Family in time
by Camilla Eustance

the eighteenth major arcana vs a hamsa
by Gia Maher

I haven’t found the moon in weeks,
is that more of an omen than when
it burns its harvest?

In the mothertongue the moon’s a
man but men broke their moon with
clouds of smoke and acid, an
omen, foreseeing that the last time I’d see

my moon she’d be drunk but
nothing sobers you up
like loving one too many
alcoholics, three cheers for three, can I get an

amen or is three an omen, now
the moon has gone to rehab half-empty
but still aglow,

can I get an omen or will my hamsa
save men, black under skin

that scarred floods above sea level in a
dingy parlor on a slow road to nowhere,
miles away from a military base helping man
fight and flee the moon, where as children we

waved flags to show we came in peace,
aliens like “take me to your
shaman,”
the immigration office and barren peach fields, and

can I get an omen         for the half-empty
bottle of liquor the last woman I loved
left in my studio         and             can I get an amen
for the full-drained prayers I said after, after

first tears this year on the side of the trade
street, so now I take the long way round on
embassy row through lanky trees saved by
barbed wire to
say amen when I pass the mosque and

can I get an omen for the plastic birds
in my gut when I pass and can I get an omen
for the half-empty sky and can I get an amen for
trying to break my memories from the future into
something more beautiful?

Abyss
by Jemma Leigh Roe

The Cookout Plays R. Kelly
by Quintin Collins

Because we can’t love a devil
if he can’t sang, and we can’t sin
if the hellfire don’t two-step us

to forsake stompin’ and struttin’
in the Lord’s house, forgiveness lists
over to the stereo to play R. Kelly

“Step in the Name of Love”
as if we never knew about Aaliyah
or watched Robert vulture about

the Markham rec or the movie theater,
waiting for hordes of too-young fans
to drizzle devotion into his ears.

No protest crossfades the crooner
and his ills for a tune of better repute.
The steppers still spin and shuffle

by the potato salad and hot links,
the same bounty of food we prayed God
would bless, as well as all who fall

because we all have our demons,
right? As someone mentions Boondocks
and Chappelle Show skits and the tape,

the Isley Brothers’ “Contagious” butters
karaoke from most throats and mouths,
even those with a maw full of ribs.

Someone says, I stopped listening him,
even the features and songs he produced.
Someone else tuts, I’m probably going to Hell

for what I’m about to say . . . There’s an uncle
who isn’t allowed to come to the cookouts.
There’s a cousin who avoids another one.

There’s a cousin who glazed “Amazing Grace”
over a funeral for a Grandma who wouldn’t know
what she would do if one of her grandbabies were gay.

There’s an aunt who does not know how to love
or share a home with her son, so she deadnames
and condemns to hell before dancing to “Ignition.”

Meanwhile, Robert tells heaven he needs a hug,
and his lyrics baste the tongues once more,
separating the artist from the artifice

he simmered for the comeback PR scheme.
Some boil. Many sugar, spin, and shuffle,
—a praise dance and a testimony that burns,

tarnishes for the devil we won’t acknowledge.

Victoria Row
by Tyrone Johnson-Neuland

The Marvel Age
by Rita Maria Martinez

An octagonal-shaped battery lives under the left shoulder. Skin sheathing this neurostimulator is christened by a scar long as my index finger; it sprawls across the sweet spot where my bra strap rests. Location selected so patients may sport bikinis confidently. General populace must believe only men sport scars with ease. I charge myself much like Tony Stark does in early Iron Man comics. Except, he rushes to outlets during close calls to prevent cardiac arrest, connects electrical cord to expansive chest-plate always hidden under tux or tailored suit. A ripening secret during The Marvel Age of Comic Books. Before arc reactors. Before Pepper Potts and Stark are an item. Before the MCU. When everyone thinks Tony and Iron Man two separate entities: a playboy billionaire and his robot employee. Unlike Stark, heart failure doesn’t top my list of worries. With hardware I fret over rousing metal detectors, airport security accidentally wanding me, shocking me, erasing programs. It’s like walking around with an internal hard drive, another device to charge via induction, via Boston Scientific disc—a personal Lojack that beeps when removed from cradle, hushes upon kissing the sweet spot. Sometimes I sit in the rear, in semi-darkness of chapel, charging. Green light illuminates my skin, shines through fabric of a floral-printed maxi dress. Like Tony, I’ve become a cyborg, though I often question if this conversion makes me more or less of who I was before.

Melting Figure
by Vincenzo Cohen

The December Dead
by Brett Warren

The teacher says the dead are all around us,
always—nothing in our world that isn’t made
of the dead. Even the dirt in the yard is dead leaves
and trees, dead bugs and birds and other animals,
including us. She says high priests separated us
from our dead, designated themselves intermediaries
we never needed and don’t need now. She says
we dream of the dead at the end of the year
not because they’re more here, but because this
is a time when emotions rise, almost materialize,
take up as much space within us as the dead do
without. Yesterday I came upon the scene of a killing,
found myself alone on a trail with scattered bits
of a squirrel’s tail and a few red-black organs
I tried to identify but failed. No one had ever seen
these things except the predator and me.
And that’s all they were—things. The same things
hidden in all of us, exposed in December light.
I know death is always happening everywhere.
And whether heaven is destination or metaphor,
I can’t say. This morning I sit in a quiet house.
I listen to the rain falling on everything,
and within the rain, the hollow sounds of gunshots
in the woods. I know right now deer are dying.
It’s shotgun season, two weeks of yuletide killing.
To console myself, I close my eyes, imagine deer
rising from the grace of their fallen bodies,
ascending to a heaven that looks just like earth
but better, full of animals, not many of my kind.

City Garden
by Natalie Solmer

Not-Mother Ghazal
by Melissa Fite Johnson

Small toys from your mother’s pale egg-
shell purse: pink-eared bunny, silly putty egg.

Remember the chickens at the old house, broody
and trying to will life into unfertilized eggs.

Say you’re a robin. Say you’re a mother-
to-be, sturdy nest and five shining eggs.

You can’t stop the brown-headed cowbird from
swapping a perfect blue oval for an egg.

Kitchen tinged with batter and grease. A lid
uncovered and recovered, the cracking of an egg.

Colonizing pans, spreading like fear, waiting
in a petri dish, hopeful sibling eggs.

For your cousin, syringes and shots. For her,
surgery. A list of names and all your eggs.

Melissa, you are not your elegant mother.
You are not a mother at all. A year of wasted eggs.

Never pound the meat like that for pork chops
by Ignacy Kotkowski

flight of the myna
by Mea Andrews

the common myna cries allegiance
to all land, believes the clearest spring
is just as sweet as the nearest muddy
backwater. resting in insect-fertile land,
they push the littlest ones born from those
who were there first out of their nests, laying
their eggs in the enemy’s roost; a checkmate
towards colonization. clouds press
themselves to the ground, a desperate need
building inside of them, dead fish push
up sides of a riverbank before being picked
back up and washed away, an unshapely
beast of dirt and branches flow down
with the current. a mother nearby
screams, children found laid out on the ground,
and in the same tree line the myna sings.

Loss
by Francesca Leader

Overeaters Anonymous
by Jessica Ballen

I am not as big as the biggest girl
in OA, but I sit my fat ass down
in a cold metal folding chair
in an overly airconditioned hospital
basement for eight years,
speaking about how I eat
my weighed and measured plate
of carrots and lettuce. My food
is squeaky clean, and for that,
I am as good as God. The bigger girls
are quick to forget about that time
I shared, detailing puke seeping through
a Wendy’s paper bag onto my Civic’s
passenger seat. How it sloshed
when I cupped my digestion
in both hands, hands that would shake
from dehydration, as I dropped bombs
of fat onto the gravel
next to the drive-thru. How most
of it found a home rotting between
the stiches of fabric that would continue
to stink even after I returned my lease.

Pace
by Cyrus Carlson

Things you may find hidden in my mouth
by Susan Rich
after Mosab Abu Toha

:: a tongue dedicated to the backwaters of the teeth,
the pink washboard ridge :: a rogue blackberry seed, kale.
When you look further in, there will be vowels and consonants—
sounds echoing gently like samovar and olive ::
in the aftertaste of a macchiato, a soft kiss—
lives the whistle and spit of the soothsayer,
the starless night. A rain-lit hour—a hum, a milky sigh.

II

The silences calcify into open sores
of those who wound with words, with uncivil wars.
Thousands of childhoods spent undercover, in the stuffed
throat. Leftovers from yesterday’s day-old bread
:: bitterroot and sauerkraut, of curdled prayers and spells
—mothers, soldiers, lovers that extracted molars
without one gram of laughing gas.

III

And now here’s you, you who urges me to spill alphabets
and sentences left languishing.
You want me to propel them
towards you, any half-thought idea—
urge me to break open,
offer my breath like a choir of birdsong
or a blue bowl of dawn.

You place a finger to my lips. You listen.

Fire City
by Amuri Morris

With Dusk Close Enough to Touch
by Foster W. Donnell

On the hand-sanded porch
Croaking beneath my bare feet
I cut my lip on a pitcher of iced tea.
Three lemons, squeezed pulpless.
One peach, pit removed with teeth.
Ma stands with her back to the new moon.
I cannot help but notice.
People hide their true nature from you
Until they’re sure you ain’t watching, son.
Ma tells me this with two chicken necks
Clutched airless in her fist.
The bloodied feathers she plucks
Drift along with the pools of dust
Like they don’t yet know the pain
That comes with being set free.
As the sunlight bleeds away
Small spills of it filter from behind me
Through the windless sweetgum branches.
The last of the dull light bends to meet us.
Illuminates Ma’s face and the amber
Hair of her leathered forearms.
The light can’t reach the dirt below us
And for a moment Ma hangs in the air.
Like an angel of war sent by the gods
To punish the armies of earth.
The sun sinking down.
Ma floating up.

Memories Collide
by Ann Calandro

watching blue planet two in a hospital room
by ari watkins

white see-through jellyfish float
against dark blue backdrop water
like stars. mobula rays, with their mouths
agape, flap their wings like magnificent
sea-birds. before i got sick, i raised money
for the wandering albatross. now,
i can only watch as they sail through air
and choke on plastic. when
did i have to give up? they mate for life.
these birds with twelve foot wingspans
love each other and die
like all good things do.

i watch sharks glide through forests
of kelp. the first recorded instance
of an octopus covering itself
in radiant multicolored shell armor,
bejeweled camouflage. a fish
who is a farmer, tending to his patch
of seaweed. the urchins that pillage,
and the otters that eat them.
the portuguese man o’war has a crest
like a sail. once, long ago, one died,
with its tentacle severed and washed up
under my tankini. it stung like hell and i writhed
on the sand, pain fresh and bright
as citrus between split lips.
now i am hand in hand
with a different species of pain, bone
against bone, aches like algal blooms,
exhaustion like a whale carcass,
rotting in the dark.

i imagine heaven
looks like a mangrove forest.
animals are the most holy
because they were made, perfect through years
of sculpting, to hunt and eat and mate and die
and they do it perfectly. oh, to be made
for a task, and execute it effortlessly
all your life. the sea lions work together
to trick each yellowfin tuna into dead ends
in their maze of Galapagos lava rock.
the young bull swims and turns
like an arrow, more painless
than i can imagine. i dream of becoming him,
my own sick, cumbersome body becoming light,
twisting and gliding like another kind of angel.

The Reader
by Gerburg Garmann

contributors

Amuri is an artist based in Virginia, recently graduated from painting/ printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. “My goal is to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience.” You can find more work at www.murisart.com.

Ann Calandro is a writer, collage artist, and classical piano student. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in literary journals, and her collages have been published and exhibited. Duck Lake Books published her poetry chapbook in 2020, and Shanti Arts published three children’s books she wrote and illustrated. See artwork at ann-calandro.pixels.com.

Ari Watkins is an emerging teen poet from Brooklyn, New York. They are a graduate of the Reynold's Young Writers program at Denison University and the winner of the 2023 Ned Vizzini Prize for poetry. You can find them on Instagram at @ariwatkiins.

Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, ONE ART, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere. A long-time editor, she lives in Massachusetts. www.brettwarrenpoetry.com

Camilla is a Melbourne-based artist and illustrator whose work centers around colour and figuration. Camilla’s visual and written work has been published in Going Down Swinging, Stylo, Demure, Art / Edit, n-SCRIBE, and Broadsheet. She has worked for the Australian Football League, The Royal Children’s Hospital and The University of Melbourne in an artistic capacity and is former Arts Editor for The Suburban Review. Camilla has exhibited in multiple spaces including NOIR Darkroom, Counihan Gallery, Schoolhouse Studios and Platform Arts Geelong. In March 2023, she completed a mural for Palomino Bar in Brunswick and in July, a larger exterior mural for Philip Lobley Wines. She is a member of Pink Ember Studio Collective. She is a BA (Hons) graduate, a Diploma of Illustration graduate, and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University. Feel free to reach out to Camilla on Instagram @camillaeustance__ or have a look at her website camillaeustance.com for more.

Cyrus Carlson is an abstract painter from the Midwest.

Foster W. Donnell is an emerging poet currently enrolled in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southland Alibi, Unbroken Literary Journal, and Amsterdam Review. Originally from Dallas, Texas, he now lives in Los Angeles, California.

Francesca Leader’s artwork has appeared on the covers of Cobra Milk, Adanna Literary Review, the Harpy Hybrid Review, Cream Scene Carnival, and in the pages of many other publications, including Flash Frog. Her Cobra Milk cover received a 2023 Best of the Net Nomination. View her portfolio on IG @mooninabucket.

Gerburg Garmann, a painter, poet, and recently retired professor of Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Indianapolis, USA, is now fully concentrating on the arts. Her scholarly publications appear in English, German, and French in international journals. Her artwork and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies around the world. She specializes in creating art for women. For more information, please visit her website www.gerburggarmann.com.

Gia Maher is a Palestinian-American poet from Georgia. She lived in Washington, DC when she wrote this piece. In her free time, Gia likes to read, write, and seek the silver linings. You can find her at bintmaher.weebly.com or @sarsoura_isdoingherbest on Instagram.

Ignacy Kotkowski, writer, painter, office worker. Born in Warsaw, Poland. His visual work is a continuous experiment in search of the most stimulating form. The aim is to create an impression that becomes an experience of the perceptual field itself, through which one can "feel the vision."

Jemma Leigh Roe is a visual artist and poet, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Fugue, The Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Tupelo Quarterly, Blood Orange Review, and others. She studied art at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and received a PhD from Princeton University. www.jemmaleighroe.com

Jessica Ballen is an AuDHD poet who is currently working on their MFA in creative writing at Antioch University, where they serve as Editor in Chief of Lunch Ticket, the school's literary magazine. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Wild Roof Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Rough Cut Press, and they were longlisted for the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Contest. Currently, they reside in Eugene, OR with their husband and a surplus of cats. Their book Kosher was released in early 2023. You can find them compulsively posting on their Instagram stories @jessiicaballen.

Mea Andrews is a writer from Georgia, who currently resides in Hong Kong. She has just finished her MFA from Lindenwood University and is only recently back on the publication scene. 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 you can also follow her on Instagram at mea_writes or go to her website at meaandrews.com

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.

Natalie Solmer was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, a grandchild of immigrants from Eastern Europe. She is a former horticulturalist and florist who now teaches writing at Ivy Tech Community College. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The Indianapolis Review. See her publications at nataliesolmer.com.

Quintin Collins (he/him) is a writer, Solstice MFA Program assistant director, and a poetry editor for Salamander. His work appears in various publications, and his first poetry collection is The Dandelion Speaks of Survival. His second collection is Claim Tickets for Stolen People, winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Prize.

Rita Maria Martinez is the author of The Jane and Bertha in Me (Kelsay Books). Rita’s poetry raises awareness about triumphs and challenges when navigating chronic daily headache and migraine. Her poetry appears in The Best American Poetry Blog, Ploughshares, Tupelo Quarterly, and in CLMP’s 2023 Disability Pride Reading List. www.comeonhome.org/ritamartinez

Susan Rich is the author of six poetry books including Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024). She’s co-editor of Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems (2023). Her work appears in the New England Review, and The Slowdown. Her work earned awards from PEN USA and the Fulbright Foundation. www.poetsusanrich.com

Oswego, NY-based artist Tyrone Johnson-Neuland (BFA Syracuse University 1990, MA SUNY Oswego 1999) continues the legacy of the Expressionists, exploring personal emotions. Utilizing color and brushstrokes, he communicates feelings and human complexity. Each stroke on the canvas seamlessly intertwines chaos and introspection, yielding captivating outcomes.

Vincenzo Cohen is an Italian multidisciplinary artist. He graduated in Painting from Fine Arts Academy and subsequently he completed his studies on antiquity by graduating in archaeology. His production is multifaceted and ranges from figurative arts to writing by exploring different social themes.