My Mother’s Mind Was Once a Well-Oiled Thing

/

Joseph Voth

Now she is sometimes a chance of stutters,
Each one a crossing gate gone down before
She can slip a next word past it. Other
Times, something in her mind leans on a door
And she falls brightly into a small room
Of bronzed feathers snatched from chattering birds.
It’s been the way with she and I, a bruise
Of talk between us, a creaking floor, curt

With little care, but now and then she goes
Where only she knows the landscape, a wheat
Field yellowed like a Dutch painting of slow
And brutal work, now ordered and complete,
The way she seemed to me to be before,
Before the birds, the wheat, the room, the door.

Author’s Statement: It struck me that the theme of a slow fade (in this case, a parent losing their memory, etc.) could be expressed in a sonnet because sonnets are formal and familiar, yet they make room for unexpected lyrical moments.

Joseph Voth has published one collection of poetry, Living with Noise (NorthShore Press), and has completed a second, A Brief History of How the Heart Breaks, containing poems previously published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, ZYZZYVA, and other literary journals. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Fresno City College in California and lives in that city with his wife, the poet Michelle Patton.

Do You Have a Family?

/

Z. T. Corley

When asked about my family, why do I think of the spiders I have allowed to live? My mother
with a cigarette, a crown of smoke around her head. Tennessee in January. Flowers I’ve
trampled, nameless and numerous. The cities I claim but who don’t claim me. My grandmother
in a hospital bed. The vultures on the side of the road. South Carolina in June. The sound of
beads. The blackberries I ate. The urn on the mantel. Not my father, but the beer he let me
taste—the bitterness of it. Fireflies at night. Georgia in July. Rainbows on the ceiling. Grass
stains and mosquito bites. Leaves in my hair. All the ashes I won’t eat. The taste of cornbread.
My grandmother’s brown eyes—both ringed blue. The rabbits I chased. Dandelions in spring.
The butterflies I’ve held. Church on Sundays. My great-grandmother’s hands. The hot comb’s
hiss. Long dirt roads. A man—not my father—standing in the doorway like a dark pillar.
California in December. All the dresses I never wore. The worms I studied like paintings. The
stench of coffee. The scabs I’ve picked and who, like an estranged family, attempted to recover
themselves even while I scraped and gouged with fingernails sharper than the beak of a condor.
What was the question again?

Author’s Statement: This poem is written after Ama Codjoe's "A Family Woven Like Night Through Trees" and the title itself is lifted from her poem. Like the speaker in Codjoe's poem, mine cannot answer the question directly. "Do you have a family?" started off lineated, in an effort to echo Codjoe, but quickly became a prose poem instead. Leaving it as a block of text created an overwhelming effect: both the speaker and the reader are overwhelmed by the seemingly disparate images, fragments, and almost-memories, and must go back to the beginning in order to try to find an answer in the deluge. 

Z. T. Corley is a Tennessee-based poet and a current student at Austin Peay State University. Her poetry explores themes of Blackness, memory, identity, desire, and loss.

Instructions for conducting a raid in kabaddi

/

Unmana B


Plunge into the swarm.
Hands clutch your legs, your arms,
your breast; bodies drag
you down in conspiracy
with a fiery sun.

Bite down on the rosary
of words between your teeth,
spitting out bead by bead:
kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi.
If you breathe

you lose. How long can you hold
your breath while the whole world
holds you back?
Still, you know this
is your chance.

If you can inch closer to the chalked
line, straining towards the ground
till one finger
touches white.
Everything

drops away. You take great
gasping gulps of breath.
Your team scoops you
up in whoops of
victory.

Your heart is still
beating out terror
kabaddi
kabaddi
kabaddi

Author’s Statement: I’ve never been into sports, and kabaddi was one of the few sports I’ve ever played (as a child, many years ago). An essential rule of kabaddi is that the raider has to hold their breath and often chants “kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi” to demonstrate that they’re not inhaling. In Parini Shroff’s Bandit Queens, a character mutters “kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi” when she’s anxious. Which is such a wonderfully specific detail, but it got me thinking that holding my breath would make me more anxious, not less. It’s how I’ve always reacted to stress—it’s only in the last few years that meditation and yoga have taught me to keep breathing, and to breathe intentionally to release stress. It made me wonder if I’d often held my breath as a child in environments where I felt unsafe or hypervisible, desperate to escape. This metaphor bloomed into a poem for all of us who thought we were utterly alone, with all the world against us, but if you just make it through, you can find your people on the other side.

Unmana lives in Mumbai and writes across genres on themes of gender, queerness and found family. Their short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Deodar Prize. Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd, published in India by Westland Books in 2024, is a deliciously bookish murder mystery featuring queer women characters.





The Trouble With Freedom

/

Ace Boggess

Chat with an ex-con friend online.
She’s struggling with life outside:
a mother who argues, threatens,
cajoles; seeing her kids;
talking to lawyers; working a job;
avoiding a chest of drawers
in front of the opium door.
She tries to keep her sobriety
from hooking up with madness on the sly.
I tell her, It’ll get better, & it will,
or it won’t. Existing has its cycles
of corruption, joy, disfigurement, relief.
I offer her three words & a pair of ears,
or eyes that read the sounds of her distress
because prison never stops calling,
saying, I’m sorry for the last time,
baby. Being out’s as hard as being in,
but with more opportunity.
I tell her, It’ll get better,
when what I want to say is, Sometimes,
we pause in a paradise of sweets;
others, we drop our ice cream
on the sidewalk, & catch a charge
for indecency.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His latest collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.

Final Scene

/

Alexey Deyneko

Author’s Statement: “Final scene” is inspired by the poetic aesthetics of Zen koans and screenwriting as a process of translating text into visual images. It is an invitation to a viewer to co-create and imagine a movie or a sequence of stills that may have this visual poem as an ending. 

Author’s Bio: He is the author of two micro-chapbooks published by the Origami Poems Project. His work has also appeared in Jersey Devil Press, The Raven Review, New Note Poetry, Sugar House Review, 82 Star Review, Molecule, and elsewhere. 



Two Poems by Nathan Coates

/

Maple Tree in September

The young maple tree on the corner
undressed in mid-September
at fall’s first freeze,
so eager to perform,
and now it stands knock-kneed
and bare, a gray spine
in a pool of perfect red and white leaves,
mute like Zechariah
burning with Elizabeth’s story,
or like a lone banjo player on stage
chasing the haunting notes
of an unsung lyric.

It waits like Barney Fife
to tell Andy
he already shot
his allotted bullet.

It’s a burnt match.

And I know that feeling,
of words spoken out of season–
spent and irretrievable,
within reach and inaccessible,
red with the regret
of being exposed and left leafless
while summer is still singing.

A Maple Tree Reflects

Here I am,
tricked by a September anomaly
into a premature abscission,
a skinny coat rack, now,
with no privacy for fall’s
remaining wrens.

It’s true that
all these leaves,
perfectly piled at my feet,
look like Schroeder’s
dust cloud or
like confetti that exploded
before an overturned buzzer beater.

What can I say?
To be honest...
I’m like a pinata
that gives up the goods
on the first hit
and then dangles,
twisting, for the rest of the party,
in Ohio’s leftover summer breath,
enduring the leafed grins
of neighboring trees
in their blue suburban lawns.

But I see the way
you can’t help but
come and touch these
red and white leaves–
dropped in perfect color–
like you’re reaching for
stolen jewels or the
hem of the rabbi’s robe.

Author’s Note: These poems started with a simple image that I found arresting so I kept experimenting with different ways to describe it. Eventually, I started thinking from the tree’s perspective and had to split all of the ideas into two poems and narrow from there.

Nathan Coates lives in Lebanon, Ohio, with his family and spends his days helping high school students read and write. These are the first poems he’s sent out into the world.

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper

/

Caleb Guard

We lift our hats to you
Casual daredevils of iron defiance
We have nothing to fear but
Fear of falling.

How many angels can you fit on the span of a girder?
And who lives not on the edge of pitfall?
Who wouldn’t risk live and limb
For a dime?

We came to build.
We stopped for lunch.
Here at the top of the world.
This is our town.

Hoisted to high heaven
Where there is no famine,
Da Vinci could not have painted you.
We do not die, we sup.

Tempered aspirations on a steel beam
Mugging it up for a buck.
The feats, the prestige, the beanstalk grandeur.
This is your skyline.

Caleb Coy is a freelance writer with a Masters in English from Virginia Tech. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Coachella Review, Hippocampus, North Dakota Quarterly, The Common, and elsewhere.

Photograph of a Young Woman, 1873: National Portrait Gallery

/

Kimberly Gibbs

Child, you seem neither princess nor lady,
governess nor maid. Fine black bonnet blooms
bourgeoisie over velvet pagoda
sleeves thanks to a bootstrapping patriarch,
his picture bride dreams. Plaid bow enormous
beneath your pale clamshell chin presents you:
white flowers, ebony curls, tender lips.

Slight fingers grasp the thin vermilion spine
of a cherished book, partially obscured
in ample swathes of lace at demure wrists.
Cage crinoline skirt, well outside the lens
of this epistolary courtship portrait.

Where will this portrait travel? West by train?
Does a future husband wait in St. Louis?
Or will you steam along the Mississippi?
Do you long to see the remote untamed
flats of the west? Or do you fear the wild?
Child, can this portrait manifest your destiny?

Author’s Bio: Kimberly Jane Simms (Gibbs) is an acclaimed Greenville poet, literary organizer, and educator whose voice is deeply rooted in the Southern tradition of storytelling, influenced by her British and Southern heritage.  Her poetry enlightens and moves audiences, offering works that are both poignant and inspiring. In her debut poetry collection, Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill, Kimberly chronicles the lives of textile workers in the Piedmont region with historical accuracy and imaginative insight. Kimberly is a former Carl Sandburg National Historic Site Writer-in-Residence, a TedX speaker, and a slam pioneer turned literary curator. She is a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau, and her work is archived in the South Carolina Poetry Archives at Furman University.

As the founder of the nonprofit Wits End Poetry—a thriving organization she has led since 2002—Kimberly has made significant contributions to the literary arts, organizing major literary festivals and fostering community engagement. Her poems have been featured in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and she is the author of two chapbooks in addition to her full-length collection. A past member of the championship-winning first Greenville Slam Team and a “Legend of the South” named by the National Poetry Slam, she continues to enrich the literary landscape with her creative contributions.

Kimberly holds a Master’s in English with a Creative Writing focus from Clemson University and a Bachelor’s in English from Furman University, with an additional 30 graduate hours in education. Kimberly is currently the Director of Education at the Metropolitan Arts Council in Greenville, SC where she lives with her husband and daughter. She previously served on the board of the Emrys Foundation, the Executive Committee of Poetry Slam Inc., and was the Literary Chair for the Travelers Rest Arts Mission.

Ron Rash, award-winning author of Serena, says about Kimberly: "she writes with eloquence and empathy about an important part of Southern history - too often neglected.”

Eurydice

/

By E.B. Schnepp

there was no such thing as poetry until a woman
in a field opened her throat to exclaim how
beautiful a bumblebee / was perched on the
webbing between her thumb / and index, the
moment before she changed before him / from
flower to threat and he did the only thing he
could, / impaled himself on her, shredded
himself for a hive of beloveds.

E.B. Schnepp is a poet currently residing in Chicago. Their work has been featured in Poetry Daily and can be found in Gulf Coast, Nat. Brute, and Iron Horse Review, among others.

A Poet’s Conviction 

/

Dr. Frank Alexander Clark

Dear Helene,

Your repetitive rapid rampant winds
and relentless ruthless remorseless rains
assaulted the Southeast with force
leaving trees, power lines, bodies of water, roads, and inhabitants melancholic
and traumatized!

Devastation and death became acquainted with one another while perseveration was submerged pleading for a life line.

Sorrow and disbelief embraced while mourning our trees whose purpose and longevity were uprooted.

Suffering and doubt stood powerless seeking generators of restoration and resuscitation.

Scarcity and fear became ravenous searching for periods of sustenance and satiety.

The before and the after, a stark juxtaposition 
for the lenses of aerial photographers. 

Your destruction will be etched in history.

However,

Our resolve remains durable and deep rooted in faith.

Our hands of humanity will restore cities with the power of prayer and passion.

Our hearts of thanksgiving will sync in rhythm as we clothe our neighbors with Godly love.

Our tear ducts will create waterfalls of abundant hope.

Our mules of humility will bear gifts of peace and antidotes for healing.

And 

Our pain will be transformed by the everlasting light.

Bio: Dr. Frank Alexander Clark is a board-certified adult outpatient psychiatrist at Prisma Health-Upstate. He also serves as clinical associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine-Greenville. Dr. Clark received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Monmouth College in Illinois and a Doctor of Medicine degree from Northwestern University. He then completed his residency in general psychiatry at Palmetto Richland Hospital in Columbia, SC.

In addition to his psychiatric practice, Dr. Clark has held many leadership positions in national organizations including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. He is the immediate past president of the South Carolina Psychiatric Association. Additionally, Dr. Clark is believed to be the first Black President of the Greenville County Medical Society. 

Dr. Clark is prolific poet who uses his creative side to provide a voice and raise awareness for issues pertaining to mental health and diversity, equity, and inclusion. He serves on the board of the Bellevue Literary Review. Dr. Clark has collaborated with composers globally who have set his poetry to music. His works have been performed by the South Carolina Philharmonic and the Wild Beautiful Orchestra. His poems have also been featured on an album in collaboration with Grammy Award Winning PARMA Recording label.

He has published two children’s book, Positively Haiku: Illustrated Affirmations in 17 Syllables and Positively Haiku Part 2: Peace, Love, Discovery in 17 Syllables. The books provide children early exposure to positive affirmations using haiku poetry.  Dr. Clark is passionate about faith and family. He enjoys exercising, traveling, and attending sporting events.






Waiting for the Staten Island Ferry

/

Lillian Tzanev


I sit mixed
twiddling in pockets
holes wearing out the cloth.
They’re awkwardly angled
stuck on the corners
of my non-driver ID.
I start to imagine renting a car
to get on a ferry to Nova Scotia.
I take out my pen to record this feeling
my tender innards stoked in hopes
but all strokes of eloquence are blocked
by like a whole bunch of stupid like fucking fillers.
I look over to the Auntie Anne’s
and see the genitive case.
Me and my mango lemonade
my mango lemonade and I.

Lillian Tzanev is a writer from NYC. She has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Allegheny Review, The Broadkill Review, The Bookends Review, Feral, The Messenger, Prairie Margins, The Rising Phoenix Review, Short Vine Literary Journal, Word City Lit, and WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Lillian currently teaches ESL in Bulgaria.

Author’s Note: Since I grew up in NYC, public transportation is my meditative space. I have become myself over and over again on buses, subways, ferries, and other public vessels.