January 2026 | poetry
Objects From The Pyramid Collection: A Catalog of Personal Growth And Exploration
Mystic body dust
things that come to us
Oils of ecstasy
fuel for allergies
Karma Sutra candles
life that’s hard to handle
Pleasure enhancers
nude dancers
The secret garden trilogy
one and one and one make three
Love Celtic-style
wet wanton wild
Crone stone
the negative endless drone
Royal nightwear
dreams that blare
The temple horn
purveyors of porn
Ruby in the rough
you’re so damn tough
Spirit of the faeries
legs that are hairy
The mysteries of Isis
another friggen crisis
Guardian of Hopes and Dreams
you make me want to scream
The Woman Who Wanted It All
had a fall and stalled on crawl
Billie Jean Stratton
Billie Jean Stratton is a 74-year-old New York farm girl who never liked the barn and spent much of her youth sidestepping hired hands by playing the flute in an acoustically superior bathroom. She met Joseph Brodsky when he first came to America. Billie’s been published in 2002’s Comstock Review, 2005’s Sulfur River, and 2014’s Lost Orchard – Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community. Billie’s poem “Brodsky” was published by Ibbetson St. Press and was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize.
January 2026 | poetry
The Desire to Sink
It was, for the first twenty-four an anvil. No, a dozen anvils pressing me into the hotel bed. I was glad for them, hoping they might press me into nothingness, where I thought you might be. In my dream I decorated them with flowers and snot. When I woke up, they began to float up and away. I wanted to scream don’t leave me, but a sock had been stuffed into my mouth while I slept. I got out of the bed. I discovered one sad anvil attached to my ankle with a rattling death chain. I had to stay in my pajamas because I couldn’t get my pants off. I got on the elevator, went down to the breakfast buffet. I worried the clanking of the chain would disturb the hotel guests. I worried no one but me could hear the clanking. I ate bacon straight from the steam table vat. The grits made me too sad. I worried that I might begin to wail and the men in their zip up fleece PGA Master’s tournament vests would call security. I was vibrated back to a sort of reality when the hospital called to say your body was on the move across Charleston. The next hour I entered the memory maze, where I will be lost for years, counting the seconds between your last breaths. Walking in circles around the hotel pool- eighty-six thousand four hundred one, eight-six thousand four hundred two. The anvil and chain made a slow dragging rhythm. When I looked up, I saw you brother, looking down from the roof top bar, lingering angel drinking a vodka on the rocks. Your new ghost liver works just fine. You shouted CAREFUL! Watching me teeter around the edge, knowing well the dangers of the deep end and the desire to sink.
Cindy Wheeler
Cindy Wheeler spent 25 years working as a songwriter and touring rock musician, founding the critically acclaimed bands Pee Shy and The Caulfield Sisters, and releasing three studio albums, multiple EPs, and singles with Mercury Records and American Laundromat Recordings. A recording of her poem “Things You Do on Your Knees” appeared on the album “LIP-The CD With a Big Mouth” alongside poets Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, and Exene Cervenka. And a recording of her poem “Knee Jerk” appeared on spoken word compilation- “What’s the Word” -alongside the work of musician/songwriters Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys) and Alan Vega (Suicide). Most recently, her haiku “Covid-Ku” appeared in the “The Best Haiku of 2022 International Anthology” (Haiku Crush). New poems will appear in SoFloPoJo (South Florida Poetry Journal) later this year. For the last 8 years, she has studied at The Writers Studio in New York, working with the founder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz, and was part of his Master Class for 3 terms. She is currently working on a manuscript. She is co-owner of the beloved New York City vintage clothing institution Beacon’s Closet and considers herself a modern-day ragpicker. She lives happily in Brooklyn, New York, with what some might say are far too many cats.
October 2025 | poetry
The Women Who Carry
I.
A woman carries her uterus in a plastic grocery bag
floating in formaldehyde, stoppered in a bell jar:
inside her, the void sewn tight to stop her organs
from migrating, where the blue whales churning
in that black hole of hunger have ceased singing
and the holy land infants wade, voiceless nouns
into an empty red sea: she carries.
II.
And when the meteor, thirty-three years in transit
tore clean from course, right ovary a projectile
of cyst upon cyst, of the stuff made of star dust,
the doctor said what do you modern women expect
this biblical reckoning as she carries two truths
as one gnawing guilt- in her morning coffee cones
packed with grass: she carries.
III.
She carries an algal bloom eating the faces clean
to the jawbone, ripping the fish gills to streamers-
each follicle, bleached coral retreating from the waves:
beyond a certain depth is stillness. Imagine an event
horizon in warming red waters- a void surface
where choices cease. Still, she carries cetacean choirs
and iron from the stars, birthing toxic pigment
into a wild toothed sea.
Myfanwy Williams
Myfanwy Williams (she/her) is a Sydney-based queer poet and writer of Filipino Welsh heritage. Her writing explores themes of identity, ecology, and intersectional justice. Her poetry and writing have been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, About Place Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Panorama Journal of Travel and Place, Alocasia, AAWP Meniscus Literary Journal, Clarion Poetry, The Winged Moon Literary Journal, The Madrigal Literary Journal, The Crank, Crow & Crosskeys, Querencia Press, and others. She was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize and holds degrees in literature, psychology and social science.
October 2025 | poetry
Aubade for Aurora
Before that late hour of blue cheese
and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine,
she asks me questions I cannot answer simply:
forget night’s history, the weight of excuse?
I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold.
Will salutations tangle into word games
and betray the desire to love a while longer?
Her naked confidence is as unabashed as arrogance forgiven.
Her gown sweeps the spiders’ dew:
lint of wherewithal, might-have-been, the else to do.
At the window, she does not have to guess
the dreams of this world, its humble corners.
She walks through orchards: they buzz to bloom,
shadows jump stone walls in glee, the moon sinks to pale regret.
She walks trails with no stumbles or switchbacks,
coaxes crows across a frontiered sky.
Early coffee to wake, scones in their sacrifice;
I plead with her stay, stay, but she does not look back
at the bed we shared: I hear only whispers
of hinge pins swinging their partners away.
Frederick Wilbur
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise. His work appears in many periodicals, including The Atlanta Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).
October 2025 | poetry
Shadow of a Doubt
Light falling against a solid, upright object
casts a shadow, the sun setting behind mountains
putting the valley fully in shade, no doubt.
In the morning, standing against the railing
on the balcony of your forest home, the valley
again fully in shade, but drawing slowly toward
you as the sun rises higher and higher. Some days,
though, you’re uncertain about rising and pull
the blankets tighter over you despite the songbirds
beckoning, the breeze stirring the pines, the scent
of fresh brew from the kitchen, too many worries
casting a shadow over you even before the day
has begun. But can’t that happen only if you let
the doubts have substance? And when you shine
a light on them, as inevitably you will, won’t they
simply disappear, cloud-filled sky or not?
Jim Tilley
Jim Tilley has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024. His forthcoming collection, When Godot Arrived, will be published in the fall of 2026.
October 2025 | poetry
Snail Funeral
Between tulip and ryegrass
there is a freshly dug grave
I might be five, or four
black soil beneath my fingernails
loss in the hollows of my footprints
Its viscous body is buried in a bottle cap coffin
offered to the earth under flower beds
opalescent snail shells fragmented between toes
and left to heal beneath swollen mounds
Two weeks later
after my eyes have dried
and my feet have been rinsed clean
I pry it open again in commiserate sunlight
just to see if heaven is real
Because I am five
and God is far
but I hope
not so far for a snail
Hannah Voteur
Hannah (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor currently working in publishing in NYC as an operations associate. She has loved fiction and stories for as long as she can remember, particularly gothic and evocative literary pieces. She earned her Master’s in Linguistics from Boston University in 2022 and her Master’s in English Language and Literature from the University of Sheffield in 2023. When she doesn’t have her nose in a book, she is most likely baking lemon bars, daydreaming about moving into a cat-friendly apartment, or seeking out new hole-in-the-wall bookstores in her neighborhood.
