October 2026 | poetry
Self-Portrait as Sisyphus with Litter Pickers
To love a city is to know its street trash.
Our new neighborhood burps it up hourly,
population quadrupled by condos crawling
up overnight, humans and heavy machinery
making mayhem with mud, Tastykake wrappers,
cans of Coke and Fanta, traffic-flattened
to the slimness of dimes.
Our street trash collages resist metaphor:
cardboard seltzer case wrapped in a torn shirt,
overflowing with fat green dog poop bags.
Hello Kitty sneaker boxes stashed with pink tissue
and empty Corona bottles, some smashed to glitter.
I have spent my life cleaning up after others—
kids’ vomit splattering soccer wallpaper, puppy pee,
student essay revisions in the tens of thousands.
Suicide attempts of my beloveds.
I stay in my lane, cover one city block.
My litter pickers amaze me with their scalpel
like precision, become an extension of my arm,
my OCD and optimism.
The 10-dollar claw grips the most resistant
cigarette butt, the heftiest bag of McDonald’s waste.
I release all into the empty clean of my garbage bag.
What does it matter that more will roll right back
down our hilly street tomorrow?
When I reach the top of our block, finished for the day,
I am dirtier, purer.
VA Smith
VA Smith’s work has appeared widely in literary journals, among them: The Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Burningword Literary Journal, ONE ART, SWWIM, Quartet, and Third Wednesday. Her third book, Adaptations, was published by Green Writers Press in 2025. Her chapbook, Urbanity, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press in late 2026. VA serves as Poetry Editor of River Heron Review. Her bliss is writing, cooking, city walking, yoga, and loving on friends and family. Visit her Instagram and YouTube @vasmithpoetry.
October 2026 | poetry
Swimming on Coffee Tables
Édith Piaf’s quivering vibrato on “amour”
tickles the back edge of my hearing tonight
as I watch my five-and-a-half-year-old friend
on her belly, atop our coffee table
swimming in her colorful stretchy pants—
a pink-legged turtle doing the breaststroke.
Her long blonde hair shines confidently
in the soft glow of our Christmas tree,
but her arcing arms and thrusting legs
belie the dullness, unusual in her bright blue eyes.
More than a little tired and just a little hyper,
the dark, shiny table is just the thing
after a daylong outing and an over-long movie
when you haven’t yet learned to soothe yourself.
This baby turtle’s eyes—drab and lusterless—
reflect something inside dimmed and fearful,
the battery fluid of her childness leaking out.
Let’s hope some sleep and “amour” find you tonight,
protect and recharge you from your father’s miserable
mesh bag of neediness and wretched insecurity,
a whirlpool sucking your turtle’s delight
down the drain of a parent who doesn’t like girls.
David J. Schast
David J. Schast is a Philadelphia-area former oboist whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Crown Heights Community News, HOOT Review, The Oxford Review of Books, Poetry Scotland, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, The F-Word, and Voicemail Poems.
October 2026 | poetry
Mother
A sac to dump monsters, ghosts and dark devils. Your daughter
calls you to empty her fears. Slippery grime that lines
her young organs, you sag under the weight of her dread.
To think you were womb that held her lightness– she lentil
at 6 weeks, melon at 40– you, sunshine filled, buoyant balloon,
she, floating lemon, grapefruit, suspended, coconut bounce
in an ocean of glow. “I feel like a landfill,” you say, your arms flagging,
“I feel like I fill her emptiness” –muñeca que quita las penas,
Lupita– you sigh, arms downed– where are the good spirits?
Ahead a halo, a radiance, white, gleams in the evening light,
white clapboard barn floats in the meadow on its face the arc
of the crescent moon: a horseshoe: arms open: it welcomes them.
*muñeca que quita las penas, Lupita: doll that takes sorrows away
Valy Steverlynck
Valy Steverlynck, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is an Argentine-American artist, emerging poet, mother and oyster farmer based in Maine. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Gordon Square Review, Literary Mama, Main Street Rag and Cider Press Review, among others. Her art has been exhibited at venues including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, deCordova Museum, Fuller Museum of Art and Centro Recoleta, Argentina. Valy can be reached at va*************@***il.com.
October 2026 | fiction
Surprise, Surprise
Maria placed her caramel latte next to the corpse and cracked the window.
Light seeped into the basement generously, interrupted by people’s legs treading on the pavement. Morning freshness diluted the air of chemicals.
Maria rolled her shoulders and turned towards the corpse. It was small, deflated. Its cover hung low on the gurney’s sides. The right arm jutted up shriveled and dry, culminating in an outstretched index finger lecturing God herself somewhere up there.
Maria frowned. The frozen gesture looked almost familiar. She shrugged it off as a stroke convulsion. She would have to break the bones to fit the arm into the coffin.
“Okay, let’s make you handsome,” she said, slapping latex gloves on.
The corpse didn’t reply.
Maria pressed a sip of silky caramel against the roof of her mouth, and wheeled the instrument cart closer.
Pulling the cover, she recoiled.
Only once had she encountered a familiar face at work — Acho, a gypsy boy from her neighbourhood that had got mangled in a mechanised dump truck whilst rummaging.
Then, she’d curled up in the corner and wept. Now, warmth spread over her.
“Professor Ivanov, what a surprise!”
Maria let down her hair, browsed her phone’s playlist for “Sympathy for the Devil”, pressed play and swayed her hips in tune.
“Remember what you told me years ago when you wouldn’t let me pass chemistry, professor?”
Maria clasped the outstretched hand.
“You wagged that finger of yours,” said Maria. “This little piggy,” she began and snap-snap-snapped the brittle bones one by one, tucking the limb at the professor’s side.
“I begged, proved your marking wrong… but you wanted more than chemistry answers, didn’t you, professor?… Remember wagging that finger at me, saying… ‘over my dead body’?”
Maria jumped, leapfrogging over the corpse. She plopped onto the dead man’s stomach.
“It’s good you did, or I might have got another job and never seen you again. Because look where I am now, perv… over your dead body!”
She placed her fingers on the corpse’s eyelids, pulled them open by the lashes and leaned over the milky eyes. Jagger’s voice screeched through the loudspeaker. Maria swayed her hair and whoo-hooed over the corpse. Warm light and shadows of pedestrians’ legs danced on her triumphant face.
Stefan Sofiski
Stefan Sofiski is the pen name of a double miscast in the literary community: a left-brain structural engineer writing fiction, and a Bulgarian doing it in English. He holds a PhD in engineering and a Pushcart nomination in writing. He juggles these two worlds, often embarrassing himself in both. Stefan works in two intertwining registers: literary fiction (Unbroken Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Tint Journal) and thriller/noir (Shotgun Honey, Close to the Bone, Thriller Magazine).
October 2026 | poetry
[Everything is close]
After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 20)
Everything is close
today, the watery glow
from the daffodils
blooming on the balcony,
the wind inflating the green
sail of the curtain,
the neighbor’s dog
yapping again at a passer-by.
I knew something was wrong
when his bark turned
from annoying to cute.
I’m thawing.
I feel it in my bones.
I’m too close to the rain
that’s been falling for days,
turning flesh to water.
I’m liquid, a jellyfish,
eerily transparent.
Let the city pour through me,
I want nothing of myself.
Whoever I was,
that woman held a box
in her hands and in it, her heart.
Unused for so long,
it slowly turned to stone.
Romana Iorga
Originally from Chișinău, Moldova, Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024), a woman made entirely of air (dancing girl press, 2025), Auz simplu (Semne Press, 2000), and Poemul sosirii (Glasul Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in The Nation, Lake Effect, New England Review, Salamander, RHINO, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Iorga’s new poetry collection, Witness Protection, won the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027.
