“Talk about being lost, Frank.”

“What’d you mean?”

“I mean, we must be in the middle of nowhere.”

He didn’t have the strength to say ‘nowheresville’.

Frank pushed himself up from the hot sand.

“We’re crawling in the desert, Ralph. If we don’t get some water soon, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

The Sun was a pitiless furnace in a cloudless sky. A few buzzards circled above.

“The desert? So you mean, we’re in the middle of the desert?”

Their clothes were burnt, tattered shreds.

“Yeah, as far as I can see.”

“No kidding?”

Frank tossed away the empty canteen.

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Huh?”

Ralph looked from the canteen to the endless sand.

“For a moment there, I didn’t think we had any idea where we were, Frank.”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

My mother said, “Honey, try not to think
about it.” In a tiny early poem
called “Cognitive Dissonance” I included
her advice, and ever since, I have hidden
away in my mind, my delicious mind,
my refuge, capable in her mind of just
letting something go. But if I try
to release myself from a fixation
on the opposite of arhant, one
deserving of humanness while the sting
of betrayal still hurts in longhand.
I rehearse distancing and finding mental dance
with the bodhisattva some golden
mean nowhere mean with embedded joy.

Sheila Murphy has been writing for a good deal of time and lives her poetry. She walks prolifically, just as she writes. She writes, “I will spare you the biographical details and emphasize that I’m a kind of jet propulsion engine filled with joie de vivre! :)”

Playwright’s note: “Hot Sox Sex” was originally performed at Manhattan Theatre Source. It starred Michael Nathanson as Dalton and Ryan Metcalf as Henry.

HENRY: (Right sock puppet, in a male British accent) I don’t like this at all. (Left sock puppet, in a female British accent) It’s over. Our marriage. Our love. (Male puppet) Will you at least give me back my English accent? (Female puppet) Bugger that. Just keep the children.

(DALTON enters)

DALTON: Hey, man. (HENRY, embarrassed, hides his puppets) Sorry, were you masturbating?

HENRY: Uh. Yes. Sure….masturbating.

DALTON:  (Sigh.) Were you enacting celebrity breakups with sock puppets? Again?

HENRY: (Bringing the socks out, sheepish) Uh, hello? It’s called foreplay!

DALTON: Foreplay is for girls. Next you’ll be buying your cock dinner.

HENRY: With any luck I’ll buy it dinner and then it’ll go home with someone else.

DALTON: Dude, only you would get cock-olded by your own cock.

HENRY: I may enact celebrity break-ups with sock puppets for my own purposes of entertainment, but at least I don’t stoop so low as to engage in penis-punnery. That’s the basest form of both penis and pun!

DALTON: But in cockney rhyming slang, cock and sock are interchangeable. Boy I bet that leads to some awkward laundry room prostitute situations.

HENRY: Well we’re not in sockney/cockney, are we?

DALTON: Sockney/cockney? Don’t mock me! Aw, you’re right, I’m so lame! I feel like punching myself! (Walking around, nervously)

HENRY: (Coming up to DALTON, he removes and hands him the sock from his right hand) Here, use this. It’ll soften the blow.

DALTON: (Putting the sock on his right hand) Thanks! (He punches himself in the stomach). Ow! That hurt! Great, now I feel like punching myself for other reasons. (He raises his fist as if to punch himself)

HENRY: (Grabbing DALTON’s wrist) Break the vicious cycle now!

DALTON: (Looking at his raised puppet-clad hand, which HENRY holds at the wrist) Huh. I worried your sock would be gross and crunchy. It’s actually pretty soft. Like a woman’s cheek, properly moisturized.

HENRY: Well of course. I bathe my babies between breakups.

DALTON: (Breaking his hand away) You have got to get a girlfriend.

HENRY: She might take away from my D D D and D time!

DALTON: At least one of those d’s has got to stand for “dorkiness.”

HENRY: Two of them. Dungeons & Dragons, drinking and drugs.

DALTON: You combine booze and drugs, two of the best things ever, with role-playing games? Not cool!

HENRY: But to my credit it’s even less cool sober.

DALTON: Jesus. I’m gonna teach you how to talk to women. We’ll do some role-playing, but not the gay-ass D&D kind. We’ll use the sock puppets.

HENRY: Sure, I mean we’re already wearing them, why waste it?

DALTON: And I’ll be the man, it’s less of a stretch.

HENRY: Do you really have to insult my manhood? It’s not just mean, it’s redundant.

DALTON: (Philosophically) Does anyone really have to do anything? Or are well all just victims of mechanism?

HENRY: You can have the free-will argument with yourself in the shower. Or when you make love to a fat chick.

DALTON: (Wistfully) Arissa? She never returns my calls.

HENRY: The point is, we can discuss cosmic predestination later. But for now we’re trying to get ME laid.

DALTON: Right. (The sock puppet) “Hello, Danielle.”

HENRY: (British accent)”Hello, Bartholemew.”

DALTON: OK see there’s the problem. Why is your sock puppet British?

HENRY: (genuinely curious) I…I don’t know. She just feels Liverpudlian in my hand.

DALTON: Well I’ll tell you, you’re never gonna score with a British chick. British chicks are either classy and way out of your league, or else they’re too skanky for you to handle. There’s no such thing as a mid-level British chick!

HENRY: Now you tell me! Where were you when I was taking European history?

DALTON: Where was I? Behind the science building getting stoned. With the stoners, and the science teachers. That reminds me I should call Roy.

HENRY: Let’s try this again. (sadly) Though without a British accent I am no longer sexually attracted to my own sock puppet.

DALTON: Yeah, life is full of minor tragedy. There is no one single cathartic event.

HENRY: My sock puppet seems to put you in a philosophical mood.

DALTON: You got your causality wrong. I smoked a bowl in the bathroom.(pause) Where were we?

HENRY: (female, non-British)”Hello, Bartholemew.”

DALTON: “Hey. Danielle. What would you like to do today?”

HENRY: “Nothing that involves Dungeons & Dragons, that’s for sure.”

DALTON: “You’ve just described 99% of the sex I’ve ever had! I am so turned on!” (The sock puppets start making out)

HENRY: I had no idea women were so easy. I totally get them now.

DALTON: From a lump of nerd-clay, I have made a man. I feel like a god.

HENRY: You are the best teacher ever! And my kindergarten teacher used to give us pot brownies, until she was arrested for other crimes.

DALTON: I feel like a god, and yet I am but a pawn in God’s idealized structure.

HENRY: Um…Why are our sock puppets still making out?

DALTON: I believe that when you create a fictional character, it has its own volition beyond you. I put a sock on my right hand and the world keeps on turning.

HENRY: So this doesn’t strike you as, like, super-gay?

DALTON: Of course not, your sock puppet’s a girl. So maybe it’s a little gay for you, but not for me.

HENRY: Oh ok. (He surreptitiously puts his hand in his pants)

DALTON: Dude, we’ve been over this. If you’re gonna spank it in front of me, at least wait until I’m either passed out on booze or I’m too stoned to remember. Which I’m not, quite, so feel free to drug me.

HENRY: I swear, this isn’t weird, I’m not thinking about you. I’m embodying the entirely heterosexual lust of my female sock-character.

DALTON: Maybe it’s the pot talking, but that sounds entirely reasonable. (The sock puppet is turned on)”Oh yeah, Danielle. You’re hotter than pantyhose.”

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, nonfiction, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. Her novelette “Jillian, Formerly Known as Frog Girl” was published by Bottlecap Press. Four of her flash fiction stories (“Jane Passes The Bar Exam,” “To Serve In Retail Hell,” “As Numb As I Am” and “Why I Said What I Said To The Bartender”) were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, all in 2025. Additionally, her microfiction pieces “Muffin Or Something” and “Wigless” are both Best Microfiction 2026 nominees.et, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.

Nature is the antidote she
said fill your lungs, empty them
awaken your senses. Take it all in.

I tap my walking stick, stumble
as my shadow dims silica stars
trapped in the asphalt. Spot Stubbs,
tethered, stopping to pee, stops me.
Howls of a neighbor’s dog, low growl
of trucks from the distant interstate,
sun breaking through the pines, finds me.
It’s too much, this moment: Start again.

We round a curve on Pine Lake Road
and I see someone, a night rider perhaps, has
tossed a Bud Light bottle, but I must stay
centered, so I tug on the leash, leave it,

come upon a black plastic bag, damp
with dew, obviously an omen.
So now I have to go back for
the bottle, bag it. There’s another one,
down in the bramble-choked spillway,
a risky descent for an old man,
who knows he cannot save the world.

Kenny Gray is the former Director of the Columbus State University Rankin Photography Center (Columbus, Ga.), where he still lives. His fine art photography has been widely exhibited and is held in private and public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta), and the Columbus State University Archives. Kenny’s recent short and feature-length screenplays placed in international Screenwriting Competitions in 2024. When he grows up, he wants to be a poet.

Rage is a nice woman
Rage is smiling
Rage is good
Rage is a good girl

Alissa Larson is a retired firefighter, motorcycle racer, motorcycle safety instructor, swimming pool cleaner, former model, current writer/artist, who is forever paying off an old and unused law degree. She has a grown daughter, and a dog named Meatball. She thinks a lot about structural injustice for women and many of her poems reflect that theme.

The mare has wide chocolate eyes
too big and too bug-ish
slanted too far toward her sun scabbed nose.
The mare, skewbald and squatty,
sits too low in her pasterns
and walks tip toe over uneven ground.
Her ears are flat and angry.
She will bite me if i let her.
The mare screams loudly beneath me
banshee-like and tense
her stained tail sticking straight up.
Her terrific screech hurtles from barrel belly
up her long neck
and out past large yellowed teeth.
She screams at her fear
and my own.
She could eat the world
if only it fit in that wicked mouth.
The mare carries me
through deep wood and big water.
She often forgets how to love
and be loved.
She often forgets most things
but not treats, 8 AM breakfast,
and how to carve a path through deep woods
with only my shaky hands to guide her.

Addison Krone is a young female poet focused on creating freeform poetry that showcases her life experiences. She often writes while traveling across the country for equestrian work. Most of her art is based around familial relationships and living life on the road.

Men lacking kin or coin or goods to sell
Were set upon them once, with scorn, to earn
Scant alms, and mime the weary trek to hell.
Less grimly now, with cash and more to burn,
Sleek devotees step up to take their turn.

Matthew J. Morris is an attorney. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.

How an IKEA construction
made there
in their house
should bear her
suddenly
up then down
but doesn’t
and never

a chair again
she is a girl
leaving an abusive relationship
destroying their chair
but the ant’s mouth
dusted with shavings
broke other
objects of theirs
one or two
she has the sure foreboding
at knowing
a broken peace
passing on the destruction

Baby Bear’s chair is gone.

Heather Griffith lives in Santa Cruz. She is a writer, mother, and physical therapist. Her work has been published by Poetryfest and the California Arts Council.

“Ed, look at that.”

Stan and Ed were at AL’S DINER, side-by-side at the linoleum counter. Stan pointed with his spoon.

“Is that a fly in my soup?”

Both studied the chipped bowl and the small thing squirming in it.

“Seems more like… An ant, Stan.”

“With wings?”

“Some ants have them. Is that the chicken soup?”

“No, clam chowder”

It was hard to tell at AL’S.

“Clam, huh?”

They had stopped eating. Ed decided against dipping his fingers in the bowl to see.

“I’m pretty sure it’s an ant, Stan… Haven’t you noticed how the flies around here seem to avoid Al’s chowder?”

David Sydney is a physician. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

As a young professor, when I first taught studio art, one of the printmaking portfolios I assigned was titled “Earliest Childhood Memory.” Students chose moms, dads, siblings, birthday cakes, teddy bears, tricycles, and family camping trips as subjects. There was a fire and a tornado. Takane, a student from Kyoto, Japan, created a delightful recollection in linocut relief in which her hand grasped a pair of chopsticks which in turn clutched a fish, her lunch, just before her cat snatched it from her.

My earliest memory remains vivid and frightening. When Mom and Dad were starting out and Dad drove a delivery truck for City Cleaners, they rented a sad, tiny cottage just down the highway from Gambier, Ohio. I don’t remember the interior of the house, but I was later told that the base of the home was rotted, which allowed unannounced visits from various small creatures. Grandpa and Grandma toiled over a ramshackle farm just a few miles away and though Grandma worked in the kitchen at Peirce Hall for many years cooking for privileged east coast students, we were all an ocean away from the social machinery of Kenyon College. I was two. My face and belly were sticky with something sweet. There were several neighbor kids who lived in the red house with the flat roof next door. All were older than me, between five and nine, and they were shouting, chasing me around the yard. Barefoot and dressed only in my underwear, I ran and laughed blissfully with a kitchen knife in my hand through the grass, slippery with dew. Mom was nowhere around.

            For a short while after college, I was a caseworker for the county Child Protective Services. One beautiful spring day (I thought, how could I discover anything heartbreaking on a day like this?) the office responded to a call from an aunt, and I was sent to check on the welfare of her nephew. My little hatchback barely negotiated the mud of a deeply rutted driveway. Towering thistle and a wide variety of other unchecked weeds dominated the place and there was little distinction between yard and barnyard. Sharp, rusted farm implements like steel obstacles from the beaches of Normandy lay about ready for use but likely hadn’t been operated for some time. A trailer, their home, sat listing somewhat, orange rust stains ringed the roof and green mold painted the remainder. Tires, lumber, and other unidentifiable items were stuffed beneath the home and hundreds of beer and soda cans, more than I’ve seen in one place except a recycling center, accumulated beneath a rickety dry-rotted porch.

            The mom and dad sat at their kitchen table smoking and drinking coffee when I entered. They were polite folks and seemed equally unsurprised and unconcerned with my arrival. The walls of the kitchen were greasy from fried food spatter and yellow from cigarette smoke. Enormous black flies buzzed lazily about several encrusted fly strips, curled dangling from the ceiling. I provided my usual caseworker bit and asked if I might look around. The dad said nothing and though the mom offered me a cup of coffee and consented, she made no effort to guide a tour. The hallway to the remainder of the trailer was filled the entire length two feet deep in clothes. I was obliged to walk unsteadily upon their wardrobe and duck in places. When I opened the bathroom door, I was astonished to discover that the back wall of the shower wasn’t there. The room was completely open to the elements and provided an unobstructed view of the barn and distant pastures.

            Outside, I found the boy, about four or five, running about the yard in his underwear. Here was a familiar image. He could have been an impish cupid or a little buddha. He was barefoot and his legs were smeared with mud. And he was happy. Exceptionally happy. He offered that type of smile in children where you are sure he would burst out laughing at any moment and for any small reason. It was a smile that said he was loved. Thirty-five years later, I wonder what memories this boy reminisces from his childhood.      

David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.