'a stone portal in the woods' — RJ Equality Ingram

SHACHATH

Not lifted up by big black wings or slit down diagonally with a single stroke of the scythe / Not escorted through a stone portal in the woods with a keystone baring the resemblance of a mother’s ring adorned with five unique rhinestones / Not an old man in clean white robes reciting names from a list written in italic silver letters on a never ending scroll / Not a familiar escort / Like your sixth grade English teacher who taught you how to read novels & bullshit your way through a research paper / Or a late famous person making an end credit cameo / Or any one of your numerous grandmothers who were each beautiful for their own special reasons / Not a talking animal of any kind / No wizened owl or innocent stray dog who spends his afterlife escorting newcomers across the threshold / Not a single spirit came to me that August afternoon when I needed them to help me up as I was crushed beneath the weight of her big black cloak / If she was listening she was listening to my mother / Who held my face together & counted to ten again & again / And if she was there & I just couldn’t see her / I hope I made a good first impression.

---

RJ Equality Ingram lives next to a cemetery in Portland, Oregon & works as a necromancer for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. They have two MFAs in creative writing from Saint Mary's College of California & a BFA from Bowling Green State University. Their second poetry collection Peacock Lane is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing & their debut poetry collection The Autobiography of Nancy Drew was also published by White Stag in 2024. They are a poetry reader for Yes Yes Books & a regular contributor of the Nerd Rage: The Great Debates podcast. More work can be found in Deep Overstock, Voicemail Poems & Phoebe Journal among others. Photographs of their cats Twyla & Senator Padme Amidala as well as their little free library can be found on Instagram @RJ_Equality

'crooked castle wanting' — poetry by Lindsay D’Andrea

ley lines

our host swaggers toward us at the bus stop in kenmare / introduces himself
as r. / smiles through boyish eyes tinged with hard shadow of habit

we sit down as strangers in his kitchen among a penitent crowd of potted plants
r. tells us stories / pours whiskey / watches dark droplets dry

on our lips / takes us to a stone circle / kicks over the rickety donation box
declares monetization the worst of human crimes / orders

more whiskey for us at a bar a water for himself / leans toward me
asks why don’t i come back to kerry alone next time

departure day / return from a walk / find our dirty clothes folded clean
atop the guest room bed small pile of my underwear creased

to careful triangles / say thanks for the kindness / arrive years after this moment
r. sends a message / had a dream about me do i want to know

what kind / remember the stone bridge covered in moss crooked castle wanting
its roof nothing so far off from decay / remember some forces

can be mapped / draw each line with precision the invisible circle expands
from a ring of rocks at its center / erected at first as a kind of prayer

---

Lindsay D’Andrea is an emerging writer working on her first collection of poems. Recently, her poems have been selected for publication in On the Seawall, The Baltimore Review, Ploughshares, and the North American Review, among others. She currently lives in the Philadelphia area with her family.

'earth’s marble cage' — poetry by Annah Atane

The Ache of My Father

“Following the kidnap of a relative in August 2024”

All his friends were leaving.

Not in the way his ancestors left. 

I mean, there is a soul 

held in a forest. Mouth, sealed. 

Hands tied. Helpless. 

And we keep reaching for God,

like how the lady in red snuck 

until her hands touched the smooth linen

of love

Unlike us 

who hustle light like miners beneath a tunnel.

Did you see my father in saltwater?

How he drowns with that old photograph

clutched in his hand.

Wanting to rescue all of them—

school boys, standing in memorial

shape shifting to that bone place.

We both agree there is nothing left 

except hope. But how much hope is enough 

to keep our hearts from weeping?

In-between these metaphors is a soul

and I hold a torch to say, I am still 

searching.

---

Annah Atane is a Nigerian writer. Her poems have appeared in the Brittle Paper, The menniscus, The Muse journal, Valiant Scribe, Writeresque, Ric Journal and elsewhere.

'silent, Sunday morning' — poetry by Nathalie Spaans

Vanitas

You move me to the place
I feel when I forget

and become, ungathered, the motes
in your silent, Sunday morning.

There’s a fly on the saucer under the cup, feasting.
There’s a fly on the rim of your butter fleet, resting,
working.

There’s an orange peel on the kitchen table
and a glass of red.

Always your eyes, always your mouth.
Always your nails on your chest like an ape,
your shoulders tilted forward like an ape.

I wish you’d for once wear a shirt that fucking fits you,
not makes me love you.

I have given up, but not quite, not the right way.

'this strikes me as a Rorschach' — poetry by John Amen

Romance

         JW’s photo

He arrived, she arrived. Actors in an improv class, two spies waiting for code words, ex-lovers hoping the other would sing first. Charisma, unusual truncations, the usual amnesia. He reached for her hand. I see how this piece speaks to the space between people he said. I see how it speaks to the way people collapse into each other she replied. The band launched, echoey guitar chords, a singer who writhed like an injured snake. Someone blew out the lights. It might have been 1936 in Berlin, 1967 in San Francisco, 2024 in Tokyo. He considered telling her about the white roses that dropped from the sky every time they were together, how he’d filled a notebook with songs about her. She wanted to tell him that he was familiar from a previous life, that there was a tragedy buried in their subtext that neither could read. He swallowed as the first song ended. She swallowed as the second song began. He turned to speak but she’d vanished, he smelled her perfume, he studied his hand as if perhaps he’d imagined her standing next to him. When they met again, he knew they would, he’d open a valve, he’d give her his dried flowers & chord charts, a copy of his book on the history of shame, he’d find her, she’d find him, those severed lines would reconnect.

---

Loop 2

He hadn’t seen her since the Bonnard soiree, when she drank an urn of champagne, he smoked his way into a nightmare house, they woke on different boats in different dead seas. In the morning, he navigated home through a storm, his hull dragging the reef. She called a water taxi, a friend in a green uniform arrived, flew her to the city. This strikes me as a Rorschach he finally said I see a man leaping from a high dive into a pool of beer. To me it stinks of realism she replied is this supposed to be a QR code? She reeled her thoughts into her rib cage, as word bubbles swirled around him. A shadow sprawled across the gallery floor, the paintings darkened. He felt like a runner who kept jumping the starter gun. I’ll call you he said, knowing he would. Perfect she said, knowing he wouldn’t. They’d rehearsed the exit a dozen times in other lives but didn’t remember, the way she scurried out the front, lips clenched, the way he left through the back, stomping down a long, wet alley. He thought about texting her, even calling out her name, but she was already so far away.

---

John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

'the sky violent' — poetry by Robert Warf

Hourglass

Held in interlaced fingers. Sand through flesh.
Into your open mouth. You, on your knees.
When I am empty, I get on mine and look
up to your fingers slowly cracking,
myself slowly opening.

---

scissored collision

---

Robert Warf is from Portsmouth, Virginia and is a PhD student at Oklahoma State University. He has work in The Cincinnati Review, Post Road, 3:AM Magazine, Forever Mag, Write or Die Magazine, and Southwest Review. You can find more of his work at robertwarf.com. 

'O, to bloom, to arch open' — poetry by Karen L. George

Vernal Equinox

Time to plan what gardens, arboretums, conservatories to visit at the peak of their tulip displays. Intrigued, electrified by how they loosen, unfurl to absorb light and heat, attract pollinators; at night, on cloudy days, close to keep pollen dry, sex organs safe.

To behold how they curve fully open, reveal pistil and dark stamens, petals yellow streaked with orange, vibrant, shimmery-soft.

O, to bloom, to arch open, bask in the current, river of the divine orb.

---

The Volume of Love

I enter a house
purple with longing
roam rooms, corners
amassed with jasper
to draw out spirits

Outside, I move between woods
and lake, deep spaces

Trunk, foliage, clouds reflect
on water, soundless
felt weight of music

The flat curl of opposite shore
calls, casts me into the golden lap
of wonder, the blue-green quiet tick—
Earth’s heavenly body

~ Found poem composed/modified from words on pages 36-7 of Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr

---

Karen L. George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and the collaborative Delight Is a Field (2025). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in 2024. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

'Love is a necessary duty' — poetry by Tabitha Dial

New England Woods

I.

The woods and I listen
to each other, its ears
taller,
deeper than mine.

II.

Solstices summon form from cold emerald depths.
The woods hold court with secret songs
and consult views spread like tarot cards.
Witches track wolves and plant iris bulbs in their prints.
Bracken ferns unfurl the boldest predictions—
bent, broken: bullfrog and berry bush.

III.

Love is a necessary duty. Pick anything –
a flock of birds, a rock, a river –
yourself and someone not at all like you.

---

Tabitha Dial’s relationship with Luna Luna Magazine began as Intersectional Feminism Curator during its first incarnation. Tabitha now curates a Garden State garden. She is the Poetry Editor of Roses & Wildflowers, a winner of the Penned Literary Contest (2021), and member of Jersey City Writers. She completed a Poetry Gauntlet of 100 poems written in one year, and an MFA in Poetry from Colorado State MANY years prior. A twice published non-fiction book author, Tabitha is working with an editor on her debut poetry collection.

'the doors of the night open' — poetry by Juan Armando Rojas (translated by Paula J. Lambert)

editor’s Note

Below you will find poetry in the original Spanish by Juan Armando Rojas alongside the English translation by Paula J. Lambert. The poems are excerpted from the manuscript El camino que lleva nuestros nombres / The Path that Carries Our Names.

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Juan Armando Rojas is a Mexican-American transborder poet, essayist, and scholar. He is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Aurora Boreal (2023), an audio- poetry album available on all major streaming platforms. His bilingual manuscript, The Path That Carries Our Names, co-translated with U.S. poet and translator Paula J. Lambert, features poems that have appeared in Mid-American Review, Plume, and Taos Poetry Journal. Rojas’ work has been translated into English, Arabic, Portuguese, and Italian, and is widely recognized for its exploration of borderland identity, language, and cultural memory. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from the University of Arizona, completed postdoctoral studies at Amherst College (2002–2004), and served as poet-in-residence at the University of Coimbra in Portugal (2011). In addition to his creative work, Rojas has held various academic leadership roles in the United States. He currently serves as the President of the Hispanic Ohio Writers Association and is the recipient of numerous literary awards and research grants for his contributions to poetry and transnational cultural discourse.

Paula J. Lambert has published five full-length poetry collections including Terms of Venery, Revised (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025) and six chapbooks including Sinkhole (Bottlecap Press 2025). Lambert is also a literary translator, small press publisher, and visual artist. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her mentorship has been recognized by PEN America. A strong supporter of the intersection of poetry and science, she lives in Columbus with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com.

'we can be forlorn women' — poetry by Stevie Belchak

WHY A SILK SCARF IS THE ULTIMATE SUMMER ACCESSORY

dear world,
I don't even know

a silver tray of cigarettes
a brutalist home underwater
wanting to be held down

hole in this poem
gnawed by moths

what gives
what gave

it's thrilling
how long a long long time can be

the sun setting beyond the boat
that my baby calls a boat

a raven's muscle
making rain

I roll around in a circular motion

my hooped mouth
a coupe
dried orange adrift
a bird of course

I was supposed to be bones
crossing over water
which had become a different water

a grand woman in a grand penthouse
a friendly plastic bee sitting on a plastic cloud

to lie like a shard in the oracle’s mouth
to wash up on another's shore

I hear the phone rattle
my baby cry

watch a woman cycling through Kyiv
shells like hands

one day you wake up and no wind moves
one day you wake up and find out you are you
green trees
ordinary sky

moss
as moss

you look backward
feel something shear inside

it's the term of the

sale

having a body
where air should be

---

SO…IS THE WHITE PARTY STILL ON?  

Apollo faintly touching my brow
Helen’s sandal breaking the dust 

butter yellow 
the color of the season 

I dream war is beginning 
to tender 

augury and tangle 
rising up 
from whatever is doing the living

children with pans begging for soup

photos of legs that are no longer legs 

my baby filling a green Walmart bucket
to stick her feet in the green 
Walmart bucket 

the shallow V-line of particulars 

a new draft 
one receipt 
tub clogged with hair 
orecchiette needing oil, salt 

I touch my face contoured into
an image of a face 

red wine sediment 
manipulated shadow 

for survival  
I come apart in the washer 
omen enough 

in my apartment 
I grow into   
the greater part of a cloud  

something awful beginning 
where the floor gives out 

---

Stevie Belchak is a writer, poet, and editor of blush lit. She lives in San Jose, Costa Rica. More of her writing can be found at steviebelchak.com. 

'I do whatever the light tells me to' — poetry by Catherine Bai

I’d rather be a poet saint and write devotional hymns all day

When Ammaiyar begged Shiva to release her from her beauty, and all worldly burdens, I was exhausted by my surrender to the man who hailed me on the street, and I was exhausted by my dominion over the hairs on my bathroom floor. Give me total power or give me none at all. I think you have me confused for a girl when, actually, I’m the pupil in your eye: I do whatever the light tells me to. You accept the world like a mold receives its plaster, forgetting I’ve nearly obliterated myself, just to flail around in empty space. It’s exhausting to remember I’ll never ever be free, I can’t even disappear, I can’t even fill up the earth, when the distance to either pole is the length of a cosmic universe.

---

I’m cold

It’s scary that I could have been born
a krill, a tree, a whale
I don’t want to be a part of the world
the way my eye is a part of my face—
that is, unable to see itself.

I don’t know how to say this, but
I love my life like a stump
and death is a saw, a line of red dots
they swim across my pupils, the serrated
edge, before it rips me clean.

---

Catherine Bai is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Prize, appears in Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and is forthcoming in AGNI. She thinks poetry is too good for her but makes her best attempts in the dark.

‘to kill bodice and give sacrament’ — poetry By Kale Hensley

Welcome to the Reliquary

To be remembered in history, you must be either a virgin or a nuisance.

I don’t make the rules nor do I abide by them. A balance
struck by my disposition. Malformed so, an inside out man.

Therefore, it is best that I do everything backwards; a crab-
walk into the bed. When I perform cowgirl, I prefer to gaze

at toes over head. My favorite position is the one where my
body is not an opportunity, not a bloom nor a peach, as I am

tired of reading poetry where pricks so desire to ravish what
cannot speak, to cock a river or tree so he can call it creating.

And too, my flesh is guilty; I have flung my desire at stony
entities: God, idols, men who did not flinch as they touched me

in my sleep. You all must have really loved me–oh but, alas!
You passed me over for a sainthood and all those minor glories,

so to be recalled by taste or eye, only one path was laid out
before me. In the vain of Margery, yes, I had to be the spectacle

unrivaled, unmatched in breath and nuisance, oh yes, to be
remembered I chose to be the annoyance. Surely by now, there

must be a better word for it? Oh yes, amid our supposedly
failing language (another lie), there must be for all flesh a fitting

dress. Utterance is begat by need, I begat by Angie & Gary;
nobody asked for my history and if they will, that is not up to me.

And it fractures me, truthfully, lack on account of ransack &
nonchalance; I know men felt passionate, once. I know you felt

passion once. Would you like to see what happens to a body
overrun? Step up to the box. Take note of the pose. Dear novice,

your lips will remain incorruptible as long as you let them go.

---

The Apple of My Armpit

after John Keats and the Austrian custom

My dear slice, offspring of the ribboning knife, will fit like a thumb in this pit of wiry copper hairs. A flushed crescent that upon sweat feasts, hibernates till it can be reborn as a talisman, as a fat offering between our four searching hands. When asked to dance, I tumble to your touch ungentle, become the blushing ram who bleats for the end of skin, for the end of music—but instead, I dance to keep our fruit fed. At the very heart of this swarm, it is so clear what I crave: to kill bodice and give sacrament. Farewell, dripping blood moon. I want a room drenched in silence so that I may hold it towards you.

---

Kale Hensley is a poet and visual artist from West Virginia. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Booth, Evergreen Review, Gulf Coast, and Sonora Review. Find more of her writing and peculiars at kalehens.com.

'Venetian draped in goatskin' — poetry by Natalie Mariko

vampire

               I knew it. I had a vision.
The 1st last time for you
that I was as you were. A shadow

           or whatever-the-fuck,

I, Venetian draped in goatskin.
What popped was a vessel.
What called from on high
and yet still me searching as through slits,
still me emic and mimsy howling
Wrong Road, I refused to turn off.

---

Nero Redivivus

[Labyrinth of the Jardin Horta, Mundet, Barcelona]

They mark the graves of plague victims with marble relief skulls in the floors
of the cathedral, bones crossed in an X beneath them. Only, it reminds you

of pirates and nazis. You take pictures of each one to post them to social media. You are
there to be there. You are highlighted. The soul exists only insofar as you. You could

take a merchant vessel. You could follow orders and you could sink into the Earth
beneath the glittery eyes of heaven to be stepped on. You could empty a village, you

could be a walking mark. You write for lightning and the cave and a monochromatic
bat and for when the shadow crawls like a cock across the blanket, drawn inexorable
by the scent of blood to heave you gasping, hand to mouth from death into eternal life.

---

Natalie Mariko is a writer from New Jersey, currently residing in Greece. Her debut anthology, HATE POEMS, was published by the independent Australian publishers, no more poetry, in 2023. She is managing editor of the annual interdisciplinary arts and fashion magazine, CODE, and a former poetry editor of SAND Journal. Her works and voice have appeared widely, both online and in print. 

'the long sorrow of the color red' — centos by Patrice Boyer Claeys

The come-on

petals
of the lipstick-red hibiscus pucker up—

their round
ruffled necklines
shimmering and trembling
for
the kiss.

They wait—
erect
pistil and stamen, pollen
dead center—

hieroglyphs
of tropical syntax

meaning
sex.

Cento sources: Whitman Chambers, Amy Lowell, Richard Blanco, Hiromi Ito, Talia Pinzari, Edward Rowland Sill, Thylias Moss, Stephen Dunn, D. H. Lawrence, E. Preston Dargan, Sam Hamill, Rachel Contreni Flynn, Gerald Jonas, Mark McMorris, Carl Dennis, Michael Ryan

---

Little astonishments

that arch and stretch
dangling upside-down
all the way along
a slender stem—

look at the tiny way
the tear
delicate and white
drops like rain
from within.

Who will comfort them with kisses
the innocent
bleeding hearts—

with their heads
bowed by
the weight of love

and the long sorrow of the color red?

Cento Sources: W. S. Di Piero, Lindsey D. Alexander, Ross Gay, W. S. Merwin, Linda Pastan, Alice B. Fogel, Richard Crashaw, Vachel Lindsay, Christina Rossetti, Primus St. John, Katherine Mansfield, Eosder Mosquera, Carmen Gimenez, Suzanne Noguere, Langston Hughes, Pat Schneider, Naomi Shihab Nye

---

Caught among the withered weeds

wild carrots
flirt
in the wind
heads bobbing like
knitted doilies
round
as saucers or moons.

A hundred, and a thousand more
small and glowing
flowers
make up
the
lacey
bloom—

reminding me
of crystals hanging in the brightened air
breath condensed

or a dream of the burgeoning of galaxies.

Cento Sources: Sara Bard Field, George Koller, Marion Strobel, Clark Ashton Smith, Mai Der Vang, Stephen Yenser, Tom Sleigh, Kiki Petrosino, Richard Cranshaw, Michael Dickman, Christopher Buckley, Dora Malech, David Kresh, P. Inman, Dan Chiasson, Taneum Bambrick, Jeffrey Harrison, Richard Kenney, David Wagoner

---

All at once

a black net of branches
flares
with
incandescent felt tips

buzzed volts
of flower bloom
strong
enough to torch us.

When April’s here
forsythia’s
neon bright
cascade

promises
the return
of light from darkness

the glazed edge
alive

from the inside out.

Cento sources: Ed Roberson, Evelyn Scott, Adrie Rose, Michael Dickman, Sina Queyras, Li-Young Lee, Amy Lowell, Barbara Ackerman, Linda Hull, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Billy Collins, Alexie Shaun, Christine Stewart-Nunez, Thom Donovan, Frank Bidart, Debora Greger, Kay Ryan, Natasha Saje, Natasha Trethewey

---

Like brushstrokes

thick and clustered,
chrysanthemums
half closed, prepare to emerge.

Like a box of kitchen matches
shaken
into
a circle

little knife-stabs of gold
ignite
in a pulsing, riotous gasp of color—

distracting us
from
the black and white
of geometric light
to come.

Cento sources: John Vian, Imru Al-Qays, C. F. MacIntyre, Michael Mejia, John Herschel, Carl Sandburg, Lisa Tibbets, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Amy Lowell, June Jordan, Helene Johnson, Alessandra Lynch, Fatimah Asghar, David Trinidad, Peter Gizzi, Lee Ann Brown

---

Patrice Boyer Claeys is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Earth Cafeteria, a photo-verse collaboration with Gail Goepfert. Her work appears in Tupelo Quarterly, NELLE, Scapegoat Review, Passion Fruit Review and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. Nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net, she can be found at patriceboyerclaeys.com. 

'Flowers are the offspring of longing' — poetry by Ellen Kombiyil

fable

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Ellen Kombiyil is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. Her latest poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) is a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. Her visual art has been displayed at Emerge Gallery and is published in Action Spectacle, Bear Review, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Radar, TAB, and The Indianapolis Review and she has new poems appearing in Sixth Finch, Breakwater Review (as a finalist for the Peseroff Poetry Contest), Cherry Tree, NELLE, Raleigh Review, Second Factory, and Tahoma Literary Review. She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.