July 2025 | poetry
Ode to T-Pain
Like an octopus crowning itself with mollusks
you took pains to hide your beauty.
Auto-tuned a voice that needed no tuning,
that sounds clear and honest as winter
on the nape of the neck. Often, if not always,
we ask angels to play the kazoo. To suffice.
I like to think most of us is unexplored
potential, songs and poems floating in vials,
embryonic kisses, and the apologies
we should have worn, hanging motheaten.
I wish Grandma, who never raised her voice,
would have. Its sound in the untested register
of rage, woe, glory. And what might she have
to unhide of her plainspoken love?
They glitter and reek,
the wines casked within us.
J.M. Emery
J.M. Emery is a Chicago-based poet. During the day he works for the government, most recently on initiatives around maternal and infant health.
July 2025 | poetry
My Body, Your Choice
Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light
waves toward my flat black pupil
a record
shuffling the same few songs.
Isn’t that what womanness has been about?
Repeated scenes:
the bonnet-donned bonnie
forking at the hay bail
the fish wife catching
her baby born under the stall
the silken onion skin
of the matron’s hands
as she uses a needle to connect
loop after loop.
“Our own” rotating square of green or taupe, mist, ash,
tobacco, brick, ultramarine, coal, pitch, straw–
is a boundary–tethered by the leather strings
of a coin purse held in someone else’s name.
The record changes its vessel:
cassette-compact disc-digital-multimedia.
A teen is taken
on a hill of quilted covers
the administrative assistant
pumps milk at her desk
a woman with a coif like a dollop of cream
greets you at WalMart.
Can anyone stammer blame if we wish
to pluck out our eyes like grapes?
Scratch, dent, break the cruel circle over our knee
Jessie Wingate
Jessie is a florist by day, poet by night, and round-the-clock mom living on unceded Ohlone land in California. She holds an MA in Art History. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, CALYX, Chestnut Review, Mother Mag, California Quarterly, Kestrel, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bold Italic, and others.
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.
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.
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.
July 2025 | poetry
Zigzags
If I knew
Socrates told us
to question everything
I would have been better
equipped to tell my mother
why I disagreed with her
why I lacked her enthusiasm
for being born with curly hair
that went in every direction
off the top of my head
like a field of unruly weeds
why I was unable to hug
that hair-dyed uncle
who took the biggest pieces
of meat off his serving tray
before offering his guests
his seasoned bites of scorn
why I pointed out the bitter taste
of water coming through the pipes
even though it flowed from
the best reservoir in the country
why I wanted everyone
in our house to stop adoring
so many hot buffalo wings
and just swallow the sweet grapes
because there are
so many of them
still in the bag
promising to go bad
if they continue to be ignored
Susan Shea
Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in a forest in Pennsylvania. She returned to writing poetry two years ago. Since then, her poems have been published in or are now forthcoming in Chiron Review, ONE ART, Folio Literary Journal, Passager Journal, Radix Magazine, The RavensPerch, Cloudbank, Ekstasis, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Green Silk Journal, The Write Launch, Foreshadow, The Loch Raven Review, and others. Within the last few months, one of her poems was nominated for Best of the Net by Cosmic Daffodil, and three poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Umbrella Factory Magazine.
