Photo by Pixabay (pexels.com)
Juan Pablo Mobili
The Happiness of Windows
My father, as a young man, wrote a line I have remembered since I was a child... I am as happy as a window. I can’t stop thinking that it was a window — not a bird or a guitar, or a man with two sons. As much as my father kept aspiring to the happiness of windows, he began to close his bedroom door. It was never locked, he left it to his sons to open it, but my hand regretfully renounced turning the knob.
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Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, adopted by New York, and has published extensively in the US and abroad, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. He’s also the author of Contraband (2022), and in 2025, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York.
LeeAnn Pickrell
Upside Down
Photo by Magda Ehlerse (pexels.com)
Two bridges spanning the bay from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. Beside the new bridge the older one in the midst of being demolished and a hole where two halves of the bridge once met, a bridge my father crossed on a streetcar that ran along its bottom deck. The Second World War had just started and he was in pre-flight school. Sundays they’d be dropped at the Claremont Hotel and take the streetcar from there to the City. Tea dances and gin at the St. Francis hotel. A photo I came across, taken at a restaurant in Chinatown after the dance, he and his pals drunk in their Navy blues. And I’m here now, almost seventy years later, in the same city, crossing the new bridge in my car. Sober and middle-age, I’m his life turned inside out, upside down, like I used to imagine the house I grew up in, what it would be like if we turned it around, lived with the furniture on the ceiling and the floor over our heads.
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LeeAnn Pickrell’s debut poetry collection is Gathering the Pieces of Days (Unsolicited Press, 2025). A chapbook, Punctuated, was published by Bottlecap Press, and her book, Tsunami, is forthcoming in 2026 from Unsolicited Press. See more at leeannpickrell.com.
Stefan Sofiski
Black is the Black Sea
And the rakia burnt its way through his mouth, and throat and lungs and rested in his belly, and he smacked his lips, dropped the bottle on the deck, and wiped his cracked mouth with his cracked hand. The boat see-sawed and sun rays seeped through his eyelids and wood pressed into his tailbone, his spine and neck. His hand rubbed his chest and chin, crooked fingers scratching salted white hairs and shriveled skin and speckles of fish scales. His mind floated in the smells of wet wood, and slime and innards that crept into the old planks and his bones. And the boat lulled him. The sun melted and dripped down on him, it flooded the boat, and washed him over the gunnel into the Black Sea that reclaimed him. So he sank into this primordial soup, and his eyes dissolved from their sockets, and his arms and legs swam away from him, and jellyfish stuck to his limbless body and sucked. So he sank into memory, and salt and slime. The boy with the golden hair that he was dissolved, and so did the strong fisherman, and the frail elder, and all else that he was. And his black particles sank through the decks and masts of the sunken ships of the Greek, and rested on the naked skeleton of the ark of Noah that lay in the black sand under the Black Sea. So he will be eaten by the mackerel, and pass through their innards, and he will be the mackerel, and he will swim, and swim in the black soup and he will crawl out of it again and the sun will leak into the hair of the boy that he again will be.
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Stefan Sofiski is the pen name of an obscure Bulgarian author living as an immigrant in the UK. Stefan is also a structural engineer.
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Things That Fall
I’ve been worried about my father-in-law falling. He fell last month & fractured his tail bone. I worry at night about the ground still covered with frost. I take care of two men who walk with canes. I guide them slowly as a ship coming into harbor when they go out to smoke. Sometimes they try to shake my arm off but in one of the rare times I must tell them no. Not this time. I have them wrap their arm around mine as if holding onto an old branch. One of the women I care for has fallen in love with a man who lives in the cabin next door. There is a kind of sweetness watching them walk that needs an unfamiliar word, like saudade, that unnameable longing. At disabled ice-skating R & L, who have Down Syndrome, were named by their student body Prom King & Queen. How radiant they looked, & what a diva L is as she spins. I remember her years ago falling over & over out of the hands of her guide as she learned to trace her blades across the rink’s blue ice. & then one day there she was gliding forward, then backwards. She always had an outfit, spangles, & a tiara in her hair. When they kiss, they kiss lightly, the way a butterfly might land on one’s shoulder. All the fragile people I love, how I worry they may one day fall & never rise. My mother-in-law, obstinate old woman, machinist, hard-headed, refuses my arm. The driveway is glistening like a frozen sky. We have no skates to cross it. Take my arm, I say, worried we both may fall, I guide her to the van. Soon all will be warm. The robins & cardinals will build their nests. & one small one will fall to the ground. Blue eggshell shattered in the early morning light. But not tonight. The early frost has melted. The sky is full of grackles, gulls, & crows. The finches have even returned, & the block’s children are kicking a ball in the street, when one falls & scrapes her knee & screams. I want to tell you about the snow that fell this winter, how at work while everyone I care for was asleep, I watched it, foot after foot with barely any wind. How in love we fall towards one another, our clothes tumbling to the floor we become waterfalls, dusk, sparrows.
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Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is his memoir in prose poems, Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023).
C. J. Trotter
The Shape of Courage
Inside a restroom at a local bookstore, a mother changes her baby’s diaper. She swathes the infant in lotion, all supple and smooth: the baby’s skin, the silky cream — each dazzling and distinct. And just like that I’m back there again, the subway platform on my way to the clinic, and memory is reduced to forms, blaring yet muffled. Ten years ago at the station. A rubber glove — thin, translucent — a doctor’s glove lying on the tracks, its index finger pointing up at me. So it took the form of something accusing, of something mother once said father forgot to use the night I was conceived. She’d been standing at the sink, her hands in Playtex gloves that sloshed in soapy water, hair curled tight in rollers, my Barbie and Ken nestling, nesting under the table, her words flying around the room like hammers directed at father, who wasn’t home again, her belly a mountain of Sissy who’d arrive in less than a week. On the way to the clinic that day I thought of Sissy, our summers away at camp, the time we found it, a thing like nothing we’d seen in the city: it fell from a tree, a baby bird gone wrong. Em-bry-o, I’d explained. Sissy scooped it in her hands and we stood there, knee-deep in jungle-thick grass, the light bleaching our arm hairs, huddled, and she whispered, It’s ugly, but beautiful too. It blended innocent, even in its aborted red, a face verging on the world because its lidless eye was open: a world in a yolk in a palm. I called Sissy from the train station that day and she said, You don’t have to get on that train, you know. So I let three go by. But the next train thundered in with such roaring resolve that I wondered, If courage were form, what shape would it take? And I got on. Even so, since then, occasionally across a train car or a restroom, something small and bright appears, all color and light — sometimes there’s a child. Miniature fingernails, dark shining eyes gently lashed, a conspicuous cowlick, the scent of a lithe, little body, wrists slender and smooth, an insistent plea for ice cream, a soft, warm breath in a mother’s ear and her grateful smile. When pansies puff in tree beds and push through what once was a hard, cold ground, I imagine myself a carpet of feathery field grass, large enough for a clutch of children to romp on, the soft caresses of their bare feet falling like new moons upon my chest.
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C. J. Trotter (a.k.a. Christine Trotter) is a poet and fiction writer based in New York City. She has been nominated for 2024’s Best of the Net, and one of her poems was published in Poetry Daily. Her work has appeared in Typehouse, RockPaperPoem, Euphony, Crack the Spine, FishFood, Spank the Carp, Elm, Cimarron Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among other publications.
Sonia Chauhan
Old Men in Dark Bars
Photo by MART PRODUCTION (pexels.com)
Old men in dark bars draw me in. Heart aflame, I peer into my notebook. No man can thaw a stony childhood. So I carve my fantasies on wood. The old man has a baby face and gleamy button gaze. We order the same drink. I think of my father, waking up from his afternoon slumber, waiting to be served. I stir my drink and think about the eternal wait, of men waiting for women to carry them on their hips and women waiting for a quiet place to weep. The old man slides onto the stool by my side. I hold my eye to the paper, set my thumping heart straight. He clutches the glass with sure fingers. In my chest, father opens his cloudy eyes. I realise I, too, want to be held. I turn to my right and he smiles at my lips. The heart is an empty expanse locked by doors on both ends. Every once in a while, someone comes in, and wins.
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Sonia Chauhan is the author of the award-winning novella, This Maze of Mirrors (2022). Her works have been published in literary journals including The Wise Owl, The Muse, Monograph Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, Zhagaram, and elsewhere.
Unmana
The end of gender
after Ada Limón
Enough of Kali and Draupadi and Penelope and Cleopatra, enough of mothers and princesses and more I am king, I am god, Florence, why not, enough of ladies and sisters and girlfriends, enough of man boobs and man buns and manbags, enough marriage, enough monogamy, don’t even get me started on taking the husband’s last name, enough of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day definitely fuck Raksha Bandhan all the way off, enough of gender reveals and colour-coded babies, enough of flattering and feminine and pretty and why don’t you cover your grays, enough of people like us, enough of women know/do/feel, enough of she she she she her, enough of gi not ga, enough of women’s prizes and women’s retreats, enough of however you identify and enough womyn, enough daughter and wife and bahu and bhabhi, I am asking you to see me.
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Unmana’s novel, Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd, published in 2024, is a deliciously bookish mystery set in Bengaluru that features India’s first fictional queer detective. Unmana’s short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Deodar Prize. They live in Bombay.
Amanda Passmore-Ott
The Lost Paths of Alzheimer's
I will not ask you what the browning cornstalks, whispering like rustling pages, say, in the meadows beyond your window, nor to remember the shape of oak leaves above the trail, the roughness of bark as you pressed a salty cheek into shag bark hickory, nor to describe the smell of moss among its roots, nor about acorns hard as marbles underfoot or of kicking walnuts down the path, nor to translate the scolding of red squirrels or the warning cackles of crows, nor to remember the way thick saplings spread open into vistas of rounded mountains crowned with scree or of the boots that stumbled there, nor about spotted salamanders along the creek beds in steep, crooked hollows, or the shed skins of rattlesnakes among the boulders, nor what pages you’ve already lost — the slow opening and closing of a butterfly’s wings, the sound of katydids as shadows gather beneath the canopy, the burnt toast taste of woodsmoke on the tongue, or the sunset palette of dying leaves, but I will bring you the words, cupped in my hands like soil, rich and loamy.
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Amanda Passmore-Ott teaches writing at Penn State University and lives in Hollidaysburg, PA, in the heart of the ridge and valley portion of the Appalachian Mountains. Her recent chapbook, Human Wilderness, was published in 2024. Amanda is also a faculty affiliate at Shaver's Creek Environmental Center, where she works with the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Project and recently completed her Nature Journaling Educator's Certificate through the Wild Wonder Foundation.
Barbara Krasner
Levitation
Maybe the floor in the operating room is checkerboard. Maybe there are spectators watching the surgical team administer the anesthesia, insert the camera through the endoscopy, insert a stent to drain the blockage in my bile duct. Maybe someone, a healer or my mother, sits at the head of the gurney, places her hands over my face to help me relax. Or maybe she is going to answer my pleas and deliver me to her. I tire of my broken body. The red bowl on the floor collects the confluence of my many chronic conditions that now take on chimeric proportions, while a hyena growl-laughs as I strain to endure until an unknown power lifts the healer and me into the air, suspended.
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Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her prose poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Blaze/VOX, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw: A Journal of Prose Poetry, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey.
Tarn Wilson
I Don’t Like the Word Illness
Illness says its name so self-importantly, as if it thinks it deserves a capital letter. I don’t like that big I next to that pair of lls: a row of stiff, emaciated people, standing claustrophobically close but never holding hands. Lowercase ill is worse. A pinheaded child with two sick-thin parents. She’s not even standing between them where she might have some protection. Just standing next to the curb where she could get hit by a car. I don’t like the sound iyl-ness, which makes a slug of the tongue. And mine has married Chronic, a sound like a thick, phlegmy cough. I don’t like the way illness looks as if it’s missing its first letter, like it wants to be Stillness but will never get there. Maybe I have a Pillness. All these bottles and boxes. Or a Drillness for the dull routines. Surely, I have chronic Spillness with my clumsy hands and feet. I spill my drink, my medicine, my tears. Trip over tricky sidewalk snakes no one else can see. I’m in danger of Shrillness from arguments with specialists, who think women only suffer from anxiety. A side effect? Chronic Billness for which I’ve never budgeted enough. It’s true, I’m often cold, but this is not Chillness because I’m not, as I wish I were, calm about the whole thing. I cannot claim a Killness, as this will neither murder nor release me. Yet this Fillness does try to claim all of me: a hose filling my body as if I were a vase. I need Gillness to swim through these waters. This Hillness never seems to have a crest. To keep going, yes, I have to find the depths of my Willness. It has driven me to Quillness, to this writing I have needed and avoided. On my best days, I’m grateful the Distillness has focused me. With so little energy to spare, every day, I must choose again what matters: no longer will I leave that little i so exposed and lonely.
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Tarn Wilson is the author of The Slow Farm, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. She is taking a break from prose and shamelessly flirting with poetry. She has been published in Only Poems, Pedestal, Potomac Review, Sweet Lit, and more.
Simona Carini
Colors of the Pandemic
Turquoise water of Patagonia lakes brought back in our eyes, carried through security checks, past questions about visiting China, kept alive until the Ides of March, when turquoise turned to white: ambulances, tents outside hospitals, ICU’s bed sheets, shrouds, stones on mass burial sites. White solitude of walks in silent parks, white western trilliums blooming unseen on the forest ground, grocery stores’ lines where we stood surrounded by white space, islands. We found comfort in no double-line against white background, not the C word, not someone we knew. Later, a white vial, white cotton balls, white tape where the needle had pierced. Traces of turquoise still tucked into memory’s folds, funds to draw from as white kept whirling in the forecast.
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Simona Carini writes poetry and nonfiction from Northern California, has published a poetry collection titled Survival Time, and can be found on the web at simonacarini.com.
Sarp Sozdinler
Emergency Contact
I listed you again / even though we don’t speak / even though you left the last message on Read again / I write your name in every hospital form / because it still sounds as if you’re helping me / and that still means something / maybe love is just muscle memory / a default setting / like when the browser autofills your email / and my stomach knots before my eyes can / I rehearse the call / imagine the nurse saying she’s stable / and you blinking like that means anything anymore / when we were sixteen we swore / I wore your hoodie / and you kissed my, of all places, clavicle like signing off an emotional contract / I used to believe in that kind of magic then / the binding spell of shared breath / these days I just want a name that sits beside me / and still fits in the mouth / when the hands shake / when the blood is at once too fast and too slow / when the body forgets what to do
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Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer and poet who has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, JMWW, and Normal School, among other journals. Their work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently working on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Howie Good
Elegy for the Ephemeral
The neighbors install iron bars and security cameras for added protection when it’s the agony in their own minds of which they should beware. Basquiat, just days before he fatally overdosed, punched a hole in his bathroom window. Near it he scratched the words “Broken Heart.” He was 27, 28, his face covered in sores. Even while I’m thinking these things, I’m debating if these are things I should be thinking or whether on gravestones they should put an empty circle, the hobo sign meaning “Nothing to be gained here.”
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Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collections THE DARK (2024) and AKIMBO (2025) from Sacred Parasite.