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.
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.
