by Dayna Patterson
by Julie Ebin
In the shower I inspect my leg,
prop my foot up
in the tiled corner, pivot
shin to calf, slowly back and forth
like a rotisserie display.
Under the blades miles and miles of leg
reveal themselves. A Sahara of leg!
I stay in the shower long
past the hot, long past
sense, admiring
my strong ankle sinews,
alien knees, stroking silky skin.
I swoon smooth strangeness,
feel illicit for days:
every breeze
up my pant leg a thrill,
I’m more naked than skin.
____________________________________________________________
Julie Ebin is a queer human whose work explores sensuality, finding stillness in nature, and motherhood. Ebin is a member of the Poem Works Boston community. In her earlier years, she studied with C.D. Wright and Gale Nelson. Her work has most recently appeared in Solstice, Touch: The Journal of Healing, and Off the Coast. A co-founder of the former experimental collaborative writing group v.e.r.b.a.t.i.m., Ebin lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with one child and zero cats.
by Abigail Michelini
by Jen Rouse
The beveled mirrors hold
you open to the sky. Reglazed
and lit to dazzle. Sometimes
I am waltzing with you
there. Your wig elaborate
and winged with birds.
The woman in the painting
next door runs through
the pasture wild, unbridled. How
I always want you this way.
Gleaming teeth, eyes that spark
and gallop. We are in worlds split,
untimed, and tragic. So stop
tapping at the glass because I
cannot take you. I raise my hand
to touch your hand to still you there.
(Oh the tapping.) We look beside
ourselves, and I become your
mouth moving so quickly, and you
become my finger against these lips.
The carousel keeps us fixed in place.
I want to tell you this thing about
the way you dance inside me.
Endless. The circles. No sound.
____________________________________________________________
Jen Rouse's most recent book is Fragments of V from Small Harbor Publishing. She is the author of four books of poetry from Headmistress Press: A Trickle of Bloom Becomes You, Riding with Anne Sexton, CAKE, and Acid & Tender. Rouse directs the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College.
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
I welcome winter’s stripped branches,
last year’s nests clinging to the sky,
the possibility of uninterrupted vista.
But this year, Sam tells me,
the generations have turned against us,
since we have eaten up the bounty
they thought would be theirs.
I look around. Perhaps it is so.
Still, I find some glory in final fruits—
a patch of ice, a snow-bent azalea,
one intrepid persimmon failing to fall.
____________________________________________________________
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She has published four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have been anthologized and appeared widely on line and in print. Find her at wendytaylorcarlisle.com.
by Ellen McGrath Smith
After Robert Hayden
When she still tried to entertain over holidays,
before she gave up on pretending things were normal,
she’d often choose a night he worked and set to cleaning house
and placing little bowls of snacks around, begging us to please
not eat them, giving us tasks we probably didn’t complete.
There was a glimmering lull before the first guest arrived,
the tree still lit though school had started up again.
We were on our best behavior for her sake,
and once her friends were all amassed
in a crush of perfume and whiskey sours,
would hang on the stairs and ledges of the night
the way angels are shown to lounge on clouds,
waiting for something to go terribly wrong,
willing the air (in the ineffectual way of angels) to shine.
____________________________________________________________
Ellen McGrath Smith‘s poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody’s Jackknife (West End Press 2015). Her chapbook Lie Low, Goaded Lamb was published in January 2023 by Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Keystone Series.
by D M Gordon
He was, as advertised, a good horse.
We became like an old married couple—
fat and sheeny at thirty, he could still buck me off.
A vet said cancer, in November, before frozen ground
and icy buckets, before a long night’s thrashing
against barn boards when no help would come before dawn.
He grazed the last sweet threads of pasture
in a halter with his name in polished brass.
Someone he didn’t know stroked his neck.
Someone who knew what was coming inserted a needle.
His legs folded, a wisp of grass between his lips.
He was a good horse. It was the death he deserved.
It is the death I deserve. I am telling anyone
who will listen. I too have been good.
____________________________________________________________
D M Gordon is an editor, poet, and novelist. Her prize-winning stories and poems have been published widely. The poetry collection, Nightly, At the Institute of the Possible, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in fiction and two-time finalist in poetry. Upcoming publications include Loosestrife for Porcupines (Blue Light Press), and Gabriel (Sibylline Press), a novel about a lost boy among Salish Sea islands. See dmgordon.com.
by Taylor Light
Frederic Edwin Church, 1861
We had to have the mast to see ourselves,
as if the icebergs’ sapphire veins
did not contain enough for human touch,
or this ice grotto, conserved as a sclera,
which seemed to spill out siren songs
at tidal surges. The lack of scope and scale
distort the scene—where do we place our feet?
Can we tune our ears to hear the ice
making its fractured adjustments, as eerie
as static? Darwin writes that light
will be thrown on the origin of ourselves
and our history. The mast wasn’t originally
in the frame; it was a later addition,
and so were we. Light lilts on the smooth
ice-sheet, as the ocean hushes against ice-
rocks, enduring the wind’s chisel.
But the mast—the mast remains in the painting
like an unwanted splinter, where loneliness
and ice align.
____________________________________________________________
Taylor Light is a poet from Dallas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and has received support from the Convivio Conference in Postignano, Italy. Currently, she is a PhD student at Southern Methodist University with a focus on eco-poetics.
by Constance Bacchus
by Liz Ahl
almost rhymes with earth, the solid dirt
we stand on which is neither one single thing
nor solid, but rather amalgam and alchemy,
boulders and grains, plates adrift on magma
seas, sinking, rising, quaking, tested
by forces seen and unseen.
Like those pocket aces you slow-play
among felt-table strangers, it can feel
like a lock as much as a lark, even
as some small voice mutters fold,
remembering well the particular sting
of that kind of loss, the dwindling chip-stack.
Was it faith rewarded when the hydrangea
we’d rudely pruned, having refused to bloom
for years, finally popped back, a dusty violet trio
returned to prodigal parents? Was it faith
or some other ache in us the whole long time
we silently agreed never to mention that empty space?
____________________________________________________________
Liz Ahl’s most recent collection is the chapbook, A Stanza is a Place to Stand, which won the 2023 A.V. Christie prize from Seven Kitchens Press. Her most recent full-length collection, A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), won the 2023 New Hampshire Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.
by Leah Umansky
After Maria Popova and for Josh Sapan and The Riverhouse
We name what we see and there are ways to see everything.
This morning, after the river cleaned and cleared itself,
The thick, jagged sheets of ice now gone, the phantom river
Once pushing through the then solid coverlet of snow, now gone,
Gone, and streaming down as one river now to the Delaware Water Gap,
We see two ducks diving for fish at the riverbank, their bodies
Curving into a lowercase ‘c,’ or a partnered dance of sharps and flats
On the bars of the river’s length. We reach for The Sibley Guide to Birds
To learn their names: Red-Breasted Merganser and Hooded Merganser.
We watch these beauties now, unfettered, with their hooded tuft of hair,
And their black and white mask, here, at the break of winter when the sun
Has melted everything in sight. Even the December air is not what it was.
____________________________________________________________
Leah Umansky’s newest collection, OF TYRANT, is out now with The Word Works. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her work can be found on PBS, The Slowdown, and such places as the New York Times, RHINO, and Poetry. See leahumansky.com.
by Valerie Martinez
by Jennifer L. Freed
It will hurt you, what your daughter hints
she told her therapist.
Let go of it.
This is not about you.
Your child burns with venom.
All you need is for her to stop hurting
herself. To stop wanting to
hurt. If she blames you
for the scorpion, the snake,
the spider, for the world
that shelters them,
then let her, for now.
For now, bless these sullen drives
to sleepover, school, therapy. Bless
the weighted air you share inside this car.
Bless her hints and jabs,
from which you shape the outlines
of those dark, barbed things
she hides beneath her tongue.
____________________________________________________________
Jennifer L Freed’s collection, When Light Shifts, exploring themes of identity, health, and care-giving, was a finalist for the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Prize and the 2025 Medal Provocateur, and was short-listed for the 2025 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. Recent poems appear in Atlanta Review, Rust and Moth, Sheila-na-Gig, Vox Populi, What the House Knows, and others. See Jfreed.weebly.com.
by Abigail Wender
by Barbara Daniels
A fly trapped
between double panes
of the bathroom window
smacks itself
into smeared glass.
I’m not more
or less despairing
than others
who wait in small houses
for cash to drop
into accounts
so we can buy milk,
tuna, saltines. No one
judges my lack of dusting
or scum on pans
I more or less washed.
That’s me at the window
watching blue light
on wet asphalt.
Maybe you want order
and freedom? Here’s
what you get—fly, irony,
scum, and daffodils
refusing to bloom.
____________________________________________________________
Barbara Daniels’ recent book, Talk to the Lioness, was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. Her books include Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. In 2025 her poems will appear in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Streetcake, The Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
by Taylor Franson-Thiel
Inspired by Sally Keith's "Limus Polyphemus”
That there may be granite unmoveable under gulls departing everywhere.
That there may be applebloom according to its own season, horseshoe crabs laying 4,000 eggs at once.
How can anything predating dinosaurs also outlive everything else?
Tulips are one reason I think God may be real.
Growing up, I pretended to hate the color pink to get boys to like me but I think everything should be pink.
I think everything should come from horseshoe crabs.
Or! Tulips!
When we were dating, it took my Mormon husband 9 months to tell me he loved me.
Our god tells most couples to be married within 6 months. He also promised me my marriage would outlive everything else, and I need that to be true.
Horseshoe crabs have 4,000 babies at once, can you believe that?
It took me 6 months to know I loved him, but it’s the boy’s job to say it first so instead I traced i love you with my fingertips hundreds of times onto his forearms during church.
That there may be firmament below, sky above with three celestial bodies to rule the light.
The lesser, the lesser, and the greater which triggers the appleblooms of spring.
We were married in May.
April showers bring awkward married sex from two recent virgins. Or however the saying departs.
That there may be a dumb rock on my ring finger, a good man inside me, and horseshoe crabs outside on the beach, 4,000 babies fighting their way through sand to open sea.
I didn’t forget about the gulls, I just had to let them leave.
____________________________________________________________
Taylor Franson-Thiel is the author of Bone Valley Hymnal (ELJ Editions 2025). She is a developmental and editorial coordinator for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe, and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found @TaylorFranson on Twitter, @taylorfthiel on Instagram, @taylorfthiel.bsky.social on BlueSky, and at taylorfranson-thiel.com.
by Anne Graue
Of course, Hestia was overlooked &
left in the home to tend the fire.
The existence of tigers didn’t
interest her in the least
as she moved from chore to chore
in the alliterative space. She stoked
& regulated, stirred & heated,
rationing what others would eat
& probably complain about.
She dreamed of having equal time
with marmosets & lemurs—
that was not her story. She barely
made the Pantheon’s top ten—
decidedly on the B-list. She made clean
what was dirty, warmed what went cold.
____________________________________________________________
Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020), and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Find more of her poetry in Sundress Publications Best Dressed Blog, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Unbroken Journal, and River Heron Review. Her book reviews have been published in The Kenyon Review and The Rumpus. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
by Ann Keniston
I remade the landscape with an emphasis not on hunger but sufficiency.
The sufficiency of the light, the branches wrapped in snow.
From nowhere, a coyote appeared and ran by me fast.
Its passing made an almost streak, then tore the afternoon.
After my father died, I tried to tell the story of my life with him.
A neither-nor proposition, the fiction held lightly in truth’s hands.
I pretended I could fold him and put him in my pocket
like an icon to be revered later in private.
And took him out sometimes, not glittering but lacquered.
Sometimes the danger of disclosure overcomes the need to tell.
Years of slow decline create a declination.
The branches make a latticing with space left in between.
Enough, said the man in the fairy tale who is also my father.
Hush, and he put a finger to my lips.
____________________________________________________________
Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. The author of several books including Somatic (Terrapin 2020), she has work forthcoming in Interim, New England Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere.
by Sara Backer