Texas women love and curse with a fatal bless your heart. Sun-burned plains enclose them, their multi-colored bodies corralled

in branded jeans. Tender cuts on man-sized platters piled high to heaven with heaping sides of disrespect, they live to be consumed and then discarded 

like Porsha Ngumezi. Doctors wouldn’t scrape her womb and she bled out, screaming, young and Black. No charity for her, she left this world in Houston

just like Josseli Barnica, who died while Catholic and brown. The green card in her purse meant life but not liberty because heartbeats from a dying fetus mean a one-way

trip to glory. Nevaeh Crain, pretty white girl with a butterfly tattoo in a sundown town, could tell you that, if sepsis hadn’t starved the pink from all her organs.

Meanwhile hypocrites under Hippocratic oath cull women’s bones to pick their teeth in self-congratulation because in Texas, praise Jesus, the right to life abides.

M. M. Adjarian has published her work in The Baltimore Review, Verdad, South 85, The Missing Slate, Pif Magazine, Gravel, Glint, Grub Street, Crack the Spine, Poetry Flash, and Poetry Quarterly and is currently at work on her first poetry collection and a family memoir titled This Life That Binds. She lives in Austin.

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

If ever someone attempted to strike fear into your heart,
I sense disappointment would follow. The traces you leave behind
prove your valor: back torn open, wings emerging. You fly
toward a setting sun, an aroma crisp and bitterly sweet in your wake.
Though men may try questioning you as they quake 
in your presence, you remain untouchable. The sweetness of cherry
couldn’t satisfy you; you sought the tangy taste of acid and reminded 
the woman following behind you, waiting to do life’s most vulnerable deed,
that she, too, could know what it means to be invincible, if only she lifted
the bacteria-laden stick sitting atop the aluminum dispenser, if only she 
took a risk and raised each tiny organism you left behind to her lips.

Alicia Swain is a feminist poet and author living in Richmond, VA. Her debut poetry collection, Steel Slides and Yellow Walls, releases in August of 2025 with Belle Isle Books. Her work appears in publications such as The Vehicle, Half and One, and The Closed Eye Open. She can be found on her website at aliciaswain.com, on Bluesky as aliciamswain.bsky.social, and on Instagram as @aliciamswain.

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Because only a woman could endure
such atrocities to her crust,
gutted inside out for the pleasure
of man and still be expected to
make him breakfast in the morning.

Only a woman could be told
her rotting flesh is a result of
her own flow and ebb, that her
salty waves are self-inflicted,
too sensitive, too soft, too
easy to get a rise out of.

But it isn’t her fault that her
body rejects your half-hearted
apologies, your paper straws dumped
in her stomach, a manufactured “forgive me”
while you pump her lungs with smoke.

She begged you to stop, sent you letters
of warning. Flames filled your cities,
winds ripped your homes from their
foundations. She fought so hard that
her skin cracked and she almost swallowed
you whole. And it still wasn’t enough.

Of course Nature is a Mother,
because only a woman could lose
the right to her own body and then
be condemned for giving birth
to the apocalypse.

Makayla Edwards is a creative nonfiction writer and occasional poet. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Creative Writing at Ball State University, where she also received her B.A. in English Studies. She is also an intern for the literary journal River Teeth where she helps manage social media and reads for their daughter magazine Beautiful Things (you should totally check them out). Makayla’s work has been featured in Ball State University’s Odyssey and The Digital Literature Review, as well as her childhood closet wall. In her free time, she enjoys half-finishing crosswords and shamelessly reading romance novels.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I touch the earth and find the ash of my mother’s hair, her breath curling into smoke, into a hymn she will never sing. The fire eats through my hands as if it knows my name as if it has waited for this moment to make a feast of my body. Everywhere I go, the animals keep my secrets. The birds stitch my grief into their wings, carrying pieces of what I can no longer hold. The snakes coil my sorrow underground, burying what I’ve begged to forget. Last night, the moon burned itself into the river, and I was there to watch it drown. Everything goes this way: the air, the body, the prayer we refuse to finish. The water cannot spit me out. It holds me as it holds the ghost of rain, turning my name into something heavy, something that sinks. I asked the water to name me, but all it gave back was silence, its voice caught in the belly of a fish long dead, long forgiven. The fire grows a mouth, and it sings my body into a psalm of smoke. I am nothing but what I’ve lost: a garden of teeth and a heart beating against the blackened wood. To live is to be buried in parts, to call each death by a different name. Here is the fire. Here is the water. Here, where the earth learns how to swallow me whole. This is what I know of living: the birds mourn another loss, the snakes keep their prayers, and the river, even in its rage, cradles me like something it forgot to destroy. 

Oladosu Michael Emerald is the author of Every Little Thing That Moves and the art editor at Surging Tide. He is a digital/musical/visual artist, an actor, a photographer, and an athlete. He teaches art at the Arnheim Art Gallery to kids and adults, is an Art Instructor at the Anasa Collection Art Gallery and a volunteer art instructor at Status Dignus Child Rescue Home and Ibeere Otun Initiative, as well as a Pioneer Fellow of the Muktar Aliyu Art Residency. He is winner of the GPC poetry contest and the Spring contest, and second-runner-up in the Fireflies poetry contest. He tweets @garricologist and @garrycologist on Instagram.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The week I resigned myself to break up with him, I had to wait until Thursday to tell him in person. There seemed to be an inordinate number of deer carcasses along roadsides that week, one especially haunting, its ribcage visible, most of the flesh having been consumed by vultures. The red sinews of each meat-lined rib were seering, vibrant against the dreary wet winter afternoon. I slowed the car as I passed, mesmerized, torso aching in response: a world in which people slow down to stare at a creature splayed open, exposed, one second living, the next devoured.

Nicole Wilson is the author of the collection Supper & Repair Kit (The Lettered Streets Press) and is a graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Columbia College Chicago.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I hold grievances grown so old they are
calcified, rounded, smooth-pearled possessions—
each tucked away in its own bitter sphere.
I know each by feel, by weight, by passion—
I know where they’ve been lodged and exactly 
why I keep them there. I’ve grown used to their
presence, to the collected gravity
of each and every ancient reminder
of who and what and why and when rotten
things happened. I’ve kept them all. Kept them all
this time. Felt their sharp angers dull, soften
into me, felt them become mutable
as I held them, shaped them perfectly.
And when I die I will take them with me.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Think Journal, Mezzo Cammin, Able Muse, The Alabama Literary Review, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (Great Weather for Media), Under Her Skin (Black Spot Books), and many other venues. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, the Elgin and the Rhysling Awards. She was a Laureates’ Choice prize winner in the 2024 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Her 6th and latest book is Curses, Black Spells and Hexes (Alien Buddha Press).

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

No matter how much you beat it,
the heart is a dog. It will lick any man
who looks on with adoration.
I know because it’s inevitable.
I too have beaten myself at the threshold
of desire and have tried dragging
this body back. But look,
here I am, naked knees grazing the floor
of yet another room. He says,
You look like my childhood friend,
by which he means I could be loved
if I were someone else.
Oh, trust me, I know, like a new dog
in the family

after the first one has died.

Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer Indian poet with a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Lucknow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Frontier Poetry, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Fourteen Poems, The Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Foglifter Press, Diode Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, he lives in his hometown of Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, where he teaches English to high schoolers.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I’m curious why you have binoculars hanging
from your neck on a faux pearl string.
I kind of hope you’re not looking past
the swelling dawn to watch tenants
in the student building across the street
eat dry cornflakes with their fingers,
a buffering screen in front of them.
Not that I know anything, but if you wait
until dark, you might be able to see
into their half-furnished, unintentionally
ascetic living rooms even without the binoculars,
provided the blinds aren’t drawn, though
it seems like they always are.

I’ve lived in three apartment buildings and
have known exactly none of my neighbors.
Sometimes, as I’m locking my front door,
I hope one of them will pass in the hallway
just so I can see what they look like. I hear
their music, their breakups, their snoring, but
I don’t know their names, their faces. Sometimes,
as I babysit my boiling pasta, I hear footsteps
outside, and I run to the peephole for a glimpse.
I never see anything but the beige wall
and stained carpet, and my water boils over.

I think what I’m trying to say is
the binoculars might not be enough.
You may have to enter the building
and sit in the hallway, waiting for someone,
anyone, to emerge. They have to appear
at some point, don’t they? If you give me
some signal, look at me looking
at you for long enough, I can take
the elevator downstairs and let you in,
and together, we can find out who lives
beside me. Just give me a sign.

E.C. Gannon’s work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Assignment Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Olit, and elsewhere. Raised in New Hampshire, she holds a degree from Florida State University and is pursuing another at the University of New Mexico.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

there are no worries on the beach;
we can flaunt our near-naked forms,
as we build derelict sandcastles
that we pretend will last forever
on a shore lit by our ancestors’ sun;
we can find this ancient comfort,
this primal escape, only here, now

it is as if we’re reminded
by the vastness of the ocean
how frail and powerless we are,
so we set aside our conflicts,
instead choosing to navel-gaze
and sunbathe and permit ourselves
to forget the two degree goal,
less than two minutes to midnight,

the world is so fucked; sometimes
i just want — need — a cigarette
an indulgence concealed by a sea breeze;
we can linger until each dune
takes on meaning, shaped by wind,
insects, you, you from weeks ago,
us from years ago, us here now

Felix Grygorcewicz (he/him/his) is an experimental writer, mostly of fiction, though he dabbles in poetry and non-fiction. He has worked in education for over 10 years on the East and West coasts of the U.S. and is currently residing in the middle of the country where he teaches. He is often inspired by nature and people.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson