photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

by Ken Been

I write water
Across a worksheet sky
As if its pale color could hold fast
And not rain out
Baseball
The secrets of Little League kids
Revealed in the vocabulary lessons of the clouds on our desks
Nimbus words and definitions
Supposedly matching up
With my pencil line
Dragged
Between them
As the suspense of the window sky squeezes into Room 10.

There is no light passing through the afternoon
And I’m called upon
To raise my hand higher than theirs
Up over the outfield fence
Up,

By Alexander Etheridge

It was long ago now, the way hail
kept falling into the open September street

right after flash floods there stripped back
hickory and willow roots.

This is our lives, how our story vanishes
into memories, into winter after winter.

Our faces blend into night snows,
and the plans we made break apart like

clumps of shadow in firelight.

by Liam Strong

Saturday: 16
mile an
hour winds

leaves ensconced
to wire fences
like a tapestry

of flaking paint
hail melts as
soon as it hits

cement
this year no
Saint

Patrick’s Day
what does the Earth
know of panic

is it the 24-hour
diner closed
for more than

24 hours
when we see
an empty restaurant

we call it
dead
nobody wants to be

a bead of
an abacus
panic another term

for starving school
children
they say love

is a kind of disease
if we were to give
each other a bag

full of hands
whose family
member

would we be escorting
away
to say nature knows

panic means
we are alone
to call chaos pure

is to say
all that we
want is within

reason

Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cottagecore straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior.

by Emily Cejkovsky

Dear Nessie,

Do you get lonely, or do you have a family? I’ve been wondering.
My lake is lonely…lovely Champlain
champagne sunset, sunlight on the surface
While I’m below, where the dirt is.
Are people nice there? Or do they not care?
Are your scales for sale,
like mine? Does it get better over time?
Misty mountains protect me. Do you have mountains too?
Do you have someone to protect you?
I want to know all the things I can do, enclosed in a lake,

by Jan Edwards Hemming

Her hair is too red
against the crumpled white
sheets. In my mouth
twenty-eight pieces of bone
bleached nearly blue
at the edges
line up like suitors
for her lips.

I reach for her face.

My fingers hold
her scent—sun and salt,
moon and ink—
and it blooms again
between us.
I am exposed pulp,
soft and wet
in the middle
but better to pet.

I pull her to me.
My pupils beg.

by Nathan Erwin

After Nastassja Martin

Last night’s wind is over the mountains now.
The lofty sky’s cast with red. The mountains
are red. The clear brook has become
an aorta, pumping red, giving counsel to the morning’s               rise:
my face is an open gulf,
crawling in wet snow, I can’t hear over                                 my throat
slickened by internal tissue & fluid. My face, a caul,
pledging to the sinews of this life
with                  a rattle-breath symphony.