Weed Tuft / Joanna Grant
So many years I’ve spent,
wandering through strange lands,
under desert suns, under skies
thick with burnt tire smoke—
choked with fine silt,
stink of burnt-out cars,
landfill reek, sickly stench
of decayed roadkill flesh—
looking sometimes for water,
sometimes for shelter,
a warm bed for a night,
or perhaps a season—
but always, always, for what
I see you’ve found, little weed tuft,
that one place in this dry waste
where I, too, might send down my roots—
break through the dust, the gravel,
the hard-baked clay, the underground
scatter of old bones and sloughed fur
to find it—that spring of living water,
that place of safety, that home.
Title cards / Judit Hollos
No matter how many times that retrofuturistic animated series guides my pre-teen daughter and me to fever dream-like worlds, it always puzzles me how its early nineties aesthetic with intertitles announcing whenever a character acquires an ability or of gifts a cake is so eerily similar to the black-and-white title cards that once were used in silent films. I begin to wonder what it would feel like if time was indeed moving forward in a linear direction.
petrified forest
between the growth rings
a silent film
Spherical to perfection, the unblemished remnant of a long-exploded supernova has recently been spotted shrouded in the Milky Way’s mist. Astronomers have tried in vain to establish exactly how far the faintly glowing bubble is located in the universe to gain a better understanding of the celestial object’s origin story. The radio continuum observation shows the orange image of a galactic plane, speckled with dark patches, somewhat similar to the remains of an amber-encased bug.
midlife crisis
the blossoming peach tree in a
photo negative
One Sunday afternoon, I wake up to the sound of subtle fluttering of wings. It is a white dove that has ended up, who knows at what point in time, in her self-made cage through an invisible hole, and is now struggling to break free from our net-covered balcony. We try to guide her in the right direction but the more desperate our attempts are the more we scare her into confusion.
life lessons
an unfinished row of beads
left on the loom
Ode To My Father’s New Girlfriend / Zach Hauptman
Ode To My Father’s New Girlfriend
Soft and round and hissy and sweet
A few white hairs upon her chin
And many more upon her feet
His naptime is hers too
sometimes in his bed
sometimes on his shoes
Doesn’t like his poker friends because they get loud around the table
She may be convinced to make amends with treats
Which bear her favorite label
Dad’s lap is her favorite spot
when removed, she cries foul
to all in earshot
at midnight, she waits for him by the sink
with eyes that glisten
(slow blink)
song of pan / Brice Maiurro
after gary snyder
welcome to the wild side
of your manicured garden.
the unanswered questions
on the other side of the green door,
wherein giant vines snake
across the perimeter,
& down below & beyond,
in the dark clearing,
the sound of two hooves
against the crunch of leaves,
begging you–come & find me.
somewhere in the vast bramble
of night, where the sweat
from the heavy pressure
of the tyrant’s chemical fire
won’t catch your temples.
here beyond the leather grip
of a calloused hand, beyond
the sharp sound of six quick
gunshots firing in a line. we
hold here the tender nest
of the childhood you found
in the pages of a story
of animals. a story of forest
houses burning dry wood
into the thick sky stew of stars
grandmother songs pouring
from the amber light of
round windows the light
that guides your compass
farther & farther from
the aftermath of your home.
take your headache sweet child
& let it become what it so
desperately wishes to become;
a pair of rounded horns
announcing your arrival
into the commune of feral things,
stirring you into the verdant
mix of joyous madness,
away from the reach of men
who would burn this forest down
just to light the tips
of their cigars.
After Impulsively Planting a Peony Bush, I Read Peonies Take Three Years to Bloom / Kimberly O’Connor
Classic: dig first, learn
later. I will breathe them when
my child graduates.
Who will I be when
the blossoms are plump pink frills?
Will I remember?
I thought I could fix
everything, summon blossoms
if I made the right
choices. I fail and
fail. I water. The future
lurks just out of reach,
like it always has.
I eye my neighbors’
lush flowers. Plot my plots.
Today is My Birthday (May 25, 2025) / Michael Schad
Happy Birthday, I am forty-three.
They say in your forties you have a crisis,
I believe this because my strongest memories
reside on Long Island, rambling through the wild
innards of an island fifteen miles wide
by two hundred miles long and the swarthe
I roamed was far less,
but now the sensations are stronger
than when I actually lived there.
The crisis is not getting older,
but not being able to remember
exactly what street in Huntington Station
your cousins lived on, or in the realization
that your friend’s house in Commack is not there
anymore, or the fact the breeze you feel
now does not come from the Bay
but off the open field behind the high school
three houses down.
The salt you taste is your own from southern
summers laced with humidity.
You made it off the island, Happy Birthday.
The Sepsis of Survival / Kashiana Singh
(a haibun)
They never chart it. There’s no ICD code for the grief that coagulates beneath a survivor’s skin. In the ward, we learn to look for swelling, warmth, CRP spikes, and a tell-tale smell. But this grief seeps in like low-grade bacteremia, unflagged by triage. It doesn’t announce itself with convulsions. Just forgetting. The kind that scrubs memories down to bone.
You eat, you shower, you even laugh. But somewhere, cell by cell, the body decomposes with precision. Mourning becomes a metabolic compromise. There’s no fever, only fatigue. Your hands shake at the sight of a toothbrush, but no one orders labs. They only say: “Time heals.” Time, that poor physician.
Your chart would read:
R99 — Ill-defined and unknown cause of mortality
Z63.4 — Disappearance and death of family member
F43.21 — Adjustment disorder with depressed mood
But grief is not a disorder. It’s an infection—one that survives the host.
invisible rot—
the body’s quiet refusal
to declare the wound
My Ex Prepares for his Y-90 Radioembolization for Liver Cancer / Elizabeth Wolf
Medical technology is marvelous. Next up:
a procedure to attack tumors while sparing
any healthy liver tissue that remains. Doctors
(hopefully young ones) will thread a catheter
through mapped arteries, delivering glass beads
through the twisting wiry tunnel to fight the cancer.
This is not a metaphor. The tiny beads contain
radioactive isotopes Y-90, delivering small doses
of radiation aimed directly at the lesions,
killing the malignancy cell by cell. Not a cure
(there is no cure) but a fierce warrior-type genie
snaking out of the toolbox to grant you one wish:
to prolong last call on the farewell tour.
