Seeing Like a Hollow

 

composed of words in “The Recesses,”

from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain

 

Let them travel the slopes,
these eyes funiculars

climbing tumbles of root,
scattering leaf and sprig.

Let them savor the tang
of the equinoctial storm,

these lips the splash
of cataracts, sips of ice


distilled in streams clear
as the sound of a stone 

gashing a still surface,
sinking to its depths.

Let them plunge in falls,
these fingers reaching

for wealth’s plateaus,
their hands a rabid peril.

Let them wade the burn,
these feet servant to speed,

narrow shelters for bone,
no alien to the bottom.

Let it lay in the stream
aerated by river spirits,

this back weary from
arching for a summit.

Let it spring everywhere clear,
this mind a grater coiled

in granite defense
of its submerged shores.

Balance tarn and corrie,
rough spirit, broken body.

Distance the commons
from talk of business.

Watch the mountain
companion the hollow,

let these eyes see the earth
how it must see itself:

unaided, without focal
point or destination,

this simple presence
a buoyant becoming.

 

Michael Dowdy is a writer from southern Appalachia who lives outside Philadelphia. His most recent book, Tell Me about Your Bad Guys, appears in the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives series. His other books include Urbilly, winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Broken Souths, a study of Latinx poetry published by the University of Arizona Press. He teaches at Villanova University. For more information, please visit www.michael-dowdy.com.


The Woman with the Paint Horse is Real Like Ghosts 

Cold and wind carry
her voice of bird call.
She is real like ghosts.

In a winter field of brown sedge
and goldenrod skeletons, I press through snow.
I’ve not been storied by my feet
but what covers them.

When I have nothing left to prove
I pull off my winter boots and wool socks,
step into ice that bites,
crystal to look into.

Behind me now human tracks
crisscross horse
rabbit deer and bird:

my foot’s trace, the green of something new;
the horse’s, my heart;
the bird’s, three twigs;
the deer, a trail of stones;
the rabbit’s, listening and leaping.

I nestle bare feet into snow
wolf-warm.


Narya Rose Deckard, an Appalachian poet, is author of Wolfcraft, which won Broken Tribe’s MFA Graduate Award, and winner of the Susan Meyers Poetry Award. She has poems in journals such as Dead Mule, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Kakalak Anthology, and the Weatherford Award winning anthology Had I a Dove. She received her MFA from Lenoir-Rhyne University, where she now teaches Creative Writing. She lives in Western NC with her husband, cats, dog, and chickens. naryawithwings.com

  

To Reach for Something You Can Never Hold 

Touch something that never existed
& call it mercy.
Crack your ribs from the inside out
& call it praying
Pinch your collarbones together
& name the space between them “God.” There’s hope
there—in the ridges of your toes, sadness
in the lines you erase from your
palms with the back of snapped
pencils. There’s emptiness there—
in your stomach filled with the tears
you swallow as you reach
for something you
can never hold:                                                                                                      yourself as a baby
                                                                                                                        in your mother’s arms when
                                                                                                                        she looks at you as a girl &
                                                                                                                        never the man you’ll grow up as.
There’s nothing
you cannot do to cut her out,
cut the outline of your shadow,
& call it “Believer”:                                   the miracle cradled in the cage
                                                                           of your ribs & its silent prayers
to
exist.

 

Max Fischer is a transgender Pushcart Prize nominated poet and nonfiction author who holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults. His work focuses on queer joy told through the lens of unconventional narrative structures and the merging of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His debut YA novel in verse, The Unpoetic Life of August Grey, comes out October 2026 through Scholastic. His most recent publications include POETRY Magazine and Thirteen Bridges Review.



Destino

My mother reminds me about God every day,
as if I’ve forgotten and left my faith at the bottom
of a bookcase. My mother doesn’t recite
an adage I can recognize but says again and again 
what’s born must one day die. A simple fact
I always knew but can’t accept, even after my father
died isolated in a hospital room, even as his brother
thins with the cancer overtaking the inside
of his bones. She says destino is unavoidable,
it’s certain as my daughters’ grip,
my tight prayer around their palms as we cross
a busy street. I look for the danger coming. 


Lisa Rua-Ware is a poet in central Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Lily Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, FOLIO, and elsewhere. When she’s not chasing after her two kids, she works as a technical writer.



Inner Work

Chronic nerve pain worsens as I age, crawling in my face, under my cheek, behind my ear. Since childhood I’ve struggled with pain, my own body a battlefield. I can’t define it any more than I can define a God of my own understanding. Some say this is a path to Higher consciousness, a spiritual journey. We can develop conscious attention, observe ourselves, meditate, be of service to others. In theosophy, the Masters say TRY. I wasn’t raised with any sense of religion, but I recite the Lord’s Prayer during pain attacks. I hold on to repetition, try to bring the sensation of spirit to my feet, away from my face. I try to exist elsewhere. I leave my body, seeking relief. I discover what matters—what doesn’t. Pain becomes a gateway. The pain’s intensity gives way to visions. One day I’m sure I’ve met Jesus. I fall asleep on the bathroom floor. Dead people come to visit. They kneel beside me and whisper in my ear. At the hospital, the doctor says, Don’t worry, we’ll find out what’s going on. I promise. They don’t. They don’t know what’s wrong, and they don’t try. Pain becomes a gateway. I learn to pray. 

I forgot my heart,
closed a door against the sky.
Where is my center?
I was wrong. I remember now—
Love is the only answer.

Rosa Sophia Godshall is the author of Many Miles (Harbor Editions). Her work has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Rathalla Review, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM Every Day, and others. She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, through Florida International University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a degree in automotive technology. Rosa lives in Palm Bay, Florida.

Ode to July 4th 2002 in Central Virginia

in the style of Angel Nafis

Plush pursed lips, ‘bless your heart’ with the hard R, sharp off the tongue like Splenda with the melody clank of sweet tea. Sweaty barefoot children running under the trees unheard, -- always seen past the old graves of the family near the creek. Warm melon dew strewn against the oak still tingle on the tongue; just like the quick wits slung from Jody in get-togethers before. Swarmed by the twilight pixies arriving now that the orange ball hangs low, unphased by the celebratory lightning strike sounding snap, a cold fresh can by an open fire grill. Roasted hotdogs, grade USA beef, ready to embrace the pillows of potato buns, the fine China of the evening. The old guard helming the roast instilling trickle down affection to reaffirm his classic Bush drive, missing the child left behind in the sack race invasion. The aunts gossiping about Uncle Pete’s ex-wife, fanning the heat, each flap a louder warning to move these party forward. Millions of atoms inside vibrating, -- dying, -- to take off their overpriced Sunday shoes to wade in the crystal clear water. Everyone anticipating the rainbow night sky to light up with patriotic platitudes, a promise of red, white, and blue sticky fingers while they push at the peripheral vision of gooey red faces across the world. That’ll never get to look at the Van Gogh sky with dilated pupils, feeling the empty spaces of Jody, cousin Corey, and Uncle Pete. The family unaware that their homecoming will include bloodied hands and fractured minds from orders above we’re told to celebrate tonight.

Katsy M. (she/they) is a genderfluid, single parent who likes to tests the boundaries of what is expected of them in rural Virginia. They are majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and minors in Political Science and Spanish at Longwood University. She has a publication in the literature magazine, A Common Place. Even being a parent, she manages to find time to dive into Romanticism literature and read Marxism to her kid.

Bongsoonghwa

back when halmoni used to dye my nails with balsam flowers
she held my hands until the paste turned them orange
behold the unfolding of spring in her delicate wrinkled hands:
wringing out bean sprouts, dancing across the ivories,
mending our garments, watering the orchids,
wrapping each fingernail with a gossamer shimmery veil

her fragmented sleep tells the story of how she dropped her mother’s hand
they fled from north to south in the dead of the night
her own hands, callused with ancient heartache
she spent a lifetime trying to undo in karmic reclamation
from that darkness her fingertips burst life-giving,
soul-bounding magic, day in and day out
and i thought mine could someday too,
the wishful thinking of inheritance

now when the flowers put on their technicolor dreamcoats
i see halmoni peeking out behind a curtain of gingko leaves
flitting butterfly-soft among the stained glass and cathedrals

this time her hand is outstretched
(this time she holds on tight)
this time her mind isn’t a shuttered field of stars,
marred by war planes and bombs,
this time there’s time,

her hand stretches out across the sea’s foaming mouth to reach mine
we rise up with opalescent pearlescent wings that stretch behind us
hands clasped so tightly i can’t tell her from me
riding the wave of a spring breeze on a makeshift raft
spun with merino yarn promises,
all the way up into the clouds


strawberry moon 

she hugs the I-83 skyline at dusk
ominously auspiciously sensually
suspends me in intricate ropes
airborne above the speeding cars
i’m gasping for air, her hand at my neck
at the mercy of her gravity

tonight, like all nights, i have the protection
of moonlit timekeeping on my side

my left thumb bound by decades-old etched silver
my index finger traces its serpentine grooves
in following the rhythms and laws of lunar seasons
last year i shed my skin like a good korean girl
molted til you could see straight through me
this year i became a horse like my grandfather
hoisted myself up onto the fiery saddle
my hands burned at the touch
but i did not flinch once
hair on my body singed clean
a different kind of casting off
the kind that destroys
rather than reveals


k. hyeri ko (she/they) is a Korean American poet and multidisciplinary artist based in Baltimore. She is a staff reader with Yellow Arrow Publishing and her work and words have appeared in The Atlantic, Baltimore Magazine, and Maryland Matters. You can find them at @stringtheoretical.

During a Tropical Storm I Take a Drive

I pull apart the layered clouds drive 
on the unknown road in the evening blush.  

Above me clouds lace swirled pink, youth’s passion 
turns to blemished emptiness. At sunset 

I drive wrapped in a billowed sky, ruffles 
on petticoats we wore under skirts twirled 

out again and again. We danced to Twist 
& Shout and Do You Love Me. Pink chiffon,

pink crimson, pink, pink, pink. A taffeta 
life where nothing ever went haywire. 

Scorched dreams rust out & catch
in the burnt tumbleweed on these low hills

I wind & wind around curves on this road 
into the pink sky’s dust. Family dispersed

in washes, in dew, and in voluminous 
clouds. One son swims in coral reef water. 

The other bikes his way home on wide streets. 
The youth make their way. They leave Legoland

and princess dolls. They stride in their adult 
frames. One sketches dawn, another divides 

 cells in tubes, one builds buildings, one more, speed 
drifts on curves. The fifth, now gone from this world. 

The road merges with Newport Blvd. I look up
scattering pink lifts my body into mist. It dissolves

and love floods in. There is no turning back.
Rain blasts, trees bend, wind gusts. I greet the world.

Florence Murry is the author of Last Run Before Sunset. Her poems have appeared in Pinch, Atlanta Review, Slipstream Press, Magazine, Off the Coast, Bluestem Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and others. Florence lives in Southern California with her husband and two cats. Her website is https://florencemurrywriter.com.

Ode to a Hated Garage

Toutes les routes de la Terre
Commencent derrière ma porte
Qui ouvre sur les kilomètres
Que les roues ont le désir
D'enrouler autour d'elles.
                                                            --Pierre Albert-Birot

 

Red-bellied woodpeckers are nesting in our garage.
When we pulled up the door, they flew out the back,
and one looked back at us from the roof,

cricking his long neck, his head aflame
with its orange stripe, all of him pointed with attention.

It’s a mistake to think that we’re the last word
in intelligence. Certainly to conclude, as some do,
that without us looking at it, the universe wouldn’t exist.

Look, at the woodpecker’s bright eye, looking at you
looking at him, and tell me you don’t see consciousness.

At any rate let’s agree that the nature
of the universe is participatory.

At long last our garage is covered in green:
wisteria, grape vine, Virginia creeper.
It was built by the previous owners as a shrine.
Because the idol was a car of course it was made cheaply,

and began to disintegrate soon after we moved here.
In the winter it will be an eyesore again,
a massive decaying blot on our garden,
not sleeping, like the deciduous trees,

or fruiting, like the evergreens, yet,
thanks to the intelligence of living things,
ants and termites, spiders, squirrels and birds,
a temple of a sort to what breathes.

Tessa Kale is the author of an award-winning collection of poetry (Crow's Cup, Discovery Award, Red Mountain Press, 2021) and an award-winning chapbook (The Hudson Line, Finishing Line Press Award, 2010) and has publications in periodicals such as The Yale Review, The Western Humanities Review, Prelude, and others.

talbiyah for displaced birds

labaika allahumma labaik.  
labaika la sharika laka labaik

it rained heavily today again,  
in the unlit corner of a mosque,  
zayn recites the talbiyah with cracked vocals,  
wonders which is god's favorite character -  
the armed defenders of faith or  
charred stomachs in a continent of loss?  
how do we share the burden in the concept of heaven -  
labaika allahumma labaik,  
could its doors reconcile the killers and the killed?

she settles outside the mosque,  
hoping god houses the birds in migration,  
the birds that flew north for the sound of bullets,  
hoping god calms the birds in agitation,  
the birds that settled in unfamiliar places.
she's a bird too, a beautiful black bird, clipped wings -  
what use is a white-browed robin-chat that can't sing?  
an acanthiza cannot spell home without family.


Adegoke Adeola is a journalist, political commentator, and poet whose work engages themes of gender identity, equality, race, and violence. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Novel Afrique, Caucasus Journal of Milton Studies, Kind Writers Literary Magazine, Literanation, Praxis Magazine, and BN Magazine among others.

 

The Data Center in Pampanga

The carabao stands in mud up to its black knees, watching
the concrete building breathes. All night the generators
hold their one note against the silence of the rice.
Inside, racks of blinking servers store what distant people

cannot bear to lose: photographs of meals, the unsent letters,
someone's father laughing on a beach he'll never visit again.
The heat they generate could warm a hundred homes. Instead
it pours into the dark where geckos press their translucent

bellies to the outer walls and wait for moths. My cousin feeds
the cooling system, checks the gauges, earns in one month
what the farm once yielded in a season. He says the building
Dreams in a language he was never taught. At dawn the farmers

pass it on the way to fields that shrink each year, their footprints
filling slowly with water. No one here has asked what lives inside.
They know already how a thing can take the land and give back
light that touches nothing, that grows nothing, that the rain ignores.

 

John Brixter Tino is a son of a fisherman and is a person with disabilities. He was raised in Perez, Quezon, Philippines. He currently serves as a part-time instructor at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at De La Salle University. 

 

After the Storm 

Brown metal panels. Battered, bent.
Scattered through uncut grass.
Caught against chain-link fence.
Overnight, wind ripped the trailer skirt
right out from under us. Morning,
Mom in her faded nightgown
stood in the pummeled yard,
holding a scrap of sharp skirting.
I needed to get ready for school.
She turned to me, her face pleading:
what are we going to do?

Sarah Seybold’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Dodge, Stirring, January House, and elsewhere, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Sarah grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, and earned her BA in English and Gender Studies from Indiana University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. She lives with her husband and daughter in Columbus, Ohio.