Photo by Alan Scott
Beth Kephart
Black
He took my colors. He arranged them. He laid the tubes of Golden Open acrylics out across the warped stretch of ribbed cardboard, setting aside the hues that do not exist in his vocabulary of beauty, though any color plus another color plus another color can make some good. He said. While discarding most in favor of some. The lesson was black. Ultramarine plus Burnt Sienna plus Veridian Green equals. Ultramarine plus Red Oxide plus Veridian Green equals. Depending on the progress and degrees of quantities and transparencies. Which is the black to be achieved? What is the thin roll of a far shadow and what the incumbency of despair? Progress. Or degrees. Mix it with a flat stick. Round it with a brayer. See. Then he leaves. Then it is his absence in this room that he once built for me—hauling the old radiator out piece by piece, the sofa where our guests would sleep, the desk, the things we had needed before my father, a cataclysm, died, which is when I didn’t want words as much as I wanted color, and he said, This room will be yours, and he made the room, and he left me to decide how to press my heart into paint and paint into meaning and life into the pigment ghosts of color, into the curve of shadows, and now again he leaves me with a plastic tool box of Golden Opens. Reves. Brayers. A straight silver edge. Leaves me to Josef Albers and Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko and Eva Hesse, so that I am never lonely in his absence, but only because he is a beaten track of dirt away—out the door and up the stairs of his studio, bent over his own dabbed palette.
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Beth Kephart is a National Book Award finalist and an award-winning author of some 40 books in multiple genres, a fiber artist, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and the creator of The Hush and the Howl (Substack), which melds words and art. More at bethkephartbooks.com.
Satoshi Iwai
Our Yellow
Photo by Alan Scott
I buy a yellow canary at the pet shop you run. You tell me that the bird has a beautiful singing voice. I take it to my apartment and put it into a cage, but it can only cough like an aged man all through the night. The next morning I find that it is dead. When I visit you again, you have converted your shop into a pharmacy. After listening to my complaint about the canary, you give me a packet of yellow pills and tell me that the pill will let me hear a really beautiful song. I buy it and come home. I take the pill and lie in my bed. Several minutes later, I feel my heart turn into a chunk of butter and attract dozens of singing cats. In my fading consciousness, I suppose that your pharmacy will be soon converted into a temple filled with yellow flowers.
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Satoshi Iwai was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Newfound, Into the Void, Phantom Drift, Outlook Springs, and elsewhere.
Kayci Baldwin
nana nana boo boo
Ask me where I’m from, and I will point to two oceans, a cherry tree, and fireflies that dance along the honeysuckle. I’ll show you bunk beds, and playdates, and twelve full days of Christmas with hand-knit stockings and multi-colored lights. I’ll paint you a picture of a trampoline covered with leaves, and a fridge covered with spelling tests, and the pride of a 97 covered by “what happened to the other three points?” when Dad got home. I will grab us everything bagels with cream cheese on the way to Sunday service, and midweek service, and family devotionals, and bible talks, and teen rallies where I’ll glue two pieces of construction paper together just so you can see what happens when I tear them apart. I’ll shuffle a deck of cards for each of us, and ask you if you’re really going to eat all that, and we’ll remember what it was like to be little girls surrounded by adults who chose between blind eyes and wandering ones. I’ll show you the wedding gown tailored to my 19-year-old frame and remind you that it’s not abuse unless he hits you. I’ll chant nana nana boo boo and tell you to shine like a star.
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Kayci Baldwin is a writer and graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, where she examines gender, sexuality, and religion. A cult survivor and Harvard College alumna, her writing explores faith and the erotic, two things Kayci sees everywhere.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
This Table Is from Ducks Unlimited
My family gave me furniture, more utilitarian than love, burdens I lugged around the continent or stored in seedy warehouses between degrees. They bequeathed me wooden chests topped with granite slabs. Dressers, tables, chairs. Dishes too delicate to be eaten from. Jewelry I don’t wear unless channeling my grandmother. I took the air conditioner and tv she instructed me to throw into the street when she forgot how they worked. I burdened myself with the upright piano. Pets. Plants. Afghans. Too much of everything. In a world teeming with things, things are nothing. And all things fall apart. For every chair, a loose dowel. Each cabinet a missing latch. Dishes chip. An idiot poet sits on the arm of a chair and destroys it. Weekly I carry one more to the basement then to the curb. There was the house, a cottage, a mansion, cabins. All of these had to be emptied. I never found my coat tree. Now I live above my own warehouse. Last fall I killed the piano. Today, I fill the car my cousin willed me with clothes no one’s worn in decades, if ever, and lug them to Goodwill. I have chosen almost nothing. Everything in my life has been a gift.
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Elizabeth Kerlikowske teaches Ekphrastic Writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and volunteers at an alternative high school. She has been published widely.
Eleanore Tisch
Evolution Objects
My gravegoods: an opal, an amethyst, my collected notebooks, salad mid-decompose. an assortment of sentimental pebbles: river rocks from the Racoon, a single special sand grain from Lunt Street Beach, a minor boulder from Sunshine Canyon (or maybe it was Sugarloaf), the ones I’ve yet to assemble from shores on which I’ve yet to step. a gilded pocket mirror that fits perfect in my palm. my accumulated letters of acceptance. a handwritten list of my allergies (tree nuts, fish, animal dander) on a blue sticky-note. a spliff. the red oval Le Creuset dutch oven my grandmother gave me. a variety of stonefruits in a miniature glass circus tent. a tube of Clinique black honey almost-lipstick. last summer’s dahlias. the last pair of panties I wore while alive. whatever’s left to find of the Persian blue ceramic plate. a strand of fox kit fur and the decapitated wing of a barn swallow and a little bit of their shit. an ancient disc of marzipan. Lavender bubble bath. an otter whisker. a goose egg. a jar of lemons and ginger and garlic preserved in honey. the nice Bordeaux. kitchen shears. a few good sticks for kindling. paper fairy lanterns. laminated copies of Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII” and Ashbery’s “The Painter” and the periodic table of elements. “Frederick” by Leo Lionni. my accumulated letters of rejection. a colossal zucchini. a bust of me carved from butter. a corked vial that contains a solution of my organic matter: uterine blood, cum, sweat, urine, all three kinds of tear. a parmesan rind and a pomegranate. his blue guitar pick. the chef’s knife he left me. my appetite. my linen apron. my crumpled one-way ticket.
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Eleanore Tisch is a writer, educator, and artist from Chicago. She has lived all across the Midwest, from the foothills of the Rockies to the grassland plains of Iowa to the sprawl of Chicago itself. Read more of her work at eleanoretisch.com.
Melissa Feuerstein
The Ecosystem of Dreams
Through the ecosystem of dreams, I've collected fragile materials: slivers of shell, old concealed envelopes, fallen leaves on the verge of browning, a tarnished antique lantern. I was driven by an invisible force through cold storage chambers, through hallways charged with reflected angles, rearranging me from every perspective. I took cell phone pictures of architectural unravelings—the faded turquoise on a wood fence, paint peeling from brick walls. I documented the shifts in alignment, how surfaces fractured, studying what might be holding them together. It felt like curating an exhibition of strange offerings gathered from different venues. In these dreams, I kept the lights on when I could, searching porous stone surfaces and hidden crevices for stuffed notes, comparing them to the more visible signs, like the occasional marquees advertising bags of potpourri or framed butterflies. If I could cross over, toward the orchards, toward the lighthouse—maybe the seasons would recalibrate into a more sustainable way of being. It was always wobbly, off-kilter, changing direction without warning. Carrying this faded ticket in my pocket, I explored stairwells, units, caves, and attics, the bag on my back stuffed to capacity with evidence of my sightings, preserving what the phone might not hold. I even thought: I'll bring these items back to waking life as physical evidence. Anyone can make anything appear “real” on their smartphones, and I wanted proof my experience was authentic—that I am a reliable narrator. In this ecosystem of dreams, the undercurrent was always music—distant but aching—a deep steady drone connecting one place to another. The last time I was there, I sat at an empty bar with shadows settled in booths behind me. I ordered a coffee and opened a small serrated sketchbook to see what I wouldn't draw. Above me, an electric bulb flickered red, making sure I couldn't define my work—I had to draw by feeling. After a while, the room ignited with bright yellow, allowing me to see the marks I made and what it revealed.
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Melissa Feuerstein’s writing appears, or is forthcoming, in Maudlin House, BULL, Oddball Magazine, The Argyle Literary Magazine, and Blood + Honey. She writes across prose poetry, flash, hybrid forms, and image-driven work exploring memory, place, perception, and the unstable edges of narrative. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Lynne Schilling
Pilgrimage
I walk on a coastal path past my home and a string of other beach houses to a large, wooded hill. A sherpa lightly presses his hand under my elbow. Our way is lit only by a full moon and the spare lighting from upstairs windows. A path leads up through the woods to the hilltop. The clearing at the top is circled by bigleaf maples, Douglas firs, and red alders. There is a small canteen, teak benches scattered here and there. I find my mother, who died 15 years ago, dressed in a diaphanous grey robe, sitting on one of the benches. I sit and she takes my hand. She tells me about my ancestors and as she speaks, she points to some of them walking about the clearing. Everyone except me is robed. Later I realize they are all dead. I am proud to be part of this lineage. It is time for me to go. Do you need a sherpa, my mother asks, but I say I can find my way back. I carefully pick my way down the hill to the path leading to my home, the Pacific Ocean smashing rocks on my right, a line of windows on my left blinking like fireflies.
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Lynne Schilling began writing poetry seriously at 75. She has published in New Verse News, MacQueen’s Quinterly, contemporary haibun online, presence, and others. She has poems forthcoming in Ribbons, The Healing Muse, and Eucalypt. She also has a chapbook forthcoming entitled My Father’s Fedora (Finishing Line Press, 2027).
Michelle Bitting
Lunch Date with Garbo
at my Mother’s Grave
Joan, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, 1939
It hasn’t happened yet, but I wish it would. Two things I know: Greta will be late and there’s snow over there on the San Gabriels. I have a basket of G’s homemade favorites ready: creamed chipped beef on toast, some fried potatoes. Angel Food Cake both she and Mother loved, sweetened with blackberries soaked overnight in tapioca and sugar. Unsure of what to wear on a brisk November Friday, I’ve opted for black corduroys, black sweater. It’s closing in on Thanksgiving; a holiday I have little use for now Mother’s dead and Father’s remarried. Must make something special of myself in this family’s branchless rooms, I’m thinking. Like Mother and Greta, shaping fragments of their lives into something radiant, baring its teeth. Crawled out from under manly avalanches, the frozen white forms. I nestle a blanket under my slacks to ward off frost still socked in the lawn’s iced blades, look up to see the first pale beams of sun slicing the gray, thin as my tardy lunch guest’s arms. Her lanky, lustrous frame indelible on film as in my own mind’s eye, except there’s a gap, always the rift between what’s real and fixed in memory. She and Mother were close, onscreen and off, but will she come? Then, as if to answer, to confound my unbelief, she suddenly appears, like a specter peeled from the mausoleum’s marble cheek, downslope of where I sit and Mother sleeps. She’s wrapped in camelhair, neck to ankles, her silk pajamas peeking through, like she just stepped off the MGM set and hailed a cab here. She flies to me, coat and milky satin rippling behind, somehow lifting her. My poor child, she sings, forgetting I’m a woman now, a new mother even. Oh, G.G., I whimper. I can’t help myself. My mother is gone, locked in the shivering dark below. There, there she croons, bending down, folding me up in her coat like a lost kitten. My dear girl, she says. I’m here! Let me warm you up. And I do let her, though I’m eying the basket, the feast I’ve made—chipped beef and crisp potatoes, the sodden blackberries—more than enough for two. And the cake—like eating a cloud, Mother used to say. Food for angels, she’d smile, slicing into that ethereal sweet, sliding a mound of her airy confection my way. Not knowing how soon she’d be one herself, our angel feasting on clouds.
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Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Master Artist Project Grantee and is the author of seven poetry collections. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
Cherie Hunter Day
Tourists
Coyotes learn to be punctual. Bold as the grit with heat spooling in the background, they saddle up alongside cars snaking their way through the campground. There’s a right time for everything in the desert. Their eyes say it all. Thanks for joining us. Take a moment to read this hunger as your own and give us your fat rendered under a sharp blue sky. Put away your concerns for safety. Trust us. We want what’s best for the both of us. Remember you are just tourists here. Make this dimension among the giant boulders and desert daggers a staycation. It’s entirely up to you. But whatever you decide, we will inhabit your dreams.
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Cherie Hunter Day’s work has appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly, Mid-American Review, Rust & Moth, The Mackinaw, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. Her most recent collection is A House Meant Only for Summer (Red Moon Press, 2023).
Holly Karapetkova
Insomnia Loops
Photo by cottonbro studio (pexels.com)
Insomnia Loop #63
Shadows shift across the dirt. The sun covers itself in clouds. What is given can be taken away: the sound of a mouth opening. Listen. Wind rifles through dead leaves, rising and falling like a symptom. I keep my passport in a drawer by the bed, always ready. I believe in conspiracies, a single house standing in a bombed-out city. I have trouble sleeping for all the air raid sirens echoing through my head. I’m still a child in this nightmare. I try to come back to the present, back to myself, but my mind has already set off without telling me where it’s going, landmines littering every field.
* * *
Doorways
I tried to lock you out but you came in through an unlatched window, emptied yourself out on the table, a thousand forms of miscommunication. Survival is not always the goal and time is not always the enemy—there are things worse than death, though we have trouble acknowledging this fact. Suffering. A perspective broken by denial. In the stories you tell yourself, you’re the one running back into the burning house to rescue me from where I’m cowering, surrounded by flames. In the true version of events, you are the one cowering, paralyzed with fear, and only a fire department can drag you out. The fire is all in your head. The smoke looks down from the trees, imagining the sky.
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Holly Karapetkova is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her third book of poems is Dear Empire from Gunpowder Press.
Jill Gonet
The Scale of Things
She was trespassing, but didn’t realize it, and stepped on the toes of a giant. How could she have seen it, when the scale of this giant extended through everything? And she stepped on its toes without knowing, and hopped upon its feet, and smelled a burning smell that stung her nose and lungs. She looked around for the flames, for any smoke, but none was to be seen, and the burning rose into her feet. She didn’t mean to steal the fire. Sometimes the strangest things would happen, and then nothing was ever the same. She had often stumbled accidentally, into places she should not have been—perhaps because she’s small and beneath notice, and not bright enough of herself to distinguish between a reward and a punishment, so no one bothers to annihilate her. She’d just laugh anyway and pop up somewhere else like a drop of time, like a drop of rain hopping up and down with the top of a pond.
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Jill Gonet’s poetry has been widely published in literary journals and anthologized. In addition, she translates Chinese Taoist poetry and has had three volumes published: Riding the Phoenix to Penglai (2014), Red Pellet, Golden Bones (2016), and Affinity with Immortals (2019).
Naomi Stenberg
One Spring Morning
SHE WASN’T SURPRISED when flowers started growing out of her face, her mouth and eyes. The flowers had been germinating inside her for a long time. They were beautiful…daisies and dahlias and roses. The seeds, somehow planted, nourished by her blood, her breath, the sun. She had felt an energy, a kind of twitching, a readiness in her face. Something was either terribly wrong or terribly right. She wasn’t sure. She had dreamed of her blossoming and when it finally happened, one spring morning, the seed-coats splitting and stems then buds coming forth, she was glad. Delighted. In awe of what her body could do now. She went to her family and friends, bursting with joy, with flowers. They were not happy with what they saw. Her best friend said, “You look awful. You need to prune your face.” Her mother turned away and didn’t turn back. Her youngest cousin just laughed. When the flowers kept coming, and her fingers became stems with red poppies at the ends, everyone stopped visiting, stopped calling. She had expected surprise, maybe a period of adjustment, not absence. But she couldn’t stop what had already begun. Couldn’t wait to see what would blossom in her next. She did feel lonely, at times. She was the only person she knew transitioning into flower. There must be others in the world who were blossoming. She would find them.
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Naomi Stenberg (she/they) is blossoming in Seattle. A poem of Naomi’s was nominated for The 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards. Her latest chapbook, The Measure of Breath, is coming out this Fall. Her work can be found in Sky Island Journal, Does It Have Pockets, Soul Poetry, and more.
Erin Lockwood
Learning to Read
The day my country massacred 120 schoolgirls in Iran was the first day my daughter curled up on the couch and read a book to herself. Came downstairs to find her in a nest of pillows, snuggled up with the grey kitten and reading Pete the Cat, no one helping her at all. My heart, swollen from the blunt force of waking to a headline about children slaughtered in my name, swelled now again with pride. Strange that tissue inflammation should be our metaphor of choice for that suffusion of joy at witnessing accomplishment. An enlarged heart can kill you. Pride can kill you too, at least when it precedes a deadly fall. But we weren’t going to die, not here in our safe house, in our safe country, in our safe schools. Not today and not from a Tomahawk cruise missile. We weren’t going to die, and those 120 girls were never going to read anything ever again. A heart ought to swell from that blow. It ought to be manifest somewhere, on the bodies of those who live.
Weeks later, we stop at a beach outside San Diego. On the sand below a bluff dotted with scraggled pines and windblown wildflowers we watch shorebirds beneath a low grey sky. Once, years before either daughter arrived to swell my belly and my breasts, my husband and I saw an osprey on the sand, tearing at the flesh of a fish it had pulled from the ocean, too heavy to lift beyond the shore. Seagulls crowded around the carnage, the boldest or hungriest braving the osprey’s curved beak for a mouthful of entrails. Today, I unpack a beach towel, sweatshirts, apples and crackers for the girls. You can’t eat up on the bluff. There are signs about it; my daughter read them to us. They don’t want the wildlife developing a taste for fish-shaped crackers, or maybe they’re worried about trash, I’m not sure. But down here on the beach I guess they’re less worried about the shorebirds, trusting them to prefer the real thing. I wouldn’t be so sure, because I’ve seen seagulls destroy a tote bag for a pack of Lay’s. One minute I’m rinsing sand off a half-eaten apple and the next, like a flock of sanderlings startled, we lift our faces to the sky: the sound of the surf and swells does not drown out the roar of an Osprey helicopter. “What’s that?” she asks because for all her emergent literacy, she cannot yet read the invisible words inscribed on the creature’s bloated belly, cannot read Marines, cannot read war, cannot read death in the staccato purr of rotors. A lesson for another day. She will have so many of them, and those other girls will not, and because I cannot swallow that truth down into my belly, past my swollen heart, I leave it here, for the scavengers.
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Erin Lockwood is a political science professor, writer, and mother living in southern California. Her poetry has been published in Red Door Magazine and Union Spring Literary Review.
Orah Levin-Minder
Lost at White Lake
Sun trembles on the surface of White Lake, edged in evergreens. I poke the lip of the lake with a sandy toe. Beside me, my sun-drenched son, wrapped in a sandy lifejacket, sleeps in the stroller. I extend the shade over him and drape it with a towel. My eldest daughter weaves an imaginary world in the skeletal play-structure behind us. My toddler orbits her big sister. These solitary moments are fleeting. I gasp at them, an exhausted swimmer reaching for sand. A scream pierces the moment. I stand, turn, run from the trembling lip, past my son in the stroller, up and over the sandy knoll. I see my toddler. She is lost, screaming, disoriented, out of orbit. She flails, drowning in open air. She gropes; trips; falls; crawls; screams; collapses; drags herself across the sand. She has no breath left. Her mouth gapes. Concerned strangers hover. I call her name; run; drop; gather her body into my chest. She heaves her wordless story in wet, shuddering gasps into the flesh of my neck. She tries to breathe me into her. “I’ve got you,” I say again and again. I stand, crushing her into my chest. Our hearts tremble together. When air begins to linger in our lungs and our hearts throb again in a synchronized beat, I walk back over the knoll to the edge of the lake. My son is still asleep in the stroller. The towel has slipped. His bare skin is hot and red.
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Orah Levin-Minder is a writer and educator. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and River Teeth. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner, their five children, and their giant rescue puppy named Elsa.
Daniel Edward Moore
Imprisoned By Lace and Longing
What makes it so unbearably hard yet miraculous to fathom is how the mind’s political persona, thick as the walls at Guantanamo Bay painted with piss and screams can make the heart a foreign land, a small red glove of old crushed silk the size of an emperor’s fist. Under the bed’s wrinkled sheets on the shore of a leather sea is allegedly where the softer side was imprisoned by lace and longing. I looked until the beating stopped. I could not look again.
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Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, and others. His work is forthcoming in The Meadow, New Plains Review, Rust Belt Review, and Action Spectacle Magazine. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
Jarrod Moss
The Patients
I peeked in. He peeked out. There were bars between us. Who was inside was not clear. The oxygen line was twisted around his paw. The fluid pump blinked green beside him. Someone had folded his blanket into a square. I walked past. He watched me. I treated a corneal ulcer in a cat. His eyes stayed fixed on me. I performed a laceration repair. He watched every movement. I walked past his cage again. He never broke eye contact. We looked at the clock. It said midnight. We made eye contact. He never looked away. Neither did I. Music drifted through the room. The orchestra moved so slowly it almost sounded frozen. It was comforting at first, until it wasn’t. The nurse was beside me. She didn’t speak. Just watched. She waited without looking away. Soft strings drifted through the ward. Then the music stopped. Nothing was rushed. Not even the silence. I spoke without averting my gaze. “We need to go in there.” “Where?” She asked. “The cage.” “We already are,” she said. The suction device was unwrapped carefully. He never seemed to blink. I attached a syringe. I suctioned thirty-five milliliters of fluid. Detached the syringe. “He’s still bleeding into the abdomen,” she said. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t look us in the eyes. I turned my back to both of them. The door was somewhere behind me. Even when I turned away I felt us staring.
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Jarrod Moss is a veterinarian, hospital owner, and lecturer with more than 20 years of experience in clinical medicine and surgery.
Andreas Fleps
Rex
One evening in my early 20s, I gathered my dying, 12-year-old corgi into my arms, wove a basket with my legs, and cradled him in a chrysalis of concerned flesh. All of his organs were laying down their swords as they surrendered to time’s endless army. I wept a storm into his fluffy fur until he smelled like the day my mom and I took him to the dunes up in Michigan, where he rolled in the sand and then leaped into the tranquil waves of the lake again and again as if he was attempting to see how many baptisms he could squeeze into an afternoon. I whispered my heart into the church spires of his ears, and as I fought for his life with odes composed of his goodness, I wielded the last weapon I had left; I never believed in prayer, but I knew I often prayed without me knowing, which isn’t surprising because I don’t know of a teardrop that isn’t a rosary bead. One screams, Ouch, and another yells, Yes, and another pleads, Stop, and another mutters under its breath, No, no, no, with its eyes tightly closed. So, I prayed despite his older age because death is always new when it’s personal, and he made it through the night and seemed more himself in the morning, and later that day, to the disbelief of the veterinarians, all of his labs came back normal, and he lived 4 more years as if miracles were meant to bark their existence at cars and squirrels. Since then, I still don’t count on a prayer, but I’m not about to count one out either, because I’ve seen when the ways of the world won’t budge, we can do far more simple and impossible things, like move the heavens or resurrect possibility’s hands.
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Andreas Fleps is a poet/writer based in the suburbs of Chicago. His debut collection of poems, Well into the Night (Energion Publications), was released at the end of 2020. His poems have appeared in publications such as Marathon Literary Review, Waxing &Waning, and the award-winning anthology, Glissando!, among others.
Frank Graziano
The Resonance of Solitudes in Trastevere
Photo by Krzysztof Golik
Via dei Riari, long and narrow, dead ends at the botanical garden. Black cobblestone, bare walls rising to insinuate a tunnel, me dwarfed beneath a high stretch of sky. That’s when I saw them. I’m walking out, the dead-end probably blossoming behind me, and they’re walking in, toward me but distant, a dozen nuns reciting the rosary. Beige habits coifed in white, soft prayer echoing off stone façades, words overlapping shadows. Nuns walking in formation with mother superior on the flank, like a drill sergeant, guiding and monitoring propriety. / I yield right and make myself small, lower my eyes with contrived reverential respect, become invisible because I can’t see them. Unobtrusive. Their ranks compress in reciprocity, open passage. / But when our crossing is imminent I struggle with an urge (could you call it temptation?) of curiosity, or maybe an impulse to solidarity with their faith, to recognition, so I lift my eyes and my gaze happens to coincide with one of the nun’s, a younger nun, and across the distance her eyes lock with mine. A longing in her gaze, or in mine (could it be?) projected and reflecting off her face, or a shared loneliness alleviated by the tactility of sight affording us fleeting solace. / Can you live inside someone else’s prayer, make a home there? / A road open at one end and dead-ended by a garden at the other. Without thinking, while I hold her gaze, I silently mouth buongiorno; she pauses her Hail Mary and replies the same. Her lips moving, her eyelight bright, her unspoken word exerting more meaning than it deserves, like a prayer. I can’t name what I’m feeling. The space between us bridged by a subtle intimacy across air suddenly haloed erotic. A voiceless exchange soundtracked by a chorus of rosary. Then we continue in our opposite directions.
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Frank Graziano’s early career included the publication of several chapbooks of poetry, as well as editions of works by Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Mark Strand, and James Wright. More recently, he has published several books on Latin American cultures with Oxford University Press.
Esther Ra
A Small Story of Solitude
Tomes of precedent sleep on the shelves, but I am trying to write a different story. This is the story where I take you by the sleeve and weave through our compressed lives. It has been a long time since we talked. The rain slants over amputated trees, fishing lines thrown into an empty ocean. It makes me sad, to grieve someone long before saying goodbye. We both read Russian authors as children, but you dislike them for the same reasons I hold them dear: They gave me the illusion that everyone thought deeply about the world, you say, but it turns out, my thoughts only made me lonelier. Instead, you turn to dreams of more efficient machines, the ritual of making a thousand steel fish. In this, we share something in common: loneliness eats at my poems, like mice nibbling at the corners of old fabric. But unlike you, I do not dream of empire or schools of hammered fish—only entrusting my heart to your hands. I ran my hands through your dark hair, two satellites fishing for stars through a welter of night sky. Once, as you walked towards me, you noticed how the light fell onto my face: You were lit up, aglow, like the main character of a story. When I was with you, I felt like the main character of my story—I lived a little closer in orbit to myself. That night in your car, my skin gleamed like milk under the moonlight, and you traced my pulse up my wrist. You told me stories as beautiful as jewels buried in a barley field, but I would rather eat bread than pearls. Would rather have beside me a person than a poem. I wanted to write a love poem with you, but you insist on being the author of your own solitude. Take, then, your vistas of cold night sky: I will feast on my buried goodbyes. Still, sometimes I think about the night we first met, when we talked until the sun dissolved into stars. You looked at me then as if I was something beautiful. You looked, then, as if you wanted to be part of my life.
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Esther Ra is the author of A Glossary of Light and Shadow (Diode Editions, 2023) and book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018). Her work has been published in Boulevard, Rattle, The Rumpus, PBQ, and Korea Times, among others, and has received awards including the Pushcart Prize. More at estherra.com.
Gerry Moohr
Breakfast at the Belvedere
Splashing in the Atlantic surf, immersing ourselves in sunshine, warm sand, endless sky, then leaving water's edge, heading toward the Belvedere Coffee Shop & Diner, and it was then you spoke in a soft voice under wind sounds—quickly to say it before we left the beach—A person like you wouldn't be attracted to someone like me (more artfully phrased because you had that knack), and I answered quickly, I answered from my heart without thinking, I don't know why you think that or maybe That isn’t at all true—god I wish I could remember exactly what we said in those short sentences because the words changed our lives—and we didn't, couldn't speak as we waited for our favorite booth in the corner by the windows, then sitting close on the bench seat careful not to touch shoulders and with joy in our hearts we gazed at the beautiful view, marveling at what we’d just done.
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Gerry Moohr writes poetry and short creative essays that blend experience and imagination, fact and fiction, not always equally. Her work has appeared in Equinox, The Ekphrastic Review, The Maine Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and walks in Northeast Minneapolis and Montrose, Houston, and is online at gerrymoohr.com.
Erin Bedford
Wish You Were(n’t) Here
Last night, I slept with my ex-husband, or tried to at least. Mostly I laid awake on top of the sheets, pressed tight to the wall. Co-parenting is weird. Our kid is on some sailboat throwing up at various spots around the Channel Islands as part of a summer camp. Her dad and I agreed to split two weeks of standby duty at an Airbnb in Long Beach should she need rescuing, but his flight got cancelled so we overlapped overnight and now he’s making the coffee too strong just like he used to. I wonder if it’s the last time we’ll ever be in a different city together. His flight is rescheduled to leave tonight. We Uber to San Pedro where our kid’s boat is in port for shower and laundry day. We get to see her for five minutes and then we eat calamari at the fish market. It takes two hundred strangers crowded at the tables around us to make me feel like I know him at all anymore. After lunch we walk in the same direction until we get tired. He takes a call from his girlfriend and pretends I don’t exist. While we wait for an Uber to pick us up, I watch the ocean. A boat sails by, a tallship. Our kid is on that boat. I point it out to him and together we watch it tack north over the water. It is just a speck by the time our ride arrives.
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Erin Bedford is a poet and the founder of Pinhole Poetry digital journal and chapbook press. She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets with stories and poetry appearing or forthcoming in EVENT magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (Biblioasis), Prism, and others. Her debut collection, one by means of two will be published by Guernica Editions in 2027.
Kapka Nilan
Scenario
Bill, who has lost his wife. Who’s now a widower. How to be one he doesn’t know. He gets up in the morning and brushes his teeth. He goes out. No one knows where he goes. Maybe to a secret place where all widowers gather and sigh a collective sigh so deep that it carries them into the air like dragonflies. He is back in the evening and the neighbourhood watches him come back. His shiny delicate wings iridescent in the dark. He unlocks the front door and enters, climbs the 12 steps to his bed. His shimmering wings quiver, fold like an old umbrella.
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Kapka Nilan (she, her) writes in her second language. Her fiction has appeared in Thorn & Bloom Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Mad Swirl, Ink, Sweat &Tears, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Odd Magazine, New Critique, and Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthology, and is forthcoming in The Citron Review and MoonPark Review. Published stories can be read at kapkanilan.wordpress.com.
Meg Pokrass
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
Some nights, he lost his mind, became reckless, downing half a bottle of whiskey in his pebbledash house. The house resembled a textured box strewn with thousands of pieces of gravel. He would get up, put on a winter coat, and go outside with a wild sadness. Then he'd gaze at the moon, pale and beautiful in her solitude. “I’m here,” he’d say. On those nights, he remembered that the moon couldn't smell the scent of roses, or feel the gentle breath of his dog. When he blinked at the moon, it blinked back, but there was nothing he could do to help.
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Meg Pokrass has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including New England Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, Five Points, Plume, RATTLE, The Best Small Fictions 2025, and Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023). She has published 10 books of fiction and prose poetry.
Benjamin Karren
Taxidermy of a Small Town
I grumbled when the out-of-staters arrived with muzzleloaders drawn, ready to blast us out of existence. Scrupulously scalpelling the local saloon, slicing out the feedstore, and axing the mower repair joint. Dumping our splintered pallet and corroded carburetor guts on the side of a back road at dusk. Bleeding out in a pool of oozing motor oil and turpentine. Resigned to indifference I left as their adroit hands sculpted a manikin of boutique shops and opulent French cafes. Stretching the town green and the autumn foliage into place. Pristine fountains like polished eyes below steeple-crested antlers. When I go home to visit the townies glare, I have become the one with the threaded glover’s needle.
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Benjamin Karren is a poet and native Vermonter currently residing in Arizona. His poems and prose can be found in Lindenwood Review, Shot Glass Journal, Sheepshead Review, Wild Greens Magazine, and Northern New England Review, among others. Check out more of his work on Instagram: @ben.karren1.
Richard Jordan
A Man at a Window Walks into a Bar
A man stands at a window. This is as common in poetry as a guy walking into a bar is in comedy. In the poetry world, though, there’s no expectation of a punchline. Usually the man at the window in a poem observes nature and has some deeply personal reaction. Most likely he’s overcome by thoughts of his mortality, since a man standing at a window is bound to be aged. The man in this poem isn’t particularly ancient. He still knows in which drawer his college ring resides and only recently began applying Just for Men to his beard. He’s at the window but doesn’t see a thing, not even the first brilliant orange oriole of spring lighting up a budding sycamore. He opens the window but doesn’t hear the bird’s notes of sweetness fill the air, doesn’t breathe in the lemony tang of spicebush on the breeze. For that matter he doesn’t register the breeze. A woman comes to stand beside him. She stretches and smiles at the gorgeous day unfolding. Normally this would make a man in a poem realize that, despite his limited time on the planet, he’s one lucky bugger. But the man in this poem doesn’t notice. He climbs through the open window. Down the block and around the corner there’s a bar he’s never been to. Though it’s barely past noon he heads in that direction. The door swings wide as he approaches. He walks on in. A different woman is mixing drinks for a rabbi and a priest. Bartending pays the bills but her passion is stand-up comedy. The man unironically orders one bourbon, one scotch, one beer. He’s thinking Thorogood, not John Lee Hooker. He’s definitely never heard of Rudy Toombs. The woman can’t believe her fortune. She’s serving keepers of various faiths. Now before her in the flesh is the proverbial guy. Hers must be the proverbial bar. She’s taking note of the punchline.
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Richard Jordan’s poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Terrain, Cider Press Review, Connecticut River Review, Tar River Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His chapbook, The Squannacook at Dawn, won first place in the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Contest.
Juan Pablo Mobili
The Death of a Poet
Under his nails, they found lead traces from his pencil, fragments of metaphors he scribbled, a single hair of the creature he wrote about, residues of the last sky at which he gasped. The investigators are still arguing over the creature’s hair, and what his last poem was about. His hands showed no vestiges of grief, but a speckle of ambition.
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Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and in 2025, he became Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York. His poems have appeared in The Louisville Review and Ilanot Review, among many publications worldwide. His chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022, and his current manuscript was a finalist in Lily Poetry Review's Paul Nemser Prize.
Lisa Zerkle
The Smell of Formaldehyde Makes You Hungry
That year, my new husband came home every night reeking of the cadaver lab. The chemical smell leached into his clothes, his hair. I’d hug him and revolt. Cadaver, the word used to excise the person from the story. Only a cirrhotic liver, arteries lined by plaque. Like the neck dissected on the cover of Gray’s Anatomy. The text book on the dinner table an atlas of places I’d never visit but whose names became familiar with exposure: islets of Langerhans, interosseous borders, Circle of Willis. We’d assembled our Pier One table with our only tool, screwdriving the legs onto the woodblock top until it looked like a dead horse cartoon, all four legs stiff and straight in the air. While we ate we could trace the growth rings of cheap pine preserved under clear urethane and discuss mucous membranes. Systems: nervous, reproductive, digestive. Ureters he’d followed out of the kidney. An artery he’d followed into the liver. From cadere, Latin for to fall. Did we ever give a thought for the person the body’d once been? We ate, our noses prickling with the scent of the dead.
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Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in Raleigh Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Susurrus, storySouth, Whale Road Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she serves as senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly, podcast coordinator for PBQ’s Slush Pile, and an editor for Iron Oak Editions.
RL Black
And the Emmy Goes to ...
In a mirror, she describes herself as pretty without trying. In a spoon, she is pale. In a window, she bears a striking resemblance to her favorite actress, the one who will win an Emmy for playing her in the greatest shit show on earth. She does not know who will play her mother, it's a minor role, no accolades. The actor who portrays her step-father will likely win an Emmy for his role as the villain, or at least a nomination. In his interview on the red carpet, he will be asked how he prepared for the role and he will say it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, that he had to pretend to be a monster. Later, when asked to reprise the role he will turn it down. Instead, he will give up acting altogether and spend years in therapy. Maybe they'll meet someday. Maybe she'll get his autograph.
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RL Black lives in Tennessee. She has founded and edited several online journals, and her poetry and fiction have been published online and in print. RL Black is the founding editor of Unbroken and Unlost.
Cara Long Corra
For Greg
Photo by Cara Long Corra
A young deer runs along the sidewalk. The old cat ignores it, chattering instead at the mice gathering seed from our window feeder. Yesterday, at sunset, you and I watched as six planets arranged themselves along the horizon. Now you sleep as the sky changes again. I, always the restless one, re-read the inscription in the book we purchased from the high school Booster Club sale, with its one small table dedicated to poems and short stories. The inscription starts with “For Greg” and ends with “Christmas 1988”. “Everything between is just time,” you had said when I read it aloud to you. Soon the pink sky will turn blue and me and the old cat will lose the quiet we had shared. You snore softly, gently. The white tail of the last remaining deer disappears over our fence; the cat saunters away. Only Jupiter is still visible.
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Cara Long Corra has written short fiction on and off — mostly off — for over 15 years. Partly Gone, a collection of her short stories, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2014. She lives in Maryland, just outside Washington D.C.
Ken Poyner
The Value of Memory
The boy selling memories is back on our street corner again. He is going to attract a churlish bevy of non-resident shoppers. Unspectacular personality seekers. The memories he markets could be collected from anywhere: a church knave, a country fairground, the pavement outside a brothel. Most of them he does not understand and customers buy on expectation alone. I would not be surprised if, in the calm between transactions, he inches close to our front porch and gathers some of our memories. To think, a stranger can purchase and exult in our skewed history. And we cannot even claim royalties.
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Ken Poyner, after years of poetry and flash fiction, has been celebrating drabbles — prose poetry concoctions of exactly 100 words. His first collection of drabbles, The Lechery of Fish Tuners, is available, along with his other 10 poetry/fiction collections, from Sundial Books in Chincoteague and Amazon. See more at kpoyner.com.
Unbroken is a quarterly online journal that seeks to showcase prose poems and poetic prose, both from established and emerging voices. We desire to give the block, the single paragraph, the unlineated prose, a new place to play.
Unbroken is edited by Ken Chau, Dale Wisely, Katherine DiBella Seluja, Tom Fugalli, and Tina Carlson.
Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our punk rock svengali is Dr. Boyd Razor, Ph.D., whose latest band goes by the name the Algae Vandals, best known for their I HATE PINK FLOYD tees, which they sell at their gigs. Our Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press tour manager is Chen Kau. His current favourite songs are Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb" from 8-Tracks (2026), and "Have a Cigar" from Wish You Were Here (1975). He is currently reading Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) by Max Porter.
Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.
Photo by Alan Scott