October 2026 | poetry
The ceremonies of winter
Like hunching.
Like watching
the spellcast rhythm
the narcotic swing
of the almost
empty feeder.
Like black tea
with honey.
Like February opening
the homemade sauce
frozen at first frost hint
and tasting September.
Like turning on the light.
Like waiting to turn it on:
a dusk approaching
but the snow takes on
the blue grey glowing
of the still bright sky.
Like testing my step
onto sidewalk ice
the barely grip
the splitting slide.
Like skitching across snowslush.
Like reading in the morning
the tracks in the backyard
to see if the stray dog
Julie’s named Mr. Rabies
came through on his wanderings:
this pandemic distraction.
Like loving the drip and the stain
of the just warm enough
pale as bleaching.
Like trying to find a way to name
the strange birdcalls
twisting like spiral fractures
through closed windows.
Like moments of drifted despair.
Like mica glints of barely hopefulness.
John Walser
John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Plume, Posit, Nimrod, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review and One Art. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and a three-time Pushcart nominee, as well as a Best New Poets nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a past recipient of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. He is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.
October 2026 | poetry
Suddenly We
Disability, a tense steel umbilical cord plucking
its steady one note of need, coupling us outside
the palace of your uterus, in emergency rooms
where my wheelchair bullies clocks to rewind
until I am suddenly we, blind labor linking us;
me at thirty, you at seventy to portable bedside
commodes, to prescription regimes, our eyes
a synapse apart search the day for my seizing
limp right arm lost in a coat sleeve. I live wired
to a baby monitor between our beds, strumming
the singular note my helpless hand can no longer
play. I am still shrinking inside my stroke, caged
within our common carefree before, impossible
afternoons under Haifa almond blossoms, us two
divided even as we embraced, a buoyancy in swimming
pools, a cadenza of two notes in flea markets, in SoHo
alley cafes, elbows skipping past Degas at the Met or up
Rue Saint-Honoré. Two solitaires strung tight, then loose.
My legs heading to Cambridge while you imaged breast
cancer a few cities away. How unprepared we are, three
years or decades into the foreign zip code of umbilical
disability, our stomachs slammed against another shade
of night, your forehead creased with my pain, your blues
bloodshot with my hemorrhage, my body a missing half
of who I am meant to be, cleaved to a black childhood, to us
a mess of memory, penned in parentheses, our cut contiguous
tissue reissued. We pray and fall prey to poetry, our shared
lonely note hours pick along our dark, sacred umbilical cord.
Grace Lynn
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art, and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels, and investigating absurd angles of art history.
October 2026 | poetry
The Auction
The house is not a home.
It takes takes takes.
It shakes the presumptuous hag stuck there
glued in place by poor decisions.
Strangles with antique trunks of keepsakes
she can’t keep for her sake,
the unused KitchenAid,
and the damn forsythia shrubs
that spitefully grow grow grow
when she needs this to stop.
The smiling dead framed on the walls
stare while she charges the trimmer.
They alone can see she’s too stoned to do it.
Moving out brings unclaimed heirlooms and ptsd.
Tripping past unshredded tax returns, warranties
to find Grandma’s unmatched Wedgewood.
To-do lists like little suicide notes.
Leaving demands
coughing out dust from a butter churn waiting for auction.
Tasting upholstery shampoo from the dining room chairs
that will sell for pennies.
It weathers her lungs.
The air has the poison of the family’s past.
She breathes down into her belly
to pack what tiny bits of life she can carry out,
to discard ghosts
the fantasy of an unencumbered self,
a new way to quiver.
I Subscribe to a Newsletter About Chronic Wasting Disease
and I don’t know why.
I recall the herd of elk
that wandered near Banff.
Three or four families together
slow purpose, watchful
side-eye to gormless tourists
who aim phones at wapiti targets.
The rangers arrive in pairs first
warn the crowd that filters
from the sulphur museum
where glory-day photos of bathers
hung in a hall cave of stench.
How did the rangers know?
Maybe the elk
texted their intention
or they trot this way often
to gawk at weird, unusual humans
like we flip through Vogue,
or people watch at the mall.
Maybe they demonstrate majesty
for lesser creatures
because I saw kings and queens
family
community
lives with purpose
on an ancient alpine trail
and I was jealous,
so jealous.
Virginia Doré
Virginia Doré lives on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg peoples in Ontario, Canada. Her first chapbook, An Adult Child’s Garden of Toads, was shortlisted by Waxing & Waning for the 2026 Apogee award. Her poetry has appeared in Arkana, Hare Paw’s Literary Journal and RoughDiamond’s anthology, Reflections of the Mind: Mental Health Poetry. When she is not writing poetry, she argues with herself and enjoys walks with her dogs.
October 2026 | poetry
Quarters
at the elementary school for 25 cents a week
in 1959 they’d bring you a carton of milk every day at 2pm.
a mid-afternoon pick me up for twenty 2nd graders who sat dutifully at their
wooden desks between math and geography, taking the slow steps
to growing up. for a quarter a week every
afternoon gary, who died of aids fourteen years later wheeled a cart between five rows
and delivered the milk while scott, who became a carpenter because he
understood angles and how to measure things; marked off the
names in pencil with a crooked check mark and minded the names with
an X beside them who didn’t get milk because they hadn’t paid a quarter.
I kept my head down, pretending not to care. I cared, of course I cared.
but I had never paid, I never had a quarter. I was seven years old,
too young to have a quarter of my own.
And I didn’t want to ask. I knew no way to bring it up
to my father who sat worn thin as explanations every evening
smelling of black dirt and sweat.
with the eyes of a poor men, scooping frijoles from
cracked plates. there was never a sliver of opportunity for questions.
no room between bites for asking. I didn’t want to see
his face and how the sun would sink a little lower behind him
when he dug into his pockets and found them empty.
Gilbert Arzola
Winner of the 2019 Passager Poetry Contest and the 2021 Rattle Poetry Chapbook Contest, Gilbert Arzola has been nominated twice for Pushcart Awards. His book of poetry Prayers of Little Consequence was published in 2019 by Passager, and a chapbook, The Death of a Migrant Worker, was published in 2021 by Rattle. His work has appeared in Crosslimb, The Elysian Review, The Notre Dame Review, Palabra, The Tipton Review, Craft, Acentos Review, Two Cardinals, Flying Island, and Rattle, among others.
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.
