Cover image: "If This is a Book" by Sarah Walko
Gallery 1
One more ring above the earth
Samantha Cramer
Sierra August
Summer smell of brittle
grass, tarweed, blackberry
ferment
granite dust, and clay
perfuming my hair,
the downy sweat-slicked skin
at the back of my neck,
saltlick begging for
tongues
dry heat here, and my finger
pads catch on poetry
book-paper,
crumpled susurration as I try
to turn the page
my solid body eager to savor
the words clinging
to fingerprint pads;
not dry, but rich
summerfeast of language
and memory,
twinned with the
ache
of physical being—I feel
it all.
Samantha Cramer has been in love with poetry since she stole her mother’s old college textbook of English poetry from the bookshelf at age 10. Poetry speaks to her of the archaeology of the psyche, the strata of loneliness and desire inside all of us, and the equally strong ache to be fully seen. Samantha is a Northern California native, and her work has been published in deLuge Literary Journal, the Aurora Poetry Anthology, Wild Roof Journal, and she was awarded 2nd place in the LaPiccioletta Barca Poetry Contest. Website: samanthacramerwrites.com
Sarah Lilius
Woman as Light
or Etmopterus perryi
I do nothing. I swim in apathy, my seven-inch body hangs a lantern from my dwarf fin. I refuse to gather fame. Lazy bioluminescence is light without a switch. My dark brown dress is shabby and wet. I’m dull without wind. My lethargy is energy reversed, enough to crack cartilage, salty clean. My part of the ocean is warm. I may boil in a pinch. Déjà vu is real. Hook my shape. I’m thrown back in excess. I might die in this scenario. Never a sword to swing, to cut open enemies. I am my own altar, candles glimmer like miracles. Purpose is the low point, a sloshing mass. Regret and sorrow, strange creatures with decline of movement. The requisite stare and sit, wander and wait. What’s inside me now was here before.
Sarah Lilius is the author of the poetry collection Dirty Words (Indie Blu(e) Publishing, 2021) and six chapbooks. Some of her publications include Boulevard, Massachusetts Review, and New South. She lives in Virginia with her husband and children. Website: sarahlilius.com
Mackenzie Sains
The Hard Work of Healing
In the tomato field we find ourselves
cursing the breeze, god, the sun,
god, the rain, god—do they not know us?
Serious humans, with our serious business,
grafted monsters from what our mothers left behind.
We are but fragile—the fine fur of our bones
celadon dust green and sensitive to this
labored endeavor breaking soil back into soil,
growing out the enduring heat of day.
As if we’re precious enough to last forever,
ripe sun on the vine—cherry red and rich
in this season, our animal arms stronger as we toil
velvet limbs carrying the weight of our work
while August afternoons bead down green
leafy branches; these hours become our lifetime.
Forgive us, we are new here. Still waking
from an embedded beaded story, forgetting
how this field and sky will wash away,
remembering how to commit ourselves
to this weathering of time, trusting the rich earth
will shape our song—the cry out for deliverance
from this howling work we are bound to.
In the tomato field we find ourselves.
Our shoulders sun-bruised and swollen
mirrored in the glossy flesh of fruited blush,
the mystery of the eternal song, blood red and
pleated as an ox heart. The eternal song gifted
out once again offering seed in exchange
for fruit; sleight of tar-stained hand.
Mackenzie Sains is a poet, writer, and dreamer in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where she loves to farm and camp. She received her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry from Western Colorado University.
Chuck Rybak
Van Gogh’s Nests
He pays children for an oriole’s nest
the bird the boys say hides inside
the dark tree knot as they mock the odd man
for being a twin of the tree thin
wiry leaning to the west
He pays for the nests deflects their insults
which sink in his bile like the stones
they will soon throw at the painter man
He reads the human head as a geography
of field labor a row of beans as the sublimity
of the sower tall grain grows into parental love
wheat is the organ of self-esteem the conjugality of sex
in uncut wildflowers a hagiography of fatigue
speeding inside the brakeless carriage of his head
the nest the human face and body
simplicity so divine he’ll spend his lifetime
failing to render them figure after beautiful figure
abandoned in new shades of black
until the woman in a winged hat collects
peering eyes for centuries while hiding
the self-portrait buried beneath
her awkward beauty brushed and flattened
over his own skin that couldn’t get the darkness right
almost done he says as another stone thuds home
Chuck Rybak, originally from Buffalo, New York, now lives in Wisconsin and is a Professor of English, Writing, and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay, where he coordinates their prison education initiative. He is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry. Chuck also writes on Substack as The Declining Academic.
Ingrid Brown
Ingrid Brown is a UK-based figurative artist working primarily in oil painting and drawing, using her observational studies as a springboard for studio work. Ingrid explores mood, states of being, atmosphere, texture, and shifting light, often sketching on location or in front of the subject matter, in changing weather and at the edges of daylight. Ingrid has exhibited across the UK and recently contributed to The Artist magazine. Website: art.ingridbrown.co.uk / Instagram: @ingridbrown_art
Rose Strode
Imagining My Imagination as a Kite
and suddenly there she is, skating on one toe
skimming the woolly sky
in a red cloak
arms open
the twine that binds her to this world–
invisible
the wind snaps
gossamer line holds tauttauttaut
the kite’s anchored star
buckles–
should I draw it in?
but sudden sun! blinding paraclete! and the red’s
a
blaze
oh
how
do I make
myself
that
light
?
Rose Strode is a poet, essayist, rehabilitator of overgrown gardens, and naturalist. Her work appears in New Ohio Review, Terrain.org, The Gettysburg Review, and The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II from Trinity University Press. When not writing or helping others with their writing, she wanders around in the woods with her dog. Read more of her work at rosestrode.com.
Kristie Frederick Daugherty
Changing My Mania Meds
All night I waltz in the front yard
so it will rain. I want this flaming bush
to turn to ash so I can cover
family graves with it.
I penned my mother’s eulogy, she who
is well and kicking. Anticipatory
grief. I pulled the well bucket
to my face and the water screamed.
I flung it to the sea where water
is water is water. I collected
shells and lugged from the depths
a purple mountain, gleaming with majesty
and stern apprehension.
I searched for my Bible and found it
down the road amongst some rusted screws
and busted tires, it having grown
tiny legs and arms
to march to Galilee.
I took it by the hand and
we ran a half marathon together.
Hand me that elephant.
I want to place
it to my neck
and feel it suckle for milk.
That’s the cure for world hunger,
the mothers. The mothers’ mothers.
Nothing can unmother me now
so I will dippity dippity
do dance this forever,
tapping it out in black
shoes for a while
while the bob-white seal
barks and bitches while
I am wiled into a wily
drugged cloud
fog of frogs.
Kristie Frederick Daugherty is a poet and a professor at the University of Evansville. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a PhD candidate in Literature/Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, published in December 2024 from Random House. She has poems in Ponder Review, The North American Review, American Poetry Review, and various other literary journals. She has been featured on Lit Hub, Barnes and Noble Reads, Medium, Parade, and Vulture. She has a chapbook of poetry forthcoming in late 2025 with poet Stephanie Burt, and she has a collection of poems, Ordinary Pietá, forthcoming in 2026. She is a contributing editor at The Blue Mountain Review.
Rebekah Chan
There Is So Much to Hold on To
Snowbanks melt, and then rush into the street gutter. The sound of torrential rain. Winter’s last sunrise flickers bright orange. Barren trees stoic outside my window as I greet the morning.
I bring balloons to the hospital for my dad’s 74th birthday. His sallow face, bones protruding like 嫲嫲’s funeral portrait in the basement. I am now staring at her son, my father, and their cheekbones. My cheekbones.
嫲嫲 brings Hong Kong in suitcases to me: astragalus root, beef jerky, Cantonese. Shouting on the phone at the phantom wet market, a steamed pork patty, and stories of Japanese soldiers. My Cantonese childhood, vanishing with each witness.
My 5-year-old pushes dad’s wheelchair like a toy stroller. In seven days, he will die. I love Gung Gung, she crayons for him to read. When you are old enough to drive, will you come visit me? He asks. His ashes, he means. Will you remember me? He hopes.
How do we measure time? In stanzas, sunrises, or birds? The distance from the people who left us? My daughter’s shoe size. There is so much to hold on to. Winter makes way for spring; my daughter’s childhood memories, in lieu of mine. A warm breeze in the distance. Gentle rain on my face.
Rebekah Chan is from Toronto but has lived in Asia for 15 years, where she completed her MFA at City University in Hong Kong. Previous publications include Tupelo Quarterly, TJ Eckleburg Review, Reed Magazine, and more. She also served as the Editor-in-Chief for her MFA program anthology, Afterness: Literature from the New Transnational Asia. She is currently based in Toronto and writes about loss and belonging. Instagram: @bx_writenow
Paula Praeger
Paula Praeger is an artist and a writer. Her prints have been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad. She has contributed artwork to literary magazines. Her poems have been published in Hindsight, Cancer, Months to Years, Close Up: Poems on Cancer, Grief, Hope, and Healing, Visible Ink Anthologies 2021-2022, 2023, 2024, and in the Sad Girls Club and Humans of the World blogs. Website: paulapraeger.com / Instagram: @paulapraeger
Ignatius Sridhar
Ignatius Sridhar is an emerging artist and photographer in Toronto. In his work, Ignatius focuses on digital arts in the areas of street photography and landscapes. His current project is Found Latin, a study of the language’s influence in modern Rome. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, Sheepshead Review, and Gabby & Min’s Literary Review, among others.
John Slater
The Trash
—for Dan Davis
All day chess in Paradise Café
and Bagel Shop Water Street
Peterborough late fall light
free refills and clear
view of bakers in back through
wall-size plexiglass
*
6 pack late in snow on path by
river—long walk home from
store—every star in the
winter sky.
*
Cheap draft. Read Euripides in
Pig’s Ear crashed party at
The Trash wacked dancer over
head with half-deflated black
lingerie blow-up sex-doll
8 ball upstairs with jocks:
cream white top-spun cue ball
trickled over taut blue cloth to
exquisite shape for next shot.
*
Chess by desk-lamp Tom Waits
blasting crowd around the bar
snow blows in wind-chime
door-slam glance up
back to book or chessboard one
dark frothy pint after the next
days go by
John Slater grew up in Ontario, Canada, but lives now as a monk in New York. He’s published a poetry collection, Surpassing Pleasure (Porcupine’s Quill), a chapbook, Lean (Grey Borders), and a co-translation, The Tangled Braid: Ninety-Nine Poems by Hafiz of Shiraz. A second co-translation, This and That: Selected Short Poems of Ryokan, is forthcoming (Monkfish Publishing, 2026). His work has appeared in various journals including The Antigonish Review, PN Review, and Drunken Boat.
Samuel Day Wharton
Rewilding
this the squirrel’s contribution
to paying carbon down
one more ring above the earth
one more volunteer against the prevailing trend
the coast oak’s truth is it forgets
more than it knows
(& at 47 I regrew my tongue
from where it had been burnt
down to the root)
O tree that sends up again & again
into the light
pale leaves / frail shoots
O tree that spends so freely on belief
in one more season
(my teeth rebelled
enameled locust brood
& clamped down hard inside my mouth)
I could not speak it the hard wet road of beauty
but I left you there
a message hot as asphalt on my tongue
Samuel Day Wharton lives in California’s Sacramento Valley, where he makes wine and writes poems. His poetry has appeared previously in Prime Number, anti-, No Tell Motel, Thirteen Myna Birds, and Versal, though it has been some time.
Sarah B. Cahalan
A painful detail, recalled at the nature center
The placard shows a century of circles,
How sprout transmuted into maple,
As sap ran through its body, sweet
With youth and green vitality,
Each year wrapped, immutably,
Bark to heartwood: history.
But here, a memory of fire breaks
Years’ concentric carapace,
And here, the most hermetic orbits
Admit red starbursts, pith-sick
Infestations. Abruptly, ashes—
Where the past was.
Affect
How the placement of a chair somewhere
excuses sitting.
Encourages, even,
one to rest one’s back against a surface,
rest one’s feet.
Bittercress, dead nettle—
those little ones that otherwise get
passed across—
a reset of the scale where flowers
become attractions.
The placement of a chair beneath
a tree, against a crumbling wall—
how placement lets a place itself
upon a person.
Sarah B. Cahalan writes about natural history, hope/grief/faith, the layers of places, and how those correspond with our own layers as people moving through time and place. She has poems, current or forthcoming, in Dark Mountain, Image, Trampoline, and others. Sarah is from Massachusetts and is currently based in Dayton, Ohio.
Sarah Walko
Sarah Walko is an artist, director, curator, and writer. Her visual art exhibitions have been extensive, including Raising the Temperature at the Queens Museum of Art and Preternatural at The Museum of Nature in Canada. She has been a visiting artist at Endicott College, Hudson Valley Community College, Kansas City Art Institute, University of Missouri, Roger Williams University, and Savannah College of Art and Design. She is a NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentor and a published author of fiction and nonfiction essays. She is a contributing writer in four anthologies: Sacred Promise (Women Changing the World Press), Neon Guides Me: A Monograph of Artist Anne Katrine Senstad (Praun & Guermouche), Royal Beauty (Arts by the People), and Transpecies Design (Routledge).
Sara Eddy
Goldenrod
I would know you anywhere.
I would choose you for my crown—
intricate florets as florets
shaking out pollen,
bees dancing around my head
like cartoon birds, you loon,
you seasonal lover.
Yes I’d know you by the roadside
or the edge of the woods
while the dog pokes his nose in.
Goldenrod, you mean school buses,
sneezes, rich dark honey,
shorter days, the last flash
before the gloom of winter.
You wave back at forsythia,
flashy bookends to a summer,
this summer, stung twice
lost my phone, kissed a girl
in the parking lot of a diner—
all of that in a frame of gold,
a seasonal sequence
synchronous at this end
with wood aster, autumn olive.
Every fall you are here,
crowning me queen.
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020) and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin. Website: saraeddypoetry.com
Emily Rankin
June twentieth
As the sun returns
it will scour the world with its shine
leaking to the root systems.
The space inside this moment comes into focus.
Time that will move forward,
breadcrumb by breadcrumb,
moment by moment, week by week.
The quality of this light makes clear
the past, its grip on you,
this rooted burden.
Makes conscious the thing you’ve been;
the sentiments you hold to be true
about your capacity to love
and be loved.
Nothing can happen in isolation.
When the full moon sheds its light,
flooded over the world,
look at the structures you are working within—
what is bound up
inside their architecture.
Where you find home changes over time,
and it might always be evolving.
Extricate yourself from the hurts
bound up in the belief
that you deserved
to experience them.
Relish the growth that comes
from something unexpected,
something completely wonderful:
the flow of time.
Relish the recognition that the season changes,
that the light returns.
Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended University in Texas, where she received a BFA. Her body of work deals with the tangles of human emotion and understanding, the intuitive messages of dreaming and subconscious exploration. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Voices Project, FLARE, and The Bluebird Word. She is currently based in New Mexico.
