Photo by Melike Benli (pexels.com)
Tom Busillo
My Spectacular Next Head
It will have lights that blink blue when kindness is needed. It will scramble nervous systems and burn out bodies. It will always be available whether I like it or not. It will welcome its own advice, linger in the burning heat and light, and roam space gathering dark matter with its tongue. It will wear headphones at a silent disco. It will have my eyes, cool energy, and big heart. It will see visions of spreading the blistered frape tomato burger apart and only eating the blistered tomatoes. It will take in the majesty of road materials placed every 2 kilometers. It will read shattering psychological works related to the repair of toilets. It will listen closely when the waiter says, “Our sirloin steak is grilled to order with our secret seasoning and topped with our house-made heavenly sauce. It’s my personal favorite,” but ignore me when I tell it to pick up some strawberries. It will know how to say "Luke, I am your father" in Latin. It will accept that bad luck isn’t my fault and make stuff up about me that isn't true. It will say “I forgot you remembered me,” or “I love your Rethinking Mao pair of shoes,” or “Did you know the term bleeding bread cake has nothing whatsoever to do with cake?” It will not allow any boarders, though I will try to live in it rent-free. It will revisit the magical memories of my childhood, learn about the Rockettes, and find out why octopuses have three hearts. It will sometimes guide me to an unknown location or invite all its friends to the meadow for a special day. It will, above all, allow me for once to be treated as human.
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Tom Busillo’s writing has appeared on McSweeney’s, PANK, and Apiary and is forthcoming in Calliope (Fall 2025). He’s also the author of the 2,624-page, unpublishable, book-length conceptual poem “Lists Poem: Top 10 Top 10 Top 10 Top 10 Lists (11,111 Lists).” He lives in Philadelphia, PA. Tom responded to our Leave any notes here about your submission you think we should know about with: “E / F# / B / F#.”
Cora McCann Liderbach
I Turn My Neurostimulator Off at Night to Rest My Brain
Essential tremor shook me all my life / I bask in stillness now / deep brain stimulation calming hands and head / so I can face audiences unfazed / read poems / but every cure has its cost / mine is muddled words / I turn my current off at night / to give my brain a break / help my tongue articulate / right hand centering a blue device on my chest / left cradling a black one, tapping Therapy Off / my millstone returns / but in sleep, movement is moot / till I fumble a water bottle to the floor / at daybreak I flail, tap Therapy On / a tingle surges through my body / intensifies, subsides / every neuron, axon and dendrite humming praises / for Hippocrates, father of medicine / Galileo, father of science
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Cora McCann Liderbach, of Lakewood, Ohio, published her first poetry chapbook, Throughline, from Finishing Line Press in 2024. Her work appears in the Light Enters the Grove anthology, Rockvale Review, Unbroken, The RavensPerch, Paddock Review, and Common Threads.
Deanna Lernihan
Interestingly, at the Clinic
Photo by Mikhail Nilov (pexels.com)
Interestingly, at the clinic, you draw attention to some incongruity — maybe the cardinal that lives in the alley between a high tree and a telephone pole sings on Fridays now. The doctor, who was just musing about how his kids attended the same elementary school as your kids, What a striking coincidence! though a time gulf of twenty years, says that this very specific change you are relating is not necessarily anything abnormal. Considering the many possibilities, it would be normal for this cardinal, or any cardinal, to sing on Fridays, and normal that your blood pressure is higher, but still within the range of normal in the greater population, and that the brain fog you experience, again normal. Try going into a room and remembering why you’re there, he suggests. We all forget. But what if you forget an epiphany that flashed in your head ten seconds ago? It’s gone. Burnt out like a camera bulb. But the doctor says it’s fine if camera bulbs burn out, they somehow get replaced or compensated for, try turning on more lights in the apartment, and maybe you should take pictures in daylight. Get some fresh air. Listen to the birds. And maybe the bulb you’re referencing isn’t burnt out at all, you’re just noticing that it sometimes varies in brightness, as it always has, but for some reason you’ve never noticed these vague fluxes until now that you’re interestingly in your head, trying to remember a song, some slurred trill of insight, that landed you between crepe table paper and exam gloves.
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Deanna Lernihan is a Virginia-based public health professional whose work includes mental health and food sustainability. She enjoys writing poetry, and getting lost in nearby woods, but mostly spending time with her family. Her poetry has recently appeared in Mslexia, Passionfruit Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and upcoming in Susurrus Magazine.
Debra Murphy
Easter Morning
Then there was the time we didn’t find any eggs at the hunt in the fireman’s field and my father, once a Marine, always a Marine, took time off from warming the bar stool to paint a Golden Egg for my little brother to find. I marvel at the tenderness, so different from other memories. Yet I remember him for this one act of caring, and not even for me. His ashes now rest somewhere in Kentucky in a large porcelain beer stein along with his third wife, Sharon, and the petals from the roses I sent as he lay dying.
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Debra Murphy lives and works on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.
Lisa Dart
S E A G U L L
Chekhov’s play taught me about you. Though it’s not his seagull I have in mind now, but one we saw once, Mum, do you remember, caught in an incoming tide? The wash of wave by the wood groyne taking the bird under in a grey-white-feathered tidal flush. Recovering just enough to raise its head, find its feet. Too wet and dizzy to escape before the next wave rushed it down. ‘l feel like that seagull,’ you said, the day after Dad’s funeral. I looked across at you. Bowed over, your brow crumpling, your pale eyes, tears, your mouth’s fine lines, hard-fletched. You were in that black, quilted jacket. The criss-cross stitching meant to plump the diamond pattern, already fraying. Bunched up in your jacket, hunched at the far end of the settee by the gas fire, two awkward pillows behind your collapsed back, you sat there wearing it for the whole day, day in, day out. And even when splattered by the food you ate (with your fingers, infant-like, the plate precarious) and I said I’d wash it, you refused to take it off, pulled it all the more close. In the play, Masha says what you couldn’t. “I am in mourning for my life.” You wore that jacket for the next few years, till it split. Odd parts of inner stuffing beginning to tell — white feathers poking through. And, though sea-soaked, you always wore it zipped, to hold back the tide, its ruthless undertow. To just about keep your head up. Stop your heart from breaking through.
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Lisa Dart is the author of The Linguistics of Light (poems, Salt, 2008), Fathom (prose memoir, Free Association Press, 2019), This Thing of Darkness, a highly experimental, illustrated book, using multiple texts (IPBooks, 2024), and forthcoming, The Bird You Are (Shangana Press, 2025) and Even So, This Song (Shangana Press, 2025).
Benjamin WC Rosser
Swans at the Mall
I sip compliance from a cardboard cup. Tight fine steel lines, hoist five lifelike life-sized paper-mache white swans. The birds seem to wing from sunlit atrium up and over an oak railing to the mezzanine. Dazzling beneath skylights, they depict ascent, flap, glide, brake and then descent towards wrought iron tables. They mimic our trek from mall entry up the escalator to feast at the food court. I sit alone at the railing, gliding swan overhead, and pretend to eye my phone. Today I secretly study humans. Food court stuffed with youthful staff, bargain hunters, transit transfers, mobility scooters, mothers, babies, bags, phones, the braggadocio of men meeting, gaunt faces of the needy. Bodies milling, streaming, yearning. The bubbling cocktail of pop rock, chit chat galore, languages, slanguages, giggles, and that one guy yelling. The carnal essence of commercial cookery. Unspoken competition for tables, at times nearly a blood sport. Each of us tiptoeing through our daily hopscotch. Only children wonder at the swans. Do mall swans search for lost wetlands, or do they strain to join us? Mythology has it that swans shift between human and avian form. The enchantment of Tchaikovsky’s swan, princess by night pirouettes into swan by day. In the wild, sudden bright white, raucous landing, huge bold birds calling, splashing power and grace. I wish we each burst into swan. But flight feathers do not anchor to my bones, nor contour feathers pierce my skin. I vow to visit the wild ones, and leave.
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Benjamin WC Rosser is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan. His poetry has appeared in Consilience Journal, London Grip, Boats Against the Current, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. Ben resides in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife Corinne and children Isabel and Oliver.
Varsha Saraiya-Shah
The Dead Are Life’s Self-appointed Preachers
Photo by T Leish (pexels.com)
Museo Las Momias, Guanajuato
A female’s denuded sex, startling. Another appears aghast, next to the showcase with her still-born-eight-inch fetus, Juanito. Concave bellies all around. Skeletal heads tilt indifferently. Fellowship and separation of the dead unsettle you. Yet, the frozen emotion of each in the moment they left this earth dares your presence. This is a church that knows no heaven nor hell. The guide tells us how these mummies came to congregate here. The dead are life’s self-appointed preachers. Withered maleness of a young man. Cataleptic female presumably buried alive. Her horror preserved like desiccated peonies. Each beside the other stands stripped of their race, status, creed. No holding of hands, palms over bony pelvic plateaus. Torn socks and yellowed linen-knickers dangle from their bones. Broken toothy smiles with their own energy – the kind I have seen for years on a drifter on Post Oak Boulevard on the way to work. I lean on my friend’s shoulder. With eyes closed. Words are superfluous in this church. One mummy sports a playful expression like my father’s when he was alive. Dread in his eyes on the deathbed, a long-faded memory floods me. I had covered them with my palms and holy chants. Pairing love with loss, letting go of it how I remember holy Ganges dribbled off his lips gasping for the final breath. Such is love. A dappled light in the museum. Blue light outside, an artisan selling his cobalt blue earthen bowls. Dust to dust. ”Till we meet again,” I murmur, spotting my father in earshot sporting his dapper looks.
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Varsha Saraiya-Shah is the author of VOICES, a poetry chapbook by Finishing Line Press. Her work appears in journals such as Borderlands, Cha, Convergence, Mutabilis Press, Orchard Street Press, Penguin Random House, Pippa Ran UK, Synkroniciti, and Soundings East. She has been featured on public radio and in a dance program called Poetry in Motion.
Mike Bove
The Geologists
Right away I admit I have difficulty with the mathematics of time. 400 million years. Too many for the mind to hold. Anything more than a few thousand & my imagination begins to warp & flail. They tell me everyone has trouble with that much open space. I ask about the swirls in rock near the shoreline. Mingled magma, they say, evidence of the edge of an ancient volcano. They show me a geologic map of the island, different colors for different kinds of stone. I like best the blue sections marked with dark triangles, the shatter zone, where caldera crust broke apart under heavy pressure. I ask if they can conceive of deep time. Yes, they’ve made peace with insignificance. I ask which part of the land is their favorite. All of it, they say, what matters most is the story as a whole. Later I’ll remember them when I crouch near the waves to examine glacial striations in a flat, gray sea-slab. I’ll stare into the tight fissures, into the smallest flecks. I’ll look deep down into the stone & beyond. I’ll close my eyes & see straight through to the layers beneath, find myself there in miniature surrounded by stone, a tiny crystal point on a vast plane, the dot of an “i” buried within the glittering timeline of a story that doesn’t need me to tell it.
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Mike Bove is the author of four books of poetry, most recently EYE (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). His poems have appeared in Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, and many others. He served as a 2024 Writer-in-Residence at Acadia National Park and is Associate Editor for Hole in the Head Review. Mike lives with his family in Portland, Maine where he was born and raised. See more at www.mikebove.com or Instagram: @portlandbove.
Bonnie Demerjian
Dear Farm
It’s really time to say goodbye. I’m spending too much time in another time. Maybe it’s the worrisome present that’s to blame or my age or the distance in time and miles that keeps you, your former you I mean, unchanged, while, in fact, one swift look makes it clear, like a teacher’s hand across the blackboard, you’ve been erased in a single swipe. So, we should part. I see that your thick walls raised two centuries ago, your dank cellars lined with ancient canned tomatoes and mysterious boilers, have been filled in. No more quiet exhalation from those sheltering deeps. The last drops of coffee sipped in creaking wicker chairs are drunk, the farmhouse now an empty cup, and no cat blinks beside us in the morning sun. Goodbye to damp-tossed summer nights, windows wide to beckon a breeze. Hear the fox barking up the road? Farewell to hikes through waist-high weeds to the gully, on past the once-orchard of blackened, broken cherry trees. Remember their amber brandy, barrels resting in the barn. And where are the people and their days that you protected with generous warmth and welcome cool? You housed my pilgrimage too, always there, always the same, as it should be for one on a mission to the past. The heat still shimmers, the locusts drone, but now I’m gone. I toss away the keys to a house that has no door and turn to face the west.
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Bonnie Demerjian writes from her island home in Southeast Alaska in the Tongass National Forest on the land of the Lingit Aaní, a place that continually nourishes her writing. She is a retired teacher, librarian, and journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, Pure Slush, and Blue Heron Review, among others. She has also written four nonfiction books on the human and natural history of Southeast Alaska.
Marcus Ten Low
My Fishie Spoke!
My fishie spoke to me, echoing a message wrapped around his bowl, not some papier-mâché news sheet emblazoned with the headline, 'TITANIC SINKS!', but something much more elucidatory. The ocean that you grabbed me out of, the environs of family that you separated from me, will be empty of sealife within a quarter of a century. Perhaps I will be the only fish left in the world, travelling around in the space of a small bowl the size of an astronaut's headpiece, shouting my warning message of climate injustice. Perhaps I will live as the thoughts going round and round in your head, perhaps I will be that spirit fish that SPILLS over the floor of your messy studio, leaving me struggling and wiggling on the broadsheets that line the floor. You save me, grasping me slithering in your slick hands, and squirt me back in my bowl. You treat me like a god, captive to your own egotistical imaginations, idol to your homecomings and your manipulations, the bug device that some spy setup, the centrepiece of your parties, the plastic of your dreams. I cannot save you, for I am the animal that lives in your conscience, which you cannot free whilst you contemplate me from afar. As I die, I breathe bubbles and float-up to the surface, bobbing against the sides of the glass bowl, on my side. I was an icon, that famous orange goldfish in a bowl, but you refused to understand. You refused, and I became a cliché, mocked, my thought-bubbles rising to the surface. I am not just playing dead.
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Marcus Ten Low is an artivist and poet who aspires to be "kind to all beings". He wants his poetry posted in vacant shop lots. Published many times in Quadrant, he also had his first publishing in Right Hand Pointing in issue #157. @antibreeder1m, his social media discusses the Earth's meltdown already occurring.
Katie Kalisz
Killing Another Mother
Today, I killed a steelhead that my son caught with his bare hands. He hauled it up from the river, slapped it on the Adirondack chair’s arm, and rapped on the slider door for me to come see. It was still breathing, cheeks still sucking in and out, while blood trickled from its mouth. My son wanted and did not want to kill it. He gave his indecision to me, like a sloppy gift, so we filled up the laundry tub, stalling for time, a kind of progressive murder. The tub was too small, and the tap water too warm. We let it suffocate more until we felt its body stiffen. Then, we celebrated our good fortune of dinner. We will use all of it, every part! I slit the belly and found a thousand spawn, the sadness of how much we’ve killed settling into my son’s face. It is not just this fish but generations of fish. After we filet it, he takes the spawn in his small hands, as much as he can delicately hold, and scatters it in the river, like a private burial, or a baptism, a way to make amends. We release the fish skeleton after them, to float away with its eggs, like the ghost of a grandmother, hovering.
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Katie Kalisz is the author of Quiet Woman, a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her second book, Flu Season, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is the recipient of a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their three children.