Category: Issue 4

trompe l’œil, le cœur Eastern Chinese Restaurant Bethlehem PA, 1993 I always think the rice is ice cream, double take at the perfect scoops in a silver bowl. It might be a vase. I am not completely disappointed. When I’m warned I might not like some- thing I trick myself to trick them. Yes, jelly-… Continue reading Alison Lubar

Vanitas with Weather Eye keep a sharp lookout cloud syzygy rail tie schoolbell creek but here’s a table laid by artful hands fossil coral honey comb paper weight budget skull shelled acorns floral roasted keyboards a solitary hornet tests mercury veins in your feet alewives falling from the sky dive Vanitas with Whether I choose… Continue reading Carolyn Oliver

Dream with Lamp and Belly After the turbulent years were over, we went to the sea Your hat cast a specific shadow over the moon of your face  The tide pools were bottomless with questions and fear The water was loud, it covered everything  Your hat cast a shadow over the moon of your face … Continue reading Cleo Qian

Elegy for a Swan The San Francisco Zoo released a statement about Blue Boy’s death, which left his mate Blanche alone to drift along in the background of every proposal by every business school grad kneeling outside the Palace of Fine Arts. Someone on the internet commented he was an ass, but we loved him.… Continue reading Hannah Smith

Painting Grass Eric Sloane, Pecos Ruins, ca. 1975 I don’t just picture him tipping all the blades— or I can’t sympathize just as a watcher would: abstractedly, instead, I flick my right hand several times before I catch it moving. I wanted to make some, not only to stand there. It must be, in our… Continue reading Emma Aylor

Love You Baby “There’s 60 buzzards in the yard” gathered around a shattered deer discarded by some charging Ram. “It’s been like this for days” Dad texts, dark omens crenulating his roof, shitting on his car, on his porch, their caws rattling like church bells struck with bike chains. Every couple hours he fires BBs… Continue reading Todd Dillard

Jayant Kashyap is a poet, essayist, translator and artist. He has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net, and is the author of two pamphlets and a zine, Water (Skear Zines, 2021). He has also been shortlisted for The Poetry Business New Poets Prize twice, in 2021 and 2022. His work appears in POETRY, Magma, The Fourth River and elsewhere.

The Squonk One day I will make myself so arbitrarily small that even the snow fleas, congregate in a gully, will miss my tracks. Not nothing, but close— like the squonk who, racing moonlight in the lumberwood, is desperate to avoid sightlines. Good hunters can follow the squonk’s trail, track it to its natural, watery… Continue reading Samantha DeFlitch 

p. hodges adams is a michigander poet who received their MFA from the university of virginia. their work has appeared or is forthcoming in shenandoah, cutbank, sycamore review, northwest review, fourteen poems, and elsewhere. they were the runner-up for the phoebe spring 2023 poetry prize and a finalist for both the 2023 c.d. wright emerging poets prize and the… Continue reading p. hodges adams

false spring I untangle the horse’s mane with my fingers dab ointment to his rain- rotted- crest. Two men coax an augur from a long, thin box wary- eyed dogs bark through Shrinky Dinked windows. The drug store on the corner is over- stuffed we wait fifteen minutes in folding chairs. Baby Darling, Dearest, My… Continue reading Summer J. Hart