Brian’s painting and poem unearths the depths of connecting with his inner child through the strokes of his paintbrush in an expansive, nonlinear process.

Madeleine Bazil’s poems toe the line between tenderness and unabashed longing. Intimate, urgent, prismatic—yet unassumingly brief—every word is threaded together with the precision of fate, and every stanza is a carefully-crafted room within the palace of the speaker’s vivid memory.

The gift of Jeni Prater’s poems is their effortless ability to render the mundane a miracle, the invisible seen, and the “unconventional” a beautiful new future. As her words search for life, sifting through the complexities of biology and bureaucracy both, her readers are unwittingly captivated by the tenderness of her tireless pursuit.

Part elegy, part prayer, part epistolary masterpiece—Amy Rose Lafty’s “My Father Is a Crab Nebula” is as littered with love and grief as the galaxy is replete with stars. You won’t soon find a more intimate glimpse into the cosmic transcendence of a life lost too soon—and the mourning that comes from being left behind.

Every time I look up, it’s still there – the skeleton of the once bustling village where my / father grew up.

Every poem I write opens with a parent. How else / do I bless the ones that birthed me?

In the house is a horse, or the house itself is a horse.

in the beginning there were no lines no markers of where & what belong to whom / or why

Still dark out when my father pulls / the trigger.

the mother circulates through Berlin’s arteries, / smacking through streets and bike lanes until a / DHL worker delivers her to my front door.

soundtrack: fall in love (remix), slum village / because it just might, / i dance like my life depends on it.

He owns seven New Balance shoes, all rights / that have lost in this house their one-time partners.

Here, lens flare recalls the burn holes in her nightgown.

The problem with draining the world from your head / is what rushes in to take its place.

A little rasp in its throat whittled the exhaling air. The auk laid down at last / and stayed there, its breath / so quiet I didn’t know when / it gave way to a greater quiet.