Two from Tama Cathers

Underworld Trips for 39 Dollars

Many think of witches as scary,
and wise women as calm;
but they are cut from the same cloth.
Perhaps one is new, fresh with harshness,
while the other is oak-barrel-aged mellow.

The witch, while she may be cheap white tequila,
knows the way to the underworld.
She'll take you down on a tour:
for $39 per person, she can
show you the scary, the dark,
and the wild.
You're not likely to die,
and will return with a story,
but your life—unchanged.

The wise woman is old cognac, bottle mostly empty.
She walks paths
knowing the ways of the underworld,
the friends and the medicine.
She goes because she goes.

Even without you, she goes
She feeds the moon moth and fairy lights,
On foxfire, smuggled moonlight, and moxy.
In the dark, she goes
to sit with the knurled trees
as they leak black ink, while they mourn.

She goes to the cave that bleeds
never-ending dark into the night.
She offers it her plain black stone,
which she'll bring back home;
dark and still bleeding.

If you are stuck in the upper world
In a nightmare, or stuck half-below,
rather than point and call her scary—
call to her,
so she might find and deliver you home.

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The Wolf Queen

I am the Wolf Queen,
who teaches her cubs these lessons.

She, who frightens her young

into their senses—

so they do not roll

mindlessly,
through the clearing,

tumbling
to lie

feet up,

panting, and giddy with pleasure,

as the badger circles in the shadows.

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Tama Cathers is a poet whose work explores transformation, descent, and the absurd conversations that happen in liminal spaces. Her background in field biology and veterinary medicine brings observational precision to poetry that threads between the physical and mystical. She has worked studying crocodiles, black bears, and red wolves. Her poems appear in The Cereal City Review, the Westminster Arts Festival, and she was a runner-up in the 2025 Ned Foskey Poetry Contest. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Three from Christie Beckwith

Bury the Elephant

Let’s play a game called gardens and graveyards.
The only way to see what grows is to bury it.

I’m thinking about the dash on a headstone,
the vapor that betrays a living breath in winter,

how a mouth can be both a cradle and a casket,
The most critical job goes to the tongue

what it offers, the comfort it withholds.
Ashes or dust, the ground after rain smells familiar.

Is this why we call the earth our mother?
Does her silence swallow you, too?

---

I Drank a Yard at Mario’s
were the words on the T-shirt my mother stole
from a free meal with a porn stache.
The shirt became a staple in our wardrobe.
Its yellow plastisol letters cracked like lines
on the road after years of shame walks.
There is no shame in a woman figuring out who she is
through the lens of what she does not want.
I pretend this is true for the sake of poetry.

My mother traded her childhood
for her womanhood, but that’s a different poem.
She found escapes better than whiskey
at the local bars. Bottled up,
Hobo, Gary, and Bob—her weak-knee trinity—
of muscles, mustaches, and mullets.
Alan Jackson could have been my dad.
I pretend this is true for the sake of poetry.

A mother and her oldest daughter are often cut
from the same cloth. Her clothes start to fit
as the fabric blends between them.
We are a cross-stitch of child and parent—
too similar to see what is best
and too different to fit into the threads between us.

As much as I want to look like her, I’m just a girl
trying not to shrink.
There is no need for her to tell me she is proud
of how I’ve stretched into new and vibrant colors.
I pretend this is true for the sake of poetry.

---

True Story of Lost and Found

My mother has this picture of me
napping in a wooden toy box
in metallic blue tights.
I’m surrounded by my Bedtime
CareBear, My Pretty Ballerina, Raggedy Ann,
and a troupe of naked Barbies.
Somewhere below me, my brother’s
Metallica tape is lodged
in the back of my Teddy Ruxpin.
I awake one night on an impulse
to leave. I don’t know why—
Curiosity? Stupidity?
I pack the essentials—
clean underwear, socks, and
my favorite action figure.
She-Ra does not go gently into that good
bag. She rustles the plastic.
The noise wakes my brother.
He commands me to go back to bed.
I thought I wanted to understand the magic
of a streetlight stabbing the dark.
But in this moment, being afraid
of my brother protects me.
I’m too young to understand
reverence for a savior, but not too old
enough to lose one.
Outside our window, the crickets trill
to the bruised night sky.
I will find other ways to run.

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Christie Beckwith is an author, poet, and freelance editor at Meraki Press. More importantly, she is a sparkle girlie and an excessive consumer of Dunkin's coffee. You can find her at open mics and all over the US, where she travels for her day job doing Alzheimer’s research. She wants to live everywhere she visits, but is always happy to return to Massachusetts, where she loves her three boys, the cat, and their two dogs.

Three from David Epstein

Emerald City Hangover*

Saturday night after the witch was dead,
the tin man went out for drinks,
ended up crying into his beer,

eyelids rusted open, couldn’t sleep, and realized
that when Dorothy went off back to Kansas,
he was too toxic from being locked in

for so long. He should have told her, you know,
that home is where the heart is,
but even he gets it about duckling love:

imprinting on the first one you see, I mean,
really see. Even had she stayed in Oz,
the city at her feet, she would have wondered about the farm,

and whether she couldn’t have been happy there,
having seen Paree. Tin man finally gets up, oils his eyes, blinks at the light.
It’s work having a heart. Even a broken one.

*Formatting is designed for desktop viewing.

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Tin Man’s at the Dentist

having fillings welded in. He’s spitting out the solder,
like a soldier out-mouthing shrapnel.
The dentist goes Ya got some rust pitting in the front,
ya must be sleeping open-mouthed,
probably snoring—sawing the steel;
put on this tooth-oil bedtimes, dream less
of gawking at wizards and balloons.

Tin man nodding, thinking he left out the girl,
then the hot iron in his cheek,
flux bubbling and smoke wisps among the molars.
Then he’s done: out of the chair, taking samples
of tarnish cream, chatting up the hygienist.

Home, checking his silver fillings in the bathroom mirror,
noticing new worry crinkles around his eyes, like used foil:
he’s aged a month in recent days, with his city job
and the stress of a heart that’s slow to heal.

---

Tin Man Goes to the gym

Wakes up thinking he has got to get over it already.
Hearts break, that’s what they do.

Of course he starts on the elliptical,
but the clanking is drawing dirty looks,
so he wipes the oil from the grips,
tries the free weights. The reps
themselves are a liberation, and he sweats,
cheeks glistening with grease.

A trainer notices him swinging the medicine ball,
asks if he ever did competitive sawyering,
says he has such a clean arc,
and he falls for her in a standard gym crush.

Later, in the showers, he’s got to think witch
to keep from sprouting a woody.
He walks out sees the trainer.
She’s getting in a car with children in the back,
and once again he sees no way
his life might fit in anyone else’s.

At home, online he goes and looks at head-shots
of metallurgy professors. Ends up two a.m.
in blacksmith porn, a pounding in his temples,
the anvil ringing with hammer blows.

---

David Epstein is a Connecticut, U.S. poet. He holds a Ph.D. in literature and writes in the middle of the night. An avid sailboat racer, he also works part time as a baggage handler for an airline. In 2021 he won three prizes. He has twice attended the Sancho Panza Literary Society’s workshops in Dublin, Ireland.

Three from RJ Equality Ingram

SEERSUCKER

They said towhead when they really meant kid in the wheelchair / Garden variety skeletons inhabit ghost towns between the carousel & the next millennium / Apples on sticks dipped in leather colored caramel & weather so nice all the golf courses closed out of respect for the amusement parks / Welcome asphalt & skinned knees to the migrant headache of too short to ride / When we dropped I spat out my gum & caught it on the way back up & I can’t believe you missed that how could you Mom? / The ice show was the same as last year & the dancers smoked menthols behind the go-karts & one of them smuggled some weed into their dorm / Penny pressers slowly going out of business / Right here is where the palmist told me where my life line ended & she was half right / When I came back the next year to show her my scar she was an entirely different woman & I too was no longer blonde & conservative / Is that skeleton climbing out of the daughter’s window or the mayor’s? / Bougainville / Fish & Chips $12 for three pieces & Tartar Sauce $2 / The animatronic skeleton steering the engine chuckles at every pedestrian crosswalk like he’s ushering around a new flock of marks / His shirt hasn’t been washed since the ride opened.

Who the hell charges for Tartar Sauce? | Turn to page 59
Help the skeleton boyfriend escape | Turn to page 60

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EQUANIMITY

We carry flowers from the trunk into the hospital / We buy plane tickets & cheese curds from street vendors & paint our faces like lions & raves & a cloudless night sky / We jump between train cars while we’re still moving & when the ice cream truck drives by we get a popsicle that looks nothing like the cartoon character on the wrapper / We forget we’re bad at poker & when its our turn we forget what equanimity means but we say it anyway & hope no one notices / We skate until our knees start to hurt & read tarot cards in the bleachers to our friend’s parents & they are so good at pretending they’re interested they start to be interested / We told ourselves we were going to stop hanging swords on the wall but we did it anyway & when they ask us what we want to be buried with we say we just want something to protect us on the other side / We gave into peer pressure but said we avoided laundromats bc we got so distracted making up backstories for folks we always forgot which machine we were using / We gave up waiting for the big check to come so we lost our keys in the gym locker room / We folded napkins on Saturdays & in the back of the van we kept a torch style flashlight & I can’t tell you the number of times we needed to use it / We used it to corral the kittens back into the cardboard box we found them in / We used it to change the spare tire / We checked the mole on your back & said it was nothing / It was nothing / At least I thought it was nothing.

Ask to be buried with a sword | Turn to page 69
Ask to be buried with a torch | Turn to page 27
Don’t worry it was nothing | The End

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SHORTHAND

Your Aunt Bev called & said she told everyone not to touch the bookcases until you’ve had a chance to comb through them / She says she knows what she’s looking for but she’s probably the only one & she’s probably right / The only Ingram capable of zen bc she knows when to stop looking / Your brother’s on his way with a kid on his lap & a golf club in one hand with his other on a tiller / Families shrink & grow a little bit at a time like an inchworm that’s always catching up to itself / We’ve got an earlobe in just about every state but only half of them seemed to be connected to anything that listens / Except Bev / Bev listens / Listens to the whales that dive to places you’ve never heard of just bring back stories & idle minds that listen / Maybe that’s why she knew what you were looking for when the family asked what you wanted / Grandma Helen’s Shorthand Dictionary / A book hardly bigger than a television remote with tiny folded practice pages that resembled archaic scrolls of spells you whisper to yourself to keep out the dangerous ones at night / Bev said she found the little book next to an etiquette guide & rightly assumed you would appreciate your starchy grandmother’s uptight style guide alongside the ancient Gregg / But the rest of us had no where to look.

I got to go your brother is calling | Turn to page 63
Could you call me back when you land? | The End

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RJ Equality Ingram lives next to a cemetery in Portland, Oregon & works as a necromancer for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. 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. More work can be found in Deep Overstock, Luna Luna & Voicemail Poems, among others. Photographs of their cats Twyla & Senator Padme Amidala, as well as their little free library, can be found on Instagram @RJ_Equality

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