top of page

ISSUE 28 SNEAK PEEK

Still Life

by Christy Prahl

There is a lemon.

There is a dachshund.

There is a broken board.

Consider the lemon,

yellow as the sun,

primal as the origin story of food.

Enter the dachshund,

squat and disproportionate circus

clown of dogs.

And now the broken board,

an accident in waiting.

What does that have to do with anything?

asks the new sweetheart,

a literalist, but strapping enough

to keep around for entertainment.

Have you never played the game

of lemon, dachshund, broken board?

Dachshund beats broken board.

Broken board beats lemon.

Lemon beats dachshund.

(The sour tongue, you ninny.)

It might surprise you to learn

that they all made me cry.

The dachshund for dying of bloat

after I let myself love her.

The lemon for a spray of citric acid in the eye

while brightening up the flounder.

The broken board for my sweetheart’s twisted ankle,

the fear that he would leave me.

But somehow, he stays.

He writes me a song called

A Lemon, A Dachshund, A Broken Board.

It is a song about none of these things.

It goes like this.

prahl
SHR28 front cover sm.png

Order your own copy or download an electronic version for just $2 from our Purchase page.

chang

执迷不悔 Unrepentant 

by Michael Chang

What can I do but shine / in memory

—John Wieners

 

racing down a beach may reap uncommon rewards

a simple gift, one a ghost could give

when all’s said & done, what have we got left

ghost nuts, a whole wad

[something to share]

ur breath on my chest

AG standing for “aspiring governor”

u will surely hate growing old

the constant yelping in the yard

followed by extended periods of pain

my mood depending upon the fireworks

i derive no pleasure from fantasies

indecent lips, carnal skin

unwholesome, vulgar

buggers to be awoken

ppl who disappear into side streets w/o warning

& never look back

on a day like today

remind me how the sunroom filled w/ ferns

over our protestations

the trip to echo park being unnecessary

it was the first good party of the season [some say the only]

baubles & balls

snow that keeps melting

after u shake it off

three bees on a shield

shiny headgear lifted from a learned man

reciting the dimensions of a dream

kilpatrick

Jackson Pollock Paints a Self-portrait

by Lynn Kilpatrick

If the brushstroke embodies representation,

let this drop of paint be the thin membrane

between being and seeing. Let the exact gray

of my eyes become nothing more than gauze

through which I see the canvas, darkly. She

said, show me the exact yellow of light,

and I said, I don’t paint that shit. I said,

every canvas is a self-portrait, every

drop of paint is a whiff of the world

that can’t be unmade. I am painting

the world in my image, one giant white

mistake at a time. I said, stand back.

I said, look at this.

bear

Trap Teop Trap Flow

by J. P. Dancing Bear 

 

for Ruth Awad

Today on your birthday,

I told several people seeking advice

to read your work. Not because,

but because I didn't know, at the time,

it being your anniversary howl.

My people dreamed of stately swans

floating across dreamcatcher

ponds who were themselves ancient people.

When I was a child, a bear came to me,

and in my sleep it nudged me awake,

and breathed into my mouth. Now I confess

my words, my words, my tongue are hers.

She still comes in between worlds, comes

and looks down at me, much as you do,

in that photo, the one where behind

you, on swan-white paper, float the words,

traP

toeP

traP

floW

Yes. It is the look of one who knows

this world is a forest trail, cutting,

winding its way down to water, down

to a face made of tears.

james

From: Visa Interview to Become a Full Human

by Cyan James

Q: Are you concerned about diabetes?

A: Sugar is more bam per gram than gunpowder but that’s only a

fact not a feeling

Kinds of sugar: confectioners’, granulated, pearl, cane, demerara, turbinado,

muscovado. Sounds like bachata song titles. Juicy entanglement. Ever smelled

a cane field on fire? Piccolo note of sweet among the whirling pillar of smoke,

hawks up high to pierce all the mammals on fire rushing the field’s edges

It kills kills kills even though it purrs so loud it fills your mouth it’s still a tiger

in your kitchen. Possible to imagine people as the personified causes of their

deaths, such as corpses like a row of frosted cakes in frilly white wrappers

We make it at seven ounces a day per person, 160 pounds per person per year,

enough to bury us all. How often we say ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘let’s

celebrate’ with the slow poison of custards, pecan pie, butter biscuits with tea

Basterdsuiker: what the Dutch called adding molasses. Sugar so prestigious

when pure, colonists gobbled it until they got black teeth. If they couldn’t buy

it, they blackened their teeth to appear rich enough (to be giving themselves

gum rot), and that’s just about everything you need to know about my people

martinez

Building L: Los Danzantes  

by Betsy Mitchell Martinez

 

I’m tired of speaking the language

of my dreams, with its childhood rhymes

and tide pools, its bulbs exploding

on schedule into clusters of grape

hyacinths. Let’s order brides on the internet

and shape our mouths into fruits

or kitchen utensils. Isn’t the weather

fine today? Would you like some sugar

in your coffee? When we visited

the ancient Zapotec city, we crouched

in the temple of los Danzantes and studied

the curves of naked men presumed

by early anthropologists to be bent

in dance. We now believe them to be

corpses, genitals replaced with

flowery scrolls. This is what I mean

when I talk about dancing.

blanchard

Fidelity is Not Dead  

by Ann-Marie Blanchard

 

Fidelity’s baby is dead. She named him Bruce

and he said goodbye, slipped into the toilet,

stingray resplendent. It hurt. Fidelity scooped

his jelly body out the bowl and buried him under

the camelia, placed a brick over his head; a Virgin

of Guadalupe candle too (even though she’s had it

with the Virgin). Some women don’t bury their jelly

babies. Some don’t give them names. Some don’t

tell anyone they birthed a jelly baby on the weekend.

Fidelity is not some women. Fidelity tries to trust

her body again—invites it out for coffee, asks what

it does for a living; doctors tell her body to try again.

Fidelity tries to chart her surges, tries to make love

even though love makes death. People say her dead

baby is the shade of hope. When did they last birth

a stingray? Don’t tell Fidelity about hope. Don’t tell

her about fish oil. Don’t tell her about mystics. Don’t

tell her to stick needles in her body at strategic points.

Don’t tell Fidelity she’s thirty-eight, daily. Don’t tell

her about prayer beads, holy water, wine fasts and

running fast. Fidelity knows a thing or two about

quackery. Fidelity prefers boa constrictors to babies,

falcons to friends, lizards to lovers, horn sharks to hope.

One of Us  

by Seth Hagen

 

One of us is drunk, and one of us is lying—

if love is a temple, it’s got spiders and a curse.

Maybe we won’t work it out, but we’re trying.

Us still swims luminous in my mind,

an embryo in its egg, candled and obscure—

OK, one of us is drunk, and one of us is lying.

You said, “Hold that thought. I’m buying,”

pleated a twenty you plucked from your purse.

Were we working it out? Were we even trying?

You swung on the surface in the glass of wine.

“I remember our first bed. Now there are no more firsts.”

Someone must be drunk. Someone must be lying.

You asked me if love was just crust, salt rime

on rock when the lies burned off from lust—

so maybe we won’t work it out, but I’m trying.

Let us kneel to its Form in faith or in science:

the voice of a virgin, black holes, a fifth force.

What if one of us is drunk and one of us lying?

Maybe we won’t work it out, but love is trying.

hagen
Contributors

CONTRIBUTORS

Alex Averbuch, a Ukrainian poet, translator, and scholar, is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations among Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. His poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. His English-language publications appear in, or are forthcoming from, The Manhattan Review (Pushcart nominated), Copper Nickel, Plume, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, and Common Knowledge. His latest book, Zhydivs’kyi korol' (The Jewish King; English transl., Lost Horse Press, 2024), was a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest cultural award.

 

About Averbuch’s translators: Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky are poets, scholars, and translators. Their translations were featured in Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Best European Fiction, and other venues. Winners of the 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competition, they coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine and co-translated Apricots of Donbas, a collection of selected poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska. Their work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Ukrainian Book Institute, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Peterson Literary Fund, Fulbright Scholar Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Steven Barfield was a British academic for most of his career, teaching principally at the University of Westminster, London. More recently he has been an educational consultant, and has taught, mentored, and advised throughout the Middle East. Now largely retired from teaching, he remains a researcher and is a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University.

 

Cynthia Bargar is the author of Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room (Lily Poetry Review Books), a Massachusetts Book Awards 2023 Honors Poetry Book. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ocean State Review, SWWIM Every Day, Driftwood Press, On the Seawall, Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, and Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits, a book of images and text by Barbara E. Cohen (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021) and the upcoming Last Milkweed Anthology (Tupelo Press, 2025). Cynthia is associate poetry editor at Pangyrus LitMag. CynthiaBargar.com

 

A graduate of the creative writing program at Boston University, Deborah J. Bennett’s poems and translations have appeared in Salamander, 236, Tupelo Press, Connotations Press Online, FUSION, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in Only a Game, Cognoscenti, Edify, and elsewhere. She recently attended Bread Loaf’s Translators’ Conference and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference. She teaches languages at Berklee College of Music, where she is inspired by fellow artists.

 

Ann-Marie Blanchard teaches poetry and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame on the west coast of Australia, having taught writing for a decade at universities in the US. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, A Public Space, Adroit Journal, Palette Poetry, Meanjin Quarterly, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction.

 

Erik Brockbank is a poet and psychology researcher living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Susanna Brougham's poetry has been published in Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. Her work has appeared on Poetry Daily and American Life in Poetry. For her day job, she works as an editor for publishers and art museums.

 

Mary Buchinger is the author of six collections of poetry, including Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, 2023), Virology (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), / klaʊdz / (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021), e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018), and Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Boston Globe, DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, PANK, phoebe, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club and is professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. MaryBuchinger.com

 

Samuel Burt is a poet and artist from Grinnell, IA. A 2022 winner of the AWP’s Intro Journals Project, Sam’s work has been featured in Salt Hill, Colorado Review, Ghost City Review, and The Journal. Sam is a recent graduate of Bowling Green State University's poetry MFA and serves as a reader for Palette Poetry.

 

Christine Byrne is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won the John Logan Poetry Prize. Her most recent work is forthcoming in New England Review, The Journal, and elsewhere.

 

Teresa Cader’s fourth poetry collection, AT RISK, was selected by Mark Doty for the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize and will be published by Ashland Poetry Press in October, 2024. Her other books include: History of Hurricanes (Northwestern, 2009); The Paper Wasp (Northwestern, 1998); and Guests (1990), winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Prize Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award. She's received multiple honors and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf. Her poems appear in The Atlantic, Slate, Plume, Poetry, Harvard Review, On the Seawall, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Magazine, and other venues. Her work has been translated into Icelandic and Polish.

 

Patricia Caspers is an award-winning writer, founding EIC of West Trestle Review, and the author of three full-length poetry collections: The Most Kissed Woman in the World (Kelsay Books, 2024), Some Flawed Magic (Kelsay Books, 2021), and In the Belly of the Albatross (Glass Lyre Press, 2015). Her work has appeared widely in journals, such as Ploughshares and Malahat Review. She is a Unitarian Universalist.

 

Benny Cauthen is a poet and songwriter who stays up late watching movies on his phone. His work has been published in 3Elements, Book of Matches, Coastlines, and other places he has since forgotten. He is an aspiring all-American.

 

Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of Synthetic Jungle (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle, 2024), and Things a Bright Boy Can Do (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.

 

Katharine Coles’ ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, was published by Red Hen Press in June 2023, and her eighth, (Solve for) X, came out from Turtle Point Press in 2022. Her prose books include The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing (essays, Turtle Point Press), Look Both Ways (memoir, Turtle Point Press), and two novels. She received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (to write the collection of poems The Earth Is Not Flat), and the Guggenheim Foundation.

 

Lila Cutter is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University with a background in equitable arts education work. Her poetry often refracts perceptions of femininity filtered through place and has appeared in The Racket Journal, Landfill Journal, and Oatmeal Magazine, among others.

 

J. P. Dancing Bear is editor of Verse Daily. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently, Of Oracles and Monsters (Glass Lyre Press, 2020), and Fish Singing Foxes (Salmon Poetry, 2019). His work has appeared in hundreds of venues.

 

Jim Daniels’ latest books include The Human Engine at Dawn (Wolfson Press); Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press); and The Luck of the Fall (Michigan State University Press), a collection of short stories. A native of Detroit, he lives in an old church on the south side of Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

 

Kurt David is a public school teacher and unionist. His creative work has appeared in Foglifter, Gulf Coast, Split Lip, and elsewhere. He lives with his boyfriend in Lenapehoking/Philadelphia.

 

Karen Earle, a private practice psychotherapist, is a New Directions Program/Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge faculty member. After earning an MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was adjunct faculty at Widener University and directed the writing lab at Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including The G W Review, Chaffin Journal, Chaminade, The Denver Quarterly Literary Review, and Hudson Valley Echoes. She was a semifinalist in the Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest and was awarded a Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing fellowship.

 

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller received his PhD and MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, where he also served as poetry editor and digital nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Joshua has published poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing; most recently he was a scholar at the inaugural Yetzirah poetry conference. His newer poetry appears in Brooklyn Rail, miCRo, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. His debut collection, The Art of Bagging, won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, and his second book, Dybbuk Americana, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Joshua teaches at San Jacinto College and lives in Houston with his wife and son.

 

Derek Graf's first poetry collection, Green Burial, won the 2021 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Sixth Finch, Meridian, and elsewhere. He currently serves as clinical assistant professor of English at Yeshiva University. He lives in New York City.

 

Seth Hagen lives in Atlanta, GA, where he teaches English. He has works published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Right Hand Pointing, and Anacapa Review.

 

Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, Lake Effect, The Nation, as well as on her poetry blog at ClayAndBranches.com.

 

Cyan James holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and published in Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, New Mexico Review, Harvard Review, and Salon, among others. She also holds a PhD in public-health genetics and works in health policy. Currently she is revising a novel about the young women who survived the Green River Killer. She loves fiddles, falconry, long road trips, and old front porches.

 

Denise Jarrott is the author of NYMPH (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Herbarium and Nine Elegies. Her work has appeared recently in Overland, South Carolina Review, and Denver Quarterly. She grew up in Iowa and is currently living in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Stephen Kampa is the author of four poetry collections: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), Articulate as Rain (2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (2023). His work has appeared in The Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in The Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (2020). During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at Flagler College and is currently the poetry editor of Able Muse.

 

Abbie Kiefer is a poet from New Hampshire. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and other places. She was a 2022 and 2023 semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize. Find her online at AbbieKieferPoet.com.

 

Lynn Kilpatrick’s poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Denver Quarterly. Her collection of short stories, In the House, was published by FC2. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, and essays in Zone 3 and Brevity. She earned her PhD from the University of Utah and teaches at Salt Lake Community College.

 

Christine A. MacKenzie (she/her) is a neurodivergent poet, licensed social worker, and psychotherapist living in Texas.

 

Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 Winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, forthcoming 2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and now serves as the assistant director of academic support at Harper College in Chicagoland.

 

Michael Mark is the author of Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, which won the Rattle Chapbook Prize. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, The Southern Review, The Sun, and 32 Poems. MichaelJMark.com

 

Hannah Marshall lives in Grand Rapids, MI, where she works at the public library. Marshall’s poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Four Way Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her manuscript “The Shape Good Can Take” was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2023 Converse Alumni Book Prize. She received her MFA in creative writing from Converse University.

 

Betsy Mitchell Martinez received an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in The Northwest Review and Crab Orchard Review.

 

Kathleen McGookey has published four books and four chapbooks of prose poems. Her book Paper Sky is forthcoming from Press 53 in October, 2024. Her work has appeared recently in journals including Copper Nickel, Epoch, Field, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. It has also been featured on American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, and SWWIM Every Day.

 

Dion O'Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator (University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press, 2024), Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020), and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition (forthcoming, Floating Bridge Press). Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and reads for Catamaran Literary Quarterly. She splits her time between the Santa Cruz Mountains and Bellingham, WA.

 

Dayna Patterson is a photographer, textile artist, and irreverent bardophile. She’s the author of O Lady, Speak Again (Signature Books, 2023) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). She collaborated with Susan Alexander, Luther Allen, Jennifer Bullis, and Bruce Beasley to produce A Spiritual Thread (Other Mind Press, 2024). Her creative work has appeared in EcoTheo, Kenyon Review, and Poetry. She’s the founding editor (now emerita) of Psaltery & Lyre and a coeditor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. She lives with her husband and two kids in a little patch of forest in the Pacific Northwest. DaynaPatterson.com

 

Genevieve Payne is a poet who grew up in Maine. She received an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and her recent work can be found in Colorado Review, Nashville Review, The Cortland Review, and The Adroit Journal. She lives and teaches writing in the Hudson Valley.

 

Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include The Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and silos in equal measure. More of her work can be found at ChristyPrahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.

 

Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught for many years in Minnesota, and recently moved back west to Oregon. His seventh book, The Oratory of All Souls, was published by Lynx House Press in February 2023. His website is RichardRobbinsPoems.com.

 

Alan Ali Saeed is associate professor of English literature at Sulaimani University, Iraq. He has a BA from Sulaimani University (2004), an MA (London University, 2009), a PhD on Bergson and British modernist stream of consciousness women's writing (Brunel University, 2016), and a PGCHE (Falmouth, 2021) in university teaching. See his publications here: Sites.google.com/a/univsul.edu.iq/alan-ali-saeed/publications.

 

Natalie Shapero is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Popular Longing. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

Brenda Sieczkowski is an assistant professor of English at Salt Lake Community College. Born and raised in Omaha, NE, she’s been reading and writing poetry since third grade. Brenda has a BA in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida, and is finishing her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Colorado Review, The New England Review, Calyx, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Diagram, The Seneca Review, Gulf Coast, and Subtropics, among others. She is the author of two chapbooks, Wonder Girl in Monster Land and Fallout & Flotation Devices. Like Oysters Observing the Sun, her full-length poetry collection, was published by Black Lawrence Press.

 

Originally from Maine, Nell Smith is a writer and field biologist in Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Flyway, Khôra, Southeast Review, Pidgeon-holes, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing and environment and natural resources from the University of Wyoming. NellSmithWriter.com

 

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from rural Pennsylvania who works as a financial executive for a large nonprofit. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Lana Turner, Modern Haiku, Burningword Literary Journal, Delmarva Review, and Ligeia Magazine, among others. He is a Pushcart-Prize, Rhysling-Award, and Best-of-the-Net nominee. His work has appeared in the Dwarf Stars Anthology and is the winner of the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award.

 

John Vurro’s debut novel Play, Rewind is forthcoming from Tortoise Books (spring, 2025). It was shortlisted for the Masters Review Novel Excerpt Contest, judged by Charmaine Craig and Craft’s First Chapter Contest, judged by Masie Cochrun. His story, “Turnkey,” was chosen for Carve’s One to Watch feature (summer, 2015). His story, “Carmine’s War,” won Harpur Palate’s 2013 John Gardner Award. His work has been published in The Sun, The Literary Review, Eclipse, Glint, Action, Spectacle, and elsewhere. Find him on Instagram @johnvurrowriter.

 

Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, 2024), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and the chapbooks House (Ghost Proposal, 2020) and Perfumer's Organ (above/ground press, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a graduate research fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books.

 

Sunni Brown Wilkinson is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collections Rodeo (Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Autumn House Press, 2025) and The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), and the chapbook The Ache & The Wing (Sundress Chapbook Prize, 2021). Her poetry has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University, teaches at Weber State University, and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.

 

Sarah Ann Woodbury lives nestled against the Bear River Mountains, where she writes; studies socio-ecology; and performs for her dog, local trees and canyons, and other willing audiences. Her recent work can be found in The American Journal of Poetry and CALYX.

 

Burgi Zenhaeusern is the author of the chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020), winner of the Harriss Poetry Prize. She coedited the translations of the anthology Knocking on the Door of the White House (zozobra publishing, 2017). Her work appears in Little Patuxent Review, Moist Poetry Journal, and as broadside (Ashland Poetry Press). She lives in Maryland. https://linktr.ee/burgitree

 

Holli Zollinger is a self-taught artist who has made a career of her talents: drawing, painting, and surface design. She is continually inspired by her surroundings living in the desert town of Moab, UT. She is highly motivated by the art of creativity and incorporates the color, texture, and pattern she sees in the world around her. Holli’s work has been published and featured worldwide. HolliZollinger.com

 

A native of Utah, Shari Zollinger divides her time between her work as a professional astrologer and independent bookseller. She has been known to write a poetic verse or two with published work in Sugar House Review and Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. She is the author of Carrying Her Stone, a collection of poems based on the work of Auguste Rodin. ShariZollinger.com

bottom of page