Poetry
Wintering Grounds
by Anna Madden in Issue Twenty-Four, July 2026
I wonder if you think of me
on that eclipsed moon.
Your ship is a copper-winged roc
that will return without you
in February or early March.
I wonder if it’s cold there.
Breathing
thin,
sharp,
apple-crisp
air.
If you packed your coat:
a dark brown
sugar wool.
You mapped out the flight
after the bathroom flooded....
The First Spider on the Moon
by H.V. Patterson in Issue Twenty-Four, July 2026
The jumping spider who lives in my kitchen
longs to leap to the moon,
to run fuzzy trichobothria over
her pitted-cheese surface
I watch him jump, each leap fifty times his body length,
relatively impressive,
but objectively mere inches.
He rests on my chest,
mandibles twitching fretfully,
eight imploring ...
Here Come The Men In Black, or, Out Wrecks The Shroud, or, Kelly’s Black Boyfriend Is Actually The Eschaton???
by Christopher Leigh Silverberg in Issue Twenty-Four, July 2026
A golden shovel on Jorie Graham’s Fission,
but also after Douglas Kearney, tbh
Spacetime changes now
beneath and to the
right of you, your theater’s
shroud of film, dead presidents, and skylight—
all sources of white, I mean, all sources of light—cosmology is
hushed, flayed, opened
silent before a new ...
flowers, coffee, cinnamon and the long way home
by Arden Baker in Issue Twenty-Four, July 2026
Sasha was not always going to be an astronaut
She much preferred
floral arrangements (natives, not gardenias)
and coffee (robusta, a dash of oat milk)
and cinnamon (a light dusting, ochre snow)
in the café at the end of her street.
But the government decree passed into law
and the testing (aptitude an...
What to Watch For
by Jordan Hirsch in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
Grandmother taught me what to watch for:
curling blue leaves growing opposite each other.
Every year, she threw a handful of seeds in the soil,
and now I do, too. She taught me
what to watch for: cooler mornings,
something called frost, the shores receding back
to the line they’d crossed w...
The Carcass of the World
by Ai Jiang in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
When the carcass of the deer first appeared
erect and alive—not in flesh but in soul—
Father told me that the world was ending.
Its antlers grew, rose into the sky, pierced
its heart with its sharpened edges, and we stood,
watched as the clouds bled, pouring dark tears,
unleashing lightning r...
The Archivist of Vanished Tongues
by Oladosu Michael Emerald in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
They say the wind here speaks in broken alphabets. I collect dying languages, fragile things made of breath and dust, barely alive, like insects caught in amber. I’m a boy born with sand in his mouth, raised by silence and the slow scratch of forgotten scripts across his skin.
At night, the walls...
SOLD: One Soul, Gently Used
by Nico Martinez Nocito in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
I rattle thirteen sparse coins
in a pocket more used to moths than money,
the soft click disappointingly
empty.
Going once!
I need, I need, I need.
Instead, I frown.
Young, healthy, secular, loving: my soul
could fetch nine hundred, minimum—
enough for a year of food and a year of school...
Poison
by Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
For Ogoniland
‘Water was the source of life;
it is now the cause of death’
— Anonymous
Heaven falls again. & the river cries black.
So much until it becomes a miracle, how a
woman can bleed & not bring out blood the
color of night. In my ache for catharsis, I
baptize in his mouth of fil...
A Science Center Education
by Lynne Sargent in Issue Twenty-Three, June 2026
I once spun a wheel
in a science center,
in an anonymous city of sufficient size to have one.
Paint and plastic peeled at its edges
the stopping lines surely unfair
worn down such that even the non-stakes
of its turning might have been a cheat.
It was a wheel of probability,
of all the li...