carving out

by John Rutherford

Carving out, the wren clings to the wall, 

feet scrabbling against the plaster, 

takes wing, falling, jumping into a stall 

but comes back again all the faster, 

twig clamped between her tiny jaws, 

poked into the beak-scraped hole, 

inspects her work, then, after a pause 

returns again to the little knoll. 

There and back again she flies, 

a clump of grass or bright moss,

a mushroom cap or leaf her verdant prize, 

securing, proofing her creche against loss.

Some gopher said it’d be an early spring, 

but what would some silly marmot know, 

around these parts El Nino’s king, 

and I still have hope we’ll see snow. 

Relentlessly she darts back and forth,

dives just in time; dark clouds to the North. 

John Rutherford is a poet living and writing in Beaumont, TX. He has been an employee of the Department of English at Lamar University since 2017. His work can be found in The Concho River Review, the Texas Poetry Assignment, and The Basilisk Tree. In 2023, his first chapbook, Birds in a Storm, was released by Naked Cat Publishing. 

cloud haiku

by Joshua St. Claire

sea foam

stratocumulus clouds

cover  reveal the moon

contrails 

a downdraft splits 

the flax field

stratus drizzle 

only the lichens

greening 

the golden hour's violet clouds nectarines

stratus nebulosus

shadows

under pear blossoms 

the fog’s softness snaps them into focus

                                                                         white pines

stratus undulatus 

rippling along the parking lot

waves of rain 

cirrostratus sun brightening and fading cherry blossoms 

cumulonimbus 

a Chincoteague pony 

becomes mist 

altostratus dawn

two mourning dove perching

in a sycamore

coyote ululations

from nowhere to nowhere 

cirrus intortus

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania who works as a financial director for a large non-profit. His haiku and related poetry have been published broadly including in The Asahi Shimbun, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Mayfly. His work has appeared in annual anthologies including the Dwarf Stars Anthology (SFPA 2022 and 2023), The Red Moon Anthology (Red Moon Press 2024 (forthcoming)), and contemporary haibun 19 (Red Moon Press 2024 (forthcoming)). He has received recognition in the following international contest for his work in these forms: the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational, the San Francisco International Award for Senryu, the Touchstone Award for Individual Haiku, the British Haiku Society Award for Haiku, and the Trailblazer Award.

POTS outdoors

by Ali Rowland

Compression threatens to explode something, 

a vessel, or the skull; blood, or grey matter 

sprinkling, fertilizing the hot soil 

snoozing in my raised beds – I wouldn’t need 

to feed again this season.

It’s not that dramatic, really, 

it’s sun-heat thwacking me, dizziness 

its maid-in-waiting. As I try to rise from 

tending, pulling, mulching, pruning, it forces 

me to hover halfway up, unsteady, 

leaning on a stake that shakes. 

I won’t die, it’s a feint attack, 

I could faint, at worst; an Edwardian 

lady’s hack in a twenty-first century 

allotment. Instead, I stagger to the shack, 

put my legs up higher than my heart, 

disturbing countless spider’s cocoons, and

the birds, wondering what I’m doing here at all.

Ali Rowland lives in Northumberland, UK. Sometimes she writes about life with mental health issues, but just as often her prose and poetry is about the world in general. After being published in over fifty magazines, and winning two poetry competitions, she is coming dangerously close to regarding herself as an author.

the wind

by Mykyta Ryzhykh

the wind has settled in the house

there is a bullet on the ground under the wall

and the sky still bears the scars from the missile attack

– 

caterpillars can't fly

caterpillars don't know how to die

what is the bright flight of a butterfly 

inside the geometric spring silence

– 

sunny embrace of summer

a white cat wanders at the crossroads

his fur shines in the sun

Mykyta Ryzhykh has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, and others. 

2 poems

by KG Newman

puncture wounds

The garter snake lays on its back in the grass, 

gnawed on from the run-in with the dog, 

imagining the late train home, the one light bulb 

burnt out in the chandelier above the table, 

dented apples on the counter, our checking account 

running low again, slipping skins just to climb back 

in them, out of the last cab on earth, into the restaurant 

where the passersby can watch us silent fight 

from the street though the aperture, and inside 

even the corner silk fern is shedding, and your nails 

are chipping again, what if the steak is undercooked, 

if the presets misdirect, what if the road dead-ends

en route to therapy, our time turning brittle 

and expensive, like another couple at the crosswalk 

well-dressed and with well-crafted feet between them, 

for all to see, yet no one journals it, no one takes 

a Snapchat of that or a safety coffin anymore —

oh to be fearless, and to be that currently, 

with no need for fertilizer, or edging, with what 

we witnessed from the kitchen window that morning, 

the floor folding up to meet our shoulder blades, 

the dog on its way.

refusing extinction

My whole life is light-up dinosaurs

and turning clocks around. 

Picking which whisper to listen to

while walking down infinity halls,

burying fossils atop warped walls

for the son of my son’s son. In history 

he will learn about taxis and why we

should’ve stopped at the flip phone.

And maybe he too will be obsessed

with restoring beauty from the dead.

He might even break at a café terrace 

and feel no need to document it.

He will just sit there, sip his coffee,

watch two magpies fight over

a dropped slice of bread and then

bike home to his farm where

he collects eggs and carefully cleans

the coop of his own dinosaurs. 

KG Newman is a sportswriter for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.

how I respond when asked about my hysterectomy

by Erica Anderson-Senter

Bracing body: one hand, palm to wall, other hand, other palm and press. 

Again with each wave. Again —

Standing was fabled-action — myth for the un-bleeding. When I remember,

I see sickle, I see scythe — bent and small and blue from no breath. 

Bouquet of women bloom in panties. I was one. I was a she whose body 

brought blood but it was a different kind: a purple, a bruise, 

clots and yes, I held, tenderly the clumps of congealed menses.

I would pray to them, ask them to end. 

How can I know love in body when my body bit down and held on —

I could withstand the black dog of my full blood moon, but why?

I birthed my own defunct organ after I begged my god-my doctor:

Take the thing that causes the thing that takes my knees, my breath, 

my sheets, my underwear, my nights, my peace, my-life-my-life-my-life. 

Erica Anderson-Senter writes from Fort Wayne, IN. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Midwestern Poet's Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, was published by EastOver Press in 2021. Her work has also appeared in Midwest Gothic, Dialogist, and One Art. She has her MFA from Bennington College.

2 poems

by Lydia Ford

push and pull

The first baby born

in the hospital’s system

this year unraveled 

into the world 

while we were there 

carving an entire room out

for our grief.

First cries,

the entire sea of our mourning.

It’s a miracle 

the whole building didn’t drown

in the becoming 

and unbecoming.

Lullaby music drifted

through the speakers,

a life for a life. 

The tick tick boom

of monitors, 

the haunting whispers

of Dad’s Dilaudid haze,

murmurs of “no, no, sorry, no”

adding to the clamor 

of motherhood blooming

when it had ended for us.

Dawn comes for us all

under the same sky.

first month

It’s January 

and you’re writing your mother’s obituary,

an ode to disconnection,

the severing of the umbilical cord

strung up red and proud 

like a welcome home banner

attaching your hearts.

Grief like rebirth 

into an unfamiliar skin,

the new year unravels, 

untouched by maternal love.

You constantly ask,

how do you put 

your own mother into past tense? 

Lydia Ford is a poet based out of the beautiful state of Colorado. She has been previously published in Words Dance magazine. You can often find her in a local coffee shop, probably telling someone about the year an album was released. More of her work lives on Instagram @lydfordwrites 

had a reading that night

by James Croal Jackson

spent the whole day down-

town at the library writing

poems in the procrastination

of destiny the flood through 

the window watching birds 

worms and cars inside the frame-

work of a city I could outgrow 

the orange construction 

cones everywhere outpace 

outspend every quick-

witted rodent that sneaks

from my brain to feed

my endless hunger

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Hello America, Little Patuxent Review, and Ballast Poetry Journal. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)

òran neo-làthaireachd

by Eartha Davis

Love is  

waking here.  

Love is rowing  

a forever song  

across your  

palm.  

The palm  

rewrites herself.  

A river  

grows.  

—  

There is no one  

to tell me  

when the ocean was born.  

How light  

creases  

water.  

How bodies sleep  

on an altar of  

forgiveness.  

—  

Suppose  

we are loving  

underwater. 

A way  

of translating  

the salt.  

A way  

of polishing  

heart stones.  

—  

We give  

rivered  

testimony.  

Ripen  

in the  

leaving.  

Mar sin leibh, mouth says.  

It opens  

like a cathedral of wanting.  

Mar sin leibh an-dràsta.  

You  

understand.  

Fingers  

crossing.  

There is  

no word for  

absence. 

Eartha wishes to live gently by a river. She placed second in the 2022 Woorilla Poetry Prize Youth Section, was nominated for Best of the Net in 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Creative Writing New Zealand’s Short Story Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in Wildness, Rabbit, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Modron, Baby Teeth Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, Arboreal Magazine, ELJ Editions, the Basilisk Tree, the Stirling Review, Where the Meadows Reside, the Spellbinder Magazine, the engineidling, Discretionary Love, Sour Cherry Magazine, Revolute, & Eunoia Review, among others. She honours her Ngāpuhi ancestors and the Wiradjuri people, on whose land she lives, breathes, and writes.

trees and boats

by Tempest Miller

Trees on boats 

nurserymen on waves 

the orchard showered in squall 

the vineyard of a rustling gunwale 

wood bark spray 

spurted from a handsaw of death 

stranded on the sea for five years 

dreaming like a prisoner 

of a degenerate kiss on a dockland 

I smell castle stone 

and bear fur on the quayside  

I smell it still like  

I smell the green mountains 

of youth 

and snow on my bare arm 

I look at the sky wretched-faced 

a face as a bed 

with the duvet flung all about

Tempest Miller (he/him) is an LGBTQ+ writer from the UK. His work has appeared in Boats Against the Current, Swamp Pink and JAKE. His debut chapbook, England 2K State Insekt, was released in February 2024. 

northern lights

by Erin Schallmoser

A friend once told me this theory she had:

that once she sees the northern lights,

really gives them a good look, she will never

be sad again. Yes, what a dazzling way to turn

your back on depression. I can see it now: streaks of 

green and purple and yellow, freshly fallen snow that

crunches under her black boots, her spine like a path 

for the rest of her life: strong and systematic and painless. 

Here in western Washington, it’s early April and spring

is showing its face, but would I  even recognize it 

if it weren’t for the winter we just walked through? 

And so it is with my friend, seeking out the deep

timeless beauties of the world, hoping they will

be like a permanent summer for her psyche,

because she knows the winter too well and 

it has stopped serving her.

Erin Schallmoser (she/her) is a poet and writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work can be found in Nurture, Paperbark, Catchwater, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gastropoda, and is on Twitter @dialogofadream. You can read more at erinschallmoser.com/.

in the crosshatch of sand and sky

by Rekha Valliappan

a clap, rapid cloudburst

a soundboard runoff

draining discord

litter of summera

buried in topsoil – 

seeds shuffle

unapologetic aperture

of mud marbled dust

beneath the shape of

sun-stoned days 

basking yellow

chance mellows,

change, charcuterie,

collards, capsicums,

cracked, caked,

ochre-ing season’s loom

fermented to fullness

the stitch starts over

bilious boards 

crushed in bloat;

the devastated dead 

which sleep, stagnate, 

do not lie

swept into vacuum

of sand and sky

do not die

this moist earth hums

gashing gagging

its spectral shimmers

loud return on the longer trek

of crumbling axials

while low flecks of sky

tilted scatter  

granules of grain

encircling an aged orb

it’s a scan, it’s spam,

solar flux triangled in

old ephemera of

a beginning with no end

tentative threads

strewn all around

paralleled with a once was

that never paused

– ages – ageless

Rekha Valliappan is an award-winning multi-genre writer of short stories, poetry and creative nonfiction. Her poems and prose-poems feature in various journals and anthologies including Press 53 / Prime Number Magazine, The Pangolin Review, The Wild Word, Small Orange Poetry Journal, The London Reader, and other places. Her poem 'The Ghostly Luna' was Poem of the Week in Red Fez. Her poem 'Sakura' earned her a Pushcart Prize nomination from Liquid Imagination.

felling

by Jonathan Chan

today the trees have been felled,

bare light glaring through the cavity, 

the patch. 

street lamps goad the eye as

foliage falls to stump and root. 

the night rushes to fill its gap, 

subterfuge to a scar. 

a lonely god watches

an undoing. 

i remember how this city plays 

with the heart, how a rupture 

shocks, blows a hole in the 

suspension of time. 

land use is a singular term. 

the wind will find new space

to blow. 

the birds must find someplace

new to rest.

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Landmark, 2022) and Managing Editor of poetry.sg. He has recently been moved by the writing of Yaa Gyasi, Chris Bernstorf, and Hala Alyan. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com and on Instagram at @fivefoundings. 

2 poems

by Katy Luxem

I want to get drunk with you

A shot for every year of our marriage, the ring

and clatter of small glasses on a dark, polished bar.

Licking salt from each rim, or wounds, or bubbles

in the froth of cold beer. Peanuts in a cracked bowl.

Or cracked peanuts in a bowl. What was it

you liked? A hurricane, murky, me rocking

with a baby in my arms, wine after the in-laws left

Thanksgiving. I feel like taking your hand, tipsy

on the highest ledge. What are we celebrating if not

us? Outdoors at the plastic picnic table, the umbrella 

barely covering our flushed cheeks. May we do that?

Tip the bartender who lets us hotly evaporate just a little

bit together into the late afternoon sun. 

first swing

This must be what they make

those little

leg holes in the buckets for, 

tiny &

absorbing your body weight. 

I love these

chains, how they bring your joy

right back to me. 

Katy Luxem is based in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and has a master’s from the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s, SWWIM Every Day, Rust & Moth, One Art, Poetry Online, Appalachian Review, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books, 2023). Find her at www.katyluxem.com.

sunday afternoon

by Leigh Winters

It is Sunday afternoon

My mom presses flowers into a

National Geographic magazine

I’ve had coffee and a mountain dew and 

Still a migraine protests on the tops of

My temples

It has the audacity to ask for more caffeine

The orange red or cuphea petals

Against the faded print

My mom closes the magazine

Leigh Winters is a 27-year-old poet. When she's not writing, she's doing Zumba, cuddling her cat, listening to loud music, and watching bad horror movies.

slough

 by Molly Kathryn Fisher

coffee-stained canines tear through sweet, 

slurpy strawberry skin, 

               gorging guts, 

a seed-

swallowing prayer that these vines may 

grow in the hollow of my stomach and 

tangle my

loose threads               together, that my mouth

may froth with sugar instead of blood, 

but 

my throat chokes on the saccharine 

sickly

slide 

down.

                                     my sheets stain red. 

please please pretend

i’m a nice woman.

please wake me when my headache

breaks. 

Molly Kathryn Fisher is a writer based in the Chicagoland area, earning a BA in Literature from North Central College. Winner of the 2022 and 2023 Ruth Cooley Poetry Prize, her poems “my stream of consciousness fails the bechdel test” and “Disco Ball Blues” are featured on poets.org. Her work also appears in Moonflake Press, The Erozine, and the fridge at her parents’ house. Molly is fond of Carole King, the color green, and feeling too much.

2 poems

by Kathleen McCann

these days without you

I move slowly, cautious as

the old snapper, pulling

for the dark, filmy pond.

Better to keep moving,

far from the country

of you.

the quintessential shoe

Where is the worry

when they smile

up at you,

a face full

of forehead, no

eyes.

Only that rich

mahogany mouth.

And maybe,

a penny.

Kathleen McCann is a poet who lives and writes in Venice, Florida after retiring and moving from Massahusetts. She recently finished a chapbook, Nothing Vanishes, and is beginning to send it out. Her full-length collection, Sail Away The Plenty, was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award, Jane Hirshfield as judge. Writing poetry and swimming help McCann stay centered in these crazy and fractious times.

delft blue

 by Benjamin WC Rosser

My Delft blue plate, a replication of an imitation, lies smashed in the trash.  Do not know the who nor how, never heard the crash.  Flat circular center an idyllic scene sealed beneath clear glazed-glass, cracked.  17th century Dutch fishing sloop, cuts towards wild reeds by a bygone windmill, beside a thatched-roof cottage before a deciduous wood, white clouds in a soft cobalt sky, distant seabirds soaring.  The plate’s raised outer rim replete with blossoms and feathered leaves.  My Delft blue plate, thousands of meals, sticky egg yolk, thick turkey gravy, steaming potatoes, sweet corn, buttered vegetables, juicy meats, tangy sauces, pasta, chili, sushi, marmalade.  Each dinner I exhumed bit by bit, bite by bite, the motionless wooden windmill, gulls suspended in air, the slicing sloop.  Tiny figures on deck, lifelong companions.  Everything wanting wind.  I sit by the window in my 10th floor concrete cage, peering through grimy glass.  Rows of residential towers resemble headstones in an amber haze, along the barren banks of an asphalt creek.  We all wait for wind.  I scroll the internet seeking a duplicate Delft blue plate.  

Benjamin WC Rosser is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan.  He has published poetry in Consilience Journal (2022), London Grip (2022, 2023), Boats Against the Current (2023), and Verse Afire Canadian Poetry Magazine (2024).  Ben resides in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife Corinne and children Isabel and Oliver.

2 poems

by Ivy Aloa Robb

Isabella

A dog asleep near gate in grass,

She looked like a caterpillar 

In late summer,

A black-ended bear all

Curled up with her back to me,

The sienna fur matted to her thighs 

Like patches of steel wool.

I wondered if she were dead,

Or if shortly she would turn her muzzle 

From flesh to lift her head

Then look at me with smoky-quartz eyes,

But I was already driven off 

And couldn’t know.

if I could go back 

If I could go back to the Ash River, 

I’d bring less with me. 

When my father turns and says “it’s slow fishing today”, 

I’d take more time to know what he meant.

I wouldn’t let the loon look at me

From across the bay.

Her wailing a mockery of my own song.

Her breath a vapor in the wind—

Suspended above the water.

I’d bait my own hook

And filet my own fish,

Even when its flesh becomes warm and difficult. 

I wouldn’t ask for any help.

If I could go back to the land,

I’d spend more time laughing with my mother, 

Watching the black bear 

Nudge its babies into the treeline.

Their legs nearly breaking under their swollen bellies. 

If I could go back to the clearing, 

I would chase the grouse with my sister again

And laugh less at their suffering.

Find another way to feel better, 

So that I didn’t have to strike them myself. 

I still remember their blood against 

The boulder I used to read Millay on. 

I can still smell August burning sulfur 

And the dock’s rotting mold. 

If I could go back,

I’d pray more often.

Ivy Aloa Robb is a poet and artist from central Florida. Her poetry has been featured in various literary journals such as Emerge Literary Journal, Lindenwood Review, Ephimiliar Journal, and more. Alongside her creative endeavors, Ivy is also the founder and EIC behind Magpie Lit, a platform she founded to give voice to emerging voices in the literary world. When she's not lost in writing, you can often find Ivy indulging in birdwatching or exploring the intricacies of theology.

a brief summing up

by George Freek

The sky is like a table

I live under.

It seems as fragile as glass,

and when night arrives,

another day has gone.

A star flickers.

Then it burns away.

It’s what we’re made of.

It does what it was

meant to do. It will rise,

flicker and then it dies.

It’s only left for me

to wonder why. 

George Freek’s poem "Enigmatic Variations" was recently nominated for Best of the Net. His poem "Night Thoughts" was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize.