Your Old Afghan

You took a trip alone and dropped me at the house with the sunken living room and plastic sofa covers, the house where Grandfather rocked alone in a wood chair in the back bedroom, and the air hung in a smoky haze filtered through drawn window sheers. There were no toys at Grandma Rocky’s except the child-sized plastic dolls she dragged out of a basement closet when I showed up. No home-cooked meal, just what she spooned from a can. Sometimes I’d sit at her desk, slip her rubber finger-tip on my thumb, and add numbers on the oversized calculator with the trailing paper roll, pretending to be office-important. Shocking that you had a Band-Aid for every wound, a hug for every heartache, when you came from such icy beginnings. I found a carton of Fruit Stripe gum in the guest room nightstand. Chewed piece after piece until she asked me why I was so wasteful, but I feigned sleep under your old afghan full of holes.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

This past winter/spring, Unleash Press partnered with the Leighton Art Centre in Millarville, Alberta on a land-based writing project. This project was created with the intention of encouraging visitors to slow down, explore their natural surroundings, and engage more deeply with both the landscape and the creative works they encounter along the way. By weaving writing into the land itself, the installation invites moments of reflection, curiosity, and connection between art, nature, and community. We received so many fabulous enttires (you’ll see many of them featured here at UnleashLit in the coming months) and thought we’d share the top five entries.

Words to Wonder, by Adele Bright

Did you think that you came to look?

Or is a gentle breeze/ ikinnai sopo lifting your hair and caressing your cheek?

Is the welcoming heat of the sun/ naatosi entering your being?

Are the Swifts accompanying you with their twitters and the insects insisting their busy repetition?

Can you rest down on the blanket of the earth/ kss’ahkom and sense your connection?



Did you think that you came to look?

Are the wild flowers and flowing grasses crashing into your vision?

Are you taking in the abundance that covers the earth’s verdant skin

Or are the steadfast mountains/miistakists winning your gaze?

Are the dancing Silver Birch trees fascinating you or the sacred water/ aohkii at the 

bottom of the hill drawing your rapture?



Did you think that you came to look?

Or is this land looking at you?

Is the intensity of the sky/ spo’ohtsim expanding this moment?

And are our ancestors/ niisitohkaa’ahssiks welcoming and holding you?





“Words for wandering” has led to “words for wOndering.”

In Blackfoot, one of the original languages of this land:

gentle breeze- ikinnai sopo

sun- naato’si. naato meaning sacred

earth-kss’ahkom

mountains- miistakists – the Rockies being regarded as the backbone of the world

water- ao’ohki

sky- spo’ohtsim

ancestors- niisitohkaa’ahssiks

Acknowledgements and gratitude to Siksikai’powahsin teachers generally and for checking these seven words.

*****

Seedling, by Arcana Shanks

I often imagine what it would be like

To be a seed

To be buried by loving hands

Beneath the damp, dark earth

Gently pressed down into the soil

And left to rest among the roots

To hear the heartbeats of all who came before me

To unfurl myself piece by piece

Guided by golden light and whispered hope



I wonder how it would feel

To be connected

To be a part of something greater

Transmitting signals like secrets

In a language only we could understand

To breathe my fears into the darkness

And have a chorus of voices echo back

To be loved by so many

Bound together and entangled as one



I dream of finding you there

Of opening my eyes

To feel your hands in mine

Clinging to each other in awe

As the dapples of sunlight sway above us

I imagine the way my name would tumble from your lips

Pouring forth like a river

I would rest my head in your arms

And know that finally I am home

*****

Traveling Mountain Bluebirds, by Kelly Kaur

Meander these winding pathways

marked by quaint

painted bird boxes

Migratory summer visits

mountain bluebirds return

every single year

Alberta’s blue skies summon

prairie green grass expands

crickets sing in curious delight

Transformation

resilience

immigrant hearts unite

Wandering feet firmly planted

grateful for this land

bird songs beckon my heart

Nature’s

genuine

welcome

*****

The Two Bird Feeders, by Kim Hanson

Harlow swung the bird feeders, one in each hand, in rhythm with her steps. Bird seed sprinkled the ground. The late afternoon sun filtered through the hazy clouds of this fault-less October day, illuminating the ethereal quality of the waxy, yellow leaves.

The ravine was just barely past its prime. Aspen trees abounded in this place, thriving in the mugginess of the high water table. Spruce trees, majestic, proud, and erect, modelled their year-round colour of deep evergreen. The fragrance of the bull rushes, so near the end of their life cycle, clung to the air.

My granddaughter noticed none of these things, intent only on finding the right spot.

Leaves already devoid of their life’s blood cloaked the asphalt in a slippery compost, as we made tracks to the old, wooden bridge. Two splintery benches beckoned all.

“This one!” she said.

Climbing up on the square, weathered railing, my hands around her waist, she reached as high as she could. Slipping the wire loop onto the branch, spilling a few more seeds, she jumped down onto the bridge. She looked up to admire her craft, and it was now my turn to hang my feeder. I reached a bit higher and strung mine just above hers.

Harlow is now in her mid-teens. Gone are those cherished days when she loved to craft, to paint, to dance, to walk, with me. All these years later, two empty bird feeders hang, one beneath the other, on the tall aspen tree, by the old wooden bridge, deep in the ravine. I can’t help but smile; no one has disturbed the feeders. All these years later, as I walk the path, my heart is full, reminiscing about a young, sweet child and her grateful grandma.

*****

First Spring, by Marcia Lee Laycock

Green. 
Green so fills my eyes 
I sway 
with spring 
a song 
alive and swelling 
out of winter grey and white

the colour 
in fields and ditches 
dances 
and I wonder 
was there life 
before this day?

Adele Bright is from Okotoks and think the Leighton Art Centre and setting is a beautiful space. I was inspired to write something as the views and lands are spectacular. I also wanted to make use of this opportunity to recognize the previous custodians of the land on which the center stands. Equally, I hoped to allude to a two way relationship with our earth, without being too strident.

Arcana Shanks is a visual artist and experimental vocalist residing in Mooniyang / Tiohtià:ke/ Montrèal, Canada. Her practice is inspired by the entangled connections between humans and more-than-human beings, particularly beings that exist beyond the traditional definitions of life such as fire, water, minerals, and other biological entities. Archetypes of nature are key elements within her artwork: the anthropomorphic “Mother Earth” and “Mother Nature,” the sacred and untamed energy of wild spaces, and the delicate relationship between creation and destruction are core concepts across her portfolio. Shanks’ work is characterized by immersive, multi-sensory elements fused with poetic narrative and storytelling, often creating artworks that cross the boundary between mediums and exist in liminal, hybrid spaces.

Kelly Kaur grew up in Singapore and came to Calgary to get her degrees at the University of Calgary. She is a writer, author, and speaker. She was recognized at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton for her writing and for honoring Punjabi Sikh heritage in her children's book, Howdy, I’m Singh Hari. She was awarded the 2025 South Asian Inspiration Award for Achievement in Arts and Culture (SAIA) and was a recipient of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award in 2024. She has a novel, Letters to Singapore. Kelly was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won Honourable Mention in the Creators of Justice Literary Awards, New York. She is a two-time TEDx presenter. Her poems, short stories and nonfiction have been published and landed on the moon, on beer cans, danced on stage, travelled around North Dakota and published in Canadian and international journals and anthologies. She is a reader for the International Human Rights Art Movement, New York.

Kim Hanson writes creatively from her home in Calgary, Alberta. She has come to her craft much later in life. Her debut children's picture book is scheduled for publication by Hancock House in 2027. She has published stories with children's magazines, essays with websites and in print, and articles and patterns for quilt magazines. Kim loves to write about nature and about children. In addition to writing, Kim enjoys spending time with her grandchildren, Jacob and Harlow, practising yoga, and walking her two dogs, Sophie and Bertie.

Marcia Lee Laycock is a prolific writer and speaker with 15 books now in print. Having lived a short distance from the Arctic Circle and a few degrees from the equator, her work is steeped in winter with a few palm trees tossed in for colour. Marcia's focuse is on paying attention and honouring this incredible world in which we live and the one who created it.

During his nighttime excursions out and about on Manassas Island, Artemus had overheard rumblings about degradation and death in the big city. The great horned owl—a truth-seeker and natural skeptic—determined he had to see it for himself. Anything less was mere rumor. He prepared himself for flight, thoroughly preening his feathers and expelling a pellet of fur, bones, and teeth, remnants of the rodent or small rabbit that had been his last meal. He set off at dusk on a field trip into Portland, charting a direct course above the Columbia River Highway, past the tidy but unremarkable burg of Linnton and the Northwest Industrial District, where railroad tracks, storage tanks, and warehouses dominated the skyline.

The elderly cock was careful to fly low, with as few wing-beats as possible, to preserve his energy. He took a westerly hop over the copper-colored bridge connecting the suburbs to the island, then headed due southeast. Smoke from the city’s northeast industrial section choked him and further slowed his journey. He exhaled relief when the tree line above the largest, most popular park appeared in the distance. Though the annual fall leaf display was past its peak, he marveled at the fading oranges, reds, and yellows. It was his favorite time of year. The chill morning air. The best hunting. And winter nesting season was nigh.

He soared beneath the small group of black helicopters hovering above him, ready to zigzag if one of them started to drop. Their rotors moved in time with his wing-flaps. The copters might’ve been feds, possibly homeland security. The raids had picked up steam. There were reports that masked agents had shown up at Kramer’s farm and taken an entire family of seasonal workers away. That much was in the local paper, the Manassas Island Bugle.

Spying the Salmon Street Springs fountain, Artemus felt he was close to the point of engagement. His exceptional hearing, ears that picked up sounds from up to ten miles away, would stand him in good stead. He settled on a high branch in a Gingko tree off Naito Parkway. A perfect perch for discovery. What he witnessed while keeping vigil above the waterfront, more than anything else he’d encountered in his twenty-five years as a rural forest-dweller, stunned and staggered him.

A kyphotic man—black skin, thick salt-and-pepper hair—fell to his knees on the sidewalk, bending over a rectangular plastic bag. It had a zipper on the side with a “Jane Doe” tag attached. Artemus could make that out. The bag’s top was open, revealing a dried-up face. He could hear the man keening. “My wife! My Nelle!” he cried, repeatedly, in a high-pitched wail that seemed to come from the very deepest place inside him. The man’s stooped shoulders shook.

The owl turned his head right, then left. There were hundreds of body bags lined up on downtown streets, functional pouches containing the leftovers of old people who had lost their homes, their health insurance, their dignity, and—at long last—their very right to exist.

These unfortunates had died in poverty, without reasonable end-of-life care or even, it appeared, a second thought. No federal disaster relief personnel had been dispatched. A cadre of fired former employees showed up to fill bags, catalog and tag who they could, and notify families when information was available, preparing the corpses for loading onto refrigerated trucks and, later, gargantuan transoms for disposal.

Downriver, to no one knew where.

Cleanup people in hazmat suits that protected them from cadaver-borne diseases collected the bags. Their company van had a “Where Trash Becomes Treasure” logo on its side.

“Irony is doing some heavy lifting there,” one volunteer was heard to say. She scratched her dreadlocked head and kept on attending to grisly tasks.

Zip. Tie. Tag. Lift.

Flies buzzed around in the mid-autumn air, lighting on this bag and that, looking for a way in. Folks with money, on their way to brunch and business appointments, stepped over the unfortunates laid out on Northeast Hawthorne and Southeast Grand and Northwest Burnside, their Jimmy Choo slingbacks and Cole Haan oxfords making dust marks on the bags’ plastic edges.

The Portland Spirit steamed up the Willamette River, its fancy passengers drinking Italian champagne at midday, oblivious to the carnage.

All the while, Artemus watched and listened. The owl trained his asymmetrical ears on conversations between paramedics and police officers drifting up from the grid below. Not even one spoke honestly or directly about what had happened—they didn’t dare!—but the bald truth was this: across America, from east to west, scores of people died from new and more virulent strain of influenza that hit like a tsunami, the frail elderly left vulnerable and helpless after a cadre of toadies gutted the government’s social welfare programs and immunizations went the way of the dinosaur.

Health care for the poor? Such a joke. Medicare ended in 2030, replaced with personal savings accounts that barely covered aspirin. Pay-to-play rich folks got their stem cell infusions for wonky knees—not to mention brow lifts and Botox—while the have-nots suffered and perished.

“To the victor …” one white-suited do-gooder began, no need to finish. His comrades knew the rest of that story.

Flu deaths were just the tip of the iceberg. Who among the elderly could afford care at the tail end of their journey? Even a middling nursing home room cost upward of ten grand a month. The 250-year plan to abolish democracy made sure of that.

Demeaned, dismissed, and consigned as collateral damage, America’s old folks paid the ultimate price. Spotty access to vaccines meant no protection. No health care meant little opportunity for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Programs that had kept citizens healthy, fed, clothed, and housed over the generations—imperfectly, but also with intentional care and appropriate empathy—were history.

“The least of these,” Jimmy Carter had called them, biblically so. After a hundred years of living, he hung up his hammer at just the right moment, December 2024, so at least some flags flew at half-staff on the morning of the orange one’s second swearing-in, a tawdry festival of self-congratulatory backslapping.

Artemus’ panoramic view showed him who the people were, the ones who merited saving the most as forests and whole towns in southern California burned because of climate change; books were banned and libraries were defunded; trans people were terrorized; immigrants were rounded up without due process and deported to countries they knew nothing about; journalists were investigated, harassed, and jailed for telling the truth; and women were made to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or die trying to get reproductive health services in certain politically unrepentant red states.

It had been a dark time of dispiritedness and despair. A season out of which could only come redemption, if anything better at all was to rise from the ashes of a country in retreat from itself, from what it had allowed itself to become.

Such unnecessary suffering. Up from Artemus’ throat came an involuntary whistling noise as he hovered over the sad avenues and boulevards and thoroughfares, mourning for humanity. There were fewer red and blue police car flashes. The authorities had dispersed. Dusk was coming. Tonight, the veil would be thin. He left his temporary roost and started back toward his beloved island. The flight home would take less time without daytime distractions.

On his silent approach, the flickering yellow lights of farm workers’ ofrendas came into view, intricate altars memorializing their ancestors, beckoning them back from the next realm, if only for a few hours. Artemus saw them, but the migrants in their homes didn’t see him. Nothing could give him away in the hours of deepest night, not even the bright pink band the animal rehabilitators fastened to his talon after his fierce fight with that big bald eagle. He might have lost his life that day if not for humans with good intentions. If not for the timely phone call and the rush of the ambulance. The skillful folks at Cascades Owl Rescue cared for him in his time of need, nursing him back to health before releasing him back into the wild. Eight weeks of confinement.

Like hundreds of fireflies glowing at once, the ofrendas illuminated the darkness. Artemus breathed in their magic, their mourning, as he descended, He landed without a sound and stumbled around for a safe spot to rest.

It was Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead.

In the morning, at first light, he would go and find Carson McClintock, an ordinary man with an extraordinary dream to save everyone he could from an atrocious end they did not deserve. McClintock, who was meeting the present moment with everything he had to give.

From the author: I'm an essayist and novelist living on a floating home west of Portland, Oregon. This submission is an excerpt from my second novel, CARSON McCLINTOCK IS NOT DEAD YET, an exploration of what could happen to the impoverished elderly at the end of their lives in a near-future America.

My debut novel SUNSHINE GIRL, a lived-experience journalist story, was published by Heliotrope Books of New York in 2025. My writing has also appeared in Newsweek, Hippocampus, The Big Smoke, Nailed magazine, the Timberline Review, Elephant Journal, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and several anthologies.

Echoes of Puglia

At the top of a narrow stone staircase,

in the white-washed bedroom

of a crumbling farmhouse,

she lay in a wooden platform bed,

shutters unlatched and knocking

in the late afternoon breeze,

echoes of mumbly Italian from

the olive trees beyond,

a lullaby on her heavy eyelids.

It doesn’t matter that she spent the night

face deep in a porcelain toilet,

expunging the bug-eyed shrimp

she ravaged at yesterday’s lunch,

or that she felt too weak

to swat mosquitos off her cheek.

In this moment, she’s celestial,

as close to beautiful as she’s ever been.

For many summers after, she would remember that day,

the fragrant air blowing through the open windows,

the divide between life and death thin as the

percale sheet draped over her bare legs.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

Mallet & Bloom

My heart became tender

with the mallet of grief and grace.

Not shaped by silence,

but by every echo I tried to bury

and called strength.

Shaped on an anvil

made of storms I never named.

On the spine

of unfinished apologies

that still know my posture.

Each crack,

a lesson.

Each bruise,

a doorway.

opened to the ache of others.

Ash fell like lullabies

on the fields of my chest.

And the wind,

once full of knives,

learned to touch me

without asking for blood.

Moons slept in my throat,

whispering languages

made of salt.

I walked barefoot through mirrored forests

where every branch remembered

a name I forgot.

I drank from a rusted cup,

still warm from the sun that left

without notice.

The stone in my stomach dissolved into soil,

and wildflowers,

uninvited,

grew softly along my ribs.

Grief wore the mask of a lion

but laid its head in my lap.

Now silence sits beside us.

I stay

just to listen.

Dayanna Almeda is a poet based in Tucson, Arizona. Her work explores intimacy, memory, chronic illness, resilience, and the emotional terrain of survival through precise imagery and sensory detail. This is her first submission to a literary press.

Forensic Files

Not my preferred TV fare, and yet

it confirms my faith in the power

of persistence. The plots lure me

into a tightening noose of evidence

that inch by inch secures the perpetrator.

Every program builds a bulwark

of protection for the truth to be revealed.

Every killer gets his just desserts

and mitigates my horror of what

can happen suddenly to anyone.

With such dogged detectives on each case,

guaranteeing that reason will prevail,

it’s easy to forget how threat of capture

provides no restraint against the worst of us

who come disguised as the best of us.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher (Humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website, freeprintmusic.com, that donates her compositions to small Libeal churches. Her poetry collections, Seasons, Remains,Classifieds, Ghosts, are availabe via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Sligo Press and Sea Crow Press periodicals.

Flowers

I think of each life as a flower

—Mary Oliver

Please don’t hate me for telling you this, but I’ve never much cared for flowers.

Oh, not because I sneeze and wheeze and choke and fuss whenever I’m near them, though that’s certainly a factor, and unlike Baudelaire, I don’t see them as mal

it’s just that (and I’m almost afraid to admit it)

I’ve never quite felt the rapturous rhapsody or drunken delight or blissful beauty or beatific grace that others, especially those who spend lots of time with their chapped hands in the muddy earth, get when prattling on about foliage, perennials, and open buds (the secret women’s places that were O’Keeffe’s raison d’etre)

and it has always made me a little sad.

Flowers are living things and we all want to live, now more than ever, and suddenly I’m basking in a photosynthetic glow. And I think to myself, maybe this time they won’t droop and die so quickly. Maybe they’ll stay around awhile.

(And then she had an epiphany!)

I vow to be partial to peonies à la Mary Oliver. Like the good doctor W.C. Williams, I will kiss every asphodel I meet in all the backyards of Rutherford, New Jersey. I will pray to the heavens about that mighty force that through the green fuse* drove that flower. I will chant, chant, chant to the sunflowers that William Blake adored (and that Allen Ginsberg co-opted while perhaps inhaling them a bit too deeply in his tenement haze).

And as for those resplendent open-mouthed tulips, so cherished in the Netherlands? Yes, yes, I can almost hear them breathing, just as Plath** did from her godforsaken hospital bed.

But without the melancholia.

*Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”

** Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”

Cindy Hochman is the founder of “100 Proof Copyediting Services,” the editor emerita of the long-running poetry journal First Literary Review-East, and the author of Telling You Everything (Unleash Press, 2022). Her newest book, I Am the Girl, is slated for publication in 2026 by Rain Mountain Press’s Cassandra Series. Cindy resides in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where she meditates, does tai chi, and studies the Russian language.

Only I Can Prevent the Collapse of Society

The morning is a whizz of cardamom grinding with espresso. Whiffs of extravagance. I begin the day sipping an oat milk latte with rose water. Journal, scroll, discover I have read both of my free Harper’s articles for the month. Sit in my armchair, legs atop a heating pad atop a pillow atop an ottoman. The inbox warns there is not much time for me to prevent the collapse of society and save every nonprofit or media organization I’ve ever encountered. Support the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s commitment to building international understanding, ensure dear Kenyon Review’s pages continue to represent a wide range of perspectives (though not my perspective) (which they’ve rejected) (...four times) (!), join Lambda Literary in preventing LGBTQ+ lives from being erased from public life entirely. I check, yup, these emails were indeed intended for me. I don’t click to learn more. What in this world can be done with knowledge alone?

My moment of indulgence ends, I have to go. I pocket a crumpled five-dollar bill, my keys. Bop down two flights of stairs. It’s too early for noise, yet my left knee yells. A teach yourself SQL in 24-hours manual sits in the landing. Does it contain secrets that could steer me towards treasure, stability, purpose? Yesterday the university invited a good percent of staff and faculty to separate. Voluntarily. Years back, for a class project, my nephew interviewed my mom about our ancestors. She told him they were slaves. Huh. He stared. Like volunteers who never signed up to volunteer—volunteers separated from their family. Oohh. He’s never about our ancestors again. A colleague calls the voluntary separation offer ‘consensual decoupling.’ We’re on reality TV. We could, perhaps should, take our silly prizes, head our silly ways. But optimism, delusion, sunk cost fallacy, and an awareness we are unlikely to ever be cast elsewhere convince most of us to continue competing for opportunities to continue competing for opportunities, despite knowing the producers might boot us off at any moment. Leave us involuntary penniless.

This might be the last season.

Someone huffs the train ain’t running because some fool jumped in front of it and didn’t even fucking die. Through dog dump, empty potato chip bags, and the contents of many garbage cans, I hopscotch to another station, where, down more stairs, it rains on the platform. Broken caution tap drowns in pools of brown water. One day the 1-train will no longer run. A woman sings ‘Killing Me Softly’ with her whole body. The Lauryn Hill version. I love New York City. That five-dollar bill passes from my black hand to her black hand, leaving me nothing to offer the next three people who, like the institutions who email me all day and myself and my colleagues, urgently need individual support. I regret not grabbing that SQL manual. We could have passed it back and forth. We could have arrived at our destinations with confidence, demonstrated skillsets, and fluency in whatever SQL is.

Sheena Daree Romero is a humorist and doodler based in New York City. Her words have received a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship, won the Miriam Chaikin Prose Award, made the Longreads Best of: Reader Favorites list, and been published in outlets such as Taco Bell Quarterly, Autostraddle, and Passages North. Sheena’s visual art has been exhibited at the Massillon Museum and is forthcoming at the Urban Arts Space. She’s currently [pretending to be] writing her first novel.

Home

The place I carry

like a camel’s hump

so enmeshed it is in memory.

Details like the floral wallpaper

the pitch of a stair tread creak

a familiar rumble of water pipes

wind whistling past my window –

all of it stored behind my skull.

Once a farm house on a country lane,

it was swallowed by a city,

its gardens turned to islands in the concrete,

chickens still clucking in the yard.

It was my life, my childhood world

that vanished like a dream,

turned to landfill and chimney smoke.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher (Humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website, freeprintmusic.com, that donates her compositions to small Libeal churches. Her poetry collections, Seasons, Remains,Classifieds, Ghosts, are availabe via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Sligo Press and Sea Crow Press periodicals.

Alewives

We’re digging a moat
elbow-deep, for C & T’s castle
near the tide-wash line

where sand’s moist enough
to shape, and the overnight
die-off has scattered.

The odd one’s still silver & shiny,
really pops against
all those grayed-off with rot,

sunbaked as shmears of mayo.
The trench fills, fingers claw & scrape
buried rocks & pebbles,

flecks of sediment & shells
that wedge under my thumb
nail. The stench of die-off kicks up,

& the waves—refill, recede, refill,
cloud it all up into a stirred broth
that settles to a floating lattice.

S.D. Dillon has an MFA from Notre Dame and lives in Michigan. His poetry has appeared recently in SORTES, Last Leaves Magazine, and The Shortlist: Best of BarBar 2024, and he received the 2025 Visual Poetry Award from Bacopa Literary Review. He can be found on Instagram at @sddillon50.

Self-portrait with a dozen breasts

I am all of us. Spaced apart. Cushioned chairs a color we called mauve in the nineties. Waiting. Quietest whispers. Water cooler and Keurig machine. Plastic thickening our air’s carcinogenic load. A (pink) Christmas tree with (pink) lights and (pink) glowing orbs its only ornaments, one-day landfill. A row of (pink) bulbs backlights the check-in desk and a column of (pink) curves requests our IDs and insurance information. Our thumbs doomscroll. Our shoulders hunch in anticipation of the contortion to come: cold plates tortilla press dense tissue with twenty pounds of pressure in hot pursuit of the money shot. One of us wipes a tear from below her (pink) right lid. A (pink) nurse calls three of us back. A (pink) sign reminds us our breasts may be undergoing a range of procedures today so breasts that arrived after yours may be called back before yours. Mine are called back in a herd, reminding me of those New York auditions – “cattle calls” – where the directors knew within five seconds whether they wanted you. Here, it’s less rushed. No less degrading. I am a self, we tell ourselves. Early detection saves life, we internalize. This is care, we hope, trailing behind our breasts, headed to their interrogation.

Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) writes, teaches, and mothers in Minneapolis. She used to be a lawyer and before that an actor. They feel lucky to have had work published in various journals, including Literary Mama, elsewhere magazine, Brevity Blog, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things.

When alone except for myself

I wish to linger

studying the textures of seasons

spending time/more time

quiet & un-rushed

no rough edges snagging my attention,

face toward future, eyes wide

here on a meandering path

inclined like a steep stair, getting out of breath

wanting, wanting, wanting to arrive

in field, in meadow

surrounded by wild taking its own course

all of me all of me surging

along the humming

continuum …

Karen Neuberg is the author of the full-length poetry collection, PURSUIT (Kelsay Press), and three chapbooks including “the elephants are asking” (Glass Lyre). Her poetry and collages have appeared in numerous online and print journals and anthologies including 805, Gyroscope, Inflectionist Review, Mackinaw, Nixes Mate, and Unbroken. She holds an MFA from The New School and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Memory

We made love all day, our loud

and insistent lives scratching at the door.

Saturday? Sunday? The only thing worth worshiping

was the mole behind your knee.

We made love all day and the next.

Clouds gathered, rained, and moved along.

Trees shed their cover, froze,

came back again green. We thumbed our noses

at time, and every mirror revealed us as dawn flowers,

wide-eyed and damp.

We made love all day,

knowing our lives must

break down the door one day

loud and insistent

and pull us apart.

Dudley Stone’s poetry is Pushcart Prize-nominated and has recently appeared in Neologism Poetry Journal, Written Tales, and The Headlight Review. He has a B.A. in Theatre from the University of Kentucky, studied playwriting at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Mr. Stone lives in Lexington, KY. More of his work can be found at dudleystone.com.

The Coming of Ants I

Go to the Ant, thou sluggard:

consider Her ways and be wise.

--Proverbs, 6:6

The pale sun’s slight

Heat can’t warm

The slender threads of life

Or weaving a dream

Of impossible hope,

Melt a messenger’s heart.

You open the apartment

Door into winter darkness,

Blinking snow-blind.

The coffee clock’s

Red digital timer

Pulses migraine.

As the TV flickers on

Announcing Dali’s death,

A telephone book,

Open on the floor,

Surges with black ants

Consuming numbers.

The Coming of Ants II

Among the veteran archaeologists, a story is passed around about a

team of diggers that disappeared from a pre-Columbian site when

there were driver ants in the vicinity after heavy rains. Only a

few artifacts and scattered bones were found.

On the hardened faces,

Cracked by forgotten floods

Stone sun-wheels

Still expose discordances

In the passage of ages.

Evidence remains

On the edge of ruins

For missing time,

For an archaeology of grief

In a faint trace of voices.

It was the same

During the last cataclysm

At Pompeii,

Huddling against the marble

In the cool, familiar smell.

Statues with stained feet

Stand naked in our

Anonymous prints,

While divining proceeds

To decode the planet’s pulse.

When the first black wave

Of ants surges across

The clearing consuming shadows,

Vipers, lizards, scorpions scurry,

Scratching away into silence.

The Coming of Ants III

Go to the Ant, thou sluggard,

consider Her ways and be wise.

--Proverbs, 6:6

The hills are loud

All night long

With the rustle of birds,

And the calls of canine and feline

Rushing toward the rapids.

Investing time with fear,

A shower of hoof-beats

Flow around the dark dawn

Of the first day, leaving

Only the smell of the herds

Seeping through the windows,

Nailed shut, leaving their sweat

And dust and silence behind.

By the second day, a droning

Hum becomes discernible.

After the light slips

Through the slits in the wood wall

And the tense air itches,

We doze fitfully, wakening

To the scratching of hive scouts

First breaching the light gaps

Beneath the doors. We gather

Together and preach the Ant,

Consider Her ways,

And are wise.

“The Coming of Ants I” was published in Transversions in 1995. “The Coming of Ants II” was published in Lynx Journal in 1998.

Edward Baranosky has painted seascapes since he was seven years old. His focus on marine-scapes, draws him back to visit his native home in the American east coast, for inspiration from the North Atlantic. His work emphasizes the present - in the ever-changing moments of water. As a poet-artist he crosses the channels and pathways between the visual and the textual. He continues to exhibit in the United States and Canada. Baranosky owns a small press EAB Publishing, for poetry chapbooks and related material. He currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Education: BFA 1969, Rhode Island School of Design, Major in Painting

War Metaphor (What is it good for?)

Without war
I’d never know Andrea Mitchell’s husband
            is Alan Greenspan.

Without war
I wouldn’t confuse my newsfeed with my pornfeed
           and dream of joining the Mile-High Club
           with blonde TV foxes.

Without war
I wouldn’t persist in thinking of strangers in masks
	   as neighbors but villains or superheroes in disguise.

Without war
I’d never choose to bury my head
            under a worn cliché.

Without war
I’d never find where I mislaid
            my fury and compassion.

Without war
I might have to finally make something
             of my life.
 

Dudley Stone’s poetry is Pushcart Prize-nominated and has recently appeared in Neologism Poetry Journal, Written Tales, and The Headlight Review. He has a B.A. in Theatre from the University of Kentucky, studied playwriting at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Mr. Stone lives in Lexington, KY. More of his work can be found at dudleystone.com.

My Watch Tells Me I’m Dead

It’s hard to believe my demise,

but when my watch says my heart

has ceased to beat, who am I to argue.

I paid so much for superior technology

I have to have faith in the product,

the IT crowd are geniuses after all.

When my watch tells me my blood

oxygen is zero, it makes sense

since there has been no breath

recorded since I put it on today.

A non-existent wrist temperature

must make me walking dead,

since although frozen, I am still walking.

My sleep duration sensor tells me

I have not woken nor slept,

no REM, core nor deep. I must be dead.

I will go out soon, look for an open grave,

lie down and try to have a little sleep.

It will save a lot of trouble later.

Rohan Buettel lives in Canberra, Australia. His haiku appear in Australian and international journals (including Presence, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest). His longer poetry appears in various journals, including Rattle, Unleash Lit, Meanjin, Meniscus and Quadrant.

Half a Tank

Late in the kitchen, the keys

hang from a nail, a question.

“Are you still secretly riding your father’s motorcycle?”

No, Mom.

Then why is half the gas gone?

Evaporation, I say, a slow leak.

She rinses a glass. The room ticks.

As I square my notes at the lectern,

throttle the right syllables, mic idling low.

Auditorium buzz, a woman caps her pen; it taps the rail.

The AV cart hums in the aisle.

On the console the needle

shivers above E.

After the talk the glass doors

push me to the ring road.

“Are you still secretly riding your father’s motorcycle?”

Yes, Mom. Yes.

I go at night, no plates, easy on the clutch,

headlamp boring a clean white cone.

The talk’s tank of nouns runs to fumes.

I learn his lean through corners;

at a red light the engine settles,

my knee finds the tank, the bars fit right,

his sound under me, low, steady,

half a tank and moving.

I cut the engine outside. In the kitchen

the keys answer with one click.

Sean Wang is a PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, wildscape literary journal, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pictura Journal, ONE ART, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L), where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.

White Spot, Black Smoke

The carriage spat me out.

Heat puckered loose tiles,

raised grit to bite my shoe.

Snow sealed the oily seams.

Platform glass ticked. A hairline ran.

Late for the change at Central.

I ground the cigarette in my palm,

kept the pain a coal I could pocket.

A click under my heel

pulled me back, the neighbor’s toy trestle,

rails sprung, the lash of coupling slack.

A whistle cut the air; the clock replied.

Yard-lights came on in the old layout.

The carriage exhaled black smoke, took my seat.

Grit lifted in its wake. I swallowed it,

thumbed the stub out, went to my knees,

crawled toward the white circle ahead,

the headlamp pooling on ice.

In the hard white quiet,

the ice gave back my face in soot,

flattened to gloss as it thawed.

I wiped with my sleeve, coarse wool.

Black came up on the cuff. The oval stayed,

a lens around the crack, a track

still traveling under the light.

The white spot thinned, then thinned again.

Sean Wang is a PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, wildscape literary journal, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pictura Journal, ONE ART, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L), where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.

Viewfinder 

Reflected 
back

into
the viewfinder

of my Canon
Powershot,

whose lens cover
I take off, now,

is a tiny,
circular 

mirror—
then the cracked,

mud-streaked
image of hood,

hibernation,
and face 

kept within
this displaced,

silver-lined
object

I’ve discovered,
which someone

else has left
between

the branch
and trunk 

of a tree caught 
in meadowland

off paths close,
just behind home. 

While Stepping into the Same Creek Twice

Although
I’m not

Caesar
crossing

the Rubicon,
with camera

angled
in hand

I step
into the same, 

cold creek
twice.  

Alex Missall studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His poetry collections “A Harvest of Days” and “Morning Grift” are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (2026). He resides in Ohio, where he enjoys the trails with his Husky, Betts.

Three Words Too Late

Late night and by the time I reached her door, the sky had already started crying for me. Fat, cold drops fell in uneven rhythms, soaking through my coat and hair, turning the street into a river of reflections. Streetlights and regret pooled together beneath my feet. The rain had that particular scent it gets in early autumn, when the first chill crawls under your collar, reminding you that things are changing, that summer is gone for good.

Still, I knocked. Once. Twice. A third time, softer, as if I could undo the first two.

The door opened a crack.

And there she was—barefoot, hair tangled from sleep, eyes red from nights that had gone on too long. She looked like she’d been waiting for something, though maybe not for me.

“Eli,” she said. Just my name, nothing else. It landed flat between us, the way a bird hits a window, soft, stunned, and already falling.

Inside, the apartment smelled of toast and rosemary. She used to plant it in little pots on the windowsill, said the scent helped her remember her mother. Now the plants were wilted, stems drooping, soil dry. On the table sat a half-drunk cup of coffee, gone cold. A thin rim of lipstick marked the edge like a fading heartbeat.

White noise emitted from her cellphone. She always said she liked the whoosh because silence sounded too much like goodbye.

“Why did you come here?” she asked, voice low, the way people speak when they already know the answer.

“I almost didn’t.”

We stood there a long time, the air thick with everything we’d never said. The rain behind me and the static inside her apartment seemed to fuse into one long sigh. If faded love had weight, the room would’ve buckled under it.

She crossed her arms, the sleeve of her sweater slipping to reveal the scar on her wrist, the one from that summer we rebuilt the old boat her father left behind. She’d cut herself on a nail and laughed it off. “A mark of stubbornness,” she’d said. That was her. Always moving forward, even when bleeding.

“I was wrong,” I said finally, my throat burning around the words.

Her gaze drifted toward the window, where distant lightning drew thin white veins across the sky. Her face caught the flash, and for an instant, I saw the woman she used to be, the one who believed in me.

“Eli, don’t.”

She said it softly, but it landed like a blade.

“I just need you to hear me.”

“I’ve heard you,” she said. “I heard you every time you didn’t say anything. Every silence was an answer.”

I wanted to tell her that silence was just fear wearing armor, that I hadn’t known how to speak without breaking something. But all I managed was, “I thought we had time.”

Her laugh was small, sharp.

“We did. You spent it.”

Lightning again, closer now. The air felt charged, as if the storm was feeding on what was left between us.

I looked around the room. Everything was the same but slightly wrong. The books we’d collected still filled the shelves, but there was dust on the spines. The photo of us at the lake, she’d turned it facedown. The afghan her grandmother made hung over the arm of the couch, its loose threads like life unraveling.

“You still live like I’m coming back,” I said before I could stop myself.

She met my eyes then, a weary calm settling over her face. “And you still talk like words can fix what time broke.”

She turned away, walking toward the bedroom, and that movement—so small, so final—was the sound of a door closing forever.

I should’ve said it then. The three words that had stuck in my throat for months, that had burned every time I swallowed them back. I love you.

But they felt useless now, too light to bridge the distance I’d built. She was already walking toward another room, into another life where I didn’t exist.

“I love you,” I whispered anyway, though I don’t know if she heard.

She paused, hand on the doorway, just enough to make me hope, but didn’t turn around. “No, Eli,” she said quietly. “You loved me in theory. Not in time.”

The words cut clean, no malice, no heat. Just truth.

And then she was gone.

I stood there, damp and stupid, staring at the half-empty coffee cup, wondering if love really dies, or if it just lingers, pacing behind closed doors, waiting for someone to let it out.

I left her apartment quietly, closing the door without another knock. The stairwell smelled of dust and rain. By the time I stepped outside, the storm had passed, leaving the city damp and gleaming, as if it had been crying for both of us.

The inside noise gone, replaced by the faint hum of an outdoor AC unit, and the arching of a neon sign about to go out. It struck me then how strange it is, the sound of ordinary life continuing after the extraordinary has ended.

I walked aimlessly, hands shoved in my pockets, feeling the weight of everything I hadn’t said pressing against my ribs. Each puddle reflected her face, each flash of passing light looked like forgiveness until it wasn’t. I felt like my love had just missed the train and I was left standing in the station with a suitcase full of words. How I wished I’d said some of them earlier.

I stopped and turned toward her building, more out of ache than hope, expecting only the dark outline of her window, but desperately hoping she’d be standing in the window, watching.

And there she was.

Not just standing.

Not just watching, but waving, with both arms slicing overhead, frantic and bright, like a beacon desperate to guide a lost thing back to shore. I didn’t need to hear the words, to turn and hurry back, ignoring the splashing in the puddles. I wanted to hold her in my arms until she barely had breath to breathe. I’d never hold back telling her how much I loved her again.

I flew up her stairs, heart pounding the way it should have months ago, and when she opened the door, she said, “I changed my mind.”

I didn’t speak—I couldn’t. I just pulled her into my arms, into everything I’d been afraid to give her, into the moment that made every unsaid word collapse into one truth.

Her lips met mine, breathless and warm, and between kisses I whispered the words like a vow I’d been saving my whole life.

“I really do love you.”

M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats.

https://mdsmithiv.com/