October 2026 | poetry
Self-Portrait as Sisyphus with Litter Pickers
To love a city is to know its street trash.
Our new neighborhood burps it up hourly,
population quadrupled by condos crawling
up overnight, humans and heavy machinery
making mayhem with mud, Tastykake wrappers,
cans of Coke and Fanta, traffic-flattened
to the slimness of dimes.
Our street trash collages resist metaphor:
cardboard seltzer case wrapped in a torn shirt,
overflowing with fat green dog poop bags.
Hello Kitty sneaker boxes stashed with pink tissue
and empty Corona bottles, some smashed to glitter.
I have spent my life cleaning up after others—
kids’ vomit splattering soccer wallpaper, puppy pee,
student essay revisions in the tens of thousands.
Suicide attempts of my beloveds.
I stay in my lane, cover one city block.
My litter pickers amaze me with their scalpel
like precision, become an extension of my arm,
my OCD and optimism.
The 10-dollar claw grips the most resistant
cigarette butt, the heftiest bag of McDonald’s waste.
I release all into the empty clean of my garbage bag.
What does it matter that more will roll right back
down our hilly street tomorrow?
When I reach the top of our block, finished for the day,
I am dirtier, purer.
VA Smith
VA Smith’s work has appeared widely in literary journals, among them: The Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Burningword Literary Journal, ONE ART, SWWIM, Quartet, and Third Wednesday. Her third book, Adaptations, was published by Green Writers Press in 2025. Her chapbook, Urbanity, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press in late 2026. VA serves as Poetry Editor of River Heron Review. Her bliss is writing, cooking, city walking, yoga, and loving on friends and family. Visit her Instagram and YouTube @vasmithpoetry.
October 2026 | poetry
Swimming on Coffee Tables
Édith Piaf’s quivering vibrato on “amour”
tickles the back edge of my hearing tonight
as I watch my five-and-a-half-year-old friend
on her belly, atop our coffee table
swimming in her colorful stretchy pants—
a pink-legged turtle doing the breaststroke.
Her long blonde hair shines confidently
in the soft glow of our Christmas tree,
but her arcing arms and thrusting legs
belie the dullness, unusual in her bright blue eyes.
More than a little tired and just a little hyper,
the dark, shiny table is just the thing
after a daylong outing and an over-long movie
when you haven’t yet learned to soothe yourself.
This baby turtle’s eyes—drab and lusterless—
reflect something inside dimmed and fearful,
the battery fluid of her childness leaking out.
Let’s hope some sleep and “amour” find you tonight,
protect and recharge you from your father’s miserable
mesh bag of neediness and wretched insecurity,
a whirlpool sucking your turtle’s delight
down the drain of a parent who doesn’t like girls.
David J. Schast
David J. Schast is a Philadelphia-area former oboist whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Crown Heights Community News, HOOT Review, The Oxford Review of Books, Poetry Scotland, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, The F-Word, and Voicemail Poems.
October 2026 | poetry
Mother
A sac to dump monsters, ghosts and dark devils. Your daughter
calls you to empty her fears. Slippery grime that lines
her young organs, you sag under the weight of her dread.
To think you were womb that held her lightness– she lentil
at 6 weeks, melon at 40– you, sunshine filled, buoyant balloon,
she, floating lemon, grapefruit, suspended, coconut bounce
in an ocean of glow. “I feel like a landfill,” you say, your arms flagging,
“I feel like I fill her emptiness” –muñeca que quita las penas,
Lupita– you sigh, arms downed– where are the good spirits?
Ahead a halo, a radiance, white, gleams in the evening light,
white clapboard barn floats in the meadow on its face the arc
of the crescent moon: a horseshoe: arms open: it welcomes them.
*muñeca que quita las penas, Lupita: doll that takes sorrows away
Valy Steverlynck
Valy Steverlynck, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is an Argentine-American artist, emerging poet, mother and oyster farmer based in Maine. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Gordon Square Review, Literary Mama, Main Street Rag and Cider Press Review, among others. Her art has been exhibited at venues including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, deCordova Museum, Fuller Museum of Art and Centro Recoleta, Argentina. Valy can be reached at va*************@***il.com.
