April 2025 | poetry
Books
There are too many.
They should be pulped.
They should be pulped to make useful things.
Cardboard coffins, for instance.
I’d like to be buried in unread copies of Moby Dick.
Old Photographs
I don’t like old photographs.
Old photographs are cruel.
Old photographs are sadistic.
They enjoy inflicting pain.
Here is the perfect example on
the windowsill in front of me.
Look at the smile on my young
wife’s face. And on my little
daughter’s face, look at the laugh.
J.R. Solonche
Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and the co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
April 2025 | poetry
I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability. Smoke, ice, ancestral fingerprints. Around this cold evidence, planets painted by a noble hand, lanterning the shade. Directing our eyes from a soiled hunger. Spaces of light relief, to birth screamless. The glass has been cold for decades. My lips pressed to its green imaginings, already misted before any invasion. The plants grow as a daughter’s hair — beyond common death. On good twilights, vines reach the height of a lover’s climax. I see my mother’s tresses waterfallen at her hips, before pooling, unassisted. The last recorded summer came thick & flooded. He reminded me of thawing glaciers. Blue china shaken on the mantle of a faultline. After the tremors, I washed my own hair immemorial, asking what could still float above eye-level. The small fish paying for my debts with their silver? The pink coral pleasuring in the absence of flesh? I’d backstroke through our burnished climate. Let the tailwinds shed his possessions over me again. Our bodies glowing in oil & salt. He, a good man for tending reflections. For oversleeping the season with. His hands electing fine rain, cradling the era’s bouquets over my belly.
Vikki C.
Vikki C. is a British-born writer, musician, and author of two poetry collections, including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Her writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature and has appeared in over 70 publications across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. Recent venues include The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Grain Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sweet Literary, Cable Street, Feral: A Journal Of Poetry And Art, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, and Ice Floe Press, among others. Vikki was named a winner of the Black Bough Poetry 2024 Poetry Manuscript Contest and was shortlisted in the DarkWinter 2nd Anniversary Contest, judged by Kim Fahner. Her writing and voice have been featured in various podcasts and audio collaborations, which showcase her music and spoken-word craft.
April 2025 | poetry
I fucked up my knitting in the sauna.
The wool fraying with sweat, animal
tiring of infrared, birds zorbing like
orbs of candles, by me, showering in
the dark. Alright, and the dog rotates
in the air above my bed in my sleep
she knows this is a different day the
rest are like a slice of sun, rolls down
the back of my calf, a remnant of
being a child, scales of lore, how old.
Everyone puts their face on my face.
Friend. Those students finished that
huge lasagne, snacking right next to
me. I realized how gross it sounds
when people cut up and eat a lasagne.
Alex Braslavsky
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is currently completing her dissertation on Polish, Czech, and Russian nonagenarian women poets and studying the relationship between aging and artmaking. Her poems are forthcoming in Rhino and The Indianapolis Review, among other journals. Her volume of translations of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry was short-listed for the American Literary Translators’ Association First Translation Prize.
April 2025 | poetry
Dark sunset blooms above my veins,
Human valleys in marrow eruption.
Amaranthine plum-drip bruises
Mark me crimson thief, orchard’s fox.
Botanic sangria slither, my throat a pink road,
Summer’s death the wine of rot and endings.
Plum thief wears mortal wound,
Seeping fatality brands intruder.
Night beast creeping,
I wear hungry, changing skin.
Soft necks open at my suggestion, sing.
I am a girl as a seed is a contained thing,
an almost thing,
a will-be thing.
I, the slowest bomb, quietest eruption.
This valley will eject me,
The toothy citizen.
Verdant patina, jade of rot’s grasp,
Verdigris mold in resplendent, changeling smear.
I sleep in a pulsing, carmine hollow.
There are a dozen words for wound,
But I suppose my name shall suffice.
There is no place here for predators.
Skin perfumed with twilight’s musk,
Closed eyelid a kaleidoscope veil cracking.
Juice stains fur tapestry, unzipping.
Hunted testament, fur tacked high,
Taxidermy desecrates decay’s appetite.
I am the insatiable heretic.
Morning brings pollen-pulse stain, searing.
You will know when there is no other way.
I slip into purple martin’s skin,
Oil slick whisper,
Become sky’s weightless shadow.
Beak loosed upon green writhe below,
Bellies break in sour plum honey,
For even worms must feast.
There is always another way into the orchard.
Alyssa Blankenship
Alyssa Blankenship is a working artist. Previously unpublished, Alyssa creates works that center around heavy themes expressed through the lens of the natural world.
April 2025 | poetry
Because sweetheart, this life
is a born escape artist,
a migrating fever,
a convict tattooed in invisible ink,
without mercy or nostalgia. – Tony Hoagland
Dear, you tell me you hope
for another 25 years together.
You, who used to skew toward ballerina-looking
lawyers with nary a hair nor argument astray.
You, the noisy admirer of stoicism
waving toward my shoes in admonishment
about the impracticality of carpeting
the world, you wrapped in a blanket
of hermeneutic suspicion, who nonetheless
equates any minor flaw with loss of full humanity−
you tell me I should just shoot you if
you ever 1) limp or 2) go mildly deaf−
you and your paradoxes are infinite:
confusing, amusing as kittens.
Because, let me tell you, such flaws
will grow, will overpopulate like tribbles,
like haystacks of books
and grain siloes of clothes:
a humiliation of abundance,
the digging out of which
could well result in the burial
of the digger. Meanwhile,
the losses peck away their
own claims until it is hard
to recognize−like something moldy
overlooked in the refrigerator−what’s left.
I told you when we met how I hated
the pressure of the term soulmate,
and capitalistic compulsions of Valentine
or Sweetest Days, let alone the big white dress,
like a coconut cake impersonating a woman
or a Christmas tree flocked with chemical toxins.
Because I never expect a lack of trouble;
tennis-hop to be ready for disaster, I request
you wear a helmet in the car, to prevent
head trauma, prompting your eyeroll.
I told Kathy, when she asked
if we’d ever make things
permanent, that permanence,
like perfection, is 1) not a thing
and 2) if it were, we’d only
notice once it was not,
say if I choked on a chunk
of delicious crusty bread
at Osteria Via Stato and
our union and myself alike
pronounced impermanent in retrospect.
But at least she died doing what she loved
with the one she loved.
Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh is the author of the poetry collection Initial Conditions and the poetry chapbook About Time. Her work has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places. She earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She lives in Chicago and holds a PhD in human and organizational systems.
January 2025 | poetry
When my children ask me who won
the world, fear grabs all 78 places
American women used to think of as
autonomous. Here in Spain, the news
corners me from 5000 miles away,
its claws sharp but intangible—
a lucky escape, friends say. Luck,
that four-letter misnomer, swaggering
as if clad in tuxedo and bow tie.
Charlatan in a gentleman´s getup,
raping my tongue for days.
What is luck if not unpredictable?
I can´t tell them which natural
disaster he has up his cuffs next.
The number of people who will suffer
or die as he rattles our planet, lunging
for loose change. How many countries´
pendulums have swung perilously
to the right, even ours? The chain
dolls my children made for Halloween
break my gaze, like a bullet through
an eye—if I sketched an oppressor´s face
on each one, they´d stretch the length
of our home, all frown line and sneer,
creepier than ghosts and goblins.
Is anything bad going to happen?
they ask. I say, L and F aren´t so
different, with their rigid right angles.
Their fiery exclamation.
Julie Weiss
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her work appears in Chesnut Review, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, Sky Island Journal, and others. Originally from California, she lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.
