October 2025 | poetry
Walking Beds
Not in any particular direction.
But somehow in concert
with the other furniture.
Me as a boy says to me
“Why don’t you stop them?”
“The days go by,” I say,
praying that this is weighty,
meaningful. But I know
me as a boy knows
that it means as much
as karaoke lyrics that flash
on the screen and never
get sung. “Straight up now
tell me,” me as a boy whispers.
“Do you love me?” Once again,
I am dumbstruck. I have no answer.
I can only pretend that the beds
have slept as well as us, slept
through both of our lives,
waking only in fits of temptation.
I flop down. I believe I know
where the bed is. But my elbow
folds and smarts. Sudden impact
feels unusual, lighting the mind
like a flashing screen. The bed must have
been walking again. I knew
where it was yesterday. “My memory
is distinct,” I wheeze to me
as a boy, trying to put myself back together,
knowing parts of me have been knocked
loose and remain on the floor. “I know,”
says me as a boy, “But still I don’t
believe you.” Precocious little fucker.
But his life will be precarious,
never knowing what to confront
when he wakes, or how awake
he’ll be, like the way he imagines
the consciousness of a daffodil
he watches grow in stop-motion.
Nicholas Haines
Nicholas Haines is a writer, teacher, and musician from New York’s Hudson Valley. His work has previously appeared in the Shawangunk Review and Chronogram.
October 2025 | poetry
A J. G. Ballard Kind of Gone
after Patti Smith
The first cool dawn following the unwavering
humidity Kentucky summers are known for, a layer
of mist containing upwards of a century of morning
dew rises eye level from the farm, like fallen soldiers
discharging their specters all at the same time
to face this particular day long past the echoes
of each shot they never heard from their neighbors
who planted them down here in this field, as if
the dead were waiting for appropriate weather
conditions to properly chill the living to the bone,
but driving in my car, windows up, heat half on,
could safely say I feel as warm as the day before
if not for the fact my arms are goose pimpled
just from looking out the driver’s side window,
wondering if I stood out there in the thick of it—
if I could even bring myself to step out of my car
and march forward into the mist—would I
hear a soldier cry for help or my dog yelp
or Nana whisper something blood-curdling,
along the lines of why did you let me go?
All it is is cold.
In Dreams Return Memories
after Maggie Millner
Often, I dreamt
that [s]he and I
were back together.
Pathetic how much I found
in the black of night
with my eyes closed,
my brain turned off,
the projections of what was
offered up in a trough
I was expected to wade around in
to find only the sweet remnants
bobbing before me,
robbing me of reason,
the knowledge the giblets
removed with the kill
were still floating somewhere,
souring the sweet,
muddying the water,
turning the sweetest soup
into unsavory stew,
beet red in color
reminiscent of blood
pooling below
the hanging carcass
of a prized deer
so tremendous in life,
so reduced once sliced
from ass to breast,
when there’s still some
heat coming off the fresh corpse
in the November cold.
Could be these sweet dreams
are meant to remind me
what was warm once—
old to me now
but unadulterated in youth
so apparent with life
I could see only the prize,
blind to anything pooling below,
leaking out, slipping away,
distracted by eyes
so green and wide
that I never wanted
to see them cry,
let alone ever be the reason.
Then, I’d wake up
in my lonesome bed
and recall how
I was just that this season.
At least there are the dreams
where everything is still good,
we are still good.
At least somewhere still exist
where our love remains
constant, understood.
Deron Eckert
Deron Eckert is a poet and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Journal, Rattle, Stanchion, Beaver Magazine, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He can be found on Instagram at deroneckert.
October 2025 | poetry
Self-Portrait as Carefully-Written Poem
Each line a soft and velvet shelf upon
Which every syllable’s a gem. A notch
For each to sit in, snug … ten gleaming swans
Perched rung-like on the water’s plane. Now watch
How, necklace-like, each gem will sound in turn
Its note, a melody of light, when pain
Arrives, the steady visitor. You’ll burn
Your eyes. Don’t look too long. Inside the flames
Of facets, crown to girdle, there lurk rays
Of information that perhaps you should wait
To learn, or never learn at all, or play
Dumb about if you do. Or you could place
The gems inside a case, inside a safe,
Inside a mine outside of time and space.
Wes Civilz
Wes Civilz lives next to a dusty cactus in Tucson, Arizona. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, and New Ohio Review. He posts writing-oriented videos on Instagram under the handle @wes_civilz.
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.
