VA Smith

July 2025 | poetry

Wheels

It began in our bodies, parts of us craving release, the Let It Go of Elsa’s
icy power, the freedom of her frozen solitude. You, car-seated chanteuse,

fresh from Montessori Pre-K, I, your chauffeur grandmother joining you
in a ramped-up CD sing along, chanted Idina Menzel’s “the cold never

bothered me anyway,” a mantra rendered comic opera by the red flashing
lights in my rearview mirror. The cop’s pull over, the letting things go

speeding ticket on my dashboard you soon narrated hungrily through lunch,
Barnes & Noble’s story hour. You named it Bin-Bin’s Big arrest, wondered

with me if Elsa’s dominance would preclude humiliations like mine for our
heroine. We believed it would, you noting that “Arendelle has no cars,” me

not knowing then that our duets would continue for years. You grew lovely,
long-haired, towering in mid-field, shining like the magnolia in your mother’s

garden, folding your legginess into my child-sized FIAT 500, plugging in your
play list the summer of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, both of us breathy with

Billie Elish, longing to What Am I Made For? Understood its existential subtext without your knowing those words, and then also, vibing with the manufactured

prettiness theme we both—soccer girl, poet—cared too fucking much about.
When Luke Combs’ cover of Chapman’s Fast Car dropped, I held back on our way

to Giant about how it took a straight, white male to bring Traci’s 20th century queer, black lyrics about “getting out of here” to win Country’s 2023 Song of the Year,

both of us singing sad folksy at first then twanging on “I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone be someone, tossed “I get you” eyes at one another, reached

into our own yearning caves of becoming someone before landing at Playa Bowl, frozen acai burning sweet-sour in our throats, coconut flakes curling on our t-shirts.

Just last week, on the way to Chipotle, we both craved Landslide, wailed about our reflections in “snow-covered hills,” Stevie’s song now covered as deep and wide as those snowy mountains, our own changes stirring our insides as Nicks lullabied “even children get older, and I’m getting older too.” So I tell you now, sylvan child,

Sylvia girl, how time, like gears, shifts to reverse, cycles forward and back. As teens your father, your grandfather, in separate centuries, on cassette then CD, played

Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, sang “Box of Rain” with me as America unfurled around us. That’s the sweet-sour thing about time, lovey. It all ends and

continues

 

VA Smith

A frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, VA Smith’s work has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Third Wednesday, After Happy Hour Review, and SWIMM. Her first two books, Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters, were published by Kelsay Books in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Her third collection, Adaptations, will be published by Green Writers Press in September 2025. VA’s bliss is traveling, cooking, hiking, and loving on friends and family. Visit her website at vasmithpoetry.com and her Instagram and YouTube @vasmithpoetry.

Dylan Willoughby

July 2025 | visual art

Marriage and Casanovas, artwork

Marriage and Casanovas

Dylan Willoughby

Dylan Willoughby’s photography has appeared in On the Seawall (10-photograph feature), Wrongdoing, Rejection Letters, and many other venues. Dylan has been a residency fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell and holds an MFA from Cornell.

Lucinda Trew

July 2025 | poetry

Huck at the altar of drainage culverts

twice a day

he leans into concrete tunnels that run beneath

driveways, trusting in what waits amid wet leaves, grass

clippings, the effluent of suburbia – he is a true believer, a witness

who recalls a raddled tabby within one gutter’s

curve – temptation dwelling in the swirl

and shadows

 

the cat is long gone

but still our walks include vigils at each grated altar

our own Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage

of fidelity, a leaning in, nose-to-ground petition

to see if today will be the day

of revelation

 

at leash-end

I watch his loyal seeking, his peering into circles

of dark and empty, and long for his faith

of returning again and again

 

Lucinda Trew

Lucinda Trew is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and recipient of Boulevard Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets. Her work has been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Susurrus Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, storySouth, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in the piney, red clay piedmont of North Carolina with her jazz musician husband, two dogs, two cats, and far too many books to count. Her collection, What Falls to Ground, is forthcoming from Charlotte Lit Press.

Lisa Lopez Smith

July 2025 | poetry

Exhalations

untethered from my daydreams

my husband says ¿Que te pasa?

¿Por que tanto suspiro?

it’s even a joke now—my fictional

characters respond to every

line of dialogue with sighs.

Like me. We’re illegible,

scrawling out the only possible

response, knee-deep in flail—

trails of guilt or worry or shame.

Today’s flavour, borrowed in bulk,

could be the baby squirrel’s failure

to thrive despite two-hour intervals

of squirrel Ensure syringed into his mouth,

or the gravity of the paralyzed kitten

white-knuckling her way

onto the couch, back legs dragging

behind like limp balloons,

a trail of urine swished across

the floor with her lifeless tail.

All of it grim. Buckling under

concrete walls of my neighbour’s

construction— the misplaced anger

or is it jealousy—

daily aimed out. I, not wanting

anymore to make this heartache

into compost, rich and mulchy;

converting inflected pain from

their daily pot shots into

medicine. Instead, I want to

molotov cocktail my clumsy pain

back at them, impaling

injustice

back at them,

firing off cannons of ill will

until we all fall.

Instead, we sip a homemade root

beer, in a contemplative quiet

punctured by deep sighs.

 

Lisa Lopez Smith

Lisa López Smith is a mother and farmer making her home in central Mexico. When not wrangling kids or rescue dogs or goats, you can probably find her working on her next novel. Her poems and essays have been published in over 55 literary journals and nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Her first chapbook was published by Grayson Books; her full-length collection is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions.

Dana Stamps, II

July 2025 | nonfiction

Why I Hate to Read

Trimming a bonsai tree is probably better entertainment. Listening to good music, from classical to jazz to rock-n-roll, is so much better that I cannot overestimate the difference. Watching television is even more addictive nowadays with YouTube’s endless gobbledygook. Looking at paintings at MOCA, or at my local Art Walk, is much better than reading. Read this. I simply don’t like to read, even a little bit—plain fact.

And, since for many readers, this anti-reading confession of mine hits too close to the wobbly eyeballs, let me just say, though, that I like to have read most of what I reluctantly read. That is, I like to have the knowledge that comes with reading, the erudite vocabulary, for example. I like to learn new ways of punctuating sentences, too, and especially of complicating sentences. Or fragmenting them. I even like learning about crap I wouldn’t otherwise care about. Work?

Reading is work, period. You see, I grew up watching TV, lots of “I Love Lucy,” and funny movies starring Eddie Murphy. Reading was something that teachers made you do, not something you did for pleasure. The movie The Matrix has its characters learn jujitsu and how to fly a helicopter instantly, with no reading required. I would sign up for that.

But if I must read, poetry is my favorite. I started my latest poetry book, a longish anthology, at the end, reading backwards, poem by poem, so the experience wouldn’t seem a chore, fooling myself (almost) that the obligation is not a whole book, but just one poem, then done. Mostly, only poems with intriguing titles get read, but this time around I intend to read each poem, trusting the editor, not wanting to miss a good poem, an important poem … to learn from. Reading is research for me, always study. If inspired, I stop reading, and I try to write a poem. In this manner, like a pendulum progressing inexorably forward with each lumbering swing as the world creeps through space, I have been a prolific writer, and well-read, too.

So, why don’t I quit? I’m not in school. I seldom get more than a contributor’s copy for my efforts. Well, I think it is inertia … yes, that is why I still write. I have put in too much time to quit now. And I hear you arguing with me—like a remedial English teacher proofreading a slow student’s work, saying, “Why did you ever start writing in the first place … if you don’t like to read? Dunce! Nincompoop! Why produce writing—work, work which you, by definition, say that you don’t like?”

The answer: I wanted to validate my life, to give a deeper meaning to my experiences, my haphazard life, my astonishing life, my great life! And, of course, to express my unrelenting ennui … and love, such as it is.

 

Dana Stamps, II

Dana Stamps, II, is a bipolar poet and essayist who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Cal State University of San Bernardino, and has worked as a fast-food server, a postal clerk, a security guard, and a group home worker with troubled boys. A Pushcart nominee, poetry chapbooks “For Those Who Will Burn” and “Drape This Chapbook in Blue” were published by Partisan Press, and “Sandbox Blues” by Evening Street Press.