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.

Metropolitan Thoughts // Tor Rose

1.

I show up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a MoMa hat. “Oh fuck,” I text my friend. “And?” she replies. This is only embarrassing in a self-imposed, insular way. No one actually cares. No one will even notice. And yet here I am, feeling like I’ve just shown up to a wedding wearing white. Narcissist, I utter under my breath.

            2.

I definitely died of grief in a past life because, unfortunately, I am that dramatic. Cue the violins. I'm convinced of this every time I’m in a museum. Certain paintings remember me in ways I cannot. I feel this while standing before Graziella by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. As the story goes, Graziella is the title character of a novel by Alphonse de Lamartine that recounts the tragic affair between a young Frenchman and the beautiful granddaughter of a Neapolitan fisherman. I actually dated a Frenchman once. He sucked. At the end of the story, the heroine dies of grief when her lover is forced to abandon her. This means I probably saw love as a vocation in a past life, too. Maybe I still do? My dramatics are fairly consistent.

            3.

This spurs my next thought: how could men render women in such exquisite detail while treating them so horribly? The softness of a hand, the longing in the eyes—it’s like if a serial killer went to church every Sunday. What’s even more (or less) baffling is that nothing has really changed. Women are still muses more than equals, trapped in gilded cages that sparkle but remain impenetrable. You need us, you want us, but we exist forever at arm’s length. What if I don’t want to be kept at arm’s length? What if I can feel you on the other side of the door with your hand hovering the knob?

            4.

The world is burning. It is an unseasonably warm autumn for another year in a row, but don’t worry, we’re amending damage with electric cars and soggy paper straws so that oil on canvas can persevere. Am I a bad person if I say I’m not entirely mad about it—oil on canvas? Stop and marvel at what it’s given us. I don’t bless the greed, but I do find beauty in the gospel—that transcendence is born from ruin, and every stroke is a eulogy for what’s gone. The irony, of course, is that museums are mausoleums dressed as sanctuaries. Art is to destruction, as sacrifice is to salvation. Culture is preserved, and it’s not alive, but it is not dead either. Do you find religion beautiful when divorced from dogma, too? 

            5.

I can’t help but feel like something is missing, like my thoughts would seem more punctuated if I were able to wander with a cappuccino in hand. I understand the rationale, of course. One rogue coffee cup, and we’re rewriting art history. Would really raise the whole “you break it, you buy it” to a perverse level. But there’s still a lack of alchemy. Coffee gives the hands purpose while the mind trails off. Same with cigarettes. I wonder if they would welcome cigarettes over coffee? This thought arrives punctually around 12:30 PM—birth control time. Nothing pulls you out of a historical reverie like tending to your reproductive autonomy. I sit on the bench that sits before Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc. Just as I’m sensing a correlation, I overhear a stranger say she has that “blue eye stare.” I think of Ray Liotta, and every documentary I watched on the Liberation Movement. Down goes my pill with the same quiet assertion of authority in a patriarchal context. Be damned my constitution for needing to define every trivial scenario. 

            6.

Nobody understood divinity in distortion better than Dalí. I say this while marveling at one of my favorite paintings of all time, Madonna. There’s something about this image, and I want to say it’s the tension. There’s an ear, and then there’s a face, a face that doesn’t want to be seen. Not entirely. It hides within the curve, in the soft place where sound is swallowed whole. I step closer and there she is—a woman caught between what is and what was—a Madonna not yet born, not yet lost. She does not offer anything easy but stays with you like a memory. I wonder if the ear knows what to listen for? I wonder how much of a museum’s magic is in the art itself and how much is in the people it draws. I wonder this as the only spectator in the room. 

            7.

And while we’re on the subject: What makes art Art? Maybe the answer is irrelevant. Maybe the act of asking is the point. Everything here is a confession of which sins are admitted and forgiven. It asks: Did you leave people better or worse than when you found them? And like any good sinner, you avoid answering directly, choosing instead to linger a little longer in front of a painting by the original mad genius: Van Gogh. The mad genius who stands as a metaphor. Who made immortalization our greatest spite. I see Van Gogh as both wound and salve; proof that brilliance often lurks in the margins. This was a man who certainly saw love as a vocation. Maybe I’m Van Gogh?

            8.

Now that I’ve made my way to the Ancient Egyptian wing, I’m curious if the secret to eternal youth is dry climates and dying young. Maybe it’s not even about immortality but the illusion of it—mummified in lavish tombs and embalmed flesh. No one does death better. Also, Night at the Museum could totally happen. I’m telling you, the statues know something we don’t. 

            9.

I have always felt a certain kinship to Georgia O’Keeffe and Rothko. As someone who is removed entirely from their medium, I’m drawn to how they enrich emptiness. O’Keeffe seems to suggest that softness, when done right, can be just as authoritarian. Rothko says the opposite yet somehow achieves the same effect. They leave us only the essentials, which in turn feels vast and all-encompassing. A balancing act of restraint and intensity. It’s the idea that less isn’t just more; it’s everything. It actually reminds me of my ballet years. I was taught at a young age that a dancer’s vitality is to move with purpose without visible effort. Every movement has to extend beyond the body as if each limb comes with its own extension chord. It’s a balancing act of weightlessness and power. Softness, when done right, can be just as authoritarian.

            10.

Gift shops are proof that humans can turn even the most existential experiences into transactions. After a spiritual stroll through centuries of human suffering and triumph, what better way to commemorate the journey than a tote bag emblazoned with The Death of Socrates? It’s capitalism’s greatest magic trick, and I eat it up every time. Wait, why didn’t I stop in here first to change my hat?

            11.

And on their way out, the dead whisper to the living: Come again soon.

---

Tor Rose is an award-winning poet emerging from the streets of New York. Through her artistry, she creates poignant portraits of the human experience, allowing readers to walk the fine line between imagination and reality

I’ve an Idea Where to Put the Babies // Adam Peterson

It’s a very comprehensive plan, so I want you to listen carefully when I tell you what I think should be done with all the babies—

Step one—we put the babies on an island.

There is no step two.

I knew it was the perfect solution to our baby problem because the instant I thought of it I could breathe for the first time in years. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t shaking. I calmly started packing tiny baby socks.

Before you can object, here’s why the baby-island can’t fail—

The babies will have a puppy on the island. In fact, I’ve already got a puppy, and I sent him ahead. And I know, I know, puppy is just another word for baby, but this puppy is responsible. This puppy gets it.  

His name is Max. The babies have many names, and we’ll no longer have to apologize for the ones we forget. In fact, maybe it’s even better this way, confirmation of the idea that there are things we need to keep and things we need to let go.

Babies and history—let go.

Freedom and adult situations—keep.

So we’ll charter a ship. We’ll cram it full of babies and send it to the island. There, Max will welcome the babies with wet puppy kisses. There, the babies will grow up far away from our world, the world where I will almost certainly be regarded as a hero for solving our baby conundrum.  

There’s no other option. We’ve tried everything else, and there’s simply nowhere we can put the babies where they won’t continue to ruin our lives.

They wail when we show them French cinema. They roll into the street when we set them outside. They destroy our credit when we rent them apartments.

Even the wolves won’t raise them, not anymore, not after the horrors those last babies wreaked upon this Earth.

But Max—

He’s a good boy.

Probably.

I assume.

And it’s not like the babies will be gone forever. Someday, surely, they’ll learn to swim and return when we’re shriveled and grey. It will be so good to know them then when they can help us work our phones and tell us the names of celebrities we don’t recognize but hate all the same.

Only then will they understand why we did what we did. Only then will they know what they must do themselves.

Because the world has many islands.

Someday, darling, we’ll find ourselves on one, sent away by those we once sent away ourselves, those who’ll swear—

This is the only one of our sins they will ever repeat.

---

Adam Peterson’s fiction has appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He can be found online at www.adampeterson.net

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.

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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.

Her Cherry Aftertaste // Danielle Roberson

I am made of the ocean, but it is not made of me. I know this because it refuses to mix with my body, its many micro-organisms keeping me firmly on the surface. It’s best not to mix ill-matched things like us, like men and power or sour milk and eager tongues. It’s best not to infect the ocean, so full of nature and balance, with my manufactured sadness and hunger for absolution.

I won’t stay human for long, at least, that’s what they say. That’s why I’m here, because I don’t want to exist like this anymore. Everyone would be too sad if I chose to die, so I’m choosing this. I wonder what form I’ll take; they say it doesn’t always make much sense. You just float for a few hours, then the ocean sucks you under, transforming you into something alien along the way.

One woman turned into an octopus, she was a waitress. Another into a moray eel, she was a sex worker. The last I heard of turned into a sand flea; she was a banker.

I don’t think I ever knew these women personally, but the world acted like it did after they disappeared. This is not new, but that doesn’t make it less disappointing. There are many names for women like us. Survivors. Victims. Selfish. Overly-ambitious. Monsters. Deserving of our fate.

I wonder what will come of me, of this body I didn’t consent to inhabit. I wonder what I will become as my back hardens, turning to a dense helicoidal staircase of chitin. I don’t know how I know what that means, but I wish I had an exoskeleton like this when I lived on land. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Or maybe this is how it was always supposed to be. It’s better than what I had before, not because it’s stronger, but because it’s not me.

I dip my head under the sea surface, only my nose and lips touching the air now. I want my mind to go next, for the water to smooth the cracks in my brain, valuable surface area for the anxiety tunneling itself so deep it burns. I want to feel nothing but nothing.

I need to flip; the air isn’t enough anymore. I gasp, my mouth gaping, cells begging for oxygen. I’m trying, I tell them.

I push myself underwater and breathe in. I never expected it to taste like this. I expected brine, for the water to needle my throat. But the sweetness is incredible, intoxicating. I used to give sweetness like this, used to rip my heart out just to dip it in gold. Just to raise it high to watch the passersby marvel. I used to –

I need more water. All my arms current more toward my new gills.

All my arms? Legs? I wriggle them one by one. I think they’re all here. Eight pairs. I have eight pairs of legs. Arms? I wish I’d had this when I was younger. Or maybe I don’t. The more I can reach for, the more I can lose. And I’ve already lost so much.

My hair once fine but coiling out of me in endless follicles, is gone. I used to hate this gift, one of the few my father left me. I had his tight curls, hair brown and lightweight. So I burned it. Painted it copper. Made sure it fell straight against my shoulders and never so much as waved ever again. 

But then I loved my curls. I don’t remember why, but I do know that once I did, the world heard, and hysteria answered. That’s when a man threatened to set my hair on fire. Took out a lighter and flicked it in the middle of the metro car. I didn’t flinch because I knew I could learn to hate what he singed off. I could twist something like that into an act worthy of gratitude. But then he took his pants off, threw them at me. Took out his penis and stepped forward so it sat in my face. No man had ever done that before, and no man since. Not because the world got better but because I learned to keep my head down.

My eyes, they’re above water now, sticking out of my head. And I can see heat. Life. It’s swarming around me. But not in me. I’m a dead zone. I don’t know if I’ve ever been alive at all.

There’s something sprouting from my joints. Large smashers pushed into my body, although I can feel them fighting to spring out. I let them loose, watch the water turn to steam around me as it bubbles to the surface. The surface? I look around, my eyes shifting independently in different directions. When did I sink? When did I lose the sun?

The ocean floor is rough but oh-so-beautiful. This is exactly why I burrow beneath it, digging a small hole where I can listen to the world sing above me. I’ll come out only to eat, I decide. But something is moving out there. Something larger than me. I come out of my burrow, ready to defend my new home, something I never would have done before. Not because I didn’t care about where I lived but because I’ve only ever lived in an organized collection of rooms.

Lingering outside is an octopus with a human leg kicking independently of the tentacles. A moray eel swimming clumsily behind with human eyes. Its sclera bloodshot, probably from all the salt scratching the surface. And then, hardly visible, a sand flea. I only see it well because of the heat pushing from its body. It doesn’t have any humanity left, though I suspect that happened long before it came to the sea floor.

I should know these people. They are familiar, but I cannot remember where I’ve seen them before. I cannot remember what makes their leg and eyes human. Is it the tiny hairs covering the leg, flowing in the water, slowing this creature? It’s not too bad now, but what will happen when it needs to escape? And these eyes, inferior to my own, make me pity the moray eel. I want it to be able to see like me. To see everything around it all the time. To be ready for anything, all the time.

And the sand flea. It approaches my burrow, too eager to enter. I wouldn’t know this small thing used to be human if it wasn’t for the rage it ignites inside me. Memories of being human pass by in vignettes, playing like a TV across the room only in the corner of my right eye. I see a woman’s face. She’s telling me I’m smart for someone with such dark skin. Asking if my wife still thinks I’m pretty with a bean-shaped lump under my eye. She’s snapping at me because she can’t stand that I am braver than she will ever be. Another vignette: the same woman is in front of me, apologizing in a glass room. Asking for forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? She’s done something to me, it was just in my mind. I’ve lost it now.

But the body does not forget, human or not.

The sand flea comes closer, the eel and octopus watching us from afar. My new back shifts to accommodate me as I rise and then stare down. As I let the flea know that I am the predator now. And it is my prey. The smashers move so fast when they release from my body. The flea doesn’t even realize what’s happening until it’s too late. And then it’s stunned, abdomen cracked in half on a small rock I didn’t notice until now.

The eel and octopus swim away, scared they’re next. The sand flea twitches, body cooling slowly. I take a bite, and again, I’m surprised by the cherry aftertaste of my new world. Or perhaps it is the sweetness of revenge. It is of no difference to me. Because I am nothing but a small thing burrowed beneath the sea.

I am not human anymore. I’m not sure what I am, but that’s not for me to know. The ocean knows me, and I suspect I’ll come to know it. It’s made of me, her, them. It’s where the women go when we get tired. Where we come to control our fate. And eventually, it comes for all of us.

---

Danielle Roberson is a writer living in Texas. You can find her short stories in The Word's Faire and Magpie Zine. She is a 2025 Writer's League of Texas Fellow.

Fractures of Meaning // Radoslav Rochallyi

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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.

The Digital Snail that Lives Inside My Head // Michael Neuwirth

*Editor’s Note: This piece is best experienced when enlarged on a computer screen.

View fullsize

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Michael Neuwirth spent most of his childhood in Virginia Beach, by the waves. In high school, he was part of the Muse Writing Center’s Teen Fellowship. He’s currently at Old Dominion University. He enjoys playing card games and traveling for tournaments. 

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

But the Cyborg Pleads, Not Asks, This Time // Claire Lancaster

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Claire Lancaster is a Creative Writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College, where she also serves as a Fiction Editor for Lumina. She received her BA from Elon University with majors in Creative Writing and Professional Writing and Rhetoric. Her work has appeared in Carolina Muse, 30 North, and Beyond Words and received Frederick Hartmann awards from authors Alejandro Varela, Claire Luchette, and poet Dr. Taylor Byas.

Bone-In Hot Dogs: Terrible Pitch // Seth Allen

Close your eyes: imagine you are hosting the perfect barbecue.

Feel the warm sun, now the cool breeze. Everyone is here, it’s the perfect blend of friends, enemies, and potential lovers. So many compliments on your playlist. “How do you keep the drinks this cold?” says your friend Chris, “You must buy that premium ice, ha ha!” Chris’s joke doesn’t really make sense but everyone laughs because the vibes are that immaculate.

Then you, Vibes God, lift the cover of your hot, sweating, curvaceous grill. A plume of smoke rises, sending the scent of perfectly cooked meat (or vegan meat) dancing across the yard. A hush falls over the crowd, everyone looks at you with anticipation. You grab your tongs (oh, how they gleam) and select a perfectly cooked wiener from the grill. You lift this dog proudly to the sky and proclaim, “Dogs are ready!”

Instead of applause, you hear gasps. Not good gasps, bad gasps. They’re looking at the weiner, and you notice right away how it hangs completely limp in your once proud tongs. Disappointing, unappealing, flaccid humiliation.

Your enemies begin whispering to your potential lovers, and now they’re all laughing at you. Your friends are gone. Chris is dead (suspected suicide). Forever.

Good news: It doesn’t have to be this way. You have time right now to invest in a better future. The future of Bone-In Hotdogs. That’s right, a hot dog with a bone in it. Grill with the confidence you deserve, knowing your dogs will always rise to the occasion, fully torqued, just completely bricked up. It’s juicier, too!

Market testing confirms high demand for our bone-in dogs. We placed a Facebook ad showing a standard limp dog next to one of our bone-in prototypes, with the simple tagline “GET BONED UP NOW,” and received millions of clicks in seconds. Our simple, straight-to-the-point ad was so popular, Facebook removed it and suspended our account. We will not be stopped.

We are looking for partners to invest several million dollars, or whatever you have on you right now, in developing the technology needed to scale our proprietary bone insertion process. Please don’t ask how we do it. Don’t ask what type of bones we use, or where we get them, or how. Seriously, we’ll never tell! What matters is that the perfect barbecue you imagined is finally here. The world is ready. Are you?

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Seth Allen is a comedian in Portland, Oregon. He performs at Helium Comedy Club and at festivals including Bumbershoot, Treefort, Pickathon, and SF Sketchfest. He co-hosts a weekly podcast called The Washed Men.

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.

Where’s New Haven? // David Capps

On the walk from Gray Matter to The Graduate, and past the couple on the steps singing a light-hearted jingle about Adderall, we overhear an old man asking, “Where’s New Haven?” – “This is New Haven,” the lady replies. And it strikes me, given his proximity to the bus station, as much more likely that he had fallen asleep on the bus and just gotten off at this stop than to think that he is both mad and cogently asking a question. Much later, as I toss and turn in bed, thinking about what I can deduce from the facts that writers have so much knowledge at their fingertips and that AI will soon be able to reproduce any given style and wondering whether our situation differs essentially from the postmodernist plight of the exhaustion of literature—it occurs to me that maybe he meant New Haven itself, where had the New Haven gone that he remembered from his youth?

David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer living in New Haven, CT. He is the author of six chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), On the Great Duration of Life (Schism Neuronics, 2023), Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming), and Fever in Bodrum (Bottlecap Press, forthcoming). His latest lyric essay is featured in Midnight Chem.

A Shadow, a Snake // Lisa Piazza

It’s not every day you see a bald eagle at Serene Lakes, but I’ve seen a few before. Flying, perched in trees, their white feathers showing or skimming the lake to grab some trout, then speed off.

Today the one above me keeps its distance. Circling, circling.

The kayak I’m in belonged to my dad back when my parents owned the cabin together. After the divorce, my mom owned it, and now I share it with my sister, her husband, and their three kids. My sister’s already said she will pass her part on to her kids, and if I ever marry (and God forbid that person has a kid), the cabin should stay in the family. I’m told it’s cheating for someone else’s kid to end up with half of something that isn’t theirs.

My sister prefers my future loneliness.

My present sadness, too. Next to my life, hers is more than fine. Fully formed and growing.

The lake water is cold. In June, the mosquitoes take over, and there’s not much you can do to avoid them. Snow melts. Puddles form. Mosquitos breed. Even now, in June, there is more than a little snow left. Hiking yesterday, I lost the trail for a bit due to a pack of snow knee-deep. Next to it, clumps of wildflowers – purple, orange, pink.

If I knew the names, I’d name them.

Wild Iris is one.

Back at the cabin, a meadow mouse is gnawing on a crust of toast. Later it will chew through the box of Life cereal in the cupboard. Knowing this doesn’t mean I can stop it.

I forgot mosquito repellent, but the real mistake I made was calling my sister this morning to ask her to bring some up. It would have been easier to drive to Soda Springs and buy my own.

“You’ve been there how many days, and you’re just now calling about repellant? I mean, did you even check the master bathroom? I’m sure we left some there last summer.”

Sure enough, there it is.

“You must really want those bug bites; that’s all I can say!”

“Sure, yeah.” I always agree – even when she’s joking. Even when I am the joke. It’s an old habit.

“We’ll be up around 5. All three of my boys are coming, FYI. Hope your guy doesn’t mind! Can’t wait to meet him.”

One of the easiest ways to kill a mouse is to set out the sticky traps; that’s also the least humane. That and poison. The mice get too smart for the snap traps after the first kill. Up here, poisoning a mouse means poisoning everything. Maybe that’s everywhere. Being in the mountains, it’s easier to see the connections – tree roots, streams, rocks, run-off, branches, pinecones, mountain lions, bears. Mosquitos. Trout. Eagles. Mice.

That I know the mouse is here doesn’t mean I’m going to kill it.

From the kayak, the bald eagle takes its time circling. It could come my way. Or not. My sister’s been trying to see a bald eagle up here for years. She sees bats, hears frogs. But no eagle. She’s told her husband about the time I was a baby out on the grass by the water, and our mom swears an eagle dipped down, talons out, and almost carried me away.

I don’t remember it, but a story is true if someone tells it enough. 

I want the eagle to fly this way, glide down to the middle of this lake where I am now, dive, dig its ---

                    No.

                                     That’s an old thought.

                                                                                    The kind I am trying

                                                                                                                            to

                                                                                                  break.

There are other ways to escape.

When she arrives, my sister will see that my guy, Grey, isn’t here. Her boys will barrel in, unaware. If she told them to be on their best behavior to meet someone new, they’ll have forgotten all about it. They’ll get out the paddle board, root around in the garage for the fishing poles, ask about bait. Their dad will set up his work computer in the master bedroom where he and my sister always sleep, and we’ll see him for meals and the occasional card game.

This is his idea of a vacation! My sister will laugh.

The problem with Grey isn’t a problem. It’s just that he’s a good guy. We have known each other for seven months. That sounds like a long time, but we only make time to get together once a month, so over seven dinners, what I can tell is he’s a nice person – has a job, two kids, drives a Tesla, pays his taxes, likes art films and 80s punk.

I never invited him up to the cabin, so I wouldn’t have to bail at the last second. I know myself at least that well now. It’s progress. I didn’t want to end up lying to him, saying the cabin trip was off for all.

It’s the overlap I’m not ready for. One self meshing with another. Who I am alone, meeting who I am with my sister, meeting who I am with Grey.

Happiness is there somewhere in the middle, but I am not ready for it yet.

I can’t say why yet, and I don’t expect my sister to understand.

Now, I watch the eagle home in on something, dive down as I dip my paddle in the lake, and pull back. Dip and pull. Let the water make its own movement.

Later, when my sister asks how it’s been going all alone up here by myself, I’ll lie easily to her: she missed an eagle swooping down, pulling a rainbow trout from the lake right next to me in the kayak. Wings wider than you’ve ever seen. She’ll gasp, but only because the mouse is tiptoeing across the kitchen counter, half-hidden by the tile backsplash she put in when she decided to remodel the kitchen.

I liked my mother’s cracked sink, the wooden countertops. I liked the way my mother could stand on the deck and point to things in the distance. Rowton Peak, and that other one whose name I can’t remember. She would explain the different types of rocks: granite, volcanic, sedimentary. Metamorphic.

At dusk, my mother would water her potted flowers, and the water lines looked like snakes making their slow way across the patio. A shadow can be a snake, she would say. Now that she’s gone, a shadow is a shadow again. A snake, a snake. 

My sister will buy mouse traps in the morning. They’ll sell her the sticky ones, and she’ll cry when the poor thing is caught. One of her boys will put it in a bag and carry it out to the trash. She’ll throw her arms around her son, taller and stronger than she is now: “What would I do without you?” she’ll coo, and he’ll shrug.

About Grey, she’ll say, “We’ll have to meet him the next time.” And I’ll almost shrug, too. Old habit. A child again in her presence, believing the future to be a circle. Like it makes any sense to say you can have whatever you want as long as you’ve had it before. 

It doesn’t.

Lisa Piazza is a writer, educator, and mother from Oakland, Ca. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Porcupine Literary and a poetry reader for Lit Fox Books and The Los Angeles Review. She has recently finished writing a collection of linked stories.

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. 

Mud and Lotus // Aaron Lelito

Reading passages in the back seat
in a parking lot
after dark.

There’s nowhere else we could possibly go.

Nowhere else for us
but we can’t leave each other yet.
And there’s nowhere for us to go
with everything so heavy,
eyes in diffuse light

piercing each other’s space
and shadows

burrowing in each other’s salt mines and we can’t leave yet,
holding on, eyes gazing
in vacated space.

Headlights go by and make us both nervous.

It’s our comfort to each other,
and we just want to be innocent.
And we know that no one else would be here for us tonight.

Maybe we’re connected so deeply
and maybe we’re just lonely,
holding onto each other’s pieces for a while,
onto the plucked leaves and not the mud
even though we read about what lotuses look like
when they bloom and what they need in order to grow.
I notice the glint of lamplight shaping her—
that we’re capable of changing our behaviors

that we’re capable, too, of merging
and of pulling apart.

Lights flash as a car passes
holding on
holding on
holding on

Aaron Lelito is a visual artist and writer from Buffalo, NY. His poetry chapbook, The Half Turn, was published in 2023, and he released a collaborative notebook/art collection titled If We: Connections Through Creative Process in 2024. His work has also appeared in Stonecoast Review, Barzakh Magazine, Novus Literary Arts Journal, SPECTRA Poets, Peach Mag, and Santa Fe Review. He is Editor in Chief of Wild Roof Journal. Instagram: @aaronlelito

Objective Truths // Liam Strong

like any fable your story
begins with a cup of soup
signifying goodness. positivity. as in:
the audience is prepared
for an unhappy ending. you are not
a rat king of traumas. but the
cherry stem knotted around
your tongue. that’s a corsage
or its skeleton
patient for your fingers. you move
in, you give up date
nights, you check the box for
nonrelationship relationship
sex. your nipples wilt
like amaryllis. your lips bore
inward like piddock. your clothes
inhale baggy. absent of hip,
waist, tight twink
chest. a simple sentence—
much like a one-word
response—is a medal
of efficiency. congratulations. oh how
the robin returns with song
in spring. oh how
your whiteboard above the trash
is an opportunity of stratus. oh
how you can see the window
for the glass, the
pane, the silt
at its eyelashes. oh how
you can be inside a house
full & alive & living
but not be
inside anything else.

Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cripple punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from the University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone's Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Vagabond City and new words {press}, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. Find them on Instagram/Twitter @beanbie666 and https://linktr.ee/liamstrong666.