Issue #28.1 Four Poems by Ann Pedone
from Par.thenon
The Parthenon’s language is
unconvincing. Its
language is almost thought. Its
language
is an instrument. Its
language is easily
eroticized but quickly forgotten.
Its language is theatrical as a white turnip.
*
The Parthenon has no
interiority to speak of. The
Parthenon has no exact
point of origin. The Parthenon
is covered in
plastic. Thick
ovarian plastic.
*
The Parthenon
is a name. It is a name.
I want to
carry it in my mouth.
I want to
carry it in my
uterus. Sea-green.
Frothy. With all of its
tender hair
spread out on the pillow.
*
Narrative. The Parthenon is locked up for
the night. Narrative. A shock to the system.
I fetishize it. It is a prelude to what is
lyrically possible. It’s this possibility that
concerns me. That arouses me. It makes
me wet. Narrative. There is no human
sound in the Parthenon. Only the sound
of marble. And dust. Narrative. If I could
plant something here. Dig something up.
Narrative. I dilate. This was thirty seconds
ago. Or five years ago. Or two weeks
from tomorrow. Narrative. I squat down.
I pee. I cover up the pee with dust.
Narrative. The Parthenon is an egg or two
mixed with lemon. A story of seduction.
A story of curvature. A story of loneliness.
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Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks, The Italian Professor’s Wife, The Best Kind of Love (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2025), as well as numerous chapbooks. Her poetry, non-fiction, and reviews have been published widely. Her project “Liz” was a finalist for the 2024 Four Way Books Levis Prize. Ann graduated from Bard College and has a master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of antiphony: a journal & small press.
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Issue #28.2 A Triple Issue: Bill Mohr, Darren C. Demaree, and Frederick Pollack
Two Poems by Bill Mohr
Fire Is Mud
Fire is mud, slick and oozing On the lolling tongues of scorched bluffs. The slathering thickens And jells. Gelatinous incandescence.
Friends disbelieve me when I say Life has no meaning other than itself As “anomaly.” I insist, though, I’m not a nihilist. How could I be -- since Being, Individuated, collapses into sediment -- Tender, succulent, reborn sediment, The nest in which these conflagrations spew their eggs.
REDEMPTION
“Give him the darkest inch of space your shelf allows”
for L.H. (1934-1991)
A friend’s been dead for over thirty years. I knew him only twenty; twenty years from now perhaps someone might say the like of me, or so my spouse succors herself. It will be half a century then, though I will not be counting. You might, if you remember either of us still as poets who for scant wages played our instruments for all their tawdry worth. (Keep singing, I say, although the echo goes uncaught). Once, at the end of another week of typesetting commercial text, Lee read at Claremont College. Someone nearby that afternoon, in undergrowth concealed, watched him load enough into his car to calculate how long he’d be gone. While Lee exulted as Tiresias, that addict extracted every precious thing – his typewriter! -- except a shelf of books. The debacle of disrespect! The thrashing of what few hours he was given to redeem. I remember once sitting in his living room. The light began to fade, but he didn’t turn on a lamp; each jounce of diminishing shadow flickered across his face, receding, bobbing back, subsiding. We sat there quietly, waiting for the turbulent dark, then began to recite out loud the songs of what’s been spoiled.
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Bill Mohr’s most recent full-length collection of poems is a bilingual edition, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana (What Books, Los Angeles, 2018). Magra Books published a limited-edition chapbook, Displacements, in 2023. His articles, reviews, and commentary have appeared in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, Journal of Beat Studies, Chicago Review, William Carlos Williams Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Project Newsletter, Los Angeles Times, and several volumes of the Cambridge Companion series. Before becoming a professor at California State University Long Beach in 2006, he worked for many years as a typesetter at weekly newspapers. http://www.billmohrpoet.com
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Three Poems by Darren C. Demaree
Emily as Frequencies of All Kinds
Affirmed, it doesn’t matter if I don’t know why, within
the pulse of this love, I brush against the spiritual just by
mentioning her name this much, but I know, I know, I know
that directness, as fierce as it can be, loves the flirting
of a metaphor that curve around her indispensable ass.
Emily as Blue Violence
Let me be clear, I have blue eyes & Emily gets dressed
every damn day & I know she must, but it feels wrong
to gather that heat beneath a denial of the bloom.
Emily as the Mint Rises
I like a jungle that’s good in tea & Emily
thinks it’s hysterical that the one poetry professor that lives
on our street just calls me the guy at the mint house.
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Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently “So Much More” (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
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A Poem by Frederick Pollack
Late Paper
What motivates the dead are trivial coincidences perceived as miracles. I became aware that my fifth-grade teacher, on whom I’d had a huge crush, lay nearby. Unremarkable in a small town, but it kept me awake. I owed her a report. She had passed me anyway (I was of course a brilliant student) but this had preyed on me. Now, with my coffin rotted, I surveyed the surrounding soil and pebbles, trying to make them into some surface, and remaining organics into ink. It was hard to do without muscles or articulated bones. Then I realized I needed a library (those were where one researched back then), and raided time and air, so far above. But the turmoil of returning illiteracy and neo-feudal attitudes among the living interfered. I did the best I could, pushed my work towards her through earth. It took a while, even longer to get her attention. “I can’t accept this,” she breathed, “it’s creative, not expository.” Then she laughed, and, I must admit, I did too, inaudibly from our untended stones.
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Author of two book-length narrative poems: THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections of shorter poems: A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, 2024), Frederick Pollack has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
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Issue #28.3 A Poem by Kayla Beth Moore
The Hounded Brain
I. THE DAY IN QUESTION
The friendly beast and I went walking on a Monday afternoon. We saw a hound we’d never met before in a place we visit often.
I remember this: the stiffness of the grass, tufts of fur drifting like snow against the negative space of pavement, thinking, this should be over by now.
Then, a warm dripping on my shoulder, a pileated woodpecker beating its brains against a high pine trunk, and wrens furious in the firebush.
II. STAPLES
She growled when they entered her scalp. This was more surprising to her than the pain.
It was the sound her father made when he tackled a stall door from its hinges
to free a horse who, spooked, had rammed the door and was trapped in its clamped jaw.
It was the sound of strength gathering to a protest.
Eight tiny bites of necessary metal and her body in a rage she’d never known.
The sound entered a vacuum and changed nothing.
Her father lay for a long time after panting in the dust.
III. AFTER THE ACCIDENT, A DREAM
Dr. Phillips isn’t wearing shoes. His office is by a swift river and there are many windows.
He sits at a desk. I am cross-legged on the old couch. He says: Tell me what’s the matter.
I open my mouth. I stop. I try again. I look at my knees.
Watch, I say. Our Father who art in … hallowed be thy … thy …
He nods. He gets up. He walks to the window.
Tell me why you are afraid. Because I am a fly with one wing walking.
IV. THE CONCUSSION CLINIC
Saddle, apple, carpet, bubble, elbow.
Apple, carpet, elbow, saddle, ____.
Backwards.
Saddle, apple, carpet, ____ ____.
Try more slowly.
sad - dle, car - pet, ____ ____.
They’re trochees!
Balance on this mat.
Where did you park today?
Apple! Apple, carpet, saddle ____.
With what foot would you kick a soccer ball?
What did you eat for breakfast?
Pour mon petit-dejeuner?
Recite the months backwards.
Elbow, apple, carpet, _____.
Follow the red dot.
Bubble! Bubble, apple _____.
Were there any witnesses?
V. THE RETURN TO LEARN FLOW CHART
The Return to Learn Flow Chart says that if after thirty minutes of concentration symptoms manifest (dizziness, changes in vision, pressure in the head, hopelessness, suicidality), then one must return to Step Zero: Complete Cognitive Rest.
One must always be cognizant of one’s symptoms so that one does not: operate heavy machinery, make Big Life Decisions, send Important Emails, or in any way strain the cerebrum.
One should call the hospital immediately if one exhibits Serious Symptoms: failure to recognize loved ones, bleeding from the ears, incessant vomiting, or loss of vision.
One should not be alarmed by Unremarkable Symptoms: fogginess, inexplicable rage, slight amnesia, difficulty balancing. One will break things accidentally. One will see bright lights in dark rooms.
One should follow the Return to Learn Steps, and with enough Complete Cognitive Rest one will Be Back to Normal soon. Soon: forty-eight hours, eight weeks, or a couple of years, depending on a variety of Complicated Factors.
VI. AFTER THE ACCIDENT, SPEAKING
Sentences are archeology projects! My wordifacts lie deep in the cerebral hardpan.
Chiseling is tedious, and people are watching.
*
It’s Yahtzee up there! You never know what combination of phonemes will land in what order, and the sorting occurs under the running of a stupid, beeping clock.
*
All my words are paper wads! The wads accumulate in piles.
The crinkles will not straighten, and once the paper is flattened,
the ink is blotted, and the penmanship— that of a lazy, fat-handed, third-grader!
VII. RINSE
I never felt as close to you as when your mother washed my hair.
Three days after the accident she warmed distilled water in the microwave,
draped a towel across my shoulders, and worked through the bloody mats.
She moved slowly, freeing single strands, cupping her hands to shield the wound.
She hummed while her fingertips massaged my tender scalp.
She moved with confidence, with the memory of bathing your infant body.
Her fingertips in tiny spirals across my crown. Her humming. The water ran brown then rust.
She patted my forehead dry when the water ran clear.
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Originally from Tellico Plains, TN, Kayla Beth Moore holds degrees from Yale Divinity School and the MFA program for creative writing at the University of Florida. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in various outlets including Plough, Lit Magazine, and Ballast Journal. She was the founding curator of the library at Grace Farms in New Canaan, CT. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her family in an old house with a big porch.
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Issue #28.4 A Triple Issue: Marcy Rae Henry, Jennifer Overfield, and
Raymond Berthelot
A Poem by Marcy Rae Henry
CF&I Steel aka The Mill
—para mi abuelo, Luis Sosa
nobody knew we lived a bit of industrial London, coal-covered in Colorado, in other words, ‘red’ en español. en otras palabras, ‘colored.’ where smokestacks blurred the horizon and the calm blue tinge of mountains. you could smell the town miles before entering it but once you were there you got used to it. men would shower after working in the heat. the whirring clanking drone. metal made and metal moved. they’d leave the mill through a tunnel. moms and kids waiting for it to spit them out and take them home where they would cough and maybe smoke a cigar. they would go steadily hard of hearing and turn up the hifi to dance cumbias to 45s pressed right here in Mexican- America. they watered lawns and washed long cars with green hoses and maybe flirted with a neighbor. might as well if you’re going to be accused of doing it. they put up chain-link fences between houses. made trips to Nuevo México maybe further. the border was still easy. easy to come back home. it was being home that sometimes felt like the same record playing over and over. the same church in walking distance. three prayers away. before it had a big parking lot the grocery store opened to a spacious street. paper bags filled with pigs’ feet, menudo, assorted tortillas: corn, flour, colorful, hard and soft. a house smelling of chile fried in oil, the old heater, blue cigarette smoke from green Kools packets, hairspray and perfume. everyone did dishes by hand with a window to look out at the neighborhood, the moment trees budded, tulips opened, the way men came into the light after a long dark day.
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Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands who’s had motorcycle crashes in Mexican-America, Turkey and Nepal. She is the author of death is a mariachi, winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize, (Bauhan Press), when to go to the Taj Mahal (Bottlecap Press), the body is where it all begins (Querencia Press), dream life of night owls, winner of the Open Country Chapbook Contest, (Open Country Press), and We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press). Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest and Kaveh Akbar recently chose her fiction collection as a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. MRae is a professor of English, literature and creative writing at Wright College Chicago, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino/x Studies Program and received Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She is an associate editor for RHINO and a digital minimalist with no social media accounts. marcyraehenry.com
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Three Poems by Jennifer Overfield
Not because it is Your will to give me
what I ask
but because it is my free will to ask for
what’s good,
moonlight walking in circles
up my body so say yes or move furtively
into the nearer part of my silence
into that closed grave, that question
mark shaped
like an exclamation point, that secret
chosen like fruit from a display of secrets,
o Lord.
You’re not helping.
Outside a windowless moon
and what I feel for you is like watching
that first friend
arrive
at a party
I am neither sorry or brilliant
I am looking up at you with
red colored lips red
like a pen with your back to the ceiling
as if
you had been manifested
what you make me forgett with two t’s
taking me by the arm
in that modern and relevant red I have
waited long as a saint.
The moon only knows one word
moon, which is a glass word the way
looking in
a mirror is like talking underwater pool
lights
marking you with their strange look back
in the summer of 2009 back in that video
of me eating strawberries and smoking a
cigarette
I heard our Pope say love is the measure
of faith and I always thought when you
undressed
it was like a third person had entered the
room whatever you can say quietly to us in
a minute or less is you
giving me a ribbon
the chance to say whatever I want
so let’s stay up now let’s go back to
feeling awake down in our small house
down where the weather
passes over long looks down where all
of south Texas is its own city
I only mention this because there is no
better neon
pushing through like a pomegranate
before it turns its actual red
a true red or red
and white flower bone,
flower animal, flowers on the passenger
seat,
flowers with arms drawn on them for
a child.
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Jennifer Overfield is a poet and multimedia artist. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.
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A Poem by Raymond Berthelot
Leaving the Emergency Room, 2 AM
Lily Rose and I drive along desolate suburban roads yellow streetlights in the night mist shine on us like God’s one good eye
We listen to the Dead, sing “Ripple” glad, both she and I, to have left the emergency room albeit with no real answers and a bottle of strong pain killers
Pass the aquarium pass the liquor stores, all night gas stations pass the tracks and we shiver neither wish to return
“It’s going to be alright,” I say and hope that she still trusts me I’m not sure that I believe in myself Lily Rose says that I still look good and gently cries
Dante and Balzac each knew a love like mine unattainable like an island in the setting sun where faith is the wind that fails to fill my sails and take me home home, towards Le Lys dans la vallée
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Raymond Berthelot is a writer, poet, and author of the chapbooks, The Middle Ages and Border Crossings. His poems have appeared in The Acentos Review, Chaotic Merge, The Caribbean Writer, Progenitor, Mantis, Peregrine Journal, Apricity Magazine, and many other diverse literary journals.
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Issue #28.5 A Triple Issue: Nicholas Alti, Sophia Carroll, and
Richard LeDue
A Poem by Nicholas Alti
If in Language is Lightness and in Lightness Transformation
Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. – Italo Calvino
Those who say less is more often have quite a good deal,
preach Flesh is Curse and boast a swell bill of health;
these events always expose some victim in the park,
a single convenient witness inconveniently impaired.
Space and time collapse inside ten thousand teeth
or rather such occasions render brothers asunder:
yes, the sister was so much stronger.
Listen! I have a cult swarming with kin,
not an itch of hurt annoys or boils me.
I have the healthy body problem—
a happy alive family
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From rural Michigan, Nicholas Alti is a bartender in Atlanta who holds an MFA from the University of Alabama. He is interested in horror, arcana, silliness, and surrealism. His poetry is in The Horror Zine, DIAGRAM, Star*Line, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. Find all his published work at 3bluntzatonce.com.
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A Poem by Sophia Carroll
Venus on Ozempic
My therapist instructs me to write a letter from my belly
to myself. “Why do you hate me? I’m just doing my best,”
it begins. The white pills I press to my tongue like Communion
wafers are making me fat. I need them so I don’t kill myself.
I’m more goblin than goddess. My hair isn’t long enough
to reach my cunt like in the Botticelli
and I was supposed to be skinny, growing up
in the heroin chic age— like Kate Moss. I saw a sculpture
of her once, contorted, cast in gold, life-size and her actual weight,
hollow. It’s about control— they want us empty, twisted
and scrunched. I was six the first time I threw out my lunch.
Thought being underweight was kind of like getting an A-plus.
Now there’s ‘slim thicc’— women can have big hips if
they also have small waists. My waist was wasted on me
when I was crazy. Now I’m fat and stable, no one
wants to date me. I rot all night long on the couch,
and my belly folds over itself into a pouch where I could hide
more pills—the fun kind— or drink tickets, or coins,
pressed flowers, Polaroids of myself when I was thin—
“This was me—can you believe I didn’t even love myself then?”
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Sophia Carroll (she/they) is an analytical chemist and writer. Her work appears in wildness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. She is also the co-founder of M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird. Find her on Substack at Torpor Chamber and on Bluesky @torpor-chamber.bsky.social.
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A Poem by Richard LeDue
“The Most Metaphorical Mountain”
The trees this spring still have no leaves, quiet as another love poem written for someone who hates poetry, but the poet is at least relieved to have feelings fit between the lines, even if written in crooked cursive, and the more it goes unread, the more self-professed genius screams from the most metaphorical mountain, causing neighbours to complain about the noise disguised as an unsaid hello or thriving crab grass.
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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He has been published both online and in print and is the author of numerous books of poetry. His latest full length book, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.
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Issue #28.6 Four Poems by Esther Sadoff
Spaces
I'm sorry for always looking for the spaces in things,
for getting lost mid-conversation.
Maybe the conversation is the moment: the tilted heads, the lean in to lessen the space.
The space between words keeps growing.
Why does every hour have its own color, its own shade? Does anyone else see it?
It's like looking up at the full moon without pointing.
Audience Everything has an audience: the way the light rims each wave in gold, the way the fireflies hum to each other, echoing moon glow. Audience to myself, I ricochet vibrations, compounding each hurt, nourishing myself, watching me heal, ear pressed to my own heart.
Poet Maybe the purpose was never to find my voice, but to make enough space for forgiveness. It was never about writing one true sentence, because nothing anyone says is perfectly true. I lie to myself, say all words are equal. If the moon appears at sunrise, it is equally day and night.
Fearful as I am They say an elephant's foot is supple, semi-softness to accommodate all its weight.
There are places we never thought to look. An elephant is an immutable fact.
The supple bareness was never for us to see, the way weakness sometimes weakens us,
the way I'm always checking my own pulse at the base of the jaw and at the wrist,
where I feel nothing no matter how hard I press. The way I can never remember which side houses the heart, so I search with my fingertips,
the same way I'll never forget the tender veins in your hands that you showed me. Why did you show me?
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Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of four chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), Dear Silence (Kelsay Books), and If I Hold My Breath (Bottlecap Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.
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Issue #28.7 A Triple Issue: Peter Leight, Zebulon Huset, Mark J. Mitchell
A Poem by Peter Leight
Essay on Privacy, in Which I’m Picking Up
When my head drops down I pick it up like a secret pocket I’m not even looking into honestly I’m not waiting for anyone to take my hands Or give me a hand as if I’m my own pet I give gifts to to reward myself Not dropping anything I’m not picking up As long as I’m private I’m writing a postcard To myself and putting it in a drawer In my desk wish you were here Not picking anything up That doesn’t belong to me according to Cicero If you have books and plants you have everything You need in your life personally I’m not thinking about anything anybody else Is thinking about when I consider the space I’m concerned with unmanned flights Something that’s happening right now is I’m putting Everything away to make room for everything I’m taking out at the same time I’m picking up my head like a gift I give myself when I don’t have Anything else to give
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Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New World, and other magazines.
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A Poem by Zebulon Huset
Chronic Adulting
Corporeal as a hologram yet far from an abstraction,
my aches make me seek some method of quickly vamoosing in an emergency—every day. An inflatable slide or droppable fire escape, I'd gladly hop through a trap door toward somewhere, anywhere... else. Each calendar day scrapes my face with its poison ivy edge. Razor bumps go green envying those moguls. The concept of constant throb, of a dull ache that’s inescapable once seemed merely nightmare fuel. Tales to warn kids that if unwise they may not survive, like playing in the woods where the wolves reside. The most common predation is more a molecular matter we learn much after matriculation. It’s the sticky side effects of living in an entropy-stricken body tossed and slammed and so so much more often just ground on the ground until the ground felt like a dwelling in itself— the best place to curl up and feel the throb of one's heart in their bones, the electricity strikes of frayed nerve shot out urgently to remind us yes, we're alive, and yes we’re in pain.
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Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Atlanta Review, Meridian, North American Review, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. His short prose chapbook Between Even Rows of Trees is forthcoming from Bottlecap Editions.
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A Poem by Mark J. Mitchell
PAST LIES
He told young women he’d been an Impressionist in his last life.
Gaugin, not poor Van Gogh—that’s too obvious and easy.
But his true, dark soul knew he’d stretched canvas in Clichy until
one night he’d stowed his way to London where he worked in a print shop.
Then one day he died from fever. His hands black with ink.
Still, he enjoyed lying to all those pretty women.
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Mark J. Mitchell has been a working poet for 50 years. He’s the author of five full-length collections, and six chapbooks. His latest collection is Something To Be from Pski’s Porch Publishing. His novel, A Book of Lost Songs, was just published by Histria Books. He’s fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Dante, and his wife, activist Joan Juster. He lives in San Francisco.
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Issue #28.8 Four Poems by Sara Lynne Puotinen
The Purple Hour
An iris silence is not quiet but loud, agitated, a house unsettled. Nerves fizzed, thistled, spine shooting phlox sparks in plum dark. The girl sinks into carpet. Moon shadow blooms through blinds, casts periwinkle stripes on her forearm. In this violet light, an old reminder: she will not be spared.
When the Girl’s Cone Cells Die
She trades blue water for bronze rivers and wine dark lakes. Switches allegiance from green to glitter. Throws out Roy G. Biv to re- organize around contrast movement poetry. In bright light this new world shimmers and shines and scatters, but always fades to gray. And in memory dark, it glows brilliant orange.
Spiriti Visivi
We enter the lake and the fish in us escape. The minnows do not mind. They dart past lunging kids on their way to what is beyond the buoys. We follow. Our fish flash and streak and leap between waves then return to bubble whisper the names of water’s colors: bronze, copper’s weathered green, reddish-purpled rust.
Between Beats
I go to the gorge
to find the soft space
between beats before
one foot strikes after
the other lifts off
when I float. I slip
through time’s tight ticks to
a moment so brief
it shudders but so
generous it might
fit every- thing left
behind by progress.
Here rhythms suspend.
Held up by motion,
the air I move through.
Now rhythms loosen,
spread out, slow. This space —
no dream, a shifting
perspective, where what
was edge is centered
and what was centered fades away
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Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in Minneapolis near the Mississippi River Gorge where she conducts experiments in writing while moving, moving while writing, and doing both while losing her central vision to a degenerative eye disease. Her poetry has appeared in The Account, Door is a Jar, Harpy Hybrid Review, Last Syllable Lit and more.
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Issue #28.9 A Triple Issue: Tamara Nicholl-Smith, Brooke Harries, Alex Stolis
A Poem by Tamara Nicholl-Smith
Evening Ritual
I adore you. Say it three times while standing naked in the mirror.
Watch the snake cerebellum uncoil from the basket of your mind rising and writhing at the charmer’s song; its flatware tongue tracing images in the air, its fangs ready to puncture the soft quiver of your rabbit belly sheltered beneath the canopy of your breasts.
Start again. This time, remember the stories your mother told, how she loved to gaze upon your toddler self, squish your milk-fed legs, rub her fingers along the soft rolls, lean her head and land her lips on your pillow belly.
Enter this moment – a circle of salt. Watch the snake retreat.
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Tamara Nicholl-Smith’s poetry has appeared on two Albuquerque city bus panels, one parking meter, numerous radio shows, a spoken-word classical piano fusion album, and in several anthologies and journals, including America, Ekstasis, The Examined Life Journal, and Kyoto Journal. She was a finalist for the 2025–2027 Houston Poet Laureate and recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas (Houston). She likes puns and enjoys her bourbon neat. Visit her at tamaranichollsmith.com.
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A Poem by Brooke Harries
After Ikea
We separated at the end of the week we bought a couch.
I was sad and he was quiet. Unusual snow fell, startling Memphis.
Workers called in sick to Ikea, and shopping took so long I missed
Graceland. I overheard a father with kids searching for the item
we bought, the last loveseat of a kind. Later I saw him pull away
in a station wagon with license plates even more distant than ours.
Back in town those last days, my boyfriend woke before me,
sat reading. I’d wake, walk downstairs to kiss him,
then back to read in bed. I didn’t know how he could break
up with me while I was reading. It reminds me of how Hamlet
couldn’t kill Claudius at prayer because he would be sending him
to heaven. For years I confused spite with reverence.
He didn’t buy the couch that fit his house. He chose
the one easier to carry.
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Brooke Harries is from California. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from UC Irvine and a PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi.
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A Poem by Alex Stolis
Postcards from the Knife-Thrower April 7-13 Los Angeles, CA
St. Jezebel is right, I’m a shapeshifter, never resting long enough to feel; she expects
me to disappear one day, leaving her to be another notch on my bedpost.
She straddles the chair all Marlene Dietrich, fiercely invulnerable; untouchable
with her perfect scars, thin white straps falling off her shoulders, iron-straight black hair.
She puts on her dress, her back to me my back to the sun the physics of us in relation to the ocean
in relation to the sand beneath our feet in relation to the scent of burnt driftwood on our skin.
The last moon wanes out of reach, and we’re left thirsty, insatiable;
we say nothing. Again. Over and again. Every word, a vibration that shatters heaven.
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Alex Stolis is the author of the poetry collections Pop. 1280 (Cyberwit, 2021) and John Berryman Died Here (Cyberwit, 2020), as well as the chapbooks Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife (Louisiana Literature Press, 2024), RIP Winston Smith (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres (Bottlecap Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in One Art, San Pedro Review, Unleashed Lit, Louisiana Literature Review, and other journals. Stolis lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.
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Issue #28.10 Three Poems by McLord Selasi
Field Trip
When I was twelve, we went to the slaughterhouse. They said it was for “educational purposes.”
The cows looked just like cows. The smell looked like something I couldn’t draw. The man who showed us around wore an apron that said “Chevon.”
He didn’t smile, but he gave us safety goggles and said:
“This part you’re not supposed to see.”
I think I’ve been looking for that part ever since.
Citrus
The orange sat on the counter for ten days. Softening in its own bright skin, becoming tender the way some memories do before they spoil.
We bought it on a Tuesday. We said, “We should eat better.” We meant, “We should try.”
By Friday, we were eating pizza in bed again, watching a documentary about sharks.
I whispered, “Do you think oranges feel abandoned?” You said, “I think they rot either way.”
Communion
My brother says the grape juice at church tastes like regret.
I nod like I understand. We watch the old women with soft, clumsy hands pass around the crackers like currency.
The pastor talks about blood. I think about tomato stew.
How it always makes me cry. How I once spilled it on my mother’s best tablecloth and she didn’t yell— just said, “That’s a stain we’ll keep.”
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McLord Selasi is a Ghanaian writer, poet, public health researcher, and performing artist. His recent works have been accepted for publication in Subliminal Surgery, Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, The Nature of Our Times, Graveside Press, and elsewhere. You can connect with him on X (@MclordSela64222).
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Issue #28.11 A Triple Issue: Steve Lambert, Corey Miller, Tim Moder
A Poem by Steve Lambert
After Schuyler
I.
Tardigrade Means slow stepper And that’s your New name, Junior But it doesn’t mean What you think it does Just because you’ve found Some neat words for it… But it helps And it’s good to find Things that help And ways to keep going Even if slowly
II.
Aging, your new-old friend, Brings over for you New-old definitions of pain And previously unused words for it Like chronic. You meet them. Come on in, You say, but I have to leave soon, Pal
“I don’t know where I’m going, But I’m gone.”
III.
And, as if a crowd of punishments, The people Arrive As they always do Ruining everything Until the whole world Comes out talking In a burn of yellow morning In the evening And that’s something, too And everyone leaves To see the show Except you And your newfound aches Who may never leave But will teach you new- Old ways To keep going
It’s what they’re there for,
Probably
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Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared in Adirondack Review, Broad River Review, Chiron Review, The Cortland Review, Emrys Journal, Longleaf Review, The Pinch, Saw Palm, Tampa Review, and many other places. In 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize and he is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations. Interviews with Lambert have appeared in print, on podcasts, and public radio. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (2017) and The Shamble (2021), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (2020). His novel, Philisteens, was released in 2021. He and his wife live in Florida.
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A Poem by Corey Miller
My Mentor Sends Me To Nikki Giovanni
She’s turning 80, this will be the last time you’ll get to see her. She’s reading for the reopening Hough Library off Superior, where I used to live in a refabbed school on the second story. English chalkboard running the studio where I paid for my escaping heat until I couldn’t. Where I studied broken music composition, snare drum gunshots putting me to rest until the shiny chamber orchestra was directed at my heartbeat. Frisked for cash beneath snow pants as if my genitals were concealing counterfeits. I contain reasons to riot, but I don’t possess the manpower. Nikki doesn’t read poetry, talks about her life teasing Rosa Parks. When Nikki signs my book of hers, I ask if she has advice for a young poet (I consider my 33 body new to the game), she says You know Rock N’ Roll, do the same. Copyright everything so you don’t go home to sit on coal.
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Corey Miller’s writing has appeared in Salt Hill, Booth, Pithead Chapel, Smokelong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He has received support from Literary Cleveland’s Breakthrough Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he enjoys taking the dogs for adventures. Follow him on BlueSky @IronBrewer Instagram: @IronBrewed or at www.CoreyMillerWrites.com
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A Poem by Tim Moder
Ceres Orders a Fourteen-Inch Hand-Tossed Gluten Free Elote at Pizza Luce, Duluth, Minnesota
It’s late in the evening. I’m with Ceres, waiting for her daughter to show. She looks me up and down, shaking her head. It’s late in the evening. She says, your method of living is making you tired. I assume it’s the drugs. She says, no, it’s not the drugs, it’s how you disregard tradition. I say, listen, “first fields, first fruits”, I get that, but can’t you make a holiday for the ghosts? I order a non-alcoholic beer. The lights go out as she starts to laugh. The pain is in your head, she says. I can hear the pigeons on Superior Street. They laugh with her. It’s late on any evening. A fox runs through the dining room. The food comes. Tajin Sweet Corn, Applewood Smoked Bacon, Fresh Jalapeno, Sliced Green Onion, Feta Cheese, Mozzarella Cheese, Bianca Sauce, Drizzled Cilantro Aioli.
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Tim Moder is a poet from northern Wisconsin. He is an enrolled member of The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Cutthroat, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sho, One Art, and others. He is the author of the chapbooks American Parade Routes (Seven Kitchens), and The Angel of Coincidence (Inkfish).
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