'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

'girl straddles the axis of ancient and eternal' — poetry by Grace Dignazio

Ode to Warehouse Rave in the Era of Diminishing Futures

After McKenzie Wark’s Raving

ghostly fortress

stripped

of your machinery

decrepit relic

abandoned

in the after times

let us gather

in your sepulchral womb

industrial hangar

aching

for familiar rattles

of assemblages

daybreak procession

of steel-toed boots

how they unbolted

your tinny muzzle

for stockpiling

so the forklift

could ram right through

we will not betray you

let us transform

this nothing zone

revel in the ruins

of collapsing capital

where we find ourselves

constructing

another kind of love

as the body sheds itself

in a fugue

of technic dissolution

sensing wholly

what it could become

we—

basement mucosae

stomping under the sprawl

fuse into oneness

---

Of Translation

girl straddles

the in-between

slippery interstice

or gap

wondering

where is loss

to be found?

I ask girl to translate

the cosmos

cross-stitch constellations

of language

and void—

what then, girl

more torturous

than silence?

limina-language

the clash

in non-meaning

apt to fall

not-together

who, then

emerges?

from blotched desire

dreamt into becoming

what of a language

with no time?

of-precarity

girl straddles the axis

of ancient

and eternal

wends toward

asymptote

that glimmering horizon

abyssal plunge

at home in the porousness

of utterance

its circuitry

how we orbit a promise

that from light

will come silence

and redaction is

a handful of tongues

how the ink slices

slight river of blood

---

Grace Dignazio is a Brooklyn-based writer concerned with the subversive possibilities of digital technologies as a medium for poetics. Her work engages with a lineage of writers attuned to the precariousness of identity and the entanglements of language and ecology in the shadow of a slow apocalypse. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The New School, where she works as a research assistant and Poetry Editor for The Inquisitive Eater.

'Talk light with me' — poetry by Catherine Graham

Nave Astral

after Remedios Varo

No linear perspective and spatial
depth in this pictorial plane.

To float in the unknowable
is to return to the womb.

What we fear has already
happened. Return

to consciousness. Leave
your skin to the stars.

---

Voice from the Night Animal

Talk light with me.

I’m here, skimming the green.

Extend my horizon

while I enter you

like a weather system.

I’m poor at multiple choice

but fighting something

releases ease within me.

It’s too late to catch threads

from felt confusion.

---

Catherine Graham’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and on CBC Radio. Her eighth book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. Her sixth poetry collection, The Celery Forest, was named a CBC Best Book of the Year. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected is her ninth book. Two collections are forthcoming. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet

'How thy high horse hath fallen' — poetry by Madeline Blair

Nightshade

Glossy black berry, your bitter taste,
your delirium. Figment sheen, what mirage!
Wild, parasitic root. In your terracotta pot
by the window of the kitchen, you’ve sewn
your dark seeds of doubt. Attended them greatly.
Watered them daily. Overly so. Are they not rotting?
Wouldn’t you like to know.

I’ve seen right through your bad habit.
I’ve come with scissors to cut it square out.
Behold, the archaeologist! How the dirt
has dug up. How thy high horse hath fallen.
The fields raked clean. The husbandry of it.
The sun ceased its shining, darkened mid-day
and shriveled away. Blood moon rose ill
with betrayal. The plant cannot grow,
cannot nourish, no, no.

The stalk wilts, petals droop, red glow
through torn curtains. The sorry sight
of apocalypse. Sad plant, your attendees
have abandoned. Where have they gone?
Was it worth what you lost? You cannot
connect. Spiders all spun your phantasm sincerity.
No flowers to poison tea. No matter.
No power.

What you cannot take is what’s mine.

---

Portrait of Christine de Pizan in The Queen’s Manuscript

In defense of the ladies we are warm enough
to keep ourselves safe & sound

We are castles we are also the moats

Pretty enough without porcelain faces
Consider Lucretia when you remember our virtue
We are whole without needing to be holy

A woman eating bread on the balcony / A woman
holding berries to the light / A woman waiting
for the night-music to rise with the anchoring
of the moon

Look at us square in the face
kitchen knives sharp beneath our palms
to holler Dinner’s ready!

We women will not be wiped out
We will etch ourselves in print by blood
{our names are write-ins for history}

---

Madeline Blair is a poet, editor, and award-winning filmmaker from Chicago, IL, with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the founder/editor-in-chief of Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Burial Magazine, Libre Lit, Ekphrasis Magazine, and more. She was once quoted in The New York Times on her passion for clean air.

'a paradise called Loneliness' — poetry by Adam Jon Miller

Opposite of Loneliness

---

Darkest Dark

---

Adam Jon Miller's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Louisville Review, Yalobusha Review, Chiron Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, The William & Mary Review, OxMag, BRAWL, Hood of Bone Review, Ink & Marrow, Folklore Review, shoegaze literary, Yīn Literary, and elsewhere. A selection of Adam's work has been translated into Chinese. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Adam is an Associate Poetry Editor at Thimble Literary Magazine. Visit him at www.adamjonmiller.com. Follow him @im.adam.miller.

'Tell me I taste like hunger' — poetry by Jennifer Molnar

I need you the way venom needs a wound

to enter the body and render
the recipient stunned—to die twice

pierced by the sting of that love
letter’s savage chemistry—demanding

surrender so absolute it no longer
permits breath: ruthless and cruelly

molecular. My mouth deadly on yours.

---

To seduce me

Tell me what you’ll do as the world ends. Tell me I’m on your list of regrets. Exhale so I can feel your breath settle on my skin like a wayward prayer. Point out the hummingbird nest in the lilacs. Describe your first kiss, then your last. Ask me how I got this scar. Bring me a handful of spent petals you stole from a hurricane. Drink this elixir and don’t ask questions. Wake me as sunrise stains the low sky like the spirit streaming through a cathedral. Kneel and light a votive in the grotto with my name in your mouth. Snuff out the match between your fingers. Bless me with the ashes. Peel an orange before I can ask. Name each phase of the moon. Peel an orange before I know I want an orange. Convert to the religion of our existence under the clearest night sky pricked with the burned-out love letters of a trillion dying stars. Peel an orange and let me watch. Let me watch you. Ask me if I saw the moon last night. Ask me if I’m still hungry. Look at me. Tell me I taste like oranges. Tell me I taste like the moon. Tell me I’m your holy communion. Promise to haunt me. Tell me I taste like hunger. Look at me as the world ends. Say all of this reminds me of you.

---

Jennifer Molnar the author of the chapbook Occam's Razor, and her work has appeared in New South, Hawai'i Review, So to Speak, Best New Poets, Duende, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from George Mason University and resides in New York.

'I prayed to be released from my longing' — poetry by Michelle Reale

The Bride Wore Headlights

I prayed to be released from my longing. Hope had no feathers. It was a scrawny bird beast that squawked and told me not to bother. But, still. All the groomsmen had their tuxedos dyed to match their moods. I stood back, waiting for the signal to toddle down the proverbial aisle, which was the way I did everything. I adjusted my headlights because my friends said that I needed to see where I was going. The harsh lights glinted off the gold lamé that every uninvited guest, all of them anxious, seemed to be wearing. Upstaging me or smiting at me, it seemed to be the same. When the groom entered, though not necessarily my groom, he kept a disrespectful distance from me. I smelled the particular tang of juniper berries wafting around his person. He carried a staff in his hand, proudly, perhaps to beat me with. I’ve endured worse. The magistrate was magisterial in his heavy velvet robes. The groom approached him and they shook hands the old familiar way that enemies sometimes do. I stood in place like a sentry. The wilted tulle of my dress hung with sad, but not bitter dejection. It was not white. I waited. The strobe of the lights shone ahead, and though I waited with a gentle thrum in my chest, no one called my name.

---

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry collections , including the upcoming Let It Be Extravagant  (Bordighera Press).

She teaches poetry in Arcadia University's low residency MFA program.

'Resurrection dance, a prelude' — poetry by V.C. Myers

A Furious Loom

Lost in a wilderness unfelt, an empty bed devours light. We sing, relinquished. I dissonance, uncharted. A cracked riverbed, this drought of trust, this heaving doubt. Dryrot, this festering bile. I'll think of you on the way down. Accusations need a scapegoat. Intentional, this nightmare. A speck of blood on the gallows. A shovel of cemetery dirt. Evidence of culpability. I stand accused. I stand. Skeletons hang on a clothesline. Resurrection dance, a prelude. A Pandora's box of possibility, boundless seas of infinity. Destruction knows not when. Cocoon this bitter end. Circling a burning field, worry not about consequence. Pain makes us beautiful. Pain makes us real. Love leaves us curled into a weeping ball in someone else's dream. A figment. Love is nothing if not nothing. In darkness, we crawl, we claw. Ever reaching for a home. Ever reaching for another. Ever reaching for the stars. Ever reaching with empty hands. Between two filthy lips. A taste of wickedness. You envy it. Such mercurial flavor before harbingers of famine arise. Doves red with innocent blood. A grasping of thorns. Crossroads. Crossbow. Crossbones. A purge. Raven wings rise from my shoulder blades, an arch of ebony feathers. Talons claw from my fingertips. I cannot fly, but burrow. Miles deep underground. The earthy smell of peat in my nostrils, a bite of bog on my tongue. Let the sun burn out above me. I need no light in the grave I've dug.

---

V.C. Myers is the author of Ophelia (Femme Salvé Books, 2023) and Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019). She has been an editor and reader for Sarabande Books, Barren Magazine, Ice Floe Press, and Frontier Poetry. Her work appears in ekphrastic exhibits and journals worldwide, including EPOCH, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and Bombay Gin.

'It is noon and the sun is ill' — poetry by Raquel Dionísio Abrantes

Lessons in Violence in the Schoolyard

I made you a braid
when a boy chewed your chosen
flower. At seven, bruised
knees were a girl’s
duty. You knew him
whose tongue — once patient
like a mother’s love —
became forked. But I made
you a rowan wreath.

---

(your God is dressed in indigo)

1. It is noon and the sun is ill.

I sip my coffee.

2. At the end of the road, your God is dressed in indigo.

3. I go to the brown lands to find my grandmother.

4. The robin hums perched on a witch’s head.

5. I descend to the underworld.

Hades is kind.

6. It is Thursday. You come back

as a brume. I am a haunted house.

---

Raquel Dionísio Abrantes is a Portuguese poet. She has a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in Cinema from Universidade da Beira Interior. Raquel gave a Master Class in Writing of Scripts about Narrative Structure. Her writing has been published by literary journals and magazines.