Mia Sitterson

April 2026 | poetry

what will I do until then?

 

buy seven white nectarines at the farmer’s market, eat one each day,

do this over and over as the nectarines become pears, the pears become

 

winter, the leaves will turn to eggshells underfoot, and I won’t

remember what it was like to live in a green world

 

are you also a child in this way? I mean dropping so heavily

into each season, it feels infinite in all directions

 

time like a puddle, like the cuffs of the sweater I wore to the beach

in September, believing I wouldn’t need to touch the ocean

 

what do I want now? a slap to the inner thigh

hard enough to bring me back into my body

 

groceries, and the energy to use them to make something

beautiful for myself and someone else, and the someone else

 

once, I held onto everything so hard I’d have to

command my fingers slack at bedtime

 

a still frame of my life in this moment reveals

I am as sad as ever, and loving so quietly

 

Mia Sitterson

Mia Sitterson (she/her) is a postpartum doula and dancer moving and grooving in Washington, DC. Her poetry finds roots in her queer, Jewish, Cuban-American body. She was selected as a featured writer for Khora Magazine, where she published “postpartum: three poems” and was a finalist for the ONLY POEMS Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize. For the last six years, she has run a biweekly queer poetry group out of her living room. Over two hundred people have written poems in this space.

R James Sennett Jr

April 2026 | poetry

With Barely a Smack

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.

Jim Ross

April 2026 | visual art

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.

Rina Park

April 2026 | visual art

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.

Scott Penney

April 2026 | poetry

Polynomial

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.