since

by Britta Adams

Late Summer: I don’t know how I am doing [since]

In fact, I haven’t done a single thing [since]

I can’t get out of bed. I know I’m hurt [since]

my bones hum and ache, and I am angry [since]

I still clench my jaw. But I’m not sure what I feel [since] 

Emptiness, a lack of something [since] 

It happened, and I’ve only shivered numb [since]

There is a persistent static [since] 

And I’m tracing the hole [since] 

she left. The cavity. And it feels hushed [since]

her silence. Hushed and immense.

Britta Adams is a poet living in Orem, Utah, with a passion for binging documentaries, playing video games, and baking delicious treats. She has previously published work in Last Leaves Magazine, Exponent II, and Soft Union Literature.

this poem originally appeared in boats against the current issue II

try to live

by E.W. Sparks

Without home or homing

It isn’t possible.

To this day, every patch of green in Los Angeles is a waiting bed and I stare hard for signs of habitation by the stolen carts of department stores

Occupied.  

So many occupied stretches between the corners and underpasses.  It defies definitions of home by breaking the city open as a shared dwelling.  Los Angeles is comfortable and safe for those who can see it, feel it, and wear it

Comfortable in its own discarded carts dotting tent cities and parking garages.  

So build it yourself – 

The safety and rooms

Take those hands and use driftwood and wet mud and measure twice.

Arrange the moment of home with care and purpose and try to remember –

The asking for help from a rolled down window. 

E. W. Sparks is a graduate of the UCSD writer’s graduate program, a graduate of the USC Rossier School of Education, and a public school teacher practicing inclusive and activist methodologies of teaching.  They are a father of five, a published poet and musician, and a survivor of homelessness spanning the cityscapes of Los Angeles, CA, Cleveland, OH, and Phoenix, AZ.  Their writing focuses on the human diasporic moment of separation from safety in personal and collective apocalypses, on the injection of love as decolonizing affect into education, and on the personal growth that surviving traumas inspires.

duplex, for a dead sailor

by Candice M. Kelsey

A eulogy is the convergence of cold water and warm. 

It is the Polar Front between here and there.

This low pressure zone a grief from here to despair:

My late father sailed the SSBN Robert E. Lee.

A Lt. Commander, he sailed the Lee into Holy Loch,

A sub base deemed unnecessary after the Cold War.

Cold and deemed warlike, I am base, unnecessary

Watching soldiers carry my father’s coffin, heavy.

Soldiers folding his flag so useless, heavy to carry

Like the sight of my mother folding over again.

Exactly like my mother folding in half, her body

A thousand mile line where polar air meets tropical.

The living meet the dead through a thousand words — air.

A eulogy is the convergence of cold water and warm. 

Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a writer and educator living in both Los Angeles and Georgia. A finalist for Best Microfiction 2023 and longlisted by Wigleaf's Top 50 Short Fiction in 2024, she is the author of seven books; her latest chapbook POSTCARDS from the MASTHEAD has just been released with boats against the current. She mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Please find her @Feed_Me_Poetry and https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/.

generic american household

by Liz Pino Sparks

By the time I had given birth to

our third child, we had two dogs,

two cats, a dead dog, two houses,

three apartments, one really good

stock pot, a french press, a few

sharp knives, many cars of many

kinds, a poltergeist in the attic, tied

up with string, a drunken mother-

in-law, not tied up with string, a

door at the top of the stairs, 

that kept smoke downstairs and 

ghosts upstairs, a scent – dahlias, 

they said – like all generic, American 

households, like our marriage, like 

our vows, like our car stereo, before

the neighborhood boys ripped it out, 

along with the center console of our 

beat up Ford Taurus. By the time 

I had lost our fourth child, we had 

two more cats, an automatic 

coffee maker with a timer, a garden 

with mint that took over the yard, 

spilling over the perimeter walls, a 

neighbor who shared his weed on the 

wind on Saturday nights, another 

neighbor who took in young boys with 

nowhere to go, in a world that would 

otherwise waste them, a broken foot 

from falling down on falling down 

stairs – jagged, you said – like all 

crumbling, American Victorians, like 

our plans for our future, like our skin 

before the smile lines stayed,  well 

after the smiles themselves had faded.

Liz Pino Sparks is a parent of five, a teacher, a legal scholar, a singer-songwriter under the name Liz Capra, and a multi-genre writer. They hold a law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law and an MFA in Fiction from San Diego State University. Their poems have been featured in Hayden's Ferry Review and Boats Against the Current Magazine. Their recent chapbook, Generic American Household, is now available as part of the boats against the current inaugural chapbook series.

walking through the cincinnati nature center

by Ashley Kirkland

My husband says he’ll be the first 

to go. I’d be so lonely. I don’t say it,

but I hope I get to see him again

when our bodies quit. We named

our kids on walks like this – early 

morning searching the clear air

for words and names, full of hope

for everything beginning inside 

me. Now we walk, discussing death

in a year where we lost so much

and all we can come up with is 

that nothing happens when we die. 

Should I bring my boots 

or let my feet stay bare?

Ashley Kirkland is a poet from Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in HAD, Major7thMagazine, The Citron Review, English Journal, and Cordella Press, among others. Her chapbook, Bruised Mother, is available through boats against the current. 

ophelia pulled back from the water

by Celinda Olive

I sat on the floor of my parents’ living room,

staring through strands

of my own wet hair.

Darkness hovered above,

a black webbing that threatened

to penetrate all my living space —

but through the clear ring of a voice

on the other end of the phone

I heard truth for the first time

in a very, very, long time.

You  have  depression,

my aunt, a former counselor, said,

everything stilled, as I strained

to focus, and understand —

and the dark webbed mass above me

shifted minutely. A single light beamed

through a tiny pinhole

in my sky.

Celinda Olive is a poet residing in the Minneapolis area, and has her MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. She's had words previously in boats against the current, Fathom Mag, Pomme Journal, Rock & Sling, and more. When she's not laboring over her words, she's growing her brood of houseplants, searching for new K-dramas to devour, or exploring new places in the Twin Cities area.

out amongst the plunge divers

by Sarah Wallis

mad weather, stinging rain and squall

the gannets are out plunge diving the plenty,

flash of white back and black tipped wings,

like one of Degas’ ballerinas,

all in pirouette, they skim and back dive

the water with angel’s grace, ‘til,

sword faces first they break through

the surface, devil faced for chick feed,

with an ice driven focus, arrowing

to target and fish gulp, white horses splash,

the feathered folk dive

God and the Weather you know you’re alive

prizes sought and won, they’re back

to spiralling, a float

of angel’s ink, shadowtipped for home,

as we all are,

dipped in the water and thinking of home

Sarah Wallis is a writer living on the East Coast of Scotland, UK. Her chapbook, Poet Seabird Island, is available from boats against the current and you can hear her read from it @EattheStorms May podcast. Poems this year have appeared at Propel, Full Mood Mag, Dust, and The Winged Moon. 

south sound soliloquy

by Noah Brown

Today we woke up in a cloud, 

A sea of white, white sound, 

The white Puget Sound. 

It was tremendous. 

I wanted to shout Ah breathe it in 

And I did. What a day 

To be on a boat with sails and 

Woodstove, the good company 

Of the dog and pa. We moored 

Through the morning here, great floating 

Amanda in great South Sound 

White shroud, cloud abyss fog, 

And made coffee and watched the steam. 

Saw Great Blue Herons float 

In the horizon on their own boats, 

commandeered-broken-half-logs, 

And watched as they took off 

Wings beating just tips of feathers 

Tapping tap-tapping the water’s surface 

Creating ripple after ripple adding 

To the infinitesimal ripples of 

Seemingly infinite South Puget Sound.

Noah Brown writes poetry and prose in close relation to lived experience, focused on capturing small moments and finding voice for the ordinary. He was born and raised in Oregon, spending most of his young life exploring the Pacific Northwest. Noah has a Bachelor’s from the University of Oregon, with a degree in Advertising and Creative Writing. He currently uses his degree to write for himself, splitting his professional career between seasonal work, including wildland firefighting, skiing in Utah, and fishing in Alaska. He writes mostly in the backs of cars, while traveling, and between working shifts.

tips to survive the south

by Chelsea Catherine

We scan red dirt for fire ant colonies, spot snake skins, trace
gator trails in the water, watching for bubbles. We lap ice cream to
stay cool, sway on our grandmother’s rocking chair perched
under porch hangs. We spritz our faces with sunscreen and don
hats, wear high socks to ward off the ticks, blood lusting as the
cypresses which leech nutrients from the parched ground.

To be a grandchild in Louisiana is to learn how to escape death.
How to run from the heat, hide from it like we would a licking, 
how to free ourselves from the moisture wet as a blanket on our
chests, heavy as the hiss of the heat bugs, the drone of the bullfrogs,
the discord in sound of hundreds of deadly creatures all around –
black bears, alligators, yellowjackets, vipers, diamondbacks. 

Everything in Louisiana could kill us if we let it, most
especially the grandmother who sips sweet tea in front of a
bunny-eared television, surrounded by gold rimmed portraits,
expensive powder makeup on her neck. So sly and raging, she is,
fierce as the sun. We cower under her crimson lipstick and white
lace gloves, her harsh words, her thick spite, her clean whippings
which slick blood and sweat into the air away from her body,
leaving her unsoiled and prim as a pew on Sunday. 

To be a grandchild in Louisiana is to learn how to escape death,
both indoors and outdoors. It is learning how to run from the
glare of an angry grandmother; how to steal from her ice cream stash
unnoticed, how to pluck pieces of antique jewelry from her vanity and
put them back in the exact same position, how to be quiet when spoken to,
how to hide when her thunder gets rolling. 

This is the most dangerous natural threat, the grandmother who
wishes we were never born, who shushes us at her side as we
stare out the windows at everything there that could kill us, all of it so
similar to the woman who sits next to us, who is wild as the outdoors,
bursting and unpredictable in her silk shirts and intricate hair pins,
spitting rage and full of the deadliest venom nature has ever seen. 

Chelsea Catherine began writing poetry at eight years old and eventually expanded into fiction and nonfiction. Their piece, Quiet with the Hurt, won the Mary C Mohr award for nonfiction through the Southern Indiana Review and their second book, Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. They like bird watching, photography, and reading books about the art of living. Their dream is to become a cowboy one day. You can find them at chelseacatherinewriter.com 

the food cart man

by Owen Taupier

A food cart at night in Times Square,

the man looking out into the distance

working the busiest street out in the cold

in deep thought, he worries.

The man looking out into the distance

he sees the chatter of the crowds of people,

in deep thought, he worries

imagining the night that is to come.

He sees the chatter of the crowds of people

they wander the streets contented,

imagining the night that is to come

the man waits for the coming customers.

They wander the streets contented.

Working the busiest street out in the cold

the man waits for the coming customers

a food cart in the night of Times Square.

Owen Taupier is currently a senior at Kents Hill School, an independent boarding school in rural Maine.

sometimes it’s okay to be whole

by Bonnie Shao

I let go

and the world didn’t stop

the day and night still rise

And the sky didn’t fall

blue to black to pink and back

the sky did not leave me behind

But for a moment

my heart stood still

you couldn’t feel it

For a moment

my heart rested in my chest

the tugging finally ceased

I loosened the bow

I shut the case

and time marched on

but for a moment

the ghost of a note in the air

my heart stood still

Bonnie Shao is a Chinese-American high schooler in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Xia Stories series, three contemporary realistic fiction novels published throughout her middle school years. In 2023, she was a Teen Writing Fellow at GrubStreet’s YAWP Summer Teen Writing Fellowship. Visit her at bonnieshaobooks.com or @bonnie.shao.books on Instagram.

the avian family life

by Daria P.

i spent three nights observing two mallards

in the puddle near my parents’ house

i watched them swimming, drinking meltwater, eating off the ground,

quietly quacking sweet nothings to each other

a ritual, the japanese pastime: savoring a slice of life

on the fourth sunset, as my hands were freezing,

i saw a lonely drake walking around the puddle

there was a subtle voice crack in its song

the start of a hero’s journey

i hope that mine is over

and we'll spend our days

in the beautiful avian mundanity

that’s worth writing it a poem

Daria P. (she/they) is a poet and science fiction writer. Their poems can be found in Tap into Poetry, Occulum, and BOMBFIRE. Daria’s works are inspired by the mundanity and characterized by the minimalist style, the detached approach to the subject, simple but effective metaphors, and a vague feeling of nostalgia.

I’m sorry I got my hopes up. [it will happen again.]

by Wanda Deglane

It is May and love doesn’t feel real anymore. 

I’m locked in a room with all my loss. I’m banging 

on the walls because there are no doors. No windows. 

My loss is a fist-shaped hole. My loss looks like 

a thousand bloody mirrors. I discover who I am 

in a thousand different shades of red. 

There is something about one-sided dead-end 

relationships that makes me roll up my sleeves 

and push and try and fight. There is something 

about broken, emotionally unavailable people 

that bleeds a mother out of my throat. I’m tired of 

crying in the bald face of cold, unfeeling silence. 

I’m tired of standing knee-deep in a sea of my own 

surrendered needs. 

My mother is the kindest person in the world, 

but in my dreams she stuffs push pins into my eyes. 

My father’s fury calcifies in my chest, all brittle 

glistening rock, and that, for lack of a better phrase, 

sucks so bad. Everyone who ever hurt me is tired of 

feeling sorry about it, so I alone carry around the hurt 

like a dandelion seed tickling my chest. I carry 

my grief like it owes me money.

I tell my therapist, I don’t think I’d know what to do 

with myself if someone finally treated me well. 

If their love was boundless and free. I think it’d really 

freak me out. I don’t think I’d be able to hold it. 

I look down at my upturned hands and notice 

for the first time how small they are. How pathetic. 

I’m locked in a room with all my hope, and my feet 

sink into never-ending floor. My hope looks like 

a thousand velvet-soft Mays. My hope is wild-eyed 

and sticky-handed and unwashed, all sweat and grime 

and stain. My hope keeps me on my tiptoes. I face myself 

in all my sweetness and my still-birthed reality. I face 

myself and cut the hope straight out of my chest. 

Wanda Deglane (she/her) is a poet and therapist from Arizona. She is the author of Melancholia (VA Press, 2021) and other works. 

for Diana, after her seventieth birthday

by Brandon North

Throughout the tilting course of October

aging forms will themselves to beauty,

no longer content to be precious when gone.

Within the shortening slots of daylight

allotted to autumn’s peculiar displays,

elder requiems arise with the fading heat:

legions of leaves forgo their green fatigues;

stoic gourds spill their sticky innards;

bees and gnats do mathematics near trash;

and mycelia emit fungal artifacts.

The muting splashes of augured color all about

shift where I sit to a grove without sound

to help me forget, to have a child’s mind

as I think of you splitting like dry leaves in wind.

You’d slumped in your scarlet chair, pallid, until found

and still you sit, as if being painted for the first time.

The blunt eloquence of dying provokes us,

though repeals of fact will harvest nothing final.

For each birthday we see, we know less and less

about death, our guaranteed miracle.

Brandon North is a working-class, disabled, and multi-genre writer from Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook From The Pages of Every Book (Ghost City Press), and his poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Annulet, The Cleveland Review of Books, Bridge (Chicago), and elsewhere. Find him @brandonenorth and theappreciator.substack.com.

2 poems

by Cameron Tricker

disorder

Retreat, recede, re-

interpret words said

Create 

relentless axioms

of thought

Avoid

everyone you love

if only for 

shoebox-room

to breathe 

triadic mathematics

Cameron Tricker is a writer from a southeastern corner of England. His life's tapestry would depict him as being enamored by humanity, cats, and blink-182. His poems have been kindly published by DUMBO Press and his novel writing shortlisted by the National Centre for Writing in the UK.

shrike

by Anna Molenaar

Otherwise known as butcherbird,

he impales grasshoppers, small mice, even other songbirds

onto rusted barbed wire.

Crucified in neat rows 

on pasture fences,

they twitch towards the dying light.

To see him preening on a willow branch

in the early morning

you wouldn’t suspect a thing,

for he is lithe and light

enough to rival any finch or wren 

crying out a gentle word at dawn.

But when he comes back to the fencepost

bloodied by sunset,

and cleans the dried viscera 

from his feathers,

you wonder how you didn’t notice

the way his eyes,

hooded and mischievous,

gave it all away.

Anna Molenaar is a writer of poetry and prose concerned with nature, humanity, and the messes that occur when the two mix. Her work appears or will appear in The Nassau Review, The Tiger Moth Review, and The Columbia Review among others. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she received her MFA from Hamline University. She works as a preschool teacher and teaches writing courses at the Loft Literary Center.

sea turtle

by Alex Stolis

I dreamed we released a lost sea turtle 

back into the ocean, heavy to heft,

we alternated carrying him, determined 

to bring him home; 

a gentle back and forth dance, the rhythm

of us in time with the waves.

The sun was van Gogh yellow, we laughed 

at the challenge before us,

the smell of salt, the pounding of surf,

a paddling reptile, a prayer.

Today, my first cancer treatment, you took 

my hand; your turn to hold the weight.

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis. His full-length collection, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower was runner-up for the Moon City Poetry Prize in 2017. Two full-length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and are available on Amazon. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press in 2024.  

I don’t want to see

by Georgina Davis

Blurry ceilings in the morning, so safe,

and maybe today I just don’t want 

to shift the world into focus. 

Stretch my other senses for a while;

symphony of shuffles down the front path,

a taxi that smells like felt tips,

sleeping sister, her son stares out the window

while my mom makes small talk with the driver:

“My mom passed away last December.”

Headlights on the road like fireworks –

“Just sitting there and then…”

Draw a smiley face in the car window condensation –

“Only 61 years old.”

Glass blends into sky where the window is cracked open –

“I guess, when your time comes, it comes.”

Red light under a bridge, black and yellow stripes,

not stripes to me but colors, flowing into colors,

and maybe one of the blurry cars on the blurry bridge

will swerve and topple onto us, 

and the car will be blurry no more, 

because I can see things when they’re right in front of my face. 

Green and go and we are gone, safely through,

blurry cars stay blurry, we stay alive. 

I am alive and I don’t want to see my world burn,

so I’ll let colors bleed into colors,

lights can stay explosions.

I will stay blind to the sharp edges and 

let the world be soft, hug me instead of hurting me. 

Georgina Davis is a 23-year-old creative writing graduate from Birmingham. She mainly writes free-form confessional poetry that depicts the small details and big feelings of everyday life. 

2 poems

by Jayant Kashyap

a man years after returning from the airport one night, having seen his daughter off for the first time

The night you left, I began

building boats – the constant

chiselling into wood / like punishment / like

saying hurt isn’t necessarily the end

of something / like worrying too much

and not let it show. I’ve now built

a total of eighty-eight boats, I’ve willed

them all to you.

melancholy

note from the author:

“melancholy” is a found poem borrowed from chapter 9 of Rebecca Netley’s wonderful novel The Whistling. And, considering the fact that this piece, in itself, comes from a gothic horror piece, “melancholy” is a piece that is nothing if not particularly ominous.

Jayant Kashyap, the author of the pamphlets Unaccomplished Cities and Survival, will publish his New Poets Prize-winning third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, with smith|doorstop in 2025.

cyclical

by Stephanie Shlachtman

Moonflower opens, lays bare a

profusion of petals and self-possession,

softens puckers between secrets

until trumpeter swans announce first light

on the water; a crumpled bloom

regretting moths that stayed too long to

witness her wild side. And the

Sun — naked, famished, whimsy fueling

her very core — she floods the

morning, a siren beckoning shipwrecked

sky, and I feast on figs and honeydew

until my stomach hurts.

Stephanie Shlachtman teaches elementary school in New York. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.S. in Education. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle and Long Island Quarterly.