October 2026 | nonfiction
Wonder Forgives
The nice thing about not knowing what you planted is that you never know what you’re going to get. In the moment I order bulbs or seeds (I’ve given up on vegetables), I am certain I will remember where they go. But every year I plant pollinator flowers, as well as any other perennials the deer won’t eat; I am surprised when they bloom. I don’t remember planting bee balm— look at the gorgeous reds! Or I planted something long ago and gave up on it growing. This year, the lupines I put in the ground years ago came bursting up all over the yard with their purple spikes and long parasol leaves. Surprise! Living, rather than just surviving, is rooted in the capacity for wonder.
But the surprise that comes with death leaves wonder behind. Death always shocks us. Our brains are wired for denial. My late husband never said anything about dying, even through four separate cancers and countless treatments. He would be one of the slim percentages that live after going into hospice. I was devastated when I woke up one morning to find him gone from his body. Why the surprise? Perhaps our logical brains get beaten down by our emotions. It was years before I saw beauty again without feeling guilty that he wasn’t there to share it.
They say that planting a garden is a belief in beauty, in hope. I didn’t think so when I was a newly grieving widow. I saw gardening as a way to dig out my frustration. Few things are as satisfying as pulling a weed out by the roots. I saw it as a way to mow down my feelings, or clip out the anger. In the thirteen years since his death, I have found that wonder is also a part of grief.
The hummingbirds chitter each other away from the feeders and the butterflies open their wings to the sun. I believe in nature’s magnificence. I feel wonder coming back to me. She forgives my denial. She allows me awe.
Lisa Christina St John
Lisa St. John is a writer living in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York. She is the author of two poetry books, Ponderings (Finishing Line Press) and Swallowing Stones (Kelsay Books). She won first place in Anthology’s 2024 Poetry Award for “Through the Membrane” and is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for “War is a Human Child.” Her poetry has appeared in The Poet’s Billow, Light, Entropy, New Verse News, SWWIM, and The Ekphrastic Review, and “Mowing the Lawn” was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize. Her travel writing appears on GoNomad.com, and her essays in Grief Digest Magazine and Sleet Magazine. She is currently working on a memoir when the poems allow it. Lisa believes that art is hope and that there is beauty in possibility. Find more on her website, lisachristinastjohn.com.
October 2026 | fiction
A Woman Walking Not Alone
dreams of marmalade cake and silk throw pillows to lean upon, to rest her swollen ankles when she comes home from stocking Aisle Two of the local WaWa, a bus, two blocks walking, and a second bus away. A woman walking not alone hears in the beat against her ribs a Vivaldi, a Dr. Dre, Taiko drummer when she sits on the toilet to relieve her always-full bladder, day-dreaming of future ifs. A woman walking not alone must be cautious who she is walking not alone with, must use X-ray vision to peer into the dark alley she passes to get to her front stoop, must meet the eye of every not-aloneness she passes to let them know that she is not the one they want. A woman walking not alone is always thinking of what may be and why nots, even as the bearing pains seize her and split her in two. Even after her not-aloneness becomes a two-ness of lone souls.
Elizabeth Rosen
Elizabeth Rosen is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses Gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, O. Henry, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Colorwise, she is an Autumn. Rosen still wants her MTV and has the T-shirts to prove it. You can order her flash chapbook, Survival Skills, through her website www.thewritelifeliz.com.
October 2026 | fiction
The Collector
I like walking. I can think about things that need thinking about. I found a workaround, by the way, I got tired of death taking everyone I loved, so I started collecting.
There’s nothing death can do about it except take me away, too, and even then, I think I’d have the upper hand. I’m going to figure out a way to remember forever.
I started by pretending. I could take the memory of any person in my family, or my dog, or the actress who didn’t deserve it so hard, or my friend from when I was a kid, and I could picture them, dream them, and remember them.
The more real they became, the more of them I kept in my mind’s eye and in my heart, the better I heard their voice or their laughter, or their bark or their triumphant holler, the better my plan worked.
I couldn’t tell anyone, though. If I did, the magic would die, and so would everything I’ve collected. The only way magic works is by keeping it secret. You start blabbing about it, everybody thinks they can do it, and then there’s nothing special about anything, anymore.
You have to hide your collection, too, keep the pieces in pictures on the walls and in trinkets loved, in the desire to know them and feel them again, just once more. The bigger you can feel them and the more places you can hide them, the safer they will be.
Should I put them all back where I found them? Let myself forget? It would be so much easier to let go, fall, give into hopelessness, but to me, that’s as horrible as death taking them in the first place.
My way, you can remember them forever because if you can’t do that, what is worth doing? Love is why we’re here and death is why we go and sometimes I welcome the thought of dying. Those days are when it is hardest—to remember I’ve collected anything—when nothing’s real and all I know is I don’t want to feel so devastated anymore.
I keep pretending, reminded of the things in this world I’d rather never remember, all those memories are phantoms in shadows—good memories getting harder to keep in focus the further I get from the day I was born.
I’ll keep walking, though, nothing else to do. I’ll keep collecting, too, there’s no one to stop me. I will stuff my pockets with phantoms and pain, burn with desire to see them again—hold them and tell them I’m sorry I took them for granted, I didn’t know any better.
I need those memories. If I collect enough of them no one ever has to die all the way.
So, come here, look at my collection. This is it, everything I remember, everyone and everything I’ve ever loved; they were everything to me. I’d tell you more, but that part’s secret.
Josh Price
Josh Price lives in Northern California with his patient wife and terrible dog. His debut chapbook, Trailer Park Ocean, was published with ThirtyWest in 2025 and features “Philemon,” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Los Angeles Review, SoFloPoJo, and others have published his flash. Scribble Magazine and others have published his short fiction. Find him on Instagram and Threads @s.joshuaprice and at josh-price.com.
October 2026 | poetry
While You Are in the ICU I Cannot Write
I cannot dredge up words,
blue suitcase stuffed with dirty clothes,
hotels and more hotels, 3 cities in 3 weeks,
every morning up early and off to the ICU,
where sometimes you eat a bit of what I bring.
A night of tears, I cannot stand the tube
that chokes your throat. You don’t remember
this; I remember everything. My rage when
they fail to read your chart and hurt you,
your confusion when you could not use your phone.
Long nights, the noise of the ICU, Baltimore’s
drug addicts waiting in the dark, predatory.
Early morning, they sleep on the streets as I walk
to the hospital, what is wrong with this city?
Your smile when I arrive each day.
So tired, my eyes won’t converge,
I’m awake, then not, the car in the ditch,
one tire blown, ripped undercarriage,
an apt metaphor for our lives now,
I could have killed someone. Or myself.
This is about me, not about me, it should be
about you, but also about us, our synapses,
our coming together and falling apart. You write
“a man unfinished,” in the margin of a notebook,
you can’t remember where I am.
Three weeks, a tube drains out your skull,
what day is it, they ask, what month, who is the president,
wake up, they say, do you remember where you are?
You say, “a hospital?” You say, “Baltimore?”
And then to me, you whisper low, “Surreal.”
Kathryn Temple
Kathryn Temple teaches at Georgetown University and lives on the Chesapeake in a small town south of Annapolis. The author of two academic books and a number of academic essays, she has published in The Inflectionist Review (nominated for “Best of the Net”), Poetry Superhighway, and Petigru Review, among others. When she’s not working, she tries to keep the ducks off the dock. You can find her at medium.com/@templek and kathryntemple.academia.edu.
October 2026 | poetry
The Hastening
Gleeful spiral of spring growth,
flattened stalks under summer’s blasts,
dazzle of yellow as Gingkoes toast autumn,
closeness of wide cold winter sky,
each so short, time on fast track.
I can’t keep up, can’t turn the pages
of the calendars and datebooks fast enough!
New sprouts hasten to wither,
seasons tumble against each other, rush,
trample over nature, tumultuous as man-kind.
Destruction seems our destiny.
Speed takes our breath, does not return it.
I am at odds with the world,
whirl-winded toward my mortal end.
New years begin every day, new lives,
hours devour months at a bite,
I am dizzy, the merry-go-round no longer fun,
going round and up and down and forward,
always fast-forward.
Nature itself hurries toward a day,
the day already written in sand, in sky,
when I will leave this heaven and finally face
the unknown. Oh, dear trees and birds, be not so hurried,
pause and let me be with you one more day,
just one more day.
Cleo Griffith
Cleo Griffith lives in California’s Central Valley. Widely published in such journals as Main Street Rag, Straylight and Westward Quarterly, she has been on the editorial board of Song of the San Joaquin since it began in 2003. Her first book, The Yellow Dress, was published in September 2025.
