July 2025 | poetry
I’ve Spent My Life Separated from Living
Separated by doors, windows, walls—
swallowed by digital throats, settled into a stomach
where I collected friends and hearts like stamps.
I’m not sure what I want on my gravestone, but I know
it’s not: Comfortable Suburbanite. Perpetually Online.
I’m interested in interruptions: how from a night sky
a lightning bolt sunders a solid oak or birch,
how an evening without electricity gathers us
like moths to the candlelight in each others’ eyes,
how eyes lock from across a busy train station,
how a train can usher a leaper or an accidental
dreamer into eternity. Eternity has already begun
and my life is a blip somewhere in its predawn.
In the predawn, my one job is to flash like a firefly,
to refuse to drown in the comfort of the dark.
Bethany Jarmul
Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer, poet, writing coach, and workshop instructor. She’s the author of a poetry collection, Lightning is a Mother, and a memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature and Best Small Fictions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She’s a grant recipient from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.
July 2025 | poetry
Grass and Marble
There’s a harmonica in my pocket, a spider crawling
out of my mouth and on my backside a lovely long tail
that’s been hiding, tucked in my pants. Instead of arms
I have wings lacy but strong. Out of my belly button
three or four babies spill out, waiting to be clipped
free. On my knees are pastel spongey knee pads
with funny messages in magic marker from
friends wishing me well.
And I will paint myself barefoot lying in a lawn chair—
watching dragon flies land on my chest and thighs,
their different colored stems deep red, navy, baby blue
and watching the sun go down behind tall trees holding
a rocks glass of iced tea with several squeezed lemon
wedges floating at the bottom with sugar not stirred in
properly, sprig of mint, the look on your face when you left.
Mary Dean Lee
Mary Dean Lee’s debut collection, Tidal, was published in April 2024 by Pine Row Press and was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2024 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2021, The Fiddlehead, Hamilton Stone Review, Ploughshares, Salvation South, Free State Review, and MicroLit. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College, and received her PhD in organizational behavior at Yale before moving to Montreal to teach at McGill University.
July 2025 | poetry
francis bacon’s black mouths: a love poem
painted over and over because he wanted
to perfect blackness in different states of mouthness
the black before the scream
i’ve printed ‘em to put over the bed
folded into origami orgasms
as if doing squats over a speed bump
onery alley critters—! no two sound alike
no matter what you say
more is less in the long run
oak-aged ale
and opium
but love—
looks like a pot pie looks like love in the mouth
my love—i’ll pump your heart empirically
kill ‘em with kindness and expectorants
spewing from my black mouth
mouth i love pot or pies or periodontal surgeons
kneeling in front of a frontrunner
never felt so god
gnawing on truthisms with jagged little teeth
jam perhaps blackberries jammed into the mouth
to replace the fist
i’ve iodine stains
henna-like investments
and : i of the tiger
pronounce you wooed
under dark lights casting a cast-iron shadow
i’ll continue to woowoo with my juju
detail the mouth going south
going black where it doesn’t belong
at times bleached and iron-clad
that after-heat black
that passion in the bedroom
the courtroom
manslaughter of the mouth
a mouth in blackness
plague-eaten and purple taken into account
the glistening shrieking wetness
that scream to a whisper
that mouth open and black for more
Marcy Rae Henry
Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands who’s had motorcycle crashes in Mexican-America, Turkey, and Nepal. She is the author of the body is where it all begins (Querencia Press), dream life of night owls (Open Country Press), and We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press). Her poetry collection, death is a mariachi, won the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize and will be published in spring 2025. Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest, and Kaveh Akbar recently chose her fiction collection as a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. MRae is a professor of English, literature, and creative writing at Wright College, Chicago, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino/x Studies Program and received Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts. marcyraehenry.com
July 2025 | poetry
This is Kansas, Toto
There is a two-headed man
living just outside Topeka
who rarely goes into town.
On Friday nights quite late
he’ll wander into the roadhouse
and order two Heinekens.
He’ll draw the odd stare, but
as long as he puts a twenty on the bar
the drinks will keep arriving.
There’s usually at least one
drunk in the corner who will stare,
so potted he sees a single head
on each of two men, with hair
shifting from black to bleached
blond and back again.
Most of the patrons, by last
call, see him and smile, totter
home and tell their wives
of the strange man with
two heads who lives somewhere
outside of town, near, their wives
assume, the twins, who stumble
home each Friday night, arm in arm.
Louis Faber
Louis Faber is a poet and writer. His work has appeared in MacGuffin, Cantos, Alchemy Spoon (UK), Meniscus and Arena Magazine (Australia) New Feathers Anthology, Dreich (Scotland), Prosetrics, Erothanatos (Greece), Defenestration, Atlanta Review, Glimpse, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Midnight Mind, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His new book of poetry, Free of the Shadow, was recently published by Plain View Press.
July 2025 | poetry
Thumbprints and Tree Rings
Are basically the same, yeah? Circular markings
on living beings that show we originate from one
genius source, one brilliant astral scientist who saw
the stunning in all creation and said, I think I’ll
leave them symbols of their innate connection
to one other, hide them in plain sight.
Make it special when they close their eyes and lean
toward the light, like sunflowers. Maybe this is why
people hugs trees, smell roses, ground themselves
barefoot on grass—to know we are in this together.
Still, I ask Big They why we wreck the very things
that sustain us, cut off our noses to spite our faces.
Still, I admire trees more than ever: their grandeur,
elegance, fierce giant magi always pointing up
at the stars. And stars, stardust! We are made of that too—
carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms created in previous
generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago.
We forget how much earth we contain, how much
space we hold. Like right now, I’m sitting on my bed
watching the oak outside my window house two sparrows.
She is me, spirited but strong. I am her, hopeful and still.
Marina Carreira
Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American poet and artist from Newark, NJ. A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Luso-American fellow in the DISQUIET Literary Program, Carreira is the author of Dead Things and Where to Put Them (Cavankerry, forthcoming 2025), Desgracada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Carreira works in higher education and teaches Women and Gender Studies at Kean University. Find her on Instagram at @savethebathewater.
July 2025 | poetry
Trauma, according to Webster’s
“An injury caused by an extrinsic agent or
behavioral state resulting from
considerable mental disruption and
duress; acute physical suffering or
emotional upset inflicted by a mechanism or
force that causes trauma.” I’ve spent years
grappling with the trauma that tanked my kids’ mental
health, and the diagnoses that have dogged them.
Intimate abuses are potent, and they suffered the double
jeopardy of their father’s gaslighting ire and uncle’s
kaleidoscopic offenses. Claims of familial
love conflated with cruelty create a funhouse
mirror wherein truth is distorted, its reflection unstable.
Nietzsche wrote, “the constitution of existence might be such that
one would be destroyed by a complete knowledge of it.”
Perhaps this is why the truth of trauma is so elusive. It is dangerous.
Quixotic armchair analysts tout treatments to
repair the damage wrought by trauma, but there is no ready
salvation to be found—recovery is a lifetime’s work.
Therapeutic tools are just that, the wrench wielded
under the hood when the engine kicks. The shop
vac when everything falls to the floor and you don’t know
where the mess ends and you begin.
Xanax to take the edge off the rising panic.
You can only understand the work through metaphor.
Zayde told the kids to “get well soon.”
Lisa Delan
Lisa Delan’s poetry and prose have been featured in a broad range of literary publications, and she has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have been set to music by leading classical composers, and she has written the libretto for a choral work debuting in 2025 in her adopted hometown of San Francisco. When she is not writing, you can find the soprano, an international performer who records for the Pentatone label, singing songs on texts by some of her favorite poets.
