working class

Lauren Arienzale

one summer
we lost power right before dinner

so we stood in the kitchen
and feasted on rocky road ice cream

i told you stories of day camp drama
and library books brimming with
distraction fantasy

and it felt so simple,
then

your mother called
and begged for money
that night

and i was young enough
for you to think
i didn’t even notice

 

Lauren Arienzale is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, former organic farmer, and poet. She is the author of the poetry collection, "Mud Pie.” Her work has also appeared in Scapegoat Review, The Closed Eye Open, A Plate of Pandemic, Assignment Literary Magazine, and others. Check out her website: laurenarienzale.com

When You Talk About Home

J.B. Williams

 

When you talk about home
            the frostbite's mouth
            bites in your words
                        dark like permafrost

your eyes like obsidian, eyes like flint
            eyes like a February sky

When you talk about home, that word
            loaded like a pickup
                        bed loaded like a gun

your voice is the same incredible quiet
            there is right before it
                       snows

 

J.B. Williams is the author of Strange Kingdom (Hungry Goat Press, 2019) and the poetry collection Maps of the World (Alien Buddha Press, 2023).

unreformed.

Brandi Bishop-Phelps

 

i cannot erupt as lily bloom
do not ask me to
strapless summer dresses grazing unbent knees
run me down the side of the valley in moss
fern
bent branches
snap me from tree-limbs and do not recite your great aunt’s wisdom in paper syntax

snapdragons are for planting in old tires in forgotten side yards in patchy earth
i will run my hands along the ridges and lean into the bees
do you remember the bees?
they hum as scribes.

telling stories of why they are dying and how
sweet the black raspberry tastes to a mortal proboscis
we tell the bees and they tell us
no one is listening. they write it in honey and feed it to us

i spread myself as nettle
do not pretend i cannot
pricking my own palms in rustling gestures
an intentional fledging pushed out of wild northern nests
tumbling
silver maple seed
crush me as bolted basil in forgotten pots and stop your proselytizing.

i was the one there when they cut down the old willow
i watched the callous way they tore through her gown
ran steel along her roots
this is why i cannot believe anything

i will not erase measureless springs
do not ask again
i have buried dandelions in the folds of my arms
dried coneflower against my skin for un-winged pollinators
mustards and mulberries
pressed in memorandum

No. fold me rooted beneath a Douglas fir and do not speak at all.

 

Brandi Bishop-Phelps gathers inspiration in bundles of wild ramp, her own Appalachian heritage and the folk stories common to humanity. She has served as a theater teacher and a Poet in Residence and is currently pursuing further education in creative writing.

Tenderness

Triston Dabney

 

I know somewhere,
one day,
before we are to leave
and ascend
from this good, blue
Earth—

a little Black
boy will read this
(Be it fridge or notebook
it may call home).

I have no
real words for you—
only marrow
and sucked bones—
only heart
and belonging,
and softness—

an irony of tenderness.

You, little Black boy,
will be handed
some grand adventure
I implore you to follow.

And hear me now:
“I’m so proud of you.”

Well,
come on now,
come up out of that room,
drink and eat well,
get fat,
and don’t forget to pray.

I may need you one day—
to share your back,
change these diapers,
and stir
these here beans.

To pick up around here
when I’m gone,
to hold my mule,
water these plants.

I may need you
to be brave
for braveness’ sake—
to cling to the goodness
you weren’t ever born with.

I may need you to live,
one day,
by being a part
of the reason
someone stays.

 

In the Sun

-        For Langston

Triston Dabney

 

Just now,
I have heard the blaring 
horns 
of an OutKast 
song on the radio
on my way from work.

And in my mind,
I imagine
we are 14 again.
Differently, this time,
on a day in July,
lying on the sunken 
carpet of your bedroom.

Our backs turned against 
the floor as it holds us up.
Lying ear to ear,
staring at the ceiling,
talking of sex and 
rap songs.

You are still sober.
You are not like your dad.
You have never rinsed
your fingers 
in the salt of escapism.

Your mom
still has her hair
and her complete breasts
as she steps in 
to bring us sweet tea.
Me,
I am not a savior.
I speak more in laughter
than in silence.

There are just boys.
And radios and Polaroids.

There are no guns.
No mouths to feed
Or flowers to lay.

There is only hunger.
and summer heat.
Nothing hunting us,
Just ripening, softening,
like raisins in the sun. 

 

Triston Dabney is a poet, cultural worker, and Oprah Winfrey Scholar from Baltimore, Maryland with a BA in English. Triston has received scholarships and support from Stockton University, Sphinx Moth Press, and the Hudson Valley Writers Center. His work appears in Obsidian, BreakBread Magazine, The Elevation Review, and other literary spaces committed to Black and queer poetics. His debut poetry collection, Moments as They Are (Fernwood Press, 2026), traces a journey through boyhood, memory, spirituality, and survival with lyrical precision and radical tenderness. Triston hopes to pursue an MFA and a career in higher education, where he can continue to nurture emerging voices and build literary spaces rooted in care, community, and cultural truth.

Another Instant

Jesse Graves

Rain filled the morning as though it were a cup
held under a faucet, time filtered by the hour,
my day awaiting its axial moment,
the slow, certain shift from remembrance to presence.

Memories that return as dreams hold their forms
through images recovered from a past year,
the pre-millennial tension of 1999 made real
again after two decades of forgetting.

Everyone alive then was alive for another instant,
until my eyes began to open and the pale light
of a stormy morning bled through the window.
Twenty years felt like the burning spire of a cathedral.

 

Warm December

                                    In Memoriam: Robert Denham

Jesse Graves

Fog smothers the valley
            beneath Buffalo Mountain
and will not rise or disperse—
            the sun will have to burn it away.
Warm and wet mid-December.
            The crows love this weather,
sun rising fast to dry wet wings.
            Squirrels do not love it,
branches slick and prone to failure,
every scamper perilous.

Another old scholar has died.
            His explications will live on
in seldom seen pages, but
for the eyes that find them,
just a little more light shines
            onto obscure verses.
Now a Carolina wren lands in the maple,
            who seems to always be
asking, “What you see, what you see, 

            what you see?”

 

The cosmos abides, above
            and around us, and there
must be many small pens
            streaking many small pages
this morning— a new Tu Fu
            alive and striving
in the high climes of faraway China,
            a new Coleridge by the Lakes,
new Baudelaire skirting back alleys,
            new Dickinson among garden roses.
And here, me, new and old
all at once, chasing words
into ink, ink back into words.

Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and A Little Light in the Grave (co-authored with Larry D. Thacker), and a book of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work has received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. He has served as co-editor for several volumes of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and Complete Poetry of James Agee.

Static

David M. Alper

 

It'll have cleared by morning, says the anchor,
her pixellated face fracturing on the weather map.
In the kitchen below, a shout of "Don't forget the
milk!"—the voice rising up through the floorboards
like steam. There's one entry in the diary: Today the
bird flew into the window and dropped, wings
spread out like a knife. On the bus, a murmur
behind me: "If I could just touch her hand."
The newspaper article laid out on the table reads:
Hope Drains as Search for Survivors Ends. A tea
spill spreads across the headline, converting grief
into a stain that will not come out. A mother calls
to tell the azaleas are in bloom early this year, their
petals the same shade as the dress she wore the
night she left the father. In the corridor, a child
whistles a tune that unwinds halfway through the
note. Even a tune has limits, its voice a string drawn
taut, unwinding. At bedtime, I hear the wind—its
parched voice scraping against the roof. I have no
idea whether it's coming or going.

 

David M. Alper's poetry appears in The McNeese Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Bookends Review, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.

 

Phillips 66, 1972

            Lebanon, Missouri

Matthew W. Schmeer

 

across the highway
            gas station lights
fireflies flickering

father's hands
            caked with grease

another customer
            cherry red mustang
full tank, oil change

reflected in glass
the meadow waves goodbye

half moon rises
beneath withered stalks
secret mice scurry

dead heat lightning
my father curses

wrench clatters pavement
a gunshot echo
my father twitches

alone in garage
he prays to metal

on a river delta
my father's gun
holes, holes, everywhere

blue skies open
no clouds rain fire

a small girl
            walks on dirt path
falls, cries out

the mustang whines
            beneath father's hands

in moonlight glass
            fireflies seek
themselves as mates

mice keep quiet
reveal no secrets

under yellow bulbs
father turns and turns
an engine, a heart

under black stars
a meadow unfolds

Matthew W. Schmeer is a middle-aged writer living in Kansas. His work has appeared in The Rush, Gyroscope Review, Poetry South, Redactions, Cream City Review, Natural Bridge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Kansas English, The Connecticut River Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Twenty-One Cents and semi-regularly posts small poems on Blueksy and Mastodon. He holds an MFA from the University of Missouri at St. Louis and is a Professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas.


The Ghost Festival

                    — To Those I Hold Dear

Xiaoly Li

 

Yearning all year long,
even separated by the Milky Way,
lovers await the day of Qixi
to cross the Magpie Bridge—
the Cowherd finds his Weaver Girl,
if only for a single night.
 

But where is my bridge in mid-July
when the gate of the underworld opens?
Only the sun beats down relentlessly; I can’t see
your shadows. Only robins carol cheerily;
could that be your whisper? 

Those I once held close
have drifted beyond reach—

the one whose childhood letter
long faded and yellowed,
the one whose smile on the screen
froze into the final face,
the one whose weary hands
removed the oxygen tube.

No goodbyes.
Not at your sides.
Just me, alone in my car, choking back tears.
Just yellow lotus, rising from silt in the meadow.

 

Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry collection, Wakening Between Worlds, will be published by Serving House Books, was a finalist in the 2023 Diode Editions Book Contests and the Word Works' 2024 Washington Prize. She was nominated for: Best New Poets, three times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net.

Found/Lost

Cathy Thwing

 

I.

Bed-time stories by Dickens,
Defoe, and Hugo—or those black
and white war films every Saturday
afternoon—we kids wondered,
What’s it like to live through history?

Gunshots at a Lincoln Continental
in Dallas, the kitchen towel wet
from Mom’s tears, Dad silent
at the table. Not history, but an em
dash in an ordinary day.

We still ate chocolate ice cream
after supper. More shots fired—
we went to art class, anyway,
painted red and black X’s,
inhaling the sweet suspended

particles of tempera powder.
Gas lines, recessions, walls torn
down, and new walls erected,
not history, but the background
noise for jobs to go to, laundry

to wash, always dishes in the sink,
endless tasks of living. It’s only now,
careers closed, friends disabled,
or dead, old connections crumbling,
wars still raging, sea levels still rising,

that we pause to ask, Is it going to be OK?
We stand beneath a palo verde, gold
in bloom, our masks in our back pockets
or dangling from our necks. Morning sun lights
the edges of every blossom.

II.

We get lost in a moment
when the sunlight shines through palo verde

            The sun shines through palo verde petals
            and we stand in the golden fog

We stand in a golden fog—
is it dawn or dusk?

            Fall to dawn, or rise to dusk
            Are we standing or lying, head in clouds?

We’re lying with our heads in the clouds
the light of a mockingbird song

            A mockingbird sings and everything’s bright
            only song and sun and golden petal

Surround the song with sun, the golden petal
We get lost in a moment

 

Cathy Thwing has been teaching writing at community colleges since receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. You can find some of her recent poems in Blue Heron Review, Meniscus, the Orchards Poetry Review, and Whitefish Review. Gardening, practicing cello, and swinging in hammocks fill her life's other nooks and crannies.

Chī fàn le ma—

Mea Andrews

a common greeting
for ‘have you eaten’
I learned

while studying Mandarin
in college, meals
cooked by women

with hands I never
imagined knowing
until I was there

and I remembered
the meals
my grandmother

made, fingers digging
veins from shrimp,
cutting red potatoes

because russets
weren't the same when
spread across five

stock pots of gumbo
in a cousin’s
driveway.

Hands I
could hold that
cooked for children
and guests, who
never questioned
if she had eaten.

 

Mea Andrews is a writer from Georgia, who currently resides in Shenzhen. She has her MFA from Lindenwood University and is still trying to learn how to make writing profitable. You can find her in Gordon Square Review, Rappahannock Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Potomac Review, and others. She was a 2022 Pushcart prize nominee, and had a poem up for Best of the Net. She has two chapbooks and poetry collections available for publication, should anyone be interested.

Blood

Alexandria Wyckoff

I watch the word slip 
out of my father’s mouth 
like an arrowhead as it pierces 
my mother’s chest. 

Indian. 

A term declared 
by eager explorers 
over half a millennium ago, 
desiccating sacred lands, 
like the diseases they carried.

My mother sets her jaw, 
her features paint a portrait 
of the Mohican blood she carries. 

Native American. 
First Nation. 

Those who roamed 
the Americas, living 
in harmony with the earth 
and the spirits around them. 

Today, physical features 
are the closest I get 
to understanding a culture 
that runs through my blood.
I stare at the mirror and see
only “white;” my Mohican
soul adrift in swaying grasses. 

Each generation loses 

another piece of the past, 
thousands of Native 
Americans bleeding
into a new America, 

trampled by Europeans
and the term Indian.

 

Alexandria Wyckoff has a BA in Creative Writing from SUNY Oswego. She has one book of poetry titled The Pain Cycle, with work also appearing in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, Kennings Literary Journal, The Bookends Review, and others. When not working on her writing, you can find Alexandria reading and sipping on mint tea. Find more of her work at https://www.alexandriawyckoff.com/ 

Arietta Melancholia

Ryan Harper

 

Do you too feel the sorrow around two
o’clock—the sink of life
when life is overlit?
In even every lift a drain—
in the core a forfeiture
of gains, a want of night,
new day, or not.

How, then, big and involved,
the simple memories of rest—
of promise and the cool, mown grass;
how the gentle wind helps—or not,
you know? Terrible two
again: in firm and falling figure,
its central, inventing ghost.

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University-Bellarmine in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Talon Review, Vilas Avenue, Vita Poetica, Presence, and elsewhere. Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal. Visit his website at ryanpharper.com.

Grandpa worked fields in two countries

Alberto Saldaña Uribe

and in a photo, he’s cheesing, teeth bared in glory standing legs wide, hands in pockets, brown pants so the soil stains won’t show, undershirt, white button-down, red-brown jacket on top. red bandana tied under the chin, tejana resting atop his head. he’s been working fields his whole life, working out of Lomita at that time. when you ask about the fields, he’ll tell you about the patrones, the community, how the air always got colder come dawn, how the sun at its peak would sweat bodies like onions in a pan, strained backs, and the pride of bringing home freshly picked  produce  they saw as beautiful  while the bosses deemed them  too imperfect  for market.

you’ll see the photo and start to ask questions. this isn’t the first time he’s worked in agriculture, wasn’t the first time he stepped on american soil. his eldest son was a bracero, but you forget he was one, too. and you're used to seeing him smiling just like in the photo. you’ve heard the stories of working fields in Jalisco, sharecropping alongside his father, breaking out and growing crops of his own. but when you ask about his time as a bracero, his grin fades, as he struggles to swallow the lump in his throat, reluctantly recalling the noxious smell, that sting of gas and vinegar, and he’ll grow even more quiet as he massages his knuckles and stares a hole through his  shoes,  muttering  fractal  memories of  el polvo blanco  that  stained every inch  of  his  skin.

mi querido viejo.

Alberto Saldaña Uribe

open casket.
face pulled as tight as possible, trying to iron out any imperfections.
ain’t they realize the wrinkles were part of your charm?

dressed in a navy blue suit.
Momma wanted you looking as sharp as can be.
                                    i always thought you looked best in your Dickies and Ben Davis.

vigil at 7 pm on a weekday.
mortuary home had to open up the rooms with extra seating.
                                    even then could barely fit, pressed in the pews to seal away any emptiness.

video package my siblings prepared.
playing on a loop, your favorite tracks serenading old photos.
                                    some of them songs, Gramps, they sting like alcohol on open wounds.

morning mass in Lomita.
cars filled out multiple blocks on both sides of the street.
                                    not a single person left your side, following all the way to the cemetery.

priest gave a small sermon
right there on the burial greens, Grandma bit her cheeks through most of it.
                                    but even Grams couldn’t hold it cuando los mariachis empezaron a cantar.

burial in Rancho Palos Verdes.
out on the greenest of hills, they planted a tree alongside you
fitting really, think about it, “la gente buena no se entierra, se siembra”[1].


___________________________
[1] “La Fiesta” - Pedro Capó

Alberto Saldaña Uribe is a high school dropout, a college graduate, and holds an MFA from Fresno State. His work can be found in HAIS: a literary journal, Flies, Cockroaches, & Poets, The Roadrunner Review, Variant Literature and Slippery Elm. Find him and his work on instagram @titioso98.