October 2026 | poetry
What Are These Things?
Do you feel the letters
in your mouth like bones
of a fish, the spine of sense
caught on the hook of your mind
that prods and pokes: a palpable
delicacy, hard-palatable, yet
slippery through the teeth?
Loquacious L, lascivious and limning
luscious viscera of what I mean.
Tell you what: Meet me at the Lehigh River
bank and we’ll collect Anthracite coal
lumps, ancient knuckles that punch
our metatarsals, polished shiny, washed ashore
like they were dumped out of a landfill.
We’ll bike the dappled D&L trail
from the Mansion House Bridge to 1975
and back through the Mirror in the Sky
that the river covets beneath a rust-red rapture
of steel. When the train bell clangs, I will wrap
my tongue around your silence
and suck it down my throat
to digest. The insects stir; their choirs
grow louder. I will align my thin fingers
with the ribs flanking your kidneys,
hold you close, and listen to the vapors
of your breath steam-clean the tiny hair cells
in my ear. The Anthracite rocks
will take cold residence on the mantel
of my decorative fireplace where dried candlewax
opens its neglected palms to cradle them.
Their names are lost. They masquerade
as fool’s gold when the sun
lowers its gaze.
Stacy Rollins
Stacy Rollins is a writer, visual artist, singer, Tarot reader, and health and fitness enthusiast who currently lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from FSU and has authored two books, Truer Faults and Learning to Read. Her poems have appeared in Atticus Review, Bicoastal Review, Everyday Genius, Diversion Press, Black Heart Magazine, Crack the Spine, Poetry Quarterly, New York Dreaming, Garbanzo, Nailed Magazine, Spine, Shantih, The Oleander Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Helen, Nude Bruce Review, and Armarolla.
October 2026 | poetry
Motherhood
Before she readies herself,
the woman smooths skin-colored
color on her new baby’s forehead,
nose, cheeks, jaw, chin, neck.
She blends and contours, then
the woman brushes rouge
on her new baby’s cheeks
until they appear to burn.
The woman dabs pink gloss
across her new baby’s lips
like they will never chap
or kiss or utter a foul word.
The woman traces her new
baby’s lips with rosepink pencil
until no cry could possibly
escape them.
Just as no words form on the woman’s
lips as she paints the color of frost
above her new baby’s eyes so that,
when they open, they will shine.
The woman outlines her new baby’s
eyes with sharpened charcoal,
adding a flourish at the corner
of each.
The woman spritzes hairspray
on her new baby’s wisps. Now,
now, whether they leave the house
or not, the woman is ready.
Megan Wildhood
Megan Wildhood is a cyclist, saxophonist, gym enthusiast, cat lover and writer whose work has appeared in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, 2023), as well as in Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.
October 2026 | poetry
Drawn Upward into a Vague Melody of Harsh Threads*
or strings smoothed by horsetail
over hours, roughened by grind of canine
teeth gnashing first
chin polished wood
or breath sent to wrench muscles, to
shake all adjacent air like the molecules
themselves were in hysterics
or outside the nearly vacant church
a single soda machine releases the wrong can
for a man who already hangs his head
or a curb hopping compact car
or a crow crouched over caulking
misfired at aluminum hem
pecking ambitionless
a mixture collective synesthetes release
once, create and abandon to dreams.
*From the William Carlos Williams poem “Trees”
Zebulon Huset
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He is an advocate of writing exercises and prompts and edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine.
October 2026 | nonfiction
Nuns & Spoons
We hold our cards in front of our mouths to hide the smiles. Draw, check your hand, discard. Keep an eye on the line of spoons. Tonight I’m the only kid still awake, surrounded by my mom, aunties, grandma, and my great-aunt, who is a Catholic nun. I sit tall among the women seated around the dessert table as we pass cards and scrutinize each other for any motions.
Then an auntie pulls a winning hand, and the stealth begins. She reaches out and slowly slides a spoon into her lap. Waits for others to notice. I see it happening, manage to grab another spoon. Others follow. My mom and the nun are the last to notice. And only one spoon left.
They reach at the same time, hands locking on either end of the spoon. “I got it! “No, I’ve got it!” They collapse into giggles but their grips stay strong. I’m entranced, watching. I can’t believe the women are acting like this. My mom, wrestling over a spoon with Sister Sharon Anne.
They are out of their chairs now, standing, gripping the spoon. “You’re a nun!” my mom exclaims as she tries to twist the spoon away and instead falls to the ground. “What about generosity of spirit? Turning the other cheek?” My great-aunt follows her to the floor. “Not….during….Spoons!” she responds, and with a final twist, wrenches the spoon free.
How to stay calm on the plane
When the message comes to you, pinging your phone as you watch Dune on the seatback screen thousands of miles up in the air, your mind a galaxy away as your body flies through space. It surprises you – who knew you could get texts up here, somewhere above the Atlantic. The zeros and ones convert to a most unwelcome message that detonates in your aisle seat: your neighbor, wondering about the ambulance at your house, wondering if everything is okay.
There’s a ringing in your ears you hadn’t noticed before. You can’t reach your husband at work. You can’t reach your mom, who is caring for the children. So you watch Dune. And breathe deep. You are terror-still in your seat. On screen they move across the sand in skips and slides to mimic the wind, to hide that they are humans, to fool the sand monsters underneath that would rage up and swallow them whole simply for being human, for carving out a little space for themselves on this earth.
You watch Dune. You breathe deep. You perch-cling onto the edge of your inner optimist, the one who says that your identity is probably still intact. The flight attendant comes down the aisle. Would you like peanuts or cookies? Are you now a wife or a widow? A mother or…the unspeakable? You recall that Dune was a favorite of your grandfather’s, who, when he saw it in the theater, was able to recite line for line from memory. Who, in late summer last year, passed away with library books still checked out. So don’t sweat the small stuff, you suppose. But also, people die.
You watch Dune. You breathe deep. You want to be on the other side of this, to stand in your too-white kitchen and trade stories about your week away. You don’t want to know. You must know. Outside, your spaceship speeds through the sky, but inside you barely dare to move.
Sarah Barbo
Sarah Barbo writes about family, identity, and sense of place. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, In a Flash, and The Ekphrastic Review, and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Find her in the Colorado mountains and at www.sarahbarbo.com.
October 2026 | poetry
The Haunting of Winter People
Patches of flattened brown grass
like those that would peek
through snow, a mid-March
yawning into spring.
Dust motes masquerading
as silver snow trickling
from above. Dendrites
settling without shivers .
The fossilized riverbed
begging for cold fingers
to play crystalline tarantellas
down desiccated spines.
Mud caked deer prints
the echo of white snow drifts
etched with broken hearts
that mend when melted.
A stripped maple smooth
as icicles sheared and raw
under the moon’s cool
and unblinking glare.
Exhalation from an open freezer
that whispers like a long deceased love:
How can this heat be anything
but apocalypse? The answer –
A painting of a cabin in a forest
carpeted in soft white
with footprints that lead toward or away,
a lost trail, invisible
under sun and summer sweat
that never ceases, while winter
becomes an artifact
in the amber of memory.
Permafrost
How did we get here?
Weighed down by the unsung
sorrys in our pockets, dragging
the hems of loved ones
like beggars, seeking
a redemption colder,
more remote than the tops
of distant mountains.
Even though permafrost
never melts, it still blooms
in summer, green blades
pearled with buds. And if
it does melt, if somehow
that ground, known
for its hardness, its inability
to change with seasons,
suddenly finds change rooted
ripening in the hard soul
of its body, carbon kept
cozy and restrained
between soiled arms, then
the silent bomb will spill
like our emptied pockets, eking
secrets into soft places, destruction
that comes like a warm pillow
across a wet mouth.
It’s the simple things that bring
us to our knees, that make us
ask how did we get here? And also
is there any way back?
Lesley Hart Gunn
Lesley Hart Gunn is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction Poetry Contest and has upcoming or previous publications in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Litmosphere, West Coast Review, Avalon Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Phantom Drift Journal, and others. She is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, but currently teaches college writing at Utah Valley University, where she lives with her partner, three children, and two cats.
