J.M. Emery

July 2025 | poetry

Ode to T-Pain

Like an octopus crowning itself with mollusks

you took pains to hide your beauty.

Auto-tuned a voice that needed no tuning,

that sounds clear and honest as winter

on the nape of the neck. Often, if not always,

we ask angels to play the kazoo. To suffice.

I like to think most of us is unexplored

potential, songs and poems floating in vials,

embryonic kisses, and the apologies

we should have worn, hanging motheaten.

I wish Grandma, who never raised her voice,

would have. Its sound in the untested register

of rage, woe, glory. And what might she have

to unhide of her plainspoken love?

 

They glitter and reek,

the wines casked within us.

 

J.M. Emery

J.M. Emery is a Chicago-based poet. During the day he works for the government, most recently on initiatives around maternal and infant health.

Jean Wolff

July 2025 | visual art

MultiLozenge, artwork

MultiLozenge

 

Jean Wolff

Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 154 works in 105 issues of 61 magazines. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving a BFA in studio arts. She then attended Hunter College, CUNY in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She is now part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan.

Rome Smaoui

July 2025 | fiction

The Tender Earth

Our mothers die quickly. When we grieve, time rushes out of us like old light. They lowered the body into the black end of the ground. All the worms turned, delighted. The sun threw itself on the dirt like a lover returning. I couldn’t help but sink after her. I went in like a delirious fly. My body thunked with the weight of all its years. I was made of gold. They didn’t pull me out; a mutual understanding flossed between their silence. One hand after the other tossed the tender earth over us, the dirt a showering of black stars. I curled my head on my mother’s dead shoulder and pressed against her like a newborn shadow. A year later, I emerged from that grave, a thousand sheets of air driving though me. I could feel her moving beneath my feet like a barge on the river. But I adored the sight, the sun with its throat on display, yellow on either end of this terrible world.

Rome Smaoui

Rome Smaoui is a Tunisian poet and writer born in 2003. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, SMOKE Magazine, Litbreak Magazine, Rejected Literature, and other places. She has recently received her Bachelor’s in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Upon graduating, she was awarded the 2024 George Gissing Memorial Prize for her Fiction and the 2024 Alun Lewis Prize for her Poetry.

Jessie Wingate

July 2025 | poetry

My Body, Your Choice

Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light
waves toward my flat black pupil

a record
shuffling the same few songs.

Isn’t that what womanness has been about?
Repeated scenes:

the bonnet-donned bonnie
forking at the hay bail

the fish wife catching
her baby born under the stall

the silken onion skin
of the matron’s hands

as she uses a needle to connect
loop after loop.

“Our own” rotating square of green or taupe, mist, ash,
tobacco, brick, ultramarine, coal, pitch, straw–

is a boundary–tethered by the leather strings
of a coin purse held in someone else’s name.

The record changes its vessel:
cassette-compact disc-digital-multimedia.

A teen is taken
on a hill of quilted covers

the administrative assistant
pumps milk at her desk

a woman with a coif like a dollop of cream
greets you at WalMart.

Can anyone stammer blame if we wish
to pluck out our eyes like grapes?

Scratch, dent, break the cruel circle over our knee

 

Jessie Wingate

Jessie is a florist by day, poet by night, and round-the-clock mom living on unceded Ohlone land in California. She holds an MA in Art History. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, CALYX, Chestnut Review, Mother Mag, California Quarterly, Kestrel, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bold Italic, and others.

Stephen Curtis Wilson

July 2025 | visual art

Last Dance at the Chicken Ranch, artwork

Last Dance at the Chicken Ranch

 

Stephen Curtis Wilson

Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime. His well-considered perspective provides him with an intimate, unique understanding of the artistry of this region, quintessentially Midwestern. He was a medical and generalist photographer and writer in the fields of healthcare and library science for 36 years. He received a BA from the University of Illinois and is an Illinois Artisan for Photography. You may view more of his work at stephencurtiswilson.com.