Photo by Alan Scott
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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Robert 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 Cliff 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.
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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 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 art commissioner is Chen Kau. His current favourite songs are Milk Bar Gang's "Kultural Revolution" and "One Child" from Beijing Baby (2026), and "Have a Cigar" from Wish You Were Here (1975). He is currently reading Taipei Story (2026) by R.F. Kuang.
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)
Don't clap for the sun (2026), Vinaròs, Spain
Photo by Emma Chaplin
