Jason Davidson

April 2026 | poetry

Cadaver

I dreamt last night that Mothra died. Three pebbles and a few rented orphans attended her wake, a modest affair. I was working. I was lurking inside a bouquet of Forget-Me-Not’s. I was fucking around inside the last coyote’s lair and I still needed a hair-cut, a blue noose, a way to stop choosing my adventures. No one picked up Mothra’s body from the good morgue. No one cared. And I was scared, so I answered the telephone. The man from the morgue said: Everyone is dead here, Henry Sugar. Your mother’s wings are getting in the way of my salad. Would you like to play Marry-Fuck-Kill? Silly me, as if I am not still beholden to how poor we were, the burnt toast, the loaves of old ghost stories. I dreamt that I scared myself awake, on the way to the death chamber, the womb reclaiming. At the morgue, Mothra smiles at me like an old flying saucer and I book us two tickets to Tokyo. We wander around the Marunouchi, and she is reminded of San Francisco. She asks: Was I a wonderful mother? and I hate that every question has an answer. Lying is a strangled yodel and Mother Mothra is easier now that she is dead. It’s a simple thing to stay silent and so I quit my mouth like an overdose and went mild. She drinks sake. We eat o-nigiri and remember Ghirardelli Square. I wish my blood could turn our quiet love to technicolor. I show her the shop where my husband and I bought the painting of the tree, the color of sour limes. She asks me if I cried when she died. I don’t remember. I do not say that I forgive her, as my tongue is only as thick as rose-beds. I touch her ashy wing and little parts of her fall into me, a telescope or hesitant quicksand. I say: I am happy, now. On the third morning, I miss my husband and take a flight home. As the jet rises over the city, I look out the window. Mothra is still on that park bench, staring with eyes that will never close, over the vast bay. I let go.

Jason Davidson

Jason Davidson is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and performer. He’s written and directed over 200 works of experimental theatre and his one-act plays have been widely published. His poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Hobart, SoFloPoJo, Heavy Feather Review, HAD, Luna Luna and other journals. Jason lives on California’s Central Coast with his husband. Find him on Instagram at @jasonwriteswords or visit his site at jasonwriteswords.com.

Brian Builta

April 2026 | poetry

Antlers Reflected in Water

I wake with that fear again,

leaping then hindquarter stung.

I’m out and I’m fake.

How am I in charge of myself?

I’m wasted opportunity,

a bug lit for only a second.

I hiccup madly, remove the dart,

resume my unfounded fear of the future,

the usual abracadabra routine.

Should’ve stopped for that hit cat,

should’ve penetrated more deeply

as I swam those laps.

Instead, a still life: Darkness

with Eyes Closed, the haunting feeling

I’m the one who hit the cat.

Brian Builta

Brian Builta is a graduate of the University of Texas and lives in Arlington, Texas. His poetry has been published most recently in Ploughshares, Beatnik Cowboy, and Sugar House Review. He is the author of three collections of poems, and more of his poetry can be found at brianbuilta.com.

Jane Hammons, Featured Author

April 2026 | poetry

Signal

Texas dawns humid

green anole at my feet skims

hot deck planks

pink dewlap

pulses orchid

throbs crimson

anole gutters

along downspout

adhesive toepads

cling

release

skitter

lust

out of view

in caliche cactus wood chip garden

When sun enough has ignited the sky

I call my mother in California

We laugh about how often we name upstairs

and down as recent destinations

Not beach or river downtown or lunch gym

84 she no longer drives; Covid she stays home

I order for both of

green anole toenail polish palette

Paint mine red    predictable

pad out to the deck          signal

Orchid my mother plants herself in the lupine bougainvillea

fuchsia gumweed garden at the cliff

Sea foam sketches the deserted beach

Blue whales

scoop krill

crack the Pacific surface

migrate south to Mexico

Jane Hammons

Jane Hammons taught writing for three decades at UC Berkeley, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Upon retirement, she moved to Austin, Texas, for five years before returning home to New Mexico. Her writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies: Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Main Street Rag, Yellow Medicine Review, Hint Fiction, (Norton), The EastOver Anthology of Rural Writers of Color, 2023 and 2024, The Maternal is Political (Seal Press), and Selected Memories, (Hippocampus Books). She enjoys photography as part of her writing practice, and three of her photographs are included in Taking It To the Streets: A Visual History of Protest and Demonstration, an exhibition of the Austin History Center. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

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.