October 2026 | nonfiction
I’ll Be Prom Queen
Someday I’ll be outspoken, ballsy, articulate, funny. Totally cool, like Fran Lebowitz, but without the cufflinks. Also, I’ll be slow talking, soft talking. I’ll think before I speak. A person others feel okay around, feel good around, want to be with for my earth-mothery energy, healing vibes. Not buzzing, jagged, all jumpy inside. I’ll be serene.
I’ll swim with sea turtles in the Galapagos Islands, hug strangers in Sedona, Arizona, bike the California Coastal Trail and hike the Appalachian from Georgia to Maine. I’ll go skydiving. I’ll be prom queen and valedictorian. I’ll get accepted to all the Ivies, but I’ll choose Reed or Evergreen, St. John’s or Bard. I’ll go barefoot to class in spring.
I’ll throw together a chocolate soufflé at two a.m. that my lover and I will eat with our hands, lick chocolate off burning fingertips, drink chilled Cristal in tulip glasses from World Market. A dreadful pairing the champagne connoisseurs would say but we won’t know.
Someday my house will be pristine. No stuff piled all over the place. A vase of fresh-cut flowers, wistful timeless elegant flowers, baby’s breath, lavender, sweet peas, freesia, will sit on my teak nightstand. Next to it I’ll place tiny rocks I’ve rescued from the side of the road over the years, slipped into a pocket or warmed in the palm of my hand, into their own blown glass bowl. You belong here, I’ll tell them. Settle in. It’s our time to shine.
Judith Shapiro
Judith Shapiro is a Washington, DC–area writer who spends a lot of time in Hoboken, NJ, staring at the New York skyline. When the novel she’s writing looks the other way, she secretly delights in flash prose and poetry. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in The Citron Review, The New York Times, Bending Genres, The Sun, and elsewhere.
October 2026 | poetry
Janitrix
My college janitor always listened to me, so I confided in her. She was on her knees scrubbing floors but stopped to look straight at me. ‘Why haven’t you done it then? Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?’ I found myself sputtering. I said I wasn’t sure. I wanted to end it, to end myself. She shrugged and bent back to her work. ‘You won’t have wasted your life,’ she said. ‘You can always be a bad example.’
Ripe
Walking through the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, we found the child. Flies had nearly eaten his ear clean off, ripe for the picking. His mother did not want our help because we were white missionaries. She did not want us to bathe her child, nor did she trust the antibiotics we offered her free of charge. When we told her that without help the child would die, she spat, “Then I will just have another one.” I looked at her as she stood there—beautiful, proud and defiant. I looked at the child staring at her, too weak to blink.
Mark Hendrickson
Mark Hendrickson is a gay poet and former psychiatric nurse living in the Des Moines area. A 2024 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he has been published in McNeese Review, Vestal Review, Variant Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or visit www.markhendricksonpoetry.com.
October 2026 | poetry
The ceremonies of winter
Like hunching.
Like watching
the spellcast rhythm
the narcotic swing
of the almost
empty feeder.
Like black tea
with honey.
Like February opening
the homemade sauce
frozen at first frost hint
and tasting September.
Like turning on the light.
Like waiting to turn it on:
a dusk approaching
but the snow takes on
the blue grey glowing
of the still bright sky.
Like testing my step
onto sidewalk ice
the barely grip
the splitting slide.
Like skitching across snowslush.
Like reading in the morning
the tracks in the backyard
to see if the stray dog
Julie’s named Mr. Rabies
came through on his wanderings:
this pandemic distraction.
Like loving the drip and the stain
of the just warm enough
pale as bleaching.
Like trying to find a way to name
the strange birdcalls
twisting like spiral fractures
through closed windows.
Like moments of drifted despair.
Like mica glints of barely hopefulness.
John Walser
John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Plume, Posit, Nimrod, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review and One Art. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and a three-time Pushcart nominee, as well as a Best New Poets nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a past recipient of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. He is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.
