October 2026 | poetry
What Are These Things?
Do you feel the letters
in your mouth like bones
of a fish, the spine of sense
caught on the hook of your mind
that prods and pokes: a palpable
delicacy, hard-palatable, yet
slippery through the teeth?
Loquacious L, lascivious and limning
luscious viscera of what I mean.
Tell you what: Meet me at the Lehigh River
bank and we’ll collect Anthracite coal
lumps, ancient knuckles that punch
our metatarsals, polished shiny, washed ashore
like they were dumped out of a landfill.
We’ll bike the dappled D&L trail
from the Mansion House Bridge to 1975
and back through the Mirror in the Sky
that the river covets beneath a rust-red rapture
of steel. When the train bell clangs, I will wrap
my tongue around your silence
and suck it down my throat
to digest. The insects stir; their choirs
grow louder. I will align my thin fingers
with the ribs flanking your kidneys,
hold you close, and listen to the vapors
of your breath steam-clean the tiny hair cells
in my ear. The Anthracite rocks
will take cold residence on the mantel
of my decorative fireplace where dried candlewax
opens its neglected palms to cradle them.
Their names are lost. They masquerade
as fool’s gold when the sun
lowers its gaze.
Stacy Rollins
Stacy Rollins is a writer, visual artist, singer, Tarot reader, and health and fitness enthusiast who currently lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from FSU and has authored two books, Truer Faults and Learning to Read. Her poems have appeared in Atticus Review, Bicoastal Review, Everyday Genius, Diversion Press, Black Heart Magazine, Crack the Spine, Poetry Quarterly, New York Dreaming, Garbanzo, Nailed Magazine, Spine, Shantih, The Oleander Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Helen, Nude Bruce Review, and Armarolla.
October 2026 | poetry
Motherhood
Before she readies herself,
the woman smooths skin-colored
color on her new baby’s forehead,
nose, cheeks, jaw, chin, neck.
She blends and contours, then
the woman brushes rouge
on her new baby’s cheeks
until they appear to burn.
The woman dabs pink gloss
across her new baby’s lips
like they will never chap
or kiss or utter a foul word.
The woman traces her new
baby’s lips with rosepink pencil
until no cry could possibly
escape them.
Just as no words form on the woman’s
lips as she paints the color of frost
above her new baby’s eyes so that,
when they open, they will shine.
The woman outlines her new baby’s
eyes with sharpened charcoal,
adding a flourish at the corner
of each.
The woman spritzes hairspray
on her new baby’s wisps. Now,
now, whether they leave the house
or not, the woman is ready.
Megan Wildhood
Megan Wildhood is a cyclist, saxophonist, gym enthusiast, cat lover and writer whose work has appeared in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, 2023), as well as in Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.
October 2026 | poetry
Drawn Upward into a Vague Melody of Harsh Threads*
or strings smoothed by horsetail
over hours, roughened by grind of canine
teeth gnashing first
chin polished wood
or breath sent to wrench muscles, to
shake all adjacent air like the molecules
themselves were in hysterics
or outside the nearly vacant church
a single soda machine releases the wrong can
for a man who already hangs his head
or a curb hopping compact car
or a crow crouched over caulking
misfired at aluminum hem
pecking ambitionless
a mixture collective synesthetes release
once, create and abandon to dreams.
*From the William Carlos Williams poem “Trees”
Zebulon Huset
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He is an advocate of writing exercises and prompts and edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine.
