Glass House Almanac

April 2025 | poetry

I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability. Smoke, ice, ancestral fingerprints. Around this cold evidence, planets painted by a noble hand, lanterning the shade. Directing our eyes from a soiled hunger. Spaces of light relief, to birth screamless. The glass has been cold for decades. My lips pressed to its green imaginings, already misted before any invasion. The plants grow as a daughter’s hair — beyond common death. On good twilights, vines reach the height of a lover’s climax. I see my mother’s tresses waterfallen at her hips, before pooling, unassisted. The last recorded summer came thick & flooded. He reminded me of thawing glaciers. Blue china shaken on the mantle of a faultline. After the tremors, I washed my own hair immemorial, asking what could still float above eye-level. The small fish paying for my debts with their silver? The pink coral pleasuring in the absence of flesh? I’d backstroke through our burnished climate. Let the tailwinds shed his possessions over me again. Our bodies glowing in oil & salt. He, a good man for tending reflections. For oversleeping the season with. His hands electing fine rain, cradling the era’s bouquets over my belly.

Vikki C.

Vikki C. is a British-born writer, musician, and author of two poetry collections, including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Her writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature and has appeared in over 70 publications across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. Recent venues include The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Grain Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sweet Literary, Cable Street, Feral: A Journal Of Poetry And Art, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, and Ice Floe Press, among others. Vikki was named a winner of the Black Bough Poetry 2024 Poetry Manuscript Contest and was shortlisted in the DarkWinter 2nd Anniversary Contest, judged by Kim Fahner. Her writing and voice have been featured in various podcasts and audio collaborations, which showcase her music and spoken-word craft.

As Though Playing in Your Head

April 2025 | poetry

I fucked up my knitting in the sauna.

The wool fraying with sweat, animal

tiring of infrared, birds zorbing like

orbs of candles, by me, showering in

the dark. Alright, and the dog rotates

in the air above my bed in my sleep

she knows this is a different day the

rest are like a slice of sun, rolls down

the back of my calf, a remnant of

being a child, scales of lore, how old.

Everyone puts their face on my face.

Friend. Those students finished that

huge lasagne, snacking right next to

me. I realized how gross it sounds

when people cut up and eat a lasagne.

Alex Braslavsky

Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is currently completing her dissertation on Polish, Czech, and Russian nonagenarian women poets and studying the relationship between aging and artmaking. Her poems are forthcoming in Rhino and The Indianapolis Review, among other journals. Her volume of translations of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry was short-listed for the American Literary Translators’ Association First Translation Prize.

The Plum Thief

April 2025 | poetry

Dark sunset blooms above my veins,

Human valleys in marrow eruption.

Amaranthine plum-drip bruises

Mark me crimson thief, orchard’s fox.

Botanic sangria slither, my throat a pink road,

Summer’s death the wine of rot and endings.

Plum thief wears mortal wound,

Seeping fatality brands intruder.

Night beast creeping,

I wear hungry, changing skin.

Soft necks open at my suggestion, sing.

I am a girl as a seed is a contained thing,

an almost thing,

a will-be thing.

I, the slowest bomb, quietest eruption.

This valley will eject me,

The toothy citizen.

Verdant patina, jade of rot’s grasp,

Verdigris mold in resplendent, changeling smear.

I sleep in a pulsing, carmine hollow.

There are a dozen words for wound,

But I suppose my name shall suffice.

There is no place here for predators.

Skin perfumed with twilight’s musk,

Closed eyelid a kaleidoscope veil cracking.

Juice stains fur tapestry, unzipping.

Hunted testament, fur tacked high,

Taxidermy desecrates decay’s appetite.

I am the insatiable heretic.

Morning brings pollen-pulse stain, searing.

You will know when there is no other way.

I slip into purple martin’s skin,

Oil slick whisper,

Become sky’s weightless shadow.

Beak loosed upon green writhe below,

Bellies break in sour plum honey,

For even worms must feast.

There is always another way into the orchard.

Alyssa Blankenship

Alyssa Blankenship is a working artist. Previously unpublished, Alyssa creates works that center around heavy themes expressed through the lens of the natural world.

Anniversary Dinner

April 2025 | poetry

Because sweetheart, this life
is a born escape artist,
a migrating fever,
a convict tattooed in invisible ink,
without mercy or nostalgia. – Tony Hoagland

Dear, you tell me you hope

for another 25 years together.

You, who used to skew toward ballerina-looking

lawyers with nary a hair nor argument astray.

You, the noisy admirer of stoicism

waving toward my shoes in admonishment

about the impracticality of carpeting

the world, you wrapped in a blanket

of hermeneutic suspicion, who nonetheless

equates any minor flaw with loss of full humanity−

you tell me I should just shoot you if

you ever 1) limp or 2) go mildly deaf−

you and your paradoxes are infinite:

confusing, amusing as kittens.

Because, let me tell you, such flaws

will grow, will overpopulate like tribbles,

like haystacks of books

and grain siloes of clothes:

a humiliation of abundance,

the digging out of which

could well result in the burial

of the digger. Meanwhile,

the losses peck away their

own claims until it is hard

to recognize−like something moldy

overlooked in the refrigerator−what’s left.

I told you when we met how I hated

the pressure of the term          soulmate,

and capitalistic compulsions of Valentine

or Sweetest Days, let alone the big white dress,

like a coconut cake impersonating a woman

or a Christmas tree flocked with chemical toxins.

Because I never expect a lack of trouble;

tennis-hop to be ready for disaster, I request

you wear a helmet in the car, to prevent

head trauma, prompting your eyeroll.

I told Kathy, when she asked

if we’d ever make things

permanent, that permanence,

like perfection, is 1) not a thing

and 2) if it were, we’d only

notice once it was not,

say if I choked on a chunk

of delicious crusty bread

at Osteria Via Stato and

our union and myself alike

pronounced impermanent in retrospect.

But at least she died doing what she loved

with the one she loved.

Julie Benesh

Julie Benesh is the author of the poetry collection Initial Conditions and the poetry chapbook About Time. Her work has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places. She earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She lives in Chicago and holds a PhD in human and organizational systems.