There is an office where they keep sounds no one was present to hear, the tree falling, the glass crazing, a man in 1943 saying the name of a woman he would not see again, into a telephone that had already gone quiet on the other end, metal cord dangling frayed.

The clerks are very organized, everything is filed by frequency, then by grief, then by the peculiar sub-category they call almost—sounds that arrived one room too late, or one year, or one translation, nothing is named, the radio in the office tuned between stations, songs burning white in static.

I applied for a position there once, they said the work required a certain tolerance for unresolved vibration, I said I understood completely, they said most people say that, they said come back when you can hear the difference between an echo and an answer.

I am still standing outside the building, the brick hums at a frequency I recognize but cannot name, this is, I believe, the interview, this not naming.

J.M.C. KANE is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals & magazines. Kane was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction, was a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Contest (UK), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kane admires compression and exhibits a willingness to trust his reader. He lives in New Orleans with his dogs, family, and a house filled with art.

DANIEL LURIE is a Jewish, rural writer from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal and a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and others. He recently won the 2026 Mississippi Review Prize, was awarded the Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellowship from UW-Madison, and will serve as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 2026-2028. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com

Janet’s husband stands bowlegged, thin
grave-digger and former smoker, his hands
shake when he holds her

purse. He and I prowl
along the edges of the graveyard
while Janet goes on and listens.
At home in Toronto

he cremates bodies,
tells families that they can’t watch
him work, even when curiosity begs,
because only he, only Kevin, can handle the lifting
and shutting, only he can handle

lighting the furnace, lighting the fire that shivers
bones back to dirt. Yes, only Kevin knows

what happens when faces disappear real slow.
              He says he just has to think of them as logs.
And aren’t you glad it’s not you? Aren’t you lucky

that he does that
and that you can kind of ride
behind the car on a skateboard
with a rope and a helmet.

KALLIE BLAKELOCK is a former high school teacher who recently relocated from Charm City to Tampa. She is a poet who explores things like sorrow, bodies of water, and her own mind. Though she’s far from the salty Eastern Shore of Maryland where she was raised, Kallie loves the sunshine and community she has encountered during her time as an MFA student in poetry at the University of South Florida. She lives with her obese cats, Mowgli and Mona. This is her first publication.

Link to PDF: Telegrim by Madeline Blair

MADELINE BLAIR is a poet, editor, and award-winning filmmaker from Chicago, IL, with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the founder/editor-in-chief of Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Blood+Honey, BULLSHIT LIT, Burial Magazine, Michigan City Review of Books, Luna Luna Magazine, Ekphrasis Magazine, and more. She was once quoted in The New York Times on her passion for clean air.

I met him at the Heartbreak Motel. A thirty-five-dollars-a-night
no-nonsense no-thrills motel. Hours before he materialized,
I threw the key cards & myself to the edge of the bed,

thought of the split roadkill I saw up I-70. Gettysburg:
weird tourist trap, war junk store, cold cider
in a cold November getting colder. Dirty ice

from a dirty ice machine. He made fun of the TV
bolted to the dresser. We play-stabbed each other
with imaginary bayonets, walked through empty

battlefields & got soaked in rain. We smelled of damp
grass & I wondered how long we could possibly
keep doing this. The cheap sheets seemed clean

when I kissed him––the kind of kissing
that only comes at the end of distance. In the morning
when he left me, I watched him walk across the motel

parking lot. I drove home north into a snowstorm.
My love for him glacier, moving downhill under its own weight.

ALLIE HOBACK is a poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and Salamander, among others. She lives in Washington, DC, where she professionally keeps houseplants alive.

Do you see that duck in the water?

You’re seeing things, they say. That duck is your losing mind.

No time for breathing into brown paper bags.
Here come the honeycombs. Flare ups of black
holes. My deadness in the hollows of circles and hexagons.
Do you want to eat me? I ask them.
Here comes the confirmation. Patterns of cavities emerge
in the midnight ripples. Mouths
of baby waves.

That water is an animal.

That water petting, pushing, brushing, disappearing that duck.
That water petting, pushing, brushing, disappearing that me.
That water petting, pushing, brushing, disappearing that—

That duck is losing my mind.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Good—

I see it! they say.

Gas diffuses for the honey like a love song. Oozing
out the hexagons, filling up the hollowness, covering
the combs, moistening my brain
folds, dripping down my face. Death
hides itself away.

I taste sugar.

Did you hear that?

Quack.

I was that animal.

JULLIETTE HOLLIDAY (she/her) is a Brooklyn based, Black, multi-hyphenate artist—writer, composer, director, producer and educator. She has collaborated with The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center,  NYU Tisch, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, The Tank NYC, and Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, and more. Originally from Columbus, OH, and a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Julliette’s poetry and creative non-fiction has received support from Kenyon Review’s Adult Writers Workshop and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Workshop). She was awarded the Katharine Bakeless Nason Participant Scholarship in Nonfiction for Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2025.

I have started to count the number of times the microwave
hums before I eat. The evening it was seven I told myself
that odd numbers are lucky. Like the women who wear ankle-
length skirts and read weather reports for pleasure. Like
the crow that tipped over its feet on the edge of the Walgreens
parking lot and dipped its own beak in cement. I stepped around
it and said sorry, like you do when you bump into a mannequin
that looks like your father. The news says that the bees are
leaving but I’m still getting stung by things. Not insects, but
poorly-timed entrances of gods through oven sparks explaining
why all my dreams are just variations of that one bus
I never caught in 2017. They start with guilt, composting.
Somewhere, the glaciers are crying. Somewhere, my mother
is planting begonias in the shape of the Chinese character
for enough. I’m still wearing that eelgrass wig, blinking
Morse code at the sun. Except the sky has the vague look
of a person who has said too much at a dinner party. So I
tell my dog to stop sighing like a human. It questions
why I don’t stop answering to my government name.
I then remember the crow, who later exploded. Not like
boom, but like oops. Like it had a scheduling error and
forgot it was made of muscle. I try not to name the loam anymore.

PENNY WEI is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She can be seen on Dialogist, The Weight Journal and Inflectionist Review and has been recognized by The Word Works and Longfellow House. She also has a passion for journalism.

Link to PDF: Decomposing at Bathhouse, FiDi by Grace Dilger

GRACE DILGER is a poet and educator. Her work has been featured in Peach Fuzz Magazine, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Grody Mag, The Elevation Review, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors Vol. 9, Slug Mag, The Racket Journal, Yes Poetry, High Shelf Press, Defunct Magazine, The McNeese Review, Barzakh, Nonbinary Review, and The Bangalore Review. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and teaches at Monroe University.