While My Niece Vacuums, Her Daughter Finds the Paper Scissors by Chris Dahl

I cut, she says, I cut, Mama.
As if they were hedging shears
she opens and closes the blades with
both hands, the advice I offer ignored.

The scissors twist in her clenching.
Apparently, my job is to turn the paper
to the blades, feeding it perpendicular,
tightening the flimsy edge until

a portfolio emerges, page after page
with fringed borders, a floor
debauched with nicked scraps.

Fiercely, she metes out the paper’s
punishment, snick after snick, her face
a bud of concentration. By the time
the floor is vacuumed—twice—
she’s embellished seven sheets.

Once I let go of my need to teach.
Once she understands what is possible.



Chris Dahl cups handfuls of murky pond-water hoping to examine another world half-hidden in this one. Her chapbook, Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts won Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition. Extensively published, she also serves on the Olympia Poetry Network board and edits their newsletter.

After Chemo by Maryfrances Wagner

How long have I been like this? she asks,
as though her chemo was a hangover.
Three days, I tell her. She punches
her pillow, a little drool creeping
down her chin, her sigh like my cat
before he gave up. No one should ever
have to live like this, she says. It’s easier
to die. I cover her with a quilt. No,
she says, I’m getting up. She wobbles
to the light switch. A devil came out of here.
He imitated me pulling my pain. Never
mind. You wouldn’t understand. I refresh
her ice water and juice, guide her
back to her bed, fluff her pillow
as she did for me, her cool hand
rescuing me from what hovered
outside my window, waiting.



Maryfrances Wagner co-edits I-70 Review, was Missouri Artist of the Year, and was Missouri’s 6th Poet Laureate. Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn book award and was first runner up for the Eric Hoffer award (2024). Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Laurel Review, Main Street Rag, Rattle, etc.

Thirty-Two Degrees by Hannah Dilday

Laid to rest beneath the All-Seeing Eye,
watched your grand master tie an apron 'round
the mahogany casket, your bloated waist.

You died at the penultimate level,
but I only knew you as Dad, not a
member of some secret society.

So I buried a stranger with the face
of my father, grave decorated with
a compass set to thirty-two degrees.



Hannah Dilday is an emerging American writer currently residing in the Netherlands. She earned her BS in philosophy from The University of Oregon and has been living abroad for the past four years. Hannah's poetry has appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Poem Stellium.

Chamomile by Joey Nicoletti

My mother told me:
five years after World War Two,
the chamomile seeds
that German soldiers spat out
into the seared ground
of her family’s homestead
grew into bushes even
thicker than my Nonno Giovanni’s forearms,
glistening in the sweat of anticipation
as they boarded the S.S. Colombo,
their ship, the silver voices of church bells
shrouding Genoa in mist.
“We will grow like chamomile
in America, my sweet angel,”
Giovanni said. “We will grow.”



Joey Nicoletti's most recent books are Extinction Wednesday: A Memoir (Bordighera Press, 2024) and Breakaway (Broadstone Books, 2023). He is the Reviews Editor of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and teaches in the College Writing Program at SUNY Buffalo State University.

Umbra by Michelle Reale

On a cold day in June I rocked my granddaughter to sleep. I buried my face in her curls then felt an intense swirl of heat surrounding me. It rested in my throat. This came on the heels of a week of ultramarine dreams, which made me feel out of time. I kept pressing my feet into the floor, trying to ground myself. I emptied out a folder of old photos. I focused on one of my father in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, his hands deep into the pockets of an overcoat with broad shoulders. Common nightingales in various states of flight surrounded him. He looked pensive, much the way his own father tended to look in photos. Always an edge of fear. The colors in the photo were muted with time, much like my father’s memory of that day. The sky was such a pale blue, it looked nearly bereft. It awakened a homesickness in me that had thus far been muted. I tracked the cause of past suffering to indecision and maybe a lack of touch. Emotional investments made me realize that I was made for freedom, but the road was narrow. I must have an ancestor somewhere, whose name, long forgotten, meant something important that could be useful to me, who could help me to survive certain brutalities. The future may make us tremble, but we will walk into it anyway. Once someone loved me and gave me a diamond ring like my very own star, brilliant, but prone to fading over millennia. Love was a miracle in the way that hysteria is: it comes out of nowhere and no one can make sense of it in time enough for it to matter. There is a photograph of me, but it is a creation of my own imagination. I am wearing a light violet dress. The sun is weak. I am pensive, like my father. I am off to the side, leaving most of the photograph empty. But I have a memory and I want to pass it on to the little one in my arms: behind enormous light, there was a raw purple moon. My blood diamond. A far off summer symphony. Now my ring finger is empty save for the scar where it used to sit like a shining star.



Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press), Blood Memory (Idea Press), In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press), and Terra Ballerina (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.