By: Melissa King Shade snakes a dark river, one sunflower tall the hill beside, mercy settling where body holds it between two deer and asphalt elbow wrinkles where sun is obstructed. I see better. Above fallen Lord’s candles, archer’s bow in the sky pulls an early storm, storytelling to scrape meaning against horizon’s indigo oil painting deep boundaries divide the line where I will and won’t go walking alone. I know better. Clouds drag fingerprints wrung, raisined. Raven

By: Kyle Rowland A cashier smiles at the blurry photo on his out-of-state license, can see his bygone boyishness like it’s a bleached Polaroid sapped of youth’s bright colors, how the high sharp points of his smile became blunted and weather-worn, handsomed with age, receding behind a week of lazy shaving. He’s passing through, stopping only for cigarettes and sweet tea and to sleep off the beer he drank two towns over and like a static spark from some ghostly finger, a jolt

By: Emily Teitsworth It’s cream and coffee and bitter and covered in crows. When my red toes tap, it’s sticky-sweet anger that rings in the air. Buzz of a thousand insects. Bricks layered with plaster that dried too fast. There’s no lion but I do see a coward or two. One way door into the office building every morning and no exit sign. No way for the monkeys to find home. I’ve tried but it’s hard because houses fall quickly. Houses fall hard and people fall harder, scraping k

By: Randy Bynum I look up at the Pleiades, brain-flamed, gob-smacked and sobbing, galaxy fusion twinkle all loose gravity hung in the sky for my tiny bandwidth ears and eyes. What are their favorite songs? Please Sisters, may we listen along? But they won’t pay our bills, buy food or a roof or cure a thousand ills nor rid us of a turgid foul despot, his toxic vampire swills. Still, a meteor flashes by, then another, chasing the past, saying beauty, myste

By: Lina Buividavičiūtė They greet us with allamanda wreaths – A ritual for tourists – the flowers drift in sacred Rivers and lakes, but with a paid ticket You earn the right to proclaim the local beliefs: how tall The Durga statue stands, how many line up to take a picture with it. We say we seek authenticity And pluck the allamandas – no hotel in the world Has everything included – because when swimming through mountains And palms, carefully tracing the craters of extinct v

By: Rachael Riley I ask for your address so I can come kiss you and ask the courier the difference between delivery and deliverance. While I wait for replies to my enquiries I circle parking lots, wanted ads, a crushed frog on the pavement. A friend tells me the city of her would be empty without me and the fullness of that sits beneath my clavicle like a high heart. A buoyancy that pulls my head under whenever I stand ankle deep in ocean. I must resemble an unlikely scaup —

By: Nevin Nahar Haque november. sixty-five degrees. your hair is too short. curls gone. I didn’t mean to look for you, my dear. I was gazing at the purple, starless sky. I was in my head again, and I know you hate that. I didn’t recognize you. I would’ve known you by your hair. my dear, are our birthdays ever really about us? aren’t they about the people who love us? i love you. i hate you. you are not here to fact check or disagree. so let me celebrate and/or mourn, as i ple

By: Dion Farquhar we’re all doing it—dying— but now it’s come home my partner happy to be home from the skilled nursing facility “best one in the county” understaffed, overworked staff crumbling, dirty infrastructure when I ask, how are you? says, not good he’s exhausted one day on a walker, has no appetite sleeps a lot, needs long naps no doc willing to say the word end-stage heart failure so we go on hoping, loving Dion Farquhar has recent poems in New Words Press, Black Fo

By: Buck Adams low cells to the blood pill going down so it tastes like red blood going down a single-celled organism of mineral-flavored thought my own minerals: it really is like that, i lose them and have lost the leaking bloodbag struggling to scare the taste from my wheel of fortune, my symposium of yesterday’s feelings yesterday’s pill, yesterday’s process and pencil sharpener, yesterday’s heart kicking in my throat peeling itself open like a quartered tomato, fluids sl

By: Julie Benesh The cardinals, juncos, and robins ignore my sky- blue birdbath, ceramic shimmering in the sun- shine, as well as the copper bowl anchored with stones and nestled on a shady stump. Because bears, I cannot lure them with beds of seeds or crumbs. I witness their unself-conscious cloacal kisses; hear their elaborate prayers, but they reject my neighborly gesture. When I first moved here, I assumed my yard, the soil so full of rocks and tree roots, unlike the lo

By: Adalain Sans forgive them. forgive them. forgive your father for jumping instead of thinking. forgive your mother for choosing grief over motherhood. forgive your brother; he does not remember that night. forgive your grandfather for choosing a kinder death. forgive your grandmother for forgetting; time asks that of us eventually. forgive the uncle who leaves before his anger becomes language. forgive the aunt with fire in her throat. forgive the cousin who took what fed

By: Laura Larkins Pure loud rage I Heard before I saw. A Karen someone muttered HELP ICE IS HERE Piercing through terminal noise. Only light beyond the door A space in which to disappear One final shove– she is gone. The voice grows feral I DON’T GIVE A FUCK IF YOU’RE BEING NICE Stunned silence surrounds shrill cries Then boarding continues without her A woman was disappeared– I saw. In detention ever since Others too, for months, some years Boarding a plane, walking to work,

By: CM Pickard Expectations flutter over stalks rippling in currents of an autumn breeze; hands hold fast to glittering dreams on a vast horizon and so time is spent counting husks, from a season of labour between stem and chaff reflecting on where it began; a reimagining of years awaiting sprouts under sun’s warmth of years tending to others’ needs, climbing rungs until breath is spent harvesting vacant fields furrows stretch beyond the first steps following the blade’s fir

By: Felix Salmoran Over four months into near-daily construction in our neighborhood, they block off both ends of our short street on which there are only six houses. I maneuver my car, want to shout people live here! between the ROAD CLOSED sign & the hefty wooden pole holding up our electricity, our internet, our whatever-it-is-up-there. The timbre of the dozer razes over the Wowee Zowee wilting from my blown-out speakers. Cradles of gravel dump into ditches inches away fro

By: Emily Brink I didn’t know how Class in session to stop daydreaming Head floating away like a balloon Teacher yanks it back the ghost note Dissonance like the lover who leaves If time is infinite find him Find the thread of the dream why not walk backwards like the crab fall in love again in eons, eras, and fads

By: J. Artemis Mackay third’s sticking. this beater’s long since tied to rust. baptized in brake dust. bride to a block wheezing its octanes. wondering if the interstate will carry a full weight the full way. second’s enough for now, the dead rarely bother a hearse about the pace. J. Artemis Mackay (they/them) is a multi-genre writer living in Portland, Oregon. Their creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in Alchemy, Pointed Circle, and The Bellwether Review. Thei

By: Cynthia Rossi When you have acquired a taste For the leaves of pumpkins And recognize the scent Of rain before it falls You are hooked You will not be the same As before you met You have heeded The rhythmic thrum of women Pounding cassava into fine dust, For sustenance at first light You have heard the faint rustling Of termites chewing As their mounds grow high Along the route to the river You have listened to the drum beat For a full moon or A funeral or ritual Or socc

By: Kendra Kopelke The morning light thumb-tacked against the window its shine slap-happy on the four cars on the street the lawn blinded the sidewalk a ribbon of sand edged in black shadow a few fallen leaves shine like broken glass in the grass Sometimes I get lucky and can see right away and I don’t need a river or mountain to lift myself out My wish, to get inside, get inside

By: Tamar Jacobs A lasagne is not like other things you can leave to simmer, break down. It’s not an it gets better the longer you cook it situation. I should know this. I have made lasagnes before. It was when I had time, I guess, or made time for making all those layers, layering them, and all that tending, watching. I am not a trad wife. I am not, actually, interested in seeing if I can feel my ancestral Sicilianness in boxes of pasta sheets. I am standing in front

By: Yvonne Morris Walk after walk become the days. The path is our path. Geese rising to the sky’s microphone will fade from this refuge someday, but what leaves our story, one stowaway to another, is as much our story as what stays. We knew the path would lead to the lake flooded with sunlight until the water vanishes. Yvonne Morris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: Mother was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press), Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books), and Small

By: Michael JJ Tilbury system on welcome query: stars star category: g yellow stars main sequence selection: planets selection: earth query: earth identify: life identify: humans search: culture select: poetry select: grocery store gothic adjust lighting to 35% ignore the appliances beeping for my attention Michael JJ Tilbury is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and author whose work operates at the sharp intersection of technology, biology, and human vulnerability. A vetera

By: Carsten Czarnecki the black hut stands silent stands silent on the edge of town there among the trees where the road ends the black god enters with creak of hinge throws open wide the door throws off his coat of bloodied buckskin throws off his hunting instruments throws off his evening's kill & sits there sits there silent as his players watch him three hooded players sitting like three blackbirds on a branch & watch him who with the sharp end of his iron picks his teeth

By: Claire Scott I didn’t know as I dropped quarters into the slot carefully steered the joystick to grab the cuddly lion yes! the lion in its claw but then it loses its grip, the lion tumbles back into the pile of prizes I put another quarter in then another until no more quarters waiting for my allowance next Saturday morning They say don’t eat processed food skip hot dogs and sugary cereals no delicious handfuls of microwave popcorn only carrot sticks and apple slices exer

By: F.S. Blake You can sign papers 
as dead leaves drop to the ground,
 so do our old vows. F.S. Blake is a Bronze Star decorated U.S. Army Veteran and Pushcart Prize nominated poet. He is a published photographer, traveler, advanced SCUBA diver, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and proud husband and father. He has poems published or forthcoming in The Military Review, Welter at University of Baltimore, San Pedro River Review, The Main Street Rag, and others. His chapbooks, Term