Drawing the Eye

September 11, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeff Miles
Art: “Tree and Creek” by Hannah Hatley

I am learning to draw the eye,
curvature of the earth,
liquid space within.

I am learning to draw each lash,
the eyelid’s fold and shutter,
the red darkness of a closed room.

I am learning to draw the iris,
breathing out at twilight,
breathing in the gathering dawn.

I am learning to draw the pupil,
aperture of night and day, well
into which the penny drops.

I am learning to draw the bones
of the socket, cup and saucer,
window, wall, orbit of the moon.

I am learning to draw the shadow,
the lift, the arc, the blink—the open door,
the secret that tells itself in tears

A Gift

September 11, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Amanda Irene Rush

One Sunday evening
my sister blue-calls
asking if she can drive
out to have me dig
a dead bird out
of the grille of her car.

Once, we spoke
every day, then never,
then occasionally. Now,
only when.

If she were a cat,
which at times she seems, a cat
you can only rub
a certain way, a way I cannot
seem to learn, I would know
this trapped
dead bird
is an offering,
a gift.

And so, I say yes, ready
to wait however long it takes,
because that is something,
the only thing, I know
how to do.

Pond’s Eye

September 11, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Edison Dupree
for Joe Cameron

One eye of the only bream
we caught that day
still hangs on a fishhook.
Far down in green light,
the barb juts from the pupil.
The yellow iris glares.

—And here comes one of that bream’s
late descendants:
hovering in close
on tiny high-speed pectoral fins.
It glares back, eye to eye,
as if it hated this alien
pod, for being so dead,
and seeing nothing.
As if there were nothing here.

But here we both are, Joe,
our adolescent faces,
engraved inside this eye
you gouged out
for bait and payback,
after the bream’s warier
smarter friends had nibbled and stripped
our last worm.
We two god-damned them all to hell.
You opened your pocketknife
as the eye watched.

Once I Was a Digger of Graves

September 11, 2026.Reading time 6 minutes.

By John Hodgen

Once on a Saturday on the way back to work, to Pine Grove Cemetery, one
grave down and another to go, walking down Athol Road from the Templeton
Diner with my friend Freddie Maahs, co-digger of graves, whose father was a
drunk, and mine, dead for six months, whom I had argued with, who wouldn’t
go to church with me, and whom I’d told to go to hell a week before he died,
we had decided, Freddie and I, young men that we were, sophomores in high
school, walking back to work, that we wouldn’t be going to the diner anymore,
too much money we thought, two hot dogs, a NuGrape with chips, thirty-five
cents, plus the twenty-cent tip, and the walk there and back probably making
us late. Not a good idea with Mr. Brown either, our boss at Pine Grove, who
was waiting for us, and who probably wanted to kill us, Mr. Brown, who looked
like Robert Frost, and acted like him too, no two roads diverged ever with him,
just the one true way, and who, a month later, would be killed himself when
his pickup truck stalled pulling out from the cemetery, a trailer truck driver
coming over the rise who couldn’t see him in time. Still, in that lunch hour
we passed Paula Hunt’s house, twice, going up, going down, and the name
the shop kids called her, Paula, who was beautiful but didn’t even know it,
and with whom we both were in love, Paula, who that summer only wanted
to be touched, but we were both afraid and didn’t know how. And there on
Athol Road walking back, Freddie on one side and I on the other, only seven
minutes more before we’d be late, he said, Freddie’s Timex in his watchpocket,
the strap broken off, I found a red rubber ball someone had lost by the side
of the road, and with all that we were up against, our damning poverty, our
numbing stupidity, our fathers both drunken and gone, Mr. Brown in the last,
vast unknown month of his life, Death coming looking for him each day where
he worked, the two of us with another grave now to dig, and Paula still waiting
as we walked by her house, only longing to be held, to be touched, in the same
way that we did without knowing it at all, and with all the gathering armies,
the vagaries of happenstance, consistency and insoluble time, like headstones
moving on the horizon, I started throwing the red ball to him, Freddie Maahs,
just for the hell of it, one bounce in the middle of the road, each of us catching
it each time in one hand, nobody missing, perfect as a pendulum, then winging
it, chucking it, faster and harder, right in front of passing cars, to see how close
we could come, the idea delicious somehow, each throw coming closer, just
being idiots, nobody stopping just yet, but us knowing they could, someone
giving us the finger, calling us assholes, dipshits, or dumb fucks, or maybe,
sooner or later, God forbid, someone really pulling over, getting out, coming
at us, arms all askew, some dumb bastard, some slack-jawed yokel, pissing and
moaning, ready to punch us both out just for the hell of it. And I knew in
that moment I would’ve just stood there, would’ve just taken it, welcomed it,
truly, the beating I so richly deserved, thinking that they’d end up feeling worse
somehow one day down the road, when they heard they’d been pounding the
dead guy’s kid, the kid from the cemetery, the weird one, the fool, touched in
the head, people would say, the idiot, who kept asking for it, wanting only to be
touched in that rough, ragged way, who kept saying with each haymaker, with
the blood in his mouth, I wasn’t throwing at you, something else I was throwing
at, something in you, within you, I don’t have anymore, wasn’t you in your living,
your fullness, I was throwing at, something moving and heavy like your life where
you are, Jesus, sweet Jesus, I just wanted to hold you, I didn’t even hit you, didn’t
touch your goddamn car.  

Birthday

September 11, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Charlie Peck

The surf is strong today and the lifeguard hangs his red flag
above his throne. At the kiosk across the road, I buy five

bottles of the local and watch the sun glide through a sky
so pale it blends seamlessly into the sea below. I don’t feel

so down today, but looking at my toes in the sand, all I can think
is My God, even the beach is just millions of shells

ground to dust. They spawned, they grew, they washed
onto shore. I love my good friend Kelsey. She’s nothing

like me. She can stand on the patio, the rest of us bringing in
the paper plates, the bowl of macaroni salad, a mean wind

whipping the western sky into an angry pudding,
and she’ll tell us all she’s got a good feeling

about tonight. I know what it feels like to try and fail.
There was a time in Budapest with Kate, drunk, we found

the perfect bar floor, the music loud, the tables close.
For the whole week we were there,

we wandered the streets trying to find it again. My whole life
she’s felt like that, a room in my house I entered

in a dream and in daylight a solid wall. I want nothing
more than to not want this again. I want to wake

tomorrow and hear the surf crash against the stone
barrier. I want to eat pasta and not think of the salty sea,

schools of fish terror-stricken by us, our boats. How we stab
and stab until the net is full. I want to look at the night sky

and love this world, the sound of a car in the dense trees.
I promise a good coming-of-age story will make

me weep. How badly I want everyone to turn out okay.
Congrats, you bottle it up for thirty years and when it comes out

nothing stays dry. I haven’t. It’s been a source of issues,
this wounded dog on a leash, limping behind me.

Once on the coast, my sister and I climbed the lighthouse restaurant,
drank Hurricanes in the hot Gulf surf. When it was time to leave,

we both hadn’t expected the steep decline. Giggling the whole way
down, our laughter echoed in the stairwell. It is like this

I want to live the rest of my life—led into the dark by those
I love, no sound other than loud footsteps and our own persistent joy

Quick Trip

September 10, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Memory Derthick
Art: “Logging What’s Discarded” by Lily Jarell

I tell myself & hit the express lane
where a bird-boned chinless man
with mouse-curls stands at the register,
name tag defaced.
It could say Greg. But anyway.
He checks his phone—
I assume the Pens are playing—

when the woman in front of the line
says We’re going camping!
I think he’s going to propose!

I’m so embarrassed
I have to look past her,
but Greg says In that case
you better bring something sweet

& the woman looks like . . . oh & I can tell
Greg knows from oh
so he says Go on.
These good people will wait . . .

As she runs off to baked goods
static flares from speakers—
I’m pretty sure it’s the game,
Pens against the Leafs—
but Greg gives us his eyes, holds up his phone.
It’s Stanley Tucci in white jeans strolling
with a glass of golden wine
& Greg’s smile shines

like Stanley Tucci’s barware
in the high-key lights
& I want to give Greg
my coconut yogurt
but I can’t
because I haven’t paid for it yet

when camping woman returns
with a clamshell of brownies
& Greg hands them back.
Free gratis, he says,
& that’s a mere misdemeanor
in Pennsylvania
so here you go

& let me tell you.
If Greg said to me Go on,
I’d go right ahead.

That pinging sound.
Finger on the rim
of a fine crystal flute

A Common Ache

September 9, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Portillo

after Eavan Boland and Leonard Cohen

I think of her as the bread lady. Every day she carries it,
new bread, simple white loaf, bouquet of crumpled plastic pinched
in her right fist, down Church Street singing I’m just a station on your
way, I know I’m not your lover. She brings her tattered heel down on the instep
of my droning preoccupation with dinner and laundry and
whether or not the dog has pissed in the house again. The
cold holds her breath so that she is a mirage in its wake. A common
face, my grandmother would have said. Now she says only my fingers hurt.
Only I miss being alive. Is the loneliness hardest? Or the not knowing which
way is home? Every day, the bread lady pays with cash in order to be touched.
Every day my grandmother catches more in the cracks. I know you
are heartbroken. I, too, lay awake some nights, wincing. But I’ve made
an ordinary life of it: unfettered love. Hot metal singe and all. And you
can’t do much better than that if you happen to find yourself here, and human.

Note: This is a golden shovel. The line “It pinched your instep and the common / Hurt
which touched you made / You human” is from Eavan Boland’s “Ode to Suburbia.” The
italicized lyrics in lines 3 and 4 are borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s “Winter Lady.”

Dough

September 8, 2026.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Elle Richardson
Art: “Peeling the Eye, Denia, Spain” by Roger Camp

You couldn’t look at Mr. Barrett without feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t just his stooping shoulders, wispy hair, or his old, round glasses. It wasn’t his faded dress shirt with one mismatched button sewn on with a darker thread (he didn’t wear the Peggy’s Pretzels uniform like the rest of us), or even his faded black tennis shoes with two wide Velcro straps. It was because he was an old person working. Not volunteering at a WWII museum or watering begonias in his front beds or stamping Bingo cards at the Y, but working in a pretzel shop n the mall for $10/hr.

It was my job to train Mr. Barrett. I presented the pre-made balls of dough and showed him how to roll them out a foot-and-a-half, using for measurement the long, Sharpie-ticked piece of masking tape I’d aligned with the edge of the countertop—one of my best booth improvements.

“That’s what we call the ‘noodle,’” I explained, although I was the only one who called it this. “The uncooked, unformed, rolled-out pretzel.”

Mr. Barrett stared at the counter. His eyes were frosty—maybe cataracts, or maybe the glint of the mall’s halogen lights on his glasses. At his temples, tufts of white hair trembled under the small plastic fan I’d installed above the dough station. Around us, the butter smell intensified, mingling with his medicinal odor.

“I remember when I was in your shoes,” I said. This immediately seemed like the wrong thing to say to someone who was probably sixty years older than me. “When I first started,” I clarified, “the guy who trained me said, ‘Just use your forearm to measure.’ And then I said to him, “Great idea, Sam, but when you’re the 6’2″ Captain of the Swim Team versus the 5’4″ Coloring Club Founder and President, there are going to be some noodle discrepancies.'” Above us, the neon Peggy’s Pretzels sign buzzed out of time to the faint rhythms playing through the mall speakers. “Got it, Mr. Barrett?”

The Hotel Eden Estoril

September 7, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Brian David Crawford

How my father gets into the pool:
not right away.

He waits on the chaise lounge
until he gets good and hot.

He and my mother
wait together for the heat.

Their bodies share a thermostat.
When it hits the limit they take a dip.

I apply sunblock to my father’s face.
The cream gets stuck in the crevices

around his nose. He waves
me away as I try to rub it in.

My mother and I
are reading the same novel.

She’s a hundred
pages ahead.

Don’t tell me
what happens next, I say.

I don’t want to know
until I get there.

Words pass between them and they rise
and drift over to the chrome ladder.

He goes in first, then she.
My father holds out his open hands

behind her as she descends
one rung at a time

placing her soles
on the cool, submerged metal.

Together in their sunglasses and hats
they look up at me, still on dry land.

The Old Guard

September 6, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Brian David Crawford

The heat I had loved as a boy
had returned to make even the evenings

in Virginia impossible to inhabit
so we retreated to the air-conditioned places

and waited for the season to pass.
On our mountain vacation I guided my father

to the men’s room at the Blackbird and held him
by his shoulders at the urinal.

That night we tried some vertigo treatments
but his mind just kept on spinning

and he heaved until he was dry. After the surges
Dad said he was sorry for all the trouble.

Don’t be silly, we all said, and left him to sleep
in his clothes on his side beneath the Mexican blanket.

Reminders of mortality come faster now
in my parents’ reports from the front.

Their friends held the order of the world
when we were young. They housed us,

cooked us pancake breakfasts, and drove
us to the center in their station wagons.

We knew they were mortal in the way
we think we understand a fact.

How quickly the declines come
in unpredictable, merciless detail.

On our long drive home from the mountains
I took the wheel; my mother sat in back.

At first my father directed
me from the passenger seat

but soon he settled in, leaving me
to pilot on my own. And then both

my parents were asleep. All the lights
of that city filled the mirror as I drove.

I thought they would extinguish gradually
fading out at one steady rate of speed.

But then I turned right and went behind a hill
and suddenly I was out there driving in the dark.

Bowl Season

September 4, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Patrick Swaney
Art: “Thinking of Japan” By Nicholas Skaldetvind

For weeks, it seems the television is tuned
to one college football game or another
that I am interested in only because
it is being played. There are problems
with football—money and violence,
for instance—that are sometimes the same
problems with life. But I watch more or less
uncritically because I learned to love football
from my dad, who loved football, and who is
for the first time not alive this bowl season.
Mostly these games, appendages to the regular
schedule, are acknowledged as falling
somewhere just short of meaningless. Still,
there will be a final score, a winner and loser.
All of it so obviously beyond my control
that I almost can’t believe I find myself
again choosing sides, cheering for an outcome
that either will or will not happen, for a moment
convinced that I can make a difference.

My Mother Tells Me How To Have a Heart Attack

September 3, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gringas

The only reason we’re having this conversation is she’s dying of lung cancer,
but she’s decided to have cataract surgery anyway. It’s a she’d like to see clearly
as she’s dying kind of thing. So, we’re sitting in the waiting room of the surgical
center, and this nurse comes out with a clipboard. She asks my mother, “When
did you have your heart attacks?” Her pen is poised. My mother looks at her. I
can tell that my mother sees the nurse very clearly. Like the cataracts are totally
gone for a second. But she doesn’t respond. Her lips go all thin the way they do.
There is silence. The I’m not talking to you kind. Her go-to. The nurse looks at
me. I shake my head. I’d like to help out here, but this is the first I’ve heard of
my mother having heart attacks. Plural. The nurse walks away. I’ve been trying
to be better with my mother these days as she’s dying and all, so I don’t say,
What the fuck? And I give myself points for not saying What the fuck. Atta girl.
We just sit there on our plastic chairs aiming forward. Then my mother tells
me, “You just press your hands together very, very tightly.”

Why I Can’t Run For President

September 2, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sandy Gringas

Once I posed for nude pictures. It was just with a guy I was seeing at the time,
who called himself a photographer. He was someone I found on the internet. I
think it was big fish dot com. Is that still around? His profile picture was cute, and
his voice was smooth on the phone, but he really was unemployed and living in
his mom’s trailer and was much fatter in person. Truth emerges, as they say. They
weren’t really wild pictures or anything. It was just me lying on my bed. Lying or
laying? Laying is when it’s an object, right? You lay eggs for example. It must be
lying. Anyway. I had my jeans on, so I was only half-naked. I had a belly-button
ring at the time. I don’t have it anymore, but I still have the hole. So, you’d know
it was me if those pictures surfaced. Why I did it was because I can’t ever seem
to see myself. I mean, can you? No matter how many mirrors I look in or photos
of me there are, I always think, Is that me? Why I thought this photographer
guy would be the one to show me my true self is really the issue here. I know.
And I don’t do that anymore. I grew up, I promise. Just in case I am running for
president one day and you’re worried about my judgment in men. But I really
can’t run for president, even though the world is so stupid, and I’d be good at
giving speeches or at least I’d be better than most of the presidents I’ve heard
over the years. I know those photos would do me in. And that guy. I can’t even
remember his name. But I know he’d be the kind to keep the photos, you know?
Just in case a situation arose where they’d come in handy. He told me once that he
was in the army, and he got this special survivalist training so he could stay under
the snow for eight hours at a time. After we stopped seeing each other, which was
pretty much right after he threw a hoagie at me, it snowed at my house, and I was
convinced that he was out there watching me from under a snowbank.

Strangers

September 1, 2026.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Selena Spier

This isn’t hell, it’s the street.
That’s not death, that’s a fruit stand.

—Federico García Lorca,
Poet in New York

The trees in the arboretum are crown-shy—
see how their limbs overlap without touching.
Equidistant, like strangers on the subway.

But the roots are touching underground.
Last week a stranger told you that they loved you.
Another one told you to get the fuck out of the street

if you’re going to just stand there on your phone.
Some days you’ll get angry at people simply
for existing in your vicinity. For making noises.

And their bodies will be objects, obstacles
to be toppled or overtaken. Inconveniences.
This will be your habitual sin, mistaking the rind

for the fruit. When everywhere there are strangers
checking their teeth in bathroom mirrors, eating
split pea soup out of Tupperware containers,

buying stacks of dollar paperbacks at Codex.
Strangers ashing cigarettes on cobblestones,
strangers with skin tags, eczema, freckles,

birthmarks, burn scars, sunspots, and vitiligo.
Strangers flaying the skin of their forearms
to ribbons in search of invisible insects.

Strangers with coats draped over their arms,
with furled umbrellas dangling from
their fingertips. On Coney Island

a stranger eats seventy hot dogs in ten minutes,
dipping the buns in warm water to soften them.
O brave new world, that has such people in it!

A stranger taps your shoulder on the subway,
she thought you were sleeping. A stranger draws an X
on the back of your hand at the entrance to a nightclub.

Strangers approach to ask you for directions.
To ask if you’ve found Jesus. To ask for a light,
for the time, for a little money. There are strangers

walking heel to toe on painted lines, reciting
the alphabet backwards. There are strangers
pushing strangers’ babies in strollers,

strangers with ghostly tan lines on their fingers
where they’ve taken off their wedding rings,
strangers playing chess in the arboretum.

There are strangers wearing assless chaps
and pearls braided into their hair, strangers wearing
durags and scrubs and inflatable dinosaur costumes.

A stranger touches your face in the dark.
A stranger cups their palms around your lighter.
A stranger becomes your friend, becomes your lover,

leaves his lipstick on your toothbrush.
And you know that you would sacrifice
every conceivable life on the altar of this one.

The lights of strangers’ windows flicker on at dusk
and you’re never lonely. The warm weather
comes and goes for a while, then lingers.

Honeysuckle shoulders through a chain-link fence.
And the golden rhythm holds, you take your
medicine, eat scrambled eggs for dinner,

listen to baseball games on the radio.
And the days slide by like seed pearls
on a string, a countable infinity.

You turn with the seasons.
You sleep through the sirens.
You unlearn the names of the bridges

Letter in April

August 31, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Selena Spier
Featured Art: “Oblivion” by Nasta Martyn

for Elizabeth Moylan

I wonder what will become of all this beauty
when we’re gone? Women’s hips that sway and open
as they walk, tulips at the edge of their season.
I live between a hardware store and a florist.
Down the street is a hospital for wild birds.
Every morning on my way to work, I see
somebody standing at the door with a cardboard
box in their arms full of paper towels or newsprint
and some sodden clot of feathers, usually a pigeon
or a dove, with a mangled leg or a broken
wing, and the box will shudder
sometimes in their arms and they’ll peer in
with a look of concern and there’s a moment
I forget that one of us will die first.

What the Doctor Said, a Paraphrase

August 30, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Kari Shemwell

The doctor was young and had a difficult last name. After she introduced herself, I wrote down the name’s pronunciation and whispered it over and over in the cafeteria checkout line so I wouldn’t say it wrong. Later, when she met with us in the waiting room of the palliative care unit, she said:

“I’m going to explain to you the process of dying. Now, let me preface this by saying that we simply can’t speak in absolutes. This can go many ways. However, there tend to be certain steps, certain stages, per se, that people pass through as they shift from living to dead. You may think there are only two states—alive or dead—but no. Instead, there are—what shall we call them? Degrees? Yes, there are degrees between the two. A person may traverse these degrees all at once or, more likely, one at a time, over the course of days or even weeks.

“Please don’t ask me how long it will take. I really can’t say. This is one of those non-absolutes of which I previously spoke. Still, if I had to guess, I would say close to but under one week. It could be longer, or it could be happening as we speak. Which brings me to my next point: you probably won’t be there when it happens. People always want to be there. They always imagine they will be. Where else would you possibly be in a time like this?

Sistie in Memory Care

August 29, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lance Larsen
Featured Art: “Cornelius” by Lily Jarrell

The elevator opens and out rolls a gurney draped
in a kid’s Easter quilt that could have been
shoplifted from T.J. Maxx. All yellows
and pinks and pastel blues. Look how pretty,
my mother-in-law says from her wheelchair,
are those puppies or bonnets? Oh, good: she hasn’t
noticed the outline of the still body underneath.
Or the name tags from Larkin Mortuary
on the two teenage attendants maneuvering
the gurney. Probably the third body
they’ve picked up today and it isn’t even noon.
Girl fake-smiles but says nothing.
Boy looks like he’s auditioning for a job
as a gargoyle. Have they taken a vow
of silence, I want to ask, or only surliness?
Or maybe their mouths were wired shut
at the mortuary? That’s when I notice
they both have earbuds in. Is this standard
practice, to plug in Britney or K-Pop
when you pick up a slowly cooling body?
If asked to guess what lies under
the quilt, Sistie might say rabbits or lemon
meringue pies and expect to be right.
That’s the world of memory care.
I wheel her away from the quilt but that’s all
she wants to talk about: Wasn’t it so pretty?
Yes, oh yes, I say, but aren’t these Halloween
decorations also pretty, Mrs. Cat arching
her back, even this nasty vampire smiling?
I keep looking back, like Lot’s wife.
How about more discretion with the sheet,
I want to ask. Make it black linen, or gray,
a polyester blend that washes up nicely
when splashed with body fluids. And maybe
try something human, something recreational
and brave, with your mouths. First, roll down
the Deathmobile windows and vape a flavor
like bubblegum lemonade. Next, sing
anything bouncy and Beyoncé, your church
voices swirling above this blood taking a final
ride through this bumpy world. Or maybe
mash your hungry mouths together (we can all
use practice) at every red light in Spanish
Fork, eyes clenched tight as baby fists, till
some rusty pickup honks to say the light is green.

Another Smeary Map

August 28, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lance Larsen

Map day in Social Studies: our duty was to save
good Europe from bad Russia by giving
each country its proper name and a color
from the rainbow. Fifth grade, and the new girl
sitting in front of me, some move-in
Carla from California, shook out her hair.
Of course, it spilled on my map. Of course,
it basked there, a breathing animal. You can’t
ask a beautiful girl to please move her beautiful
hair, especially if it’s goldish and unruly
and smells like the sea. How about move the hair
yourself or re-position the map? No sirree.
Girls have spies in their hair and think you
have a crush on them, which in this case—
okay, yes. Sometimes allure stuns us into stillness.
I left east Europe blank but breathed in
Carla’s world. Hungary, Malta, Bulgaria, Greece . . .
Called her hair every magic name in the book.

Connemara

August 27, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steve Myers
Featured Art: “Imitating Tom Balbo’s Pulp Paintings on Denim” By Nicholas Skaldetvind

The skyblue nest eggs of a robin
lie touching each other in her early
photo hanging on our kitchen wall
as do the cats in another
sunning on a cottage threshold
like that she has now crossed over
into dementia even as the door
she confesses has shut behind her
on the practice of her lifelong art
inching toward my wife as if she
were the friend who need understand
speaking as one who could not recall
the once familiar drive over the word
that begins with W the trip to Ireland
that lingers only in the photos she desires
wants more than anything to give us
one of a light gap among deadfall trees
she long ago labeled Woodland Serenity
one of ponies pulling carriages on Aran
clopping at opposite edges of the frame
we praising and passing hand to hand
till the last shot stops us
a single sheep windowless turf shed
empty rockstrewn Connemara headland.

That Good Night

August 26, 2026.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Gladys Haunton

A bucket list doesn’t interest me. The thought of marvels I will never see, adventures I will never have, brings me no more regret than would a hedgerow of wild plums with too much fruit to pick. Were you to tell me, though, on a sun-struck day in August, that I am picking plums for the last time, regret might drop me to my knees. I’ve reached an age where time pressures me to identify the acts that have satisfied me deeply, determine which are still possible for me, and then repeat those as often as possible. Folding beaten egg whites into thick batter. Pausing under an awning to shake rainwater from a half-furled umbrella. Walking down a flight of wide marble steps. Who could have guessed the value such moments would eventually take on?

What if I never watch a skein of geese cross the face of a full moon? Or smell goldenrod picked from a roadside ditch? I do what I can to defer such losses. On the coldest mornings, for instance, I alter my route to the coffee shop to increase my chance of seeing sun dogs where steam from the medical center rises through the morning light.

Other joys are gone for good. Brittle bones forbid that I ever again glide along the oval of a roller-skating rink, crossing ankle over ankle as I round the tight end curves to the rhythm of canned music. Nor will I dive again from a rocky crag into a lake. In cases like these, I work at acceptance

I Should Have Known

August 25, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tammy C. Greenwood

these sheets billowing on the line
would become a sail,
carry me away from this body
which now rejects every vice.
Take me to that shirtless girl
in the shelled driveway
making mudpies in rain-soaked soil.
To the font of sand and silt
collecting liquefied heaven.
The patch where grass never grew,
where the earth saved a space
just for me. Cleansed of inhibitions,
alabaster skin and underwear
now the color of excavated clay.
I’m sure she never questioned
belonging, or tomorrow—or even me.
Arms and legs flapped into mud angels
in a dusk of fireflies
floating in her own bioluminescent sea.
Or how when she dried in the summer sun
she stood like a terra cotta god
taking her place among the ancients
brimming with all the answers.

I Married a Beatle

August 24, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Chris Greenhalgh

I bag a guest spot on The Late Show. After some chit-chat,
the host asks what poetry means. I say I can’t answer that.
The producer whispers in her ear, “Two minutes, max.”
I see myself on a monitor and start the story of the stapler
I found clearing out the contents of my parents’ home after
they died—the stapler I’d begged for as a child, imagining
some big precision-engineered gizmo with knobs and dials.
There it sat now in in a drawer, rusting under a ball of string,
next to a box of extra-long matches, the same gunmetal blue,
the head bearing the manufacturer’s name, with a ribbon
to hold the staples in place. They’d kept it all this time—
like love that has nowhere left to go. Or a past you long to
climb inside. The host asks if I have it still. “What matters,”
I say, “is the memory of the thing and not the thing itself,”
She leans forward, inviting intimacy. A two-shot. I add,
“It’s the small stuff that dismantles you and makes you cry.”
Her voice rising, she says, “Is that what you mean by poetry?”
“Even if you can’t see the sun you still recognize its shimmer.”
Straightaway the camera swings. The ear-phoned producer
levels a hand in a cutting motion to his throat. Stage crew
lift big signs saying, Applause. Spotlights rake the audience.
With brisk professional sincerity, but without a glance at me,
the host says, “Thank you,” then exhorts everyone to join her
after the break when she will be talking to a woman who
claims her gran in secret married one of the Fab Four.
Footage shows them bowing in unison at the end of a song.
Before I pass darkly into the things around me, I see on the
monitor my head enlarged as in a shaving mirror. Not a
moment I want to stay in. As I watch on the sofa back home
the simulacrum seems more real than myself. I wonder if,
impossibly, my parents were to see the broadcast, flung into
the ether beyond the star belt, what they’d make of it all.
Mum? Dad? I have a faint recollection mum preferred Paul.

Hattiesburg MS

August 23, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Regan Green

For Phillip

My mother blows cigarette smoke
up the fireplace every time we stay at her brother’s
one-bed, one-bath, one-hole-in-the-television
where he shot the 9mm after too many fingers of Scotch
because “I’m not a Kevin Costner fan.”
My mother goes on again about my father
clanging his spoon in the cereal bowl.
“I don’t reckon I would’ve married Kimble
if I’d seen him eat a bowl of bran.”
I sip my three-day-cold cup of coffee
and sit on the mustard-plaid couch
where the pistol is tucked between two cushions.
When my father calls us home on the phone,
we walk out past busted glass:
a poster of Catherine the Great,
who took a slingshot to the head.
As we pass, my uncle asks how fast my fingernails grow.
I cut them once a week.
“Good,” he says. “Good.”

Ladders

August 22, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jared Harél

My grandfather and I worked together
three summers straight stocking Flowmasters
and exhaust pipes at my father’s garage

while Dad darted between bays to deal with customers,
raise a lift, answer the phone.
Each memory’s been coated now

in dust and metal shavings, plus whatever song
was blaring on K-Rock. Over eighty,
my grandpa insisted on scaling the ladder

while I stood below, securing its base, hoisting
each tar-streaked pretzel of steel.
Of course, I could never feel at ease there:

a seasonal employee. The boss’s kid.
It was different for my grandfather, a bull
of a guy with navy suspenders and a laborer’s gait,

who could speak five languages,
yet rarely spoke. Everyone adored him, was in awe
of this man who worked for his son. Once,

during a lunch break, as a stream
of potential customers plowed down the turnpike,
one of the mechanics lit a smoke, pulled

up a seat, and told me my grandpa
was his goddamn hero. Then he grinned and said,
Your daddy ain’t shit next to him. What to make

of a memory like that? Of shipments flattened
by box-cutters and silence. To lift my head
and watch my grandpa work.

Charmed

August 21, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jared Harél

How many episodes have I taken in
while running nowhere at my local gym?
How many scenes made hypnotic on mute—
canned techno thumping on repeat—
while heaving free weights toward a drop ceilinged sky?
Three wiccan sisters vaporize bad guys
in butterfly hairclips and low-cut tops
tipped lower to boost ratings in later years.
How I strain to believe my years are charmed too.
That this body will hold, my kids remain close,
settle nearby. That our souls won’t sink
under rising tides or some fiery apocalypse.
Before long, a vortex will materialize,
whooshing a demon back from whence
he came. Shannen Doherty will resurrect
her signature arctic smirk as the sisters embrace
beneath a Venetian chandelier. Soon,
I’ll quit half-assing it on the elliptical.
I will spritz and wipe my insectile machine,
feeling a sort of dreamy relief as I labor
past the check-in desk, those energy drinks
lined like plutonium. Did Holly Marie Combs
just freeze time from her kitchen island?
Will Alyssa Milano escape the Underworld at last?
Endless questions, yet my kids have soccer
practice, piano lessons, playdates. My kids have lives
and I am their chauffeur, making sure
they wear seatbelts, asking about their days
as late-afternoon glistens our windshield,
as turkey vultures swoop from storm-
splintered limbs, as the crossing guard waves
us on with not a glance at even one
of the eleven planes of existence.
Still, we pass safely. Red lights in the air.

Open Mic at Dante’s

August 20, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Garth Upshaw

Jed’s a big guy, a linebacker gone to seed,
New jeans, button-down cream shirt. Nice.
Dante’s, close in on the second ring, has a heavy
Red-and-black theme. Natural-gas flames
Under a glass bar. Though the fire’s off.
Tuesday night. Early.

Open mic isn’t even in the main space.
The bartender jerks his head, uninterested, towards
A side room tucked away behind,
With its own tiny black stage, its own tiny bar.
A quartet of stools, half-a-dozen two tops.
Bonanza flickers soundlessly on the wall.

The emcee’s a short guy, full of manic energy,
Chip-on-the-shoulder vibes as he rattles off the
Rules. Five minutes. Hard limit. Be funny.
Don’t worry about the gravity.
He mocks Jed’s shirt.
You look like you’ve got a 401(k).

A young woman does a bit about one night
Stands. Vaginal discharge. What we’ll do when we get there.
A blond, milk-fed guy, dented guitar,
Sings a story song about a terrible blind date.
The emcee does another, even angrier, diatribe. Says we
Can catch him every other Thursday at Kell’s.

Jed’s material is solid, but his demographic is
Old-school, nostalgia porn. He gets off a bit
About flying cars, and I laugh.

No one else is there to laugh, though, and
They sit like punished schoolchildren
Waiting their turn to shine in the light.

Meanwhile, Indians have taken Laura, and
Hoss is missing.

Video Ghosts

August 18, 2026.Reading time 37 minutes.

By J.V. Skuldt
Art: “The Choice” by Edie Meade

Maybe it was the dust, the mildew-edged boxes, or just the sheer stress of trying to sort through a lifetime of artifacts, but Jody came home from her parents’ with a hatchback full of random keepsakes and a screamer of a migraine. One eye already forced shut with pain, she grabbed a single box from the back of the car and headed into the house. Inside Kevin sat in the kitchen with his laptop. Jody dropped the box next to him.

“You look awful,” he said, glancing at the box then at Jody.

“Thanks. I want to take an apple corer to my right eye,” she answered.

Instead Jody took a Coke from the fridge, headed to their bedroom, swallowed the tiny pink miracle called Rizatriptan, and sprawled on their bed. Migraines: Jody’s inheritance from her mother. Along with terrible eyesight and two baby teeth missing their adults. Eventually those baby teeth, with their soft impermanence, rotted and had to be extracted, leaving two pink gaps just beyond the edges of her smile. A smile that had required years of orthodontia to straighten into presentable—the crooked gift of her father. Her sister, Elise, on the other hand had never needed braces or glasses—or, for that matter, the orthopedics that Jody had worn in her sneakers since age 11. Jody had been the repository of their parents’ bad genes. That had been the family joke.

In the Tavern

August 17, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

It’s a luminous moment in the history of thought experiments. Enlivened by
gooseberry pie and ale with gin and bitters, a vociferous group of scholars is
testing the boundaries of hypothesis.

“Envision,” says one, “portable mirror-like surfaces for communication across
towns, over mountains, even between continents.”

“An exchange through galvanized ink? Words inscribed on one mirror would
instantaneously appear on the other, replacing the Penny Post?” inquires his
friend.

“No, I speak of a more surpassing marvel—distant faces and voices summoned
at will, borne on subtle aerial frequencies!”

“Etheric magnetism, as with a seance?” asks a third man, a little too loudly.

The first scholar frowns—it’s dangerous to speculate openly about occult
practices. “Not magic, but natural philosophy!”

A few scoff, but most find themselves intrigued; thumping their tankards on
the oaken table to demand another round, they spin out possibilities. Why,
with this device, a gristmill owner in Yorkshire could discuss the price of grain
and the fluctuations of the Royal Exchange with his banker in London before
tea; the colonel poring over his map at headquarters could give timely orders
to his lieutenant in the field; and far-flung lovers could strip off their garments
to mime for each other their most lascivious imaginings!

Yet as our philosophers ponder parabolic reflectors, the movement of light
through dimensional space, the location of the soul in the human frame, and
the relation of matter to mind, apprehensions arise. To separate a person’s
image from its source—what kinds of ghastliness might ensue? Would these
apparitions be passive simulacra or possess free will? Might self-interested
savants trap them en route to nefariously command or alter them? Or might
they spin loose on their own, proliferate, roam in packs to haunt and harass?
What uncanny powers would they wield, and how long would it take for that
unnatural practice to deplete each body’s living essence, leaving only a husk
behind? Though even at this hour the fire still crackles and spits in the open
hearth, a chill creeps over the gathering.

And whispering across the centuries, what reassurance could we give them
now?

Has the Neighborhood Changed? Yes

August 16, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alice Owen Duggan

The mailbox has teeth in its mouth now, so you can’t steal
the mail—and the gas pump plays swaying ukulele tunes,
while you stand in the snow under the palms.

Wild teen turkeys hang out by the bank and even here,
in Contentmentville, a girl holds up her word, Hungry,
outside our grocery store.

I could mention a murder and let it stick in your throat and mine.
Or move swiftly on and describe my husband, gray and frail.
You asked about change. On a hot afternoon

as he carried a heavy box to our car, three people wanted to help.
In fact an amazement of help has come our way—Adam who hooked up
our amplifier, Bill who searched out the right fluorescent,

Mindy who’s unafraid of our chaos, boxes it up. So all is still sweetness
and light, is it not, it is not. Always there’s something to keep on the back burner
of rage. The pocket park with its grove of pine, its gentle welcome, is gone,

replaced by a dull hulking bank where yes, I cash my checks, this isn’t
the teller’s fault. I would never give up my anger, otherwise how
could I be myself? But we’re talking about the neighborhood.

He Thought He Should Have Them Both

August 15, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alice Owen Duggan
Featured Art: “Listening to Todd Moe’s Story of Mark Rothko’s Grandson Getting Lost In his Back Woods” By Nicholas Skaldetvind

A streak of titanium white jumped from one canvas
to the other, like a supporting beam of light.
An astonishment, even to me, the artist,

the first time I saw them hung together. He thought
he should have them both, being so cool in his cowboy hat,
flashing his cash. Of course I wanted to sell my paintings,

but not those two, with their newly discovered bond.
Not to him. Fear took over, raced through my life,
as I scrambled to keep him from taking my—what?

I’ll carry these paintings out to the barn, bury them deep
in the straw. Is it dangerous or endangered, what I have
here? What will I do—me with no barn, no straw

Zuihitsu for What’s Coming Already

August 14, 2026.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Melissa McKinstry

When Google says your storage is 50% full at 7.6 GB, and you begin to sift, you discover
your dead son’s vaccination records, that you can use the Google One storage manager
to clean up space by deleting large or unwanted files,

and today the docent told you Elaine de Kooning signed her paintings E de K
because she was a woman in a man’s world of Abstract Expressionism,
painting bullfights for ten years,

and your dead friend’s partner said she’s finding messages everyday: a heart-shaped light
with wings glowing from no findable source, except maybe the painting
I’ve always thought is him, and a medium at the celebration of life yesterday talked to him
in the hibiscus, while you sweated in the Rocky Mountain foothills listening to stories
of the dead, watching the pink petals for a sign,

and this evening, It’s coming already, the waiter says of the food at Alma Fonda Fina–
the fine soul of the hole in the wall—he translates for you when you fumble, and you wonder
again about the docent asking Did you know JFK was a fidgeter, and you’re thinking
did he know what was coming already when E de K was commissioned to paint his portrait,
and he could only sit for ten minutes, always in motion, and she sketched rapidly
then returned to her studio to paint him, from a ladder, on a huge canvas, and in that painting
at the National Portrait Gallery, he looks like he’s still moving,

and Joan Mitchell saw floods of color when she heard sound, and that’s called synesthesia,
and if you’re a painter who’s an Abstract Expressionist, and your aim is to capture a shimmer
of light, this is useful, so she played music while she painted: Mozart or jazz, nothing heavy,
reports the docent, Hemlock and Ladybug made Mitchell famous, and Mitchell said,
I paint from remembered landscapes which I carry with me,

and today was free day at the Denver Art Museum, so you made a donation
and thought about painting on a ladder, wielding a paintbrush on a pole, or a palette knife
with a deft touch in a world that wanted a woman to be a man because a woman
who was a woman shouldn’t be painting these things,
and you’re pretty sure every one of those women felt compelled to keep a steady effort,
stretch another canvas, attend another bullfight, select another color,
listen to another track, and keep carrying it with them—

just like you did for your son, because after his birth, you knew your own synesthesia:
sorrow for joy, what was coming already even though it wouldn’t happen for 26 years,
and you’re back at the computer in the 7.6 GB of sound and color touching your boy again
a shimmer of light, a matador in fuchsia, impossible pink hibiscus, a jazz
track, the landscape you carry—an expanding canvas.

Sunbeam Dust Physics

August 13, 2026.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Andrea Bishop

The surprise came when his bedroom curtains were closed against the brightness of the morning, though he’d been wishing for the light of the sun for many months now, or rather, the curtains were almost closed because they didn’t quite close properly. They were old-fashioned curtains which, ironically, had blackout screening that allowed him both privacy and the ability to sleep, but also restricted his view, and where the curtains joined together the hooks extending from the fabric flopped out of their intended rings on the rod, which happened so frequently it was easier just to leave them off and tuck one curtain behind the other each night, and besides, he would fling them open so violently in the morning—relieved after a night of dreams, of gains and losses, passions and disappointments, to land back in reality, a world solid and definite, possibly dull but at least predictable and explicable—that even if he did secure the curtain hooks in the curtain rings each evening they would just pop out again the next morning. When the curtains were open the view from his window was grass and a patch of mud and part of a low cement wall, with a few weeds in the far corners, but flowering weeds, and the only other things he could see were people’s legs as they passed by, and all of their dogs, usually. Unless it was a very tall dog and then he couldn’t see the ears, or the head, or the neck, depending. In those cases, just two human legs and four dog legs.

Dirt

August 12, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Laurie Glover
Featured Art: “Farmer’s Market” by Hannah Hatley

The black hen and I
are having it out.
She wants to brood
and I want her not to.

I resent that she thinks
she gets to sit
and want.

Even with nothing beneath her
to warm
nothing that will lead
to anything new
she insists.

Her little red magma eyes glow.

When I tilt the box
she erupts
every feather straight out.

I know I’m not her.
But I am,
and I want to stop—

I want the pain to shoot out
like cleansing light,

I want to stop
crouching in the dirt
willing something to be born.

Let’s Pretend

August 11, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By SM Stubbs

I’m awfully good at it, with years
of experience, plus eons of needing
to disappear from the world, plus
my mother’s dead and my father isn’t
and I’d like to believe for a couple of hours
that one of those isn’t true. If I say,
Jigsaw a hole so you can crawl from your reality
to mine, can you do it? If I say, Reality
is a snare for unhinged minds, will you believe
we’re not all playing by the same set of rules?
Perhaps I’m searching for the trap door
they spring the minute you understand
how things work. Psychologists say children
learn how to negotiate the world by play-acting
adult roles. When I played Store, I learned
how capitalism relies on the bottom line
and slim profit margins with little room
for discounts and when I played House,
I learned how to manipulate my wife
into cooking dinner night after night, how
to avoid chores that don’t involve sparks.
Only now am I starting to understand
the precision with which children mock
their own futures. I’ve examined my traumas
and what that type of pretending meant,
but as long as we’re inventing new selves
I’m going to leave it out, make believe
it never happened. I hope that’s okay. I hope
I can deposit that in the past for now.
This is us pretending. This is us negotiating
the world. When we woke this morning,
the temperature had dropped thirty degrees
and everything was covered in frost.

Steaming Wallpaper, 1973

August 10, 2026.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Jen Karetnick

My mother peeled sections like bananas,
in rot-spotted arcs, revealing the muffled
trends of decades until she reached drywall,
flesh dented from thrown fists, the rough
shove of chairs, the smack of accordion
doors that she uncoiled the phone cord
beyond, back in the days when a kitchen
was a heart, its double arteries shuttered
even when left ajar, never fully open.

1977

August 8, 2026.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Susan Browne
Featured Art: In a Café Called The Corral, in New Mexico” by Rebecca Pyle

I was lying in a hammock
in Fred’s backyard, trying not to be so stoned.
Someone put hashish in the brownies
& I’d eaten three.
Putting stuff in the punch & the brownies
was old hat, something we did in 1975.
I stared at the stars as if I could see through them
& beyond the edge of the universe.
With every ounce of my atoms,
I wanted to know what was there.
As if that would help. I wanted help.
I’d recently learned about stars being dead,
but I was too obliterated for science & missing Jack.
All I knew was, like a dead star, love still emitted light.
Maybe I should go to Alaska & find him
on a boat juggling salmon, was one idea
except I couldn’t move.
“Tiny Dancer” played somewhere in the house,
oh how it feels so real & it had felt real with Jack
until it changed & felt even more real with Mike.
Everything’s in flux was another idea except
my body stuck in the hammock seemed eternal.
Blurry figures passed by like in Plato’s cave.
I was majoring in philosophy.
I thought it would save my life.
I thought Mike & Jack would save my life.
Elton John, too. Even the dancer in my jewelry box
when I was a child. What was a life?
Tiny. Wearing a sparkling tutu. Diaphanous.
Electrified air appareled in tulle.
The shadows on the patio wall asked
if I wanted a hit off their doobie.
I said, “Take me to the hospital.”
They laughed & disappeared.
Salvation wasn’t high on anyone’s list that evening.
I rolled over & fell out of the hammock. Like Sartre,
I would take full responsibility for my existence.
If he could survive hallucinations of crustaceans
following him after a bad trip on mescaline,
I could get my face out of the flowerbed.
When the crabs & lobsters finally went away,
Sartre felt only loss. Slowly, I wiped the petals off
trying not to hurt them.

October Tennis Court

August 7, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Browne

My wedding dress hung in the closet
gathering dust & cobwebs.
On a walk, I’d seen it—a simple white dress—
in a store window & bought it
& continued not planning the wedding.
Once in a while, I’d try it on
to see if it still fit.
A friend came to visit, said,
“That dress needs to see the light of day.”
I’d been living with Kenneth for nine years.
We’d been engaged for three.
I loved him. What was love?
Like Louis Armstrong said about jazz:
If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
I didn’t have to ask, did I?
Love was like a tennis court in late October,
leaves blowing across it & the dream of playing.
Marriage was a tennis ball tossed to a dog over & over,
until the ball was pulverized & the dog dead.
I didn’t tell anyone this, but there it was
like the worm in the apple.
One day, the dress & I wore a gardenia in our hair.
Kenneth’s and my vows swam in the rainlight.
Decades rolled by like tornadoes or pangolins.
Sometimes I’ve thought, we’re done, kaput.
We can’t fix the dishes & doorjambs we’ve broken.
Then we play some more. It’s not a dream
& we need lessons no one can give us.
The best thing is to forget you’re married
& go to a lonely tennis court when the wind is wild
& chase each other around like leaves.
Then lie down. Your beautiful bodies
knowing what they know.

Chain

August 6, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joseph Landi

I.

You glow,
veiled, dress
like crusted snow
before traffic
has its way.

II.

The minister,
fighting hiccups,
asks: Do you take
as your awfully
wedded wife . . . ?

III.

Carving a grin
on his prime-rib face,
your Dad, unembarrassed,
flees into the wake
of tables, raising glasses,
celebrating
his disencumbrance.

IV.

Your Mom sits
unknowingly
next to his mistress—
her friend of forty
years. They chat
in matching dresses:
one pink, one green.

V.

My steak
never arrives.
I go hungry
immediately.

VI.

The band covers hits:
All My Life,
Beds Are Burning.

VII.

Silver and crystal
clink like railroad
switches. Kissing
becomes a burden.

VIII.

Your family argues
over the table photo.
Some are missing,
some already dead.

IX.

The cake fork’s full,
the cream capsizing.
I’m offering everything.
You’re laughing.

X.

The hall empties. Gift
boxes tilt like ruins.

XI.

In the lot,
my mother touches
my face like a blind
woman before I rejoin
you.

XII.

Cleaver.

Out of Her League

August 5, 2026.Reading time 38 minutes.

By Christina Reiss
Art: “Flood” by Nawmi Manaam

Dana left before dawn, reeking of the previous night’s alcohol, and cursing an alarm he forgot he set. Mary woke as he woke. Reaching for him, her hands came back empty. He said he was going fishing.

Later that morning, when Mary peered out the small cape’s large bay window, she had her doubts. An unobstructed view of the Atlantic Ocean revealed white caps cresting seal-gray waters. Leichester’s town pier, shaped like a beckoning finger, reached out to a solitary unmanned lighthouse skirted in foam. You could fish in those seas, but it would be neither pleasant nor productive. Fish weren’t stupid; they knew where to hide when the ocean roiled.

Mary had cleaned clams and cod for chowder. Sauteed onions and salt pork drained on a paper towel. She left the window and resumed peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. Several minutes later, she heard a persistent knocking on the front door. As she washed and dried her hands before going to answer it, the knocking became louder, more insistent.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered, wondering if Dana had forgotten or lost his key. After a string of break-ins up and down the Maine coast, they had taken to locking their front door. Having grown up in the house, the sole child of two taciturn but doting Mainers, Dana took the crimes as a personal affront. He said he had every right to feel safe in his own home as if he was what the thieves were after.

The knocking became pounding. Mary opened the door to a fist prepared to deliver its next strike. Standing on the stoop, her daughter, Deidre, was flanked by a young boy and girl. The shock of seeing her only child was like a stick shoved into the gears of Mary’s mind. She stood still, her mouth gaping open. Eleven years had passed since Deidre left home at seventeen. Over time, the pain of losing her had dulled, but it had never subsided.

Hurl

August 4, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Nick Norwood
Featured Art: “Flyboi” by Martins Deep

Dirt clods plucked from piles,
rocks, car parts in bar ditches—
burnt plugs, nuts and bolts and bits

of bumper and fender chrome—
bottles to bust on curb sides:
we hurled the world. Gutters

bore our leavings, the broken
glass, gum wrappers, gravel;
whatnots our siftings left. Boys

coming in touch with reality,
picking it up to hum it, feel its
grooves and facets. We found

money pennies at a time and
threw it all away. You cannot
know what you cannot palm

in the hand, rare back and sling,
rock and fire. Let the lingering
feel of it—the sting of a hand slap,

the burn of a hot muffler, balm
of your mother’s butter—be all
you know about what’s what.

Why She Won’t Have Wire Clothes Hangers in Our House

August 2, 2026.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Nick Norwood

because of the way they bang together on a closet rod
get left behind in sleazy motel rooms
crappy apartments where things didn’t go well

because she is not irrational
other people are irrational, not her

when she was a little girl she and a friend snuck in
an abandoned farmhouse nobody’d lived in for twenty or thirty years
the earth plowed right up to the front porch
weeds springing up between the boards:
inside, in a back room, two of them, like bent dusty filaments
hanging at odd angles on a bowed rusted length of irrigation pipe
unmusical in their slow, sad clanging
wind moaning through the broken windows

askew on the floor in an empty unit in condemned government housing
pick them up and set them jangling
the joyless sound like the same notes an octave higher
of iron bars clanking shut in county lockup
that same awkward swinging on the clothes rod
as bodies from tree limbs

and who hasn’t had to jump the rent in the middle of the night
or help somebody jumping rent load her car
a friend’s sister
a friend’s sister’s friend from work
her backseat full of clothes on hangers from shuttered dry-cleaning shops
a burnt-smelling hair dryer
wallowed-out shoes
tampons rowed like soldiers in a half-empty box

and who hasn’t had to try to unlock a car door with one
back in the day
in some cold dark parking lot in a bad neighborhood
down the street from a bar
where you slammed well-drink whiskey
your fingers frozen as popsicles
the idiot end of the straightened hanger
banging against the inside of the window
fumbling around the knob
bark bark against the glass
the keys glinting in the ignition

lying in the street, bent, sheathed in gray-brown mud
they’re about the saddest thing you could ever see
sadder than a teeth flosser thrown down on the sidewalk
sadder than a used condom

and who doesn’t know that a hook made from one
is vicious as a shiv

and when she was a kid on a camping trip sitting around the fire
they told her to stab her marshmallow with one
impale it on the clothes hanger before she surrendered it to the flames
then, later, as a teenager on the beach she saw the beer-bong crowd
skewering shrimp the same vicious way
to grill them over a driftwood fire
like they were cooking little embryos

and who hasn’t had to try to explain this one more time to her mother
and it’s just too fucking exhausting
and who hasn’t heard her mother say she’s praying for her
and imagined that vicious wire thing hooked inside her belly
because the law has spoken

somewhere deep-sea fishing off the Cape the wise and upright
their heavy robes depending from carved cherrywood hangers back in chambers
snag mountable trophies on hooks
barbed as gaffs

Room 5A Supply Closet 14A

August 1, 2026.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Ava Moreci

Kevin does not know how to tie his shoes yet.

His red sneakers have Velcro straps, and the day we met, even those were waving in the air.

I knelt down to secure them after I took attendance. “Miss?” he said, when I stood again, his shoes fastened tight. What’s that say?”

A large painted mural was beside our line-up spot. I read the words for him out loud: Welcome Student Scholars!

“Scholars?” He echoed. “I’m not a scholar! I’m six!”

Hannah and the Class Watch Peep and Chirp

July 31, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By George C. Harvilla
Art: “Scraps and Leaves” by Nawmii Manaam

We are each born pursuing extinction.

Some days I substitute teach.
Kindergarten today. And the questions.

Did you know my dad died in September?
Do you know my name?

Hannah.

Hannah is defiant, refuses to follow instructions.
What to do with her?

We watch Peep and Chirp. YouTube.
The class is still, content.

Turn the sound down, Hannah says. I like it better
when I can see the trees without all of Peep’s noise.

He thinks he has problems.

That’s an oak, she sighs.
It shouldn’t have leaves that time of year.

Adults are always lying.
They want kids to think nothing ever dies.

It’s cruel

It Is What It Is

July 30, 2026.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Denise Duhamel

When my grandnephew Max gave me a Starburst
from his stash, I took it because of the pleasure
he had in sharing. Once I heard his grampa’s voice
come out of his mouth—It is what it is—when his Jenga tower
collapsed. I called him my Little Nietzsche and he laughed.
I don’t like Starbursts but I love Max. He’d given me
a lemon square of candy and said Let’s write a poem
about video games about which I know so little
and he knows so much—things like the prisoner’s dilemma.
This makes me think of Michael Burkard’s Entire Dilemma
which I treasure. The poems center on his sobriety
and I remember how, when I first met him, he clutched
the Big Book in a poetry workshop where I was his student.
I’m on a plane sitting next to a woman who reeks of gin. I helped her
shove her carry-on in the overhead so she think we’re friends.
I only assisted because she was swaying and I was afraid
her bag would topple and hit me in the noggin.
She is telling me about her life with her husband
and his mother (whom she can’t stand) which is why she moved
to the back, to an empty middle seat, and wound up near me.
She is wound up and I would like to wind down.
She explains her husband is a momma’s boy,
that he and his mom are two peas in a pod while she is a lone pea
rolled under the table. She offers me a stick of Juicy Fruit
which I decline because I don’t love her
the way I love Max. I tell her I have to work
but I am really writing a draft of this poem in my notebook
(which is my work, but I don’t want to explain).
She starts to snore but not for long. She wakes up
with a start, just in time to order a Rum and Coke.
I’m going to a divorce lawyer, she says, as soon as we land.
I am sober like Michael was. He’s gone now
as are so many of my mentors. Wait! Is that a poem?
she asks, noticing my lines don’t go all the way to the end
of the page. I tell her I’m coming back from a writing conference
and she says I hope you learned some good tips. I don’t want to
tell her I spoke at the conference. I don’t want to
tell her anything at all. But suddenly she is talking
about her husband again, who will soon be her ex-
if she has her way. I sip on my seltzer and try to go back
to my notebook, where I can be more generous to her
than I can sitting next to her slurring. She too once wrote poems
before her life went to shit. Now she’s a nurse
and hates it. She wants me to know this won’t be her first divorce.
Who might have she become if she had stopped drinking?
Who might I have become if I was still ordering vodka tonics?
I wish I knew more about the prisoner’s dilemma—
I am a prisoner here, even as I turn my head and try to
write. I love that Max doesn’t know who Nietzsche is
but was happy to laugh at his name, which
I have to admit has a comic sound. At one point I say
I need to close my eyes and that makes her go quiet
though her head is lolling and slouching toward my shoulder.
Soon I’ll be home where I can sleep like a starfish,
my limbs sprawling towards the corners of my bed.
I wonder how marketers came up with the name
Starburst for candy—a kind of synesthesia
perhaps? Light in the galaxy of our mouths?
And I’m thinking now of Mars candy bars
and the way little kids like Max love planets and space.
We never finished our video game poem
because Max was happier in his Meta Quest alternate reality
headset where I watched him fight demons I couldn’t see
in his living room. He wanted me there, just as a witness,
and I was happy to sit still observing him, imagining
what was on his screen. I scooted out first, as I was on the aisle,
then saw my seatmate again at baggage claim
standing with her husband, his mother
reprimanding her about something, maybe her drinking.
Then a kind, young man with a lemony beard pulled
my suitcase with its orange “heavy” tag from the belt.

Wasn’t It You Who Loved Me?

July 29, 2026.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Jen Brewington
Featured Art: “The Thing About Umbrellas” by Lesley Weston

Merriam started this. She called me a whore on a Sunday morning in the middle of the small grocery store in my hometown. To be fair, she had some facts on her side. Her husband, Neal, and I had this on and off thing for years. What I mean is, we were married once. He was my husband before he was her husband. It’d been ten years since we ended things, still young and dumb, and I hardly even thought about him except when I did. Still, he was mine first.

Well, there is more to the story or at least the memory of it. A few months ago, I found out quite suddenly that I’d lost my job as a graphic designer at a small press in Ohio. It was a budget cut thing, and I couldn’t do much about it in these technological times. I loved my job, and my boss loved me. She was sorry to let me go. At the same time, I was seeing this guy, Sam, who had recently confessed his deep love for The Grateful Dead. I guess that could have been overlooked, except when we had sex, he asked me over and over, “Are you okay?” and the more he asked the less okay I was. And the third unbearable straw was that my cat died. My vet said, “You gave her a good life.” It didn’t mean anything to anyone else, the loneliness of losing her, but it must be said that she was the best cat. Talkative, gentle but wild, and she had the loudest purr. I called my mom, tangled in the dead roots of it all.

“What’s wrong, Honey?”

Hearing her voice sent me sobbing. “Bubbles died,” I said. I could hardly get it out.

“Oh, Honey. I’m so sorry. She was a good cat,” she said. She already knew about the job.

Maybe I’ll Actually Like This Gun

July 29, 2026.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Matt Hart

but error number one was mistyping “gin”
as “gun.” For the record, I do not like guns,
not even water pistols—especially not
water pistols—but that’s another matter
and not at all germane to the aesthetics
of my judgment about this gin,
which is literally a matter of taste.
Error number two: somebody described
the Hendricks Midsummer Solstice gin
I’m tasting now as flirtatious. I don’t know
what that means, except in the sense
that most alcohol dulls one’s senses
in a seductive way that makes one desire
more of it, until soon enough one finds oneself
drunk. Baudelaire was always drunk.
Apollinaire was drunk on stars.
Someone tasted a liquor never brewed, but
I don’t remember who and refuse
to look it up. I defuse, too, the catheterization
of catharsis. Those are errors three, four,
and five. Now I’m on my errors tour. From here,
let’s assume that drinking is a bad idea,
so always a mistake, and I can stop
numbering the issues and clear the air
of the word “error.” Always lean in
to the initial first impulse and the debacle
of the intellect, which is poetry
according to André Breton. Beauty will be
convulsive or not be at all, he also said
after drinking a shot of gun. I mean gin—
again, my mistake, stupid fingers. Some people die
from drink, including, I assume, from drinking
gin. Others die as firemen. A few people even die
as astronauts, but most people just die.
My maudlin-ness, here, a result of the floral notes,
the herbaceous caliginous, facticity of the factotum.
Obviously, I don’t even know what
some of those words mean . . . anymore . . . if
I ever did, but the thing is, as with guns,
I don’t really like gin, but until recently
I also didn’t like The Grateful Dead.
Then I heard that song “Box of Rain.” Now
I still don’t like The Grateful Dead, but
that song is convulsive if anything is, and thus,
beautiful, so maybe there’s still hope for me
and at least one kind of gin. Apparently,
Phil Lesh, bassist and occasional lead vocalist
for The Grateful Dead, wrote “Box of Rain”
for his father who was dying. I am a sucker
for the elegiac, I just wrote to somebody
the other day in a text. But Lesh was
also known for playing a six-string bass
and no one should ever play a six-string bass.
That’s about four strings too many. Why
I apparently associate gin with death is
somewhat inexplicable, since it obviously hasn’t
killed me, but it most certainly has something to do
with the “i” and the “u” being right next to each other
on the keyboard—thus creating the gun/gin
phenomenon or paradox or conundrum—and also
it has to do with the fact that “I” and “you”,
however close we are, are always significantly
separate from each other in time and space.
As human beings, there is an unmitigable distance
between us, which is part of what makes us
unique. Even if we were to be somehow
right on top of each other, we could never be
each other, nor feel each other’s feelings
except in an imaginative empathetic way.
It’s the sort of thing one tries to get to, or
to achieve, in poetry and drunkenness and
being on top of each other. But in reality,
we are always at a loss when it comes
to other people, the feelings they feel,
the deeper meanings of their words.
We lose and lose and lose throughout our lives,
until eventually we ourselves are lost to others.
Beyond that is the Beyond that no one knows,
an eternity of not-ness. At least
that’s what I suppose. And while that’s
a rather complicated web of associations,
it may help to illustrate the reasons
I associate gin with death. Were you still even cognizant
that that’s what I was doing? Have another drink.
In the short term at least, you’ll feel lighter.
The Hendricks Midsummer Solstice gin,
in particular, when one first tastes it, is a high point
with regard to lightness, though I’m sure
with each subsequent drink and every day after
it will be a little less. And you and I, too,
will be a little less—a little more occluded
in the darkness of what’s next, which is why
to arm myself against it, I misspell “gin” as “gun”
nearly every chance I get and why I don’t
drink gun unless I’m forced to at ginpoint.

Abecedarian for Misused Tools

July 28, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Janine Certo

A martini olive stick to remove
batteries. Shears to open packaged
chicken breasts, trim daisies,
dahlias, a rosemary sprig. No
extension cord for the unruly
front hedges. No Fiskars for the blade of
grass. A garden chair’s a stepladder.
Higher chair, a three-rung stepladder.
In the apartment of my twenties, people
joked I owned only a dull, single
knife to chop garlic, open envelopes, halve
large muffins. A coffee mug for a hammer.
Mostly, I try to do things right. Sometimes,
no tool at all. One eye’s a leveler. Nix that
orbital sander. A fingernail’s a screwdriver. Two will
pull splinters. What’s stashed in the basement isn’t
quicker. A leaf blower sounds in the distance, while this
rake becomes broom because it’s closer. Sloppy, you
say? Swat the fly with a novel. Here’s a story, kind,
true: a man once gave me a toolkit. He didn’t know. No
usual pegboard in my garage: DIY drills,
V-clamps, voltage testers, mallet, shovel, socket
wrenches. After my break-up text, I shuddered when he said I
carved out his heart with a rusty spoon.

That Noise, Can You Hear It?

July 27, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeff Whitney

In the movie the question is “What was that?”
and the Star Trek away team learns the answer
the hard way, losing usually a nameless face
in a red shirt. The procedure is figure out what
problem comes first, then what comes next.
In kindergarten it’s nap, eat, sandbox,
and actually, now, it’s not so different.
The issue of what to say versus what to feel
about what is said. The dilemma of training all your life
for something then, after it’s over, what to do with
your specialized equipment?
A shoe advertisement asks, “Who will
save your sole?” Nice one, shoe advertisement.
There are several ways to skin a thing,
it turns out, and none involves happy birthday
balloons. For a while you can live in a city
and have friends and feed the ducks
who assemble around you, a sort of
congregation. I didn’t know much at eleven
but I knew our neighbor Linda desired heaven
for we heathens, felt we were lost, how earnestly she tried
to save with her Saturday meetings and Rice Krispie squares.
Linda, if I let you down, I’m sorry, as much as my sole
loves good-faith attempts, I don’t think we’ll be beamed
up to the same ship. That’s okay. For a while we were together
on this team of nobodys, the plucky upstarts against
the biggest, baddest all-stars and headlines like “Dozens
killed waiting for aid,” and what god would allow
that, Linda? What person? might be the better question.
But every so often I put on my god hat
when a large enough spider is in a corner difficult enough
to reach at a late enough hour so for peace of mind
I decide to kill. How my apologies are well-meaning
and polite but don’t change anything, like saying sorry,
so sorry, while holding a neighbor’s head
underwater, as each night I go to sleep hungry.
I go to sleep hungry and dream of money.

Threnody for the Triumph of Science Over Faith

July 26, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson
Featured Art: “War of the Worlds on Denim” By Nicholas Skaldetvind

Who wants a frowny Crusader in dusty armor and spurs
clanking at a gallop across the drawbridge and

over the moat? We don’t sanction his mandate to smite

the trackless steppes. We don’t want his blade banging
against the Tartar Gate, his muscular throat

bellowing the slogans of faith and certitude: Deus vult!

No God don’t. People’d say anything back then, angry
and delusional, prone to auto-da-fés

and the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg. Nowadays we nod
so logically, comfy in our algorithms

and siding with the chimps ever since Nietzsche wept

against the withers of a maltreated jade. Or, wagering
for God’s thumbs-up, the night Blaise Pascal

fudged the math. Poor Søren Kierkegaard! He tussled
with absentee seraphim and cherubim

as he stalked the streets of Copenhagen, boys chucking
snowballs at the inky plans for Christ stuffed

in his Scroogian top hat. We make snowmen only
so we can endure their melting, he might’ve but actually

never said. He’d be right, I’d imagine. But who knows?
Today God lives, they say, only in my brain’s

sludgy yeses and nos, where a no is no worse than a yes . . .

My Therapist Tells Me Despair Is Not the Answer

July 25, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

He’s so cute! His eyes are brilliant blue and almost
perfectly round. So sincere! Sometimes

I dream about them, outsize like Disney mammals’

or an anime hero on a quest, lustrous with heartfelt,
unambiguous virtue. Save the princess!

Let me be the princess! Gallop me away from all
my trolls and this drip-drip-drip dungeon,

whisk me away on your pharmaceutical unicorns . . .

His office artwork is insipid (at best) but I’m such
an asshole I extravagantly praise it

in order to lay a trap (although such malice is hard
when you’re on the mood elevators

he’s got me on). Such bright, happy colors, I chirp,

grinning at the mess of daffodils, yellow-on-yellow
squeezed, apparently, right out of the tube.

My wife painted that, he tells me, with such a blend
of hope, doubt, and quavery pride

that I am disarmed. Touché shrink! Bad art and
sincerity grant the believer inviolability

(at least for a while). Besides, I think he’s in love . . .

Well, even real art does nobody any good and real
artists (as Soviet judges once proclaimed

at poets’ trials) are parasitical mopes. I nod gravely,
like a connoisseur. The world

can never have too much cadmium
yellow, I tell him. Yellow is like sunshine that way.

He looks suspicious, but I think I halfway meant it . . .

A Crack in the Glass

July 25, 2026.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Margaret M. Byrne
Featured Art: “While Shadows Sleep” by Edward Supranowicz

Piggot’s Point, May 11, 1975

Nothing ever snuck in through the second-story window at 333 North Bollingbrook, the foster home owned by the Grimmer sisters, Lucy, Lila and Lily, who swore on the Bible to care for “them poor motherless boys” at the price of one thousand and sixteen dollars per boy per month, “and worth every penny as boys eat so much and are so much work and d’ey got so much boy dirt and da price of food has gone up so much—and all d’em city fees.” Paid with a bank deposit by the Commonwealth—always on the first.

Nothing found its way through the crack in the two-over-two window, shut tighter than Miss Lucy’s lady parts. Not a bird. Not a moth. Not a squirrel or a mouse or a cat. Not even a skeeter.

Nothin’.

Until tonight.

Departure

July 24, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Rowe

All morning I watched the inlet
rushing back and forth
like a woman packing up her house.

Then I went out to climb over
the rocks again; I love them,
not just because they stay in one place,

but for the way the shades
of moss, bright green and dark, pulse,
and underneath, the pink and silver veins.

You think you saw me leave, waving
from the scratched window of the ferry.
But really, I’m still here;

follow the clues—you’ll see how
the stones gather at the edge
of the water like a circle of old women

who bring their handwork out of doors
in spring; quiet women, who pause,
nod at the sky as at a mirror,

and at the copper plate of the beach,
where, wave after wave, the sea,
with its diamond needle, etches

the bright kingdom below
the cold slapping surface:
far out, far out beyond the archipelago.

— To the memory of M.N., who departed, who remains

The girl who loves bird science

July 23, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Paige Sullivan
Featured Art: “Unclear Path” by Hannah Hatley

is practicing how to quit.  
She skims racks, holds sweaters up  
to her chest, imagines other lives.  
She walks around testing the fit,  
wondering what a morning feels like 
inside, no dew dampening her socks, 
without the tick of each data point  
when a call or a cry or a song 
is heard. She tells the podcast host, 
This was everything I ever wanted. 
It was always me and the birds. I don’t 
know who I am without this dream.  

I listen to her story on the way home.  
Every now and then, a dream comes 
unbidden. An old boyfriend sits 
and watches me sweep a comb  
through my hair. Or it’s Christmas 
and we watch his son watch the TV, 
where Snoopy and the children 
are a ribbon skating across the ice.  
Soft halogen light. People gazing. 
Who am I if I change my dream?  
she asks, stepping onto the elevator 
to keep company with the perfume  
hanging lightly in the air, the quiet 
double of someone she just missed.  

On a Walk Through the Superfund Site

July 22, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Justin Rigamonti

I stop to gawk at a burned-out trailer—
kinda pretty. One of the guys behind it
taps his ear, asks, Are those nice?
They’re old, I say, lifting an earpiece.
Speaking of nice, the other guy says,
That bike is only twenty bucks. It’s pink
with tassels on the handlebars, and it’s
probably stolen. He must think I’ve got
a couple kids at home, but no, it’s two
chihuahuas, so I’m not interested. Instead,
I skirt a stand of poplars with laundry
hanging from the lower branches, a catalogue
of dirty magazines beneath. Three pit bulls
barking poetry behind a chain-link fence.
A tall dining chair in its Sunday best:
a red McDonald’s T-shirt. It’s like shopping
for moments down here. Because all of this
will vanish soon—everything, yes, but also
these woods and three feet of topsoil,
excised and hauled off to god knows where.
For now, a poisoned cluster of madrones
coughs up a guy who looks like me,
also wearing headphones, also browsing.
You teach at the college, he says, like it’s
not a question. I took a class with you ten
years ago, he says, and I don’t respond.
Because how is this still happening?
Life, I mean. Above us, a row of tan condos
lean out over the superfund riverbank
where hawks pluck salmon with gills the color
of benzopyrene, scrawls of green and pink
graffiti across the concrete pediments.
I want to offer him something, a shred
of hard-won middle-aged bullshit.
But he beats me to it: Life is strange,
he says, smiling. Which is true and I
finally answer: Compared to what?

Dear Attention

July 21, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gordon Taylor
Featured Art: “Weaving a Nest” by Lily Jarrell

notice my eyes
mistaking the wildfire’s distant glow
for sunrise. Notice my heart moving
away from a constant rhythm.
The cardiologist heard this too.
I am a drifter, I explained, my heart
is easily distracted. I want to change
the way I write
from confession to observation,
but it’s difficult to stay with one image
longer than a line.
This is why I’ve written so many poems
without endings.
This is why I’ve had several husbands.
My marriages never resulted in divorce.
I simply began searching the horizon
for continuity errors. Sunset
seeming like sunrise
with no day in between. Dear attention,
notice I describe the sky
heading into dusk
as the inside of a ripe peach.
Now it’s cooked salmon.
Now a tarnished silver-pink.
I’ve wandered years
in my own neighborhood without admitting
I am going to die.
What are we waiting for? Dear winter
sun with your darkening stare.
Dear silentium, I can’t pretend anymore
that I am not afraid.
I am not Lot’s wife under rain,
nameless and brave,
turning to witness what happens behind me.
I know the past
changes shape all the time.
I know I am becoming something else.

Conspiracy Theories

July 20, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Arpita

I am not smitten. I’m just licking the months
to try their sweetness. It’s not that weird.
You’ve thrust your face into water fountains,
you know what I’m talking about. Not
just thirst, but surprise, the anticipation
of surprise—they made me do it.
I would jump if my friends jump. I would be
the clown at Costco; try a baguette over my head
and say, ‘I’M A VERY BIG SANDWICH’,
just so you can chase me with a cast-iron.
It’s not that I enjoy putting on a suit
every morning and advocating for the man
with two horns, but it comes with benefits:
eyelashes part like zippers to fuck with
what I’m saying. You laugh too, there’s that.
Oh the things we do for love! Carry massive
pumpkins up the stairs, scoop cat poop
at midnight, bawl ludicrously for the first time
in another’s arms. Then there’s all the shit you say—
I would keep you in my pocket if you were a worm,
or, why kiss with mouth when we can
rub armpits, or, yes, of course, I would move
across the world to be with you. And you do,
you drive to a desert with your cat in the backseat
and curse the Fahrenheit gods. When it rains
for two weeks straight, you don’t realize
how rare it is; why the drivers panic. Instead,
you waltz into every 7-Eleven in a five-mile radius and
befriend the workers. I had a feeling there’s
free pizza involved. Why else would anyone
buy into this nonsense of ephemeral metaphor?
These, you fondly name my off-ramps:
when a word falls from my mouth, followed
by another and then a string unspools.
You kiss my shoulder. What a brilliant plot
to make me forget that space isn’t real.

Votive

July 19, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kevin Grauke

With my penultimate match, I light this candle.
Too bad there’s not a god somewhere to breathe
in its scent, to feel its flame. It shines in my dark
room alone, the same as in the larger (the largest)
dark. All alone, it gutters. Like a tumbling meteor
or a cold deathbed, all alone. Nonetheless, I light it.
Because something has to come from doing so,
doesn’t it? An offering proffered to nothing
can’t simply be just that much more of nothing.
It has to be something, even if only just barely.
The effort makes it so. In its own small way,
you might say its tiny heat becomes, itself,
the divinity. With my ultimate match, I light
a second candle as an offering to the first.

No Ideas But in Things: The Un-Poetic Education of Adult World

July 18, 2026.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Bethany Bruno

There is a specific archetype of the millennial poet, a figure of earnest conviction we recognize instantly. She is armed with a liberal arts degree, student debt, and the belief that her interior life is a subject of profound importance. She was taught in workshops that her voice matters, and she took it to heart.

This is Amy (Emma Roberts), the heroine of Scott Coffey’s 2013 comedy Adult World, and the film suggests not that poetry is foolish, but that Amy’s fantasy of herself as a poet is incomplete. It challenges the idea that art is born fully formed from feeling alone and suggests, instead, that a voice is shaped through contact with other people, disappointment, work, and the humiliations of ordinary life.

Amy’s conviction is almost tender in its excess. She doesn’t simply write. She insists she is “writing nonstop, all the time,” that “things are pouring out of me you wouldn’t even believe.” She tells her father, with the panic of someone who can’t separate inspiration from destiny, “I mean, I’m feeling a lot. I’m thinking a lot. I’m inspired, Dad. I’m inspired!”

I first watched the movie a few years after my own college graduation, and Amy’s predicament felt less like fiction and more like my life. I was a wannabe writer drowning in debt, working a dead-end retail job, hoarding spare dollars not for savings, but for submission fees. That gap between what you long to be and what you can afford to be is the part of becoming a writer no workshop teaches.

Pasolini’s Chaucer: An Edged Smile

July 17, 2026.Reading time 20 minutes.

By Brock Henry Allen

In his adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, Pier Paolo Pasolini appears only a handful of times as the medieval poet of the tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, and in these few moments I feel reproached and hopeful. Slotted between stories of deception, lust, and retribution, the bodies and souls of Chaucer’s characters bared before the camera, Pasolini-as-Chaucer sits in his chair, or late at night lounges in his bed with a quill in hand, and in these brief depictions his face glows in the reflection of a mind skittering through the imagination. As he writes, head in hand and eyes cast upward, he smiles. I had forgotten this feeling, and I wanted it again.

Pasolini’s film maintains an amateurish quality befitting a man who saw himself foremost as a writer, as he sought a “poetry of cinema.” His editing in particular cuts hard between close-ups and establishing shots, with this viewer often unable to understand what or where is being established. The Canterbury Tales was shot in English, dubbed in Italian, and then redubbed in English (I think I got that right), and this also lends the film a quality of mis-timing between the characters, the pauses between lines regularly too long as if each person understands little of what the other has said. In particular, Pasolini likes to linger on smiling faces, of angels or devils or his beloved Ninetto Davoli, until these smiles stiffen toward grimace. It all creates a feeling particular to Pasolini that I’ve only experienced while watching his other films—The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Decameron, or Arabian Nights (I have not seen his most infamous film, Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom; it frightens me), and in these smiles, and in the spaces between the characters’ words, I feel peculiarly entranced. At times, I feel bored, but never detached. It’s an unusual sensation, because unlike other hypnotic stylists of his country, like Fellini, Antonioni, or Bertolucci, whose painstaking productions heavily wear the appearance of masterpiece, Pasolini’s appear as a charming accident, off-handed, like something he nearly scrapped, a sketch that has against the odds lived.

On Poetry

July 16, 2026.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Diana Khoi Nguyen
Featured Art: “Carrying Hay” by Hannah Hatley

Though Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is a Korean film, I found myself thinking of the Vietnamese word nước, as the opening shot reveals rippling water. A close shot, bird’s eye view of the water, a near-black filter dissolving slowly from the sun-glinted ripples. Nước, meaning water first, for me. Nước, meaning also: country, state, the tide coming in, the tide going out. A place so connected to water it shares the word. The camera doesn’t fall into the river, but moves with it, panning to reveal grade-school-aged boys playing in the grassy sand bank, moving rocks, digging holes. The sun is overhead, it’s 11am perhaps, and the body of a 16-year-old girl floats along like the body of each young woman in every movie and television show I’ve seen before: dead.

Danusha Laméris touched briefly upon Poetry in an earlier New Ohio Review essay, “Beautiful, Brilliant, and Dead: Portraits of the Female Poet in Film.” She writes that literature and art are rife with images of dead women and dead poets: “[t]he dead girl, appearing again and again, by the river bank, in the river.” Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s short film, What Happened to Her (2016), similarly examines contemporary culture’s obsession with dead women on screen. The dead girl in Poetry’s opening scene isn’t a poet, but she is a casualty in the world of cruel boys (and men); and her death eventually causes the film’s protagonist, Yang Mi-ja, to reflect on her life and society and write her first poem.

And Poetry, itself, feels like a poem: plot is more than mere narrative content; it serves as material arranged and composed in such a way that I found I could trace craft moves that exist in poetry writing: juxtaposition, (visual) syntactical surprise, the interwoven portraits of boys vs. girls, men vs. women . . . all of these have a metrical rhythm in the film. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is that while watching, I felt I was also reading a poem.

The Post in the Machine: on Poetry and Il Postino

July 15, 2026.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Rowland Bagnall

Il Postino (1994) tells the story of Pablo Neruda’s brief exile in Italy. The film is adapted from the novel Burning Patience (1985) by Antonio Skármeta, which fictionalizes Neruda’s 1952 stint on Capri, during which he occupied a villa owned by the Italian historian Edwin Cerio. Skármeta’s novel relocates the episode to Isla Negra, a village on the coast of Chile, fast-forwarding events to 1969 in order to encompass both the poet’s Nobel Prize (awarded in 1971) and death in 1973. The novel unfolds against a backdrop of political unrest; Neruda died just days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, a successful coup d’état led by General Pinochet. Il Postino, co-written by director Michael Radford and the film’s star, Massimo Troisi, restores the events of the story to Italy, exiling Neruda to another island in the Gulf of Naples. While the location isn’t specified, much of the film takes place on Procida, where Mario (Troisi), a simple, gentle man with a desire to outgrow his surroundings, lives with his aging father in a small fishing community.

The set-up of the film is straightforward enough. One night at the cinema, Mario sees a black-and-white newsreel of Neruda’s arrival in Rome, the voiceover explaining that the famous communist love poet has been unable to return to Chile on account of his political views. The footage soon turns to the island that Neruda is to stay on, at which point the audience bursts into applause, one man leaping to his feet when he sees himself up on the screen: “That’s me!” On his way home, Mario spots an advertisement for a job at the post office that requires a bicycle. Uninspired by his life as a fisherman, he bikes to an interview with the local postmaster-cum-telegrapher (Renato Scarpa) who promptly offers him the gig. Mario’s task will be to deliver mail to a single addressee, the celebrated poet, Pablo Neruda.

Gertrude Stein: The Matriarch of the Paris Salon

July 14, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find
an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
–Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris.

I’ll admit something: all through graduate school I kept this to myself, but . . . I never liked Gertrude Stein. I remember a woman in my cohort swooning over Tender Buttons, but every time I read a Stein poem, I was just confused. What was she trying to accomplish? I didn’t get it. It felt too erudite, too experimental for me. Also a Stein fan, a professor at a nearby college told me she wanted to teach scansion to her Intro to Poetry students using Stein’s poems, and I couldn’t think of a better way to turn undergrads off poetry. Or Stein.

The photos didn’t do Stein any favors either. She looked severe with her short haircut and the perennial scowl she turned to the camera. She seemed terrifying. Someone more likely to be your friend’s ancient great aunt who only spoke to her dogs than a world-travelling, ground-breaking poet. Enter Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Online Exclusive: Poetry in The English Patient

July 13, 2026.Reading time 18 minutes.

By John Hodgen
Art by Sage Kerrigan-Christ

There is no poet in The English Patient. Not a single one. And the patient isn’t English. And there is only one bodice ripped, though it is readily repaired by the penitent ripper. There’s a Canadian nurse who believes with good reason that everyone she ever loves is doomed to die. There’s a sapper from a bomb disposal squad who blows up and one who doesn’t. There’s a thief and morphine-addicted spy everyone calls Caravaggio whose thumbs are cut off and who blames a Hungarian count. And there is an English pilot’s wife who engages in a torrid and doomed affair with the Hungarian count who ultimately becomes the titular English patient. And still, there is no poet. Not one.

And yet there is, and her name is Katharine Clifton, and she has no idea she’s a poet, but she embodies one and may be the best representation of a poet to appear in a major motion picture that somehow thinks it’s a poem as well. Katharine is a change agent, a newly and already badly married woman dropped in out of the pre-war skies over Cairo to move within a group of men who represent the British Royal Geographic Society but call themselves, somewhat poetically, the International Sand Club. She seems as out of place as a poet among mapmakers, but she’ll transform them all. Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this film. Transference is all. A great war is coming peopled by lovers and traitors and fools. And Katharine is Circe but a Circe of true love whose childhood best friend has become her husband who now calls her “Sausage” and defends the word “uxoriousness,” to explain over-worshipping a wife. Then she engages with Count Lazlo Almasy, who worships his aloneness and history, especially that of his beloved Herodotus in his battered leather-bound book, and who does not worship wives until he meets her. That transference of allegiances, that dramatic awakening is what poems often aim for and what movies that want to be poems aim for as well. It works best if the author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, is more often a poet than a novelist. Anthony Minghella, the screenwriter and director, is also a poet, a visual one, line after line of the film filled with imagistic figures of speech, charged and charred language, parallel characters, interwoven stories and countries, and even the Arabic names for the winds of Egypt and the parts of the body for which there can never be enough names.

The Dazed Poetics of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life

July 12, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Lilia Santeramo

If Richard Linklater loves one thing, it’s good talk. There are few directors, save for the ones we suspect inspired him, whose films rival Linklater’s in sheer chattiness. In a Linklater film, the plot and action happen primarily within and around unending speech. Waking Life, Linklater’s 2001 foray into animated film, is no different.

The film follows a nameless, desultory young man played by Wiley Wiggins as he navigates a bizarre, existentially fraught dream in which he also happens to be trapped. In the dream, Wiggins encounters a large cast of characters who explain their worldviews, which are often influenced by briefly referenced artists, thinkers, and poets. As the film progresses, it repeatedly uses talk of art as an avenue to reach understanding and awareness.

For Wiggins, it becomes apparent that reaching awareness—of his own dream state, of art itself—is the key to freedom from his seemingly endless, inescapable reverie. Though only a few poets are mentioned in the film, each time they are Wiggins reaches a pivotal moment in his journey out of the dream. Once, as he becomes lucid; and then again, right before he wakes up at the urging of a character who resembles Linklater himself, after that character rants about Yeats’ lover.

Yes, at its worst, Waking Life is name-droppy and unconvincingly “deep.” The film is often indulgent of the musings of stoned teenagers, made more palatable because instead of kids, a contemplative French woman and her lover (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Before Sunrise’s Céline and Jesse) vocalize these ideas as they sit in bed, so it’s, you know, sophisticated. This is the kind of movie Woody Allen might have made if he was a slacker. But Waking Life isn’t just for Dorito-fingered, channel-surfing philosophers who reference artists and intellectuals without bothering to examine their ideas.

Facing the Music

June 11, 2026.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Kimberly Johnson

Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptations of Shakespeare plays represent a formidable corpus. In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers called his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V “thrilling” and gushed that Branagh’s performance “captures the poetry and potency of Shakespeare” with an “unquenchable fire.” Of Branagh’s Hamlet, Geoffrey O’Brien raved that in this particular, “brilliant,” version, the play “is allowed all its complexity.” As of February 2026, the two films are rated 98% and 95%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes.

In stark contrast to these rhapsodic responses is the general reception of Branagh’s 2000 Love’s Labours Lost, whose Rotten Tomatoes aggregation currently hovers just over exact middling, at 51%. Even the more or less positive reviewers think it “wildly uneven,” and less generous viewers dismiss it as “silly, redundant, odd.” The chief irritation seems largely to arise from Branagh’s decision to adapt the play into a musical spectacular lifted straight out of the golden age of cinema. In Branagh’s Love’s Labours Lost, characters burst out into song at random junctures and pause discussion to hoof it like downmarket Fred-and-Ginger wannabes. Bewilderment at Branagh’s impetuous decision to transpose Shakespearean seriousness into madcap fluff animates a goodly portion of the hate this film has received.

I’m here to stand against the haters. Not because Branagh proves to bedazzlingly light on his feet—indeed, none of the ensemble company seems remotely expert at sashaying across the screen in heels or warbling their tentative notes along to the soundtrack’s catalogue of standards by Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and other titans of the American songbook. Alicia Silverstone is, as it turns out, no Judy Garland. Nevertheless, I will defend Branagh’s decision to make a musical out of Shakespeare’s play until my last breath because of his perceptive understanding that the Hollywood musical offers an honorable modern analogue for Love’s Labours Lost, a romantic comedy that is not really about either romance or comedy but is very much
about sonnets.

A Matter of Life and Death

June 10, 2026.Reading time 14 minutes.

By David Lazar
Art: “Azure” by Nawmi Manaam

Michael Powell directed several of the greatest English films of the twentieth century, in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, his screenwriting and producing partner. Of these, my favorite has always been A Matter of Life and Death (1946, originally titled Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.). It is a film of urgency and whimsy, familiar tropes (angels, wings in heaven, celestial judge) and original images (an RAF flyer quoting poetry as his plane, in flames, heads down; the same pilot on the beach speaking to a naked Pan-like boy). But before we get to the film’s romantic and poetic soul, perhaps we should start with the prelude, unlike anything that had been presented in a narrative film previously.

We are told, “Any resemblance to any other world known or unknown is purely coincidental,” a play on the preemptive dodge of liabilities in narratives that draw on “actual events.” But Powell and Pressburger, ambitiously, are really telling us that we’re going to see something new. In soft, deep-blue technicolor, we see distant stars as an authoritative baritone documentary-like voiceover intones: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?”

“Late to Counsel”: Poetry as Trace Evidence in Kiss Me Deadly

June 9, 2026.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Matthew VanWinkle

In the noir classic Kiss Me Deadly (directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955), the big break in the case arrives in an unusual way. Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) has been wearing out shoe leather, punching hoods, kissing dames—time-honored investigative techniques by the standards of the genre, but he hasn’t made a lot of headway with them. The lead that puts him on track is an excerpt from a Christina Rossetti sonnet, haltingly read by Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), who’s mixed up in the business somehow.

Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of a future that you plann’d.
Only remember me; you’ll [sic] understand[.]
But [sic] if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once we had [. . .]

Lily is picking her spots in the poem pretty haphazardly. She’s vocalizing lines 5-7 and then jumping ahead to the eleventh and twelfth lines. Something in her improvised edit clicks with Mike, though; he asks to hear those last two lines again. He and Lily head out, hot on the trail to somewhere cold.

Mike’s looking for something but he’s not sure what. He just knows that it’s big, and that it has something to do with Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman), a hitchhiker he’d picked up in the movie’s opening sequence. She’s in trouble, barefoot and out of breath on the highway blacktop. After a stop at a gas station—Christina heads into the bathroom while an attendant unwraps a tree branch from the front axle—she informs Mike that she’s named after Rossetti. She keeps looking over her shoulder as he drives, expecting the worst. Just before she’s proven right—they’re run off the road and she’s tortured to death under interrogation—she tasks him with her last wish: “remember me.”

Broken Voices: Wenders, Tarkovsky, and the Plight of Modern Poetry

June 8, 2026.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Michael Lavers

I.

Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire is, among other things, an elegy for Homer. We see the aged poet (played by Curt Bois) wandering through a divided Berlin, no longer the unifying voice of a community, the consolidator of disparate histories and legends, but, in his own words, “an old man with a broken voice . . . ignored and mocked.” He can’t climb a flight of stairs without pausing to catch his breath.

No longer the center that binds together what otherwise would remain scattered—the Earth and the stars, mortals and gods, time and eternity—his poem is studied in a library whose patrons cannot see its author passing by, burrowed as they are in their deaf and mute analyses.

Throughout the film, he interacts with no one. All we hear are his beleaguered thoughts: “Those who once listened to me over time became my readers instead. They no longer sit in a circle but apart, each oblivious to the other.” This isolation is made hideously visible in the city’s great graffitied wall, topped with razor wire, surrounded by once-glorious buildings left pockmarked by bullets and bombs.