Melodic Dream of Attic by Sarah Samarbaf Poetry - “Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.” (4/18/2025)
A Chapel by Harry Readhead Poetry - “Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.” (4/14/2025)
Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches” by Johnny Payne Essay - “Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.” (4/13/2025)
The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks by Matthew Hummer Poetry - “The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.” (4/11/2025)
Embers and What Will Unleash by Carolyn Martin Poetry - “But embers don’t care who goes or stays. They fire up blueberries/and coyote brush, traumatizing elk/deer/hawks/hares again.” (4/7/2025)
Public Education by Mark Connelly Poetry - “No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.” (4/4/2025)
Daisy Chain by Hannah Page Poetry - “Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god” (4/1/2025)
Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well” by Johnny Payne Essay - “The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excruciating detail.” (3/30/2025)
Overpass to Memphis by Elly Katz Poetry - “This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms” (3/28/2025)
The Bells, on Evening Paths by Erin Brown Poetry - “The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song” (3/26/2025)
Perfect Paradox by John Zedolik Poetry - “the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship” (3/24/2025)
The Worst of Our Fathers by Mark Botts Poetry - “we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth” (3/21/2025)
My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy by Anna Christina Piccione Poetry - “waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank” (3/19/2025)
Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting” by Johnny Payne Essay - “[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premises too long.” (3/16/2025)
Miscalculated by Marla Dial Moore Poetry - “For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time” (3/14/2025)
Observance, 2022 by Christina E. Petrides Poetry - “Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.” (3/10/2025)