​
Twin Blossoms

The last sunset bleeds gold through the paper skin of our lanterns,

and we stand in the overgrown cathedral of our garden,

built from childish giggles and floating pollen,
​
hiding ankle-deep in the tide of shadows, lighting our small,

                fragile souls aflame.
 

The strike of a match blossoms in our cupped hands,

our world enveloped in this hushed ceremony, the name of every flower

               carnation, lily, lily, rose

a prayer we whisper to make the moment real. 

 
We are architects of a forever that is already slipping through our fingers 

like the last page of a story we swore

with blood-pacts and crossed hearts, we would never finish.

                lily, lily, rose.

the white of my dress a flag of surrender to the encroaching dark, 

its fabric a ghost of daylight that escapes my childish feet. 

 
Our faces, twin blossoms, 

                lily rose,

turn towards a moon that will not remember our names.

The distant world that waits beyond haven of blossoms and will soon, 

too soon call us away to separate roads. 

 
The garden exhales, a slow release of petals and memory,

leaving behind the ghost-smell of matches, the fragile skull of a lantern,

a scorched blueprint of a kingdom we built that night.

But this ash will scatter,                       

these flowers will forget our names, 

and so I wave goodbye to my childhood and the

                 rose.

Yixuan Zhao

Yixuan (Sunny) Zhao is a high school Junior living in North Carolina who enjoys writing poetry and short stories. Outside of writing, she enjoys playing violin, soccer, and going out to eat with friends! 

Magnolia 
 
Water her and she will bloom. Swirls 
of white chocolate petals unfold
from green caps resting on leaves shadowed
by light and darkness.
 
Caramel edges indicate time
passing. Fragile evolution soft spoken
strength. She celebrates this moment
embraces circumstance and cheers
 
on tiny buds that surround her waiting
for their turn, waiting for renewal
rebirth.

Leslie Archibald

Leslie Archibald, a graduate of the University of Houston, writes poetry, flash fiction, and nonfiction in a tiny home office in Houston, Texas. When she is not writing, she is likely roaming the city photographing Houston’s unique character, dabbling in watercolours, and exploring multimedia literature. She was the board treasurer for Writespace, a Houston literary arts centre, and currently works at a full-time office position while writing and editing part time. Leslie is a slush reader and nonfiction writer for Interstellar Flight Press. Her work appears in The Best of Tales of Texas Vol 2 and Synkroniciti Magazine Vol 5 No.4 and Vol 6 No.4.

The Anatomy Lesson, by Manuel Machado (Spain, 1874-1947)

Light’s enemies -- reclusive indentations
and entrails -- take the stage for their premiere,
in lurid, horrible hallucinations
of dreadful truth and bonfire-flaring fear.

Candescent ochres; carmines, hot as flame;
soft ivory- and rose-tinged subtleties:
these left the gold-rich chapels, and became
death-pallor, blood, and pustulent disease.

Rembrandt it was, whose name earned worldwide kudos --
that awesome, venerated artist -- he
was paintbrush-poniard of these sinews’ luster…

Rembrandt. Conqueror of light and shadows.
Thus, pain had its first portrait, misery
its painter worthy of the title master.

Manuel Machado, translated by Julie Steiner

**

La Lección de anatomía

Los enemigos de la luz -- rincones
y entrañas -- surgen por la vez primera,
en tremendas y fúlgidas visiones,
de atroz verdad, y resplandor de hoguera.

Lumineos ocres, cálidos carmines,
ebúrneas y rosadas morbideces,
dejaron los dorados camarines,
para ser sangre, podre y livideces.

Fué Rembrandt, cuyo nombre al mundo asombra,
artista poderoso é insensato,
pincel-puñal de palpitante nervio…

Fué Rembrandt, vencedor de luz y sombra.
Y el dolor tuvo su primer retrato,
y la miseria su pintor soberbio.

Manuel Machado

Author's Note: Manuel Machado (1874-1947) and his brother Antonio (1875-1939) were leading figures in the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of ’98. Manuel published this poem in his 1911 ekphrastic collection Apolo, teatro pictórico (Apollo, Pictorial Drama). For a high-resolution version of “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp,” the 1632 oil painting by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) whose tiny areas of intense colour inspired this poem, visit:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Rembrandt_-_The_Anatomy_Lesson_of_Dr_Nicolaes_Tulp.jpg

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Matters, The New Verse News, Light, and Snakeskin, among other venues. She has been an active participant in the Eratosphere online poetry workshop (www.ablemuse.com/erato) for more than twenty years.

Close to Us

I always focused on the clouds, the way they part in places across the canvas, as if to prove they hold back the sky. I often thought that if I stared at the scene long enough, I would become part of the scene—a fifth figure—and watch over the four as if to protect them from the sun. But they all wear hats, I’d remind myself, and by now must be inured to the tilt of the catboat. I sometimes forget that my father loved this painting, and that for many years a copy of it hung above the couch in our living room. After work, he’d lie down, read the afternoon paper, and fall asleep. Across the room, I would watch as he slept and imagine that the space between us was the dark water in the painting. If I had to, I knew I could swim across, and he’d wake. Mostly, I would search for him in the painting, thinking about how at one time he was a boy. Not the oldest one in red whose grip on the mainsheet creates a perfect angle from stern to sail, nor the one steering, but one of the younger ones, maybe the boy stretched across the bow, or, as I wanted my father to be, the one sitting starboard, back turned to the horizon, longing for home.

Cynthia Kolanowski

Cynthia Kolanowski is a poet, educator, and wishful gardener, who for many years called Colorado home. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan and has had work published in the Portland Review and Broad Street. Riding the parabola of midlife, Cynthia returned to her native Pennsylvania in 2021 and now lives in Scranton, where she serves as production advisor for River & South Review and co-directs Electric City Writers. ​

The Obituaries 

after the AIDS Memorial Quilt, National AIDS Memorial, San Francisco (USA) 1987 
​
From afar, the panels seem to blend into a cacophony of pixilated stories, the static on a television screen that fills the empty space between programs. They remain a collective, forever frozen through fabric and thread, their patchwork stories now united through art. The weight of their lives are translated through fifty-two tons and thousands of three-by-six panels. Each one provides enough space to fill a grave, to lay down on the homely quilt and fill the space once occupied by another. It's space enough to be seen but not heard. We have room for a name, year, perhaps a quote or two; we know these people through footnotes, through brief three-by-six windows into their lives. One panel, a vibrant, silky teal, consists only of a couple hand-stitched hearts and hand-written messages from family members. One note reads, I love you Daddy, with a little girl’s self-portrait drawn beside it. She is not alone; another panel, simple, sees a silver star on a light-blue background. One word is meticulously stitched above it: friend. Panels over we find a wall made from the same message, repeated eleven times—each meant for a friend, comrade, a previous teammate. They end with hope; until our journeys bring us together again. We only know these people as a moment, a fleeting burst of light, a match struck in the dark in an attempt to illuminate an ever-darkening world. They are held together not by suffering, but by an understanding.Their stories persist, though, the burn-marks on the pristine facade of the world. The discordant static blends together to create a chorus of fifty-thousand voices, all singing the same song: remember. 

Ainsley Hlady 
​
Ainsley Hlady is an emerging writer attending Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. She is majoring in English, with a minor in creative writing. She is currently the president of Flagler’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter and the current treasurer for the Flagler College Creative Writing Club. She enjoys writing poetry, as well as worldbuilding and Table-Top Roleplaying game design. When she isn’t conjuring new fantasy worlds to explore, she can be found lounging at home with her Chihuahua, May.

Saskia in The Night Watch

The master of light and dark
Mourned her as he mulled
His pigments, and wept
As he dead-coloured the canvas,
As vast as the gap she’d left in him.

But now, leaning on his mahl stick,
He lets the light in his brush catch her
And places her, in miniature,
Right in the middle of a militia,
Her golden gaze drifting out and away.

In chiaroscuro, he colours the dead.
Her face catches the light
Bringing into the night the brightness of dawn.

Ella Leith

This poem was highly commended in the Pen Nib International Competition 2021. 
​
Ella Leith (she/her) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and occasional poetry. Her work tends to draw on her background in folklore and oral histories, exploring how the past, the imagined and the uncanny exist in the present and the mundane. Her work has been published in The Kitchen Table Quarterly, The Icarus Collective, and Gramarye, and she is currently querying her first novel. Originally from the Midlands of England, she now lives in Malta with her partner, a haunted terracotta bust, and several hundred notebooks. Find links to her work at www.ellaleith.com

Jolly Hour
 
It wasn’t, after all, a second-line jazz band from Preservation Hall 
that I heard behind me on my way back toward the Fens on foot
in a state of arrested attention that left me open to such possibilities 
after sketching, in a museum hallway, a marble statue of Aphrodite
in the process of emerging from the foam of the Aegean Sea,
chiseled by some Hellenistic sculptor on the Isle of Rhodes
in 43 B.C.E.—Athenodore, Polydorus, or Agesander, maybe--
minus her noble head, her raised arms, and her legs below the thighs.
 
Bells clanging and horns tooting, iron wheels clicking off the iambs 
at well-measured intervals across the frets of the railroad ties 
on the parallel iron rails, it was the sound of the outbound trolley 
clattering up Huntington Ave., not a brass band like the one I heard 
in Tremé, the first Black neighborhood in the nation, a few years before
on my only visit to New Orleans, after visiting the Blues Trail, 
Yoknapatawpha County, and the battlefield in Vicksburg.
 
It wasn’t a parade of pallbearers leading friends of the deceased
behind the black hearse and its flower-bedecked casket
in that funeral march I witnessed through a graveyard’s open gate
from the sidewalk on Esplanade, across from a Catholic church,
as I walked toward the French Quarter, by way of Congo Square--
not a joyful dirge for a teenaged boy who died in a hail of gunfire
in a neighborhood still traumatized from Hurricane Katrina,
or a send-off for a beloved octogenarian mother of four children
and grandmother of ten, some classy old gal whose gumbo and greens 
brought water to the mouth, whose ancestors worked for free
on sugar and cotton plantations in Haiti and the Deep South.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.,
but Judy Garland wasn’t aboard, singing her way up the aisle 
in her high starched collar, perky and cute in that sharp little suit
in bright red lipstick and high-top shoes, her auburn tresses piled 
high on her head, lamenting aloud, as if no one else were around, 
in her trademark velvety contralto, at the World’s Fair of 1904,
depicted, forty years later, in the Meet Me in St. Louis movie,
that she’d jumped aboard on an impulse, “to lose a jolly hour,”
but had found herself distracted by a fellow passenger on that loud
and cheerful trolley, instead of relief from the surging crowd.
 
And he was “quite the handsomest of men” at that, so tall and dapper,
a dashing stranger indeed, in a bright green tie and shiny shoes
popping into the scene now, tipping his light brown derby hat
to her, and apologizing if he had accidentally stepped upon her feet 
as he took a nearby seat, scaring her half to death, by golly, 
causing her heartstrings to thump and twang in her chest, and making
her lose, rather than that jolly hour, her lonely heart instead.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.,
and the model for Aphrodite—a young woman named Phoebe, 
Angela, or Chloé, whom he’d heard about through the grapevine--
at five-feet-six and one hundred and fifty-two or -three, fresh 
from a patio breakfast of feta, grapes, pita, and hot mint tea, 
with the archaeological discovery of her statuesque stone figure 
among the Grecian ruins still so many centuries in the future, 
wasn’t heading to work on it, her golden hair in braids, dressed
in the emerald linen jumper and rope sandals she wore all summer,
hanging onto a strap among all the students and commuters
listening to podcasts and reading their magazines and newspapers. 
 
She wasn’t humming and tapping her foot to a folk-rock, funk, 
or hip-hop tune that she heard on her headphones, either,
or looking particularly forward to resuming a difficult pose,
to lifting her arms and raising her face to the brightness of the sun,
in a diaphanous gown that looked more like a camisole, to be honest, 
with an Empire waist, with a fitted bodice provocatively reinforced, 
just below the bust, by a drawstring cord tied in a rabbit-ear bow
that clung to her solid torso, to her ribs, breasts, and hip bones, 
when the demanding, if not maniacal artist soaks her with water
to make her look even more like she’s emerging from the foam.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.,
and I had attempted to evoke, in soft and steady charcoal strokes,
more than two millennia later, with the help of my blending stump, 
not the winner of the wet t-shirt contest at a fraternity party,
but the complexity of that impossible bow, the folds of silken cloth 
overlapping at her cleavage, and the expression of her arms,
even in their absence, upflung to suggest those of the love goddess,
Aphrodite herself, as she sprang from the Aegean Sea, as told
in Hesiod’s Theogyny, written several hundred years before,
in the eighth century B.C.E., to describe the gods’ genealogies.
 
It was the sound of the outbound trolley clattering up Huntington Ave.
between the Mission Hill projects and the MFA of Boston, 
toward the VA Hospital at Heath Street in Jamaica Plain, 
near Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace —the E train of the Green Line 
traveling between the poverty of Roxbury and the prosperity 
of the Fens, as if to draw attention to the best and worst of Boston.
 
That, and the upward thrust of her right hip in its subtle contrapposto.
 
Scott Ruescher

Scott Ruescher is the author of two full-length poetry collections--Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017) and Above the Fold (Finishing Line Press, 2025)-- and of two earlier chapbooks, Sidewalk Tectonics and Perfect Memory. He has won Able Muse’s Write Prize, Poetry Quarterly‘s Rebecca Lard Award, and, twice, the New England Poetry Club‘s Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His poems have appeared in About Place, AGNI, Common Ground Review, Negative Capability, Nine Mile, Pangyrus, Ploughshares,  Solstice, and many other publications. Retired from administering the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaching English in the Boston University Prison Education Program, he writes publicity for The Neighborhood Developers in Chelsea, Mass., and works in ESOL and citizenship classes at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden.

​Grass Green

In the dark of this path in the white of the night, I put down a foot, kick at loose gravel. Midges dust my cheek, the honeyed air storms my nose. It’s a tempting scene. 

I lean my bike against a tall yew hedge where the scamper of rabbits is so reassuring I don’t bother with the lock. It’s other-worldly here. One house is turreted, another could be a tree house on stilts. It’s so unlike Lester Street.

Our move didn’t explode my life as Dad promised. The guys on the rec. already had their 5-a-side and gave not so much as a nod when I slunk from the shadows and sweated fifty keepie-uppies. "Keep at it, mate," coaxed some bloke picking litter for the council. I appreciated that.

Since then, I’ve felt washed-out. Hopeless.

But here is a place where darkness crackles like old leather, wraps my skin in treacly-browns. I think of Grandad and the bronze coins he’d spill from his pocket, spit and buff with pride. His warm tobacco breath. 

Chewing hard on old gum, I eke out remnants of mint. "Yeah," I tell myself, "worth the bike ride."

To be fair, the new neighbours are cool about my wheelies. My incessant up-down, close swerve of car mirrors and the screech as I skid round the death-wish cat. Their only shout-out, "Wear a helmet, won’t you!’" by which I assume they’ve my safety in mind. 

Lester Street is a step-up for us but, still, the houses are piled like boxes. Featureless grey blocks. An occasional steel balcony the only relief from flat brick, flat cement. There’s outdoor hubs of recycled plastic benches where people sit and feed the pigeons, gladly fetch dropped toddler toys, pass weather notes. But there’s no soul. No art. 

I like art. Not saying I can paint or sketch, nor that I get any teacher’s praise beyond, "Nice lines, try shading." Not sure what lures me: colour? light? the blob my eye sees as a mountain, a yellow flick that becomes buttered toast. Yet I know style matters, boosts your happy. 

The path winds past a pretty house with a chilli-red roof . There’s splashes of pink light shimmying across the lawn, the soft plop of a frog in a pond. I carefully put down foot after foot, but can’t avoid the crunch of stones. Damned Nikes. If it wasn’t so dark, I’d lose them. I bet the residents here go barefoot, do outdoor Tai-Chi.

It’s way more inviting than Lester Street, though Dad would be wary. People like their privacy, he’d warn.

But how magical the stars. Twinkling above the rooftops in criss-cross silver, as if they’ve been crayoned in wax. I hope Dad’s clocked off his late shift and can see this incredible sky. 

And WOW! how the moon lights the perfectly-pruned trees: cones, spheres, upturned goblets. Half in Viridian Green, half in a wispy Paris Green. I know these names from my artist’s colour chart and – man! – here they are for real. Seriously, there could be pixies plucking the leaves, making dance notes. No throbbing beat boxers. And no dog shit, that’s for sure.

A dog is barking, though. 

I slip behind the trunk of a lollipop tree. Is this where the breadcrumb trail ends? Perhaps an Emerald Green chimney pot is not the mark of a happy destination. Perhaps the turreted house is really a decaying Gormenghast. Dad showed me a mechanical model once. At the press of a button, paper-engineered owls flew round and round the pointed tower. It’s likely owls live here. Perhaps they, too, are waiting to peck out the eyes of the dead.

A breeze gets up, amplifies the next bark. I hate the sound of it grinding back into the dog. Wince at its re-exit; jaw wide, announcing its big intention. I try not to picture the strain of a neck. I try not to suppose someone could unleash the dog. I crouch. Swallow all breath. 

Still not breathing, I stare down a strip of solar lights pushed into the soil. Moths tumble confusedly in the bright auras and I’m frightened for their pale, furry bodies. This tableau, this moonlit green. It’s made me greedy, audacious prick that I am. And I so wish I’d locked my bike as I’ve a hunch it’s already gone. 

My eyes dart. The creamy fluff of a rabbit’s backside would be welcome now. Nothing. No one. No face in any of the shut-tight windows. No one calling in their cat. No van pulling up with a late night delivery. No dad at the window, saying "It’s gone to Howard’s," (whoever Howard is) and, "Nice! He’s tipped the driver a tenner." 

I let go my breath. Laugh inside at the ways in which dad has tried to convince me Lester Street will work out, that the guys on the rec. will come round and even if it takes many more keepie-uppies, they’ll be wanting my muddy arse on the pitch soon. 

And it’s with this thought, I see the sign: Strictly Private. Another: Resident’s Only. I blink hard. When my pupils adjust, I see signs everywhere: No Admittance  – Keep Out – Ball Games Forbidden. I spit my gum and a gob of sour backs up into my throat. 

The barking continues.

Fuck! The pretension I’ve put on this place; this lime-lit tree, this shadowy gothic arch. Light is light and doesn’t the moon sculpt its beauty everywhere.

I’m suddenly sickened by this night feast. I want to be spreadeagled on the weedy rec. In the corner where the pitch dips and a puddle of moisture keeps a patch of green. Grass Green: No 4, best colour on my chart. 

Where, if I raise my chin, there’ll be a robin hopping round the bench and a trail of messy bramble. Where the bloke from the council will nab a blackberry on his litter round, give a matey holler.

Dad’s right, of course. The guys asked me to join them last week. "Hey! they offered up, ‘We need a midfielder. You in?"

I fist-thump my head. The spite, not letting dad know. Unable to bear his told you so.

The growl is rock-grind. The bark the loudest yet.

Light saturates: a roving torch?  a beam from a watchtower? a mob with flames? Whatever the source, it reveals the one sign I’d missed. It’s fixed with two fat screwheads, each a shiny glint in a post that’s tarred black and concreted in for the purpose.

My eyes are wet and needling but the words are buffed and clear.

GUARD DOG ON PATROL 

Vanessa Crannis

​Vanessa is from Essex in the UK. A latecomer to writing, she enjoys its exciting challenge and quiet interaction. She is thrilled to have pieces published in The Phare, The Ekphrastic Review and Writers’ Forum. Vanessa is happiest out-of-doors in nature and walks, runs or swims every day.

The Consultant 
  
Cora clenches her teeth. Takes a deep breath. If she can only sit still, stretching her spine to the sky, she will not revert to the once unsettling split of herself, the top of her body floating, fruitless, her bottom half touching the ground, both halves casting a shadow barely substantial enough for the whole of her. She understands that an erect back can keep her intact because Chat, intact himself, keeps harping on about that, Chat, her faithful, insistent feline, nagging at his mistress from inside his mirror, where he’s now ensconced for his ninth, and final, life.  Clouds like flying saucers hover above a cuticle moon as folks in the village walk past and look away, scornful of her solid obeisance to guidance dispensed by a meddlesome, hissing black moggy forever trapped in a looking glass.  Cora's body absorbs their disdain, slumps as she starts to shift and divide again. Chat arches his back, hairs rising, badgers her to adjust and align. I must sit up straight, she echoes, at first a questioning quiver, now growly and firm.

Mikki Aronoff
​
Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024.