Issue #92

David Rosenthal

The Prompt

Let words appear as thoughtlessly
as thoughts in meditation. Let
them come and go, and do not be
attached to them, or let them set
themselves in stone. Just see them as
they pass, enjambing wildly on
their way to something meter has
in store, collecting as the dawn
collects itself to launch the world
again and again and again,
or as a rattlesnake lies curled,
prepared to strike and puncture skin.

David Rosenthal is a public school teacher in Berkeley, California. He has contributed to Rattle, HAD, Rust & Moth, Birmingham Poetry Review, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and others. He’s been a Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and Pushcart Nominee. He’s the author of The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things (Kelsay Books).

Jennifer Mills Kerr

What I Know of Longing

Petalled poison,
white-green

Back door grief,
a worn mat

Howling winter
breezes

Water-ache
distances

Underneathness,
pink-green

Living two by two
in the ark of the deep

Tiny talking
colorless song

A little moment
readied

Sources: Denise Levertov, Seeing for a Moment; The Ache of Marriage; Talking to Grief
Camille Dungy, Characteristics of Life; What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. She has work upcoming in The Inflectionist Review. You can connect with Jennifer through her substack newsletter, Poetry Inspired.

Michael Minassian

Kind of a Love Story

When I was in college
someone sent me a letter
with a blank piece of paper
folded into fours.

Later a friend who claimed
to be clairvoyant told me
it was from a woman
who was in love with me.

I thought I knew who she meant;
the next time I saw that woman
she was married
to one of my best friends.

When I went over their house
(the only time I was invited),
she handed me a slice of cake
with pieces of paper
in place of frosting—
my friend didn’t notice.

When I left, she squeezed my hand.
That night I picked splinters of glass
from my fingers & palm.

I never saw my friend again.
His wife gave birth to twin boys,
neither was named after me—

Each year on their birthday,
my fingers bleed,
invisible shards of glass
try to form words where none exist.

MICHAEL MINASSIAN lives with his wife in Southern New England. He is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com

Elly Katz

Go Gentle

Out of nothing, begetting nothing is everything. The once true.  No longer youthful, my skin goes mossy on windows & walls. This body is a nation I do not know. The world is ancient. The world is new. Lungs rub skin-weary bone. We recognize shapes. We knew What made us. They refuse to stay intact. The weather enters. Out of nothing, begetting nothing is everything. The once true. Pedestrians call me lonely. The distance is not God in flocks of blue. Anything but. I am not lonely. I get to tell the truth. And fail to deliver what I do not know. The world is ancient. The world is new. I clamor with shadows. What you name grey, I name moon-polished anew. Nothing has a name. Silence. Scratch at it like a rash. Out of nothing, begetting nothing is everything. The once true. I miss mildew seeping our prayer books. Glitter glue On cardboard. Rubber-banded $2 bills. Melt sweat & sun I do not know. The world is ancient. The world is new. Heaving in my flesh. Barefoot. Born as more than sturdy sockets of sound. We leave things Green. The perimeter is real. The curious comes in. I lean into clearings Out of nothing, begetting nothing is everything. The once true. I do not know. The world is ancient. The world is new.

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke from a physician’s needle misplacement. Forthcoming books: creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted (Lived Places Publishing) & poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief (Kelsay Books), both in 2025.

Jean Ryan

Night Feeders

Behind my house is a woods,
the southern variety—a chokehold of trees
and thorny vines and savage undergrowth.
Impossible to walk through.

Between my yard and the woods
is a chain link fence continuously violated
by tall clumping weeds and rampant runners, which I rip away
with gloved hands, sweat streaming into my eyes.

Sometimes after dark I aim a flashlight
into that black beyond and find glowing eyes.
Unlike the birds and squirrels that cruise
the yard in daytime, eating the seeds I offer,
whatever lives behind the fence stays there,
safe in those tangled quarters.

I picture small clawed feet
crisscrossing the litter, whiskery snouts,
teeth sinking into scraps I make sure
they find: heaps of limp lettuce,
aging apple halves, pliant carrots,
bones and fatty meat and even
perfectly good food, a handful of peanuts,
cucumbers straight from the garden.
It is all gone by morning.

I don’t feed them to save them.
I do it for the thrill,
for those weary, eager snouts nosing through
a monotony of leaves and rotting wood
and finding what shouldn’t be there:
pieces of another world.

Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in coastal Alabama. She is the author of two short story collections, Survival Skills and Lovers and Loners. She has also published a novel, Lost Sister, a book of nature essays, Strange Company, and a poetry collection, A Day Like This.

Kaecey McCormick

Death Visits Me Again—

this time, a girl in a green hospital gown,
thick socks covering her toes, smiling:

It isn’t all bad, she whispers. Not all silence
and the heavy weight of night. It tastes like
morning, she says. Cotton-candy clouds.
The sky moments before sunrise. Some days
it smells like rain. But mostly, she says,
it’s coffee brewing by the sink, dew-wet earth
steaming through an open window. We sit
on the wall built from teeth and bone and watch
the warm-milk moon fade. Finger spiky swamp verbena,
fog at the edge of the woods. Even with this veil,
she says, we see the exact pattern of light
through trees, dance with the smoke dancing
on the water. Listen to the living sing and scream,
and shout. I love it, she whispers, blinking dust
from her eyes. No fear, she says. No pain.
No wet hound barking at the gate or chemical-sting
of the dripline at your nose. Just spring, she says.
The rising wind in your hair. A warm hand
on your naked back, she says. And the scratch
of the living under your skin.

Kaecey McCormick writes poetry and prose in the San Francisco Bay Area. She served as poet laureate for the city of Cupertino, and her work appears in different literary journals, including the Baltimore Review, The Pinch Journal, Pedestal Magazine, and her chapbooks Sleeping with Demons (2023) and Pixelated Tears (2018).

Elvins Artiles

Today

Today was wonderful.
Before the train arrived,
I watched construction workers
power-wash the tracks—cement sediment,
brown metal, the third rail
we studied
together.

The mist of the hose,
September’s cool breath,
licked my face, whispered
of trees’ shedding skin.

The train arrived quietly,
and I was alone:
its tiny rumbles were nothing to fear.
A tricycle trembled in the wind
dangling from a brick balcony.

And outside, Bolaño, thin, hungry,
needing a haircut,
writing about pigeons
pecking at used-cigarettes,
trying to shove them into their beaks.
I lit the ones they managed to pick up.

I whispered:
no one knows
the songs pigeon poets sing today.
I watched Bolaño stealing books,
scraping his tongue with a plastic spork,
walking to Stop & Shop
for potatoes.

He tugged his hair like a rubber band,
wrapped potatoes in his dark sky,
he lay in the sun, the potatoes baking.
Soon, he’d have enough for today,
eating as the ash rose from the rails,
watching the workers
as I had.

When I got home,
she was waiting.
Her body swirled in the beer we drank;
the TV’s colors,
waving, washed over her,
seeping into the window,
into my reflection; she asked me
about today. I stared at her.

Outside, men looked like skeletons
fighting over a hanged clay man.
The sun was alive and growing,
Bolaño sat on a roof across from us,
watching the scene
like a lonely cold pigeon,
with his fill of potatoes, writing
on my body with a pen—
the wonderful day.

Engaged in an adulterous affair with life, Elvins Artiles strives after the subduing of the sublime with the few words he feels confident in showcasing. A self-proclaimed literary masochist, Elvins enjoys the celestial contempt acquired in every turning minute he gives to his writing. He hopes to make beautiful things.

Alison Eastley

A Different Kind of Truth

Solitary as the spasm
of light
closer than this rush of desire

pinking my skin, this sudden
heat a stutter
on my tongue, an epiphany

different
from the contradiction
of truth fucking

cheap premonitions
lingering
longer than a night.

Alison Eastley is a poet living in Tasmania with her cat Jane. Her work has been widely published in print and online journals in Australia and the US.

Stefanie Lee

Crown Shyness

they call it crown shyness—how the trees rise, side by side, yet hold their branches back, leaving space for the sky to pour languidly through, like drip coffee. it is not loneliness, no, but a quiet understanding, as if they know, without saying, that to touch is to alter the shape of light. instinctively, they are aware that distance can sometimes be crucial, giving space can be a gesture of kindness, letting each branch bend in its own direction, stretch burdenless towards sunlight. in our own way, too, do we drift apart to thrive as individuals: rivers split at a fork, or a meticulously parted hairline, occasionally dodging each other’s patches of shadow. the art of closeness without entanglement, firm roots, deciding when to intertwine, when to yield. this still remains a hopeful poem: snapping conformity like twigs, re-learning growth as a steady reaching, although at times with restraint.

Stefanie Lee is an ambitious young writer from Montréal, Canada. Living with a rare physical disability called Nemaline Myopathy, she is a motivated software engineering student. When she is not writing or studying, she can be found editing her photography or solving crossword puzzles.

Rina Olsen

cemetery communiqué

the last time i belly-laughed was when
we were on our way to the cemetery.
when the trees looked like cracks in glass
and it was almost too dark to plunge
our hands deep into each other’s voices
and you were telling me a funny story.
maybe this was why graveyards were
invented: to show us how much life our
bellies can hold without having to burst
into roman candles. you said you needed
to write a poem about this, but what if i
told you that we were already in the belly
of a poem that was laughing, laughing.
jonah, and his reflection in the stomach
acid of a whale that knew next month, it
would be a beached memorial of sin but
was singing anyway. laughing, laughing.
laughter lacing its fingers with the end
of the world just because it can. for once,
i felt like i wasn’t dying. i was running in
a world where the sky was kind and
laughter was confession. running to instead
of running from. running between the
headstones with you, i’d never felt so alive.

Rina Olsen is the author of Third Moon Passing and The Water Stricken. A hat enthusiast with a fondness for data maps, she is a Best of the Net nominee and was twice longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2024. Find out more at https://rinaolsen.com.