January 2026 | poetry
Arid Land Thermophilia
love for the desert heat / a cautionary affair
I don’t feel overjoyed or conceited
to hear people bitch about heat
in a hot place, in late May, amid
what’s befalling the Earth– It’s two
degrees more– think less clothing,
more rubbing of UV protection, but
I’m stuck in a freezer, wearing a down
jacket in June, desiring the burn on
my face, arms, and back, a fiery love bite
on my nape, that ectotherm craving
that sensual boil that gets cramped in July
when the awful AC, the culprit that causes
greenhouse gases, makes me disdain my
thermophilic bent, knowing the price
to the thermotolerant: the Chuckwalla
Fringe-toad lizards, tortoise, roadrunners
hawks, bighorn, coyotes, and xerophytes
could all vanish in August’s peak hour behind
sweltering sand and stone. One degree more
could be that upheaval that stops me from
elating on the hot wall on my skin, heat
emanating from the floors, an endless heat sink
I don’t hate the amorous stink of my Staphylococcus
hominis, thriving in my armpits
Lizbeth Bárcena
Lizbeth Bárcena is a writer and naturalist, dedicated to bringing awareness of the wonders and fragility of nature through writing. She’s currently pursuing an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. A Semi-Finalist for the 2024 North American Review Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Contest and recipient of the Mari Sandoz Emerging Writer Scholarship, her work was recently published in the El Portal Literary Journal Spring 2025.
January 2026 | poetry
Fever Dream
You are about 7, skinny, sheathed in a flaxen knit dress. Margarine yellow. You are
persuaded by the son of your godmother, your namesake, to climb through a large,
wooden fence into a meadow. It’s late June, your month. You have only been on this new
continent for two months. You have some firsts. Your first chocolate milkshake. Its icy
chunks making your stomach turn. The ginormous American burger crowned with a tile of
orange cheese and onions. You are only able to chomp through about five times before the
meat monster appropriates your stomach and now lives there rent free. The burger is
topped with something you’ve never had, relish. But you do not. You help your godmother
catch beefy slugs in the garden. Everything here is super-sized. You feel dwarfed by it all,
the XXXTRA-Largeness of the houses, the roads, the trucks. The size of your parents’
dream.
You and your new friend stroll into a soft, lemony hue of a meadow. The air is toasty, the
flavor of summer tasting you. You are wary of wandering too far. This American boy is
leading the way. You have faith. Until…you see the bull. Why is this giant beast standing in
your fever dream? It gallops like the inevitable future that is racing towards you.
The boy grabs your hand. The air zoomed, the present zooms, the future will zoom.
You reach the fence again. He climbs through but you struggle with your little legs, and
your dress becomes snagged! th-thump-th-thump-th-thump goes your heart thump-thump-thump go the
hooves rumble-rumble goes your gut. Between safety and risk.
Your dress is set free, by you or by him? You both keep running, laughing. Jubilant.
You are never released. The bull remains. An insatiable meat monster.
June Chua
June Chua used to read stories aloud to her little sister when their family lived in Borneo, Malaysia. Eventually, they moved to the Canadian prairies, first living in a trailer! This passion for the written word has led to a 25-year career in journalism, filmmaking, and communications, including work as a CBC News reporter and the writing of articles for newspapers and magazines. Her works have appeared in Back Where I Came From, The Best of Rabble, Strangers in the Mirror, poco. lit, Palisades Review, Tough Poets, Chatelaine, Canadian Living, and The Globe & Mail. She resides in Berlin and is working on a prose and poem collection supported by a Canadian literary grant. See: junechua.com or @re.juneration
January 2026 | poetry
A Kat, a Mouse, a Brick
Be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow
of himself caught in the web of this mortal skein.
—George Herriman (1880-1944)
Charlie Chaplin, Jack Kerouac, R. Crumb, Quentin Tarantino.
Krazy Kat has some loyal fans.
Cartoonist George Herriman reprised the same plot
with shifting scenes of a dream-like Arizona landscape.
Characters: an androgynous & incurably romantic black Kat
in thrall to Ignatz, an outsized, stick-legged, pale-pink mouse
who routinely clobbers Kat with a brick. POW!
Kat mistakes each attack as proof of love.
Meanwhile, Offissa Pupp, who has fallen for the tormented
Kat, tries to protect him—or is it her?
A comic love triangle. Unrequited & surreal.
The strip’s biggest fan, William Randolph Hearst,
featured Krazy Kat in his newspapers for thirty years.
Surprise ending: Three decades after Herriman’s death
it’s revealed that the gifted cartoonist—
who’d come to LA from New Orleans— was not ‘Greek’
as he claimed, but mixed-race Creole.
Herriman painstakingly kept his secret, wearing a hat—
day or night— to conceal his ‘knotty’ hair.
Friends remembered a shy, self-effacing man
who lived with wife & daughters in the Hollywood Hills.
Krazy Kat, a brilliant, prescient fable on race?
The cartoonist claimed he ‘just drew what he saw.’
In a 1921 cartoon, a bucket of whitewash falls on Kat.
Only briefly—does the mouse return his love. Then POW!
Joan E. Bauer
Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA, where she co-curates Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.
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.
