Issue #107
Aza Pace
A GODLING OF LIVING AND DYING TRIES CRAFTING
At the library sale, old books go for a dollar. Cookbooks, dogeared epics, knitting how-tos, outdated astronomy texts, mysteries like Nancy Drew. This one spirals green ink into terrarium designs, all shapes and sizes. I brush the book’s spine—feel, here is the artist who drew each miniature world, the glass, moss, and stones. Here, the printer, replicating that delicate work in dotted halftone. And here are the library patrons who took this book home, who licked a thumb to turn each glossy page, who built small Earths to set on coffee tables, next to ash trays and rotary phones. I fill my curious arms.
At home with my haul, I listen for what these odd tomes want to be next, what they know of a time before press and glue, the library’s hushed glow. “Trees!” they clamor, “Vines! Weeds!” So, I get to work, tear and twist pages into pale roots, bark, and leaves. A paper jungle grows, creeps out from the bedroom into the hallway, as pages furl and unfurl their new shapes. I start a spruce bough, then let it go sprouting needles from shortbread and fudge recipes. Everywhere, words start to crawl ant-wise in great wheels and rows. Here: brother and wiles, bell, made cheer. There: furtive, stand mixer, and shear.
Paper squirrels nose out from hollows to scratch at the ground. Quick, I squeeze mystery newsprint tight in my fist to toss out as acorns. My rooms lose their sharp edges as the forest unfolds. Now the trees creak and make their own birds. Curled paper lilies fill the air with ink and vanilla perfume. I breathe in, sigh, and curl in a corner to rest my paper- cut fingers and word-bleary eyes. While I sleep, loose pages huddle around, and shreds weave into my hair. Listen, now they whisper, now they bicker and chirp: their slant wisdom, “Look behind. Look ahead, beware.”
Aza Pace is the author of Her Terrible Splendor (Willow Springs Books, 2025), which won the Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, The Adroit Journal, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.
Kathryn Reese
Sunrise Sonnet
This morning it’s not waking so much as
gathering your raincloud self and drifting
on the cool change that might take you to the
soft edge of the mountain or drive you out to
sea. Its always this: the gathering, the
dissipation, the taking apart of sunlight to
show all the colours it might hold. I, too, am
worrying the yarn, twisting it in my fingers,
fraying or felting the light to soften it down.
Raincloud, self and the shimmering edge of
the ocean: I pretend I have held these in my
dream, in my naked palm, taken them on my
tongue—the darkness, the water, this
dissolving. Nothing left on my fingers but light.
Kathryn Reese is a poet living on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical microbiology and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Literary, Kelp Journal and Red Room Poetry
Alana Saltz
Little Earthquakes
When I don’t have a voice, I sing out
to yours.
It starts
that day at the pool when
my friend
tells me your name.
I find you on a store shelf, a jewel case wrapped
in plastic. You emerge from a brown box,
a tiny blue piano in the corner,
bursting through the cover
with wild red hair and bare feet.
No one hears my words.
I tell them to the doctors,
my parents, my friends.
You give me words.
New words, strange words,
words that make so much sense.
They take on new meaning
each time
I hear my voice
sing with yours.
I can be you
for a while.
Alana Saltz (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent writer and activist. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, The Uncertainty of Light (Blanket Sea Press, 2020), Seedling (Maverick Duck Press, 2020), and Where It Was Coldest (Roaring Junior Press, 2021). Her work has appeared widely online.
Kyla Houbolt
Followed Into the Day by Night Sounds
I might be
a river or a moth,
I might wonder which
bin to put the bottle in.
Counting coins, not even
dollars, look! Here is
a small treasure and I have no
idea where it came from.
My mouth is tired of these words.
I always wanted something like
magic, something hidden and bold
that could unlock most succinctly
the wealth inside absolutely
everything. Well, didn’t you?
Let’s go, come on. We have had
enough of this, surely. I mean,
why bother to keep pretending
our hearts are in it?
Looking up, suddenly,
two hawks circle,
their dance
speaks.
Kyla Houbolt (Social media | website) is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina. Her first full length poetry collection, Becoming Altar, from Subpress Poetry, is available here.
Sophie Daly-Atkinson
Ode to Selective Mutism
It was a dream, I confess, to think
my words would find the bead of
stars, Orion wielding the sky beyond my
window. Instead, they curled along my
lip, tongue the red vampiric leach,
speech the desert multitude sitting
over the dune. You told me, did you not —
not to free the dove from its cage, only to
drop the sky upon its wings? I did it
anyway. Held my mouth open to the
sun, tongue burning into white silence,
rose of absence buried in the stars.
Sophie Daly-Atkinson is a poet and novelist living in Scotland. She generally writes about the queer autistic experience, and has poetry published in April Showers’ Winter 2025 Zine and Inklight’s 2025/26 journal.
Sienna Gallus
Halfway Home / How to Survive
I. Before I ripped my stockings
I am running.
My heels blister already,
so what’s the use. I think you used
to fawn over these
legs
They have tried taking me far from you.
I am talking to no one
over the phone
II. Before I ripped my stockings
Untouchable in nylon; naivety.
Thought just sheer enough,
to tempt without
asking for it
Told your friends
you hoped to see more
Got razor burn
to be infantile-smooth
key-between-fingers-wolverine
III. Before I ripped my stockings
A run in the fabric is almost a tear
Almost some skin
Almostsomesex
The way it's all woven
is wrong.
Can’t be fixed
by a backstitch.
A disembodied voice; an angel: Look over your shoulder
Blister popped.
Sienna Gallus is a 21-year-old undergraduate student studying Psychology with minors in Women and Gender Studies, Religious Studies, and English at Manhattan University. Her work has been featured in Lotus Magazine, Manhattan Magazine, NPR’s WDIY 2022 poetry contest feature, and FlowerMouth Press’s LitArts in the Valley, among others.
Alan S. Ambrisco
1920s Home Repair
I live where lead paint flakes off plaster walls
that bubble with regret, where even the dust
knows the past is poison and the future
can only be reached with remediation and HEPA vacs.
Sometimes we call it restoration, like when we bathe
solid brass hinges in lestoil to bring back paint-free
adolescence or uncover a brick fireplace paneled over in ‘75
by grown children tired of their parents’ long love affair
with clay. Sometimes we call it improvement,
like when we buy energy-efficient, double-hung
Pella windows to replace cracked ones in rotted frames
more like frayed rope than well-kept wood.
Sometimes, like now, we call it delusion,
as though stripping seven layers of paint off an aging
one-panel miracle door could bring back,
roaring into life, flappers, Babe Ruth, and speakeasies.
When the hammers stop and the dust settles,
we lie even to ourselves, thinking this is how it was,
because we need that past stripped clean,
the one that brought us here, need
to hope that somewhere there’s a clean hollow
in the wall, aching to be uncovered, just
right for poplar built-ins stained to match,
need to know it wasn’t found decades ago
by some grey squirrels that fouled their own nest
and, warm against the knob and tube wiring,
raised their claustrophobic young in the spare, dark
space between hard wood and plaster lathe.
Alan S. Ambrisco is a Professor of English at The University of Akron, where he teaches medieval, British, and World literature. His poems have appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Great Lakes Review, Verdant Wonders, and other magazines and journals. He lives with his wife and children in Akron, Ohio.
Carlee Ehmer
For He is a Consuming Fire
It rains inside
the chapel some kind
of miracle I think
so I stay seated
book of hymns in hand
this is the proof
I’d been praying for
the choir breaks
for any exit
like the mice
when I get home
or like my smile
when he stumbles inside
the priest demands
calm with a voice
that pounds against
wooden pillars and pale
walls and it squeezes
my nails into palms
until I’m alone
in the storm
water strikes ash
gray floors like a glass
wind chime shattering
I tilt my face
to the heavens
and taste the rain
sweeter than the burn
in my lungs
from the smoke
Carlee Ehmer is from North Eastern Ohio and currently resides in the Catskill Mountains, where she spends her time hiking, skiing, crafting, and watching black bears from her front porch.
Pandel Collaros
Into
Running the race,
Long, black flag flows in the wind
and tight sinews ripple under smooth brown skin.
Running the race—and more.
Turning back,
the pack, small figures in a becoming distance.
Running with red eyes closed now.
Perfect rhythm halfway more than half way.
Into floating—
eyes turned back, the pack now—
Waving figures on a distant Caribbean shore.
Into snorkeling—afraid to look up,
but once I saw the horizon closer than the distant shore.
Face down hoping to keep beautiful fish.
Pandel Collaros has taught at Bethany College (WV), Ohio State, and the University of Kansas. His work has recently appeared in Yellow Mama, Chewers by Masticadores, Freedom Fiction Journal, 7th-Circle Pyrite, and Suburban Witchcraft.
Sonya Wohletz
Late Spring
All spring I watched the garden
roar its way through the confusion of seasonal affect
and refused to intervene—
The fallen laurel branches from last season
continued their ritual of memento mori in slow motion
beside the piles of apple and cherry branches
lain along the fenceline
like rotten roses at an abandoned shrine.
At times I felt the urge to collect it all in my arms—
this detritus—and relegate it to the further margins
where nothing substantial spores the shade with novelty,
but each time the thought occurred to me,
I dismissed it and resumed my suffering.
Something familiar must steady the passage of time.
Now I watch the burgeoning foxgloves with fascination,
unfolding their palms to each new day
as if faith were the only answer.
I remind myself—had I taken to the
weeding dutifully in March,
I would have extirpated their promise,
not knowing what they were, one thing vs. another,
unable to appreciate the course of
their spackled, purple futures hollowing out
the air like optic nerves connecting
eyeballs to some monstrous, vegetal brain.
In their sheer muscle I perceive
the fragmented image of a man I saw running yesterday,
along the busy road. He wasn’t running, really,
but striding confidently, as if he were cooling
down from a twenty-miler, camelback strapped
across his bare chest like artillery, his lean body
rippling with endorphins, sweat seeping
along the brown neck, his fragile joints
adorned with the raiments of well-calibrated
hamstrings and quadriceps—
These were the kind of things
I once placed my faith in, before my body
began to live out its own purpose separately from me.
Yet the lure is still present in my mind—beauty and strength—
isn’t there freedom in those, if only tended properly,
when one immerses oneself in their incremental ceaselessness?
My days now are subsumed by other routines,
as if the mind must persist according to some ideal of itself,
even if it can never fully occupy the human form—
Still, it keeps its habits:
the morning, the workday, then sleep—
the messes accumulating and dispersing accordingly,
awareness of children anchoring
any sense of time into what it perceives
to be limbs—no church, no tools—
swinging thoughts as if thoughts were more than vapors,
intoxicating, transient—
as if they were cultivars, something that can
feed another living thing.
And as with the garden, I must eventually
step back, let the mind have its way, until
it no longer regards me as a suspicious stranger,
ready to knock down whatever
returns the sign of its
own strength to the tyranny of seasons.
Sonya Wohletz is a writer whose work brings together image, history, and landscapes. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Revolute, Roanoke Review, and others. Her first collection of poetry, One Row After/Bir Sira Sonra, was published by First Matter Press in 2022. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Fulbright-Hays scholarship recipient.