July 2025 | poetry
This is Kansas, Toto
There is a two-headed man
living just outside Topeka
who rarely goes into town.
On Friday nights quite late
he’ll wander into the roadhouse
and order two Heinekens.
He’ll draw the odd stare, but
as long as he puts a twenty on the bar
the drinks will keep arriving.
There’s usually at least one
drunk in the corner who will stare,
so potted he sees a single head
on each of two men, with hair
shifting from black to bleached
blond and back again.
Most of the patrons, by last
call, see him and smile, totter
home and tell their wives
of the strange man with
two heads who lives somewhere
outside of town, near, their wives
assume, the twins, who stumble
home each Friday night, arm in arm.
Louis Faber
Louis Faber is a poet and writer. His work has appeared in MacGuffin, Cantos, Alchemy Spoon (UK), Meniscus and Arena Magazine (Australia) New Feathers Anthology, Dreich (Scotland), Prosetrics, Erothanatos (Greece), Defenestration, Atlanta Review, Glimpse, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Midnight Mind, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His new book of poetry, Free of the Shadow, was recently published by Plain View Press.
July 2025 | poetry
Thumbprints and Tree Rings
Are basically the same, yeah? Circular markings
on living beings that show we originate from one
genius source, one brilliant astral scientist who saw
the stunning in all creation and said, I think I’ll
leave them symbols of their innate connection
to one other, hide them in plain sight.
Make it special when they close their eyes and lean
toward the light, like sunflowers. Maybe this is why
people hugs trees, smell roses, ground themselves
barefoot on grass—to know we are in this together.
Still, I ask Big They why we wreck the very things
that sustain us, cut off our noses to spite our faces.
Still, I admire trees more than ever: their grandeur,
elegance, fierce giant magi always pointing up
at the stars. And stars, stardust! We are made of that too—
carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms created in previous
generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago.
We forget how much earth we contain, how much
space we hold. Like right now, I’m sitting on my bed
watching the oak outside my window house two sparrows.
She is me, spirited but strong. I am her, hopeful and still.
Marina Carreira
Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American poet and artist from Newark, NJ. A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Luso-American fellow in the DISQUIET Literary Program, Carreira is the author of Dead Things and Where to Put Them (Cavankerry, forthcoming 2025), Desgracada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Carreira works in higher education and teaches Women and Gender Studies at Kean University. Find her on Instagram at @savethebathewater.
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.
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.
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.
April 2025 | poetry
The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of
brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy
tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep,
that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow
scarce? But there’s comforting memory as
well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a wet but
soothing thaw after sledding outside for hours.
Childhood leaves its imprints, remote and often
faded, only to swell at incongruous moments
like now, here in the late afternoon warmth, as
hundreds of seagulls circle above this lagoon,
white specks in the distance shimmering with
light against the western face of Tamalpais,
from the Miwok támal pájis, “coast mountain,”
an approximate translation they say. I was once
a mountain girl, but not this kind; no ocean
near, frozen ground for months, and snow swirling
as white shapes in wind like these gulls I could
write, if I wanted simile today but I don’t. I just
want these gulls as gulls, rising and circling,
circling and soaring, and I want the pull of
the tide in and then out . . . waves of ache tangled
with rapture; this poem a rough decoding of
the fugitive sway.
Virginia Barrett
Virginia Barrett is a poet, writer, artist, editor, and educator. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco, where she was the poetry editor for Switchback. Her six books of poetry include Between Looking and Crossing Haight—San Francisco poems. She is also the editor of four poetry anthologies, including RED: a Hue Are You anthology.
