Wrapped in a Banana Leaf // J. Rodriguez

wrapped in a banana leaf, // i float in the sea. // i smell like earth. // i am still green. // and when the soldiers come to get me, dressed // in their sunday killing best, // i will raise my arms // up towards the sun // and i will put up no fight.
... in boston, tío pedro is wrapped in ashes // and
spread across the world. // in some other version of our lives, // he is laughing in the kitchen // and the hospital room is far, // far away. // in another version, // he is given a proper burial. // in this one, // he is just a stone in my shoe // that rolls around and around, // and my mom keeps his photo // on the shelf by the television. // it is a ghost that haunts me. // now, he is a day in the calendar year, // and christmas passes like a ticker // counting up and up. // in this version, grief // is an unwound clock, // and i am waiting still // for the soldiers to come and get me.

---

Born in New York and growing up all around the United States, J. Rodriguez has called Minnesota their home since 2019, and has been writing for as long as they can remember. They have previously published poetry in Chanter and Spaces, two student publications at their alma mater, Macalester College. Now, they spend most of their time taking pictures around Minneapolis and regularly updating their Letterboxd profile. They are mother to one child, a tabby cat named Howl the Destroyer.

Trespassing // David B. Prather

The first time I saw a jack-in-the-pulpit,
it was an accident,
or is that by accident? Trees scattered
shadows, and
a freshwater spring wept from the side
of a hill. Or was that me?
The sun tried to part the leaves
for a better look,
and a breeze crept low in the weeds,
chasing mice and grasshoppers,
or it may have been searching a place to rest.
I thought the plant rare,
and my father told me if I were careless,
I could be punished,
or was it admonished? I was afraid
to touch those leaves,
sure they were toxic as poison ivy, sure
there would be a sermon
in mist and shade. I was alone, or was I lonely?
Sometimes, I can’t tell
the difference. There had to be birdsong,
and surely wild animals,
though I don’t remember either. I could
take you to that place,
but we’d have to secure the gate behind us
to make it appear
we were never there.

---

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands: A Journal of Poems (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Cutleaf, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

A Plain Old Man // William Doreski

Being a plain old man stuck
in a savage village, I take the wind

as personally as a bar brawl.
Trees consider touching their toes.

A copper weathervane goes south.
Wood smoke flattens and obscures

the innocence of the winter sky.
I read only quarrelsome books,

especially Plato. His version
of Socrates addles the young men

flaunting their marble torsos.
His arguments squeeze their brains

like oranges shipped from Egypt.
The village hunkers down and grins

that bestial grin I first saw
in the Forest Park Zoo when

my mother crushed my hand in fear
of great apes mocking their jailors.

The wind today could topple
a tree and render me homeless,

but I strain my elementary Greek
and believe everything I read.

---

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors (2024). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Self Portrait as the Last Kumquat // Annie Diamond

We cool our feet in the oldest pool in Santa Ana,
built 1929. I am 29, inelegant save for swimming.

Remembering how to breathe among wisteria
and lilies, Easter. Is the Eiffel Tower the most

famous thing in the world? Took a boat
on the Douro under Gustave Eiffel Bridge,

eat the last kumquat off its tree, share one pitcher
of gin cocktail. California a conundrum. Sunlight

psalmic, smells of ocean. For so long I wanted
to be beautiful, and then I found I was. Novato

we ate Peruvian food and drank pisco cocktails,
hiked Cathedral Grove, Muir Woods: devotional.

For dappled things. Lemon trees so casual.
Once I thought I knew the size and shape of

this heart; I was 17, arrogant. Muscular
where I have not been before. Last week

a stranger in an elevator told me
I was radiating happiness, I think

the best compliment I have ever received. Once I
misread sunbathe as unbathe, preferred the mistake.

---

Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet and recovering academic who has made her home in Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2018. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, No Tokens Journal, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She is currently trying to place her first poetry manuscript.

Strauss’s Last Songs // Sandra Kolankiewicz

Later, I sought solitude, sure being
alone was not the same as loneliness,
till I started to recall and, in the
remembering, understood the broken
glass, the hand moving faster than I could
see. On my wrist the scar’s now visible
only in summer, my skin browner.
Unwanted thoughts, determined memories
intrude on my view of the river in
the midst of one of Strauss’s last songs,
composed for his wife when he was ninety,
an urgent celebration of love and
ecstasy, his bliss vying with my past
despair. Did she adore without losing
herself, embrace for a lifetime without
being caught up in his arms, find her breath
if wrapped too tightly, struggle to break free?

---

Sandra J. Kolankiewicz’s poems and stories have appeared widely over the decades, most recently in New World Writing, The Write Launch, and Courtship of Winds. Her most recent chapbook is Even the Cracks, published by Finishing Line Press. Read more from this author.

Be There or Be Square // Frederick Pollack

Clark in his book on Modernism
goes on and on about the green
half of the canvas above David’s dead
Marat. To which one intuitively adds
Malevich’s Black Square. They are images
of the Other World – at least an other world,
which is not, admittedly, inviting,

but also not, in a strict sense,
unattractive. A choice is required,
the kind you don’t make;
someone makes it for you. Meanwhile
lunch, the sky brightens,
the world outside is distances (unlike
the other, which cosmologists say,

although unreachable, is next door),
and several cars from the neighborhood leave
for a party. It’s been so long
since you were invited anywhere ... Though
it’s true that almost everyone
you know has died or otherwise dissolved,
you still regard your quarrel as with space, not time.

---

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Poetics: neither navelgazing mainstream nor academic pseudo-avant-garde. Website: frederickpollack.com

Horoscope / Affirmation / Promise /Prayer // Haylee Shull

New Year’s Day, 2025

Already the days grow longer a few seconds at a time.
Already the light traces a path along the wall.
The old years burrow and harden like swallowed stones
stuck deep in your gut. You will carry them with you.
There will be dancing and sparkly cocktails. There will be
footprints in stiff snow and cat hair on all your sweaters.
May will break your heart, but not for the reason you expect.
You will know hunger. You can interpret this however you choose.
On the other side of your grief is (I’m so sorry to tell you) more grief.
What I’m saying is, you will hear the wind through the leaves
and it will sound like rain. You will keep looking up.
You will keep waiting for the drops to hit your skin.
How long will you hold on to your dread? What I’m telling you
is that the moon will fall from the sky. The ground will swallow
you up along with everything you have ever loved. Then what?
Aren’t you listening? July is only July. A poem is only a poem and
a fortune is only a wish. Kiss someone before it’s too late.
Tally up your losses. Stand in the middle of the street and wail at the sky
until your sobs catch in your throat. Drop to your knees shouting,
why why why!, and fuck you, stars!, and fuck you, fate! Run
until you can’t feel your legs and then strip down and kiss
every part of your body that you can reach—bare and clammy
and yours and you. You’re alive and then you’re not. Alone, and then
you’re not. Teeth bared and then not. Don’t mistake self-awareness for
control. You will get sunburnt. You will pick at your wounds.
You will wake up every morning and want and want and want
and want. All these things will happen. You will swim. Sweat. Swear.
Break the skin. Bite your nails. Coax. Confess. Float. Forget.
Some days it will make you cry. Some days the light breaks through
the window and that’s all there is.

---

Haylee Shull is a writer, artist, and Libra from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Swim Press. She has two cats and owns a super small, super gay art business with her sister.

old daze // Thomas Zimmerman

Venetian blinds moonlit your belly sliced
like bread // before though kisses traded rassling
in the weedy lot behind the Beef Days
Ferris wheel // we bummed a ride back home
Cheap Trick Bob Seger playing loud inside
the F-10 cab yes we were stacked in back
with tarps scrap metal sparking when we tossed it
on the highway singing “I Fought the Law”
// then homeward you & i my arm slung cross
your shoulders drunken broken orphic such
was my delusion // notebook out i scribbled lines
a sonnet “College Daze” you poured the drinks
bikini line the border guarded no
i met you at the great divide alive

---

Thomas Zimmerman (he/him/his) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. His poems have appeared recently in Ablanatha, Cold Signal, and Lowlife Lit. His latest poetry book is My Night to Cook (Cyberwit, 2024). Website: thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/

I Wish I Was a Riot Grrrl // Jadey Holcomb

Darling, you make me wolfish
up on this rooftop, under this
volcanic light.

Can I drink Cherry Bomb
lipstick, chew fishnets for dessert?
Press your lips to mine, fill me -
bones and all - with your smoke.

Let me quarry your leather-cracked
ribs. Let me burrow under soft tissue.

Grunge girl, goddess of violets
I remember when you jumped
from that bridge, billowing into

glittering waters. Can you hear me,
under this bubbling music, under this erupting light?

---

Jadey Holcomb (she/her) is a poet, storyteller, and author of Average Asexual. She is currently studying Creative Writing and is the poetry editor of her university’s literary journal. She has a deep infatuation with Conan Gray, red eyeliner, and yearning for what she does not have. When not writing she can be found searching the night sky for Orion’s Belt.

Sign Off // Ellie Snyder

While out at Bullman’s Pizza with Ty and Caroline
to celebrate the job offer my mother watched
her most recent ex-husband arrive with a woman
and sit down next booth. By the time I visit in three
weeks I expect she’ll have been on at least
that many dates, less thin, no longer saying
she’d just like to find a companion. Still saying
she’d just like to warn the new woman, he’ll
fuck her up. Her laugh convincing since finally true.
She’ll still be sad I don’t want love from my lover. 

My brother? Starts flying tomorrow and put down
crabby deaf white-faced Daisy yesterday,
his dog at his dad’s. Grief never gives a moment.
He is otherwise happy, obsessive, the straightest
gay man possible, glancing up against the staples
only thanks to the man with whom he exchanged
gold bands on a bench in Mexico City. Thanks to
Brayden I can tell my brother I think I’m Miranda
but also Samantha and a little bit Carrie. They’ll
marry once settled in Colorado, once my brother
is used to his monthly jumps across the sky.

I love them more than usual tonight without
wanting to speak to them. A signature
lifted the fog and it’s like I no longer have
a single problem, perpetual catch plucked
from my throat. The sleep alone. I’ve learned
how to eat again and walk uphill, I’ve read
200 books. I’m finally moving forward.
I just remembered I used to eat men.

---

Montanan poet Ellie Snyder writes and manages socials for a global nonprofit and is passionate about literature, fashion and music. Find her work in Pangyrus, The Headlight Review, The Blood Pudding, and elsewhere, and find her fitchecks on Instagram @elliegsnyder.

The Coast (A Diary Entry) // Cole Forrest

miss the lake back home
so I drove to the ocean
mussels always taste like the waters they’re from
it’s like that pop song with the ice cream out here
ate at the same ice cream shop
I like what’s simple like personal fulfillment like going to places they talk about in songs
I missed water so much
I wonder if I taste just like the lake
it’s sweet to me, I hope I’m sweet tasting to you
thought about all the traditional land we’re moving through
mom would probably want me to leave some tobacco
“I didn’t know it was actually in a valley”
I genuinely believe I’m an idiot most days
ndn idiot
ndiot? it’s not funny
walked through a neighborhood with palm trees I wondered what it would take for me to live here
went bowling and I was humbled
bowling one of those things in life that it’s okay to be like just fine at
going across Arizona some of it reminded me of the landscape back home
everything is almost like home
my heart’s one of those squishy toys that’s full of liquid and you’re kind of worried it’s gonna burst everywhere or it crosses your mind like “what if this totally explodes on my couch”
that’s my heart filled with lake water
don’t squeeze it too hard
if you know you know but those dinosaurs beside the tipis on the side of the highway always make me laugh
the land makes me laugh
had a realization the other day when I lay tobacco down it’s for everyone
it’s an offering to everyone in my life, not just my own dreams
cried in the bathtub the water’s never the right temperature
I had a dream once about the ocean
I was with someone I didn’t know
we stood on a hill overlooking the water
I asked where I was
she said I was home

---

Cole Forrest is a Queer Anishinaabe writer from Nipissing First Nation. Last year they published a debut co-authored poetry collection titled Once The Smudge is Lit. Writing is their passion, and any opportunity to share their words is a welcomed one. Miigwetch.

Roxy’s Heaven // Cole Weiss

They have boarded up the place, emptied out the popcorn machines, and the carpet stinks of butter and mud as it is torn from the flooring. You and I are still sitting in Theater 2. They are

ripping out the fixtures, gutting the cinema, throwing out the rolled up movie posters that didn’t sell. We have not opened our diet root beers yet. The hiss of the soda’s gas is forever.

I am waiting for the previews. They never come. They are tearing down the Roxy
and in my imagination you and I hold hands over the armrest as they take us with her.

---

Cole Weiss (they/he) is a current junior at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, working towards a degree in elementary education. When not drafting lesson plans, they enjoy writing, digital photography, and scouring bookstores to expand their poetry book collection.

What’s Human // Thomas Higgins

When a cat comes to lay at your feet
you never ask why, but you do
hold still for as long as you possibly can,
even holding your breath as you once did
passing a grave. In the presence
of ghosts and small gods, you believe
that it’s wise to be humble, despite having
no proof of either. A cat, however, proves
there are some things language can’t tell us
which love also is, that what’s human
about us can be what sustains it
as silence and stillness sustain
a cat’s slumber, the pulse of its breathing
a language you both understand.

---

Thomas Higgins is a poet and critic who is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magpie Zine, The Inquisitive Eater, The Adroit Journal, Hoxie Gorge Review, the minnesota review, and elsewhere.

If a Plant Dreams // Zixiang Zhang

the ground
into being, what does that say about farming?
a pilosus in the seam,
hearing john’s words on the radio
machine potentiating
world war iii, thinking miles to set ablaze. 
tacit
is their need for light.
i am     
perch on first waking,
bladder ridding the sapless grain; water 
tipping
out of bed,
to find the anointed pressure point. 

the first disappointment
in genesis is
the immaculate conception of a granny smith:
that the axis bifurcates 
& center
of mass surrenders
bark, to be always heart. 
blue veins shedding dendritic
discharge
underneath the atlantic, silver lilies
brought to blush
on the face
draining the existence of red— the winds
can’t breathe into being, the potassium 
aplenty.
flowers grow tall
& halt the crown that thomas dreams of 
engorging.
gamma rays dislodge the train. 
it is winter 
400 million years away, iapetus
prior to photoshop. seabiscuits 
avoiding molasses,
tricuspid tongues
from the stable licking the moonlit antorbit.  

if a thought,
to be human, spends
bilateral symmetry
in the attic, or
if a plant dreams,         
a plant              dreams a planter.

---

Zixiang Zhang (he/him/his) has poems published or forthcoming in Hanging Loose, Cathexis Northwest, Consilience, Pedestal, The Nature of Our Times, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality, and others. He holds an undergraduate degree in geology from Stanford University and master’s degrees from UC Berkeley and the American Museum of Natural History. Once, he published research on brachiopod evolution in the journal Paleobiology. Now, he teaches Earth Science at a small high school in NYC and enjoys growing succulents, erging, sunbathing, and sundry. He may be active @zzverse.

How the Moonbeam Endows the Rime // John August

Barely, brushingly.

---

John August is an emerging writer. He currently resides in the Midwest, and his work explores themes of addiction recovery, ecological mourning, and the place of the sacred in modern life. At his best, his work says something about how those three things are one.

Fractures of Meaning // Radoslav Rochallyi

---

Radoslav Rochallyi: “With my work, I try to look behind the curtain of the philosophy of universal semantics and discover emotional symbols and visual signs that have universal intelligibility - red color = passion, danger, or circle = unity, thus trying to complete my aesthetic-logical minimalism as a system that combines aesthetics and logic in content and mathematical and geometric patterns in form. This helps me to create the most concise description of the expression of complex ideas. I try to say more with less. In my work, I try to answer the question of how deep meanings can be communicated through simple, aesthetically pleasing forms of mathematics and geometry. This minimalism is the basis of my artistic-aesthetic communication system. The result of my work is mathematical poetry (in all my artistic expressions from text to painting) as a language of the subjective experience of reality.”

For the Student Who Told Me Their Grandmother Died… Twice // Ezra Fox

They tell you grief comes with permissions,
a hall pass, an extension, a moment's reprieve.
As if pain needs documentation, as if suffering
requires a formal declaration.

First, let me say: I am sorry for your loss.
Grief can swallow a semester whole,
shrink it smaller than the space between
a B- and a B.

When your email landed in my inbox,
my own grandmother surfaced. Her voice
rising through memory, like wind. Strange
how quickly I filled your loss with my own,
how grief recognizes grief.

Then, your second email arrived, same story,
different month, grandmother dying again,
and I understood: not a lie, but a different kind of loss. 

Oh, dear student,
if you've learned to summon ghosts
as shields against the living dark, I understand.

If the weight of now, the deadlines, the discussions,
the endless notifications of crisis feels
like watching avalanches through glass,
you don't need to conjure grandmothers. 

Let me be sorry, instead, for the losses
too quiet to name. The best friend who moved
away mid-sentence, the morning you woke
to find your childhood had slipped out
while you slept, for the nights your anxiety grows
teeth, for the days when planes cast shadows
like dark prophecies, when your phone
becomes too heavy to lift, or when
your reflection wears a stranger's face. 

Sorry for the stuffed bear guarding your empty
bed at home, for mistaking homesickness
for food poisoning again, for dormitory mirrors
that make you question your belonging.
And, for every time you've swallowed words
like broken glass, thinking no one wants
to hear your truth.

You don't need to dress your pain.
I won't think less of you for simply living
in a world that demands performance
of our wounds. I see how they told you
small hurts don't deserve attention,
that missing class requires tragedy.

Let the deadlines dissolve.
There are more important things in this life:
geese cutting shadows across fog-draped quads,
laughter echoing in stairwells at midnight,
the way strangers cluster under bus stop awnings
during rain, and each text from a beloved,
that sits like a crystal in your pocket.

---

Ezra Fox lives and writes in San Francisco, CA. In their writing, Ezra is curious about impermanence and non-duality, and how it pertains to their subjects of lineage, queerness, and spirituality. Learn more about Ezra, and read their other publications at ezrafox.net.

Deliberate Displays of Unease // Hallie Fogarty

Deliberate Displays of Unease

I’m trying to get into a life of hedonism
but I honestly skew more towards prude
when it comes to vibes, not that I want to,
and the most virgo thing about me is the
fact that I didn’t buy my first vibrator until
I        had       done        multiple        years         of         research       and     I
ended up buying a $165 one, light pink
and the new technology, clitoral suction,
and still the first time I used it I felt nothing,
felt like my clitoris was broken, but now I
use it religiously, can finish in three minutes
or less, except for the times it takes me 40
minutes, which my sex therapist best friend
says is not my body’s fault, and I’m always
torn between my mind and my body but
lately I’ve been trying to take my body’s side
because frankly my mind has taken up enough
of my time and space and mental energy and
maybe I’m not just my body but I’m surely
not just my mind, either, and honestly I’ve
been looking to be a little objectified, recently,
‘cuz growing up fat meant I never really felt
beautiful or wanted, especially by men, which
until recently I wasn’t even sure I really wanted,
and maybe it’s shallow but all I really want is to
be called beautiful and have that person believe
it, have myself believe it, but I also want to be
called hot and to feel hot, and I had this conversation
with someone once about Chappell Roan’s “HOT
TO GO” lyrics call me hot, not pretty and we
must have had different wounds because I
related to the lyric, am unendingly used to being
called cute or adorable and frankly rarely even
pretty but that’s the most heated a compliment
towards me would ever get, but he said that all
he wanted was for someone to think he was pretty,
and he was, is, but must’ve been sexualized and
socialized in a way to think that all someone wanted
from him was his body when I’ve never felt like
anyone wanted my body, and no, objectification
shouldn’t be my goal but when the societal standard
is skinny and thin and beautiful it’s hard not to
feel that pressure, that desire for something I shouldn’t
need, and lately I’ve been pondering if I even know
what I need, what I want, or if all this wanting
I’ve been doing is a performance in and of itself,
because no emotion I feel really feels complete until
I have someone on the outside to witness it, to
bring it to fruition, like how beautiful can I look
when I’m suffering, when I cry, and honestly lately
I’ve been wondering if I really want anything from
anyone or if I want to be alone, wondering if I just
have high standards or if I even want a relationship
and the idea of being aromantic terrifies me completely
because even though I’ve never been a hopeless romantic
I still have always liked the idea of coming home to
someone, of the big finale scene in the romcom, like
the proposal in While You Were Sleeping with all the
family smiling at Sandra Bullock through thick fogged
glass, and Bill Pullman’s quiet smile just waiting to take
her away and fulfill her life’s fantasies, whisk her away
to Italy, and I think frankly I’m too caught up in the
gay version of gender roles to really identify what I want,
like I love butches but do I want them to order my food
for me, open every door, and there aren’t even enough
butches in Northern Kentucky for me to try dating
one, because I’ve always only loved them in theory,
and frankly that’s what life feels like, doing everything
only in theory, and most of the time life doesn’t even
seem worth half the effort it takes to survive it.

---

Hallie Fogarty is a poet, teacher, and artist from Kentucky. She received her MFA in poetry from Miami University, where she was awarded the 2024 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Award for Poetry. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry South, The Lindenwood Review, Hoxie Gorge Review, and elsewhere. Besides writing, she loves cardigans, dogs, and everything peach-flavored. Find her online: www.halliefogarty.com

B & B // Kathryn Reese

B & B

I find him in the kitchen making sandwiches, as men do, not with marmalade but with mandarins. He has laid the skin pith-down on thick-cut squares of white bread, he is unfolding the segments and bedding them down, each curve snug against another. There is a butter knife balanced on an open jar of mustard. The mustard lid lies face-up on the bench. There are a dozen mustard seeds scattered: along the knife blade, the bench, his dark cuticle, his lips. He is so much taller than any man I have slept beside—when he sees me, he smiles, slides the bread under a warm grill, and pours tea from a green pot decorated with cherry blossom and dragon. We sit at a mahogany table covered with a linen cloth, a vase of fenugreek leaves and almond buds between us. We eat as though pith is not bitter, as if mustard is mild, as if hot juice is not burning my chin.

---

Kathryn Reese lives on Peramangk land in South Australia. She works in medical science & enjoys road trips, hiking & chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Kathryn’s work can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Lit, & Australian Poetry Journal.

Love Poem for the Neoliberal Age // Michael Conner

I don’t want to be radicalized by terror.
I want to feed mourning doves
from the palm of my hand in spite of it.

 Steady breathing, no tremors.
Offering what little I can before
all this gets reduced to statistics –

 plotting out the maps and graphs for how
to go on existing. What if, what if.
Negotiating the amount or razor wire
I would crawl through to get around the fence

            (which depends, I guess, on whether or not
you’re still there crawling beside me).

Every year eating approximately one credit card
worth of microplastics. Keeping the accounts current,
dancing through another dehumanizing transactional
relationship. I, you. I, it.

When we return to the dirt together,
how much will remain that hasn’t been spent –

            monocropped into toxic dust, burned out,
depleted of all nutrients?

I don’t want to be radicalized by terror,
But I am willing to die for a small plot of land

where we are the rich, dark soil spread beneath
the echinacea, watching the doves

eat from our daughter’s hand. 

Michael Conner is a writer and public health worker living in Swannanoa, North Carolina. He is the author of Total Annihilation (Bottle Cap Press, 2023). His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Hare's Paw, YNST, Neologism, and Spectra, among others.