Moth’s Whimsy

the moths circle their own astonishment,
soft bodies orbiting a question
no one asks out loud.

fragility, I realize,
is not the opposite of force.
it is the form
force sometimes wears
paper wings,
dust-fine,
beating glass
until the night listens.

at the edge of the canvas,
ferns keep writing themselves
into the air,
a green script older than language.
I lean close,
but they refuse to translate
their silence repeating itself
until it becomes chorus.

above, the birds scatter across sky,
dark silhouettes cutting fractures
through the painted dusk.
their wings are small knives,
their flight not fearless
but willing
proof that absence
can still leave a trace.

and here it is
the terror essence of nature:
that everything fragile endures,
and endurance is never gentle.

I want to believe in this ecology:
fern, bird, moth,
all persistence,
all refusal,
each one
a way of saying
light-seeking,
half-whimsy,
half-riot.

Kath Healing 

Kath Healing (they/them) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent poet living on the unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples (Victoria, BC). Their work explores myth, memory, and survival, often blending ecological imagery with queer embodiment. They are the first prize winner of the 2025 Victoria Writers’ Society poetry contest, with publication forthcoming in the society’s journal, Island Writer, and in Becoming: An Anthology of What-If Poems About Women and Womanhood (JLRB Press, 2026).

​Gustave Caillebotte’s Brother Plays the Piano

An air of ballet wets the keys
and flutters the memories of etudes
into a collection of Martial’s own puddling corpus.
How the light tags the ivory as it
depresses

into the wood and releases violent and honeyed hums. 
He ponders Rene, dead eleven years now, his, and Gustave’s
oils studying this room. Not a fortune
could have kept Rene there, leaning on the
piano in the study, asking himself

where francs go when they die and
looming over the streets of Paris, his body
blocking the sun briefly, the room taut and
dim. The two think: how life could breathe when
Gustave’s friends posed

a threat to the draped daffodils in the couch
and swells of red velvet chairs, gilt.
How that Monet monsieur left the window
curtains an abrasion in the dust of their laze
arts, flattering the cool Parisian air. O, but how sweet,

a garden with the boys. 
The burgeoning masculinities of a new Paris, erect
as Gustave’s habitually militant stance since
the itching sobriety of warfare straightened
his spine with fellow soldiers and loosened each stroke

of his brush. How those rivers moved in his
work, Martial recollects as his fingers press 
into the third movement—did old Gustave cage
the Impressionist touch in those small dusks, each
ripple stripping the scene of its definitude,

pacing the wake of the oars as his fellows
and he raced down the suburban Seine? Is this
the new Paris to those thirteen years on
with the kind of money that traces your footsteps
into the grave? Will he paint this? Will

Rene and Mother hide in the rising
steam from Gustave’s and Claude’s Gare Saint Lazare?
Their faces pressed against the glass of a new train?
And what of Gustave’s burgeoning collection of poor Claude’s
work? Where will it be written? Which will? Piano wood,
whisper something true and strip
the floorboards for Gustave. Paint into the husky breaths
of the dead.
 
Daniel Weiss

Daniel Weiss is a writer, ceramicist, and archaeologist from River Forest, IL. He earned his B.A. in anthropology from Kenyon College in 2024, where he was an Associate at The Kenyon Review and co-founder of the student-run magazine FOCUS. As a field archaeologist, he cherishes the opportunity to meet the past in person, finding that archaeology's inherent relationship to nature and the passage of time heavily influences his work. His poetry appears in Shadowplay and Wayfarer Magazine.

Letter from San Francisco

​for Wayne Thiebaud at 100
 
A small red car turns onto Eureka, 
the climb so steep, so narrow, trees form 
a canopy of green. Unless the tarmac 
is magnetized, there should be no hope
for that sporty red coupe, nor for the moving 
van approaching the top, which appears to lose 
heart, makes a left before the hill’s summit.
A few brave cars do beetle down this way,
plus a speck of a motorcyclist, like a fly.
Who else could have invented these streets?
I'm afraid the next time I hear your name
it will be because you've died, so I'm writing
to say that your vision still holds here:
White metal sky, another dot pushing
its tiny stroller diagonally across 19th.
This whole, delicately balanced universe 
ought, according to the laws of physics,
simply tumble and roll. It’s why I praise,
though I hesitate to say, your outdated
trust in the world to hold itself together,
sheer joyful unlikelihood of the next car, 
headlights on in daylight, hurtling this way
and managing to stick to the vertical grade 
that should (says the eye), launch it into space.
But it slows at the bottom, stops to drop
someone off at the Civil Rights Academy,
and continues. School Crossing says a sign. 
Friday Street Cleaning says another, as one 
more Tinker Toy crests the hill and creeps back
down, under knitted phone and electric lines 
which traverse the street in all directions, this
cat's cradle which somehow brings the power 
in and out, at least, most of the time. 
                                                                 Paint.
May power still surge through your brush,
flattening the city, then tilting it up again.
You make the rest of us want to stay vertical, 
to peer over edges, to hold on for dear life.
The hills grow steeper every year.
 
Julie Bruck

Julie Bruck is a Canadian poet who lives in San Francisco—a hill city that Wayne Thiebaud’s streetscapes keep teaching her to see afresh. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Walrus, Poetry Daily, and The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, among other venues. Her third book, Monkey Ranch (Brick Books), won Canada’s 2012  Governor General's Literary Award, and How to Avoid Huge Ships was a finalist for the same award in 2019. “Letter from San Francisco” comes from a new book manuscript, We Love You Get Up. www.juliebruck.com

Topsy Turvy

We’ve got a pretty important job. Big assigns us our missions, and we do everything in our power to turn the world topsy-turvy. You see, we spice everything up with a dash of humour, because life would be unbearable otherwise. Let us give you an example.

Picture this: You are standing in line at the grocery store, unsure if you can afford everything in your basket. Your boss makes your life a living hell. He can’t make up his mind, and he randomly screams at you when things don’t go his way, among other things. He’s even developed the habit of blaming you for literally everything, from the global financial crises to his forgotten gym membership. Mind you, he hates going to the gym; he is a gym payer (whenever you remind him) and definitely not a gym goer. At home, you have a shitload of chores but nobody wants to help. It’s as if you live alone but must deal with invisible pigs that eat all the time and fill the sink with leftovers. And that is why you ended up at the grocery store. You needed to buy more supplies for the pigs. So, you are slouching and scrolling relentlessly on your phone at the grocery store after work, trying to avoid thinking about your credit limit.

When you’re feeling like that, we step in. Usually, someone catches our eye. A guy, for example. And not incidentally, he also catches yours. So you stop slouching over your phone. He is nothing out of the ordinary; he is just shopping and reading a text message on his phone. We’re sure you do see a pattern here. Well, it’ s not intentional. He trips with a little help (wink wink) and falls. What is your first impulse? To laugh, of course. You would have laughed and laughed even if he had stepped on a banana peel or if he bumped into someone who was also texting—we have a whole list of ways to make them fall.

You know, you ‘d still laugh even if he got a bit hurt, even if he bruised his bum or broke his wrist. It’s okay to laugh. It’s not bad. Nor is it good. It is what it is. Let us explain our life’s work: We are entrusted with saving humankind. We bring the world topsy-turvy, we unconditionally, selflessly, and perpetually focus our time and energy to think of ways and execute plans to make people trip and fall over. Sure, some people get upset. Some even had the nerve to call us “demons” or “devils.”  What is wrong with them?
​
Let us clarify this: we are not into labels. We don’t call people who trip clumsy or people who laugh desperate. You know, if we go all serious about things, ennui and resentment can bring you to a nasty place, a place some call “hell on Earth.” And trust us, nobody wants that. That is the worst of punishments. So, Big knew what He was doing when he created our job description. Okay, okay, we didn’t exactly apply for it, but we love giving the world a small nudge towards topsy-turviness. It’ s a refreshing gust of commonplace, controlled chaos. Who doesn’t need that to survive?

Maria Tsangari

Maria Tsangari lives in Nicosia, Cyprus, with her two cats, Sappho and Zozo. She works in local government by day and writes fiction by night—though she often neglects it more than she’d like to admit. Her short stories, written primarily in Greek, have appeared in various literary magazines and have received awards in Cyprus. She studied Classics at the University of Cyprus and Comparative Literature at University College London (UCL).

Sighted
 
Clouds drifted over the sky 
in his blue eye that bore down-- 
a gun barrel stare. He said
she could see herself there. 
 
In his arctic gaze she recognized 
the flat black disc of herself
hovering like a space ship, fixed. 
She would disappear if he blinked.

Lavina Blossom
​
Lavina Blossom is a painter as well as a writer. She grew up in rural Michigan and now lives in Southern California where she grows a native garden to support local fauna Her poems have appeared in various journals, including 3Elements Review, Common Ground Review, and Poemeleon. 

The Floor Planers
 
scrape shavings of light off dull wood
and to Caillebotte hovering above
abrade his canvas that will be rejected
by the Salon for being realistic and
vulgar and criticized by Zola as
bourgeois and vulgar but the painter paints
what he sees: three planers
on their knees, backs arching into
the work, half-stripped like
the floor, pass over it plank by
plank, one mind in conversation,
skin pulled taut across their ribs
gleaming in a varnish of light, then
turn along the slant to what’s
next, resting only for cheap wine
from a shared glass once they’ve bared
it, like a painting before the vernissage
when it’s unfinished and
done.
 ​

Young Man at His Window 
 
Though his reflection is already halfway  
out the glass door, the balcony holds
his weight in Haussmann’s new Paris:
René, up from the velvet sitting chair 
on his heels, legs akimbo, watches 
floating above the stone balustrade  
the silhouette of the mother of 
the children he won’t live to have, 
or the chalky apartment blocks 
or the shadow they cast over her alone  
down on the boulevard, wistful only as 
one born old can be wistful as he goes. 
At his back, his older brother applies 
the last strokes of René’s black suit 
inking a carpet of primrose.

 
Paris Street, Rainy Day

Just before their umbrellas collide –
a distracted couple strolling down
 
the sidewalk and the cropped
half of a man wearing half a top hat –
 
veering, the husband falls through
the cobbled street that glistens like
 
a harbor in which the prow
of an angled building docks.
 
That year, pedestrians in ones and twos
skim across the boulevard
 
and Caillebotte returns again
and again to the moment on which
 
his replicas depend –
pavement not yet ruptured,
 
the husband’s final measured stride – 
 mapping in quiet quadrants
 
what soon will be, then
decamps to the countryside.
 
Streets seal shut.
Photographers descend.

John Fadely

John Fadely’s debut book, Before Leaving the Island, won the 2025 Trail to Table (an imprint of Wandering Aengus Press) Book Award in Poetry and will be published in April 2026.  After 29 years in Asia practicing law, John wrote Before Leaving the Island as part of journey from Hong Kong through Singapore – both islands – to California.  He is co-translating an illustrated edition of Tang dynasty poetry for publication by Princeton University Press.  
​

Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune

(in loving memory of Amanda)


1.
Bequeath me your acorn-amulet
amid vibrant branches at altitude.

Galvanised in your viridian, gossamer-
thin Demeter-gown, trailing like
absinthe down your thighs. Paradise
is not artificial. At Castle Rising,
West Norfolk, where your mysterious

Oak presides, contemplation is your
phantasmagoric premonition
tinctured in gold-leaf & silverpoint.

Byzantine leaves snagging in your
maenad hair; teach me to divide
Gaia’s breviary as it continues to
pulse in your indefatigable palm.

Fingering its carapace
as if assaying a crystal;
a bursting phallus of light,
oracular pulse as we entwine.

Let me offer another libation
before your comet implodes
into a shade of ash.

2.
Ace of Cups, be my offertorium,
my aerated liturgy.

Reddest wine which burbles
in its cylindrical verve:
voluminous, zest-filled outpouring.

Is this a poco paradiso? Intermittent?
Turtle doves illuming our solar fellowship?
Ent-wise: these limbs as lianas intertwine;
so learn your place in the gold-green world,

&, Ace of Cups, be our levitation,
be our fleshed-out cornucopia

before your comet detonates, dear,
into that shade of ash.

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson has published five poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (LeakyBoot Press, 2013), Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016) & Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate (Black Herald Press, 2025). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, Tears in the Fence, 3:AM Magazine, Anvil Tongue, International Times, The Fiend, Syncopation, Epignosis Quarterly, Mande, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Enheduanna, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.

The Ugly Duchess to Her Mirror

Margarete, the last Meinhardiner countess, exiled her husband, reigned from Tirol, and laid siege to Hochosterwitz, but is still mostly remembered as the subject of the portrait The Ugly Duchess.
 
There is a power in pulchritude, I grant--
to thumb the scales of fate, avoid its lashings,
to charm the hearts of men, and stir their passions,
to be an object of devotion, and
desire, to live as charmed a life as Helen’s
(or that of Cleopatra, or Adonis),
to scorn the scorn of those who would admonish
that faces fade as time flees. (On the balance,
“immortal beauties” are immortal for
a lifetime, less.) My courtiers claim that I’m
as lovely as the Alps, when veiled in fog.
The one true immortality is power.
My crown is pretty. It will last. That’s why
they say a face like mine could stop a clock.

​Daniel Galef

​Daniel Galef lives in a city named after a fictional character and collects counterfeit coins. His first book is Imaginary Sonnets, a collection of sonnets which are imaginary.