Matt Zambito

October 2026 | poetry

An Awful Way

“Have you ever imagined what it might feel like

to pee in perpetuity on the outie bellybutton

of the first or worst person to shatter the mirror

of your heart?” would be an awful way to start

a poem, when one should really begin (why not,

you know?) with septillions of daisies in parallel

universes Big-Banged from daisies, into daisies,

all daisies, and only then turn into the love-hate of

animals with oxygen, each breath rusting us

beasts to dust. Since even the entertainment

poetry provides means you’re a bit bored with you

(as I am with me!), any tonight might become

sincerely solo, a loneliness capable of comedy

and killing. Oh, isn’t nearly every pleasure—

from apples to oranges to the comparison of any

metaphoric fruit—the most wonderfully forsaken

action on Earth and a best bet of bad bets to help

tolerate our treks to a never- or forever-ending

whatever, surely any hereafter an impossible

darkness with the strangest reflected lights?

Matt Zambito

Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities and two chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances. New poems are forthcoming in Swamp Pink, Tampa Review, Cottonwood, Slipstream, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has lived in Ohio, Idaho, Washington, and New York, where he now resides with his rescue dog, Sadie.

Mark Hendrickson

October 2026 | poetry

Janitrix

My college janitor always listened to me, so I confided in her. She was on her knees scrubbing floors but stopped to look straight at me. ‘Why haven’t you done it then? Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?’ I found myself sputtering. I said I wasn’t sure. I wanted to end it, to end myself. She shrugged and bent back to her work. ‘You won’t have wasted your life,’ she said. ‘You can always be a bad example.’

Ripe

Walking through the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, we found the child. Flies had nearly eaten his ear clean off, ripe for the picking. His mother did not want our help because we were white missionaries. She did not want us to bathe her child, nor did she trust the antibiotics we offered her free of charge. When we told her that without help the child would die, she spat, “Then I will just have another one.” I looked at her as she stood there—beautiful, proud and defiant. I looked at the child staring at her, too weak to blink.

Mark Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson is a gay poet and former psychiatric nurse living in the Des Moines area. A 2024 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he has been published in McNeese Review, Vestal Review, Variant Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or visit www.markhendricksonpoetry.com.

John Walser

October 2026 | poetry

The ceremonies of winter

Like hunching.

Like watching

the spellcast rhythm

the narcotic swing

of the almost

empty feeder.

Like black tea

with honey.

Like February opening

the homemade sauce

frozen at first frost hint

and tasting September.

Like turning on the light.

Like waiting to turn it on:

a dusk approaching

but the snow takes on

the blue grey glowing

of the still bright sky.

Like testing my step

onto sidewalk ice

the barely grip

the splitting slide.

Like skitching across snowslush.

Like reading in the morning

the tracks in the backyard

to see if the stray dog

Julie’s named Mr. Rabies

came through on his wanderings:

this pandemic distraction.

Like loving the drip and the stain

of the just warm enough

pale as bleaching.

Like trying to find a way to name

the strange birdcalls

twisting like spiral fractures

through closed windows.

Like moments of drifted despair.

Like mica glints of barely hopefulness.

John Walser

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Plume, Posit, Nimrod, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review and One Art. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and a three-time Pushcart nominee, as well as a Best New Poets nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a past recipient of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. He is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.