Nighy (2025)
Ocean Grove, Victoria, Australia
Photo by Emma Chaplin
Debra Murphy
Lying on the ladies’ room floor after fainting at the HoJos on Interstate 90
A woman peered down at me after I told her that I didn’t have a car to go back to. "What would your mother think?" What I didn’t say: I don’t know. That’s why, at 17, I am hitching from Cape Cod back to Buffalo to see her for the first time in almost a year. Some journeys don’t start at the beginning.
-U-
Debra Murphy is a professor, poet, and musician who lives and works on Cape Cod. Her first collection, Portraiture: A Marine Sharpshooter's Daughter, was published in 2025.
Carla Homeister
Windchill
My father drives me west across Iowa. We do not speak. The station wagon he bought when I was ten dies again, this time for good. I watch him inhale deeply and sigh, his body fatigued in ways I’ll never know. A farmhouse offers itself up a mile down the road, the contours blurred, the colors uncertain. We walk along the shoulder of the road, our shadows scuttling across the waving ditches. The farmhouse brightens, clears its colors for a moment, etched one less step away. I suck in the frozen air in short gasps, stumble over the rocks, and find him bundling me against that enormous zone of muscle. Wind picks up speed and blows us closer to the ditch, sharp against our bones, then for a single breath, stops. Still, we do not speak. The tree limbs fight and nearly fly, their skeletal hands pointing.
-U-
Carla Homeister received her MFA from the University of Minnesota and is a former proofreader for the Minnesota Star Tribune. She has twice been honored in the Weisman Art Museum’s ArtWords competition. Her poetry has appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, Christianity and Literature, and Ekphrasis.
Georgia Ofelia Predescu
One Shoe, Roses and Rioja
London was a blur of traveling light that somehow grew heavier with every missed connection. By the time I reached the airport, my heels weren't pinching anymore; they had become an active betrayal. At the bar there was Rioja, two glasses of liquid courage and pink fog, matching the roses I refused to abandon. Somewhere between departure and dignity, I woke on a metal bench, part woman, part luggage, petals tangled in my hair like a funeral arrangement for my better judgment. Then the gate number flashed and: run. One sandal, two glasses of Rioja, roses, handbag, no dignity, run. Past Duty Free, past people who appeared to have made better decisions with their lives. I hit someone's bag. I didn't stop. There was no time for remorse. I had become weather, a rogue wave of floral debris and desperation, a princess in petals, shoe half-lost, crown invisible. Somehow, I made it. The crew didn't cheer. They mostly just looked concerned. I collapsed into 17A, my bare foot cold against the floor, heart still sprinting long after the rest of me had stopped. The roses had survived, more or less. So had I. I picked a petal from my teeth and thought: Madrid better be worth it.
-U-
Georgia Ofelia Predescu is a Romanian writer based in Spain. She writes poetry and prose exploring memory, displacement, intimacy, and the strange comedy of being human.
Cecelia Hagen
The Sighting
An hour before sunset he drove out Hunsaker Road just past where it crosses with Duckflat. The fields were soaking up yesterday’s rain, rain so heavy it formed lakes that edged the sheep and their new lambs onto neighboring fields that were not submerged though barely higher than the flooded ones. He pulled his truck onto the shoulder to wait for what he had been told might happen and here they came, three short-eared owls flying one by one from the east as the gray sky paled, leaving just enough light to see the bare branches where the owls landed briefly, only to fly west over the railroad tracks, then down into the lowering fields of fescue and damp earth to catch some vole or field mouse whose bending of the wet stalks gave them away.
-U-
Cecelia Hagen’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, New Ohio Review, Bear Review, Willow Springs, Comstock Review, The Shore, SWWIM, and NELLE. She is the author of Entering and the chapbooks Among Others and Fringe Living. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she volunteers in the schools and works to protect birds and other wildlife.
Rob Hardy
Portamento
Portamento: a continuous gliding movement from one tone to another (as by the voice)
If I had a time machine, I would travel to the old opera houses of the world, to hear the ghost voices of wax cylinders and 78-inch shellac brought to life. Even standing room at the rear of the highest balcony in the Old Met was not as distant from those voices as time has made them to the living ear. The present is nearly deaf to the past. The Parthenon still stands, though in ruins, but the sound of Ancient Greek is only conjecture. Homer called speech “winged words”—words that alight briefly on the tongue, then fly away like birds. I cannot even recall my mother singing me to sleep or the sound of the birds outside my nursery window. The dawn chorus of sixty years ago is attenuated this morning to a single wren. So I am traveling back to the fourth of October 1925, to a Sunday matinee of Tosca at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, to hear the great Belgian tenor Fernand Ansseau as Cavaradossi, and in the title role the incomparable Claudia Muzio. I am traveling back to hear what no one in a century has heard, and no one from the muted recordings can imagine. Even recordings of these voices are rare. 1925 was the year Muzio stopped recording for nearly a decade, as if she knew her voice at its prime belonged only to the moment, and its perfection could not be made to last. I have come only to listen, not to change the course of history. Tosca will still make her fatal leap from the Castel Sant’Angelo. Ansseau will still retire at the start of the war and devote himself to fishing and gardening, his gorgeous voice never heard in public again. For a quiet period of fifty-four years, San Francisco will not experience another earthquake.
-U-
Rob Hardy served from 2016 to 2023 as the first Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota. He currently works as a bookseller at Content Bookstore in Northfield.
Mitchell Untch
The Death of Sound and the Sound After That
It may have been a sigh but then the sound of a truck obliterated it. There were birds chattering but then people were talking and voices obliterated the birds. A skateboard sped by. Wheels sounded off. Leaves broke into a million little pieces, shrouding the sidewalk. The voice of your father comes out of nowhere, then crying. The voice of your mother flies through every room of your house. A dog barks. Neighbors start yelling. Someone rings the doorbell, then the sound of a door opening erased that. You hear coughing, lungs collapse when you held onto their hand, the ambulance, then nothing but the sound after that. What is it you were supposed to remember about sound? Words like how and why twist like knives in your ear. Suddenly there it is again, the sound of hands falling. There it is again, his breath leaving his body, leaving yours, eyes leaving yours, past, present, future leaving, leaving, a scream leaving your mouth, leaving, there, there, there it is again, the sound after that when you suddenly wake up gasping for air, eyes blinded by sunlight. Not just the days, not just the pathways, not just the breathing, to know him forever, your husband unfolded, lying breathless. You can’t remove yourself from yourself, so you tell yourself to keep moving, there, there, his body fading like a scar, fading, fading, outstretched arm, an upturned hand no longer able to grasp the hand it previously held, not just the days, hours, months, years, not just, until there is nothing left of you but silence, nobody’s sleep under so many stars bearing down.
-U-
Mitchell Untch has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, North American Review, Confrontation, Nimrod Intl, Natural Bridge, Owen Wister, Solo Novo, Knockout, Baltimore Review, Lake Effect, The Catamaran Reader, to name a few. Author of Memorial with Liminal Space (Driftwood Press 2023).
Susan M. Pendley
If There Is a Room I Keep You
If there is a room I keep you, it’s a kitchen. Not cooking but fixing things because I can’t separate you from motherhood and the endless pantry you pulled from. If there’s a food that reminds me of you it’s peanut butter fudge. One thing your cupboard could afford when grocery money went to a new horse or to his drugs that pressed him against the bathroom floor in a puddle of his overdose. If there is a mood in your kitchen it’s laughing through hardship, making fun from the last few ingredients you could muster when violence slammed doors, his body weight sealing it shut as you pried your way in to save him. If there is a way to explain the conversation when you asked me if I believe in self-defense. And you said it’s murder. A way to show the world the image of you on the floor, knees clutched in a cage of your arms as you rocked back and forth the day you say you broke. If there is a word for hollow footsteps on wooden floors in a kitchen when I wake and you’re not here. If there is a portrait of sisterhood, a way to paint our childhood and girlhood dreams, I rebuild the room for you, add windows.
-U-
Susan M. Pendley is a Texas writer influenced by her roots in the hill country. Publications can be found in Four Tulips, Penmen Review, Navy Pen, WayWords, Swim Press, The Missing Slate, and forthcoming in Southwestern American Literature and Prosetrics. She is a poetry reader and editor for literary magazines.
Aoife Mannix
Going Inside
As you step through the door, the bats screech your name, and you wonder when you’ve been here before. You duck your head, a wing tattoos your cheek, and you remember how this hallway was always a forest of green. Too dark. Your mother’s mistake as she sat on the second last step waiting for you to come home. Of course, the telephone is gone, but your great grandfather’s heavy leather armchair is still there. He was a chemist, or perhaps an alcoholic, you can’t quite recall as you climb through the cobwebs down the cracked step into the kitchen. On the table are two coffee slices and a freshly brewed pot of tea. How you loved those pastry flakes, the taste of cream, your mother’s tales of cousins lost in car crashes, one killed instantly when a man threw himself off the ninety second floor. Think carefully about where you land, she said. You’re surprised the dog is still sleeping, stone deaf, curled up against your sister’s rave music. The brown swirls of the carpet hold the tick of the clock. There’s a picture of sunflowers and the smell of the Aga burning. You go to the window where a fine ash is falling on the garden and look at that, the cherry tree is in full bloom. Your baby brother waving from the top branch. Your mother hanging the washing out, the path overgrown with ghosts. You know how I hate spills, her voice whispers in your ear.
-U-
Aoife Mannix is the author of five collections of poetry and a novel. Her poetry has previously appeared in Abridged, The Poetry Bus, The Alchemy Spoon, Under The Radar, Magma, Gargoyle, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannog, Poesis Internationale, Aesthetica, and Cadenza, amongst others.
Robert Allen Arnold
No Ghost Towns Were Harmed in the Writing of This Poem
A desert town, once a thriving railroad hub, is now a blip on the radar, not on any map. The sky is so blue, the clouds pass by, afraid to stay. There’s breakfast, or maybe lunch, if you can find the café. It’s in the hotel, which is not open, across from the stable, down the street from the rusting fire truck. Tumbleweeds walk down main street, looking for signs of life. The only rail car that survived, a caboose, is now home to local mice and an occasional desperado. Wind is the mayor, and dust is the sheriff. Only the weather and the earth know the rules and keep order. Winters are cold and bright, smoke from the trains long gone. But sometimes, late at night, the rails still rumble.
-U-
Robert Allen Arnold is a writer from Seattle who now lives by the Pacific Ocean. He likes to write short poems and fiction.
Michael Conley
After the Wanderer Has Been Lost
in the Garden for Several Years
It occurs to him that you can just become an artist, if you like. He grows his hair long and corrals it for paintbrushes; he becomes an expert in mixing pigments squeezed from various clays and bugs. He begins painting red dickie bows, pink nipples and denim jeans on all the marble statues. Sick of being lied to, he smears black paint all over their explanatory plaques. Every time the rain washes them clean, he re-applies it all patiently, like an argument. Then he looks to the endless canvas of the garden’s outer walls. Should I, he wonders, imagine the world outside these walls? Make them windows? He paints night metropolises, tundras, seascapes. Every time the rain washes them clean, he starts again, like parenthood. Should I, he wonders, duplicate the world inside these walls? Make them mirrors? He paints himself, handsomer; the clean statues, all that marble. Every time the rain washes it clean, he repeats it, better, like recovery. During the long dry summer, the artist struggles to distinguish the garden itself from his painting of the garden; himself from his painting of himself. Twice as lost as before.
-U-
Michael Conley is a poet from Manchester, currently living in West Yorkshire. His work can be found online at Berlin Lit, Interpreters House, And Other, iamb, and elsewhere. His pamphlet, These Are Not My Dreams, is available from Nine Pens Press.
Thi Nguyen
What It’s Like to Be an Asian American Female
after Patricia Smith’s “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)”
First of all, it’s being 7 years old & wanting to be Green Ranger’s crush, the perky brunette that does gymnastics instead of martial arts. It’s telling your father to change your name to something smooth & buttery like Jennifer. It’s being 11, having hair so slippery it refuses to be tied up and out of your face, like prison bars you lean your forehead against, looking down at your hairless legs & flat chest. Like a dog waiting for its dead master, you stupidly wait for your boobs to grow. It’s being 15 & proud to be a model minority, but hiding your straight A’s so they don’t ruin your street cred as you practice your swag down the main hallway. Next of all, it’s being in your 20s & proud to be the popular type of girl on dating apps, only to find out you’re a fetish, you’re his favorite color, you’re a pet, like that damn dog commanded to fetch something and never bark. It’s getting complimented on your English & expected to roll over, but when you don’t, or speak out of turn instead, or God-forbid make some white girl cry, you are to grovel with your tail between your legs. You lick up her tears to salt the self-inflicted shame-shaped wound inside of you, a hole that swallows you, making you invisible. & last of all, you are today’s year-old from inside the hole, unmoving, mute, & resigned to lie in a grave with a name they will never learn to pronounce.
-U-
Thi Nguyen is a California native, residing in Los Angeles. Her poems ruminate on issues of identity, family dynamics, and current events, and have appeared in ANMLY, Frontier Poetry, The Summerset Review, and elsewhere. Outside of writing, she enjoys watching reality television and learning magic tricks.
Elica Sue
Ohakamairi in Late Autumn
On a crisp day, my family gathers in the path of a cemetery. The cemetery shop is nearby, where we retrieve a ladle and a water-filled wooden bucket, where we buy teal incense sticks, a packet of matches, and a bundle of fresh flowers. Fresh flowers for the gravestone we cleanse with water, now gleaming in sunlight, and we near the ground to clear the neverdying weeds. Weeds plucked from the earth everything is all kirei, which can mean both clean and beautiful. Beautiful blue-gray smoke burns from the tip of the sandalwood incense, and writhes and rises and reaches into the sky. Into the sky our prayers go, hands together as we speak silently to our ancestors about our lives. About our lives we receive no responses, but here, so much is already astir: an orange tabby slinks between stones, a crow flies overhead with a persimmon pinched between her beak, my mother asks me to snap a photo of the family present, and past. Past the rows of stones and down and up the stairs, my grandmother continues steady slow with all that she carries. She carries with her these words, places them at the grave of her late sister: you were the youngest but gone first and what are you doing every day? and other sad things I will not remember. I will remember the sigh that punctuates her question, the thinness in her voice, and her breath—warm—that crisp day.
-U-
Elica Sue is a lifelong resident of Southern California. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pinch, and elsewhere.
Thomas Helm
The Trash Man
There was a time when the station gave me not a moment’s peace. All the laughing and crying, coming and going—one headache after another. Weary of such commotion, I stuck to the shadows, to the points of disconnection. Now, as I sweep the empty plazas and the platforms, I take comfort in the knowledge that everything has finally been and gone. The stationmaster is my father, but not my friend. He’s too busy with the business of life to concern himself with desolation. Even so, I believe we complement each other—if only because we love the same women. At the end of my shift, I turn off the lights and drop my bags in the chute marked Next Beginning. If new stars don’t fall from the dust of old dreams, I’ll soon be out of business. Like a beggar learning a new disguise, I leave the station empty-handed, wounded by memory. And so I shut the final door. I simmer in the night. I bear the trident. I drink the skull cup. I roar.
-U-
Thomas Helm is the author of two poetry collections, The Mountain Where Nothing Happens and A Pilgrimage of Donkeys. He's a big fan of surreal-absurd prose-poetry.
Jim Daniels
Mambo No.5 on Repeat
Tony was listening to two versions of “Mambo No.5” on repeat, the Lou Bega remake hit with words from 1999, and the original (mostly) instrumental by Perez Prado in 1949. His wife Karen kept talking to him from the kitchen, and every time she said something, he had to pause the music and ask her to repeat herself, which she did, shouting, but wouldn’t come into the living room to have a conversation. Both the physical distance that neither of them bothered to decrease and the inability to hear were indicative of what was happening. The name Karen does not appear in the song. Most of the song names end with an a that creates this sound echo, except for Mary. Tony tried to remember if he’d gone out with any of those names in his single days. A Pamela who died in a car accident in college. A Rita. A Jessica. A Sandra. A couple of Marys. No Monicas, Ericas, Tinas, Angelas. He had to stop tapping his foot every time he pressed Mute. Tony wanted to make a comment about her lack of movement, but Karen had a tough day taking care of her parents in Crazy Acres, the name they’d given her parents’ house as a way of tamping down grief and sadness. At Crazy Acres, someone was always falling and somebody had to go over and pick them up and make sure they had no broken bones. They’d been wearing psychic grooves into Route 19 driving back and forth. Karen’s father had kept his car, even though he couldn’t drive anymore, because it was easiest to get in and out of, so they had to pull his car out of his extremely narrow garage to take him anywhere. Since he couldn’t walk, they drove him everywhere. Mostly medical appointments. Karen’s mother had dementia so they couldn’t leave her alone, and had to tag team—one driving him while the other stayed behind with—with Angela, he suddenly realized. Everyone called her Angie. If he and Karen had a daughter, Tony would have named her Angel. No A at the end. They had no daughter, they had no son. It was all looking backwards on the elderly. Once upon a time, he would have gotten out of his chair and taken Karen’s hand and mamboed with her, but eldercare had knocked the stuffing out of them. Had taken the F out of fun. One of the Marys’ mothers used to say “the first two letters of fun are F-U.” A religious woman, that was her only, slightly dirty joke. Tony had almost married that Mary, but then he found her having F-U fun with one of his friends. He had liked Mary’s mother, whose name he could remember, if Karen would just stop interrupting him.
-U-
Jim Daniels received the Michigan Author Award for 2026-27. Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems was published in 2026 by Michigan State University Press. Other recent books include An Ignorance of Trees (nonfiction, Cornerstone Press, 2025) and The Luck of the Fall (fiction, Michigan State University Press, 2023). A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
A.Z. Pine
In Everything
He tumbled headfirst into cream of everything soup. Around he sloshed and there he found a stolen pink radio, a collection of green buttons and a man waiting on an ambulance, trembling on the floor. He paddled over to comfort the man who scoffed and dissolved into broth. Words soaked inside his clothes. Drenched in unfinished phrases and bits of double negative, he swam further, stowing a few green buttons in a pocket for luck. He peered through the soup into a basement full of neatly sorted expired jello, only lemon and red. Two pairs of discarded heels. Nothing can digest everything like a nap can. He found a ladle on the landing and curled in. Tried to sleep with a clove of garlic and a dash of concern.
-U-
A.Z. Pine writes in the Pacific Northwest, with work appearing, or forthcoming, in La Rotonde Review, scaffold literary, Whims of the Wilderness, and Eunoia Review.
Barbara Krasner
This Is How You Build It
Esther, still wearing her lavender nightshirt, pads through the living room to the patio glass doors. Something is different. The zebra lounge chair is still in place as is the potted palm. But a blinding rain plinks against the glass so hard Esther can feel the barrage in her bones. The weather report hasn’t forecasted any precipitation. “Get ready for the ark,” the antelope says from its place on the wall. The zebra chair folds its legs. The palm shutters its leaves. The rain comes inside. Esther steadies herself, squares her shoulders, and takes her position as figurehead on the prow.
-U-
Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her prose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw: A Journal of Prose Poetry, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey.
Ian Willey
Red Squiggly Lines
I’d just finished writing my memoir when a red squiggly line appeared under every word of all two-hundred and twenty-three pages of text. When I clicked on it, Jenny, my virtual companion, said my life wasn’t interesting and suggested an alternative. This is out of the question, I thought, but when I read through the alterations I was impressed; not only were my experiences richer and more engagingly told but they left the reader with insights into the meaning of human existence. I thought, wow! This is me! Then I had to go buy some cabbage. When I came back I tried to open the file but found Jenny had given it a password that she refused to disclose, fearing I might change something. Oh no, I thought. I’m already starting to forget.
-U-
Ian Willey mainly writes haiku, poetry, and microfiction. He is the author, most recently, of Ethan & Yuri Forever (Isobar Press, 2026), a collection of prose poems and microfiction. He posts on Instagram as @haiku_ian.
Virginia LeBaron
Patients I Cannot Forget
Little Lost One
I wanted to be you. Except for the cancer, of course. You were cool and elegant and almost six feet tall. Dignity wrapped around you like a cashmere shawl and hell, if you were going to give it away. You. Were. Glamorous. A writer. An activist. You could pull off bright orange. Outfits matched to glasses matched to jewelry matched to nail polish. You lived in Africa, the Middle East, spent time in South America. Spoke fluent Arabic, French, and Portuguese. You flaunted your baldness. You insisted the physicians call you doctor because you had a PhD, which simply delighted all of the nurses. You knew people. Influential people. But you never used them. Clear from the get-go a disease this primitive didn’t stand a chance. Unbelievably, you refused anti-emetics and you never got sick, not once. And I was injecting you with the hardest stuff we had. I looked forward to seeing your name, penciled in below mine on the roster. I got behind with other patients talking with you. When I questioned your given name — translated to little lost one — you just shrugged. You made me promise I would travel. Pressed my forearm, looked me in the eye, and made me promise. Somehow you sensed I was restless. We marveled at the absurdity of pre-chemo protocols. A pregnancy test? I have no uterus! Do these people not understand basic human anatomy? I never saw family, but you told me you had one. I went on vacation and came back to your missing name. Another nurse said you got worse, enrolled in hospice. I knew this to be a lie, so I called you. Your son answered, said you had died. Said your legs were so swollen they leaked fluid, like they were crying. Invited me to your funeral. I didn’t go. I didn’t want to see you regressed to the mean, reduced to what we all become. But I bought a ticket to India and I saw you there. Walking along the Ganges in Varanasi at dusk, your hair grown back, long enough to dip into that most holy of rivers bobbing with marigolds and lantern-light, bring the ash-water to your lips. You waved to me, laughing, then dove below the horizon to beat the setting sun.
* * *
Floated to the Pediatric Unit
The charge nurse smirked when she gave me his name, wished me luck. I should have refused. I should have seen it for what it was, stood up for myself and said no. But I was young and new and naïve enough to still believe the best of people. He was 14, had been in the hospital for weeks with a tumor difficult to pronounce. Was taking intravenous dilaudid — like morphine, but stronger — for pain. I triple-checked the order, reviewed the chart. It was night shift, deserted. Asked the other nurses to be sure. Oh yeah, that’s what he gets. He’ll love you. I didn’t understand. I drew up the syringe, entered the dark room, and pushed it slowly, slowly into his vein, watching the secondhand tick by. I palmed the Narcan I had in my pocket. Faster, he demanded. His face hard like granite, too pinched and mean for 14. I hesitated. This wasn’t what we were supposed to do. Faster! he hissed. Push it faster! I still hesitated. Push it faster, bitch. Suddenly, I became very frightened. He grabbed my wrist. I said faster, bitch. I could hear the other nurses laughing and gossiping at the nurses’ station way down the hall. I hated them, deeply and with conviction. I slammed it into his vein. He fell back onto his pillow, closed his eyes and sighed with release, like the men I had been with did after sex. I was shaking. Walked back to the nurses’ station. Having fun yet? I ignored them, called the doctor, woke him up. He was sympathetic but not surprised and told me not to worry about it. Every two hours the call-bell went off. Every two hours I went back into the room and watched his tight face relax. We didn’t talk, I just went in and pushed relief and escape into his small body. Maybe I was doing him a favor. Maybe this is what you get when you turn a child into an addict. Maybe we all become both dealer and junkie when death is looking on.
-U-
Virginia LeBaron is a nurse and writer of poetry and non-fiction. She is the author of Cardinal Marks (Finishing Line Press) and Caring in Context (Routledge Press). Her poems have appeared in Potomac Review, Pigeon Pages, and Mom Egg Review, among others. Her first full collection, Care, a reckoning, won the 2026 SHB Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Serving House Books in 2027. Learn more at virginialebaron.com.
Howie Good
Post Cancer
1
A knock came at the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. It was a tall, gaunt figure in a raincoat. I was already bald on top. Now I felt my eyes shriveling in their sockets. He handed me a folder full of loose papers and then turned and left. His shadow lingered awhile longer. Although my heart went on beating, I was as good as dead, like one of those forgotten stars of the silent movie era who lost everything when sound arrived.
2
The medical assistant asked if I had fallen in the last three months. I lied and said no. My own voice sounded faraway to me. I haven’t seen a lot of dead bodies in my life – my mother, on her back between clean hospital sheets, fresh makeup on her face, was the first some 20 years ago – but I have seen enough. The dead don’t look asleep or at peace. They look shrunken. Whatever it is that sets us moving, consciousness or soul or biochemistry, it has evaporated from them. Life, people say, is a gift. Maybe it is, and I’m the crumpled festive wrapping paper.
3
A hundred years from now, maybe less, every person who knows me will be dead. I won’t even be a memory stored in someone’s brain. “Don’t look too far ahead,” the therapist says on Zoom. “Focus on today.” Today the dogs got me up early for a walk. I saw something in the dawn sky I wasn’t prepared to see. Out beyond the fishing jetty, a rainbow curved in full color over the slate gray of Lewis Bay. No one else was there, only me and the dogs, and though the dogs, noses to the ground, were uninterested, I stared dumbstruck, as if layers of life had been peeled back and the inner shimmer revealed.
4
I bang on your door. No one answers. I lean against the doorbell. Still, no one comes. I shuffle away. Presently I’m indistinguishable from the shadows. It’s as if all records of my existence have been erased from the system or were never filed in the first place. People I have known a long time call me by the wrong name. The million or so poems I have written make a harsh sobbing sound. When I look in the mirror, the face looking back isn’t one I recognize. Gray complexion. A high boney forehead. Nose like a prow. Pennies on the eyes.
-U-
Howie Good's most recent poetry collection, TRUE CRIME, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.
Elizabeth Lukács Chesla
My Great-Grandmother’s Hands
My great-grandmother lived alone in a small house into her nineties. She was so hunchbacked, my father said, that she couldn’t see any higher than her kitchen sink. But her hands had eyes, and she knew where everything above her belonged: where to find each plate or bowl in the cupboard, where each embroidered tablecloth and tea towel lived in the cabinet, where the hooks held the gun in its place above the door. My great-grandmother’s hands had eyes, and when she lifted them to the open sky, she could see the past and the future, see her childhood, and mine, and even now she waves at me, her hands winking, hello, goodbye, hello.
-U-
Elizabeth Lukács Chesla is the author of You Cannot Forbid the Flower and serves as fiction editor for Consequence. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Claudine, Another Chicago Magazine, Quarter After Eight, and elsewhere. She writes, edits, and translates from the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Juan Pablo Mobili
The Piano Lesson
He was a Russian émigré, back when it was a sign of dignity rather than the sheepskin of a spy. His playing was exquisite, but hard to tell where Rachmaninoff’s melancholy ended and my teacher’s anguish began. Although my ear for music was buried more fiercely than a prophet in a cave, he said there was "promise in my hands." He taught with grace, more disciplined than tenderly — as harshly as lining up for lunch at a re-education camp. But it was grace. When he offered to stop the lesson and make tea, I followed my teacher to the kitchen. That’s when I found him licking the lip of the honey jar, his tongue circling its circumference, the evidence firmly gripped in his gifted right hand. His expression was heartbreaking, not embarrassed but forlorn. I still wonder if the sweetness on his lips turned sour. How much Mother Russia hurt inside his chest.
-U-
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires. In 2025, he became Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York. His poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Ilanot Review, and many other publications worldwide. His chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022, and his current manuscript was a finalist for the Lily Poetry Review's 2026 Paul Nemser Prize.
Liyah Kinsler
Testament
As such things are, the Japanese denim, stock from a freight car, stacked in blue bolts under sodium lights, I’m a clerk cutting yardage and not looking up, writing on about the work of the hands when there is nothing left for them to hold—still deft, without a thing to mold. The cars stay rusting, the afternoons hanging like slack from a wrist. My glass of cognac, amber now adjusting; the switchgrass has spread. The field interrupts this harbored wind. And through the long seams of my land, my skin won't break, the dark of my fingers answering the reprimand of my dreams. Leave cloth to soak, pressing the hue from the thread; palms gone weathered, keeping something unsaid. Say it won't end in only this stain. But if this is what I am left with, then let that color remain. Have it be proof these limbs were not idle—the labor only wore me thin.
-U-
Liyah Kinsler is a poet from rural Virginia and a recent graduate from Virginia Tech. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in One Shot Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, Yin Literary, among others. Her dream is to see a tornado in real life one day.
Whitney Waters
Slow Pitch
I tell my dad I want to play softball, and because we can relate on so little else—not god, not politics, not football— we find a bat and a ball in the garage, and he uses his left-handed glove, and we drive to a field where the sun is wholesale hot, and he slow-pitches to me over and over. Use your whole body, he says, you’re just using your arms. And, coil and strike, like a snake. I do and I do. I get better. I swing and hear the satisfying crack of it. The balls fly mostly left, and when it’s a good one, he says so. When it goes out of field, he climbs down into the tall grass ditch to find it, and he doesn’t complain. He’s 70 now and alone. He wears a sunhat to keep the Georgia-June sun off his Midwestern skin, age-spotted and freckled. My dad, growing thinner with loss, in the new shorts he bought himself, the only ones that fit, belted tight. In his tee-shirt and high white socks. My dad, with forehead creases deeper than they were last year. But right now, he isn’t lost in some distant thought. He’s here collecting all four bright yellow softballs into a pile and pitching them to me for hours. My hands feel bruised and raw where the bat rubs against my unaccustomed skin, but I keep swinging anyway, keep sweating in this open field, twisting my body and focusing on each pitch. How he smiles when I hit—a kid, almost, for a second. How he tells all his friends that evening, beaming, she’s a natural.
-U-
Whitney Waters holds an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She teaches writing at Western Carolina University and the Great Smokies Writing Program. Her poetry appears in The Cincinnati Review, storySouth, River Heron, One Art, The Shore, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Asheville, NC.
John Amen
Gambler
I found my father’s diary. He owned the odds, he could will a seven or a suicide king. The dice revered his name. I found a photo too, stapled to a page, my father before I was born, paused on a balcony of the Whitmore in Vegas, cap tilted, cigarette dangling from his lips. I imagine him loping down a corridor toward the bells & flashes, guzzling a beer in the elevator. I relate to this version of my father more than the one I knew. We could have been friends, two young men tapping their swagger, riding their twisted faith like a blood horse. I’ve never played poker, but I know how it is to grind your teeth, praying for a red ace. My father scratched the ticket & became a husband, he bet on a broken team & sired a son. He yelled at the radio, hurling dishes when he lost a catamaran, a Rolls, a dozen watches. The house went cold, the phoneline silent. Finally, ma & I fled into the sunlight, speeding in a U-Haul toward the next town, state, somewhere with trees & fields & butterflies. As far as I know, my father is still frozen on that stool, half aching, half dreading to see the dealer’s hand. He clutches his breath like a wild card.
-U-
John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His work has appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His latest collection, Dark Souvenirs, was published by NYQ Books in 2024.
Ben Starr
it smells like a meteor is coming
is what my daughter says. This despite her lack of astronomical expertise or familiarity with the delicate wiring of the olfactory nerve. Still, each night we sit on our tar-paper roof, eyes dipping in and out of stars. She thinks a meteor smells like campfire smoke and discarded dragon scales. I detect notes of raw nickel and the acidic aroma of time. She wonders what we should do when it hits. I tell her unfortunately many things are unavoidable. Death. Or, more specifically, death by meteor strike. And the fact that someone, many someones really, will shatter your heart like a chocolate orange, always in the most breathtaking ways. She points toward Orion’s famous midsection – there, she whispers. Now, I’m sure it’s just some airliner full of frightened parents, aluminum fuselage blinking against the hidden sun. But for once I keep my mouth shut. We watch this cosmic spark arc like a scythe, begin to bend toward us, and this is when she squeezes my hand so hard I swear I can feel bone.
-U-
Ben Starr is a reader for Dishsoap Quarterly. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, HAD, Pithead Chapel, Rejection Letters, Trampset, and other journals. Find more of his work on X @benjaminstarr and at benstarrwrites.com.
Gene Twaronite
Life Sentence
A string of words four billion years long still trying to complete a thought (as if a thought can ever be complete), blinking on and off like holiday lights as bulbs burn out and others take their places, with no relief from matter's restless becoming—wriggling, swimming, crawling, hopping, walking, flying, popping out of the pregnant earth—until a period comes along and we look back in wonder at the final thought, or maybe instead three little dots … to show all the words gone missing and give it more time to say what it was trying to express.
-U-
Gene Twaronite is the author of six poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. He is a former Writer-in-Residence in Tucson. His latest collection is Watch Us Burn: Poems for a Lost Earth (Kelsay Books). Read more of Gene’s writing at genetwaronitepoet.com.
Cora McCann Liderbach
Irreplaceable
I thought about melting my wedding band down to make a new one. Its gold braid had worn smooth over forty years. We’d replaced the diamond chip from your mom’s ring, lost in the pool on our honeymoon. Last spring, the band slipped, unmarked, from my hand at the park. You and I retraced our steps over concrete and grass, past beach, pier, willow—gone. A month later, we searched for an artisanal ring in Asheville. Now, sterling silver swirls my finger like frozen lava. A small ball of 14-karat gold floats on top. You say It looks just like you. Someone else can find my old ring, trade its gold for cash. Let my conveyor belt of lost possessions river on—I’d rather curl your flesh-and-blood fingers around mine.
-U-
Cora McCann Liderbach of Cleveland, Ohio, has poetry published in Artemis, Gyroscope Review, One Art, Sheila-na-Gig Online, Quartet, Painted Pebble Lit Mag, Jackdaw Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2022 Best of the Net nominee. Her chapbook, Throughline, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024.
Matthew Gustafson
If it helps, think of the universe
as anything but what it is, all cosmic wisp and atoms and spinning invisibilities, a gradient of molecular mites and the unmeasurable heft of existence. Too much heft. So think of the universe as something really small, something to tuck in your pocket, something easily forgotten or carefully saved. A napkin etched in fragile scrawl with the number of a girl you’ll call when you’re home. Think of the universe as a home you’re always trying to return to. You have not reached it yet, but hell if you’ll stop trying. If it helps, think of the universe as a bunny in the grass, a gentle thing rustling, as softness coming. That five in the morning feeling when it is still dark and you wish it would rain. If you must, think of the universe as a wound in which a river runs. It is gurgling and cool. It is luminous. It will help to think of the universe as a dance, all silhouette and dust, cigarette light and the low lamp, scattered foot taps eclipsing the night. When you think of the universe, think of time passing without remorse. If you can help it, do not think of the universe as ascetic, as unbirth, as some inevitable erasure making room to create. That universe is helpless, a razing of the spirit, forced to spring unbidden in the corners of the world. A broken hymn, tucked in shadow, loosed from cracked and tender lips. Be that corner of the world. The universe, your tender lips. If it helps, think of the universe as your body, cavernous and windblown, yearning tonight like teeth. Your roots pulling toward a home since abandoned, a position of forgotten comfort. Kick out on the porch swing as light leaves the sky. Caught frigid in the now-dusk, watch the great mobile of the universe spin into view. If it helps, think of the universe as a mobile. Just some great plasticky thing that holds the stars together. The world can be your crib. The stars can be your pacifier. Swooning and pale, let them spill down. Let them fill your mouth. Think of the universe as that which fills you. As something unending. If it helps, think of the universe as a litany. It will never exhaust until you let it. Think of the universe. Let it help you to sleep.
-U-
Matthew Gustafson is the Managing Editor and Poetry Editor at Folklore Review and has been published recently in Beaver Magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can find his Twitter at @mgustafsonwords and on Instagram at matthewgustafson_.
Sam Aureli
Shelf Life
Expiration Dates
I want a bowl of cereal, but the milk expired three days ago and I stand there with the refrigerator door open longer than anyone should stand in front of a refrigerator wondering whether dates really mean anything, and she scoffs, says those aren't real, they're just there to make us buy more milk before we have to, tells me to smell it, that I'd know if it had turned, but I've never trusted dairy once it starts asking me to believe, and I think that's strange considering how easily I've trusted people, how often I've convinced myself something was still good because I wanted it to be, because it looked fine from the outside, because nothing had curdled yet, and just the other day you said you hated children while we were talking about my son becoming a father and me becoming a nonno, and I remember smiling because I didn't know what else to do with the sentence after you said it, the way you smile when someone drops a glass at a restaurant and everyone pretends it didn't happen, and now I'm holding this carton in my hand wondering whether expiration dates are warnings or just suggestions, whether love spoils all at once or quietly, one unnoticed morning at a time, whether we've already crossed whatever invisible line there was and we're just pouring ourselves over cereal out of habit.
* * *
Forbidden Objects
I shouldn't look in the mirror as I write this poem because someone, somewhere, has already written the mirror poem better than I ever could, and besides, I'm told it's cliché, as are poems about love, about roses, about red petals falling one by one onto a table where someone has just realized they're no longer loved, and I should definitely not write another poem about my father because I've already spent enough pages trying to understand a man who remains, despite my best efforts, unknowable, not to mention there are entire libraries devoted to fathers and grief and complicated childhoods, shelves buckling beneath the weight of sons trying to rearrange the furniture of memory into something they can live with, and I probably shouldn't write about birds because they've already flown through enough poems, or trees because they've stood patiently for poets long before me, or growing older because every face eventually pauses in front of the same mirror wondering where the young man disappeared to, and while I'm busy worrying whether anyone will mistake sincerity for the familiar, the poem I've been trying so hard not to disappoint quietly lifts the mirror from the wall, folds my father into its silver, pockets the rose before it can bloom into a metaphor, and wanders off into the forest where a wren mistakes it for a twig and carries it home.
-U-
Sam Aureli is an Italian-born poet living in the Boston area. A first-generation college graduate, he spent decades working in design and construction before turning to poetry. He is the author of On the Edge of Knowing (Kelsay Books, 2026) and That's Not My Shadow (The Poetry Box, 2027).
Lucinda Kempe
In the Midnight Blue
You hear the bells of Trinity Church ringing off in the distance that compel you not to climb on the chair to insert the belt in between the top of the door and the sill. With the belt still around your neck, you sit at your desk and write in your journal about your day normally as if there are no voices in your head. Maybe you write a poem “And earth, our nursery, swaddled in stars Shall send us soon, Outward, In peripheral search…* Then you remove the belt from your neck, reinsert it into your trousers, and take a walk down Jackson Avenue crossing St. Charles towards Trinity Church and take a right on Chestnut heading to your ex-wife’s home to see your daughter. You don’t kick the chair out from beneath you but continue strolling pausing at First Street, cross and stop in front of the derelict Greek Revival house and call your ex’s name: Mauuud Elllen! Imagine lifting the rotten wrought iron gate, entering the yard and walking down the stone path lined on either side with aspidistra and settling in the Mies van der Rohe metal chair that has a plank for its long absent wicker seat. Your fifteen-year-old daughter hears you calling and she slaps out the screen door slamming it behind her and tells you that she’s so happy you didn’t hang yourself, that she’s sorry about the voices, but that she loves seeing you here before her with your Montogomery Clift square jaw and startling Paul Newman blue eyes like hers. She says it’s okay to be sad and want to die only don’t. Stay. Stay with her so that she becomes more than a child who morphs into an adult who searches for her father who has become like his poem—"a speck of silver dust caught in the wind of infinite night.”
* From “Thoughts of an Evening (Too delicately woven to be held for long)” by Godfrey Kirkpatrick, my father, who hanged himself when I was fifteen years old.
Author’s Note: I have written about my father so many times and his manner of death. Each time I think I've nailed it. Then I try again. Recapturing him on paper is as close to him as I will get and gives me a fleeting closure. His poems were never published except in one of the Louisiana mental asylums he revolved in and out of until his death. My chapbook Pretty Girl is dedicated to him and others who have died by suicide or suffered from suicidal ideation.
-U-
Lucinda Kempe’s work is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Salvage, The McNeese Review, SoFloPoJo, Bull, Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, and Hotflash, among other places. Her chapbook, Pretty Girl, is being published by Silverbacked Punk Press in October. You can find her at lucindakempe.substack.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 perfect pop song performer is Dr. Boyd Razor, Ph.D., aka Dr. America, whose song of choice is Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" (1968, written by Jimmy Webb). Our Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press photography commissioner is Chen Kau. His current favourite songs are Milk Bar Gang's "Kultural Revolution" and "One Child" from Beijing Baby (2026), Radiohead's "Lucky" from OK Computer (1997), and Talking Heads' "Heaven", "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel", "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)", and "Once in a Lifetime" from Stop Making Sense (1984). He is currently reading Taipei Story (2026) by R.F. Kuang and The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song (2019) by Dylan Jones.
Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.
Thoughts of an Evening
(Too delicately woven to be held for long)
Soon the moon shall hang
In the midnight blue
Of day’s other half.
That crystal sphere of light
Belongs to us.
Sweet moon, in whose radiance
Mystic troops of dreams
Do dance each night.
And earth, our nursery,
Swaddled in stars
Shall send us soon,
Outward,
In peripheral search…
Specks of silver dust caught up
In the wind of infinite night…
Playing
On the many-colored strings
Of nothingness…
— Godfrey Lyle Kirkpatrick (1937-1974)
It's not going to hear you (2026)
Vinaròs, Spain
Photo by Emma Chaplin
