Timothy L. Rodriguez

July 2025 | poetry

Hee Haw

We walk where the blade talks

high wire of a divide

between schemes of dreams

and the certain verdict

in the capital trial called living

 

All walks punish with wishes

We wander dead ground

a travail through felled

trees of knowledge

 

The hee in the irony

of haw is we knew

all sides of the effects

but still stayed the course

 

Profits issue the orders

to disavow how this foul

and noxious handiwork

can level if not erase

our collective sense.

 

On the shoulders of hubris

we stand arms akimbo

assuring our final resting

place is disgrace

 

We think we’re invincible

too important to fail

too big to flail in our own stink

incapable of falling into oblivion

 

Until the fall we dismiss the mephitis

Telling ourselves it’s odorless

the perfect deflect to hasten

the end of our kind

joyously singing in acid rain

 

Timothy L. Rodriguez

Timothy L. Rodriguez has published in English and Spanish. Warren Publishing of Charlotte, NC, recently introduced his latest novel—Never is Now. His fiction and poems have appeared in over two dozen national and international publications, including Main Street Rag, Another Chicago Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal (2017 Pushcart nomination), The Raven’s Perch, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Jim Ross

July 2025 | visual art

Monet's Blue Iris, artwork

Monet’s Blue Iris

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in nine years, he has published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage, Sweet, and Typehouse. Recently nominated for Best of the Net in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between the city and the mountains.

Joseph Landi

July 2025 | poetry

Bodies

We found them rolled together in a sack,

soaked by runoff at the bottom of a grass embankment.

Tossed from a car, no doubt. We peeled them apart

and laid them on a bare log in a skinny roadside copse

to dry. We were nine with little idea of what we beheld;

their pictured parts pierced by familiar appendages made

alien by size. Our mouths gaped like theirs as we stared.

 

We hid them in the hollow of a rotting stump

and went home to wonder at sisters and neighborhood

girls. All summer, we returned to our moldering hoard

to ogle and ahh and, later, laugh at and fight over

favorites. We were learning like any beasts.

 

Joseph Landi

Joseph Landi is a medical writer living in New York City. His poems have appeared in North American Review (NAR), The Southern Review, South Carolina Review, Midwest Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. His work is also featured in the textbook “Elements of Creative Writing” published by NAR and the University of Northern Iowa.

Bethany Jarmul

July 2025 | poetry

I’ve Spent My Life Separated from Living

Separated by doors, windows, walls—

swallowed by digital throats, settled into a stomach

where I collected friends and hearts like stamps.

 

I’m not sure what I want on my gravestone, but I know

it’s not: Comfortable Suburbanite. Perpetually Online.

I’m interested in interruptions: how from a night sky

 

a lightning bolt sunders a solid oak or birch,

how an evening without electricity gathers us

like moths to the candlelight in each others’ eyes,

 

how eyes lock from across a busy train station,

how a train can usher a leaper or an accidental

dreamer into eternity. Eternity has already begun

 

and my life is a blip somewhere in its predawn.

In the predawn, my one job is to flash like a firefly,

to refuse to drown in the comfort of the dark.

 

Bethany Jarmul

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer, poet, writing coach, and workshop instructor. She’s the author of a poetry collection, Lightning is a Mother, and a memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature and Best Small Fictions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She’s a grant recipient from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.

Zoé Mahfouz

July 2025 | fiction

Jellicle Song For Jellicle Clint 

Not long ago, after I started devouring my Chicken McNuggets, this old man, who by the way I’ve never met in my life, tells me that normally food is forbidden inside the cinema, so my first thought is oh, he must be hungry with all that skin that’s falling off him like a blobfish put out of water, so I offer him a nugget, and he says he will allow it but it wasn’t like that back then I tell you that, are we still talking about the chicken I ask, he follows by saying that back in the seventies he used to work in a cinema and most cinemas had leaking roofs, which sounded odd because humidity helps your skin stay hydrated and look younger and that man looked almost as dry as a tardigrade in the Atacama Desert, he then says that in addition to the water infiltrations there were mice everywhere because of the food scraps that people made around the seats, so the cinema decided to buy a cat called Clint to chase the mice, and when there were no more mice, Clint had no home to return to, so this old man whose sweat gland functions have clearly deteriorated during this conversation, decided to adopt Clint and he fed him normal processed food for the next twenty years of his life, then he went to Paris with Clint and met Clint Eastwood at the George V, they took a glass of champagne together which didn’t make up for the missing thirty percent his body needed to achieve his sixty percent normal water intake, so he decided to go back to London, he stood still outside in the wet soil and that allowed him to grow and grow and grow until he turned into a magnificent cardinal flower, and right before he was about to perform for the funeral of another dry king he turned progressively brown and felt the moisture wasn’t enough anymore, so Clint stepped in, put him in a sink filled with water, and his topsoil started feeling damp, that’s when he realized he should probably cancel his paid Patreon membership to this odd fantasy podcast he’d been listening to before his billing date to ensure he wouldn’t be charged for the next period, but as he was about to reach for his phone Clint put his paw on his mouth and whistled shush, and Clint in Boots was way more persuasive than Puss in Boots, and that is how this old man got his military discharge.

 

Zoé Mahfouz

Zoé Mahfouz is a multi-talented French artist: an award-winning bilingual Actress, Screenwriter, Content Creator, and Writer whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her writing has appeared in over 70 literary magazines and best-of anthologies worldwide, including Cleaver Magazine, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, NUNUM, as well as Ginyu Magazine, a respected journal of avant-garde and contemporary poetry, and The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers. While her fiction is often described as “very tongue-in-cheek,” “kookie,” and “random,” her poetry, which ranges from seventeenth-century eerie Japanese haiku and haibun to more classical forms and the occasional ekphrastic poem, draws on anthropological strangeness and sharp mythological references. In contrast, her other poetic and prose works lean into a darker, more introspective register. They weave fragmented narrative with sensory overload and philosophical undercurrent, exploring themes such as psychiatric care, neurodivergence, and the collapse of identity.