by Athena Kildegaard
A cardinal in a lilac beside the parking lot
by Esther Lin
by Rickey Laurentiis
by Stine An (a (translation of Yoo Heekyung)
by Ruth Dickey
by Simone Zapata
by Barbara Hamby
by Naomi Shihab Nye
by Natalie Shapero
by Jo-Ann Mort
by Ae Hee Lee
by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe
A simple sky beams into the afternoon, 34-degree bank sign blinking overhead. I’m waiting for the light to change, mid-October, out on a corner, a thousand fingerprints on the silver signal walk button in front of me. At home the socks sit in separate piles. Your old record albums stacked separately. My winter coats in their own separate closet. We’ve always come together best in argument, our emotional forte, the dark ash of thrown books and shoes. It took hardly any time at all for us to learn the value of my body, its intonations. Its pitch. At the curb, transgressions mound in a thick paste of early snow.
Crosswalk signal bleating
walk, walk, walk
I do what it says
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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review and author of Prayer Can Be Anything (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have or will soon appear in On the Seawall, The MacGuffin, SWWIM Everyday, Split Rock Review, Mom Egg Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others.
by Suzanne Cleary
Giant is the film where Rock Hudson is upstaged by a piece of rope.
He sits behind a big desk while James Dean sits before him, waiting
to see if he’ll be fired—for what, I’ve forgotten. There are lots of things
that can go wrong on a ranch in West Texas. Hudson owns this ranch.
Dean lives in a shack the size of an ice cream truck. In this scene
he holds a piece of rope 15 or 20 inches long. He drapes it across
his palm, pulls it slowly off. He winds it loosely around his wrist,
slips it off. Actors cite this scene as a masterclass in presence.
Dean has the dirty-blond hair of the man I once saw at a funeral home,
wearing a shirt from the local hockey team: bright green, a white number.
He waited in line with the rest of us, and when finally he stood
near the casket, he held the hand of the widow
between his cupped palms, as if he were holding a bird.
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Suzanne Cleary’s fifth book, The Odds (New York Quarterly Books 2025) was selected by Jan Beatty as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, her poems appear in Best American Poetry and journals including The Atlantic, Southern Review, and Poetry London. She is Core Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing Program of Converse University.
by Rebecca Brock
She didn’t say it to me.
But I was old enough to understand
it pertained to girls like me,
to the women we would be—the not
born with it, I mean. I’m trying to explain why,
when the house painter sent me a video
of him playing the saxophone
in a dim but freshly painted
dining room, naked
beneath his white overalls,
his eye contact
with the camera as he wailed—
I really didn’t think it meant
what he probably meant it to mean—
he’d talked to me about his daughter,
about his wife. He’d be back in the spring,
to finish the outside of the house.
When he fell off someone else’s roof
and broke his foot, I was surprised
by how safe it felt
to ask for my deposit money back.
When he said I was beautiful
I found out I still believed
I should say thank you.
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Rebecca Brock’s awards include the 2025 Lascaux Poetry Prize, The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor’s Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, she is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). See rebeccabrock.org.
by Susanna Lang
Uzès
A pigeon trusts our slender balcony with two eggs
though it’s September, and the leaves she stuffed
around the fragile shells are dry. A late start for her
as it is for us. We step softly, not to startle her
as we shift our few things here or there, looking
for the corner where a chair would be content to sit,
a comfortable space where the buffet can wrap its arms
around our plates and forks. She must have thought
she’d found a quiet spot, empty until we arrived
with our baggage, our foreign speech, a vacuum cleaner.
We want her to stay, want to feel her brooding
presence on the other side of the glass as she waits
for the weeks to pass, for her eggs to stir and crack
into loud insistent voices, into need and finally flight.
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Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This (Unsolicited Books), appeared in 2023, along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). She was the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Rhino Reviews, and The Slowdown.
by Elina Katrin
by M.P. Carver
I’m in the bathroom hurling my guts out. From inside me
comes a needle, a heart, a dozen paint chips
There is no solution to the repetition of morning
My roommate listens to the mice in the walls
entering their own golden age of discovery
Aren’t trees, storms, earth, stone just common things?
Another street, another continent maybe, but the same sun?
There is toothpaste in my hair, smothering the mites
I have fostered there across 800 generations
My roommate helps me hold my head up, puts my heart back
brushes color and sharpness off my knees
The year is 2025, and I am in my 2025th week of life
All around the earth life simmers into vapor
Demodex mites live 2-3 weeks. Domestic mice 2-3 years
The bathroom is old and tired, but still it has a window
And beyond that window, a winter, a weakening sun
Though studded with light, the sea is desolate
So desolate, it’s hard to imagine
____________________________________________________________
M.P. Carver is a poet and artist from Salem, MA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, and Mantis, among others. Her second chapbook, Hard Up, is available now from Lily Poetry Review Books. She directs the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and co-founded and edits Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag.
by Béthany Pozzi-Johnson
lest you one day ask, let me enlighten you as to why I
chose to live on an island in the middle of the Pacific
with nameless neighbors beyond the bamboo
within a studio nestled into the mountain which has received
no friends, no one for tea, high or low, nor a jam session
unending songs looping riffs and phrases
nor sangha sitting time between bells using the bronze bell
my mother gave me for my 34th birthday, catching wind
that her daughter whose only full time employment had been as a
karma yogi in the Guatemalan Highlands, years ago, who now
prefers silence, the silence which the refrigerator’s hum is the
greatest disturbance to, the daughter who liked small spaces
like the one next to the fridge in our apartment growing up
the space sealed off by a plank of fake wood, you know the kind,
a plank of pressed sawdust, held together by glue, pretend
wood blocking out a tiny cubby-hole she willingly dropped herself into
from the top of the fridge, armed with a screwdriver, to apply tool to
screw, and open up the dusty gap, making way for brooms—
that daughter, who in seventh grade hid in a trunk
during her book report on Houdini, to then leap forth
in a flash of enthusiasm: she-who-loves-small-spaces
she-who-loves-silence she-who-loves-privacy she-who-loves
the-ocean: turquoise and saturated blues, or covered with storms
muted lilacs and radiant gray-green expanding its heart
open to the infinite reaches of the planet she loves,
so she sequesters herself away to be able to see its
subtle shades, hear the delicate tones, the refined voices
of the sun-soaked and rustling bamboo, the incandescent peak
rising out of the sea, tickled by waters and whale song;
she-who-glows-with-love she-who-glows-with-glee
she-whose-roof-has-become-the-star-bright-sky
whose-floor-is-mountain-close-whose-walls-are
salt-rich-breath-she-who-she-who-she-who
____________________________________________________________
Béthany Pozzi-Johnson, winner of the Mark Linenthal Award for Poetry, holds an MA in Songwriting and a BA in Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University and Bath Spa University in the UK. She has worked as an editor, translator and astrologer, and currently lives on an island in the Pacific where she studies Gaelic and sings sean-nós.
by Susan Cohen