An Alternate Universe Where the Bullet Missed

You come out west to visit, and fall in love
with how the waves hug the shore, and being a hugger yourself,
decide you belong by the sea.

At a Midsummer bonfire, you meet
your beloved. Spellbound by how they howl at the moon.
In a hushed whisper, you confess. They’re the one.
I set a place for them at my table. We spend
weekends splashing in the surf. The two of us giggle
like children at how dogs shake their butts.

I learn to make your mom’s sausage gravy,
so my house will always smell like our home.

I throw a surprise birthday party for you,
invite everyone you love. You fall down laughing
and hug everyone twice.

When your children are born,
we pace the ward together, waiting for news.

We teach them to play baseball using trees
as bases, which is how I taught you. They learn to grow
tomatoes and tiger lilies, how to dig in the forest for treasure.
We visit the monarch butterfly grove and wonder
what we would do if we had wings.

I love you never stops being true.

On Sunday mornings we eat biscuits
and gravy at my house. We take the kids
to the arcade where you always win at skee-ball.
We talk all the time about the garden, about growing up, about God.

Every Christmas, we buy each other socks. Only we get the joke.

The children go from Little League to car keys, and we dance
the Electric Slide at their weddings, badly. The gray filters
into your beard and I find it handsome.

Some day, it will be you who picks fresh flowers to lay on my grave.

Sara Beth Brooks (she/they) is a queer and disabled self-taught poet and visual artist who explores grief, identity, illness, relationship, and the vulnerability of human bodies. Sara Beth’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Squawk Back, Rogue Agent, Tiny Spoon, and elsewhere. They teach writing and revision workshops online and live with their spouse and a tuxedo cat on the unceded territory of the Nisenan Miwok people, known today as Sacramento, California. You can find her poetry and workshops at http://linktr.ee/sarabethbrooks.

Hemi

Inside our tents we drum
on our full bellies, make hemiolas 

until neighboring campers come
to quiet us. In these woods, 

I don’t dream. My weight lays heavy
on the ground. I stiffen like flannel left out to dry.

We wake and walk for miles.
All my blood is in my fingertips. 

A blister blooms on my hip bone.
You take my photo at the edge of a rugged cliff face.

Our world is half
water, half dirt, half light, half dark, 

half amnesia, half clarity, half feather,
half iron, half cut, half mend. I know 

there can’t be so many halves in a whole, that’s just the way
I want things — divided, divided.

Make camp again. Your body
in the hammock’s membrane, a hemisphere I want to peer inside.

Lily Tobias is a poet from Fenton, Michigan. Her poem “Strawberry Interlude” was recently shown at the Paseo Arts Association Small Art Show and her work has appeared in Rockvale Review, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. Lily lives in Michigan with her husband, Josh, and their cats Wallace and George. Find Lily at her website: lilytobias.com

The Last Nights of Ailil

For one night in seven,
I give myself fully,
To the brief pleasure of escape,
Granted weekly, by my need to replenish my supplies –

_____Fuel and fruit, meat and seeds,
_____Potatoes, pulses, and bushels
_____Of dark green leaves –

And in escape I also satisfy a deeper need,
A need that sates my eagerness
For the familiarity of boot-heels clacking on stone floors,
And stout-fed laughter loud enough to drown out your voice,
And music, for some three score thrice, in the autumnal hall,
Watched over by those ministers of thirst, in white shirts,
Serving ale long before even the banns of the Senchas Mar.

And the music, always it veers from lament to comedy,
From Marbhna Luimní to soldiery that scours the town –

_____Tooral looral looral looral loo –

And the music it is full of spirit talk,
Of old kinship, and kenning, too,
And most of all it heavies with the kerygma of another place,
All sung in a holy lavishing of exhaled air.

And last, of course, my journeying satisfies that other wanting, too,
That wanting, which leaves our bodies pulsing, as they endless do,
For flesh and spirit, to be flesh and spirit-drunk,
Beyond these hours we know to be our last.

Irish poet, doctoral candidate, and journalist, Oisín Breen, a multiple Best of the Net nominee and Erbacce Prize finalist, is published in 121 journals in 22 countries, including in Agenda, North Dakota Quarterly, Books Ireland, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, Quadrant, Southword, and The Tahoma Literary Review. Breen has two collections, the widely reviewed and highly praised Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, a Scotsman poetry book-of-the-year, 2023, (Downingfield), and his well received debut, Flowers, All Sorts, in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten (Dreich, 2020). Breen’s third collection, The Kergyma, is slated for 2025 (Salmon).

Christina Chin / Uchechukwu Onyedikam

In The Act

walking

learning to walk

with the sun

_____glorious tan
_____on the body

to the mountains

hiking 
map butterfly 
tattoo 

cooling

_____whitest sand
_____fresh coconut in Perhentian

from the summer heat

an involuntary expression 
breath of relief 

a night with cicadas

_____if you haven’t heard
_____them in numbers

a child says

begins babbling 
learning…
sounds 

he loves me gazillion

_____good memories
_____we must keep

to infinity

knock knock 
hands on a full stomach 

Christina Chin is a painter and haiku poet from Malaysia. She is a four-time recipient of top 100 in the mDAC Summit Contests, exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, California. 1st prize winner of the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura Festival 2020 Haiku Contest. 1st prize winner in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama 2019 Photohaiku Contest. She has been published in numerous journals, multilingual journals, and anthologies, including Japan’s prestigious monthly Haikukai Magazine.

Uchechukwu Onyedikam is a Nigerian “mad” creative artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He’s a well-published Poet. His poems have appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Brittle Paper, Poetic Africa, Hood Communists, The Hooghly Review, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and in anthologies both print and online. He and Christina Chin have co-written and published two poetry chapbooks — Pouring Light On The Hills (December 2022) and Clouds of Pink (March 2024).

Enough

What if the end of the 
world isn’t fire or ice, 
but the pacu, vegetarian 
fish from the Amazon, 
which was introduced 
to the Sepik River and turned 
into man-eater. Or by corn 
drinking too deeply of top 
soil, or kudzu covering 
North America. We all 
yearn for our place. 
We all yearn for enough. 
The river thinks it has found 
its floor in a canyon 
only to have time 
move it away. The clouds 
finally root to the ground 
as fog only to unmoor 
with the sun. The coyote 
takes a bite of the day 
and sings it back 
to the night, jagged and sharp.  

Danielle Hanson is the author of The Night Is What It Eats, winner of the Elixir Press Prize (forthcoming), Fraying Edge of Sky, winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Prize, and Ambushing Water, Finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and editor of an anthology forthcoming from Press 53 and a book of literary criticism. She is Marketing Director for Sundress Publications. She teaches poetry at UC Irvine.

Burning Snows

I want to set the world on fire
and watch it burn.
Everything in it

has stayed the same except me
even the one-eyed corgi
with a nose for ghosts.

My family eats its young:
we commit a crime against nature
when we survive —

survival is all I have left.
The cygnets are big now
and the night bugs’ songs all together

shine bright as day
and the great horned owls
call on the edge of hearing;

I still find no shelter:
Pop’s old raisin cake recipe
tastes like ugly memories

and don’t even get me started
on jigsaw puzzles,
not even the pristine snow scene

with the white New England church:
there is no way into any of it
anymore.

___

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. His poetry collection is titled What Keeps Me Awake (Silver Bow Publishing) and his chapbook is called Bossa Nova (River Glass Books). His work has appeared most recently in Poetry Pacific, Poetic Sun, SurVision, Versification Zine, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Revolver. Koester is an aficionado of single malt whiskey and a proud Cub Scout dropout.