Sreeja Naskar
Unlearning the Monster
I still dream about the sound. The crack that split the air, the moment everything tipped. It lives in my body like marrow. I wake up gasping, the ghost of it curling beneath my ribs. There are nights I wonder if it ever really ended. The hand that struck. The voice that broke. I tell myself I was scared. That I didn’t mean it. But I did. Meaning blooms after the fact. I remember the way the silence came — thick, metallic. My name sounded different when they said it. My hands looked foreign, the veins straining through skin. I could trace the tremble like a fault line. But even that feels too kind. As if harm is a thing that simply happens. No, I was deliberate. My rage had teeth. It bit down. I see their face in flashes now. The way the light fractured through the window. The startled gasp, like a child learning the world is not safe. That the people who say they love you can become something else. I did that. I tell myself I’m trying. The therapy. The journals. The weeks I spend scouring the inside of my own head for some small, trembling reason. But there is no reason that fits. There is no story I can tell that makes it not true. I remember the way they flinched when I reached for them. How even tenderness felt like a threat. I haven’t touched them in months, or heard their voice outside the edges of memory. But the echo is there. I carry it with me. In the way I fold my hands, the way I hover at thresholds. I don’t know how to stop seeing what I’ve done. Even the sun through the blinds looks accusatory. Some days I convince myself I’m not the same person. That I’ve changed. Other days I know that’s a lie. What’s a changed person, anyway? Someone who learned how to bury it better? Someone who can say I’m sorry without their voice shaking? I could scrub myself down to the bone and still feel it. The worst part is the waiting. For the moment someone will call it out. You are not safe. I’ll nod. I’ll say I know. I wonder how long I will live like this. My own hands, foreign. My own name, a weight. I ask the mirror what it means to deserve forgiveness. It never answers.
Sreeja Naskar writes about the complexities of grief, memory, and the tender ache of growing up. Her work explores the spaces between love and loss, the intimate and the unsaid, the softness and the ache of being human. Her poetry has been featured in magazines like Poems India and Modern Literature.
Virginia LeBaron
Patients I Cannot Forget: The Man in the ICU
My stepsons want to know
on a lazy Sunday morning what is the worst thing
I’ve seen. The worst thing, they repeat
as if I am unsure, as if I will deny them
what is always perched precariously
on the crumbling cliff
of my memory. I nudge
around the periphery.
Ah, there are so many sad things…
This is unacceptable. They are greedy
for the details, want to run their long fingers through it, crush it
like grapes in their hands now bigger than ours.
No! Tell us the worst thing.
Their Dad nods, tops off my coffee, runs the disposal.
Well, there was a man in the ICU. They lean forward
backs separating from the couch, bare feet
pressed flat against the hard wood floor.
He had melanoma. He belonged to another nurse.
But the ward was open, you saw everything
like a pig sliced open, freshly slaughtered. Like a magic trick multiplied
in a room full of mirrors.
I didn’t usually work in the ICU, they were short-staffed.
I had never seen suffering covered by so many tubes.
It looked like someone had poured hot asphalt over his body, all the way
from his neck to his groin. It was black and lumpy and bleeding. Like a volcano erupted onto his chest.
They are astounded that cancer could push through a body
so completely, take over both the outside, and the inside.
But he was really sedated, right? He couldn’t feel anything. Right? They decide
that must be the case and look up at me with earnest eyes, like a dog
before it is kicked. I lie
Yes, yes, he was sedated. I have let them down
with the dilution. The verdict:
That’s not that bad. The axis
bends back, righting itself. My husband gets up for a second
cup of coffee. The mail slides through the slot in the front door.
The dog barks as it fans out across the floor, like it is the first time.
The boys want waffles.
Perhaps love lies in the shadows
we know to hold inside: he was tied to the bed rails
in soft white cuffs circling his wrists and ankles. For 12 hours
I watched him pull against them, writhing, screaming –
loudly at first and then more softly as he tired –
calling us what we were: demons, tormenters
unholy bitches
holding him to this earth.
Patients I Cannot Forget: LE
You flew into clinic like a razor blade: sharp and shiny and ready. I had seen you every three weeks
for months but that day I did not recognize you. See, I only knew you beaten down by MG-114,
the neon-yellow-not-yet-approved-but-that-we-dripped-into-your-veins-anyway chemo. A drug
so precious we squeezed Kelly clamps with their tiny teeth around the IV tubing to make sure
you got every last drop. The thing about a Phase I trial is that it isn’t designed to actually help anyone, just to be
sure we don’t kill them, I overheard the doctor say to you, leaning over your small body swallowed up
in the recliner. You were so weak you just took that. And on the other side of the curtain, I just
took it too. Complicit. All those days you moved full of gray with the world rooted to your
cachectic frame, I thought that was who you were. Only with the poison paused could you come out,
like butterflies after a hurricane, disbelieving the still air. Like a child into the first snow of the
season, or a dancer after the blitz, pirouetting in satin shoes through the wrecked streets, kicking up
ash, punching your way through the smoky air. I step aside to let you pass.
Virginia LeBaron is a nurse and a poet. She has published one chapbook (Cardinal Marks, Finishing Line Press, 2021) and her writing has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems can be found in the Winter Anthology, Pigeon Pages, Gyroscope Review, and One Sentence Poems (forthcoming).
Olivia Gash
if you get this text me back
Dear Friend,
You promised you would always be here for me,
but I’m finding it hard to believe you,
because your grave is twelve hours and thirteen minutes away.
I had a friend who was like a fish trying to escape her bowl
and I was there
but I was not there for her
because I wanted to watch tv.
During two truths and a lie,
my friend told us she was life flighted for swallowing batteries once,
and I’m starting to think I should ask her if that wasn’t the lie,
but I can’t because her grave is twelve hours and thirteen minutes away.
My friend texted me goodnight
and I ignored her message,
now no matter how hard I try
I never receive a response,
because it’s been three years
and she’s still sleeping.
Olivia Gash is a sophomore at Lebanon Valley College. She writes in her free time and takes care of a colony of feral cats to prepare for her future career as a Crazy Cat Lady.
Howie Good
Dog Eat Dog
Slaves were brought from Africa to mine salt. No one gives a shit. They’re serving cocktails outdoors on Deck 7 after a day in port. I’m seated at a table with my wife and two other couples, drinking a pina colada and calculating our respective status. We had taken a tour of the island in a hired van that morning. The driver said his name was Jude. His eyes were hidden behind very dark glasses. He chattered happily as the van rattled our spines. Damage to the roads from a hurricane and mudslides four years ago still hadn’t been repaired. We passed a small shack that sold “native” trinkets. An old black woman dozed on a stool in the shade of the doorway. To harvest cinnamon, Jude was saying, you must cut down the entire tree. Black men with hard faces under shoulder-length dreads loitered on corners. Meanwhile, spindly goats wandered around loose. There were no dogs to be seen; I presumed dogs got eaten. I was frankly relieved to get back on the cruise ship. We were even in time for team trivia in the Grand Salon. The string of typographical symbols (%@$&*!) used in comic strips as a substitute for an obscenity is called a “grawlix.”
Howie Good’s most recent poetry books are The Dark and Akimbo, both available from the Berlin publisher Sacred Parasite.
Jane Grovijahn
Homage that Hurts
Ripped.
Slit.
Robbed.
Ragged.
Now exhausted by words
poured out empty,
into ordinary endings
of an elegy sung in silence.
I am becoming a war memorial,
where others
preach forgiveness.
Dr. Jane Grovijahn is a published theologian and trauma scholar. She does theology from a place of pain and possibility (is female in social imaginary of misogyny, is queer in place of Christian nationalism that denies her sacred birthright, is sexual abuse survivor in world that normalizes gender-based violences directed especially at female+ persons). She knows well the holiness of how to navigate a body dredged by others. Restless within tombs of other’s making, she now resides in sturdy structures of delight built from those places within us often hardest to relish but bursting with unpredictable pleasures. Here the power of wounds continues to surprise her with its call to community, rising into collective, riotous rites of repair.
Kate Morgan
Paintbrushes abandoned
on the boulevard
instead of hydrants
kept in service
as budget crises created by
the untrained loomed
long before flames licked
habitations.
Kate Morgan is a U.S. Veteran, humanitarian, and scholar who has many published works, including award winning poems and films.
Baani Minhas
Clutching My Umbrella, I Walk Home
I detest the itchy, debilitating lava that oozes through my veins,
hauling along every memory fashioned in its merciless mold.
It freely seeps from my limbs until I am a helpless soldier in retreat.
A paralyzing primal instinct that I cannot afford to serve.
Desperate imaginations of packing it into my appendix
to be removed, thinking I’d walk away lighter.
If only it could take a nap, drift along a cool
lazy river, and trust my control.
Long enough that I can wrap up my spring cleaning,
this man has seen enough of my seasons in this mutant fragile form.
I just need to release a few of the words chained and shackled
together in my throat, yanking against my spine to be unfettered.
The metal links will come apart, scattering into bullets,
clinking as they hit cold floor, then finally a crisp silence.
He’ll be the aftermath of a small victory in a quiet war, the true struggle.
One of the bodies strewn on the floor to be dragged away.
All before I have something else to fear,
and the lava flows again.
Before I succumb to it
once more.
Baani Minhas recently graduated from the University of California, Merced and currently lives in the Central Valley. Baani’s love for storytelling often finds its expression in poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in Harmony Magazine and Agora Magazine.
Michael Roque
The Assembly Line Flow
Steel slab after steel slab
guided, slid, shoved
into a push press
expected to deliver
on loose screws and bolts,
thirty seconds of ear-shattering bangs per sheet.
Bang!
Bang!
Eyes, mind closed to own smoke—
Overheat—
but maintain top speed.
Slow down, breathe—
become obsolete.
Move and manufacture,
produce and progress
till guide, slide, shove
devolves to push, pull,
snap back on a fallen piece
Till each steel slab
on assembly line’s flow
spawns a sob
masquerading as a rattled screech.
Bang!
Bang!
till screaming prayers to remain composed—
on shifts one through three—
looped on an endless repeat.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives in the Middle East and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary magazines like North Dakota Quarterly, Cholla Needles, The Literary Hatchet and others.
Âmî Jey
Playtime Observations
I kneel beside blocks, building towers,
fragile structures, toppling truths.
A small hand brushes mine,
desperate for something solid,
something that will not fall.
His eyes dart to the corner,
where screens flicker stories
he doesn’t belong to.
He is a shadow in his own home—
quiet, still, forgotten.
I hear her voice like an echo:
“I can’t take this behavior anymore.”
Normal, wild, restless behavior—
like a sapling bending toward light.
She clips the branches,
calls the roots unruly.
But I see her, too.
Worn thin, emptied out,
buried beneath routines—
work, feeding, bathing, cleaning.
She holds up the world
and cannot hold herself.
I count breaths. Swallow words.
He doesn’t deserve to be soil for blame.
And yet, I cannot save him
with finger paints and praise.
When the session ends, I gather my notes,
and a part of myself too—
the child who wanted someone
to stop the leaving.
I tell him he did well.
He looks at me as if I’ve given him
an entire sky—his first glimpse of blue.
But the door closes.
Behind it, silence grows weeds.
Screens hum lullabies.
A mother’s exhaustion seeps
into the walls.
And I sit in my car, staring at my hands,
knowing I cannot untangle roots
that were planted long before I arrived.
Yet I carry the weight
of wanting to be more than a visitor—
of hoping that I leave behind enough seeds
for him to find his own way
out of the weeds.
I drive away
with the echoes of towers falling,
and the silent scream
of what I cannot fix.
And still,
I build again.
Âmî Jey is an occupational therapist and poet whose work blends professional expertise with a passion for poetry. She explores themes of resilience, healing, identity, and caregiving, advocating for emotional well-being, self-reclamation, and the transformative power of vulnerability.
Billie Dee
Pediatrics
Back in the day I’d pull double shifts at the County Hospital, then race home to my waiting lover,
shower, dress, dance all night in that smokey little dive off Sunset Boulevard—limp home, nap,
shower, dress, repeat. . .
my last day
in the Emergency Room
tooth marks
on an infant’s thigh
wide as her father’s grin
Billie Dee is the former Poet Laureate of the U.S. National Library Service. A retired health-care worker, she earned her doctorate from UC Irvine, did post-graduate training at UCSD and UCLA. A California native, she now lives in the Chihuahuan Desert with her family and a pack of strays. Billie publishes both online and off. www.billie-dee-haiku.blogspot.com
This poem first appeared in haikuKatha (2023).
Natasha Del Bianco
Trudeau meets Trump at Mar-a-Lago (circa 2024)
Found poem from O Canada (lyrics: Calixa Lavallée, Adolphe-Basile Routhier, Robert Stanley Weir), The Star Spangled Banner (lyrics: Francis Scott Key), and This Land is Your Land (lyrics: Woody Guthrie)
native land
command thee rise,
glorious
the perilous fight
the rockets
the bombs bursting
this land was made for me
that ribbon of highway
that endless skyway
that golden valley
a voice sounding—
a big, high wall
this land was made for me
Natasha Del Bianco lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is a queer mother, a legal writer, a part-time poet, and a full-time dreamer. With deep gratitude and respect, I am honoured to be learning and unlearning on the ancestral and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) & səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation).
Howie Good
2 Dead, 6 Wounded
Her name was Natalie. They called her Samantha. Natalie/Samantha was 15.
There’s talk she was bullied. She attended a private Christian academy,
Abundant Life. 2 killed, 6 wounded in Wisconsin school shooting,
the headlines said. Natalie/Samantha was dead but uncounted
in the tally of victims, excluded from our sympathy,
banished below. Even as I’m thinking these things
I’m debating if these are things I should be thinking.
Natalie/Samantha shot and killed a teacher and
a student and then herself. She brought the gun from home.
Investigators are looking for a possible motive.
Christmas was only just about a week away.
Howie Good is author of the poetry book, The Dark, available from Sacred Parasite, which will also publish his book, Akimbo, in 2025.
Alaina Hammond
Two Gentiles Discussing Hitler
“To understand all is to forgive all,”
he says, from the rocking chair he’s more than earned.
In response, I internally roll my eyes—
though outwardly, I’m polite.
Because I’m a philosophy major.
And I’m twenty.
So, I know everything.
But then I remember:
when he was eighteen,
a freshman at Harvard,
he dropped out of college to fight Hitler.
He was shot down over France.
His life saved by German soldiers—
not quite Nazis,
just men on the wrong side of a divided line,
still doing their duty for the burning enemy before them.
Shipped back to America,
he survived nearly a year of surgery.
At the end, adorned with a Purple Heart,
a weak apology for the dent in his forehead.
Barely anything left of his ears
Just a bit of cartilage remains,
to hug the holes.
“To understand all is to forgive all,”
he repeats with soft authority.
Hitler is the reason children gawk at him.
If he needs to forgive Hitler—
then who the fuck are you, at twenty,
to spit on his forgiveness?
I tell my uncle I hear his point,
even as I disagree.
He’s a lawyer and a soldier.
A hero in practice and on paper
he wouldn’t want me to lie.
Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and visual artist. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.
Darrell Petska
Minding Snakes
The snakes we keep
wriggle and writhe
as if they want to be free,
and given a crack, a fissure
they’ll find it, slithering
into the wilds to hunt,
drawing us after their
devious scales we’ve named
according to their personalities:
Come, Invidious!
Greeneyes, show yourself!
Killer, best get on home!
True to their names, they’ll
bite perceived enemies, though
they’re wont to circle back
to our confining cages
where they thrived
on the vermin we fed them.
Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Verse-Virtual, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Midwest Zen, and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.
Arvilla Fee
Soldier Pieces
His hands shake
as I pass him the bowl,
his eyes darting
from side-to-side.
I speak gently to him,
like a negotiator
poised on a windowsill
coaxing a man
from the ledge.
He relaxes for a moment,
sucks in a deep breath,
releases it,
picks up his fork.
His face looks the same—
half shadows, half flame
from the candles I’d lit;
yet I know it isn’t.
There are worry lines
etched into his brow,
framing the corners
of his mouth,
his once bright smile.
There is a guardedness,
one I must accept
as I gather the pieces
to help make him whole.
Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio with her husband, children, and two dogs. Her works have been widely published and appear most recently in Wilderness House Literary Review and others. Her books The Human Side and This is Life are available on Amazon. To learn more, visit http://www.soulpoetry7.com
Jean Biegun
Reparation
A poem, in my eyes, is a public document of experience
—meant to be shared …an invitation to think hard
about the human condition …. —Tim Seibles, PoemoftheWeek.com, October 5, 2007
I want to apologize for my mother’s Uncle Henry whom I overheard say “black plague” back in the mid-50s when I was nine or ten, escaping from Chicago heat to stay for the summer with Aunt Bern and him in their rural Wisconsin town, population still under 200. I thought he meant sickness, that plague that killed so many in Europe I read about in my textbook. Then a decade later his meaning came clear. So finally, here in this fast, spiraling new century … to George, Trayvon, Breonna, Sandra, Martin, always Martin, and every other soul whose name should be overheard by children everywhere, I grievously apologize for Uncle Henry’s violence—he the tall, skinny, gruff, white-haired farmer who held my small hand when I was four on special walks to the general store for vanilla cones, who ate runny eggs every morning and poured new honey on soft fresh bread, donned clean overalls for Sunday service and taught me how to crack hickory nuts on the anvil—he whose toothless grin and gentle twinkle I think I had loved.
Jean Biegun’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her second chapbook Edge Effects was published in 2024 (Kelsay Books). Work recently has been published in Third Wednesday, As It Ought To Be, Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken, and Thin Places and Sacred Spaces: A Poetry Anthology, Amethyst Press.