Domestic Psalm by A.R. Williams

She brews a pot
while the children are still asleep,

her ritual.
Today, I joined her.

As I sipped,
warmth poured through my darkness.



A.R. Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. His poetry collections include Funeral in the Wild (Kelsay Books, 2024), Time in Shenandoah (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and A Weathered Ship (Ridge Books, 2025). Website: virginiapoet.com

Terribly, Almost Never: A Golden Shovel by A.R. Williams

          “When I need them most terribly, never.”
          —Franz Wright, “Words”

There comes a time, for all, when
we are asked to lose ourselves. That’s when I

discovered the fullness of feeling empty, the need
to find abundance through release. Now I sing an anthem
made of silence, craving most

the absence of self; only then, terribly,
do I find what’s always here, though felt almost never.



A.R. Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. His poetry collections include Funeral in the Wild (Kelsay Books, 2024), Time in Shenandoah (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and A Weathered Ship (Ridge Books, 2025). Website: virginiapoet.com

The Oil Stain by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

When you fry sardines the whole world will know,
my mother would say, seated at the kitchen table.

She rubbed the fish with chili paste, silver skins
sparkling, as they crackled like fireworks

in the blazing vat. Oil splattered in amber spots
she never wiped away. People often complain

about the stench of sardines, but I never found it
repulsive. Never thought of them as fertilizer

for trees either. What the neighbours used
for garden compost, I saw as sustenance—

delicious salvation served on a plate. It was the year
of the war. Mother called it the year of the eclipse,

the year of the wandering feet, the year of flames
and ash. But, misfortune was no match

for my mother’s grit. She gathered our restless souls
and held us in warmth at the kitchen table—

a mahogany bench, on which she served the same
humble meal, night after night: green beans, yogurt

and sardines on rice, each dish infused with faith,
and the hope that we might rise from the trenches

of strife, that we might find stable ground again.
And slowly, the shadows yielded to light.

Bad times faded as our wheel of fortune creaked
and turned and brighter days returned. And now,

all these years later, what I still remember
is my mother at that kitchen table—seated

at the mahogany bench from the year of the war,
the year of the eclipse, the year of the wandering feet,

how that table glowed like an apparition, like an altar
of sacred communion, with its green beans, yogurt

and fried sardines shimmering in a plate of bronze,
how I once toppled the fish and a puddle of oil

splashed onto the wood in the shape of a fluttering pool,
seeping deep like a prayer, like a hymn, how the memory

still lives in that oil stain on that kitchen table,
still warm, still holy like my mother’s fearless heart.



Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a widely-published Indian-Australian artist and poet. She is the author of Patchwork Fugue (Atomic Bohemian Press UK 2024), and A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys (winner of The Little Black Book Competition, Hedgehog Poetry Press UK 2024). Find her on X @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings

Calling, Calling, Calling by Ann E. Michael

Today’s children will never know
what it was like to hear, from outside,
the sound of the telephone’s ring
inside the house: that persistent bell,
regular, plaintive, and how you’d
have to run to the door, perhaps
up some steps, open the latch, turn
the doorknob—all this time the phone
ringing, urging you to hurry,
from its sedentary spot on a table
or a wall—and how sometimes
you’d pick up the handset just in time
to talk to your grandmother or your
best friend, or a secretary reminding
you of your dental appointment;
but often, the ring would cease
its beckoning before you answered
so that you would hear not a friendly,
human voice but the vacant hum
of the dial tone, an accusation about
your lack of haste and the mild
recrimination that told you
someone called, you cannot know
whom, and you did not answer.



Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog

Red-eared Sliders in Southern New Jersey by Ann E. Michael

Along the Cooper River and Pennsauken Creek
late spring on the humid coastal plain
red-eared sliders slipped through mud and sedge,
leaf litter and Coke bottles, seeking
sustenance after a winter of not-quite-torpor.

We watched for them. They were likely some
former pet a child outgrew, set loose
to fend and forage, feed on toad spawn, fish-bait,
water-striders, duckweed—omnivorous
and swift, even on land.

We did not catch them. Our mothers would object,
and we thought a turtle indoors boring,
but beside the creek we crept behind them,
we lay willow wands on water’s surface
to capture their attention.

In motion, in their voraciousness, they rose
in our esteem, even as they rose
above the stream, ever urgent and moving forward.
They were colonists, southern strangers—unlike us,
intent on settling in.



Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog

Class Countessa by Russell Rowland

Erstwhile classmate Rosemary—
I’ve heard she married a count: making her,

in the usual course of things, a countess.

Either she left the new world for the old,
or he came over in this direction,

and allowed being a count to count for less.

Rosie would wear her title light—
no inviting the paparazzi in for a photo-op
when she read to children—

she’d answer her own phone, keep a budget,
carry her shopping bags herself.

In home-room, she sat
just behind me. We would visit, awaiting
the first-period bell.

Once, she requested
my hand, gently turned it over, and said—

“Let’s see what our two lifelines tell us.”



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire, where he helps judge Poetry Out Loud competitions. His latest poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Winter under frozen stars by Richard Weaver

The lung is draining well, the Doctor says
during my lunch; at least he has hope.
But most mornings I sit in this bed

tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
And still the cough comes like a false dawn.
The afternoon train has left for Paris,

taking the Doctor back to his wife.
Blind as any moon, there was nothing
reassuring in his smile, or in the warm fist

that taps the hollow of my chest.
The sun is a bright red balloon
passing outside my window today. A small boy

holds it, terrified
it might carry him off.
His mother scolds and pulls him

from my vision. They are as far away
as last week or the week before
when I had fresh fruit and waited for your letter,

thinking at the time
perhaps I’d reach you before now.
It was foolish to think. The day hot, and red

dust settling on the tables. Somehow
the weather seemed responsible
for my being here without you.

You would have found it quaint.
The waiter dressed in black. His skin
shone like copper with the light.

His eyes were what most intrigued me.
When he brought me a China fingerbowl
painted with white jonquils

it was as if he meant to tell me
not to hate God for the blood I’ve spat.
I was helpless in that widening silence.

                         * * *

Do you remember our last garden?
All greens and gold, the spears of lavender,
strawberries pale before the frost?
And the dragonflies when a mist settled
on their wings! Sometimes you’d brush
your hand through the apple-mint
and then spread your fingers to comb the scent
through my hair. I’m sure sparrows have eaten
all the figs. I see them now in this salmon-colored
dusk, pecking the soft green husks for the secrets
kept inside. Their wings smartly folded,
their heads swivel at right angles to the veranda
where a cat sits, eyes closed, reflectively licking
a paw. Isn’t that the way it happens?
One minute alive. And in the next
someone wears a garland of your feathers
in his mouth.

                         * * *

Sometimes I want to throw these letters
into the fireplace, and watch
as the gray-white ashes rise, stumbling
into the air like a gorged sparrow.
Tonight my body is a bottomless well
into which I drop all hope.

The long winter has numbed everything:
the books you sent, the doctor’s promise
I’d recover enough to be with you. Everything
except the fever that burns
its sulfur in my chest. Last night
by the fire, I watched and listened

as rain and wind rushed over
the chimney’s mouth, making a hoarse sound
until the room itself answered.
I could hear it saying,
I freeze, I burn. Over and over.

Is this what I wait for?
Visits from a voice that might be
yours or mine, but isn’t?
What I fear most is near at hand.
The red song in my throat
longing to escape. Readying its escape.

-Previously published in Slush Pile

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

When I Was a Child by Heidi Slettedahl

When I was a child
Pluto was a planet
and a dog.

When I was a child
Mercurochrome solved everything
with its orangey amber blur.

When I was a child
we played with mercury
when my mother dropped the glass thermometer on the floor.

When I was a child
you could buy cigarettes from a vending machine
and fireworks from the back of someone’s truck.

When I was a child
Stranger Danger meant
we forgot to look at our uncles and our cousins and our next-door neighbors.

When I was a child
family business was family business
and you didn’t tell.

You never told.



Heidi Slettedahl is a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. Her most unusual talent is her ability to ride a unicycle. Mo(u)rning Rituals (Kelsay Books), her first collection of poetry, was published in 2024.

River Birds by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue

The taut turn of river birds through the thick summer air.
White-winged axes gliding above the eddies.
The river low here.

For a brief instant, my eyes spot a silver rippling radiance,
and then, as if I hadn't seen it,
thought the trip dull.

The river, a meandering ditch.
Our world's default setting of never-surprised, jaded ennui.
But it was beautiful for an instant –

fully full of that thing – beauty –
as were my eyes – heart and soul,
if such be real.



Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue is a retired high school English and ESL teacher living in beautiful Fort Worth, Texas. He has had poems published in Concho River Review, The Texas Observer, Borderlands, California Quarterly, Book of Matches Literary Review, and two anthologies of Texas poetry.

At the end of a war by Rose Mary Boehm

I hadn’t seen him for a whole lifetime.
When you’re eight, three years are that.

I skipped across the broken veins of a badly
damaged asphalted road. Nodded
to absent neighbors repeating
the singsong of happiness:
Picking up my father. I do so
have a father!

Waiting on the platform
I looked along those two
iron tracks. In the far
distance they met.

‘Vanishing point’ they called it at school.
The train didn’t vanish.
It appeared.
Got larger.
The smoke hung well back.

Then its bulk puffed into the station. Stopped
with a final shiver, as though it wanted
to throw off its human cargo hanging
from handlebars supported only by footplates,
or balancing precariously on the roof. Like dead
insects they fell onto the station platform
or oozed from too small doors.

I scanned the faces of all the men
spilling from the train. Jumped up
hysterically, tried to look around
so many big people who took their time
to leave the platform. Hugging,
saying good-byes, waiting for others.
I worried that I may have forgotten
his face.

Slowly I accepted my first
betrayal. There was no Father.
My life changed shape.

Finally the train left.
And still I stood, rooted.
By the time I saw him on the
other side of the tracks
my heart had hardened.



A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and eight poetry collections, her work has been widely published (and rejected) mostly by US poetry journals. https://www.rose-mary-boehm

Fox Sighting in the Middle of the Night by Joan Leotta

My own sneeze woke me up,
a restless mind, scratchy throat
kept me from returning to sleep.

Pulled on my black velvet robe
then wrapped my neck in a red
fleece scarf for added warmth.

Downstairs, as I waited for my
tea to heat I heard yip, yip
from the street below.

At the kitchen window,
in the streetlight’s glow
I saw fox prints on fresh snow,

leading to our hedge and
a pair of bright eyes over a
narrow nose peered up at me.

I waved my scarf
toward the small face
in the hedge.

A rustling noise then fox
darted out of the hedge, his
bushy red tail waving back at me.



Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She’s been published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, and a two-time nominee for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her poetry, essays, and stories have appeared in many journals in the US and abroad, including Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Impspired, Red Eft Review, One Art, Gargoyle, Verse Virtual, and Storyteller Poetry Review. She performs folktale programs that often highlight her heritage, food, family, and strong women, and offers the one-woman show, “Meet Louisa May Alcott, Author, Nurse, and Writer.” Her email is joanleotta@gmail.com