'down down down the hall of mirrors' — poetry by Ronnie K. Stephens

THE MUSEUM OF BROKEN THINGS

after Rachel McKibbens

step through the turnstile and bear witness / bear witness to the unbearable / the unbearable begins with a field of strawberries / a field of strawberries emptying their red red hearts / their red red hearts empty onto the hillside / the hillside and the strawberries and the boy break open / the boy breaks open mouthed and flying / open mouthed and flying the boy kisses rusted steel soft / rusted steel soft and savage toothed / savage toothed gears rattle a cigarette boat still / a cigarette boat still as a grave in the backyard / a grave in the backyard for the tip of the knife / the tip of the knife and the ankle fracture / the ankle fractures against the pavement / the pavement leads to a water warped picture bible / picture bibles for all the kids on the day of baptism / on the day of baptism a limp wristed wave / a limp wristed wave and the cold slap of a truck door / a truck door slaps shut and the gear shift punches down / down down down the hall of mirrors / the hall of mirrors laughs / itself to sleep

---

Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:

I chose this poem for Possession because it was, for me, an exercise in seeing how I both possess and am possessed by anxieties directly tied to formative memories from my childhood. A memory palace of sorts, but more funhouse than reality, each memory reflected indefinitely, distorted.

---

Ronnie K. Stephens holds a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies, a Master of Arts in Creative Writing, a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction, and a PhD in English. His research centers the role of poetry in subverting antiethnic and anti-LGBTQ legislation affecting public education. He is the author of three books: Universe in the Key of Matryoshka, They Rewrote Themselves Legendary, and The Kaleidoscope Sisters.

'Grew appendages, clawed towards light' — poetry by Lucie Brooks

Transubstantiation

One morning, I woke with a mouth full of stones instead of teeth. Then my skin turned pale pink, from soft and warm to cool and hard. My mouth slicked over and disappeared. Then my eyes. My body shrank. Smaller and smaller until only a polished piece of rose quartz was left atop the sheets. Later, someone – I couldn’t say who, on account of losing my eyes – found me and slipped me into her pocket. My smooth surface warmed against her thigh as we traveled around town, from the flower shop to the hospital, and every time she grew anxious, she found me again, thumb worrying my smooth side, both of us whispering it’s okay. Elsewhere, magma pushed towards the Earth’s crust. Minerals collected in the heat. A piece of rose quartz formed. Then it turned soft, stretched. Grew appendages, clawed towards light. Became girl. Covered in dirt and looking for answers.

---

author’s note on this possession-themed poem:

Many of my poems play with the concept of transformation, or becoming, which can just be another way of saying possessed. In Transubstantiation, you have the mirror possessions - the girl and the rose quartz, and the kind of force that keeps you clawing towards the light.

Lucie Brooks is a poet and professor. She is a board member of Sarabande Books, an award-winning, independent literary publishing house founded in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the 2022 Kentucky Poetry Society Chaffin/Kash poetry prize winner and a 2024 Grand Prix poetry prize finalist. Her work can be found in print and online, including in Swing, Salvation South, Catapult, and the LEON Review.

'do not be afraid' — poetry by Maia Decker

Speaking to My Mother at Twenty

I know you are nervous because you have been dreaming—
visions of the buck your lover shot and hung, of your father
burning the baby blue dresser the day you left home.
You follow the smoke west, but by the time you arrive,
ghosts live in every house. The dead play loud music
and you cannot sleep, so you find a lover who dreams.
Your new friends want happiness. They sleep three to a bed.
They want to dance. It is 1999 and the world promises
to end very soon. A woman stops you in the street and says
all the unborn babies spoke to her. They said do not be afraid.
Four thousand miles east, the dresser keeps burning.
You swim in the creek and think blue blue blue.
You stumble out the door, hand on your beating heart.
Know that when you tell your lover I am coming, he kneels.
He says do not be afraid. He says baby, let’s go west.

---

Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:

For me, poetry is a way to transmute consciousness across time and space, to be possessed by circumstances typically not our own. This piece is for my mother in her younger years; I imagine that it will somehow reach her, traveling via language from now to then.  

---

Maia Decker is a writer and teacher from Montana. She graduated in 2024 from Yale University with her BA in English and concentration in Fiction. She is interested in material histories of the West, dreams, and writing as a way to make sense of our obligations to others, dead and alive. 

'The darkened bedroom' — poetry by Jessica Purdy

Custody

Something gritty and splintered intruded between my lips; my aired out tongue. Abrasive like an emery board. A flat wood stick. I gasped and awoke. My mouth was dry as a dying child. The rain came after. And sunk the woodpile deeper into ash. As if someone from another house—an orphanage perhaps—had claimed to be my family. He ate singed spiders crisped on the hot stove. My brother. His tongue wasn’t supposed to speak our language or be near me. Cigarettes were taped to the ivied brick house. In the black I hovered out the window to blow smoke from inside my lungs up to guilty stars. Away from trouble. And the weasel slipped in and out of the room like a sheet of paper let fall from a godhand.

---

Consume

My mother home from work. Me home from school. And I was quiet so as not to wake her. The darkened bedroom. Her sweet smell and the sheets. She had been fifteen once and chased through woods by a strange man. The sticks scratched her bare legs. She taught me to use pads. In her drawer was a belted thing I’d never use. The yellowjacket found a hole and slept with me. Stung my eye. My orange cat hugged me around my neck. When I was told I was fat, my mother suggested I drink broth when hungry. With her blue hands she melted animal gelatin for my skin and nails. I was frightened of my own bed. My note box stained my fingers every time I pried it open. It had never dried after I painted it black. Words adhered to my fingerprints.

---

Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:

I wrote these poems in a gush after reading some of Marosa di Giorgio's prose poems I found online. It was so coincidental because I was researching the "necropastoral" and came across her work (or maybe it was the other way around?). I know I had heard of her work recently because Lisa Marie Basile (Luna Luna's esteemed editor) had been praising her in posts on social media. After I wrote the poems I thought to look up synonyms for "possession" and found the words "Consume" and "Custody" and thought they worked well for the titles of my poems. Thank you Lisa for introducing me to Marosa di Giorgio. I have been "possessed" by her writing. Now I'm reading her book "I Remember Nightfall" which I ordered after writing these.

---

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in Action, Spectacle, Marrow Magazine, Does It Have Pockets, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.

'I am the body that I am under' — poetry by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

On Estuary #2, by Tadashi Sato

Oil on Canvas, Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa.
(rocks disrupt water)

I carry my rocks inside.
The way in, too quiet: an end, the lapping of water, a start.
A ghost story and a love story: same difference.
We like to say dead body but we never say live body.
My pressure points, repetitive, no heat; life has left this canvas:
water sputters, drowns us all, beckons the birds to visit.
Clouds leak from the summit.
I want to flee, seek out the color orange, a dry square room,
wrap this weighted blanket around someone else’s body,
so it won’t find me. I fail.
I am under the body. I sleep. I wake under the body,
I forget my temples, a gravy of detritus rapping to get in.
The gray water comes, not friend-like,
twigs, moss, water bugs, plastic, the sheer volume of it all
because: physics.
I have no natural environment.
I am a natural environment.
I am a body.
I am under a body.
I am the body that I am under.

---

Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:

Sometimes, no matter what we do, we cannot escape or get away from a feeling inside of us. The feeling possesses us. In this particular case, with this poem, the rocks represented grief to me. I've had several conversations with friends about carrying a sack of grief around with me, even while moving forward and experiencing joy, and living my life. The grief, about a relationship that ended, was always a weight I carried/carry. Next step: one friend said to create a dinner party and invite the grief to a seat at the table and have a conversation. So that is in my future!

---

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens (she/her) went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she is landlocked. Her fifth, full length poetry collection, “Pool Parties” is now available from Unsolicited Press. She is the author of fifteen poetry chapbooks. Some of her work appears in The Pinch, South Broadway Press, Cleaver, Zone 3, Slant, Yalobusha Review, and Grist. Find her online at http://jennifermacbainstephens.com/.

'Hotter than gluttony' — poetry by Anne-Adele Wight

Lemon Tree

A lemon tree grows under water. To someone swimming, snorkeling, or peering from the deck of a boat it looks insubstantial, cobwebby. Seawater bleaches the lemons of color; from above, the tree could be a different source of pearls.

Divers drop down to recover a fortune, surface with a basket of citrus fruit. Magnetic, sunlight yellow as it breaks the surface, hotter than gluttony. Lemon is a lemon is a tree is a coal stove.

The tree branches outward into submarine eruption yellow as sulfur. All around it the sea boils with acid. Lemon is a lemon is a depth charge is a frenzied motherlode.

---

The World of Catacombs

Because the undersea judgment becomes too much at that modulation of pressure. Time doesn’t exist any more than the vertical franchise on which we build upward from the earth.

Up is upward in only one direction. Sideways molt or breakage point facing down. The universe is a subway of direction finding. The train to the catacombs clatters like a rooster into sunlight before plunging into the intestinal wall of those a century dead. A century in which they shrank out of their best clothes into a loneliness of teeth, of death’s-head exposure.

Where into the world of catacombs does the sea enter? Murmuring or crashing on the other side of a stone wall. How long can limestone hold the sea back from a dead commune?

What will change if the wall is breached? A revolting float of corpses like hurricane victims into a live city.

---

A Plastic Horse

The little plastic horse fell down the bathtub drain into a volcano. He found himself in a forest where jewels grew everywhere. Sapphires and rubies hung in clusters from silky branches, and emeralds lay greener than moss underfoot. The little horse grazed the forest, grew large and dark, changed into a real horse with a confused memory of being plastic in a child’s slippery fingers. His eyes glowed amethyst.

She remembers herself about to cry as her tiny horse ran off down the drain. Her mother improvising stories in which the horse discovered fabulous adventures in the magic forest and lived happily ever after. Now she remembers being the horse, grazing on emeralds gentle as a forest floor.

---

Anne-Adele Wight is the author of An Internet of Containment, The Age of Greenhouses, Opera House Arterial, and Sidestep Catapult, all from BlazeVOX. She has curated several performance series in Philadelphia, including the multi-genre series Jubilant Thicket. Her work has been published internationally in print and online and includes appearances in Poets and Writers, The Adroit Journal, Luna Luna, Apiary, Bedfellows, and others.

'As though from Babel' — poetry by Fox Henry Frazier

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Fox Henry Frazier is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer from upstate New York. Her third full-length poetry collection, Break Blow Burn, is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing in 2026. Her debut novel, Francesca, is forthcoming in 2027.

'See my wants' — poetry by Aaliyah Anderson

knifeless

Touch me, hands at these roots, pulling scalp
from hurt. Say sorry, forgiveness rings through
drenched wind. Hello means goodbye.

Dungngo, see my wants. My country tousles
my fat. My systems. Spout to bark. The slipping,
the call. Her detached finger in a gentle fist.

I was a kid, yet knew harm. Knew that to feed
is to care, is to find the blood, spot the shedded
layers of life. To arm yourself is to greet me.

---

Flee

Lemme speak to the shore
which gave me these
bumps lovingly. Thin rings
which died once plucked.
Fangs in the corner,
buried in our backyard,
breaking my turf &
tightly whistling at night.
Pinakbet stirring itself.
My forward ocean & the perspiration
of its body. Bricks break
pigeons’ skulls. Pack
nothing & I bring
my navy bra. Cupboards
blow wide not only in
rainy dreams. This
isn’t where—just how
trying to adjust. To
feast. Precision of small
steps leading, yes,
guiding us to
the trees with split
lychee & the spooned
hope.

---

Aaliyah Anderson (she/her) is a Black and Asian American student at the University of Mary Washington majoring in English: Creative Writing and American Studies. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Third Coast, The Madison Review, Brink, and elsewhere. Winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2024 Student Award, Aaliyah currently resides on Monacan and Patawomeck land and is obsessed with burnt cheese and intersectional storytelling.

'black viper dangling a golden fruit' — poetry by Nova Glyn

Straight out the Eight-Turn

You came straight out of the eight-turn,
black viper
dangling a golden fruit
of clusters of stars,
rattling it in my face.
I took the bait;
I knew the hand that dangled it;
I knew it was bait
and I took it because I wanted it.

---

Noyade in the Pink Cavity

Fingers dripping with
opalescent milk.

A hit—
while our secrets, murmured,
are executed in death.

Guillotine’s at the helm,
ready for the neck
but my hair is pulled southward,
a black ribbon
tied ‘round instead.

An inked chest
comes to life with my hot breath.
The deadly nightshade emerges, stalking;
sprouting from your ribcage—
hungry for innocence.

He spins me round
like a candlestick head,
pulls me in lustfully,
buries me with the sheets
in the bed.

Empty is the room
where the white calf
breathes its first breath.

---

Nova Glyn is a young emerging female poet, who examines the mundane, society and politics, female sexuality, desire, and what it means to be a woman in the modern world, often through a satirical or meditative tone. She self-published her first poetry collection in the summer of 2024, Romance In Stark Summers, which includes her poem 'Suicide: Chasms or Mountains?' that featured in the 2023 BAU poetry anthology following a poetry competition. Her new concept poetry collection, Dark Columbine, will be published this summer, in 2025, by the Scottish publisher Gometra Press.

'It would be unfair to touch you' — poetry by grace (ge) gilbert

Pink verses

I feel the marrow
of a home street

A place of love

There is steam against the window of my sister’s room
Where you were once a very gentle animal

How many times have we lost contact
through the gadget of the past?

I saw your parents at the craft market
Your father was pale

We had a terrible love affair meant for children

and I feel like a little duck
I think of you all day

---

March

Nipples caked like dirt
beneath the pink top I borrowed from my
dead aunt

Eating
blueberries
in the window
of a screen door
she had also left behind

It would be unfair to touch you so I don’t want to

puffed up completely

I didn’t know detritus was pronounced like
that
if so i wouldn’t have wrote it

---

grace (ge) gilbert (they/them) is a poet, writer and collage artist. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where they now teach. they are the author of Holly (YesYes Books, 2026), a hybrid image and text book about the 1976 murder of their paternal grandmother, as well as three chapbooks: the closeted diaries: essays (Porkbelly Press, 2022), NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK (Antenna Books, 2023) and today is an unholy suite (Barrelhouse, 2024). their work can be found in 2023's Best of the Net Anthology, the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Adroit and elsewhere. They teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at Brooklyn Poets, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and other institutions.  

'Praying in retrograde' — poetry by Courtney Leigh

Blood Lemons

Show me how
to make a sandwich
in a dream in the dark
of a kitchen, I’m shoving
a bong down my throat
where I keep the good meat
the body / the blood
the lemon juice I grip
in the tender insides
of my cheeks, like holding
a mouthful of tacks
without swallowing.
I’m bent on the tile
bracing my curvature
rearward hands & feet
praying in retrograde
forgive me forgive
this sandwich I eat
I’m not meant to be
carry me back-crawling
in the acid churn
of this magenta dream
forgive me forgive me
forgive me—I crank
my neck sidewind
forgive me for not
being full.

---

Courtney Frankenstein

I wake to a burning
dawn in my chest
I’m here to live
this another-day
they told me today
would be an old sack
& I the cheese
I the mustiness /
mold spores settling
atop the sheets,
my life-bed where
the part of me dying
is night-body
indica breath
& heavy agony
forming in the creases
sparking sadistic metals
a cation of aliving—
reanimation is total
annihilation of the person
I am before
in the linen currents
in the depressive room
where light flashes
& faces flicker
like tv specters
back & forth.

---

Courtney Leigh lives in Phoenix, AZ where she runs Crimson Sage (crimsonsageaz.com) & White Stag Publishing with her husband. She is the author of the chapbook “the unrequited <3<3 of red riding hood & her lycan lover” from Dancing Girl Press. 

'To not want is death' — poetry by Letitia Trent

Taking a Picture of the Waxing Gibbous Moon with My Shitty Phone

I tried to forget this poem the entire walk, to let the lines go and focus on the meaty slap of my sandals against the pavement, the breath rasping up my throat. A poet said to sometimes let a line go to signal your lack of attachment, your trust that it will come back or trust that what’s lost is worth the presence. I believe this, though when I was in a mindfulness program I wrote “to not want is death” in the margins of a notebook when an instructor extolled the freedom of emptiness. I get it, I believe it, but sitting together in a circle where everyone agrees makes me want to defend the busy, humming mind. I argued with the teacher who instructed us on spontaneous photography as opposed to planned composition. I argued the idea of Big Mind, a distance from which every horror becomes the bumbling of ants over a dropped crouton. We’ve got to hold the lived proportion of horror, I said, otherwise, how do we not sit placid at a wise distance, another kind of separation? When everyone in the room agrees I need to sour the vibe, make the vibes as unbearable to everyone else as they are to me, the vibes like smell from the garbage, the lid lost, overflowing. On this walk I saw the moon and wanted to photograph it, then wondered if the desire to photograph was just another attachment, a way not to just be here but instead to grasp it, hold it in my hand, the pictures just a frantic bright bleed on the blueblack sky. I know Big Mind isn’t floating above the world but an attempt to set the busy workings of the mind aside to see the bigger system, to let in a little peace when we have no control. I know here is the only place I live, that’s why I want to capture it. I know it’s good sometimes to give away a line, a whole poem, to the wind to prove I don’t need it, that the well won’t go dry. There isn’t even a well. The waters always rise.

---

Infinite Resignation

An old throb, hot as the new rise
across my cheeks, red wine
exploding in my blood, I know
you from a time, 1996, 95.
Nearly thirty years later I’m reading
Kierkegaard, who says in loving
another one must be sufficient
unto himself, the lover’s
availability or actions irrelevant,
and so God’s apparent absence
is just another interpersonal challenge.
Resignation is the shirt
you sew with the fabric of your own
acceptance that maybe everything is wrong,
permanently, but also exactly
as it should be. I write this
as a sick balloon expands
across my chest. A shirt I make
of that expansion, could I wear it
through a fire, come out devoured,
and still believe I’ll make it home
for dinner? It’s nearly Christmas
again, and I don’t believe in God
but I like an impossible riddle.
Here’s one - what leaves every
room empty, what walks though it’s cut off
at the chest, what stands though
it’s a puddle on the pavement,
what’s waiting at the bus stop all night
with flowers in hand and no expectation
that you’ll ever arrive.

---

Letitia Trent's work has most recently appeared in Figure One,
Biscuit Hill, and Diagram. Her books include the novel Summer Girls
(Agape Editions, 20204) and poetry Collection Match Cut (Sundress
Publications, 2018). Trent is a mental health professional and lives
in an Ozark mountain town. Find her Substack here:
https://letitiatrent.substack.com/

'Our wildness the eternal now' — poetry by Hannah Levy

Desire

He looked at me from across the room
and I looked back. Impish, alive: black
candy eyes following my every move.
It was 113 degrees—Death Valley, 1994.
I wanted to know what it felt like
to be hunted. The rest stop smelled
like ghosts and gasoline. In the van,
my back legs stuck to the backseat
and I peeled stories from my skin.
The casino was hours away, or maybe
it was never there at all. I was small.
Gave into desire fast and won. That year,
an earthquake shattered every mirror
in the house and I laughed and laughed
as my face split down the middle.
Stuck my tongue all the way out
and felt proud. I liked dead animals
and kidnapped girls and shark attacks.
I liked how the jackalope looked mounted
on the wall. I didn’t care that he wasn’t real.

---

A childhood memory

The house is never clean
enough, and neither am I.
In a low whisper at recess,
my Catholic best friend
tells me she was forced
to kneel on rice at church
for having impure thoughts.
The next time I get sent
to my room, I crawl
into my closet naked
and turn off all the lights.
The rug weave makes my
knees both numb and raw.
I huddle there, in the dark,
pretending someone loves me
enough to show me the way
back to God.

---

When I was a girl, the La Brea tar pits told me

even those with wings aren’t free.
We are hungry animals, stolen
in time. Death after death,
our wildness the eternal now.
A mother sinks, her mouth
a frozen scream. The babies
forced to watch.

I buried that black hole
inside me—salty lips,
hands wet with want.
Sunk into my own hot tar,
the dark mess a magnet,
a rotting altar, where the
fiercest predators kneel
in rapture.

---

Hannah Levy is a writer and editor living in Northern California. She has been published in Variant Literature, Sunday Mornings at the River, Indie Earth Publishing, Rhizo Magazine, Penumbra Online, and elsewhere. She's also the editor-in-chief of The Rebis, an annual literary anthology that celebrates tarot, art, and creative writing. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s hiking in the redwoods, horseback riding, and playing extensive make-believe games with her daughter. 

'Always tipped toward the light' — poetry by Christina Lloyd

MATER DOLOROSA

In case you’ve any taste buds left, I wait for you to savor the apricot purée
before shaving the excess from around the corners of your mouth
with the spoon’s edge. Swallowing has become a thorny undertaking.
After a few spoonfuls you shake your head. No more.

The whiteboard across your bed names your carers: David, Esther,
Dr. Angeles, reading like characters that featured in your bible lessons
as we made our way down to St. Brigid’s on Van Ness. Your stories 
about Eve, King Solomon, the Stations of the Cross revealed 

what the Irish nuns charged with my First Communion skipped over.
A week later you no longer recognize me. Half-naked, you kick off
the sheets swaddling your legs; refuse the nurses’ swabbing.
Your gaunt body lingers, restless in the letting go.

---

HYACINTH

After it had bloomed
I found it keeled over,
reaching for the sun.

I cut back the flower stalk
with a butcher knife, 
then shifted the bulb 

from the forcing vase
into an old ceramic bowl
filled with water.

The oniony gleam that lay
just under its tunic
matched Marthe’s skin

as she soaked in the bath,
perhaps for hours.
Bonnard would sit

and paint her milky limbs,
her hips always tipped
toward the light.

---

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Manila and San Francisco, Christina Lloyd holds a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. Her work appears in a wide variety of journals, including Canadian Woman Studies, Hive, Meniscus, Poetry Daily, Poetry Ireland, Poet Lore, and The North. Her debut collection, Women Twice Removed, is published by Sixteen Rivers Press. She lives in San Francisco.

'We all lived once on the cusp' — poetry by Carol Hamilton

Early Music

There were Messiahs in the air
when they were young, gods
and muses to pluck strings,
set them athrum
through infinity,
and loves to lift daisies
out of their beds, send them
spinning in the vortexes of black space.
We all lived once on the cusp,
hope still a newborn
fresh-cleaned of blood and urine,
one string ours alone
from the music of the spheres,
reverberating in our hearts,
lapping distance,
licking at unseen shores
with by then (though we didn’t
know it) tiny, tiny songs,
all, all come of our own awakening.

---

Carol Hamilton has retired from teaching 2nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana and Oklahoma, from storytelling and volunteer medical translating. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published 19 books and chapbooks: children's novels, legends and poetry. She has been nominated eleven times for a Pushcart Prize. She has won a Southwest Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, Byline Magazine literary awards in both short story and poetry, Warren Keith Poetry Award, Pegasus Award and a Chiron Review Chapbook Award, Editor's Choice Book for Main Street Rag.