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.
January 2026 | poetry
After,
we took
the long way
home.
As if such
a simple act
might flummox fate.
We are
a good people.
We bury our dead
and help
the maimed
to cross the road.
Yet the image
persists.
One careless step
along
the poorly
cobbled avenue,
and Atropos
snips
the thread.
Steve Deutsch
Steve Deutsch is the poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Prize multiple times. He has six volumes of Poetry. One, Brooklyn, won the Sinclair Poetry Prize.
January 2026 | poetry
My Muse is Growing Up
My muse wears prescription glasses,
so she’ll never see
beyond the village
with its walled-in acres
of poolside loungers.
Plus, she quit her diet,
so her diaphragm gags her
esophagus and larynx.
I’ll find another voice
preparing to leave somewhere.
Starlings nest in her wool mouth,
under her tongue knots of familiar
as the juniper bush
bends her fingers to catch the night.
I call this girl my neighborhood.
Fingers like ten puny,
black summers waiting in the sky.
She skips into the juniper bush,
to where a rainbow saddles the alps.
She walks further into the horizon,
fall in the air and rain on its way
and who knows, like her,
the different smells of the grownups’ homes
preparing to bake butterscotch cookies
or braid the sabbath dough.
I call this girl my neighborhood.
Her walkie talkie is morosely
static in the tropical twilight.
She releases me from social media.
She holds onto the darkness,
believes like wildfire
in frizzy-hair-like echoes.
If she wades deeper, silences of darkness become
windows into waves,
and she and only she can see
the reclusive moon of doom imprinted
with ragtag teeth coughed up by the dog.
I’ll have to get her training bras and tampons.
I’ll still call this girl my neighborhood.
Warn her to put her guard up,
so she can make it to
the suburb stars of love
before we bury our body of time.
Grace Lynn
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art, and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels, and investigating absurd angles of art history.
January 2026 | poetry
When the Neighbors Sell their Knock-Down in Just Four Years for Twice What They Paid for it
They spiff it up,
repair old siding,
cut into the crumbling hillside
to squeeze in a bonus room.
Throw on a coat of paint, shiny
like a chrome-plated lie.
Bucolic gem among the pines—
reads the realtor’s sales pitch.
So much potential. The realtor gaunt
in high heels, a plucked chicken
in a power suit. Signs go up.
Buyers come & bid & fight
each other over the price,
wrestling like amateur grapplers
in the mud of a dive bar. Short
escrow & the sellers decamp
to North Carolina to try
its Southern charm, this
also a lie. Now our eyes
shine with possibility. We too
could gentrify, cash out
on our constant fixer, our old house
groomed for the highest bidder
eager for a quick flip
as young techies move
their crypto AI brains into the void
and demo what we worked
so hard to preserve. And then
we move where old people
who never planned ahead go—
elder mobile home community
in a nearby town or a college town
up north where it rains & students
study science & the classics,
and we can still pretend our lives
contain a wealth of options.
Dotty LeMieux
Dotty has published five poetry chapbooks, including “Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune” from Finishing Line Press in 2021 and “Viruses, Guns and War” from Main Street Rag Press in 2023. She formerly edited the literary and art journal, The Turkey Buzzard Review. Her work has appeared in publications such as Rise Up Review, Loch Raven Review, Painted Bride, MacQueen’s Quarterly, Gyroscope, and Wild Roof. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two active dogs, where she practices environmental law and manages progressive political campaigns.
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
