Two from Jessie Harrison

In Case You Missed It, We Aren’t Friends Anymore

And we were just friends—
Who posted each other on Instagram every day,
And texted each other goodnight,
Even when she kept bringing up that she saw my boobs
When I needed help getting into a hospital gown
When she took me to the ER—

And now we’re nothing,
And we don’t go to each other’s shows,
And she doesn’t read my poetry anymore,
And she’s just the flash of anger
When someone forgets to text back,
And the reason I don’t talk about the eating disorder.

I want to rip the butterfly clips out of her hair—
She used to say butterflies were my thing—
But we only knew each other for one summer,
So I need to suck it up and accept that butterflies
Maybe aren’t that special,
Maybe aren’t mine.

---

Your Language

He showed me photos in shoeboxes,
Filled with Shakespeare and Dickens and Shelley,
Photos of a mother who thought her son
A gothic hero, a handsome martyr
To sacrifice on the altar of her suffering.

You have a complex,
But your son isn’t Oedipus,
So he left his home for a postmodernist
Who speaks your language better than you.

And your pillow talk may be Hamlet,
But the Bible was the belt I beat myself bloody with,
And I can spot Abraham and Isaac anywhere,
Even if Isaac isn’t the type to pray,
And Abraham has blue hair.

You cannot call it love—
The way your house is heavy with duty,
How even the cat tiptoes around your tears,
And you cannot make him a monster
For growing past your demands and whims.

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Jessie Anne Harrison (she/her) is a poet from Houston, Texas, currently located in Utah. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University and juggles writing with teaching and acting. Her poetry is rooted in grief, religious deconstruction, and the beauty of rebuilding. You can find a list of her previous publications in the "About" section of her blog, allthebestjess.wordpress.com.

Two from Frederick Pollack

Hearth

For three years it wasn’t cold enough
to make a fire. Then it was, but when friends of ours
in LA lost everything, we didn’t
want to. Fall this year
is ambiguous. I read articles
about the dissolving Gulf Stream, the descending
Polar Vortex. The iron box
beside our firescreen is piled high
with logs, twigs, cedar strips,
which must by now be very dry
and eager. Perhaps in February, perhaps twice
I’ll be able to indulge
that fancy—that the pleasure of
control has something to do
with what the fire itself
feels. What it would do
to us if it could. Knows it has done. Yet dies
quietly, calmly, the way we’d like to.

---

In Partibus
Perhaps the new revolutionaries would wear monks’ cowls,
and preach that only purity of means justifies the ends.
– Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

At dawn I think of Kalief Browder, who served
three years at Rikers without trial
for allegedly stealing a backpack and who
hung himself two years after being released.
Helped by study and training, I imagine
as well as I can what he faced
and felt. Then extend my meditation
to the 150 stabbings
that occurred each month at Rikers, and the character
of its rules, staff, lawyers, water,
and roaches. Then, as is our practice,
I think of other places, more recent horrors.
Some of us call this prayer. It’s only memory
and attention; the aim is not
to release or depress, only to focus,
like a list of things to do in a day
that lasts a long time. Then I go down
to the shooting range, and one or another
martial arts class, and only then
to breakfast. Beyond the cleared
area, the guardposts and the wire,
the day as usual is filthy hot.
Citizens of this disputed, “purple”
region walk to what stores or depots
are open, what work they have, and either
make a great show of ignoring us or
ignore us. At one point our main building
was one of their churches. After meetings,
I enter what is truly now
a sanctuary. Two stitched and bandaged
women have been released from
the infirmary and wait, one with her kids.
There are also a battered youth, and some immigrants
who by the look of them have known hunger.
I’ll be here late, evaluating, offering
what comfort we have and initial placement.
There’s also a dude. I know he isn’t
packing but he may carry an engineered
virus, or plan to do
what damage he can with what he can grab.
Or he may actually have had
enough of the lies outside and now sits
looking blankly around, as much
without a settled home as the word freedom.

---

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems—The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; reissued April 2022 by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998)—and four collections: A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and The Liberator (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse and elsewhere. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

“At the Concession Stand” by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

The small man at the concession stand
bounded off one countertop to the next.
A trapeze artist couldn’t swing,
couldn’t hang like him—
they’d fall to the ground,
ensnared by cloudy circus air.
 
It was the summer of ‘78,
Grease is the Word, is the Word, is the Word
blared from his transistor radio.
He had a finesse I couldn’t stop staring at.

My roller skates were too tight,
but I dared not bend to loosen them—
I’d miss him. I was afraid he’d disappear
like Santa and one of his elves.
We kept watching him—my friends,
who were a few years older than me,
with combs in their back pockets.

They tried to keep their laughter in check,
but I knew this Puck-like creature could hear their snorts,
as he leapt and spun from hot dogs to Cokes. 
I didn’t want it to end, but he gave us our change.

We skated back to my dad’s station wagon.
I was in awe, looking back not once but three times,
as my friends carried on about Three’s Company.

When we talk about that time back in ’78,
my friends often recall the summer heat,
Grease, and the hot guys
they met at the roller rink.

I remember this brave man,
who I believed rode home on a snail
and lived in a mushroom. 

---

Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a writer from New York—her work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Eunoia, 34 Orchard, Maudlin House, and San Pedro River Review. She is the author of four chapbooks and is a two-time Best of the Net nominee. She was also short-listed for the 2025 Poetry Lighthouse poetry prize. When she is not writing, she's roaming the fields near her home in upstate NY or playing with her three cats: Nash, Emily Dickinson, and Rocky—www.nancybyrneiannucci.com ; Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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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