I understand not seeing a thing for what it is, like the thief mistaking the carmine-red rhinestones for rubies. Shattering the moonlight, he plucked the size 5 slippers to the black market, leaving one careless sequin behind to squint in the museum case. For years, I mistook the bright blue along the ridged shell of a scallop for mere ornamentation, plucked at the sapphire gaze, an unintended cruelty, blinding what I thought was a starless galaxy without sight or grief. But I’ve learned that a galaxy with no stars is just a hypothesis. Gemstars, everywhere. And we, desperate to handle them like a rune or hand—their message indecipherable. Even if they turn out not to be rubystars, they might be perfect talismans. They might pity us, see that this is as close to real as we can get.

Sandra Fees lives in southeastern Pennsylvania where she is a Unitarian Universalist minister and past poet laureate of Berks County (2016-2018). Her poems have been published in The Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She also has a CNF piece published in The Citron Review.

The only way you can strip a bear
down to skin is with dart and gas-

            (light),
            or bullet-
            hands
            and knife.

Shined shoes and bare feet
pooled in my pelt. I was family
room luxury—but not for me.

I tried to scrape myself off
the marble floor—tried to unbreak,
and remake, an entire body.

By the time I stood, my fur had turned
to felt. But I’m a girl—
I learned

            to tailor,
            to stitch,
            to cut and carve
            a covering.

Sometimes when I’m alone,
I remove my coat.

My glass eyes still reflect light—
but sometimes my fingers fumble
with the buttons made of bone.

Shagufta Mulla is the art editor of Peatsmoke Journal, a veterinarian-turned-content writer/editor for TIME Stamped, and an artist. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Stoneboat, Crab Creek Review, Blood Orange Review, the speculative poetry anthology NOMBONO by Sundress Publications, and elsewhere. Shagufta lives in Oregon, but you can find her on Instagram @s.mulla.dvm.

Today, at three months and three weeks old,

he musters all his focus,
and reaches out his pudgy, dinner-roll arms towards the target:
a pale-yellow tissue box with green deer and trees and squirrels and foxes on the side.

As he tries to pull out the prize, his brain’s joystick moves his limbs with the precision of a claw machine arm going frustratingly for stuffed toys.

Failure! The tissue is in his grasp, and then lost.
Failure! His arm jerks left, and he misses the tissue altogether.
Failure! The fingers fail to close.

And then, the hand, the eye, the brain all work together to create a successful grip, and with a tug there is the satisfying sound of paper rubbing against the box’s plastic dispenser opening. Another tug, and the tissue comes loose. His eyes go wide.

Success! He waves the white tissue around like a captured flag, and lets out a “Yap-yap-yap-yap-yap” that only abates when he plugs the tissue into his mouth in glorious victory.

Timothy DeLizza lives in Baltimore, MD. During daytime hours, he is an energy attorney for the U.S. government. His fiction has recently appeared in Noema, Southwest Review, and New South. His essays have recently appeared in Undark, Washington Square Review, Salon, and Earth Island Journal.

She can swim,
but she’s not water,
so give her some grace.
Take it slow,
make the water
warm to your wrist.
Hold her back
legs together firmly,
feel the potential
of those muscles.
She’ll fix you
with her eye
while you lower her in.
Existential sorrow
and suffering.
She thinks
this is forever,
her sudden
sodden demotion.
You will feel monstrous.
A rabbit isn’t big,
ever, but wet
she is entirely different,
and now you know
how much she relies
on furry masquerade
for what little presence
she wields. What misery,
what danger we risk,
doing this, starting
to think about
what’s underneath.

Sara Eddy’s full-length collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024. She is also author of two chapbooks, Tell the Bees from A3 Press in 2019, and Full Mouth from Finishing Line Press in 2020, and her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a white dog and a black cat.

They asked how many sides the fetus had.
Unsure of what to say, the doctor lied, knowing
they expected the same number as themselves.

When the baby bulged and bounced
down their sides, the sky turned plain and paths
were pathed with flattened fool’s gold.

Like cubes trying to love spheres, they
could only wonder at the failed geometry
of it all – nothing stacking up.

They balanced between the planes
and the points of parenthood, never to under-
stand the trials of being round.

More worried about, than for: they thought
of how schools were unfit for purpose; the streets
bordered by broken fences; the hospitals

confused with their whetted tools. So
they spent their whole lives shaping their child: a
                                                                                nip
here,                                                 there,
                                a tuck
                a word,                                         just
                                                a word,

a word made of silent letters. And then all
was right-angled in the world; the round peg
chiseled down to fit into a square hole.

Every day, hidden away with tight –clothes–,
straightened |hair| and ironed-out [expectations],
a vised {heart} is by its own (ribs).

Luigi Coppola – www.LinkTr.ee/LuigiCoppola – is a poet, teacher, and avid rum and coke drinker. He has been selected for the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 23/24, Poetry Archive Now Worldview winner’s list, Birdport Prize shortlist, and Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition longlist. He also performs music as ‘The Only Emperor’ and has a debut poetry collection from Broken Sleep Books due out in 2025.

For music, videos, the writing process of the poem, and other links, please visit: https://linktr.ee/thesharpparentsofaroundchild.

indelible promises.
the dent in your palm.
the memory of what-could-have-been.
confusion, misgivings, sin.
the crack left in your side.
bruised knuckles.

you claw your way to an opening;
lose a little time trying to gain a little speed.

what does grief feel like today?
are its fingers pushing against your spine?
can you breathe past it?
or is it crushing the innocence
trapped in your windpipe?

regardless of how big the wound is,
the world says you shouldn’t fuss over it;
the wound says you shouldn’t make a future out of it.
when grief is synonymous to existence,
the world is sharper.
but, see,
no one ever taught me how to grieve.
they say: it’s just a matter of learning backwards.

glory be to the topsoil.
to the worms, to the wounds.
glory be to the intricate congregation of mycelium.
what makes for a better angel of death than
the quaint prompt of decomposition?
a thankless, endless task.
return to the earth:
precipice and prayer.

silence and sunrise.
silhouettes on the garage door.
the checkbook of mortality.
the blue chemical of the morning.
the waking burn in your stomach.
the taunting endures; single-toned litany.
your eyes adjust to the darkness; the heart never.

Gervaise Alexis Savvias (they/he) is a Zambian-Cypriot writer, artist and researcher currently based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Their practice is predicated on an entanglement of parapoetics, radical archival methodologies, and lounging in the sun. Their work stretches across installation, poetry, collective utterance, and sound; observing language through its manifold forms and recognizing its ability for collective communing and vulnerability.

out the window
neighbors string clear bulbs
across their lawn
fearing the sun will not
be sufficient this spring

morning. I go out to get a haircut
or have oral surgery,
and the highway ferries me
across a field barren
save rows of stalks.

brown, tan, burnt umber
crusting the place where dead
plant meets dust.
the sky so blue, a sign—
WE GROW DREAMS beside

metal arches rib-caging the dirt below,
and while this whale size skeleton
awaits plastic skin of resurrection,
I’ll return to watch the neighbors’ party
with shorter hair or missing teeth.

Christie Wilson lives in Illinois. Her work has appeared in various places, including Bending Genres, New World Writing Quarterly, MoonPark Review, and Pidgeonholes. You can visit her at christie-wilson.com, or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @5cdwilson.

Link to PDF HERE: i_have_an_existential_crisis_on_realizing_my_reading_list_is_finite

 

Karan Chambers is an ex-English teacher and mum to three lively boys. She has been published in Atrium Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, Propel Magazine, Sylvia, and The Hyacinth Review. Find her on Instagram @KaranChambersPoetry and Twitter @KaranJCChambers.

Life is complicated. Your power bar
shouldn’t be. Your power bar should be
as simple as a paper clip, toothpick, button,
candle, bookmark, spoon, napkin, coat hanger,
scrunchie, crayon, dinner plate, or rubber ball.

Actually, your power bar should be simpler
than that. It should be the simplest thing
in the world, simpler than a dash, a dot,
a Euclidean point. It should be a fundamental
constituent of the universe, so simple
that anything simpler would be nothing.

That’s because your life is complicated—
more complicated than the stock market,
a nuclear reactor, blockchain technology,
cybersecurity, pharmaceutical drug design,
geopolitics, quantum entanglement, consciousness,
and Hegelianism combined. You can’t take
a complicated power bar on top of all that.

I’m talking about your life, not mine.

My life is pretty basic. I take a lot of walks.
I mourn the dying trees. I worry about the fate
of birds. Sometimes I write things down.
But mostly I pray that everyone will make it,
that by some miracle each one of us will find
the power bar we need—that it’s out there,
somewhere, exquisitely simple, an invisible
living signal just waiting to be received.

Owen McLeod is the author of the poetry collections Before After (2023) and Dream Kitchen (2019). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Sun, and many others.