By Jessica Pierce

Featured Art by Pieter Holsteyn

The female in particular seems worthy.
She carries mud in her jaws to make her nest
one mouthful at a time, setting up
in a crevice or a corner. One egg,
one chamber. One egg, one chamber.
It’s better to keep them apart, as larvae don’t
know the difference between food and
a brother or a sister. They aren’t wicked,
just young and hungry. She has pirate
wasps to battle—they want her young
to feed their own offspring—and she does this
alone, drinking flower nectar to keep
herself going. Let’s just try

and see what happens when we raise up
this winged thing who will hover by your feet
without attacking. Covered with dense golden
hair and sometimes described as singing while
she works, all she wants is bits of damp dirt.
She has a slender thorax and two thin
sets of wings to carry her and
her earth. She is exactly strong enough
for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn
or proclaim or fill your head with visions
as she hunts crab spiders and orb
weavers and black widows. Yes, let’s ask

her to pray for us as she stings
a black widow, brings it to its knees,
and sets off to feed her children,
singing as she holds up the world.

By Liz Breazeale

Featured art by Nsey Benajah

The first ghost stepped out of the ocean in the summer, shimmering and hazy with captured light. We saw the age in her body, moving as though still burdened by a vast and lonely sea. Her wrinkles like the finest, most fragile spiderwebs we’d ever destroyed.

She came to rest on a foamy lip of shore. Her outline was set and static, her insides swirling, misty, full of translucent opals spun in an ancient hand. We realized later that every ghost was different in texture, but only when we couldn’t count them anymore, when they’d packed themselves across the sand.

By John Moessner

Featured art from rawpixel.com

It contained home movies where he wore
goggle-sized glasses, a toweled shoulder holding
a small redhead at a birthday party, three hours

of ripped paper like static on a radio, the sun flaring
off the ripples of the neighborhood pool. What do
those thieves think of your soccer games,

the Go girl! and the rain that drove him cursing to the car?
What about last Christmas? He was too tired, so you held the
camera instead and closed in on his drooped head

nodding while everyone opened gifts. Would they tear up
thinking of their fathers, would it convince them to call more?
Ripped from your life, just a plastic box in a bag of stuff.

Maybe before wiping it clean, they will browse your home
movies and say, What a good father, what a good life.

By Kelly Michels

Featured art by rawpixel.com

A new cure is invented every day,
along with a new disease
because every miracle needs a
disaster to survive, and there is no
shortage
of disaster, the sparrows have learned
to eat anything under the slash-and-burn
of the sun, and the children have learned
how to weave plastic buttercups into bracelets
between the alphabet and spoonfuls of NyQuil
their mothers give them before bed
where they dream of the swish of scar tissue
behind their teacher’s glass eye.

We tell them: There is horror. There is pain.
There are people wedged between bullets
and mud floors, between cracked river ice
and broken elevator shafts. But not here.
Never here.

Now, we sit still as an Eames chair, and the children
will never know the bridge of a song the rain spells
out in the sand on an October morning.
It is safer behind closed doors and windows, safer
where the wheat and ragweed and daisies
can kill no one.

We tell them: We have seen the grim amoeba of lake water,
the blizzard of ocean waves lashing against the curved spine

of coast, the blue-eyed grass raising itself like a rash toward
the swollen ache of sun, the sting of salt, grazing the long arm
of a bluff. We have lived it. We know better now.
We have knelt at the rim of a cliff and looked down. We
have fallen, felt the pulse of the sea pull at our hair and
it was not kind.

Child, put your ear to the conch shell and listen.
This is enough.

By John Bargowski

Featured art by Kieran Osborn

You know the spot, that sharp left
off the county road to Hope

that passes the roadside shrine her
classmates built to our youngest,

the blank stones that mark the old
Presbyterian graveyard,

then on past the last rusted knob
of safety rail

where a graveled lane cuts through
swampy woods.

The pair of wood drake decoys
Hubert anchored to the bottom

riding out every weather on the big pond,
the splotch of white on their sides

that catches in our high beams
as we round the curve.

The twiggy wrack of alder and sumac
clipping the sideviews

as we pass through streaks of moonlight
burnishing the shields

on the skeletoned ruins of our friend’s
red Massey Ferg.

A place we’ve gone to many times
trying to nudge the season ahead,

we crack open the side window, crank
the heater up a couple notches,

sit with the lights clicked shut, side
by side in the front seat,

strain for the first callers crawled free
from March mud, the hyla crucifer,

no bigger than a fingertip, noted in our
dog-eared Peterson’s for shrill voices

that rise then fallm and those dark little crosses
they carry on their backs.

By John Bargowski

Featured art by Teerasak Anantanon

Weeks after the cops cut Bill down
and the squad sheeted his body,

bore it out to the street, his mother
leaned over her sill and called us

upstairs to share the flies he’d wrapped
and knotted, labeled

with names we could never
have dreamed up, and arranged

in small wooden boxes next to coils
of tapered leader and packs

of hooks barbed along their shanks,
the button-down shirts

and bank teller suits in his closet
screeched and swayed

on their hangers when she elbowed
her way in for the split bamboo pole

he’d hand-rubbed to a gloss
and mounted with a reel cranked

full of line, nothing we could ever use
when we biked down

to the Hudson piers and bait-fished
for river eels and tommycod,

but we took it all, every piece
of tackle we could carry down

to the stoop to divvy up among us—
his canvas vest, his shoulder bag,

spools of waxed line, the bamboo poles,
his hip waders and creel,

and those boxes of flies—
the Zebra Midge and Gray Ghost,

his Black Woolly Bugger,
Pale Morning Dun.

By Justin Hunt

Featured art by Markus Spiske

At sundown, we sit at our garden’s edge,
speak of thinkers and their theories—

what’s real, if something follows
this life, the ways of knowing

the little we know. An owl swoops the
creek below, swift as death. I shift

in my lawn chair, pick at my knee— an
old wound I won’t let heal.

Do you wonder, I ask, if Descartes
ever said, I feel pain, therefore I am?

You sigh, run your eyes to a remnant
of light in the oak above—as if,

in your drift, you could re-enter the time
of our son, inhale his dusky scent.

I honor your silence. But what I feel,
what I know, what I want to say is,

we have no choice but to watch
September settle on our garden.

And look! All these tomatoes
that cling to withered vines—blushes

of green and carmine, waxen wines
and yellows, the swollen heirlooms.

When the next one falls, my love,
I’ll pick it up, fetch us a knife and salt.

By Rome Hernández Morgan

Featured art by David Hockney

Evenings, we hold hands
and take long walks
through the neighborhood

as the sweet and sickly smells
of the chemical toilet plant
crystallize into greenish glowing stars.

We live a stone’s throw from
the nicest part of town and
we do—throw stones

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By Caitlin Cowan

Featured art by Serzill Hasan

There was a mechanical bull and a waitress
who flirted with everyone. There was a rainbow
of cocktails served lukewarm in pint glasses,
two fingers of dread. We’d missed a flight
in bad weather but had been offered another.
There was only one seat. He wanted me
to get on, but I said no—wouldn’t leave him.

Interred at a dark sports bar, we ended
the night eating wings cruelly torn
from an Atlanta–area buffalo. He watched
five games at once—linebackers creaming each other
in snow—and nothing was enough. Outside
I dialed a friend, asked her Is it weird he wanted me
to leave without him? At the airport hotel

he laid his head on the sticky desk
in front of the mirror, defeated.
He was beside himself—
one version quite literally slumping
next to the other, and only one of them still

my husband. My eyes hurt from the obvious
overhead lighting. I asked him if he was okay
until I felt insane. We never know
how long we’ll have to rest,
how long we’ll nap in the terminal
of not good enough before we run,
out of breath, to board something better—

I wouldn’t recognize myself
for years, had so far to go until
I could become a woman I’d want to know.

That night, there were gas station 40s and Cheetos.
There may have been pay-per-view porn.
Back home in Texas, Jolene may have been waiting
for his return: I couldn’t hurry my knowing.
It was Christmas. When I opened
his gift, he whispered next year
and better. But there was no next year,
no better.

By Erin Redfern

Featured art by Jordan M. Lomibao

The drugstore on Hamilton and Bascom used to be a Long’s, then a Rite Aid.
Now it’s a CVS. That’s where sadness stays, nestled in packs of Ticonderogas,

hiding behind Jim Beam bottles at closing. While registers spin LED dreams,
sadness settles between Pampers and Depends. Not at home,

but still it’s got everything it needs––sandals, snacks, sewing kits.
Curled into itself, sadness inches forward on the same tear-track it emits,

snags on frayed carpet in the photo album aisle, which is always empty.
Sadness adheres to envelope flaps, tastes of foil torn open with teeth. It naps

amid our unanticipated needs: Ace bandages, B vitamins, vaginal cream.
It permeates the circulated air––the air I breathe in every other CVS.

The one back East where I bought lip gloss that smelled like apricots.
The one in Chicago you found when I got sick.

Even the future one, where you’re not on the mend
and need strange new prescriptions from the pharmacy bins. Dad.

Your body has begun its reluctant fade: you’re on your third left knee,
second right lens, first dental bridge. In the San Jose CVS

I’m not buying anything yet; I’m in the greeting card aisle, reading condolences,
passed by smocked employees with their carts for restocking.

They’ll stop what they’re doing to help someone find cat food or aspirin,
nylons or sunblock or a drying rack. They’re bone-tired and kind. They don’t let on

how these dumb rhymes make me cry, how I’m standing here wiping my nose
with my sleeve. Opening, reading, putting back. Practicing.

By R. Bratten Weiss

Featured Art from rawpixel

To live decently is to tread lightly, but
here it is a new year and maybe I’m ready
to stop worrying about decency. I’m ready
to stomp around, a ten-ton weight with
elephant legs, shaking the windows.

I’m tired of going gently, water on glass.
Maybe it’s time for the tongues of men and
angels, time to shoot fire from my fingertips.

A fleet of ships on the wine-dark sea would
do nicely to carry what I want to say.
I need to make cities fall.

I need to write the message like a knife
to the throat, like firewater. I need it to crack
like a whip in winter air.

If it does its job, it will lift you on its
burnished horns, trample you, raise
a trumpet to its mythic mouth and blast
Alleluia over the broken cliffs, terrify
the wild turkeys and the grazing deer,
and the red-tailed hawk that will take
to the air crying your name.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art by J.L. Mott Iron Works

How long I’ve tried to love you, the way
you still blush and gleam like a teenager
in a poodle skirt, unblemished as the day

you were pressed against wire and mortar
in the shower, on the walls, even the floor,
its concrete flecked with pink. The Nolans,

who chose you, are long gone, their daughters
now grandmothers in their own houses,
the blueprints they left behind moldering

in the basement. How can I blame them?
I didn’t live through the War, the Boom,
this neighborhood rising up in neat rows

as if each Cape had been pining for sun.
In those years, you were prosperity, pedigree,
First Lady Pink named in honor of Mamie

Eisenhower, her White House bathroom pink
from the walls to the tub to the cotton balls,
so that all over America, millions like me

wake up and stumble into a past that waits
with toothbrush and soap. In you, I saw history
running like a faucet, building to a flood

unless stemmed. But when the contractor
gave me a price, he said you were lead,
and with my daughter . . . it might be better

to let you be. So I’ll own your purr and poison,
though I may dream still of reinvention—
blue trim and Harbor Gray—even as I hang

the pink polka dot shower curtain, lay down
that cranberry rug, act as if I chose you,
as if you were everything I ever wanted.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Featured art by 2 Bull Photography

Tonight is a rodeo night, the announcer blaring his bull
and clown doctrine so loud it carries two miles
east to our block, where just now a hummingbird
hawk-moth drinks from the pink phlox
with its long wand
and I’m alone for a moment and the sky
is bleeding itself out over the train tracks and the brick
abandoned factories. The lights
of the carpet store by the mall flicker carpe
and I wonder just what I can seize.
The homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name
fills up every night and spills
downtown next morning,
wings of strange creatures brush our flowers
while we sleep, and a hapless moose wanders
a schoolyard before it’s caught,
tranquilized. Everyone’s looking for it:
a warmth, a softness in the belly, in a bed
of grass. Take it when you can. Seize it.

Lately sleep is a myth and my brain
is so hard-wired for worry my whole body
crackles, then a deep fog rolls in and all day
I’m lost. Unlike this moth, greedy in its guzzling,
drinking sweetness without asking,
and now the buzzer of the bull riding sounds.
I think of the grace of that single man,
one hand on the saddle
and the other a flag waving violently
above him. A wild show of surrender.

Some days it’s like this: one part
anchored while the other begs for mercy.
And some days it’s the other, the posture
he begins with: both hands together, holding tight.
Sometimes you hold your own hand.
That’s all there is to take.

By Mark Alan Williams

Featured art by Katie Manning

We buy hot dogs at a gas station
of broken pumps and eat them
on the pier, watching ratty shrimpers
limp in for new bandages,
sit there in the cold for hours,
thinking sunset will fill the bay
with the blood of the Brazos,
do something holy to us.

This is after Ganado,
and Victoria, and Refugio,
and Point Comfort, and Blessing.

We’re newlyweds,
willing to burn fuel on skywriting
if it can make marriage
feel less like living in Houston.

Sunset hangs around
like a towel that won’t dry,
and when we tire of waiting,
we leave the dim, fuming galaxy
of refineries for home,
bright and deadly as a hospital
circled by ambulances, the music off.

By Henrietta Goodman

Featured Art by Katsushika Hokusai

“Free associating, that is to say, is akin to mourning; it is
a process of detachment that releases hidden energies . . .”
—Adam Phillips

Always the smell of Windex brings me back to Martin Shelton
in first grade, his memory atomized from some forgotten source.

It’s wind and window when I see him late for school through double
doors of tempered glass, then rushing in on the lovely trochaic

feet of his name, shirt buttoned wrong, blond hair blown in a gust
of oak leaves, smoke, and frost that swept away the simmered meat

and rubber smells, the green litter that soaked up accidents. The wind
recorded and erased. I was afraid to sit with him, or speak—

my first crush a boy who packed his own lunch and walked alone
through dark stairwells hung with Bomb Shelter signs, arrows

aimed at the basement lunchroom where we bowed our heads
to wait for fallout’s drift from the split atom, the invisible anvil

that could fall no matter where we hid. Even when the speakers
hummed and Mr. Wells announced that we were safe,

his name said the earth would swallow us. And now I spray
the glass to wipe away the prints, the trace, but traces gone,

the glass I see through stays. How, then, could mourning set me free,
if Windex leads to Martin leads to beauty leads to bomb?

By  Susan Browne

Featured Art by Carol M Highsmith

I walk down my neighborhood street called mountain
although there is no mountain     only rolling hills
although hills don’t really roll        & as I look
at a window display of shoes & pass by the candy store
a gasp happens in my head    a quake in my heart     they aren’t
here      my father who loved sweets
my mother who loved shoes    & the sun shines
on a world of orphans      I quake along mountain street
like a rolling gasp although if someone asked
how are you I’d say fine      like most of us are
& aren’t       I thought sadness was a prison
but it connects us & if a chain it should be
one of tenderness     my father died
two years ago although sometimes I say a year
a way of keeping him closer      can’t do that
anymore with my mother      need math on paper      the ache
woven into each leaf although there are birds & nests
we live in a tsunami     waves of being & non-being
but I’m no philosopher standing at the counter buying
bunion pads     feeling drowned & drying
under fluorescent lights & warmed by the smile
of the clerk who blesses me with have a great day as I go out
to mountainless mountain & remember donovan’s song
playing in my parents’ house in the sixties      first there is
a mountain then there is no mountain then there is