In silver, a flash: fish flesh, crystal blue. Scalpel. Tool gleam in blue glove, blue gown angel. A wolf in water, chest collapsing. The rind of a stomach pressed to glass, leering in. Sliced mouths on the hips, a cheshire lump removed from a woman at the body’s corner. A window in the long room’s milky skin. A glance taken…

Cloud shadow hangs low on brindled hills. The chill breeze clears a musty mind. Doors slam, birds trill, air conditioners buzz, the wind hums this daily choir. This town was not named in irony. A New River rises every rain. An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel lives in Arizona. He has published stories in Western Humanities Review, Water-Stone, and…

When my grandmother died, no one asked the house what it wanted. They asked about the bangles, about the land behind the well, about the teakwood trunk that smelled of camphor and mothballs. But the house— with its flaking pistachio paint and the hairline crack that ran from window to ceiling like a held breath— refused to divide. Every afternoon,…

His lungs were filled with air motes and twice the size of pulchritude. The gong of the cathedral’s bell nor the recitations of catechisms could save him, as a dole can save a drifter marooned in an icy updraft. I swear his eyes were all pupils, two chthonic magnets, and as he approached I awaited the darkening. The squall of…

On page one, a scratch of coastline where the ocean rehearses its apologies. On page two, the swamp’s green choir, all throat, all patience, all hunger held behind the lily pads. On page three, a man selling boiled peanuts from a cooler with a cracked latch. He smiles at you as if he knows what you buried under the seat.…

It keeps me limping in these clayey, foot- tamped cuts, working my way through lilting shoots and thorny boughs that look like stanzas. Bare- foot, I feel warm sensations in the deep ruts left by long-gone waggoneers, whose cold words cling, frost-like, to the echoes of my heels. My throat swells shut from allergens I’ve kicked up—my lozenges are almost…

Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has won the DIAJ Award and been nominated repeatedly for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Burningword, Gyroscope Review, Bicoastal Review, Stonecoast Review, and Sunlight Press. Alina is a haphazard but passionate…

Lindsay Rockwell opens the shared landscape of poetry, healing and the sacred. She’s recently published, or forthcoming in Guernica, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, Poet Lore, SWWIM, among others. Her collection, GHOST FIRES, was published by Main Street Rag, April 2023. Her manuscript, A Woman and Her Gods was a finalist with Lit Fox Books and a semi-finalist for the…

we do not join the navy we are the navy that sails through cities, that docks on your sidewalks with ragged boots and jackets for masts and bedrolls for gunwales our noses are prows our behinds are poop decks our smells are dead salmon what you shun and escape and leave for rats to ravage no address necessary when you’re…