My grandmother kept her dead husband’s teeth in a velvet box beneath her bed. Not the dentures—his real teeth, lost one by one in the war, but saved in a tin that smelled of tobacco and the particular rot of old metal.
She would take them out on anniversaries, arrange them on her good tablecloth like a smile that had outlived its face. She said it was important to keep what you could, to not let the earth have everything.
I understand this now, the way we hoard the evidence of having been loved. The voicemails I can’t delete. The shirt that still smells like your sleep. The way I keep returning to the places where we were happy—the diner on Route 9 where you always stole the cherries from my drink, the motel above the lake where we watched a storm move across the water—as if the happiness might still be there, waiting.
Last month I found a baby bird on the sidewalk, still feathered, still warm, already gone. I dug a hole in the garden with my hands, buried it beside the tulips that never bloom. My grandmother would have kept the bones, washed them in bleach until they were white as the inside of her palms, white as the lie she told about his death being peaceful.
Instead I watered the earth and waited for something to grow. Instead I am learning to let go of what I cannot keep, which is everything, which is the only lesson worth learning, which I will forget by morning.
McLord Selasi is a Ghanaian writer, poet, and performing artist. His work has appeared in Panorama, Apricot Press, The Shallow Tales Review, Shoegaze Literary, Trampoline, Rough Diamond, Isele Magazine, Subliminal Surgery, Eunoia Review, Poetry Journal, Graveside Press, and elsewhere.
Sometimes they sneak up on us. Sometimes we see them coming, the horizon black and still. This last one was a doozy.
Flying debris, lightning like shattered glass, deafening thunder right behind it, and rain that seemed it might drag everything away.
When it finally ended there were tree limbs on the ground, roof tiles missing, the basement flooded.
I don’t know how many more storms like that this old place can take, but it’s been weathering them for decades and it’s still standing.
We did have some work done on it years ago and maybe that helped, but it seems more likely it was just built well from the start on a solid foundation.
And, after, it is usually me who does most of the cleanup, as it should be.
For it is usually me who is to blame.
Brian Gotta is a San Diego-based poet and author with a BA in English Literature from Indiana University. His poems have appeared or will appear in Third Wednesday, Pink Ochre, Watertower Press, The Soliloquist,AC/DC Lit Magazine, The Big ?, Effable Press, Fresh Words Magazine, the San Diego Poetry Annual, MockingOwl Roost: Sprigs of Peace, and Literary Cocktail Magazine. His previous work includes a young adult novel, four children’s sports novels, a youth baseball coaching guide, and Congratulations! You’re a Millionaire!, published by Possibility Press. BrianGotta.com | @booksbygotta
The morning after our best friends’ wedding, hungover, my husband and I are making our way to coffee and eggs, and already there’s a buzz in the streets, protesters gathering for the march across the city, and we will go too, of course we will go, but first the diner where the server, bless him, surprises us with big lollipops, the comically cartoon kind with swirls, saying Happy Halloween and my smile breaks open wide like I’m a kid again, like I’ve forgotten anything bad has ever happened.
On the bus we’re packed with sweat and people and posters, quiet and still as we wait, and when we arrive at Embarcadero Plaza, we stop at a convenience store where the cashier asks if we’re going to the march and when we nod he says take two waters on me, and we carry them with us and the people chant and the musicians sing and two nurses hold their signs high, insisting we will not go back, and a yellow butterfly drifts past like it’s riding the whole thing, the resistance and the heat and the hope.
We skip the bus home and walk instead, stopping for beer in the bright, oblivious sun, and yes there’s some sadness in it, tears like condensation on glass, but we keep walking, find ourselves in the backyard of some restaurant where it’s couples and families, and a girls’ night in bloom, all of us making an evening of it, and San Francisco, listen, San Francisco gives us one of those rare days where the sun stays touching you well into the night, a gift.
In the park at golden hour little moths sprinkle bushes like something from a fairy tale and no one else is around so we let the whole display be just for us, and around the corner a group pops champagne and the cork sails through the sky, lands at our toes like the world is saying here, have this too.
At our favorite spot for wings we sit outside and a group of children are spinning and laughing, their parents inside, and one kid comes over, double dog dared, you can tell, and says to my husband Are you guys friends??? and immediately giggles because the answer doesn’t matter, the dare is the thing, and this happens three more times, each question sillier than the last, and when we get up to leave my husband drops to his knees and does this silly dance and the kids squeal, actually squeal with delight, and run around him in circles like he’s given them the world.
We walk under the trees where the sky has gone bluish black and we hear the faintest hoot, and we stop, and we listen as two owls call for one another in the darkness, and other people stop too, we strangers pausing below the trees, all of us going ooh and ahh like it’s a game of hide and seek, like we’re all in on it together.
My husband takes my hand and finally we step onto the bus, get off in front of our home, walk in to start dinner, our black cat finding us, and I turn on all of the Halloween lights even though it’s over a week away— why not?— and I look through the glow of our small existence and I’m thinking about it, about our friends proclaiming their beautiful love to each other, and the server with his lollipops and the cashier with his water and the champagne cork at our feet and my husband on his knees making children laugh and the owls calling in the dark and all of us strangers stopping to listen, and yes, the present is terrifying and the future might be worse, but also— I feel this— achingly, all of this.
Katelyn Sweeney is a writer and middle school English teacher in San Francisco. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals including The Pinch and EcoTheo Review. She is happiest anywhere that feels a little wild and believes every walk should end with at least one good rock in her pocket.
My grandmother said the body remembers what the mouth is too afraid to say. She said the ache in her knees was every border crossed without consent, every history folded too small to breathe.
I believe her. My bones hum when the news is bad. My lungs flinch at flags. Some nights my heart beats like it’s trying to escape jurisdiction.
Tell me what is a country if not a story told loudly enough to sound like truth? What is obedience if not fear dressed as loyalty?
I was taught to kneel before I learned the names of things: soil, spine, hunger taught that silence was a form of cleanliness and that pain, if borne elegantly, might pass for virtue.
But the earth does not kneel. It splits.
There is a sound to it not thunder, but a long, intimate tearing, like fabric giving up on being useful. Like a mouth unlearning prayer.
We live over fault lines we pretend are roads. We pour concrete over grief and call it progress. We teach our children to count borders but not to listen to the ground.
I want a language that stutters on purpose, that refuses to behave. A language that cracks open the word home and asks who was locked outside to make it possible.
When I say I am here, I do not mean safe. I mean breathing despite. I mean stitched together with borrowed courage and the stubborn muscle of staying.
The chasm is not ahead of us. It is what we fall back into every time we choose comfort over witness.
Still there are hands reaching across it. There are voices guiding us out like ropes.
There is the radical act of looking down and refusing to look away
If the earth asks anything of us now, it is not forgiveness. It is attention.
To feel the ground move and learn to move with it. To stop pretending stillness is the same as peace. To stand at the edge and speak anyway.
Khayelihle Benghu is a South African poet based in Johannesburg. Her work explores themes such as memory, grief, faith, family, and the quiet endurance of ordinary lives. Her poems have appeared in Person of Interest,Aloka, Decolonial Passage, AKE Review, Eyes on the Telescope, and Metphrastics. She is also the author of the poetry collection The Names We Carry.
In 2003, salvation has blonde extensions and a chihuahua named Tinkerbell.
I watch her descend from the Escalade in low-rise jeans that part the Red Sea of paparazzi.
that’s hot rain glitter reign, glitter
prophecy in a Juicy tracksuit, rosary of rhinestones
Bless my cheap gloss, my beaded clips, my Sony Cybershot— every pop girl who burned herself beautiful for the lens.
We kept the light spinning. We were the mirrorball saints— worshipped, ridiculed, necessary.
Shae is a queer, autistic goblin interested in the intersection of disability justice and design, collecting tiny trinkets and having an unwavering devotion to Shrek as both art and ideology.
I am texting you pictures of cats: cats doing jobs, using “z” instead of “s,” Look! Cats in frog hats, cats riding on Roombas. I am texting you cats instead of what I can’t bring myself to tell you: I am sending out the save-the-date for the unveiling of my grandmother’s headstone. I need to shovel this morning’s snowfall and register my children for next year’s summer camp. I was in the emergency room with my dad last week— trying to recite prayers I didn’t know the meaning of, to take note of the medical words that I did— and I just want you to see how funny this kitten is: curled up in a pile of hay in the barn next to the lambs, as if it belonged there.
Pam Yve Simon (she/her) earned her bachelor of arts in English and American literature from New York University. Her poetry and photography has appeared in various online and print publications. She was awarded the Analog Science Fiction and Fact Analytical Laboratory Award for Best Poem of 2024 for her poem “Gravity.” Say hi to her on Bluesky Social @PamYve.bsky.social or visit: pamyve.wordpress.com
i would rather not wake with arms of glue and legs of blue numb, drowsy, reaching for hairy chest and crusted eyelashes, swishing my palms across empty sheets
i will pick him up, drive him to his places. he will not know mine, nor will he ask if i changed something about my hair. i did, it’s a half-inch shorter
we will trudge down concrete sidewalks window shopping with empty wallets. i will stop in front of panes of shiny glass. voice quivering, i will say: look at all the diamonds
Orly Berkowitz-Henkin is a senior at Haverford College studying religion and creative writing. She is from Brooklyn, New York and is pursuing a Masters in Social Work. She loves writing, dogs, knitting, and going to the movies.
they said my great-grandmother taught herself to read by whispering hymns backward into a jar. kept snakes in the stove, sucked pennies clean for luck. the men said she was feeble. the women said, nervous.
i chew the same rhythm into my sleeves. rub the fabric raw until my hands forget the weight of being witnessed. this is how i pray, in repetition, in retreat, in the hum behind electric things.
in my uncle’s trailer there’s a buck head nailed to the fridge and a child’s drawing of a sun with no face. my cousin says i blink wrong, like a deer deciding whether to bolt.
my mother once locked me in a linen closet because i wouldn’t stop spinning. said she couldn’t take it anymore, the noise, the flapping, the bright click of me not being like the rest of them.
when i came out, i spoke in color for three straight days. she burned my drawings in a metal bowl and told god to come collect me if he had the stomach for it.
they call it a spectrum but in this house it’s a curse, a bloodline of girls who look away when spoken to, who name their toys after latin verbs, who learn affection by studying taxidermy.
the living room smells like mildew and lilac. granny’s perfume still haunts the upholstery. they say she went silent for twenty years and came back speaking perfect French. i understand. sometimes you have to leave language just to survive it.
i sit on the porch and stim with a pop tab and a dead wasp. my cousin’s boy says i’m touched by something evil. i tell him so was christ.
Carrie Farrar is a poet and musician whose work explores neurodivergence, memory, and the quiet intersections between survival and grace. Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Flare Magazine, and The Art of Autism, among others. Blending lyrical precision with emotional candor, she writes to make sense of a world that often misunderstands difference. Her poem “I Am the Twitch in the Family Line” reflects her recurring themes of inherited pain, resilience, and the beauty of the mind’s odd wiring. She lives in California, where she continues to write toward empathy and light.
The young man at the next table is evangelizing to another young man. He is arguing we might live in a simulation. Something about light not behaving intuitively. He’s on to Lazarus and The Screwtape Letters now.
And I didn’t bring my headphones.
Outside, I watch boys hang loose as marionettes on a dying earth beneath a dying sun. And I worry about war and fundamentalism. I’m sick of dialectic dialogue.
The young man has moved on to talking about Fight Club (which is something you’re not supposed to talk about), misquoting the book and film, talking about a purposeless struggle.
And I marvel at a belief system cobbled together hodge-podge from religious texts and pop culture. Probably not so unlike my own.
Of course you are here. I don’t have my headphones to block you out.
Well, you aren’t here-here (I mean, could you imagine?), but you’re here the way I don’t notice my legs until they ache, or my stomach until I am hungry, or my heart until it’s breaking.
You are hiding in every poem I write and every story I tell, every journal entry and not far from every thought. (God, now he’s talking about love and his divorce and I feel pangs of sympathy and guilt.)
He says to the other young man: Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this.
But the questions are all rhetorical, simply there to further his points.
I sip the weakest tea I’ve ever had and it hurts my stomach as bad as the sympathy and guilt, but the barista said she’d try better if I wanted a refill and I’m trying not to be rude.
And of course you are here.
Textured tile covers the face of the coffee bar and it looks inside out the longer you stare at it, like an idea, like a simulation of a coffee bar.
And there is a father playing Go Fish with his daughter trying to ignore the young man talking now about the difference between the sexes and how dating is really like sales if you think about it.
And of course you are here.
Matthew Roy (he/him) lives in the American Midwest. He’s moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a small apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He’s writing more. He’s making changes. He’s querying his first novel and banging away at his second. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, Haven Spec, IllumenMagazine, PenumbricSpeculativeFiction Mag, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Space & Time Magazine, The Sprawl Mag, star*line, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, untethered magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, among others.
I asked you about the novel you were reading and realized too late I was flirting, despite wearing an oversized nautical sweater and a fanny pack designed to carry a child around my postpartum fat.
You were playing Pavement but didn’t know the band, and I forgave that, looking in your pretty face as you said witchy playlist, feeling that sense of undeniable possibility, and underneath, the scintillating savor of my own internalized shame.
It’s what we all dream of, right? Witchiness, which means taking ourselves to the forest to dance naked away from laundry and picking up countless old socks and half-full Coke cans— in other words, away from men.
I’m sorry for my fantasies of a wife, girlfriend, women, when I outlive my husband, sorry for breaking the illusion when he came in with his beard and his requests, his sense the world was made for him, and asked to use your restroom, to which you said no.
Harriet Weaver is a Los Angeles–based writer with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Yale University, where she studied with Harold Bloom. She was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books journal PubLab and has poetry forthcoming from Roanoke Review. In her previous career as actor and producer, Harriet studied under Wynn Handman and brought shows to Broadway with Blue Spruce Productions. She was an instructor of poetry and composition at UC Irvine. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wexford, Pennsylvania, and lives in LA with her husband and toddler.
