My Childhood is Strange to Me by Heidi Slettedahl

We didn’t think it macabre

to have a rabbit’s foot in our pocket,
to stroke it against our palm or face.

We played with cap guns and candy cigarettes.
Our mothers never knew where we were.

Once I almost drowned in our neighbor’s pool.
I told no one, fearful I’d never be allowed to swim again.

We found Hustler and Playboy in the woods,
crumpled and torn and sticky with sap.

A man kissed me in the parking lot near our house.
I didn’t take the five dollars he offered me.

I was afraid of ghosts and being buried alive.
I didn’t know what else to fear.



Heidi Slettedahl is an academic and a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. She has been published in a variety of online literary journals. She is the author of Mo(u)rning Rituals (Kelsay Books, 2024).

What We Carry by Joseph Mills

A family of five, we trailered
a pop-up tent on highways
all around the country,
camping in state parks,
picnicking in rest areas.
It was how we could afford
to go anywhere. Each of us
had a beer case in which
we could put whatever
we needed or wanted.
Clothes, toiletries, snacks.
I filled mine with comic books,
choosing to wear the same outfit
for an entire trip to make room
for Archie, Batman, Casper,
Richie Rich, the Fantastic Four,
Spider-Man, Tales from the Crypt,
Two Fisted War Stories, and
I would read for mile after mile
after mile after mile after mile.

Annoyed, my father would say,
Put those damn comic books down
and look out the window.
You may never be here again!
I would glance up to see
some mountain or forest or
tourist attraction, say “nice,”
then go back to reading.
Years later, I hear his voice
in mine as I tell my children
to get off their phones
and Look at that! Look! Look!

I understand my father now,
his desire for us to be present,
but I was traveling elsewhere
as we crossed Ohio or Nebraska.
Before I ever heard of multi-verses,
I knew what they were. They were
stacked in that beer case. They were
pages and panels. They were worlds
made by words and images. They were
stories we travelled with and in, ones
we needed more than clothes or food.



Joseph Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published several collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance.

Anywhere But Here by Russell Rowland

A young couple, new to the trail,
were both appreciative of our advisories—

what lay ahead, the footing, the elevation gain,
one inconvenient newly-fallen tree—

while an older woman behind them—mother
to one, mother-in-law
to the other?—glared icicles in our direction,

as if reaching deep

into a repository of resentments, long saved up,
against the day—the effort—us.

We shook our heads afterward:
high mileage on our hiking boots, each of us
aware that the only mishaps

we ever had on a mountain
happened on days we were mad at the world,

and wished we were somewhere else.



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

A Tour of the Cellar Holes by Russell Rowland

Some day after black-fly season,

but before it snows, I will take those interested
to Ossipee Glen to see the cellar holes:

labor of hands established—then, completed,
left for earth to swallow up again.

I will not moralize—

just study the faces of those who cared to come,
as they consider work

they themselves have done or left undone.

Once they’ve seen it all,
thought it over for themselves, I’ll lead them back

to the hiker’s parking lot—

from which they will go home, a few may realize,
to no continuing city.



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Route 9W by Christine Potter

doesn’t take you where it did: to scarlet
picnic tables under green neon at Annie’s
Snack Shack and tall bottles of beer icy-
wet as bare-handing snowballs. To onion

rings on sheets of red and white wax paper
in plastic baskets. Hoyer’s bright old sign
with the four-foot-high soft-serve cone has
unplugged its electric buzz, and this road’s

lost itself to no place special: nail salons,
gun shops, chain drug stores faced in fake
antique brick. The summer cottages down
by Rockland Lake are winterized or gone,

front porches masked-up in vinyl siding, AC
blasting the breath of weary ghosts. We’re
all of us tired: beyond fireflies, not ready for
crickets. We all need a vacation and nobody

takes much of one anymore, not here. No
dads down in Manhattan send the wife and
kids up the Hudson for open windows and
music echoing from a lakeside dance hall—

music that could inspire anyone to grow up
and want that fun, that fun exactly. It didn’t
work out that way. We went out for a drive—
hey, anyone would have—and ended up here.



Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. She has poetry forthcoming in Tar River and Grain. Her poems have recently been in Rattle, The McNeese Review, Cloudbank, ONE ART, and featured on ABC Radio News. She's the author of the young adult series The Bean Books, and her latest poetry collection, on Kelsay Books, is Unforgetting.

Birds of Slow Motion by Frederick Wilbur

Uncle Morris stowed his wooden canoe
in the rafters of grandmother’s garage,
upside down as if floating on the depth
of apex, a doubt on spiritual mystery.

As a ten-year old, the ribs seemed
a fence against darkness, or a whale’s
cavern: something I’d never seen before.

Of the float, it was stranded.
It was waiting.

My uncle did not want to be a lawyer,
would take cousins and cousins
to the Sound to swim,
to picnic at Fairfield Beach Club.

For me, the canoe remained paddleless
all my years growing up
like memories that wait for their time,
vultures of intention slow to finalize meaning.



Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work appears in The Comstock Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, Red Eft Review, and Shenandoah. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize by Midwest Quarterly (2018).

O Cache Luxurious by Lisa L. Moore

This is a summer memory: that’s why
my feet were bare. Helen’s head was round,
her forehead high and pale, her blue eyes meek.
Her English parents did not speak fluent
sunscreen, so that day her face, scarlet
and swollen, caused her pain. The goal back then
was burn, peel, bronze, suntan. My olive skin
tanned easily beneath my thick brown bangs.
A tan was said to be my one beauty,
so I was ungreased, unprotected too.

We had discovered treasure in the lane
behind her house: O cache luxurious!
Pale grey cement rectangles, no doubt
destined for construction in our raw
new neighborhood. Like toybox blocks, and free!
we thought. We’d build ourselves a playhouse.
Brick by brick, we carried what we’d need,
in four-year-old fingers, one girl on
each end, across the street and into my
backyard. We couldn’t mess up Helen’s yard,
we knew. Her parents were the only ones
scarier than mine.

          I used to start this story at the end,
when Helen dropped her side and broke my toe.
We grew up with injuries like this, and others,
mostly secret. As the harbor opens out
today on Pearl Street, the screen slides back.
I glimpse anew. We were making something,
fingers slipping, eyes on one another.



Lisa L. Moore is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, as well as the poetry chapbook, 24 Hours of Men. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Waxing and Waning, Nimrod International Journal, and Hairstreak Butterfly Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Dad, too, had been a child of deprivation by David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton

He is a traveling salesman child
of the Great Depression who,
thank God, stopped traveling
(much) by the time I was 13.

Before him Pap-Pap, a jovial giant,
had been an overseer for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The boys at the firehall he & Dad had floored one summer
appreciated his largesse.

“Another round for everyone!” he’d boom.

Na-Na, slight as a rail
& rail tie sturdy,
sent Dad as a boy
into bars after Pap-Pap

to try to get him
to come home
before his paycheck was spent—

David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton is proud to appear again in Red Eft Review. His work has also been in Lothlórien Poetry Journal, Poem Alone, and dadakuku.com. He and his family enjoy dogs, good food, good friends, each other, and travel.

Reassurance by Martha Christina

My old cat yowls
loud and long
into the dark.

My sympathetic vet
explains: She wakes
disoriented, uncertain
of where she is, where
you are. You can let her
know, reassure her.

In those first months
when I was learning
my new identity: widow,
half-asleep I sometimes
felt my husband’s weight
against my back. Waking
fully, I’d find this same cat
curled in that space, as if
she could reassure 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.

Hot Water by Martha Christina

Widowed and childless,
he married again; his
second wife, my aunt,
also childless, a
professional woman
before that term was
used. Past child-bearing
age, they lavished
affection and attention
on other people’s children
and on each other. Their
favorite drink: hot
water, with a splash
of top milk, a scant
teaspoon of sugar

added to each cup.
Comfortable, they were
also well-past the rural
poverty they’d worked
their way out of. Even
so, with Starbucks
within our means,
as they liked to say,
they drank hot water,
grateful for every
sweetened swallow.



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.

Practicing by Martha Christina

Today the fledged finches
are on their own, practicing
how to feed themselves,
how to fly. The females
dominate the feeder, filling
all six perches, trading places
before the males can land.

Two males practice flight
between the rose canes,
and the wisteria, then cling
to the kitchen window screen,
resting their young wings.

They’re in no danger, ignored
by my old cat, who’s practicing
the sleep she has perfected.



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.

Royal Crown by Linda Parsons

As my grandfather’s handkerchiefs stiffened
on the line, she filled a used Royal Crown bottle,
sometimes Dr. Pepper (those sugar tits we craved
at ten, two, and four), to dampen the squares
embroidered with an M for Mac or McClanahan.
I begged nickels to help, aimed the shaker top
at each curled corner. Heat puffed from the iron’s
silver prow, cotton’s thin skin pressed to the board.
Her airless kitchen, a warmth that evaporated
when I left their house. People say more stars
in her crown for this or that goodness, and it’s true—
she wouldn’t leave him, no matter how many
amber highboys he slid to the side of his chair.
Through the steam, I counted a thousand or more.



Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Day at the Beach by Terri Kirby Erickson

Slathered with suntan lotion and sitting
under a Shibumi, my husband and I along
with two of our dear friends—all of us

over sixty-five—ate our lunch. Pimento
cheese and turkey sandwiches, potato chips
and chocolate pound cake, made for a grand

picnic as we sweltered in the heat, pressed
bottles of cold water against our sweaty
foreheads. Adding our ailments together,

we’ve had cancer and a heart attack, high
cholesterol and a movement disorder, each
of us taking daily medication. So be it. We

still looked good, if a bit shopworn, in our
beach attire, including billed hats and bare
legs—white, brown, or freckled. Look at

that, we said a few times while watching
people of all ages do whatever it was they
were doing. There was a lumbering little boy

wearing a thickly padded life jacket, loads
of nearly naked teenagers, and tattoos galore
on both firm and sagging flesh. Couples

strolled by and mothers with babies, dads
with more hair on their legs than their heads.
Most people were stationary, like us, parked

beneath their umbrellas and Shibumis, music
blaring, beverages in hand, soaking up sounds
of the sea, the white-hot glare, and a cloudless

sky the color of blue jeans washed a thousand
times. And despite the occasional temper tan-
trums of hot and tired children, the screaming

gulls fighting over bits of stale bread, and the
blistering heat, we were content to breathe the
humid air and brave those soaring temps for

a few carefree hours with the friends we have
known for years, talking or not talking—just
watching the world go by. We were happy

to be alive on a sunny summer day that will
never come again—but could shine through
the scrim of a poem long after we are gone.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven collections of award-winning poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), a finalist for the International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” Rattle, The SUN, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many others.

Class Outside by Paul Willis

Evening light in the sycamore trees,
the tilting pines, the sandstone
boulders across the lawn. Crows call,
dogs bark, soccer players on a distant field
shout and plead with one another.

But here, the quiet urgency
of a circle of students at their desks
on a patio, each eye pausing
over the path of a wandering pen,
taking direction from the wind.



Paul Willis has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Somewhere to Follow (Slant Books, 2021) and Losing Streak (Kelsay Books, 2024). Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Christian Century, Southern Poetry Review, and the Best American Poetry series. He is an emeritus professor of English at Westmont College and a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California, where he lives with his wife, Sharon, near the Old Mission.

Simulacrum by Richard Weaver

          After Modigilani

With one hand he suspends everything
in the framed space of an open window.

He lifts the canvas weight as easily
as her almond-shaped eyes rise to take

pleasure in the wind wrapping itself around
the spine of a tree. Her faith’s a gravity slowly

lowering to earth. There’s a spreading light
beyond this violence. A column supporting

the athlete of the eye, and in the painted figure
of a nude on the beige wall, a one-handed effigy.

The strength of its secret lies in the collusion
of objects, not in the straightforward abstraction.

The red square, the blue circle and yellow triangle
whetting the edge of a voice. Pressed against the wall

rising in short, broken waves, a human head expands
in an arabesque of its own faith which begins in pleasure

and now fades in the autumnal cry of an opaque sun
in the space between the perfect shadow and a fixed sessile light.



Richard Weaver is the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub in Baltimore. Other publications include conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, Coachella Review, FRIGG, Hollins Critic, Xavier Review, Atlanta Review, Dead Mule, Vanderbilt Poetry Review, and New Orleans Review. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). He was one of the founders of the Black Warrior Review and its Poetry Editor for the first four years. Recently, his 204th prose poem was accepted since he began writing them in 2016. (Only 353 remain available as of today).

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

After Chemo by Maryfrances Wagner

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



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

Thirty-Two Degrees by Hannah Dilday

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

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

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



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

Chamomile by Joey Nicoletti

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



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

Umbra by Michelle Reale

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



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