The sun is gigantic over the horizon (just a moment ago, the shutting off of lights). She can’t tell if it is rising or setting. A hermit thrush is singing on the corner of her granny’s springhouse roof (that’s me, but she doesn’t know me yet). She puts her bare feet (where were the socks they insisted she put…

  Based in Ohio, USA, R. Jerome Michael teaches writing and writes about ethics and technology–the techne and the logos. Their writing mostly appears in peer-reviewed, academic journals. They write poetry too, though with questionable talents and little fanfare. Their poetry has appeared in Nocturne and SLAM.

  This machine is a lippy huckleberry; get out your brain: He that adze his fleshy blade  hacking a deep plane chops a field to the sore. Not a wager behind him, he that mad drafter swings untranslatable  hooks through the cadmium, the age-dense ore.  He, that unfinished,  that closer on the track to the ancients turns up the masto-…

Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale is a black poet & pilgrim from the city of brown tenements. A Pushcart prize and BOTN Nominee. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Kraak Prize. His poems have been published in: Boudin, The Oakland Arts Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Progenitor Art and Literary Journal, Zaum Magazine, Ember, Brittle Paper, The Westchester Review, Soundings East Magazine,…

  Calligraphy Lesson I press my elbows into the edge of the mahogany table. Grandpa spreads bleeding characters across the chapped paper— each stroke a tucked pocket. On afternoons like this, the sunlight warms the cold black ink. While we sit in the room, framed by photo albums and paperweights, Grandpa follows his shadow through a brush.   The characters…

    Mississippian John Horváth has published poetry internationally since the 1960s in Parenthesis, The Write Launch, Streetlight, Quagmire Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal (Best of 2018), and Brave Voices (Zimbabwe). After Vanderbilt and Florida State universities, following a bad parachute drop in Iraq leaving him 100% disabled with the VA, “Doc” Horváth taught at historically Black colleges. To promote contemporary…

  It’s the dignity of pigeons, their imperious head tilts, surveilling their domain. No one understands that. They don’t have the same impediments. Imagine subway tunnels if you were eight inches long and had wings. An American Tail was right about the crown on the Statue of Liberty. Only pigeons could do that. Imagine having the scope of the city…

    Poetry by Rebecca Pyle appears in The Hiram Poetry Review (forthcoming), The Penn Review, Anacapa Review, Flying Island Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, Eclectica, and in many other journals and reviews. She is also a writer of fiction and essays; her fiction has been nominated for both the Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize, and an…

    Peter Munro is a former fisheries scientist who worked in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Seattle. Munro has recently earned a poetry MFA at the University of Washington. Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, The Birmingham…