Gemini
by Tracy Whiteside

1. 4_e by Ana Prundaru
2. Materijal by Katarina Gotic

Swallows
by Laura Amsel

In my pajamas, the poplin ones
dark with swallows, I watch him

back his car from the garage,
see in his headlights the oil slick

Rorschach creep across the concrete
floor, become a sharp-shinned hawk

tawny, prowling, a weeping
willow, a river rushing over rocks.

In that black blot—his panic, his hand-
clutched heart, his chest constricted.

Had he slowed long enough to notice,
he might have seen his own angina-

tightened arteries. He does not see
me standing in the shadows here

to watch him take his yellow leave.
Does not see the mud-cupped nest,

its weave of daub and rye grass,
between the pane and strip of razor-

spikes he hammers to the window-sill
each spring to keep the birds from nesting.

He does not notice the same rufous-
throated, blue-crowned couple, defiant,

swoop and rudder with scissored tails.
Does not watch the swallows’ acrobatics

to catch the spotted moths they offer
to their gape-mouthed hatchlings.

He won’t recall, that spring
in Andalucia, the flock of golondrinas

that crossed the sea from Gibraltar
to the cobble-streeted pueblo on the cliff.

He won’t remember March
in Capistrano: we watched swallows

fill the mission’s belfries, its red clay eaves,
its arches, listened to its pealing bells,

urgent courtship songs—twitter-warble,
the chirping-whir of mating

birds. He knows nothing
of the monogamy of swallows.

In The Sweep Of Maybe
by Edward Lee

Boys in the Whip
by Adebowale Adelegan

Painting With Robert Duncanson
by Amuri Morris

I Name My Cyst Cecilia
by Ja'net Danielo

after my favorite poet. I think of her—all wild black hair & nails, trekking through alpine peaks & valleys, along limestone cliffs of the Carpathian Mountains, picking polovraga. She drinks tea with raw honey in some golden-lamplit cabin. Asks, Who am I? Where am I going? And when Cecilia—all questions & fire, secrets thick & dark as mud—ruptures & I’m doubled over in pain, it helps to think some small part of me has escaped, surrendered itself to a country of blood, blue-green of virgin spruce, to the hunger of bears & wolves.

Strata
by Judith Skillman

Self Portrait as Your Medieval Vocation
by Rachel Rothenberg

My son claims he would have been the doctor
                     and not the clergy or the cavalry.

I cover his cheeks with a crow-faced mask.
                     It was never my intent to teach him

how fever opens the body to fire
                     the way a starched cloak opens the body

to faithlessness, or how a horse fallen
                     to its hocks opens the chest to the sky.

We nest his beak with juniper and mint,
                     knot the ties behind his ears, air tight

a glass eye warped convex in each socket.
                     Crows have monocular vision: one sight

set upon the fire he pencils orange
                     on the page, the other strayed, divergent,

the gaze divided. He levels the planks
                     of his composition—the plague doctor’s

draped sleeves flag a heap of dead to the left,
                     children dance rings and posies to the right.

I wasn’t trained to measure symmetry.
                     My vocation demands I calculate

the bodies on the pyre divided by
                     their weight in ashes, set his sights ajar

to knight or bishop, refasten the stays
                     against a siege we’ve been staged to counter.

Untitled
by Carolyn Watson

Transit
by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White
            double-voiced golden shovel with lines from Marilyn Hacker and Walt Whitman

Because everything human is made up, we
give our aging selves back to games. Pretend may
make real, after all: that tiger, its fur could be

an orange-lit corridor to a cosmos where learning
leaves us bright as fern fronds unfurling our know-how
from tongue to river, as we ride the mythical to

milky way implosions. Doesn't the universe tell
us the same story of the Serengeti and Siberia, the
red ants suturing the sidewalk? Truth

is a zigzag through falling trees, while the concept of I
is a pelt smelling of the dead. We have to dare
to disrobe from the past, whether flop or farce, not

keep covered in scarves and opera gloves that tell
of farewells regretted, cloaks damp with shrugs—does it
matter whose fault split tundra into shredded tapestry? In

animal fierce fashion, we let our stripes blaze into words,
weave our bodies toward the sea, toward velocity, not
the rabbit’s plucked-off tail. Our voices in transit even

when our bodies look bolted, and, even if they seem in
consequential, the voices live out a series of fruiting. These
old lines spring from ley lines, and we walk them into songs.

Poses of Ash
by Donald Patten

Origin
by Ximena Keogh Serrano

For some, the question of origin glimmers neatly into speech. For
others, it shivers like a haunting—a prickling of the tongue from the
failure of places to speak of the self. What lingers at the crevices of a
word, at the outset of a thought, at the precipice
of enunciation.

                     TO ORIGINATE, as in, to emerge from.

But what about the body etched out of the globe’s geographical skin?
What to make of this formidable struggle, for our bones to utter
habitation— to speak of entangled lines and misplacement. What
becomes. A pain that evades language. A pain that cuts the
imagination. A pain that cannot recall itself outside of the shiver.

I was born in the middle of the earth, in a land deemed “Third”
under codes of imperial design. My landing in a roulette of threes
deems me last in the sphere of assumed “progress.” I like it here,
outside of the first and second “worlds.”

But being born does not guarantee anything, for I was swung onto
the first of worlds in no time. & here lies the bite.

                     ORIGINS: A TALE OF DEFICITS.

O the expansive movement. Spectacular eyes trailing              oceans,
countries, continents.
Crossing roads like viscera. The loving cities lodged in our insides,
like stubborn splinters, piercing it all.
We bleed from disintegration.
O what a splattering aww! & there are sighs you cannot return to, nor
recover from.
Funny, how a place maps itself out, over the throat, like a language.
How the desire for place can sometimes lead to your own
suffocation.

Alterend Peony 2
by Holly Willis

Translation
by Emily Franklin

In the field at night without
lantern and without family

I am translating the shree and scrim
of night birds and the insects they eat

each in its group above while bats
and cicadas compete for air acreage

and I feel almost fluent in the language
of searching and loss, the ache of groups

made of single things and how at night
each creature is its own verb and its unseen

trail is a subject no one around seems to know
like the face of someone you knew and even

loved, whose eyes recognize yours without
being able to identify your species, your name

even but somehow knowing you and these hums
are joined the way we swam in the dark and knew

this home temporary but warm too and how the host
wanted us at least somehow and how it is to understand

language more when a person like your mother loses it
and all words flit gnat-like together or now like this

hummingbird out when it is meant to be sleeping wherever
and how hummingbirds sleep and I wish I knew more or held

the pages of those dictionaries I ear-marked as a child
words or phrases to memorize as though I would someday

be in a country so far away yet would know exactly
what to say in order to get back.

The map
by Ell Cee

Adebowale Adelegan is a Nigerian writer with a deep love for music, films, culture, languages, and literature. He is also a musical artist and has a passion for poetry. In his free time, he loves to play basketball, watch movies, and write fiction/non-fiction pieces about music, his bus trips around Lagos, and other topics surrounding identity. https://medium.com/@debowaleadelegan.

Amuri Morris is an artist based in Richmond, Va. He recently graduated from painting/printmaking and business at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to this, he studied art at the Center for the Arts at Henrico High School. Throughout the years he has acquired several artistic accolades.

Ana Prundaru was born in Romania and presently lives in Switzerland. Alongside her legal career, she writes and illustrates for publications like Third Coast, Kyoto Journal and New England Review.

Carolyn EJ Watson is an interdisciplinary artist who is drawn to the useless and unusual. She takes what she can find to tell a story using a mixture of unconventional materials. Through her art, Watson strives to advocate and educate, particularly focusing on concepts such as identity, trauma, abstraction, chaos, and conservation.

Chiara Di Lello is a writer and educator. She delights in public art, public libraries, and getting improbable places by bicycle. For a born and raised New Yorker, she has a surprisingly strong interest in beekeeping. Find her poems in Variant Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Whale Road Review, and others.

Donald Patten is a senior in the Bachelor of Art program at the University of Maine at Augusta. He produces oil paintings, charcoal drawings, graphic novels, and ceramic artworks. His art has been exhibited in galleries across Maine. His online portfolio is donaldlpatten.newgrounds.com/art

Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, and non-fiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England, and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, and Smiths Knoll. His poetry collections are Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge, The Madness Of Qwerty, A Foetal Heart, and Bones Speaking With Hard Tongues.

Ell Cee (They/She) is a lifelong artist as well as a member of the LGBTQIA2S, genderqueer, and disabled communities. They create one-of-a-kind pieces whose vibrancy and glow inspire joy. Ell uses recycled materials in much of their art, such as cardboard boxes, packaging materials, repurposed labels, and even discarded library books. Find them on Instagram @EllCeeTheArtist.

Emily Franklin‘s work has been published or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Threepenny Review, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, and Alaska Quarterly, as well as featured on national public radio and named notable by the association of Jewish libraries. Her debut poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here, was published by Terrapin Books. Her novel, The Lioness of Boston, was published by Godine Books in April 2023.

Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist who integrates theory and practice, working primarily in film, video, and still photography. Her work often examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder, alongside critical reflection about our relationship with the matter around us.

Jackie K. White, Professor Emerita at Lewis University, has published three individual chapbooks plus the collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl (2021). Her full-length collection, The Under Hum with Simone Muench, is forthcoming.

Ja'net Danielo is the author of two chapbooks, most recently This Body I Have Tried to Write (MAYDAY). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Diode, Raleigh Review, Radar Poetry, and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press), among other places. Find her at www.jdanielo.com.

Jim Still-Pepper is a wordsmith in many different areas of life: writer, counselor, public speaker, and photographer (a picture paints 1000 words). And he is recently a grandfather.

Judith Skillman paints expressionist works in oil on canvas and board. She is interested in feelings engendered by the natural world. Her paintings appear in Thin Air Magazine, Torrid Literature, Penn Review, Raven Chronicles, and elsewhere. Skillman studied visual art at McDaniel College, Pratt Fine Arts, and Seattle Artist League. Judithskillman.com

Karen Zheng is a first-generation, queer, Chinese-American. Her poetry has been featured in Emerson Review, Sine Theta Magazine, Honey Literary, The Wave, and elsewhere. She was a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Contributor in 2022 and a Roots. Wounds. Words Poetry Fellow in 2023. Find out more about her at www.karenzheng.com

Katarina Gotic is a Bosnian-born poet and interdisciplinary artist. She is currently working on a language/visual collage "leerlauf" and an erasure project "VENAC", in which she collages her family's socialist magazines. Her first poetry book we need a breathing tongue between will be published in 2023 by kith books.

Ian Powell-Palm is a poet and musician currently splitting his time between Amherst, Massachusetts and Bozeman, Montana. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has been published in journals such as Chapter House, Chiron Review, American Poetry Journal, and others. His first chapbook Highway Fatality was released in 2022. His work attempts to interrogate familial trauma, sexual identity, and the resurrection of the dead. He is the co-editor and co-founder of the literary journal Rejected Lit Mag. You can find more of his work on Instagram at the username @Ipowellp16.

Laura Isabela Amsel has poems in recent issues of Crosswinds, Briar Cliff Review, Dunes Review, Nimrod, and Atlanta Review. Her poem “Father” won the 2022 Monica Taylor Poetry Prize and A.E. Stallings selected her poem “Cain” for the 2022 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize. Her first book, A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet, won the 2022 Brick Road Poetry Prize.

Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, Mn.

Rachel Rothenberg was born in Edison, New Jersey. The 2023 winner of the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, she is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Rhode Island and an Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press. Her work is featured or forthcoming in phoebe, About Place Journal, and Shenandoah.

Rachel Singel is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisville. Rachel grew up on a small farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013.

An academic physician, internationally known amateur photographer and writer, Ricardo Jose Gonzalez-Rothi has had his work awarded, published or forthcoming in Black and White Magazine, Light, Space and Time Gallery, Northwest Review, Fusion Art Gallery, London Photo Festival, Wanderlust Travel Journal, Grey Cube Gallery, Hispanic Culture Review, Tiny Seed, Stillwater Review, Small Harbor, Ilanot and About Place journals among others.

Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002) and Heat (Charta, Milano, 2008). His work has appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, Witness, and the New York Quarterly. He is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NYC.

Serge Lecomte was born in Belgium. He came to the States where he spent his teens Brooklyn. After graduation, he joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force. He earned a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian and a B.A. in Spanish. He worked as a language teacher, house builder, pipe-fitter, orderly in a hospital, landscaper, driller, bartender.

Simone Muench is the recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship and the Meier Foundation for the Arts Award. She is the author of seven full-length books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, The Under Hum, co-written with Jackie K. White, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2024.

Tracy Whiteside is an award-winning, internationally exhibited fine art photographer specializing in dark art and fantasy images. Her work has been printed in fashion, art, and literature publications, magazines, and on book covers.

Ximena Keogh Serrano is a poet and transdisciplinary scholar based in Portland, OR. Born in Quito, Ecuador, her writing embraces a movement between disciplines and languages. She is an assistant professor at Pacific University, where she teaches Latin American and U.S. Latinx literary and cultural studies. Ximena is also an alum of VONA/Voices. Her poems have appeared across print and online mediums. To learn more visit www.ximenakserrano.com.