Big Boys, Borrowed Bikes / Joanna Grant
At home station, these little boys are full-grown men
who carry it all on broad shoulders: providing, fathering,
wives they both love and bicker with, and children
who cry during video calls, and don’t always remember them.
Out here, by day these little boys stick to their soldiering
through long months away from the wives they love, their children.
But when it’s time for chow, or drinks, or sweating at the gym,
these once-grown men ride their borrowed ten-speed Schwinns
like the gang of kids in E.T., as if there were no wives or children,
as if the years had rolled back, away, to a man leaving them
no longer grown, with beards, tattoos, and mortgages, complaining
wives they both love and bicker with, and screaming children.
But now somehow just themselves again, what they were back when
life sprawled out in front of them like a summer holiday weekend.
Until this deployment’s done, the borrowed uniforms and bikes turned in,
and the little boys fly home, full-grown men, husbands and fathers again.
Bells / Judit Hollos
In one of our neighboring villages in the Great Plain Region, it was customary for adolescent girls to sneak out before the sun came up to cut three long strands from the rope of the bell that called for Morning Mass. If they braided them into the ribbons they wore in their hair, they could expect a lot of suitors at the yearly carnival and ensure the marriage with their future husband would bring long-lasting happiness.
false dawn
streaks of silve
light up my hair
Waking up alone on the couch, bathing in an insomniac moonlight, and feeling the pearly touch of almost healed scars inside and outside. Cinema dates and bridal laces later, he is nowhere in sight but a toddler’s joyful babble can be heard from the other room and the scent of lilacs glows wilder in the streets.
dawn vigil
the long-buried bell still
chiming underground
untitled / Zach Hauptman
Zach.pngfalse magic / Brice Maiurro
i too have seen no bees
this season
we are too busy running
slowly into our own wall
gifted too much food
so we threw it
into the receiving ocean
called ourselves the moon
when we saw
the waves we made
too many trees
so we burned our kin to the heavens
like a rungless ladder
bent their frail bodies
into something other
we signed our initials
& carved our crosses
into their skin
called it puppy love
broke our gorgeous jaws
so we could scream
even louder than the wind
our throats now hold
no season
the wild canyons will
not echo our sound no
this is not their grief
to hold
we stand at the edge
of the knife our father
gave to us
wisdom
i too have seen no bees
this season
we are too busy running
slowly into our own wall
gifted too much food
so we threw it
into the receiving ocean
called ourselves the moon
when we saw
the waves we made
too many trees
so we burned our kin to the heavens
like a rungless ladder
bent their frail bodies
into something other
we signed our initials
& carved our crosses
into their skin
called it puppy love
broke our gorgeous jaws
so we could scream
even louder than the wind
our throats now hold
no season
the wild canyons will
not echo our sound no
this is not their grief
to hold
we stand at the edge
of the knife our father
gave to us
wisdom
pulled from vocal cords
confined to paper
never witness
to the wild
somewhere in
the web of our
cages we carry
the pain
the sound
the tree will make
when it falls &
no one is around
to hear it
somewhere in
the web of our
cages we carry
the song we stole
from the first bird
wherever the bees are
i hope it’s with god
in reverie & prophecy
attuned to the next world
through truer poems
tied to the legs of pigeons
that follow a magnetic pulse
much longer than our time
Serpents / Kimberly O’Connor
My people were snake handlers.
Rattlers, copperheads.
It’s why I believe
coin tosses can prophecy.
Jesus Name People,
believing their beliefs
protected them from poison.
One time—January—prayer
woke from frozen dirt a dead-
asleep serpent. It emerged, early crocus,
and slithered to my great
great grandmother, who scooped it up,
singing. It didn’t bite,
and here I am,
palming my magic penny.
I Drink Fish Oil for Heart Support / Michael Schad
My grandfather was Norwegian.
He believed in the translucent coppery truth
that his ancestors squished from barrels
of cod to produce bottles of codfish oil.
I drink fish oil for heart support.
Scores of Vikings would slurp it down
while riding their ships towards shores
to indoctrinate villages with their swords,
and remove precious materials.
I drink fish oil for heart support.
Standing in the kitchen, 7am, a large spoon
poised with the copper liquid, he would help,
and the memory still helps my insides become
slick with fish gold.
I drink fish oil for heart support.
The Weight of Waiting (a haibun) / Kashiana Singh
Some weeks are better than others, she tells me, her voice low, her gaze averted. I see the truths she hides, reflected in the hollow of her eyes, in the tremor behind her words. I don’t press. Instead, I wear the practiced smile of someone pretending this is normal—the mother who must believe in something even when everything is unraveling.
We trade silences more often than words. I build stories with reasonable endings, line them with soft phrases to cradle her chaos. But life resists tidy explanations; it folds in on itself like paper soaked through, too sodden to hold a shape.
She speaks clinically now. Her voice, stripped of emotion, names the coldness on her chest, the drowning that comes without warning. She hides her storms from her father, wary of igniting old fears—the kind that echo through generations like a whispered curse.
“Enough is enough,” she whispers, again. And I hold her gaze, even as the weight of waking and sleeping and simply being threatens to crush her. The bed, the air, the very hours—everything bears the scent of waiting too long to breathe.
A vintage hourglass ticks grain by grain.
Inside, the noise builds to thunder
She curls, still as clay.
beneath autumn leaves
the earth forgets to promise—
first frost in her bones
Listen to the Noise / Elizabeth Wolf
She didn’t try to write the next day
but later that week she lay on her bed
and listened to the noise all around her.
The lady in the next room
who always yelled and cried in her sleep
was quietly, rhythmically, moaning.
The woman in a pink bathrobe
who walked an imaginary poodle
and pooped on the floor, blaming the dog,
was prancing up and down the hall.
The kid who swallowed a bottle of Tylenol
after sleeping with her eighth-grade teacher
was crying on the pay phone.
The guy with frostbitten feet
who thought he was the one true Jesus
was busy preaching at the skinny staring guy
who never said a word.
Sad Girl sat up and wrote a poem.
