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.