Arthur Herman Bremer Gives a One-Star Review to Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel During His Quest to Assassinate President Nixon

This place is a five-star letterhead shop surrounded

by one thousand of the lousiest rooms in New York:

the walls cardboard and saran,

toilet running with runnels of rust.

But, man, the stationery!

Dear Mom and Dad –

Dearest Dad and Mom –

Dear Mother and Father, Father and Mother:

I won’t waste it on them.

The envelope glue tastes like a Wowee Whistle.

The W embossed, with a wreath.

Makes sense.

Sitting on a metal chair with one short leg, same as my apartment,

composing on the Formica desk

a letter in longhand to the dear and dearest world:

Come here.

Paul David Adkins (he/him) served in the US Army from 1991-2013. He holds a MA in Writing and Oral Tradition from The Graduate Institute, Bethany, CT. He counsels soldiers and teaches scholars in a correctional facility. Publications include Barzakh, The Mark, Crab Creek, Kissing Dynamite, Badwater, andSpillway.

The Inheritor

I’ve been waiting for you to switch that light off.

I perch with a tripod gait—

persistent, lacquered husk.

Antennae like blind men’s canes.

Watching you at all degrees,

enduring under crumb and soap.

Upright keeper—

as I shiver, you hiss staccato.

On the baked substrate,

in the cracks, I die in pieces every night.

You see day as your dominion.

Your taking was singular.

Throughout me, multiplicity.

As your days give me nights,

my nights will take your days.

I watch you as intermission.

You watch me as I inherit.

Eno Howl is a poet based in Southeastern Europe. Their work often explores material transformation, inheritance, and our perceptions of morality.

Hemingway's Grave

Moulder under granite between blue spruce

and decades have brought change and stones,

pens, pencils, goldenrod, Old Glory cap,

oceans of ecstasy – Pabst Blue Ribbon,

Woodford Reserve – you drained faster than a desert well.

I speak frankly, Papa, excuse my search

for one true sentence:

The sparrow sings over graves at dusk.

At Ketchum Cemetery there is no war,

Sawtooths silence the valley with weight

of millennia, ten-thousand foot cathedrals

make one man’s bones another part of the main,

become the land and sea, free-roaming

yellow leaves on trout streams,

leaves on the breeze above the hills,

no one could destroy you except you

who knew better than anyone that the world

breaks everyone, in the end,

made strong by those cracks and crevices

darker than caves in the mountains.

Brandon Fick received his MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan in 2022. His fiction and poetry has been published in Toronto Journal, El Portal, Scrivener Creative Review, Hart House Review, and in medias res, and he has published reviews in Prairie Fire, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, and SaskBooks. Longlisted for the 2022 Bridge Prize, and recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Brandon is slowly attempting to write a novel.

There are lizards living in the woodpile

that was not always a woodpile

but an elm tree that split—

no lightning, no wind worth remembering,

just a dry crack that startled us

and the birds one afternoon.

Part of the elm fell forward.

Part still stands, leaning hard,

half dead but upright

as if reconsidering.

We cut the logs into similar lengths,

stacked them neatly into a low wall,

a kind of fence separating

nothing but the tree line

from a small field.

The lizards must have lived

somewhere else before:

under bark, beneath stones,

inside the loosened seams

of older things.

Now they slip into

the dark spaces, flatten themselves

against warm grain, and pause

in narrow light.

Perhaps they believe the woodpile

was made for them.

Each winter the wall grows smaller.

Logs disappear one armful at a time,

carried into the house and fed to the fire.

The lizards scatter

and return, threading themselves

through what remains.

For now, there is enough shadow.

For now, the dead tree leans

over its own body

rearranged, and nothing knows

it is lost.

Woodpile

Jacob Friesenhahn is the author of the poetry collection The Prayer of the Mantis (Kelsay Books, 2025). He teaches Religious Studies and Philosophy at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

A tear; a tear—

at

our

beginning

breath,

our breaths—

penultimate,

then,

at that very last.

We bore a little death.

We saw:

kenned—ultimate.

Whence we wore lost waters’

sunken masks.

Slickened soothe shan’t save

scorn’s sting as droplets cut through

our window glass.

Scything soulful views

from rupture’s suffering

dripped

in pierced cas—

cades into our punctured spirit’s casks.

A tear; a tear—

bursts hollows—

prone to fill, where regretted ocean shoals are cast

from the shallow pockets of briny swill

down the deepest cheeked ravine—

onto wet, carved, unforgetting—

pasts.

A tear; a tear—

at a child’s beginning breath,

those breaths—penultimate, then, at that very last.

They bore a little death. They saw: kenned—

ultimate.

Whence they wore lost waters’

sunken masks.

A tear; a tear—

Callum Featherstone is a poet based in Nottingham, UK. His work explores water, fire, light, rupture, and transformation through lyric and visual forms, drawing on ecological imagery and elemental systems.

On

nights we wandered

with nothing to do,

it covered everything.

There were no girls

on Regent Street,

so we drank —

not what,

just how much.

We cut through dogless yards,

loitered where cops

never bothered.

What did we fear?

Not parents. Not death.

Maybe boredom.

Mostly we walked

until, one by one,

we disappeared.

The night they found Rick

under six inches of snow,

I went home early

and watched TV

with my dad.

I’m sure he wondered

why

I was there.

He said nothing.

We were good at that —

silence,

like snow

brushed from an eyelash.

What If the Snow Fell Up

Jim Zola is a poet and photo artist living in North Carolina

Thick air. The dog pukes in the cistern night. New light from somewhere down below the

neighbor’s house

glows the opposite sky whale-blue in our backyard.

Four o’clock in the morning. Only a body, brain shut. The blanket around me is worn:

blossoms disintegrating

and blossoms gathering dirt. Dogs: brush fur backwards and dust plumes. Air is a thing. Dog

grass-eating in the black stage of the backyard. Sticky night, but the wind,

where did it come from, falls down the branches and unsticks my arms. An episode of

breath.

The dog is velvet even now, puking. I call him. I am the only bird at this hour. Then he’s

inside, puking.

Puking a film of grass on the rug. Dog air peels the water off my tongue.

Horizontal, any blanket is too thick but no blanket is too bare,

the window forced ajar. The dog burrows, collapses, twitches, rises, paces, pukes.

Dog Puking

Courtney Mandryk is a multi-genre artist with an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan and an MFA in visual art from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Mudfish, and the Cimarron Review. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her children. (www.courtneymandryk.com)

Listen, everyone,

like it or not, fact of life, they exist,

others exist, fact of life, they do,

to all appearances they do.

Maybe you already knew.

They seem to. They think, feel,

say sentences, do things,

the whole shebang.

For real? Really?

Real as you and me?

I don't know, you don't know,

nobody knows..

But it looks uncannily like human consciousness.

So we arrive at adulthood

nodding and smiling like professionals

and speaking without a trace of accent

as though native-born.

because the highway of life has just the one exit ramp.

* * *

Sometimes, late,

deep in my soft plump leather recliner,

it enters me like a stomach cramp,

Suppose they discover

they aren't

and never were

and never lived a life I didn't think for them.

What could I say to them? Sorry?

And what knight-errant

on his thunder and lightning steed

just in the nick of time

saves me from their fury?

We must never stop pretending, not for a moment.

The Solipsist Addresses the Plenum

William Nelson is an 80 year old retired lawyer living in Vermont. He won poetry prizes in college and in law school, and has published a book of poetry Implementing Standards of Good Behavior (L'Epervier Press, 1979). Nelson returned to poetry after a career as a public defender. His poems have appeared in The Lothlorian Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, Moonstone Poetry’s Remembering T.S. Eliot anthology, and Zig Zag Lit Mag, which also published chapbook, The Inscrutable Meanwhile. Zig Zag in 2024 and New Verse News in 2025 nominated his poems for a Pushcart Prize. He has posted some of his current work on a Substack page, https://williamanelson.substack.com/

The door to his small art-studio is left open.

Rows of ceramic amphibians stare

unblinking at the melt from mountains.

My Dad’s obsessed with frogs. He sculpts

them from clay and fires them into dancing

stones—long legs wrapping around ordinary

objects: a cup, a teapot, his urn.

Outside a river swells past the shoreline.

Spring is a body too full of blood,

I’m sure this will be his last season.

I hear frogs croaking in the distance.

He is teaching me how to be a potter

before it’s too late.

My Dad is obsessed with permanence,

the idea that his pots will be discovered

thousands of years after his death.

Frogs are ancient yet facing extinction.

He tosses

the plastic hose of his oxygen tank

about like an unwanted leash.

His lungs are failing—

heart’s swollen from compensation.

All the organs are compromising with each other,

competing for more time.

He uses his last

days molding head to body to limbs.

When I look closely, I can find thumbprints

in his work—swirled ridges resembling grooves

in a record. Pushing down and pulling up,

I watch how shape emerges from the spinning wheel—

space being defined by the parameters of a bowl.

The idea that we come from clay;

we are an empty space to be filled.

He asks me, When frogs are gone,

how will we remember their singing?

Every Vessel Full of Song

Nicelle Davis is a poet, collaborator, performance artist, and educator. She is the author of Penguin Noir, The Language of Fractions, The Walled Wife, In the Circus of You, Becoming Judas, and Circe. Her poetry films have been screened internationally, and she has taught poetry through organizations including WITS, Volunteers of America, MHA, and Youth for Positive Change.