I ask: do her breaths shake the house? With each crossed finger, with each denial does she grow on, unacknowledged? though you tried, tried hard to hold on to the times when people were nothing but an admirer of you I ask: does she still live here? incorporeal and thus unimportant, thus unattainable eternally. do her diaries keep her living? and do her ninety pounds weigh…

Cadmium yellow dandelions hug grape lake hyacinths. Fuchsia redbud flowers sneak a peak from their branches. Bradford pear trees spill their snowy white petals on the sidewalk and street. The sun spills brightly from a cloudless sky. Lemon-yellow flowered plants carpet the riverbank and sway in the wind. Most Canadians are avoiding our country. But not the Canadian geese: two swoop down to the river.

Some mornings are warmer than expected. Sweat gathers along the hairline. The regret of sleeping under a quilt arrives before the day does. Some people find it attractive, that raw smell of another body. Ser never understood why. His phone buzzed once on the bedside table. The reminder glowed faintly: Wingman. He let his feet loose from the bed, dangling. He threw the quilt away in small jumps, restless even half-asleep.

Stained slippers and threadbare pajamas. I invite you back to your side of the bed. Fights beneath our fingernails, we dug and fed ourselves grace-filled dirt. Awkward fumbling over a familiar dawn. Like teenagers learning to dance. We start, stop, two decades between us. We are still here. Our once hollow home brimming. This is where we begin again. Sober, you stand before me.

the length of noon beach shadows Gareth Nurden was born in Newport, Wales, and has spent his recent years writing haiku, senryu and haiga, and has had several hundred pieces published by sources worldwide in countries such as Wales, England, USA, Canada, Russia, New Zealand and more.

on the 5 line into the city. the air is moist with exhale. inside, sweat and grease coat the windows. I pick at my vermilion nail polish. someone's spilt soda hisses at me from the corner. an older woman summons the bus with her cane. without a single word passing her crimson lips, she greets the driver, sits at the far end…

For An the screen door stutters on its hinges, a locust shell kicked loose. july arrives with a slow stretch, curling heat into the floorboards, kneading the long, white glares of the solstice across the counters. the peaches sweat through their fuzzes, soft as bruisable hours. i press a thumb to their seams: split them clean along the stone, where sunken orange flesh spills down my wrist in amber ribbons, tumbling & looping into voracious dragons of candied scales, jaws unhinged to swallow the burning nine suns.

Let me back that question up— when you believe yourself, what's that like? To be whole, uncracked, able to recite your heart by heart in the flicker of gaslight. A dear teacher once told me to be on the side of the poet. When you're on your own side, what's that like? I think about the way Joan Didion describes…

During the night, my father cried out for a woman. The nurses assumed he was calling for my mother. I tell my mother her name meant nothing, just something he overheard as the drugs tugged him under. My mother takes my word for it, as good as true. I'd love to ask him who she was but the operation that removed a tumor…

The sun bobbed up and down in my dorm room window, the floor a whitecapped sea of used tissues. Unsteadily I peeled off my damp PJs and dressed. My fever made its own weather, cold air not quite abutting my skin. I sat in the busy infirmary, unnoticed till an arm cuff puffed to my blood guttering. Water, pills in mother-daughter cups.

1. Get out your kitchen knife. It's not what you think it is, I promise, so do not be afraid. Fear will do nothing but pollute your mind. There is no one you can trust more than me, at least when it comes to rituals of erasure. I've gone through these motions enough times to know that catharsis will come no other way.

Before the wet land, The promise will open wide Its mouth, for the Compromise. Before the secret And the soil of its Echoes, everything can Be mistaken for warmth. Kingsley Okafor is a writer whose work examines, among other things, the implications of identity, belonging, ambition, and migration as a Black person. He is a Nigerian who currently lives in and writes from the UK. His debut collection of poetry is titled The Slow Passage of Time.

The pendulum is broken By the songs of what's put On repeat: our laughter, The ache in our bones, The small flame of nostalgia Burning through the storm, Through the night and endlessly Through our stories. In the beginning was the smoke, Then there was the fire, then we Learnt how much light was needed To name darkness a beautiful thing,

I want a rose with a thousand flowers, a tin cup sailing from sun to moon, Meryl Streep's millions for crying too much. I want Elvis's blue suede shoes, the second row of seats to Lakme at the Royal Albert Hall, the last punch of Kimbo Slice in his fourth backyard brawl. I want the moon singing freedom, the mirror showing what I should see,

or, rather, he's always cutting fruit irregular thuds against scarred wood splashing juice all over the floor. grapes are good, he says, easy to eat. the american ones don't need skinning don't need wresting with the thick peel, just teeth into wet pulp and burst it open. 吃葡萄不吐葡萄皮 i wonder if our ancestors were once farmers, if they beat with heavy limbs at heavy limbs until fruit scattered,

In small towns south of Milwaukee, days disappear like dreams on snowy winter nights. Red maple and sassafras release turning foliage— a signal of nature's seasonal changes. Stopping for an evening meal, I slit the envelope postmarked Paris, confident you miss these moments as the restaurant's speakers sing Ed Sheeran's "Perfect" from an oldies station out of Racine, Wisconsin. Imagine a tangerine sunset…

I linger over hot coffee at the café on an avenue in Dover as a northerly wind wails in dimming light under a lopsided moon while I remain captivated by the soft echoes of the wind, captivated by your faded photo as memory erases the time I held your hand. A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of…

The June evening acquires a silence as a crescent moon emerges above sassafras and white pine as early evening shadows restore my memories— forgotten afternoons when we stood in shifting light a hundred miles from the country station and pointlessly questioned why we never kissed. A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving (2024) and…

At the far edges of Nebraska corn fields, billowing clouds gather before lightning displays its vengeance in a distant county, prepares to uproot nearby plowed grain fields as a porchlight two doors west blinks its warning as the morning sky quickly transforms into licorice. A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving (2024) and Nameless Roads…

The day comes perishing, inevitable on the waning east, settling hands dark and lonely over ground roots and whittling light away. Still in the awakening, growing fluent in meditation, lightwarm creatures giving way to a tender dusk. Among dry clustered forms, solemn in their ritual shadows, hoarding insects filter chorales, revised for later praise. At the turning of the stream,

sweltering late summer draws the skin to the thought of cooling even a whisper of monsoon sounds sippable we both know it's not that whose fault is it you breath-take instead of letting go I repeat myself into the mirror bell of a tuba the child kissing the broad wide embouchure both of us trying to make a morning but the day keeps turning late afternoon…

for Shanzida Alam Pritthy It's going badly. Already I have gotten up thrice to make coffee, once without sugar, once with, finally to drain it down the sink, the poem still uncorked, silent, like the bottle of wine you pick up unheeding. There will always be things to interrupt old habits, some guy in a suit will get on the local when it's ninety-three…

I found a dead mouse in a bathroom in a wealthy London suburb. A grey nonbreathing lump. The horror movies supplied a trickle of blood. Shock punched my skin from inside: that sense that everyone's fate is to become this bin-able matter. I dashed out, shrieking, "Un rat, un rat mort!" (the few French words I knew), feeling English inadequate for the tragedy.

I am looking for bones. I am looking for my sanity. I am looking for a mechanical pencil with broken lead and cracked cap, last seen on the slate under the desk of my third-grade classroom, sloppily hiding a rolled paper of a handwritten multiplication table. I am looking for fungi. I am looking for algae. I am looking for lichens.

The strike against the paper of the first letter you type And the wrinkle-faced puppies barely opening their eyes The freshly painted white of the street's long lines And the flower bud forming on the flourishing vine The light behind the clouds of the coming sunrise And the wobbling wheels of your very first bike The cursor blinking in the document's white expanse…

The water's surface threatens to reveal how far down curiosity sleeps. Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Confessions and Cold Coffee (Troublemaker Firestarter, forthcoming 2027), Now Let's Get Brunch (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in HAD, ONLY POEMS, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, Pine Hills Review, and more. Visit or follow him on Twitter (@carriganak) for more info.

ALT: Gregory Brown: I Think It's Kind Of A Beautiful Thing

Snow white contrails above the iron skein the wakes of flocking ferocity their hypersonic wailing the silver majesty of militant precision for only micro seconds seen as stiff necks crane over the girded gilded cables bridging the island's diversity so tourists can sojourn across the elevated span to cross the palms of panhandlers to stare at ocean's surging turbulence beyond steel spars and spokes, arches and beams, and, perhaps, to dream. Author writes in NYC, USA, under the pen name J. Cronos.

I listen to my voice & all its lies All my thoughts of you are good ones My eyes have shrunk the trotsky glasses only make it worse His buttered words arrived from France by fax & green as grass, I believed them Glimpse What foolishness to say: I know you I waited at the airport in Bangkok Three hours late…

Yellow butterflies gather on the red-rusted panel as if a pond of nectar appears in mirage to nourish their beings. Wind rasps a weed against, a fear of mass ascension settles as a piece of yellow paint flutters to the ground, and one more butterfly disappears. Diane Webster lives in western Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly…

Fishing line spirals in limp loops into the river inanimate on shoreline like drowned driftwood lying dormant in silt. While in current's flow a tree trunk floats; an overturned canoe up a creek without a paddle. Diane Webster lives in western Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Studio One, Jimson Weed…

I chose my father's French instead of my mother's Spanish, why, when I could have had the key to this city of soul—of salsa, of señoritas parading down Sixth, I chose my father's French, when I could have had melons and mangoes, my mother told me 'Try one poppy!', in winter, thermostat set at eighty-two, why, when I loved her café con leche, how she…

I learned parallel parking at 17. I got my first job at 19. I now speak Indo-European, play the bassoon, and eat tartlets for breakfast. You would be horrified. At 25, I lose all my clothes in a 5-star hotel. At 41, I try salsa for the first time and I hate it. At 294, I discover the meaning of life.

Forty-two thousand turkey days and seventy-four lightning mornings. Did you like the feeling of ice cubes on your skin? Or did you like the way I dried them with dolphin-patterned paper towels? We bought so many things that first week. Batman mugs. Three hundred forty-two glitter gel pens. I don’t remember the exact brand of laundry detergent we used, but I can remember the exact way you shrieked…

We walked the Lake Erie shore for an hour. No beach glass. Stopped for coffee at a place that looked like Starbucks. "Why now?" she said. "I'm getting too old to make the drive," I said. "And you already are." In a rundown part of Erie we saw a vegetable stand set up on broken pavement. Green tomatoes in a crate.

Sometimes I think there were too many. Other times too few. I've lost track of most of them— the living, the dead, the ones in between. A few show up in dreams. We say things we didn't say back then. Nights on damp sheets. Breath coming back slow. Both of us quiet, not sure what comes next. David Jibson lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is managing editor of…

I'm in the basement again folding your laundry. It will always be your laundry because that's how we did things. Your laundry to fold, my trash to take out, your dog to feed, my car to wash, your garden to plant, my garden to weed. At the bottom of the basket, a towel that says "his". David Jibson lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is managing editor of…

Maundy Thursday, Green Park the young man sings at Green Park station /if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us/ and the morning rush bundles by eyes half-shut, ears plugged and pumped with anti-noise inverted sound, they’ve cancelled him out, and I wonder if melody is enough, if words are enough, if anyone even listens anymore, is stillness still a thing on this…

We believed the ground. Until the ground forgot us. Walls went one way, children another. Someone called a name. Someone answered. Beneath stone and dust, a hand found another hand. For one moment, the earth held still beneath us. Eric Goldfarb’s work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday Magazine…

The fresh snow early in the morning reminds me of a love poem that most will never read, and instead, they let their footprints become like clumsy words giving directions no one asked for. Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, Existential Drunk, was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2026.

It's waking up early enough to feel the cool breeze against your naked feet after another miserable hot day that you realize eventually there'll be no more hangovers, blankets pushed to one side in the middle of the night or someone next to you, snoring as loud as love. Winter both a desire and a dread of accepting your own footprints…

Reading a dead poet arguing that there's no god seems to at least prove something about the way ghosts can be born from words and a true amen might be the silence between turning pages. Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, Existential Drunk, was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2026.

It's Halloween in Buffalo. Technically, it's the day after Halloween because it's nearly 3 A.M. and I'm dressed as Waldo and stumbling along a street I don't know in a neighborhood I've never been in and I'm wondering what the fuck just happened to me. My phone has no signal and the only thing I have to orient myself is the fleeting magnetism buzzing in my body that tells me Lake Erie is…

they chanced upon a fine school, followed by a casual affair, a common marriage, and a decent job (meaning wages) they had the compulsory children, two sometimes three, and bought a standard house in a green and peach neighborhood. they enjoy rollerblading, two glasses of red wine before bed, sex as perfunctory as 9 a.m. occupations. they throw parties where others like them…

see Giovanni the castrati sing high, his lilt tickles cockles of stars. poppy sleep, plum-plucked as a knee-high boy, Medici tosses roses from afar. a mild rush, all his body can deploy, a fate marked by his nether scar. man must invest, he must try to get by, somewhere sits a vinegar jar. Sameer Saklani is a Brooklyn-born creature of matter, now residing closer to the equator with his loved ones. He explores the humananimal condition alongside the various qualities of language. His work appears sporadically like graffiti upon tortoises.

after Harrison Hamm It was a star-less year—koi-shaped scars on knees, tequila cocktails, fire alarms as exam bells—parents teach us how education is the only way out—while the roof tops swarmed with lost souls—history books summarize the reason each movement failed, list the casualties & economic loss—while returning again and again. i am a vain person dressing up niche with cynicism, word-vomiting in the hollow of your neck—& you take me for what i am: smoked crisp in the slammer, smooth as china, opaque white & rice yellow like snakeskin.

We both sink into quicksand, unsure of who dragged whom. You struggle free, while I cave in, down into the marbles & shells. Deeper, now bumping coccyx bone on the longshore trough. Body molding in a fetal position, a daring sun would mummify & carve. You don't stretch your hand out to save me, from your own pool of tears, sorrow from nowhere,

You are somewhere the lights do not know how to go out, beneath a castle made pink by fireworks, while here the room keeps its old darkness, into the corners and waits for the person who has not come home. There, everyone is moving. The rides lift and return them, children are carried through tunnels of painted stars, a princess bends to hear a name she will forget by morning.