The Poets: Volume 10.2, Winter 2025

NEW: Click author’s NAME to jump to their section or SCROLL to read the issue in its entirety.

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Curator Barbara Sabol

Barbara Sabol lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her book, IMAGINE A TOWN, won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Prize. Her most recent book from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions is Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Arts Alive Outstanding Literary Artist of 2024 award. Barbara’s haiku and haibun have been published widely, and her haibun have been recognized by the Haiku Society of America, short-listed for a Touchstone Award by the Haiku Foundation in 2024, and awarded a 2025 Rachel Sutcliffe Haiku-Arts Prize. Barbara conducts workshops through Literary Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Falls Library.  She earned an MFA from Spalding University. When not at her desk, Barbara is working in her garden or walking in the woods. She lives with her bird carver husband and wonder dog.

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The poem wakes me at 4 A.M                      

urging me to throw off my warm comfort
and tend to the carousel horse going round
and round in my head, its colors and strange   
grin clearer with each revolution.

It does not speak in a wee-hour voice, this poem
insists I skip combing my hair, washing
my face. That I head straight to my desk,
make good use of its clutter.

Open the blinds, it prods, even though the air
is ink; just a few porch lights like lanterns
in a wilderness.

Look! the poem cries, the day begins, and you
haven’t even noticed. It signals to you now
from the street

where a woman walks her dog, the paperboy
flings the daily news as he rides by
on his bicycle. Garage doors grind open
all by themselves.

Everything you want to say is taking shape.

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Nanuq

Curled inside the polar night, the white bear sleeps in a shallow well
of snow. Her back to the keening wind, paw a soft pillow. In a broken
swath of white, now smudged by the long dark, the bear embodies the field,
and the field the dreaming bear, dreaming a sheath of ice that extends
beyond the frame of her ken, dreaming she’ll waken to swim through
her ancestry, out to a platform of years-old ice.

The ice will remember her immensity and the hunt. Ringed seals will rise
between thick floes. She is, after all, Ursus maritimus, the great white bear,
belonging to the land of the Shaman. Her spirit will return dressed as fur,
as shadow, as vapor. For now, her dream suspends the thaw, rafts into mine.

fog horn echo
the coast lost
in mist

Editor’s Choice Award Winner: Julie Esther Fisher

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What Iron Can Pierce the Heart with Such Force as a Period

In our father’s house
a question mark lived in the room next to ours
Other parts of speech wandered the halls
Commas wept at the windows
colons twisted in their beds
exclamation points choked our throats
Our speaking marks were empty

We consented to the lock and key of his rules
Anything to avoid his bedroom
where the full sentence lived

The dash was impossible
We only dreamed of it, my sisters and I
while periods stopped us dead
stopped the unpunctuated, grammarless dreams
we ought to have been having
where no participles were left dangling
no subject was deprived of agency
no object hurled and shattered
and no verb ever locked a door

We were the ellipses hanging at the end of things
the ellipses
suggesting something better to come
three who barely made a mark

His rules and principles
Do not break a sentence in two
Keep to one tense
And as to his lessons on style
Place yourself in the background
Do not overstate
or affect a breezy manner
Never use dialect unless your ear is good
Do not inject opinions
or take shortcuts

Their hollers, his hounds boarded up for the night
What did they know or care for style or speech
The empty bowl was their only rule

An old ladder he was too drunk to remove
angled against the house like one side of a letter
A for abase
A for abjure

All the way down, its rungs and rails
shaped another letter
H for home
for heartbreak
All the way down
the dash we only dared once

That night the hounds lay quiet in their kennels
as if they knew
Six girl feet, twenty paws wrote the word escape
on the earth
We took the lessons in those woods
the decisions of ferns
the listening skills of lichen
the jousted calamities of fallen limbs
We bore the trials of trees
the harelips of bark, their cleft palates
wired jaws

Lichen dusted our spellbound toes
It was scent now that mattered
finding us the shortcut through the woods
to a road
which would stretch before us like a long unfinished thought
not yet put into words

You are only three words, he said to us once
And a sentence with three words
is taking the rules of concision too far

We were there
We were gone

Three relative clauses running through the trees

Pamela Ahlen

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In the Anthropocene

I’m lost in my inner boondocks staring into January, as if what matters most is today’s inconsequentialities, when suddenly, a raccoon parades, it seems, with purpose, straight down the middle of the dirt road on some essential mission, cocooned in her furry-brown overcoat, heading somewhere only the racoon is privy to, straddled between farm on the left and tangled woods on the right in the still point of a buttoned-up sun that has already sucked in its light and greyed her measured tread, nothing to mark where she’d been or what she’d left behind. I sometimes move on purposeful feet, like I, too, know where I’m going in a world that exists perfectly without me.

Pamela Anderson

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Every summer morning while the world burns

my neighbor rises early to water her flowers.
From my kitchen window, I see her unwind
the hose and twist the spigot handle.
Before she begins, she fills a blue water bowl
for the feral cat who will not allow her touch
but acquiesces to food she leaves. Then
she sprays asters and Japanese anemones
while greeting bumblebees
who already are hard at work. I notice
that she takes special care
to water gently around the lilac bush
where a fat toad burrows in soft,
well-tilled dirt. She does this
while also avoiding the praying mantis
whose geometric face
turns ominously toward her
when she passes its regular perch.
It takes my neighbor less time to water
than I take to drink my coffee. Still,
the time she spares is enough
to save this small patch
of color and life
while flames lick the edges
of the rest of the world.

KB Ballentine

KB Ballentine, winner of Poetry Society of Tennessee’s 2025 Best of the Fest and Writer’s Digest November 2024 PAD Chapbook Challenge, has nine collections of poetry, the most recent All the Way Through (Shelia-Na-Gig 2024). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

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What Looks Like Silence

Unable to focus, I shift in the chair,
desk pebbled with papers and books.

Blue skies swallowed by gloom and a mist
sifting in, I wonder if I’ll get home

before the storm and step into fog
where cedar perfumes the air, maples

and hickories already bare. A watercolor
washed in gray. There’s something

just beyond the pearled horizon I can’t name –
an owl shrouded in shadow, waiting

for darkness? Come, help me translate
this moment of time between time,

everything still except the drip, drip, drip
of fissured clouds, rain seeding the earth.

Ruth Bavetta

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Red Mountain

Just when you think you’re nowhere, you’ve arrived.
The dented roadside sign, the vacant truck stop.

Horn silver from the abandoned mine, polished
by desert wind and dust to the luster of cow horn.

Faded green trailer, laundry line of sheets and underwear.
A Coca Cola sign, its joyful red faded to dirty pink.

Silver Dollar Saloon, a light in a dark window.
One blue, tail-finned sedan on the dirt outside the door.

What must have been a general store with hammers, nails,
beans, and rice, perhaps a child-sized wagon.

Three houses sagging on each other, seeking strength
against decay. Rusty girders all askew. A cow. A barking dog.

Every year more houses tumble down
and the highway still leads out of town.

Laurel Benjamin

Laurel Benjamin’s book, Flowers on a Train (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), was a finalist for the Cider Press Book Award and received an Honorable Mention for the Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. A San Francisco Bay Area poet, she is active with the Women’s Poetry Salon and is a reader for Common Ground Review. She founded and leads Ekphrastic Writers, a group dedicated to writing and community. Publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press, 2025), The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Land, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (Paloma Press, 2025), among others. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She invented a secret language with her brother. Read her work at: laurelbenjamin.com

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Levitation

—for Jennifer Martelli
With a line from “At the Garden Center”

I picked the painting with a woman suspended
for you. Not because I imagined your long dark hair

falling towards the table, top hatted magician performing
the act with arms pinned to his sides, marble to break

your fall / break you, but because despite cells
mutating for over a year, you never stopped to count

the number of readings and journeys, meaning Movement
is never mute. The painting depicts no cat, yet I’m sure

Maria crouches in back of the table, guide to the underworld,
or at least in cahoots with witches. I will not describe further

the sparse depiction of two people and a table rooted, a wall,
a floor. Such devotion to the art of magic. Or is it emptiness?

I prefer the fullness of pears or maples or rough shapes of paper
or clothespins or small pots at the garden center or shoulder

blades or scissors or even cigarettes, yet those hinge your
poems open and that would move me too much. You blurred

and smeared words like scrim, simultaneously bridged one
land mass to another with a leap in the same line. Maybe

you are not in the painting—blue-grey brush strokes
meant for a canvas, not a room, and the floor ocean green,

not a translucent embrace for when the waves rush in.
The last time I asked how you were feeling you said,

I’m going for a walk. You didn’t say you’d found a way
to swap places with the magician, but I know you did.

Maya Bernstein

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At a Nature Hotel

i. The laws of nature are not to be questioned
Nevertheless, I questioned
the man with three cell phones and heavy
key rings the front desk sent to assess
the swarm of tiny flying ants – “alates”
he called them, claiming they emerged
because of the unusual heat – that crowded
the walls and shower and sink of the small hotel
bathroom. The man said, What did you expect?
You’re at a nature hotel.

ii. The human language has become two languages
I slid closed the pocket door
that separated the bathroom,
with its trembling walls, from the bedroom,
whose walls began to freckle with wings.

The website said we’d be immersed
in wilderness and wildlife. The web-
site promised a hotel for those who want
         to leave urban life and experience the natural
         world, comfortably. I stepped outside into the warm
         evening to witness the moon melting,
         a pat of butter in the navy bowl of sky.

iii. It is that very darkness that is fearsome
Then I took a tissue and began
to kill them, pressing them
against the wall, leaving dark smears.
I pressed and pressed and pressed
         then stepped outside and wondered
about my nature, and returned
and pressed and pressed again. I thought
about the day’s heat, why it drove them out,
why the light drew them in. I unscrewed the bulbs
and scrubbed the stains from the walls.

iv. Between concealments the void looms
The children didn’t brush their teeth
that night, and there was no love-
making. We slept, dreamless,
and in the morning they were gone.

v. The nearer we approach the illusory light that is before us,
         the larger grows the shadow behind us
The fresh day led me
to imagine that the human
language is only one
language. Wanting
to believe the void
is rife with light,
I washed my face.

The italicized phrases are citations from Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Revealment and
Concealment in Language” (1915) translated by Jacob Sloan

Rose Mary Boehm

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Delirium in the Amazon Delta

I feel like a huge old tree
suddenly felled by an unexpected event.
I hear the word Dengue.
Become the rushes of a movie.
Breakbone.

By the tall strangler fig, a man
carefully brushes his big yellow teeth,
white foam emerging from his nostrils.
A black creature in a tux shoots its cuffs,
roots drill into wet, loamy earth.
Damp is rising.
My skin is ice.
Giant mushrooms unfold all over
my body with soft kisses.
Bonebreaker.

A dog-eared gossip mag is reading
me. Rita Hayworth suffered
from halitosis. Clark Gable took out his teeth
when he didn’t like his co-star.

A tone-deaf friend plays the violin
on the sideboard in the music teacher’s house.

It’s been raining steadily.
Water spatters against my fever eyes
which are still being shaped by the glassblower.

Ace Boggess

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Free Man Watches Yellowjackets

enter a cavern in concrete
where the patio has pulled away,
patient for their turns like 747s
called to runways.
Must have a nest, he thinks,
imagining a secret base
used by villains in comic books.
They are free wasps in a free world,
glowing goldenrod & graceful,
bound only by programming
in their insect brains.
The free man, too, is free
to slaughter them en masse,
can’t figure out a way
without pouring gasoline
into the hole &
burning his house to the ground.

Marion Starling Boyer

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Preparing For Cold

The sky slumps in bald trees.
Rain. Needles of rain.
Tomorrow, the hard frost.

For now, warm the pot
and when the tea steeps,
pour it into your mother’s
china cup. Add a little milk

and soften to your memory
of the tower of giraffes easing
among the acacias, necks pulsing
forward, tongues tasting
sunlight on the high leaves;

remember, too, you were
an Ontario girl, the last
to come in from swimming
Superior’s icy water, laughing,
stumbling on the slick stones.

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Alzheimer’s, Muscle Memory

We don’t sleep together any more. One snores. One flips around. Tonight,
though, I slip into his bed just as he’s falling asleep. The dog dozes between us
where the mattress dips. When his breaths change to soft puffs she shifts to a
far corner. I roll over and his arm reaches to lie heavy across me.

stunned
by familiar sweetness
summer’s first peach

Jeff Burt

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He won the Cold Mountain Review 2017 Poetry Prize, the 2017 Heart Poetry Prize, and the Sheila-Na-Gig Winter 2020 Poetry Prize. He has a digital chapbook available from Red Wolf Editions, and a chapbook about his father, A Filament Drawn So Thin, from Red Bird Chapbooks. He has a poetry book due out in winter 2025 from Sheila-Na-Gig, The Root Endures.

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Offering

The moon hangs low over the trestle
no train uses,
tagged with graffiti, symbols,
and countless hearts
surrounding pairs of initials,
and suddenly the messy life
of day dissolves
in the clean bath of evening,
not a purification,
but a rinsing off of work and what was obtained
to give the skin a sense of unoiled,
unanointed pleasure,
just washed skin, that cooling elation
of evaporation,
and low branches tipping
in the last wind
of the day like towels
being offered.

And here I am with a spray paint can
on tiptoes reaching
from the trestle railing writing
JA loves CM
for the rest of the sweating world to see.

Stephen Campiglio

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Service

The man in the restaurant waiting for his order to arrive
fidgets with his napkin, and his mind begins to wander
back and forth through time, stopping to consider the future
of his poems after he dies.

The white tablecloth has a stain in the shape of Eurasia;
the crack in the dinner plate, emblematic of our schismatic race.
A condiment bowl of oil, garlic, and basil approximates
the location of the Black and Caspian Seas; its spoon handle,
pointing northwest-southeast, the Caucasus Mountain Range.
A pair of salt and pepper shakers: God and the Demiurge.
On the linen plain a glass of water radiates hope.

When the cooking wine hits the hot steel pan, the aroma
is worth living for and breaks the man’s reverie.
He stops fidgeting with the napkin and tucks it beneath
his fork and knife, as a passing cloud obstructs the sun
and changes the light in the room.

The fate of all poems, he muses … then wonders about
his order, before his mind wanders again, this time, westward,
crossing Europe and the Atlantic to New England, unsure
if he left his home behind or if it’s somewhere up ahead.

David Cazden

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Lean Season

Crows drag the dark crosses
of their bodies over the yard,
searching thin stalks
of grass in the snowcrust,
feathers fluffed
like loose raincoats
my dad wore
even on nice days
walking to teach class.
Mostly he’d stay in his study,
walled-in by books―
on shelves, in stacks,
with a card catalog to keep track.
When I was 9, he taught me
how every snowflake
of the Holocaust fell
of its own weight
through iron clouds.
Resignation carved itself
like a snowdrift into his face
each time he showed me
pictures of abandoned buildings,
windows with grates
and the field where they ate all the grass.
Decades later, I forgave him
for never loving me―
though I remember
crawling under his piano
as he played Scott Joplin―
notes like icicles
catching February light
as his feet worked the pedals
like walking the Brooklyn streets.
Now that he’s gone
the crows returning
fly with his spirit―
settling back on the lawn,
dragging sooty feathers,
scavenging for food
leaving ancient tracks
like wounds in the snow.

Ann Chinnis

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Ode to the Atlantic Croaker

After Maxine Kumin, Credo

I believe in brackish water,
a sacred place
between salt water & fresh,
my next ER shift waiting.

In the river,
its gaggle of chattering common terns,
cattails purring near shore–
my salvation.
In the friendship of herrings,
the poetry of tides.

I believe
in the EKG’s of last evening,
the spine x-rays of midnight,
the newborn who stopped breathing,
the waiting room’s endless suffering.

To the sea turtle–your shell
cleaved by propeller–
my outboard yields this channel
to your ramble. To the Atlantic croaker,
you may pilfer
my bloodworm, hook, and bobber.

After a night under the ER’s
fluorescence, I lie on my back
in my boat for a nap,
bowline looped
around the blue suspension bridge.

I believe in cumulus clouds; trust
when I close my eyes
barnacles fly in blue-grey swirls,
croakers sing,
and oysters laugh in opaled colors.

I believe the river saves me,
my next shift always waiting.

Kersten Christianson

Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild, wanderings, and road trips. She authored Curating the House of Nostalgia (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2020). Her newest collection, The Ordering of Stars, will also publish with Sheila-Na-Gig in fall 2025. Kersten lives in Sitka, Alaska, where she eyeballs the tides, shops Old Harbor Books, and hoards smooth ink pens.

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Bombastic Pomegranates & Storm

I wanted to write about pomegranates this week, about their thick shell of rind, their poppy red arils tucked inside, arranged like the tight rows of letter keys on a typewriter, but then the hurricane flirted with our coastline. The forecasts landed, tapped one after another with wordy precision, numbers allocated to wind speed, wave height, high enough to make us restless. First, the Fortress of the Bear announced their closure. Next, the Raptor Center followed suit after moving the birds indoors, followed by Wintersong, the soap shop. This isn’t your typical windstorm; this is a take-shelter storm. Sometimes you can half slice pomegranates just the right way, to reveal the shape of winter’s pending snowflakes. Or sometimes, the pattern takes on an appearance of hearts, four, as if each chamber flourished into a whole, each beating its own lullaby rhythm to the windchimes above the porch; erratic, frenetic. And anyway, I quite thought the roar of the gale would result in sacrifice, drop the crimson canopy of the yard’s Japanese maple tree, but those leaves remained persistent in their Calypso-hold to branch in such wild gust. There is roar, there is riptide, and within four walls, the makeshift temple of tea in a hand-pottered mug. I could well drink from the calyx, this heady fruit brew amid the bombast and bluff of storm. I could unravel the fruit’s wispy filament, dry flat under a heavy book, type roughshod poems of stillness and storm as if thin paper to hang from restless stem to drift in squall and blast.

Another voyage
to the underworld of winter;
smattering of storms

Maureen Clark

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Here and Not Here

after Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

if we could have them back
those ten years
when we weren’t speaking

repair our split over religion
which now means nothing
to either one of us

but we did have
those final years
of lantern festivals

sitting in the garden glider
you are still here
when I put on your blue sweater

and not here
when I have
a quilting question

here when I watch a storm
move across the valley
and not here

to tell you
how the orange poppy
has gone to seed

and peppers
the sidewalk
with tiny black guarantees

Joe Cottonwood

Joe Cottonwood is a general contractor, licensed and bonded, who has repaired hundreds of houses to support his unlicensed no-guarantee poems in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest books of poetry are Foggy Dog and Random Saints. His web site is joecottonwood.com

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Private Parts, Private Thoughts

Terry comes over for our Tuesday walk.
He bruised his leg pretty bad
going down some rocks on his motorcycle
so we don’t climb any mountains today,
just walk the roads and talk about private parts,
the concept we impose on children
who are born without privacy
until we lay down the law at some point
for their safety, our comfort, society.

Terry was seventeen in Cincinnati,
she was fifteen and curious,
they shed privacy together
for an entire summer.
I remember skinny-dipping
on a sandbar of the Meramec River
in Missouri with friends,
private parts flopping, wet,
the same summer as Woodstock,
I guess it was something in the air at the time,
never expecting forty-six years later
to be homeowners with SUVs,
old hippies with grandkids,
reminiscing. One of the Meramec girls,
Debbie, died in a car wreck a month later.
I still recall her breasts slick with the river,
upright, untasted.

We each are wearing broad-brim hats,
canvas sombrero for Terry,
funky fedora for me,
and we wonder about the lost custom
of tipping one’s hat to a lady, so we try it,
tipping “Howdy ma’am”
and then simply “Ma’am”
like the laconic cowboys of old movies
as we arrive at the pond in the center of town.

Suddenly we both share a glance,
something in the air. Strip our clothes,
keep the hats on. Wade into the pond.
Cars drive by but nobody stops.
Fish, bullfrogs make way.
A great blue heron takes flight.
Squishy mud between our toes,
simply wading. Glory. Hot day.

Still wet, we pull our pants on.
A sheriff’s deputy stops his cruiser,
leans, lowers the window,
says there was a complaint,
two old men naked in hats,
personally he doesn’t care but
the young mothers seem the most upset,
what if the children saw?
“Haven’t seen any,” we say,
“but we’ll keep a watch.”
We tip our hats to the officer
and walk home with our private thoughts,
mine of greeting Debbie still a young lady
in heaven. Howdy, ma’am.

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Next 1 Mile

Wooden wagon wheels rolled
through prairie grass and alkali dust,
over Sierra mountainside from Missouri
bringing Jeannie’s great grandpa as a baby
to Jeannie’s little ranch
in what is now Silicon Valley
which she bequeathed to her sister
who immediately sold for subdivision.
As Jeannie’s last wish she gave these funky
wheels to me, to my home under redwoods.

Moon followed moon.
Worm followed rot.
Wooden spokes detached, wooden felloes
collapsed—saved for kindling.
Rims remain—giant hoops of metal,
heavy as history.

So today I drive my Subaru
from the mountains to the Palo Alto clinic
and there’s a highway sign on Route 84
left over from road construction
as you enter the redwood canyon:
          NEXT 1 MILE
That’s all.

I hitchhiked the American West,
summer 1968, hearing each next mile
like a gift among the yak-yak calls of magpies
a pop song played from every car and truck:
“Soul Coaxing.” Raymond LeFevre.
Lush violins. No words.
Then it vanished, as sounds do in the air,
never Number One so never replayed
by oldies radio but launched over light years
to bounce off galaxies and return by surprise
like a lost buffalo—right here, right now
on my drive to the clinic—tune of my memory,
of alkali and prairie grass
broken by fences and strip malls as I enter
the parking garage for physical therapy.
For balance training. For my internal
wobbly wheel.

In the fireplace I burn remnants of spokes,
of felloes for warmth launching white smoke
while balancing on one foot like a
blue heron in rehab as I hum a lost tune,
as the creaky old wagon rolls slowly
toward sunset along the space-warp trail.
May we find balance. At journey’s end,
soul rises like smoke. Each mile a gift.
Look ahead.

*felloes: the wooden outer circle of a wheel held
within the iron rim, to which the spokes are fixed.

Mary Katherine Creel

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Because the World Is in Need of Mercy

I buy a pair of garden gloves
and let the grass spider keep living

in the faux-suede, gray ones
left too long on my kneeling board.

Because I am in awe of her
silk-spun funnel, the way it pitches

and spills like a gossamer tent
over a green metal trowel,

I will not tear her house down.
Because she hunts from

the door of an adjustable cuff,
her delicate silhouette, silver as

light from the flower moon,
I start looking out for her.

Because some mornings, I pause
to watch her gather raindrops

and sweep away cypress needles
after a storm. Because in too many

places, homes are being taken
and by winter, she will be gone.

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When I Wore the Earth

I never got to bury a cord or placenta,
only the toothpick bones of wrens and voles,

and once, a wild rabbit swaddled in a towel.
There was a time, I wore the Earth

like skin—sand-spurred and splintered,
catbrier-scratched and sticky with pine sap.

My body, tinting bathwater red ocher
and burnt sienna, left a telltale ring of mud

and minerals I was made to scrub away.
I wanted to be a different kind of mother,

wear my wildness like a buzzing crown
of honeysuckle and clover, share

the wonder of every small and winged thing.
Now, the body is a black walnut husk,

split and tooth-scraped clean of fruit
and seed; a shade-tree offering, softening.

Arlene DeMaris

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When you ask about my children

I say they are just like me, tall with unsettled weather. The gentle
fiction of their faces.

I say last week I saw the obituary of the boyfriend almost
their father who died in his sleep.

I say the names I never gave them are tattooed where
I will never see.

I say rain is hanging from the leaf edges of the wisteria vine,
its blooms in pieces on the ground.

I say I wish I had the patience for roses.

Dolo Diaz

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The Pearwood Recorder

A varnished tree from the past,
a keeper of the sounds in tubular form,

gracious curves, craftsman work,
laid to rest in the original cardboard box.

Carved out of pearwood.
Thinking back, I must have tasted

the sweetness of the fruit.
I am a six-year-old again,

surprised I can cover the finger holes.
In the box, yellowed music sheets,

fat-bellied notes in faded blue marker,
just half a dozen songs, all I could play,

but those are hedged so deep
that I can still play them

fifty years later and not knowing music.
The only gift from my father,

the pearwood remembers his touch
when he gave it to me.

I caress it in my hands,
hold it to my lips,

position my mouth on the scratches
of long lost baby teeth.

Nothing in my life has lasted this long.
It may as well be a fossil,

a relic.
It may as well be a receptacle

for the umbilical cord.
Six years old again,

the fingers stretching in familiar ways
to cover the finger holes.

Kika Dorsey

---

Inside of You is a Door

It’s made of oak and brass.
Inside the door are atoms
pushing each other.
There is no solidity, you say,
and I brush my hand against your thigh.
Is solidity so open?
The door unhinges
and outside the Russian sage blooms.

Inside of you is the room with a door.
It is full of cushions
the violet color of Russian sage.
Inside of me I feel their blooming
on the back of my mouth.
When I say I love you,
you open the door,
walk outside.

Outside of the you
the trees dream of yellow.
It’s so hot, you say
as you wait for autumn.
Inside the hollow of willows
the bees weave hives
and fill them with honey
from the pollen of Russian sage.

I brush my palm
against your cheek.
I am gentle in your swarm.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

---

Double Ghazal of Ohio

My rambunctious or should I say obnoxious daughters
are posing with gestures as they rap, “We swag like Ohio.”

The Midwest’s door, the state of main street, the boys’
Wright wrote of donning their helmets to get mad like Ohio.

In a city of glass I learned to shoot hoops on asphalt courts.
After we’d sit against the fence, smoking nickel bags in Ohio.

There are towns a Black person should not pretend to attend
after sundown, for hidden in the shadows is the Klan in Ohio.

At the West side bars, the die-hard fans adorned in brown.
They drink & curse at every fumble, dare I say flagged in Ohio.

But what of the wind & the lake, the small town churches
with their protestant rapture, enough to make one gag in Ohio.

The red lights are mapped with hot rods, jacked up muscle cars
revving their engines, jacked up, shining with chrome mags in Ohio.

On the roads of farms, the wind carries the sound of Spanish
cantatas, as the laborers bend, the women singing sad like Ohio.

In the pool halls, the money is left up on the lights, a thousand
a set, Toledo to Marietta, they gamble high, lag for break in Ohio.

The plumes of smoke from the last steel mills curl into the sky.
A woman rolls her window down, shouts I’m on the rag in Ohio.

She drives joking to the corner bar, for what are undrunk wages.
What is money made not spent? No one toasts the flag like Ohio.

Tough boys, corn bred fed, off the farms, in the locker rooms
with wet towels slapping, calling each other f__s in Ohio.

My father was first called the N word there, first time I heard it
uttered not as affection but as a curse that lagged the heart in Ohio.

The pale white kids who moved up from Marietta, their round
slow faces, how I fought fights for them, their clothes were rags like Ohio.

I ran ball till dusk, we passed it back & forth as we walked
the city sidewalks, a hard boy I was pretending to be a man in Ohio.

Once I saw my friend’s mother, she stood in the window changing
from work, taking off her nurse’s uniform, her breasts sagged like Ohio’s

two O’s. But the way the light framed her, as if she was the moon
rising full over the tenements, above the freighters, lighting up Ohio

shores, the endless farms of corn, the backroads through main streets
shuttered pharmacies & shops, green lights bright as the O’s of Ohio.

I taught that year our daughter was born, you tried so hard, but nodded
into the night, the way your hand opened like a rose, in the Heights of Ohio.

We woke to the call from the Synagogue, the young Rebbe who nodded
Good day, crossed the street to pray, the cantors voice like a kite over Ohio

skies that reached out to the lake, the Great Freighters carrying ore
to Huron & Superior, men shipping out before the ice locked Ohio,

& the drought that came, the corn stalks bent & dry, empty silos,
barns set on fire, the shuttered farm houses, a blight across Ohio.

The river rolling through the steel towns, the old men wading
in the water, Black & white, casting their lines at twilight on the Ohio.

& there I saw the Pastor & his flock, they held the boy down
as if drowning him in water: Baptism in white robes on the Ohio.

The hidden places, the regular heroes who saved runaways, the trackers
following a trail how many drowned crossing the rapid might of the Ohio.

The railroad underground, passed from farm house to church,
traveling at night to the shore, to freedom’s sight looking back at Ohio.

Or staying in Sandusky & the mighty mills, the workers striking
for a wage, the blast furnaces once blazed at night across Ohio.

There is a blues in Cleveland, it crosses the city Heights, out to the lake
& back, like smoke blown from a blunt, what is right about Ohio

is what is written down to Dayton & the funk my father played.
The Ohio Players streaming out the eight track with delight across Ohio.

The bored boys on the boulevards, the buskers by the bus station
The skinny pimp & the girl he pulled by the hand (in fright?) in Ohio.

I watched them board the Greyhound, carrying only a paper bag
& headed off to a life I will never know but what is not right about Ohio.

& once when the cicadas whirred & strained, when the autumn leaves
turned blood red & the buckeyes fell like ore, I watched a fight in Ohio

between two men, one who said this is my pool table, one that said eat shit.
One with my face walked head bloodied back into the bourbon light that is Ohio.

Melissa Downes

---

Buggane: Monsters in Middle America

A placid black cow, cud-full
in cool spring Kentucky,
shifts its monstrous shape.

The buggane, that old ogre, enters
the child’s memory, horned, hard,
infects green air once

creamy with magnolia, blue
with hydrangea, as if the poison
ivy in berry-bramble scratches

found arteries of oxygen
in which to seep and
sink. The tainted creek

at the bottom of the hill floods
up across the road, swallows
the plank pedestrian bridge.

The black cow above the sturdy,
terrified four-year-old girl becomes
the red-eyed sow broken loose,

immense beyond imagination,
becomes the move to a Midwestern
suburbia in the great fish of an Imperial

Chrysler, becomes the boy
in the basement bedroom telling her
she likes it when he touches

her little groin and thin, flat chest.
All the rest of her days, past
and future, nothing holds

its shape: a waterfall of ghosts
pours out before the open
door of her memory, her bed.

Allison Elliott

---

In the Woods

It’s so easy to get lost,
though there are tags,
blazes, marking the trees.
Red, like wounds in the bark.
They say stop, start,
or change direction.
Even the experienced
can lose their way.

In the story, they drop
bread crumbs,
but the birds eat them.
In the story, there’s a witch,
and a house that tempts them.
The children, the house,
the witch
who wants to eat them.

How do they find their way
out of the woods?
That part I don’t remember.
In the legends, the knights get lost,
their horses disoriented,
leaping against trees,
the same view in all directions.
In the story, a woman gets lost
off the trail, they find her body.
There are many stories like this.

The leaves make a canopy
that lets in the light,
but you can’t tell where the sun is.
You should learn to read a compass,
know the tools of navigation.
Stay in one place, hug a tree.
That’s what they said when we were kids.
Someone will find you.

You follow the group, other hikers.
What will happen to you in the forest?
Will you come to yourself, like Dante?
Oh, they are too symbolic, these woods.

I just mean that it’s dark there.
The children go in and they don’t come out.
The horses get scared.
Wolves, bears, nature doesn’t care.

She will survive any story
you tell about her.

The forest is noisy with bugs,
the branches crack.
You are sweaty in your hiking clothes,
invisible things are biting you,
altering your body.
And now you are the witch,
surviving however you can,
with what glamor you can muster.

A candy cottage, a red apple.
These tales prepared you.
The dangers of childhood—
the task was to get through.
And now you are the adult,
the tale teller, the interpreter.
You will come through
if the metaphors don’t kill you.

If the stories don’t drive you to despair,
if the need for narrative doesn’t break you.
You break at the top of a rock.
And now you are the queen,
surveying the woods below you,
the land that is yours.
So strange, this sound
of nature humming.

There is the clearing,
short fences by the highway.

You leave the forest, unchanged,
yet you have been so many things.
The hikers make their way to the pub
for one drink before the train,
the train that you will be on,
going back to the city
as the lamps glow on platforms.
There is no story.

Scott Ferry

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His most recent books of poetry are Sapphires on the Graves (Glass Lyre, 2024), 500 Hidden Teeth (Meat For Tea, 2024), and dear tiny flowers (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2025). More can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.

---

draw a picture of myself

string ants and spiders into a body
using honey as an adhesive
the image moves and eats itself
which seems correct

inside the middle of the flesh
of mandible and web
fashion a god from a hole
in the paper

make the holy ghost sweep up
and origami into clouds swans koi rattlesnakes
roots corals lava-pools
maple samaras whispering down

place an unsolvable puzzle in the skull
a wet pulsing mango in the chest
an itchy bee in the groin
a crow in the throat

give the digits cracked nails
capture the eyes inside a box
inside a cave inside a child
make the being sway and sleep and laugh and scream

as if a magnetic music were haunting it
make it love everything but itself
as the weeping god holds all the bones
together

George Franklin

George Franklin practices law in Miami. A Man Made of Stories (2025) is his fourth full-length collection with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, complementing Remote Cities (2023) Noise of the World (2020) and Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions manuscript competition in 2018). His chapbook, What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused (2024) and Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (2025) are also from Sheila-Na-Gig. Franklin has also authored the dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (translated by Ximena Gómez and published by Katakana Editores, 2020), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press, 2020). He is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día / Last Day and co-author with Gómez of Conversaciones sobre agua / Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores 2019 & 2023).

---

Each Year the Buzzards

Each year the buzzards come back to feed,
To eat roadkill, dogs and opossums.
They stretch the intestines on the grass
And crowd in close looking for answers
In roadkill, dogs and opossums.
By noon, the flesh is speckled with maggots
Crowded in close, looking for answers
On wet fur clotted by midday sun.

By noon, the flesh is speckled with maggots,
A kind of resurrection we don’t imagine,
The fur, wet, clotted by midday sun—
Buzzards are oblivious to disgust.
Here’s the resurrection we don’t imagine:
Bodies drained of mineral, soil, and seed.
But buzzards are oblivious to disgust.
They digest whatever’s given by the road.

Bodies bleed mineral, soil, and seed,
Food for buzzards hungry in autumn,
Who digest whatever’s given by the road,
Eye sockets empty, bellies dried black.
Praise those creatures hungry in autumn,
Who stretch intestines on the grass,
Peck eye sockets empty, bellies dried black—
Praise these buzzards come back to feed.

---

When My Father Was Dying

He said he didn’t understand why he had cancer. 
He said he’d been a good man.  Fluorescent lights
Flickered above the bed.  The curtains were
Closed even though it was just after lunch. 
He hadn’t been able to eat anything.  His stomach
Was bulging, and he was in pain.  I couldn’t
Tell him then that why almost never has an answer. 
I could only have told him how, that a cancer
Had started in his colon and spread to his liver,
But that wasn’t what he was asking.

Jennifer Freed

---

After Half a Year

Up on the aluminum step ladder,
five feet closer to the sky,
she grasps wet bundles of leaves—shining,
clumped, blackened with time. The gutter
overflows with her movements, turbid water
sloshing down her sleeve, splattering
her body.

She moves the ladder again, again, again, careful
with her climbing up and climbing down
(her bad knee, her stiff spine) until she has freed,
at last, the last handful of wet decay.
And she’s done it! This dreaded task
she’s never done before—the gutters always his
favorite chore.

With the sound of water gurgling down
the metal spout, she remembers
their trip to the mountains, years ago—
the snowmelt filling the stream
beside their little tent. The view
of the lake below. How deep and blue,
his eyes.

Gary Glauber

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He was awarded this year’s Peter Heinegg Literary Award from Union College. He guest-curated the Fall 2025 issue of Sheila-Na-Gig online. He has five collections Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), an Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur finalist. He also has two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize.

---

TripTik

He always seemed reclusive, remote,
as if removed at a great distance.
Like Pavlov’s dog, I hear a bell ring
and I think of him, of the sky, the rooftops
turning black inside summer’s late dusk.
Inside, it’s hot, hotter than usual
in this mid-year’s reflexive reflection.
That bright red dress with small flowers
translating to movement, the motion of grace.
This is Ana Song, he said. My friend.
She always spoke of towers on high hills,
places she might visit someday.
Thinking of the future moves anything along,
but details of the past slow our progress.
Twenty bones inside her hand reached up,
touched the soft fabric of his devotion,
and this melted her hard-icy heart.
You have the most beautiful fingerprints,
he told her that day, in the mad surging crowd
eager to find last-minute Christmas gifts.
The streetlamps came on as if to emphasize,
to punctuate, yet my father’s driving remains
distracted, unfocused, chaotic, irreparably bad.
The way she pronounced those vowels
threw shadows onto the back seat, where
I watched past tense mingle with present.
She was still learning, and English is no sleigh ride.
This was not some medieval triptych, men crossing rivers
and pleading their cases to woo the Chinese princess.
It was one ideogram after another, or so I liked to pretend,
filling his stoic silences with images of imagined romance.
In my mind, he drove up mountains, into valleys,
traversed steep canyons in impossible ways, nonplussed.
His lack of detail made it easier to create my own hero
out of broad brushstrokes, the lack of real knowledge.
He was the landscape changing with seasons
into something vaguely unrecognizable. He became
the names of small countries halfway across the globe,
ones I could not pronounce, ones exotic enough
for a National Geographic spread. Ana Song took my hand
and dipped the brush in ink. Together we made sloped lines,
dots that comprised an intimate code only she
and a billion others could figure. She said it meant “little artist.”
Recalling her controlling guidance made me giddy
with excitement, and I could ignore his imminent absence
and my mother’s concern about my stress eating
since he disappeared with “that foreign minister lady,”
the dark freckled one with a preference for satin and silk.
He is in the wilderness, my mother said, dead to me
forevermore. She made long distance calls to
relatives I would never meet, cousins of other cousins
thrice removed, people who thrived on her scandalous
reports, or merely her bragging about my latest art project,
entitled “Battle of the Shapeshifters.” It won an award.
It was a woodcut of that red dress and the small flowers.
There are few details I still remember from before.
Year after year, I look at the desk where he helped me
carve my name. I let my fingers read for hidden messages,
clues as to his current whereabouts, but all I get
is the name he gave me long ago, and the way he would
squint his eyes to brace against blinding sunset
through the large windshield, accelerating beyond reason,
eager to get to the next destination.

Cynthia Good

---

Alternate Reality

In an alternate reality you fly to New York
to see your mother though she tells you
not to. And it’s winter so you take her up
Madison Avenue in a warm cab to visit
the doctor and carry her bag of snacks,

her socks, though she says, Don’t bother.
And after the news, the two of you sit
on her couch and light candles since she
has placed several of them on a platter.
And maybe you stroke her hair and say

It’ll be OK, though you both know it can’t,
and you watch the wax seep over the sides
onto the marble. The wicks burn for hours
while you breathe the same air and the two
of you saunter off to sleep until the medicine

kicks in or wears off and she stands up
straight and her true love is alive again,
sitting in the chair by the TV playing
guitar, each giving the other this glance
like they know this is impossible.

And they’re drinking up the moments
and grinning into the bottom of the glass,
his cologne and heat from their bodies
ribboning around them like smoke from
the candles as they flicker into darkness.

Susan Grimm

---

No Drunk, No Jar, or Vinton County

1

This is where I would have lived wearing paperbark
clothes, my hair twisting in the waves of tall grass. Standing

ankle deep in the creek thunking stones, climbing the hill.
The hill like a dolmen or totem gestured out of the earth–

its seneschal tree with a tangle of honeysuckle so thick.
Clover as big as my thumb. The sun pressing its crown

on my head. But in the city. Have I forgotten how it works.
Tiny measures of green. Gravel and concrete pushed

to a rise. And all the time the world battering you with waves
of radiance and beauty, rightness coming into you like light.

2 Vinton County

Rare green. The air not clear but shining.
No thought of witches unless in a book

where they did not smell of hot honey
and light. They’d have to be good–not puff

of smoke acrid–the sounds of the world
like a hum in their throats. They get

the trees shifting like you on a dance
floor forfeiting all but your physical self.

Lying down flung. Everything a familiar.

3 Headstones

At the top of the hill to be nearer
to God. Or to survey what we can no

longer touch. Men rolling by and women
standing in the yard with their wedge

of skirt. I can’t smell supper or hear the call
inside. My years wearing away while

the trees cast a larger shade. Sometimes
the birds cluster near and sing us a hymn.

4 Underground

Nasty times in the dirt       fat slick thread
winding through      fragmentary what      there was
i really loved      but i got older      and my hair
was white      used to watch him down the road
to the bridge      footsteps      crude words
drawing a heart like our 2 could beat together
+ +      concentrate is what i did with eyes
hair slicked back      and shines
forearm warm elbowed at the window

5 Undone

Winter tries to pierce but summer wants you undone
melting into the bark and the green and so forth. There’s

a crippled dog. The horses are not mine. As always don’t drink
from the creek. To spend all day hiding in the grass. Clawing

my way up the hill. Everywhere feels secret and only
for me without sickle or hoe. Without two good knees.

Without enough years. Flagrant green with upslope
panoramas and unwieldy altitudes. Who do I hide from

here. Any idea of God long gone. Relaxing into the hill
and the hill’s way–even the glaciers gave it a pass.

W. Scott Hanna

---

Last Apostrophe to James Wright

    I began in Ohio.
    I still dream of home.
      ~James Wright

I’ve come here this spring morning
down along the Ohio shore

where my young daughter and son
skip rocks into the murky wake of a passing barge

churning north toward Tiltonsville, then on
past Brilliant and Steubenville and off to wherever,

and I feel their young senses absorbing the river,
muck and rock and bank and shoal and time

that slows across on the Ohio side, just north of Ferry,
where not much has changed since you fled

from suffocating under the slate gray shroud
of a dying factory town sixty-some years ago,

making it impossible for me now to roam
beside these waters that carved out the mountains

and not think of you pouring pain into verses
that still bleed deep into the muddy currents

all the way down to the floundering souls
you knew you never could save,

every line a ripple in the river, every image, a dirge
for the drowned and still drowning,

every poem, a stone thrown from my children’s hands,
an anchor sunken into bedrock, buried in the belly of the river.

Colleen Harris

---

Spivey’s

–Danville, Kentucky, circa 1999

Directions don’t matter. You can’t get there
from here unless someone who knows the way
takes you. No one goes to Spivey’s alone. Take

the offered hand, walk out past where the lights
on West Walnut reach their limit against rural
Kentucky dark, out to where railroad tracks

morph from coy campus landmark into a sinister
path out toward fields of insect hum and shadow.
Pass under a trellis you’ve never seen in daylight.

When you feel instinct tug your sleeve to turn
back, keep walking. Strain against the straitjacket
of night, see a solitary building stark against

black sky, light spooling out onto cracked concrete
and upward, dimming old Boyle County stars until
you could be anywhere, and nowhere. Open the door,

feel heat, smell grilled onions, count crouched backs
in flannel minding their plates atop listing stools.
A grey-haired woman wielding a spatula and cigarette

over a flat-top of beef and bacon ignores you, but
your burger will show up just the way you like it—
bloody rare on a crisped buttered bun. Jason and Shara

circle each other, arguing again over something,
and nothing, Mazie flirts with a townie she will never
see again, and you have enough quarters to play

Everything I Do, I Do It For You six times in a row
on a jukebox decades older than the song. No one
complains. Sometimes Jason will break away

and twirl you in tight circles on cracked linoleum
because he knows you need it. Your feet don’t hurt.
No one laughs. Twenty, drunk, you never question

the magic at work here, never think to invite someone
new, never walk anyone through the odd fae night
to this place you can’t find sober in daylight.

Valarie Hastings

---

Villanelle for My Breasts

“These bras are designed to empower those with smaller chests. Finding
the right bra, no matter your size, is a journey.” (Review of the “Pepper Bra”)

Empowering your team these days is a snap.
Push up those lay abouts with straps and lace.
Show them a bra’s a journey without a map!

Each one fit my boy snug and neat as a cap,
ladling out cream while I rocked him or paced.
Empowering your team these days is a snap.

Hands once opened them like fancy gift wrap,
And tongues like hummingbirds would flicker and trace—
Tell them, too, a bra’s a journey without a map.

When Bobby Woodcock squeezed one, hard as a trap
in Sixth Grade Math, he laughed, Got to first base!
Empowering your team these days is a snap.

This needle at my chest now’s like a wiretap:
Doctor, take my history, I’ll make my case—
These B Cups have been a journey without a map.

Jubblies, Tatas—O, little Bishop’s caps—
Who knows better than you to play it straight?
Empowering your team these days is a snap.
I tell them a bra’s a journey without a map.

Alison Hicks

---

Two Tones Against Brick

Baby shoe, white and blue, on a brick sidewalk.
Upright, as if waiting for a foot
to come along, insert itself into it.

Leather, expensive, the kind of shoe
a parent might re-trace steps to find.
The kind my son would have kicked off.

I was on my way to visit a friend whose husband had died.
My small foot too big.

A grad school classmate told me how she would find
discarded arms and legs of dolls in streets and gutters.
They’re everywhere once you start looking for them, she said.
A discarded baby shoe the closest I have come.

Like everyone, I am bewildered by time.
I do not seek to go back.
Whatever the age, the heart is held
in a nest of pain. Different pains for each age.

Through a tunnel on a towpath along a canal
I once hiked long enough so that in the middle
no light came in from either side.

Nothing for it but to keep walking.
My friend ahead of me,
I can make out her back in the dusk.

I’m afraid to reach the place she is passing.
I place a hand on the damp bricks
that make up the arch above me.

I worry for myself, for all of us,
how we will sleep.

Previously published in Homing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024)

Donna Hilbert

---

Thalasseus maximus

I hear, but cannot see, the terns
who fly across the evening sky
through wings of cloud

against day’s deepest blue,
and sun’s last burst of bright.

“I hear angels singing,”
says my friend, and I cannot say
she’s wrong, or right.

Kirk Judd

Kirk Judd has lived, worked, trout fished, and wandered around in West Virginia all of his life. Kirk was a member of the Appalachian Literary League, a founding member and former president of West Virginia Writers, Inc., and is a founding member of and creative writing instructor for Allegheny Echoes, Inc., dedicated to the support and preservation of WV cultural heritage arts. Author of two other collections of poetry, Field of Vision (Aegina Press 1986) and Tao Billy (Trillium Press 1996), and a co-editor of the widely acclaimed anthology, Wild, Sweet Notes – 50 Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999, he is widely published. Kirk is internationally known for his performance work combining poetry and old-time music, and he has performed poetry in Ireland and across West Virginia at fairs, concerts, and festivals for many years.

---

What Stays 

Like a stone walks 
through the desert 
leaving tracks 

Grief moves 
in your belly 
in whatever direction 
it will 

Not always enough 
to make you sad, 
rarely enough 
to make you cry 

Since it first dropped  
hot into you, 
seared your eyes 
your throat 
your fingers 
as you tried to claw it back 
send it away 
banish it from your body your heart 
the pieces of you 
not completely broken 

In time, it cools, 
settles, 
a scar 
a forgotten bruise 

Like the memory 
of your grandmother’s good ghost 
diminishing, 
a deep fade, 
never quite vanishing 

leaving tracks 

Merie Kirby

---

What Is Left on the Shore

So many creatures of the polymorphous earth
shed their skins. Walking any shore you find evidence
of revision and reconstruction – not just the sandy margin
of the ocean. The business belt of asphalt, the coast
of the city. Dirt paths skirting trees and underbrush,
perimeter of woods. The breathless fringe of exosphere,
boundary of the galaxy. And everywhere, discarded skins,
integuments outgrown, strips of tires shorn by use, winter fur
shed, boosters sloughed from rockets, windfall apples and dry branches,
litter of wings and shells. All of it the refuse of lives transforming.
Did she think she was alone? Why was she surprised
to see, in a tangle like discarded stockings, one more cast off
chrysalis and, following the footsteps skipping from that spot,
to find her son, a broad smile on his newly bearded face.

Christen Lee

---

The Distance Between Us

Riding with Oma through Dongducheon in the
pouring rain,
we listen to Elvis Presley croon Blue
Christmas —
a melancholy only mothers and lovers can
understand.

I want to offer Oma something lighthearted
about Christmas in July,
but my Korean is broken and idioms are
incomprehensible.
so I talk about the monsoon rain
and the abundance of artisan coffee
as Oma’s expression softens into a smile,

She speaks of time passing
and the distance that lies between us,
the long gap through which our hearts yearn
for one another.
She tells me how, in winter, these roads glaze
with snow,
then bloom pink and gold with spring’s return.

She sees it all from her car,
sad love songs spanning the miles and
months
while she thinks of us—
longs for closeness,
the way she can reach out now and touch my
hand,

showing me what it feels like
to love someone so much
that it not only breaks you
but disables the very language between you,
so that only the wordless ache and tear
can bridge the chasm.

Oma is a proper noun and a complex state of
being.
She is not only a person but also a place—
a place beyond distance and borders,
a place where jip (home) and salang (love)
can be used interchangeably.

Even now, as she drives these sleepless roads
without us,
the melody of Always On My Mind
her only companion through the rain.

Dotty LeMieux

---

The Perfect Diner Pour

When we were young
we took our life as fun,
throwing politics and convention out the door,
tootling down the highway, our coffee
laced with brandy singing:

            Drinking’ and driving’ and singing about Jesus

And we laughed, your laugh a force of nature, starting
small but growing so gusty the old truck rocked with it.

I chortled, a word you don’t hear much these days
just knowing one truth:

            Our life is good

We camped in out-of-the -way places.
Sleeping on a blow-up mat
and making crazy mad love
in the back of your Ford van.

No encumbrances. No dogs.
No mortgage payments and who even thought
about the price of eggs when Top Ramen
was portable and cheap and easy
to make cowboy style.

But in the morning, no burned coffee
over a smoky camp stove,
but a real greasy-spoon breakfast—
bacon-eggs-over-easy.
There’s a diner in every town.

And—Oh, that coffee!
So bitter and the waitress in her little waitress hat
with 1950s hair tucked up under it
And—Oh, the perfect diner pour.

Deftly executed like God’s own waterfall:
            18 inches above the cup
            Doesn’t spill a drop.

Marjorie Maddox

Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence, and Professor Emerita of English at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—including Seeing Things (Wildhouse) and Hover Here (Broadstone Books)— as well as a story collection, 4 children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and Keystone Poetry (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). She is the great grandniece of Branch Rickey, who helped Jackie Robinson break the color barrier in Major League Baseball. Her middle-grade biography, A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment, is forthcoming from Sunbury Press. www.marjoriemaddox.com

---

Gabe Builds a Birdhouse

-after the painting by Kathryn Rice Cummings

And they come: cardinals and jays,
robins and larks, drab sparrows flecked
with anticipation to this boy-made
world of wood, boards rough-hewn
and slap-dashed together,
roof and walls joined at the nail
because his mind sparked his grin
that moved his hand
that grasped the hammer
that made a sanctuary
with its Yes, Enter of a door
for each inquisitive acquaintance
that perched daily on the ancient maple’s
thinnest twig, peered in his window,
and saw him.
                                O, hallelujah,
for yesterday’s orchestrated trill
that called to one small boy
to wake and construct
what they did not need
but gifted to him:
the soaring desire to create,
the swooping joy to give.

Tamara Madison

Tamara Madison grew up near the fault line in the California desert. Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, and many other print and online journals. Several of her poems have been featured on the Writers Almanac and the Lyric Life. She is the author the full-length poetry collections, Wild Domestic and Moraine, and the chapbook The Belly Remembers, all published by Pearl Editions. Along The Fault was published by Picture Show Press in 2022. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

---

The Future Has Laid Me Low, But

To the west right now,
clouds are boiling dark
off the sea
but there’s no storm.

If we were at the seaside now,
it might be dark around us,
maybe even swirling with fog.
The future might look bleak

from there, but
the future is nothing
until it turns into
Now.

I say, to hell with the future.
I will move gently into Now
where it is very warm,
with blowsy clouds moving
overhead.

The kumquat’s blossoms
are dropping off the boughs.
There may be fruit in the future;
there are tiny green nubs now.

A vulture is making easy loops
to the north. There’s a meal
in his future but for now:
clouds, sky, treetops, air.

Robert Manaster

---

Getting There

           In this adult league
of middling dads,
how a gloveless fielder
will push off
from hands on knees, springing
for the ball and
getting to it in seconds,
I’ll never know.

I let my bat
hit the plate
and bounce
until at rest
then lift
           the heavy wood
                           to rest upon my shoulder.

It’s our last at bat.
The day’s holding on
to a half-sunken orange sun,
and in the muggy air,
my grip tightens
arms tense,
knees ache.
My legs are not
what they used to be.

I’m looking to the bent-ready
           pitcher who loosely palms
                           that sixteen-inch softball.
           I’m in the game.
                           I’ll hit,
I’ll run down to first.
Reaching there before the ball
           is like the day’s last
                           swig of ale and light.

Joshua McKinney

---

The Overburden

In memory of Irene McKinney 1939-2012

In Appalachia, mountains move but known graves
remain. Strewn among coal mines, small family plots,

like scattered islands of the dead, tower in stark demarcation
over stripped and road-carved slopes, over felled forests

and decapitated hills, over the last traces of bought-out
towns with their bull-dozed churches, their homes abandoned

or torn down. A cloud of blast-dust dims the sun, corrupts
the wind, and spreads a noxious crust upon the land.

Trucks rumble over rutted roads, haul loosened overburden
off to choke the hollers. With rain, more dirt comes sluicing

down the naked slopes in a toxic gruel that stains
each poisoned branch. Perhaps such seismic violence has jarred

the mine men from their caskets, waking them to the call
they heard in life, to work deep underground, following the pull of

the seam to spelaean deeps beyond all relocation. Do they delve there
still, seeking an abyssal darkness dark enough to bestow the rest

denied above? How deep must they dig before they can stop,
lean sunken cheeks against the rock, and feel the throb of detonations

die to silence? How long before they can close their carbide eyes
which blink in the dark as their wasted lungs hack black into black?

They must labor on, for now, must feel the detonations pulse
through half a mile of mountain overhead, where the high ground,

chosen for its nearness to Heaven, is barred to their kin,
and nearby blasting bucks their gravestones from the ground.

Wendy McVicker

Wendy McVicker’s latest collection of poetry is Alone in the Burning (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024). She has been an Ohio Arts Council teaching artist for many years. Her poems have appeared in Gyroscope Review, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and elsewhere. She was Athens, Ohio’s poet laureate from 2020 though 2022, where she and her husband raised two sons and now share their home with a Hemingway cat named Dora.

---

What Water Knows

My friend knows
his island home
will be underwater
one day, swallowed
by the hungry sea.
Another friend built
her dream house
on landfill, a narrow
spit between ocean
and bay. In storms
the waters meet,
a family reunion
where they talk, with
much bubbling and foam,
about how they will all
be together again one day.
Here, beside our tamed
river, it rains and rains.
The river jostles, pushes
against her banks, struggles
to find her way back
to her old path through town.
She rises. She knows:
Water once owned
this land. Water
will take it back

Jane Medved

---

A Poem Without Horses

And weren’t we saddled
into our belongings
busy sleeping late warm
didn’t we complain
that stupid driver damn
traffic weren’t we
in a rush get there
come back say I’ll do
it tomorrow meaning
probably not wasn’t
it a mad gallop no jockey
no break then commotion
in the mind noise
in the street the fault
line a rough horn
to grab onto didn’t
the mirror groom us
for the next impatient
rope wasn’t heaven
a milky dream where
the sun could cinch
our bruises without
burning why were we
bridled with anger
when the world hadn’t even
begun to flex itself?

Victoria Melekian

Victoria Melekian grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives with her husband in Carlsbad, California. She writes poetry, short fiction and, on occasion, a novella-in-flash. Her poetry collection The Accidental Courage of Our Lives is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. For more, visit her website: victoriamelekian.com

---

And

Today, a political assassination, another
school shooting, and a purple petal.

Never have I coaxed an orchid to bloom
until our plant grew a long stem with seven
buds like green rosary beads, and there
it sat for months. One morning, a petal.

A week later, a few more until we had
a full-fledged flower. The next three months
we were kids rushing into the kitchen
to check our Christmas stockings, watching
each bud bloom sequentially down the stem.

A small thing, this word “and.”
The world is falling apart and I can choose
to enjoy an orchid’s purple flowers.

Nancy Meyer

---

Heresy

do not tell me
             every thing merges
                            into the slivered    aurora    I know

one greased grip
                            finger slip      the parti-colored circus
goes awry

every lath flies apart
              daughters      sister      wife      the slam
of the screen door

the house that loosely
we expect to remain
                            we expect to remain

you are not
the harrow blade rusting in the grass
                                not even this sag on the sofa

                              where you lay
for eight months      the smell of laundered
      flannel

sudden
                     hail on the tin roof

your hand warming
               around the coffee mug

your hand around the coffee mug
                                                       warming

Juan Pablo Mobili

---

Meeting by Chance

Let’s imagine we strike up
a conversation at a party,

at the home of an old friend,
years after both of us chose

to live abroad, having lost
part of our hearts

to the unthinkable cruelties
that our government unleashed.

Should we tell each other
that we write poems, confess

they saved us although
the grief will never end,

that we possibly wear
the same scar?

Aimee Noel

Transplanted from the shores of Lake Erie, Aimee Noel now lives with her wife in Dayton, Ohio. She is the author of Slag (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) and has twice been awarded the Ohio Art Council’s Individual Excellence Award for poetry. She was an OAC Fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center. Her poems are published in journals such as Ecotone, Witness, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Find more at aimeenoel.net

---

Witness

Chautauqua Institution August 12, 2022

Having been taken unaware,
my brain now expects

violence like weather,

changing but persistent.
My mind spools ahead
creating images

of horror. It predicts

crushed metal in this sea
of traffic, a car eating through
the yellow line, crumpled

steel glinting like
sun-caught ripples
on Chautauqua Lake

or like knives.

I am told that waiting
for a person to walk out
of that high-rise window,

as certain as I wait for an elevator,
are my thoughts protecting me.
I am not spared premonitions

of limbs swimming

through their own airy regret,
but, rather, the surprise of it.

My senses prepare me now
for the blood before
it happens so that

I do not delay this time,
do not take so long
to recognize the attempt on a life.

---

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

What are the words, the comforting
as we forgive those who trespass against us

words, rhythmic pulses sung or chanted
as we forgive those who trespass against us

that can rescue you or talk you
as we forgive those who trespass against us

into anything? What words are whispered
as we forgive those who trespass against us

until their meaning is rubbed smooth
as we forgive those who trespass against us

as seaglass. These are the words to which we return
as we forgive those who trespass against us

Enid Osborn

ENID OSBORN has lived in Santa Barbara, California for 45 years, and served as Poet Laureate in 2017-2019. Her work has appeared in SALT, Askew, The Delta Review, Silver Birch Press, SB Literary Journal, Blue Mesa Review, and Gunpowder Press anthologies, among others. Her book When the Big Wind Comes (BYP, 2015) takes place during her childhood in Southeast New Mexico, where her family raised quarter horses. Her new collection, Pedregosa St. (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025) describes her long tenancy in an old house in Westside Santa Barbara. With Cynthia Anderson, she co-edited A Bird Black as the Sun / California Poets on Crows & Ravens (Green Poet Press, 2011.) Enid is an avid birder and longtime advocate for preservation of bees.

---

The Causal Arrow of Time

Bedtime asserts a strangeness,
the transition from upright to lying down
a diminishment of the guard.

When all the house goes to sleep,
I begin my battle against sleep
and keep it up into the wee hours
when neck gives like warm tallow

and head nods into deep space
or, if standing, one knee gives way
and I fall like a length of timber.

Let’s talk about things
that happen while one is asleep.
The clever rat has its way.
A ghost stands in the hall.

Shoes walk themselves
across the tired carpet
or crawl deeper under the bed.

Scraps of paper, meant to remind me,
fall from their postings and lodge
behind books that are busy
reading themselves aloud.

My mother, Disruption, visits
from her coma to knock over
a jar of honey. A Westside banger
whistles one note beneath the window.

A spigot drips into a cup
that overflows, and Master sits
at the foot of my bed
to quietly chide me. He and Jon

talk about their paintings.
I strain to hear their conversation
over loud orchestral music,
knowing all the while that

the causal arrow of time
moves in one direction.
The hours are fleeting,
unwatched, wasted.

At daybreak, I open to
terrible dread
and remain skeptical
well into morning—

the world I have just left
more loved than this one—
until I rise and wash,
until I strike a blue flame
beneath the glass kettle,
until the sky shows its shy light,

and I begin again to forget
and slowly embrace this world,
the one with closets of wool
and bells of silver.

Brian O’Sullivan

---

Hints of Mortality in the Irish Catskills

“[T]railing clouds of glory do we come.”
–Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality in Earliest Youth”

It was always a place that had seen better days–
in need of a coat of green, white and gold.
The second “l” in “O’Neill House”
was already tilting away, far back as I can remember.
But to us it was a twilight field lit by fireflies,
or a creek of minnows where we’d hope to catch a trout–
or it was the smell of stale beer
and sawdust at the Shamrock Inn, where we’d play
that weird countertop bowling game and wave
our fingers as horns from our foreheads while Pat Roper
rolled his r’s through “The Last Unicorn”;
or the dinner rolls served in the great room
with individual pats of butter–my dad’s definition
of luxury; or it was pings and flashes in the shack
where we played pinball and later Asteroids and PacMan,
next to the vending machine where I could find a cream soda.,
which I’d never see or look for downstate.
And as I remember that shack—the kids by ourselves—
I remember teasing and boredom-fueled fighting,
and really, we had already seen better days,
if we’ve ever seen them—I remember no youthful
“clouds of glory’ being trailed across these green fields.

But then, I’d never seen East Durham’s glory days,
back when this annual three-hour drive
promised the dream vacation of Irish
working-class New Yorkers, before plane
fare started to drop, opening loftier fields.
As a kid I barely noticed the photos of radiant
grand dances in the Fifties, when this
was as good as it got. Now it was not,
and we’d be dreaming of flying to Ireland,
or to wild Caribbean waves, next year.

But on a “pilgrimage walk” that the activities director
led through the woods behind the softball field,
to a statue of Mary with chipped powder-
blue paint, I didn’t know to pray for something,
someday, that would somehow not be belated.

John Palen

---

Grounding

One night in the dorm
lonely and stuck on a piece of writing
I stood up at my desk
walked out in the clothes on my back
a twenty in my pocket
and hitchhiked across Missouri
to see you

rode most of the way with a sheriff
from Otero County New Mexico
who over Cokes and cigarettes
in the glow of the dashboard
told me about his jurisdiction

that it was bigger than three American states
most of it a single cattle ranch,
that people have lived there
for 11,000 years,
that Trinity the first atomic bomb
was detonated there

let me off at dawn at a country road
and I walked a few miles
on wet grassy shoulders
among birdsong and ripening corn
until a farmer who recognized me
took me the rest of the way in his pickup
and you and I had breakfast together

and I spent most of the twenty
on bus fare back and a trolley ride
watched the city lights come on
as day morphed into evening
sat down at my desk
and wrote.

Elaine Fowler Palencia

---

Research

You’re 2,259 miles away
according to my phone app,
in the 90-degree Colombian
Caribbean, chasing your research.
That’s how far a 56-year
marriage can stretch,
while here in winter Illinois
it’s minus 5, everything
quiet except the wind’s plans
to take us to minus 15 by noon,
and squirrels
burrowing for acorns.
Across the snowfield
outside our big window
in a stand of bare trees
three large branches
form a calligraphic A
against the white sky
and two more in an adjoining tree
make an X,
as if the trees themselves
are asking to be put out
of this cold misery.
Inside, the house is dim
and still and frigid,
perhaps like the afterlife,
but with tv.
This morning when I opened
the bedroom blinds
I was surprised,
and a little disappointed,
to see the world still there.

Linda Parsons

---

Eating the Bees

Don’t eat the bees, I tell my dog,
though he snaps at their sun-glistered
bodies. You have your own glister,
I tell him, nose to tail tip, your own
weave through the lacecaps of blooming
chives. The bees, sedum-frenzied, weigh
the whole of summer on their backs, furred
yellow, the whole of everything we wait for,
counting down, passing, as it must, into September
drought, too soon lapsed to ruin. But first,
scarlet and bullion coins fall uncountable
in the hand and heart.

                        Winter to winter,
it’s all about the body: how it endures
its heavy pack, the dog’s arthritic age, the bees’
hurrah before honeyed sleep, trees clasping
each leaf stem until letting go is the only wealth
in time’s legend. Each hums with others of its kind,
subterraneous or on the fallish breeze, my good
old dog scenting unseen passersby. All while
bees farm proteins in their sweet cells, fueled
beyond sting or flesh, beyond the light
they sip to last until it begins, inch by inch,
to lengthen again.

---

Samaritan

In the boulevard four houses down,
I can hear it—not the purr of backyard banties
or the bluetick who roams the neighborhood—
I hear it groan, the Kentucky coffeetree, one gangly
limb hanging by a few tendons, leaves curled
brown. Every day I think I’ll take my loppers
and put it down, that sorry branch, out of its misery.
Every day I’m distracted by lilies to divide,
new ground to break, grass to mow before the storm—
and still it groans, wrenched like a body on the highway,
a bloodied accident I can’t not see. You know
about the traveler on the road to Jericho, beaten,
robbed, left for dead. The temple poobahs cross
to the other side. It’s the Samaritan, a disdained
half-breed, who binds the traveler’s wounds,
carries him to an inn, pays for his care. Likewise,
it’s the neighbor in each of us who should hear
the groan no one else cares to hear—
and not turn aside.
                        Years ago, with friends on a wooded
slope at the botanical garden, one a new widow,
we pocketed the seeds of a coffeetree, plump
as Jack’s beans, brought them home for elusive
hope and luck, for grief’s shattering windfall.
I kept mine in a teacup on the sideboard, and when
they grew old and wizened, when they no longer
spoke magic, I tossed them aside. But today,
I fetch my loppers from the shed, and with one
clean cut, free the tree from stormy loss,
from the burden that calls us to turn toward
not away, to hear what the world often muffles,
to go and do likewise.

Emily Patterson

Emily Patterson is the author of The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025) as well as three chapbooks. Her poems appear in Christian Century, North American Review, CALYX, The Penn Review, Cordella Magazine, NELLE, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized and honored by Sundress Publications, Sweet Lit, and Whale Road Review, and her poem “Small is the Seed” (Tyger Tyger Magazine, 2024) was set to music by composer Katerina Gimon and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2025. Emily received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Marie Drennan Prize for Poetry, and her M.A. in Education from The Ohio State University. She is a curriculum designer for Highlights for Children and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Read more at emilypattersonpoet.com.

---

Psalm for the Common Milkweed

Among leaf litter and mulch,
their stalks stand at least

five feet: brittle forest
at the edge of the parking lot.

Pods pale and pebbly, husks
of their summer selves, yet

their insides shelter amber
seeds, white wisps soft as yarn

tucked into tidy loops. I imagine
their threads cushioning winter

nests, fibers in flight toward
future wings of future beings.

January, I know I have named you
a landscape of dread. Instead,

let me learn to overwinter
with such grace. Let me inhabit

the hymn of each day, equally.

Roger Pfingston

---

Early March, Indiana

It’s happening, a foot of snow
succumbing to a higher power,
the wet glow a thawing sprawl
of little ghosts dancing to a silence
of 40 degrees, faces morphing
to a smile, a scream, a wry in-between,
though always dark and leafy their eyes,
thinning arms reaching out as if to touch
and join the spooky gender of their crystal tips.

Streaks of vernal greening causing
a copy-cat of slow-waking bulbs, hues
preordained, the lost and found
of garden trowel, one glove, frozen tracks
of local fauna softening to a smear…bobcat,
deer, the furred blur of rabbits, even
the morning you went out with your camera
to hang a few in your digital gallery,
your short boots filling with a cold
reminder…a taller pair for the climate-
change vagaries of a minor god.

Kenneth Pobo

---

Common Loon

She slides on the
lake, sun and a baby
on her back. Ripples
form in her wake.
If boaters get too near,
she makes a dive,
swims underwater,
and re-

appears where a water
lily pinks the bay.

John Repp

John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. In December, 2025, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions will publish his sixth full-length collection of poetry, Never Far From the Egg Harbor Ice House.

---

Another Riding-the-Bus-to-Arlington Poem

We rode the bus to Arlington,
where friends served boiled peanuts,
a means of bringing Florida north.
We called the taste “interesting”
& spoke of fiction & family.
At the Arlington line, the city
we possessively thought The City
ends though the jammed streets
belie it, the three-decker flats

no different though they don’t
call them “flats” there. The asphalt
degrades when you cross back
& rediscover muffler joints & bodegas
though they don’t say “bodegas” there.
We learned to like Greek pizza, tonic
& the claustrophobic shortcuts it took
to avoid the rotaries on the way
to Heartland. On their stoop,

the friends grew herbs that made gumbo
especially piquant though that refined
a palate was pretty much beyond us.
We learned to call movies “films”
& savored many. We spent three days
helping the friends pack for Wisconsin.
We picnicked once by the Charles,
grassy bank thronged, bridges quaint,
paving pre-industrial. In the deepest circle

of summer, we idled whole days
in the venerable library. The train ran
to the airport, the square where the best
music was & all the way to the beach.
We missed the city even as we lived there,
especially the jugglers in the Square,
the butter soaking the fallen-open muffins,
the curses vivisecting the alimentary canal
& the meat loaf in the renovated caboose.

David Schast

---

Invisible Line

Trethewey wrote she was ruthless to remember salmon fishing with her father,
so she could write an elegy of love and longing without saying either.

I wish my daughter were jealous of Trethewey’s words,
the invisible line of the poet’s father, casting her ache across the river.

The parolee at my door hoping to sell magazines off my white guilt—
unaware of my fatherly guilt—asked if I believed in second chances.

If I did, I might not be jealous of Trethewey’s father,
of men with many children and granddaughters in the river with them.

Second chances means hoping salmon slip the hook,
windows never shatter, mail that mattered never fades or burns—

that I am not unforgivable.

Nothing now but to write
how much my daughter mattered to me.

I think by now her river must be thick with salmon
but her line always slips away

from mine.

Steven Shields

---

Bathers

After an eponymous painting by Edgar Nye.

What are we to make of these mute and elegant bathers,
those reclining, faceless figures near the waves?
Not here for bathing in the ocean, but the sun?

What do their unseen picnic baskets hold?
Their glinting flasks, so quick to rise in rapid salute
to almighty Sol? Where are the parents

of that young boy so near the water, a wave
imminent? Who checks beneath that beach
umbrella from which only three legs protrude?

Where is the jug-eared ice cream vendor? The village
roustabout? The homeless drifter, eying the happy
multitude from his perch atop a boulder

out of the frame, quietly sizing them up
to see whose wallet lies unattended,
but inviting, as the pain flares monotonously

in stomach, mind and needled arm? The painter
does not allow us to see this mischief, yet
we know full well it lies among us

and along us and perhaps it even
lies within us, near enough to guard
against it. And so, this moment caught in time

is not so much a verity as it is
illusion, a moment when we simply lie
in peace and something like forgetfulness,

enjoy the waves, the breeze, the sun’s warmth
as it radiates across the sand and bounces
back across the sails of passing pleasure

craft, bathing, at our leisure, in
contentment as we wash away our many
hopes and cares, our fading dreams, despair.

Michael Shoffstall

---

Rain Crows

Theirs is a gentle haunting.
They call across the hollow
stillness—always in pairs—
to tell us rain approaches.
We hear two breathy notes,
no… three, but legato,
three more, soft, staccato,
then caesura, the long pause,
expectant… finally the distant
complementary response.
The predictable weather
follows. Call and response.
My father called them
rain crows. A colloquialism?
Or simply his name
for them, something to say
to children? A vestige,
maybe, of our vaunted
one-sixty-fourth Cherokee
heritage. As children
we learned to cup our hands
to our mouths, to blow
through knuckled thumbs
‘til we were blue from trying
to duplicate that cooing
sound. Years later I learned
it was the song of mourning
doves that warned us
of impending storms.
I still see them often,
in pairs, perched on a sill
or wire, watchful as parents.
They mate for life, I’ve read,
and beyond as well,
I’ve come to believe.
Today I cup my hands again,
in prayer—not for rain
but for the familiar duet
that’s at once fateful
prelude and faithful refrain.

Lisa Shulman

---

Hawk at the Feeder

This morning a Cooper’s hawk
dove into the bird feeder
scattering seed, finches, and chickadees.
I didn’t see if it had caught
any small body in its talons,
but later a spill of feathers
drifting beneath the valley oak
told the rest of the story.

For a short while the feeder was empty,
chitter and chuckle silenced,
tiny bodies hidden deep among nearby trees.
Then, one by one, they returned
puffed against the autumn chill
to peck at millet, corn, sunflower,
their black bead eyes careful, bright,
three on the feeder, sharp bills filled,
one on the chain, waiting.

I think how alike we are,
these songbirds and our unfeathered selves,
how even though death may swoop
down at any moment, our flight is brief,
our hiding short, so soon we return
to gather at the hearths that feed us
the fires that warm our fragile bones,
forgetting the rush of dark wings
we enjoy those small gifts
for which we sometimes raise
our thin voices in song.

---

One Wave: A Family Snapshot

We are at the beach, my mother holding
her phone, my sisters and I behind her,
looking over her shoulder at the close-up
she’d accidentally taken of her
own pale eye, all of us laughing so hard—
my mom shrunken in age, slumped in her chair,
my sisters and I holding on to each other
and our mother, in a way we never
had done growing up. As if our mirth
had somehow washed away the angry years,
the tangles of blame and sorrow, piled up
like seaweed on the shore. As if all that pain
could recede on this one wave of laughter,
our backs to the sea and the tide not yet turned.

Melanie Sievers

---

The Tree of Life

The thing about rugs is they’re tough.
You can leave them in the garage for decades.
Cats can pee on them.
Donkeys can sweat under them.
Once I saw on TV cars driving over them on a highway through a desert.

“Is your husband kind?” the old lady asked me through her granddaughter.
By this I knew she meant, “Does he beat you? Does he buy you things?”
Sitting with Yemeni women on soft Persian carpets in a new-built suburban home,
how could I whine about my American disappointments, my loneliness, my husband’s
disinterest?
So I said, “Yes. My husband is kind.”

There are one hundred knots per inch in my Beluch prayer rugs.
They have dark, blood-red, patterns in the borders
and in the middle is the tree of life.
Another husband bought them.
There were three rugs then and three people in the marriage:
Him, me, and whoever he was sleeping with –
our friends’ girlfriend, our dental assistant, a prostitute.
When I left, I took a pair of rugs with me and left him alone with one.

Recently I bought a thick Hamadan in a thrift store
and posted a picture of it in a Facebook group.
A stranger named Mohammed sent me back a picture he had taken
of the mountains around the village where it was made, his home.
He asked me to imagine the woman who made it, knotting the design inch by inch,
cooking for her family, caring for her children, tending her sheep.
He did not mention her husband at all.

There was snow on the rugged Iranian mountains.
The terrain was tough.

---

Mist

When I was dying my mother brought me a shallow bowl of broth
which she had filtered through a fine mesh sieve.
In it she had placed one prawn, one slice of lemon, and one sprig of dill.
And on the top one orange red nasturtium.
I recognized the flower as one I had known
growing in a culvert in Pacific Grove when I was twenty-one.
It grew beneath some eucalyptus trees
whose elegant leaves drooped languorously
as if to call attention to the flower –
a red orange nasturtium beneath gray green trees.
So then at the hour of my death the fog, the ocean, the trees
and my youth came back to me.

Michael Dwayne Smith

Michael Dwayne Smith lives near a ghost town in the Mojave Desert with his wife, rescued horses, and Calamity the California calico cat. He’s the author of four poetry collections, most recently Shaking Music from the Angry Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Recipient of both the Hinderaker Poetry Prize and the Polonsky Prize for fiction, his recent award nominations include three for the Pushcart Prize and three for Best of the Net. His work haunts literary houses all over the dang place in journals, magazines, and anthologies including Third Wednesday, The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, Heron Tree, Star 82 Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Chiron Review, San Pedro River Review, and Heavy Feather Review.

---

I Start Watching La Dolce Vita Again

Out of ideas, in the theater’s tenth row, center,
air conditioning laced with popcorn and tears,

I see a helicopter’s blades stir the panorama,
tilting to St. Peter’s Square. XXL Jesus dangles

on cords beneath, face forward, arms aloft, and
the chopper’s full of reporters, so I’m thinking,

Which is sacred-er, Sky or Earth? since what’s
left must be profanity. Outside the movie house,

my sun has been setting for six days. In here, it’s
Rome, 1960, and these Italian press hacks want

telephone numbers from a bounty of bikini’d sex
b-bomb sunbathers around the pool (but this is

one time being in a racket won’t pay off, fellas).
Then it hits: what’s obscene is camera-wielding

lechers floating like a crown over Christ’s head.
What’s then profound is the grounded glitterati

shouting into troubled air: Why are you airlifting
Jesus? Where are you taking him? Like they’ll

miss him, they need him, though it’s the first time
they’ve met. By film’s Fin, I’m hip to the Holy

Trope Trinity— in the dark I am beautiful; no life
is ever truly resolved; whoever falls in love first

loses. On the drive home, I hope you’re in that
black dress. This heart ain’t gonna break itself.

Judith Sornberger

---

Midwife

For Nancy, thirteen years later

I don’t think I could have borne
those last weeks without you walking
beside me toward my love’s death,
driving two hours to the hospital
where I slept in a nightmare of lights,
on a chair beside him. Following
the labyrinth of hallways with me
till we finally found the womb-like chapel,
softly lit by gleaming gold letters
inscribed on the black marble wall.

Because there was still a shred of hope,
we sat, holding hands, alone
in the tomblike silence, reading
aloud the words glowing before us:
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
But what I spoke was a lie.

I wanted a lot. I wanted the dark echo
of the doctor’s prognosis to stop
ringing like bells for the dead in my ears.
I wanted him never to suffer. I wanted to jump
from the highest story of that building.
I wanted him never to leave me.

But the psalm didn’t offer
those options. And I didn’t want
to lie down in any pasture
in this world without
his body beside mine.

On what would be his last day,
when you offered to lay
your small starlike hands on him,
to do energy work, I said,
Oh yes, oh please, willing
for once to turn him over
to another woman’s touch.

I watched you lay your palms
and fingers on his forehead,
then, inches above his skin,
follow the contours of his body
all the way down to his feet
that I’d massaged with ginger oil
just hours before. When you closed
your hands over his long bony toes,
the labored breathing we’d endured
hearing all morning—huh-uh,
huh-uh, huh-uh, huh-uh—finally eased,
and you handed him back to me
for a brief kiss on his cheek
before he found the portal
you’d opened. And we all exhaled.

Dylan Stover

---

Human

Because I can’t eat starlight.
Because I don’t echolocate.
Because I can’t freeze my own blood and thaw it out again.
Because I can’t regrow the bones I’ve lost.
Because I can google the correct number of bones in my body (and forget it again).
Because I believe a mind is something capable of forgetting.
Because I’ve gotten into the habit of getting in order to forget.
Because I get in fast cars in order to get to places that I get impatient to leave.
Because I get tired of getting (tired).
Because I invent more languages expressly so I can speak to other people less.
Because I mistake having a name to be called for the same as being someone to be called.
Because I say the heart feels heavier, though the liver weighs approximately five times more.
Because I don’t know the full purpose of having something to call a heart.
Because I don’t know fully what’s in my heart right now.
Because I don’t have a heart at all sometimes.

---

Peninsula

Imagine you’re lonely
standing at a seashore, as the wind
tests your garments, and seaweeds
twist around your toes; imagine you’re
breathing the distinct smell of land
leaving itself behind for good:
there’s a strange air that blows over an ocean,
like the caught wingbeats of a lost lark
beyond the curvature—or whatever
the starting truly was, or might’ve been—
if ever things did or could
begin

in an instant—Boom!—
just like that: standing, you extract
yourself from the multiple, splitting
down to your atomic core, to become
the pure light of fury, the centripetal
force of death’s shining orb…
—and then, like a postcard sunset,
the sign of the familiar crimson
tide creeping in
to life again

you imagine the shore in
yourself standing like a body,
the sword of its currents cleaving
every firmness that was yours, as it mixes itself
with kelp and the fishes’ tangled amines—
the profligacy of the sea, that body always
breaching itself to bring all life down
to its knees—like your body is
now, splayed, cold, wet and dripping
on the sand, obeying the moon’s
intrepid oath—and what’s left there,
if not human: but just the tip
of a coast!

Marcela Sulak

---

A Beautiful, Rare Name

Upon meeting the man for the first time
you feel compelled to talk about the ghost
your classmate was named for. It wasn’t
your classmate who’d told you, in fact, but
a second woman with the same
rare and beautiful name that you’d
never heard before or since.
These two were born in the same
year, on two sides of the
same county. The ghost would

pace the staircase each night till the family
was so accustomed to it, it was like
another family member, but one
you couldn’t talk about. The man acts
as if you’ve just told him something
completely normal, like what you’d
eaten for lunch yesterday.
He says he usually doesn’t
talk so much himself, but
now he wants to tell you

how, as a child he’d hid himself to hear
adults conversing; how he’d taught machines
to perform repetitive little
tasks. He’s an architect of circuits,
interested in what doesn’t fit
in. You yourself have always been
wandering out of orbit.
Then he begins to ask you
such basic questions that
others would normally

have been embarrassed to ask. So no one
ever had. Charmed you began to describe
the hatchets and knives, the hay trap of
the rotting barn in which you’d performed
the theater of your childhood.

You couldn’t get enough. He
gathered your particulars.
You rested peacefully in
his imagination.
Your bodies were beauteous

and belonged to the same doll house. You’d
not even noticed the two halves
closing, the latch snap shut, the
handle begin to lift,
being carried away.

Jennifer Sutherland

---

I’ll Be Your Tornado

If you’ll be my Nebraska – my no. 1 choice
geographically, ngl – or Oklahoma.

Picture it: you, a field of intervals
laid out between coordinated wagon wheels

of hay which I set rolling when I aim
my funnel toward

the firmament, which is cartoonishly itself a series
of corresponding Roman arches overhead.

Made as I was made, most of us don’t get
to choose, we assemble from what lies near at hand;

and we require such a narrow set of circumstances,
perfectly aligned (like

the hay, so hapless otherwise) to trundle on the track
that runs from one horizon

to another. All summer long
the sun sags lower by degrees.

I am anticipated, then worn to ragged.
The chances of me fade as afternoons accumulate

their afters. I can’t centrifugal but for you, my
retort, my flask. My Oklahoma. My Nebraska.

Alison Townsend

---

Our Lady of Mid-Winter

In the frigid garage,
the painted plaster statue
of a young girl holding flowers
gives the whole room an air
of hushed and unexpected mercy.

My stepdaughter gave her
to me for my birthday years ago,
when I fell for the statue’s stillness
at the Buy and Sell Shop
in my small Wisconsin town.

Painted in soft reds, yellows,
and blues, the statue looked
like a girl from the Tuscan
countryside—not a saint,
exactly, but something better.

European, the shop owner
thought, assuring us the statue
was weather-safe. So I put her
outside, in the copse
of oaks behind the house.

Our Lady of the wildlife
feeder, standing on a log,
she watched silently as turkeys,
deer, raccoons and rabbits
came and went. Rain slowly

washed her delicate features
away, carving white rivulets
into the substance of her being,
so that it looks as if her body
was shaped by weeping. I keep

thinking I’ll throw her away,
or take her to the town dump,
where someone else might
take pity and claim her.
But gazing at her ruined face,

running my fingers over
the streaks of rain embedded
in her skin and simple clothes—
weather working on her
the way time has worked

on me—I can’t make myself
do it. And so I’ve left her
there, shining with something
holy but unnamable in the
underworld of the garage,

so alive she startles me
whenever I drive up, daughter
I dreamed of, but never had,
standing alone in the cold,
her eyes downcast, hands

folded, the basket of flowers
still held out, so real I almost
see the petals shaking.

Fendy Tulodo

---

Missing Word, Found Silence

I was supposed to translate a sentence about rain,
but there was no word for what it did
when it touched the tin roof of this building,
how it stopped midair before falling again.

I looked through dictionaries,
stacked like buildings in fog,
each holding words that didn’t fit.
A coworker asked if I was okay,
and I said yes, though I wasn’t sure
what language that belonged to.

The office smelled of old paper and coffee left behind.
I wrote a new word: Merrin.
It meant something half-remembered,
something like rain that forgets its own shape.

Later, walking home,
I heard it again on the rooftops.
No translation needed.
Only the sound of something returning quietly
to where it had always meant to be.

Christopher Watkins

---

Erosion

Instead of stepping over it to fetch what you needed
from further back in the garage, you stop and stare
at the broom, thinking about your hair falling out
and getting swept up in the bristles. You think about
fingernail clippings and pieces of rice cake; all these bits
falling off from the whole. Dead spiders and silverfish.
You remember the last time you used the broom,
sweeping up sand from the beach. Quartz and feldspar.

The storms are coming again this year. Once they begin,
the ocean will cease its siege only when it wants to.
Atop the cliff, my boots swing in space. I feel
the coastline defined as much by resistance as by erosion.
Hydraulic pressure causes huge fractures to form.
When a crack widens far enough, part of the cliff will fall.

Hanna Webster

---

In the garden

I.
I wrap another glass jar in newspaper,
step around cardboard towers when the ricochet
of a BB gun silences
the squeal.
I’ve chased him or his brother out of the squash
beds more than once. Sown by my father’s worn
hands, and bursting from their canary flowers; bulbous,
lime-green striations—as rivers carving toward an eddying point—
gnawed in patches. I slump
at my desk, surrounded.

II.
In the evening, my father hovers
in the kitchen doorway flaunting a metal
bowl, squash brimming.
He grins.

III.
He mails a package in autumn
stuffed with zucchini.
I smile while dicing
their cold bodies,
and think about communion—
about what it takes.

William Welch

---

Stone

“The body is a condition of the soul.”
—Jack Gilbert, “Tasters for the Lord”

Two small pines are rooted on a stone
surrounded by water lilies. They’re each a foot tall,
and look as though some bonsai novice
groomed them, a joke, meant to annoy
his master, to see how he would react if he thought
nature was trying to prove itself capable of human art too,
and win the argument. But you and I know the wind
established those trees on their miniature island,
or a bird accomplished the task.
And we know theirs will be a short life,
since they have so little room to grow.
Imagine how the stone feels!
All around the shoreline of the lake, hemlocks
fifty feet tall. Their trunks are massive.
They started their lives a hundred years ago.
When the breeze picks up, needles fall. For a moment,
we think it has begun to rain. And the stone can tell
those two saplings have it in them
to reach that height, to live a century
or more. I think they’re older
than they seem, it’s taken longer to reach this stage.
But the stone has given them all it can give.
They must be to their host what love is to us.
Inconceivable. Something too big, that shouldn’t fit
in us—and grows all the same.

Marianne Worthington

---

Leaving

The road toward the heart
of town curves sharp
as a knife. The guardrails
pen you in like grief, that vile
thief. You had almost forgotten
about sadness, passing it behind you.
As you head away from home
the road softens. You depart,
bound for the unknown, the burn
of your tires just another
mark on the freeway.
Just another mark on the freeway,
the burn of your tires
bound for the unknown.
The road softens as you depart
as you head away from home.
About sadness, passing it behind you,
you had almost forgotten
that vile thief, penning you in,
the guardrails like grief, like a knife.
curved sharp, like the road
toward the heart
of town.

---

Her Last Days