the heater whines like exhaled helium skillet griddles shredded refrigerator potatoes I am quiet enough to enjoy each individually because you are sleeping in the bedroom where an oscillating fan barriers sound between us. I nearly lived a careless life with sails billowed by lies I love to tell myself when days were difficult and outnumbered the free form ones. I unfolded myself face down into stovetop lavender syrup, salvaging homework on a Sunday night, saving what I can for last while embracing what is daily laid at my feet. I love my life despite the overly dramatic gun I hold by my head, pointed somewhere in between a direct hit, a grazing knick of the skin, and a Catalpa tree strung by bean-based icicles dangling from the branches like wind chimes tuned to pitches meant for other creature ears. Beside me are thin cushions that don’t stack well enough to tend to my posture. Yesterday I passed in and out of registers like large bills in residence within a rich neighborhood’s mall. This morning I am seven cents on a wooden window sill, available to so much eyesight, yet left so unbothered.
Jeff Stonic (he/him) is a Denver artist writing poetry, performing and producing standup comedy, and image-making with photography and videography. His poetry has previously appeared in pan pan press and Eunoia Review.
She is the peddler at the end of our dreams, With a beautiful surface.
The dance of the morning, where gentle sight abides.
The feast of clear color with smiling song and form.
The sight that sees beyond the sea And the coming home of the fishes.
The song of the kindly living, And the coming home of the lovely breeze.
Steve Anc is the son of Ajuzie Nwaorisa, a Nigerian poet. He is a poet with searching knowledge and deep meditation on universal themes, he is quite a modern poet in his adherence to language and his use of metaphor is soul-searching. Anc’s works have been published in Open-door Poetry Magazine, Poetrysoup, Goodlitcompany, Voice From The Void, Our Poetry Archive, I Become The Beast, Fire Magazine
are silent films slapstick and melodramas
projected onto old white sheets hung
inside her skull If she wants a sound track
she has to create it herself
Memories blur and emulsion molds
even on precious 35mm Kodachrome slides
evidence of her family her childhood
her dogs Lassie and Bambi
She squirrels letters photographs clippings
opera programs museum tickets trip itineraries
in 8 x11x 4 inch boxes on shelves in her study
She can’t remember what’s in the boxes
Who cares what’s in the boxes –
a memento is not the memory
Memory requires mind electrical waves sweeping
over the cortex sweeping cobwebs from corners
swapping one year with another one face with another
flux of memory trails through forests of fact and fiction
Memories do not stay stacked neatly in boxes
but dribble foam seep sublime onto the rug
into corners over window sills flow down
the clapboards on the side of the house
They trip her up when she goes outside to water
the garden Tigers of grief pounce when her back
is turned Sudden tears on the anniversary of her
mother’s death even though it was more than fifty years ago
To look back is to flirt with becoming
a pillar of salt but says Letitia
with a shrug it adds needed flavor
to whatever I’m stewing in today
Sylvia Byrne Pollack, a hard-of-hearing poet and former scientist, has published in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review,The Stillwater Review and many others. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she won the 2013 Mason’s Road Literary Award, was a 2019 Jack Straw Writer and a 2021 Mineral School Resident. Her debut full-length collection Risking Itwas published by Red Mountain Press (2021.) Visit her at www.sylviabyrnepollack.com
One day our bodies
won’t work this way—
won’t fit together
coaster on tracks,
wild
ride rise fall plummet
into
oblivion.
exhilarate
tummy turned
knotted nausea
panting
fingers clenching,
holding onto,
pushing into,
leaning back to
There might be
bedpans.
diapers.
A neat row of teeth
soaking in solution.
Bones so arthritic
they can’t bend
towards each other.
or unbend,
and still
I will reach
for you.
Talya Jankovits’ work has appeared in a number of literary journals. Her short story “Undone” in Lunch Ticket was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her poem, My Father Is A Psychologist in BigCityLit, was nominated for both a Pushcart prize and The Best of the Net. Her micro piece, “Bus Stop in Morning” is a winner of one of Beyond Words Magazine’s, 250-word challenges. Her Poem, “Guf” was the recipient of the Editor’s Choice Award in Arkana Magazine and nominated for the Best of Net. Her poem, A Woman of Valor, was featured in the 2019/2020 Eshet Hayil exhibit at Hebrew Union College Los Angeles. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and resides in Chicago with her husband and four daughters. To read more of her work you can visit www.talyajankovits.com, or follow her on twitter or Instagram @talyajankovits
a broken- window wind and these flutters of unsettled evenings, pushing elbows through shelves in a second- hand bookshop.
pages flutter wildly, falling wide open – flags flying to signal all nations.
DS Maolalai (he/him) has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and by another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His poetry has received eleven nominations for Best of the Net and eight for the Pushcart Prize, and has been released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)
If I am going to be a poet I had better stop chatting with the homeless fellow at the Shell station on the corner. I had better pour my coffee into the most insulated of all the metal cups with the most securely sealed lid engineered, credentialed so that I don’t spill any coffee in the car and I had better not dream too big before I decide to move on and forget myself I had better not scream about it and wake myself up
Canopy
The bus will take you to a place where you have been before but cannot seem to find. Where the leaves are starting to turn and the cool breeze herself tumbles down the mountain wearing a yellow turtleneck. Dancing across the road, she approaches to give you the most amazing gift: the color orange. Twist it between your fingers turn it red, against your heart like when you were a kid hands flung out the window cold air rushing between each finger soft fleece on your skin. When you become a tree, how tall will you be? She asks, gently swirling beneath the canopy admiring the blue sky. When you become a tree, what will you teach me? Smiling, she bends her arms back in time, fluttering at the edge of the sun curling up into a memory dotted with warm light.
Julie Oldbury is a writer, musician, and corporate boss bitch living in Denver, Colorado. She studied English and Creative Writing (Non-fiction and Poetry) and Visual Art at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. While an undergrad, Julie’s literary thesis explored connections between modernism, abstraction, and gender across the works of Virginia Woolf and Pablo Picasso. She was an editor of the student publication, Medium Weight Forks and a promotions employee of the NWMSU Visiting Writers Series. She earned a graduate degree in business from the University of Houston and currently works in the data insights and security software industry as a part of the Denver and Boulder tech community. Upon moving to Colorado in 2018, Julie rediscovered her excitement and passion for writing poetry. Inspired by her surroundings, her growing relationships, and the global landscape, Julie is in the process of compiling her first body of poetry and is actively seeking to publish her work in independent and avante-garde journals.
Josh Gaydos (he/him/his) is a self-taught poet that currently resides in Colorado. He has been published in Barren Magazine, Door Is A Jar Magazine, The Lettered Olive and The City Quill. For 2023, he is releasing a poem a week on his free substack at https://joshgaydos.substack.com/InstagramTwitter
Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.
Pablo Neruda
What does this quote mean to you?
Trite but true with some flowers is this Neruda quote to me. It’s stuck around since I read it and though I am finding that finding of self a great deal less static than this quote implies, it keeps me aware that I could wake up in a decade’s time and find what I’d been running for or running from had made me into something I despised. Sorry for rhyming so much.
What books have made an important impact on you and why?
Too many so I’ll pull the first five that come to mind. East of Eden by John Steinbeck, captures human nature and our interconnectedness, the fact he addressed it to his young sons and was saying “here it is, everything” and delivers. frank: sonnets by Diane Suess, for the “isness”, not answering the Sirens call on a happy feeling or ending, the ability to paint a landscape as big as a coast and also write a poem about the grout around a brick (I’m being figurative here). What Work Is by Phillip Levine, for laying out that blue-collar / American working condition with romanticism and disdain, to put himself in it, distance himself from it, and paint individuals like they were in the room with you. Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, the ‘other poems’ in that just drop you somewhere and you’re immersed, it could be India and you feel the dense downpour with a herd of water buffalo walking by or New Orleans, or Compton. Robin puts you there in a way I haven’t been transported before or since. Another big one for me is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. My mom had given me that when I really went headfirst into this writing thing. That book helped me to make a point to find art and make space for art wherever I was. Watch a movie, read a book, spin some vinyl and pull feeling or a scene from everything.
What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?
Sanity. Gelling and coming to terms with the cracks.
How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?
I wouldn’t be here without it, and I don’t just mean serving a guest editing stint for this press. I’d be dead, or fishing with my hands and a line in the Gulf, or possibly I’d be a merchant marine. Most likely dead though.
Barefoot and listening to Fiona Apple, feeling as eternal at 33 as I did at 9 years old, at 12, just as likely for every emotion I have ever had to destroy me or vitalize me, just like every feeling is a Grand Canyon, barefoot on the gravel that is every stripe of red that music has ever made me relive, invincible and vulnerable at the edge of realizing that a chasm is beautiful because of what it exposes.
Mickey Thompson (she/they) is a poet, biologist, and teacher who grew up in Arizona and has now found her heart home in Northern Colorado. Their work has appeared in “Multiverse: An Anthology of Superhero Poetry of Superhuman Proportions” from Write Bloody Publishing, and one self-published chapbook that was stapled together on the arm of a couch in Tucson.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. I feel my fate by what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. -Theodore Roethke
Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men. Always stirring in the early am hours –for prayer, for stamps, or for chess. No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.
Ironic now, how my father and The Middle East have made amends. The 2am World Cup Futbol games that the continent of Qatar sends. Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men.
The last few months in Los Angeles, I worked the graveyard shift 10pm to 10am. Six months later I put in my two weeks and moved home at my parents request. No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.
Now home drinking coffee and wine. I call it Roethke’s Wake to Sleep Blend 2am I walk to the bathroom, occupied by him. Later the kitchen again in his possess. Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men.
As ghosts we haunt these halls each night, of my old home to no end. Conversing with our demons and angels , some damned and some blessed. No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.
Old blood never sleeps well– doesn’t now, didn’t then. Much unforgiven in our chests, walking hearts without rest. Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men. No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.
Cid Galicia is a Mexican American poet who taught in New Orleans for over the past decade. He is in the final year of his MFA, through The University of Nebraska Omaha. He is a poetry editor for The Good Life Review, a reader for The Kitchen Table Quarterly, and this year’s FIRECRACKER Poetry Manuscript Awards. He was the recipient of the Richard Duggin Fellowship—granted for demonstrated excellence in writing, runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Helen W. Kenefick Poetry Prize, and most recently nominated for the Helen Hansen Outstanding Graduate Student Award. He is currently living in Los Angeles as an Intern to The Editor for The Red Hen Press. His work has appeared in The Watershed Review, the National Poetry Month Issue of The Elevation Review, Trestle Ties Issue 5, and the upcoming spring issue of Trampoline.
I finally stood, happy at disrobement Brought about by some principalities Some fundamental truths not escaped Alone, free, tied to each being Nakedness in the forming. I tried to put a stop to it Afraid once, though only once Allowing layer upon layer to melt Slither away into better forms – Serve better suited seekers And quickly I latched on to the fact of my emblazoned bare Such a funny patch; so many distinct markings – though all in all a large converging pink Naked, as naked as one may be.
Abhishek Todmal is a writer based in Pune, India. He is currently working on his first novel – a piece of comedic fiction. His poetry has most recently been featured in an issue of DASH Literary Journal. Amongst other things, he enjoys keeping active and loitering aimlessly under the sun.