This issue features
photograph by Brian Michael Bareito,
poetry by Vyarka Kozareva,
poetry by Tom Pearson,
poetry by Adam Torkelson, and
photograph by Brian Michael Barbeito
Vyarka Kozareva
Sister Theodosia
Too meek and tiny,
She makes people think
She used to dwell a doll house.
She says
Nobody’s born taught
How to remain a stoic
In the vortex of tactlessness
Or how to discern the most promising chance.
Through her eyes
Misfortune looks extravagant
With its long swoopy fringe,
Accordion skirt,
And old silver ring.
She plants xanthic flowers
To scale up and down
The importance of pain
In an attempt to respect
The death’s abstract taste for art.
She isn’t afraid
The worms may apply canons
To judge (post factum) her life
In the bubbles of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
She’s never seen time a social construct
Nor asked herself
Which is the true part
Of the mantra:
The vicious always emerges
From its wrongly presumed latency.
Copyright © 2025 by Vyarka Kozareva.
Gestalt Principles
Pieces of unproved love
Incongruous
Couples of (un)lucky dice
With sayings of superstition
Somewhere sometimes
Someone
Juggling with words
States of matter manner and mind
Winds of change
Smoke rings
In the points of inflexion
Dialectical bubbles
Up to using false dilemma
I’m afraid
We’ll become asymmetric
Taking too much of plagiarism
In between
In return
Illusions
Can’t prevent altercation
Between large and small molecules
Blooming on the most Lenten days
The Easter flowers won’t object
When we share our fishes and loaves
Without scruples and scrutiny
Unaware
What’s beneath the loincloths
Of the paper heroes
In times of aneuploidy
If you are strong-minded
To throw amber skeletons into fire
I am ready to illuminate my conchoidal fractures.
Copyright © 2025 by Vyarka Kozareva.
About the Author
Vyarka Kozareva is from Bulgaria. Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Ariel Chart, Poetry Pacific, Basset Hound Press, Bosphorus Review of Books, Mad Swirl, Ann Arbor Review, Fevers Of The Mind, Juste Milieu Lit, Trouvaille Review, Aberration Labyrinth, Triggerfish Critical Review, Sampsonia Way Magazine, Synchronized Chaos Magazine, Toasted Cheese, The Big Windows Review, morphrog, Tipton Poetry Journal,Wildfire Words, Wellspring Literary Journal, and Panoply Zine.
Brian Michael Barbeito
Birds on Vessel

© by Brian Michael Barbeito.
About the Artist
Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. He is the creator of the prose poem and photography books, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through (Dark Winter Press, July, 2024), and the forthcoming work, When I Hear the Night (Dark Winter Press, January, 2026)
Tom Pearson
Night Riders
If not for the mangroves and dunes, Granny and
her back room, or the creeks and swamps and
marshes, it might have mattered more that we had
been raised on cinder block, stacked two by two
under a single-wide trailer, toddling through a red-
black forest of thick shag, silver-lined, plucking out
curly shavings of aluminum because they laid the
carpet before they cut out the windows.
When the trailer pitched in storm, a snare played
by the branches of cypress, we were knocked out by
the assault of cloud cannons, pelting the roof in
rapid-fire—so sound was sleep, so deep our dreams,
and we would ride her into midnight, the trailer
with its hitch pointing forward like a prow—but that
was us too. There. Then. Now.
Copyright © 2025 by Tom Pearson
Palimpsest
No wonder.
Clever tactics on a treacherous route
Today the mailman came late. Tomorrow
A younger man will come even later.
The labrador showed his confusion at
The gate when his daily postdate went un-
Rewarded.
Smart tactic.
Trespasser gaslighting the sentinel—
It was the 1980s and we were
Spinning a cold war on a warm globe with
Mutual Assured Destruction, material
Devotion, and a treat for the
Mis-treated.
Or it was
2022 and it was only
The world tour of the same show with different
Players on different stages—same plot though,
Same blocking.
Curious.
The night the younger man came, I made the
Old recipe, and it was winter there
In Russia, a vegetable massacre
Occurring in a famine year and I
Dreamt of a mushroom growing from the top
Of my head, and woke to cancer in the
Late summer.
Driving to Providence and listening to
Erasure. Innocents. Overwritten.
Another
Season (the bloody borscht of winter’s past),
Saint Petersburg in rain, through a body
Bag thawing on the counter–all the while
She cauterized vessels, I could smell the
Flesh burning and could feel the four horsemen
Of the Apocalypse pushing the folds
Of my scalp back together. She scooped me
Like the soft insides of boiled beets, but it
Was the stitching back together that was
Her true treachery.
It didn’t have to be, but could just be
Nothing.
Another
Postdate in another town, another
State, murder in the park or meltdown on
The river, atrocities unexamined,
Gorky or Chernobyl, that would take us
Another 40 years or more from
Pryp’yat to the mouth of the Kalmius
To notice on the shores of
Mariupol.
Ignorance.
We blamed it on our parents while our own
Complacency bloomed; we once survived
Atomic threat, and so we took smaller deaths for
Victories.
Oiled and naked
Screaming with delight, we would squirm through
Their arms and run free into the sun. Now
We all sit in a waiting room like cartoon
Characters after a bar brawl, a
Bandaged ear, a tourniquet head, a face,
A nose–
Looking at
Each other without looking, something
Passing between us that felt like a concert
Of collective past, I could hear the
Radio from the nurse’s station, Boys Don’t
Cry, The Cure.
Copyright © 2025 by Tom Pearson.
About the Author
Tom Pearson is a poet, multimedia theater artist, choreographer and co-creator of the long-running off-Broadway hit Then, She Fell (2012-2020). He has been noted for his “exacting, exuberant choreography” and for his “vastly panoramic and deeply personal” poetry. His published works include The Sandpiper’s Spell (Ransom Poet Publishers, 2018), Still, the Sky (Ransom Poet Publishers, 2022) and Eppure, il Cielo (Interno Poesia Editore, 2023). Visit: tompearsonnyc.com
Adam Torkelson
Breathe
Whispers,
pensive whispers,
saturate me with flame,
caught nevermore by unchaste ears,
concealing pride against its usefulness,
to never hate nor lose your scorn,
to hear overhead the
voices that are
whispers.
Copyright © 2025 by Adam Torkelson.
Deer Rush Illusions
Rowing out to
the edge of the pond that night,
birdsong slowly through the solitude
from surrendered oars in the dory’s hull
imparted polyphony athwart your whispering lips,
and jug-o-rums from provincial bullfrogs
floated through firefly-fog.
Alas, as they drifted, they impeded your voice
and breath-to-ear,
each passing word,
had vanished.
Copyright © 2025 by Adam Torkelson.
About the Author
Adam Torkelson is a poet living in Texas with his two sons. He has degrees in music and accounting. He works as a staff accountant at a small CPA firm. His interests include reading, writing, and music. He writes poetry to express his love of life and nature.
Brian Michael Barbeito
Lake Sun Trees

© by Brian Michael Barbeito.
About the Artist
Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. He is the creator of the prose poem and photography books, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through (Dark Winter Press, July, 2024), and the forthcoming work, When I Hear the Night (Dark Winter Press, January, 2026)