ISSUE 19 - sPRING 2025
POETRY
FUTURE MORE BLACK
Dee Allen
[ For aries jordan. ]
I cannot announce the future
With a detailed
Ten-point demand plan.
I cannot build the future
With a high-tech, somewhat sustainable vision
Described in a paperback novel.
I cannot see the future
With a clear crystal ball
And unfathomable power of the mind
Before it materialises.
I'm no Black Panther or Black Rider.
I'm no Science Fiction author.
I'm no clairvoyant either.
I can study to the full the past.
I can apply those lessons learned to the present.
But a “Black future”?
Excuse my uncertainty.
Comments on such a time-line
Can be said for just three things
I wish for in it:
A future where the African is not extinct,
A future where Africans have more say in everything transpiring on Earth, and
A future without racism and White supremacy.
Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on creative writing & Spoken Word since the early 1990s. Author of 10 books--Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black, Elohi Unitsi, Rusty Gallows: Passages Against Hate, Plans, Crimson Stain, his newest Discovery and his newest, The Mansion--and 77 anthology appearances.
Waiting for Remission: Soundtrack
Catherine Arra
He doesn’t abide by stillness, prefers
a rebel’s rush to beat death, cross life’s gate
a wild man swinging arms, kicking legs,
torso twisting to Sing, Sing, Sing
off to downtown, around town, the gym
job, upstairs—circle three times
descend to bed—one two three times
three to blast off—a keyboard
clicking tap dance
poems, photos, logging in/out
love letters, a romance of emails
resume, updates, DIY divorce.
Says if he stops his brain
will kill him, legs will cramp
and trip him. He will lose.
Wants forgiveness, absolution
he doesn’t think he deserves. Says he
believes in a higher power, not in God.
A rose by any other name …
I tell him
You are the rose.
Sing your red, baby, sing.
Catherine Arra lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, where she teaches part-time, and facilitates local writing groups. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in San Pedro River Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Origami Poems Project, Stone Circle Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Unbroken, Unleashed Lit., and The Ekphrastic Review. Find her at www.catherinearra.com
Zeroes and Ones
Scott Davidson
No system cares what you’re bringing to
the experience. Whether you’re winning, games
in progress are all that matter, the well-crafted runs
and player reveals, pieces of something resembling
winning. Predictably, system response is showing
clearly unhelpful cards, the ones most likely to
ruin scores. A small example of algorithms
actively working against us, watching and
recording while we play our games. Having
no proof I can only say I see it happening all
the time, triggers, evasions, a hundred examples
of games choosing outcomes and effects. What
machines learn by doing, they do from then on.
Scott Davidson grew up in Montana, worked for the Montana Arts Council as a Poet in the Schools, and – after most of two decades in Seattle – lives with his wife in Missoula. His poems have appeared in Southwest Review, Hotel Amerika, terrain.org, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, and the Permanent Press anthology Crossing the River: Poets of the Western United States.
Migration
Jennifer Handy
Two doves groom each other and stare at us outside our open window,
sitting on a low-hanging branch, cooing, making eyes at each other,
while giving us what could only be called the stink-eye.
At any moment, I expect them to make a move, to fly inside our camper.
Instead, they fly onto the roof. My husband shakes his fist at them.
They fly off, return, and perch in a second tree higher up, just out of view.
After sunset, I hear a hiss and draw back as a young sidewinder makes its presence known.
How well it blended into the rocky ground. My husband chases it
with a shovel, threatening to cut its head off.
The birds come back, day after day. This tree we parked under for shade was theirs
long before we made it ours. I wash their shit off of the roof.
Are we not allowed to come here? Can no one ever move?
A hundred miles south, a row of shipping containers stacked two high
line the Rio Grande. Behind the walls and fences, border agents
are poised, like snakes, to strike.
The earth belongs to the birds, the snakes, the coyotes.
The earth belongs to whoever’s there. The earth belongs to no one.
We all are temporary occupants, our lives, our selves, just passing through.
Jennifer Handy is the author of the chapbooks CaliforniaBurning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Dirt (Finishing Line Press, October 2025).
The Argument
Alison Hicks
The wave is coming, the seer said.
It cannot be prevented or avoided.
You must learn to read the shadows
on the sea, cracks in the land
where fire seeps through.
We set our feet down softly, spoke in whispers,
covered our heads with our arms.
The first of any drink went onto the ground,
we cut the best fruits and left them in offering.
A voice rose: The wave has not come.
The seer is wrong. We fell to arguing:
that our attentions had prevented the wave,
that they were unnecessary.
We who heeded the seer moved our shelters up the mountain.
The rest stayed by the shore.
We went about our business of knowing and not knowing.
In the mountains, we kept our learning to ourselves.
Evenings we watched ourselves the shore-dwellers dance
on smooth sand. We wondered if they might be right.
We watched as the sand grew wider and longer,
ocean backing away, we watched us running after,
calling it back, we watched it swallow us,
and only we were left.
Alison Hicks’ fourth collection of poems is Homing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024). She was awarded the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press for Knowing Is a Branching Trail. Previous collections are You Who Took the Boat Out, Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, and a novella Love: A Story of Images. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, among other literary magazines. She was named a finalist for the 2021 Beullah Rose prize from Smartish Pace, an Editor’s Choice selection for the 2024 Philadelphia Stories National Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern, Quartet Journal, and Nude Bruce Review. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.
A Church on the Hill
Veronica Hill
There was a church on the hill
and I’ve never been one for religion,
wasn’t raised that way,
but there was a church on the hill,
bathed in the blue light of dusk,
the many steps leading up to it
lit by yellowed bulbs
in the antique lamp posts,
humming in the quiet setting sun.
And I’ve never been one for religion,
a product of a father sent to Catholic school,
but there was a church on the hill
and in that moment
the weight of the centuries
set down heavy on my soul,
like those colossal oak doors,
the inner light shining through
intricate stained glass
high set in the stone walls,
and that old church bell
rang
(through me)
seven times.
There was a church on the hill
and I’ve never been one for religion,
but there,
in the new twilight,
I understood
that eternal pull towards
something bigger than what we know.
Veronica Hill is a soon-to-be graduate of Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, majoring in Law and minoring in Professional Writing. She is originally from coastal Massachusetts and focuses much of her poetry on the natural world, split between the coast and the mountains.
Human
Joshua Kulseth
were there ever moments between miracles
when Jesus got food in His beard,
or came down with the flu, sending Him
to the outhouse for the night, around back
puking in a hole? Did He laugh at farts,
or when told some dirty fisherman’s joke?
Sure, He didn’t need advice, but did He ever ask
Peter why the tides move, and when? Or why
seasons change, patterns of fish migrations,
or even just the quotidian particulars of casting
a net, baiting a line? You know, just to get him talking?
Like a kindness at a get-together, when the host
casts out for what he already knows,
to flatter, put everyone at ease? I hope so.
And everyone would’ve been on their best behavior,
but I wonder were there times when maybe
some drunk stumbled to the dinner for sinners,
and maybe like some drunks I know, stole the show,
wildly, incoherently, innocently cracking jokes
so you couldn’t help but smile—that there were
moments when Jesus, leaning back in a chair,
arms crossed, might eye the disruption, moments
He would have laughed, clapped even,
or shaken His head and smiled, wondering
at His silly creation; not mad or scowling like the priests
down the street, just enjoying the company
of a few drunks and crooks, whores and cowards,
poets and pornographers: just happy to be with us.
Joshua Kulseth earned his B.A. in English from Clemson University, his M.F.A. in poetry from Hunter College, and his Ph.D. in poetry from Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, The Emerson Review, The Potomac Review, The Windhover, The South Carolina Review and others. His full-length poetry manuscript, Leaving Troy, was shortlisted for the Cider Press Review Publication Competition, and is currently under contract with Finishing Line Press. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Alternate Reality
Christen Lee
My mother is unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.
She sends me AI-generated images,
commenting on the strange behaviors of cats and babies,
the exquisite features of squirrels and landscapes –
oblivious to the obvious cyber-embellishments of these images.
I try to correct, explain, exemplify, but mom persists.
Hers is a quiet stubborn, defiant of human reason and logic.
She is a woman of firm faith, and her reality has shifted
through years of deep practice.
My mom inhabits an alternate space that is soft with solitude.
In this world, there are dreams more real than flesh and blood.
More welcoming than the hearth of tradition.
Have you ever woke from a blissful sleep,
only to be confronted by the dread of deadlines, breakdowns,
panic, and loss? My mom has moved on from that world.
Last night she captured four perfect images of the December
full moon,
magnified and filtered to the finest effect, then sent my way.
In all these years of wanting, I’ve never known a greater gift.
My mother gave me the moon.
Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in Dulcet Lit, Rue Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World, Sad Girls Club, Encephalon, In Parentheses, The Elevation Review, and Moot Point among others.
No Word in English Rhymes with Month
Amy Lerman
On occasion, our doorbell reminds me
of packing peanut butter and jelly bagels
the nights before, perhaps some string
cheese or pretzels, the mornings cold
and calm as we followed the dark,
migrant geese fading into the sky.
I could almost time your zoning out
mid-sentence once Benadryl kicked
into the drip, amazed at how quickly
swallowed your words, mid-sentence,
I envied short naps, quieting away, still
motion, you looked no different from
a summer outside Aspen’s music tent,
dozing mid-afternoon, cartoon black
notes circling the air, you would let us
roll up jeans for creek dunking, grass
sticking ours toes after when we’d pick
Indian paintbrush flowers we should not
have, at the small concession stand,
my friend’s mother offering Dixie-
cupped lemonade and plastic-wrapped
cookies for the walk home. And back
in the beige recliner, your eyes inviting,
clear again, how we giggled flipping
celebrity magazine photos, choosing
top awards-season looks, then joining
nurses’ applause when the bell ringing
signaled another’s last treatment,
our fingers entwined, only an hour
until no infusion tube, unrefrigerated air,
that driver’s horn lofting pigeons
from the crosswalk, discarded corn
and shedded hackberries a patchwork
feast for later samplers.
Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press) won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Atticus Review, Muleskinner, The Madison Review, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.
From the EdAdvance Adult and Continuing Education Course Catalog, Fall 2024
Ada Lowenthal
Beyond pedestrian ESL and GED, non-acronymed classes unfold enchantingly. Travel fictional geography in Fantasy Mapmaking, and, along with Medicare Basics, find Paint Your Pet, Discovering a Bowl of Matcha (New), and Intermediate Irish Tin Whistle. So many things I never thought I needed to know, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just a matter of degrees, now I see I could learn Beginning Basketry and wouldn’t that be helpful for all the times I placed all my eggs in one? And Shamanism for Personal and Collective Healing might have come in handy for my dying sister; she’s on home hospice now, painkillers paying forward the gift of sleep, but it’s good to know there’s a course, Hospice Volunteering 101, aptly followed by How to Talk with the Other Side, and in class, “Messages from the other side are geared to whomever is present.” I’m not sure I’ll want to chat. For years, I’d delay a call for another day and another, road running from her unmedicated mania, her Cartooning 101 Tazmanian Devil-ish vortex of words, turning tail on tales of falling, breaking, something botched, defeat by pain and Percocet, because why bother, she was a lemon, and she’d never see London or Paris anyway. Transforming Your Life During Challenging Times would have meant transforming a lifetime. Still, who else could plait our memories of Detroit’s bitter winters with spring’s bitter herbs? With badminton, our badinage, our beloved, departed brother? At my last visit, she barely spoke, barely moved, her body mere impediment. Now I bear witness to these sacred, unteachable moments of her final descent from fluent flesh to sediment, this blink of an eye between cognition and, Latin for Beginners, terra incognita. Too soon, when she is dead, I’ll have to register for From Memory to Memoir: Writing Your Life Story, because I have none without her.
For more than fifteen years, while working as an architect and educator, Ada Lowenthal wrote poetry in private - a kind of compulsion - no submissions, no workshops, mostly no good. Since retiring to northwest Connecticut a few years ago, she has worked on honing her craft and sharing her work. In 2024, her work appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Road Not Taken, and Rat's Ass Review, and she attended the Kenyon Writers Workshop and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
Maybe Just
Morgan Matchuny
i imagined lies to hide my truth: it started with nibbling
at poppies, then handcuffs, and now law, our law, bondaged
by thumb in mouth and flat white sheets, borderline genius
minds holding insurance companies for ransom in locked wards,
born too soon to comprehend their reach toward paralytic
dreams under ceilings which know what i can’t know, the art
of sky-bathing beneath artless onyx, all white-spotted as though
a thousand fawns, frolicking & ignorant in the distance, feasted
on nettles and lichen, all to form a monolith of some endless
resilience, and aren’t we all like that, capable of change, of
hatred for systems, maybe it can be enough, the hatred, to breathe
again for ourselves, and look out the window, there’s an aimless
train of malady condescending itself to our power, alive in flight, too alive
for the love of streets and rage, but maybe just alive enough to survive.
Morgan Matchuny is a psychology student at the University of Kentucky. She is proud to be in long-term recovery from addiction. Her work can be found in Ramblr, Drunk Monkeys, and God's Cruel Joke.
My Shooting Years
James B. Nicola
I used to shoot. My scores were pretty good
for five and six and seven, maybe eight.
I bet you don’t believe that of me now
so I refer you to my older brother.
How I became a man of peace, I can’t
tell you. Maybe the Friday evening News
with weekly casualty numbers, plus the sum
so far, when I was seven, eight, and nine,
had something to do with it. Later, I
found out those totals Walter Cronkite said
did not even include the million dead
or more who were not American boys
like me. Now, if you are from Viet Nam,
I’ll squeeze your hand. Your arm. That’s how I am.
James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award. Recent nonfiction can be found on-line at Unlikely Stories and Lowestoft Chronicle. Recent fiction appears on-line in Neither Fish Nor Foul and The GroundUp. A graduate of Yale and returning contributor to HeartWood, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller's People's Choice magazine award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels stunned and grateful.
This evening I spied a coyote
Adrienne Pilon
running past my house. This coyote
has roamed our street before; I recognize
how moonlight strikes his whitish ruff.
Coyotes seem to lead a lonely life, but what do I know?
I too roam this street, in and out of the woods,
more often solo than not. A rangale of deer
come out in the evenings, too. But then:
a lone doe. Each night she visits
the birdfeeder on her own. Goes another way
from the rest. What kind of exile is this?
There are more kinds of loneliness than
I’ll ever know: my mother, in her darkening house;
the parents whose only son is forever gone;
the widow next door, who leaves a single lightbulb
burning on the porch day and night. And a moth,
perched on that light, extinguishing
itself on the only brightness it knows.
Adrienne Pilon is a poet, essayist, and educator. Recent and forthcoming work appears in Tendon Magazine, Solstice, The Tiger Moth Review, Susurrus, and elsewhere.
ROTTELA PANDUGA
a festival of breads
Sreekanth Kopuri
All the roads lead to Nellore
not to demolish a masjid
nor disown a temple nor
deconstruct a church
but to exchange-
the rotte of miracles.
It doesn't ask my religion,
nor saffronize, nor convert
my faith for it isn't a human.
Instead burns its self in my
neighbour's hands to make
me love him as myself, always
our faiths dissolve here
into a breaded oneness
for something that bonds
us with a hope, a child has
in a father's promised toys.
The tide of hopes rise
and stream into the
Barah Shaheed Dargah,
take a sacred dip in
the swarnala cheruvu,
knead more hopes and
signpost the names:
Pelli rotte,
Soubhagya rotte
Udyoga rotte
Santhanam rotte
Nuthana gruha rotte,
Arogya rotte,
Promotion rotte
elsewhere someone
holds a placard:
Prapancha Santhi rotte.
Myth or truth
isn’t the question
but the hope we
exchange as a
prasadam or Bread
of a holy communion,
a reality not of Gaza
nor the weird silences
of Manipur nor the one
around our own clocks
but which draws you and I
to a sanctity of purpose,
for hopes above woes
and faith above despair.
Here the reasoning's
perennial like the Pulicat
that doesn't cease to draw
the birds from everywhere.
A quantum leap, year by year
from the unreason around
the discriminations of faith.
Rottela Panduga is an annual five-day festival of breads in Nellore of India in the month of Muharram. It commemorates 12 martyrs who fought against the British troops in 1751 during the siege of Arcot in the Carnatic wars. Their mortal remains are buried in the Bara Shaheed Dargah, a mausoleum. It draws nearly 20 lakhs of pilgrims from various parts of India as well as abroad every year. People cutting across class, caste and creed congregate near Swarnala Lake near the dargah and break bread. as thanksgiving for past wishes fulfilled, while others receive them, hoping their own wishes would be granted
Rotte means bread in Telugu
Pelli: marriage
Soubhagya: prosperity
Udyoga: job
Santhanam: having children
Nuthana gruha: new House
Aro gya: health
Sreekanth Kopuri, Ph.D., is an Indian poet from Machilipatnam. He is the current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, Writer in Residence, and a Professor of English. He is a pushcart nominee for 2023. He recited his poetry in Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, Caen, Banja Luka, and many. His poems appeared in Two Thirds North, Arkansan Review, A Honest Ulsterman, San Antonio Review, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, South Broadway Journal, Vayavya, American Plants & Poetry, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry San Jose, Oddball Magazine, to mention a few. His forthcoming book From an Indian Diary is the finalist for the Eyelands Book Award 2022, Athens. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022.
Hand Me Down
Peter Sagnella
Posing in the field, ridge in the background,
we were a ridgeline ourselves. Oldest to youngest,
tallest to shortest, rising, peaking, receding
into earth. And the same might be said
of our clothes: the way we shared them, passed
them down the line. Wool, corduroy, denim—
we were hemmed and patched, stitched and seamed
into each other’s lives. That this was a way
of life is what I, in the end, take away—
that the way we’re dressed is never ours, or ours
alone. And so, when the time comes, when
the end of my line comes, carry me to that ridge.
Unseam me, strip me down. Palmful by palmful,
dress me into earth. Let my ash reseed.
Pushcart nominee and Edwin Way Teale Writer-in-Residence, Peter Sagnella lives in Connecticut and teaches Composition, Poetry, and Environmental Literature. His work has been exhibited at the Yale School of Forestry, and appeared in many journals. Recent work has appeared in Shō, Planetree, Poet Lore, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Black Fork Review. In 2023 Cathexis Northwest Press published his chapbook, Coming to Terms.
Stroke
Tim Snyder
My neighbor must have struck something
deep down, the order of letters
slosh ‘round the bottom of his hull—
motatoes…motatoes…pointing to my garden.
Like a word that splashes out of shadows
and swamps a sentence—wedding
but you meant funeral—there’s no shame
or pity. Yes, the tomatoes are ripe, I say.
Can I get you some?
Tim Snyder, originally from Rochester, New York, lives with his wife in a small house on a narrow road with a dog and six cats in Northwestern Ohio. He divvies his time up working on his house, teaching composition, and interpreting for Deaf folks in his adoptive home state.
Apostasy
Isabella Tennant
Autumn was the last time I saw her.
The leaves were orange and brown, littering the ground.
I heard the crunch, felt them collapse under my boots as I trampled across
friends and families and lifetimes and legacies, all by staying silent.
I tasted the bite of winter drifting across the lake and felt the chill in the air.
Her white face eclipsed even the moon that was stubbornly lingering in the sky.
The wooden porch was solid beneath my feet, the glass door translucent enough
for me to see God leave as life left her eyes.
Small hearts were embroidered on my blue sweater, colorful shapes made of thread.
They didn’t pound like my heart pounded as I ran for help, as I sought solace
in sharing the awful thing I’d seen.
They didn’t break like my heart broke as I thought of my best friend’s body or
my best friend as a body.
Suicide didn’t seem like an option to me after that, but a threat,
a monster that would take my life late at night if I wasn’t vigilant.
So, I watched and I waited.
I turned to a religion I’d lost and grown to loathe all because I used to love it.
Because I wanted to return to a time when I believed a god would intervene.
A time when I believed young girls didn’t die at their own hand.
For a long time, her house loomed like a cross on a hill, threatening to crush me
if I came too close.
The memory of the way she looked that morning stalked me like a predator,
waiting for the moment I let my guard down.
I had to turn over pictures I couldn’t face.
I had to throw out the sweater and the boots.
Autumn still makes me think of her.
I see her in the red sourwood leaves and the white pumpkins wet with dew.
I hear her in old albums, her essence etched into the grooves of each record.
I feel her when I write, when I conjure her from my memory,
the only kind of afterlife any of us get.
Isabella Tennant graduated from West Virginia University (WVU) in May 2021 with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Secondary Education. After teaching high school English for three years, she’s now recuperating as a Sponsored Programs Associate at Fairmont State University. When she’s not licking her wounds, Isabella can be found hiking through the nearest thicket of trees or catching a flight to the furthest location from home. Her single published poem, “Holler and Heaven: In Response to George Ella Lyon’s ‘Where I’m From,’” is available in Volume 32 of Calliope, WVU’s undergraduate literary journal.
Impending
Zac Yonko
The word "impending"
sounds like a creak in the rafters,
a slow groan of timber just before collapse,
but here in rural Appalachia,
it means snow—maybe—
a white specter lingering
on the lips of the meteorologist
as he gestures wildly at a map
like an auctioneer hawking clouds.
We don’t trust him,
though we tune in anyway,
our heads tilted like dogs
hearing the rustle of a distant treat.
50% of the time,
he’s as wrong as the groundhog,
but still, we listen,
marking his words like a pastor’s sermon,
praying that this time,
he’s right—or wrong, depending.
At the grocery store, the bread aisle
becomes a battlefield,
mothers clutching the last loaf of rye
as if it were salvation,
old men peering into the chasm
of empty shelves, shaking their heads
at the absurdity of milk.
What will we do with it, anyway,
when the roads are clear tomorrow
and the snow turns out to be
a passing thought of the sky?
But "impending" carries a weight
that logic cannot lift.
It’s not the snow we fear,
but the possibility of stillness—
a silence stretching its arms
across the mountains,
the trees heavy-laden,
the world whitewashed and waiting.
And so we gather provisions,
not for survival, but for reassurance—
a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk,
as if they might anchor us
against the storm that might
or might not
come.
Zac Yonko is a pastor, poet, and writer from Johnstown, PA. He serves as the lead pastor at Vinco Brethren Church, part of The Brethren Church denomination. Zac holds a B.A in English Literature from Waynesburg University and is a graduation candidate for an MDiv from Ashland Theological Seminary. Zac was selected as the 2025 b.f. maiz Lecturer-Poet at Waynesburg University and is the author of the upcoming book Sixty-Six Reveries: A Poet’s Walk Through the Field of Scripture (Wipf & Stock). His poetry has been featured in Time of Singing, Gabby & Min., and the Festival of Poetry. When he’s not writing, Zac can be found reading, learning, or watching movies he’s never seen before with his wife.