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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
FelixGrygorcewicz (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.
“The SAP Ariba spend management solution portfolio is empowering companies to move faster and spend better. The solutions connect millions of trading partners worldwide to SAP Business Network to enable direct, intelligent connections that redefine how organizations communicate and get work done.” – SAP Ariba website.
1
Ariba, I have failed you again. I have placed a box fan in front of a cattle fan and called it ambition. I sent my resume to the paltry gods and it contained a typo, a misplaced “y” or “i” and now I must cleanse my relevant experience at the river of the many-headed girlboss. I asked a career coach for a smoke. Ariba, with your four-step approval process, your sacred ladder, and me, a mere renter comprised of trustworthiness scores. I live in terror of your guided buying, as it should be.
2
Ariba, you must understand that I lived for years in a tempest of misremembered Morse code. They refer to it as the ancient ‘90s. Your origins lie in a hush of patents, but my eyes still sting with since-dead neon. I remember the sign of the hatchery, a cracking egg. I remember the flamingos, so many, and a wildfire’s worth of green gas station dinosaurs. A teapot atop a building. A water tower of painted bees. A green screen computer with a single blinking cursor. Heretical childhood. Modus operandi: Midwestern. O Ariba, we are but public four-year arts majors with flapping fruit bats for memories. Deliver us from our contract requests, our blanket orders, too. We ask this of you, not God.
3
Ariba, an office door slams in the afternoon light and I cry. If the employee of the month called eternal suffering a pain point, middle management may learn to practice active listening. List the ailments: your upskilled heart, your quiet quitting soul, your obsession with how even a pandemic could not finally slow the grind. Label your faults as a series of rooms: infinite rooms, rooms for growth, outreach, engagement, and quality assurance. The Voynich manuscript is now understood by no one but Ariba, we know you as a precision of timestamped pleas.
4
Ariba, I wake in the night to pain everywhere. I think I hear the Earth trying to dislodge from its orbit. I will not stop thinking of you, force of habit, fever dream of process improvement. Ariba, I once ran from you and saw perfectly rusted mopeds flit down a gade in Copenhagen. I tasted the crisp stars against glow-in-the-dark velvet. I understood metaphysics. I had never been so alarmingly sober. I returned home to an eviction notice. Ariba, are you animal, lamentation, or dream? I am but a child at your feet.
Katie Berger is the author of two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press and several other essays, stories, and poems. She hold an MFA from the University of Alabama and works at the University of Nebraska at Omaha as a project coordinator.
they’ve got me running in circles again, spinning round the old mouse wheel, lunging for scraps and we retire at 70 now with no time left at all and it feels as if the world has spun completely out of control. little houses for millions of dollars, fortune-busting interminable educations that lead to no jobs, to mcdonalds and fat-choked arteries because the rent is due this week.
i sit here and read the job postings on the internet, all the digital madness, all the arcane terminology and technology that no one could possibly understand (or would ever want to were they sane), and reflect on what it must have been like to live like a real living being in a jungle or a forest all those millions of years ago, to do things that made sense, to hunt when hungry and sleep when tired, and to die when the time came instead of being stretched thin to such obscene degrees.
and we jump through these hoops because we don’t know what else to do, we are scared and don’t know any way out, some of us drink and some of us turn to stone and some of us have families and some of us go mad and learn to love what tortures us. they throw us crumbs to pay the utility bills and we keep churning along, day after day after day until in a heartbeat 20 years have gone by and the muscles and joints are aching and the mind is fading and the rest is crying right along.
and cnn blares in the background and traffic lights go green and red and the holidays come and go, the endless cacophony of a few billion choking throats, religion and money and passion and sex, the computers blink and run interference for the suits with their fat fingers in the cookie jars and it just seems to get worse and worse with each passing year.
the freeways are jammed, the buildings are bursting, the fields are burned, there is no room for love, there is no room for grace or simplicity, there is only this diabolical fear of starving that keeps us chasing carrots, this fear of drowning that keeps us afloat.
Scott Taylor hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications; his debut novel Chasing Your Tail has recently been released with Silver Bow Publishing, and his novellas “Freak” and “Ernie and the Golden Egg” are slated for inclusion in an upcoming anthology with Running Wild Press. He graduated from Cornell University and was also a computer programmer in a past life.
Vast 