Issue #108
Elena Rotzokou
Sleep Study
I.
Last night the house inhaled before I did—
not loudly,
just a low rehearsal in the beams,
a throat-clearing of timber and tin.
I lay awake and counted out the space
between my ribs
and the room’s reply.
The ceiling lowered its measure of height.
The walls withheld their weather.
Inside the wiring filament fretted—
a thin bright nerve
refusing rest.
II.
I have begun to think structures practice us,
rehearse our outlines in our absence.
Absence is never empty—
it is padded,
a draft of flesh awaiting revision.
III.
Morning light leaned wrong in the kitchen,
a blade loose in its handle.
The spoon inclined toward the cup.
The cup edged toward the counter’s lip.
Everything mid-fall, mid-thought.
I said good morning to the quiet.
The quiet answered in my register,
slightly improved.
IV.
A doctor once told me sleep rehearses loss.
He said it softly, as if loss were silk.
I began sleeping crosswise,
refusing the clean geometry of rest.
The mattress recalculated.
It pressed back
with patient pressure.
V.
Now when I breathe I leave a margin wide
enough for a second draft of air.
When I exhale, I listen for the edit.
Sometimes the room inhales before I do.
Sometimes it completes what I begin.
VI.
This afternoon I found a fracture in the plaster
running the length of the hallway wall—
so fine it felt like syntax testing break.
I pressed my ear against the seam.
On the other side
something was practicing my voice—
not copying,
not echoing—
replacing the source.
Elena Rotzokou is a writer based in New York City. Her work investigates voice, interiority, and the pressures language places on the body. She is currently completing a PhD in English at Columbia University, where she studies lyric form and environmental thought.
Holly Day
Some of the Things that Happen Around Us
The violinist folds himself into his case, tucks his wings
in carefully, folds his arms across his chest, sleeps.
Beside his case is a smaller case, with a handle, and in it
his violin also rests, perhaps dreaming of new strings.
There is no need for furniture in this house. Everything sits or sleeps
in a case or a cage. The shelves are filled with kennels containing
sleeping cats and dogs, covered birdcages of canaries and finches
parrots who think they’re in charge. Even the unnecessary couch is covered
encased in clear plastic, as if being preserved for freshness
as though some day, the violinist might have company
and they will want something brand new to sit on.
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.
Kristen Keckler
“Corona Borealis Casement”
After Joseph Cornell & Emily Dickinson
Crystals of intimacy’s
residuum
seep into fissures
of my stimming brain
hours after
the motel door
clicks
behind us.
A cavalcade
of clouds
splitting mountains
plays like a nostalgic film
on the screen
of my sleepy
eyelids.
From our unfinished
colloquies
I extract a stray thread,
random whorl,
beaming a telescope
inward
half convinced that
even in a fifth
dimension
you wouldn’t choose
me
because I am too much,
your zodiac twin,
a siren you prefer
naked and fleeting.
More likely is you
love in ways
I must silently trust,
beckoning you in
taps of code
to a window
where you gaze
at our anthracite sky
splattered with
white alchemy,
this glittering crown,
Arcturus blinking.
Below in some hidden
brush, a Northern
mockingbird
trills a meticulously
rehearsed song
as if he knows
I’m still awake,
overthinking
the sweet weight
on my heart,
and that our share
of night to bear
is also our blank
in bliss to fill.
Kristen Keckler writes and teaches in the suburbs of New York City. Her poetry has appeared in The Disappointed Housewife, The Collidescope, Chainmail Poetry, As It Ought to Be, Sky Island, and other journals. Her poem is a response to Joseph Cornell’s shadow box “Observatory Corona Borealis Casement.”
Melanie McCabe
Sleeper’s Din
In my dreams, peril fidgets at the threshold,
straining for its cue. It waits to hear the lungs
suck sharp air, then rushes in flailing
blades, stirring the pot of tsunami, spinning
cyclones on a spindle of whim.
Disaster loiters in the back alleys of my
eyelids—an addict jittery for a fix, buzz
of adrenaline and sweat. In those narrow
lanes of night-damp and mist, shadows
breathe hard. They skulk and desire.
Day is too tame to be real. Something’s always
coming. Scales must be balanced; bills are past
due. Over my shoulder is where night steals in.
Sun slides down cardboard scenery of deepening
blue. Moon’s exploited bulb burns out.
It would seem that a careful review of my accounts
has revealed a deficit of calamity. For too long
my dark guests have dozed at another inn.
Sleep elbows in, that old arbiter, with armloads
of slashers, zip-ties, and mayhem.
Beneath my pillow where I never look, the night
shark swims. Circles round, circles round—it can
never stop. At the surface of a dream, my toss and thrash
will open those jaws, Terror dwells not in teeth’s
snap and twist, but in the chasm before they do.
Melanie McCabe is the author of an award-winning memoir, four books of poems – most recently All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize – and her debut novel Road Longer Than Memory, which will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026.
Chris Pellizzari
THE REFLECTION ON THE POOL AT THE COURT OF THE MYRTLES
Alhambra, Granada, Spain
The rain without warning
breaks my reflection
into El Greco longevity,
eyes ascend long and thin
to heaven in flickering impressions.
A young girl dances solea,
hands tracing “Allah”
in Moorish calligraphy
over the heads
of swimming goldfish light.
God in the detail,
or a god in the detail?
Three young brothers pose in what
comes back from water
as the image of Brahma
four heads, four arms,
and Goya’s Saturn,
devouring offspring
Soon, all reflections disappear.
What remains are the senseless,
random turns of goldfish.
Chris Pellizzari’s work can be found at Hobart, Lake Effect, and The Citron Review. Pellizzari is a member of The Society of Midland Authors.
Ron Wetherington
When All is Said and Done
When all is said and done, it may appear
That much is said to please the anxious ear
While less is done, alas, to meet that goal
And even that oft’ fails to please the soul.
Or sometimes words themselves cannot convey
The magnitude of what is meant to say,
While actions, less constrained, go far beyond,
Yet never find an end to correspond.
In fact, if all is said, there’s no debate;
If all is done, what’s left to advocate?
What options do we have, less absolute,
For mortals to agree and still dispute?
Suffice to say, there’s just this one:
When all that’s said is all that’s done.
Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology. He has published a novel, Kiva (Sunstone Press), and numerous short fiction, prose poems and literary essays. Read some of his work at https://www.rwetheri.com/
Lauren MacKinnon
The Never
child was a prevention was an imagined
golden burnt cyst singed in my deepest
fears & worries & wonderings
my mind couldn’t
bounce her any more gently
than my unmaternal
knee,
but oh, today’s caught
the untamed thought of her, flaming
meadow
& yard
& skeleton wood,
toe-soaked with muddy
emerald sod, summer air
waggling her inherited red hair.
I’ve grown her a home,
but quiet now; I can’t bear
this foamy idea:
a tiny banshee, a brutal
gloam
darkening my free, blank years—
& me, a yawning,
eye-bagged matron,
who colds love like a tender fib.
The unborn pip
is better off
a dudded vision.
I give this sinking
river to rest—
hand in froggy hand I hand her
over to the water. The same gel
daughters our wrists,
her sticky grasp loves leaving
fingerprints; one unearthly peck
of a sweet thumb remains in my fingers’ web.
Through this line
of precious,
slackening
wavelets:
her wild smile
veins a ripple. A ticking
marsh reed, a sundial
submerged.
Lauren MacKinnon is a writer from Oregon, whose work has previously appeared in Neologism, Poetry Northwest, and Bending Genres.
Ava Gordon
open shutter, dusk
I leaned close to a girl once and everything blurred the way a photograph does when the shutter stays open too long, our closeness becoming a landscape rather than an action / like standing at the edge / of a lake at dusk where you can’t tell / where the water ends and the sky begins, / and whatever passed / between us felt less like a moment / and more like weather, a pressure / change I sensed in my bones / my breath syncing to hers / the way train tracks run / parallel without touching yet still promise arrival, / and in that nearness I understood / queer love as a kind of apprenticeship / learning how to read omens in warmth and silence / how a glance can be a match hovering / just above the wick, how longing / can stretch like a horizon / you walk toward knowing / it will keep moving / and though nothing needed naming / my body stored it anyway / filed it under constellations and secret rooms / a soft unlearning of gravity where affection became an orbit / and I realized that sometimes / love doesn’t announce itself at all / it simply rearranges the furniture and leaves you / standing there, changed / carrying the quiet certainty / that some truths are written only once, in the mouth / and then echo forever.
Ava Gordon (she/they) is a lesbian poet studying Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. She was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and spends her time writing poetry that examines the beauty (and pain) of the human experience.
Kataryna Zharkovna
Changeling
Changeling
The forest’s murk and withered deeps will stay.
Choked in moss, my oak-clad Mother keens.
Cloak-clad I choke on my mother’s tonal keens.
The oak stump rots, velvet soft, on which she rocks.
Her voice, velvet soft — Rotting stump ringed by rocks.
The mark of your own, I know it. You’re not mine.
Mother, mark me your own — even I’m not mine.
Iron-shy, yes — but that horseshoe nail’s kiss stings.
Shoe the horse and nail your kiss to me, stinging —
I ache to be your child, mother, let me.
Does motherhood not ache to be yours, through me?
Uncurse me, embrace me; your child, your child.
Curse your embrace, unchild, not my child —
wither in your murky deeps. Here you stay.
Katarina Zharkovna is an emerging Serbian-Canadian poet based in Siberia. She lives in perpetual hope that metered rhyme in poetry will soon make a comeback in the popular literary sphere.
Brooks Lindberg
Wittgenstein’s Thesaurus:
the trout’s
black and gold eyes
are black and gold.
the wine-green lake
is wine-green.
muddy or
clear
a pond holds
the same number of fish and
streamlets
flowing
from a spring
are as clear as the spring.
frogsong
frogsong.
sink
into each thing itself—
what else do you need.
Brooks Lindberg lives in Washington state and practices tax law. His poems appear in Squawk Back, the Beatnik Cowboy, and elsewhere.