Headless Patrons
Black & White Beach
VA Wiswell
VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. When not writing, she enjoys ice skating, reading, and working on her photography and her art projects. Her work has appeared in Literary Heist, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Lumina Journal, Panoplyzine Magazine, The Basilisk Tree, Remington Review, Figwort, and Homimum Journal. She also recently published a poetry collection through Kelsay Books.
Before that late hour of blue cheese
and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine,
she asks me questions I cannot answer simply:
forget night’s history, the weight of excuse?
I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold.
Will salutations tangle into word games
and betray the desire to love a while longer?
Her naked confidence is as unabashed as arrogance forgiven.
Her gown sweeps the spiders’ dew:
lint of wherewithal, might-have-been, the else to do.
At the window, she does not have to guess
the dreams of this world, its humble corners.
She walks through orchards: they buzz to bloom,
shadows jump stone walls in glee, the moon sinks to pale regret.
She walks trails with no stumbles or switchbacks,
coaxes crows across a frontiered sky.
Early coffee to wake, scones in their sacrifice;
I plead with her stay, stay, but she does not look back
at the bed we shared: I hear only whispers
of hinge pins swinging their partners away.
Frederick Wilbur
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise. His work appears in many periodicals, including The Atlanta Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).
Annabelle
Stephen Curtis Wilson
Wilson is a designer and photographer. His deeply personal view of this quintessentially Midwestern region, central Illinois, highlights and celebrates its visual textures and curiosities. He was a medical and generalist photographer and executive writer in the healthcare field for 33 years. He cut steel in a foundry for a decade and drove a truck for a time. Wilson is a graduate of the University of Illinois and a juried Illinois Artisan for Photography.
Incendiary
Paper Cities B
JL Smith
Since visiting Hiroshima, Smith has been reflecting on power: what overpowers, what empowers us to rebuild, and the ruptures that continue across generations following cruelty. What remains in the wake of disaster? How do we reconfigure a world that is constantly fractured? These pieces were made using transparent adhesives, mica, sea glass, and a beam of light. Light ignites the mineral. Waves and time smooth the edges of the glass. We ask for transparency, but we rarely get it.
Light falling against a solid, upright object
casts a shadow, the sun setting behind mountains
putting the valley fully in shade, no doubt.
In the morning, standing against the railing
on the balcony of your forest home, the valley
again fully in shade, but drawing slowly toward
you as the sun rises higher and higher. Some days,
though, you’re uncertain about rising and pull
the blankets tighter over you despite the songbirds
beckoning, the breeze stirring the pines, the scent
of fresh brew from the kitchen, too many worries
casting a shadow over you even before the day
has begun. But can’t that happen only if you let
the doubts have substance? And when you shine
a light on them, as inevitably you will, won’t they
simply disappear, cloud-filled sky or not?
Jim Tilley
Jim Tilley has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024. His forthcoming collection, When Godot Arrived, will be published in the fall of 2026.
