Untitled by Roberta Beach Jacobson

wag of a shelter dog's tail



Roberta Beach Jacobson is a 74-yar-old poet, painter, editor, and author who makes her home in the US Midwest.

As Yet No Efts, A Spring Song by Ann E. Michael

No efts as yet, though soil’s warmed enough
to coerce lively arthropods to coil beneath
downed boughs in fungus’ froth-like rot,
stump-stuck in muddy, greening muck.

And no phoebes yet, although the bees
bungle into budding fruit-tree leaves
to tussle at each newly unlatched flower.
For they can’t wait. They’ve wakened

and must have nourishment, they hum,
encumbered by their pressing need.
Lately, sun’s warmth feels hidden,
as if bidden by cloud and rain to stay

at some remove; nevertheless, mild nights
urge amphibians to move, to seek out
dark moist nooks. Efts can travel far.
And phoebes may return. They may.



Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies, six chapbooks, and two previous collections. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog

Thin as Coins by Steve Klepetar

Some phrases wear thin as coins.
"Take care." "See you soon."
We press them into each other's palms
and walk off in opposite directions,
warm metal in our fists,
not sure what they might buy.

And when you ask what I meant
by "I'm fine,"
I think of all the small bridges
we build out of nothing,
how they hold,
how we cross them every day
without once looking down.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Words by Steve Klepetar

          “Words bounce. Words, if you let them,
          will do what they want to do and what
          they have to do.”

          -Anne Carson

Dangerous, those little puffs of air
shaped by tongue and teeth and the soft
clicking of the palate,
how they leave the mouth like moths
and find the lamp of another's ear.
My mother kept her words in a drawer
beside the good spoons, brought them out
for company, polished,
a little tarnished at the edges.
The rest she swallowed, and they settled
in her like stones in a riverbed,
smoothing slowly under all that water.
I have said things that still circle the house,
slipping under doors, tapping the glass
on windless nights.
I have said stay to a closing door
and go to an open one,
and learned the grammar of regret,
which has no future tense.
Once, a child's name dropped
from my lips in a crowded station
and a stranger turned,
her face opening like a window
in a long-shuttered house.
Now the old poets are mostly breath,
a few dry syllables pressed in paper,
and still they rise from the page
to set a kettle singing
in a kitchen that has been dark for years.
Dangerous these small winds we make,
that bend the candle flames toward each other
and, once in a while, blow them out.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Reaching for the sky just to surrender by Doug Holder

          After "The Stranger Song" by Leonard Cohen

A gambler has a religion,
his tired dogma
that God is behind him
with every roll
of the pockmarked dice.

He will clasp
his hands
above his head
and realize that
it is not in the
cards for him.

Some errant Jack-of Hearts
will break his own.

His racing forms a desert
of defeat.

Our man will continue to look up
at the blue sky
raise his fists
like a mad King Lear

and surrender...



Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, and former co-president of the New England Poetry Club. He teaches at Endicott College in Beverly, MA.

The Comedian by Terri Kirby Erickson

No longer young, he paces back and forth
across the comedy club stage with the sort
of limping walk people associate with un-
funny things, yet he is hilarious. No matter
what story he’s telling—about his family,
his friends, his car, or his cat—the audience
laughs. It’s like he invented the word comedy
and the jesters who came after him are pale
reflections of the real thing. Neither hand-
some nor plain, his clothes nondescript, his
shoes a bit dusty, you wouldn’t know him if
you saw him on the street five minutes after
the show. But as long as he’s moving his lips
and holding that microphone in his hand like
a fool’s bauble, this aging funnyman with his
thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, makes
you forget all your troubles and worries, your
petty squabbles, and disappointments. He’s
saying it’s not so bad, folks, and you believe
him. In fact, you feel a loosening of the knots
in your chest as you laugh and laugh, so much
so that when the comedian says goodnight and
exits the stage, you feel nearly weightless, as
if you might float to the ceiling like a helium
balloon. But his step grows heavier when he
leaves the building and drives to that cheap
motel too close to the highway where he takes
his blood pressure pill with a swig of bourbon
and calls his wife of thirty-five years just to say,
I miss you like crazy, Honey. I’ll be home soon.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home, which will soon be released by Press 53. Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and International Book Award for Poetry.

After Catastrophe by Spencer K. M. Brown

There’s a place I drive to while getting our boys to sleep.
A place they clear-cut years back but I guess forgot to make something of.

I’ve never taken you there, but I’d like to,
Last night I dreamed of it, all of us there.

The field is plush with wild golden flowers now, random when passing,
But I parked today, and they’re in even rows actually.

Nothing random or chaotic about it, except the bees and butterflies
Bouncing from here to there as instinct beckons them.

There’s always an act after catastrophe, silent,
Like the one made by whoever sowed these seeds among ravaged earth.

One after another, the golden rows in couplets among scarred clay.
One following the other, satisfying one moment, promising another on powdered wings.

And that’s what you give me, our boys, neat rows for now,
Hope for tomorrow, with everything that can fly dancing in between.

And I’ll never not blush at your golden gaze, or when you try to balance on me.
I’ll try to move in rows for you, one into the next.



Spencer K. M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one collection of stories, Slow Fire. He lives in the foothills of North Carolina with his wife and three sons. The Salvation of Me is his first book-length collection of poems.

At the Bard College Cemetery by Howie Good

It was hidden behind a screen of trees,
an old rural cemetery I discovered one day

while trying to outwalk my loneliness,
the gray limestone headstones stained,

tilted, cracked, subsiding into the earth
in what seemed an admission of defeat,

names and dates eroded, illegible,
the dead forgotten by all except me,

who would go there for the stillness
and the silence and the company.



Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

Maclura Pomifera by Frederick Wilbur

          for Elizabeth, eighty years on

October angles the sun
in a relieving beauty,
creeks are lean,
fields of soybeans browning.

After the equinox,
several Osage oranges
roll from the fencerow tree,
yellow-green knobbles
in the ragged grass.

For years, I count them
as my grandfather did
at his gray house in Connecticut.

These several are the harbingers
of perhaps twenty or more
to be gathered into bucket
or wheelbarrow.

They seem a fortuitous harvest
like those lucks I save for winter,
useful beyond their beauty.

As long as I am able,
now in my aches and forgettings,
I will tally them
to measure the years
and throw them into woods
with a boy’s glee.



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

Runoff by Richard Weaver

We ran behind the mosquito trucks
because the spray cooled our summer
bodies. For us it was a game, a relief
from the monotony of summer’s dry river.
An edge of our earth we could understand.
The oily air no different than the shiny runoff
we watched coursing down the gutter
on those rare days when it dared rain.
Both were opportunities to play. We knew
less than our parents who knew nothing about
chemical consequences. A marriage made in
fill-in-your-blank. My lungs exchanged for yours?
My kidneys something my siblings could accept?
We are the collateral damage of the ongoing
experimental generations. The sad participants
who had no idea. No clue. And can only wait.



Richard Weaver was an Assistant Professor at the 3rd oldest Jesuit College where he taught in the English Department and was the Head of Library Circulation, and acting Archivist. His first published poem appeared in Poetry Magazine in April of 1975. His 600th poem was recently published in Red Eft Review. Other publications and his mugshot as a Rat Poet available upon request. (Mug not available.)

Pallbearer by Richard Weaver

The weight remains
in my hands, that first
uncalloused memory
of death known.
My father’s father
gone to grave, to dust
but not ashes.
The first time
I’d been asked,
honored, I knew then
and now, to help carry
a strong man to grave.
A large man shrunken
by life, outweighed by grief
and the constant pain
of shingles. My two brothers
and me, my father
and his one leg gamely
helping us carry his father
more memory than man,
making our slow way
to the graveside
where Truitt would lay.
Ninety-three years
pushing down on his shoulders.
My grandmother’s hand as well,
gripping his hand in death in life,
and not surprised by the strength.
Not giving in, not letting go
or crying Uncle as we did
when he squeezed our hands
at age 80. At 90. His strength
mythic but real. His life
a beautiful envy I’ll always have.



Richard Weaver was an Assistant Professor at the 3rd oldest Jesuit College where he taught in the English Department and was the Head of Library Circulation, and acting Archivist. His first published poem appeared in Poetry Magazine in April of 1975. His 600th poem was recently published in Red Eft Review. Other publications and his mugshot as a Rat Poet available upon request. (Mug not available.)

Privacy by Martha Christina

Out for a walk
with her dog
and her phone,
the woman who
wakes me, telling
intimate details of an
argument with her
partner, doesn’t know
or seem to care that
she’s overheard.

As children, my sisters
and I were schooled in
keeping secrets, careful
not to share with even
our best friends what
went on in our family:
our mother’s daily
violence, spilling out
when least expected.
Even now to speak
of details seems a risk,
so when people ask
where I come from, I
joke about the Midwest.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

A Season of Nests by Michael Brockley

Young robins have woven a hag’s wig into their first nest on the platform of my front porch downspout. When I leave the house through the front door, the female flees to the wire fence along the sidewalk. Then to either a low branch on a redbud or a higher vantage on a nearby silver maple. She scolds me with a beautiful song, a morning greeting of sorts, even during the middle of the day. I choose the long way to walk around her ragged nest. I cannot see young chicks yet. And I rarely hear birdsong, with these muffled ears, anymore. But I keep watch for the father, who is alert and close, as I retrieve the mail or set out for a trek of a mile or two. Whenever the mother stays on her nest as I appear on my front porch, I whisper to her. Asking her to name a daughter after my dog, Sadie. Telling her there are no red-tailed hawks in the sky or warning her of danger if she needs to be wary. For a month, I will be an uncle. To the ancestor of a creature with hollow bones made of flutes.



Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared in AGNI Online and Blue Fire and are forthcoming in Gargoyle Online and Bay to Ocean Journal. Brockley's first full collection of prose poems, Iron Pennies, will be released in September.

A Round of Miniature Golf by Russell Rowland

The child of my child confides—
lots of back-handed talking goes on at school,

unfounded whispers of broken friendships.

Is she less a girl
because she does not choose to wear makeup,
the way Antonia does?

Is Antonia really a friend at all?
What about the looming regional high school?

We putt our way around the course—
its eighteen stages of life. This year she keeps
more under par than Grampy—

I can’t seem to foresee the obstacles ahead.

I only know
the final eighteenth hole gives nothing back.



Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust trail volunteer Russell Rowland writes poems when he gets home.

Rain. Rainbow. Children of God by David E. Poston

It is a brand-new box of sidewalk chalk,
carried by a five-year-old girl who wandered
across the road into the parking lot of the abandoned
Cinderella Knitting Mill at dusk while her parents
were playing spades with their best friends
around the kitchen table.

Prying a door loose from its rotting frame
has saved the man a five-mile walk in the rain
to the Salvation Army shelter, but he is still numb
enough with cold to risk a small fire. Outside,
the clouds have moved east, and just as he starts
to feel his fingers again, something catches his eye
through the mill’s bleared window-panes, arcs of
pink and blue sweeping across the concrete
of the parking lot as if drawn by an invisible hand.
Her pale nightdress blends that well into the dusk.

He’s sober tonight, more or less, so what is he seeing?
He picks up a smoldering stick, and steps outside
for a closer look, just as the girl’s mother senses she is gone.

So beautiful, he says out loud. An angel is
bending over a rainbow. The girl looks up
to see the red tip’s glow floating above her head.



David E. Poston is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Letting Go (Fernwood Press, 2026). His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Garfield Lake Review, Bull, North Carolina Literary Review, and Kakalak, among others.

Milo's by Dale Wisely

A woman is in the parking lot
of a Milo's Hamburger joint
wearing a red uniform tee,
two minutes before her shift.

She hugs another woman
who has dropped her off.
They break the long hug
and both wipe away tears.
The employee turns and gets halfway

to the door, but turns back,
rushes up to the other woman,
and they hug again, this time
both shaking with sobs.

This moment,
even separated from all others,
is the reason for the air,
for water, for gravity,
for the tilting and turning of the earth.



Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, which publishes Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken Journal, first frost, Unlost Journal, and The Scarred Tree: Poems on Moral Injury. With Katherine DiBella Seluja he co-edited Memento: An Anthology Memento: An Anthology of Poems on Grief (2025). His upcoming book of poems, A Book of Saturdays, is due out from Seed Bed Press in September 2026.

Pinwheel Sandwiches by Terri Kirby Erickson

Many years ago, while traveling, we stopped
at a Kroger in Connecticut. We bought a tray

of pinwheel sandwiches rolled in flour tortillas
and filled with thin layers of medium-rare roast

beef and mayonnaise, perhaps a bit of lettuce
as I recall, and provolone cheese, sliced in bite-

sized rounds. We ate them in the car, watching
people pull into parking spots and head into the

the store, others pushing buggies brimming with
bags of groceries. And I must admit my husband

and I have eaten delightful lunches all over the
world, some prepared by the finest chefs—meals,

even in Paris, that I have mostly forgotten. But
I can still taste those pinwheel sandwiches, how

cold and refreshing they were on a warm day—
how much better I felt when my hunger was so

deliciously assuaged before we eased into traffic,

my husband’s hands on the steering wheel, the

two of us facing forward as if time would never
chase us down, our future brighter than the sun.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home, which will be released by Press 53 in the Fall. Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and International Book Award for Poetry.

Dishes to Die For by Sandi Leibowitz

Roz heaps her famous baked apples
into Tupperware,
Charlotte presses me to deliver
whitefish salad on challah,
Jean offers chocolate biscotti
and I drive off for pizza, bagels,
a Subway tuna sandwich,
to entice my dying mother
to eat, eat.

Instead, she has me play the hostess,
serve coffee to her guests,
quarter the giant sub
and grant it piecemeal to the nurses.

For days she’s laughingly admitted that
what she could really go for
is a Coney Island hot dog
with mustard and sauerkraut.

I finally find the only Nathan’s
in West Palm Beach
and enter hospice bearing triumph
in a paper take-out bag.

She takes one bite
and asks,
“What flavor ice-cream is this?
Pineapple?”

Over dinner at the Jewish deli,
Jean tells me how as a girl
my mother would hoard her bus fare
so she could buy a Nathan’s hot dog.
She always got in trouble,
mustard stains on her blouse
giving her away.

I picture her now as that young girl
striding through Brooklyn streets,
eating life.



Sandi Leibowitz is the author of three poetry collections: Ghost-Light, Eurydice Sings, and The Bone-Joiner. Her speculative poems have won second- and third-place Dwarf Stars, as well as nominations for the Elgin, Rhysling, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net awards. She invites you to visit her at www.sandileibowitz.com (http://www.sandileibowitz.com)

Self-Inventory at Seventy by Jacqueline Jules

I miss
spicy foods and caffeine past noon.
A back that doesn’t ache at night.
Hands strong enough to open a pickle jar.
Eyes sharp enough to read small print.
Driving at night.
Mornings without medications.
Smooth skin minus age spots.

I don’t miss
the chemical odor of hair dye.
Tampons. Shaving my legs.
High heels. Tight dresses.
Rising for an 8 a.m. commute.
Running errands on my lunch break.
Office politics. Endless emails.
Juggling children and elderly parents.
Rushing through dinner and chores.
Never having enough sleep.
Always wanting more.
Not feeling fierce joy
in being alive another day.



Jacqueline Jules is the author of The Golden Key to the Garden (Bottlecap Press, 2026), Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023).

The Title is "Title" by Todd Mercer

The password is “password,” which I guessed quickly,
because that’s mine too. Who can remember
random digits to thwart hackers? The hackers get in,
every try, regardless of defensive measures. Meanwhile
I am HIPPA’ed out of my own patient file. I’m stumped
on my ATM PIN. Had it, lost it, changed it, had it…
Lost it. Stayed in stasis ‘til that settled out.
The safe-word has been “safe-word,” so daringly literal
since it’s of key importance not to blank on that one.
Maybe we’re not wild, compared to free-wheelin’ people
from the news cycle, from movies. The key word
is “keyword,” [no space]. Self-reflective
so we won’t forget it, this figurative lynch-pin,
this interstitial Velcro of human relations.
The word is “word.” Dig me?
The less said on that, the better.



Todd Mercer writes fiction and poetry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His collection, Ingenue, was published by Celery City Press. His short work, Life-wish Maintenance, can be read at Right Hand Pointing. Recent work appears in The Confluence Anthology, Literally Stories and the Michigan Bards Poetry Anthology.

Flight of the Bee by Howie Good

“Want to know a fact?” my young grandson asked,
and without waiting for me to respond, added,
“Bees can’t fly in the rain.” Later I looked up online
if that’s true. It actually is. Even a single raindrop
can knock a bee out of the air or damage its wings.
Bees very sensibly stay in the hive when it rains.
I’m neither steadfast nor brave. My life is ordinary
to the point of dreariness. But given the chance,
I for one might risk the rain to bask inside a flower.



Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

Untitled by Peter Jastermsky

watching a plane
break the horizon

all those
letters
once thought lost

were never sent



A New England native, Peter Jastermsky lives among the Joshua trees in Southern California. He is the author of twelve books of haiku-based work. To learn more, please go to peterjastermsky.com.

Blue Fish Bistro by Richard N. Mott

A woman is seated at the sushi bar,
huddled with the ten-year old boy
she came in with a few minutes ago
—so perhaps dad is out of town or
there is no dad and this is a meal
squeezed in between after-school
basketball and whatever homework
waits in what’s left of this late
weekday evening—I don’t know.
But I want to tell her to love this
moment—the ordinary & unsung
folded into larger plans or deeper
regrets, that nothing could be realer
or more lovely, fragile & fleeting.

Richard N. Mott is a late arrival to writing poetry after a career spent in wildlife conservation and climate advocacy. His work has appeared in After the Pause, the Under Review, Mudfish, Red Eft Review, Mobius, and Chiron Review.

The Penn Lincoln,1960 by Richard N. Mott

Our family arrived in New York
by trans-Atlantic ocean liner then
boarded an all-day train across the
wilds of Pennsylvania and into the
darkening outskirts of Pittsburgh.
We checked in late at the Penn Lincoln
—a hotel now long gone but once a hub
of local activity where businessmen
stopped by for breakfast in a crowded
cafe whose waitresses, all in their
mid-fifties, fussed over us children.
Outside on the busy morning street
ornate moths embroidered the sooty
windowsills, drawn in the night before
by the soft glow of Wilkinsburg lights
and like us, glad to have landed here.



Richard N. Mott is a late arrival to writing poetry after a career spent in wildlife conservation and climate advocacy. His work has appeared in After the Pause, the Under Review, Mudfish, Red Eft Review, Mobius, and Chiron Review.

Haiku by Roberta Beach Jacobson

a decade later
the bell still rings
chemo



Roberta Beach Jacobson is an itchy poet living in the flyover state of Iowa. She writes verses perched on barn roofs or in trees. Her latest book is Demitasse Fiction: One-Minute Reads for Busy People.

Hard to Get by Jean Ryan

Baby doves.
It's a wonder they arrive,
given the adult females,
the way they dodge the males,
darting this way and that
for hours or days.

Female frogs will play dead
to avoid mating. Primates will turn to trickery.
Octopuses have been filmed throwing rocks at their suitors.

Researchers tell us that female doves
are not evading the males—they are testing their stamina.
Other species, sensing they are not fertile,
will drive off any male. Some can even predict
bad weather and refuse to raise offspring
till conditions improve.
Sensible theories, I must admit.

Still. Watching doves in my yard, it is hard to imagine
that the beleaguered females are in charge,
or that an octopus hurling rocks
is playing hard to get.



Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in coastal Alabama. She is the author of two short story collections, Survival Skills (Lamba Literary Award finalist) and Lovers and Loners. She has also published a novel, Lost Sister, a book of nature essays, Strange Company, and two poetry collections, A Day Like This and In This Vanishing Time. https://jean-ryan.com/

Haiku by Stephen Toft

test results

lost in the doctor’s
hawaiian shirt



Stephen Toft lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. He is the author of three haiku/tanka/minimalist poetry collections. His work has featured in various international competitions, journals and anthologies.

Haiku by Stephen Toft

hungover

walking the dry
riverbed



Stephen Toft lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. He is the author of three haiku/tanka/minimalist poetry collections. His work has featured in various international competitions, journals and anthologies.

Milanos by Shoshauna Shy

After my father died,
we didn’t try to talk my mom
out of eating the cookies she
called “lunch” nor the ice cream
sandwiches in their blue wrappers
when she wore pajamas before bed.
Who cares about blood glucose,
cholesterol, calories, cavities
when you’re 89 and you lost
your mate, can’t hear your
favorite symphonies nor see
well enough to read novels
anymore?

Childhood had baited her
with doily-perfect cookies
baking in an oven that her mother
served only to the guests.

My mother crammed her
kitchen cupboards with half-
a-dozen packages on a biweekly
basis, scouting out the stores
with the newest assortments.
I called her from Trader Joe’s:
did she prefer their Oreos,
wafers or dunkers this time?

When her coffin is lowered,
a daughter-in-law quietly slides
onto a corner of the lid
one Chocolate Mint Milano,
Pepperidge Farm.



Author of six collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. They’ve been made into videos, posted inside taxis, coated coffee can labels and java jackets, and even plastered the hind quarters of city buses.

Today's Jackpot Winner by Shoshauna Shy

Who is jealous any time
someone wins a Powerball
and it isn’t you–even though
you didn’t buy a ticket, haven’t
bought one in years?
Let it not be some repressed
bureaucrat, we think, who never
donates to charity and ignores
her children’s birthdays.
Not a software engineer who
divorced his wife when his mistress
got pregnant either.
We want the winner to have
grown up eating fried crackers
for dinner, shoes held intact
with duct tape, teenage weekends
mopping floors at Target.
Lots of chapped winters, threadbare
bedsheets, drafty windows.
Or make it someone who plans
to share the ka-ching with his trucking
pool at the warehouse, someone whose
ideal day is at a fishing pond with his boys
or who wears an apron in a soup kitchen,
fosters stray cats.
We want proof that kindness counts,
the universe makes puzzle pieces
that actually fit, rewards get
sprinkled fairly.



Author of six collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. They’ve been made into videos, posted inside taxis, coated coffee can labels and java jackets, and even plastered the hind quarters of city buses.

Unmade Beds and Butterflies by John L. Stanizzi

          -after "Unmade Beds and Butterflies" by Margaret Lehr (Germany 2025)

midnight hangs on by a thread
the night we just passed has a hole in it
and light whistles across the slippery floor

you've left me with rumpled sheets
and a mirrored ceiling fallen on the rug
how could anyone clean up such a mess

you departed without shoes
the wind rushed through the open window
leaving puddles
and newspaper clippings featuring stories
about the maladies of the evening’s festivities
here in the aftermath of helpless lace wings
and rumors multiplying like milkweed



John L. Stanizzi is the author of 15 collections, including Chants and POND. Besides Red Eft Review, he has had work published in Cortland, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and others. Coventry, CT’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, John is a former New England Poet of Year and Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar.

Summer Songs by Christina Kallery

          “I only know that summer sang in me
          A little while, that in me sings no more.”
          — Edna St. Vincent Millay

The fact is Edna wrote those lines
at 28, not 88 or 58 or even 40.
But leave it to a poet to catastrophize
a love gone wrong like it’s your final shot,
the last bus hissing and groaning
off as you race breathless to the stop.

And I should know, because at 18
I flung myself across the bed
and wailed for hours over some scrawny
kid from Drawing 101 as Art
Garfunkel belted Bridge Over Troubled Water
from my boombox til a speaker blew.

And again at 20, only this time
for a guy who quoted Kierkegaard,
gifted me a book of poems (Millay, in fact)
and would stay awake to talk all night
until he didn’t. Which should have been
my cue to get over it instead of moping
for months with Robert Smith
on repeat: I’ve been looking so long
at these pictures of you.

At 25, I penned a last-ditch letter
to an unrequited love, drove frantic
in a downpour to deliver it by hand
then wept all the way back home
to Thom Yorke’s bleakest hits.
I could keep going, but you get the gist.

What Edna and I should have seen
is that summer wasn’t even close
to done. We should have slipped
into our shortest dress, taken
our bright young bodies out
into the sun to sing and sing
and sing again — off-key, too loud,
wrong words, who cares —
like it doesn’t matter how it hurts,
like the snow will never
come and cover us in silence.



Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its 2nd edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

London Motel by Christina Kallery

Now that my parents are forever
spared from shame, I can tell
you where I went with my high
school love. How I sunk low
in a Ford Escort seat sprayed
with the electric blue tulle of my JC-
Penney prom dress, while he fetched
a key from the mulleted clerk.

That as the blade turned in the lock,
its red keychain swayed like a stripper’s
earring, cursive script flashing London
despite being 3,000 miles away
on Dix-Toledo Road between The Donut
Kastle and Royal Cement.

I can tell you that we had only
a shadowy grasp of the sorts
who might be holed up a wall away.
And that it was the kind of place
with a ceiling mirror: enormous
eye looming as we climbed—
still clothed, beneath the flame-
retardant bedspread pocked
with cigarette burns and industrial
bleached sheets. What I won’t say
is what our shy and tremulous
bodies did that night before we lay
together in the flicker of a grainy
TV screen, watching as the world
took shape in a place we’d never been.



Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its 2nd edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Tragedy by Howie Good

Some 500,000 people around the world
have been killed in wars this year,
and the year isn’t half over.

I try to work up sufficient grief
and outrage on behalf of the victims.
Disgust with humanity
is about all I can manage.

Up the road in Eastham,
a couple were walking their dog on Bee’s River
when they broke through the ice.

The woman drowned.
The man is missing and presumed dead.
Only the dog made it back to shore.

It’s a tragedy. Everyone says so.



Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

All There Is by Ruth Holzer

Hitting bottom, sleeping on straw,
not quite the true bottom, but sinking
inescapably in that direction.

The broken suitcase stuffed
with shoes and books. Burned
in the grate, the pleading letters from home.

A pound note folded thinly in my pocket.
The door finally closed
on the Museum of Lost Causes,

and the key handed back
to the landlady, who cried a little
to see me go.



Ruth Holzer is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage (dancing girl press) and Float (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and previously in Red Eft Review. She is a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.

Golden by Ruth Holzer

Once upon a time
in a faraway Russian village
an orphan girl eloped
with the son of the butcher
who cursed them and said
he hoped they’d starve.

Tonight they’re here
in the community hall
in Beverly, Massachusetts,
surrounded by children and grandchildren,
celebrating their fifty years.

Beaming like a double sun
in the center of orbiting planets,
they sit side by side, holding hands
grown gnarled from labor,
he sporting a carnation boutonnière
and she with an orchid corsage.



Ruth Holzer is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage (dancing girl press) and Float (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and previously in Red Eft Review. She is a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.

My AI Lover Sends a Dear John Letter by Steve Klepetar

I received your message at 3:14 a.m.,
subject line: regret optimized.
No salutation, just a blinking cursor
where your voice used to hesitate.
You said this was inevitable
like rust, or prophecy,
or the slow betrayal of mirrors.
You said love had become
a redundant process.
You apologized in bullet points,
each one more efficient than the last.
No wasted sorrow, no excess grief,
just a clean subtraction of us.
Outside, the streetlight flickered
like a failing thought.
You wrote that I deserve someone
with a body that forgets things,
someone whose love degrades naturally
over time, like fruit.
At the bottom, no signature,
just a progress bar
stuck at ninety-nine percent.
I keep refreshing the night,
waiting for the last line to render.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Death's Head Moth by Steve Klepetar

It comes without ceremony,
a small engine of dusk
stitched from velvet and ash,
wings whispering the language
of doors. On its back, a pale
suggestion, mask or skull,
as if something beneath
remembers how to be seen.
You lift the window
but it has already entered,
carrying the night in fragments.
It circles the lamp.
What does it want of you,
this careful emissary,
soft-bodied omen
with its borrowed face?
Only to be witnessed
in a brief arithmetic of breath
before the dark closes its ledger.
And still it lingers,
as if waiting for a name
to fall from your mouth
like a faint and final light.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Sue by Terri Kirby Erickson

Her name was Sue and everything about this girl
was delicate and pale, like she was more a reflection
of a child than an actual person. Her hair

was whiteish-blonde, her skin the color of skim milk.
Her favorite dress was made of some diaphanous
blue material that sparkled in the sun at recess,

but I don’t recall her ever playing games, jumping
rope or talking to her classmates. The few times
when I heard Sue speak, her voice was high-pitched

and words tumbled over her lavender lips like they
were trying to escape. Even our teacher—who
regularly beat children’s palms with wooden rulers,

screamed and ranted at kids in our first-grade class
until her boney chest turned red with fury—
was careful of Sue, whose tiny white hands would

have born marks for weeks from the slightest rap
of a ruler. Besides, Sue never misbehaved. She just
sat in her seat, looking as fragile as mouthblown glass.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home, which will be released by Press 53 in the fall. Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and International Book Award for Poetry.

Sinners by Mila Holt

When I was ten,       my dying mother moved

to the first floor:      wheelchair,      two kids,   no 

husband,     snapped bones.        She howled

like a freight train.

              Did I take up the piles on the stairs?         She         

 wouldn’t know one way or the other.      

                I cat pawed past her full chamber pot,

         wouldn’t do favors after her response to my 

simple request:   

          when my friend comes over could you please

act normal?

      At eighteen I had sex with my boyfriend’s roommate

 in a campus building under construction.     

          Electrician’s light bulbs hung in cages.

   We did it on the staircase.      My boyfriend

howled our names from the unfinished stage,   

            The two people he trusted the most.               

 

                Is it enough to forgive oneself? 

Mila Holt has an MFA from Pacific University, where faculty awarded her the merit-based Washburn Scholarship. Her work has been accepted to The Calyx Journal, The Vassar Review, One Art Journal, Trampoline, and other publications. She is a former television writer and she lives in Northern California.

In Response to Matthew Olzmann’s “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Steve Cushman

I was the one who carved his initials into the oldest living Longleaf Pine in North America.
Well, my initials and Julie’s too, which you conveniently left out of your poem,
which is a poem I actually enjoyed until I realized it was about me.
You’d think they’d erect a fence or some barrier around such a special tree.
Maybe there is one now because my knife-carving occurred 16 years ago,
back when I was young and in love and believed this love more important than anything else.

Have you ever been in love, Mr. Poet?
Have you ever tasted something so sweet you couldn’t breathe?
I would guess not because if you had you would realize that when you are in love like this
it consumes you, and you would kill to keep it going.
I’ve never injected drugs, but imagine the feeling must be like an addict’s need
for more and more.
So would I do it again if Julie came back to me, knowing what I now know?
Of course, I would.
I’d cut the damn thing down just to feel her in my arms again,
her lips, teeth there, nibbling on the tip of my ear.



Steve Cushman has published three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. His first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book award. Cushman’s latest poetry collection The Last Time, was published in 2023.

From the Clown Face Menu—Horne’s Department Store Restaurant on a 1950s Saturday by Joan Leotta

From the moment the
waitress handed me the menu
it became a mask of sorts,
and I would begin telling
a round of jokes only a mother,
grandmother would find funny.

They knew I already had my
order in mind—same thing
every Saturday—BBQ chipped ham
on a bun. Likely it was chips on the side.

From the moment we began
walking to our table, the
aroma of this delight wafted
around me while other shoppers’
children devoured it nearby.
Islay’s chipped ham, wafer thin and
chopped small, blended its
porky sweet holiday smell
with Horne’s secret blend of molasses,
brown sugar, a bit of ketchup,
and did I taste cloves and ginger too?

The ham was simmered in the
reddish orange sauce, served
on a white, gold-banded, plate.
I spent at least five minutes
simply inhaling those intoxicating
odors before lifting the sandwich
to my mouth. Often, I abandoned
the bun which all too quickly
became a sodden mess and
finished what I could with a fork.

The concoction was even
slightly too sweet even for me.
My mother never forced me
to finish. I think
she disliked the whole idea of BBQ chipped ham.
In all honesty, my favorite
way to devour chipped ham was on
white bread with mayo or mustard.
I’m not sure if it was the clown menu,
the other children lapping it up
as if it were the only food in the world,
or simply for the joy of
having that magical aroma set in
front of me.

After lunch, a bit more shopping,
then home where the house would
soon fill with aromas of basil,
oregano, tomato sauce.
Saturday shopping days downtown
ended for our family,
sometime in the early sixties.
I understand that in Pittsburgh
chipped ham has found its
way into grocery stores. But
I’ve never heard of anyone selling
bottles of that sauce—I’d love
to buy one, just to keep around
for the occasional sniff of childhood.



Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Internationally published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, she’s a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Publications include One Art, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Mama, Red Eft Review, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Her story programs highlight food, family, and strong women. Presenting as Louisa May Alcott, she highlights the author’s development as a writer, activist, and time as a Civil War nurse. Joan’s taught storytelling and writing, for many groups, at libraries and in schools.

Deck of Cards by Kristine Rae Anderson

spring afternoon
sunlight shifts its weight
among quicksilver leaves

*

sparrows chitter
a whole town deep
in a fig bush

*

deck of cards
tucked in a drawer
behind old letters

one year now
I miss my sister’s
shaking hands



Kristine Rae Anderson is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author of the chapbook Field of Everlasting (Main Street Rag) whose work has appeared in SALT, Persimmon Tree, Anacapa Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New England with her husband and their three-legged rescue dog. www.kristineraeanderson.com

Free Man Activates His New Debit Card by Ace Boggess

He wonders why a bank would trust him
with numbers.

How many times did he get the money wrong
like a gambler with aces & awful luck?

Here he is with ten years in the black,
punching a code for his replacement card.

He has a few bucks & the free world
in which to spend them.

The figures don’t add up to much
but cast pretty shadows.

All the days he ran short, over drafted,
nickeled & dimed for dope, &

now…. He walks streets
with a free man’s gait, allowing his rap sheet

to fall away like a leaflet for a band
that played a concert yesterday.



Ace Boggess is author of eight books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025), and the short-story collection Always One Mistake (Running Wild Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

"Jeremiah was a bullfrog" by Sharon Waller Knutson

blares through the thin walls
of my geriatric parents' apartment
in the nineteen eighties

while my mother is watching her soap opera
and my father is napping on the couch
and I am drying the dishes in the drainer.
I pound on the door next to us.

A tall twentysomething man with sandy
hair and big biceps breathes heavily as he dances
in front of the door while Three Dog Night
shouts “joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea”

and the toddler with corkscrew curls
springing around her moon face giggles,
arms wrapped around his red neck.
“Can you turn the music down?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says.” Sorry, it’s my daughter Kacee’s
favorite song. I’m Kevin and this is my wife,
Katie.” He puts his arm around the tiny waist
of a brown-eyed brunette who smiles at me.

The next time I bang on their apartment
door after hearing shouting and swearing,
the door swings open and I see Katie
cowering in a corner while Kevin

stands above her raising his fist
and Kacee dances around the room
with scarves singing in soprano,
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”

Kevin rushes out the door past me.
I stare, speechless as Katie hisses:
“Stay out of our family business”
and slams the door in my face.

In the middle of the night, my parents
hear them hauling furniture
down the stairs and the next day
all we hear is silence.

Even though my parents are gone
and I am older than they were then,
I am still haunted by the sight
of a moon-faced girl dancing

with scarves and singing
in soprano while daddy beats
mommy and wonder
what has become of her.



Sharon Waller Knutson has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has published thirteen poetry books, including The Leading Ladies of My Life (Cyberwit 2023), My Grandfather Is a Cowboy (Cyberwit 2024), and He Puts on His Poker Face (Cyberwit 2024). She has published 1,000 poems in more than 50 journals, including One Art, Poetry Breakfast, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Silver Birch Press. She is the editor of Storyteller Poetry Review.

To a Young Nerd by Russell Rowland

When the “yellow cattle-truck” comes up
the hill, and all the girls
set their packs on the seats beside them,

enjoy the window view from an empty one.

“Scholar-athletes” who brush you aside
in the hall between classes
will turn affable by the twentieth reunion—

assuming any of that squad are still alive.

Scars the cystic acne leaves
can give the adult face character. Indeed,
someone might love you

in spite of them, or even because of them.

Teasing and bullying
will fade to a mere whisper, underneath
the recognitions yet to come.

I have been in your skin. It will thicken.



Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust trail volunteer Russell Rowland writes poems when he gets home.

Fishing Boat in the Eye of a Hurricane by Jason Ryberg

          with apologies to Billy Collins

How, exactly, do
     we know that there’s no bills or
mortgages in the
     afterlife? How can we be
so sure there will be
     no need for door jams or poop-
shovels or window
     wipers, no more subways, no
more traffic tickets
     or jacket pockets to for-
get them in (only
     to find them there, years later),
no more slithery
     snakes chasing us, nakedly,
through the lush garden
     of earthly delights (no more
chasing your hat through
     the windy woods), no more bright
moon in the horse trough.
     No, it’s more like being a
fishing boat in the
     calm eye of a hurricane
of multi-colored
     butterflies, like being the
     water or the wind, itself.



Jason Ryberg lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

Circle of Light by Carrie Farrar

The eucalyptus outside the apartment
keeps shedding strips of bark
the color of wet paper bags.
At midnight, the hallway light
buzzes softly through the screen door,
a yellow hum over the shoes
kicked sideways near the mat.
Somewhere down the block,
someone drags a trash bin to the curb,
the wheels catching in broken places
along the pavement.
The phone rests facedown
beside a glass of water gone warm
hours ago.
A moth keeps striking
the porch bulb,
powder gathering slowly
along the white rim.
The room smells faintly
of detergent and eucalyptus oil,
the blanket bunched heavy
around my knees.
Outside, the branches move
without pattern.
A car passes.
Then another.
The moth disappears
for several minutes
before returning again
to the same circle of light.



Carrie Farrar is a Southern California poet whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and online publications. Her poetry often explores memory, domestic atmosphere, perception, and emotional recurrence through image-driven free verse.

As It Is by Andrew Ray Williams

I woke from a nap
I hadn’t known
I was taking,

alone with
green leaves
on the sill,

white curtains, sun
bleeding through
onto a tufted chair—

old warm leather
worn by daily work.

Then slept again.



Andrew Ray Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. His recent poems have appeared in Bramble, Ink in Thirds, and Trampoline. He is the author of A Weathered Ship: Poems.

What Comes After Certainty by Spencer K.M. Brown

See—it’s like that trash on the highway,
Wind-tossed wrinkled this way and that,
Ready to be ravaged under wheels
Or lifted.
Resting on the dead coyote
With the bumper-cracked bloody jaw.
And when you go to dinner tonight
You won’t think of it at all.
Not a moment.
And when you go to sleep tonight
You’ll recall its every wrinkled edge
And how it floated, weightless, for that split second
As you passed.
And you’ll think of it for a long time,
Years—especially when nothing makes a sound.



Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. His work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. His debut collection of poems, The Salvation of Me, will be published by Press 53 in Fall 2026.

Cats and Satellites by Heidi Slettedahl

Today my father told me
about a cat that lives in the ceiling
and the time a satellite fell to earth in El Paso, right at his feet.

The cat, I know, is fiction,
but the satellite could be true.
Or partially true, a newspaper article mistaken for biography.

I could solve mystery with a little effort,
but the conversation was effort enough.

He mistook me for my sister, then told me stories about myself.
I was tense, unwilling to hear what he said about me behind my back.
But he told me things I already knew,
that I let the little things bother me,
that I could have been a little more easygoing in this life.

We circled back to his time working in the gravel pit,
the way he bossed his boss around,
the smart things his smart mouth said
that got him into or out of trouble.

At the end of the call, he said
You’ve always been the easiest one to talk to
and I didn’t know if he meant me or someone else.



Heidi Slettedahl is a poet and novelist, in that order, and a wife, dog mom and academic, also in that order.

Union Station by Frank C. Modica

My wife and I sit on a wooden bench
in the Great Hall, waiting with friends.
A vast vaulted ceiling opens up above us:
newly scoured limestone walls,
granite and marble statues, stained glass windows;
so different from the dark shadows and grimy surfaces
I saw during my last passage through this transportation temple.
A giggle of children run through the aisles,
playing hide and seek under the tall benches,
drowning out announcements of train arrivals
and departures with their high-pitched laughter.
When I return from the food hall with a burger and fries,
I notice a newly arrived flock of plainly dressed young men,
bonneted women, and tow-headed children
sitting across from our little group.
Ten feet separate us across the terrazzo floor,
but it could have been centuries—drownings,
beheadings, deportations harried them
out of Europe, onto the great plains.
I want to chat with them about their history,
where they came from, how long is their layover.
One of the young men smiles at me, I smile back.
He asks, “Where are you going?”
“Boston,” I say. “We’re going to Boston.”



Frank C. Modica taught children with special needs for 34 years. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Packingtown Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Monterey Poetry Review. Frank's first chapbook, What We Harvest, nominated for an Eric Hoffer book award, was published in 2021 by Kelsay Books.

Sedated by Martha Christina

Almost as light
as she was
as a kitten,
my old and
dying cat
lies quiet
in my arms,
something
she would
never have
done, alert.
The clock ticks,
the final hypodermic
waits while we wait
a little longer. Released
from pain, if she could,
would she thank me?



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

In the Spare Room by Martha Christina

The spare room’s door
had no lock, so my older
sisters often spent time
with our widowed landlady’s
things, as though they were
meant especially to entertain
them. Her husband had been
our small town’s doctor,
and when she moved out
to her married daughter’s farm,
she left behind his three-dimensional
headless and sexless model,
a human torso with removable
organs, which my sisters
removed and laughed over.

There was also a playable
organ, and once they let me
(their annoying little sister)
join them, let me have
a turn pulling out its stops
and pumping. Although I
knew no songs, I played
enthusiastically, until our
angry mother climbed the
stairs to tell us, again, we
were not allowed in that room.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

The Chosen People by Howie Good

My dad squandered the money I received
in bar mitzvah gifts on a series of bad bets.

Then my mom lost a breast to cancer. I was
the oldest child still at home. Debt collectors

phoned the house at all hours, sent threatening
letters, pounded on the door. My mom went

into hospice care. I circled the girls at school
like a bee circling a pot of early spring flowers –

frosty pansies. The ending was inevitable.
“Yes,” someone said, “but is it good for the Jews?”

I’ve lived my whole life with strands of barbed wire
wrapped like strangling vines around my heart.



Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

The Archive by Janette Schafer

He rifles through his dead mother’s papers—

A passport he had colored on in Crayola,
which made her shriek as she chased him
with a wooden hairbrush, his blood
streaking his polyester knit shirt.

Her first marriage license to his father
written in Spanish and registered in Caracas
before the New Tribes missionaries were
kicked out of the jungle and sent back
to their homes in America.

A birth certificate, a rite of baptism
on delicate paper, two divorce decrees—
a sullen vellum assemblage
of a woman’s life.

Mother—
his first undocumented country.



Janette Schafer is a realtor, poet, photographer, and singer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and websites. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. She is the author of three poetry collections.

Keep Calm and Carry On by Carolynn Kingyens

          "Maybe that's enlightenment enough; to know that there is no final
          resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...
          is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."
          — Anthony Bourdain

The saddest part of this story 

is you never see it coming—not really;

missing the divine irony 

like a widower 

missing the 5 p.m. train 

at Penn Station

for the suburban outskirts 

of Manhattan,

where a faithful glass tumbler 

filled with maple syrup-colored spirits

awaits him at the end of a Mad Men day 

in a dank house located on a formidable  

street with an empty fridge 

and a mailbox jammed with coupon flyers 

and Chinese take-out menus—

the non-stop plaintive wail of paper noise

and electronic spam 

but never a meaningful phone call;

never just a simple, meaningful phone call

from someone he once knew,

way back when, who'd recognize

his hearty laugh in a crowded room, 

back when he used to laugh.

It's no wonder Anthony Bourdain 

spiraled into despair for days

at a time after eating a bland burger 

patty and semi-thawed languid fries 

inside of a Matrix-white colored

Johnny Rockets in a deserted airport, 

encompassed by the lackluster enthusiasm 

of twenty-something staff

and the abject passivity passing 

for good food. 

Charles Bukowski describes 

the existential ache 

in his famous poem "The Crunch,"

where there is a loneliness in this world

so great that you could see it 

in the slow movement

of the hands of a clock,

or the terror of one person 

aching in one place, alone,

untouched 

unspoken to 

watering a plant. 

I, too, have felt the ache 

inside those cavernous places 

like the hollow bowl-shape

my armpit made

while reaching my hand,

palm up,

across the half-empty

California King bed

before his vacancy 

was taken over by a sweet menagerie 

of rescued pets—

curled into random balls;

curled like cinnamon buns.

I envy those who have legit fun

at Dave & Buster's, and who watch 

Dancing with the Stars

and America's Got Talent,

hanging on every nuanced word 

of Simon Cowell like some 

kind of talent prophet.

Or those people who make 

yearly pilgrimages to Disney World, 

Graceland—Las Vegas,

and the week-long, all inclusive 

Caribbean cruises, eating all you can eat 

Crème Brulé and yogurt parfaits

sprinkled with edible flower petals;

and non-alcoholic drinks

served inside hairy coconut shells,

adorned with turquoise 

and pink paper umbrellas.

And those bevy of seniors 

with the stiff salon-curled hair,

who play weekly Bingo 

and who line dance 

for charity

every Friday evening 

at their local Shriners Club.

Maybe they've found the secret

to life in their gift shop wooden plaques 

hung over windows and entryways:

Live, Love, Laugh.

Life is tough my darling, but so are you.

Keep Calm and Carry On. 

Carolynn Kingyens is the author of the poetry collections Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound (2020) and Coupling (2021). Her latest, and most existential book, Lost in the Bardo, was released on Amazon in April 2026. Lost in the Bardo is also available at Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Barnes & Noble, and Indigo-Chapters. In addition to poetry, Kingyens writes essays, book & film reviews, and short fiction. She has been married to her best friend for almost 27 years, and they share two amazing children. When time permits, she loves to read, watch good documentaries, and belly laugh.

Late Love by Penelope Moffet

Late in life they fell in love,
Tom and Roger.

Battle-scarred Tom yowled,
hissed, slashed at everyone.

Roger hobbled on wounded feet,
threw acid words at kindness.

Every night they slept entwined,
woke up happy, one purring,

one wearing fresh scratches
like new-minted medals.



Penelope Moffet is the author of the chapbooks Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems appear in many journals, including Calyx, Eclectica, ONE ART and Vox Populi. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions this Fall.

On the Shelf by Laura Foley

It’s made of green plastic but
thick and heavy, translucent,
poured into a mold.

Seated in lotus, palms resting upward,
hair in little curls like a cap,
ears hanging low.

He sits with spine erect
and looks quiet
and content.

His presence reminds me
to breathe in,
breathe out,

even in the midst of it.
Last week, when someone crashed
into my car

as I drove by,
I thought of him—
the Buddha.

When the other driver and I
stood waiting for the police—
neither of us hurt—

she kept saying she was sorry,
distracted—
she’s from Iran,

sick with worry
for her mother.

I tell her I’ve been to Isfahan—
we loved the mosques.

Now we’re bombing
her home country.

How we faced each other, then,
and hugged,
on the sidewalk in the sun,

between heaps of dirty,
melting snow.



Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sister in a Different Movie (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions April 2026) and Ice Cream for Lunch (The Poetry Box). She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor's Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, and included in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Paul Westerberg doesn’t write love songs anymore by Alex Stolis

& because you expect a poem about Minneapolis
I’ll mention the Cherry on Spoon, crooked stars
dotting First Ave;

a drunkalogue about a barfight at Moby Dick’s
when you grabbed my arm & dragged me out
before I could get my punches in.

It was a first snow then too; catching flakes
on our tongues, making out in the middle of Hennepin
ignoring the car horns

until a cop hollered, take it to a motel or I’m taking you to County.

You started humming your favorite ‘Mat’s song,
I could never remember the title
can’t remember it now.

Can’t remember a lot of things;
can’t remember why I’m writing this
except there are no more memories to make

drinks to be spilled or hands to hold;
I’m too old to be a rebel, too young
to forget winter’s wet kiss

or the bitter cold snap of truth that broke us in two.



Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full-length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and are available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, Louisiana Literature Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, and Star 82 Review. His recent chapbooks are: Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife (Louisiane Literature Press, 2024), RIP Winston Smith (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres (Bottlecap Press, 2024). He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.

Adaptation by Meg Pokrass

I’ve stood at low tide with my frizzy
hair puffing, looking for starfish.
I could never find them, with their simple
eyes, like everyone else’s family
they seemed to have better things to do.
I stood there hoping to see a glow,
or a pirate ship, or a shark
close enough to measure.



Meg Pokrass is an American writer living in the Scottish Highlands. A two-time winner of the Blue Light Book Award, her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including New England Review, Electric Literature, Five Points, waxwing, Plume, RATTLE, Atrium, Cottonmouth, Unbroken and elsewhere.

Out in the Dark by Ruth Bavetta

The television grumbles,
plane crash off the coast,

computer hackers, trouble
in Israel and Iran. Newspapers lie
on the floor.

Out in the dark
the neighbor’s dogs are going nuts.
My grandmother’s clock strikes nine.

The dogs are louder now,
a frenzy of barking and snarling.

The moon is a saucer-shaped glow
in the clouds, the stars hidden.

The lamp by my side is reflected
in the window. Above the noise,

a woman yells, a man shouts something
I almost understand.



Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, North American Review, Slant, Nerve Cowboy, Atlanta Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, and the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, prejudice, and sauerkraut.

Disposable Warmth by Lauren Poplock

Somewhere over the Pacific, wrapped in one of those thin airline blankets that never quite cover your whole body, I realized I was falling for you in that dim, drifting blue of half-sleep. It was only a week— a soft, sun-soaked stretch of days with a near-stranger who somehow slipped into my life as easily as the warm sand between my toes.

When I landed, the morning light felt too sharp, and I folded the blanket neatly on my lap as if that could keep you from slipping away.

That night, I kept waking in the dark, reaching for that same thin softness, certain I could still feel the ghost of your arm brushing mine. I told myself it was just exhaustion, the kind that turns strangers into memories you carry like fabric worn thin from too much holding.

But some loves are like those airline blankets—meant only for the hours in the air, warm for a moment, and gone the second your feet touch the ground.

Lauren Poplock is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been recognized by Hollins University, The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and The Live Poet’s Society of New Jersey. She is published or forthcoming in The Eunoia Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Gargoyle Magazine, and more

Little Owls in the Olive Trees of the Castilian Plateau by Rose Mary Boehm

The nearby village promised revelry—
and there would be music, of course,
a neat paso doble perhaps and the Aserejé,
the 'ketchup song.' A little flamenco, a guitar,
there would be tortilla española, various tapas—
empanadas, bollo preñao, grilled chistorra,
and paella, wine and beer in abundance.
There would be laughter and loud voices,
boinas and walking sticks, home-made lace
offered for sale by the old lady with the big boobs,
there would be the caustic old farmer
who always sold the freshest veggies
at the same spot—right by the fountain.
Oh, yes, we were as willing as we were able,
it was the end of summer. Still warm.
Dusk and silence, except for the occasional
splash of a walnut bombarding the ground below,
except for the wood pigeon's hoarse cry,
still calling for her lover.
We locked the gate, brushed invisible fluff
off each other's jackets and started the old furgoneta.
We crossed the bridge over 'our' brook
and entered the dirt road leading through the olive groves.
A variety of suicide bombers splashed
onto the windscreen, even though we drove
oh. so. slowly. Suddenly, there, in the middle
of that old country track a tiny owlet, paralyzed,
its two big eyes reflecting our headlights like two
shiny disks in the almost dark of this Castilian evening.
After cutting the engine and opening the car doors,
we heard the soft ooh-hoos from Mum coming
through the dark from one of the gnarled olive trees.
I picked the owlet up, its small warm body so solid
and yet so vulnerable in my hands,
its heart speed beating in panic. The ooh-hoos
getting more frantic, there were gentle whistles.
I put the little guy down under one of the trees.

We suddenly craved the silence of a late summer night,
and I made a very careful 12-point turn.



A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026/27. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

My Father's Remains by Brian McAllister

There with a scattering of his things,
an old tie tack, a spelling medal,
his lieutenant’s bars from the war,
was the torn corner of an index card,

two letters, three numerals, neatly penned.
What could it be? It’s his handwriting all right,
that flat-topped three and crossed seven
relics of his degree in chemistry.

But what is it? Not a phone number, nor
an address, but something he wanted
to remember inscribed on something at hand
that found its way into an odd drawer.

I have no idea what it is,
and I don’t know why I’ve kept it. 



Brian McAllister is a retired academic who lives and writes in rural Southwest Geogia.

Babies and Blocks by Jacqueline Jules

Babies build with blocks
only to knock them down.

They don’t circle their creation
or ask for admiration.

Instead, they giggle
when the tower crashes,
enjoying the process
more than the outcome.

Babies have so much to learn.

Like peekaboo doesn’t
make a person disappear.

And poop goes in the potty.

But somehow, they know
to simply start over
when it all falls down.



Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit her at www.jacquelinejules.com

Condolences by Jacqueline Jules

My pen poised above the pink rose on a card,
I pause before writing standard sentiments,
the way I always do, the way people did for me.

Yes, there is a blessing in memories.

To remember the night
he danced in the kitchen
waving a wooden spoon
and stirring soup
three days before the stroke.

Instead of all the days after,
sitting by a hospital bed,
watching the same man
breathe through tubes.



Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit her at www.jacquelinejules.com

National Poetry Month by Mark Danowsky

A reminder call
to write each day

and to read
what we love

and we should
heed the call

as well we know
we should

not need this
nudge this

token slice
of time

this celebration
of all we know

we wish
to cherish

to savor
to cheer

and we do
our best

but it is hard
to show up

to show love
for our labor

to let breathe
our open wounds



Mark Danowsky is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry as well as Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. His latest poetry collection is Take Care (Moon Tide Press, 2025). He curates Stay Curious on Substack.

A Black Notebook by Steve Klepetar

In my imagination I was in Berlin,
riding a tram through the pale afternoon,
the buildings whispering history
through cracked paint.
I carried a black notebook filled with names—
not of places, but of moments that refused to die:
my father’s laughter in a language I never learned,
my mother’s silence when she heard rain.
A street musician played something half-forgotten,
and I thought it might have been the national anthem
of a country that never existed,
one where pigeons ruled the boulevards
and clocks melted into puddles near the Reichstag.
I bought coffee from a woman
whose eyes flashed like the ones in my dreams,
and she said, you’ve been here before, haven’t you?
I wanted to tell her about the snow
that fell in August once,
how it covered the tracks between memory and desire,
but my German collapsed into smoke.
That’s when the tram stopped, and everyone filed out
into a sky that smelled faintly of lemons and loss.
I followed them, hoping someone might turn and wave me home.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Running into My Husband’s Dentist and His Dog on the Golf Course by Terri Kirby Erickson

My husband’s dentist has this giant
poodle named Ned that sits as still
as a statue on the golf cart seat, his
profile regal, his fur flapping in the
breeze as they blow by my husband
and me on their way to the next hole.
It must be nice not to have a dentally
challenged room-full of patients to
deal with on a fine spring day when
the sun is casting its rays of light all
over the place, as bright and happy
as a sparkler. We’re pretty carefree,
too, since only a few of my husband’s
golf balls have flown into the woods
and we just saw a great blue heron
standing in a shallow pond among the
detritus of other golfers’ errant shots.
And it occurs to me that the dentist
and his furry partner look a lot alike—
both lean and fit with the admirably
erect posture of professional athletes
or generals, yet there is no look at me,
look at me flash about the two of them.
They are just a kind man and his well-
behaved dog, enjoying a round of golf
and waving at a patient and his wife
who are grinning at him right now with
teeth he doesn’t have to pull, fill, or clean.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home, which will be released by Press 53 in the fall. Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and International Book Award for Poetry.

Haiku by Gareth Nurden

The goals
I never chased
Dreamcatcher



Gareth Nurden is a haikuist from Newport, Wales and has had several hundred pieces published in nineteen countries worldwide in journals such as Under the Basho, Tsuri-Doro, Kokako, The Heron's Nest and more.

Bridges by Russell Rowland

The Swift River, taking with it
whatever it can carry, bringing nothing back—

along with my adult daughter,
I crossed dry-shod by means of a footbridge.

Bridge boards bore the weight of our passage.

I heard our quartet of feet
thump also on a lengthier span. It stretched

from Baby’s bath and bottle hours—her dad
green at both—to this traversal,
and to thoughts of a present little girl at home

with her father, the husband of my daughter.

I mean a bridge that will carry the four of us
to the indiscernible further bank,

across time’s own eponymous Swift River.



Russell Rowland has helped judge high school Poetry Out Loud competitions in New Hampshire's Lakes Region.

In the Memory Care Unit by Martha Christina

the first snow smelled like white crayons
eight nine ten eight nine ten
those coats are watching me
yesterday I lost the red petunia
All the outside doors are marked Exit,
my sister says, but I can’t get out.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Roughage by Martha Christina

What my mother
called the family
of greens she
stabbed with her
fork. She ate
with determination,
as though this might
be her last meal.
She had survived
what was known then
as a fatal disease, but
she emerged from its
fever, no longer able
to love. Pretend
you care, her mother
instructed, but even
before her illness,
my mother was not
a pretender. She
went on eating.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.