Patrick Cahill’s The Machinery of Sleep (Sixteen Rivers Press) appeared in 2020. A second collection, If We are the Forest the Animals Dream, also from Sixteen Rivers, appeared in 2025. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. A cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal, Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.

Jennifer Campbell

Your Privacy Is Worth $8

Shut down one sense

heighten the others

your contact lenses

wilting on the sink edge

become shards of blue ice

lost to the tile floor

you will smile at the stab of pain

triggered by spoons clanging

differently appointed glasses

a symphony for the throat

Feel the mouth blood

of a burning world

within a frozen tundra

your insides twisting

independent of your actions

and regrets

cameras looking in

cameras pointing out

Follow the car wash line

whining into traffic

conveying exhaust

through a steamy tunnel

of drilled drops

back into gleaming light

Blow your whole settlement

check on a cup

of coffee crafted

with oat milk, two sugars,

and caramel syrup

predicted and customized

before you walked in the door

then start the process again

About the Author

Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and served for nearly 20 years as a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She is the author of Supposed to Love (Saddle Road Press), Driving Straight Through (FootHills), and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems titled What Came First (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in North Coast Voices 2025, Healing Muse, and Cumberland River Review, and is forthcoming in Pennsylvania English and Timberline Review.

CS Crowe

Soup of the Day

Steaming in stainless steel pots

In an empty corner of the deli

Too many options for simpler times

The old man's heart beats in his ears

His doctor has been telling him

To watch his cholesterol for years

Sugar and salt, butter and bread

There's a shelf full of salads to his left

But his hand passes over the veggie soup

For golden bubbles of lobster crab bisque

It is a cold and rainy day in April

Soon, spring will return, then summer

The asphalt warm beneath the sun

An grocery cart abandoned just past

The line where the wheels lock up

A haggard man sits on the corner

With a soggy cardboard sign

The old man eats his soup in his car

A spoon held firm in shaking hands

Too many options for simpler times

About the Author

CS Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.

Robert L. Giron

Song 131 Simplicity

My soul is like a mirror

that displays my inner core.

No action goes unseen,

no thought contained.

Before You is my life

clear and plain.

Song 146 Praise for Help

I praise You for your help,

for I live my days at

your side.

In You I place my trust

for no other would be just.

The breath of truth in the

tomb You are, the source

of life from the womb.

The galaxies your cast, the

earth your stage; here we

are but emblems upon

the rocky plane.

Let us grasp

your magnificence,

preserve us until to

dust we return, to join

You upon the celestial plane.

About the Author

Robert L. Giron is a poet, writer, photographer, and editor. His has published several books of poetry as well as anthologies. His work has appeared in national and international publications.

Irene Kim

Watchful

© by Irene Kim.

Sam Hendrian

"Did You Feel the Earthquake?"

Fled the conservative Midwest

In the year 2022

Just to finally test

Whether her childhood dreams were actually true.

Mom and Dad shook their heads

While praying for her soul

And overdosing on the meds

The Church said would make them feel whole.

It grew hard for them to talk about anything

With damnation at stake

Although now and then her phone got a ping:

"Did you feel the earthquake?"

California had its trademark stereotypes

From vapid personalities to natural disasters

But despite all their judgmental gripes

Her parents remained checking-in masters.

Initially she didn't respond,

Unwilling to play their game

Until her fear of a shattered bond

Made her realize they were so different and so the same.

"Nope, I didn't feel the earthquake,"

Might as well be honest this one time

Since she didn't want to go to their wake

Seeming like she was there on someone's dime.

No, she genuinely loved them

Passive aggressive delusions and all

Except resentment did naturally stem

From their insistence that her rise was a fall.

Why couldn't they understand?

Why must they stay blinded by fear?

The Beatles was their favorite band

Yet they'd rather forgive LSD than beer.

One beer and she wasn't even horny

For women or for stupid men,

Instead searching for an attorney

To defend every liberating place she'd been.

"Did you feel the earthquake?"

Well, at least they cared about something

And she'd accept every reminder she could take

That to someone she meant everything.

About the Author

Sam Hendrian is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, poet, and playwright striving to foster empathy through art. From writing personalized poems for passersby outside of LA's oldest independent bookstore every Sunday, to making Chaplin-esque silent films about loneliness and human connection once a month, Sam lives to make other people feel seen and validated. More work can be found on Amazon, YouTube, and in various online literary magazines.

Vitaly Titov

Sunrise Over Prague, Look from Charles Bridge

Laurence Levey

Meanwhile I Wait

Meanwhile I wait

For another bit

Of serendipity

Like the ones

That brought me

To Prague, Vilnius,

And București

Or the one that led to the job, crappy job,

But where I met

My wife-to-be

And the one that led

To the Buddhist retreat

And the death ceremony,

Candles lit,

Flames burning,

Buddhists chanting,

Grievous sobbing,

Dead all but rising,

And I thought

Of Joe and Jimmy

And all the others lost…

It was grace I felt

When tripping,

Out of my mind,

Out of my tree,

And the most deeply

Troubled individual

I’d ever met

Shepherded me

Back to something

Like sanity—

Albeit fleeting—

Without all of which,

Where would I be,

If not here, waiting?

About the Author

After receiving degrees in Psychology from Wesleyan and Duquesne Universities in the previous century, and since completing Naropa University’s Creative Writing Program in Prague, CZ, I have had work published in Versal, Ellipsis, the Barcelona Review, the Worcester Review, the New Guard, the Main Street Rag, Poemeleon, and other journals, and was a finalist for the 2023 Princemere Poetry Prize, and in the 2016 Breakwater Review Fiction Contest.

Joan Leotta

Lilies of the Valley

From the shady

places in the garden,

among the rocks,

small white bells

ring out

spring and

summer’s

sweetest fragrance,

hope, liberty

with each breeze.

About the Author

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Internationally published as essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, she’s a multiple nominee for Pushcart and Best of Net. Her publications have appeared in One Art, Poetry Superhighway, Lothlorien, The Ekphrastic Review, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Her folk and personal story programs highlight food, family, and strong women. Her “Louisa May Alcott” presentation highlights the author’s development as a writer and time as a Civil War Nurse. She is a Regional Rep for the North Carolina Writers Network. She has taught storytelling and writing, for the North Carolina Poetry Society, NC Writers Network, ND Humanities, and others.

Kevin J. B. O’Connor

Basura

The man, choosing his subject, selects garbage over trout.

Like the chemist-poet from Ithaca whom he emulates,

he maneuvers through analogies. But language, meaning—

all are tossed in the dumpster beside dried fish, bones,

foam, and soiled hamburger wrappers. There is no waste

if all is expendable, only diversions in an enclosed prison.

Ammons recommends Eliot, who recommends Pound,

but the man reads nothing, sipping a Mai-Tai in the late afternoon

on the porch of his State Street apartment. It’s summer, so kids

are swimming in the gorge, leaping from cliffs into a lake.

That is where the man was bitten by a tick, contracting a disease

that has taken him decades to fix. In his garden, blue irises sprout,

green tomatoes, elephant garlic. The man feels like an elephant

as he contemplates the great poets of the East—

Death entering into a drawing room with Rumi and Basho.

Yet even that will be erased before the construction of the New City

with its skyscrapers and interfaith cathedrals.

Hot dog stands will close, and reopen as makers of pomegranate soup,

almond scones, and lamb shish kebabs—a thousand hot dogs

flushed down a city toilet in the middle of the night.

The New City will have songs worthy of its character:

“Man Holding a Shish Kebab,” “Guitars in Traffic,” and “Pomegranate.”

En vez de jugar fútbol, los jóvenes buscarán miel y leche en la basura.

The milk and honey they find will be half-eaten, perused by ants.

They will leave it in the trash. Hay cosas que no sabemos—obvio—

pero también vamos a escribir un poema sobre las nubes.

Maybe the smog has the answers we’ve never known, the man thinks,

half in Spanish and half in his own internal language that cannot be translated.

Meanwhile, the Buddha appears to hand the man a black slate

to write upon—to declaim the vicissitudes that encroached in his twenties.

“Suffering is like a geranium in place of a pink orchid or a bite of dragonfruit,”Buddha claims. The man disagrees, but allows him to continue.

“Loss is the name we give to our secret desire to reappear.”Again, what the Buddha says is no different than a fortune cookie.

The man quotes the Bible from memory: “I have come to set fire to the Earth.”

Buddha responds: “Yes, the wisdom of the metaphysicians of the West,

what interesting prophets you have.” In the end, the Buddha moves in

with the man and sips bourbon on his porch, contemplating maple trees

and meditating beside the garden. The two cook garlic pasta with olive oil

and eat pomegranates for dessert. Most nights in Ithaca, the stars

are just visible over the streetlights and roofs of houses.

The Buddha types his wisdom on an old laptop, burning the midnight oil,

and the man sleeps soundly dreaming of his childhood—

baseball games, nature hikes, family dinners.

In the morning, he fries bacon and eggs, mixes up a batch of blueberry pancakes.

Ammons calls. “What have you written?”

“Nothing but garbage,” the man replies, searching for wit to impress the poet.

“That’s all there is” Ammons says. “Didn’t you read my book?

But you must present it as a bouquet of dead shrimp, empty bottles of zinfnadel,

and a charming cement block. That way it can be glimpsed from afar,

like a lighthouse on the shores of some abandoned metropolis. Our duty

is to preserve morale; and secondarily, to sell our words.” The man nods,

staring at the Buddha, who is now eating his second serving of bacon.

“Buddha is here,” he says. “I better go. We have plans to pick strawberries

this afternoon.” “Very well,” Ammons replies. “But I should inform you.

There has lately been a man in town—a professor of history—

posing as Buddha and writing a book about his experiences.

It’s been on the news. You better make sure that’s the real Buddha!”

But the man knew what Ammons said was nonsense,

and spent a long summer

learning Eastern religion and writing poems,

while the Buddha slept underneath the stars, and the blue irises

bloomed like wildflowers in his suburban yard.

About the Author

Kevin J.B. O'Connor received his PhD from the University of Kentucky and his MFA from Old Dominion University. He has poetry forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Action, Spectacle, and Speckled Trout. Currently, he resides in Lexington, KY.

Thomas Phalen

What Stone

What stone will bear your name for you

When you, no more, are done,

What runes there carved to vault through time

To mark all that is gone?

Whose heart your memory gently keep

When a heart have you no longer

What echo will your joys resound

When none can you yet conjure?

What harp of grass will speak your words

When no breath have you to mouth them,

What song will by it then be sung

When stilled, your music ends?

What breeze in vain will beckon you

And who shall give response,

When it will be you can’t attend

Nor hearken this last once?

What force will in some matt of roots

Your new shoots run again,

What freshet cool will slake your thirst

When your waters all dry run?

What tree atop the next high hill

Will be your eyes to see,

O’er which the day at break will rise

But will not rise to ye?

What silken pond will be your skin

Wrinkled now by winter wind,

Past time of rude youth’s bitter flight

In icy vice too stern to rend?

What warm sun be your sweetheart’s love

Fond embrace now loosed and lost

What clouded sky will weep its rain

Shed for such dread cost?

What meadow soft will be your bed

When no more you need of sleep,

And who, but I, your bedfellow be

‘Neath the vault of twilight’s keep?

About the Author

Thomas Phalen is a retired lawyer, an Irish/American dual national, and has a Master of Philosophy degree in Creative Writing from the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. His chapbook, Losing My October, will be published by Finishing Line Press in May 2027. He has been published in more than a dozen literary journals among which are: The Lune, Blue Mountain Review, The Muleskinner Journal, Icarus, The Wild Umbrella, Third Wednesday, SBLAAM, Wilderness House Literary Review, Written Tales Magazine, Harrow House Journal, The Scop, Does it Have Pockets?, ArLiJo, Arlington Literary Journal, and Cider Press Review. He was a four-time contributor in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a founding editor of The Muleskinner Journal.

Geo. Staley

Another Monday

On my walk from the swim center,

I trip, go face first to the sidewalk.

Blood gushes from my nose.

I grab the wet towel from the gym bag,

put it to my face to stem the flow.

I somehow manage to call my daughter

to rescue me.

As I sit on the curb waiting,

nose bleeding, throbbing,

a man walking by asks if I need help.

Aside from the blood, I’m fine.

Help is on the way.

Soon, a jogger asks if I’m okay.

Yes. My daughter is coming to get me.

Then a bicyclist rides by and swings back.

He asks if he can help.

I’m good. Waiting for my daughter.

The bicyclist says he’ll wait with me

until she arrives.

Three people chance upon

a bleeding stranger

sitting upon a curb at 8:30 AM

offer help.

This is the world I believe in,

the world I enjoy being a part of.

About the Author

Geo. Staley is retired from teaching writing and literature at Portland Community College. He also had taught in New England, Appalachia, and on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. His poetry has appeared in ArLiJo, Freshwater, Main Street Rag, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, Willow Review, Trajectory, Evening Street Review, Paddock Review, Slab, Book of Matches, Slipstream, Change Seven, and others.

Tim Suermondt

Recharging the Batteries

“You should be writing,” my muse says,

making it sound like a command

but I’m determined to continue my laziness

and come back with a flurry of genius,

shorter poems, of course, willing to disagree

with Camus who wrote real poets

write long poems—he was a muse of mine

in my youth and I took him as gospel,

even now I see him in the Combat offices,

turning a Resistance poet who wrote long poems

into a candidate for martyrdom and eternal verse.

I want to believe that had he not died so soon

Camus would have remembered the necessity

of the provisional values and given the stamp

of approval to shorter poems, as my muse

has done, dropping any threat to leave me.

“When I start writing again,” I tell her,

“the first poem will be dedicated to you.”

“It is about time,” she says, her voice growing

softer, doesn’t notice her hand on my shoulder.

About the Author

Tim Suermondt’s seventh full-length book of poems A Day In The Republic came out in late 2025 from Dos Madres Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Amsterdam Review and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Jay Udall

Implications

I watch a buck, fearful of my dog and me, leap—

a fluid arc—into two tons of speeding steel.

The earth is sealed under snow, under ice,

under asphalt and concrete. Where is there

left for wild things to go? Where do I kneel?

Forgive me, great deer. Forgive me, feral kitten

who climbed into my car’s engine to flee

the unforgiving cold, only to be shredded by

the fan belt, screaming when I turned the key.

Forgive me, unknown creature who climbed out

of a Louisiana ditch to be crushed by my tire

as I hurtled, afraid, desirous, through the night.

Unknown driver who woke from rushing dream

to sudden buck and brokenness, I know you.

The ego is survival’s engine, driving us.

We are the blood in the machine, still beating,

unlike the hearts of Minab children murdered

in their school by our errant missiles, a war

invented by men’s terror-rage for power

acting out the myth of a wrathful God.

I worship creatures breathing, curled in warmth,

wandering fields, woods, broad water and sky,

children at their desks, attentive, bored, or

at play in their unrepeatable lives.

About the Author

Jay Udall’s latest book of poems is Reach Beyond Reach (2022 Comstock Review Chapbook Award). Previous volumes include Because a Fire in Our Heads (X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize) and The Welcome Table (New Mexico Book Award). He teaches all things English at Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale.

Rido

Stressed Young Businessman

Susanna Solomon

Your Account Has Been Terminated

“What?” Winston Fitzpatrick stared at his cell phone. His account? Cable, telephone, bank account?

He froze. His bank account?

Winston looked very carefully at his phone again and listened again. The recorded message was bland and annoying, but clear.

His hands felt funny. Tingling a little. Same with his toes. He was sitting in his favorite chair, in the sun on his porch in Asheville, North Carolina, knees bent, cup of coffee in one hand, phone in the other.

Book of the Month club, terminated. He hadn’t asked for that and neither had Gladys, gone now, six months. He hadn’t the desire to clear out her closets, tomorrow, maybe. There was always tomorrow for that.

He put down his phone. Rubbed his temple. Waved to Mr. Thomas, a neighbor, walking his enormous black Great Dane Rex.

Winston reached for his cigarettes but remembered, quite suddenly, that he didn’t smoke. Stopped when he lost Gladys and he missed them both.

He had to get his bank account reactivated. That would be a problem. His phone flashed, he touched it, and one by one the apps on his phone disappeared as he watched, incredulous. What work he had to do to get them all back! Now to find someone under thirty who could help.

Winston felt more and more peculiar. His ears were cold and his mouth hot and parched. His feet were freezing, his eyesight fuzzy. His hands thinner and thinner like Mr. Thomas. But now his skin was almost transparent, like his father before him, at 90, but Winston was only 85. Bit by bit, slowly at first, Winston himself disappeared in a cloud leaving one tiny spark that ignited and burned out.

Winston wasn’t on his porch anymore. He was in front of Gladys’ house when she was younger, a California bungalow, he was late for a date, his hands were sweaty, his mind clear for the first time in days, Gladys had said yes to going steady.

The memory of her bright blue eyes turned in his imagination as he stood by her parents’ front door, his tie a bit askew, his jacket borrowed, his shoes somewhat polished.

Winston had all the time in the world but didn’t know that then. All he knew was that Gladys would come out the door and this time she would take his hand as they would walk to his ’67 Chevy Bel Air for a kiss, which he thought her parents never saw, but they could.

Gladys was radiant, her figure like the ads in beauty magazines, built just right, her blond hair cascading down her back, her cat’s-eye glasses with sparkles winning over his heart.

He reached for the door knocker, knocked and waited.

Gladys was equally radiant when she held Joshua, their first, a few years later. His tiny fingers curled around hers, his mouth like a rosebud, and Gladys, sweat-stained hospital gown, wet hair plastered to her forehead, his Gladys, his love, and now a mother.

He woke to another room, a sitting room in a hospital, but this time there was no joy in his heart. Gladys sat beside him as they held hands and prayed that their youngest, Jeremy, would make it through the night. A pocket of tissues were on Gladys’ lap, all used and smooshed like

Winston’s heart.

Jeremy, weakened by pneumonia, standing in his snow suit on top of Observatory Hill, holding his saucer. Winston at the bottom of the hill and Gladys, beside him, while Jeremy, in a bolt of speed, flew down to them, screaming with delight, while both parents had tears in their eyes.

Gladys tried to teach the boys how to bicycle, on their tree-lined street, while Winston watched for traffic and yelled at the boys, “Pump, pump your pedals. Go, go, go!”

It was Winston’s job to teach them how to drive his old stick shift, but it was Gladys who taught them to be kind to girls.

He could see her now, standing on the beach, in her dumpy bathing suit, curves in all the wrong places, calling to him, Winston, it’s you, oh, Winston, I’ve waited too long to see you, her feet in the water, waves splashing her ankles, a little dress skirt on her bathing suit and Winston, in his everyday polo shirt and trousers, again overdressed for the occasion.

His beloved was there, waiting for him and in the distance, a small figure, running, running to them, a boy, not yet in his teens, “Oh, Jeremy,” Winston cried out, “Oh, Jeremy.”

“He’s gone,” the nurse said, putting down her hand. “I’m so sorry.” She was in a crisp white uniform, efficient, kind and no one Joshua would ever forget.

“Just like that,” he said softly.

“Yes. But if it’s any comfort to you, Joshua, he did have a smile on his face up until the very end.”

Joshua took his father’s still warm hand, leaned over and gave his dad a kiss. Then gently left the hospital. If he didn’t get a move on, he would be terminated too.

About the Author

Susanna Solomon is the author of three short story collections; Point Reyes Sheriff's Calls, More Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls (both inspired by actual sheriff’s calls in the West Marin newspaper The Point Reyes Light), and Paris Beckons, evocative stories full of emotion set in Paris. She has just finished her newest short story collection, Atlantic City 1909, stories about misfits—unusual people who find themselves in difficult situations.

A Review

by Robert L. Giron of A Little World Made Cunningly, (2024, Resource Publications) by George Klawitter

George Klawitter’s latest book of poetry titled A Little World Made Cunningly is surely an homage to John Donne’s I Am a Little World Made Cunningly. In the spirit of the metaphysical poets who question things that one can’t explain by science alone and writing that goes to the core of “what is” in the philosophical sense Klawitter lays out a poetic banquet for the reader. For one’s intellect may propose answers about what one cannot explain but how does one reconcile emotions and the ethereal of what one observes or even touches?

Knowing that one cannot possibly know the answers, one nonetheless attempts to sort out the wonders of the world through language and imagery. Well versed in the spiritual and the metaphysical, Klawitter steps out into the world and provides us with the charm of poetic vision to help us see what he hopes to find in his quest for knowledge.

The poem His Lake evokes the mystery of life and all its wonders, of which the self is primordial as man searches with curiosity “to find the self in water / where the answers lie waiting / for fulfillment, ecstasy, and peace // dissolution the only finale / worth ample consideration.” And so, the reader is left wondering as we have been for eons: What is out there and beyond our mortal existence?

There is a fascination with life and all its creatures, be they animal or human—all have a purpose or simply continue their life, as it’s that energy that keeps one / things going on, even without a purpose, though many invent one to exist. Then when one’s time comes, it’s like a sudden “wind from nowhere / swirled down among the autumn leaves, / lifting [us up] in a whirl skyward, then [is] gone / as suddenly as it appeared.” The remaining contemplate the element of common life with its vast array of possibilities which keep us moving forward notwithstanding its highs or lows, for what else can one do?

Yet it is the primal smell of dirt when thrust into fire as it fuses “the bone and muscle” that arouses the priapic force that has the will to go on. And though we all know bone and flesh will rot, it’s ironic that the forged dirt in a pot will outlast us all as it goes from “hand to hand”—it oblivious of its longing grace, “proud just to be.”

Klawitter’s collection is a cornucopia of poetic mosaic tiles laid out for the reader to read and re-read, with each reading one finding yet another reference to spiritual and poetic wisdom handed down to us by the legacy of poets and mystics who have seen, found, and understood mysteries that need to be revisited each eon to rise to the surface for each of us to attempt to disrobe the world “made cunningly.”

About the Author

George Klawitter taught English at St. Edward’s University, edited the poetry of Richard Barnfield and published The Enigmatic Narrator, a study of same-sex love in John Donne’s poetry. His poems have been printed in various journals including The James White Review, Assaracus, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Evergreen Chronicles, Milkweed, and Cumberland Poetry Review. His first book of poetry, Country Matters, appeared in 2001. His book Let Orpheus Take Your Hand won the Gival Press Poetry Award in 2002. His most recent poetry book A Little World Made Cunningly appeared in 2024.

About the Reviewer

Robert L. Giron is a poet, writer, photographer, and editor. His work has published several books of poetry as well as anthologies. His work has appeared in national and international publications.