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 | nonfiction
Diapers
In rural northern Illinois northwest of Chicago, a raised, pressed, gray gravel path, long ago a railroad track, runs straight for miles, bordered by trees. On one side, farmers harvest their cornfields, green John Deere combines and tractors stirring up more dust than smoke from a forest fire. On the other side, houses on two-acre lots show off manicured, landscaped backyards with two and three-story mansions with castle-like turrets and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Walking through this shadowy tunnel one day, I meet Blackjack, a 14-year-old deaf, half-blind black lab. The man walking him, Mike, looks like Hemingway in his later, Ketchum years. He tells me he is a retired contractor.
I am strolling our family’s miniature poodle, a dog rescued when ten-years-old, now lying wrapped in blankets in a baby carriage because, at 18, partially deaf and mostly blind, she no longer walks.
Like aging men do, we start talking general aches—physical and familial—and how we handle them, then graduate to specific body parts. I brag two replaced hips, he a prostate.
“The friends of mine who had them taken out all wear diapers today,” Mike says, his voice low, gravelly. “Me, I got nuclear implants. They put in radioactive seeds that kill the cancer. They said I had eight years. That was back in 1998, more’n twenty years ago.”
Before surgery, Mike asked his doctor, “Will I still be able to get it up?”
“I’m not a miracle-worker,” his oncologist answered. “Can you get it up now?”
I tell him when eight or nine-years-old, I had to tap twice with the first two fingers of my left hand each light pole passed when walking to my elementary school on Dearborn Place or else something horrific beyond imagining would befall me.
I never missed touching one. Maybe I was afraid each would collapse if not tapped.
After one or two more serendipitous meetings, I no longer met Mike and Blackjack. Then Summer died. Occasionally I walked the Great Western Trail thinking I’d run into Mike, most likely alone. I looked forward to seeing him. After many strolls, no sign of him or his dog, I pretty much stopped walking there. Maybe he, like Blackjack, was no longer able to make it out, his prostate issues finally catching up to him.
The town we lived in bought a farm with a prairie growing an infinite number of wildflowers, a marsh where egrets and herons gathered, and multiple pairs of bluebird houses. I would have loved to walk it with Mike. Why hadn’t I asked for his contact information? Every time we met I left after saying goodbye thinking I’d see him next time when we would exchange phone numbers or emails, when more convenient, when we had more time.
Now I step onto the gravel trail, look up and down the shady path, see one bike rider in the distance, know it’s not Mike, know I won’t see him today, and know I won’t see him again, ever.
Richard Holinger
Richard Holinger’s work has recently appeared in Chautauqua, SIR, Cleaver, Whitefish Review, Cutleaf, and elsewhere. Nominations include the Pushcart Prize (5), Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction 2025, including the latter. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). His 2025 poetry chapbook, Down from the Sycamores, is available from www.finishinglinepress.com, and a short fiction collection, Unimaginable Things, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publications. He holds a doctorate in creative writing from UIC, taught high school and community college English for decades, and lives in rural northern Illinois.
January 2026 | fiction
My Daddy Was an Omnivore
He drank coffee in the wee hours long before the sun oozed its way up over the hardwoods at the end of the property. He played Solitaire and smoked Camels before he woke all of us up to begin our day. My mother had to be at work by 7. Daddy took care of her like a cake maker, frosting her sides with a thick coating of meringuelike candy, opening the door of my bedroom, asking the same question: What would you like for breakfast? I slept like a bear cub, not sure who this man was interrupting my dreams about girls and flying boomerangs with dogs and wispy clouds. What? I’d ask. Denver omelet or pancakes? One day when I came home from playing down at the railroad tracks with my buddies, I found him crouching in the garden pulling up greenery and placing it in a Tupperware bowl. Dandelions, wild onions, unidentified grass and weeds What are you doing that for? I asked. This is dinner tonight. It’ll be great with those pork chops you like. As it turned out, the salad greens from the backyard weren’t so good for most of the family. My sister refused to touch them, and my mother gagged. Since he always seemed to like me, I decided to humor him and have a taste. Explosion on my tongue, in the back of my throat. Fireworks! No meat required. Transformation like spine Unfriending notochord, transmitting blasts of bovine deliciousness into the atmosphere. I am wild and grazer and hologram of urban sunsets, their lemon essence and citrus aftertaste diffusing into my soul. My mother demanded spaghetti and handmade meatballs. My sister didn’t care because she was in love with a man from the plastic factory. And Trixie, the terrier, ate everything she was offered. I pushed my pork chop aside that evening, but my father urged Don’t give it up…yet. You need both hands to make your dreams come true.
John Dorroh
John Dorroh likes to travel. He often ends up in other people’s kitchens, sharing culinary tidbits and tall tales. “Learning about cultures begins with the food,” he asserts. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, Burningword, Kissing Dynamite, North Dakota Quarterly, Penstricken, and North of Oxford. He’s had a book of micro fiction and two chapbooks of poetry published in recent years. Once he was awarded Editor’s Choice Award for a regional journal and received enough money for a sushi dinner for two.
