October 2026 | poetry
What Are These Things?
Do you feel the letters
in your mouth like bones
of a fish, the spine of sense
caught on the hook of your mind
that prods and pokes: a palpable
delicacy, hard-palatable, yet
slippery through the teeth?
Loquacious L, lascivious and limning
luscious viscera of what I mean.
Tell you what: Meet me at the Lehigh River
bank and we’ll collect Anthracite coal
lumps, ancient knuckles that punch
our metatarsals, polished shiny, washed ashore
like they were dumped out of a landfill.
We’ll bike the dappled D&L trail
from the Mansion House Bridge to 1975
and back through the Mirror in the Sky
that the river covets beneath a rust-red rapture
of steel. When the train bell clangs, I will wrap
my tongue around your silence
and suck it down my throat
to digest. The insects stir; their choirs
grow louder. I will align my thin fingers
with the ribs flanking your kidneys,
hold you close, and listen to the vapors
of your breath steam-clean the tiny hair cells
in my ear. The Anthracite rocks
will take cold residence on the mantel
of my decorative fireplace where dried candlewax
opens its neglected palms to cradle them.
Their names are lost. They masquerade
as fool’s gold when the sun
lowers its gaze.
Stacy Rollins
Stacy Rollins is a writer, visual artist, singer, Tarot reader, and health and fitness enthusiast who currently lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from FSU and has authored two books, Truer Faults and Learning to Read. Her poems have appeared in Atticus Review, Bicoastal Review, Everyday Genius, Diversion Press, Black Heart Magazine, Crack the Spine, Poetry Quarterly, New York Dreaming, Garbanzo, Nailed Magazine, Spine, Shantih, The Oleander Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Helen, Nude Bruce Review, and Armarolla.
October 2026 | poetry
Motherhood
Before she readies herself,
the woman smooths skin-colored
color on her new baby’s forehead,
nose, cheeks, jaw, chin, neck.
She blends and contours, then
the woman brushes rouge
on her new baby’s cheeks
until they appear to burn.
The woman dabs pink gloss
across her new baby’s lips
like they will never chap
or kiss or utter a foul word.
The woman traces her new
baby’s lips with rosepink pencil
until no cry could possibly
escape them.
Just as no words form on the woman’s
lips as she paints the color of frost
above her new baby’s eyes so that,
when they open, they will shine.
The woman outlines her new baby’s
eyes with sharpened charcoal,
adding a flourish at the corner
of each.
The woman spritzes hairspray
on her new baby’s wisps. Now,
now, whether they leave the house
or not, the woman is ready.
Megan Wildhood
Megan Wildhood is a cyclist, saxophonist, gym enthusiast, cat lover and writer whose work has appeared in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, 2023), as well as in Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.
October 2026 | poetry
Drawn Upward into a Vague Melody of Harsh Threads*
or strings smoothed by horsetail
over hours, roughened by grind of canine
teeth gnashing first
chin polished wood
or breath sent to wrench muscles, to
shake all adjacent air like the molecules
themselves were in hysterics
or outside the nearly vacant church
a single soda machine releases the wrong can
for a man who already hangs his head
or a curb hopping compact car
or a crow crouched over caulking
misfired at aluminum hem
pecking ambitionless
a mixture collective synesthetes release
once, create and abandon to dreams.
*From the William Carlos Williams poem “Trees”
Zebulon Huset
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He is an advocate of writing exercises and prompts and edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine.
October 2026 | poetry
The Haunting of Winter People
Patches of flattened brown grass
like those that would peek
through snow, a mid-March
yawning into spring.
Dust motes masquerading
as silver snow trickling
from above. Dendrites
settling without shivers .
The fossilized riverbed
begging for cold fingers
to play crystalline tarantellas
down desiccated spines.
Mud caked deer prints
the echo of white snow drifts
etched with broken hearts
that mend when melted.
A stripped maple smooth
as icicles sheared and raw
under the moon’s cool
and unblinking glare.
Exhalation from an open freezer
that whispers like a long deceased love:
How can this heat be anything
but apocalypse? The answer –
A painting of a cabin in a forest
carpeted in soft white
with footprints that lead toward or away,
a lost trail, invisible
under sun and summer sweat
that never ceases, while winter
becomes an artifact
in the amber of memory.
Permafrost
How did we get here?
Weighed down by the unsung
sorrys in our pockets, dragging
the hems of loved ones
like beggars, seeking
a redemption colder,
more remote than the tops
of distant mountains.
Even though permafrost
never melts, it still blooms
in summer, green blades
pearled with buds. And if
it does melt, if somehow
that ground, known
for its hardness, its inability
to change with seasons,
suddenly finds change rooted
ripening in the hard soul
of its body, carbon kept
cozy and restrained
between soiled arms, then
the silent bomb will spill
like our emptied pockets, eking
secrets into soft places, destruction
that comes like a warm pillow
across a wet mouth.
It’s the simple things that bring
us to our knees, that make us
ask how did we get here? And also
is there any way back?
Lesley Hart Gunn
Lesley Hart Gunn is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction Poetry Contest and has upcoming or previous publications in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Litmosphere, West Coast Review, Avalon Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Phantom Drift Journal, and others. She is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, but currently teaches college writing at Utah Valley University, where she lives with her partner, three children, and two cats.
October 2026 | poetry
An Awful Way
“Have you ever imagined what it might feel like
to pee in perpetuity on the outie bellybutton
of the first or worst person to shatter the mirror
of your heart?” would be an awful way to start
a poem, when one should really begin (why not,
you know?) with septillions of daisies in parallel
universes Big-Banged from daisies, into daisies,
all daisies, and only then turn into the love-hate of
animals with oxygen, each breath rusting us
beasts to dust. Since even the entertainment
poetry provides means you’re a bit bored with you
(as I am with me!), any tonight might become
sincerely solo, a loneliness capable of comedy
and killing. Oh, isn’t nearly every pleasure—
from apples to oranges to the comparison of any
metaphoric fruit—the most wonderfully forsaken
action on Earth and a best bet of bad bets to help
tolerate our treks to a never- or forever-ending
whatever, surely any hereafter an impossible
darkness with the strangest reflected lights?
Matt Zambito
Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities and two chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances. New poems are forthcoming in Swamp Pink, Tampa Review, Cottonwood, Slipstream, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has lived in Ohio, Idaho, Washington, and New York, where he now resides with his rescue dog, Sadie.
October 2026 | poetry
Janitrix
My college janitor always listened to me, so I confided in her. She was on her knees scrubbing floors but stopped to look straight at me. ‘Why haven’t you done it then? Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?’ I found myself sputtering. I said I wasn’t sure. I wanted to end it, to end myself. She shrugged and bent back to her work. ‘You won’t have wasted your life,’ she said. ‘You can always be a bad example.’
Ripe
Walking through the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, we found the child. Flies had nearly eaten his ear clean off, ripe for the picking. His mother did not want our help because we were white missionaries. She did not want us to bathe her child, nor did she trust the antibiotics we offered her free of charge. When we told her that without help the child would die, she spat, “Then I will just have another one.” I looked at her as she stood there—beautiful, proud and defiant. I looked at the child staring at her, too weak to blink.
Mark Hendrickson
Mark Hendrickson is a gay poet and former psychiatric nurse living in the Des Moines area. A 2024 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he has been published in McNeese Review, Vestal Review, Variant Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or visit www.markhendricksonpoetry.com.
