October 2025 | nonfiction
Transfer
Long crooked stem, blunt thorns, deep red, tight center, black ridging outer petals that curled back—I forget how I acquired the rose. People were always giving me flowers, but I bought them, too. I could guess a bouquet’s price in any neighborhood, or vased on someone’s shelf, with stunning accuracy. I picked up many a five that way, guessing to the penny, knowing that if I bet more I’d feel too guilty to take the money. I was waiting to transfer at the 168th street station, a dank cavern sepia-ed in failing light and staling urine. It took anywhere from five to one hundred fifty—but usually forty—minutes for the train to come. I read Moby Dick and War and Peace on the subway, but that night I had Beloved. When I felt nervous I took a cab, reasoning that if I got attacked I’d kick myself if I’d ignored my instincts, but it was a long way to Inwood. Cab drivers always tried to take the bridge, because they didn’t believe Manhattan went up that high; I’d have to fight to keep them on the Henry Hudson—a repeating course in assertion. I was nineteen. Some drivers asked me out, some confessed that they were on drugs, one muttered over and over that I was as tender as a young brussel sprout, but we were above 176th, and I was scared to make him pull over and let me out on the dark un-sidewalked thoroughfare — there was no riverwalk then—so if I felt OK, I’d save the twenty dollars. I slipped the rose into the triangles of space between the crooked elbows and concave chest of a long thin homeless man, hugging himself as he slept it off on a bench, then chose a place to stand where I’d see anyone approaching (I wasn’t dressed for the walk of shame and thought it was obvious that I was waitress coming home with a wad of cash and wanted to be ready) and watch the rats emerge from the tracks, the third rail, the garbage, the puddles, and the chunked-out walls exactly as they emerged if you were hallucinating them coming down from acid or X while I waited and read. Two chattering women crossed the platform. I did not fear them; I saved my fear for men. They looked dressed for church or a baby shower—vinyl pumps with ankle-wobbling heels, pastel polyester dresses with deep ruffled necklines. Tiny hats. Stiff curls with banded grooves where bobby pins had recently secured plastic rollers. The bar closed at four and it took until five to get out of there, and I’d made it this far from the village, the women were probably headed to an early service. They were loud and bright, and I watched them without turning my head. One slipped the rose out, like a Pick Up Stick, or a Kerplunk skewer, without waking the sleeper, but her friend said, “that’s not for you” and made her put it back.
MFC Feeley
MFC Feeley has an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is a board member of 49 Writers. She wrote a series of ten stories inspired by the Bill of Rights for Ghost Parachute and has published in Best Micro-Fictions, SmokeLong, Jellyfish Review, Pulp Literature, and others. Her one-minute memoir was featured on Brevity Blog. Feeley was a writer in residence at The National Willa Cather Center and a Fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, The Pushcart Prize, was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist, and has judged for Scholastic. More at MFCFeeley.com
October 2025 | poetry
thieves and murderers
she gently sacrificed the sparrow
eggs under a strawberry moon
to a mother and her baby raccoons.
just cells in shells, nothing
breathing or eating. it had to be
hard for her. so soft,
her critter loving soul will be haunted
until wrens return to nesting
where sparrows strangled their young.
a simple repair, a smaller hole,
there will be wren babies
eating inch worms and slugs,
beetles and bugs.
imagination, her merciless gift
will see them seize the eggs,
hear them crack the shells and lick
clean every crumb with tiny raccoon tongues.
invasives, she knows, those
house sparrows, but they’re birds,
not yet birds, but on the way to be
someday with pumping hearts and mating
calls, sunwarmed feathers and puddle baths.
maybe if they ate the wrens
to survive like hawks, not just to steal a nest
like soldiers.
Don Farrell
Don Farrell lives in Cambridge, MN with 3 sons, 2 dogs and other critters where land transitions from forest to prairie. He holds a monthly open mic at The ARC Retreat Center in Stanchfield, MN and a bi-weekly zoom poetry critique group. He has a full-length book accepted for publication by Fernwood Press. He has poems in Bodega Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Exist Otherwise, Shoegaze Literary, Brushfire Literary Journal, Five Fleas, The Orchard Poetry Journal, Suisun Valley Review, Men Matters Journal, Willows Wept Review, Harrow House Journal, Mason Jar Press, and New Square of Sancho Panza Poetry. He hopes to leave this planet without getting what he deserves.
October 2025 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Why Thinking About Taxis Makes Me Sad
I could never trust an Uber or a Lyft,
and I have my own car anyhow.
But should I have the need, I’d prefer
a taxi with bright colors or checkers
and the wide, bulbous car body, as if
other car bodies or frames are underneath,
so the taxi can shed one, like a cicada does,
and move on to its next destination or passenger,
someone waiting streetside and almost desperate
for a ride and to get somewhere safely
in a city where the passenger knows nobody
and needs to get somewhere that may look like
a home for one or two nights and where
there may be the potential for a face that
might make softer the darkness and the unknown
of an unfamiliar city or maybe even someplace
in the country where without a full moon or any
moonlight, the darkness feels like a seal of wax
on the back of an envelope that will never be
cracked by anyone I know or love but only by
a stranger in the night behind a desk with keys
hanging on hooks on the wall and he can’t or won’t
find mine, so I keep walking in the dark
in some cold warehouse district like those
on TV where they find the dead or barely
alive bodies in an old tractor trailer, or
in some cornfield just beyond the edge of the lights
on the highway where the arms of those I love
have become the stubble left long
after the harvest, and the sun
has gone down on my life.
Buzz Lightyear Won’t Forgive You,
nor will the ceramic cat
with the Felix tick-tock eyes.
It’s the people far down
on the street that matter, those
we can barely see for our being
so far up in this silver skyscraper
that makes us forget and not care
about who’s below.
But we can get close again, and the people
can get large, so we don’t forget who and what
they are, so they don’t have to flee
when the hammer drops and the sparks fly.
Doug Funnie we know
is your hero, so quiet and unassuming.
He knows what’s important: the weave
of the living room rug, the fine-enough cotton
sheets that make up your bed, the doctor
who once made house calls and popped
the cork at your wedding.
These are the people who call
your name, who will pat your shoulder
when you need it, who know that magna tiles
gather even more color in the late morning
sun on the porch floor where toys tell
the stories, where playtime is the
supreme value that we should talk about
in church and political speeches,
so we never forget what it’s like
to be pushed on a swing, to have the touch
on the back that keeps us going,
so we don’t forget that hand and those
fingers when we let go and throw ourselves
into the air, assured of the balance
the arms will find and gather
to stick the landing and make sure
the heart is everywhere
the blood flows and may want or think
to go.
Pete Follansbee
Pete Follansbee likes writing in the early morning dark and lives in Richmond, Virginia, a good place to survive climate change and political uncertainty. This summer, Pete’s poems have appeared online in Humana Obscura, the Rockvale Review, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. In the past, Pete’s poems have been finalists in contests and have found publication in The North American Review, Barrow Street, The New Guard, About Place, New Millenium Writings, and elsewhere. An MFA graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Pete was a T.A. for poet Tim Seibles at the summer 2017 edition of The Writer’s Hotel and a Faculty Assistant for their 2021 Virtual Poetry Weekend. And this coming June 2026, Pete looks forward to being a Director’s Assistant at The Writer’s Hotel in Maine. Pete has a website of his published poems at petefollansbee.com.
October 2025 | poetry
Walking Beds
Not in any particular direction.
But somehow in concert
with the other furniture.
Me as a boy says to me
“Why don’t you stop them?”
“The days go by,” I say,
praying that this is weighty,
meaningful. But I know
me as a boy knows
that it means as much
as karaoke lyrics that flash
on the screen and never
get sung. “Straight up now
tell me,” me as a boy whispers.
“Do you love me?” Once again,
I am dumbstruck. I have no answer.
I can only pretend that the beds
have slept as well as us, slept
through both of our lives,
waking only in fits of temptation.
I flop down. I believe I know
where the bed is. But my elbow
folds and smarts. Sudden impact
feels unusual, lighting the mind
like a flashing screen. The bed must have
been walking again. I knew
where it was yesterday. “My memory
is distinct,” I wheeze to me
as a boy, trying to put myself back together,
knowing parts of me have been knocked
loose and remain on the floor. “I know,”
says me as a boy, “But still I don’t
believe you.” Precocious little fucker.
But his life will be precarious,
never knowing what to confront
when he wakes, or how awake
he’ll be, like the way he imagines
the consciousness of a daffodil
he watches grow in stop-motion.
Nicholas Haines
Nicholas Haines is a writer, teacher, and musician from New York’s Hudson Valley. His work has previously appeared in the Shawangunk Review and Chronogram.
October 2025 | poetry
A J. G. Ballard Kind of Gone
after Patti Smith
The first cool dawn following the unwavering
humidity Kentucky summers are known for, a layer
of mist containing upwards of a century of morning
dew rises eye level from the farm, like fallen soldiers
discharging their specters all at the same time
to face this particular day long past the echoes
of each shot they never heard from their neighbors
who planted them down here in this field, as if
the dead were waiting for appropriate weather
conditions to properly chill the living to the bone,
but driving in my car, windows up, heat half on,
could safely say I feel as warm as the day before
if not for the fact my arms are goose pimpled
just from looking out the driver’s side window,
wondering if I stood out there in the thick of it—
if I could even bring myself to step out of my car
and march forward into the mist—would I
hear a soldier cry for help or my dog yelp
or Nana whisper something blood-curdling,
along the lines of why did you let me go?
All it is is cold.
In Dreams Return Memories
after Maggie Millner
Often, I dreamt
that [s]he and I
were back together.
Pathetic how much I found
in the black of night
with my eyes closed,
my brain turned off,
the projections of what was
offered up in a trough
I was expected to wade around in
to find only the sweet remnants
bobbing before me,
robbing me of reason,
the knowledge the giblets
removed with the kill
were still floating somewhere,
souring the sweet,
muddying the water,
turning the sweetest soup
into unsavory stew,
beet red in color
reminiscent of blood
pooling below
the hanging carcass
of a prized deer
so tremendous in life,
so reduced once sliced
from ass to breast,
when there’s still some
heat coming off the fresh corpse
in the November cold.
Could be these sweet dreams
are meant to remind me
what was warm once—
old to me now
but unadulterated in youth
so apparent with life
I could see only the prize,
blind to anything pooling below,
leaking out, slipping away,
distracted by eyes
so green and wide
that I never wanted
to see them cry,
let alone ever be the reason.
Then, I’d wake up
in my lonesome bed
and recall how
I was just that this season.
At least there are the dreams
where everything is still good,
we are still good.
At least somewhere still exist
where our love remains
constant, understood.
Deron Eckert
Deron Eckert is a poet and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Journal, Rattle, Stanchion, Beaver Magazine, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He can be found on Instagram at deroneckert.
