The Poets: Volume 11.1, Fall 2026

Click author’s NAME (not photo) to jump to their section or SCROLL to read the issue in its entirety.

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Editor’s Choice Award Winner: Lisa Rhoades

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Dear Life

This morning I walked past a young man
doing the sharp dance of addiction
outside a small café. Tourists
were already in line at the Wall Street bull
to take pictures as they cradled its balls
which shine gold from being rubbed
by so many for luck,
although they are only bronze.

Just last week I was driving
through rural Missouri soybean fields
so gold I cried as my eyes adjusted
to the variations of brown
the season happily supplied–
grasses and sumac spears and goldenrod,
the razor-sharp dun of dried corn stalks.

And there was nothing about him,
as there is nothing about me
that would make our passing stand out
on this day, in this city, in this century
which feels old but isn’t, except
I passed him again on my way home,
standing near a tree, maybe
a Thornless Honey Locust,
planted because it’s fast growing,
and “tolerant of urban conditions”
like dog piss and garbage, and bicycle chains
and a young man running his fingers along its bark,
holding on for dear life.

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Better Yet

Who taught me to pluck honeysuckle blooms,
pinch the calyx and gently pull the hair-
thin style from its orange-petaled core, bringing
forth a small drop of nectar, a sweet trick
that also works on clover? We spent summer
days dismantling globe after pink globe.
Not my mother cocooned in her house
though she’d drive us most anywhere in town
and wait for hours in the car during dance
and band and scouts. Not my dad, though he agreed
to a pony and kept a kitchen garden
in a plot he first tilled clear of redtop and sedge,
the soft cellulose heart of which
he might peel free of its rough sheaf
to chew on while he thought, or better yet
press the blades between his knuckles and thumbs
to make a reed instrument of his hands.

Jeffrey Aron

Jeff Aron lives in New York City and studies with Lisa Bellamy at The Writers Studio. His poetry has appeared in Tiny Seed Literary Journal and Killing the Buddha and is forthcoming in The Examined Life. He is a co-founder of Global Action for Mental Health and directs outreach for the Global Play Brigade, a network of artists, health practitioners, and educators across 105 countries. Thank you for your time and consideration.

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Self-Portrait as Matchstick

A thin wooden match,
one of many
in a box on my coffee table

as I watch a documentary
about young women in Medellín
lifting gardens from garbage,
murals from the rubble.

Which is to say: I’m nearly eighty,
no longer quick on my feet,
but still startled
by what people make from ruins.

My body is a weathered house
but my heart,
still a foolish boy,
I leaned toward the screen,
toward the warmth of it.

Long after the credits ended
I remained seated,
stroking the spine of the matchbox,

the way one touches a letter
from an old lover.

you’d laugh if you saw.

A girl in the film,
her hands, a child’s hands still,
sketched a woman
rising out of the trash heap behind her,
drawing on a wall patched so many times
it looked tired
of holding itself up.
She’s thirteen
and knows more of the state
than most senators ever will.
The officials call the conditions “unfortunate,”
as if they hadn’t signed every line that made it so.

My chest opened,
age loosening its grip.

At my table,
I lifted a match,
its red head fragrant with sulfur,
the old scent of uprisings.

I didn’t strike it.

Not yet.

I kept it upright,
ready.
An old comrade
trembling and burning
owes the living
a spark.

K.B. Ballentine

KB Ballentine’s latest collection All the Way Through was published in November 2024 from Sheila-Na-Gig Inc. Current books can be found with Blue Light Press, Iris Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies including Women Speak (2025) and The Strategic Poet (2021). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

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Silence Gathering

Broken, I wanted
to weld my thoughts,
my heart – anything
I could feel.
My skin a chamber
of woes,
I could compose
no tunes fit
for a fiddle –
all strings
missing.
No secrets left
to tickle the hope
I once held close.
Instead
I will raise a goblet
to the closing door.
Key rusting
in the throat of a crow
that will not fly or lie –
this masterpiece
you created –
a wax statue,
a melody unsung.

Tom Barlow

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Memorial Day

inspired by “The Dead” by Susan Mitchell

At midnight the dead men take their seats
around the livestock auction floor.
Their ghost cattle struggle to fit flank
to shoulder in the sale ring
while the auctioneer clears his throat
with whiskey, as he has done every
Memorial Day for a hundred years.

The farmers’ pockets bulge tonight
with the quarters they made as children
running trap lines for muskrat pelts
egg money from their neighbors
and hawking Grit door to door.

Back home, the matriarchs haunt
the kitchens where the ghosts of
the biscuits they once made overflow the table,
the counter, the stove, by the thousands.

They busy themselves carrying jug after
jug from the well outside to poach
the chickens while plucked feathers
swirl ankle deep in the mud porch.

These women with knuckles like
hickory nuts and blacksmith’s arms have
only a few minutes to prepare
the memory of a feast

while back in Mount Hope, the Moon
halts the church bells and holds the hands
of the tower clock fast to the hour.

Upstairs the descendants sleep uneasy
and the youngsters dream only of tomorrow.

Simona Carini

Simona Carini was born in Perugia, Italy. She writes poetry and nonfiction (food, memoir, the outdoors). Her first poetry collection Survival Time was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (2022). She lives in Northern California with her husband and two rescue cats, loves to spend time outdoors and in the kitchen creating recipes. Her website is https://simonacarini.com

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The Bully Can No Longer Reach You

after Golden

The bully can no longer reach you
Say it while fingering rosary beads
Counting kinnikinnick berries
Gathered among reindeer lichen
Scarlet drops, weeks of tears
Tearing textiles of gossamer gold

The bully still prowls
The ghost town Age of Innocence
Howls at humans and heaven
Haunts the Beatitudes
Hungry and thirsty for righteousness
Your cup will be filled

Bruce Christianson

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Nothing Has Changed

the keys are in my hand but even so
it’s tempting just to knock now on the door
& hope you’ll answer – although i know
you’ve chosen not to live here anymore

but i remember these rooms full of light
& space & all the words we never said
the empty cups discarded clothes the sight
of all your clutter underneath the bed

if we could take things back & start again
you’d move in unpack decide to stay
or at least be here for tea when i come in
does that make me the one who’s run away
or would it be exactly like before
with all those lovely hats you never wore

Wes Civilz

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The Kayaker

He dreams a lot about all kinds of stuff,
Stuff also has its dreams about him, which
Is weird—like when he’s dreaming of a rough
Patch of unnavigable rapids glitched
With gnarly rocks, that selfsame patch of river
Tosses and turns and dreams of him cascading
In his red kayak, paddle gone in blur,
And hates him for it, hates him for invading
The space of these eleven, iced, uneven
Rocks that are actually occupied
With unsuspected functions that no men
Know of, like calculating how the skies
      Produce the language of the clouds, and how
      The words invert themselves from rain to snow.

Patricia Clark

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Dendritic: Elgar’s Piano Quintet

The music often takes me to a haunted wood
where soft snow drops from a branch with a sigh.
Most trees hold something broken in their arms.
By January’s end, we gain a month of light.

Soft snow drops from a branch with a sigh.
Beyond that oak, the creek’s a slash, water invisible.
By January’s end, we’ll gain a month of light.
I hear a plane rumble overhead.

Lamberton Creek’s a slash, water invisible.
I don’t think orioles will return to last year’s nest.
I hear a plane rumbling east overhead.
A red-tailed hawk flies to the cottonwood.

I doubt the orioles return to last year’s nest.
Most trees hold something broken in their arms.
When the hawk, hunting, cruises to the cottonwood’s top,
the music takes me back to a haunted place.

Joe Cottonwood

Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit under the redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California among wagging tails and dog-eared pages. His website is joecottonwood.com

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Three Story House

We muscled the heavy,
squinted the fine,
made decisions you can’t design on paper
but only with fingers in the moment.

Old Walt coughing, Marlboro dangling,
hand-rubbed the wainscot to a rosy glow.
His final job. Lungs.

Paul the preacher
moonlighting as plumber
installed the water heater badly
distracted by divorce, a repossessed car,
now preaches on sidewalks
outside the bars.

Frank the tile setter with eleven children
in a three-room shack received messages
from space aliens through his penis,
he told me. Level and true, they said,
set your lines level and true.
His quiet wife simply smiled,
home-schooled every child.

Years later, spirits still here.
Fingermarks. Marlboro ashes
in wainscot oil. Hot water, a blessing.
Frank’s tiles set level and true
where we shower each day
with pores open, naked.

Lenny DellaRocca

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Mirage

Before light I wake desperate for a smoke,
              rummage through the pockets of my friends.
Slowly the sun peeps on their paralyzed dreams.

              All night I heard the sea rip rags from the moon.

Footprints near the lifeguard stand.

              I step over the sleeping,
sit on the green coping of the bandshell
              where last night jazz be-bopped for tourists
on Halloween. Ghosts drunk on whiskey and clarinets.

              Down from gray motels the dark-haired figure
flickers between surf and sand.
              She vanishes, reappears closer by meters.
The wind takes her hair in a gust;
              all black sideways like love,
like a tongue in your mouth
              that can’t remember names.
Her legs Michelangelo her white dress in mortal sin.

In bare feet she says nothing. Yet I smell it on her, the French
world with its salt and semen. The man’s red name spelled
on her face. We say nothing. Facing the sea she sits beside me,
lights the Gauloises. We share the white flower like gin kisses
in six feet of water.

She says nothing in bare feet.
              Walks off toward the other end of the beach,
flickers between waves, sandpipers.

Cheryl Denise

Cheryl Denise is a West Virginia Appalachian with strong Canadian roots. She and her husband live in the intentional community of Shepherds Field in a timber frame home they built themselves. She is co-author of Porch Poems, published by Sheila-Na-Gig editions. She recently finished chemo for ovarian cancer and is doing well.

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During Chemo

on the bathroom shelf
a lint roller for my scalp
beside pink lip gloss

like a baby girl
a lace bow glued to her head
bright scarves wrap my crown

Minnette holds my hand
over an old blue towel
paints till I shimmer

for a rainy day
two old bottles of oxy
beneath my mattress

crying over lo mein
I tell my husband about the pills
their hiding place

at dusk he mixes
the oxy with coffee grounds
unburdened I sleep

Lynn Domina

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Extraction

How long ago had he fallen in love
with copper? Not the ore body
he descends to so many mornings, or the crushed
chunks, or the slurry, frothy bubbles easing
against each other, heavy,
molten, brought to a slow chemical boil, but the glistening
refined sheets he’d once seen touring a refinery.
He’d imagined becoming a jeweler
or artist, a metalsmith. Now
he puts himself to sleep
sleepless nights envisioning wire
stretched finer than his daughter’s
wispy hair, slinking invisibly up lampposts
in some bustling city, crowds oblivious to their reliable
miracle, wire clipped into speakers as he listened
to Shostakovich or Arvo Pärt. Then his right forefinger
circles a spot on his pillow, small as a penny, tracing
Lincoln’s silhouette as he counts dates
on coin after coin after coin. Some nights
he almost makes it to the year
he was born before he confuses thought with dream.
Waking, he waits into dawn, watches light
seep through window to floor, float up
until he can see his hand, his flat callouses, thin scars
chained across his palm.

Colleen M. Farrelly

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The Color of Home

Not bright like a lime leaf turning under a harvest sun. Not varied as winter waves clinging to
Moher’s moss like valley fog furling around a stone fence at first dawn. Not pale as cabbage
stew. Not graffiti green like slogans marring a memorial or our Green Party blamed for another
wave of hate sweeping through Belfast streets…

morning mist
kissing a clover—
our crimson dew

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Is ait an mae an saol*

Under twilight stars, Grandpa says our family banshee wails in the Mullagh bogs now smothered
in fog. An aunt lost young, he supposes. Tonight, thick dew falls over a field of ryegrass and
white clover, and we linger a bit longer where our grandparents once hop-skipped under a
glistening sky. Tonight, I think I hear our banshee screaming in the distance.

moonlit glow
a glint glides off
barbed wire

*Irish for “life is strange”

Laura Foley

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sister in a Different Movie (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) and Ice Cream for Lunch (The Poetry Box). She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, and included in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

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Bright as the World

She took the train to NYC
for her husband’s memorial.
On the way back,
she sat beside a young man—shaved head,
a meditation stool strapped to his bag,
his stillness like a small candle
in the wide, rattling car.

She read a poem to him,
about her husband.
The same one she had spoken
to the hushed crowd
in the dark chapel.

He read her The Journey,
by Mary Oliver—
like a narrow path
through a forest they both knew.

She opened her backpack,
showed him bars of gold—bullion, coins—
remnants of her late father’s lockbox,
the last brightness
of another life lately gone.

At her stop,
she gave him a piece of paper
with her address on it
and, wrapped inside,
one gold coin.

Not as a promise,
but as one offers a leaf
to a river’s current.

She liked to imagine,
as the train pulled away,
as the late October light
poured over the tracks—
how the gold might have slipped
through his fingers,
bright as the world itself,
letting go
and beginning again.

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Walking to the Edge of It

At breakfast, croissants still warm,
jam shining in small glass pots,
oatmeal giving off a slow, good steam—
we find ourselves talking about death,
the way you do when a four-year-old
simply walks to the edge of it.

You get put in the ground,
Milo says, certain as weather.
Yes—yes, but part of you keeps on,
I touch my chest as if to show
where the departed go on living.

I show them the photo of my mother—
there on a sailboat, leaning into the tiller,
bathing suit bright against the dark hull,
a white scarf banding her hair,
wind lifting it like a small, defiant flag.

Eleanor’s eyes widen—
Oh, Grandma… she’s a mermaid!

For a moment the three of us
swim with that—
my mother, young again, laughing,
salt on her arms, the wide water
holding her up.

I pat my ribs—
where grief sometimes still knocks—
she’s in the sky too—
up in the clouds,

where I see her as the children do—
not gone, not buried,
but sailing the long blue seam
between sky and sea.

George Franklin

George Franklin practices law in Miami. What You Were Saying is his fifth full-length collection with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, complementing A Man Made of Stories (2025) 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).

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Chicken Day

Tuesday’s chicken day at the prison
Where I teach.  At noon, a guard announced
“Chow, now or never,” and the men left
Their notebooks open on the tables
And formed a line outside.  They didn’t
Return.  I waited an hour, then went
Back to my car.  The control room buzzed
Me out and handed me my ID.

The assignment I’d given my class
Was to find something to praise in spite
Of everything, in spite of the food
They don’t recognize, the dorms without
Air conditioning, the shingles on
The roofs almost melting from the heat,
The grass already turning dry and
Brown next to the white gravel on the
Walkways, the yellow lines they follow
To chapel, education, or chow.
Only staff can walk down the middle
Of the asphalt path.  I don’t know if
Later on my students were allowed
To come back to get their notebooks and
Drafts of poems.  That depends on guards
Who are paid less than supermarket
Clerks, and who find new jobs as soon as
They can. 

At one prison where I taught,
Prisoners were attacked waiting in
Line for chow.  The cousin of one of
My students was stabbed in the neck from
Behind while he waited.  That doesn’t
Happen here, but there’s still razor wire,
And the best meal this week is greasy
Chicken on Tuesday.  I’m not sure what
They’ll find to praise in July sent back
To their dorms, the Everglades so hot
Alligators dig into the mud,
And the fans don’t spin fast enough to
Move the air. 

But this is where they live,
Some for the rest of their lives, with no
Appeals left.  Sometimes, I’m asked to write
A letter to the parole board, and
I tell them how this man is a fine
Writer.  There’s no anger left in him.
He wants to be back with family,
Have a community, help people.

There’s a lot I can’t say.  Whatever
He did, you’ve tortured him enough now.
He’s been inside for thirty, forty
Years, worn your blue cotton pants and shirts,
Done whatever you told him to do.
He’s too old to cause you more trouble.
Does he have to die here, leave just a
Department of Corrections number
And a footlocker with some photos?

But I can’t say that.  Instead, I write
How the other men look up to him,
How he wants to contribute while he
Still can.  I don’t say how he just might,
Against all odds and human reason,
Find something to praise in what passes
For a life here.  Maybe the chicken
On Tuesdays, maybe that enormous
Sky, where the blue is almost the same
Color as the faded uniform
He wears.  Does the sky have a white stripe
Down its pants leg?  Does the sky also
Need rehabilitation?  This year
There were wildfires in the Everglades,
And they kept the prisoners inside.
The smoke sent men to the hospital.

Maybe he’ll praise the fire that burns grass
And trees, fire that doesn’t clean floors or
Cut lawns, fire that doesn’t obey guns
And barked orders.  Or maybe he’ll praise
The rain that soaks through cotton, that falls
As the chaplains say, on the just and
Unjust alike.  Or maybe praise the
Night that finally brings restless sleep
And through the window sometimes a breeze.

Karen George

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A Liminal Place/Space

Lynn D. Gilbert

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FOCUS

Sometimes I’d like my last days
to be now, so I could find out
what the ‘now’ means, looking back on it.

I’d live backwards, changing
the now so that my last days would emerge
clearer, more composed,

as if I’d printed out my ‘shots’ before
I’ve taken the scene in front of me,
so as to catch it better, while I’m still fiddling

there, lining up the foreground fir
to frame the distant ridge and contrast
with the shine of river in mid-foreground.

Other times, I can foresee scanning the prints
and wanting, too late, to hear the catbird’s call
that sat unseen in the tree, or the chat

of those passersby who took so long
to get out of the way of my scene. I might want
to feel the fingers of one who whined

and pulled on my arm while I struggled
to get things into focus.

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 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.

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Whence Wisdom

The prompt sends him searching
for practical advice he only now realizes
he sorely lacks.
The mentor never materialized
to provide clarion words of comfort.
No prophetic Mel Bay revealed existence
as galactic guitar, six strings tuned
to capture the percussive musicality
of this sensually nuanced world.
This complex human symphony is bereft
of even the treble clef’s simple promise:
that every good boy deserves favor.
His favors never were counseled by goodness
or painted by numbers or tempered by guidance.
His dance unfolded minus confided alliance,
an unfettered gem both subsumed and unpolished,
gleaning advice directly
from an often-improvident universe.

Benjamin Green

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Light

Every year, upstream, down—
asters bloom late beside mallows,
the sumac edges crimson,
and the gold of the cottonwoods
ferments into autumn—
creates an amber light
in the shady bosque,
a flickering stillness
only as tall as the trees.

There is activity—
robins and squirrels
gorge on juniper berries,
bees seek the last blooming;
in the creek, trout splash
on the fallen bees.
Divine, but with no God,
only an amber light
filling the creek side trees.

Let yourself feel this, he whispered to himself.
Open yourself to the moment,
as it happens. Give yourself to it.
Let the light fall
where it will.
Even on you.

Magin LaSov Gregg

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River Baptism

At Vicksburg, the highway
opens like doxology, faded
tear stained, praising creation.
I’ve never been this far West
but over the bridge I go
Two suitcases from a life
I’ve left behind
rattle in the trunk.
I think of bones, a man I love.
A single act of acceleration
will torch the future
I thought I wanted.
A forest must burn
before it can grow.

Cantilevered steel rises
a hundred feet above the river,
this trestle a mammoth rib-cage
a crossroads forged by water,
concrete
no way out but through

On the other side, land
becomes womb, a Delta
that Greek word for “change.”
Beneath chicory skies
of Louisiana, I’ll shelter
learn resurrection
happens every day.
Listen —
The black throated warbler cries.
There are crossings we make,
and crossings that make us,
ten thousand ways to be reborn.

Colleen S. Harris

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Things I Wish I Could Say to My Sister, But We’re Grown Now

        for Meaghen

wanted to be strong like a fist,
            like a tooth against the soft meat
of some weak creature’s inner thigh.
            I wanted the world to shatter against
me for a change, but I was wretched,
            I was small and powerless, and you
were smaller and in reach and the most
            beautiful thing our mother ever made.
And since seething sea met silent sand,
            what have jealous sisters ever done
but try to ruin the gleaming mirror
            that reminds us of what we are not?

David I. Hughes

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Tomato With Doubts

The tomato wakes up
already apologising.
It knows the salad people
call it a vegetable,
and the botanists
call it a berry,
and the grocery store
just wants it stacked
in obedient pyramids.

It remembers the vine—
how the sun held it
like a warm verdict.
It remembers the first knife
that mistook it
for something sturdy.

Inside, it is all
soft declarations,
a cathedral of seeds
whispering fruit, fruit, fruit
in a language
no one bothers to learn.

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Cucumber, or the Long Green Lie

The cucumber has spent its whole life pretending to be crisp, neutral, a background actor in the
salad bowl. But inside, it carries the quiet arrogance of a fruit—seeds arranged like a secret lineage,
a genealogy it never speaks of. It watches the melons from across the produce aisle, feeling a tug
of recognition it refuses to name. When sliced, it releases a scent that is almost a confession. When
pickled, it becomes something else entirely, a creature of brine and reinvention. If you listen closely,
you can hear it practicing its truth in the refrigerator drawer, rehearsing the sentence: I am not
what you think I am. But the drawer closes, the chill sets in, and the cucumber goes back to being
the cool one, the quiet one, the fruit that never quite comes out.

Paul Ilechko

Paul Ilechko is the author of Post Moby (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026) and Fragmentation and Volta (Gnashing Teeth, 2025). His work has also appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, Bear Review, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Laurel Review. He reads for Marrow Magazine.

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Where There Were Children

I thought I heard the sounds of children
walking quietly through the empty rooms
it was in a house that faced north towards
the coldness of the coming winter

it had rained for several days and my body
ached with the ongoing chores
the cleaning and painting and all the other
small tasks that pile up over a year

*

there are locks on the canal bridge
dozens of them     some decorated with gemstones
all of them once thought to be essential
I know this because one of them is mine

the song in my head is a slow song
and I know most of the words     I imagine
the melody drifting from the empty bedroom

and over the bridge     gradually dissipating
into the small plashes where dragonflies
flicker on the surface of the water
where once we sat and dreamed together.

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About the Canal

This is not Venice     but we have a canal
and I like to walk some number of miles
along the towpath     shaded by the tall trees
and bamboo stands     never thinking
of the bodies of people who have drowned
here over the years     the emergency vehicles
with their flashing lights     the hooks and tackle
used to extract the ones they are too late to save

the reflections of the old brick buildings
just downstream from the small arched bridge
where ducks and geese swim through the ripples
and the current is manhandled by a pillar of stone
it’s here that a small boat is chained
ready and waiting for an urgent need

and somedays when the sun is bright and the water
is calm     the youngest children in town
are brought here to watch the fishermen
who patiently cast again and again     feet firmly
planted in the tight-packed gravel of the path
and the teachers hold the hands of their young
charges     keeping them safe     at least for now.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

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Amethyst Speaks

In Dillsboro, beside the river,
every kind of rapid in whitecap
conflict, working with what’s
in the way, so many craggy rocks
worn and wearing
smooth
            the pouring of it, the river
water, every which way, water
in bounds but not controlled, a frothing,
all motion and stillness, a sameness
of the difference
                            yes, the powerlines,
the bridge, this bench, the flash of red
truck on the road, the glint of lightening,
profusion of purple in the buddleia
and rose of Sharon, where, yes, a bee or two
is visiting still at dusk
                                      oh, this is the year
I find myself good company like the buddleia
in bloom with its companionable fragrance at dusk.
Even the amethyst speaks at the end of the keychain,
reminding me of melting ice. So much facet
in the rough-hewn stone, all the ice
and thunder stopped, for the moment stopped.
What plenty, what more? And growing from
the river’s bank, sycamore with its dappled branches.
As if we were meeting, briefly, buddleia, rose of Sharon,
sycamore beside the river in the year I lost
the last of what I thought
was mine.

Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Her most recent book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, North of Oxford, Offcourse, One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad.

---

Caretaker’s Lament

I need music injected
into my veins, a PICC line
of music guided into the vessel
above my heart, music flowing
like wordless water, soft as velour,
music filling the dry wells
of my brain. I need piercing
violins, sweep-me-away
harp arpeggios, thunderous
kettle drums overriding
the lapsing seconds—
your faltering mind,
my stumbling love.

Paula J. Lambert

Paula J. Lambert has published five full-length poetry collections including Terms of Venery, Revised and As If This Did Not Happen Every Day, both from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She has also published six chapbooks. Lambert is also a literary translator, small press publisher, and visual artist. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her mentorship has been recognized by PEN America. A strong supporter of the intersection of poetry and science, she lives in Columbus with her husband Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist.
More at www.paulajlambert.com.

---

Cardinals, Come Winter

Tonight, the smell of apples
and vinegar: rot. The squirrels

couldn’t keep up. Nor could I.
And through the silent night,

soft thumps. Fruit still falling.
Earlier, dozing in the blue light

of the big screen tv, holding
your hand till it twitched,

I woke to watch you fall, too,
into deep sleep. We’ve aged

so sweetly together. Apples
round and spotted and soft,

just shy of the tender thump
of our letting go. Come winter,

ground a blanket of snow,
air scented only blue-white cold,

two cardinals, fat and happy,
will settle in the tree’s bare limbs.

David Anson Lee

---

Small Theology of Returning

After rain, the marsh forgets its outline.
After rain, nothing agrees on form.

Reeds bend as if surrender
is another way of standing.

Nothing here announces recovery.
It simply happens:
green where there was none,
lift where there was weight,
sound returning to air

like something forgiven
but not explained.

A bird calls once,
and the air continues it
without hesitation.

I do not know what returns
or what only appears to.

I only know this:
the ground no longer agrees with absence.

And that, for now,
is enough.

Cora McCann Liderbach

---

First Color

Red: the ochre clay of bison
on cave walls, the vermilion
shine of Chinese lacquer
dyed with deadly
cinnabar, the carmine
of New World shawls
tinted with crushed insects.
Now it’s the Red Barn hue
of restaurant walls
that piques our appetite,
the Coca Cola Red
of bottles and billboards,
the Ruby True of a pop star’s
lips—the crimson,
claret and candy apple
that light the winter woman’s
skin. Red stops cars,
halts traffic for fire engine
sirens. Red is blood
meets oxygen: scrapes, scabs,
scars. Red, the first color
ever named, the first color
babies see. The color
of mist rising in a childhood
living room before Goddammits
and Go to Hells rain down,
before the front door cracks
open, thunders shut.

Daniel Lusk

---

Because the World Does Not Need Another Knife-Fight-in-an-Alley Poem.

—After a photo by Lar Duggan

Is it the artist who sees beauty in grieving
so we see the shadow of an isolated house
and barn, the retreating light?

When there were trains, remember?
Before dawn a small, wild sound
maybe a distant, residential crossing

tentative, as if a small boy,
trying his dented horn.

---

What Sort of Bird

—after Study (Painting of an Egyptian Girl)
by John Singer Sargent

Neither a Renaissance garden
nor on the menu at a fine restaurant
on the outskirts of Bruges.

So her skin, ripening in lamplight
glistens burnt umber.
Gorgeous fruits of another’s passion.

Once again, Old Poet bemused
by a long ago beauty—iron-blue clouds
against burnt sienna sky—batik on silk.
There was a woman; I made this dress she said.

Is it wrong to wonder, to be amazed?
A boy from the country,
his first taste of Crème brûlée

As if we could smell colors the way
the bass player’s wife, she could hear them.

What leads a human into the thicket of desire:
Perfume of black olives, a hint of chocolate.

Breathe stranger.

Marjorie Maddox

---

How It Happens

And we all know the story—
of someone (was it you?)
standing in bright sunshine
calmly looking up, when,
ten steps away, rain
attacked the sidewalk,
shooting up to strike
the ankles of any bystander.
In such scenarios, it is always
summer, the drops warm
and miraculous, the dark
cloud just a small patch
pasted over a sea-blue sky.

Or maybe it was, after all,
the other way round,
someone (was it me?)
shocked into stillness
as slanted rain streamed
down forehead, cheeks,
chin, chest, and onto
toes, while—six steps
to the side—all remained
remarkably dry.

But this time,
this year, everything
is winter storm, as cold
as wet can get without freezing,
as bold as fear can thunder without
pausing— tsunami crashing up
and over the roofs. No
doves sent out, no doves
returning. And this,
after all, is the only
story, the one that ends
The End.

Ashley Mangtani

---

Daylight

London, 2026. The gas is still lit by hand.

Near the old Agway, crayfish still burrow under
the smooth stones I skipped across as a child.

And look, there is the old penny candy store.
And there, there is the cemetery where I’d slither

between stones like a small snake to reach
the wild strawberry. Do they remember me?

The days that flashed like lightning, condensed
as a kitchen on jamming day, thick with

the steam of the pot, the ripe fruit ready for gelatin.
I can no longer knock on the door to my childhood,

but I can stand like an old ghost past the window:
inside is my mother. Her healthy thyroid concealed

under a layer of sun-kissed skin. She hums
as she works mason jars into warm baths.

A Police album on the stereo. Synchronicity. Watch
how I do not knock at the door. How I see my small

self come into the kitchen. I had caught a minnow
in the creek and my sneakers were sopping wet

and I held the slithering thing in my cupped palm like
a treasure to show her: her, who was all that mattered

at the time. What is time, anyhow, when I can still watch
her turn to the window, past the me who is me no longer?

Betsy Mars

Betsy Mars is a poet, compulsive photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, in journals such as ONE ART, SWWIM, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Thimble, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Betsy’s two chapbooks are Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Her full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

---

Cousin Susie Gives Advice

Also apply mascara to your lower lashes, Susie said,
as we drove her old whatever-it-was car down the road
through Amish country one summer. Her duty to take me
away for the day, an adventure so I wouldn’t get bored
away from the Shore, away from my aunt and uncle’s quiet
house with its vegetable garden, dachshund-sized zucchinis,
general glamour-lessness. Back home in LA, my mom was busy
and inattentive to the state of my lower lashes or most anything
else to do with me and my growing needs. We did clothes
sometimes, browsing stores, trying on, but not life advice,
not the things that mattered. Like mascara. Hair.
Where to brush on blush to create prominent cheekbones,
hollow cheeks. Don’t wear horizontal stripes she might have offered.
Or dark colors are slimming, which I took as gospel
and rarely deviate from, even if I only got that from a magazine,
not mother. So it was Susie I relied on. I was maybe fifteen,
she closing in on twenty. How did Susie make her way,
those decades when we rarely spoke? I heard from my aunt
about her seizures, divorce, turning gay, the family fallings-out,
troubles between, among, within. I saw her last at her father’s funeral,
took sides with her in loyalty to those remembered rides. And then
I heard that she was gone, found alone – or worse, with her little white dog
standing guard. The crew had to hurdle the high piles between porch and her,
upright in her chair (I like to imagine), remote in hand, no makeup required.

Nicholas McGaughey

---

The Followers

On the waste-ground behind the gas plant,
spinning over the hoardings, where

cigarettes promised 20 Sovereigns
and a lippy girl unpeeled her Flake;

twice a year it landed like a spaceship
over our pub and chapel town.

Four foot short, about nine or ten,
we mooned by the waltzers and dodgems,

drawn by the lights, and the waft of griddled onion
watching the gypsy-boys sparking

the cars like comets, chatting-up girls,
who were five years away from our fumbles.

We were little men with big ears
and candy floss who couldn’t hook a duck;

pooling our losses for chips and lardy sausage;
following stray lovers and their trophy bears

as they dovetailed away from the electric showground,
to coo in the park under the tell-tale stars.

Ivan McGuinness

---

Palimpsest

A swell of memory ran me aground
when I found, tucked between forgotten pages
a wedding frond, dried in forgetfulness,
pressed since the day when Carl and I jogged,
blue and white striped aprons fettering legs,
sawdust clagged in boot treads, from butchery
to registry in less than five minutes.
We wrote our names, knew, before anyone,
that my sister was married again.
After soapy beer at The Bear Hotel
(the price of our witness) we ambled back
to sharp knives, steels, butcher’s hooks, pungent meat,
and scrubbed a wooden block back to whiteness
so it would shine in the blue light of night.

Of course we left the aprons at the shop
and scraped our boots against the bristly mat,
but that’s not how my memory has it.
The tangled web of that day’s happenings
breaks down to these few linear movements,
repeating so they are self-similar.
The book fell open, the fern marked a place,
a fractal fossil written over leaf,
when peeled from the page left a mesh of delicate cells.

Wendy McVicker

Wendy McVicker lives and writes in the green hills of southeastern Ohio. Her most recent chapbook is Alone in the Burning, published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2024. Her first solo full-length collection, Meanderlines, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig. She celebrates community and creativity whenever and wherever she can.

---

How shall I green?

How shall I green
on this cold gray day?
Is rain greening in pools
by the curb? Is grass
greening in that hollow
of the yard that is always
damp? Am I greening
as I turn to the window,
or away, as I turn
to you, still greening
in my heart?

Once, greening beside
a pool held in a curve
of hawthorn hedge,
I slid into the water
where you swam, greenily.
Our limbs slipped past
each other, greening.

The green fuse was lit
and all summer long
it burned.

Sally Mills

---

Crack in the Floorboards

Inspired by “From Below” by Carl Phillips

There is a leaden shame in expansive love
offered, then squandered.
It poisons the blood. Drags.
Barely perceptible.
Until the years pass.
You thought you were
dancing on a table, trying to gulp the champagne
gushing from the popped bottle. Singing
Queen of the Night
though you are an alto. Object of envy—all those
broken families.
Until the day you discover that the decorative tree
in the corner of the room, actually
has no pot, but grows directly from the floorboards
and must be ripped from even beneath the foundation
to capture all its roots, halt
the widening crack.

Lay a carpet wall-to-wall. Set a heavy chair
in the corner. No one
need ever know.

Penelope Moffet

Penelope Moffet is the author of the poetry chapbooks Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Born in Ohio, she has lived in Southern California most of her life. Her new book, Think of It As Music, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

---

Still

A turtle takes a long time to decide.
I’m sure he was a turtle not a tortoise.

Same size and shape as all the other turtles
in the pond, dark dimpled shell, red stripes

near his eyes. I found him in the dust
far from the water-lilied pool, maybe

helicoptered there by some cruel child,
pulling in his head and legs as I came near,

peeking out again as he flew back to water.
Placed where reentry could be simple

he stayed still, watching, stretching out
his neck, pulse beating in his throat.

Nearby two other turtles danced beneath the surface,
a small one with green algae on her shell

chasing a big one, circling to bump foreheads,
feet reaching toward the larger turtle’s face.

Maybe the one I rescued was annoyed
to be back at the pond, maybe he was done

with turtledom, had been traveling for days
only to be airlifted back. An hour passed.

He hadn’t moved except to turn his head,
push himself away from water, push back.

Much the way I live. Wanting
the familiar, wanting the unknown.

Marjorie Moorhead

---

Touching Base

Once again, I saw L. at the start of my walk.
Once again, we compared notes
on how life is going.

She’s got hip surgery scheduled two days from now.
After that, her husband will have surgery on each eye,
about an hour’s drive from here.

I commiserated. Told her about my sciatica legs
and sleepless nights, and that I may have cataract surgery
in my future too.

We touched on the good stuff.
A recent visit to Germany.
Writing poetry.

Then, I went on my way, happy to be out walking.
Happy for the spots of shade, and the strong clear song
of cardinals high in the full-leafed trees.

Katie Moudry

---

The Shepherd’s Hut

Her brothers were up on the downs
whilst she sat each Sunday
in the grip of the preacher’s voice,
tight as the vice of her corset.

But, then they laid down staffs
for guns, the officers commands
like sheep dogs snipping at their heels
driving them into no-man’s land.

They died along with half their flock,
were buried in a grave in France.
So, when the gorse begins to flower,
she pulls on their coarse woollen clothes,

fills a pallet with straw, banks logs
against the rough wood walls
to feed the pot bellied stove,
sleeps in their narrow bed.

Her hands pull stuck lambs
from the ewes’ slick canals,
the new born steaming bodies
melt their shapes into the snow.

Her breasts hang as she works,
or she binds them flat with linen strips,
cuts her hair with fleecing sheers.
No-one in the village mentions it.

The men now stop to talk,
share news of anthrax outbreaks
and remedies for lung-worm.
The Sunday bells peel faintly here;

she sits on the steps of her hut,
set on ground consecrated by gorse,
the only hymn the sound of the tide
rolling its tongue into the river’s mouth.

Michael Olson

---

Don’t tell me the hawk never dreams

resting on its breeze

or that it does not pray,
head bowed to its wind

talons buried in its kill

and don’t you recall
that Arizona summer when we saw

that hummingbird tongue
slip inside honeysuckle lips

and seem to linger
longer than it should

and why not –
there is never a moment

when they are not moving away
or toward some finality

and haven’t you ever wondered
how much mystery is here

for these beings to know
or take for granted

and what purpose talons
but to prove mortality

what purpose wing and tongue
if not to know wonderous things

William Palmer

---

Thin Place

1965, Detroit

After clearing the table we run out
under the arching branches of elms,
a few cars asleep by the curb.

Fred waves me back—
I cut right and miss.
We keep doing it

till his spiral glides
into me and I hold it
like a baby.

When I wave him out
I throw a wobbly;
he just smiles.

I ask Fred to kick one:
it goes straight up fast, then slows,
touching the canopy—as if probing

the thin place between here
and the other side,
staying like a long-held breath

till it falls
landing hard
in the Murphy’s front yard.

Twilight deepens;
Mom turns on the porch light.
My brother and I toss till we can’t see.

Travis Park

---

Floodplain

The river
borrows the field
for three days.
When it leaves,
the fence
has learned
another shape.

Roger Pfingston

---

Luck

After yesterday’s mystery of finding
the pileated woodpecker dead,
still perfectly intact at the bottom of its
favored power pole, my wife and I
step out the kitchen door to the deck,
the June dawn a slow dissolve
as the sun becomes a shining example
for early risers, just in time to catch
the doe’s tawny glow ballet-leaping
the length of our yard into the woods,
its mouth, no doubt, still flavored
with daylilies, deer spray be damned.

So be it, the luck of our time here,
whether the slow amble of a possum
bearing her clutch of joeys, or a clever-
hungry fox eyeing the neighbors’ chickens,
sometimes the dim stripe of a skunk’s
zigzagging appearance at dusk,
and of course, the bagpipe sweep
of crows scattering a blush of robins just,
it seems, for the hell of it. Half a day later
an afternoon nap, our waking assumed.

John Popielaski

John Popielaski is the author of several poetry collections, including most recently That Special Something from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, as well as Attuning, a novel from Broken Tribe Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Cutleaf, Gramercy Review, HAWKEYE, and Rawhead.

---

Top Dead Center

A pledge was being mildly abused
beneath my open dorm-room window
as I read from an enormous book
about a rude mechanical
whose head a sprite named Puck transformed
into a braying ass’s. You have heard
of people who grew up in houses
stuffed with books, with parents
who spoke highly of the Canon.
The first book I remember reading
with my father was a Chilton’s Manual
in preparation for the timing-chain
replacement on the Gran Torino
station wagon, which was I don’t know
what number in a long parade
of beat cars he led home for care.
What I remember of that reading
at the dining table is rotation
clockwise of the crankshaft is essential
to achieving what I think of
after Robert Pirsig as the Zen state
known as Top Dead Center, when
the piston rises to its apex
in the cylinder that starts it all.
But these days I fall deeply
into contemplation when the moment comes
for me to change a flaccid tire.
I’m alone here on the Golden Road at dusk
and know there’s no point in pretending
I have not ignored the tire-
pressure warning light for weeks,
no point in trying to deflect the blame
by saying to my Oberon
what fools these mortals are.
Instead of settling on a jack point
and uncovering the lugs,
I stare into the northern woods
and listen to a thrush sing.
Whether wood or hermit, I can’t say,
but I am certain Francis Flute,
a bellows mender, played the role
of Thisbe in the woods outside
of Athens and was richer somehow
for the venturing beyond
the satisfactions of the masterful repair.

---

Rowing Through the Dawnland

On a pond below a mountain
that a camera-toting people climb on
in the warm months like a species
that has flown up from the south
by magnetism or the stars,
a rowboat is at peace, the sound
of two oars doing nothing.

Then the oarlocks rattle,
and the blades dip, and the black bugs
skate aside like catamarans
whose sails have caught the wind.

The man who rows is old enough
to know it’s deeply inhospitable
to not allow the purple dragonfly
who keeps returning to his naked knee
to stay as long as it would like,
and so he keeps suspending progress,
oars extended like two slender wings,
although he has in mind
a special place he’s rowing to
and an approximation of arrival.

The dragonfly is on his knee
as the ungainly rowboat drifts
to wooded shore, no footpaths, no signs
that a person other than this man
knows that this miracle is here.

He apologizes to the dragonfly
and pulls the dripping oars in,
lays a soft hand on a boulder
left here by a glacier in retreat.
He finds the petroglyph that looks east
at the pond: a radiating sun,
five human faces, two fish.

The dragonfly lands on his knee,
and he believes it wouldn’t be so bad,
his culture’s swift post-literate shift,
if it led back to this eventually,
the written word deposed, a picture,
for example, to remind us
that we don’t forever need the w
to poorly mimic water, don’t
forever need the alphabet
to mediate our closeness to the world.

Patrick Reardon

---

Unknown

Lincoln Scarlet was unknown in the
Western Avenue McDonald’s at Lawrence.
Wendi, unknown in the stained-glass
vestibule. Not known in the dollar-store
was One-Cent, and in the tuxedo rental
shop, and at the viaduct meeting place
of the Uptown buccaneers and pirates,
and under the open sky of the lacy tea
shop patio in blue-collar Morgan Park.
Not known to Hambone, an easy friendship.
Not known, a day without nervous fear,
nude sacred art, the poet mythology of
saints and reptiles, of ward superintendents
and the halfway-house fashion woman of
West Rogers Park. Unknown hopster lore,
eccentric blueprints and brick logic.
Not known, Lucy’s polemics. Not known,
the woman clothed in night, the lost tribe
kiva, the pebble of great price, the Broken
Bottle, the food riot gear, the gear shaft
crack, the shaft of laser light, the purple
eye of the long black rat. Unknown, the
Rich Young Man. The nun walking across
the board over the trickle of the Mississippi
River source flow, not known. Our Lady of
Idaho, unknown. Our Brother Moon and
Sister Wren, unknown. The echoes of a
God art. The open door in the blank wall.

Lucas Reilly

---

Shelf Life

Tongues of steam lick her face
As she stirs the blueberries,
Stovetop hissing sapphire flame.

I pour white sugar. Gyre greets
Our offering, bubble-and-pop,
Perfumes floating sweet with

The sun’s yawning song,
The wild bushes dyeing
Our palms in juice and dew.

Thus she sends me out,
Pointing with wood spoon
To fetch can-lids from the root

Cellar, oak steps moaning,
Musty earth sinking cool,
Generations of walled stone

Begging me to carve my name,
Shadows watching small hands
Sweep blind over spidered shelves,

Falling upon the mason jar,
A lid pricked with holes,
Visions of the last summer

When everyone was alive,
When you and I whispered
In this night, this jar our light,

You gripping a Swiss knife,
Carving these constellations,
Explaining how important it is

To let the fireflies breathe.

John Repp

John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent collection of poetry is Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House, published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025.

---

Licked

…making salacious promises to lick me into next week… Wanda Coleman

I got licked into next week last week & have licked x others
beyond/beneath their friendly commands to slide them & be
slid by them along the honey-yellow floorboards of, say,
the loft quivering six stories above the Raritan. Who’d you love
if you’d never met me? Oh, my sweet, I’d rather brag than speculate,

but OK, her. Her with the white-girl ‘fro bronze when the sun
squats atop Lebanon Mills for many minutes in June twilight
spent chatting & smoking in tube top or spread-collar Oxford
shaken out practically brand-new! last week in the Salvation Army

up by Almonessen, but I did meet you & here we are in the by-God
gloaming the sun we thought would never slide off the dumpster
has bequeathed us, just us, the billions living & dead conceptual

as a heaven-high stack of balance sheets. I don’t need God to thank
for the tastebuds that usher existence behind my teeth. They just do

& will. With each curl of letter & whole-note croon, they will & will.

Amy Riddell

---

Chemo in a Time of Plague

The nurse enters with valium.
My husband’s spiking blood pressure
has revealed just how terrified he is.

The pricks and needles will stay sealed
in their sterile wrappers for now.

The hair-pulling tugs to unstick

his port dressing will come later,
after she has again cuffed his arm
and then finished up the chemo prep.

Not so long ago, sunlight shone
like an unwrapped gift

from the architect who lit this space

with so many windows
and translucent chandeliers.
A violinist sent her song floating

into our charged air every week,
taming the buzz of anxiety so well

that our lungs could easily find breath.

These days, the lobby is a muffled
cough behind N95 masks.
Outside we wait in a long line

until cleared with a touchless thermometer
and Covid checklist.

Then the long walk to the infusion floor,

my husband holding my hand as lightly
as before, his touch as vital as sunlight or song,
my touch, any touch, a threat.

Ellen Rowland

---

The Task

Across the valley at the peach house
with the terracotta roof tiles,
a woman stands on her balcony
flapping a small, handwoven rug
into the cold November morning.
She picks up a second and strikes them together,
one in each hand, releasing dust and crumbs
and mites into the pine trees below.
She beats the rugs furiously against the railing,
then slowly lifts them out to the side,
glides them together again, and again,
so that from here, she might be a large raptor,
or an aproned angel about to take flight.
She stops then and turns, as though someone
has called her name, needs her back inside.
For just a moment, now that the task is done,
she stands perfectly still, arms limp at her sides,
and lifts her face to the sun.

---

The Last Ferry

For Sunny

Missing you is not the only thing in the car.
There is also music—your favorite August song

still playing as we race along the coast road
keeping your ferry in sight for as long as we can.

There are memories no one photographed
of a summer that has come to an end, ghost

passengers of laughter, wave after wave, forgotten
arguments, the slow al fresco meals, flowing dances

in flowered dresses. Sunburned backs pale roses,
the scent of wild oregano lurching through open

windows, tears stinging like sea splash. A candy bar
wrapper on the back seat floor, still smelling

of caramel. A stray elastic that lived on your wrist,
tangled with strands of your hair. The ferry

disappears behind the highest peak of mountain
and we descend again into valley, into rock shale,

into silence,
pine-lined and breath-taking.

Alissa Sammarco

---

Dreams While Playing Dead

Rikki Santer’s poetry collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year and currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio and a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her fifteenth poetry collection, Could Be, was published this spring by Sheila-Na-Gig Press. Please contact her through her website, https://rikkisanter.com.

---

An Honest Hour

There was that afternoon when you and I harvested
some strands of strawberry mint from the overflowing
pot on my back deck and you ever so carefully wrapped
the stems together with dental floss because we couldn’t
find string in the kitchen’s odds-and-ends drawer and then
standing on the step stool with your tippy toes you taped
each bunch to the ceiling beam above the fireplace to dry,
and together on the couch we grinned in anticipation
of the libation we would savor from my mother’s/your
grandmother’s pink teapot equipped with a tea leaves basket
for a future hour that may be sweetened with your beekeeper
friend’s backyard honey and then the house kneeled
in silence, the cat rubbed its cheek against your ankle, and
the gentle tempo of our breathing filled the room with light.

Wendy Schaffer

---

What the East River hides

is that it’s not – a river.
A saltwater tidal estuary is a naturally occurring collection
of tears. Against their reflection, peopled towers
hold light in remarkably similar squares,
push against the earth, while
the not-river settles
the sediment &
floats the fish.

Dan Schwerin

---

My Natural Theology

The firefly has come to ferry
my worries out of the ditch.

Wildfire smoke is gauzy.
Truth is hidden in this burning world.

Lilies love the low places.
Han Shan left us breadcrumbs there.

Travis Stephens

---

Amy at Ten Below

Junior was crazy. Not medical crazy
but beyond reach.
We thought
depression
some thought
bi-polar
others thought schizo.
Nope, he was simply unattached.

Amy, he said, pass me the lighter.

No, I said, I smell gas.
You’re trying to quit anyway.

A sunny day in February in Junior’s
ice shack, the reflected snow cool
blue plastic, maybe a Sunday.
Ice swept clean like gray glass.
He spends some nights out here,
has a propane hot plate.

Amy, he says, you’re the only one
cares about me.

That’s not true, I lie again, your wife
Becky wishes you’d come home.

Amy, I can’t. He starts to cry.
The only good thing when Uncle Junior
cries is he stops talking.
I have my fishing lure fifteen feet down,
just one tug off the bottom. I wonder how
cold it is down there. Turtles sleep
in the mud, and frogs. This end of the lake
we hope for bluegill.
Something other than pike. Pike will ignore
my little orange lure, think, nice try.
What is that supposed to be?
Bluegill, they might think, hey look,
a salmon egg. Lucky me.
Junior stops to blow his nose. He is the last man
I know who still carries a handkerchief.
Honks like a constipated goose.

Junior, I said, you got anything to drink?
No, I give that up too.
Well shit, uncle. You got to treat your guests better.
I know. Pass me the lighter.
No, I still smell gas.
Amy, he said, you always know how to make me laugh.

Jody Stewart

---

Here

from the lap of language, from
that ladder rising
out of my mouth I bring you

    beauteous
   despondent
   the chainmail of arrogance

a fog unfurling from my fingertips
could be one last breath
then another, or even mutant air’s final gasp

how words won’t even take that first step
how today’s blue weather
is a truth just beyond my front door

From the lap and ladder of language come

   swelter
   distance
   flaneur

come indigo, tuft and all our names
climates and the ways
we mistake one thing for another

the seriousness of snails and individual galaxies
of your arrogance, my arrogance
keep us from walking barefoot
through that first, and final, bright garden

Ann Dyer Stuart

---

The Scales

I am my mother’s daughter
locked in a box of my own

making. I will not
be let out

until I finish
what I can’t begin. The surface

is beautiful. It can’t stop
smiling. Everything

so thoughtfully arranged.
On the surface, frozen

mystic ocean. Two fish
trapped in ice

still swimming. On the surface
two scales balanced

with silver.
I am a daughter.

My weight
broke open

the box.

Tim Suermondt

---

OUTER SPACE

I don’t know what I’d do there—
signs of advanced civilizations
have come up nil, then again

signs of advancement here on earth
has taken a hit. Perhaps we expect
too much, the thrill and payoff

in the adventure alone, no matter
what kind of matter we find or don’t.
I remember watching the early space

flights in Florida amidst the palm trees
and the alligators, cheering the pioneer
astronauts on, straight up and straight

down, the capsule landing in the ocean,
softly as if it were made of eggshells,
schools of fish stopping, then moving on.

Jeanine Walker

---

They Say He’s Better When I Visit

From his high-backed wheelchair,
he reaches to grab a thing
not there in the air. His aide lifts
a spoon to his mouth, full
with pureed turkey and cranberry
that looks like it’s been bleeding.
I’m seated on his hospital bed,
leaning forward. His eyes,
thinly open, turn toward me
as he voices some words I can’t
decipher. He accepts, then,
the food from the spoon. I reach
for the absent object in the air
and bring it to my mouth.

---

A Paucity

“Look at all those eyes,” my father says.
I’m wearing a shirt with the pattern of a giraffe.
His head pressed against the back of the recliner,
he gazes at my middle. “So many eyes,” I affirm
for him. “What will you see if you have those eyes?”
It’s what we call his good day. He’s not sedated,
not half-comatose in the chair or on the bed,
not curled up. His voice is soft and slurred, hard
to hear. He has no answer for my question
but reaches his hand toward the brown patches
that blink for him. “Take ’em,” I say.
His stiff fingers flutter over the cotton, two,
seven, twelve eyes attempted. “Just take one,”
I suggest. He turns his face to mine, affronted.
“That’s all you’re gonna give me?”

M. Brooke Wiese

---

Born in Water

..it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up…
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

The captain’s round face was like putty
in the moonlight that slid over him through the tiny
panes of leaded glass at the ship’s stern,
and his visage shown like he was brother to the moon.

The baby was a girl. I saw that
before they took her from me and threw her
through a porthole into the sea.

The only reason I wasn’t thrown
in after is this: my upper arms
are round and firm as the ship’s mast
from all the scrubbing and waxing bollards
and chocks, and from holding myself up over the captain,
and I can read a little from the Good Book.

Also, most of the food that isn’t gone
is rotten, and I can cook.

Michael Young

---

Prehistory of a Word

A new word for “nightmare”
radiated from a star.
But it won’t reach us for years.

Until then people will wake
and not know what to say
about the strange halls
and birds of their sleep.

They will hand down
to their children a dimness
in lamplight, a silence
lingering in their songs.

Conversations will feel unsettled,
each suspecting the other
of withholding
an important detail.

At night they will look up
and not know what to wish for.