The liquor in an oyster is the brine of the water-body held at harvest. This river drains the Blue Ridge, meets the Chesapeake with a sigh, leaves a sweetness in the locals, but on the new planks of Wellfleet Harbor, I tasted your salt. Beloved, that one word in the day’s chalk floods the room with light. Could I ever choose another having known your waiting nacre, your shucked, gleam-soft interior along my tongue?
Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. She is the author of American Crow (Beltway Editions) and the poetry chapbooks Before: After; In a Period of Absence, a Lake; whisper song; and The Salt of the Geologic World. Find more of her work at linktr.ee/jenniferabrowne.
Ally Eden (Former Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, Colorado) writes poems that are vibrant, poignant & tender. Their work invites readers to conversations about current events while invoking reverence for humanity & nature. A Spanish interpreter by trade, Ally’s poetic ethos parallels her role as a linguist — bridging difference by way of words.
and the hive is still there hanging over the washing machine. Expanding like my hair when I walk in the rain. In search of another man. Who wants to have an emotional affair? And fold clay into dinner cups and plates so we can playhouse. The bees listen to us murmur under the doorway, like a velvet blanket, I dragged from Cuetzalan. We make a cake and douse the windowsill flowers with imitation vanilla extract. I record myself talking for my She-Ra doll and try to make myself blonde. Learn the color of the maw under my nails when the wind bangs on my door at night, though I should be grateful. My sister says we’re going to The Continental grocery store on Blackstone Avenue, and I pack my bags because I want to cradle down in the fruit’s harvest. The misters wet my hair until it takes its natural bend. And I’m embarrassed by my hair even when I try not to be. Unhooking my feet from pomegranate shells never felt so lovely. Never felt so much like I am dolled fucked for sure. And you will have me for sure. I turn on the TV in my hotel room and catch a documentary about my colonizer ancestors blowing their busted hearts in the wind.
STAGE LOCKET
BY MONIQUE QUINTANA
Crow investigates the sea and begins to fight with his own reflection in the water. His sick self. The crow twins are so engrossed in their arguing that they don’t notice that yellow roses have sprouted up from the water and all around them like a fence. The woman walking along the beach marvels at the scene and writes a list on her hand. A remedy. Snail pulse. A cloud beat. Salt around the eyes that becomes a mask. Crow pecks bone out of the sand with such ferocity that he makes a dress. Frightened by the art that he’s made, he abandons it there on the sand. The fragments tremble and ache. You, sister, pick up the dress, quick, your nails to the blue, and sigh because it would be unforgivable to rob our mother of her sea. Crow collects green bottle fragments until he has pieces to build a castle. Inside the castle, there is a papier mâché doll with black hair. The doll longs for a machine to take her to a table set with a warm bowl of soup with cilantro. To a brined kitchen. To clay parts. To a clock that resembles the ticking of a water bee.
Monique Quintana (She/Her/Hers) is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, The Community of Writers, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Storyknife. You can find her at moniquequintana.com and on Instagram and X @quintanagothic
juggling the priorities of my life, to an endless cycle of t r y i n g to catch each element and make it do tricks. to impress, to prove i am doing it (life) right, an example. the eldest daughter inside of me dictates my ritualistic hunger to succeed, to mean something. each all fall and splatter on the ground, one by one like spoiled plums, purple ooze staining the earth below me
fruit flies circling to devour my potential as i lap up any remnants of the spoiled, moldy fruits of my wasted labor. dirt on my tongue, seeds between my teeth. fists clenched, knuckles bruised from grasping onto the flesh of my life until it seeps into
the concrete and i am just left with the pit, the center. me. at the core, i am stripped bare, an echo in a hollow body.
leta iris (she/they) is a bisexual, midwestern poet studying english, with a concentration in creative nonfiction and a minor in creative writing. she is the author of two poetry collections, when summer fades to fall and the fruits of her bittersweet sadness, left to rot. her piece, “animals,” was previously featured in the Experiences of Femininity exhibit at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, as well as several other small literary magazines. she enjoys caffeine, thrifting trinkets and collecting purses. you can usually find her beneath a fuzzy blanket, book in hand while cuddled up with her lifelong partner, cody, and her blue-heeler beagle mix, buffy. you can find more of her work on instagram, @tangledflxwers
I travel the earth with one foot on each side of gender, a border as imaginary and dangerous as any nation’s boundary, no secure footing in either. But most places I enter, I have to choose anyway. I don’t have time to explain to the cab driver why my face and name are at war. When I state myself, who hears how carefully I’ve chosen?
I travel the line past the cop car parked outside the synagogue, past the greeters checking names to deter intruders on our most sacred day. I realize I’ve never asked before if there are cop cars at Eid. Would they be any protection? And there is another unsteady stance: one foot beneath the pile of bodies, one foot on their necks.
Nobody gives a shit about your definition, sometimes. A word means what it always has to them. A name, a curl of hair, a shade of white, a slanting slogan. They pull you off your feet and drag you over the border with one glance.
Every day, I step over a fault line that stretches to the earth’s molten core. I’m one foot in a new world, one stuck in what is.
BECAUSE WE DID NOT DIE
BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ
I fold my arms across my lover’s hard-won breasts, sink my weight onto one thigh gripped tight between hers, our naked skin luminescing in the dim twilight of our new apartment.
Reach across time, I’ll tell you we did not die.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS HAPLOPHRYNE MOLLIS
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: BEST READ ON DESKTOP, OR IN LANDSCAPE ON MOBILE.
BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ
Let me sell my bones to you. Let me be a ghost to my own life, to become yours. My teeth have hunted for a niche that holds them perfectly, someone who will let me stay at her side, no become her side as mine atrophies.
You don’t have to feed me, you don’t even have to look at me. All you have to do is let me remain, laying down the burden that is my self, let me deliquesce into you. A flap of scales, a deformed fin, a translucence
glowing in the deep. Ghostly seadevil, let me become a ghost to my own life, but don’t let me alone.
Leo Rose Rodriguez is a queer, neurodivergent writer and artist based in Minneapolis, on traditional Dakota land. They are the author of chapbooks “Fatherland, Motherland” and “…and this would be Moshiach”. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Rise Up Review, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere.
These poems are from an as-of-yet unpublished collection entitled “Buffalo Elegies”. “Buffalo Elegies,” is a collection of twenty-three poems that reflect on the devastating impact of the near extinction of the American Buffalo during the brutal colonization of the American West. This chapbook is a series of 23 poems elegizing the sixty million buffalo who were massacred and honoring the 23 buffalo who remained. This work explores the historical slaughter of these animals, emphasizing their significance in shaping the Western landscape. The poems vividly contrast the once-thriving buffalo herds with the current empty and haunted environment, highlighting the profound loss and ongoing silence left in their wake. Ultimately, the collection serves as an elegy, mourning the buffalo and the indigenous cultures connected to them.
BUFFALO ELEGY #4
BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH
to the west are the rockies those granite tombstones catching clouds memorializing that storm of brown fur and short horns the fallen nation of hooves there used to be so many buffalo there are none left here we killed them all on purpose haven’t you seen the pictures of their skulls stacked stories high?
right here there was once a breathing snorting stomping tidal wave trampling this dirt into soil but the mountains are so quiet now and so are the plains
we think they are peaceful but they are not peaceful they are dead this mountain range is just a marker on the largest mass grave the world has ever seen and has so quickly tried to forget
BUFFALO ELEGY #9
BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH
standing in the midst of a sold out stadium show I look out at forty thousand bodies it is more people than I have ever seen at once I do some quick math and realize that the number of lives held in this expanse of concrete and heat is nothing compared to the massacre known as western expansion that intentional near extinction of the buffalo it would take one thousand five hundred full up stadiums to equal the population of the herd that were exterminated sixty million reduced to twenty three
this is when my mind begins to swim this is when my I begin to drown this is when I start to sink into how much is really gone
and I look out over the city from the bleacher seating not seeing the sunset not seeing the crowd not seeing the show seeing only what is not there but is only thing that should be
BUFFALO ELEGY #12
BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH
I drive these highways which mirror past migrations and for brief flashes I swear I can hear their feral drum through this valley I swear I see the dusty cloud ghost of their stampede on the horizon line at dusk but I know what I am seeing is just hopeful daydreams for the fact is we live in a cemetery above their unmarked countless graves I look out at these gorgeous vistas the places people come to take pictures of on vacation and I see beauty but I also see what isn’t there it’s like a painting without a foreground just a sprawling landscape with the subject erased from the grasslands from the back of coal trains this is a small attempt to fill in the emptiness it is an attempt to scream “there was so much else here” there was once a living storm a rush like fresh blood that came to give life to this dried up dirt this is a reminder that we are not living in a mere landscape painting of the rocky mountain range there was once a subject and it was not us
Alexander Shalom Joseph is an award winning author of seven published books, most recently The Clearing (Middle Creek Publishing, forthcoming October 2025) and Living Amends (Galileo Press, forthcoming 2025). He has an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Education. Alexander lives in Colorado, writes a weekly poetry column on Substack and teaches writing workshops in libraries, schools and prisons across the Colorado Front Range.
Caught a glimpse of you last week in the manikin room, tip-toed past a group gathered around the body that wears your face, a protection circle, as if the light they shone in your eyes some kind of candle magic to manifest the real of you from the past, from the river, from the floating, from the dead, to the today, into this rubber corpse, mechanical breath catching, as a reignited heartbeat scratches itself into the screen of their smartphone.
They never asked Are you okay? Never whispered Do you mind? Never wondered Can we make a mask? Never implored could they Copy it? Make you famous? Make you most-missed, most kissed? Your unclaimed body, claimed, controlled, sold.
You are everywhere: your face on walls, CPR dolls, written in literature, cross-stitched, encased in poetry, sold on Etsy, and I dream your no,
your eyes closed and finally they hear your no, your no in death smirk opening wide, your no as purchased faces melt into waters your no, your river Seine bursting in no rushing no through art galleries and Red Cross classrooms, your scream no, flooding the world in no, in your no bursting from doorways, in the churn of dark water pushing no into your death mask, your no into the sunshine, into fire and flame into ash into no into goodbye into reclamation.
BECAUSE EVERY GIRL HAS A POMEGRANATE POEM IN HER
BY MONICA FUGLEI
I remember last summer: three or four fruit lined up, how the French call them grenades, their brilliant speckled red, these tiny bombs.
I remember how I’d pull out the meal prep plastic – quart-sized, like a restaurant kitchen,
then how, to music, I’d drag the knife lightly along the skin trying not to draw juice from the aril, how carefully I pulled the fruit apart, catching any seed that fell.
And here is where a poet would park metaphor or simile – this fruit is knowledge, harvest like murder, fruit blood red and bleeding, fruit ripe like a thought, fruit as fertility, fruit as fecundity,
fruit complex as the woman’s mind and it’s always a woman isn’t it? With the cutting and the work and the pulling and the intricate web of hanging on, her hands – my hands – around delicate skin barely holding this juice to seed, and then my crushing and pulping and
drinking, and I would harvest the work to pass on to my children, would pause in the dripping, in the wasting, hands a deep crimson, this harvest collected moment by moment,
this quiet time in the kitchen, where I ran a finger through yellow pith and packed each ruby seed in small food storage gently, thinking about death.
Monica Fuglei currently teaches in the Department of Composition, Creative Writing and Journalism at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. A 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has recently appeared in Progenitor and Mason Street. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s usually knitting or tweeting on #AcademicTwitter.
Fished a moth presumably Miller out the coffee pot presumably dead.
Again, no talent for judging life.
Everything learning to walk is Bambi except for people.
I hate moths and hate them more when they’re dying in front of me. So stunting. So honestly dying. The gall.
drank the coffee of course i drank the coffee boringly. To myself. I wouldn’t write the poem if I didn’t drink The Mothra Jus Wouldn’t submit the poem if I didn’t drink The Mothra Jus And there’s flavor in being misunderstood Pollinators. So, yes, down.
Burned my feet on the fire escape Where it dried out in a bad way something awful uncomfortably.
Then life again more than caffeinated only so poisoned
drowning those on the surface underneath it’s downpour
you are very much as the spring this year
we can only pray hope is real practice deep breaths plan in positive accord
as in what may grow
closer
perhaps the squirrels will not eat the strawberries but better to put a barrier between them and the fruit
I’m sure the weeds and wild grass will stay a few weeks more green before the summer sizzle
maybe we may take advantage of both the growing tumble and the withering
to pull from the rain and the land the best we can
to add to the home we share within us
set the table prepare the meal and may neither one of us be cut
the cosmic within and without
BY TED VACA
YOU MIGHT WANT
to think deeply
about where you
come from
To Think Deeply About Where You Come From
TO
THINK DEEPLY
ABOUT WHERE
YOU COME
FROM
to think
deeply
about
to open the eternal
gold-fringe lined
burgundy curtain
on the stage manager's signal
let the show begin
step upon the stage
stomach in turmoil
mind electric
your eyes
wide wild
and excited
to accept what is
within
is without
to accept what is
without is within
the universe s
s p
l i
a r
out and in
unfolds engulfs
consistently for a manufactured
lineage of time
the universe
doesn’t care about
TIME
time manmade time the cursor
from birth to death and how much
can you accomplish
time the accomplishment
measure of worth and meaning
time the killer the waste of
the sought after for proof of
deeds and diplomas
the microscopic
is C O S M I C
the cosmic is
microscopic
the embryo in their sack
utero evolving galaxies
spinning and star beings
born in a chemical-chance
at becoming only to be seen
in awe by the dark matter
that surrounds
Incomprehensible!
our eternal selfs
witnessed
mirrored not above
not below
but all around
breaking the novelty of direction
the compass explodes and the earthly mind
is set free of dimensions then intuned with the way
then again becoming unknown
as a dream
separated
from the expansion
we’ve not far to go
to reach & realize
Ted Vaca, Denver poet father lover crime fighter / semi holy somewhat sweet can be bitter / published here and there / Founder of The Mercury Cafe poetry slam / Coach of the 2006 Championship Denver Slam Team / Member of 1995 Championship slam team from Asheville NC / Intergalactic Provocateur
Incantation to my Wisdom Teeth
I imagine you being lifted up and out
easily
not by the touch
of an object or an instrument
or a hand
but by way
of your own command.
I see you floating out
as if you simply
wanted to leave–
no force, no ache, no blood.
After,
you are not gone from me
but returned
to the Earth, to the Air.
You are less bone
than soil
less soil than sky.
You are four moons
in the soft night
so there is no part of me
that needs to be healed
only these glowing orbs
that I have known.
And now, they have
relinquished me.
Ode to the Barn Swallow
I love a beautiful bird
that cracks open the daybreak
and re-configures the setting
of the sun. I take her into me.
Everything I know of touch
has been learned from the gloss
of her feathers
and the swallow
down her orange throat.
When I am to finally live,
it will be with the arrival
of hope. The hope
that she will surrender
the whole sky
that was once under
her wings so that she
might return to me.
On Prince Edward Island
a corridor opens
along a path of red pines
long necks
reaching toward a starless
November, dirt like burnt sugar
litters the path I ache
to taste it
but pine needles lace
in and out, at once sharp,
and when the night settles, soft
I am searching for pieces of broken
promises, but when I tire
I will turn myself in
Jessica Bagwell is primarily a poet, but also dabbles in creative nonfiction. Her work appears in Needle Poetry, Sorin Oak Review, and New Literati. In her poems, she pays homage to the lyric and explores formal experimentalism. When she is not writing, she enjoys practicing & teaching yoga, taking long walks, and sampling local breweries with her partner.
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