Jack Bordnick Studio

April 2026 | poetry

Our Shadow’s Know

 

Jack Bordnick Studio

Bordnick’s interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy. As a photographer and sculptor, he has been able to share his professional experiences in ways that benefit both business and community projects. With over twenty years of experience, he has successfully designed, fabricated, and installed various projects. He is an industrial design/sculpture graduate of Pratt Institute in New York, where he has had his own professional design business and has been a design director for numerous companies and local government projects. They included a major children’s museum for the city of New York and the Board of Education.

Kenneth Boyd

April 2026 | poetry

Hot Rhythm

Archibald Motley (United States, 1961)

 

The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

 

If this dream could dance, I’d feel it in my veins

Circulating in rhythms of dazzling dances

The fusion of primitive roots found in my nature

Echoes hanging in the hills like conjured arrangements

For a modulating hang-time of reckless rhapsodies

Sent a timbre of waves resonating through me

 

By the thunder of my heart you could find me

Not where I was brought up or the legacy in my veins

Forces of fire and wind found in rhapsodies

The dialect of my horn was heard in dances

Interpreting the lingo repeated in blazing arrangements

Cast with copper and zinc from nature

 

Always faster, like a sonic boom, to awaken nature

Stunning and spellbound reflection of forces in me

Elevated restoration of bright sounding arrangements

Pulling along titanic ensembles with boiling veins

“Without etiquette,” said the erudite critics of dances

Radiogenic to silvery tolerance for bullish rhapsodies

 

 

Muscle memory residue echoing in sultry rhapsodies

Repealing the imposition of new rhythms of nature

Elements of an off-beat life-force persisting in dances

The approach of a shouting force majeure in me

My war-like call as fast as cocaine in my startled veins

Jolting from an annular soul of tarnished arrangements

 

Melodies for any who would burnish the arrangements

Torrential intuition of endless musical rhapsodies

Coming down from hills of migrated musical veins

Translation of swelling emotions beyond a listeners’ nature

A reverie of impressionistic showgirls crushing me

Without the ability to hide in the shindig of dances

 

My sound and soul settling in sweet and somber dances

Brandishing luminously time-insensitive arrangements

Or a discreet show of red was a commandment

For bravery, ego, and artistry in rhapsodies

Unapologetically trenchant in a temperamental nature

A blue beret to hide the apocalypse in my veins

 

Knowing me was to know the riot in my veins

Swelling in arrangements of a lyrical nature

My refuge preserved in thundering rhapsodies

 

 

Art Source: https://nasher.duke.edu/stories/archibald-motley-hot-rhythm-1961/

 

 

Kenneth Boyd

Kenneth Boyd is a neurodivergent poet and former jazz musician. As an emerging writer, his poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Of Poets & Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine, eMerge Magazine, Flora Fiction, Unlost Journal, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2024 Royal Palm Literary Award, Empyrean Poetry Competition, and the Penumbra Poetry Contest. His debut poetry collection, Grasshopper Dreams, was published in 2023. Kenneth is a graduate of the UCLAx Creative Writing Program and an Assistant Poetry Editor at Southland Alibi magazine. He embraces life in the South with his wife and dog Stella. He enjoys fine jazz, fine cigars, and fine pork pie hats. More about him can be found at www.bardopoetry.com and @BardoPoetry on social media.

Dawson Steeber

April 2026 | poetry

Are You Coming Back

Last night I tossed and turned, the night

torn mad with slamming doors and clanging radiators.

I threw pillows and covers all over

the room, woke in a terrible cold sweat.

I walked to the kitchen gingerly, feeling

the swollen, sore pad of my foot where I

picked up that barbed sliver of floorboard

like a prison shank. How sweet,

thinking about that splinter

and the way you came to me then, bent

to your knees, and pulled it out.

The kitchen was dark, the sink full of dirty plates.

I opened the refrigerator door,

the light illuminating everything. I pulled

the half drunken quart bottle from the door,

unscrewed the cap, and inhaled

the miasma

of tired, flat beer.

It smells so much better

on your breath, tastes better

on your mouth. I twisted

the cap back on, set the bottle in the door

and let it fall shut. Everything was dark

again. I lumbered to the sunroom and sat

in the red leather chair where you fold yourself

behind half-smoked cigarettes.

The leather was cold as was the streetlight

shining across the floor where windblown

ashes scuppered into dark corners

like paper thin insects. I sat

the rest of the night on the mattress

in the living room, washed in the glow of the TV,

a pair of pliers in one hand,

needle nose in the other, fixing

the bracelet that broke in the dining room

that night I tried to link it round your wrist.

It’s fixed now. Are you

coming back for it?

 

Dawson Steeber

Dawson Steeber is a union carpenter working, reading, and writing in Akron, Ohio. His poems and fiction can be found in Thank You For Swallowing, Pink Disco, Halfway Down the Stairs, CC&D, and elsewhere.

Michael Horton

January 2026 | fiction

Ping Pong

The house was a gift—picture perfect weekend luxury on the lake. From their three daughters. They were all doing well, money wasn’t a hurdle, and they wanted to show their parents a good time.

Just relax.

Sit on the dock.

Hold hands, the oldest adds.

They’d become concerned.

In the cathedral-ceiling living room, the fireplace rose in a striking arrangement of natural stone. An island as big as a pickup truck filled the kitchen. Everything was fully stocked. He looks for the coffee maker. She checks for milk. Next a master suite with glass doors to a private deck, the bathroom crowd-sized with walk-in shower, tub with jets, warming towel bars, a heated floor. Upstairs a second-floor balcony overlooks the living room and out to the glittering lake through the two-story window wall. They pause to look without speaking. They stand several inches apart.

More bedrooms, bathrooms, balconies overlooking the lake. Every piece of furniture was hand-crafted, surfaces polished to a finish like clear water. A dream house from some dream life.

* * *

The ping pong table in the walkout basement brings them to a standstill.

She rests her fingers on the scuffed green top. Do you remember?

He crosses to the table. Two paddles with blue rubber-nibbed faces rest on opposite ends of the table, the ball tucked under the nearest.

You used to win, he says, picking up the paddle.

Only at first.

He smiles, shakes his head, remembering. He picks up the paddle wagging it back and forth.

She circles the table. The panorama of the lake is framed in glass doors behind her. She picks up the other paddle.

Lovely hands. Even now, he thinks she has lovely hands.

He picks up the ball, hollow, feeling fragile as a blown egg.

Shall we give it a try?

Now she smiles.

I don’t know if I can—it’s been too long.

He laughs. Very carefully he taps the ball to her. She catches it in her hand and holds it a moment, staring down at it. Then taps it back with equal care. He moves to return it. It goes over his paddle and bounces across the floor.

A little rusty, he says, returning to his side. She moves slightly, shifting foot to foot.

Ready?

As though tapping glass, he serves. Stepping sideways she taps it back. His smile broadens. This time his paddle finds the ball, returns it.

It’s a moment of triumph. Look what they have done! She returns it.

The sound takes on a natural tick tock rhythm.

They focus on keeping the rhythm, the mutual cadence of pass and return. They concentrate, hitting the ball so it is an easy pass for the other to return. Some go wide, and they step quickly reaching out. It is coming back to them.

Serious now, both smiling, almost holding their breath.

It has been so long. So much has come between.

They concentrate.

They keep it going.

 

Michael Horton

Michael has worked as a bookmobile librarian, McDonald’s shift manager, factory worker in a rubber parts plant, prep cook, men’s dormitory janitor, purchasing agent, and IT guy—but writing is what he does. His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Raleigh Review, among others. Stories were nominated for “Best of the Net” and Pushcart Prize. He is an alumnus of the Sewanee Writers Conference, where he learned from the remarkable Tony Earley and Alice McDermott.

Amy Agape

January 2026 | nonfiction

If You Were There

If you were there, you surely would have noticed the scarlet slash cleaving the soft brown fuzz. Her roly-poly-curved shrunken shape. White sheets, once crisp, now softened by sweat. Darkened room illuminated regularly for blood draws, IV exchanges.

You would have heard her on the phone. Do you have avocados? Maybe bring one of those. And toast? Black beans too, those might work. Oh, a wheat tortilla and some grilled chicken. I can make a little taco. Maybe a bite of that will stay down. Ice cream, too, please, sometimes that’s okay. Something cold to drink – maybe Pepsi? No, Sprite.

Then, turning to me, “Can you believe it? My mom and sisters took my daughter. They were supposed to pick up pizza, bring it back here to eat with me. That would have been nice, right? They just texted that they are coming later, after they’ve finished eating. Why couldn’t they just eat here with me? Now I’m starving, and it may be too late to be able to hold anything down. That’s not nice of them, is it?”

You would have witnessed a woman arriving with a stack of cards. “You’ve got lots to do, Sis. I planned for all the birthdays, the graduations, even their weddings.” Maybe you would have recognized appropriation disguised as altruism.

You likely would have noted the numbers scattered throughout her questions. Will I be here 2 months from now? Can you believe the nurses have to wear gowns and gloves to hand me this 1 little pill? What should I tell my 3 children? Do you think they realize I may only have 14 days to live?

You never would have noticed:

A scar, mollified by years, a kind of cleavage under my blouse

Me alone in the bed, my family out for burgers

Suppressed shame that I was unable to write letters to my kids like the dying mom on Oprah

The newspaper clipping shared by a friend – a grief camp for kids with dead parents

My own numbers: 2 weeks to live; 12 previous cases, all diagnosed by autopsy; 3 major surgeries and dozens of procedures; 25 bonus years

An infant son learning to walk in my hospital room

His younger sister, not even arrived by that hospital room but present for all the following ones with the new scars and new guilt and new hope and new joy

 

You may have noticed me grab her hand, look into her eyes, whisper, “I’m here.”

 

Amy Agape

Amy Agape, PhD, provides spiritual companionship to hospitalized individuals and their families. This work, rooted in her own experience with a rare illness, invites her to listen deeply to others’ stories and explore the ways they interweave with her own. Amy dreams of a world where all people experience the profound blessing of being companioned with loving presence. She intends to spend the remainder of her days helping to create that world.