ALLEN SEWARD

we felt ashamed of our nakedness

tho’ we were not naked,

the thought was enough for us:

the thought of our bare souls,

of our soft jelly souls,

the thought of vulnerability, of truth

or something like it,

the thought of our hiding places being ransacked,

all our precious secrets being tossed

out into the dry air and sunlight.

it was enough to do us all in.

one by one by one we fell

from our branches

and armchairs,

from our windowsills,

from deck railings and rooftops,

from wherever it was we had climbed to,

and even that was not enough,

or too much.

we mulled over our wretchedness

but came to terms with nothing.

we put on masks so we could hide

our faces away

and look but not be seen,

or at least not be looked at.

and we fell again.

lower, lower, lower.

it became warm, and then hot,

and then it became cold again

only for us to, finally,

land in a pile of others—many others—

who were just the same as us.

we tried to sleep but could not sleep

because we were ashamed of our nakedness

tho’ we were not naked,

had never been naked.

and the sounds this pile of us all made

were enough to wake the dead.

the dead ones came to us

and complained,

told us to keep quiet,

but we could not keep quiet.

it was too much for us,

the thought of our bare souls.

it was enough to do us in.

is a poet from the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He is the author of multiple poetry collections, including "the grimy job called living" and "throw it into the fire and dance." He currently resides in WV with his partner and five cats. @AllenSeward1 on Twitter, @allenseward0 on Instagram 

After his dog dies, my father searches

for wisdom about death

in short stories I wrote as a student.

He texts me to ask about the purpose

of a mysterious typo

in the tale of a hearse driver whose

wife has died, asks me to explain

a mythological motif in the story

of the man who collects coins

in Hades. I want to tell him

that these stories are not a place

to seek wisdom,

that I was in college and

fairly stupid.

But I have been reading Moby-Dick again,

which begins with a typo in the forward—

long before “Call me Ishmael”—

Melville’s made-up word for “whale”

that roughly translates, instead, to

“grace.”

And I’ve been reading Barthes,

who suggests that killing the author

is the only way the reader can live.

And this is why I do not tell my father

that my old writing will not teach him anything

meaningful about grief.

Instead, I tell him about the beginning

of Moby-Dick, its mistranslated grace,

while I picture a G-d who looks back

at the Torah sometimes in shame,

wishes he could edit a line or two,

while his rabbis grip the Book tighter,

yell up to Him, Lo ba-shamayim hi!

No, no, it is not in heaven!

All of it is here.

Note the little guest

hiding on the yellow gourd

on the bottom right

I relineate my father’s text

into a haiku beneath the photos

he has sent the family group chat—a deluge

of gourds flowering in his front yard,

almost miss the noted guest—a frog,

thimble-small clinging

to the mass of greening gourd—

my father, who is always sending us photos—

last week, tiny orange shoes

on his aging dog’s front feet,

in frame next to his own orange sneakers—

“matching kicks”—

my childhood dog, whom he gently diapers

at night like an infant

before waking at six to let him out

of the crate he built so many years ago.

I can see him now, toweling down

our incontinent dog’s old wet fur;

he deposits the towel in the washer,

then steps outside into the predawn

to check on the growth of his gourds.

is a North Carolinian poet, teacher, and penguin enthusiast. You can find his poetry with The Jewish Book Council, Psaltery&Lyre, and Gashmius.

By thirty, your days will be sliced in chunks by the clock’s knife blades.

Each hour, laid out like instructions in a recipe.

The same bland dish, eaten one day after the next.

                                    Idealism, squeezed from a tube for forty years, eventually crusts

                                    and dries. Passion devolves into a cliché on your resume.

Innumerable nights of insomnia will scrape your mind blank,

grinding it from a cusped scythe to a dull butterknife.

                                    Creativity will drip off your desk, leak onto manila folders, pooling in a

                                    puddle on the carpet. Taking its place, a robot will squat in your brain.

In youth, you filled journals with vivid dreams. By middle age, you’ll waken with scraps and feathered traces, tendrils of fear, an aching jaw. The leftover pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, unfinished.

                                    Over the course of your life, you will spend more time looking

                                    at a screen than at your child’s face.

Excellence is a bulb that forever hangs too high on its cord, just out of reach.

                                    Gluttony for love will lead you astray. Two loves cancel each other out.

Your mind becomes a commodity, auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Just another flavor of prostitution.

                                    With reluctance, you’re pulled into work’s addictive game.

                                    By retirement, half a century later, you won’t know what else to do with yourself.

For decades you can almost fly, clutching the feathered underside of talent’s wing.

                                    Your size-four dress from college, kept dusted with hope in your closet,

                                    waiting for the day when you’d finally lose those twenty pounds, will see

                                    daylight only when dropped off at Goodwill after your funeral.

Empathy will be milked from you daily,

an ingredient in someone else’s pie you’ll never taste.

                                    Those dreams of helpless animals— kittens, ducklings, squirming rabbits

                                    in a nest, always withering. One day, they will evaporate entirely,

                                    swallowed into night’s gaping gullet.

You’ll placate bitterness through drink, or sex, or art.

Moist flakes of resentment harden to pebbles, accumulate,

erecting an iron mountain in your belly.

                                    Liquid words, which used to weep freely from your pen, will catch on

                                    your fingers, desiccate before they congeal on the page.

You’ll cut yourself to pieces and give them away:

breasts to your baby, legs to your dog, arms to your daughter,

ears to your husband, your brain to a boss who doesn’t deserve it.

Some days you’ll feel this as a noble sacrifice, others an enslavement.

                                    By forty, you’ll finally discern what you should have done with your life.

Love’s room will get smaller and tighter, cramped and narrow,

shrinking to a box the size of a casket.

                                    Motherhood is a gamble. Your son may or may not remember a

                                    thousand bedtime stories, rocking chair rhymes, lullabies during

                                    midnight fevers. He will certainly remember the three times you lost

                                    your temper.

You may devote years of love and labor to a child who, if you’re lucky,

calls you once every third Sunday.

                                    Virtue, supposedly the path to happiness, narrows to a tube littered

                                    with needles.

Little pains, carried in your body, amass over time:

the throbbing molar, a growl in the lower back,

stiff neck, bunions, tight thumb nagging until it’s cracked,

a child’s red and screaming face, spite spewed from a beloved’s mouth.

                                    You’ll never decide whether love is a tether fastening you to earth,

                                    or the harness of a trap, holding you back from the stars.

After retirement, you’ll whittle away afternoons in an armchair, shrouded in the static between wake and

sleep, drifting into a shallow slumber devoid of dreams.

                                    By eighty, you will become unhealthily attached to your cat.

Your fingers will clutch and ache at the piano’s keys.

Your voice, once a honey-dipped arrow, sticks in your throat

like a jammed door, wedged in grime and dust.

                                    Novels will take too much concentration.

                                    More often, you’ll sit alone in front of the crying rectangle.

                                    Little by little, your native language devolves into a foreign tongue.

People will drift in and out of your house to change your catheter and your linens, monitor your pills,

bring you groceries. You will almost remember their names.

                                    Soup dilutes on the tongue. Sugar’s sharp hook dulls.

                                    Losing your appetite, you’ll finally achieve slenderness

                                    when it no longer matters.

You’ll scour the clock, obsess the hours, fret your doctor’s appointments, the pills you may or may not

have taken, the movement of your bowels, drive patience from your husband with repeated thoughts stuck

in tired, churlish ruts.

                                    Each Sunday, you will attend church more devotedly,

                                    with mounting desperation.

You’ll know you’re nearing the end of days

when you prefer silence’s drone to melody,

when words become slippery on the tongue,

when joy no longer leaks from December’s lavender sunrise.

works as a grant writer in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her poetry has been published in Richmond Magazine as a finalist in the 2021 Shann Palmer Poetry Contest, awarded by James River Writers, in the 2024 Poetry Society of Virginia anthology, and in literary journals Ekstasis, Arkana, The Ekphrastic Review, The Piker Press, The Write Launch, Neologism Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Literary Mama, Uppagus, and Lullwater Review.

She’d put up peaches, tomatoes, and pickles,

and they’d sit in an apothecary posture

of tinctures and viscera in the basement.

The air was as fertile as laying beds,

an ethic of wet wood, of mold and hay,

mushroom plum and musk,

full of spotted brown and blameless eggs.

Layered there, her preserved mine,

enclosed tunnels of lost rituals

accessed by a decaying stair,

out of view in a waving dark:

her youngest son’s papers, his socks,

old jokes, old cassettes, matchboxes,

jars of peaches, tomatoes, and pickles.

is a writer and art curator living in Los Angeles. He has published widely, including in the L.A. Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, The Blue-Collar Review, The Nonconformist, and Frieze. His first collection of poetry, Letters Apart, was published by Dopplehouse Press in 2023. @icallitoranges 

I learned the word sternum in movement class.

The center of my chest. We were supposed 

to imagine one string attached there, one 

at the top/back of the head, and a third 

at the keister: three strings up to the sky

and an imaginary puppeteer

lifting on them so we would stand up straight,

our spines aligned, weight over balls of feet,

all that good stuff. It seems we wear our lives—

past pains, abuses, sadness, fears, and so 

on—in our bodies, tension here and there,

and it screws up our posture. This makes it 

impossible to create a character

onstage true to the character: without

the physical manifestation of 

our personal baggage having to be

hauled, unrelated to whatever role

it was. We must learn to 'get to neutral'

first, then build from there (a valuable

skill in life, too, it would seem). Well, we all

got to neutral by the end of that class;

it took a smattering of gasps and tears.

But this was when undergrads were like friends,

and talked, confided in each other, helped

each other deal with baggage of all sorts.

So later I found out about the lives

of classmates: rapes, attempted rapes, assaults,

violent parents, teachers shaming them

because of breast size (large or small), boyfriends

fucking them over—all that, visible

in how we stand and walk, leading with which

part of the body. Concave posture meant

almost always a problem with one's weight,

for instance. I related to that. So

ever since that class I have rolled my spine 

just about every day. But till today

I never thought to share what sternum meant

to me: when I was just about to say

that day in movement class. "Oh, that is where

you place the point of the machete—I

still feel the point of that machete—right

before you try to plunge it in."

My father's World War Two machete from 

The Philippines hung in our basement play-

room, well within my reach when I was five

and six and seven and eight and nine and ten.

Quite handy for those moods of bottomless

despair. I'm only sharing this in case

it's interesting to you, and, I suppose,

because I can—and should, perhaps. On that,

I'm not quite sure. But since I'm clearly still

alive, it hardly matters anymore

's nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. Recent nonfiction can be found on-line at Heimat Review, About Place, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Unlikely Stories and Lowestoft Chronicle; fiction, at Epistemic, 10 x 10 Flash Fiction, Neither Fish Nor Foul, The GroundUp, and Sine Qua Non. The latest of his eight full-length poetry collections (2014-23) are Fires of Heaven, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. A graduate of Yale, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller's People's Choice award, a Best of Net and a Rhysling Award nomination, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels both stunned and grateful.

If we are all prisoners in jails built of our own

devices, I am yesterday's young yowling like

a coyote in yellow fields of yarrow. I am far

from the maddening chatter, blind glint

of bar lights on bare teeth. I am far from wherever

tomorrow's sun kisses first. Even cowgirls

get the blues, and mine are the kind of indigo

wildflower we're not supposed to pick, but I do

'til my fingers are bouquets of gypsophila

and blister. I come back to Texas every April

for the bruise. One day I'll come home,

and there will be no bluebonnets, no buttercups,

no Indian paintbrushes left to pluck or pollen

my nose into a lightning bug. Will you still love me

when the plains are fallow, when I drain my teeth

of venom and gun of bullets? Tell me yes, darling.

Tell me you, darling, hand pressed to my eroding

chest. Tell me slow steam mornings and porch swing

nights; that the poetry isn't all I am made of.

was born with salt in her wounds. She flushes the sting of living by writing poetry. She is the author of five poetry collections, and her work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Exposition Review, Full House Literary, Watershed Review, and elsewhere. She received first place in Sad Girl Diaries’ 2023 Fall Poetry Contest and the 2022 John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize. Kait is an Editorial Associate at Yellow Arrow Publishing. She enjoys cats, repetition, coffee shops, tattoos, and vegan breakfast. Kait lives in Minneapolis with her partner and their very polite Aussie mix. Find her at kaitquinn.com.

Unaware of their chains, arrayed they stood

In their world of false impressions

The oracle spoke:

“Incensed, when faced with truth, they will be

sturdy resistance they will mount

dither for a while

then swiftly sink back”

Those were her words – then cymbals crashed.

The prison’s thick walls vanished,

its locked doors opened flung.

Yet, still, they chose to stay.

comes from Greece where she is a published book author, script writer and playwright. Internationally, she has contributed to four poetry collections published by Scars Publications, The Poet, and Adelaide Literary Magazine. Some of her poems, flash fiction stories and essays have been featured in Bright Flash Literary Review, Flash Fiction North, The Penwood Review, Balestra Magazine, Candlelit Chronicles, Uppagus, Litbreak Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Brazen Head, The Daphne Review, The Stray Branch,  The Cannon's Mouth, Aphelion, Ascendency Literary Magazine, Eskimo Pie, Mediterranean Poetry, Twist & Twain, Ariel Chart, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Sentinel and Tri-Town Tribune.

You’re standing in the checkout line holding a sack of limes, bright, cold, sweating in your palms like they know something—and you realize the cashier is your boyfriend.

Not metaphorically. Not in the “wow, everyone looks the same in this city” sense.

I mean literally your boyfriend, wearing a long chestnut wig that sways with the confidence of hair that has never belonged to him.

He scans your limes with the bored precision of someone who has already lived through every version of your grocery habits. And then, because reality in your twenties is generous with its derangements, you notice him again, bagging your groceries in a bald cap pulled so tight across his skull it looks like a bad choice he made in a past life.

He lifts your bananas, inspects their greenness, and gives you a disappointed dad-face, as if ripeness is a moral failure. Okay, bad afternoon, weird coincidence, full moon, maybe dehydration? Except it doesn’t stop.

All week long, you don’t run into a single person who isn’t your boyfriend. Your boyfriend in bleached hair hands you a paper cup of coffee and says your name like he’s auditioning to play your barista in a low-budget indie film. Your boyfriend in an undershirt jogs past you in the park, all clipped steps and Protestant discipline.

Your boyfriend in a suspiciously expensive car cuts you off in traffic, mouthing sorry in a voice you know too well to hear. And at the gym, where anonymity should be a human right, he’s suddenly triplicated: front desk boyfriend scanning your key card, towel-boyfrien handing you something damp and vaguely citrus-scented, and treadmill-boyfriend sweating in a way that suggests he’s been there since dawn, working through his issues with cardio.

This is the first truth of your twenties.

Reality gets porous. Identity fogs.

The world becomes a house of mirrors, every passerby a funhouse reflection of your fears, your longing, your worst habits. You keep catching glimpses of yourself in other people, or them in you, and the whole arrangement feels suspiciously personal.

History, of course, insists that humanity has always been this messy. That we’re carried forward like sediment, shuffled by fire, by exile, by the sloppy map-making of the underworld. That we stand where others stood—shorter in years but the same in type, dragged by Chance’s daughter onto the rock of consequence.

Burdened with sense. Robbed of decision. But honestly, what does this unfreeing matter?

If chance chose our being, who exactly are we filing complaints with?

These are the lightweight-heavy questions that ambush you in your twenties, fluttering like receipts in your coat pocket and weighing like stones in your chest.

Questions that feel clinical one second and cosmic the next.

Like the flip-down binoculars a surgeon uses, the kind that jerk their face millimeters from yours, aligning light and optics until each eyelash becomes its own trembling filament. In that proximity, you understand (in a newly horrifying way) that adulthood is one long examination you never signed up for. There you are: gloved, gowned, lit from above by the theatre lamp of responsibility, its wide astonished bowl staring at you like, Well? Any revelations today?

You try focusing lens-to-lens, waiting for the click, the answer, the you revealed beneath all the borrowed voices. But the angle shifts. Light bends.

The puzzle stretches beyond what you can parse.

And you start to suspect the point was never clarity—only proximity. You think then of the giant leaves you adored in childhood picture books—broad green umbrellas big enough to shelter entire families. How back then, you believed in benevolent foliage, in the idea that things wanted to protect you.

Later, you learn the truth: when it rains, those leaves fold inward, saving only themselves.

And you feel it in your bones how often arms drop from shoulders, how often people retreat before the storm even gathers.

A small bird lands on a railing nearby, trills a complicated little aria, and flicks away in a single twitch. A whole life condensed into a few vibrating membranes.

Everything, you’re told, gets easier with time—except dying, which is why humans keep building elaborate real estate for it.

Hospitals scrubbed with Clorox. Stone cathedrals echoing with incense.

Marble monuments carved with faces we try to believe resemble us.

Still, none of these places feel natural.

The candles wave their tiny orange flags like they’re trying to warn us: mortality refuses choreography. Eventually, the questions stop waiting for permission.

They come as weather systems—pressure fronts drifting across your days: Will this dream- city ever stop raining long enough for me to remember my original sun, the one ambition warped into a lopsided imitation?

If my grandmother’s voice reaches me only through pixels and garlic-scented memory, can I still claim belonging, or have I become an unassigned echo?

How do I translate the bruises I carry into a language my new friends don’t even know exists?

Is my identity a wild vine strangling a concrete life that never asked to host it?

When my voice feels borrowed from another lifetime, who is the one truly trying to speak?

You learn that in your twenties, answers are elusive but questions multiply like fruit flies, tiny, insistent, hovering around every bowl of sweetness you try to set down.

And you, walking through all of it with a bag of sweating limes, a dozen versions of your boyfriend, and a growing suspicion that clarity might not be something you're meant to find so much as something you're meant to live beside.

is a cultural journalist, editor, and writer from Sonora, Mexico. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of PROYECTO VOCES, a digital magazine amplifying emerging voices across art, literature, music, and design. Her work—featured in Latina Media Co., Hypermedia Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and other outlets—explores identity, memory, and grassroots cultural practices throughout the Américas. She is the author of the debut novel Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us Back in Woodstock (Foreshore Publishing, UK, 2025). Writing across journalism, poetry, essays, and hybrid forms, she is committed to fostering inclusive, transnational conversations that honor community histories and cultural transformation.

Wasting away

         unable to open my mouth

for sustenance, as the waistband

                  of my pants

                                                                        slipped off in the orange

                                                                                 glow against the cot,

                                                                        and a quiet click of the lights–

                                                                                          I am breathing

                                                                        being breathed into

lower towards my hips

         I have lain here,

helpless body,

                  this vessel has proven to me

it is not mine. Do not speak

                                                                        as a movement

                                                                                 but rather with intention

                                                                        of the rainfall that poured within myself

                                                                                          I am going mad ripping my hair

of fragility, for the gentle torrent

         flows through me, tormenting me

for giving myself to one

                  who cannot be the chariot

driver of passion

                                                                        from this unspoken pressure

                                                                                 like rolling thunder in the thicket.

                                                                        A helpless target

                                                                                          in this cool southern breeze

                                                                        I tremble–

as he withers in the face

         of unknowing.

I wait, lustre stolen,

         begging the skies to pour again

                                                                        attempting to relieve

                                                                                 this pain, this pain

                                                                        is worship

is love

                                                                        is power

Athens First Cemetery

Above, pines and cypresses shade narrow paths,

speckled shadow of swaying branches.

We take gentle steps along swirling light,

clusters of marble statue and stone crosses

grounded with flowers casting flints of color

glinting in the sun, sticking upright.

The statues sleep eternally by family graves,

gaze serenely at the summer lull of passerby–

for us living, we brush mosquitoes from bare

shoulders, having the same conversations

we’ve been having over again and again. I dream

these statues will come alive, ready to hit play

on this overflowing circular reverie, much

like us, again and again. Here, so many people

lay for the final time, and here, so many people

drift by. Someday, I’ll lay down a bouquet

of words for you, each silken petal a different memory,

a subtle glimmer briefly dancing before fading away.

And when my bones have settled back to stardust and dirt,

will you leave your light on, so I can become the breeze

against your sunned cheek, a hug from a drifting leaf,

so we can keep talking in whispers, forever?

The monsoon above

reflected in my hips.

Rolling up I rain.

The thunder against metal roof.

Limbs reaching for a damp cool

across the red stone floor,

bury myself in the dark wetness.

My hemline drips lower

towards your ground.

The garlands adorned on our chest are a prayer towards rebirth. There are sailboats in our jewelry, longing for the shoreline. We rip petals from our oiled plaits into pieces. A conch is being blown at the temple. The sound shatters the sky. Prayers thrive amid death, amid the sea during the full moon. A tree is swept away, strewn across the sand. The waves are aflame, alive, thrashing against the beach, like blood closing in on a pumping heart. Our dreams float underwater, forced beneath the surface. And then, the rain falls.

Swim through clear, night skies.

Salty tears your pond I drink in.

Ebb and flow. Vividness of color,

contrast between sand, sea, and sky.

Foam of waves all milk froth ready to sip,

drenched in your blurry reflection,

the first I’ve gazed upon like this.

Drip down my face

as you take my garlands off me.

is a young writer based in NYC with roots in India and the American Midwest, focusing on poetry that captures the intricacies of when Eastern and Western culture intersect in a modern, globalized world. Her poems have been published in Glass Mountain, Equatorial Magazine, The Allegheny Review, and Montage Arts Journal.

I don't see how one falls into a faith 

that might command a rambling, wandering

fields with a forked stick, waiting for the sway 

toward water, toward earth singing itself known.

If I accept that something underneath 

is reaching toward the light, it's a running 

jump, still, to believe in a forked stick more 

than science's best guess, (50/50 

if the water table's good). That would be 

unfalling into a grace that expects 

an exacting compliance, a walking 

like a draught horse, waiting the wand's bending.

Belief is its own punishment: the boy

who, dowsing, found a corpse, he'd hope never 

to feel the spirit's tug at him again.  

A man piling sandbags in his driveway

and hunkering down behind them 

with his rifle, watching the road, waiting.

Might you persuade him, he's wasting time, that

contending he's chosen to hear the call 

is different from his merely being

prompted toward oddities?  A woman saw

angels in mirrored shades, driving taxis

through her halls.  She'd contend that the spirit

had something to say, and se'd been chosen 

to hear it told.  How might one convince her

otherwise when she's fixed on believing

every place she sets her foot turns holy?

is a post-aspirational man whose first book of poems, A Dog's Job of Work, was published by Sligo Creek Publishing. He has published variously, and his children, generally, concede that he has been an adequate father.