Volume 9 - Poetry Archives

2024 Bingo Card

By Celeste Bloom

Sky Caged by Vishaal Pathak

About the Author

Celeste Bloom recently graduated with a BA in Literatures in English from Bryn Mawr College. She is currently based in Philadelphia, working as a college and career advisor. Her work has been published in The Write Launch, The Bryn Mawr Nimbus, The Haverford Milkweed Zine, and the Q&A Queerzine. They are also an editor for GLG zine.

About the Artist

Vishaal Pathak writes short stories and poems and occasionally clicks a picture. His photography has appeared or is forthcoming in Juste Milieu Zine, Moiramor, Ink In Thirds, and The Word's Faire.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

Ode to a Paperweight

By Nancy Takacs

Art: Landscape Vista #4 by Max St. Jacques

About the Author

Nancy Takacs is a poet and natural fiber artist. Her poetry is the recipient of the Juniper Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and other awards. She has 8 collections of poetry, the latest of which is Dearest Water (Mayapple Press 2022). Please visit her websites at nancytakacs.org and mappingliteraryutah.org.

About the Artist

Max St. Jacques work has been shown at Colors of Humanity Gallery, J.Mane Gallery, Usagi NYC Project Gallery, Glen Echo Photoworks, Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, Ten Moir Gallery, Station Independent Projects, Remote Gallery, Red Dot Miami, Art on Paper NYC, Gallery 1313 and at the BRIC Project Room in NYC and in Stone Soup Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine and Wanderlust Journal.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

Aunt Rosanne’s Truchas Ranch

By Alexis Sandoval

Aunt Rosanne’s Truchas Ranch
belongs to my father’s least favorite brother.
It doesn’t matter. I’ll still speckle
like horses, tails like distant dogs.
I’ll still rumble like road, spoke
like wheel, split like wind, and drop like snow
so that when she goes, I can remember
the chocolate chip cabinet under the stairs.
Legs bitten bumpy. Christmas Tupperware
come June.
Aunt’s paint oiled by a trembling hand.
My father—a boy—in the other room.

Division of the Equine by Ronald C. Walker

About the Author

Alexis Sandoval is an undergraduate student at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. A New Mexico native, Sandoval writes poems to celebrate the people and places close to her heart. Currently majoring in English and minoring in economics, Sandoval hopes to become a technical writer.

About the Artist

Ronald C. Walker is an artist living and working out of the Sacramento area of California. He works in a style he calls "Suburban Primitive." This style combines his interest in the origins and functions of art along with life in the suburbs. Mr. Walker has had more than 50 solo exhibitions over the years, and his work can be found in several collections, most recently the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, CA. He holds both an MFA and an MA in painting and is a retired art teacher of more than 30 years.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

Portrait of a Female Elephant Bird

Delaware Museum of Nature & Science

By John Wojtowicz

She was the last queen, the last
of the megafauna our ancestors overhunted
out of the same cellular panic

that drives us to stockpile
toilet paper when we see
a snowflake on the weatherwoman’s map.

Maybe this is also what feeds
our nostalgia for kings
and keeps fascist leaders in rotation.

Visitors regularly mistake her for
a colossal ostrich
with hips like a Victorian hoop skirt.

But this ten-foot, thousand-pound bird
is cousin to the kiwi—
two feet tall, five pounds, tiny wings

it cannot fly with. Bones thick
with marrow. Loose feathers
patterned like fur for camouflage.

During times of stress,
making ourselves small
can feel like the most natural way to survive.

To her right, encased in glass,
is a melon-sized elephant bird
egg. The sign reads:

DNA can be extracted from eggshells.
One day, scientists hope
to restore this wonder to our world.

The glint in her marmalade eye says
think twice, mammal-brains. Good luck
on your elephant-bird-less planet.

Aepyornis skeleton, Monnier, 1913.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

About the Author

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he teaches social work at Rowan College of South Jersey. He has been published in Rattle, New Ohio Review, and Gigantic Sequins. Find out more at his website.

Uncategorized / Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

Small Hands

By N.W. Hicks

When I arrive at a meadow,
ready with dandelions,
swollen with bird song,
empty of small hands,
I wish for a daughter. I wish
for the laughter in the lily of the valley
ringing like bells, the swish
of a stick parting tall grass,
the dandelions tied up in chains.

When I arrive at the meadow, I leave
to listen to the stream instead
breaking against rocks, weeping
down an old dam wall,
but there are voices in the water too.

I wonder if I will ever see my wife’s hair
on my daughter’s head, fanned out
in the current that shaped me from blue clay,
or her olive skin soaked in the same sun that cured me,
her fingers tracing eddies,
her arms outstretched like wings.

Nature's Grace I by Michael C. Roberts

Nature's Grace III by Michael C. Roberts

About the Author

N.W. Hicks is a Connecticut-based poet, a graduate of UConn, and earned his MA from Manhattanville College. His poems have appeared in The Passionfruit Review, Molecule, Yes, Poetry, and elsewhere. He believes in water but works with dirt and dreams of becoming a river’s meander.

About the Artist

Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist who, during the pandemic, painted rocks and dropped them around his neighborhood as inspiration and motivation. He since has returned to photography. His images have been published in several literary magazines and on journal covers. A photographic book is available on Amazon: Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga. In his photography, he seeks to portray things and scenes that are overlooked or are mere backdrops to everyday life. In the last several months, he has been exploring minimalism as a way of projection and abstraction. Roberts often makes photographs in a range of colors, objects, and formats; the simplicity of minimalism reduces nature to its basics to reveal the underlying beauty of structure and form. The images may seem bleak to some viewers, but through these vestigial elements of nature, we can appreciate its simple complexity and basic beauty. These stark figures made in the Sonoran Desert have reduced nature to its essential elements and beauty.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

The Only Thing You Taught Me, Katie

By Mark Fleming

easy groove your voice
crackle pops like
merry-go-round
classic vinyl

what does a poet tell another
one who showed them
through beige plains
to a pool of speech
let cool water move
through cupped hands
to a dry mouth
teaching it to drink

you don’t say thank you
despite many thanks earned
you don’t say anything
you make yourself available
to the next leather tongue
dipping your ladle into the mirror
and letting the water drip
from one person
to the next

all you taught me, Katie
is how to cup my hands

Draining by Lindsay Liang

About the Author

Mark Fleming is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio.

About the Artist

Lindsay Liang is an interdisciplinary artist whose work traces the vanishing contours of memory—personal, cultural, and biological. Raised on Daishan Island, her early intimacy with the sea continues to inform her understanding of time, disappearance, and continuity. Water, in her practice, flows as childhood ocean, fetish structure, and bodily fluid—both materially and ecologically. Originally trained as a pre-med student, Liang published scientific research on genes regulating longevity. Her background in neuroscience and pathology shapes a heightened sensitivity to the unstable boundaries between the normal and the pathological and informs her visual exploration of the body as a site of transformation. Drawing from dream theory, embodied perception, and traditional kingfisher feather techniques, she constructs a hybrid visual language that binds craft, science, and ancestral residue. For Liang, the body is not a subject but a site—of inheritance, trauma, and transmission. Her work unfolds as a recursive process, where preservation and reinvention co-exist. Each piece is an unstable container: a reconstruction of what slips away, a structure for what resists language but demands to be remembered.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

Cleopatra at Mersa Matruh

By Anne Whitehouse

So many shades of blue
existing together
in a sea of clear water
rippling over a beach
of fine white sand.

A massive rock rose
out of the sea,
hollowed by the slow
grind of erosion
into three natural rooms.

In one, a sunken pool
emptied and filled
as the tide ebbed and flowed.

It was here, to her capital,
Mersa Matruh, that Cleopatra
retreated with Antony
after the disaster at Actium,
knowing she’d be blamed for the defeat.

All day she bathed in the limpid pool
or sat in the sheltered cool.
She gazed up at the strange shapes
of the water-and-wind-worn rocks,
bright in the blaze of morning,
violet gray in the dimming light.

Zoe_blum_This_Isn’t_Healing_But_It’s_Something_1

This Isn't Healing, but It's Something by Zoe Blum

About the Author

Anne Whitehouse is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, Being Ruth Asawa, and Adrienne Fidelin Restored. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Her poem, “Lady Bird,” won the Nathan Perry DAR 2023 “Honoring American History” poetry contest. She has lectured about Longfellow and Poe at the Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine, and Longfellow House Washington Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About the Artist

Zoe Blum is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is focused on her personal experiences surrounding the themes of trauma, memory, and mental health. Her painted photographs reflect how memory is altered as a body goes through distressing events, emphasizing feelings of confusion, disorientation, and curiosity. Blum currently resides in Cincinnati attending the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program, on her way to earning a BFA with a certificate in photography. She has had work shown in a number of exhibitions at the Tabula Rasa Gallery in Cincinnati and has collaborated with companies such as IKEA and Cummins, Inc. in her professional experience. Blum continues to explore how paint can alter the context of photography in her work and investigates how paint can be a vessel for remembering.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025

Ice Cream Lessons

By David M. Alper

In the half-light of a rain-soaked summer,
his mother's hands, callused & gentle,
steer them to the corner where Lane kisses Crescent.
The ice cream truck, a pastel mirage,
hum its sugar-coated lullaby.

She fills her denim purse with coins & dreams,
each fifty-cent cone a promise
of sweetness in a bitter world.
He watches her wipe her chin,
as if to brush away the weight of memory
a gesture so small it could be mistaken for tenderness.

She speaks in the language of light,
translating the emerald dusk into wisdom.
Look, she says, how the sky bleeds into ocean,
how the moon hangs like a pearl
in the throat of night.

On the beach, they trace the geometry of loss
in the rotted remains of a manta ray,
its once-sleek body now a relic,
sculpted by time & salt & sorrow.

He learns to read the world in shades of garnet,
to find beauty in decay,
to see how even the diamond-dust sand
can chafe & wound.

In the space between heartbeats,
she teaches him to survive.

WhatsApp_Image_2024-07-01_at_11.49.51_AM_5

Mother and Child I by Dr. Gattem Venkatesh

About the Author

David M. Alper's work appears in The McNeese Review, Variant Literature, The Rush Magazine, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.

About the Artist

Dr. Gattem Venkatesh currently lives in Chicago. He is a visual artist and architect, specializing in painting and carving miniature sculptures on tips of pencils, chalk pieces, crayons, bamboo, matchsticks, and making architectural models using waste materials. He was awarded two national awards from the government of India and honorable doctorate (arts) from the International Peace University, Germany, 2019. Winner of the Limca Book of Records (2014) and the Guinness World Record in 2017 for carving the Empire State Building on a toothpick.

Volume 9 - Poetry - 06/09/2025