frostbitten hands snatch at the cigarette
dangling from your lips and
you stoop to meet my gaze with a hangdog expression.

i want to be angry
(god, i want to be so angry)
because cigarettes will kill you in a lifetime, and –
i have handwarmers in my fucking pocket.

but love is a two-way street, so it doesn’t matter if
my pockets are overflowing with iron powder and saltwater, or if
my hands offer woolen mittens, or if
i crank the heat in my bedroom to ninety degrees
with just the friction of my hips on yours.
love is a two-way street, and
if your frostbitten hands won’t drop their carcinogens,
you’ll freeze to death.
i cannot exhale love onto your fingertips,
bring feeling back into your bones,
without you first reaching for me.

and i want to be angry
(god, i want to be furious)
but how can i be, when the only thing
your body knows
is how to weather
a midwest
winter?

---

Nix Carlson (she/they) is a queer, polyamorous, and neurodivergent poet and sign language interpreter based in Lexington, KY, with strong ties to Milwaukee, WI. Their work appeared or is forthcoming in Wildscape, Orange Rose, Vellichor Literary, Art of Nothing Press, Broken Stone Review, Coming Up Short, Eunoia Review, and Page Gallery, among others. You can find them on Instagram at @bynixec.

I hang my jacket in the hallway
her apartment is old
made from shoestring potatoes
it smells like a jelly factory.

Against the wall a man’s face
eyes folded
laces around his neck.
That’s your Uncle, dear.

He barred her
from doing much of anything
when he was around
then he died.

She asked the doctors
to keep his eyes and brain
alive and put them
in a fish tank.

That night when she got home
she put on a mambo record,
poured herself a vodka, lit a cigarette,
and blew smoke in his eyes.

The tank is down the hall
full of algae and bubbles.
She has it hidden
behind a curtain.

On the wall are photos
of President Gerald Ford,
our family on vacation,
and antique pictures of naked ladies.

How many naked ladies do have to look at
before I get something to eat? I ask.

I’ll think about it, she says.
Behind the curtain skirts are hung up,
sponges tied together,
a bag of teeth.

My Auntie takes a photo of me
so my parents will see
the child they raised,
buzz-cut, roadworthy.

My Auntie tells me stories
about my family,
takes me shopping,
for sweaters and sneakers.

When she gets excited
she makes the sound
of a happy seagull
and spins like a mooring buoy.

---

Bill Ratner is a 9-time winner of The Moth StorySLAM and a well-known voice actor—”Flint” in the TV cartoon G.I. Joe, “Donnell Udina” in the game Mass Effect, etc. His poetry and essays are published in Best Small Fictions 2021-Sonder Press, poetry collections: Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake-Slow Lightning Press, Fear of Fish-Alien Buddha Press, chapbook: To Decorate a Casket-Finishing Line Press, Chiron Review, Baltimore Review, Missouri Review Audio, FeminineCollective, and other journals. Bill’s readings are featured on National Public Radio’s Good Food and The Business. He is the author of Parenting for the Digital Age: The Truth About Media’s Effect on Children from Familius Books, a volunteer grief counsellor, and he teaches Storytelling for the Los Angeles School District, and Voiceover for the Screen Actors Guild-AFTRA Foundation.

A fig in an orange grove—
I pruned myself from the rotting branch,
sawed through the only bark I knew.

Now I stand among the citrus on the longest night,
their branches strung with stars,
garlands of dried slices glowing like tiny suns,
the air thick with clove and cedar.

I watch the easy way they intertwine,
how a hand finds the back of a neck,
how embraces happen without flinching.

I ache in rooms full of warmth.

Grafted here now,
tethered to sap not my own,
wrapped in evergreen and borrowed moss—
the trees around me
teaching what roots can do when the frost comes,
how love moves through heartwood
without asking permission.

Then the gathering scatters.

Everyone carries their candlelight home.
My husband’s hand knows my bark.
My in-laws wrap me in their shade.
This grove has given me everything.

And still—

somewhere, two trees stand stubbornly rooted in place;
they planted me and refuse to water;
they’d lose me before submitting to pruning themselves.

I am full of sap,
of sweetness,
of more love than I was built to hold,
and still bleeding from a cut I made to save my life.

---

Tian Sanchez-Ballado (b. 1989) is a CubaRican-American poet and author ofBaby Back Bitch (2025) and Every Fig Has a Wasp Inside (2025). His Southern Gothic, post-lyric work examines how trauma, illness, and identity pass through families. His poetry has appeared in The Acentos Review and Kirkus Magazine, and he was a finalist for the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Contest. He lives in Tallahassee, FL, with his husband and their very fluffy cat.

Once I visited my old roommate
at a film festival
on Scheveningen beach
where the winning movie
was something avant garde
and vaguely religious
we did not understand.

Afterwards we danced to
Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”
within the sand dunes all night,
the wind transforming the blanket
around my shoulders into wings,
my roommate recounting how their friends
in Atlanta held their newborn
for the first time.

We biked miles back into town
and laid next to a canal.
As we smoked weed, they confessed
they might never be able to live
in our home country again.
I know, but tonight let’ s pretend
we’re the loves of our lives,
I retorted, swinging a stick
to hit another out of the air.

Murmuration began overhead,
the birds changing phase
according to the relative strengths
of our anger, wonder, and fear.
The sky moved without permission.
We let the mosquitoes circle
and bite our legs bloody until light.
Small volumes of ourselves
hung in the air around us
as we ignored all the ways to start over.

---

Cole Pragides is an emerging writer living in Queens, New York. His work has been featured in wildness, phoebe, The Southeast Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. You can find him flying a kite.

by Ariana Brown

---

Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet based in Houston, Texas. She is the author of the poetry collections We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). She holds a BA in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, an MFA in Poetry, and an MS in Library and Information Science. Ariana is a national collegiate poetry slam champion, winner of two Academy of American Poets prizes, and has been writing, teaching, and performing poetry since 2009.

---

Erick Flores Díaz is a visual artist and a poet based in Morelia, México. Coming from a long lineage of traditional ice cream makers, he writes.

---

Trystan Popish is a poet and essayist from Colorado. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and can be found in Pleiades, The Sunlight Press, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Rogue Agent Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver with her husband, their toddler, diabetes, depression, two dogs, and two hairless guinea pigs. Find her at trystanpopish.com.

---

Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests.  A Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which his debut chapbook, This is My Body, was published in 2025.  Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Rolled in gold
leaf, cocooned in
shreddings of ancient
text. His words, a pathetic
stream slurring
out between pulls,

Prophets lust but I beg
you, beg. Lick the good
soil off your lover’s
hand. Taste what the tree
roots know, Bend your
back at lightning snaps.
Submit to the murmurs
of rabbit children.

And God and I smoked until
the vapors chased
the heavens and nothing
dared open the sky.