by Anthony Wilson

Piano notes
arrange themselves

with help
from you

playing them
in twos

and threes
then pause

before coming
home again

in twos 
and threes

fresher than
before and

exactly the 
same except

you played
them not 

knowing what
came next



____

Anthony Wilson’s most recent books are The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019) and Deck Shoes, a collection of essays (Impress Books, 2019). In 2015 Anthony published Lifesaving Poems (Bloodaxe Books), after his blog of the same name. www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com

by Raye Hendrix

for M

Today was promised snow
but the sky is pure

as the purest robin’s egg
inverted, sun a yolk. 

This morning before the light
approached the window

my lover left me
to make the coffee (strong

the way I like it) then
came back to kiss me 

on the mouth. Today 
there is no snow

but it is so cold 
it doesn’t occur to the ice

that holds the fish at the harbor 
market to melt. Today

the wind comes from the west
so the market doesn’t smell 

of sea life, but of sea, so
the mongers are pleasant. 

Today the Russian man
who sells piroshkies and never 

smiles sells piroshkies
and smiles. I buy two of his

piroshkies and he gives 
a third for free. Today 

my lover lights my candles,
surprises me with cake.  

My sadness is so large I can’t 
find anything to hold it. 



____

Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. Her debut micro-chapbook, Fire Sermons, is due out this Summer from Ghost City Press. Raye is the winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and Southern Indiana Review’s 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and in 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Auburn University and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Raye is a PhD student at the University of Oregon studying Deafness, Disability, and Poetry. You can find more of her work at rayehendrix.com.

by Ankh Spice

Begin again—born to cold-swaddle-
sea and she wraps me to nurse

this grievance with gravity.
The sinews of snap-and-blast

let go. Grit floats from my hinges.
It is very early, the water’s skin

thinned to eyelid, and whole worlds cradle
rocking behind the fold. I ‘gator, sightline only

for the ripple, smalled disrupt
of my body mapped

onto hers. All the disquiet
I am, she writes larger, out and out

forever but gentle as a pulse 
of jellyfish and yes out here

I understand the thumb 
on every scale heavy

more than anywhere else. 
Rain begins. She embraces each child

as he falls, soon overcome
by a chatter of circles, spreading

brief astonishment— O, O, O—
then, again, murmured part of her vast. Me

too, me, too. No way to tell
why my face is wet.



____

Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed, queer-identified poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His work has been published widely, with several poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is a joint winner of the Poetry Archive WorldView2020 competition. He’s a co-editor at Ice Floe Press, a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine, and shares a lot of (often-moist) photography and poetry on Twitter @SeaGoatScreamsPoetry, or on Facebook @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry. You’ll find quite a lot of his published work here: https://linktr.ee/SeaGoatScreamsPoetry.

by Lily Greenberg

Lightning chaser, maker of pies, 
she who reminds violins how to sing— 
 
none of that matters here. Naked, 
we become unknown to each other. 
 
Thrown water on fire, a blanket of heat, 
and we are ten women sighing in the dark. 
 
Hole in the ice tonight. Chatter spins  
its wheel (will you, won’t you?) tires out. 
 
Full, empty, these melt into simple words. 
We are young birch twigs gathered into a whisk, 
 
night birds layering question and song, 
the weak call of the shofar, we are laughing. 
 
We do not think, charge stinging feet  
through the snow and plunge. Electric, 
 
back again, awake. What falls from us, 
this clearing, we carry in our eyes.  


____

Lily Greenberg is a poet and writer from Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Hobart, storySouth, Third Coast Magazine, and Hole in the Head Review, among others. She is a 2021 Breadloaf scholar and the recipient of the 2021 Dick Shea Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Jennifer Militello. Lily holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire, and lives in Portland, Maine where she is working on her debut book of poems. Find her on Twitter @lily_greenberg.

by Dina Strasser

I want to be a cider house. 
I want to be drunk and hold the apples of generations.

I want to be a chicken coop because
one side must be fully paned
fully open to any light. 

I want to be a potato cellar.
Warm, long and low. 
A house for people
cut off at the knees . 

I want to be 
nowhere near the manse.

I want
to seem to serve singular 
and unlinked
out in the rape fields,
horses pacing in the hot walker in the morning mist
as if alone. 

I want to be an old log corn crib.
Cradling the seeds to sleep.
Arms wider than my feet, to shed the rain.


____

Dina Strasser teaches English to K-12 students who speak other languages. Dina serves as a reader for LongLeaf Review and the ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment) Journal of Oxford University. 

by Stephanie K. Merrill 

I am keeping faith in seaweed 
now the kelp, the dulse, the nori, the alaria
manifesting salt from the sea
for this salt of the earth flesh
this ocean this deep dive of cells.
I am eating billions of years backwards.
Everything in the sea is the sea.
Everything in the body is the body
opening doors to all that roars in the waves
in the healings in this sudden archive of grief
in these carnival days in these carnival names
in these carnival stalls called loss. Every night now I dine
with the porpoises, with the turtles, with the manatees 
among tender curtains swaying just below high-water mark
these oxygen-chanting relics from the seed millennia
this fresh home with all its ancestral essential hopefulness.


____

Stephanie K. Merrill has poems published in The Rise Up Review, Blue Heron Review, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in the June 2021 issue of UCity Review. Stephanie K. Merrill is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a retired high school English teacher. She lives in Austin, Texas. 

by Mary Ardery

You cross just before dusk. January water
floods your boots, surges up to your knees,
then pierces your thighs. Goosebumps
rise like ridges on a map. You still shiver
even after changing into dry clothes.
Remove your gloves to give night meds
and feel your hands ache in the freezing air,
a bone-deep throbbing as you twist countless lids
off pill bottles, your fingers clumsy with cold.
When the women lumber drowsy to their tents,
their keychain lights blink on and off and on,
blue dots breaking the distant black.
Meanwhile, the river rushes on, a lullaby
that haunts you like children sweetly singing
in a trailer for a movie where no one survives.


____

Mary Ardery is originally from Bloomington, Indiana. “Song of the River in Winter” is about her time working as a field guide for a wilderness substance abuse program in North Carolina. More of her work appears in Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,” Fairy Tale Review, Cincinnati Review’s “miCRo” series, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. You can visit her at maryardery.com.

by Jessica Coles

too much happens imperfectly
rain clouds serve uncountable deities

with acolytes in brown robes who don’t 
know how to drink what they spill

I can’t find a hymn that sings
perfection as a multiplicity of peonies

months out of green, grass serves 
brown’s purpose while I untangle

from ugliness, dig toes into dust’s wisdom
invent plainsong prayers for rain

wait for an old goddess to tell me 
what makes water spillable

what imperfect droplet transforms
the song in earth’s throat


____

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and editor-on-hiatus, from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6 territory), where she lives with her family and her judgmental tuxedo cat. Her first chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate (Prairie Vixen Press), was published in late 2019. Her poetry has also appeared in Prairie Fire Magazine and Write (The Writers’ Union of Canada).

by William Woolfitt

after Kimiko Hahn’s “Mine: a crazy quilt of men from West Virginia”

I cannot see with your eyes, but I let 
your poem’s grainy images take me 
to barstools, coffee, miners, the kitchen 
of Fred Carter, disabled black foreman 
from Fayette County, who organizes 
the black lung movement, never quits. 
There’s Carter in his godfather hat 
and green suit with white stripes—
there, a woman saying her town smells 
like oven cleaner, the plant’s fumes 
give her polyps—there, men waiting for 
x-rays and tanks, the blood gas test. 
Carter says, miners don’t die of natural 
causes in West Virginia. I try to know 
dust that soots and rips the soft air sacs, 
tars blood and spit—that chokes Carter 
as he says the heart gets overworked, 
calls for jailing coal operators who ruin 
miners, the water, the air. I drive icy 
roads through hollers, ribs of rock,
the curves gauzy, the steep asphalt 
busted, the drifts dirty as lungs.


____

William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer University Press, 2020).

by H.E. Fisher

When the boy was little, • Chicory • there was no sewage treatment 
plant  in town. • Green Adder's Mouth • Raw sewage went into the creek.                 
• Woodland Lettuce • The creek curves around the town • Creeping Myrtle    
• like a horseshoe • Tall Hairy Agrimony • and was a tributary of a great 
river. • Puttyroot Orchid • The river was polluted • Western Pearly 
Everlasting • with nitrates • Twoleaf Anemone • from farm runoff and 
waste water • Galax • from industries like steel production. • Thimbleweed   
• Nitrates are found in fertilizers and explosives. • Liverleaf • Mercury and 
PFOA, • Blue Toadflax • a chemical used in making Teflon, • Pale Meadow 
Beauty • also polluted the river. • Broadleaf Arrowhead • Like all               
the children in town, • Thimbleflower • the boy swam in the creek. • Doll's    
Eyes • His father fished in the creek. • Golden Glow • The creek was the 
source • Trout Lily • of the townspeople’s water • Clasping Bellwort •         
for drinking, • Baneberry • washing laundry, • Blueweed • and for bathing.         
• Spike Gayfeather • Many of the living beings • Wild Comfrey • near the 
creek and river • Summer Lilac • got sick. • Appalachian Barren Strawberry  
• Still, wildflowers grew along the bank. • Widow’s Frill • The boy could  
name them. • Hot-rock Beardtongue • Sometimes he would pick some      
to bring home for his mother. • Small Bonny Bellflower • She would put   
the wildflowers in a clear glass vase • Cancer Drops • and fill the vase    
with tap water • Coalwort • which traveled in a system of pipes • Sorrel •              
from the creek • Wild Yam • to her kitchen sink. • American Bluehearts 

____

H.E. Fisher‘s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Miracle Monocle, SWWIM, Canary, Feral, and Dream Pop Journal, among other publications. H.E. is pursuing her MFA at City College of New York, where she was awarded The Stark Poetry Prize in Memory of Raymond Patterson. H.E. lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.