Old Friends

By Charlotte Iannone

᠅

Eyes shut: Earth has unraveled into dreams.

I talk to you in all of them.

I tell the truth.

In the streets at night

I see a thousand twitching nerves like rope

roiling to a needle on the wall.

Then a thousand invisible snakes exploding out

across the continent, into trenches of sea.

My finger meets the needle—it bleeds.

Too many tomes of us—too many inken deeds.

The handwriting—all of a lowly writer—blurs

into mismemory.

Seawater has soaked the pages

(I omit the nights

I found you hovering over the basin,

dunking them. Some nights

it was me).

Perhaps we are beyond saving.

The shame of admitting it:

I will no longer climb

when you call,

if you have ever, like a child in the dark,

called out to me at all.

If it was not always

just a spiderweb of dreams.

᠅

Charlotte Iannone is an emerging writer whose work revolves around her upbringing on Long Island and the complicated nature of families. She just completed her first novel, a family epic centered around a real-life historical family that lived in East Williston, New York. At Bowdoin College, she was the Editor-in-Chief of The Bowdoin Review and Poet Laureate of the Peucinian Society. In her free time, she plays soccer competitively, reads classic novels, and serves her local community as a volunteer firefighter.

You're Named for a Saint

By Nick Hoffman

᠅

The fittingness of it: 

old language, old book

and always found 

on calf skin, pulled and dried

With that name, if anything bloody 

ever happened to you, 

it would mean something 

In the bathtub, they rub off easy

your wick-cut letters

and I’ve cleaned for now 

those etymologies and other daily dusts

The shame of admitting it:

I forget my own mother sometimes

how she made me and thought, “yes,

this one will be a gift-giver 

and bring storms to a whimper”

Eyes closed and my palms upward

I wonder fully, and I pray halfway

thinking of the feast days 

falling between March and harvest

But your name is the spring, 

and the spring is a numb chariot,

bursting forth in its senseless living

Its wheels scatter a planet 

of supplicant flies, thin hands

fingerless and busy, humming

vespers at the watermelon rinds

And I love to watch you

and the seeds swell over days

Ticks stuck in the pink flesh

᠅

Nicholas Hoffman is a medievalist and writer from the Hudson Valley. He lives outside Washington, DC, with his partner and any number of pet rats. His work has appeared in Chronogram, Night Picnic, and Eunoia Review.

Wanting

 By Kate Fetters-Walp

᠅

The world is an endless wheel of prizes
and look at me:
holding hands with my trepidatious mind
to dream of lands across a sea,
new and sparkling
(I'm afraid of water, barely learned to swim).

Sometimes I lay in bed and sing,
voice scratched up and hair a mess,
and in the box of my car, my voice may ring
but I never take the mic at karaoke
(I never do anything).

I wonder fully, and I pray halfway
and though I've seldom been religious,
in my morning haze, there are church bells,
tempting.

I saw it last night, for a moment:
the glimmer of a future
where I live and breathe
the kryptonite of my torment
but my hands weren't made to build bridges,
never were.

For what in the world have I ever done
except sleep and dream
and want
and want some more?

᠅

Kate Fetters-Walp is a high school senior with a passion for poetry and storytelling as a way of connecting to the human experience. She lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and like many creatives, finds that her work flows more smoothly when she's in nature. Kate is excited to continue learning the craft of writing through working on novels and poems. She is also looking forward to submitting to more literary journals in the future.

List in my back pocket

By Alex Stolis

᠅

She wants an aquarium.
Can’t explain why.
Something about waves.
Some vision she had.
Her first kiss.
Billy, three years older.
He was 18, had a mustache.
It didn’t tickle.
She always felt landlocked.
Not quite pretty enough to be asked to the dance.
Not ugly enough to attract the mean girls.
Wore baggy clothes, covered herself like a bruise.
Failed math in 12th grade.
Almost missed graduation.
Stuffed a quarter ounce in her bra

when Billy took her to see Van Halen.
Billy so stoned he forgot where he was.
I took her home.
Didn’t even try to hold her hand.
Said she looked like Chrissie Hynde.
I think she liked the comparison.
Gave me her number and a peck on the cheek.
Billy never called her again.
Someone said he joined the Navy.
Someone else said he moved to LA.
I’m afraid of water, barely learned to swim.
She wants an aquarium.
Wants to quit smoking.
To sit for hours in a movie theater.
Wants me to write her a poem.
To stop being the answer to her questions.
I tell her I’ll carry her in my back pocket.
Wrapped in cellophane.
I tell her she looks like Kim Addonizio.
I think she likes the comparison.

᠅

Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in Hudson Valley New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.

The Smile

 By Lynn White

᠅

The picture fell.
Unharmed
she still smiled back.

The glass had broken
but uncut
she still smiled back.

I replaced her back
in the frame
that buckles precariously now,

making her smile is a little lop-sided,
but then,
so is the Mona Lisa’s.

I think she likes the comparison
as unabashed
she still smiles back.

᠅

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/

Alternate Endings

By Mara Lovelock

᠅

Everyone has that point–

a moment when their branch

went one way

not the other

Perhaps a decade

pain averted

seven scars

and countless procedures

erased

burden to a family not yet known

undone

I don’t need

an alternate ending

to know

what didn’t kill me

didn’t make me stronger

it broke me apart

First a blow

like an axe

to a log

then

a carving knife

whittled away

until

I was a toothpick–

the frame

that buckles precariously

under this messy and glorious

lean-to of life–

the only possible one

᠅

Mara Lovelock (she/her) is an emerging poet whose work explores trauma, illness, bisexuality, nature, and motherhood. She facilitates a community mindfulness and meditation group and is at work on a memoir-in-poems manuscript. Her work has appeared in Gnashing Teeth Publishing’s Poem of the Day and is forthcoming in Stanchion’s Elegant Variations and Third Moon Press's anthology The Museum of Human Hearts. Originally from East Tennessee, she lives in Santa Clara, CA with her husband and 4-year-old son. IG: @maralovelockpoetry

Here where we still exist

By Allie Olvera

᠅

In the basement of my mother’s house
lives a generation of baby teeth.
Sets that once grew in her body, too,
back when we were hers.

The old bits of us live jumbled inside an Altoids tin;
bleeding molars we twisted out before they were ready,
then tucked sweetly under pillows.
I don’t know where my sisters end and I begin.

Waves tear at the sandcastle.
Relationships sour,
memories tarnish,
but our enamel sits unchanged.

These teeth will go must go somewhere
when she dies and the house is sold.
Time turned me into a
burden for a family not yet known.

᠅

Allie Olvera is a writer and educator living in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her writing has appeared in Trash Cat Lit and other publications. Find more at allieolvera.com. @allie.olvera