'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

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Darkest Dark

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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.

'every moon rolling fat through the night' — poetry by Zann Carter

Paper Body

Skin once. Like once vellum was.

When my body becomes paper,
containment of self (a vaporous thing) is nearly impossible
and my place in the world becomes questionable.

Paper knees crackle and fold and tear
I can’t go anywhere

without falling apart.

I can hardly believe I still hold this teacup.
A poem on my wrist keeps the parchment hand attached.

Ink sutures.

This paper head won’t hold
the weight of consciousness,
let alone support the arc of a long thought.

Gnat-thoughts dance gibberish around my sad old eyes.

blinkblinkblink

lizard brain vellum paper skin of a calf tissue
dictionary disbound torn words paper whisper wind

gonegonegone

In the paper body I cannot even say,
“I am here.”

—after the imagined sculpture “Embodiment Simulacrum”, handmade paper, vellum, ink, cotton thread, torn, stitched, folded, 14” (from work in progress Oracular & Ekphrastic Poems: Imagined Art)

---

somnambulist, water, waking

i was hunger and anxiety, a production in silk,
wasps, and doomed
aspirations, sleepwalking drunk

on the rogue whiskey of men
who dissolved the sugar of me
and left

my bones on fire
inside, skin so tender
a glance gave me hives.

i wished on all first stars
and every moon rolling fat through the night
for waves to take it all

as water always will
the itch the sea the salt
the saving.

---

Zann Carter writes poetry and short fiction in Terre Haute, IN. and then works with fiber arts to get out of her head and back into the body. She co-hosts a monthly open reading now in its 17th year and has created workshops focused on navigating a path through grief with expressive art. Her work has been published in SageWoman, Witches & Pagans, Misfit Magazine, Dream Pop Journal,  Atlas and Alice, and  Driftwood Press and the anthology Erase the Patriarchy from University of Hell Press. Her always-under-construction website: zanncarter.com

'I have been monstrously good' — erasures by Lauren Davis

Author’s note: These poems are erasures of the letters of Anne Sexton. I have not altered words or word order, but I have modified capitalization and punctuation of the original texts.

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1977.

March 13, 1957

Darling—

I adore you all over
the page, all over the lonely
house. Your face haunts
the still made bed.

I know the void and loss
of you. Find the sharp way—
possess me. Whatever it is,
it is like starting over.

Do you remember how
to reach the begging me
in a more delicate way?
I want to be only ghost

and witch. How fleeting
it is—doves cooing in
the pine. Spring will come.
You will come home, too.

Anne

---

November 2, [1948]

Dear—

I have been monstrously good.
Then the rains came.

Plenty of drinking, and I gave myself
a very nice burn. I did not sleep

at all on Friday night. Saturday night
I wore my satin dress. My heart’s desire

is that the worst is over.
Thank God for now.

Very much love,

Anne

---

May 8, 1963

Dear—

If I were to listen to God,
I would be tempered a bit.
That’s the whole trouble.

So far I have not succumbed.
It can be a lonely road. All these
idle thoughts, all this is wrong.

Writing a poem, each word
ripped out. The wrong
things start to happen.

A new kind of orthodoxy—
the only way—to go back
to your desk.

With my best wishes.

---

Lauren Davis is the author of the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed poetry collection When I Drowned, and three chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter and elsewhere.

'The light slices the mouth' — poetry by Aakriti Kuntal

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Murky

God elopes, deer on a fervid tail
A conch ripped, shells in my mouth
Small peanuts are plucked by the grandmother’s nails
Soundboards stocked with a sharp, fang-like dissonance
Rain slaps my face
My nose grows molecular
God, did you pinch my very tongue and scream?  
Are you standing, all lather,
in grandma’s petticoat?
Are you the rain?    
The marble floor?
My balcony is a ball of black seeds.

---

split

Orange wrappers. Foil of light. I fish my hand into the cool sigh of a water tank. I wish to elope into the dusk’s quartet. What roams in the blinking eye of the water trunk? The stomach moans and my mouth grows into a rectangle –-a square—an oval gesture. Memory drops from the ocean of the body and wriggles in the trough. I stare at my own face. What roams?— All thick and blurred in the light of the water. My face swims along the comb of waves. I stare at myself and wonder how true this construct is. I swish my hand, and my long face comes apart.

---

“,”

The light slices the mouth.
Absence fills—cold climate of the body.

Snow— porous sheet. You enter
and leave while my arms

Spin and spin. The days are growing around
my clamp ears. Whirl. Cotton mass.

These days, the skies are punctured.
Nothing grows here. I wake and wake

to the barrenness of my own naked body.
Between my fingers, the sun shreds

the dotted skin. Sleep, you too betray.
Grow around the chin and

gnaw with your new mouth. Everything wants
to claim the syllable of the body.

The pills pop and pop. There is no stopping this
withdrawal of blood.

There is no pausing this curtain of paleness.
I grow around my slime body

and fall further into a comma.

---

Aakriti Kuntal is a poet, writer, and visual artist from India whose work has been published in various literary journals, including Panoply, Icefloe Press, The Night Heron Barks, and The Hindu. She is the author of 'God, am I your eyelid?' from Sigilist Press, USA. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017, shortlisted for the RL Poetry Award 2018, and nominated for the Best of the Net.

'quiet grandfathers in dark tuxedos' — poetry by Scott Ferry

[when i do not write]

when i do not write
my body turns into a wordless sore

plump and burgeoning
filled with fluid and yellow sleep

the news i was supposed to report
covers the head with cruel snow

unverbed and wet–
my feet catastrophes–

my organs buried–
quiet grandfathers

in dark tuxedos

---

[gather my cellophane call to the harpies]

gather my cellophane call to the harpies
erase the ropes stir the poison in the mezzanine
police are laughing monks
call to the winged death
i am a seed hourglass red
i spin guns i can’t see
too many ghosts are captured here
their lips are bullets blood pills
take me to the ER i am leaking
i have forgotten to breathe

---

[the forgotten things are still alive under the soil]

the forgotten things are still alive under the soil i take out the bee larvae and suck the honey from each blistered head there is a buzzing inside my mouth i have done nothing but eat my own body a coral spine a fungal carotid along the chest i haven’t remembered how to swim inside myself i haven’t forgotten how to drown inside the wide dry air my eyes bees angered by the intrusion my fingers blunt sticky wombs i can’t bring the whole corpse back to the shore it is too heavy and the children have been feeding again the words which make my breathing definable are also curses medicine poison and lymph i have mixed them into a paste that the young love to lick i am a father of broken things but i nurture them by singing psalms backwards in a whorl of soap washed and slippery i am not any cleaner nor any more civilized my army is seething under our beds the forgotten things are still alive under the soil

---

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His most recent books of poetry are Sapphires on the Graves (Glass Lyre, 2024), 500 Hidden Teeth (Meat For Tea, 2024), and dear tiny flowers (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2025). More can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.

'made a deal / with Azrael' — poetry by Triniti Wade

Azrael’s Interlude

Churchgirl screams / made a deal / with Azrael / burned his thumb / in the back of her bible / carried his name / in the back of her throat / Put me back, she pleads / he holds her open / like a palm / her body longs / to be a fist

---

Churchgirl

after jeanann verlee’s communion

I know a girl whose body is a choir. I think my own body is a chorus that I have forgotten the lyrics to. I hide between lines of pews and sing behind the thick skulls of preachers long before the first drop of blood appears. I let myself drift toward pulpits, giving heaven my hallelujah for this dog-heart. Sometimes I think my body is on fire. I think God set my body on fire in the names of Tamar and Shadrach. I met a girl whose body was a shrine. She felt like God, the way she wanted to be believed. I watched her peel her body off mine like fruit skin, grabbed my pinky and made me swear not to tell our mommas.

What happens on Earth keeps me up at night. On Sundays we talk about memories: the sacred heart covered in thorns, the body of Christ, bloody and swelled to a holy pulp, bullet wound in his abdomen. Tupac died for our sins. Screw guilt. I’m Tupac; kiss me. My blood comes in the color of ugly cherries. I ask God to make it stop. I peel through layers of cellophane, plastered to my skin with chicken grease. When it bubbles I light my body on fire.

When it bubbles I ask you to light my body on fire. I met a boy who sprouted in Gethsemane. He wanted to be the tongue and the grapefruit, too. I burned his image in the palm of my hand. I watched a moth toss itself into the flame and saw myself. I’m always digging through pomegranate seeds in search of memories that disguise themselves as wounds. I know a girl who memorized her birth. Pleading in Jethro, halos wrapped around her newborn wrists. We spent our summers licking the sunsets off each other’s eyelids. Little girls filled with too much heat. I still shiver at every meeting with Florida water, holding my breath before I pirouette. My rancid palms, these quivering fists. I let a boy tell me that my body is a crime scene. I let another stick two fingers inside — just to be sure. He tells me about the girl who tastes like prayer, begs me to repent with him. I think that my body is a notebook. I rip through its pages in search of questions that only God can answer. I ask for blank skin. My body still reeks of kerosene. Please cut the heat out of me.

---

Triniti Wade (b. 1999) is a writer from Miami, Florida. Her writing explores fragments of Black girlhood, longing, and religion. Her work has been featured in anthologies by the YoungArts Foundation, Scholastic, and O, Miami. She has been recognized by both the Cave Canem Foundation and Miami Writers Institute through literary workshops. She’s currently pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School.

'The birth of a body that never unraveled' — an excerpt by Hillary Leftwich

When I Come Back from the Dead

(an excerpt from Saint Dymphna's Playbook)

When I came back from the dead, I came back as a color. Brambleberry burgundy. The color of dollar store lip gloss and sour gummy bears. When I returned, no buses stopped for me at shadowed street corners. Security cameras lost me in empty aisles, where teenagers wearing each other’s clothes pocketed vapes and lube. When I came back from the dead, I found myself in old motel rooms, the dank smells of sex and bruises hiding under sheets like lost children. The janky ice machine buzzes an old, faded tune, and the whiskey dead gather in the cool smell of humid cigarettes and night sweats. When I returned, no buses stopped for a color. I found myself an old, faded tune, wearing other people’s clothes. Shadowed street corners—lost security cameras find me. When I come back from the dead, this is the place I return to again and again. The birth of a body that never unraveled.

---

Hillary Leftwich is a multi-media writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (Agape Editions, 2023), Aura (Future Tense Books, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming from Limit Zero, 2025). She teaches creative writing, business writing, and environmental writing and storytelling at several universities, writing organizations, and nonprofits for adults, previously incarcerated and hospitalized youth, and unhoused populations. She centers her writing around themes of class struggle, the impact of disease, mental illness, ritual, and the supernatural. On the outskirts of the writing world, she teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities along with writing. She is a professional Tarot reader, an Usui Reiki Master Teacher, death worker, and speaks with the dead.

Find her author services here: Alchemy Author Services & Writing Workshop

She is currently working on a series of hermit crab/collage essays and video poems investigating gun violence along with her background and experience growing up in Colorado and its history with mass shootings.

'Time's metronome blank' — poetry by Rehan Qayoom

Finale

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
                                                                —Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol. (1843).

In the lone dark house where men are mended 
On the far side
Where things are ended 
Virgins sing wide-eyed
Come death dear, come death come,
Come lovely, lovely death come 

When you closed your eyes and disappeared
Love died
Life became hollow and meaningless
Death black
Deader than the doorknobs
Deader than the dewberries
Deader than dead

Where does it all come from?
Where does it go?
The minus the plus
The plus minus - Deader than dead

Words adrift upon the winds:
Nuages = New Age
To vast nowheres in particular
“Brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard”

Time’s metronome blank

---

Rehan Qayoom is a poet of English and Urdu, editor, translator and archivist, educated at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has featured in numerous literary publications and performed his work internationally.  He works with a wide range of archival and independent research projects and is the author of several books.

'There is no choir on the mountain' — poetry by Dawn Tefft

Joy

This is the only way I know how.

To tip my head back from the dark well

and let my watering mouth

catch stars in devotion.

My life continues to run and mill

through the night. I sluice small

moments for smaller pieces of light.

There is no choir on the mountain

whose voices will ring through the pass

shaking the snow like a woman

too long a queen. I open my throat

like a bell or a lamp and nothing

comes out; only the silence of animals

dying carries the night.

Below, in the swirl and congeal

of churches and houses plays a loss

forged by centuries. Regret

moves dim and warm over my bed.

I refuse to wait for cellos and oboes,

violins describing a heart.

Rocking on my toes and sucking

wind through my teeth, pleading

with pines to fill with last year’s life

or three perfect wood-described notes.

I stumble over the slovenly stones

in a universe that resurrects itself daily.

Reflections die out of leaves

and in phone booths, while a bird

continues to pick friends clean from

my ribs. I walk in my succulent

flesh towards the city, because it gleams

when I’m not there, whole and in love.

A fish in my chest keeps on moving.

I take whatever light breaks into my bedroom,

caught in mirror and curtains, galloping

a plain room with the horses of day.

I won’t be left here without it.

I spin on my back with the movements

of sky and open my mouth

like an orchestra bleeding.

'to anoint the robes' — poetry by Timothy Otte

45

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44

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46

after Robert Lax