“There can be but one teacher – nature. She must always be consulted.”
– Camille Pissarro

I’m wondering how best to preserve
this day when I find myself summoned
outside into the warming light, tossing
my net beyond the low islands and
the jagged edge of the Sound,
hoping its threads return in gilded
attire, yielding a tangle of blessings
culled from both sea and hollow
that are a mix of old-growth splendor
and the commonplace, while I fall
back to silence, watching the way
the morning light breaks apart and
is then quickly redrawn by wind gusts
that blur and wrinkle the surface of
the water, and entranced by the soft
rustling of the beach grass and taste
the tang of salt-scented air while
white-capped tides are suffused with
the same mussel-blue hue as the
open fist of sky and seeing how
both air and water are stitched together
by these clamorous gulls rising in
rapture then swooning towards shore
and asking what more can be done
other than to try and somehow slow
earth’s hurry and call summer back.

---

A resident of Connecticut, John Muro has published three volumes of poems — In the Lilac Hour (2020), Pastoral Suite (2022) and, most recently, A Bountiful Silence (2025). Since the publication of his first book of poems, John has been nominated four times for the Pushcart, two times for the Best of the Net and he also received a Grantchester Award in 2023. John’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Acumen, the Belfast Review, Delmarva, Grey Sparrow, Sky Island, the Valparaiso Review and elsewhere.

---

This poem previously appeared in Valparaiso Review.

by Chiara Crisafulli

Inspired by the current state of the American political landscape, this poem expresses the (linguistic) discomfort I’m experiencing as a recent immigrant who speaks and writes four languages.

---

Chiara Crisafulli is an Italian writer originally from Sicily and a recent immigrant to the USA. Her poems in English have appeared in A)GLIMPSE OF), Uppagus, and Streetcake Magazine. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband Haris, where she studies creative writing at Santa Fe Community College. Read more at https://chiara-crisafulli.com. 

The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work.
I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work.

I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters
in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work.

I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head
but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work

at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head
laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work

to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you
in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work

gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell
through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked

so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have
given myself away (I did) just to make it work.

---

Jarrett Moseley is a bisexual poet living in Miami, where he was a James A. Michener fellow in the University of Miami’s MFA program. He is the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024), and his full length manuscript Rehumanization Litany was an honorable mention for the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. His poetry has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Baltimore Review, earned an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, and been long listed for the Poetry Society’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems are featured in Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, AGNI, Poets.org, and elsewhere.

---

Lauren Dotson (they/she) is an interdisciplinary performer, poet, collagist, and storyteller currently based in Chicago, but originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Lauren creates work that concerns itself with Black temporalities and the tenderness of protection. Through their poems Lauren wants to critically fabulate forehead kisses on the ancestors of their family’s archive. Her previous work can be found in Blacklight Magazine and the upcoming publication of The Common Almanac.

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20
with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen
shaggin’ wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South;
a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy
stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out
with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the
border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip
a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time
-traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober,
makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by
a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out
the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened
gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not
because they’re mine but because they never will be.
Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months
without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms
of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn
that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences,
a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet
heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one
who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me
to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument
he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the
gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials
in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love
during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions
of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into
the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes,
a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever
my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask
my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick
the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas
pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces
when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights
in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi:
the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer;
freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of
shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself
off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden.

---

Dré is a queer Mexican-French Canadian poet, alchemist, and herbal bruja who loves wildlife, moon-bathing, and dismantling oppressive systems. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Gnashing Teeth, wildscape.lit, SWWIM, PRISM international, and Arte y Literatura Hispanocanadiense. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection.

---

This poem previously appeared in wildscape.

& when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks,
do you want to die with that?
& my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you?
& i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks
& the eldritch horror, profound & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies
& my friend says, oh, i think they only have coke products here,
& i say, hm, then i guess a cherry coke
& my friend says, okay, a mcchicken, a cherry coke, plus can i get an answer the question unspoken in my heart?
because my friend is always saying shit like that,
especially in the mcdonald’s drive through
& this time the voice from the speaker is sweet dulcet caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony,
& my friend says, damn, i think i’m a dollar short,
but it’s okay because i have two dollars in my pocket, & anyway, the prophecies are free here, free like the way any of us are, free as a man with an albatross around his neck, free as an albatross around a man’s neck, since the albatross is dead, and isn’t death a kind of freedom?, free like a limited time only BOGO sale at the Gap, free like you’ll still have to give up your firstborn son, but whatever, who’s having babies in this economy, anyway, not to mention your firstborn won’t be a sun, if anything they’ll be the MOON,
& we drive to the window
& my friend’s camry sounds like it might fall apart right there
& so might i, if i’m being honest
& i look into the black hole at the first window
or rather, it looks into me,
i blink first
& it becomes a murder of crows, silent, except to say
second window only tonight,
& then i say it, just for good measure,
second window only tonight,
& we’re at the second window,
which is a little grimy,
with a freckled bespectacled teen behind it,
& she looks like me, a study in personal time travel,
but when i ask my friend he says,
hey, doesn’t that guy look like me?
so it could be the whole world, or nothing at all
(like most things)
& i’m handed the cherry coke without much fanfare
& the teen leans out the window to whisper in my friend’s ear
& i strain to listen
but all i hear is the rustling of the first breeze that ever swept this earth,
& when my friend turns to me,
he says, the prophecy machine is down tonight. can i get a sip of your cherry coke?
& we drive away, dial-shifting through static,
as the world dissolves into whipping wind, fresh fizz,
& our laughter, spilling into empty eternity

---

Aparna Paul (she/her) is a writer, chemical engineer, banana bread enthusiast, & amateur crossword constructor based in Cambridge, MA. Her poetry & prose has been recognized by Reckoning, DMQ Review, & Gaining Ground, among others. She is the author of HOME FREE (Game Over Books, 2025), editor of the anthology Reflections of The Land (Literary Cleveland, 2022), and co-editor of GOOD SOUP mail magazine (@goodsoup.mag on insta!). She performs regularly, hosts occasionally, and slams sometimes at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge. When not writing, you can find her calling to a stranger on the street, saying, “Look! The moon!”

---

Devan Murphy is the author of the chapbook I’M NOT I’M NOT I’M NOT A BABY (Ethel 2024), a collection of prose poems and essays and abstract comics about God and loneliness. Her writing and illustrations have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Gigantic Sequins, The Cincinnati Review, -ette, The Iowa Review, The Guardian, Diagram, and elsewhere. You can find her online at devmurphy.club http://devmurphy.club/ or on Instagram @gytrashh. She lives in Pittsburgh.

---

This poem previously appeared in Construction Literary Magazine.

Chocolate Polynesian brown was beckoned
to the land of the long white cloud
to work in factories, freezing works, docks,
was beckoned to work hard,
send money back to islands of hibiscus and frangipani

But chocolate Polynesian brown got swallowed,
digested in a stomach churning with acid-filled hate
The outcome? That other shade of brown

//

But dawn,
because you covered your eyes with the dark hands of night
batons bashed on doors,
scaring pregnant women, given barely enough time
to dress while dogs spat their barks through bared teeth

But dawn,
Because you hid behind the horizon
torches blazed, blinding,
breaking sleep and families
as parents were taken from screaming kids
to be jailed then charged then sent back to the islands

Dawn,
because you were silent,
because all murmurings were silenced.

---

Cindy Kurukaanga lives in the north of Aotearoa, New Zealand. A late comer to creative writing and having a blast doing it. Requires coffee to function before 10am. Cat parent to a wonky-legged bob called Tuī. She has work published with Broken Spine Arts and in Flash Frontier. You can find her on Bluesky @kakapowhakatoi.bsky.social

I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian.
At one job, I’m a glorified secretary.
I answer the phone in my professional voice
and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses.

My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life.
We’re the only Black gay men in our building,
so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups.
For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his.

In the 80s, on a fellowship in Spain,
he practiced arias and translated Romani ballads.
After a concert, he presented Leontyne Price
with flowers wrapped in sheer blue paper.

Today, I argue Another Country is Baldwin’s best novel.
My neighbor shares a recipe for chicken paprikash.
Gone like that, he says, flipping through an album of friends
in their youth with fades and thick mustaches.

They could quote Mahogany. They cut up
in the house-inflected dark of a dancefloor,
worldly and glamorous as a Venetian painting.
I refill our cups. A splash of whiskey in his tea.

---

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. He is currently at work on a hybrid non-fiction book about ekphrasis.

---

This poem previously appeared in American Chordata.