I buy an old city bus, which will / whisk me away from this sinkhole I’m circling.

Last night I dreamt of / walking to Auger Beach / at dusk / only to find the tide / too high again:

In this moment that has come to happen / in other moments, the notes / of birds nestled in my asking.

The new year begins in winter white embroidery— / trumpeter swans and needle-slim herons piercing / drainage ditches.

As I look out upon a landscape now heavily shaped by American colonialism, I know another world is possible.

A farmer with a wolf, a goat and a cabbage must cross a river by boat.

The year I meet granpa my hands mimic clouds. / Charybdis turning turpid pools / beneath his globes— vision I have awaited.

The Opera House power vault / blows and knocks out the local grid / on our first day of work together.

We don’t know. / Despite thousands of years spent / conceptualizing moralities of power, / theorizing hierarchies / or their abolition…

Teri Vela’s “Superstition Sonnet” invites readers to dispense with everything they think they know about the sonnet. It is not the rules of a form, but the warp and weft of intergenerational violence and prevailing softness that tethers these intricate lines together into a powerful reverse origin story.

In her dazzling suite of text poems, image poems, and art, Tina Lentz-McMillan designates the negative space in every page as an intimate collaborator in her story. Her speaker is an un-silenced witness: of obsession, desire, and the ache of longing—and of what (and who) lives on even in the liminal territory of erasure.

Michelle’s poetry and collage act as a bridge between beloved, departed souls, ancestors lost to undocumented histories, and unborn future lineages.

In a world where writers operate within the confines of page and word limits, Sionnain Buckley is a visionary without regard for parameters. In her poem, “The Time-Space Synesthete Draws You a Picture of What You Can’t See” Buckley renders a world where time has a shape, where every word has weight, and where the experience of glimpsing through the speaker’s vast, synesthetic scope will leave an indelible impression in your worldview.

Brian’s painting and poem unearths the depths of connecting with his inner child through the strokes of his paintbrush in an expansive, nonlinear process.

Madeleine Bazil’s poems toe the line between tenderness and unabashed longing. Intimate, urgent, prismatic—yet unassumingly brief—every word is threaded together with the precision of fate, and every stanza is a carefully-crafted room within the palace of the speaker’s vivid memory.