Photo by Jaredd Craig (unsplash.com)
Jill Muhrer
Tell Me About the Horse
You start with your horse, not the thoroughbred I hope for but a generic horse, sweet, small, easy going, the one your two boys can care for and ride but look here’s the difference, I respect your horse but I need a fierce horse, an Appaloosa with speckles, a tangled mane, and a soft muzzle but you don’t hear me and you’re on to your chickens, the cats, the dogs, the boys wanting ice cream and your lunch at the Silver Spoon diner and the Leave It to Beaver quality of your life which I admire, because I see you’re a nice person, a wonderful mother, a caring doctor and because of your horse I’m on my way… riding my Appaloosa who is brave, gentle, and fast as I lay across her back, there are no boundaries, just muscle, strength, and power as we race across fields, where trees blur, the world becomes a stream of color as a brisk wind wraps around us and carries us gracefully, we fly into the night full of bright stars that complement and accentuate blackness until my favorite moon rises, the crescent one, and now I can come back to the exam table which you are finally lowering. I turn to you and say, “ok, I’m ready, tell me about that damn barbell-shaped tumor!”
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Jill Muhrer, a retired nurse practitioner, completed writing workshops at Westport Writers, Smokelong Quarterly, and Columbia University. Her publications include stories in Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and haiku and haibun in Modern Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, and The Haibun Journal.
Pris Campbell
Comings and Goings
I was four when Baylum became my friend. Nobody else could see him but that didn’t matter. He was the perfect playmate, eating my mud pies without complaint, hanging with me from branches on the chinaberry tree without warning me I would fall and crack a bone. With no sibs around, mother gradually became adjusted to holding the back door open long enough, as instructed, to let Baylum through the door too. She also occasionally set an extra plate out at the dinner table so Baylum could enjoy family life, too. My father never talked to Baylum like mother and I did but took his presence in his stride. Soon word got around… maybe through our neighbor peering over the hedges at my long conversations… about the comings and goings of make believe people at our house. “Gus, you’ve got to stop that child,” friends told my mother. It’ll affect her mentally.” Mother wasn’t worried about me mentally. She saw it as a sign of my creativity, so continued to allow Baylum to be my friend until a year or so later, more new neighborhood children knocked at the back door. Baylum went away on his own to find new mud pies to share with other lonely little girls who welcomed him.
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Pris Campbell was a clinical psychologist and biker/sailor until sidelined with a neuroimmune illness. Writing has taken the forefront since.
Richard Jordan
The Quarterback
Shuffling out to recess, I keep my eyes on the ground, kick pebbles. I make a point to line up beside Big Tony. In this way, I have protection should I be accosted for lunch money or who knows what. Writing this is also a protection — someday I may show the Principal. But, today, I can sit beside the jungle gym in a bit of shade, pretend I’m doing Tony’s homework, and no one will pummel me with the muddy dodge ball. Common denominators require a long time. They’re so tricky, I tell Tony. He pats my head. An improvement over yesterday’s noogie, for sure. This could take until high school, I say. I know by then Tony will have forgotten me. He’ll be the quarterback, after all. It’s written all over him. Already he has muscles, a square jaw, that Johnny Unitas flat top. For now, he says, Hey, watch this, kid, as he chomps through a large banana, swallows a chunk, dark, greasy peel to boot. Future QBs don't have to chew on things like the rest of us.
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Richard Jordan's poems appear or are forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Connecticut River Review, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Gargoyle Magazine, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, The Squannacook at Dawn, won first place in the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Contest.
LeeAnn Pickrell
Communion
Photo by Lia Bekyan (unsplash.com)
November, Week 4
The week ends with a drive down 280 to a holiday party in Woodside and almost missing my exit while listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 from the early 80s, Kenny Rogers and “Lady” topping the pop charts at #1, and memories of my first trip to San Francisco when I was in sixth grade, wearing yellow toe socks and a blue skirt, riding down this same road to Palo Alto and how green and rolling the hills were; the same trip where a mime got married on a cable car and the conductor played the wedding march, and I announced, “I’m going to move here someday,” which I did, and get married on a cable car, which I didn’t; the same trip where we went wine tasting in Napa and after my first glass of wine, which my parents had gotten for me, I went back for a second and the waiter said loudly as I reached for the glass, “And you’re twenty-one?” which I wasn’t, being twelve, and I slunk back to my parents who whispered, “We’ll get you another glass.”
* * *
Evensong
The first time my father’s given morphine for the pain, my mother and I stay late, into the half-light of a shadowed April evening. We sit on opposite sides of his bed, each holding one of my father’s hands. The morphine makes him smile. He says, “That last drink really did it.” He laughs. In the quiet that follows, I ask if my mother remembers the 23rd Psalm. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. We recite it, haltingly, as one of us remembers a line. He leadeth me beside still waters. And then they come, the old women in their wheelchairs, steering themselves down the hall and into my father’s room, so surprised to find my mother and me sitting there, as if this isn’t the first time they’d come to visit. He restoreth my soul. “That last drink really did it,” he tells me again, nodding, remembering that I too used to know how a drink could really do it. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. This last Saturday of his life — morphine, a psalm, and a procession of white-haired women in their wheelchairs, come to pay their respects, or perhaps these are his old girlfriends returned, the ones we used to hear so much about in drunken stories, led by Mavis, the older woman he fell for in high school. Perhaps they’ve come to claim him, to bring him home.
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LeeAnn Pickrell’s chapbook Punctuated was just published by Bottlecap Press. Her book Gathering the Pieces of Days is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in April 2025. She writes LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry on Substack and her website is leeannpickrell.com.
Kristin Bartley Lenz
Microcosm of Marriage
What kind is it, my husband asks, blowing on his spoon, and I say red lentil, a new recipe, and we dunk our bread and chew and sip wine and update each other on the banalities of our day as routine as junk mail. Some evenings, we slip easily into existential ponderings, metaphysics, solving the world’s problems while savoring a meal. But tonight, we are trapped in our own minds, and the best we can do is hold each other’s gaze, an open bridge. My clients’ secrets swim through my bloodstream, their pain sticky like clots in my veins, and my husband knows if he talks about his workday full of numbers on spreadsheets, a cloudy film will creep across my corneas, even as I nod and murmur and scramble to keep up with the calculations. And so, we scoop and swallow and smile across the scarred table. Our silence stretches. Not a taut band of tension, but rather a loosening of ligaments, tendons, muscles. We’ve both talked enough today, and our words need time to settle, like the way our dog paws at his bed and circles around and around before curling up to sleep. We scrape our spoons against our bowls, and then we push back our chairs and carry our dishes to the counter with the stained cutting board and dulled knives and remnants of garlic skins and carrot peels and a squeezed half of lemon. He loads the dishwasher while I ladle the leftover soup into containers and hand him the big sticky pot with the charred bottom that’ll take some scrubbing, but he doesn’t complain, and I ask, so it’s a keeper? And he says yeah, I liked it, I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow.
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Kristin Bartley Lenz is a writer and social worker in metro Detroit. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Lunch Ticket, Literary Mama, and Women On Writing. Her second novel, The Door Swings Open, is forthcoming in 2026. Learn more at KristinBartleyLenz.com.
Jennifer Mills Kerr
A Journal of Lost Love
For years I pulled our tangled story line taut: we loved one another but couldn’t make it work. Today, I open that notebook, so old the cover sheds gray grit. Pages of blackened scrawl, so fiercely pressed, the paper’s textured like pavement. His name, resuscitated, a repeated blip on my heart monitor then, a dagger pulse on screen. Still, I make myself read every line, witnessing our slow death, listening for a final breath which never comes. Fights and lies and drunken nights burst from the panicked handwriting, a static that belied any calm horizon of love or trust. Now look, how I turn back to the journal’s beginning again, desperate to find another story, scavenging for bits of white behind the scratched ink, as if collecting confetti for a wedding I missed. Look at me, standing on the sidewalk alone, the limousine, a black dot departing down a distant, unnamed street. Inside its cavern, my parents, slender and young and happy — before the fights, the lies, the drunken nights. Look, how I fabricated their lost love, a ragged blanket keeping me safe inside their once upon a time, a place I never knew. I shut the journal, wishful and sorry, all my messy lines, crossed, crossing, now in clear view.
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Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. After twenty years publishing fiction, Jennifer has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to supportive editors, teachers, and friends. Connect with Jennifer through her Substack, Poetry Inspired, or say hello at JenniferMillsKerr.com.
Amy Marques
After the Spat She Tries to Choose a Playlist
Something soothing. Something to cut the silence that had mushroom-clouded and followed them into the car. Nothing high pitched. Nothing unpredictable. Nothing like the jazz that had been playing in the restaurant they’d gone to after he’d come home that night and asked how she was and she said she was tired and he said they should go out so she wouldn’t have to make dinner and so she’d changed into a sleeveless dress and regretted it when the only tables available were out on the patio and she remarked on the starless sky and how it might rain and he said to not be ridiculous and couldn’t she just enjoy things without spoiling them so when the bread basket arrived and she felt a raindrop on her goosebumped arms she knew better than to say anything unscripted because he was already wincing at the horn solo with staccato high notes that insisted on variations that challenged the same old usual refrain.
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Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She’s been nominated for multiple awards, longlisted twice in Wigleaf50, and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, Unlost, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is the editor and visual artist for the Duets anthology and the author and artist of the erasure poetry book PARTS. More at amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
Cora Schipa
Watching a Sex Show in Amsterdam
The first act was a man and a woman who giggled as their silky robes dropped to the ground. They kissed on their knees; eyes locked. My friend and I were the only other people in the dark room and, violently sober, we sucked vodka sodas to loosen the walls. The music was loud and slick on their bodies. The sun shone outside, birds twittering in the trees, and across an ocean my mother stepped around in her kitchen, opening the fridge and closing it, pulling pans out and wiping the table down. Earlier, I watched a bee land on my knee and thought, I’m alive. A male patron walked in, late, and sat across from us. Our girl bodies stiffened, a light turning on inside. He leaned back with his knees sprawled, oh so comfortable, positioning himself so he could catch our eyes in the spaces between the bodies on stage. His gaze, a worm-wriggle of fear. How strange that we were more uncomfortable at this man’s presence than at the carnal scene in front of us, at the woman in giant plastic heels, taut with Botox, pulling a never-ending pink ribbon from herself, at the girl with a neon toy, arms twisted with muscle. The last act was an older couple, all leather and chains and blunt German rap music, their mouths hard straight lines, looking like two people using each other. I remembered, once, a pair of unneutered dogs stuck together, neither knowing why their bodies wanted each other. He wore small round sunglasses and a studded vest he never took off, and her breasts hung like utters. I wondered, naïvely, why they didn’t even pretend. We left feeling electric but deflated, jittery, like early-morning sobriety after a whirlwind night. I thought of all the ways my body had been a stage, all the ways I’d been outside of it but dangerously close, like the thrilling whoosh of a monstrous train. How I’d used my body against myself, how I’d basked in the applause.
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Cora Schipa is a poet and writer from Charleston, South Carolina, where she holds degrees in creative writing and sociology from the College of Charleston. She works as a creative writing mentor and tutor for teen girls and gender-expansive youth. You can find her work in ONE ART, Garden & Gun, Last Leaves Magazine, and others.
Thomas Elson
As a Child Sits
The little girl waited on the corner across the street from the family home as her father rushed toward her — his arms waving. Now, her mother searches for her daughter, finds only dirt and rocks, senses the smell of rotting meat and fruit. Her child, unable to cry, too stunned to hear, sits alone inside the scorched strangeness of a building, across the street from her house its tilted roof angled into the crater under which her father lies, his last breath taken ten minutes earlier; his search for his wife and daughter terminated; while men — in crisp white shirts and bespoke suits — congregate around a solid walnut table with a diamond-shaped black marble inlay upon which rest bottles of chilled water and freshly-brewed coffee, outline a strategy for the next target; while folks half a world away stare glaze at entertainment packaged as evening news; as the child — who will know neither her fleeting classification, nor her permanent one — draws her final breath.
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Thomas Elson is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and his stories have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including New Writing Scotland, Short Edition, Selkie, New Ulster, Lampeter, Moria, Mad Swirl, Blink-Ink, Scapegoat, Flash Frontier, Bending Genres, and Adelaide. He divides his time between Northern California and Western Kansas.
Nora Nadjarian
Knee-deep
Photo by Museums Victoria (unsplash.com)
So here you are in the flooded kitchen and have no idea what to save first or how to reach the door but worst of all there’s a stranger here with you or maybe not a stranger who says hello Eva do you remember me and you think is this for real and there are pots and pans floating around lightly touching and not touching and you wonder what it all means and reach for your cell phone but it’s not there and you think surely you’ll wake up and laugh Oh it was just a nightmare but then the stranger not-stranger says do you remember that night Eva and you think surely not that night could you be hallucinating and then your cell phone rings and somebody picks it up and you hear a woman’s voice saying Hello this is Eva how may I help you and you try to swallow and think of all the water you’re wading in and you think of that night almost two years back when your husband was out of town and how it poured down when you pulled up at the motel and how the stranger’s lips came so close to the nape of your neck touching and not touching while he helped you with the raincoat helped you peel off the wet tights and smiled and said just two words Eva hello and the rain lashed against the window and you put your cell phone on silent and the room started filling with flowing with flooding with Eva hello Eva.
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Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. Her work was included, among others, in Poetry International, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Perverse, and Dust. Her poetry collection Iktsuarpok was recently published by Broken Sleep Books.