art by Stephen Ground

by Catherine Buck

We met at the place where water plunged over ground, where everyone met in song and story and so it seemed a fitting place for a rendezvous of our own.

You found me seated on the boulder. When the rains came hardest they’d coat the surface slick, so I always checked the skies to confirm I was in no danger. That day, the rock was dry and the sun directly overhead. My feet waited flat on the stone and I could feel the beginnings of a burn.

art by Virgil Suárez

by Steven Dampf

I forage for leaves and fallen bark in the park. Looks like an old face. I’ll make a sculpture, and become acquainted with it, the shedded skin from the still-breathing cherry blossoms. I’ll lay the pink flowers over a plate of paste and dry it into paper for my poetry, and melt whatever’s left into soy wax for a candle. Light it during my moments that turn out as defining moments, and one day associate the aroma with this stage in my young life.

by JV Dias

art by Virgil Suárez

January 8, 2023^[1] 

I – 09:15 AM – WAKE UP!

My father enters the room in a disordered manner. The door swings open with excessive force, slams against the wall, then recoils a few inches, trembling before surrendering to the weight of its own wood. The impact tears me entirely out of sleep. I do not wake gradually, but all at once, my body rigid and my heart racing from the shock. For a few seconds,

art by Virgil Suárez

by Forrest Rapier

Forrest Rapier has poetry and prose forthcoming in 2River and Midway Journal. His debut collection, As the Den Burns, was published by Texas Review Press in 2022. Recently, he received the Dean’s Award for Doctoral Excellence at Florida State University and he is a finalist for the 2026 Apogee Poetry Chapbook Award.

Instagram: @forrest.rapier

Virgil Suárez was born in Havana,

art by Gregory Stump

by Michael Murphy

Nate and Lily have everything they need. In bed, on screens, they comfortably receive, blanketed in a surety that nourishes them, umbilically bound to the ether. Telework, telehealth, telelife. Add to cart, buy now, deliver today. Desires form, are filled and forgotten, footprints in the sand swept to sea.

Their apartment is bedroom, kitchen, and living room in one. It is capsule and craft sailing true through the all-against-all. A button push or click of key and onward in a woosh of serene.

art by Gregory Stump

by B. Anne Kalicki

HEAD SOUTH ON HEVER RD TOWARD UCKFIELD LN

0.3 mi

Hever Castle was resplendent – too much of what you expected. The crawling ivy, swans in the moat! The one thing you could have done without was the life-size replica of an adult Anne Boleyn. The castle was her childhood home, and you wanted to imagine her there as a child. Her appearance is your access point into her, after all. Getting there was easy enough,