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Raul searched obituaries and wrote down names of funeral homes and cemeteries for almost a year. He tried making sense of it all but couldn't. Instead, Raul created a twisted reality where he could be kept safe from the truth, and the exaggerated fabrications he told his co-workers and family became a narrative prescription for what ailed him. Raul ingested his reconstructed existence daily to stave off the smell and sound of burned rubber and shattered glass. But sometimes, his drug wore off, and memories of his son reinfected his heart like a virus until it unleashed bits of truth from his mouth as suddenly as a cough. Today, Raul arrived to work late again, and he rummaged through his brain for one of his usual lies, like: 1.       My battery died, 2.       I had a flat, 3.       I got stuck behind... •        …a school bus, •         …a trash collection truck, But, feeling exceptionally exhausted this morning, a little truth sputtered out: •           …a young boy's funeral procession. Later, Raul put on his headset and pretended to make the same collection calls on his list from days and weeks before. He dialed numbers on his call sheet, and when someone answered, he put them on hold just long enough for the office switchboard to register his call, and then he hung up. Raul often exaggerated his progress and fed his co-workers his made-up lines for lunch, like: 1.         I already hit my quota, 2.         I gave her an extension, 3.         Had a doozy of a call today, But, feeling particularly frustrated this afternoon, a buried resentment poked out of Raul's self-imposed shell, and a bit of cruel reality slipped out: 4.      I told her, "Ma'am, if you don't pay by the end of this week, we're coming for your dead son's car." Raul timed his arrival home with precision, careful to avoid any version of truth his wife might serve him for dinner. Tired, he placed his hands over his ears as he went upstairs and passed by Mikey's bedroom door but failed to block out the sound of emptiness inside. Sometimes, he paused by the entrance of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and whispered through the crack of the door excuses for his tardiness, like: 1.        There was a rollover on I95, 2.        The boss took the team out for drinks, 3.        I stopped at the mall to pick up a gift for my mother's birthday, But this time, a sadness so heavy dragged his heart back down to the second-floor hallway where Mikey once crawled and later, ran and jumped, when Raul revealed a rare, painful truth to his wife: 4.   I stopped by Mikey's grave. Most nights, Raul grabbed onto his lies like helium balloons and floated away, depriving reality of oxygen. But tonight, Mikey's framed face looked out at him from the walls, and a familiar scent from a sweatshirt that hung on a hook in the hallway filled up his senses and tethered Raul's broken heart to the truth. Margo has worked in public education for over thirty years and is the mother of two daughters and the best rescue dog ever, Harley. Her work has appeared in places such as Bending Genres, Maudlin House, The Dillydoun Review, MER, HAD, and Roi Fainéant Press. You can find her on Twitter @67MGriffin.

Hold tight. Let go. Paper cuts. Finger pricks. Knuckles jam. Bones smash. Muddy nails. Palms on an oak burl. Dandelion yellow. White snow on red skin. Scar from a pocket knife. French manicures. Lavender soap. Fingers dipped in cake batter. Your fingers untangling my hair. The intimacy of our hands interlaced. I remember when your hand engulfed mine. It was aged with lines and wrinkles, covered in skin that I could pull into little teepees before watching it retract back over your bones. My hand was soft and small in comparison. You traced the life lines on my palm and predicted joy; caressed each finger lovingly as a half part of your own creation. You brought my palm to your lips to brush a kiss across the center, curled my hand beneath yours to seal it in. You spoke the words I knew by heart, having heard them from you so many times before: “I will always love you, my Justine Rose.” I could feel your voice echo internally, the deep burrowing of a mother’s love. Then years passed. My hands slick with fear. My fists clenched. Nails scratch on my naked body. I tried to push away, push away, push away. Did you see this on my palm? Did you know that I would fail to push him away? In darkness, I hold myself together with my own two hands. I wrap my arms tightly around my body. I am grown now. My hand is bigger than yours. I can pull my skin and watch it transform into little teepees. I trace the lines that zigzag across my palm, but they lend themselves to a different interpretation. And I wonder how you missed the deep grooves of pain, the trials and devastations that would come. I wonder if, when your fingers traced those paths, you thought you could protect me from it all. In the forests of my childhood, I catch ripples in the river and watch as sunlight dances across its surface. My hand curls to bring you near, deep into the sanctuary you helped build for the times I would become lost in life’s dark and empty spaces. You, who with each kiss imprinted a reminder. You, whose voice I can always hear  —  “I will always love you, my Justine Rose.” It is you whose love is engraved on my hands. It is your hope etched along these birth-given lines. Justine Payton is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, as well as managing editor of the litmag ONLY POEMS. She has been published in the Wild Roof Journal, HerStry, The Corvus Review, The Masters Review and The Keeping Room. An avid hiker and ecofeminist, her writing most often focuses on the themes of resilience and finding wonder in the small things.

“We can compute an ephemeris for it,” I suggested. “What is that?” “It’s charting the path of a celestial object.” So I collected paper, pencils, calculators, diagrams, and opened an excel spreadsheet. We didn’t really need the paper. I thought it would make her feel more involved. She has nice handwriting. Just in that little dash-line trail of the projected path, there is careful consideration in her penmanship. The lines are steady, well-formed, like her thoughts must be something solid. Maybe she’s one of those people who thinks in concrete images. Seeing the world through her memories like a movie broken down into its separate scenes. Some people think in words. If you are like me your mind does both. There is a movie, a soundtrack, a voice-over, and closed captions but these separate elements are not always on the same page. In fact, I daresay my planets rarely align. I was drawn to her for her simplicity. Beauty is a surface thing. It cannot go deep. Or so I thought. She turned out a sharper line than I expected. She composed my image in a way I’d never seen myself before. It was like looking into a mirror from an angle I’d never had access to. “You’re more human than you think you are,” she told me. “I don’t want to seem like a douche and tell you you’re not special, but I think you give the rest of humanity a bad rap. We’re not all simple-minded beasts.” “Jesus, are you charting my astrological sign?” She hunches up her shoulders and looks away in a comical exaggeration of shame. Because shame is something she doesn’t really feel. Not like I do. I want to ask her if she can tell through the charts that I’m queer, that I want her, that I see her now from this different angle, that she is gorgeous beyond the surface. The opportunity comes and goes like a meteor across the sky. Too fast to catch in image, or words. A syllable started that goes nowhere. Dried up in my mouth. Like a dash mark, too vague. Line unconnected, never fully formed. She slips away, gets caught up in a new orbit, some handsome boy. The math was right, hypothesis confirmed. I follow the chart. A course that was always clear. I see her path projecting out of reach, out of sight into the future. Kate E Lore is a queer, neurodivergent, she/they, born to a single widowed mother, youngest of four, second to graduate high school, first bachelor's degree, first MFA in the family. Kate E Lore is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction with many publications including Black Warrior Review, Longridge Review, Bending Genres, and Door is a Jar. A jack-of-all-trades Kate splits their time between fiction and nonfiction, screenplays, flash prose, full-length novels, painting, and comics. Kate strives to appreciate the small things in life but has been known to throw down hard at an EDM rave.

While the lads Kurt used to play football with raised their glasses to toast his life, I hammered a For Sale sign into the lawn. My mother said, ‘You’re out of your mind to leave now.’ Kurt and I had lived together for ten years. He was a builder and I worked in recruitment. We’d talked about moving away, but he always dug deep arguments and cranked out complications. Without him, I had no anchor, so I drifted with my boxes all the way to St Ives. I dyed my hair shades of sapphire and started wearing florals and fishnet tights. Every evening, I played nineties music in the backyard and reclined on a lounger. I found that, if I tried, I could tune into the movement of the ocean, the way it inhaled like breath. It pulled me back to the mountains and back to Wales, back to when we were students. I closed my eyes, and we were dancing in the woods. His shoulders were firm and I felt his skin brush my lips. We danced carelessly and I knew then that I would never say goodbye. Katie Coleman is a British writer living in Thailand. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Sunlight Press, Briefly Zine, The Ilanot Review, SoFloPoJo, Bending Genres, The Odd Magazine, Lit 202, Five on the Fifth, Bright Flash and others. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. She has a master’s in creative writing and loves teaching English.

Amid the solemnity of Qingming, I ventured up the mountain, a lone pilgrim on a path of remembrance. Winding upwards, the trail was a verdant tapestry, embroidered with spring’s tender rain and the delicate, snow-like white of tung blossoms. These blossoms, clustering in profusion on the branches, fell like a soft flurry of spring snow, carpeting the path with their ethereal beauty. The breeze, a cool and gentle consort to the rain, whispered through the leaves, refreshing as it caressed my face. Atop, before a monument cloaked in moss’s green embrace, I arrayed the offerings and kindled the incense. Spirals of aromatic smoke rose, sketching delicate patterns against the somber sky. A wail, forlorn and piercing, sliced through the mist. Eyes lifting, I beheld under a tung tree’s shelter a spectral figure in dark red. Her gown, adorned with peonies stitched into the fabric, fluttered in the wind’s melancholic dance. A phoenix crown, faded yet echoing past magnificence, crowned her pale, sorrowful visage – eyes brimming with a solitude profound and ancient. Tales had spoken of such forsaken spirits, condemned to wander these woods, unacknowledged, un-mourned. A chill of fear touched me, yet within me, empathy bloomed. Are you the lone spirit of this mountain? I whispered. No words returned, only a gaze upon the offerings in my hands. Summoning bravery, I offered, these are for you, may they grant you peace. Her eyes, pools of the forgotten, flickered with surprise, then a slow nod – a silent thanks from the realm of shadows. In that hushed mountain stillness, a mortal and a ghost shared an ephemeral connection. Around us, the forest deepened into twilight, the persistent rain a gentle symphony. I’ve navigated the realms of the living and the spectral with differing strides – cautious with one, unexpectedly bold with the other. Was this the destined moment? As my homage drew to its close, her form began to blur, merging with the mists of time. Preparing to depart, her whisper, a gratitude as ancient as the hills, brushed my ear. Turning for one last look, she had vanished, leaving only tung blossom petals and the fading wisp of incense. In that fleeting encounter, our worlds – one of flesh, one of spirit – touched, before diverging once again into their solitary journeys. Huina Zheng, a Distinction M.A. in English Studies holder, works as a college essay coach. She’s also an editor at Bewildering Stories. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and others. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize twice and Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her husband and daughter.

It may be directed by a hive mind or synergist contrary to my cogitation, but that doesn’t diminish its dignity. Those eyes tune in little-known ditties in a diction I don’t follow. But there is an inexplicable truth to them. A reality that wipes my wanting bits. Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He has been published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He edited Dreich Planet #1, an anthology for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. In 2023, he won the First Prize in a Poetry Competition by the prestigious National Defense Academy, PuneHe was recently conferred the 2023 Setu Award for Excellence. He lives in Mumbai, India. X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems

I drop our daughter off at your house After my weekend visit. The small talk we make at the foot of the stairs Just isn't easy, now is it? I've gotten so good at avoiding discomfort Weighing each question I ask. Meanwhile our child on a pile of toys Watches from behind a mask. Once when the wound was still throbbing and sore, The child made us play a game. "You stand here. And mom, stand here." "Interesting game. What's it's name?" "Now walk over here and stand next to dad." "No 'cause I know what you're doing." The game was Our Wedding. We were its pawns. Her parents she was regluing. Or with salt and pepper shakers She'd reenact the scenes From movies where weddings are thwarted by villains, While the jar of oregano keens. Then it was hugging. I'd hug her goodbye And with her arms still warm She'd instantly rush to her mother's embrace And like a magician perform A secret incantation there, Not even a whisper she'd risk. Then rope us both in, to hug as a trio, And off to her bedroom she'd whisk. That was fine for a while to embrace as a group If it helped while her feelings healed. But soon adult notions asserted themselves And all tenderness was repealed. The child secretly scrutinized us As we hugged at every parting. But as of now, into your arms I'm no longer pathetically darting. The next time she'll witness us hugging each other Will be when her grandfather dies. It forms a critique of the world that the kid Must see with unbonneted eyes. Her toy owl watches me from the stairs As I nervously chat with her mom. How did they know to put blinders on falcons To keep the predators calm?

Some nights I just want to talk to you. Get a true sense of us. Learn the ins and outs of your childhood stories. Take a brisk walk through those old Warhammer books. We’ll tell stories of the times we ran from cops and stole from Target. About the time we kissed boys who someone calls their daughter. About the times we were sons before we became children. About the times we made our bodies into pyres. How their glow was unlike any other. Amber flames. Yours and mine. Queer shared passions becoming the caulk of cisgender atrophy. Yes, neither of us get how this living thing is supposed to work. Indirectly asking you to tell me it’ll be alright. A paranoia, fueled by visions of bodily decay and societal malice, fills my every waking moment, save for when I listen to your exposition. Lovers are a good way of forgetting the world around you. A home of speckled skin and ample amor. Burying my head - broken skull - into the chest of someone makes it all go away. Ramble about nothing into the tear-stained shoulder of one of my emergency contacts. Most nights my brain tries to kill me. I’m told it's built wrong for being. The cracks, the ravines in the flesh have to be filled up with medications and pills and DBT binders and ad nauseam. I feel sick most days, my thoughts forming a pressure on my throat compressing it ever-smaller. One day it’ll snap. I’ll go bald at thirty and my voice will drop lower and my stubble with scratch against the chin when I try to kiss you but I’ll leave those fears inside you. Forget a world that hates our love and our bodies and our bodily love and we’ll just talk. So let me tell you about Chaos Space Marines and strange medical phenomena and the meaning of some French horror film that neither of us truly understand. Jubilee Finnegan (they/them) is a writer based out of Southern California. They hope their work will delight, amaze, and/or confuse you.

Let me tell you a secret: When I’m old with a mouth like a gravestone party(all tilted teeth and mossy gums)I’ll still know your face better than hands know a house-key in the dark. That face — something to carry in the palm, talismanic-smooth.A key* to unlock and relight a home room by room, entered and made warm from footsteps and good thoughts alone. *A key has many parts to love your fingers over. A moon-round head. A blade running to the tip that nuzzles the skin of your thumb. A plain of notches and teeth that feel like nibbled kisses beneath that round head, that marvelous unlocker. That opener of doors. Encore: Ten definitions of nostalgia To be lost in loss and like it. To construct a dollhouse youth and call it a golden age. Calling up each passing second, and with static on your tongue, calling it an anniversary. A feeling-delivery system that comes in just one flavor.* Silvery fish, a-gasp and slippysoft, pulled up from below. Now thrashing in a boat (and you too scared to kill them). A modern-day magic turning you into Houdini. Slipping the rope of now. Sheer stubbornness: the past refusing to dilute. Old shows, old photos. Shadows made to make you feel younger. That Grecian myth where the hero can get all he wants most, as long as he doesn’t look back. He looks back. A most visited vice, a sin that taps your shoulder and says: look back. Be lost in loss and like it. *Salty-sweet. A little sickly. Licked off of your fingers. Read that again. See if the feeling lingers. Fire/light after the riot Bonfire flames fuel double-decker fun / eating cars like snacks, crunching glass and / fire-light kissing tarmac into wax / beautiful in a way but the night is thin- / skinned alive, we're all / just / hanging / by a thread. You / know we are. So don't waste / a single matchstick moment.

A face so beautiful you’d hate seeing it age. He had to die young. Almost. Fingers, hard-knuckled yet so delicate, at once pulling and not pulling the trigger, like the soft spots of my body. Someone had to tell him. Someone had to kill him. Before it was too late. Funny when you think about it. How he downed one Bud Light after another like it was nothing. How it was all that it took for me. Just the hour before, those cops bothered him with all their silly questions, ruining his mood. Mistaking him for some other douche. He’s guilty of many things, but not this. He’s guilty of the burn holes on my bed. He’s guilty of murdering the plants on her momma’s grave. He’s a guilty father, a clueless partner. “I gotta find Rat.” His fingers probe the bowl on the bar counter like the scoop of a gift machine. One nut. Two nuts. Three nuts. “He’s gotta know what to do.” I think: Why would anyone call himself Rat? He says, without knowing: “Why would you rat me out anyway?” The truth is, I didn’t know better. He didn’t know I didn’t know better. Not yet. Devil got the better of you, that skinny-ass priest in Ma’s favorite TV show would tell me if he knew. If he knew me. How stupid and uncareful I can be. “I didn’t know better,” I say, clinking my bottle to his in apology. “I love you.” Those cops. They didn’t happen to be just passing by. I was the one who called. Watching that poor girl getting her ass beat by that motherfucker was just too much to bear. What with this new critter in my belly. All those screams and tears. Motherly tears. Babyish tears. They couldn’t stop me from getting hysterical. That was when my man got hysterical, too. Their fight had turned into ours by the time the cops arrived. They just couldn’t wait until we left now, could they? He’s the baby papa, I couldn’t say when they asked. “I love you,” I now repeat. He leaves his beer on the counter and gazes about the bar. Patrons are dancing and kissing all around us as if to sate a certain kind of thirst. The birds in the corner cage are chirping the tunes to a classic Fleetwood Mac song like a pair of organic jukeboxes. Old people moving in younger clothes. Young people sporting old teeth. We’re nothing like them. We’re more. “Let’s bounce,” he says. Outside, the sky is already claimed by dirty-looking clouds. We walk and walk along the highway until time becomes one thing and we another. We count all the blue cars to kill time. He tells me at one point that his mother once forgot him in the back of her Camaro when he was a kid. Where were the cops back then, he says—and for the right reasons. It turns out that if it weren’t for the snoopiness of a passing-by carjacker, he would’ve been dead by now. Nada. Gona. Banana. I nod along the way, pretending to be interested in whatever he has to say. I wonder when we’re going to kiss next. Watching his lips move, I crave a vanilla milkshake. We stop by a drugstore past a water tower, which, as the sign reads, doubles as a public toilet. “Just wait,” he says, then whips into the store before I can talk back. Waiting for him, I watch my copy in the shop window. My reflection in the frosted glass looks thinner than the last time I checked, getting wavier with each new move as if to mirror my anxious mind. I can’t tell if my belly has started to show already. I can’t tell if he noticed. I can’t tell if he still finds me pretty. That girl in the park. She, too, was pretty as a peach. Yet it didn’t stop her from getting hurt by her man now did it? Right in front of all those buggers and coppers. And what about Ma? As the story had it, she was the prettiest gal in her class. In that asshole of civilization she had the misfortune of calling home. I know she was just as gullible as me but too proud to admit it. Why in the hell wouldn’t she tell me who my papa was otherwise? Why keep silent for all those years? Then, out of nowhere: a gunshot. Bang. One shot. Two shots. Three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Seven. Another bang—this time from the front door slamming open against the wall. My man plunges out of the store, the packs of baby diapers tucked in his armpits. His neck hangs low while running as if he pulled a muscle there. “Let’s bounce,” he yells. We start dashing about the highway like stray bullets. Cars honk at us as they pass by. Some of the diaper boxes fall on the ground along the way, but I don’t care. Watching him carry all those fluffy pink boxes fills my chest with such warmth I could scream. “I love you,” I keep shouting. “I love you I love you I love you.” “We gotta find Rat,” he keeps saying, disinterested in what I have to say as ever. “He’s gotta know what to—” —Bang. Of course. Bang. Bang. Bang. Those coppers. They just wouldn’t let go now would they? They blockade the road before we even know it. They withdraw their guns and start yelling at us without even bothering to find a middle ground. I stand and look. I think of all the things I can tell this critter about her papa. I can tell her all the half-truths and half-said love-you’s. How pretty didn’t do him any good. How the cops didn’t like the look of him. How one glance was all it took. How there was no changing their mind. How he pointed his gun at me and yelled, “Let’s bounce.” How I didn’t reply. A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Vestal Review, Maudlin House, and HAD, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded a finalist status at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He's currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. Find him online at sarpsozdinler.com or on Twitter @sarpsozdinler.

The Titillation A bird has left an azure feather on our cold red cement sill. It corroborates the curiosity's tale about the bird, about me. The bird must have probed the room, bearings, belongings, my chair, my father's table, crime-club book of the month and the silk flower you crafted in-between the pages fifty two and three. A breeze levitates the feather. My palm stays open, impoverished. The whistle from the nearby train track asks, "Why do you never desire to know where I go and with whom?" I shake the window-frame and flip it. Mistral The leaves gossip to the vardar, mistral. One white hair entwines a reed. It is the time for our winter jackets albeit not quite, not this year. I try to cheer you up, "We know the end, yes, but the ways are endless." Moody Swamp The plant stuck in its tub, in an ever youth, bears the burden of my mate's dry-weather norale, flow state. The other week he brought a brook, softened the dirt, that sunk an inch. The hardest part of the bole rose up a little. I hold the tub, lift the plant. The old leaves yellow the circle. Sun flares up an will-o'-the-wisp in the swamp of the room. In bokeh my friend sits in front of the tarots spread on the table of fate. They show nothing but a hand-fan pattern. Rays spatter like a chicken's sacrifice. As The Memory's Vultures Circle "Where are you going?" He cannot answer me for the first time or the second. He has to rake his head before he can say, "I don't know." His voice sounds autumnal. A pale wind brushes the tips of the streetlights. The sky will not tell us if it is an evening or a morning and the city has forgotten to turn off the lights. The posts remind me of cacti in a deserted path. Kushal Poddar is the author of 'Postmarked Quarantine' and has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of 'Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe. Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

After First Frost Let’s be unrealistic. I’ll pretend the armadillo isn’t dead in the ditch, it’s half burrowed hole beneath the hostas filled with leaves, that the white aster in the spent raised beds matter still to anyone, the fritillaries long gone, only the buzz of a thousand Asian lady beetles leering from the garage window in the brief warm midday sun. Subdivisions Below the red barn the red hills run tilled for the last time reaching the creek slipstream into eddies and are gone. I want to say stop. Stay with me longer than the morning stratus filled sky, a language deeper than blood that dries it’s eyes knowing the storm isn’t here yet, isn't here yet. Sam Calhoun is a writer and photographer living in Elkmont, AL. The author of the chapbook “Follow This Creek” (Foothills Publishing), and a collaborative work “The Hemlock Poems” (Present Tense Media), part of the Conservation Through Art: Saving Alabama's Hemlock program and exhibit. his poems have appeared in Pregnant Moon Review, Westward Quarterly, Eratos, Boats Against the Current, and numerous other journals. Follow him on Instagram @weatherman_sam, or his website, www.weathermansam.com.