Before I knew I wasn’t a girl by Ren Wilding

I went on a date with a straight man. His voice, when I was with him,
an echo in an empty hallway. I wasn’t there. He worked in a warehouse.
I was in grad school, trying not to assume we’d have nothing to say.
When we parted, I said I didn’t text, still had a phone with no keyboard.
I asked him to an exhibit at the city library, as if putting him in a room
with art would make me feel like a girl. He told me maybe, so I went
alone. I was a collage undone, pieces flaking out of the frame, caught
by another with glue still wet, unfinished. He texted, what are you
doing later? I pressed the numbers to spell stop and I can’t, the answers
to my own questions.



Ren Wilding earned an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri. Their work appears in Braving the Body, Comstock Review, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Tulip Tree, and Zoetic Press, and others. They received a Pushcart nomination and are co-curator of the “Words Like Blades” series.

The Key to Finding Love is Fucking Up the Pattern on Purpose by Ren Wilding

You made a big deal about showing me
your Andrea Gibson tattoo, as we drank
coffee at ten pm. It was before I had a tattoo,
when I could still drink coffee late.
You asked me to your apartment for a movie
and showed me your bedroom copy
of The Ethical Slut with the door
wide open. In an alcove, we sat on the sofa
under a blanket without touching.
It was before I’d had sex with a woman,
before I’d had sex at all. Your roommate
walked by, and nothing about this was private.
I didn’t know what you wanted, so I went out
with you again just to see what you would do.



*The title is a line from Andrea Gibson’s poem “Pole Dancer” from Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns.



Ren Wilding earned an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri. Their work appears in Braving the Body, Comstock Review, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Tulip Tree, and Zoetic Press, and others. They received a Pushcart nomination and are co-curator of the “Words Like Blades” series.

Beethoven in Snow by Richard Weaver

Like watching clouds
dissolve into animals
the snow beneath my fingers
takes the shape
of a man long dead.
A portrait in white
and winter wind.
January’s sun relenting.



Richard Weaver continues as the official writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub, though he splits time with Hooley’s Public House in San Diego.

Home by Vera Kewes Salter

Shoes scattered
by the door

Coats thrown on
the couch

Cat sits on the wide sill
to watch birds

Your coat still
hangs in the closet



Vera Kewes Salter lives and writes in New Rochelle, New York. Her Chapbook In Lewy's Body about her husband's struggle with Lewy Body Dementia was published by Finishing Line Press in February, 2024. She has a full-length manuscript titled Girl on the Underground which starts with her life in London as a daughter of refugees from Europe, and continues with her life in the United States with her African American husband and family.

Caregiving by Frederick Wilbur

We craft word-coffins for our inner necessity,
holding our parents’ hands in hospice quiet;
questions of loss and grief are not asked
as time embezzles riches from us all.

Racing against the morphine drip,
we swear to respect their inconvenient wishes.
We wonder if our gift of flowers consoles them,
too late perhaps, naïve in our hope.

But why are they still blind to our brother’s thefts and abuses?

No ransom for the cruel kidnapping of disease;
days priceless, grief without end,
yet poorer, we turn to leave dissatisfied,
counting our own lives without answer.

Why are they bankrupt of plausible, even cheap excuses?



Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps and forthcoming, The Heft of Promise. He is poetry co-editor and blogger for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).