Jack Bordnick Studio

April 2026 | poetry

Our Shadow’s Know

Jack Bordnick Studio

Bordnick’s interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy. As a photographer and sculptor, he has been able to share his professional experiences in ways that benefit both business and community projects. With over twenty years of experience, he has successfully designed, fabricated, and installed various projects. He is an industrial design/sculpture graduate of Pratt Institute in New York, where he has had his own professional design business and has been a design director for numerous companies and local government projects. They included a major children’s museum for the city of New York and the Board of Education.

Kenneth Boyd

April 2026 | poetry

Hot Rhythm

Archibald Motley (United States, 1961)

The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

If this dream could dance, I’d feel it in my veins

Circulating in rhythms of dazzling dances

The fusion of primitive roots found in my nature

Echoes hanging in the hills like conjured arrangements

For a modulating hang-time of reckless rhapsodies

Sent a timbre of waves resonating through me

By the thunder of my heart you could find me

Not where I was brought up or the legacy in my veins

Forces of fire and wind found in rhapsodies

The dialect of my horn was heard in dances

Interpreting the lingo repeated in blazing arrangements

Cast with copper and zinc from nature

Always faster, like a sonic boom, to awaken nature

Stunning and spellbound reflection of forces in me

Elevated restoration of bright sounding arrangements

Pulling along titanic ensembles with boiling veins

“Without etiquette,” said the erudite critics of dances

Radiogenic to silvery tolerance for bullish rhapsodies

Muscle memory residue echoing in sultry rhapsodies

Repealing the imposition of new rhythms of nature

Elements of an off-beat life-force persisting in dances

The approach of a shouting force majeure in me

My war-like call as fast as cocaine in my startled veins

Jolting from an annular soul of tarnished arrangements

Melodies for any who would burnish the arrangements

Torrential intuition of endless musical rhapsodies

Coming down from hills of migrated musical veins

Translation of swelling emotions beyond a listeners’ nature

A reverie of impressionistic showgirls crushing me

Without the ability to hide in the shindig of dances

My sound and soul settling in sweet and somber dances

Brandishing luminously time-insensitive arrangements

Or a discreet show of red was a commandment

For bravery, ego, and artistry in rhapsodies

Unapologetically trenchant in a temperamental nature

A blue beret to hide the apocalypse in my veins

Knowing me was to know the riot in my veins

Swelling in arrangements of a lyrical nature

My refuge preserved in thundering rhapsodies

Art Source: https://nasher.duke.edu/stories/archibald-motley-hot-rhythm-1961/

Kenneth Boyd

Kenneth Boyd is a neurodivergent poet and former jazz musician. As an emerging writer, his poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Of Poets & Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine, eMerge Magazine, Flora Fiction, Unlost Journal, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2024 Royal Palm Literary Award, Empyrean Poetry Competition, and the Penumbra Poetry Contest. His debut poetry collection, Grasshopper Dreams, was published in 2023. Kenneth is a graduate of the UCLAx Creative Writing Program and an Assistant Poetry Editor at Southland Alibi magazine. He embraces life in the South with his wife and dog Stella. He enjoys fine jazz, fine cigars, and fine pork pie hats. More about him can be found at www.bardopoetry.com and @BardoPoetry on social media.

Dawson Steeber

April 2026 | poetry

Are You Coming Back

Last night I tossed and turned, the night

torn mad with slamming doors and clanging radiators.

I threw pillows and covers all over

the room, woke in a terrible cold sweat.

I walked to the kitchen gingerly, feeling

the swollen, sore pad of my foot where I

picked up that barbed sliver of floorboard

like a prison shank. How sweet,

thinking about that splinter

and the way you came to me then, bent

to your knees, and pulled it out.

The kitchen was dark, the sink full of dirty plates.

I opened the refrigerator door,

the light illuminating everything. I pulled

the half drunken quart bottle from the door,

unscrewed the cap, and inhaled

the miasma

of tired, flat beer.

It smells so much better

on your breath, tastes better

on your mouth. I twisted

the cap back on, set the bottle in the door

and let it fall shut. Everything was dark

again. I lumbered to the sunroom and sat

in the red leather chair where you fold yourself

behind half-smoked cigarettes.

The leather was cold as was the streetlight

shining across the floor where windblown

ashes scuppered into dark corners

like paper thin insects. I sat

the rest of the night on the mattress

in the living room, washed in the glow of the TV,

a pair of pliers in one hand,

needle nose in the other, fixing

the bracelet that broke in the dining room

that night I tried to link it round your wrist.

It’s fixed now. Are you

coming back for it?

Dawson Steeber

Dawson Steeber is a union carpenter working, reading, and writing in Akron, Ohio. His poems and fiction can be found in Thank You For Swallowing, Pink Disco, Halfway Down the Stairs, CC&D, and elsewhere.

Steve Deutsch

January 2026 | poetry

After,

we took

the long way

home.

As if such

a simple act

might flummox fate.

We are

a good people.

We bury our dead

and help

the maimed

to cross the road.

Yet the image

persists.

One careless step

along

the poorly

cobbled avenue,

and Atropos

snips

the thread.

Steve Deutsch

Steve Deutsch is the poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Prize multiple times. He has six volumes of Poetry. One, Brooklyn, won the Sinclair Poetry Prize.

Grace Lynn

January 2026 | poetry

My Muse is Growing Up

My muse wears prescription glasses,

so she’ll never see

beyond the village

with its walled-in acres

of poolside loungers.

Plus, she quit her diet,

so her diaphragm gags her

esophagus and larynx.

I’ll find another voice

preparing to leave somewhere.

Starlings nest in her wool mouth,
under her tongue knots of familiar

as the juniper bush

bends her fingers to catch the night.

I call this girl my neighborhood.

Fingers like ten puny,

black summers waiting in the sky.

She skips into the juniper bush,

to where a rainbow saddles the alps.

She walks further into the horizon,

fall in the air and rain on its way

and who knows, like her,

the different smells of the grownups’ homes

preparing to bake butterscotch cookies

or braid the sabbath dough.

I call this girl my neighborhood.

Her walkie talkie is morosely

static in the tropical twilight.

She releases me from social media.

She holds onto the darkness,

believes like wildfire

in frizzy-hair-like echoes.

If she wades deeper, silences of darkness become
windows into waves,

and she and only she can see

the reclusive moon of doom imprinted

with ragtag teeth coughed up by the dog.

I’ll have to get her training bras and tampons.

I’ll still call this girl my neighborhood.

Warn her to put her guard up,
so she can make it to

the suburb stars of love

before we bury our body of time.

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.

Dotty LeMieux

January 2026 | poetry

When the Neighbors Sell their Knock-Down in Just Four Years for Twice What They Paid for it

They spiff it up,

repair old siding,

cut into the crumbling hillside

to squeeze in a bonus room.

Throw on a coat of paint, shiny

like a chrome-plated lie.

Bucolic gem among the pines—

reads the realtor’s sales pitch.

So much potential. The realtor gaunt

in high heels, a plucked chicken

in a power suit. Signs go up.

Buyers come & bid & fight

each other over the price,

wrestling like amateur grapplers

in the mud of a dive bar. Short

escrow & the sellers decamp

to North Carolina to try

its Southern charm, this

also a lie. Now our eyes

shine with possibility. We too

could gentrify, cash out

on our constant fixer, our old house

groomed for the highest bidder

eager for a quick flip

as young techies move

their crypto AI brains into the void

and demo what we worked

so hard to preserve. And then

we move where old people

who never planned ahead go—

elder mobile home community

in a nearby town or a college town

up north where it rains & students

study science & the classics,

and we can still pretend our lives

contain a wealth of options.

Dotty LeMieux

Dotty has published five poetry chapbooks, including “Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune” from Finishing Line Press in 2021 and “Viruses, Guns and War” from Main Street Rag Press in 2023. She formerly edited the literary and art journal, The Turkey Buzzard Review. Her work has appeared in publications such as Rise Up Review, Loch Raven Review, Painted Bride, MacQueen’s Quarterly, Gyroscope, and Wild Roof. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two active dogs, where she practices environmental law and manages progressive political campaigns.