Issue #104

Filiz Fish

Before Me

My mother lost three children before me.
I imagine them as shadows pressed into her ribs,
small ghosts whispering against the inside of her skin.
She never says their names.
Just before you, like a door half-closed.

When we fight, I think of them—
the could-have-beens who never learned her temper,
who never slammed doors. Who might have stayed
soft, unexpiring sweetness. Sometimes I wonder
if she wishes for one of them instead:
someone quieter, easier to love.

When I was young, she’d check if I was
breathing at night, fingers stiff under my nose.
Now, she hovers in doorways.
We orbit each other: her grief, my defiance,
the silence in between.

In the mornings, we pass like strangers.
The kettle hisses; the floor creaks.
She asks if I’ve eaten, and I nod—
mouth full, always, with what I’ll never say.

Impact Study

I.
I was six when I learned
how glass gives before it breaks.

A scream,
then the world split clean—
a mosaic of my own reflection
scattered across the tile.

Blood slicked the air like oil.
My mother’s hands trembled
but her voice didn’t.
She said look at me,
and I tried, but everything shimmered—
her face refracted,
a thousand versions of her fear.

II.
The nurse stitched my foot shut.
The thread tugging skin together,
mending the way apologies do—
tight, temporary.

Outside the ER window,
a moth beat itself senseless
against the fluorescence.
I memorized its rythym—
the small, determined tapping—
and wondered if that’s how I’d sounded
while shattering.

III.
My mother says I’ve always
had a talent for breaking things.

Sometimes she looks at me
like she’s waiting for something to give—
her hand tightening around
the counter’s edge, light trembling
in the space between us.

After, she swept the pieces barefoot,
wouldn’t let me help.
Every shard a mirror,
every mirror refracting the two
of us—each one smaller,
each one still bleeding.

Filiz Fish is a student and writer from Los Angeles, California. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the National Poetry Quarterly, and The New York Times. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Gone Lawn Journal, and more.

Michael J. Kolb

Convalescence

The bed taught me stillness.
Sheets stiff as plaster,
pills aligned like sentries.

My body hummed
with the machinery of healing,
a low invisible labor.

I learned patience
in the ache of rising,
in water tasting of copper,
in the sullen insistence
of each breath.

Each day I returned
half-stranger,
as if the bones rehearsed
without me.

Healing is runoff,
mud pooled in the tracks,
sunlight rinsing
what remains.

Michael J. Kolb is a poet and educator in Colorado. His work has appeared in Third Wednesday and Bramble, among others. He writes about memory, illness, and resilience, asking what we carry and what we leave behind.

Stephen Ruffus

IN THE HOLLAND TUNNEL

Cigarette smoke sifts through the air curling back
like a mist where I lie in the half dark lights flashing by
like pieces of memory as though on a gurney
wheeling down a long path or submerged in a metal tank.
There is a river above us a mile wide.
I feel its currents. We must be floating.
Someone is driving the car who looks like my father.
Resting my head against my mother,
I hear her voice through the body
from whence I came and so am unafraid.
Glancing out of the rear window the world is a mirror
receding, flickering, bending as through an aperture.
Along the curve of the bottom of the riverbed
the tunnel runs far ahead like a necklace
in a manifest journey toward the promise of light.

Stephen Ruffus is originally from Queens, NY. Recently, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hanging Loose Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Radar Poetry, and Hotel Amerika. His chapbook, In Lieu Of, was published by Elik Press (2024). He is a retired educator living in Salt Lake City.

P.H. Coleman

It’s hard to live long enough for spring

Honking traffic: the geese dip, rising over the pond, so near
they see their hearts in water. They bank hard skyward then
write in flight w, v, lambda, and blink out into hazy blue sky

frosted by their trailing breath. Snow cartwheels around them,
like someone spilled it by accident, bouncing crazy over roads,
melting into slush, sliding into the first words of winter’s story.

My father was not much about this darker part of year, frozen
days locking up all his joints. I watched over him in that bed,
spread out like some marionette on tubes, imagined him still

behind his muzzy blue eyes, thinking of highballs and tee-offs.
Then he turned, seeming to see, to say wordlessly—well damn.
All this and not a bite of turkey. The snow’s too deep to shovel.

On tips of burned grass, dead ferns not yet covered, cloud bits
hold onto each other, a jigsaw of hexagons in perfect interlock,
enshrouding summer life in linen till spring rolls back the stone.

P.H. Coleman sold shoes, taught chemistry, curated art . Clearly, next was poetry. He looks at and talks with people inside and the snag woods outside a large window. Tree’s leaves gone, their lives in roots with other creatures. Barred owls are back, geese are gone, spring’s a ways off.

Mark J. Mitchell

THE FOREST OF KNEES

        For Emmett

He was surrounded. It was loud. The trees
rose up and up—gray, black. How
to find his way through and out?

Ahead, he saw a grove of white trees. He thought
two called him lightly. A voice he knew.
They kept moving. Sounds blared. His tiny steps
took him nowhere. Then the plaid trees grew.

He didn’t cry. Stayed brave, but his lips shook
slightly. Looking up, he slipped,
not falling. He grabbed a hip.

He climbed the white tree. Great big eyes looked down.
Not his mom’s. He tried to hold on tight
anyway, but it moved. Then long arms scooped,
swung him up. The song changed. He’s all right.

Mark J. Mitchell has been a working poet for 50 years. His latest collection is Something To Be. A novel, A Book of Lost Songs, was recently published by Histria Books. He’s fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Dante, and his wife, activist Joan Juster. He lives in San Francisco.

He can be found on Bluesky @MJMitchellwriter

Arielle Arbushites

tow truck therapy

I need a lift, not just the car,
but the carcass of my calm,
stranded and blinking under a Friday sky.

You pull up, chrome and coffee breath,
say “at your service”
and I feel the static hum between your words,
a session beginning without consent.

In the cab’s altitude,
you confess in engine sputters:
combat, ghosts, PTSD.
I nod like a metronome for pain.

The air smells like diesel and disclosure.
For several city blocks, your story drags,
sparking against asphalt.

At last, the drop-off.
You release my car
and my counseling couch.

Before you vanish,
you’re already dialing your mother,
you need another ear,
a man forever in transit.

You wave like a soldier saluting the wreckage.
“At your service,” I whisper back.

Arielle Arbushites is many things, but above all she is a mother and a licensed social worker who has been a writer all her life. She has mainly published poetry on social platforms and lit mags, but also debuted a short poetry collection in 2024 entitled “cracking at the heels.”

David Milley

Tiller and Shears

The first warm March day arrives. Out back, you till the garden.
You still wear winter’s tattered plaid. Under the bright sky,
your boots sink up to the ankles in the damp, black earth.
I watch you from the greenhouse door. I fetch the shears
to trim the taxus yew up front, now grown higher than your reach.
I leave the door open and leave the hot room. I sneeze in the sun.

Shears in left hand, my right shields my eyes from the sun.
I see you haul the rototiller and yank at every turn. Your garden
mostly lies fallow, but you will change that soon. I reach
for my bandanna, wipe my brow. I walk up front. I scan the sky
where high clouds blow past. The yew awaits. Hoisting shears
overhead, I chop. Green shoots thick as pencils fall to earth.

At far ends of the yard, we ply our tasks. You cut the earth;
I cut new growth. I can’t see from here, but I can hear you. The sun
swims across the sky, slowly. The yew submits to my shears.
The world at large does not admit us, even now. Your garden
sustains us through these times. In a long life together under sky,
we’ve grown our own world. Still, safety remains beyond reach.

I think of Bruegel’s replaced painting. Out of human reach,
Icarus sinks beneath the sea, unseen. A farmer tills the earth.
Having once spied Daedalus, a shepherd keeps scanning the sky,           
dreamily intent. His sheep graze on a sandy ledge. The sun,
its damage done, sets. For Bruegel, the earth was his garden;
flight, mere fancy. I return to the thwack, thwack of the shears.

I’ve always owned a woolly mind. Dull tasks, like taking shears
to an overgrown hedge, send me straying to the farthest reach.
These are merely tasks that must be done. But for you, your garden
always brings joy. Coaxing green seedlings from fecund earth,
you meet each season with a focused mind. Clouds race past the sun.
Your distant tiller purrs. I wipe sweat from my eyes and study the sky.

For those who lived before us, gods roamed earth and sea and sky.
Demeter’s daughter promises renewal, but I hear Atropos’ shears
click and snap. Rongo vows good harvest beneath Pacific sun.
Boötes tills the northern stars. The Dagda strums his harp. I reach
the farthest branch and cut. Osiris, dying, offers life to earth.
Kouzen Zaka laughs. Your tiller stops. Silence falls over the garden.

Later, tiller and shears stowed, we sit side-by-side. In the eastern sky,
dark clouds heave and roil, but sun still slants across your garden.                    
I reach for your hand. I bring it to my face. You smell of earth.

David Milley has written and published since the 1970s. Recent work appears in RFD Magazine, Friends Journal, Last Syllable Literary Journal, and Feral. David lives in New Jersey with his husband and partner of forty-nine years, Warren Davy. These days, Warren tends his garden and keeps honeybees. David walks and writes.

Matt Stefon

February ends in Lisbon Falls

The town buildings
settle down for
the night—evening
settles upon

the canal. The
houses, alight
with a glow leeched
out of the new

moon-infused snow
pack, gravitate
toward the House of
Pizza sitting,

patient, right by
the head shop. On
One-Ninety-Six,
cars dream of March.

Matt Stefon lives, writes, edits, and teaches north of Boston. He has two micro-chapbooks, two chapbooks, and 463 wiffle ball home runs, which he believes puts him on some all-time leaderboard somewhere.

M.B. McLatchey

Palinode

         for a grade seeker

So much dwelling on the cusp. A crescent moon
assuring us there will be change and flux;
the promise of new quarters and new moons.
I looked for these moons in you. But now, I want
 
those lunar phases back, the waning and waxing,
not apparently for journey — a new satellite — but
intake added to a static average. I regret, I retract,
if teachers and poets can, my nod on your behalf. 
 
Poor Stesichorus given back his sight — only after
the lie. Yet Helen was an imposter. He had it right.
Spinner of truths. Heartsick. What he had to divine:  
The fullness of life, the peace in being blind.

M.B. McLatchey is the author of six books including the award-winning titles The Lame God (Utah State University Press), Smiling at the Executioner (Kelsay Books), and Beginner’s Mind (Regal House). Professor at Embry Riddle University in Florida, M.B. is also a Poetry Reader for the journal SWWIM. Find her at www.mbmclatchey.com