Lisa Delan

July 2025 | poetry

Trauma, according to Webster’s

“An injury caused by an extrinsic agent or

behavioral state resulting from

considerable mental disruption and

duress; acute physical suffering or

emotional upset inflicted by a mechanism or

force that causes trauma.” I’ve spent years

grappling with the trauma that tanked my kids’ mental

health, and the diagnoses that have dogged them.

 

Intimate abuses are potent, and they suffered the double

jeopardy of their father’s gaslighting ire and uncle’s

kaleidoscopic offenses. Claims of familial

love conflated with cruelty create a funhouse

mirror wherein truth is distorted, its reflection unstable.

Nietzsche wrote, “the constitution of existence might be such that

one would be destroyed by a complete knowledge of it.”

Perhaps this is why the truth of trauma is so elusive. It is dangerous.

 

Quixotic armchair analysts tout treatments to

repair the damage wrought by trauma, but there is no ready

salvation to be found—recovery is a lifetime’s work.

Therapeutic tools are just that, the wrench wielded

under the hood when the engine kicks. The shop

vac when everything falls to the floor and you don’t know

where the mess ends and you begin.

Xanax to take the edge off the rising panic.

 

You can only understand the work through metaphor.

Zayde told the kids to “get well soon.”

 

Lisa Delan

Lisa Delan’s poetry and prose have been featured in a broad range of literary publications, and she has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have been set to music by leading classical composers, and she has written the libretto for a choral work debuting in 2025 in her adopted hometown of San Francisco. When she is not writing, you can find the soprano, an international performer who records for the Pentatone label, singing songs on texts by some of her favorite poets.

Kimmy Chang

July 2025 | poetry

chrysalis

first bite in an anorexic’s recovery

 

i’ve lost the iron sting

of leaves once devoured—

green bitterness a stain

on the backs of my teeth.

 

“still hungry?” cicada chuffs

from its split-shell pulpit.

my half-open mouth,

raw as nacre, tilts

toward a wind-tossed bloom.

 

i touch the map of my face:

caterpillar hunger, butterfly refrain

pressed behind glass.

 

inside, stored fat thins;

sun-blade spears my shell.

cells liquefy, re-script themselves

into trembling wing.

 

house lights rise.

 

sequined skirt, gaunt face,

i study the mirror-dark oval in front of me—

one veined leaf breathing open.

 

i lift it like a passport,

let chlorophyll crack

against the dark of my tongue.

 

Kimmy Chang

Kimmy Chang is a poet and computer vision researcher. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in trampset, Amsterdam Quarterly, Bombay Gin, and more. A recent Pushcart nominee, she lives in Texas with her husband, two chaotic fluffs, and a steadily growing army of 3D prints.

Cyrus Carlson

July 2025 | visual art

Abstraction 1, artwork

Abstraction

Abstraction 2, artwork

Abstraction

Cyrus Carlson

Cyrus Carlson is an abstract painter whose small, colorful work creates moments of attention in a distracted world.

Holly Willis, Featured Artist

July 2025 | visual art

Water Still 25, artwork

Water Still 25

Penobscot Bay Light, artwork

Penobscot Bay Light

Holly Willis uses text and image to wonder how we might reimagine our relationship to the world, not as autonomous beings moving through isolated landscapes, but as embodied forces intimately enmeshed with the matter around us. These images capture sunlight and water from Penobscot Bay in Maine, shot with a camera that moves in tandem with these elemental forces.

Holly Willis

Holly Willis is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder. Using a variety of analog, digital, and computational image-making tools, Willis explores the ways in which we might reimagine our relationship to the world and its varied spaces and landscapes, not as independent beings moving through separate realms, but as transcorporeal forces enmeshed in dense relationships with the matter all around us. She asks if we can imagine the world not as some inert backdrop to human activity but as a dynamic array that we engage with in ongoing relations, how might we care for our world differently? Her body of work overall attempts to capture this sense of active matter, of sensation, and dynamism, and strives for what Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, calls the “arts of noticing.”

Christina Borgoyn

July 2025 | poetry

terminal ii

How quiet a mouse must be underfoot

as it feeds on human destruction.

This house changes with the seasons,

its long steps shaped like a mailbox

& languishes in the snowmelt,

freezing and refreezing as the days

grow longer and nights lengthen

as a ruler gathering grammar dust.

I find the envelope sitting in the mailbox,

waiting for its postmaster, but it’s been

years since anyone has passed by.

The snow is trodden by many afeet,

but it doesn’t matter that my hands

are like ice, frozen in midair and un-

formed by ASL words that vibrate in

our hidden reflexes. All we are able

to consume on lonely nights like these

are ashes disguised by our daring at-

tempts at feeding the empty gnawing

sensation cratering like a hole through

our esophagi.

 

Christina Borgoyn

Lives in the Baltimore area. Owns 1 square foot of Hawaii 2, a private, uninhabited island in Maine, thanks to Cards Against Humanity. Been writing since age 7, poetry since 11. Has written over 20,000 poems. Graduated from UMUC in 2012 with a BA in English Literature. Participates in NaNoWriMo and NaPoMo. Active member of AllPoetry, where they are known as Amaranthine Lover. Self-published November Poems, available on Amazon. Administrative Specialist II for MDE by day, demi-goddess by night.