on the keister,
our young brother
was sent back
down home
to till his soil
solo,
Vesuvius bile
vomited
out of bitter lips –
even still!
Venom unabated,
poison spittle
distorting the crops
we consume:
hell, it’s in our clothing!
Endgame?
Dissolution of the collective
dream.
R James Sennett Jr
R James Sennett Jr lives, works, breathes, and chases his muse in Louisville, Kentucky. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications for which he is grateful.
C Fred Johnson Park
Fred Johnson Carousel, Johnson City, New York, one of six old carved carousels in the Binghamton metro area, known as the “carousel capital of the world.”
Jim Ross
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in 200+ journals on five continents in the past ten years. Best of the Net nominee in Nonfiction and Art, photo publications include Barnstorm, Blue Mesa, Burningword, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, Stonecoast, with Normal School forthcoming. Photo-essays include Burningword, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Pilgrimage, Sweet, and Typehouse. His most recent interview, published by Terrain.org, was conducted with an artist. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.
The Shape of Absence
Rina Park
She is a sophomore at Chadwick International School in Incheon, South Korea. She has a deep interest in photography as a means of capturing the essence of society through everyday events and human relationships. She uses her camera to explore the impact and benefits of social dynamics and behavior, focusing on how subtle interactions shape our world. Through careful attention to color, composition, and detail, she strives to tell unique visual stories that highlight the beauty and complexity of the ordinary. Her work invites viewers to pause and reflect on the often-overlooked moments of daily life.
Lines as points that flow
from the first to last,
planes as groups of lines
that define a surface,
some rippling surface
a topographic map
defined by rippling lines
also to mean mountains
but they move too fast
to define a moving figure
a human figure computed
in its sudden contortions
on a flatscreen of colors
limbs that part from bodies
or melt back into the torso
from which they came
or part like distended ribs–
it’s all just lines distorted,
flowing points composing lines,
points that move on a plane
crossing boundaries of others
nota bene the wrestling harlequins
as they melt into another
in the prize ring.
Scott Penney
Recent publications have been in Artful Dodge, basalt, Faultline, Fugue, Chiron Review, and other magazines. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Currently, he lives in Chelsea, Vermont.
Leave it back home in the driveway: this is your chance to be purified. Approach the drive-thru entrance on foot, like it’s a cathedral of cleanliness. Shift your body into neutral, and get ready for the ride of your life. As you are splashed and soaped and buffed and waxed, exorcise all the dirt that has accumulated in your bones, your skin, your fingernails, your toes. Clean every last surface of your most desirous thoughts: your mind should shine pristinely, all dreams of chocolate cake or tight-sweatered strangers or public figures you wish to strangle safely sequestered in a supply closet at the back of your brain, a place you can’t access without a skeleton key, or two-factor authentication. Ever since you were young, you’ve dreamed of this moment. Ever since you were strapped in the back seat while your mother—harried, hurried—ran your red Volvo wagon through its glow-up shower after retrieving you up from elementary school. You remember watching the show through the cranked-up window, the mops of rubber hair that slopped wet all over the car’s body calming you somehow. Becoming a vehicle wash voyeur also made you think of your excursions to Lion Country Safari, the sadness of that drive-thru zoo; what, you wondered, did these regal but strangely emaciated beasts make of your huge-wheeled and armored animal as it slowly idled through their artificial, exurban habitat? Now, you’re a grown-ass adult pretending to be a Porsche, and paying $19.95 plus tax for this strangest of baptisms—or at least you’re test-driving the idea as reverie. Hand an extra fiver to the guys who finish hand-drying you, and thank them for their efforts. Well: do you feel cleansed? Are you ready to face the horrors and pleasures of this blemished world with fresh-faced and sudsy energy? Or do you desperately want to get dirty again—to go roll around in a puddle of mud somewhere, like the filthy, sinful creature you are?
Matt Leibel
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been previously anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2025, and Best Microfiction 2026. Find him online at mattleibel.com.
