with what it sees –
by Roger Desy
rebuffed and buffeting – rising over the circles of its veering
– its talons tucked into an underbelly’s agitation rippling
in the turbulence – the knitted barbs blown to a feathering
lift in the slip of updrafts to the ring of ice on a blinding sun
where a finesse of wings within the whims of the prevailing winds
soars over random symmetries of undulating fields – and ash
of an aloof stray shadow in the glare gathering terrain to a temerity
of retina – pierces a frayed-strained skrrie to stir the surface
till the inevitable chance tangent erratic other shadows
blurring the white of white on white divert its gaze from hint
and sign to a fixation one at one with what it is it sees it sees
– tenacity in its acuity tweaking the flurries at the edge of squalls
into the heart of the squall itself – plummeting sieves of wisps
unseen a shining faceting the wind-sheared frigid-heated air stoops
to the ecstatic target of a snowbound prey pinned to a stain on snow
Numbered Exercise in Eulogy
by Sheryl L. White
I will write 39 lines, longer than I have left
in this endless preponderance of no time,
no thought but that one, that prologue
to all sunsets I have gathered into, light
left lying beside headstones that mark
time, again time. Now I will write 33 lines,
a shorter mourning run, quieter than feathers
that pass on the other side of glass, silent ghosts
like dust settling on lawny crusts, shadows
on clear days. My clearest day was that one –
you remember, a celebration of snow, brief grace
found in a cemetery, tucked on a hill purpled
with violets, beside some other memory, some
other name, not one spoken in books, not any name
screeded under a marble willow bough, no.
I will write 24 more, slide each line by your eyes.
Along with 23, 22, the number plumbed until
it sinks into the past, and 21 becomes the mistress,
an age of attainment, majority, legal limits
revenged on each new generation to keep up,
impose their own limit on you, on me, on
time’s limitation, while on they go, attained,
legal, certified. Still, you sit unresponsive,
deaf to the last lines of your own history. Now,
15 once again, 14, while this untenable speed
backwards stuns until I crawl out –
aged shell back into fresh skin and bones,
no longer a need for plot, grave, urn,
long enough, and I will become one
with the mother, father, egg, sperm, cells
so tiny no given can match simple need,
love, even love, abstract homilies set down
when 7s were created unequal, fraught
with burdens of age and animal, tree, rock,
war, and its illusive counter. Each has its day,
its line in the book, its own vein to feed on,
succour when time runs out, clot when sounds
cease. All the world falls dark. Remember
what began long ago? Then. I will write.
Sheryl L. White’s writing has been published in The Comstock Review, The Boston Globe, Arnoldia, The Roanoke Review, among others. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Finalist Grant and has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her chapbook, Sky gone, was published in 2020.
Ostrovsky in the Rainforest, 1974
by Rebekah Curry
All this is too much: the green
rampant on another green,
the yellow and scarlet petals
of bird of paradise.
All this is strange to him;
he is used to months of ice
and has only ever seen
such profligate array
painted as a picture
in a child’s geography book.
He turns his head to look
for the guide the college sent
to “show him around the town”
and finds her a step behind.
She gives a smile meant
once more to reassure.
Somewhere, a toucan croaks.
The Zoological Park,
she said, was their final stop.
He must accustom himself
to all that is too much,
must make his poems contain
this green America.
He reaches out to touch
the flowers seen on the page
some twenty years ago,
but now alive with the drops
of artificial rain.
let the world
by Zoe Dickinson
Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
– Elizabeth Barret Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, XXIV
cool evening air/ diced
by the swallow’s two-pronged tail
as he carves up and down the beach
with swift strokes of his slim knife-
self, unconcerned by me or any other
dull lump of land to be skimmed over
smoothly/ unconcerned by the spikes
my landlord erected at his nesting place,
he teaches fledglings how to fold up
the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,
how to caress the contours
of the earth without breaking its skin.
I watch but cannot learn how to bless
this dismembered breeze,
its scant flowering of gnats –
fewer than last year in this drought,
and not enough –
cannot fathom how to make
my grasping human hand
shut in upon itself and do no harm
Zoe Dickinson has published two award-winning chapbooks: Public Transit and intertidal: poems from the littoral zone. Her poetry is rooted in BC’s Pacific coastline, where she is a manager at Russell Books and Artistic Director emerita of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2026.
Argos
by Imogen Wade
“But Argos passed into the darkness of death,
now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith.”
– Homer, The Odyssey, Book 17
I’m dreaming of getting a Doberman again.
My landlord would say no, even though I haven’t asked
and never will. So I don’t know. But I dream of Argos
clawing at my door. Dream of him tearing my silk dresses.
Dream of his black eyes by the side of my bed,
begging me for the hills.
I first started dreaming of Argos when we scattered ashes
over gorse on Harting Down. Wind came and fine dust
rose like smoke from the bush, à la Exodus.
Once upon a time, a man with a heart and a liver
and a shiny black hat used to sit on the hill – he watched
over the village, could see the church steeple
and our roof. Man became ash. Then my love became
grief became a Doberman, a dog called Argos
filled with faith. He needs over two hours of exercise daily
and his stamina is the stuff of myth. He has good recall,
so his name is a leash. I tell my mother to count
her blessings, I could have worse coping mechanisms
than taking my fictional Doberman for a walk.
Argos is an island in my aloneness, made of loyalty
and a glossy black coat. The sunlight loves him.
Sometimes I can’t get rid of the sight of the yellow petals
turning grey as we tipped his remains –
the way we hid their colour, and sometimes I cry.
Argos licks my face. I feed him a treat. I lie on my back
in the grass; I hear him panting beside me.
Argos who is grief who is love can seem indefatigable,
which is why his breed is known for full body slams
and growls that could make an army plead defeat.
I run him ragged, let him work out the power in his heavy
muscles. Then he sits on my lap in the evening
like he doesn’t know his own weight.
Imogen Wade won the UK’s National Poetry Competition 2023, and was commended in the New Poets Prize, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and The Moth Poetry Prize. She has been published in The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, and PN Review. She can be found on Instagram @imogen_wade_poetry.
String Theory
by Wanda Campbell
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
– T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
The poet says in the end
we will arrive where we began
and know the place for the first time.
Everything is connected to everything else.
We think we operate in four dimensions
but there are several we can’t even see,
and here in this valley of orchards,
I relearn the branches of my youth,
recognize the curious climber as me
and the children in the apple-tree.
The way to glimpse elementary particles
is to pretend they are points in space,
interacting on the stage of gravity,
with strings holding them together
like a net to catch all of reality.
Just as my friend’s art includes a door,
we do what all scientists and poets do –
use what we know to learn what we do not,
aware that the explorer misnames the shore
not known, because not looked for.
I walk on the wind-blown dykes
where le Dérangement still endures
and the tide rushes in with the force
of all the rivers in the world.
I know of no better way to
heal the hurts we carry like an illness
cruel and chronic though kept at bay,
whispers of the past drowned by cries
of gulls, their squawk and shrillness,
but heard, half-heard, in the stillness.
The sea’s slender fingers slide
across strings of knotted kelp
tangled against rock and sand to play
planxties on the harp of who we are.
We hope to recover dimensions we’ve lost
along the way, but there’s no guarantee.
Whatever the ocean hurls at us, pebbles,
a mermaid’s purse, rags of foam or refuse,
we must sift the stars from the debris
between two waves of the sea.
Wanda Campbell teaches Creative Writing at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. She has published a novel Hat Girl, and five collections of poetry, Kalamkari and Cordillera, Daedalus Had a Daughter, Grace, Looking for Lucy, and Sky Fishing as well as books on Early Canadian Women Poets and Bronwen Wallace.
Faith, or A Walking Palm
by Audrey Molloy
West of Quito, in the saddle of the Andes,
where air is wreath and mist,
a woman searches for a sacred vine.
She’s heard the parrots chatter ayahuasca,
that it can set the spirit loose to wander
unrestrained by trunk and limb,
that it can bend the mind, or make it whole again.
Nothing is fixed; not to say that everything
is broken, or constancy impossible –
only that all of it is mutable.
Nothing abides – neither planetary rings
nor the metal dust that briefly shapes itself
to something vital, then unshapes again.
There is only possibility and a woman
searching botany books in vain,
studying time-lapse photography
for proof a palm tree, resigned to shade,
can work one stilt-root free
from darkness and, like God to Adam,
extend a finger towards life, towards light.
Beneath the canopy, a harpy eagle
makes off through the cloud,
carrying a sloth like an old carpet,
nerve and sinew clutched in its sleek
claws. To be slow can be fatal,
or it can save you. A tuft
of fluff floats down to feathermoss.
Slow time. Even mountains flatten,
and a palm, given patience, can shift,
infinitesimal as the orbit of a distant planet,
and walk slowly out of the shadows.
Interlude
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
A chameleon, the boot of a shoemaker, your wife’s ring finger.
At the Museum of Surgical History in Chicago,
I learn that after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895,
the Munich aristocracy hosted parties
where they took “bone portraits.”
We all want to see inside ourselves, if only once,
if only wrecked on Veuve Cliquot as the century wilts
like silver roses outside the windows of the chateau,
if only to remember that flesh is an interlude
between your hand and the crystal glass it holds.
In the gift shop, they sell postcards
of Röntgen’s early experiments.
A dolphin foetus, a porcelain vase, a coat full of watches.
I buy a stack of his wife’s skeleton hand
so I can send one to every city I still call home.
The cashier, who’s wearing a t-shirt of a ribcage,
scans each jeweled phalange.
Back on the street, I imagine every outfit
as a reflection of the inside. A man sitting on his porch
in a red velvet robe is showing off
his bright network of arteries.
A model on a billboard
the lace nightgown of her nerves.
A kid being dragged by the hand
in a blue corduroy jacket
his fear of the ocean.
In the hotel room, I write to my brother
that I miss him on the back of Mrs. Röntgen’s hand.
I unclasp the chain from my neck,
a silver collarbone I coil carefully on the bedside table.
We all want to see inside ourselves, if only once,
if only as you change into your evening dress
in front of a mirror in Chicago, if only to know
there are still parts of you
no one can see through.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois/Acadian poet whose work explores notions of hybridity, translation, and belonging. His poems have won Arc’s Poem of the Year, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award. His latest book, Entre Rive and Shore, was a finalist for the BC & Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
In Front of Lucy, Our First Mother, My Son Has a Lavish Nosebleed
by Medrie Purdham
Australopithecus afarensis, Natural History Museum, New York
We wait for platelets to cluster, and I think: It’s the other way around.
I mean, we’re not religious and she’s not the Virgin Mary,
and my boy’s not a wonderstruck urchin in some verdant valley,
host to a serpentine river. It should be the stone mother who, weeping, bleeds –
and the wayfaring boy who stands with a blank face.
Lucy – named for the one in the sky, with diamonds – is a vision.
The small toboggan of her jaw, her ribs and pelvic girdle, are all in pieces.
She tells an osseus story of uprightness and of being found.
I dab at my child’s expressive nose, which, on seeing an ancient mother,
calls, care for me. He signals from his own troubled membranes,
aches for her. I shiver, because every family tree is unbroken. Every one.
Happy, my grandmother thought me kind. She never knew how I
nursed my selfish whims. Everything that ever touched her left her
before she forgot how to mother. She held our family’s latest baby,
singing about shaking dreams from the sleep-tree, the last song she remembered.
She died without me. I die to think of it. And now it’s me
singing about shaking dreams from the sleep-tree, the last song she remembered
before she forgot how to mother. She held our family’s latest baby,
nursed my selfish whims. Everything that ever touched her left her
happy. My grandmother thought me kind. She never knew how I
ached for her. I weep, because every family tree is unbroken. Everyone
calls care for me. My child signals it from his own troubled membranes.
I dab at his expressive nose, which, on seeing an ancient mother,
tells a cartilaginous story of all-rightness and of being found.
The small toboggan of her jaw, her pelvic girdle, are all in pieces.
Lucy—named for the one in the sky, with diamonds—is a vision.
The wayfaring boy stands with a blank face,
host to a red, serpentine river. It should be the stone mother who, weeping, bleeds.
My boy’s not some wonderstruck urchin in some verdant valley.
We’re not religious and she’s not the Virgin Mary.
We wait for platelets to cluster and I think, It’s the other way around.
Medrie Purdham lives in Regina, Saskatchewan (Treaty 4), and is the author of Little Housewolf (Véhicule, 2021), which was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Fred Cogswell award, and won a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her work has appeared several times in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books / Biblioasis).
Bane
by CLIVE McWILLIAM
Wolf phones me from a train late at night
lost between northern towns at the end of the line.
I hear his head buzzing
against the window as the train slows down.
Who is it my wife goads from behind her book
and I wink and laugh too heartily down the phone.
A jolt in wolf's voice as he jumps down
from the carriage. Then quiet, but for the sound of water
running away and the dry bellows of his breath.
He sends me a Snap so I’ll recognise him again. Scratchy.
Button-eyed. His face fills the screen like a giant feathered cat
that’s been knocked to the roadside in the rain.
Tonight’s stars have gathered around his head,
teasing and chattering in the dark.
He bats them away with a wing of his coat,
pans the plain of broken glass and rough sleepers about him,
an island between a groove ploughed by tankers
in the river sludge and light seeping from the town.
You still at the same address Gordon?
His voice like clinker as he curls in a scrape he’s made
in the sediment of glass and needles. We’ll sleep for now.
I walk twelve thousand steps around my chair in the night.
The carpet crunches underfoot.
My wife turns in our bed above me.
Morning all at once in the rain, a cry of the gate and a reek
like the farmers have been spreading on their fields again.
I feel him in my gut as I button my coat.
Clive McWilliam’s poems have appeared in The Forward Book of Poetry, The LAMDA Anthology, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, and Poetry London. He has been awarded third prize and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and first place in The Plough Prize and Cheshire Prize for Literature. He was runner-up in the Poetry London Prize and in the Troubadour International three times.
Hibernation
by Ash Adams
You might first think of bears,
but consider the common poorwill, a bird
who nearly stops its own heart for weeks,
barely breathing in rocky outcrops
where bodies the colour of sand can disappear.
A poorwill becomes the desert to survive it.
Queen bees, too, burrow at the end of the season
and wake surrounded by a dead colony,
though scientists argue that theirs
is not real hibernation, almost in the way
that no one’s account is ever bad enough.
The question they ask you, my Indigenous child, is how much.
How much of you, with your white mother,
has a stake in this land?
But did you know that bears do not even hibernate?
Like badgers, bears slip into torpor
and sleep fat while the rest of the world dies,
but no story is simple and we often
do not pass on the right ones,
like a man who climbs inside a woman
and then blames her for it.
Sometimes I think
my body had to learn my mother’s story to know it,
which is why I am telling you, daughter,
about the bird called sleeping one.
There were years after when I was barely alive
yet stayed in the open, disappearing but showing up each day.
But I did not sleep.
I strained in the darkness until my eyes glowed.
I held winter inside me until I was winter.
Sickbed
by Rebecca O’Connor
Rebecca O’Connor’s debut collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Irish Times Shine Strong Award. Her poetry has been published in the Guardian, Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her debut novel, He Is Mine and I Have No Other, was published in 2018. She is co-founder and director of The Moth.
Passage
by Johann Sarna
It was humid there. The delicacy of planets in that dream, of one waterfall in the distance, made your feet heavy on the steps. Your feet built them with their insistence. When we arrived, we took the train to the peacock pens. Hello, we called, and behind us grew an intermittent trail of blood. That dribble showed a way we could project. How bleeding asks the world for its own body, queries a broadcast (at midnight), a rose, black hair splayed around the river barber’s bad shoes – I don’t know. We found no seamstresses in the city. Gradually our clothes flayed the air. The tractors sat like hunched animals in the dirt and each rock waited its turn. Departing, already in the air, the plane shook gently. Like a phone vibrating in the pocket of God.
Sustenance
by Trina Das
My mother brings me a cloudy, plastic container
packed with yellow gold kernels of rice, sweet and
delicate and speckled with strands of saffron.
It may as well be a loaded gun. I scrape
it into the bin with a fork once she leaves,
saffron strands and all. Time
slips over me like syrup. I see my arm:
an undone roll of Pillsbury dough, glazed
with slick, raw yolk. I feel my jaw:
made so heavy by its sac of blubber
that I must strain to stay upright.
When my skin breaks open, I bleed oil.
The mattress is less of a mattress and more
of a mausoleum. Powdery, escitalopram white.
The nurse scolds him for pressing
his palm into mine, soft and full against my
birdlike bones, and for kissing my cheek
in the wet, shapeless way that teenagers do.
This is a hospital, she tuts. There are rules. Yet
she maintains a note of amusement
at our clammy, interlaced fingers,
at the fact that, even when young people
are dying, they still can’t keep
their goddamn hands off each other.
Stations of the Crossed
by Adam O. Davis
Adam O. Davis’ debut collection, Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), won the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. The recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, his work appears in The Believer, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Davis teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School in San Diego, CA.
The Results
by Anthony Lawrence
I found my doctor on the floor of his surgery
with a model of the heart.
He was clipping colour-coded pieces
of plastic into place. I had come for the results
of my kidney function test
and renal scan. Above him,
a chart of the cardio-vascular system
like a London Tube map.
He sat down, pressed his fingers together
like a detective considering evidence,
and told me
my blood-work revealed points of light
scattering in a hollow ring, “As when protons
meet head-on and throw
quarks inside a collider. Your scan
shows angel trumpet flowers after ingesting
their own fluids.”
He said he had seen something similar
during Gestalt therapy when the words
Belladonna
and Nightshade appeared on a door
that opened onto a garden planted
abundantly with worm-
wood and narcotic bells.
The doctor said, “Now, as for your scan...”
I looked at a screen
where flowers were shape-shifting
into figure-ground illusions, then at photos
of kidney-shaped dams
filled with black water. As he spoke,
a skeleton beside a poster warning
that abuse will not
be tolerated, was telling me to avert
my eyes and cover my ears. I left the doctor
pacing, his hands
like a pair of axolotls, his expression
that of a man in a Robert Crumb cartoon
who had just been
diagnosed with a fatal form
of Derealization Disorder.
Refugee Blues About Blue Butterfly
by Viktoriia Filonchuk
You and me, we live in blues playing, giving tea to a teddy bear,
Building houses and palaces on the carpet.
Every time you hear guitar you say “Daddy.”
I tell “he is far away” and become silent.
At this moment you show the sound of train, you are on my hands and we go to the next horizon.
You find your favourite blue colour in everything,
You never give anyone your blue pencil,
And you always choose that blue butterfly among all the creatures that live in your books.
I look at this living being and see our life; it is so fragile.
I had a dream: when we finish this colouring book we return home.
But today I bought two books more.
You like cats and horses and dragons in them.
“Scratch-scratch,” my pencil is moving. It scratches my heart every day.
Missiles attack our land again. I can’t tell you all I feel at that moment.
So let’s colour the dress of the princess pink. And unicorn’s hair will be blue.
There are balloons and swings on the pages of your books.
And there is no death.
Instead of “dot” you say “god,”
And I ask myself if the refugees have their own God.
Their own Refugee God, separate from their persecutors.
The murderers and their victims should not pray to the same God.
I prepare to talk with you about it someday,
That is why dragons in my tales protect home and roses, not the caves filled with diamonds and gold.
Blue butterfly and his friends also have their own God,
He is merry, light and free.
He is like a human without past, like a tree without roots,
Like a spark in a darkness.
I will draw a blue butterfly in your album,
It is fragile, beautiful and a little bit crazy.
You should never give someone your blue pencil:
It is our protection, our life is in it.
The wheels of the baby car are moving.
You hold a camomile in your hands in a middle of a January.
You hold my life, my love.
We Are Most Ourselves When We Are in Transit
by Aurora Bones
There she goes across the country,
turning her boyfriends into vegetarians
& then breaking up with them.
There she goes,
peeling paper off orange crayons,
weaving wilted violets in her hair.
Vomiting quietly into her wineglass.
The anti-glamour of her sadness
still unfastens me.
On the train I sip cherry blossom tea
& press forget-me-nots
into the pages of a dictionary
while trees go by outside
the window at just the right speed.
I am still trying to decide
if her eyes are mostly green with blue flecks
or mostly blue with green.
I remember which direction
to put my sweater on
by reminiscing which shoulder
her fingers traced
through its torn sleeve.
It takes a lot of energy not to love someone.
To stand for years with arms outstretched,
palms facing away, bracing against
her tangle of veins and glitter.
Her mouth a keyhole.
Eyes a burning building burning.
Aurora Bones is eternally curious about the relationship between the internal and external worlds. Her manuscript, Almost Untethered and Without Weight, was recently a finalist in the National Poetry Series. Her work has been published in online and print publications such as Allium, Another Chicago Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She earned an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and currently teaches English at a University in Illinois. She also enjoys planting sunflowers, and often spends her evenings catching fireflies and then letting them go again.
Suite No. 62
by Dorota Biedrzycki
Farewell to arcana,
branches,
sugars,
ink – The dangling girl,
I put her down in the dream book
Dear God, please don’t make me a poet
I see her swinging from the elm tree
That is all that interests me now – Sleep,
pastime, exile – I don’t want to be a poet
I want nocturnes,
fog,
oaks,
wine,
something is wrong with me
something is getting away
another sunflower, another border,
Death, eternity –
I want you to sit here until I fall asleep
The tranquilizers are kicking in,
she is crushing me, pressing,
onto shade,
your dark, swan-like,
Your hours,
damp,
blue,
those tight, white ivies,
The idylls make you
Forget your cocktail,
your room key,
that huntress,
the killer,
– Doesn’t
she
scare
you?