January - Poem 8

caddis 4 / Haley Bosse

Note: This form takes inspiration from the larvae of caddisflies, which create protective shells for themselves out of the natural debris in their habitats. In each of my caddis poems, there is one personal line written by me, the poet. This true line is encrusted in overheard snippets and otherwise found pieces of language debris. Using this form allows me to say something that otherwise feels impossible, under the protection of scavenged language.

how to become lost  / Jess Bowe

find yourself in the forest, in the deep emerald, 
in the dirt of the night and the early 
rainy mornings. find yourself 
when the kids are with dad. 
when the world is quiet for the first time 
since sometime in seventh grade. 

find yourself when sunday mornings are empty 
and made for good coffee and a sunrise 
with a cat in your lap. when you can make 
mistakes and clean them up before the kids get home. 
when you can swing christmas and wrap gifts 
until 2 am. find yourself on a sidewalk on a date 
with yourself, hot chocolate made how you like it 
without anyone asking why, cold 
so painful your hair sticks to the corners 
of your tearing eyes, and yet, never complain, 
not once, because the lights are beautiful 
and people are singing somewhere 
around the corner and the entire world 
has itself unzipped and ready for you. 

find yourself in all your bright ideas. 
in your piles of notebooks. in your dreams 
and time for things like dreaming 
and painting and tv-less bedrooms. 

convince yourself, once, that you’re lonely. 
that you’re ready. come through the front door 
you forbid from any man and tell the cats 
you’re in love. do mushrooms under a full moon 
and when the clouds cup your face, invite him inside 
and forget which moon is yours. 

the nausea will overcome you. 
you’ll learn how to carry life again, 
half divorced, and when your broken walls 
in an already broken home are too shameful 
to look at with someone standing next to you, 
you’ll volunteer yourself for every job 
that mingles with potential disappointment. 

do all the laundry. every sock and tee and blanket. 
watch your children melt into puddles 
and forget to buy rainboots. 
cry in a barnes and noble when you remember 
you loved to read and look at the spot 
you’d sit in when you had time to be alone. 

cry in every empty room, in any empty moment 
left with a hint of your name on it. 
try to remember what color is your favorite. 
what flower, what song, what day of the week. 

write a letter you never finish, and start it nine times: 

dear me, if i ever get out of here, 
please remember this:

Remembering My First Anatomy Lesson  / Joanna Lee

            --after “On learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs1,” by Renée Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by ICE on January 7, 2026

Never before such helplessness

the exact baleful pale green of the cadaver lab’s doors
in line outside and feeling I may as well lie down
beside a body in its sloshy stainless cradle

as expect to pinpoint the location
of the medial-most
branch of the brachial plexus
in a strange corpse.

Every              
body is different,          do you see?
In a room of twenty,
the nerves will take on new appearances in each, im-
perfect facsimiles of some larger principle.
And so many! veins, muscles, fascial planes, all empty now, yes,
all dead, static, flat like a tire with its air let out

but God,

I’ve studied this stuff for weeks—late nights,
skipped dates, through Halloween and damn near to Christmas—and still
can’t bring a quarter of it back to life on a dime. The sheer volume

of detail drowns me, and I smell perpetually of the dead, pungent vinegar-pink which will haunt
my scrub drawer for decades. Yet it isn’t

the formalin that humbles,
but the wonder.
The body thus reduced a miracle of intricacy.
The niceties of our daily rounds revealed
as complex equations in mechanical tension& nerve transmission& chemical signaling. We are

amazing.
Our lungs so like ocean
floor sponges, what divine evolution brought us
to breathe? What tinker-minded plumber
fixed the pump of our hearts into four pliable chambers, what
statistical nearimpossibility is every     
single  
thought? each decision a chain of neurons
firing in succession to relay intention
to guts, to muscle, to skin,       quicker than you can blink
To write a poem.

To assess a threat.

To pull a trigger.

1 https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigs

Inaccessible    / Thomas Page

The world isn’t accessible // at least in a wheelchair // which isn’t fair // because we have to use the wheelchair a lot // a lot a lot // especially whenever we want to go anywhere // that isn’t the kitchen // or the fireplace room // (what she calls the room with all the windows // and // you know // the fireplace) 

I know that it isn’t fun // having me tower over you // as we roll un-merrily along // the undulating sidewalk // full of cracks // and fissures // rocking the red steel chair // into the air // you putting all of your weight // into the left side of my hair // trying to keep you afloat // on the sidewalk // and // me standing upright 

We have traversed over // ungodly huge door jambs // unwieldy accessibility doors // and unseen accessibility buttons // who knew how messed up // the world really is // for those who aren’t ambulatory // trying to navigate // to any public place // under heaven 

EMERGENCY PROCEDURES FOR 2026  / Sarah Paley

Please exit
to the right
of my brain

in an orderly
fashion. Step lively
and mind the gap.

No need to assess
outside conditions
before departing.

Just go.

Migraine Sonnet #4      / Amy Snodgrass

There is a world at the base 
of my head that gets disturbed 
from time to time. I tell everyone 
it’s a migraine and I don’t mean to lie, 

but I think that’s a cover. Things are
alive in there. A cluster of maggots, 
orange with rage, swarms a rat carcass 
that –surprise!– leaps up in still-alive fury: 

claws out, teeth aglow. Then –oh hello!– 
a pool of magma, fierce and mad, in a frenzy, 
and frankly just mean, pours down over the rat 
who fought so hard to survive, over the maggots 

just trying to do their thing. I become the rumbling bubbles of pain– 
I boil wild, I boil free, I spill over– we are gone, gone, me–gone–and the rat.

January - Poem 7

Hopecore / Haley Bosse

When I tell the doctor I was exposed to RSV, he puts on a mask. 
How I only have to search her name to rewatch Princess Diana hugging AIDS patients. 
Knowing that if I get sick someone will hug me. 
Knowing that the first time I had Covid, my partner hugged me from behind through a plastic tarp. 
The memory of both our masked faces seeding clouds into frigid air. 
The hutch of seeds sleeping in the lobby of the public library. 
The older man googling how to support my trans daughter in the public library. 
Replying All in the Zoom chat: still here!

the erosion  / Jess Bowe

it begins before birth. it begins with a name on your back, seventeen stories high, with others just like you, carrying towers of war and legacy strapped and crushing their wings. it begins before your mother’s skin warms to the touch, before your father knows the weight of his own name. it begins before you open your eyes and see clearly the faces that shape you. they spit it out in ink and it begins, this belonging, this leaf on a branch on a tree in a forest in a world. at five, at fifteen, in alphabetical rows. when you marry and make a trade and do the labor of grief alone in your celebratory gown, champagne and sex and promise in your wedding bed. in the government office. in the paperwork. in the whatever-was-established-before-is-no-longer. in the kitchen alone, one night, forgetting what you wanted before you were told what to want. in the let me do that for you, in the late night tears and all the way down to the bottom of the barrel. in the saving yourself for last because you’re a good person. in the fantasy where you chop off the extra weight and your first name stands like an island. in the aftermath, floating on the back of the spirit who will not drown, whispering over her shoulder as an ancient grandmother would: i am. i am. i am, rootdirt still caught in her hair.

I watch cat grooming videos for solace before bed  / Joanna Lee

instead of writing. because my 
brother is drinking while he
cleans up the plumber’s mess
in his upstairs bathroom while
my dad forgot where he put his phone
and my brother yells at him
for not answering, and he feels bad,
and I make him feel worse by
telling him he should not
indeed tip his phlebotomist
when he goes in for his next
urology appointment and maybe
none of us should talk
on the phone so damn often but
then what would we do but worry?
meanwhile you’re coughing again
through a late dinner and
learning CPR is on my 2026 list but
in truth unlikely to worm its way
high enough into my priorities so
one of these nights in the thin window
we have between dinner prep and bed
some malevolent piece of pasta
is going to lodge itself between
the semi-mobile tissues of your vocal cords
and that will be the end.

all the while the number of emails
I haven’t answered multiply like gremlins
between the hours of four and eight-
thirty pm and I’m sure my to-do today
is lying to my screen-lit face and also
Venezuela and Epstein and ICE and
on this day five years ago we watched
—from a hospital bed—while they
stormed the Capitol and I really
should sleep instead of rousing out
those old ghosts because tomorrow
we’ll be back all smiles and pleasant
for another long winter draught
of hours and like the guy who
comes in from the towing company
for his coffee first thing,
we’re it, baby, getting it done without
a break, without breaking, living the dream,
at least someone’s, I suppose,
one of those who believe
it will all come out in the wash,
maybe, or that drinking more water
will solve all our problems. this to say
it could be worse, and really,
I’ve nothing to complain about, but god
bless that cat whisperer guy on IG.  

Online Orders   / Thomas Page

after Ocean Vuong

Monday

book on color theory 
book on WWII airplanes
bottle of gray, horse-pill-size vitamins
box of chocolate-covered oreos 
pair of compression socks 

Tuesday 

100 count box of alcohol prep wipes
bottle of sherry 
100 count box of individual eye drops 
bottle of rioja for kalimotxos 
bottle of coca-cola for kalimotxos 
pair of compression socks from a speciality store 

Wednesday 

refill on the sky blue pills
refill on the hi-vi orange pills
refill on the hazy purple pills 
book on WWII tanks 
ticket for an art film showing out of the state 
fast fashion wool-ish sweater 

Thursday 

giftcard to a national movie theater chain 
book on Japanese grammar 
150 count box of hypodermic needles 
medical grade first-aid kit 
10 ounce tube of neosporin
toilet bowl hand grips with stand 

Friday 

refill on white trapezoidal pills
refill on white oblong pills 
refill on white flat-circle pills
refill on white round-circle pills 
tub of green exercise putty 
box of instant Irish oatmeal  

Like a Dumb Man Trying to Shout “Fire!”  / Sarah Paley

That is how I feel trying to write today.
Something there but it’s like smoke in wind.
I might as well tell you about my grandfather Julius,
the bastard from Bobruisk, aka The Pickle King.
His head was like a misshapen potato and his hair
like a worn-out broom. A master of self-pity and guilt,
with a smile reserved for no one that looked like a boiled
string bean trying to regain its former shape.
Oh, and he was also a crook. As slippery as an eel
preparing for his nuptial journey to the Sargasso Sea.
Julius would have pickled the eel and sold it to the Pope
as if it were the body part of a crucified saint.
Actually, I think he did, and I saw it in a little town near
Assisi when I was young and beautiful as a ripe plum.

Out of Body  / Amy Snodgrass

I had another one of those no-drugs-needed
highs on the way to the airport this morning:

I saw a Porsche dealership 
shimmer by and lost my mind

floating
my skin 
dissolving 

hatred for consumerism seething, fear for 
my son raging in competition for his heart

and my soul felt like the book cover 
of A Million Little Pieces except instead 

of clinging to the skin on my hand, all the tiny 
spheres floated out into a bluegreen ether

strips of flashing street lights shot across 
the dark just enough like stars to deceive

all my pieces floated out I hoped into him, 
agnostic prayers of please stay steady on

the thwap of the rubber on the concrete lines
lulled me into such deep and brighter blues

that the hatred and the seething pulled 
themselves slowly up like a tired band-aid

then ripped themselves off that last little bit 
in a squeal of brakes opening my eyes:

no streetlights
   just stars

        and the plane

bringing him back, steady floating and blue

January - Poem 6

No Violence Without Harm / Haley Bosse

You waited patient
For your first stretch of seam,
You dreamed of perfect
Settling over you in the night,
Friction smoothing crystals
Malleable and ready to be rolled,
Your body doughed out 
On the counter,
Whole ranges of ancient mountains
Parting at the touch.

salt  / Jess Bowe

i used to run from her,
the fish with my mother’s
name, chasing me through 
waterways of a dream;
the mouth, gaping
and toothless,
sound waves swallowing
my safety— i believed
this was anger as big 
as a planet,

formed in a fist of cells
and sea-life, 
made in the image 
of its origin—

until today, waking up
with saltwater dripping
from the blades of my back,
stolen dolphins circling 
the tank of my ribcage,
their prison song wrapping 
its grip around my bones,
cracking me open 
like a lightning knife—

i’m swimming to an illusory 
shore, sand reaching out
with thirsty hands,
brine pool at the bottom
of my first-born fear.

in all of this thrashing,
thunder and roar 
of fins slicing blue,
my small voice feels 
blindly 
for boat bellies,
for boards 

turning waves 
into tunnels of light. 

Excised  / Joanna Lee

Look, I have cut out the words
to make room for you.

We used to say such heavy things,
whole bloodied histories,

devilry and romance. Which we stole
from something someone wrote once,

a soldier, maybe. Maybe Neruda
who dreamed in train whistles,

tracks. The past, though, is never
really past: someone’s dad’s always yelling,

there are forever
sirens. The Roman coins

tucked in the bottom of my dresser
you gave me over

all the years, I see now:
ferryman’s wages.

We never know how close we are
to becoming another statistic.

Just yesterday, for example, I fell in love
with the gleam of this place;

today I fall with its grit.
The same train still passing.

You, still
gone.

Getting twenty-seven cards about you didn’t make me feel better  / Thomas Page

How can I fault them
for trying to make me feel 
better about the way 

I had to leave them 
to attend to matters you
had no reason to 

want to happen? I
received a stack of twenty-
seven cards, hand-drawn

“In a better place 
nows” with smeared clouds and wings 
of angels harping 

gilded strings, happy 
with the results of your place.
I force a smile 
and a soft “thank you” 
at the big stack of twenty
seven earnest pleas 

for me to return 
to normalcy. Bereavement 
lasts only a week, 

apparently, so 
I take my twenty-seven 
cards, in purples, pinks, 

and baby blues; dyed 
with markers; colored with pens
to my desk back there. 

I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You  / Sarah Paley

(Sestina for HDP)

Do you remember me doing a som-
ersault for you? My body
curling up in a ball. But you died,
just as all & every
body must. I stopped then, for
what seemed like good but was mere seconds

in the scheme of the afterlife; heavenly bodies
& such. You’re wandering while I try di-
aloging. Remember that Christmas Eve
when you threw a bat at the cat for
taking a shit on your table saw? A sec-
ant! You had excellent aim. Some

sibling, trying to soothe things over for every
one, drew a cartoon of our Mean Dad. First four:
two sons, two daughters. Then me. I was your second
favorite. Later that year in the summer
he, the cat, would reappear. His terrible body
ravaged by living in the wild. A miracle he hadn’t died.

Images & words float up when I stop & wait for
you. Corduroy jackets, ring-a-ding-ding, your rusty sec-
ateurs. You loved moving earth. Hoeing, digging, some
times making us all join you for hours & hours. Everybody
griping about planting saplings we thought already looked dead.
You know what? I am now older than you ever

were. Seems rude & dangerous to say. I want no seconds
taken off my clock. You didn’t either. Though there was some
thing off, wasn’t there? That sadness got your body
to just quit. Street urchin, loved son, card player/die
roller, soldier, port captain, husband, father & at every
turn never resting. Forging ahead. What did you say? For

Christsakes! Yes, often & with your lower lip bit. Some-
where. Are you out there? I’ll stop and sit my body
down and wait till you pass. When I die
I don’t expect to see you. I do that now, every
once in a while. It’s been what? Forty
plus years since you split in a mere second.

Somebody dies every four seconds. 

Solitaire  / Amy Snodgrass

for Louise Glück and my mother

the cards are glossy and slip

count to seven and over again

sliding the three of hearts 
that can save the game 

the quick flip and tap 
is my mother 
reborn into the air 
around me

and I gasp 

synapses grasp and find their hold

this game I decided 
would save me
did not save her
what did I expect?

count to seven and over again

the sliding and scooping start 
shuffle and arc and flaring fan, fast 
and impressive although it’s all I can do
and within that line she sits 

across from me, ashamed

count to seven and over again

and I gasp  
and shut

cutting the cards, a satisfying 
drop sets new plasticity into place

she hovers lightly and haunts
she never ended her poem

the glow of the bluelight dissipates 
into a cushion, cozy and sure

count to seven and try again

January - Poem 5

Aquifer / Haley Bosse

Broken ankle, bruising like a peach
And propped in the rot of your bedroom.
Memory of the empty church, chairs stacked
And the flickering light barely grazing your face.

It’s cloudset in the street,
The scrape of your calluses on broken concrete,
The shiver you indulge in the place of desperation.

Between the pain, emptiness,
A gift of atoms, invisible
Unless you attend to them:
The worms surfacing from puddles,
Their wriggle in your palm,
The undersides of dripping leaves,
Greenbright between their veins.

Later, when you clutter with distractions,
The worms call out with inching rustle.
Place your softened feet on pavement,
Trace the shape of emptiness again.

no one young knows the names of things  / Jess Bowe

i wander barefoot through the wind-pressed field, high grasses bowing to the soil, birds glittering in color, high and low, sky to Mother. clouds of every weight and form gather and drift. i pay attention. i offer up my most abundant treasure and gift it to the land. white peeks from just before me, rough and weathered bone in my palm. science asks me to drop a skull into a box. Mystery says decide to not know. i imagine a story instead of a face. i imagine survival and what it asks. i imagine i am not god. i imagine i’m as common as the wind, as ordinary as any leaf left for winter’s bed. teeth and jaw. can i call you friend? can i blur the border between body and light? can i rewind, count inward, become alive in the heartwood at my center? can i become new? i carry remnants of a living i’ve never seen, packed away in my pockets of feathers and stone.

Progress can be beautiful  / Joanna Lee

There was a moment on the bridge this morning

blankly driving south to work
across the river in the leftmost lane
as we daily do when out
of nowhere,
all the small presence of traffic, all
the weight of the coming day, all the fear of failure

that tucks itself into my socks,
all the terror of losing you that never really
vanishes
vanished into just the way
the sun smacked the new downtown highrises

crimson gold, a gleam like god herself pausing,
entranced,
as she traces her name in light.

Passwords  / Thomas Page

How many ways can I type recognizable 
combinations of your first grade teacher 
or your first pet or where you met your spouse 
before online hackers access your health records?

Your healthcare provider seems to think everyone 
is out to unearth every single note 
between you and the doctor about flu
shots and medications and test results; like, why?

What purpose would there to be to unearth records 
about all the times I’ve administered 
medication your network of doctors 
seem to disagree or even to disavow? 

What is the value of knowing how many times 
you and I have driven together to 
appointments that say the same, terminal 
diagnoses that washes its hands from treatments?

How could someone impersonate all memories 
that are sewn together in these doctor’s 
notes, hewn by the clinical manner which 
your experiences are totaled in those numbers?

Can a person, a patient, be sold for crypto 
on the black market blockchain for some tryst 
impersonating your numerous years 
for some digital exchange of goods or services?

Where’s the humanity in that?

Sonnet for Fred  / Sarah Paley

Wilma goes to bed but Fred puts
Baby Puss out and gets locked out
himself. “Wil-ma!” he screams to no
avail. No one answers – not his friend
Barney. Not Betty or Bam-Bam. He sleeps
outside which shouldn’t be a hardship
for a caveman but it is. It’s cold and he
doesn’t have any shoes and only three toes –
not like he has any to spare to frost bite.
People night think I’m an alarmist for worrying
so about Fred – locked out of his house every
night. Hapless father, for-granted spouse –
he suffers for us all and we switch channels –
hoping he’ll make it to morning.

grace and mud  / Amy Snodgrass

after Daniel Halpern & Seamus Heaney

expecting the northern lights
then expecting them to crumble

into glisten across mud
that white man and his canon

me holding my pen and 
my rage fades to the exhaustion 

of impotence and I cannot hold
but it's time to be getting on with the getting up now

and this other white man, well, he’s digging things 
up, out of the bog and me, he lightens my load

like swirling arcs of orange so obvious and so rare
hindsight shatters myth into endless renditions

and it’s time to be getting on now, getting 
up now and expecting the grace now

the grace rising up now out of the mud now and up

January - Poem 4

Extant Horizons  / Haley Bosse

Their blue a promise
of elsewhere

as much as proof
of hereness

though you wish
here wouldn’t bother

though you wish
these cousin mountains

would split beneath you
and drop you in the sea

just like your distant
finny relatives

gazing up at the illusion
of bright white nothing

dancing beyond your shrinking bubbles
and then behind your tired eyes.

body heat / burning haibun  / Jess Bowe

new year and i’d like to be
an old me, one still at a crossroads, one
fooled by the costume of loneliness
worn by spacious possibility, the void dressed
up in a bed too big, a carrot in the shape
of a face; i’d tell her to think about 
it, the sense to run, the voice of sunrise
screaming to her bones look how far you can
stretch out your arms! look, i know 
you’re tired of learning how to keep the heat
on, tired of wearing chainlink over the soft
of your silvering coat. i know you wonder
if your hands will sink into more than sherpa
in the middle of the dark. can i be a spark
of a star, dancing across the backroads?
or a scroll of light, carriage of warning,
constellation in the shape of an arrow
go this way! this is a map from your future,
and an accident has been reported.
you are no longer on the fastest route
to joy. pull over and warm yourself
with kindness. it’s just the cold talking,
and the heating costs are much too high.

the voice of sunrise: 
soft wonder, you are the route
to joy, warm with kindness

Poem to a physicist (reprise)  / Joanna Lee

Bitter texts still sit
gathering the dust of the unrequited
on the lowest bookshelf : Schrödinger;
Einstein;          Dirac;              I wish
I had learned my quantum mechanics harder,

learned how the waves of us can crash into
one
another
and devastate or

leave no trace, infinite             
footprints
whose hum no human skin can feel,
on a beach where God bathes without sunscreen.                               

Watching from another ocean,
could you yet teach me
to temper my frequency &

bend it
round an ending
that doesn’t land broken
in a puddle
on the floor? or

demonstrate, at least,               how to encounter                    elastically:
one vibration smiling across a room, and we both walk away, un-

wounded?

Or just (to hit all the classic buzzwords) put time                   

in reverse, do this shit over? the homeless cats
that sleep on my front porch
waking up tomorrow to a slightly
different sun.
Higher
math never had a damn thing
to do with love.

Bloodstains  / Thomas Page

I’ve had to clean up blood twice,
scrubbing the red off the beige 
carpet—mellowed with age.
Wouldn’t it be oh so nice
if I never had to see 
you apologize to me
for letting body slice 
or a gashed fleck of toenail 
to flood my clogged pores. Wail
in unison while I ice 
away the labored pain 
while I let floating guilt pang
me. I continue to roll dice 
allowing myself to care 
for you alone like a bear 
lost in the winter. I splice 
triangles of bandaids
over the wound as I bade 
myself to watch the dear price 
you pay for my negligence.
My troubled, labored conscience
remembers the Prince song thrice 
about blood and rain mixing 
into purple life nixing 
all familial deaths    

On My Way to Lunch for Spicy Jicama Salad and Rissoto Nero  / Sarah Paley

It’s grey, grey, grey on Great Jones Street today
with clouds drifting behind a scrim of mist,
punctuated by exclamation points
of dangling yellow traffic signals.
This vague day sets everything in sharp
focus – the red, yellow, green, red, yellow,
green disappear down the Bowery as wet
wheels hiss on the slick black and I remember
the cow pie on a summer day in a field
of golden hay and know that what thou
lovest remains, the rest is dross and what
thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee
and I remember to try to remember to come
back to any small part of you.

River Street Fire House, September 2001  / Amy Snodgrass

for Ilyce

There’s a beach I go to when I feel lost.
Accessed only by a narrow overgrown path.
Black sand with sparkling flecks. Black cliffs 
with ledges just right for swinging. 

We used to be so every-minute-close I would call you if I sneezed.
We always knew exactly what we meant. Now we are worlds apart.  

Our sons have turned 18.  
You taught me how to pump breast milk. 
You found me the right daycare. 
You clipped that car seat right in.

But– even before all that, and certainly 
before all this– we were lost together

on that awful day and in all 
the weeks after. We had no idea. 

Remember that small, two-bay fire station? 
How we found it one night, just around my corner?  

“Let’s light a candle.” 

It lasted all of two minutes: “Ladies, 
we need you to leave now, and thank you.” 

We had no idea how young we were.

I wonder– where do you go now when you feel lost?
Take me someday? You’ve never seen this beach. 

Someday, I’ll bring you. I’ll say, “Remember that time 
you brought me milk during the lockdown?” and you’ll say 
“Remember that time on the bench by the football field?”
and I’ll say, “Remember that time you said that thing and saved my life?

We will swing our legs, soak in the salt, and know exactly 
what we mean: we were, we are, so lost, so lucky, so lucky, so lost.

January - Poem 3

At the end of the lane, a house with staining carpets  / Haley Bosse

At the carving fork’s furthest tip,
The graveyard where my sister shattered stone,
The borders of letters long softened
Into a face tucked away from fall rains 
And gazing down into the fairy circle
Thumping stone by stone 
From our palms into the moss, 
Small weights sifted from the dust 
At the edge of the nearby field,
Plucked from the ever-crowning Earth
And piled by whoever tended the wheat
Shushing as we layered upward,
Ring becoming clicking fence 
And then a leaning wall, 
Any calls back for dinner muffled 
With the fading light 
Weaving through the Old Man’s Beard, 
The drooping arms of oaks brushing sweaty hair,

My sister’s arms cast out to catch the stone
Between them as she fell, 
The snap and scrape of one more body 
Throwing shadows through the shade. 

resolution  / Jess Bowe

out the window, the backyard is barely breathing.
i wonder whether i am looking out or looking in
the mirror between us.
she yawns in the darkened morning
and stretches her pale face against
the sky. i stretch thin
and flat against the night. 

across the hall
i see you in memory, your small body
hollowed with song. it’s been years
since you saved me
from the frostbite of winter,
kept my heart warm and rhythmic.

across the hall, i see you, 
handfuls of tears, a fear so high
i wonder what you might look like
behind its walls as you 
stand there in front of me.

as close to death as she appears, 
a mother’s silence has a sound,
a primal birthing-place of what eventually
crescendos through the orchestra green.

i am a mother 
in the quietest places,
a daughter adopting the patterns
of Her seasons. 

she taps her cold fingers
on the walls of my room, to say:
we wear teeth, even in the snow,
a necessary danger born
of unquestionable love.

Tanka as Dream Sequence  / Joanna Lee

Up at Dad’s

Up at Dad’s, the deer
curl heavy into daylight,
their white plumes bright flags
to break his long loneliness
into tolerable waves.

Three snows come and gone
before an old year passes
leaving its sharp breath
etched in echoes of regret,
cold hands reaching for cold stars

Leaffall of decades
lingers in the woods’ hollows
collarbone-deep like
swimming holes for winter fear,
cannonballed oblivions

Not the same, you say,
this season, its bright baubles
that hum and lie flat
since your chest rises even,
and dying feels further off.

Still

My hand holds heavy
to yours in the hospital
elevator, sinks
like gravity each checkup,
each new smirk of a season

God’s laughing, maybe
into the wind that howls round
the parking garage
outside the cancer center—
it is always colder there.

We take the long way,
valley road by the old tracks,
the way you don’t like
me to drive at night alone,
where I pretend fearlessness.

Reprieve

Methodical plunge
blunt knife into midwinter
red flesh excisions
then tie stems with summer tongues,
make cherry margaritas

Home again           

Yard sleeps, unlovely
and hard in its winter coat,
still-thorned roses climb
past the windows, penciling
there is no escape from rest.

The white lights you strung
and taught to shine through the night
flicker a welcome
against the cold long darkness
of a city rigid shut

It’s the same, I say,
the loneliness, the cold star
reaching back across
bent midnights to find heartbeats—
to find us, in the moonlight.

Later

Neighbor’s porch chimes fall
into stillness as you sleep
with untroubled breath;
wind has died just a little—
silent prayer of gratitude

 Dr. Pepper Shot Tips    / Thomas Page

It takes about a month to fill one bottle—
one empty bottle—of Dr. Pepper with shot 
tips. I have to be careful not to pierce 
a hypodermic needle through my fingers 
as I juggle the alcoholic prep pads 
to moisten the germs from your skin. 
Every so often, I do puncture 
the skin I inherited from your side 
of the family—pink and white and freckled—
skin I have to keep shrouded in cotton 
and wool; skin labeled “rice paper” 
by the makeup company; skin possibly 
sold in stores under the label “bruised peaches”
or possibly “plum flesh; too ripe to eat;”
skin that my mother slathered in spf 
one hundred because of your time 
in the ultraviolet rays; the skin I lived
in when I impersonated your mannerisms
when I played the dad in The Pajama 
Game when my mother pointed out 
who exactly I was pretending to be. 

LOVE  / Sarah Paley

Blindfolded, we know the way. We’re familiar with the shifting
landscape. Our well-worn boots know those overgrown roots –
there just to trip us up. We know the streams with their sudden
drop-offs, slippery rocks, and, of course, we know where the quicksand lies.

We know who lives where and how to find them and there they’ll always be –
at the kitchen table, dancing in the bar, sleeping in the den, hiding up that tree.
The one we climbed together and where I knew you’d never leave.

We didn’t know the steady breeze would turn into a gust and blow away
the permanent, the for-granted and the dear. So much for popping
by for a drink, to shoot the shit, to play canasta, to roast a chicken, to tell a joke,
to sing that song, to tell what only you would get or to remind you of the time…

Intern at LoveMoney Clothing  / Amy Snodgrass

  for Tyreik Prentice

Because money follows love, the website says.
Not because you’re supposed to love money, right? 

I told you about the salmon in Alaska.
You were mad I was gone. Remember?

You are so full of love in a world so full 
of frantic upstream flipping and frenetic 
addict flailing. The salmon. They flap and flip 

like the hands of the man on the corner:
just as red, scales and scabs, desperate, 

not knowing they are about to die, 
both knowing they are about to die.

The man’s name is Chester, you tell me.  
“Chester,” you say, “You come on in, old man, 
and you eat. Eat for free. Eat because I love you.” 

You hold his hands inside yours and they still.  
My heart son, please, when everyone— 

like the almost-dead— pale blood-red— salmon
like the crack-fueled shaking— death of nature’s making

—when everyone is all on about the money

stop—

           hold the fiending until it stills into love

—hold the love — hold it to heal

the obsessive money-fueled drive to death—

January - poem 2

Stitched Up  / Tess Adams

They closed me with catgut—
a surgeon’s neat crosshatch
where the world had split;
my body a torn thing
stitched back into use.

Sutures tugged and burned
rough twine pulled through silk.
Each knot a small salvation
each scar a line of text
I’d never planned to write.

They mended my belly
my bladder, my broken gate—
made me a patchwork of losses
that somehow held.

I trace the seams—
their raised relief, their quiet shine.
I wear them as testament—
not to what was lost
but to what was re-made.

Unwanted Winter  / Haley Bosse

Wooded midday. Snow nearly
Scarring light. Wondering at
Quick damp. Crackle 
Of the plastic sled. Electric blue
Window of your thighs. How 
A breath catches. Then
Scatters out behind you. Coats
The sharpened hill. How
Even now you fly. 

Mother Magick  / Jess Bowe

three ingredient pasta dinner
tastes like firesitting feels;
for this moment,
you are warm and tethered
to meaning. you are close
to each other and binded
by story and songs and the scent
of smoke prays its way into
every fiber stitched across
your body. you are blessed
by memory.

in every room a song,
in every crisis, you know
what it means to be safe
and you do not learn the word

Crisis or broken poor without;
you know what it means
to have music sung in your doorway
while your blankets
wrap around you like angels
and you say them by name
uriel michael raphael sandalphon

the oven cracked open down the hall
sends heat and you never ask
because you never suspect
your mother is cracking open;
all you hear is melody
painting photos on blank walls.

under the night, poetry is written
in an upstairs room, candle flames
dance their shadows
and your mother, alone,
is sobbing her thanks to the close-up
clouds of winter.

you won’t know the furniture
she’s moved, the stacks of clothing
in the garage, the grief she’s shaken
hands with at all hours. morning is a rising
thing and her well-trained gaze 

catches the shadow of a child
wrapped around her waist
glowing on the back wall of the kitchen,
coffee and bread in the air.

magick comes from nothing.
there’s no need for it
when the world always knocks
at your door.

in the empty night, with bare hands
and feet to kiss the cold of the ground
that’s where it strikes,
each spell
and intention,
each noticed wonder unobstructed
by Things; what can you do
with the Invisible

that opens your eyes
to tiny white faeries
grazing the lips of pink
peonies— that pauses your steps
in the driveway
the sun spilling gold across
your rooftop,
the rain
calling out to light
splitting in spectrum

speaking
‘blessed are the mothers’
who make peace in their walls
with ghosts and crumbs
and still know god
at the end of the night
at the bridge of morning
and still wrap arms around
the world with room in their pockets

and somehow make
fireworthy
three ingredient pasta dinners. 

Haibun: Second draft for a requiem / Joanna Lee

siempre quiero estar contento
triste no valgo la pena

                                    --Estopa, “Te Vi Te Vi,” Destrangis

You were conceived in a season of darkness, of regret and little hope for a brighter anything. Born sour, plucked by hand and secreted into a clear plastic cup during January workdays that began before dawn and ended after night had made its daily return. Washed and paper-towel-dried, you were set with a half dozen brothers into special dirt and a small peat pot, anxiously perched in the sill of the most southern-facing window. You, miracle of mid-winter: those first two baby-fine leaves like a second shot at love. And like love, you grew. At two inches you caught the light as the days lengthened; at four, you were given a pot of your own: clay of some desert earth shaped in promise. Paychecks were poured into your fast-drain soil, and you soaked up each successive summer on the front porch where daylight lingered longest. Come fall, you’d be carried icon-like to the back of the house, your own room lit with your own fluorescent lights, defying the shortness of the days. Soon, your leaves were as big as a hand, fragrant as tea. You grew thorns—thorns! Spring rolled into summer and your branches reached for the sky, their willowy lengths dividing, thickening, hardening into arabesques. But there came a turning point. Some plague, one overlong winter, and for the past eighteen months, you’ve been slowly dying. The leaves dropping soundless, you ceasing to look upward. Each day a slow shear. No more drinking of the light. No more green laughter. Like me, you will never bear fruit. It is the burden of one who has planted the seed to put it to rest at its failing. One midwinter evening I carry you from the house to let the night seep through all at once—leaf, stem, trunk, to the cradle of your roots.     

Eres de los que no vuelan
presidario del silencio frio,
frio que la sangre hiela

Placeholder   / Thomas Page

Most people understand how serious
it is when I say what you’re dealing with 
“Oh, I know a guy’s son,” or “a classmate,”
or whatever distant connection they have 
with what they think you’re going through. 
People always wanted to commiserate 
about what how it must be like to be you
or to deal with you or to deal with it. 
Secrets are like the foil over candies—
torn open rather easily by children;
savored in the mouth as it melts. 

Time Travel  / Sarah Paley

Memories have a gravitational pull
though I seem to become untethered
and find myself floating like a novice 
astronaut taking in the galaxy of my childhood –

the iron key
turning reluctantly
in the grandfather clock

      the slurp of the mud
      swallowing my red boots
      as my sister pulls me from above

      a fireball’s dye
      alarming my red
      tongue

      the smell of lilacs, pine needles,
gasoline, cut grass, the rotting trunk
I sat on for hours in the woods

These comets hurtle towards me or hang
like dumb dead stars insisting on existing.

What are we without them? What do goldfish remember?
Involuntary traveler, there is no cure for memory.

Lap Swimming in Costa Rica  / Amy Snodgrass

(after living here for 12 years)

Somehow I’m still surprised every year
when these December winds make waves,

shaking my early evening laps 
into a frenzy: unwelcome and hard.

Here these winds –warm and long–
mean Christmas. These winds make 
everyone around me glad with tidings.

But even after all this time, I long 
for the dry scent of snow coming, for
the pine wreaths, the toffee and the elves,
and I wonder when my mother will come.

The winds shake the crane cables:
abandoned, shameful, and smooth.
Arcs of half-painted steel above the pool
claw into what’s left of the sun.

I pause and I float, watching others 
on the deck gesticulate as they discuss 
the next stages of construction. I watch 
them wave and point in the direction 
of the winds, and smile 
their holiday smiles. 

To them, the winds are faith.

To me, the winds are dust-filled omens,
darkening my lane with whipping dry leaves—

I don’t know how I got here.

January - Poem 1

Bog Body, Also Known As  / Haley Bosse

Sulfurskin 
Softbone 
Loosebreath
Breakthrough
Bottlerocket
Bricabrac
Songshush
Winterwait
Weightpuddle
Properform
Chloroplast
Sugarcrust
Crumblebuttal 
Cornerstore
Gathergutter
Groanlift 
Pittersplatter
Bedmade 
Lornlace
Twistslumber
Covetcradle
Gonedaughter 
Twinface
Allrefrain

under pressure  / Jess Bowe

saturn moans with a storm
composed of a thousand 
flavors of misery. 

hydrogen gets a hug. 

we stand at the glass 
and cheer 
for what we haven’t survived,
what exists without us,
unflagged. 

she holds me between
thumb and index,
a honeyed marble,
all 5’6 of me,
every bucket of midnight 
grief, volcanic paradise 
joy spewing, flame-spattered 
across the blackened 
forever-night canvas;

every color witnessed,
every tuesday afternoon
down to the palm of a hand. 

isn’t it glorious, the way time turns 
inside-out the moment we become
fully occupied with atmosphere? 

every human story, a game of jacks 
on the ringed bedroom floor. 

Eschatological meditations while doing the dishes on New Years Eve  / Joanna Lee

For some days now, the light
has grown—just a bit, as it does:

a few minutes’ sunshine
at the end of a long dark prayer.

And maybe that’s all we can ask
of the things for which we ask,

a brighter ending, or less clouded eyes
with which to see

even the smallest moments, like
watching the grease

from last night’s dinner
break its slick hold on the plate

when we apply a little Dawn,
a little elbow, the oil becoming

streak, then bubble, then sliding
into the oblivion of the sink’s drain.

A clearing away before beginning again.    
No, it ain’t quite the thing with feathers, this

clock tipping the first handful
of earth onto last year’s grave, it ain’t

dandelion wishes or confetti-on-crystal—yet,
dishes cool and drying on the rack,

we’ll pop that bargain store bottle
of bubbly just the same.   

Cop-Out / Thomas Page

I’ve seen it mentioned a lot on TV
to explain away an absent actor 
or pencil in a cause of departure. 
“This kind of tragic thing happens many
times a day,” they say, “just make sure to see
your doc, just to check” patting the bereaved 
tissues all over the floor. They might play 
Coldplay or Snow Patrol or even Creed
while the heavy, steel double doors close out 
this season’s big twist— a fan favorite killed 
off screen— syncopated with the baseline,
Hollywood white teeth enrobed by cherry gums 
pantomiming grief, collapsed on the floor
liquid tears rolling down in a straight line: 
I only remember how quiet it was when they told me. 

BREUGHEL  / Sarah Paley

Across the street on the sixth-floor missing windowpanes are billowing plastic
on this windy, cold day. A floor below a Puerto Rican flag serves as a curtain.

An army of delivery men congregate outside the Hub. They talk, argue, whisper,
shout, sing in Wolof, French, Fula, Mandinka, Jola, Soninke, Arabic

They wear their unofficial uniform of black hoody, thick canvas pants,
and helmets. A sea of orange and green bicycles extends around the corner.

Prayer mats are snapped open and placed on the sidewalk facing Mecca.
Their comrades huddle and picnic under scaffolding eating mountains of rice

bought from the Halal truck parked mid-block. Cooing pigeons, their chests bulging,
heads thrusting, pace like generals inspecting the troops as they wait

for grains to drop. At the bakery, young couples order lattes and Scandinavian pastries.
They try to navigate their heavily insulated children

while pushing stroller tanks. It’s recess time at the Eastern New York Community School
and a gaggle of adolescent girls, armed crossed, heads askew,

try to convey their utter disinterest to the middle-aged coach who holds the basketball.
On the other side of the playground boys attempt to look menacing

but can’t resist busting out to chase one another in circles. Two customers sit in the window
of The Barber’s Blueprint. A black and white pit bull in an argyle sweater pulls

his master towards a tree. A firetruck, red lights flashing, is pulled up outside Andrea’s
Pizza Oven. A firefighter emerges with a slice

And yes, overhead, that’s Icarus falling and flailing through the blue sky.

Late December, 2025  / Amy Snodgrass

the sun took so long to rise 
we thought it wouldn’t,
my daughter and I  
–it took so long

–the stretch of Illinois highway spilling 
in front of us to the horizon– 

we felt apocalyptic:  the world 
seemed intent on stopping, ready-ing 
          itself to re-start, defiant

we laughed, used the words freaky 
and eerie, doomsday, foreboding

a great moment of connection and we
will relish it in reverse but still
I longed for lorazepam and still
she slide-glanced on repeat to the east 

we came to the brink
I felt my panic tide up to crest
she googled sunrise time today

the white lines barrelled us along our way

and eventually, yes, the darkness heaved into dullness 
and the gray glowed around the edges

my daughter relaxed into relief, laughing 

I myself tightened (and now here’s|
the secret I’m telling only you, so sshhhh!)
I tightened into what felt like–
it couldn’t be, though–     disappointment.

I mean, the day 
rose, the drive ended, and
everything, even after all that, everything 

was just fine