Hugh Findlay
Ice
Warehouse
The artist lives in Durham, NC, and would rather be caught fishing. He drives a little red MG, throws darts on Tuesdays, reads and writes a lot, dabbles in photography and makes a pretty good gumbo.
The Proxy Tunnel
I.
There’s a chance everything has been assumed incorrectly.
There’s a chance I’ve gotten it all wrong.
Misplaced the dangling modifiers.
Left decimals out of column.
Commas forgotten, and misfired chromosomes
flipping an entire species on its genealogical frontal lobe.
Prophets tried to warn.
Seers and shaman returned
carrying markers of indemnity, lived experience
suffered and survived, until now
becomes instinct, systemic acceptance
defining the limits of beauty and love.
II.
Compressing time compares
particle versus wave, proxy tunnels
navigating both like wormholes
linking process and form.
Conceptual technology owes its existence
to the human body, the internalized
network of firewalls, end-stops, cul-de-sacs
of private intentions needing protection
from fear of the anonymous hack.
Conjunction subordinates proper speech.
By all indications, pop stars leave the myth-
making to poets and teachers.
Take a straw poll of life’s greatest fears.
See how many answers feature
bridges and tunnels connecting us,
and all things.
III.
I carry weight around unknown,
height a cradle-fantasy of remembered baptism.
I am never smart enough to think like a foreigner,
an outsider accustomed to facing nature
in its raw nakedness, beauty balanced and awe.
Some tastes require jugular sweetness,
warm country tabernacles surrounded by thick night.
Preachers wed desire with a mother’s faith,
common metaphor saving its best for last days
of character-selling, shelter-space limited
to flesh and imagination.
IV.
Sanctuary splits me confused, me not smart enough
to skate across thin layers of meaning.
Not understanding but knowing the difference
between here and not here
simultaneously. Nowhere to be found
depicted in watercolors is too diluted
for aristocrats and the general
practitioners of the Sacred Arts,
the Primal Magic of self-doubt,
paranoia, and its shady base
of operations in poetry.
Patrons pay my expenses, photograph my receipts.
Desire allocates, critiques my inner algebra,
formulas setting parameter for stammer
too elastic to eliminate its brittle shell.
After questioning, beauty accepts
quiet comfort, knowing fear remains
the only modern ignorance left to eradicate.
Marc Meierkort is a writer and educator who has taught high school English for 19 years. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (B.S.) and National-Louis University (M.A.T.), and he currently lives in Chicago’s suburbs. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has recently had poems published by The Main Street Rag, Columbia College Literary Review, The Nassau Review, Inscape, and Spectrum.
Line Dancing
A week after our father’s memorial service, my sister and I leave town for our cousin’s wedding. A wordless clamp lodges at my temples. My sister turns me sideways in the bed, places her hands in my hair. Maybe I can make it go away, she says.
The women in our family are always the loudest. Our cousin Marsha, yellow hair, red dress, calls out steps: the wobble, the slide, two kinds of shuffle. We dance with her into the din. We’re following orders, we’re miming happiness until we (goddamnit) feel it, every movement prescribed.
It’s a relief not to think for a while.
Later, my sister and I lie side by side on the queen-sized bed because we’re too tired to go back down and request a double. My sister says: Nope. Not tonight. We’re not going there.
Don’t say it.
No tears allowed, no crying.
There’s a snake around my neck that used to be a lion.
Melissa Benton Barker’s work appears in Jellyfish Review, Peach Mag, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Elemental, was named semi-finalist in The Atlas Review’s semi-annual chapbook reading period and finalist in Eggtooth Editions annual chapbook contest. She is the former managing editor of Lunch Ticket and a first reader at Vestal Review.
Blessed are those who cannot see
Blessed are those who cannot see
Or don’t believe in their sight
Or perhaps in vision altogether
For they shall be granted visions of what might be
Rather than what is
Or seems to be
A glut of nothingness
Random in its nature
That circumvents or ignores
The possibilities occurring
All around us
That don’t yet fit
Into a theory
Built
Upon the past
Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in the Bicycle Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Calliope, The Cape Rock, The Chaffey Review, Inscape, Mouse Tales Press, Organs of Vision and Speech, Tacenda, The Bohemian, Agenda, The Corner Club Press, Crack the Spine, The FictionWeek Literary Review, the Aurorean, Carcinogenic Poetry, The Bangalore Review, 521magazine, Former People, Grey Sparrow Journal, IthacaLit, New Plains Review, Inwood Indiana Press, Free State Review, Poetry Nation, Witness, and The Cats Meow. A short story has been published in blazeVOX. He’s written three novels and five screenplays. His film was successfully screened at Santa Cruz and Short Film Corner of Cannes film festivals.
ODALISQUE PAINTING, MIXED MEDIA
odalisque #7 climbs out of the wall evicts me from the museum
odalisque untitled becomes very invested in her cuticles
odalisque #13 is detained in de gaulle international for the oil pastels in her purse so she
touches up her makeup in the airport bathroom & forgets her foundation inframe
odalisque (black eyes) spoke to me about the parts of the sky she had omitted
on Wednesday I find her bedrooming the beehives in the tree under my kitchen
odalisque #8 is still waiting for the moon to notice her back
Maya Salameh is a sophomore at Stanford University, where she is a member of the nationally ranking Spoken Word Collective and serves as the Inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Markaz Cultural Center. She is a 2016 National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets, and has performed at venues including the Obama White House and Carnegie Hall. Her chapbook, rooh, is forthcoming with Paper Nautilus Press. Her work has been published in the Greensboro Review.
Print & Digital Issues
Featuring:
Issue 115, published July 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Christina Borgoyn, Cyrus Carlson, Laurence Carr, Marina Carreira, Kimmy Chang, Lisa Delan, Todd J. Donery, J.M. Emery, Louis Faber, Mathieu Fournier, Veronica Scharf Garcia, Alaina Hammond, Marcy Rae Henry, Bethany Jarmul, Joseph Landi, Mary Dean Lee, Madeline Eunji Lee, Zoé Mahfouz, Juan Pablo Mobili, Arthur Pitchenik, Timothy L. Rodriguez, Jim Ross, Susan Shea, Dave Sims, Rome Smaoui , Lisa Lopez Smith, VA Smith, Dana Stamps, II, Angela Townsend, Lucinda Trew, Thomas Vogt, Holly Willis, Dylan Willoughby, Stephen Curtis Wilson, Jessie Wingate, and Jean Wolff.
