Poems

9/3/26

Jon Vilardi

In a Slate Sky the Sun

In a slate sky the sun
Looks different for the first time since creation
Must mean something to the
Shadow puppet people going up in flames
Exalted in new warmth old cinders float down
Upwind cities sit innocent uncontacted
Tribes awaiting missionaries foaming at the mouth with
Good news salvation deaf ears bolt awake to music you can’t claw out.
Make sure to sing loud enough for your new god to hear the
Alternative isn’t great

8/31/2026
Rusty Barnes 

Wild to be Wreckage Forever
(title from James Dickey)

the night-dark intermezzo closed us off like a door,
when we burned incense in the tack room never
counting on the sparks alighting
in fear of the newly-baled hay erupting.
You stomped on the flame but it didn't help,
so I grabbed the smoking bale in my hands,
tossed it near the barn door then kicked it out
as best I could--you stood there round-eyed.
Cockeyed with adrenaline we clung like glue
to our fiery skins as the barn door opened
into the rest of the world which was not lit.
The ready skeins of your hair in my fists.

8/27/2026
Sam Calhoun 

Grief

In the corner by the door
I scoop seed from your
storage bin, that held
your food, still holds
your scent, even your
fur still mixed with
cobwebs so thin
the morning sun
casts no shadow
through them,
as it casts no
shadow over
this crevasse
inside my
chest.

8/24/2026
Nate Tulay


‘Beauty and da BEAST’

I am predestined to lose you again and again,
in innumerable ways, from one age to the next.
My schizophrenic mind has destroyed us, and will
drag me to rock bottom again and again, forever
and ever if I cannot find a way to immortalize my life.
Whenever I think of this fate, I am reminded of
Icarus who attempted to free himself using wings
made of feathers and wax. Like him, my poems are
the feathers, and my essays are the wax, but I am
still not sure if they will outlive me to guide us in
a future life. Beloved, I am predestined to lose you
again and again, in innumerable ways, from one
life to the next, and so I write to remind myself
of you and our love and magic too, and of all of
the things I missed and learned from stumbling
and falling on the boulevard of shattered dreams.

‘Dreams and Nightmares’

I woke from a dream,
cold, terrified, trembling alone
at everything I had just experienced,
only to realize I was still trapped
inside another dream,
and that nearly ten years had passed
since I last saw my beloved;
ten years since I last kissed her lips,
held her hand,
and felt the softness of her skin.
O how lucky I was back then
to be young and foolish,
unaware of dreams
within a dream as I stumbled
through life blindfolded,
guided by my senses and imagination,
and by the love and wisdom of my beloved.
Yet at times everything feels like a dream,
like the one I had just before waking

inside this dream. And though I had lost
my beloved forever within that dream,
it is still nothing more than a dream,
for I still hold a 1% chance
of a happily ever after
within this one.

‘Yet I Stand Tall’

It was apocalyptic, the night I stumbled into you
in the City of Brotherly Love,
before midnight at some cool kids’ house party,
trying to forget my time was almost up
and my dreams had already slipped away.
Yet I stood tall when love befriended me
and afterward overcame an endless amount
of pain to show you some of the magic that
exists within my genes.
That was before I lost my mind
and after I fell in love with you
in spite of being unable to see
any path toward a happily ever after
or the future I had planned before
my institutional loan application
was coldly denied.
Yet I stand tall again,
overcoming even greater pain
to write this poem and reveal
more of the magic in my genes
because my beloved chose me
in spite of my battles with schizophrenia.

8/20/26
Shrutidhora Mohor 

SPORTS DAY

Cut pieces of shadows lie around
And you think it’s only a cemetery
We brew life the same way dead skins hang on trunks
Hollow
Torn
But attached
And then
When it’s time, we finger a vibration
Within seconds, there are thousands
And you think it’s going to be a lost game
Or, dead sports
Or, sports of the dead
We know better, for we brew life the same way a stray blossom appears on burnt branches

Cut pieces up
Cut pieces sprinting
Cut pieces somersaulting
Cut pieces vaulting
Cut pieces cheering
Cut pieces clapping
And at the finishing line, there are shadows as well

Get the trophies ready, for there’s a full bough there, swaying, swashing, and bending to touch
our heads
And you think it’s only a, well…
Funny!
Anyway

8/17/26 
Shawn Scott Smith

Making.


I’d like to think about something other than
Being in between your legs,
And whether you’d actually walk to the Walgreens with me,
At quarter past twelve,
In dirty underwear, we made into a cover,
For the last bit of youth,
Inside our bodies,
As we let our tongues talk
In languages better left to the young.

8/13/26 
G. Lynn Brown 

Lobotomy (or, Jack-o-lantern Envy)

I wish I was a pumpkin at Halloween
And someone cut open my head
Scooped out my brains
Tossed them out for squirrel food
Then this overthinking would stop
And intrusive thoughts couldn't intrude
And my mind wouldn't race
With what ifs
And if onlys
And what abouts
Or with obsessive thoughts of you
And what we could be
Or shouldn't be
Or might've been
And then they could take that knife
Carve a smile on my face
And there it'd stay
Through the rain
And the sun
Day and night
I’d always look happy
I'd always look like I'm thinking of you
Without the want
Without the worry
With all my heart
That is
If pumpkins had hearts

8/10/26 
Johannah Simon 

The Song of Spreadsheets

my beloved
together we
render columns
precision clean
right aligned
coaxing chaos
into structured cells
ripe with purpose
impregnated
with formulae
numbers yielding
in service
to my firm instruction

8/6/2026
Carlos Francisco Pompeu 

Streetlight! amber
stuck contained pressed
in ships

at a distance

green waves grind
with themselves in the jetty
live a hundred thousand roaches

lightspine through the beach:

amber-whit-amber
redoes itself cyclically
hexapods march amid the tetrapods fixed that chip
being lambasted by the current
beneath all this
sand and concrete lies serene
a piece of my
heart
and when it goes out to breathe
a tourist places in its
bloody claw a can of
skol
Storing them all under the steps
of the stairs, lined up,

like a thousand xylophones it’ll sound, when the people with their feet

beat the planking
at the peak of the night of

réveillon

Impression briefly captured on christmas eve 2025

Tells my grandfather
the route he took
to work leaving
at the estuary of night
emerging from woods
towards the field
and I, who’d had a few
hear the electric sound
of crickets frogs and toads of summer
and concentrate abnormally
on the tale

suddenly

a spear

traverses my backbone:

same crickets and croaking
same night and same archery
that sang on that road
in a moment
same pooled water
same coagulated air
ricochets pressed between the treetrunks
same crimson spinning in woodcracks
lighting the epidermis that emerges
and my grandfather’s voice is filled with solemnness
and my other grandpa asks:

“why didn’t you give notice?”
“I gave but no one took it” is the answer
and we laugh
and cackling the continuum leaves into the night

Francis Picabia (for Bibis)
Far away flicker
the lights in the horizon
beauty marks glimmer
in the blue of your lineament
and I shuffle both in air

8/3/26 
Karina Longo

Eternal Ephemeral Sun

I'd take any day
in the sun with you,
even if a day in the sun means
Fake Plastic Trees on,
hand in hand, lying
in icicles.
Your skin in a dream, and
your hand somewhere
blurred and silent
have different textures,
and I don't remember
either.
But I’d take any day
in the sun.
My blue hair drowning
your neck in the dark,
even if the sun
eclipses you.

7/30/26 
Jack Bedell 

The Lighthouse

We saved the lighthouse
as soon as it began to lean
into the lake. We called

the Corps of Engineers
immediately, no studies
or surveys or third-party
bids, just action. The tower
stands as straight now
as it ever did
on this tiny, disappearing
strip of land we all seem
content to watch fade

away, wave by wave.
The survey we ordered
gave that land 15 years.
The study we commissioned
concluded Lake Ponchartrain
and Lake Maurepas would
combine to assault our north shore
wetlands almost immediately
after the strip gives way.

By the time bids go out
for remedies, our new coast
will be miles inland. Miles.

The lighthouse, though,
should stand straight and tall
in our super lake for a century.

7/27/26
Mark McConville

Prominent Friend.. 

You tell me to love 

You tell me to eradicate all my fears 

But I can’t promise you 

As they still have me cornered 

Like a frightened rabbit.


I don’t posses the time either

Or the energy 

To compete with the enemy 

I’m a wrecked vessel 

Open to shots and knives 

Car crashes and bomb scares. 


My life has become a joyless charade 

Where I’m the forgotten prince 

Who once had it all ironed out 

Who fought with urgency and pride 

Who carried an emblem of opportunity.


I see the world cutting itself 

In my dreams 

I see it bleeding 

Just like my prominent friend 

Who died alone 

On the outskirts of a decaying town. 


I still think about him 

Carrying burdens as big as mountains 

Sifting through broken glass 

Crying tears of pain and disdain 

For a world which blanked him out. 


I feel sick 

So so sick 

Of the way I live 

Of the way I see things 

Through blurred vision 

And I don’t have the capabilities 

To craft a new existence. 


So as I sit and cry 

On a stool made of old wood 

And a pattern cut from the flag of courage 

And I pray for the people to make me feel counted. 

7/23/26 
Parker Galloway

Dead Fish

smell of rot and salt
drifts across these dunes
caterwauling curses
between drunk beach-drifters
i’ve been digging for gold
and found only seawater
thirst pinches the throat
there is no purchase here
the sand crumbles in my grip
i’m feeling myself slippin
into where there is no sandy relief
the sea beckons 
its waves sing whispers
speaking of lives unlived
futures not yet decided 
a desk job waits for me
back in the city
do i wait for it? 
i could just drink seawater
until the visions
announce my death
to those congregated
and then my death-smells
will mix with the rest. 

 

7/20/26 
Justin Karcher

Before the Summer Concert, the Corner Store Cashier Told Me She Used to Be a Drug Addict

I told her we all get addicted to something
and she said she misses feeling good.
I had no wise words as I bought JUUL pods
to pour over my lungs like hot birdseed
because we all want something pecking
at our insides. Outside, I cracked open
an Arnold Palmer and walked toward
the parkway where drunk people were
dancing to jazz, their bare feet turning
the dirt into dessert. A woman told her
Siberian husky not to bark at me, explaining
that he likes to bark at everyone. I confessed
that I crave the attention. She laughed into
a wave of stuttering streetlights as menthol birds
tried to lift me away, but they weren't strong enough.

7/16/2026
Maximiliano Guzmán

A RIVER FLOWS THROUGH


A river flows through the darkened room.
A river that alters its flow so you can dream the dreamer.
An act of love.
A clumsy, unnatural way to ask for forgiveness.
She sleeps in the arms of a God.
Queen in her kingdom.
Battle of metal birds and springtime dragons.
Fishermen of our pain.
The wreckage of my shipwreck sinks into your dreams.
Listen...
Listen to the river transforming under your bed.
Transforming into the solitude of us both.
Together.

7/13/2026 
Zoë Davis

The cold cuts
hit like a second pulse
gunpowder recoil into emboldened palms
moral of your fingers
curve at my neck
why were you late again
to my drumming my drowning
in truth a devilled sound
percussion a zip
of coming home of raining timpani
flooding brief amber fridge light
leftovers haunted in taut cellophane
mute at bedroom door
denial
floor cast view
eyes sharp in our stolen flat
lying
but I have sung you
I know your notes they are handfuls
past victories past lust growing
dull that red butcher’s string straining
I swing rope legs over
frame you play you
da capo al coda
morte strisciante

7/9/2026 
DH Reed 

Copper Minds

Forgotten pennies on the bar
sticking on my ear

Such a fever dream,
they melt

Copper slop forge of mettle
I doubt you know war

DH Reed is a San Francisco based poet and fiction writer exploring general abstract nonsense colliding with concrete life.

7/6/2026 
Ron Arbuckle 

MONTY HALL PROBLEM #1

What hides behind 
Each of three doors?
Self-love?
Self-loathing?
Self-acceptance?
They all share a thin veneer
Dividing walls so sheer you’d 
Mistake one for the other 
Pick your door and 
Live with the consequences

7/2/2026 
Sarp Sozdinler 

it’s not scary if we all cross the red light together

harder now
rooms keep multiplying
behind the door
must remember how
the mirrors begin inside him
a hundred small hallways opening in his coat
one leading to rain one to drought
one to a laugh echoing in an empty kitchen
until all our names come loose
fall through the walls
lands somewhere bright and wet
with all its clouds changed for fields
a night guard dreamed
with his flashlight on
I swept over sleeping statues
that opened their mouths
for a laugh

Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer based between Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals.

6/29/2026
Stephan Crown-Weber 

The Rain - by Paul Claudel, translated 2026 by Stephan Crown-Weber

Through the two windows straight ahead, two on my left, and two on my right, I see and both ears hear the immensity of falling rain. It must be a quarter past noon: everything around me light and water. I dip my pen in ink, and I am writing this poem secure in my indoor water prison like a bug in the middle of an air bubble. This is not feeble, doubtful drizzle. The skies grab the earth and attack—tight and rough—hard, deep. You frogs, the air is fresh enough to forget the pond in thick, damp grass! The satisfying downpour ceasing is not something to fear. It would take a thirsty fellow, my brothers, for this wonderful draught not to suffice. The ground has vanished; the house is bathing; the submerged trees are streaming; the great river itself that ends my horizon like a sea seems drowned. My time does not drag and, attuning my hearing—not to any hour’s onslaught—I meditate on the neutral tone of psalmody beyond numbering. Yet the rain pauses towards dusk; and while the amassed heavens ready a grimmer assault, like how Iris from out of the sky’s zenith used to melt straight into the heart of battles, a black spider stops, head lowered and suspended from behind in the middle of the window that I have opened onto the foliage and walnut-casing-green North. It is not light out anymore, and I need a lamp. And I am offering the storms a libation of an ink drop.

LA PLUIE

Par les deux fenêtres qui sont en face de moi, les deux fenêtres qui sont à ma gauche et les deux fenêtres qui sont à ma droite, je vois, j’entends d’une oreille et de l’autre tomber immensément la pluie. Je pense qu’il est un quart d’heure après midi : autour de moi, tout est lumière et eau. Je porte ma plume à l’encrier, et, jouissant de la sécurité de mon emprisonnement, intérieur, aquatique, tel qu’un insecte dans le milieu d’une bulle d’air, j’écris ce poème. Ce n’est point de la bruine qui tombe, ce n’est point une pluie languissante et douteuse. La nue attrape de près la terre et descend sur elle serré et bourru, d’une attaque puissante et profonde. Qu’il fait frais, grenouilles, à oublier, dans l’épaisseur de l’herbe mouillée, la mare ! Il n’est point à craindre que la pluie cesse ; cela est copieux, cela est satisfaisant. Altéré, mes frères, à qui cette très merveilleuse rasade ne suffirait pas. La terre a disparu, la maison baigne, les arbres submergés ruissellent, le fleuve lui-même qui termine mon horizon comme une mer paraît noyé. Le temps ne me dure pas, et, tendant l’ouïe, non pas au déclanchement d’aucune heure, je médite le ton innombrable et neutre du psaume. Cependant la pluie vers la fin du jour s’interrompt, et tandis que la nue accumulée prépare un plus sombre assaut, telle qu’Iris du sommet du ciel fondait tout droit au cœur des batailles, une noire araignée s’arrête, la tête en bas et suspendue par le derrière au milieu de la fenêtre que j’ai ouverte sur les feuillages et le Nord couleur de brou. Il ne fait plus clair, voici qu’il faut allumer. Je fais aux tempêtes la libation de cette goutte d’encre.


Paul Claudel (1868-1955) was a French diplomat, playwright, and poet. 


Stephan Crown-Weber (@ crownweber ) is a writer and translator based in Central Kentucky. 

6/22/2026

The poet swoons, and the audience swoons back.
Yep, they still snap their fingers at these things, 
and all are in thrall
to the passion, the emotional display
of the reading. 

Later, backstage, the kid who loved
poetry spied the poet 
reciting the lines in the mirror,
mimicking themselves in the throes
of the reading: each gesture, gesticulation
and tear, all rehearsed 
and replayed and so very
calculated. 

6/21/26

In the aftermath of a car crash I walked away from, I went sober
for a while. My head cleared. I started running. One day I noticed
myself actually feeling good. 

It didn’t last, but I think about that particular run– around a manmade lake, 
in the hot evening of Phoenix as the sun went down. I don’t
think a poem has to be the occasion for gratitude, 

but I’ll put this down as one. 

6/17/26 
Jason Diaz

Channel thy self from the seat of Fear. 
Recognize the "sovereign anguish". I am
hypnotized by the transit of bees; Human
Love outside the blood is Achievement at long
last. 

6/10/26 
Trevor

Egg Urns 

Firstable, 
for all intensive purposes, 
she should of listened. 
It's an old wise tale: a pre-madonna,
with a new deep-seeded leash on life, 
hurtled toward a hair-brained
scheme. She became a social leopard;
I told her, "Its a doggy dog world out
there,". "Curve your tongue," she replied. 
With so much free reign, little did we know
it was the death nail. We celebrated
with Holland Days sauce on
eggs
and corn. 

6/8/2026 
John Rake 

April 4th the end of the world.

Far enough on that road you’ll find a windmill and a stock tank out there in the high plain. So close to the center of wyoming you can balance the whole state on the point of a knife. You can’t build a fire. No trees. No wood or brush. Just grass and a wind that lifts the snow into the sky. It is cold. Far enough out there it is nothing but cold. The buffalo are gone. The antelope are gone. Far enough out there everything is gone. 

Far enough out there you’ll blow past the windmill and the stock tank. Pretty soon you’re on a road that lays down in the dead grass and dies. Far enough and the road is gone. Far enough and the dark and the stars and the night are all there is. Far enough and the wind and the universe take the high plains away. 

Stop the truck. Put it in park. Get drunk in the driver’s seat. Work your way through what was left of yesterday’s case. Your only passenger to the end of the world. A cardboard box of cheap beer. Drink it like all the women and people and memories and lives you drank before this night. The wind will sing you to sleep. The great architecture of night will cover you. 

It’s too windy to smoke. It’s too cold to step outside. It’s too far to pick up a signal. The numbers ticker away when you push seek on the dash. There are no stations at the end of the world. Whatever you used to listen to is gone. Whatever man you used to be is gone. Whatever the future was is paid out like bills in the palm of a bigger man’s hand. They’ve got you by your credit and your mortgage. Mom can’t use her right side. They took her car. Your brother stopped breathing behind an omaha rest stop. Your sister married a tech guy. 

Far enough on that road you’ll think the thoughts you once put away. Time to pull them back out again. Like why is it these people always dish out the losses and the losses add up the way they do. Always underneath the great big sky. You used to learn about the oceans that once covered this land. You used to learn about the stars boiling life awake on a cooling planet. People like you once hunted all the lands on that living earth and now there’s nowhere to go but the end of the world. Far enough out there on the high plain where the high plain ends and the world falls into the night sky.

Far enough you won’t put away the thoughts you used to think. You’ll light them like a fire in your hand on a windy night. Why not. Get deep enough in that case and you might even make a plan. Far enough on the high plain. 

Far enough in the future a choice is all a man has got. Far enough you’ll burn a batch of thermite through a data center pipeline. Far enough and you’ll put everything you learned in iraq to work again. Far enough in the future a choice is all a man has got. Far enough on the high plains. Far enough, you say to yourself. Drinking in the driver’s seat, listening to the winds at the end of the world. 

6/7/2026 
Caroline Cameron 

Knitting 

O, let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body.

Teach me to braid 
the sheafs
and thresh wheat from wheat berries,
teach me the techniques of harvesting 
the self from a broken body:
the student knows from two limbs
must one body rise. 

6/6/2026 
Trevor 

кот  

My cat is a little standoffish but I know his heart. When he sits down
by my feet, like a hounddog, and just shares the refreshing
dullness with me, we both seem to understand something 
together. We stare cooperatively. 

As for him, 
he sleeps, half-sleeps, cut his eyes at bugs and motes
of dust. Not much seems to bother him. If he’s
not a sage he sure acts like one. 

/

6/2/2026
Tristan Jones

I Should Have Told the Bees

I should have told the bees,
like the old wise women whispering in days of yore,
I should have stated to them in plain English the direness of the situation,
The direct line of mistakes and calamities caused by human greed
That will bring Hell to Earth.
In encounters past I have told the bees about my peaceful intentions,
My personal ambitions and philosophies to not bring harm.
Well, that was all quite useless as I should have relayed stark warnings of catastrophe.
Those poor little guys, we really don’t stand a chance, do we?
I will say, it does bring me satisfaction to hear when bees chase and sting humans.
Including myself, when I get stung I probably deserved it-
A little subcutaneous fire as a reminder of my failures.
I used to tell the bees about us, about our shared love of garden flowers and reading by sunlit windows,
The way you laughed at my jokes over a cup of tea.
A lot of good that did them, buzzing along ignorant of how bad it’s going to be.
No, the bees do not need mild introspection, gossip, or chatterings of gratitude for friendship,
As much as they love listening to those things,
A wake-up call would be best for everyone involved.

6/1/2026
Trevor 

Second Summer

The second summer arrived and I was full anachronism to myself. 

I was on the wrong side of things lately, and I was foolishly

waiting on a third summer. In my great waiting, I am waiting

on perfection giving ground to peace, I am waiting on surrounding

myself with what must be music. A pale pound of sunlight

illuminates the half-dark of seeing past your own eyes, 

and why should solitude be a solution to loneliness?