Cover image: "Seaweed" by Harrison Zeiberg
Gallery 2
Topographies of fervor
Noah Soltau
Noah Soltau teaches about art, literature, and society to the mostly willing. He is managing editor of The Red Branch Review. His debut collection of poetry, Titanfall, is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. His most recent work appears in Harbor Review, storySouth, and elsewhere. He lives and works in East Tennessee. Instagram: @noahsoltau & @redbranchreview
Kristin Lueke
not a perfect person
i have been ashamed. for the way i crave
a little violence. how even now, surrounded
by prayer plant, thriving, i worry what i’ll miss
when i’m gone. i worry that i worry just to prove
that i care, that i want, knowing what i do
about wanting—its making & deliberate
dissatisfaction—nearly nothing, enough
to know better by now. still i want
quiet. kindness. an end that comes gently.
call me a clown, i’d like to be loved.
just not too much. lord, let me never
be needed. i’d like my first rodeo back—
the day i learned about mutton-busting, inhaled
deep sweet shit & earth, corn ground & fried,
watched sideways, through sun-struck braid
of breathing bodies, mothers whose lives
i know nothing about gripping their children
how a child grips small fistfuls of wool,
told to hold on—always, in the end, helplessly.
& i, too, helpless but to marvel a minute
at the man who first built a fence around horses.
forgive me. i laughed when they fell.
poem with possibilities (incomplete)
say—the angels were vengeful, also accurate.
i hot-hand my psalms. kneel at the antler
& the antler were a room. a body would listen,
my enemy fell. i knew what to yodle
& you dreamt what you mean. say we heard
a thinking buffalo. your thoughts were loudly
read aloud. you slept through the week & changed
your heart, i changed my middle name.
the better were the devil, yet i know a softer nail.
different loved to gamble. grace was just a word.
every whisper box gets emptied & i haven’t any tea.
say i could have a moment to gather my particles
while the road runs out to kill you. say i wore the weather
& the weather turned mean. say i said if i’m tired—
you told me you’re tired. say i believe you.
Kristin Lueke is a Chicana poet and author of the chapbooks (in)different math (Dancing Girl Press) and here i show you a human heart. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart, Best New Poets and Best of the Net, has appeared in Sixth Finch, Wildness, HAD, Okay Donkey, Mizna, and elsewhere. She writes at theanimaleats.com
Elizabeth Rae Bullmer
Muscle Memory
Bone slips, a slight limp,
left hip corner-tucked,
folded into origami orchid;
joints angled since 8th grade
summer spent stretching into splits.
I identify willow trees
from a distance,
by their interpretation of wind.
Speak fluent ocean,
though I live among lakes.
Scapular stitch pins
one wing; shoulder stuck
as a scorpion in a lollipop.
Neck forever locked westward.
Body of paper-weighted petals
imprisoned in perpetual bloom.
Elizabeth Rae Bullmer started writing at seven years old. Drawing on life experience and trauma recovery to harness the healing power of poetry, she explores memory and how it shapes our definition of truth. Bullmer’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Cloudbank, Anacapa Review, The Awakenings Review and two recent chapbooks, Rhubarb Pie Without Berries and Skipping Stones on the River Styx. Bullmer is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee, a workshop facilitator, a licensed massage/sound therapist, and the mother of two phenomenal humans, living with three fantastic felines in Kalamazoo. Website: elizabethbullmer.wordpress.com
Deborah Kennedy
Swamplove
Walk across winterbit fields
down to the teeming swamp
every step drops, deeper
and deeper into waiting marshes
fens, and bogs. Scent of sepia water’s
earthy tang, hear high calls
of tree frogs over bullfrog
basso. Swamplove guides my feet.
Walking on a quiet path
of one, whispering, weaving
my story through morning
greengrows, a first touch of Spring.
Give me eyes, give me feet.
Give me the empty places, so full
for me. I claim no insignias
no amulets, no name. Give me the
roiling clouds, bristlebrown thistles,
rustling cattails, beating wings
rising. Dig the willing earth
and plant Loblolly pines
roots sinking into the wet soil,
branches heavy with cones.
Let the lifepipes sing
clear across the longlost lands.
Author and artist Deborah Kennedy’s work focuses on the challenging relationship between ourselves and the larger natural world. Her book, Nature Speaks: Art and Poetry for the Earth, was recognized with the Silver Nautilus and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Poetry Book awards. Deborah’s poetry has been featured in The Midwest Quarterly, Caesura, great weather for MEDIA, and Leaping Clear, among others. She recently won two Sheridan Prizes for Art (Sculpture and Experimental categories). Currently, she is a Creative Ambassador for the City of San Jose. Website: deborahkennedyart.com / Instagram: @deborahkennedyart
N.W. Hicks
The Ghosts that We Carry
She waits until the dark settles
in her room to ask
if you believe in ghosts.
You don’t know these shadows
well enough to answer.
You don’t know this woman
well enough to let the silence ruminate
on the question for you.
You tell her about the time
you saw a ghost apple
in your grandfather’s orchard
after he died
and no one was left
to pick the apples at harvest time.
How it hung from the branch that would break
next season, when no one bothered to tend it.
You almost told her
that you eat apples every day
to keep your grandfather’s ghost alive.
That before he taught you their names,
when every apple was only red,
or green, or gold,
that he told you that the taste of an apple
was determined by who bites it,
and that only good children found sweet apples.
How eating tart ones became a lesson
in keeping something to yourself.
Instead, you told her how he grafted his trees
while they were young;
the process of cutting shoots at an angle,
pressing together two wounds,
the black grafting tape peeling in the sun.
How the red apples by the basement door
could be Pacific Rose, Cortland, or Macoun.
How there used to be a three-colored tree by the shed
at the edge of the field
carrying Winesap, Smokehouse,
and Ginger Gold.
You want to tell her
that you think you killed your grandfather’s ghost
when you were sixteen.
How it took three stones
to shatter the ice on the bough;
how the light left the skin
when the ghost apple hit the ground.
Instead, you say you believe
in the ghosts that we carry,
our unfinished business with the dead.
N.W. Hicks is a Connecticut-based poet. He is a graduate of UConn and earned his MA from Manhattanville. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River & South, Tabula Rasa, Chrysalism, Paper Dragon, Shot Glass Journal, and elsewhere. He believes in water but works with dirt and dreams of becoming a river’s meander.
Greg Lehman
Securities Industry Essentials Exam as Lacuna
as the gaps walling
the most of everything
I won’t know and fall through
too fast to grasp more than what I
have to, absolutely must question in
the hard out on an hour cornered, a three-
sided cubicle for me and my fellow candidates
in noise-canceling headphones, phones
checked at the desk, together, we
find out what we have
on our own, timer
started, go,
chase
how
agents
can or cannot
mitigate the averse,
approach the variable,
bubble-wrap tragedy
as best
as the unavoidable
will lend us tax-deferred growth,
hold
liability
on the forever
unknown, the test
raking explanations memorized
to the lengths of what we gave to retention,
depths on the edges of how
obsessed
we must be,
or, had to be
with the falseness
that I could not pare away
from a resolution as rare as it is
infallible: pass/fail, in
an instant, oh,
no, not
at all, Greg,
thanks for playing, you
caught a hair over half
of what was asked
of you, which
grows, a
gargantuan
calm, cooling
my car at the test site, the air
humming as it swells, serene, a vast
sigh on contortions
relieved
from excess, swollen voids
beside landscapes, topographies of fervor
for carving, gutting self, making words
look like this, hives that are hearts
that are haystacks on fire,
senseless and abuzz
and alight with
the word, no
gradation
to them, any
curve to offer in increments
we never get back, given, or wished
we had given more to, no averaging out
on the catalysts of hands, medium,
compulsion and love
and knowing we
know nothing
of how much
we have
for what
has us, what we
must not fall through
too fast, what
we, I need,
I need
outside of
a cage, slim cleft
I crawled in to grapple
with the me who can’t not know,
this can’t,
won’t,
isn’t me
in the fissure,
how expansion arrives
with a freeze, then,
melts,
evaporates,
flies.
Greg Lehman earned an MFA in creative writing from Lindenwood University and a BA in journalism from California State University at Fullerton. He has published and edited as a poet, professional writer, and journalist, and his poetry has appeared in the Moon Tide Press’ Poet of the Month feature series, Like the Wind Magazine, Dark Winters Lit, and Book of Matches, among others. He lives in Los Angeles, California, and all are welcome to follow his Substack and Instagram @bestcoastgreg. His ongoing interview series “Moon Beams” is available on YouTube.
Ellis Eden
Lacunae
isn’t there but must be there.
If only she could clear her eyes,
catch her breath, but the stairs never end—
they curl away, horned into shadow.
Children watch her as she ascends, the little ones.
Behind each door a blank face, unknown yet
familiar. Between floors, a moment of rest:
Lead paint peeling, poppies gone to seed,
shoes unlaced, wireless silenced, bombs away.
The telegram in her pocket thin as dawn.
They will leave if she doesn’t return soon,
go searching in the city beyond the clouded glass.
The higher she climbs, the more it recedes,
this threshold of knowing, the door that
Ellis Eden is a writer & fine artist with a background in print design. Her words have been published in Andromeda Magazine, Periphery Literary Journal, Wildscape, and The Winged Moon, among others. She has worked for Ploughshares and River Styx. Ellis is a Midwest transplant to the South, and lives in a mosquito breeding experiment known as Florida. Her intersectionality is bisexual, neurodivergent, and Chahta Okla (Choctaw). She loves mythology, foreign films, and toads. Given the choice, she’d rather stay home and read, but if a wizard comes knocking, she’s always up for an adventure. Website: elliseden.com
Marissa Paysinger
((The Last Call))
Sometimes, I think about what it means to press transient song in silk and look for the shape of absence.
In another life, in another April, I went to see Alice Hargrave’s Last Call/Pink Noise project, her portrait of birds—not of their faces, nor their shapes, but by their songs and the song’s absence.
She imprints the sound of the bird’s song on silk, often revealed in shades that echo the body in some way, such as bright yellow eyes or bright pink skin. Why save that simple brown bird? Why save a bird if no one listens for it?
First, I sift through the worth—Why save a simple brown bird?
Because simple is easily understood, no matter how plain.
Because brown means dark or dusky.
Because bird means song.
Second, I consider the song and what is lost by losing it.
Sometimes, it’s not just notes, sometimes it’s a home with morning light coming through the window. Sometimes, it’s just an aubade of birdsong singing to some parting lovers. Sometimes, it’s just time passing.
Third, I consider the skin. The way wings understand wind by mimicking the sound. The way the bone has to hollow, has to make space for air so air can hold it. The way the eyes recall the field and the home they nested in.
Nightingales aren’t born knowing their song. They have to learn to form song memory. None teach it directly—they hear fragments of songs and must assemble them, almost like memory itself. The song is a learned memory passed mouth to mouth—not in encoded DNA but finding a home in the hollow bone.
If the bird is lost, if the song is lost—there’s no one to sing the song—the lineage fractures. The song goes silent.
And then the last bird only knows the ache of wanting to sing, but knows no notes.
It knows there should be another—
One it could call into being, if only it knew the song.
So it waits on the branch—squalling, trying to piece together memory from another’s mouth when that mouth has gone.
Trying to bring the body of another back into being with a song that’s already lost.
I think about what it is to want to put those notes on silk, just to try to hold them in the air a little longer. What it is to long so much—wanting to prevent time from pressing forward and so pressing song to silk. You long so much that you’re willing to slaughter thousands for it. Because silk is the production of another’s mouth, and the silkworms have to die for it.
Have you ever seen thousands of silkworms be boiled? That’s what it takes to harvest silk. Silk they spun from their body as a shroud but also a tomb, having faith and believing in that silk a body can transform and have life again—with wings.
The silkworm is born as a mouth, its whole body’s purpose to consume mulberry leaves obsessively until it’s so gorged it’s put into a trance-like state. The salivary glands secret fibroin, solidifying into thread by making contact with the air.
That’s the work of its mouth—a single thread it hopes might carry it as it transforms. So it weaves—moving its mouth around its body, spinning spit into air. And once its covered it’s whole body, the silkworm’s body starts to liquefy itself.
It becomes a body of liquid made of unrecognizable cells. Because cells can’t recognize themselves in death.
Typically, if the process isn’t interrupted, a miracle happens.
Because hidden inside that body from birth, was a memory.
The body begins with imaginal disks, small dormant clusters and DNA encoded with a different future, a different body in mind. These disks are dormant during the life of the larva. They don’t participate in gorging themselves on mulberry leaves or weaving a mouth around the body.
It’s only in that unrecognizable state of death those imaginal disks imagine what it is to wake up. They remember, even without a mouth, without a body. They know wings as the shape of absence.
And so it rebuilds a body, plank by plank, code by code. Like Theseus’ ship.
A body—
Eyes that have never seen light.
Antennae for sensing the world they want to re-enter.
Wings—
Brief beauty—
Keats said that too—
While he was dying, he wrote to his beloved Fanny Brawne—
“I wish we were butterflies and live’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
—He died only a few years later. And now, his voice pressed ink to a page. The page made from a tree that fell. Likely unnaturally. Likely raised only to be cut down for paper. Another body to count.
—I like to think that Keats did become a butterfly after—like slipping one body for another.
That maybe everything is born with imaginal disks hidden inside their DNA. DNA encoded with another body in mind. And even in death when body begins to be made of unrecognizable cells—
That’s Lethe.
That’s death’s forgetting.
That’s water returning to water.
Until those imaginal cells begin to imagine the shape of absence.
That’s real love—
Remembering the shape of absence.
I feel like there should be a word for it—
Something just on the edge of the mind, or on the tip of the tongue, an intuition that I’ve failed to catch or see something necessary because I do not know the form it takes—I don’t know what song to look for.
A way of feeling absence so absent the very feeling or awareness begins to trace it, making it undeniably present. A kind of obscure sorrow. A kind of silence when you know there should be song. An ache in the throat like thirst.
But I don’t know it.
Maybe another mouth was supposed to teach me—
So I look at a birdsong’s sound wave pressed in silk. And in the silk I see the silkworm and the miracle it sacrificed to press transience of song onto the work of its mouth. I see the moth or butterfly it could have been—and in it I see Keats, living again with his beloved Fanny for three brief days.
I’m longing for a word to shape my longing—
The sound wave of one mouth woven in the weave of another’s mouth.
Imagine those imaginal disks—
Marissa Paysinger writes creative nonfiction and poetry attentive to language, listening, loss, and the small rituals that ask to be preserved. Her work has appeared in The Hopper, Crab Creek Review, and Suspended Magazine, and she was the recipient of the 2022 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. She holds graduate degrees in literature and education, and is a member of Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Boulder Writing Studio. She lives in Colorado with her husband and border collie.
Isha Mital
Isha Mital is a visual artist and poet whose work is vibrant, unapologetic, and endlessly evolving. Her creations are a celebration of existence, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in a world full of life and the whole experience of being. Both her written and visual work have appeared in Sunday Mornings at the River, Through Lines Magazine, Where Meadows, The Turning Leaf Journal, Ink in Thirds Magazine, Full House Literary Magazine, SQUID Literary Magazine, and SHINE International Poetry Series. Instagram: @thoots.s
Keegan Lawler
Teaching My Child to Pick Dandelions
and wild carrot and chokeberries and everything else the county mowers
come for in a few weeks. Things grow so fast around here.
The juice of summer sticks to them through a dozen
baths. The dirt in plastic bags and under our nails.
I want to tell them about the looks on the fathers
as I drew yellow on my arms in the outfield,
but I barely know this person. Don’t know them more than impulses,
desires, a humor, but what am I, if not patient? If not a time-lapse camera, aperture winking.
Keegan Lawler is a writer living in Washington State with his family. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, Salon, The Offing, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourteen Hills, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. His chapbook, My Own Private Idaho, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks.
Karen J. Weyant
Rock Hill
So called, because the creek
that wound its way down
the hillside was just a trickle
of stones and water,
just a wobbly trail for
a ten-year-old me, to climb
to where boulders
split the woods into parts.
Left over from the Ice Age,
my fourth-grade science
teacher said, his explanation
for the rocks that lined
the local hillsides
and with his words
an echo in my head,
I imagined the way
my mother saved leftover beef
for a thick stew,
and started my climb,
hoisting myself up,
my small hands grasping
patches of moss and ferns,
scrawny legs and knees
bracing against stone ridges
carved out and eroded
from years of wind and rain.
At the top, I stood proud,
a hole ripped in my jeans,
the palms of my hands nicked
bloody with stone. I was sure
that if I could conquer
this landscape, I would
win over the rest of the world.
Karen J. Weyant’s poems and essays have been published in About Place, Chautauqua, Crab Orchard Review, Crab Creek Review, Lake Effect, River Teeth, Spillway, and Slipstream. She is the author of Avoiding the Rapture, published by Riot in Your Throat Press. She lives, reads, and writes in northern Pennsylvania.
Maureen Schirack
The Spatial Orientation of Earth
On the rim of Mount Harris
I trudge through ruts carved
by logging trucks,
the sun looming into noon
casting no shadows,
the air thick with the smell
of wood and pine.
Looking down, I consider
the farmland stitched in squares
and rectangles, at secure boundaries
where wheat and hay
squabble with the roundness
of the Earth.
In the distance, I hear
the low moan of a tractor,
know it imposes neatness
on the land before winter creeps in.
If I could see it, I’d see
the morning marauder’s
straight lines carved in the curve
and crest of the hill.
Nourished by rain,
earth and sky, my life
moves out in concentric
circles, layer on layer
like the rings of trees,
each ring arcing outward,
each ring an orbit of wisdom,
becoming fully human
always a sphere away.
How do I push against margins,
use doubt as an instrument
to embrace a world off-kilter?
Maureen Schirack is a writer from Ohio. She holds a BA in English from Kent State University and an MA in English from The University of Akron. Her poetry appears most recently Hellbender Magazine, Last Stanza Journal, and Red Cedar Review. Maureen enjoys tending her garden, walking with her dogs Waylon and Reba, and writing poetry.
DeAnna Beachley
Colorado River as/is
I have lived, traveled, rafted, hiked, stood, sat, slept, driven alongside the Colorado River for most of my adult life. It sustains me — and this region.
At fifteen, I first glimpsed the Colorado on a family vacation. I stood on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and saw a little green slice of the river in the distance.
Sometimes it is red or green, muddy, silty, salty, depending on where it is on its path. Shades of red and green before or after one of the fourteen dams on the main stem or where a tributary creek or river enters the flow or after monsoonal rain or snow melt joins the course. Salty and silty downriver. Blue to red where the water comes in from Havasu Creek.
Words flow like the Colorado. Easy, moving along. A dam — a block — then flowing again.
words flow -//-
words flow -//-
words flow.
The Colorado is like enjambed
lines — unexpected
breaks — breaths
doing a lot of work before a dam.
I woke up to words about the river tumbling across my mind. And now as I sit to write, some of them crashed — evaporated. Will new words surface?
What does the Colorado have to say?
I sit by the river and listen.
It sings — it shouts — it demands — it whispers.
It sounds like revolution. Like joy. Like a charge. Like life.
A longing to be free from the shackles of dams, and words that don’t serve.
Unburdened by compacts, complex rules, and regulation.
In 2017, a lawsuit was filed against the State of Colorado to declare the Colorado River as a legal person. This first-in-the-nation lawsuit requested that the court recognize the river’s rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve, and grant the river “personhood” and standing to sue in American courts. That lawsuit failed.
The river remains.
River as touchstone. Guide. Living being.
Imagine travelling down the Colorado in a wooden boat with oars as the Powell Expeditions did. Imagine that allocating a river’s water is a good idea. As if drought would never be a possibility. In 1922, the first Colorado River Compact divvied the river’s water between the seven western states where the Colorado or its tributaries flow. That compact omitted Native Americans and Mexico who also have a stake in the health of the river.
We went for 214 days 2024/early 2025 without measurable rain in Southern Nevada. No monsoonal rains in the summer of 2024. At least 5000 new homes built in the valley during that time.
More pressure on the river. More pressure to write. I keep thinking of a line that came to me in a dream. But I can’t recall it. I know it was beautiful and compelling. It is on the edge of my mind, but I cannot remember. Can I find another?
I am left with many questions. If a mountain is a wave is the river then a canyon? Or is the river something else? Can a river be a political party? (Oh please, please, please.) Can a river be a state of being? Can a river have agency? Can a river be rock?
Can a river enter my dreams and carry me to a place I’ve never been?
A resident of the West for most of her adult life, DeAnna Beachley has grown to love the Mojave Desert and the Colorado River Basin. She is a bird watcher, hiker, teacher, historian, poet, and essayist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Red Rock Review, Sandstone & Silver, The Nature of Our Times, Thimble, Slant, Blue Earth Review, Gyroscope, Liminal Spaces, Remington Review, Anatomy of an Essay, Awakenings: Stories of Bodies and Consciousness, and Wild Roof Journal. The Long View is her debut chapbook.
Harrison Zeiberg
Harrison Zeiberg is a photographer and writer from Massachusetts. He currently works at a nonprofit in Boston. His previous creative credits include Havik, Inlandia Review, Washington Square Review, Journal X, Wayne Literary Review, and more.
Elizabeth Townsend
To Talk About Giving Birth
Is like lifting a flowerpot in a graveyard of volunteers,
peering down to the pulse and squint of the ground,
to the half-healed suture of November’s mud,
suddenly split.
There, nodding, blinking in their nude suits,
are all the devoted, noses bowed to the trenched soil.
And, off to one side, you see her — barely living,
but blood-baring, like a toe or a tongue,
solemn, still in her purple burial,
boneless as a fruit.
This daughter of yours,
this produce that has sat anonymous in a patch,
you pick with two hands from the common clay.
And what can you do but draw her near you:
knowledge that you would be the bog
this creature could have crawled from.
And beyond, but in your periphery,
a new sheet announces something startling,
like a sail throwing out white chest in a storm.
A wail.
And it is here the elements converge:
the four corners of the earth closing in.
You are not alone, and you never will be.
And, in your first eye-to-eye encounter,
you witness this face you cannot clearly find,
her gaze busy passing one last time
through the long memory of the earth.
And all that was in her that pled
for the anonymity of stone,
the containment of caged rib,
the desire to climb back into a mother’s obscurity,
must be trained to stay.
Elizabeth Townsend is a poet and psychotherapist living in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM and Beloit Poetry Journal, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on her first poetry collection.
Andi Myles
An engineered model of unconventional positive-affect paradigms
A Myles
PMID: 161803398 DOI: 10.2718/2818.284.590
Abstract
There are many who would benefit from a thorough understanding of why happiness does not suit the human animal. Although the Milky Way smells of rum and raspberries, black holes obscure the universes where I never made it out of my twenties. The challenge of weaving the strings of theory together to answer the dilemma of why balloons pop in my presence has shown that the wrong diversions have been elevated. Instead, happiness was identified floating in hotel conference rooms filled with vacuum cleaner enthusiasts, behind a chandelier of sunlit leaves, and in the Church of Outdoor Voices, Skinned Knees, and Sidewalk Chalk. In summary, this investigation proves that when a child asks, What day were you born? Was that the first day? The day the world was beginning? the answer must always, of course, be, Yes.
Andi Myles is a Washington DC-area science writer by day, and poet in the in between times. Her favorite space is the fine line between essay and poetry. She is the author of the chapbook Fractured Symphony (Cathexis Northwest Press) and her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, and Chestnut Review, among others.
