October 2026 | poetry
Mother
A sac to dump monsters, ghosts and dark devils. Your daughter
calls you to empty her fears. Slippery grime that lines
her young organs, you sag under the weight of her dread.
To think you were womb that held her lightness– she lentil
at 6 weeks, melon at 40– you, sunshine filled, buoyant balloon,
she, floating lemon, grapefruit, suspended, coconut bounce
in an ocean of glow. “I feel like a landfill,” you say, your arms flagging,
“I feel like I fill her emptiness” –muñeca que quita las penas,
Lupita– you sigh, arms downed– where are the good spirits?
Ahead a halo, a radiance, white, gleams in the evening light,
white clapboard barn floats in the meadow on its face the arc
of the crescent moon: a horseshoe: arms open: it welcomes them.
*muñeca que quita las penas, Lupita: doll that takes sorrows away
Valy Steverlynck
Valy Steverlynck, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is an Argentine-American artist, emerging poet, mother and oyster farmer based in Maine. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Gordon Square Review, Literary Mama, Main Street Rag and Cider Press Review, among others. Her art has been exhibited at venues including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, deCordova Museum, Fuller Museum of Art and Centro Recoleta, Argentina. Valy can be reached at va*************@***il.com.
October 2026 | poetry
[Everything is close]
After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 20)
Everything is close
today, the watery glow
from the daffodils
blooming on the balcony,
the wind inflating the green
sail of the curtain,
the neighbor’s dog
yapping again at a passer-by.
I knew something was wrong
when his bark turned
from annoying to cute.
I’m thawing.
I feel it in my bones.
I’m too close to the rain
that’s been falling for days,
turning flesh to water.
I’m liquid, a jellyfish,
eerily transparent.
Let the city pour through me,
I want nothing of myself.
Whoever I was,
that woman held a box
in her hands and in it, her heart.
Unused for so long,
it slowly turned to stone.
Romana Iorga
Originally from Chișinău, Moldova, Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024), a woman made entirely of air (dancing girl press, 2025), Auz simplu (Semne Press, 2000), and Poemul sosirii (Glasul Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in The Nation, Lake Effect, New England Review, Salamander, RHINO, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Iorga’s new poetry collection, Witness Protection, won the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027.
October 2026 | poetry
Terminus Rotgut
I have the recording scratched bloody as a red record groove into my body, the totality of my body, a needle sending resonant, flowing memory through every vein, cut in rows, scratched, recorded and played, scratched recorded and played, the blood running in and through, drawn back by the writhing mass at my center, the organless weight of consumption, antithetical to being, antithetical to anything but driving the needle, driving the etching and scratching and playing, tasting whiskey and blood and piss and vomit in a kiddie pool of off-color sick-like salmon drool, driven by that corporealizing phantasm of my muffled grunts and his labored breathing, his piston machine desire flowing not through but into, driving like a nail laying track for an express destined to run indefinite, always in, deeper into the dynamite blown cavity of my cervix, over the precipice, into the train graveyard, the organless weighted writhing mass, crashing, compounding, a pear of agony wrought from tortured shrapnel…
Sylvie Oleta
Sylvie Oleta is a poet and fiddler residing in Charlottesville, Virginia. She once fell off a cliff while hunting for the wreckage of a B-25 Mitchell and is now forever grateful for conveniently placed trees.
October 2026 | poetry
I am not the housewife of perfection
Saturated with gin and academic takes on subjectivity
I sit surrounded by summer sunflowers and the cosmos
I sowed beside the patio and wonder how to continue
in a body, in a world, that does not think it needs
this body, even as the planet turns, taking along
me, my dog, our companionable silence in waning sunlight.
I should sweep the patio, exile the effluvia of trees
and plants that fell here, tidy up the crumbs
beside the woodpile. I am not the housekeeper
of the backyard. I am not the housewife of perfection.
I reject the broom, the whisk, the great dustpan of time.
Shriveled flowers of linden, yellow leaves of elm,
curls of outer bark, here you may linger. Rest
beside the cricket, ready to serenade the diminishing
sun and warmth, the ants following the highway of sand
between the pavers, and the shucked body that was bee.
Cricket, genius of late summer, dutifully stridulating your wings,
this tune insists on the lowering of stage lights,
the show ending earlier each day, and a pause,
as if for applause, to gauge the audience’s investment.
The dog sits at attention, but his ears are tuned
to other sounds, his eyes on the street, watching children run home.
Merie Kirby
Merie Kirby teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems, and has been published in several journals, including Whale Road Review, SWWIM, West Trestle Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, with work forthcoming in The Prose Poem and Scientific American. You can find her online at www.meriekirby.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.
