Cyrus Carlson

July 2025 | visual art

Abstraction 1, artwork

Abstraction

Abstraction 2, artwork

Abstraction

Cyrus Carlson

Cyrus Carlson is an abstract painter whose small, colorful work creates moments of attention in a distracted world.

Holly Willis, Featured Artist

July 2025 | visual art

Water Still 25, artwork

Water Still 25

Penobscot Bay Light, artwork

Penobscot Bay Light

Holly Willis uses text and image to wonder how we might reimagine our relationship to the world, not as autonomous beings moving through isolated landscapes, but as embodied forces intimately enmeshed with the matter around us. These images capture sunlight and water from Penobscot Bay in Maine, shot with a camera that moves in tandem with these elemental forces.

Holly Willis

Holly Willis is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder. Using a variety of analog, digital, and computational image-making tools, Willis explores the ways in which we might reimagine our relationship to the world and its varied spaces and landscapes, not as independent beings moving through separate realms, but as transcorporeal forces enmeshed in dense relationships with the matter all around us. She asks if we can imagine the world not as some inert backdrop to human activity but as a dynamic array that we engage with in ongoing relations, how might we care for our world differently? Her body of work overall attempts to capture this sense of active matter, of sensation, and dynamism, and strives for what Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, calls the “arts of noticing.”

Christina Borgoyn

July 2025 | poetry

terminal ii

How quiet a mouse must be underfoot

as it feeds on human destruction.

This house changes with the seasons,

its long steps shaped like a mailbox

& languishes in the snowmelt,

freezing and refreezing as the days

grow longer and nights lengthen

as a ruler gathering grammar dust.

I find the envelope sitting in the mailbox,

waiting for its postmaster, but it’s been

years since anyone has passed by.

The snow is trodden by many afeet,

but it doesn’t matter that my hands

are like ice, frozen in midair and un-

formed by ASL words that vibrate in

our hidden reflexes. All we are able

to consume on lonely nights like these

are ashes disguised by our daring at-

tempts at feeding the empty gnawing

sensation cratering like a hole through

our esophagi.

 

Christina Borgoyn

Lives in the Baltimore area. Owns 1 square foot of Hawaii 2, a private, uninhabited island in Maine, thanks to Cards Against Humanity. Been writing since age 7, poetry since 11. Has written over 20,000 poems. Graduated from UMUC in 2012 with a BA in English Literature. Participates in NaNoWriMo and NaPoMo. Active member of AllPoetry, where they are known as Amaranthine Lover. Self-published November Poems, available on Amazon. Administrative Specialist II for MDE by day, demi-goddess by night.

Angela Townsend, Featured Author

July 2025 | nonfiction, Pushcart nominee

My New Exercise Bike

Herman is going to restore the vigor of my youth. Herman is going to prevent me from traipsing through the discount store when I am bored. Herman is going to remind me why God created hip-hop music. Herman is going to lend purpose to my soles. Herman is going to memorize my cat tattoo. Herman is going to become a shaman specializing in blood glucose. Herman is going to grant absolution if I miss a morning. Herman is going to do hand-to-hand combat with anxiety. Herman is going to sing Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs” to keep me motivated. Herman is going to acquire decals of cats in spacecraft. Herman is going to learn the feel of God’s hands over my hands on the handlebars. Herman is going to be a secret for twenty-one days, the gestation for a habit. Herman is going to find out whether I can keep faith with Herman. Herman is not going to tell anyone that I get out of breath on speed #3, “moderate.” Herman is never going to experience speed #7, “vigorous.” Herman is going to smell like Lemon Cupcake hand soap. Herman is going to mesmerize my cat. Herman is going to inspire me to name a future cat “Flywheel.” Herman is going to hear hymns and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Herman is going to provoke the purchase of jaunty sweatpants. Herman is going to learn the names of all the West Wing characters. Herman is going to merit a five-star review urging others to obtain Hermans. Herman is going to celebrate day twenty-one with a congratulatory pat on my buttocks. Herman is going to hear me shriek, “was that you, Herman?” Herman is not going back to the Herman factory, even though returns are free.

Angela Townsend

Angela Townsend is in her eighteenth year of working at a cat sanctuary, where she gets to bear witness to mercy for all beings. This was not the exact path she expected after divinity school, but love is a wry author of lives. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Her poet mother is her best friend.

Ars Poetica—Bolinas

April 2025 | poetry

The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of

brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy

 

tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep,

that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow

 

scarce? But there’s comforting memory as

well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a wet but

 

soothing thaw after sledding outside for hours.

Childhood leaves its imprints, remote and often

 

faded, only to swell at incongruous moments

like now, here in the late afternoon warmth, as

 

hundreds of seagulls circle above this lagoon,

white specks in the distance shimmering with

 

light against the western face of Tamalpais,

from the Miwok támal pájis, “coast mountain,”

 

an approximate translation they say. I was once

a mountain girl, but not this kind; no ocean

 

near, frozen ground for months, and snow swirling

as white shapes in wind like these gulls I could

 

write, if I wanted simile today but I don’t. I just

want these gulls as gulls, rising and circling,

 

circling and soaring, and I want the pull of

the tide in and then out . . . waves of ache tangled

 

with rapture; this poem a rough decoding of

the fugitive sway.

 

Virginia Barrett

Virginia Barrett is a poet, writer, artist, editor, and educator. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco, where she was the poetry editor for Switchback. Her six books of poetry include Between Looking and Crossing Haight—San Francisco poems. She is also the editor of four poetry anthologies, including RED: a Hue Are You anthology.