by Elizabeth Pope

painting by the author

You took a night class, 3D design with the intent to get out of the house
to meet people and make something, to move your mind off the ceiling
watermarks baring the maps of escape, fissures leaking
the silhouette of Alaska.
                                                Left your husband
                                                and daughter, bottled breastmilk in the deep freeze.

Your hair was longer then, and you always worried it might catch fire
as you solder-ironed a book out of steel strips
the size of toothpicks,

photo by Vasily Kleymenov on pexels

by Samn Stockwell

A cockroach takes a sip of night, stirs
by the highway where a mouse
prods bits of chips in a red wrapper.

I’m hanging on the guardrails
of the overpass, on a thin crumble
of sidewalk – below

the turn of the streetcar waddling back,
a guitar player rumbling his hand up the frets,
and the moon over the amplitude
of a horn blowing the last note.

Samn Stockwell has published in Agni,

by Jaye Nasir

photo by Ricardo Lima on pexels

In the dark woods. In the dark
woods at night. It was
a dark and stormy night. There
was a girl. There she was, among
the willows. Among the open mouths
of the trillium flowers.
It was a girl, the woods. A dark
and stormy girl. This girl she was
a woods. The tallest tree: her mother.

To make an index of every folktale
defeats the purpose. The point
of a story is: you cannot catch it.

photo by Henry & Co. on pexels

by Michael Olson

(After Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”)

I fall to rise and take my falling fast.
I feel myself in things I hope to know.
I learn by holding those that never last.

I feel by thinking how to hold my past.
I know myself by what I need to sow.
I fall to rise and take my falling fast.

To those who know a part of me, you asked:
Where are you going?

photo by Sarah Brockhaus

by John A. Nieves

Because it started in pepper spilled on a diner

table, this sad little opus was born grains

and grey. And I think of the pebbles that dull

the mower as they sleep in the grasses pushing

up toward your sun. And your front lawn is

sloping and your driveway is filling with family

cars and the stains of routine.

photo by Mirto Kon on pexels

by Lance Larsen

Like water I know enough to follow
cobblestones and gravity
to the busking sea half a mile to the west
cigarette butts underfoot
broken light drifting in from above
through laundry hung from windows
such twisty passages awash in a tongue
almost Spanish not quite French
I could be walking a primeval forest
dense with hanging moss
each path tagged with graffiti
a new way to be lost
motley hieroglyphs of here I am
touch me nope too late now I’m a ghost
smells and commotion spilling
into the street from open doors
a mother frying onions
someone vacuuming the world
a teenager sitting at an open
window channeling her darker twin
why are they so much happier than me
somewhere a couple has locked
a bedroom door behind them
maybe he’s shaved his beard
for the first time in seven years
maybe she has one sock on make it pink
make it the left I can intuit
these sacraments just by looking
up at a week’s worth of wash
pinned to the improvised sky
clothes trembling now in the breeze
tablecloths furthest from the window
then the gray workaday work pants
and bleached house dresses
finally closer to the sill scrubbed
boxers and delicate underthings
what decorum what clean
rustling bras like sideways angels
swimming in this bright quickening air

Lance Larsen has published six poetry collections,