A foot’s pressure spreads
a dull halo on slick sand.
Pop goes bladderwrack.

The line of a dragged stick bends
around a spiny puff and tentacles
bunched by frothing lips of swash.

Seethe-away backwash
plumes off shards unrushably
milled to blunt and matt.

Chris Andrews lives in Sydney, on Wangal land. He writes poems and translates books of prose fiction, most recently Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark (New Directions, 2024).

“You’ll never take me alive,” shouted Rocco through the open window. Among glass shards and spent casings, he lay on the warehouse floor. His head below the sill, he pointed his gun in the direction of the police and fired a few rounds. “I told you, I’m not coming,” he sneered as the smoke began to clear.

“THROW DOWN YOUR ARMS, ROCCO.” That was the Chief, talking through his bullhorn while commanding the SWAT team. From behind an armored vehicle, he had a view to the warehouse riddled with bullet holes. The standoff with Rocco had done nothing to help its commercial value.

“COME  OUT.”

“No way.”

“YOU’RE SURROUNDED, ROCCO. MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF.”

“I’m not coming. I told you, no one’s taking me alive.”

The Chief reflexively ducked as Rocco fired a few more shots. He waited a minute before talking.

“ALIVE? WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT THAT?”

“What’d you mean?” shouted Rocco, keeping his head low.

“ABOUT ALIVE?”

“Huh?”

“WE’RE EASY. JUST COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP, AND I’LL PERSONALLY TAKE CARE OF THE ALIVE PROBLEM.”

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

Below the Umbrian hilltops, mugged by mourning fog,
the regiments of ripe tobacco fields unravel green
where all the delicate courtiers of this autumn draw
vermillion coverlets upon the naked bed of summer,
arrange the mortal liveries of their gold estate
as heralds to the kingdom of our winter.
Here, in these fallowing fields, lies all there is to know
of death and life – that every future comes to bathe
and bloom in the fertile blood of its tragic past, and yield
to the moment, this, the holy seed of Now. All this
appears as a face or figure frescoed on a wall,
and these survive and serve as a balm to the death of years.
Here are the stillness of columns and painted saints,
where the bells of heaven toll, as only they can hear.

Marc Wiegand has participated at a number of universities, among these the University of Texas at Austin, and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. He has been an Affiliate Fellow in visual arts at The Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy. His poetry has appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, The Penwood Review, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Westward Quarterly, and, soon, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets. He is an international lawyer and exhibiting visual artist who lives and works in the Texas Hill Country.

Red-dyed fingers dig into Jell-O.
Extract bits of marshmallow,
pineapple, cherry, walnut.
Leave gaping pockmarks
for other bits to gape at, cry over.
Pontificate their time.
Still pockmarks close over.
Jell-O demands that.
Missing bits are forgotten.
Where they were is forgotten.
Other mournful marshmallows,
cherry slices are plucked,
the spaces, spouses they leave
filled with shiny stickiness.

Brennan Thomas is a Professor of English at Saint Francis University, where she directs the campus’s writing center and teaches courses in creative nonfiction, fiction, novel writing, and Disney film studies.

I opened my mouth and spiders came out.
I opened my mouth and my tongue was a web
made from the letters of your name.
I couldn’t see around their legs
or your letters
so looking in the mirror became a horror show.
I could barely brush my teeth without choking on a vowel.
He promised he’d clear these spiders out of here,
why hasn’t he come yet?
I’ll snap the strands between these consonants.
I’ll dust the cobwebs down my throat myself
if he won’t help me.
These furry corpses stick to my teeth,
turn the words poised on my lips into a crime scene.
My stories stink of dead and rotting things.

Sydney Cloonan is a speech-language pathologist and writer living in Queens, New York. When she is not working at a special education elementary school, you can usually find her snuggled up on the couch with her partner, her dog Hannah and her cat Helo. Sydney lives her life based on two true things: there is no greater snack than peanut butter and it’s always a good night to watch a horror movie. Sydney’s first chapbook, maybe., is available through Bottlecap Press.

Color of a sea creature
suctioned to coral
trembling in the windcurrent

in the hands of grandmother gods
sitting circled
spooling galactic gas
into acid water layers

laughing
about your sour breath

Holly Castleton is a master’s student at the University of Edinburgh studying Religion and Literature. She loves to read, to eat, and to lie in the sunshine, which is sparce, and therefore all the more precious, in Scotland.

Light
drapes over us
warming shoulders and smiles
toeing waves,
which then wash over us

And you too
are light; energy.
Eyes bright—
reflecting sky, sea,
youth, me

Suddenly— light
breezes turned to heavy gusts
clouds billowed
We did not see them gather over us.
We did not see the waves surge.

But finding safety is easy
when we are the life raft.
We were drenched,
the rain fell like waterfalls,
then we emerged,
and it was light.

Athina Hinson-Boyte is a previously unpublished poet living in Raleigh, NC. She works as an attorney for children. She has two cats, and excessive TBR list, and a deep love for the ocean.

Animals talk when people are absent. It was 2 AM at the zoo. Dark, of course. And empty of the public.

Rhinoceros: Hey, who are you? And what’re you doing here?

Rattus: You’ve got to help me.

Rhinoceros: You’re a rat, right?

Rattus: The name’s Rattus

He was a brown rat, also known as a common rat or sewer rat

Rhinoceros: So?

Rattus: May I stay here?

The rat was wet and scraggly. The rhinoceros took up a great amount of space, as rhinos will.

Rhinoceros: Huh?

Rattus: I can’t take it anymore.

Rhinoceros: Was it the sewers? Was it the people out there?

Rattus: The sewers were gross, and the people even grosser. That’s why I figured it’d be so much better here with a rhinoceros.

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

I know I won’t be able to forget
the way the sun fell
across the room. That slant
lands on the part of me
I’m least willing to look at, so I tense
only the muscles I deem
worth the risk. Eventually I’ll notice
the withering and see all the space
left in its wake. Eventually you’ll wake
to a different way
of holding your same body
upright. And that’s the secret

no one told you because no one knows
what the word “pace” really means.
Half the time I’m taking baby steps
just to remember
what they’re like. Don’t count
out my ability to become
a spotlight. I’ve shocked a number
of nonbelievers into countless conversations
about the chemistry
behind shutting doors
at just the right decibel.
Real friends will unhook your jacket,
hold it up for you to sling your arms into
one at a time as a way of saying
“I want all of you to stay”

and there’s not one example I’ve found
to prove it untrue.
There are approximately no chances
left if you aren’t greedy
in a sense we’re all little kids
genuinely convinced we have control
over the wind or waves. And I’m saying why
not, but getting less and less
answers. Goodbye is just another hue
of loss you can only be so prepared for.
Consequences hover and hope rotates.
Don’t you know how easy it is
to fall in love with me
when I’m not paying attention?

Kelly Tierney is a dabbler in the arts—currently focused on theater, movement, and poetry. She resides in the quaint-as-always Northampton, Massachusetts. Her creative passions are varied and ever-multiplying, so she is mostly known for having so many ideas and so little time.

Me, Rich, Buck, and Jane were sitting at the tiny table where Rich and I eat dinner every night. Dishes in the sink. Third bottle of wine. At some point, we started playing a game: most memorable sight, go around the table, most memorable sound, repeat. All five senses. If an answer was interesting enough, an explanation was extracted.

We shared things.

Rich had accidentally glimpsed his grandparents making love, Buck had touched a dead elephant’s trunk, I’d smelled my childhood house burn down to ash, and Rich had heard his Gram-Gram talk dirty.

Nothing noteworthy from Jane.

We ended on taste.

Buck went first. He’d sampled a barroom floor in Pensacola. Got cold cocked by a local.

“The floor tasted strange,” Buck admitted. “Came to with lips and tongue on floorboard—beer, bloodrust, urine, faint traces of Florida Man.”

Rich and I went next.

            Then it was Jane’s turn.

            Her last chance.

            Me, Rich, and Buck had known each other for years. Jane was new. She’d been dating Buck for about a month. Rich and I had never spent time with her before. Jane was attractive and quiet and seemed utterly unremarkable—another one of Buck’s pretty young things.

We waited.

            Jane’s eyes were misty. She was toying with the edge of the tablecloth.

            Rich’s hand was resting on my thigh, his fingers lightly tapping time to a beat.

When Jane said what she’d tasted, Rich’s fingers stopped tapping.

No one spoke.

            Finally, Buck said, “Details.”

Jane kept toying with the tablecloth.

            “The doctors thought it might be his last night,” she said, “which turned out to be true, and they suggested that we say goodbye. My mother went into his room first, came out pale. Then I went in.”

            Jane let go of the tablecloth.

“They’d been giving him morphine for the pain. Lots. He was lying in bed, and I went up to him, and he stared at me. His eyes were cloudy, and scared, like he knew, and before I could start speaking, he called me Audrey.”

Buck sniffed.

“He called me Audrey and said he was sorry and asked for a kiss.”

Rich shifted in his seat.

“‘One last kiss,’ he said. And then he started crying.”

Jane’s eyes were downtilted.

“I was seventeen and confused and had never seen my father cry.”

I was looking at Jane across the table.

            “Audrey was your mother?” I said.

            She met my eyes.

“Audrey was my father’s assistant. She was over almost every day. My mother and I, we loved Audrey, and worshiped my father. We had no idea.”

            Rich reached for his wineglass.

            We were briefly silent.

            Then Buck brought us back.

“So,” he said, “what did it taste like?”

Jane turned. She looked at Buck, full on. Then she looked at me.

Then, a surprise: she smiled.

The three of us were leaning forward. We were hers.

She was staring at me but smiling to herself, then she opened her mouth and said the word.

Nick Simon lives and works in Arlington, VA. A New Jersey native, he aspires to meet Snooki one day. Nick doesn’t own any cats or dogs.