July 2025 | poetry
The Pilosity of Memory
Although mindful to remember but unwilling
to commemorate, during our nation’s holidays,
during grade school, I carried our flag, hoping
it would end my parents’ wars.
That might be why I still gaze at armies
with suspicion, why peace is first the memory
of my mother returning her small suitcase
to the bottom of her bed, swearing to stay with us.
Juan Pablo Mobili
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose Magazine, Louisville Review, and The Worcester Review, among others, as well as publications in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. He’s a recipient of multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, and an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival. His chapbook, “Contraband,” was published in 2022, and in January of 2025, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York.
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.
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.
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.
July 2025 | poetry
Grass and Marble
There’s a harmonica in my pocket, a spider crawling
out of my mouth and on my backside a lovely long tail
that’s been hiding, tucked in my pants. Instead of arms
I have wings lacy but strong. Out of my belly button
three or four babies spill out, waiting to be clipped
free. On my knees are pastel spongey knee pads
with funny messages in magic marker from
friends wishing me well.
And I will paint myself barefoot lying in a lawn chair—
watching dragon flies land on my chest and thighs,
their different colored stems deep red, navy, baby blue
and watching the sun go down behind tall trees holding
a rocks glass of iced tea with several squeezed lemon
wedges floating at the bottom with sugar not stirred in
properly, sprig of mint, the look on your face when you left.
Mary Dean Lee
Mary Dean Lee’s debut collection, Tidal, was published in April 2024 by Pine Row Press and was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2024 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2021, The Fiddlehead, Hamilton Stone Review, Ploughshares, Salvation South, Free State Review, and MicroLit. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College, and received her PhD in organizational behavior at Yale before moving to Montreal to teach at McGill University.
July 2025 | poetry
francis bacon’s black mouths: a love poem
painted over and over because he wanted
to perfect blackness in different states of mouthness
the black before the scream
i’ve printed ‘em to put over the bed
folded into origami orgasms
as if doing squats over a speed bump
onery alley critters—! no two sound alike
no matter what you say
more is less in the long run
oak-aged ale
and opium
but love—
looks like a pot pie looks like love in the mouth
my love—i’ll pump your heart empirically
kill ‘em with kindness and expectorants
spewing from my black mouth
mouth i love pot or pies or periodontal surgeons
kneeling in front of a frontrunner
never felt so god
gnawing on truthisms with jagged little teeth
jam perhaps blackberries jammed into the mouth
to replace the fist
i’ve iodine stains
henna-like investments
and : i of the tiger
pronounce you wooed
under dark lights casting a cast-iron shadow
i’ll continue to woowoo with my juju
detail the mouth going south
going black where it doesn’t belong
at times bleached and iron-clad
that after-heat black
that passion in the bedroom
the courtroom
manslaughter of the mouth
a mouth in blackness
plague-eaten and purple taken into account
the glistening shrieking wetness
that scream to a whisper
that mouth open and black for more
Marcy Rae Henry
Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands who’s had motorcycle crashes in Mexican-America, Turkey, and Nepal. She is the author of the body is where it all begins (Querencia Press), dream life of night owls (Open Country Press), and We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press). Her poetry collection, death is a mariachi, won the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize and will be published in spring 2025. Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest, and Kaveh Akbar recently chose her fiction collection as a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. MRae is a professor of English, literature, and creative writing at Wright College, Chicago, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino/x Studies Program and received Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts. marcyraehenry.com
