my feet would allow

Not considering the sweltering heat in early July, 

Not envisioning the plump blisters on my course skin, 

splitting open and bleeding out,

cherry red, my favorite color 

Not sealing my eyes shut and standing still,

hearing the sound of my own heart palpitations bang like a drum 

pounding violently against my leathery chest 

And I think to myself – 

Oh how I think and think and think

If only a bird would have sang earlier, 

perched gently in its tree

High up from the madness,

the Northern Mockingbird watching destruction unfold, 

singing his sweet song,

the lullaby I never received 

Watching me closely, and with purpose, 

the endearing eye contact that failed to ever exist – 

I hear that song

And I go 

Caroline LaNoce attended Saint Joseph’s University where she graduated Magna Cum Laude in the Spring of 2023 with her Bachelor of Arts in English, Writing, and Literature. She is continuing her education at Saint Joseph’s and is pursuing her Masters of Arts in Writing where she hopes to expand her writing skills, both professionally and creatively.

distant stars illuminate nothing

by Tohm Bakelas

It is September, no October,

and for three days the rain 

hasn’t slowed. Except now,

now it has stopped, when

just before it was steady.

You can see the river has 

risen, far higher than it had 

been all summer. And 

summer, a season now gone, 

is a place you no longer wish 

to remember — too many losses, 

too many heartbreaks. Summer 

grows shorter as you grow older.

But here in this autumn, you

hear crickets talking amongst

themselves, talking about things

you will never understand. You

wonder where all the birds have

flown, is it to some place south,

some place tropical where the

sun always shines? You wonder

why you were not invited, but then

you remember you are not a bird.

And tonight, outside your window,

you will watch the moon disappear 

behind grey clouds in the inky sky 

as distant stars illuminate nothing.

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world.  He is the author of twenty-six chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including “Cleaning the Gutters of Hell” (Zeitgeist Press, 2023).  He is the editor of Between Shadows Press.

the cloud

by Virginia Lake

My computer tutor tells me

My poems are in the cloud

I guess that means 

With everyone else’s poems 

Rent receipts

Grocery lists

Etcetera

Thomas Aquinas 

Father of moral philosophy

Who was canonized in 1308

First asked 

How many angels can dance

On the head of a pin?

That is a famous subject

Of theological debate.

I worry about the angels

Who dance

On the head of a pin

In the clouds

Where the angels live

How large is that pin?

Will there be enough

Room for my poems?

And the tutor has

Yet to explain

What about the rain?

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.

iron lung

by Benjamin WC Rosser

My window shut,

blocking Summer’s fierce gaze

and brown haze from distant flaming timbers.

One machine cools the room,

then my cats and I may nap.

Another, like a Vegas magician,

pulls gallons of water

from the air we breathe.

My window shut,

glazed by Winter’s cruel lick, 

outside sheets of ice and broken branches.

Furnace air and a space heater

blanket us with dry heat.

Eyes itch, hands and heels crack,

another device weaves soothing water

into the air we breathe.

I met a man, years ago,

who lived inside an iron lung.

It did the work of breathing for him.

His hapless head stuck out one end

of what seemed a metal casket on wheels.

With cheeky laughter, he read everything

and used his mouth to write.

I crack open my window.

Benjamin WC Rosser is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan where his areas of research and teaching were, respectively, cell biology and human anatomy. His poetry has been published in Consilience Journal (2022) and London Grip (2022, 2023). He currently resides retired in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife Corinne and children Isabel and Oliver.

still life

by Chloe Cook

Lipstick rimming glass
imprint of bottom lip like nectarine segment
bruised purple shade Amythest Wrath
I aim for the same spot, sucking in citrus notes
The glass’ contusion follows my head, blurring
Strangers hang like swollen berries on the vine
movements slow, anchored by elbow on syrupy bar
I stroke the wooden butt of pocket knife
enclosed in jacket as pip is enclosed by lemon flesh
fingers feel its polished streak embellished by nights like these
Fantasy of fruit freshly cut from stalk, warming in the palm
The people change faces nightly, mould their bodies more generously
but their smell – fruit bowl sickly, banana peel splitting – unchanged
flies feeding at the dishes of their mouths, alcohol rotten invitations
I am an apple rolling from crowded tree, worm bitten
sensing the sagging, bathroom door is the gateway to safety, sagging of my face
I find a mirror to see it with, toilet sounding behind me
with closed eyes I wash the glass clean, water pouring over cuff
soaking up to my elbow, I push my shoulder under
tip my head beneath the faucet, washing myself down the drain

Chloe Cook is a literary fiction writer and fine artist, located in England. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing and is interest in themes of dissociation, the fracturing of reality and the contrasting stillness that inhabits everyday lives. In her spare time she goes for walks – normally with a coffee in hand, avidly fantasies about improbable things, and runs a modest bookstagram account under @thenovelobserver.

thank you

by Robin Kinzer

It’s drizzling when I step outside.  

A July Sunday in Baltimore,

the night after we say goodbye.

Even as the sky spits steadily

harder, fireflies weave drunkenly.  

They continue to flicker and flash.

Tiny strobe lights in the night sky,

I wonder how strong their wings must be.  

Wonder if you realize you changed my life.

I tilt my face towards the ink blot of stormy sky, 

let rain spill down my cheeks. Let it curl through

my spray of pink hair. I watch the fireflies

weave drunkenly through the rain, seeking

out love even with sodden wings.

They know what they desire.  

As do I.

Robin Kinzer is a queer, disabled poet, memoirist, occasional teacher, and editor. Robin has poems and essays published, or forthcoming, in Cleaver Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Blood Orange Review, fifth wheel press, Delicate Friend, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She’s a Poetry Editor for the winnow magazine. She loves glitter, Ferris wheels, vintage fashion, sloths, and radical empathy.  She can be found on Twitter at @RobinAKinzer and at www.robinkinzer.com

summer storms

by K. Rice

Cruelty to me is the stoplights never staying red 

long enough for me to think about how

"He occupies his body again"

made it sound like the poison was just something to sweat out.

Like this dream was something I could have controlled

if I could reach inside a synapse and grab

a fistful of sedative

and wake up on purpose for once.

Between me and this highway,

I hang from these words like milkweed,

moonlight on the wall signaling seasons

when I cocoon myself away from the grief

and the loose threads of you everywhere all over

this damn house:

When every day is a choice

I either die in my wraps or fly away.

K. Rice (she/her) is a creative based in Los Angeles, CA. She currently studies urban planning at UCLA. In her downtime, you can find her at Philz Coffee working on passion projects and sipping a Honey Haze.