Tag: stanza

“wonder-struck” by Bridget Gordon

MPJ 
you will, at times
find yourself in defiance 
accidental or no
of grand celestial plans

regimes will rise to meet you 
vast empires of ruin
will array themselves 
against you

all because you had the nerve 
the absolute fucking gall
to exist where you might 
be seen

do not, under any circumstances
seek to return yourself 
to the false safety
of despair

instead
know that there are meadows 
waiting for us
that smell of apples and wildflowers

and soon, us
captured as we are by wanting 
like fireflies in the night
in the hands of the wonder-struck

Bridget Gordon (she/her, fae/faer) is a queer trans woman and emerging poet based in Chicago. A former MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she tried faer hand at sports journalism before settling into short-form writing about queer longing, identity, and liminality. Fae lives with her husband, metamour, cats, and a growing TBR pile.

“poem for drinking down that gin and kerosene” by nat raum

MPJ 
my firespit slicks bridges
for miles, i swear to you—

i am through with structures
that seek only to support

their kin. if my refusal
to go on like this forever

means i must build a town
of my own edifices, so be it.

i want baby blue and cotton
candy pink banners strung

up between the bank
and the fire station. i want

no cops, including the ones
in your head. in chemistry

class, we mixed metals
with bunsen burner flames,

made a rainbow of elements.
may copper and rubidium

ions decide to salt the surface
of this planet, cause a flurry

of proud flames when
the first molotov cocktail hits

the spans. i am past renewal,
past peaceful assimilation;

we must destroy to rebuild 
a world that could hold us.

nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of the abyss is staring back, random access memory, camera indomita, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.

“Prepping” by Matthew Murrey

MPJ 
I’ve done some: a little extra 
food and toilet paper socked away,
and cash in case cards won’t work. 

Better is the idea of cultivating 
being a neighbor—pitching in 
for the broken or the broke. 

She knows first aid. They raise bees. 
He is an expert at cultivating  
beans, greens, and fruit in the yard.

Of course I’ve considered guns, what 
country do you think I’m from? But bullets 
go only one way—no going back. Better

is the suggestion to pay attention 
to right now, the handbasket, and make it 
artful, sweet, and inviting all the way to hell.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in One, Anthropocene, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for more than 20 years, and lives in Urbana, IL with his partner.

“Summer Light with Migraine” by Donna Vorreyer

MPJ 
a horseshoe shovel

Something precious, pink shimmer of quartz in rough earth—
precious glimmerseed of memory. No lie, things have been rough.
Pink-cheeked fever, clustered stab of pain. But I’ve found here, in
shimmer and dirt, a slow sifting of time, a stalled second-hand, the quartz
of a Swiss watch stymied. When I close my eyes, I imagine a mound of
quartz where the garbage lies, where even trash cans shimmer
in the right light. How lucky to have known love, its gardens of pink,
rough caresses. Such delicate firmness. Both common and precious,
earth that blooms diamonds, stays fertile, alway growing something.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) & A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and co-edits of the online journal Asterales.

“We may think Bede” by Catherine Rockwood

MPJ1 Comment 
did or could not say what true speed was1  
without impossible foreknowledge of 
jet-bombers, lasers, a crouched F1 car.
But this morning two sparring sparrows flashed
past my dull head into a wet azalea
and in that wing-touched moment of departure
my soul spoke, Oh.

1 Viz. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.13 “The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter…”

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine. Two chapbooks of their poetry, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion and And We Are Far From Shore, are available from The Ethel Zine Press. A third chapbook, Dogwitch, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press.

“Midrash on Judges 15:4” by Reyzl Grace

MPJ 
I don’t know why I always imagined
the fields in dusk—the little flame-
tailed foxes dragging their torches
behind. Do you think, as they rushed from their doors,
the Philistines saw how beautiful it was?

It must have been: the purple twilight
crushed against the grain like the velvet
of a noblewoman in adultery, her robe slumped
to a mosaic floor; the breeze slipping
through the guard hairs of the foxes like a quiet kiss.

God, how we love what is in pain—how it reminds
us of youth. You know that the sun was created
setting on a Tuesday? I think Samson
knew . . . but where was I? Yes,
looking out on the fields, on stalks become candles, 

on foxes, coats rusting in the gloom 
against the golden crop. The rabbis
hunt every letter of Torah
for sport, shoot each with a thousand arrows,
yet the Talmud glosses this only once,

when R. Bar Abba tells us the fox
was a symbol of renegation—the only creature
that runs in reverse. But don’t we all?
Don’t we run from the Ark and the Tabernacle 
still turning toward them, enraptured? Yes.

We are on fire, but still must breathe—
little kits gulping air
as we twist and writhe around each other.
In a moment, all will be desolation and burnt
hair, but for now, it is lights gay

as summer bonfires, bobbing up
and down the rows of the vineyards and the oliveyards,
the rigid ranks of wheat and barley,
the tangled foxes snarling as they spin
and snap like firecrackers. How I wish

I could make you see it as I did—a child
who had lost nothing, felt nothing,
never asked what happened to the foxes. 
Sometimes I wish I had never asked.
Sometimes I think that the rabbis were wise.

Reyzl Grace (reyzlgrace.com / @reyzlgrace) is a poet/librarian with work in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other magazines, as well as an editor for Psaltery & Lyre. She lives in Minneapolis with her novelist girlfriend, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her girlfriend.)

“Once, Offhandedly, An Ex-Boyfriend Said He Hoped I Could Find Someone Who’d Be OK With Me Working on Sundays.” by Megan McDermott

MPJ 
after Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond, 1785

I teach you to look head-on at those looking at you, to not, in returning 

gazes, drop your palette or your work. Surely men will look at you 

with hopes of causing pause, so wear your daring dresses and your hats 

with feathers and look at them right back, with a look that tells everything: 

there is no me without this canvas or those who will learn over my shoulder.

Megan McDermott is the author of Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems and chapbooks Woman as Communion and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including Amsterdam Review, the Maine Review, the Christian Century, and more. She is an Episcopal priest in Massachusetts.

“Missing Parts” by Sam Rasnake

MPJ 
                   – after “It is essential… to undertake
                   the reconstruction of the primordial Androgyne
                   that all traditions tell us of… within ourselves.”
                   André Breton & Androgyne III
                   (1985, Magdalena Abakanowicz)


as if these definitions –

she and him, she and her, 
he and him, they and 
her, they and him, they
and them, she, they, him

– weren’t enough, the dark 
blurs of who, what, and why 

coil their supple excesses
through the night hours 
and behind walls – when
the heart only

knows the heart

Sam Rasnake is the author of Fallen Leaves (Ballerini Press, forthcoming), Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press) and Like a Thread to Follow (Cyberwit). His works have appeared in Wigleaf, Stone Circle Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, UCity Review, Best of the Web, Southern Poetry Anthology, and Bending Genres Anthology. Follow Sam: Bluesky @samrasnake.bsky.social.

“Shopping Music of the Gods” by Kyla Houbolt

MPJ 
Someone said hurdy gurdy heart
so of course I thought accordion heart,
vuvuzela heart, calliope heart.

Hello, heart, I say as it knocks
on my door.  What have you been
up to? Oh nothing much, says
heart, achingly.

We have broken much together,
heart and I, and yet we still
do not know each other
very well. I offer my kazoo.

Heart declines. Pulls out
a blues harp, says,
shut up them damn birds,
I got something to say.

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina, USA. “Shopping Music for the Gods” will appear in her full-length selected and new poems, Becoming Altar, forthcoming from Subpress in autumn 2025.