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.

By Richard Schiffman

photo by Mariam Gab

After the deluge, they’re popping up fast,
a pimpled pox of pallid shrooms,

puny members swell tumescent
cracking earth-egg’s humus shells,

donning post-apocalyptic bonnets,
daisy chains of moonlit domes,

gilled as sharks and cute as buttons,
hoisting clods of moldy duff,

fungal, Mongol-horded armies,
mountain-moving mycelia,

creeping up on sleeping cities,
hoodied toughs on every corner,

meek and dapper Mussolinis,
squat Il Duce’s of decay

casting nets in fetid mulch,

By Christopher Citro

photo by Allen on Pexels

Raised by retired parents I have that, why bother
I'll sit picnic tabled and watch the clouds go by.
The battle, that position worked out, I see through it all.
I tear packets, toss the seeds across the open ground.
The sky can do the rest. This boy burying plastic
Chewbaccas between beechnut roots, my boy.
Sit beside me, not too close. Here's how you open
the knife, straighten the short blade, pull the other
to an angle, balance it between your legs and
with a forefinger's soft tip,