By George Bilgere

I find an old air gun
and a can of ammo
down in the basement
in a cardboard moving box,
along with some other stuff,
flotsam from previous lives.
A teenager, a long-expired
me, used it to polish off
tin cans in the backyard,
and once a bright, golden
oriole, shot in mid-song,
blowing a hole through me
as it fell. Holding a pistol
is like shaking hands
with death. What the hell,
let’s see if the damn thing
still works. In the same box,
a volume of poetry, slim,
but not slim enough,
by a poet I never liked—
all smoke and mirrors—
a poet utterly, brutally
forgotten, although a blurb
on the back still calls his book
“an astonishing debut.”
I prop it against the wall,
pump, load, cock, and Blam
goes the gun as it hasn’t
in half a century. I inspect
the astonishing debut.
The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two,
just deep enough to dimple,
not tear, a sonnet on the guy’s
divorce, how his wife ran off
with his best friend, how terrible
the betrayal, how deep his grief.
How losing her tore out his soul.
And now this.

By Pamela Davis

Do you see us? We park in our cars
all over town. Enjambed between jobs
and laundry at home, we stop time.
Toe-off shoes. Fan our bare toes. Exhale
the poisons of the day. Somewhere
in the car, there is chocolate. Aretha,
Mrs. Dalloway. Men pass staring hard
as cops. One asks if we’re okay. Sorry,
we mutter for the hundredth time.
Beyond the dashboard, the sun stalls
before sinking the ancient way.
An open road is ripe. One summer night
in the Sixties my Dad drove home from Vegas
in a gold convertible he bought playing craps.
Cheerios went limp in our bowls
the morning he came back, presenting
Mother with the car keys. Choking them
in one fist, she slammed out, gunned
the engine’s 385 powered horses
and thundered off. It became her way.
We were always left listening for the Pontiac’s
brakes to screech at the end of our street.
Tonight I point my car north and turn up
“Respect.” City lights leak out my rearview mirror.
I’ll be gone an hour or half the night.
Virginia was wrong. A room isn’t enough.

By K.T. Landon

                                                                                                                For Jessica Jacobs

You say that a poem that contains a fox
and a henhouse must, at some point, include
a slaughtered chicken, that the rifle on the mantel
must go off in Act Three. But what I am telling you
is that my neighbor has built his coop to last
and surrounded it with a sturdy double fence
of chicken wire, and that that fox is out of luck
this time. And I know that good news for the chickens
is bad news for some vole or field mouse or hapless
housecat. So maybe all I’ve done is point that gun
in another direction or into another poem, but this
is a poem in which no chickens will die. A rabbit
will bound across the road and the car will slow
in time. The fox will discover the trampoline behind
the house next door and with it the wonder of flight.
Everyone I love will live and call me after supper
to say goodnight. My neighbor is a good man,
a minor god who has brought forth a paradise
for chickens. And I know those chickens, clucking
contentedly in their self-important obliviousness,
are too foolish to be a metaphor for hope
(though isn’t hope always foolish?) but in this poem
the chickens stand for joy—for feed scattered
with a free hand and fresh water in the trough,
for a swept house and a warm nest, for the sun
and the breeze and friends to admire your glorious,
feathered self and this single, glorious day.
And we’re in pretty deep now, aren’t we,
speculating about the Inner Life of Chickens,
but can you doubt, watching them watching us,
that they have one? That they, too, understand
the urgency of this still and incandescent moment
that is here and leaving already? I know
it’s not always this way. The gun goes off
eventually. One night the latch will fail to catch
or a hinge will rust through, and the fox will bring
terror and death, as foxes do. Every story ends
with a corpse. But, Jessica, it’s not Act Three yet.
My neighbor, the chickens, the fox, you, me—
we love what we love for as long as we can.
Right now, in this blue and breathing hour
that shines inside us all, those chickens are fine.

By Mark Cox

By Sue D. Burton

“. . . she circled the battlefield as a conspiracy of ravens to carry away the dead”
—Gregory Wright, Mythopedia.com

There were trainloads of us, my daddy said, heading
to “Hillbilly Heaven”—up to Akron in the 30s and the 40s—
lured by Tire & Rubber, but we were open-shop snakes (cheap) to
anybody who already worked the factories up there, though of
course once we got active in the union, we got dissed
for that, oh, it goes on and on—homesick— the
rubber bust—.

It’s what now we call the Great Appalachian Migration— but

by the time all that went down, we pretty much forgot
the Morrígan, that ancient Celtic goddess of battles and doom
who crossed the Atlantic with us and spent the next how-many-years
dirt farming in West Virginia. And the Morrígan, too, got
pretty much tamed down, though sometimes she just shows up,
on your doorstep, like the baby my friend gave up,
who thirty years later tracked her down.
And didn’t have a pretty story.

But why should the Morrígan—a feisty old gal
with the head of a raven—have a pretty story? My dad said
the Scotch-Irish (we Celts) had a fightin’ reputation.
Though now they say if you eat vegan, your microbes or
whatever are in sync and you pass for middle class.

I never went to war.
But I would like a bird’s head.
I’d like to think I had some magical mythical legacy, other than
Wonder Bread and bad-years Goodyear Tire. Though to what end? I
told my nice bourgie dentist once I wanted a gold front tooth.
I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sue, he said.

By David Dodd Lee

I counted eight cygnets (and two adult swans) on the river in May but then counted four
cygnets in late June and today the four have turned into three. My next-door neighbors

went from two to no persons then back to two after the deceased
couple who’d lived there’s daughter and husband moved in, then up to five

after the woman’s sister, her sister’s boyfriend, and their child
joined them. A note written on lined notebook paper that I assumed

(on what basis?) was written by the woman’s sister blew into
my yard. It said I want out of this life and I love you Jesus I do

but I don’t care anymore I’m sorry but for now they’re still five. My
house is one and sometimes two, especially on weekends, add

one cat and it goes up to three. I grew up in a house of six and then
there were five and then six again for a while and then five. My

sisters ended up in houses of six, five, and four eventually, I in houses
of two, four for about eight years, two again, now usually one . . .

The eight, four, then three cygnets take all summer to become close to
indistinguishable from their parents and then by spring each relocates

to a different pond river lake where they become two, then four, five, six, seven, etc.,
something you can count until counting no longer seems to matter anymore.

By Carol Tiebout

We traded Harvey Wallbangers, Velvet Hammers, and straight-up tequila, kicked
Nixon and Agnew around and came up with a board game
about Camp David that would use lacquered walnut shells and peas as markers.

When the acid slid in, clipping all the edges in clear light, we fell out into
the late-night street now stuffed with one hundred thousand points of
cool fog that wrapped the curbs and thinned under the lamps

into a series of three-foot worlds. A drunk appeared below us, limbs curled up waving
like a crab that had been tossed onto its back from its rocking bed to hard granite while
still holding the comfort of the sea. He looked up at me

with baby-kissed blue eyes and asked, “Are you an angel?” I thought for a moment
maybe I was, maybe in the realm of infinite possibilities, it could be there on certain
Tuesdays, my name in the index of Alan Watts’ book under A.

Fifty years later the sky opens up, raindrops the size of cats singing
the hood of my car as it curves past the turnoff to town
and in a loud whooosh, deafening as a splashdown, I no longer

understand why I would hold back any longer from
whatever walks into this minute
from the deep seams of the world.

By Sarah Sarai

Jacinth looks at the pig and 
asks what she did in another lifetime 
to be so beautiful. 
Maybe not everyone would see it
but she’s perfect. 
I am not everyone. I agree. 
Alice is perfect, 
a hippopotamus made compact. 
I stroke her dark hide and feed her 
fruit cup from breakfast. 
Cauliflower and a toasted bagel.
Plum jam. 
With the pig, Jacinth and 
I break bread. 
Jacob, who is new to this poem, 
buries his cigarette in a late-fall lawn
to take a call from Quebec.
In bright sunlight Alice considers 
eternally recycling life. Is my guess.
Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob
and praises only the pig, who is complete. 
Is her guess. The heart gets lonely 
some days. Is Jacob’s guess.
Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation 
irrelevant, without obliterating either.
Aspens snap their every yellow leaf. 
The trees expected we’d be gone by now. 
Their every yellow leaves don’t guess. 

By Damen O’Brien

Featured Art: Atardecer rosa by Rubi Villa

I climbed down into Wonderland following the paths of my memory.
Old playing cards ruffled like leaves, but his burrow was empty. It was
a shivering day, a pale sun peeking briefly into his cold warren. He was
long gone. Soft crumble of soil, colorless straw. He had vanished,
popping the buttons of his waistcoat on the far paddock’s fence.
All those years ago and we’d lost touch. One rushed note in 20 years, 
apologies for not visiting, complaints of lateness, and then nothing.
No phone number, no address. He has joined the ranks of the Missing, 
shutting the last yellow doors of Wonderland, boarding the windows,
battening down the root cellars, scrambling across the checkerboards
of desperation. He’s a gray exposure photograph on a billboard 
of the lost. He’s a file note numbered amongst the renditioned, the
compromised and betrayed, standing in a hopeless queue somewhere,
waiting for his portion of grass. We give the past away in exchange 
for the future. We foreclose the titles on our fairy tales for a handful 
of beans, until they’ve all gone, hitching out in the huddled back of 
rusty trucks, bussed in to the Big Smoke for a carrot or two, a cardboard
sign seeking work, selling our heirlooms for a passport, lying unmarked
and misremembered in a thorny field. It’s been such a long time. I was
a little girl with mud on the hem of my petticoat, but I always knew 
the world would one day come to Wonderland. He has gone on the last 
flight from the embassy’s roof, hiding his face from the government’s 
algorithms, sleeping in subways. I barely remember what he looked like. 
A twitchy nose, a neat tail, a pocket watch. If I were asked to identify him, 
I would say, he was a White Rabbit. He was always having to leave.

By Damen O’Brien

Seven hours under
bubbles to breakfast,
practicing his terminus
while they slap water
with the fowl’s carcass rag
and tempt him to spring-
loaded striking at 1 p.m.,
to the matador’s applause
each hot weekday and
twice on Saturday, but
he must only win once,
tangent to his target,
a holy investiture,
sacred digestion, and
every zookeeper has
one absent moment,
so he’ll wait forever
like the best missionaries,
for the one chance of faith
to find its grim purchase,
when in the coughing dark,
a child’s fever breaks
and prayer can be praised,
so one heedless heel
too close to the water,
then matter of fact,
not with any animus,
not out of revenge,
a final punctuation
for the slow god
of limitless perseverance,
cold-scaled leviathan,
to take and roll and roll 
until the silent ripple of
dismay which is
a crocodile’s patience.

By Corinne Wohlford Mason

It was winter solstice. As day faded, 
we drove to the appointment
through our city and over the river, 
a circuitous route, the golden light
ennobling the derelict brick, the industry
of the river, the winter hawks perching
on the floodplain. The news was 
not that bad, but still, bad enough. 
We had options. We drove home 
toward one bright star against the pink 
spill of sunset. Look at this light, 
we kept saying. Here is a neighborhood 
we have never seen before. The sky shifted 
sapphire to black. We floated 
premises; they floated away. We would 
choose later, let the longest night 
take its time. We would do this right.

By Kevin Boyle

As retirement began in May, I placed my little reminders 
around the house, “Every third thought shall be my grave,”
and for the first week I was dutiful, losing track of 

my lists of groceries or my dog’s empty bowl, thinking
of my grave easily a third of the time, keeping a running tab
of each idea on my phone, sometimes unsure of when

a thought might end and another begin, was the Carolina
wren’s call only one thought, and the white-throated sparrow’s another,
if so, then as I dug my garden with my rototiller 

that hurt my bones, I would certainly consider my grave
just then, the rectangle clearly a visual reminder and the soil,
only the treated lumber borders threw me off, so I thought of the pecans

By Kevin Boyle

I missed it on holiday by a mile
or so, collapsing at hilly
Sacré-Coeur—calling out,

My hips, my knees,
my wife answering, 
My hibiscus, my hydrangea,

darling, though I wish
I had marched farther on the Parisian butte 
like a Communard, braving

it to see the song-and-dance bar beautifully
named Lapin Agile, the agile 
or nimble rabbit who would enjoy

the cruel, rugged landscape,
and while there, I’d hoist a tankard
to toast the artist Utrillo

who painted the bar a hundred times,
a thousand, always from the outside,
perhaps because he loved drink too much

and inside were the drams and drafts
and cups and absinthe, and outside 
there was weather and next door

a cemetery where he would later lie.
Perhaps it’s best for me to see the bar
framed, hanging on a wall, and not to toast,

from inside, the melancholy Utrillo—
why toast an alcoholic?—
but to focus on his focus, the repetition 

that always changes
somewhat, an idée fixe that lets you see
the seasons that are colors and leaves

or no leaves at all. I don’t need to travel
since I can see what there is to see 
(life!) here in my sleepy and flat zero-ass town.

By Carrie Shipers

If I said “Dead” you’d want me to describe
the cause and circumstances, promise 
my demise is unrelated to my work, 
which I don’t know for sure. Most days 

I’m awake to my impending doom,
but the details remain dim. “In your seat” 
would sound arrogant and also isn’t true. 
I much prefer a cubicle to losing 

my weekends or leading folks like me. 
I may be surrounded by robots, but I bet 
they’ll need a human standing by in case 
they walk into a corner and get stuck, request 

a reboot to erase having learned their tasks 
are stupid and endless. Given you’re 
a decade my senior—or else really 
fatigued—“Retired” might offend 

by rubbing in you’re nowhere close. 
Too much focus on the future strikes me 
as futile. Once the apocalypse begins, 
we’ll probably all do things we can’t 

imagine now. If I asked you the same, 
I wonder if you’d have an answer prepared, 
be flattered someone cared, or if you’d 
be upset by goals you haven’t met. 

Experience suggests I’ll be performing 
this same show for a new audience,
either because the company’s at risk 
of shutting down, or because I’m so frustrated 

I can’t bear to stay. I’m tempted to say 
“Standing on the roof,” then allow 
an awkward pause before explaining
there’s also a DJ and champagne 

to help us celebrate my latest great idea, 
which I won’t reveal until after I’m hired. 
I wish this question had come sooner 
on your list. I don’t want the words

I leave you with to ruin our rapport, 
but the longer we sit here the more 
my vision narrows to the door, 
the relief I’ll feel when I walk out of it.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: untitled by JC Talbott

We don’t negotiate salary because we’re already certain 
what you’re worth. It may be less than you’d hoped, 
but it’s enough to live on if you’re practical. We don’t
negotiate benefits because we think you’re lucky 

to get any. The single therapist is prone to naps and lousy 
metaphors, but you’re so sad that you’ll keep going back. 
We don’t negotiate duties because the job ad was crafted 
to include everything that we don’t want to do, and then 

revised again when we got sued. Belonging to a group 
always requires sacrifices: someone has to do the dirty work 
for which no credit is received, take on difficult tasks 
where failure means you’ll probably get fired, and it’s not 

fair for you to skip your turn. We don’t negotiate 
vacation time because we’re angry it exists. You’re also 
not allowed to work from home unless you’re quarantined—
we tried it once and were so drunk by noon we answered 

our email with kitten pictures. We don’t negotiate 
office space because you’ll be assigned a cubicle, 
bottle of bleach to combat creeping mold. If you choose 
to decorate, make sure all items fit into a single banker’s box, 

which allows for ease of exit if you suddenly get fired. 
And should you have requests we haven’t covered, 
the answer’s No to those as well. We know winning 
a small concession would increase your confidence, 

make you feel truly wanted. But honestly you weren’t 
our best or favorite candidate. You were the one 
we settled for because you seemed most likely to say yes, 
and the fact that you’re still listening suggests 

we were correct. Regardless of your reasons for taking 
this job—debt, despair, misguided optimism—
we think you’ll fit in fine as long as you remember: 
We don’t negotiate because there is no need.

By Carrie Shipers

If I said solutionism was the greatest challenge
facing us today, how many whiteboards 
might you fill before the irony hit home? 
Was your attempt to privatize the Post Office 

short-lived because it was too hard to disrupt 
real objects, or because Jeff Bezos told you 
to back off? Are you more embarrassed by 
the bubbling sinkhole stinking up your campus 

quad, the fence that fails to block its view, 
or the studies stating that the Valley’s so-called 
“pipeline problem” is merely a myth you’ve built 
around a rigged system? Given the resulting 

poor publicity, do you regret deciding to: 
use live endangered animals to illustrate ideas, 
spend millions on a bonding trip at which 
most of your staff contracted STIs and salmonella, 

compete pants-less at the all-hands sack race?
Relatedly, what percent of the lawsuits 
you’ve had to settle might’ve been avoided 
by investing in HR before a second helicopter? 

Are you aware the word “founder” also means 
to sink or fail utterly? If yes, do you ever dream 
you’re drowning and wake up afraid, 
and does this perhaps explain your interests

in sea-steading and extreme longevity? 
If I suggested several of your famous Principles, 
e.g., Be Boldly New, seem cribbed from 
other companies, would your benign 

but somewhat flat affect pivot toward rage 
so fast I’d feel dizzy? Did you agree
to this meeting in the hope that seeming
open, honest, and sincere would counteract 

your current image as a greedy genius
hooking users on their own abuse? Or because
a public busy judging your ethics, humor
and haircut is less likely to notice or object

to your real work, which is not the thing 
you’ve gotten famous for? Assuming 
the latter, are you sorrier I’ve caught on 
or flattered by the depths of my alarm?

By Ronald Okuaki Lieber

In dry season in equatorial Chad, the Sahel is so hot the soil
Chars to red dust, the grass to a blond bristle, heat bearing down like affliction

And because the land blisters and coastal Africa is forested, humid and cool, air Is
Sucked easterly, darkening the horizon with fury into which a man, tending

The village flock stares, a wave so sudden and massive the Dogon has little time
To corral the sheep before the air erupts with stinging needles. The storm

Sweeps across the continent until in the Atlantic thunderheads and wind
Marry the doldrums, and a hurricane is born. Its updraft plunges the ocean, and swells

Spiral westward across the open sea to loom large on 
Beaches lining the American Eastern seaboard as in Montauk Long Island where surfers

Scan the near horizon for the shadowed lines their kind read. It’s what they have prepared for 
The summer afternoons and cool September dawns before work, that one stirring

Pitched perfect just where a surfer waits, and he paddles to catch the lip, a chthonic uprise
Heaving him high to which he surrenders, riding the rollinglevel underneath

Into rapture that I as a ten-year-old in the thick of the Ozarks heard in the treetops
Swaying back and forth, a thousand miles away. The shepherd stokes the charcoal

Embers with dry twigs, the surfer packs his board, and the hurricane makes landfall
In Kill Devil Hills, splintering wooden homes. I am joined.

By Ken Holland

My friend and I stopped in a bar
we maybe shouldn’t have stopped in,
but we were on the way from here
to there and decided to pull off the road
somewhere in-between.

Somewhere in-between has its own charm
being a space where letters don’t get written,
and bills don’t get paid, and old lovers
just get older for all the time you get to ignore them.

A beer and a little space in-between you and
your friend who’s in the same in-between space
as you are, ignoring all the same things
you’re ignoring.

By David Hansen

With my sister, a lean, hard girl who looks like our mother, I discuss my trouble. When I’ve said it all, we talk about money.

“Just let me help,” I say.

“You are helping,” says my sister. “Let me help more,” I say.

Now my sister fishes a roach out of a tiny bowl from which I, as a little girl, ate ice cream, and says, “You’ve changed the subject.”

“Have I?” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “We were talking about you. Whenever we talk about you, you try to talk about me instead.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “But very well. What about me?” She asks me whether I will do a certain thing about my trouble. “Oh, I don’t know,” I say.

In truth I will not do this thing, but I will come close. I will come so close that I cannot speak of this thing, even now.

My sister lights the roach and draws a gentle breath from it, leading it back into this life. Then she offers the roach to me.

“But should I?” I say. “Probably not,” says my sister.

“I must warn you,” I say, accepting the roach, “that this will make me a mite dreamy.”

When we are both afloat my sister tells me of the business with her landlord, a bad situation she has only made worse by taking him to bed. I ask her how much she pays now. She tells me.

“For this?!” I say, but in truth, I adore this little place, with its seasoned hardwood and its hideous angels sculpted into the cornices.

By Kari Gunter-Seymour

twisted silver-streaked strands
into a knot, pinned at the tip of her crown,
draped her bird-bones in crossback aprons
cut from calico, sewn on a pump pedal Singer,
bought brand-new just after the war,

baked flaky scratch biscuits from
White Lily flour, spoonfuls
of lard, a pinch of salt and sass,
danced the flatfoot clog around
an old wringer washer,
employed on Mondays without fail,

wielded a scythe and hoe
good as any man, grew cabbages
big as watermelons,
drew us maps, where we came from,
patchworks of bloodroot, furled fierce
along the face of the Appalachians,

orphaned us, laid out
under a pine branch blanket,
a rough-chiseled stone.
Daffodils regretted their unfurling.
Redbuds wept purple pearls,
the fields so bare they grew voices.

By Jana Tigchelaar

While bodily autonomy and individual privacy are phrases commonly associated with the current discussion of reproductive rights in the U.S., the key term for understanding the culture of abortion starting in the late nineteenth century is knowledge, according to Kristin Luker in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. As legal exceptions to the ban on abortion rested on a physician’s determination of medical necessity, abortion became the privileged ground of the doctor whose medical license gave him the sole ability to decide when abortion was medically justified. In other words, by the late nineteenth century, abortion became a question of who could lay claim to this specialized knowledge, and who could exercise their authority based on it. Luker calls this era from the 1880s until Roe v. Wade in 1973 “The Century of Silence” because while the medical community determined the necessity of abortion care, they also dominated the public narrative about abortion.

By Emrys Donaldson

When I consider being pregnant myself, I imagine Sigourney Weaver from the original Alien: a wet head emerging, its teeth bared, as I scream and scream. What for others may evoke joy and anticipation for me evokes fear. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2021 horror novel Manhunt, pregnancy itself becomes a kind of body horror as testosterone turns people into sex-crazed zombies bent on cannibalism. A fertility specialist explains the process to a wealthy patient: “When they [the changed men] impregnate a victim, the baby is XY. No variation. It undergoes viral metamorphosis in utero and eats its way out of the mother at three or four months. A few hours later, it can hunt for itself. In a year, it’s sexually mature.” Gossip tells of “a woman in Vermont whose boy twins had eaten their way out of her.” In this science-fiction world, pregnancy is not only dangerous for all the usual reasons, but also because a zombified fetus might eat its way through the abdominal wall (just like in Alien). Abortion access saves lives. To abort, in this world, is to avoid being eaten from the inside out. Yet in the post-apocalyptic world of Manhunt, as in the twenty-first century United States, abortion access varies widely and depends on the pregnant person’s financial and social resources.