'Make of me a piecemeal mound' — poetry by Matthew Gustafson

BRUTALIST SONNET

A gray June and a broken porch, the sun lost and the neighbor biking. / With the grandeur of two corpses thrown in a grave our spines fold into one. / Inside we feel vaguely moved, but after we are quiet, and we don’t address the dying bird caged within our chests. / I visit the graveyard to keep voices alive, and in this decaying summer I find not solace, not comfort, but grim reality. / My parents are buried like brickwork, one casket atop another, fused together by the dirt, the graveyard a foundation of wood and wax I bury my memories and bootsoles in. / When I die, I will do so in small, squarely framed boxes, like the quiet doll of a child that I am. / My tired kintsugi lungs will collapse into themselves like inflatable slides, and the great bruise of the milky way will settle on my stiff skin like dust on an old photo. / A hard year I’ve had of it. / I’ve been gardening, see, my skin caked in sweat and the rose petals all dry, so let me lie, and lend me now your soft, uncracked hands. / Exsanguinate me. / Let me of my blood, drain my tucked away veins of their last warmth, pull them from the house of my body like worn-out heating ducts. / Make of me a piecemeal mound, make of my heaping remains and heap of veins a new kind of art, gather my scattered parts and make of this mess something whole. / Sweep my scraps into russet collage. / Leap into me with such force that even the sky must relent its grasp and for just a moment I’ll hold you entirely / all that exists you and I in something like cloud of leaves.

---

Dirge at Dusk

For the dim day. For the long night. For the night pooled in flower pots. For the night that glows under watchful starts, under the half-built moon. For the night on your fingernails, in your downturned pupils. Your hair is the glittering filigree, our hands the moonlit arabesque. For the stars that draw down. For this panopticon we guard, and call the night sky. For the shy god’s handrail that we call a galaxy. For this second story balcony. For the galaxy of breath, loose from my lips. For the galaxy from yours. For how we watch our breath dance away together like proud silver horses. For how beautiful they gallop. For how quickly they fade.

---

Matthew Gustafson has many ghosts stuck in his throat. At first, the poems were meant to be like hot tea, washing the ghosts away and soothing his windpipe, but now he realizes all he's done is give the ghosts a microphone. When not tending to the catacombs of his throat, Matt has found time to graduate from Lafayette College and Stony Brook University, be the Poetry Editor at Folklore Review, and publish poems in The Shore, Eunoia Review, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere.

'the fever always holds' — poetry by Abbie Allison

my doctor’s folly

darling, darling – cerberus wheezes, and inside it is the smell of his pure smokes, snuffed and hanging heavy in the air.

in this acetylene paradise, i am the meek virgin, the hothouse orchid, the lecher’s baby – i am a lantern’s delicate glowing radiation, flickering off, on, off, on. the night trundles along outside, but in here – in this garden of indelible metal, my feverish cries bead and dissolve like paper on my tongue.

he thinks of himself as god, as a light eating the days from the rounded heat of my body, but god hurts the world in elements, not in love. his kiss is my head gated under water. his flush is an anchored body choking. three deaths in an hour. there is no devil, not in here – hiroshima’s ash coating was a man’s sin. darling, darling.

in this paradise, the fever always holds.

(Note: Diction taken from Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath)

---

Abbie Allison is an emerging writer and poet from Hanceville, Alabama, infatuated with themes that work through grief, girlhood, religion, and southern culture. She is a current undergraduate student at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she studies criminology and writes opinion articles for The Crimson White. Her fiction work can be found in The Reprise.

'those petty midnights' — poetry by Zoë Davis

Value

Remember when our currency was horses?
I’d buy a stable full of you
trade in unicorns
an unusual bargain
back when we both knew
the going rate
hooves churning
gold topped milk crests
wild thundering plains. I’d be moved
if we purchased a loaf of bread
sure in the knowledge of oil-slicked flanks
muscles straining beneath
a wealth of polished hide
more precious than paper
worth more than the value
it claims to hold.

---

Heroes

To our darling selves, we chimed, running with stick guns and darting finger-swords.

You you you. Always you. How the world swelled at those petty midnights; how we lost shoes
and wore each other home.

I never told you how I felt. It was heavy business to twist the dagger so. Tetanus shot of leaded
air. Parking lot arsonist dipped in burger grease.

Divine.

You stalked me home, slipped slick palm into mine, said is it pennies that smell like rain or is rain just God’s loose change?

They said it was a cigarette. Drifting you to sleep.

---

Zoë Davis is an emerging writer from Sheffield, England. She's a stubborn FND sufferer and fights what her body says she can't do by playing wheelchair rugby league. In her free time she writes poetry and prose, and especially enjoys exploring the interaction between the fantastical and the mundane, with a deeply personal edge to her work. You can find her words in publications such as: Ink Sweat & Tears, Strix, Roi Fainéant, Dust and Red Ogre Review. You can also follow her on X @MeanerHarker where she's always happy to have a virtual coffee and a chat. 

'my dear vesuvius' — poetry by jp thorn

there is one who watches over you

my dear vesuvius, you’re overdue on eruption: tiny screw still
turns into the frame of our body, we’re deconstructing though
true will hovers above; it is compassionate & sage.

it’s when we speak i hear crows lodged in your throat rasp out,
unaware you forgot to postscript the future, blissfully pompeii.

fear itself frightened sinks talons deep into your larynx; a sore
throat makes you tremble towards death, speak hoarsely about
specter kids who stalk from around corners, toying you with
hypotheticals until you’ve gotta test the placebo effect of suicidal
ideation for yourself,

right back to scarceness of childhood bedrooms where you’d rest
your head on some god’s eyelids, sleep to dvd menus & train
sounds as they pooled into one great ocean at her feet. there, you
are free from trying, held only to self-made standards though time-
clouds weather, oftentimes more scalding than lax.

nowadays, do you still wish to flee? two tickets purchased because
i’ll probably go, too, palm your remainders into my pockets then
head for the door, notice a shadow break inches of light through
the keyhole: maybe you were right about us always being watched.

---

jp thorn is a queer, neurodivergent artist & 2026 best of the net nominee. raised in & returned to the bible belt, they advocate for destigmatization & radically open communication with work inspired by humanness, reframing traditionalism, therapeutic processes, unlearning patriarchy, identity, & global patterns. you can find more of their them at www.thorn.jp

'In the doom tunnel' — poetry by Melissa Eleftherion

my myth

I ate the four seeds that kept me tethered - a bridge, a gold watch

I shed the battle cry landscape

I reckoned with my doom agent

My automatic clock, my heart on the grid

Layers of skin just shred for the compost

Layers of skin on the meat slicer

In the doom tunnels I channel my latent id

My shadow warrior

My pain

I lash a dungeon wall

I lash a dungeon wall & eat cheese

I’m such a good girl

I am a good girl dreamscape

In the doom tunnel

---

Queen of Cups / Ammonoid

Predaceous wisp

Thetamorph of thunder

& catastrophe

Innocuous sweet clawing

A flesh of needs

Why interrupture

Sinks / a dream

Capture abrupt

Like jaws

Between its eyes

Why & why again

The compulsion

To drown with one’s love

Thirteen chambers where I can sometimes hide

A sea of indexes

When the clouded

Wash of your heart

Tamps my fire chalice

I secrete in chasms

Protect a

“soft interior from damage”

The mud of your ancient

Shell a longing

I can no longer endure

---

Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, they are the author of four poetry collections: field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), gutter rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024), Suture (Cooper Dillon, 2026) & Malocchia (White Stag, 2026) as well as twelve chapbooks including abject sutures (above/ground press, 2024). Her work has been widely published in venues like Quarter after Eight, Sixth Finch, & Verse Daily, & received numerous nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Melissa now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Ukiah. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

'Love me as a wilderness' — Ruth Martinez

When I Sing Blue

Love me when a memory seizures me
to those acts of violation,
when a long emptiness follows,
the moon in the window cracks and falls
and the spider won’t quit crawling up my spine.

When I become a day moon, love me,
for I am a round thin host placed on the tongue of the sky,
melting into the west.

Love me as I step from Salvation Army-food stamp bower,
section 8 haunted house,
ditch road dusting my feet as I wail-walk the waterways,
looking for my drowned self in reflections of crane-shadow moon.

Love me as a sun-stained flower in glass.
Love me as a painting framed in gold on the floor of a burnt museum.
Love me as a wilderness alight, drought candle opening evergreen seedlings.

As if you are the promise that peeled me back from the edge of a building, as if you are petals of wind, and I,
footsteps of a garden as it dances in your spring dawn.

---

Ruth Martinez lives in Burque, New Mexico. As a child she listened to rain birds, horses, migratory birds and the stories of the grown-ups in Spanish and English. She has published short essays and poetry in Ofrenda Magazine, LunaLuna, Cordella Press, Poetry As Promised, Witchology Magazine, The Hopper, Black Moon Magazine and Ice Floe Press. She co-wrote an Indie book of poetry, Crow Moon, with her good comadre Anna Griego, and Bottlecap Press published thier chapbook Root Women. In her spare time, she reads poetry and fantasy novels, dabbles in art journaling, strolls through botanic gardens, and hikes in the mountains, where she has encountered cougars on three occasions. She cannot choose a favorite book. She’s a hoarder.

You can follow her on Instagram @blackberrybramblebooks and @veranotaos.

'lost in the rapture of man' — poetry by Ian Berger

[A freckle at her sun’s eye]

A freckle at her sun’s eye in

the windows of the nursery

I will mange, that graceless, through the

frames of saints along the walls

A rapture that I left in her

old garden tub upstairs is

bleeding through her mother’s cupboard

on the dollhouse chairs she kept

And should they plea, should she let

her children see the vanity fair

at last, I will know her from afar

as she spreads blankets on the floor,

and ask something of her savior

whilst the cattails pierce her blouse

---

[Or a cherub cast in resin]

Or a cherub cast in resin that

the girl who bled in the garden tub

will practice nursing in her sundress

when the doors to the parlor are closed

somewhere in the daylight, leaking through

the windows ’til it peels the moulding clean

Whilst her brothers whine at mother

for the cider in the cupboard—reaching,

unrepentant—spoiled, I said please.

Whilst their father wanders the activity bus

with girls he baptized in the aughts

and asks them, halos in his teeth,

where they find such pretty dresses that,

he hopes, will flatter his daughter’s eyes at service

---

[Whilst the boys, in their study]

Whilst the boys, in their study, pick

a harvest for their lessons in

the greenhouse, carrying, to their

mothers, baskets of sprouts and

parsnips, I will follow her through the years,

to where their paper mache and cabbages

fell, “Ages past,” she said, “lost in the

rapture of man.”

And whilst the boys

set the table for lunch in the

parlor, I will taste the kind foxglove

with my heart in her teeth, and see,

from the windows of the manor, the lady

in the curtains mouth the name of a saint

---

Ian Berger is a writer and teacher in Wilson, North Carolina. He is currently studying literature and political science while working in the public school system. In the meantime, when he is not writing poems—that is, often; between visits from kindly muses—he cooks for his partner and collects books.

'Stop trying to write something beautiful' — poetry by Diana Whitney

There’s No Normal Anymore, Says the Minister of Farming

June high pressure sweeps out the dross. Tree pollen, grass pollen, weed pollen floating lush on the breeze, dusting the dashboards, settling on the lake like a skein of saffron. Celestial bodies above our bodies enact a story of anguish and will. On Friday, Mercury stations direct and passes the demon star, Algol. Our girl sits on the porch screaming: It happened to me, it happened when I was 12, I’m the one who has to live in this fucking town where nobody believes me. The peonies ignite. The poppies explode in a riot of crimson. I want to plant myself among the flaming blooms and lift their silk dresses, touch their black tongues. I want to channel the cycle of yearn and release. No one is sleeping long or deeply. The cats roam the gardens under a waxing moon. A bear cub wanders through the high school parking lot. Our girl sneaks out after midnight and doesn’t get caught. You’re chugging Benadryl and coffee, red-eyed out weeding the corn, trying to survive Gemini season. I’m riding high on June rocket fuel, waking to the woodpecker knocking at dawn. We know it can’t last, the dog days are coming, so why not go out in a blaze of solar fire, gobbling up the flowers like a supernova.

---

Hum

The clothes in my closet hang drab & forlorn skins
without a body I want to swap them

for somebody else’s life

I want one perfect sundress all summer long

In the soup of late August I outrun
the thunderstorms Goldenrod crackles
in the fields Poison ivy seethes

& shines in the ditches
What if I will always at some level
be sad? At my mother’s house

my ears prick for ghost noises footsteps
up the back stairs breath rattling
the latches

Stop trying to write something beautiful
and write something true My mother

with her fists curled
around two stuffed animals eyelids drooping
or perpetually closed I kiss the soft

hollows of her cheeks stroke the freckled
backs of her hands feel the bones
of her limbs

coming to the surface What will become
of this place we called home? Bats roost
in the attic squirrels scrabble

the walls yellowjackets nest
in joists & doorjambs Beneath
the silence you can hear a hum

something small wanting in
It’s not over yet
far from it

---

Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry books, Wanting It, Dark Beds, and Girl Trouble. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.

'I am a devotee' — poetry by Patricia Grisafi

Oranges at Selinunte

The cafe in the middle
Of one temple and another
Feels right. They have pastries
And espresso and a plexiglass box of oranges
Ripe for squeezing.
I order an espresso because.
Then I ask for an orange. How stupid
To arrive without fruit. I am determined
To leave an offering. I forget
Almost everything including doctor appointments
And intimate partner violence.
I am fine.
There are oranges.
There are tombs.
I put fruit in my bag.
Thistle, snail shells, dust, hard sun
Making me holy in its light. I lived here
I know here
I made this walk
I carried this fruit
I saw these goats
They saw me
On the hill was the gorgon
With her sneer
And we felt safe. This was family.
We cursed and smiled,
It was hot but the sea curled over the hill.
I lost
So much. Bending over
A stone I pretend is God, whispering
Where is home, please take me

---

Dig

Archaeology is self-injury, I want
To visit the museum
Where everyone’s murder
Underwear is blasted under white light
In a sad little room.
We are so in love
With ritual, I have prayed deeply
To wake elsewhere in time,
In a building overlooking the sea,
Everyone gossiping about what
To make for dinner, who didn’t have sardines at the market,
Whose kid is behaving like an animal, wanting
Wanting to fall into a fantasy swirl —
Oh hi, I am from the future, I don’t know I don’t know I wish I knew
Will you just take me
To the crack where hell spills out of the Earth and let me
Inhale black death and be
Eye to eye with it?

---

Before Mary Was

Oh, I prayed. Walked into the black
Box and told a stranger lies
To make it seem I was worse.
I did not want to bore the priest
Like a child entertains her elders
With smiles and twirls.
A woman burned a hole
In my Communion veil with her Virginia Slim.
Very fitting, terrible, solemn,
Tiny hands forming triangles
All so clean instead
Of death humming
Inside, insisting
Once, I was
A woman long dead
Who buried her hands,
Had dusty feet, licked inside
Snail shells for slimy meat,
Everywhere, clinging
In the sun. I walk. Opening
A deep cut with a grin
As blood is power,
Makes the grain.
I don’t have to worry
About Botox or balding.
We will all die young
In the sun, in pain, but in the sun.
I am a devotee.
The god is my sea.
I collect wild parsley.
Before all that was good and kind
Was the veil and the door.
We all kept our eyes
On the moon and what fell
From the trees.
Burial was simple.
No one was pure.
What was a sin.
I lie, have always lied, I am the queen of lies.
My heels drag. I never
Sleep, but I must have known
Salt crusting skin, once, and was free.

---

Patricia Grisafi, PhD, is a New York City-based freelance writer, editor, and occasional professor. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, LARB, CNN, NBCThink, MSNBC, VICE, Bustle, Narratively, SELF, Catapult, The Rumpus, Ravishly, and elsewhere. Trish's interests include horror and the Gothic, feminism, mental health, parenting, and representations of mental illness in popular culture. She is the author of Breaking Down Plath (Jossey-Bass), a literary companion on Sylvia Plath for middle and high school students. Her debut poetry collection, Animal, is available from White Stag.

'come enflesh our feast' — poetry by Haley Hodges

SUBSERVIENT

I am drawn from your rib.
God plucked me
from your chest,
could thrust me in again.
Since we are dust, love,
tell me what sort of dust
to be. Shall I settle on you, or
shall you breathe me in and later
cough me up, wiping me from
your wet lips, from the brow
that sweats for its bread?

---

GOOD ANIMAL

I was your good animal,
your tiger eye. You were my

one ruling
roar. I was your

jungle smut but far
more, a like-minded
beast.

Come palm come fern come vine
we said, come green

to greater green, come enflesh

our feast. So fast! I was your
good animal, not best. Not

first, or last.

---

Haley Hodges received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University in 2025. She holds additional qualifications from Hope College, Shenandoah Conservatory, and Oxford University. Her work has been featured in Cassandra Voices, Ekstasis Magazine, t'ART, Reformed Journal and elsewhere. Her debut book of poems, Eros Rex, is forthcoming from Orison Books in 2026.

'noonday I dive' — poetry by Karen Earle

into the pool

hills hollow

forest fable forth

bride-and-grooming

us whisper-nested


flowering clouds

cast and recast shapes


shimmering a moment

shadow you naked

noonday I dive

~

night rogue stars

drill darkness

hold us

in light

---

the past is a woman in the other room

silent
in her always 

children
feathered

in their beds
housed in evening

she in night
holding

words she learns
and unlearns

braille
of sand and wave

hieroglyph
of shell and bone

cuneiform
of cloud

still in stillness
how to decode

the history
of forgetting

---

Karen Earle is a poet whose work has appeared in various journals, including: Lily Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, The Denver Quarterly, the filling Station, The Hopper, Clade Song and in Tupelo Press’ The Last Millweed Anthology. She was awarded a Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing fellowship and has attended several Colrain Poetry Conferences. She earned an MFA in Poetry from University of Massachusetts/Amherst, directed the writing lab at Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, and serves as faculty member of the New Directions Program/Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge. A psychotherapist in private practice, she lives and works in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, a small town in western Massachusetts best known for its Bridge of Flowers. 

'To eat dying stars' — poetry by Juliet Cook

Haunted Escape

Strange silo filled with
apparitions rising up
to the top. Above
all this dried out corn.

Grim husks drift apart
so the insides can escape
but where do they go?
To eat dying stars?

---

Juliet Cook doesn't fit inside an Easy-Bake Oven and rarely cooks. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including "red flames burning out" (Grey Book Press, 2023), "Contorted Doom Conveyor" (Gutter Snob Books, 2023), "Your Mouth is Moving Backwards" (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2023), "REVOLTING" (Cul-de-sac of Blood, 2024), and "Blue Stingers Instead of Wings" (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025). Her most recent full-length poetry book, "Malformed Confetti" was published by Crisis Chronicles Press. You can find out more at https://julietcook.weebly.com/.

‘same spectral symphony’ — poetry by Julio César Villegas

CDXVI.

Clock tower frozen at 4:16 for its 28th year now. scaffolding like spiderwebs like safety nets spiraling down its structure, numerals faded like any Roman plagiarism: white flames, faces of animals in symmetrical dozen pinned along that circumference where time was discernible. public records, private testimonies on its architect, engineers, or builders still without harvest, a drought tolling every hour down to the exact millisecond, for 28 years, while both arms remain transfixed: no signs of visible rust, yet possible blueprint of involuntary crucifixion.

but ideas are not identities, nor descriptions destinies, nor feelings facts: just factual for now. ophiocordyceps unilateralis, tropical fungus hijacking the physiologies of rainforest ants, possessing them to climb up a plant’s stalk, clamp mandible to leaf vein, & wait for its final act of bastard metamorphosis: from your skull another’s forest forces, spores of your sacrifice. repeating the cycle to repeat the cycle until the cycle no longer looks strange but like stranger looking up at the clock tower frozen at 4:16 for its 28th year now wondering why the safety nets? what possession compels any citizenry, sleuth, inspector, or sadist to go searching for stairwells?

same spectral symphony: strangers, stairwells, seeking, something, skylines, silhouettes, spores. rustless arms frozen as white flames flicker as animals’ faces cycle & shift in eternal clockwork.

---

Tsunade

analog anachronism: anarchy of one’s birth beyond any given binary.
voices with my mother’s eyes, birthday gifts a living room w/ eggshells
until we stopped keeping count. whole numbers to fractions, irrationalities,
carving equations on apartment walls with great-grandmother’s kitchen knives,
a dropout’s dissection, attempt at everything’s theory: I am here, I am me, yet I’m not.
on the edge of the bed watching myself crouched in the corner, handfuls of chamomile,
watching myself watch my other self from the ceiling, somewhere between waveform
& witness, my fourth self standing at the doorway like when parents believe you’re asleep.
the veil’s thinned, sometimes starved: not a fast, not an abandon, but an autonomous 3rd state, counting supernovas with an unfixed gaze, watching them disappear once I re-materialize.
dots & dashes, 1’s and 0’s, derivatives & diagrams & limits of our own language’s liability:
oasis more of a mockery once factoring the sea of desert surrounding one, as is definition as definition, immutable, predictable, always starting here, and always ending there, always. punctuation, question marks hooked through my jaw, this roofless mouth, unseen puppeteers waiting for either side of the tensions to relent first. how stubborn, binary of strings & theories. disobedience civil until it can’t be. pretending the string is a kite’s doesn’t disguise its intent.
lips like eyelids both stitched, be a doll. dragonfly wings halted in admiration of orb-weavers.
on the edge of myself watching the bed, walking on ceilings in fear of another living room,
clean & spotless & lightest of steps, my soles still scrape on eggshell, pieces of crescent moons neither here nor there, yes: in this I am free. pressed tongue to diode, knuckle clenching string.

---

Julio César Villegas was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Essex County, New Jersey. Puerto Rico Se Levanta. https://linktr.ee/jcvillegas

'I think I know why I am looking at roses' — poetry by Stephanie Victoire

They Make You Hungry for the Holiness

Tell me, why does the smoke of frankincense still make such a mark? Were all those bruises made on cold wood—dents in my knees, bent and fixed down—meant to keep me kept? At funerals I think I know why I am looking at roses. You said that Davinci’s opus etched onto her casket was what she would have loved and what she would have deserved and I agreed. I think I might be the sinking when it was sinking in. I asked for grace and it snagged on its way down to me. On St. Bride’s spire. A corridor at the River Thames. I love that fog the most. Some prayers are still hovering there. They are Tower Ravens with wings pinned. Grazing blue and grey. Charcoal when smudged against violet. Maybe I’m the censer, swinging back and forth by a sanctified hand.

---

Stephanie Victoire is an author and creative writing mentor born in London, UK, to a Mauritian-Creole family. Stephanie has published several works of fiction in literary anthologies, including: “Spiritus Mundi” (Liminal 11 Press), “Outsiders” (Three of Cups Press) and “Flamingo Land and Other Stories” (Flight Press). She has commissioned and broadcast short works with BBC Radio and published her collection of short stories, & The Other World, It Whispers (Salt Publishing), which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Saboteur Awards, and shortlisted for the DIVA Literary Awards. Stephanie currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

'All the trees are you' — poetry by Barbara Ungar

ALL SOULS

I stay home quiet wrapped in cotton wool

holding my own hand consider the emptiness

within each atom throw my voice into the void

in a waking dream I saw your face

There was a last time we came together

without knowing

When I got there you were already cold
on the couch the cat curled beside you
nested in a ratty sweater stone deaf
he slept through the hubbub purring
We watched him dwindle away after you
& buried him in your old sweater

Get used to disappearing
as the veil thins
the dead come close
You said
My arms are always around you
but where

---

equinox

and it’s fall again

the dead as near
as the other side
of a fallen leaf

*

You’ve been gone eight months.
Should I fly to Rome?

How to climb the mountain of each night
the slightest question
an avalanche

*

The yard’s a wild mess like my hair

I forgot to pick the raspberries

Sweeping dead fuchsia from the porch
each day a new drift

Sound of wind

*

How can I live without my skin?

I have no off-switch

I am emptiness

but I leave a paper trail

---

NOBODY BARBIE

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.
—Epictetus

You were living a posthumous existence,
like Keats, each thing for the last time.

Where are you, except in my dreams?
You have vanished like a cloud.

Poems will be the way we talk from now on.
The moon delivers yours punctually.

Is it hard for you to stay with me, like
swimming against a rip tide?

Fearless, you slept, even in hell.

All the trees are you. I slept well
and did not dream of you.

Impermanence our theme for the year.
Most of the gold is on the ground.

Turning into the darkness, a winter coat
or blanket, we were all collectively holding

our breath. This grief is my super power.

---

Barbara Ungar’s sixth book, After Naming the Animals, addressing the sixth extinction, appeared in 2024 from The Word Works, which also published Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life. Prior books include Save Our Ship, which won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Poetry Prize. Professor emerita from The College of St Rose, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. www.barbaraungar.net