Highway Angel Encounter

Sarah Ellis


The coyote rock came alive
in the halfway highway light
and wind twisted the asphalt
to twin continents shifting,
a cold concrete Pangea.
Then high beams like a hundred eyes
howling whole-heartedly bent the earth
back to its most basic name,
and a satellite order of orbital oracles
cut closer to the rime of the sky
with every crease in the horizon line,
and a voice like a smoke-soaked gun
heaved out of heaven, its deadbeat doxology
dancing down a strip of sidewalk
torn from her turbid suburbia.
Be not afraid, breathed the beat of her
wings, this was always holy ground.
And the barrier between the bowl of
the sky and the blood of the earth burst,
first in fevered fettering, then for freedom,
then was still. Her wings drew close
like plastic bags in glassy water,
soon swallowed by the rearview’s sallow hue.

Sarah Ellis is a chemist and graduate of Reed College who lives and writes in Massachusetts. Her work has recently appeared in Poet Lore, Welter, wildscape. a literary journal, and others.

 

Nocturne With Quiet Woods (Hours Before Autumn)

Spencer K.M. Brown


Shadows dance Atlas in circles across the moon-lavished lawn.
The barred owl we’ve come to love croons a call and response to his errant barks.
Tonight the air stirs hot and cold like a fever, summer breathes in as autumn exhales.

The woods are dark and deep, they are lovely now—furred dreams laid upon emerald moss.
Boughs of poplar and walnut hold their color like my wife cradles our little son,

Not letting go tonight, not until nature demands it.
At such an hour, I’m spared of assaulting thoughts, cracking dreams like summer clay,
As if the night conspires and pretends I’m still asleep.

No thirst right now, no Golgotha of the heart, no myrrhed wine to ease my days.
Midnight in the foothills, I allow myself to remember good things.

How I’ll always remember them—no one, not even ghostlight, can take that away.
Atlas dances—there come howls and howls. How many thoughts does a forest hold,
How heavy such a burden as that, how delicate and necessary.

I think of calling Atlas in, of sleepwalking back to bed.
I think of kissing your shoulder, telling you to come out, listen for autumn to arrive.

Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning novelist and poet. A finalist for the CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and the Flying South Fiction Prize, his work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast. He lives in the foothills of North Carolina with his wife and three sons. His debut collection of poetry, The Salvation of Me, will be published in 2026 by Press 53.

 

topsoil (1959)

Erica Breen

                        

1. Claude sold the mineral rights

They pushed it aside, into a mountain range
along the bottom of the field—
excavators scooped gravel,
a long parade of trucks hauled the ancient riverbank
away. “Hundreds of truckloads,”
the foreman recounted to my father, thirty years on—
of course, trucks were smaller then.

Many of the drivers grew
up on farms themselves—

yet, when they were finished,
someone neglected
to respread the precious top—

2. of his most productive field

Claude’s father dead, his wife fled
his mother fumed and took in washing
while he farmed alone

sweating to repay
the mortgage that his father took
to buy Claude’s ag degree: thirty-five years
he struggled with that loan

lien on a river valley farm, deep sandy loam,
buried treasure: subsoil drainage
highway engineers could dream

3. for gravel, to the highwaymen, leaving

They built an interstate, I-91
long wound unwinding
across farms and hills,
mined mountains of gravel so cars
would travel smooth
and fast, never mind
Earth stripped bare of grass—

Other families had their farms subsumed
by eminent domain. They watched
their fields and houses razed,
moved into town, buried
bitterness under highway’s grade—

4. five acres of barren sand

topsoil, a farmer’s medium
washed down from its unseeded mound,
settled into grass at the edge of the trees—

a neighbor leased the field, took one pass with his plow,
glanced behind, saw dry sand rolling back into the furrow—
raised the bottom and drove away,
never looking back.

 

Erica Breen lives in Southeastern Vermont, where she grows leeks, raspberries, and weeds, and works in a volunteer hospice. She is currently experimenting with growing field radishes to break up hardpan and as chicken food. Her work has appeared in About Place Journal, Lily Poetry Review, and Connecticut River Review.

 

Cemetery Walker

Arielle Arbushites

 

There was a time I was a cemetery walker
with my small son in a stroller,
and as we rolled thoughtful through
the blades of grass on paths between the graves
of those great and not so great, I came up
with a custom.

On any given day, I’d look for that day’s date
before the hyphen etched into the stone,
worn by time and terrain.

Happy birthday, Esther, I’d whisper
to the soul beneath the soil. Happy birthday, Henry.

Little celebrations thrown into the air,
whatever the mantra, whatever my mood—
I’d imagine their lives, reflect
with a storyteller heart, upon
how long they’d been gone
as I ticked off the years on my fingers
and the baby cooed or babbled.

Keys hidden in my throat turned
to unlock connection as I spoke to the dead,
and the ships cut their ropes and rushed
toward the tide to meet me.

On any given day, especially at twilight,
when the deer ran cautiously through the headstones,
I’d look for that day’s date
in the spot behind the hyphen
and think of how brutal the day must have been
for those who loved the soul beneath the soil.

Anniversaries are always a scar shaped like a kiss.

Precious prayers sent into the void,
I’d travel onward with my shadow friends.

These days my son walks on his own two legs,
backpack heavy with American childhood
into a school that makes us flinch as the double doors shut.
I think of how I once whispered strangers’ names to stones
and pray today’s date won’t be some future headline,
carved into some nearby sepulcher.

The news tells me children are taught to hide behind desks,
shrinking to stay alive
when all I ever wanted for him was for the world to be his oyster.
The raw fear in schools is so ordinary—
rain falls so often we stop looking up at the sky.

I once sought names worn down by weather—
now I dread how quickly they are carved
for lives that never had the chance
to struggle against seasons.

I blow blessings into the air like dandelion dust
the way I once did among tombs
and send them trailing behind my child
like invisible companions
so the shadow friends keep watch and report back.

Perhaps all those birthday wishes whispered to souls beneath the soil
were rehearsals for the way I love him now—
holding his life like a candle cupped against the wind,
knowing every step into the world is both miracle and memorial,
and that even as I walk among the living,
I am always practicing elegy.

 

Arielle Arbushites (she/her/hers) is a licensed social worker who has been a writer all her life. She has been published in numerous lit mags/journals such as South Florida Poetry Journal, Maudlin House, and The Orchards Poetry Journal, among others. Arielle lives and writes in Pennsylvania where she balances motherhood, hospice work, and poetry as a means of understanding what it is to be alive.

 

Twenty-Nine Days

River Houser


East Tennessee autumns are marked by two distinctive things: football season, which remains the focal point of nearly every family event, grocery store, billboard, and local news cast between the months of August and December, and the wildfires. The wildfires are incommunicable. Forever scorched into the mind: the image of my car, parked on top of the hill and myself, feeling the helpless desperation stretching inside my body like some terrible supernova, like dough, collapsing in on itself and stretching and again and again and— Close your eyes. I want you to put yourself there:

Suppose that you have looked at the same mountain every single day of your entire, minuscule life. In time you might have come to believe that the mountain would always remain the same. After all, this mountain has been here for hundreds of millions of years. This mountain has taught you everything you know; has protected you; has kept you fed; has kept you warm. The news cameras do not love it the way you do nor can they see its wounds. Of course you are going to be there with it now. Somebody has to and it should be you. You have always needed to see these things through.

Now suppose that the drive up the mountain is as heavy as the smoke that still hangs in the air. This is not the normal kind of smoke, either, not the kind that is supposed to be there. Ten thousand acres razed to the ground. Fourteen dead. Two kids with matches. News outlets release an aerial photograph and the char takes the shape of every horror story you’ve ever heard about the Wampus and haints. From that high up ten thousand acres of this mountain is like a grease smudge on a skyscraper. On the ground, where you love it, you feel the heaviness of it all settle like ash in your lungs.

Smoky Mountain home.
Shadows cast in orange glow.
Another dry year.

 

River Houser is an Appalachian butch, poet and folk practitioner. They can usually be found writing about the mountains that raised them or sitting outside in the sunshine.


No More Doors

Hania Qutub

 

When I was growing up we heard about God
closing a door and opening a window
when times are tough

We waited 
sure in our faith 
that someday a window would open for us
because in Gaza all the doors had closed
entrapped within its walls my people languished 
with rationed food and dirty water
for generations

When the doors closed to the Palestinians, no windows opened for them
Caged in by land 
surrounded by a thick cement wall built by the Occupiers
Caged in by sea 
surrounded by bombs if they attempted to fish or sail in the Mediterranean
They languished for years in their outdoor prison
An entire people encircled by a wall with 3 doors
And the world around them flourished and moved on
And the nations beside them decided it is time to make their own peace 
Because the people who needed peace the most were nicely locked away
behind doors that did not ever need to open
again

And when they tried to march peacefully to remind the world
that they wished for open doors
The March of Return
their kneecaps were blown to pieces by the Occupation Forces
doctors, nurses, and journalists were shot 
in the knees
old and young were sniped
in the knees
And no one saw their suffering

Disabled so they could no longer walk 
to any doors
A nation of canes and wheelchairs

And when they tried to fly over the doors
in slipshod air bicycles
Without hope for a present or a future
in a miserable show of desperation
The other side was waiting
And Crimes against Humanity was assigned to an entire people
who for 105 years had lived through the most unimaginable crimes themselves
But they were now for once collectively “guilty” 
And instead of the Occupation opening the doors for them
to go back to their homes
to reclaim the land stolen
from their fathers and grandfathers
They sealed them off permanently from the world
No food, no gas, no electricity, no water 

Only bombs and snipers and quadcopters and explosive robots and white phosphorus 
And they blew up all the doors to their churches, schools, and mosques
And they blew up all the doors to their hospitals and universities
And they burned the tents that had no doors

In Gaza all the windows are now always open
In Gaza there are no more doors
In Gaza God has opened the skies instead
for the Palestinians to ascend
to the heavens above

 

Hania Qutub is a Palestinian American poet and physician. She currently practices Obstetrics & Gynecology in the United States and overseas with Syrian Refugees in Jordan. Her work includes publications in Mondoweiss, and FestivalofPoetry.com , Rowayat, Passager, Gordon Square Review and Last Leaves Magazine and winner of Honorable Mention in the Bethesda Emerging Writers 2026 Poetry Competition.


Responding to Struggles of the Moment

Ace Boggess

 

Her father in the hospital
returns to his usual languages
of say-everything-at-once &
do-everything-at-once.

We laugh at the gallows.
I drive her back & forth,
spin, dizzied, return home.

I need a moment
to remember who I am,
or was, so grab my guitar,
purge it of a layer of dust,
tune its corroded strings.

I play in bed on my knees,
numbing; I play in prayer,
sing away a world.

 

Ace Boggess is author of eight books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025) and My Pandemic / Gratitude List (Mōtus Audāx Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, was recently released from Running Wild Press.


On Being a Legible Black Woman

Mera Baid

 

Cursive isn’t taught anymore so my hand releases a straight line
here and there, wishing upon a dot or cross, these accents
give access to how my heart beats, that it is a groove to dip into,
relax in, not to pump blood through this collective vessel
but to groove to, grow from, connect these dots and form
a tapestry that follows the sequence of numbers that settled
us here, when we were our ancestors’ answers to the call
of heavens on earth, spiraling into codes and fonts that mirrored
each other, reflective through the horizon, bringing pirates
who parrotted our punctuation, but couldn’t end our sentences.

 

Mera Baid is a mom of 5 living in South Carolina. She loves gardening, music and learning languages. She waffles between homemaking and working in education, wellness and marketing. She has work published or forthcoming in Indigomania by Truth Serum Press, Vallum, One Sentence Poems and other publications.  


The Book of Inventions

SM Stubbs

 

Isn’t alphabetical, it’s chronological,
it begins with Knife and ends with Cloning.
We started with a tool that cuts pieces of things
from themselves and arrived at removing

pieces of ourselves to create more selves.
We are the prototype for more of us
which is how procreation works, but this
is different. This leaves out the messy fluids

and emotional blackmail afterwards.
It would be nice to have more sheep for wool
and shish-ka-bobs, but we do not need
more humans. We can’t handle us as we are:

solitary, complex, prone to depression
and tantrums. The three separate times
something scratched my eyeball crippled me.
How would I console myself if there was

another me? When an unstable man
stalked us on the streets of Brooklyn, hissing
that he meant to end me, he held something
sharp at his side. Though scared,

I worried most about my wife, wanted her
to survive the encounter without her organs
punctured or her flesh rent and torn.
As a Scout, one of the first badges you earn

grants you the right to carry a blade.
On camping trips after lights out, I’d slip
into my shoes, grab hold of my knife 
and head out in search of a wheelbarrow,

a flush toilet, a typewriter, an assault rifle,
a bottle of aspirin—anything to protect us
from what we’d already invented
thinking somehow they’d make us whole. 

 

A former bar owner in Brooklyn, NY, SM Stubbs was born & raised in South Florida. His first book, Learning to Drown (Gunpowder Press 2025), was selected for CLMP’s Notable Poetry of 2025 list. He has been a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best American. His work has or will appear in Poetry Northwest, Tar River, New Ohio Review, The Rumpus and others. More information can be found on his website, smstubbs.com.


Dos Chicanos

Tomás Baiza

 

A blow off.
You dogged me—como se dice in San José.
Does your LA-themed poncho
Make you more Chicano?
Does my leather jacket
Make me less?
Our tattoos tell two stories
Of two pasts,
De dos senderos
Toward the objective fact that
Neither of us could ever call ourselves 
“Mexican”
Because your people are not from 
There
And mine are, but long enough ago for
la madre patria to sneer:

Good luck with that, refugee.
Pinche sell-out.
Ahora estás por tu cuenta—
You’re on your own now.

You quiz me on my Spanish,
And there,
In that look,
That tone in your voice,
Comes the judgement
And the mockery
That once would have ended
In bloodshed,
That once sent a boy to the 
Hospital
With broken ribs and
A destroyed face,
And for decades made me
Wonder: Is that what it means
To be Chicano?
To inflict pain?
Or to let the pain eat you
Alive 
From the inside until
It hollows you out and erupts from
Your mouth in words that
Might be
English or
Might be
Spanish or
might be both, but
Will always assault the ears as a

¡Grito!

There is a place for both of us
In this world where
We can wrap ourselves
in the clothes 
That we want,
Wear the tattoos 
That we want,
Speak the words 
That we want,
And pronounce todas esas palabras 
Como se nos dé la gana, cabrón.

I catch your eye and
You look away.
You dogged me—as we would have said 
In San José.
¿Es lo mismo en Los Ángeles?
Te apuesto que sí.
Porque something tells me
That we’re
A hell
Of a lot more alike than
You want
To admit.

 

Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, but now finds himself in Boise, Idaho. He is the award-winning author of Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and A Purpose to Our Savagery. Tomás's third book, Mexican Teeth: Stories and Assorted Artifacts of an Errant Chicanidad, will appear on Inlandia Books in 2026. Tomás's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize, and his novel, Delivery, has been accepted into the holdings of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Sherman Alexie has called Tomás's writing “painful, scary, hilarious, incredibly vulnerable, and powerful in equal measure.” Tomás has been stalked by wild dogs while hitchhiking in Mexico, was once escorted by security out of the Pebble Beach & Tennis Club, and had the privilege of delivering a dozen pizzas to a Klingon-themed orgy at a sci-fi convention.


Food

Jim Krosschell

 

I. Abundance

The truck from Augusta arrives, backs up,
swings out the man-high pallets stacked
with waxy, forty-pound “banana” boxes —
cauliflowers the width of silver platters,
purple onions, tomatoes,
red and yellow peppers, bags of apples,
carrots still coated in dirt,
zucchini so big that six fill a box —
a cornucopia of free.
We get to work,
unstacking, sorting the boxes into groups
for the pantry inside,
and the backpack program at the schools.

II. Fellowship

Walking, tottering on canes, rolling in wheelchairs,
the elders arrive for the weekly hour of fellowship.
Today is the last Wednesday of the month,
so there’s the usual happy confusion
at the hall’s only door, the boxes coming in,
the people coming in
to claim their seats, with friends
or alone.
Angels pour coffee,
butter the muffins and zucchini bread
if they see help is needed.
They’ve set vases of wildflowers
every few feet on two long tables,
and they josh, cajole, sympathize
with the recitals of medical woes.

III. Security

We have never known hunger.
When we were small, food just appeared.
When we were grown, Visa was there,
wrapping our lives in plastic
as tightly as the peppers and cheeses
in the cold cases of supermarkets,
where we no longer wander so blithely.

IV. Hunger Tariffs

Who knew that nearly thirty percent
of Americans formally volunteer?
The media would never report
what must be innumerable
acts of kindness such as this,
one small island community
in one small state
turning to themselves for help,
blunting the cruelty
of government thugs
against the one in seven of us,
the fifty million poor, sick, and old,
who are food-fearful and frail.

 

Jim Krosschell has published work in 85+ journals, plus three collections of poems and essays: Man Afield, One Man's Maine, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Deer Isle, ME and Newton, MA, and volunteers on Boards for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

 

Trailer-Park King

Hailey Duncan

 

Ole Smoky Razzin’ Berry Moonshine
stains the already pissed-on, shat-on living room carpet.

The dog that my father had spent his entire disability check on
has grown fond of marking its territory on the wood-paneled hallway walls.

Ants live in the mold that grows in the corners of the shower,
cigarette ashes are pressed into the seat of the porcelain toilet.

My father considers himself the king of this tin-roofed tuna-can domicile.
The plush brown recliner from the downtown thrift is his throne.

The king indulges in homemade lasagna and FOX News.
He also partakes in the frivolities of Mary Jane, Sunday night football, and planting tulips.

The king once told me that if I ever brought a black boy to his castle, he’d beat me bloody.
The king once told me that my 15-year-old body was worthy of an older man.

The king, as wise as he may be, is unaware that I prepare his eulogy every time I bathe.
His liquor-lathered liver only needs to fail once more to spell his demise.

I am scared that one day, this tuna-can lifestyle will be what suits me best.
I am scared that the crown on my father’s head will fit mine just the same.

I am his seed.
His royal blood runs through my veins.


Hailey Duncan is an undergraduate student at the Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She enjoys telling stories about her life through her work and loves to explore complex emotions in each of her pieces.


Ubermensch

Camdyn Bass

 

I didn’t indulge in what the church had to say
in the way that my grandma Eakin had prayed I would.
I was told it was intended for me to live
my life for god on the promise I’d get into heaven.
I would sit in my seat,
relieved to be done hugging strangers
who never held on long enough for it to mean anything,
and while everyone’s head bobbed and bent,
as they kneeled and stood,
while they listened and sang,
I would sit still and wonder about all of the things here, on Earth

Sin.

he said.
             Sin and Sin and Sin– that’s all the Earth can give, forgiveness can only lie with Him.

But that felt wrong.
                              Don’t you see? Thieves and beggars litter our community– sin!

he grew bigger within the Cathedral.
The man sent by god,
armored with warm ornate robes,
speaking low on the poor man who lays his head against the church door every night, searching for that same warmth,   this same god,     promised to give.

A superiority complex coated and dripping in crosses and verses and hymns.

Oh! You Pretty Things, if only you knew then that God is deaf,
and I met him once without ever having to bear a cross.
He sometimes stays in Pittsburgh and smokes cigarettes with strangers outside on the church steps while He waits for His bus.
He has foggy eyes and poor penmanship and not once did He ask for my name.
I stood there with Him,
after lighting both darts,
after inhaling deeply,
and asked,         Can you read lips?
On a tattered piece of paper He pulled from His pocket He wrote,    I read minds.

I smiled and thought, Are we allowed to be sitting here?

He smirked, but His eyes were looking beyond me, and we sat for a while
in a sort of silence that sounded holy,
and when His bus finally came, just after He sorted out His change,
He hugged me– long enough for it to mean something.

Camdyn Bass is currently an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University where she serves as the Poetry Editor for the graduate led literary magazine, Puerto Del Sol. She is the recipient of the Ruth Scott Poetry Award and Harris Kunz Poetry Thesis Prize. Her piece, "Put Down Your Weapons", can be found online at Poets.org.