Cover image: "Buried Artifacts" by Mindy Kober
Gallery 3
Talking to the water
Kate Gough
Ley Lines
i am in love with leaves, (and no, i am not ashamed: i am in love with leaves). i am in love.
i am in love with the full force of the verdant tide rising and falling within their embossed veins, flowing out through invisible rivers to the heavens, to the ocean, each one a fractal-like microcosm of the tree whole.
just like the veins in my own hand
the line that’s meant to mean
i’ll live forever.
if only i could trade essential virtues — the tree lives forever while i,
slowly, drinking deep, my feet spread in soil’s throng, arms tasting wild wind, eyes toward sky, weathering both the kiss of honeyed sunlight and the fierce, iron storm’s brow,
i grow.
even so, i do not think
any tree could be bought
by the single ley line
clutched in my fist
when Earth has
So maNy.
Kate Gough is a Californian writer and artist living in North Wales. She is wildly in love with the world, and stokes that love with words. Kate has written and exhibited for newspapers, lit mags, galleries, spoken word events, and touring exhibitions around the UK and the USA. Her work can be found in Wild Roof Journal, Peregrine Journal, Kith Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine.
Kate Kadleck
Kaley’s Tarot Cards Told Me
to move to the Driftless Area, but now here
I am, drifting still. All the locals know you
go to Illinois for weed, Wisconsin for beer.
Iowa offers sweetcorn, at least, which only
sometimes stays stitched to your teeth.
Everywhere in Dubuque there’s a bluff,
a bridge, a border. Another edge to fall off
of. The other day you asked me again why
we live here, and I texted an article about
apocalyptic migration patterns in response.
While houses crumble on both coasts, and
industries and whole lives with them, we
drink in another Midwest sunset, allow its
crimson to briefly quench this thing we call
thirst because really, there is no word for it.
Kate Kadleck is a writer and relationship therapist based in Dubuque, Iowa. She earned her MS in marriage and family therapy from Northwestern University and is the author of a chapbook, Corpse Pose (Bottlecap Press, 2025). Kate also has a poetry collection, Not Quite Medusa, forthcoming from Kelsay Books. She is a poetry reader for wildscape literary journal, and her work can be found or is forthcoming in places such as phoebe, Outskirts Literary Journal, The Turning Leaf Journal, boats against the current, Ivy Literary Journal, and Rust & Moth. Kate collects Russian nesting dolls and drinks cold brew even when it’s below zero.
Diane LeBlanc
Solastalgia
The cabinet in my mother’s living room is a portal to childhood. Shoeboxes bulge with photos, and strips of brown negatives beam the white eyes of dead relatives. The envelopes are organized by years so I grow younger in every stack until I’m two years old, sitting alone on our back porch in a snowsuit. The photo is black and white, but I imagine my snowsuit is red, like most of my childhood clothes. Four older siblings have piled snow on the porch around me because, my mother tells me, the snow in the yard was over my head. I look at the camera with distant eyes, more interested in snow than people. It all makes sense, how happy I am to be alone with snow. This winter, our third without snow, I walked the ski trails hoping to conjure the immersion of December afternoons when the holidays are too much of everything but the woods are calm, only deer or a fox moving among the trees. But it never happened. I was exposed.
through empty branches
my lost companion posed
a negative sky
Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Diane is a professor and writer in residence at St. Olaf College. Website: dianeleblancwriter.com
Rachel Turney
Rachel Turney, Ed.D., is an educator and artist located in Denver. Her poems, research articles, reviews, and drawings can be found in a variety of publications. Rachel is passionate about immigrant rights, teacher support, and empowering other artists. She is a Writers’ Hour prize winner and Best of the Net nominee. Rachel runs the online reading series Poetry (in Brief). She is on staff at Bare Back Magazine with her monthly column ”Friday Night in the Suburbs.” She reads for The Los Angeles Review. Website: turneytalks.com / Instagram: @turneytalks / Bluesky: @rachelturney
Grace Melstrand
Grace Melstrand is a sophomore at University of Wisconsin-Madison double majoring in English and Psychology. She is published in The Madison Review. In her free time she oil paints the same stuff she writes.
Derek Thomas Dew
Painted Over
Underneath the headache is what we know of ourselves,
and underneath what we know of ourselves is a shimmering cove,
so we put our names down on a list, hoping someone will contact us
if something opens up. Underneath our fidgeting is the knowledge
that prices are rising; already we had to flee the place we started from.
Is it possible it’s only an empty stomach advancing on each of us?
Did we misdiagnose as a triumph our hiding underneath who we are
yet never wanted to be, hiding down where the desire to be different
is confused with the desire to be free? Should we count among our betrayers
the rosewood and inlaid marble behind which might be found the best clothes?
If we can find that room in the mind we knew as children, the one with the dark
wallpaper and the green vines spilling through pulses of TV light, we can be new,
we can live completely as our own field of vision, chorusing in twilight purples
with scattering breaths which neither remember nor learn, which is important
because if the things we can hold will deliver us, there is a chance they will first
fall upon all we wanted to escape from becoming that is still beneath our flesh
like old advertisements under the freshly painted side of an ancient high-rise.
Derek Thomas Dew is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet living and teaching in New York City. Derek’s debut poetry collection Riddle Field received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from the Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada. Derek’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and have been published widely, including Interim, ONE ART, Allium, The Maynard, Azarão Lit Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Overgrowth Press.
Sean Wang
Tap Glass for Price Check
A sticker on the tank says it plain.
I lift a blue stone from the grocer’s bin,
bagged with peelings, wet newsprint
oiling its facets while a fish taps.
Lunch break at Rundle, card in the bag.
Ink slicks my thumb. The wall clock fogs.
At the sushi train I set the bag
by my knee; the vents pull current,
seaweed nets the grate. Receipts rise,
settle like scales. Trays skate the belt.
The scanner chirps my tooth when I laugh.
I show the chip; it answers in light.
Moisture threads into the grout.
Shop-water blue, motor under glass.
Dye climbs the wall in capillary lines.
Coins slide through the headline, blur and sink.
The terminal reboots, once, then again—
AUTHORIZE, REMOVE CARD, TRY AGAIN—
its bar climbing to the same notch.
I count. I turn the stone. The bag clouds.
A PA asks for a price check. I pay.
Thermal tape inches out my total.
The door shivers; street tide enters.
I touch where the fish keeps touching.
SALE flickers, breaks, then steadies.
Digits skate my face across the glass.
Sean Wang is a PhD student whose poetry appears or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Wildscape Literary Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pictura Journal, Soul Forte Journal, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, where his work was selected for the Broadside Series. His writing explores the intersections of labor, family memory, and material craft, often using precise sensory detail to evoke how care persists through making.
Cynthia Atkins
How to Speak Ill of the Dead
They might admonish you for not calling more often. The living
couldn’t help leaving the phone off the hook, that is, when we
had a phone with hooks? My son didn’t know what a dial tone was.
I mean the things lost to me now—photo albums and ancestors
at dinner tables, inflicted with madness and indigestion. They
might question who you really belonged to?—The parents made
children with quarrels and sweat. The dead could weaponize and starve
you for attention. They are hoarders. They keep everything.
Our desks are sleek and clean and nearly empty of keepsakes.
They don’t understand our digital nakedness. Their grief is not
your grief. They will whisper among themselves and start rumors
about you. Your infidelities, your selfish wants, your morbid thoughts.
They wear your old clothes they picked from bins at Goodwill.
They find your gum wrappers in the pockets, and dust from
decades ago. A phone number of a crush folded neatly
at the seam. You will scream and yell and forbid them, but still,
their people will call your people, and death will whisk you off
like a child being slung and carried off by a parent after a smoky
late-night party. Whatever you do, don’t talk behind their backs.
Cynthia Atkins, originally from Chicago, IL, is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure, Still-Life With God, and Duets, a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Cimarron Review, Indianapolis Review, Florida Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust & Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, Plume, Seneca Review, and Verse Daily. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and teaches at Blue Ridge Community College. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist Phillip Welch and their family. Website: cynthiaatkins.com
Michelle Geoga
Sitting Outside in the Sun
I smell warm toast and fold up the paper. The scent
a stepping stone away from another shitty news day.
The sleeping dog doesn’t put nose to breeze so maybe
the scent is in my head, concocting enticing odors
to distract, or break the rumination, like it does
with a strain of Prokofiev, the Dance of the Knights
pounding my footsteps to music. Like it does
at night when it pulls my eyes up to needlepoint stars,
applauding a planet married to sickle moon.
A thin line exists between perfectly toasted sourdough
and the horrid smell of burnt toast: the perfectly toasted
scent transits away but the burnt toast cremains cleave.
This simple odor pulls me away, smells like better days
like domesticity, buttery sunshine and then it’s gone
riding the breeze to the neighbor’s house. Let us pray
their windows are open. En route, the toast wave passes
over the little herd of deer—five watching us walk to the road
for the morning paper, disapproving. I wonder, do they embrace
that scent? Deer have sensitive senses. Have they smelled burgers
on my grill and thought, who eats flesh? Monsters. That’s who.
Bam. Pow. Distracted. Stop. Wait. You’ve forgotten something.
The neighbors never open their windows. Maybe they’re trying
to keep things out. I want to let more in. Toast, moon shadows,
and katydid song, hiccupping circles, repeating thoughts.
An hour before dawn, the backyard horned owl hoots outside
our open bedroom window. How sad life would be without
because it’s already pretty sad, all bad-news dust-clouds afoot.
I count those bitches up, those self-care mind tricks.
And I make toast with care. The burning clings.
Michelle Geoga is a writer and artist living in Southwest Michigan. Her writing has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Five on The Fifth, Bridge Eight, Cleaver, Longleaf, and elsewhere. Her visual work has been featured in New American Paintings, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Woman Made Gallery, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Writing and a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and was granted a residency at Yaddo based on an early version of a novel in progress.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Goldenrod Dreaming
In the sun-bunkered hills west of Boston, sways massive dazzle yellow, thick with bees, gold on butter, black buzzing in slant September heat flow, reveries of summer fading, glories banked now in memory, dreams of picnics and sweet sweat, of hot dogs and bonfires, of swimming and cycling, thermals off asphalt, a book thick as a sandwich that you never quite finished.
If you sit down by a clump of goldenrod, sprawl without prejudice. You can be a pilgrim. Be consolidated, co-dreaming.
If you incarnate yourself into the stands of solidago that doze on the slopes and nestle bee-laden with the asters and Queen Anne’s lace along the roadsides, what calm mysteries might be revealed ?
If you listen with your fingertips and anklebones, you might hear the hum of its subtle roots, the shushing of your self in return for the flow of resin and drift of pollen.
If you follow the arrays of the flower heads, panicled or flat-topped, with eyes slowed to the crawl of the beetle on the stem and the patience of the gall-making wasp, you might see the syntax of the plant, which beckons you in.
Down near Popham Beach, where the waters run chill even in summer, now nearing Halloween, the last pale flowers sling low over sand, defiant, dreaming of deep roots and deathless, of bees sleeping and wasps wuthering, the cold yet to come, wassail without us, of wheel-turn, of hope that next year you’ll finish the book that you started.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi has been published in Crab Creek Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, Chicago Review of Books, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among others. He is a Pushcart nominee, with poetry chapbooks published by Moonstone Arts Center (2025), and Finishing Line Press (forthcoming, 2026). He lives in New York City with his artistic partner and spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills. Website: danielarabuzzi.com
Garth Pavell
Symbiotic Speech
A whale
lost at sea
equals ten
castaways
talking to
the water
that thinks
swimming
is a breeze.
a woman writes. for no reason. other than the one. that first urged. utterances on earth. her notes app is full of sentient secrets. by the way. her thumbs make love. with most everyone.
A whale
lost at sea
equals ten
fishermen
tangling
the water
to not walk
too straight.
she corrects. autocorrect. looks skyscrapers in the eye. when a hurricane is about to sneeze. on christmas. while titted robots sell out. across the galaxy-shaped brainchild of the internet.
A whale
lost at sea
torpedoes
midnight
ships shouting
in the shadows
of its language.
breathed bubbles. ride the sonar. nature may have intended. to make art. with mistakes. from these bodily states. transcribing. being young feels forever.
Garth Pavell is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. His poetry can be found in the recent or upcoming issues of Broadkill Review, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Epiphany, Glint Literary Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Misfit Magazine, Peatsmoke Journal, Trampoline, and VOLT.
Theodore Wachs
Squirrel at Home
Scampering — the squirrel sound —
breaks
the early morning calm
with
staccato backs and forths,
here
where I have introduced the rooftop and the wooden decks —
foreign objects that these natives
seem to find convenient,
staking claims as if
they had an owner’s rights
to settle in and nest among the eaves,
hunt and store their booty
beneath the deck or where they will
and chatter at a pitch that’s menacing
No loon or hummingbird —
others native to this place
whose presence I find pleasing,
even soothing —
assaults the senses as these creatures do
but
shall I let squirrel antics
challenge my embrace
of what I welcome here,
how I cherish it?
A friend has had enough,
declares they are the enemy
and shoots them when he can
the gun I never owned
will keep its silence
while I choose reflection
as my weapon,
train it on the world we all share,
and concede
they manage adaptation naturally,
like landlords in their own domain —
here
where they define a world intact
a world,
reflection tells me further,
in which it’s we who interfere,
living with ideas we’ve imported
that are of no consequence
and destined for irrelevance
Theodore Wachs grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from Wabash College. He has had careers as a teacher, editor, and translator in Switzerland, and currently divides his time between the US and Switzerland. Poetry has been a life-long hobby. His imagination is engaged by themes of love and loss, faith (or lack of it), creative genius, social concerns, and mysteries of the natural world.
Jim Tilley
Around an Oak Wood Fire
Sitting around an oak wood fire at the end of October
after a day of canoeing in the Laurentian Mountains,
our T-bone steaks grilled to perfection, we three
cavemen wondered about our distant origins, whether
we all hailed from one place on another continent
and then migrated here, or popped up at different times
in different spots around the globe, all our questions
readily answered with a little research to refresh what
our younger minds once knew. Then the question
of what exactly we descended from, one of us asking,
“Doesn’t it depend on what it means to be human?”
We suspected that our ancestors were also tribal, in it
just for themselves, and with well-defined enemies.
We wondered why evolution stalled, at least for some.
Jim Tilley has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024. His forthcoming collection, When Godot Arrived, will be published in 2026.
Mindy Kober
Mindy Kober is a contemporary pop artist living in Los Angeles, and her preferred medium is gouache on paper. Her work explores the themes of reconstructed memories, societal codes, and the natural world, and evokes an illustrative charm typically found in storybooks. Instagram: @kobermindy.
Edie Popper
Tributary
The mountaintop, a granite cradle
nursing thick and downy clouds.
In the pines and alpine heath:
stepped stones, a tiptoe-spring.
We crouch on buttongrass and peat
to sip its newborn waters. Clear as air
this creek is cool, cool as the creek
that pours along my shoulders, spine
when your moth-mouth meets my neck.
Windchill on our wet-flecked cheeks.
I grew up on tea-coloured rivers, their
tannins of rot. I grew up on monetised rain
but this creek is unowned, unsold, untamed!
Ribbed and dribbled — wild wells — those
crumbled clouds that cannot hoard the wealth
of water, and are broken if they try.
Downslope, this creek weaves a brook weaves
a river weaves the estuaries to feed the sea.
Tributary: what a wonderful name.
The clouds pay tribute to the mountains,
mountains to the valleys, valleys to the oceans,
oceans to the clouds. Humans too pay tribute
to each other. Hot stew and oven-bread.
A box of pills on a friend’s porch. I’ll drive you
to the hospital —
and everywhere — rivers!
Sun-silvered, vascular plains. Periwinkle
down my wrist, flickers of fish inside the vein.
Even poems and music make rivers of the air.
So does our talk. The water tastes sharp, almost
sweet. And look! — an eagle arcs and does
its vigil of the valley. Cold gust, let us be
and beat in this rhythm, this time,
this place.
Edie Popper is a critical care nurse and poet living and working on unceded Gadigal, Wangal and Burramattagal Countries. Edie’s work often explores human and planetary justice, earth as our kin, queerness, relationships, illness and disability, memory, and history. Their poetry has been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Jacaranda Journal, Meniscus Journal, The Marrow Poetry, Right Now, Wildscape, and others. They have performed poetry on community radio and at the Sydney Opera House.
Alex Dodt
Two Birds, No Stone
After Victoria Chang
There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is
to kill the stone with the bird
by letting it sing, by making it
a bird. On these wings, fly.
Alex Dodt is working on a book of poems about siblinghood, punk rock, God, and grief. His poems, stories, and essays can be found in Florida Review, Emerson Review, Poetry South, and others. He founded The Grief Commune, a magazine about the politics of collective grief, which published its first issue in 2025, and he can be found on various social media hellscapes @alexisapoet.
