Words for the various levels of hell.
Words for the forest, the trails worn against it.
To name such places was to name limbo,
the way shot through with longing and starlight.
Each journey begins with loss
though when young we were taught to call it setting.
Then, to list it with other devices.
To touch it and put it down when we’re done.
On the floor, a mess of needles and soil.
Under the moss, rocks and water.
In the corners our forms moved
against each other, if movement was right
for the chosen word.
It’s important to write the ending first.
Not that you met someone else
but that frost is an alternate ending for night.
They called it the end but this was a circle.
Wasn’t the beginning a forest?
Wasn’t it dark?
In the underbrush branches shuddered.
Birds called how they do
when animals move through the distance below them.

*

Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (2022) and Folklore of Lunenburg County (2024), both published by Gaspereau Press. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, The Cortland Review, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.

Some edible heiress, lapsing as hot
wax, her lavender bones
spooning with glacial, inconsiderate drape:
encased, transparent, opaque, and primmed.
Yet the I slithers inside the skeletal drift,
imagining fresh, glowing aspirations
like the pricking wound of embarrassment:
ah, beauty dissimilar, slinky in dissent,
a revoked invitation. She is far and unfair,
a petulance enviable for its mobbish acquiescence.
Ghost, Euridice, what of his singing rocks
assembling the staircase to the basement?
I’ve heard of them, but did you?

*

Annie Goold is from a small farm in rural Illinois. She graduated from Cornell University in 2017 with an MFA in poetry. She is currently pursuing an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Eastern Illinois University. She lives and writes in Champaign, Illinois.

“[Women] already make all the people […] You make all the humans. That’s a big fucking deal.”
Joe Rogan, Strange Times Netflix Special

Year one would be mostly medical:
midwives, doctors, hospitals, NICUs.

The diaper industry would take a hit.
All uteruses in quiet agreement.

The second fallout: downsizing daycare.
The silent shockwave of kindergarten.

1.5 million kindergarten teachers in the US
set up to enjoy a solid extended vacation.

Let’s set the record straight:
there is no miracle rib.

Babies grow in utero
and burst out of vaginas.

What happens when the government can no longer
procure babies from female bodies?

An IRB would frown upon growing
Homo sapiens in petri dishes.

Historically, power belongs to the oppressor.
Religion: a primer in female suppression.

Maybe, like Mary, we should all aspire
to parthenogenesis. Virgin birth.

No earthly penis is worthy of uterine holiness.
The sacrosanct womb holds no place for patriarchy.

*

Angel James is an easily distracted creative person from a sleepy, rural river town in Central Pennsylvania. She earned her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in English and a graduate certificate in Institutional Research and Assessment. Angel’s first book of poetry, Becoming Friends With Chaos, a collection of works inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, was released in 2022. You can learn more about her at angeljamescreates.com. 

You can look God straight in the eye
It’s not fun

but don’t flatter yourself, it’s not a challenge. It’s outside of what is restricted
It’s outside of what is forbidden to you. And it’s outside of all that hates you

You bring your slack jaw to it

The Eucharist was insisted upon
Christ and man provoke each other now

(Christ the provocateur)
(Emily the provocateur)

That is the Christ-Man’s perpetual
motion machine

And I haven’t even decided yet
I’m just looking. I’m trying to think

Christ Pantocrator looked at me from the Eucharist
Yet I willed it

But we knew each other. And there was a stress on nothing. Which I resent
And I had to carry that home with me

I have inherited a pallor, a gait, a watchful eye
Not a brilliant eye

*

Emily Tristan Jones was raised in the subarctic and prairies. Her poems have been in Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, and several other journals. Her first book of poetry, Buttercup, will be published by Verge Books (Chicago, 2024). She is an alumna of the University of Chicago, Banff Centre, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Montreal where she edits Columba. 

Foxes run borders
of vision. Draping
moss and calling
birds—it was long
before I felt
the cold depress
my dress & through thread
paired ivories. What it was
I was thinking I hadn’t
said, the feeling
again come over
me. Dreams of
children every night, looking
like you we
sang the Kyrie & luciferous
corners echoed
woozy. All our prayers
to a god unearthed.
A god who is & is & is.
Nothing more.

*

J.J. Starr-McClain is a poet and writer in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended the New York University creative writing program and has received support from Wesleyan University and the Community of Writers. Her work can also be found in The Common, Cosmonauts Ave, Juked, The Journal, and elsewhere.

you’ve been dead and here I am still trying
to fix you, waking in the morning with a cure
in my mind — for the cancer, yes,
and all the old ills, too, all the things you never
reconciled. I want to lock you in a padded room
called health. I, too, want to draw your body
into some other rubric. My daughter refuses to sleep
alone. I am thinking of having another baby.
Perhaps the next one won’t enter the world
on the heels of so much death. So what if they do?
Isn’t that always how it happens? If not your death
someone else’s. I don’t know when it happened,
Mother, but somewhere in the day, a knot blooms
in my throat, and I realize I’ve barely been breathing.
Suddenly and for no reason, I’m gasping for the air
that presents itself freely to me. These strange things
that come upon us when we were so careful to resolve
our grief. All the while, robins in the long grass
pulling worms, red brush strokes
of cardinals flitting branch to feeder to branch.
Even the one who’s lost half his beak
manages to carry blonde seed
to his beloved when the snow falls.

*

J.J. Starr-McClain is a poet and writer in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended the New York University creative writing program and has received support from Wesleyan University and the Community of Writers. Her work can also be found in The Common, Cosmonauts Ave, Juked, The Journal, and elsewhere.

In the stained glass factory, the glazier pinned the violet upon the crucible
with purple and gold, set upon the metal frame.
She dabs molten glass into the lapis lazuli not by choice but necessity,
as hotness melts the ultramarine, the plus ultra.

The sea of the sky beacons, broken by the rising sun.
The great-granddaughter of the glazier does not remember the waves
of the Hudson River, only the echoes of failed pronouncements at Ellis Island
reverberating years later, as she frames the drone frequenting the low skyline.

In the intimacy of disparate parts, the girl whispers into the ears
of the passerby, fractals of true artistry which went beyond the intensity
thought possible in photographs, as centuries pass upon the metamorphic
bedrock filled with towers of Babel made of glass and steel.

The lore of fables which once bound rapt audiences now long forgotten:
on the New York City subway, the girl studies photos of sights she beheld,
the smell of unwashed bodies and marijuana in refashioned vintage 7 trains.
She thinks of how she is the last of her tribe.

Memories of her lineage hug her legs like cold air when the train door opens,
fickle like the red twin trees in her night lamp, or memories
of downing defrosted frozen fruits, its sugar already gone.
In a lab of molten glass, her fingers burn like Prometheus.

Gatsby’s junkyard once shown proud with the Unisphere
now a swamp for Canada geese and mallard ducks.
The girl walks, as steam rises to occlude sight
with fog the color of mist in the grass.

At home, the girl recounted the sun in its octagonal beauty,
the life beneath the stillness of the turquoise green pond.
Mama laughs before turning down the lights and kissing the girl
on her head of hair, wishing her a kaleidoscope of sweet dreams.

*

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (forthcoming, BlazeVox) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the Women in Translation project at the University of Wisconsin. Her reviews and interviews of emerging and established voices are published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Laurel Review, EcoTheo Review, Rain Taxi, New World Writing, Hong Kong Review of Books and Tupelo Quarterly, where she is Managing Editor.