'bloodsponge rubies & wicked diamonds' — poetry by Emily Murman

sandman

the garnets in yr ring
gleam as wet tumors do
above somewhere a dove
coos uselessly

frost powders the grass
every nippy morning
winks in sour sun & I
sore on my skeleton,
bristle & hiss

wrap me in yr black cloak, konstábl
let me somnambulate a little while

moldering w / desire more devilish
than ever
limbs heavy as coffin lids
sleep sweet as tea cakes

---

rings

I misplace my rings
for four days & nights

the thought of their
bloodsponge rubies
& wicked diamonds
heckling til I cry myself dry
chaplipped & wheezing

we pick apart clumps
of dryer lint
tear open bags of last
week’s garbage
rot hanging in january
air, snow sparkling
under flashlights

perhaps they are
some hierophantic fetish
mere metal symbols
of my failing containment
objects to be twisted
when unease creeps in

we go to the funeral home
hours after close I cannot
let him in

fumbling for lightswitch I
glance at my visitors
one waterfat & green
another younger than
this husband
& feel nothing

---

post-

I prep only for a day &
everything clings
even soaped my parched
hands reek

think what it means to be
opened
of who does the opening

& an unattended faucet
is always trickling
it is only natural
to crave & to carve

I mean if this month
you watched an artery bleat
in the throat of some lover
know I have held that thing

---

Emily Murman is an autistic poet & mortician. She holds an MFA in poetry from National University & is the author of four chapbooks, “SHRIVEL AND BLOOM” (Dancing Girl Press, June 2021), “I want your emergency” (Selcouth Station Press, July 2021), “all the light in here” (Ghost City Press, June 2023), & “hey nonino” (Dancing Girl Press, July 2024). Emily lives in Chicago with her husband & two sphynx cats. 

'beauty is the last thing before death' — poetry by Francis de Lima

Sortilege

“The living reduce the dead to those who have lived: yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.” — John Berger

and here the dead become a part of the landscape. sling their sickles over their shoulders, after a day of work. I carry anything with me. carry you, carry me. carry the boy, jumped out of the sixth-floor glass window. carry the man lifted from the lake. carry the woman, fallen asleep. carry the sleep, carry the forgiving. when we march to the crackling fury of a steel furnace, we rob our feet blind, bandage them in sleep. when did you last feel the basin of rocks? there they repose. the dead carry your feet. every step, a handprint. the ground is pass-through, permeable. their hands meet our soles to make a step; a wave of palms, every arch, a mountain to circumvent. there is knowledge under the moss, in the mulch. the gone are collecting in their droves. driving us out of the heavy door of the future, where our tongues will syncopate to the same rhythm. arranging the string figure of the woven child. divining the tempest, the soft humming. having secret meetings with the first dew. showing the sunlight which way to go.

---

Why I am not a critic

Because one day I woke with an omen in the throat. Trade lines like baseball cards. Because I want to make music with the chords pressed into the red of skin not delineate their concurrent tension in the paragraph. Because the circle of my life got smaller. Got good. Grift, catapult. Because starlings murmurate in their own shape. Because hurricanes interlink into dead men walking. Because truth. Interpreter. There are old gods just behind the window. Because I don’t really understand what people mean when they say doozy. Because at the end of the day I want to say this is true, but I end up saying this is beautiful. Firework. Because I want to be beautiful, because beauty is the last thing before death. Before avarice. In our hunt for honour we went as far as suppression. Likewise, a handshake cannot be dealt with a singular body. Feeling falling. The hands intensify like moss up the tree. Because climbing for the sake of height is the reverse of falling on accident. Because these breaths equal a conversation. Because your heat in the falling light, because your heat. Lightning rod. Because in engraving the alphabet, I slipped into the early hammock of the dawn. Because the dawn. Because the fuzzy quality of atoms. Soft light. Because gravity does not know the ground, its insistence. It knows space, the inverse of a leap. Riot. Rhizome. Tangle. Knot. Knowing. Corpus. Cavern. Climate. Raincheck. Forest. Special. Because finally, the circle must hold and it did. Because finally. Because finally, within the circle, we found the music of the dawn, its long held note, and it was near silent. Deafening.

---

Francis de Lima is a Finnish-Brazilian poet living in London, where they recently completed their MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway. Many of their poems can be found in online literature magazines, and some have even been shortlisted for an award or two. They also work as a translator, as well as in various roles within independent theatre, film, and art projects, both in the UK and abroad.

'remember the language' — poetry by Adjei Sun

A Passing: 2

In salt and lime I washed off
The blue vervain, then stirred
In a cooking pot. He spoke alive poems:
Like rain birds and black birds
In the shadows that taught people
How to lift off the ground like sahara
Dust, when thunder swallowed the cries
From their throats like conch shells
Let out to remember the language
Of canoes on obsidian
Tides, sirius stars, beaded
Mask dances to the drum.
Said not to add sugar,
That the bitterness was medicinal,
That those whose pillows were rock stone
And still did not wait to be buried
Facing east before they rose
Knew what those who were in paradise
Stole from their own souls.

---

Adjei Sun is a poet and facilitator based in Birmingham, England. His emotionally resonant poetry has been performed nationally and internationally including at The World Expo, Birmingham Hippodrome and The Natural History Museum, London. He was also formerly awarded as a BBC 1Xtra Future Figure for his work as a poet supporting young people and communities, leading creative and educational projects. He often draws on Caribbean storytelling and histories, environmental themes, surrealism and social justice poetic traditions. You can find Adjei Sun on Instagram @adjeisun.

'through the bramble in the name of joy' — poetry by Tara Labovich

girlbedroom

---

Childhood Law

the law declared dozens
of fruiting bodies planted
in every yard. we grew rich
with hazelnut, strawberry,
tart cherry, and johannisbeeren,
fat with black walnut, quince,
and honeysuckle. at the edge
of the yard tangled
a wide apple orchard, abandoned,
except for in our playpretends,
when it was populated
by land-stranded pirates.
but there, at that edge
lived the blackberries.

we’d sucker ourselves
sweet on those little gems.
we’d pry ourselves bloody
through the bramble
in the name of joy.

i, too, want to love
and be loved well—like holding
a palmful of ripe blackberries,
refusing,
to tighten the grasp, to crush
for the sake of sweetness
or dark, beaded drip.

---

Tara Labovich (they/them) is a professor of Creative Writing in Iowa. Their award-winning multi-genre writing can be found in over sixty publications, including Brevity and Tractor Beam. You can find them online at @taralabovich or checking out the prairies of the midwest with their dog, Finn.

'my feline floweret of death' — poetry by Lize du Toit

Katjiepiering

Milk-sweet little bloom,

kitten-saucer for pollinating beasts;

they spill you around the farmhouse

to ward off adders coiling in the garden.

You, little vermin gatekeeper,

waxy jasmine cat of Morpheus.

At night the moon-tears pearl

from your poison-flower lips,

ushering the grower into lush and glossy dreams,

shepherding the gardener toward Paradise,

where the executioner will hook his creamy flesh,

fork his pulpy viscera to dangle and swing

on the pickets of the butcher bird,

who perches beneath your ivory buds,

who nips from fragrant velvet salvers

below the tangled undergrowth.

You, little midnight porter,

my feline floweret of death.

*Katjiepiering is the Afrikaans name for Cape Jasmin, and its literal translation is “kitten saucer.”

---

Les Fauves

Above a threshold hover mirror tides

in rolling want, the anima and animus;

dark and dark we both verse on sides of skin,

impelled in brute-brushed impulsed ink —

poems beached on sloping flesh and shores;

on mine or yours, we count the gravitas

of lines libidinous on pale scapes of land,

luminous in snaking Aegean indigo

that stains in sweetness where we lay

heavy, milk-swathed in river sheets,

a curving hull moored in the bay of your thigh,

and when I turn, you bend into the swell and rise,

your hand the bow on violin hip,

first and index coil and loop

along the lumbar spine, thumbing

plender gap to collar bone — mine or yours;

a hundred motions edged and bled in waves

and sighs — our wildly longing ghosts

pawing animal prayers

that run ashore between bedposts.

---

Lize du Toit is a South African artist and emerging poet residing in Australia. Her creative interests pivot on melancholia as part of a larger inquiry into identity, the psychology of landscape, and suburbia as transgressive space. Lize holds a master’s degree in art and visual studies but works as an editor by day to fund her nocturnal inroads into art and writing.

'eye-shine and woods' — poetry by Eric Huff

Eden

show me eye-shine and woods, hunger and the prairie below. show me the dark swoop of bats /

of little ghosts along Crossman Creek. find refuge – nest in the hollow of my abdomen.

---

River Black

all yellow and buzz all truss and the icy river below. I see my breath all curls and disperse do you feel it in your chest? do you feel her trace a finger across the emptiness these streets? and do you hear her? the city yawns and stretches its back. shake the paint can of my heart, let the rivulets run and pool at my bare feet. are you okay? everything is mirrored as I step from the fog of each early morning. all buzz. what, then would Alvah say? river black, and the ache of ice. show me the reflections in my eyes, all glow, all breath. my name is a fright car left abandoned on an overpass and as the river thaws open, my own spirit pushes up like a crocus.

---

Eric Huff (he/him) is a public-school teacher living in the west metro area of the Twin Cities. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as 1913: A Journal of Forms, Rockvale Review, After/Thought, Molecule, Livina Press, and Action, Spectacle, among others.

'Isn’t this magical? Being like God?' — poetry by Thom C. Addington

YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE BIBLE WITH THE BEAR

Exodus 3:2 – The stuffing machine whirls with soft muscle tissue.
Luke 24:32 – “First, rub its heart between your hands to warm it up.”
1 Samuel 3:10 – “Next, put its heart to your ear so it’ll be a good listener.”
Isaiah 35:3 – “Now, rub its heart on your knee so it’ll be there when you fall.”
Song of Solomon 1:2 – “Give its heart a kiss to add your love.”
Ezekiel 36:26 – “Close your eyes, make a wish—now rub its heart to yours.”
Genesis 2:22 – It’s taken from me to the machine, alive, to be given shape.
Isaiah 14:14 – “Isn’t this magical? Being like God?”

---

ON DEATH ROW, I THOUGHT FOOD DIED, TOO

in the decompensating stomachs
of murderers, of molesters—
of the innocent.

Last meals prepare
those suspended
in unlife to end,

satisfying the human knee-jerk
to bring something to death
with us. At the end, we want

Hugo’s chapters-long street scenes,
fresh flowers forever on the sill,
and a large, slow meal well-wined—

like a good, old dog who’s crawled
into your stomach to dream.
But then I remember that

acid in a corpse is still acid
just as a tree can murder
its friends by falling, unwitnessed.

The unseen hydrolytic work
eats for a rigored
mouth like chelating

junk cars,
back-yarded and cinderblocked
for spite.

---

Thom C. Addington (he/him) is a queer, Catholic, rural Southern writer with Appalachian roots raised on Rappahannock land in King & Queen County, Virginia. He currently serves as Associate Dean of Business, Humanities, & Public Service at Reynolds Community College. His work appears in Outskirts Literary Journal, Soundings East Magazine, and elsewhere.

'Spacious fruit, ripe fruit' — poetry by Patrick Paridee Samuel

Daybreak

Doesn’t it scare you this blue

morning repeatedly its

intensities; the chatter

as chaotic, all together

worms discovering the bird

song onto them. Deeper

into the ground

until winter, hell

by river, flicker the lantern

candlesticks. Singed

and thin the dove

bones seeding weeds.

Toward day, colder than

dirt, into clay.

---

Driving the Blue Jewel

Idling leather, my mother’s

fur coat useless without wind

forcing its skin zipped, indulging

indigo. My bloody heart

warmer color implies, windows

airing my hair memories

in ring-gripped fingers.

Steering the backyard limbo

ride bent sky-blind,

smiling. Crisp, cool beneath

carport pull string, room

temp beers still boxed, I ease

the beast from the house’s

undertow, bottomless berry

bruise rushing to the touch.

Spacious fruit, ripe fruit.

Navy-shaded eyes star

the night in doldrums; essential

deflections capturing affairs

in daylight, surprised

by the seamless fit of an alibi.

---

Patrick Paridee Samuel is the author of And Another Thing (Broken Sleep Books) and the chapbook A Suite of Heads (Ghost City Press). He received an MFA from Columbia College. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Seaford Review, and Villain Era. Patrick lives in Nashville where he works in university press publishing.

'you desire me to a dead end' — poetry by Katie Jean Shinkle

Caduceus

Houses like eyeteeth west-end and the ex-wife
down the street, the son’s first job
every near miss becomes smaller
ice on electricity lines, crumbs on a black shirt
a line of vision only seen through dilated eyes.
When was the last time you let anyone
drive you, hold doors for you, fuss?
The attentiveness of it.
Remember the hard years. When darkness crept in.
You paid your bills, went to work, had your big ideas,
thought about sex so often it drove you
to near madness. Your wake of destruction.
The forests between the airport
and the town you live in, between one large city
and another, become a centralized blur
listening to rap music,
speeding like your life depends on it
to take you back to where you live
though you doubt it is home.
How, if you go fast enough, the teenager inside
feels the same, a hard you escaped.
You think of her breasts as you drive,
think of her nylons, the way her throat was delicate
but muscular, a python. You could have had
your way, couldn’t you? You always can
though something goes wrong at the finish
every time. You know better.
Lovers devour each other
only when timing becomes immeasurable,
the sorrow bigger than them both.

---

Caduceus

The way bodies curve into each other.
A desire, a start. Too many ways to say
the night goes on and on. Life is short and life is long.
The photograph of genitals comes through text message,
unwarranted but not exactly unwanted.
In the car she asks if you are married,
you say divorced. You say, from the cornfields
of a difficult Midwest childhood.
You say, my teen years were difficult.
Young adult life, difficult. Now, I am middle-aged.
Growing more beautiful by the day. What envy.
You imagine inside you a place to lie down and dream.
A vastness that tells you about how to deal with heartache.
We leave each other in brief replaced with day drinking and lovers,
roofing repairs and books to read in-between.
The winter is over in the South but there are places
where snow accumulates for many more months.
You remember those places vaguely now.
In my mind’s eye, I am above you walking to the bar,
a drone for your every move. I am above you as you
sex. I am above you as you are above you, watching
yourself make the worst decisions possible to satiate
the emptiness. I am above you while you think of me,
considering the brief days, wondering more about my life.
I am above you while you let your hair grow curly,
while you fret about students and existence,
your insatiable desire, the template of being misunderstood.
Maybe this is what it means to love at first sight,
a seed sown and rotted. I think of all the years
I was left undesired. The years the snow piled
as tall as the house. The years the corn didn’t grow
on time. And now, you desire me to a dead end.
How the curve grows and grows until bottomed-out.

---

Katie Jean Shinkle’s books and chapbooks include The Only Way Out is Through (YesYes Books, 2026) and Transference (winner of the 2024 Gasher Press Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2025). Other work has appeared in Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), FLAUNT Magazine, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from Lambda Literary and Ragdale, and she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.

'I extracted my own heart' — poetry by Anne Champion

PERSEPHONE DISCUSSES OTHER ROYALTY

People say it could’ve been worse. You could’ve never resurrected
from that cave in Eleusis. This always makes me cry.
You don’t understand, they say. Let me tell you the story
of the king who severed the heads off every queen he impregnated.
Let me tell you the story of the king with a mistress whose queen died
being chased by people hungry to consume her loneliness. At least
he wasn’t like your father, they say. You don’t understand, I say.
You think Hades gave me a crown? You think he was loyal to me?
I wasn’t the type of woman who could escape but willingly returned to a tyrant.
I didn’t become queen because some man could put his hands on me
without consequences. I didn’t marry a wolf and passively watch him feed
on our children and other prey. Do you realize what I had to kill inside of me
to become his queen? I extracted my own heart with his forked spear. I fed it to him.

---

Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (Bowker, 2024), and This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (Bowker, 2024). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere.  She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She received her MFA in poetry from Emerson College. 

'Can language become a noose?' — poetry by Marko Pogačar, translated by Andrea Jurjević

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Editor’s note: These poems are from ‘Book of Holidays' by Marko Pogačar, whose previous book—also translated by Andrea Jurjević into the English—was a finalist for the National Translation Award in Poetry. ‘Book of Holidays' consists of 52 linked prose poems (and a few illustrations) that ask what happens to holidays of places that no longer exist or perhaps have never existed.

These poems have been published as images to preserve the language, which browsers sometimes auto-translate.

---

Marko Pogačar (Split, Croatia, 1984) is one of Croatia's most translated contemporary poets and a leading literary voice of his generation. He is an award-winning author of nearly 20 volumes of poetry, short prose, essays, and travelogues. A frequent guest at literary events worldwide, Pogačar has received numerous honors, including Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Récollets-Paris, and DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In addition to writing books, he collaborates with musicians and occasionally writes for radio and screen.  

Andrea Jurjević is a Croatian poet, literary translator, and painter originally from Croatia. She is the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook: In Another Country, winner of the 2022 Saturnalia Books Prize; Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize; and Nightcall, which was the 2021 ACME Poem Company Surrealist Series selection. Her book-length translations from Croatian include Olja Savičević’s Mamasafari and Jadranka’s First Life as well as Marko Pogačar’s Midnight Verbs and Dead Letter Office, which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Her poems, stories, translations, and essays have appeared in The Believer, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Joyland, The New Republic, The Writer’s Chronicle, and many other publications. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches in the English Department at Georgia State University. To learn more, visit https://andreajurjevic.com/  

'a wretched thing on this earth' — poetry by Liza Sparks

Self-Immolation

some part of my father must be flowers—peony and lily

his beliefs are bees they are all sting

where is the honey

he believes I will burn in hell for all eternity

he does not know that I have cut off my hand like a butcher

he does not know that I have swallowed the wet eel of my tongue

he does not know that I have ripped out my own eyes—olives rolling

on the ground all in the name of sainthood and I was never good enough

for his god he does not know all the places I have wept and the moss that grew there

to cover any happiness I have swam in lakes of fire—psychosis has taken me

and smoked my brain like a joint I could smell the smoke I could see the ash—

everything crumbling haven’t I suffered enough in this life I have crawled—

a wretched thing on this earth I am learning to stand without shame

I am happy to dance with his devil—that pagan god

my father does not know the sweet grapes I have eaten from the devil’s hands

I have danced all night until morning—until my feet burned

I have watched the sunrise without sleep in my eyes

I have drank entire bottles of champagne

I have lit my flesh on fire with my own hand

I am a carousel of pleasure I am a carnal thing

I want sweetness in my mouth

I have worn the ring of this life I am wedded to her

I am making love to her animal fur I am biting her neck

I have had more than one lover at a time—

bodies burning

bodies on fire

bodies on the hot hot coals of this life

bodies sublime

---

Liza Sparks (she/her) is a writer, poet, and creative. Her work is informed by her intersecting identities as a brown-multiracial-neurodivergent-pansexual-woman. Liza is a student in the 2025-2026 Poetry Collective at The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Allium, CALYX, TIMBER, Split This Rock, Pangyrus LitMag, The Pinch, and many others. She is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee. Liza has two forthcoming poetry chapbooks with Gnashing Teeth Publishing and Finishing Line Press, respectively. You can find more of her work or connect with Liza on IG @sparksliza534, Blue Sky @lsparks, or on her website, lizasparks.com.