Cover image: "Wild Lavender" by Chelsea Tikotsk
Gallery 1
Shadow-clinger soaked in sun
Marthine Satris
On Agate
Bull kelp and wasps swarm
on the swell of it
years back,
a whale here
its rot rising
drifting on air
Eight pelicans, wings taut
skim where sky begins
and then, fast
as jack flash
some flock
birds flying and doubling back
into the blind
light of western sun
small and turning
as one
Light splintering on
ocean panes —
through my father’s archive of waters
“grey, long silver glare of sun,”
“the waves soundly pounding”
“flowing in towards high tide”
“The wind and sea, stretched to forever”
Pace the sun west,
let it go,
against the sky
a rock
like a fin,
gull sentinel,
the ledge we married on slipping
out each winter
toward the shale resist,
a reef, a tilted bed
the edge
of the known world
Marthine Satris has published poems most recently in Flyway Journal. She is Associate Publisher at Heyday, an independent nonprofit press in Berkeley, CA. She received a PhD in English with a focus on poetics in 2012 from UC Santa Barbara and now lives in Oakland with her family. Follow her at @msatris on Bluesky.
Author’s Note: Quoted lines are from my father’s archive, used with permission.
Alina Kalontarov
Negative Space
How odd to have a thing but miss its absence,
to crave the hunger that once flirted
with fulfillment.
So delicious, the pregnant silence
of all as yet unborn.
I should be content standing here
under the full belly of the moon,
a million sparkling dreams secured.
But I would scatter the constellations
for a glimpse
of the profound nothing on which they hang.
It’s not enough to be here, with these toes
gripping a slip of sand, ocean froth
kissing whispers on my feet.
The mind rides the tide to some phantom shore
where the ebb forgets the flow
and the waves are laid to rest without a witness.
How strange, to be a shadow-clinger soaked in sun.
Tender is the friction that frays the seams
of all I’ve sewn.
The negative space that hugs the edge of everything,
that teases the divide, whose hollow weight
pins these words upon the page,
is where the meaning hides.
And so I seek.
Alina Kalontarov is a Humanities teacher in New York City. Her most recent work can be found in Sky Island Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Overgrowth, Scribeworth, Sand Hills, boats against the current, and Words Apart: A Globe of Literature.
Marybeth Holleman
Held
we sit in our slender boats, paddle pulling at the skin
of sea which holds us, skin so thin we can look right
through, see you, right below us, your flowing
locks undulating with swells that rock us, like a song
we are all singing, tendrils we glimpse enough to see you
hold an entire world here, the greens and pinks
of algae, of coral, of some bright glow of orange, silver
dart of salmon fingerling, and such shades of reds
and golden browns, so many small beings we cannot
name who cling to your soaring strands as we cling to this
dimension which boundaries us, holds us as you hold
them, innumerable swimmers, crawlers, huggers, floaters
who find in your limber lines sustenance and refuge and we
can only imagine your strong yet giving body stretching down
and down to toes which grip some rock or boulder at rest
on the deep sea-
floor, the floor, the skin above and below,
the living world of you, your gracing arms reaching up like
a tree, like the ancients in deep old growth tower, diversity mag-
nanimous, a depth of life, vertical worlds where uncountable
beings live entire lives never touching ground, never touching
water’s surface, dancing, swaying along with you, in you, on you,
you, who contain more than we can know—
don’t tell me
the world is a shallow rim of life upon which a few chosen tread.
I have glimpsed that glowing pulsing under, you whose every
lock flows with singing life, whose every sway reveals our quest
will never end. it is the wondering itself,
the endless song of wonder:
this that keeps us afloat.
Marybeth Holleman’s most recent book is the poetry collection tender gravity, with her debut novel, Bloom Again, forthcoming in 2025. She’s also author of The Heart of the Sound, co-author of Among Wolves, and co-editor of Crosscurrents North, among others. Her award-winning work has appeared in venues including Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Deep Wild Journal, Sierra, Literary Mama, ISLE/OUP, The Hopper, North American Review, AQR, zoomorphic, Minding Nature, The Guardian, and The Future of Nature. Raised in North Carolina’s Smokies, Marybeth transplanted to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound two years before the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Website: www.marybethholleman.com
Rachel Turney
Rachel Turney is an educator and artist located in Denver. Her poems, research articles, drawings, and photography can be found in a few publications. Website: turneytalks.wordpress.com / Instagram: @turneytalks / Bluesky: @rachelturney
Jane McBride
Compost
Jane McBride is a fiction writer and poet. Originally from Colorado, she moved to New York City to study Creative Writing and Religion at Columbia University. These days she lives in Queens, where she can be found learning to cook with her roommates, playing D&D with her friends, and being bullied by her foster cat Egg Roll. Her poetry has appeared in Rising Phoenix Review; Orchards Poetry Journal; No, Dear Magazine; and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Weird Lit Magazine. You can read more of her writing on her blog, Loose Baggy Monsters, at janemcbride.substack.com.
D. Walsh Gilbert
Rescued
So many field mice had been snapped
in the traps—they only wanted the dark
dry kitchen cupboards full of Cheerios.
Gallons of petrol were poured into the mouth
of the generator—hungry to satisfy.
I couldn’t tell the difference between
sufficient and my gluttonous need
for electricity—meaning marital sparks,
ignition after forty-five simmering years.
Losing others close to you produces rage—
how a woman can begin to scare herself,
can choose to tamp volcano into field mouse.
A chance here, though, to distill maple sugar sap
and sip the syrup hot from the cauldron.
I’ve always feared the fire—the campfire,
bonfire, sparkler celebrations, the birth-
day candles. I’ve always watched from afar.
I’ve quenched the heat leaking from my heart,
kept it buried to warm myself. And then, you
took the trembling mice away. You fed
the machine grumbling behind our house
with your gloved hands smelling like Lava
Soap and cowhide. Forged the electric.
Another carcass thrown to night coyotes—
four-legged, gray and crouching.
One death to feed what else must live,
something wild, fiery, virile, and howling.
D. Walsh Gilbert, a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States of America, lives in Connecticut on a former sheep farm at the foot of Talcott Mountain near the watershed of the Farmington River, the previous homelands of the Tunxis peoples. Her most recent publication is Misneach: A Story of Kidnap, Enslavement, and Colonialism (Grayson Books, 2024). Her poems appear widely in poetry journals online and in print. She serves on the board of the Riverwood Poetry Series and as co-editor of the Connecticut River Review, published by the Connecticut Poetry Society.
Laurel Benjamin
We toppled the fireweed,
what he called low-liers in dry soil,
made it to the top of Sonoma Mountain to survey the wine growing valley
on the other side and to square
feelings between beads of sweat, like the pauses
between weak beats in the Baroque music I was studying.
But on this summer hike, my boyfriend’s
footfalls, his knee-up way of finding advantages, like an air
hammer—well, I’d had enough. Of whichever
boyfriend. I knew how to strew food on my plate, abandon craft projects,
ready to leave the nerves I’d developed in response to his glasses
as they darkened in response to the sun—ready to dismember
the furry lamb’s ear plants we caressed that day,
a secret satisfaction that I’d break up with him. My oboe teacher would say,
You want a dance feeling
to emerge in the music. How this happened—air circulation, lips
formed around the reed—the rest a mystery,
like the madrone trees we’d peeled on that hike, red bark
the usual paperishness, but underneath,
a bumpy texture we couldn’t explain, maybe something about California
and how only locals like us could hear the crisp
language of the earth. Only now, years after
the boyfriend’s long hair and tie-dye t-shirts, how he gave up
cigarettes when asked, even during linguistics finals—
only now, years after playing Handel and studying metrical accentuations—
well, the plan wasn’t to leave everything unfinished,
like the temp jobs where I didn’t return after lunch (who can count)
and ice cream bars half-
melting in the fridge—It’s my nerve system,
I told my mother, as a girl. I took up the oboe again later
in an Octet, yet quit the group without a beat, and for a while in duets
with another boyfriend who transposed
Venezuelan choro for our instruments, moved to contrapuntal
movement like night fire-glow
I couldn’t control the bright sounds circulating to my shoulders and hips.
Laurel Benjamin’s full-length collection, Flowers on a Train, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, active with the Women’s Poetry Salon. She curates Ekphrastic Writers and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Current publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, and Nixes Mate. She received an Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She also invented a secret language with her brother. Website: www.laurelbenjamin.com
Victoria Brooks
Encyclopedia Entry for Twins:
Enemy and saviour. Land and sea. You and me.
Or. Angel, and his duplicate sibling, Ariel. Both have blonde hair that curls at the nape of the neck. Generally, they look alike. In temperament and taste, they’re different. Ariel is happy-go-lucky and likes fish, whereas Angel is nervous and draws stars. Angel is tired of Ariel and is often trying to lose him, which makes sense because they’ve been together since the beginning. They were monochorionic-diamniotic, so they shared a placenta, but had their own gestational sacs. Worlds separated by the finest membrane.
Them and us.
“I hate how everyone calls us them,” Angel often laments. “I want to be a you. A me.” He said this out loud once to a rockpool on his favourite beach, and to his surprise, they replied.
“You don’t want to be an us? We love being an us. Otherwise known as the following: rocks, fish, barnacles one to forty-seven, urchin, anemone, and tiny crab. One couldn’t function without the others — like you and Ariel, we’re a delicate ecosystem,” they said.
“But Ariel stops me being me. It’s like being followed by a shadow. An ego-body, or who I could be,” said Angel, sitting cross-legged next to the pool, looking at tiny crab.
“Actually, hello, it’s anemone speaking right now,” they said.
“See! You want someone to see you.”
“Sorry. Slips happen when we speak human. We suddenly become tense and self-conscious. Jealous, even. Yet when we chat in twin-tongue with a little galaxy to the left of Venus, personhood dissolves into something like love. Has that ever happened for you?”
Angel buried his hand in the cool sand, took a deep breath, and thought for a moment. The rockpool was right. Ariel and Angel had their own pre-language — it was that way since they could babble, apparently — and it never once occurred to him to be sure who said what. Often the answer emerged between them — whether the issue was what they wanted for tea, or who should have the first bath, or who should get to sleep with the rag-doll mouse. Sometimes he couldn’t remember who decided what, or how. Maybe this extended further back, to when they were bird-like, communicating through ghostly veils, over the top of whooshing bowels within the womb.
“I think I get it,” said Angel.
“You see, you’ll always have the problem of being human twins. Remember this: twins are a reminder against humanity. You and Ariel are the key. Being a they is a natural state — the I is not — no matter how loudly he insists in that tone only humans understand. You and Ariel must resist. Use your secrets to find your way into the collective — to loving and living deliciously with the earth.”
“So, you’re saying twins will inherit the earth?” said Angel, throwing a fistful of sand into the rockpool. “When it happens, I don’t think I’ll share it with Ariel.”
“Man and nature — also twins. Twin voice. Twin voice. Resist, remember,” said the rockpool.
Vic/toria Brooks is a queer nonbinary author, and parent to an octopod (2-year-old identical twins)—an identity-shifting experience they recently wrote about for W0rms Magazine. Their first queer sci-fi novel, Silicone God, was published by MOIST Books in the UK, December 2023, and was recently published in the US (House of Vlad Press). They have also published various essays on writing trauma and trauma-writing, time-travel and ethics, as well as short fiction, usually relating to trans-dimensional and futuristic sexuality. Website: www.victoriathewriter.com
Jo Rose
Jo Rose’s artistic journey began with a BA (Hons) Degree in Makeup and Costume Design from the London College of Fashion. From a Camden market stall, she launched a successful illustration brand, with her distinctive designs gracing the shelves of iconic department stores such as Liberty, Selfridges, Harrods, and John Lewis. Over the years, Rose has received notable recognition, including a nomination for the Henries Most Promising Artist award. Her collaborations span award-winning screenwriters, development producers, and esteemed animation studios such as King Rollo in the UK and GURU in Canada. Rose now draws on her diverse creative background and deep connection to the British countryside to pursue her passion as a full-time painter from her studio in the heart of Winchester. Website: www.jorosestudio.co.uk
Chelsea Tikotsky
Chelsea Tikotsky is a California-based abstract artist whose work captures nature’s fleeting magic and the emotions it evokes. Using vibrant textures and expressive color palettes, she translates moments of wonder—like sunlight dancing on water and the glow of a setting sky—into paintings that invite reflection and escape. Tikotsky holds a B.A. in Studio Art from San Francisco State University and refined her artistic perspective at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. Her work has been showcased in exhibitions across Northern California, including the 2024 PBS KVIE Art Auction, where she received the Juror’s Award.
Sean William Dever
There are raccoon kits behind my bedpost wall, and I begin to question my fertility
Like the tinnitus evanescent in my ears their claws scratch
against the drywall come morning when mother leaves.
I press my hand vertically along the egg-cream paint and
wait for them to feel the warmth emitted; a foreign sun.
And although work and the signs of a failed infusion set attempts
to pull me from my bed I try my best to coo, to purr, to chirp;
allow them to feel safe. Safe in a new body, in a new home,
amongst sounds and scents alien to those of nature.
I place my left hand with my right, try my best
to be a heater of sorts, at least until their mother returns
so that they may rest until nightfall. Yet the buzzing of my tech
blisters my ears and as I look down blood is being birthed
along my abdomen. But mother raccoon hasn’t returned yet
and I don’t want her babies to cry, so I wrap my blanket
around my stomach and return my hands before they wake.
When she scurries up the drainpipe running to my window,
and she creeps into the attic, she lowers herself down into their nest,
into the home within a home she has made for her children.
And I remain vigilant, knowing that the gift of life and children
is one that may escape the rigid outlines of my body; that the hollow
outlines within myself may erase with wear; that tech may fail;
but that these hands will not as long as I can still be a source
for something else to depend on.
Sean William Dever is a Boston-based poet, educator, and editor with an MFA in Creative Writing and a focus in Poetry from Emerson College. He has recently been published by io Literary Journal, Levee Journal, HOOT, Stickers, Unearthed Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, and Fearsome Critters Literary Magazine and was a nominee for 2019’s Best of the Net. Sean is the author of the chapbook I’ve Been Cancelling Appointments with My Psychiatrist for Two Years Now, published by Swimming with Elephants Publications.
Michelle Patton
Horoscope Cutting to the Chase
Your sister will call from the rehab
and you will marvel at the mathematics
of life—five are now two. You will
wonder if the story has always been this hack,
and really what is the plan? You were born for better
than this 80s music life, the debt always arriving,
the jets ripping your Saturday sky apart, and
really, little star, why have this soft owl
in the heart, anyway? Why carry the music?
We agree it is enormous, too much
and very unfair; we agree. Still your owl,
its dark eyes scanning the baseline; too much
beauty for one sky to hold, never mind
our light. Wandering star, the darkness
wants to unspool its tender throat, too.
Everything has a story, if you want to listen—
where they’ve been, what they want.
Michelle Patton received an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno. She won the Ernesto Trejo Award for poetry in 2003 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Zyzzyva, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, and others. She teaches English at Fresno City College.
Heather Swain
What You Tell Yourself to Get By
You tell yourself that you’ll only put her name in the search engine on your phone.
You tell yourself this is fine. People do it all the time.
You tell yourself it’s so you’ll know her better.
You tell yourself it’s for your job. You’re her therapist but you are also a person. A curious person.
You’ll look her up even though you know that if she knew you looked her up, she would be uncomfortable.
For a moment you wonder if there is an app you don’t know about that alerts people when they are being looked up. You Google this to make sure there is not. There isn’t.
Yet.
That you know of.
You tell yourself you’re just killing time. After all, you’re on the train. The ride to your mother’s is two hours and you forgot a book. You already did the Wordle and the crossword puzzle. You can’t read the news. Too depressing. Especially on a day when you will see your mom and she won’t know who you are or why you’ve come but it feels important to go anyway because you’ll know that you went long after she’s gone.
You tell yourself you’ll just browse. No rabbit holes allowed. It’s not stalking anyway. It’s legal. Not immoral nor even frowned upon. You could ask ten other therapists and eight of them have probably done this, too.
You tell yourself it’s only weird because she told you about being stalked when she was younger. About the assault. That’s why she came to you to begin with.
You tell yourself that you are a good therapist who has helped your client. She told you last session that she’s feeling less afraid. That during a walk in
the woods with her dog she passed a man and forgot to feel frightened. You were proud of her. Proud of yourself for helping her get to that point.
You tell yourself that imagining a world in which you were the man in the woods with her alone is not creepy because in this scenario she was happy to see you. Her face lit up. “Oh, it’s you!” she said and she wasn’t afraid.
You tell yourself that it makes sense there isn’t much online about her. Her wedding announcement from twenty-some years ago. A blurry picture for a community award. No social media. Mostly doppelgängers with her name and different faces living other lives.
You tell yourself this kind of voyeurism is harmless. As harmless as the island you created in your mind where you sit on a park bench alone waiting for her to join you. She comes on a boat through the fog. As a talisman, she holds up the worry rock you gave her during one of her first sessions. It’s one of dozens of smooth flat stones you collected on the beach near your mother’s house when she could still go for walks when you visited. You’ve left a few on your mother’s bedside table. They are soothing and cool to the touch. You press one into your mother’s palm each time you leave, hoping it will impress a memory of you onto her skin. The rest of the rocks are in a jar in your office by the plants. Your client admired them one day, so you offered her one and she took it happily.
You tell yourself it’s okay when she brings you small gifts — cookies she baked, a card she wrote, a book, a plant — even though your mentor’s voice rings in your head, “Don’t accept gifts from clients!” This is different. You have more in common with her than your other clients. You’re the same age. You have the same taste in music and movies. A shared sense of humor. There is an easiness about your conversations and sometimes you forget that you are not friends even though you coincidentally went to the same grad school at the same time but didn’t know one another then. You wonder when and where you crossed paths before — in a student cafe, on a street corner, in a meadow. What if you had spoken?
Your children have left and so have hers but she is handling it better than your wife who seems bereft to be left with only you while your client seems to blossom in her empty nest. She has told you that she is happily-enough married. You also are married and committed to your wife and even though things aren’t so great at the moment, they have been before and likely will be again because you are working on it.
You tell yourself that it’s harmless to imagine a world in which your doppelgängers know one another. Yours doesn’t have a dying mother who no longer knows your name and a wife who wishes she could forget. In that version of the world, you can stay on the island with your client, the rock pressed between her palm and yours and feel no remorse.
You tell yourself all of this again as you erase the search history on your phone. Just in case.
Then, you sit and wait and you ask yourself if maybe it was fucked up that you looked her up. But you understand this to be a rhetorical question that you have no intention of answering so that when she buzzes, you welcome her back for another session.
Heather Swain is the author of two novels for adults, six young adult novels, two illustrated children’s books, and two craft books, as well as numerous articles, short stories, and personal essays that have appeared online and in anthologies, literary journals, and magazines.
Sara Baker Michalak
Sara Baker Michalak has a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Humanities/Geoscience) from SUNY Fredonia, NY. She exhibits her mixed media artworks widely, including at the American Craft Museum in New York and both the Burchfield Penny and Albright Knox galleries in Buffalo. Baker Michalak works in her studio on the banks of the Canadaway Creek in western New York, where she also propagates native wildflowers.
Claire Poshusta
When My Mother Was an Apiary
She let her frames fill with honey,
great stores of pollen, nectar chilled by
our wings, so many little wings.
Fields of posies were her skirts,
nurturing us with dawn’s dew drops.
It was the summer when she failed us.
Home became too small, overcrowded with wax,
overfilled larders.
It was summer, her four walls heated up
stripped to a stretch of tarmac
—the summer heat, summer sun, sun heating—
we melted and burned our wings and wax drowning
the pupae evaporated our little waters
and we swarmed and we swore
suffocating—
the exit covered with propolis
Claire Poshusta was born and raised in Spokane, Washington. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington. The area’s beautiful landscape, rich literature community, and forests inspire her to write about the way she sees and often challenges the world. She was previously published in Underbelly Press (2025).
