Artist's Statement: Echoes of Casablanca and Woman Seated in the Temple of the Cats are two photographs from an expanding series called Quartz Secrets . These particular photographs resulted from experimenting with clear quartz exposed to morning sunlight while placed on a hammered metallic plate. The refraction and diffraction occurring along with the miniature worlds suggested by this particular quartz piece’s inclusions and the surface of the plate produced complex image

Don’t dream the way I dream. For it’s jest and lust, knots that seek to u-n-r-a-v-e-l, f “ r” a” y” , drawn apart from being whole, strung///////////////out, bared. Noose sprung.I fell in love to fall asleep. Jonathan Memmert has poetry published in various journals and anthologies such as Anti Heroin Chic , Heavy Feather Review Side A , Vagabond City , Lone Mountain Literary Society , and Viridine Literary Journal among others. He has an MFA from The City College of New Yo

J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg . Chapbooks of her visual poems, How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; a full-length volume, She needs the river (Poem Atlas), was published in 2024. Other chapbooks include The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and Sleeping Lessons (Milk & Cake Press, 2025).

At first it feels foolish, this sudden drive to drive somewhere and run in place. How, either way, going nowhere quickens the heart. To love anything is hard, is to lift its weight to failure. Still, this metronomic click in a knee going up the stairs, your black book of prescriptions. Watching infomercials before bed, you almost believe parts of you could be incinerated, torched, melted like sea ice in this climate of supplementation. The less of you

when the sun fell into me, the people burned Zeus’s temple alone survived though not a stone remained of it fire raises capital that’s why he’s god of lightning and this river I’ve become wears down your edges hourly Originally from Seattle, Elizabeth Kate Switaj currently works at the College of the Marshall Islands on Majuro Atoll. She is the author most recently of Serial Experiments (Alien Buddha Press, 2025), The Articulations (Kernpunkt Press, 2024), and The Bringers

Time folds itself like linen at the foot of the bed, creased from nights we’ve held under it, our bodies pressing new constellations into the fabric of our loss. Each exhale is a new type of departure, each inhale return, the lungs building and demolishing the same small world. We call this breath, it feels like prayer, our mouths a doorway for our unnamed ghosts. Each moment we remember slices at the tender lining of our throats. We gasp and only ash and smoke remain. The li

Here, river runs dry until deluge A body could die of thirst or drown under a cloudless sky I like to walk in the arroyo past prickly pear and alders I’m told the river flows under this arid bed Her movement unbound I want to feel it—that subterranean stirring permeation as path Jesus said those who believe without seeing are blessed but can I be a tongue Can I see anything I don’t already know I ask the river to turn me holy unkink my garden hose and let cement steps cascad

My first death is in the basement on the concrete  at the blade of my father’s shovel  slim black snake coiled  garden hose and no spigot—roadkill season headless deer season  hacksaw and trophy season comes after Thanksgiving  ODOT pickups rove the highway we dodge traffic to miss them on the way to Walmart in the snow  gloves and cover -alls  the men pitch wintered muscle into truck beds  our brothers  o

Inside a travel bag, I found my missing red wool sock, in a winter jacket, one earring. My wallet turned up months after a grocery trip, on a coat peg, nestled in the scoop of a cap. A constant struggle to track, my phone may lie beneath a book or pillow, its charge exhausted. I believed in God, when my keys showed up in the freezer— though it did seem an odd way to answer a prayer. And when, preparing to wash an apron, I checked its pocket and felt two puzzle pieces, AWOL a

Because I come from a long line of bisexual nonbinary pacifists married to cis gender hetero army officers, and because the opening of this poem is a lie, but a sweet one: a silk flower of a sentiment. I just want to say it somewhere: I am not alone. I inherited what is good from people who tried to do right but also did wrong, who enabled pain while cultivating love where it wasn’t expected to grow. My grandparents appreciated bowls of painted stone grapes and apples because

Editor's Choice : 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize At eighteen I got up early and hitchhiked out of town. Hitchhiked all morning. And when a man put his hand on my leg I took his picture. He didn’t look at me again until I got out of his car. I was braver then. The camera conferred an almost supernatural passport — a kind of super power. Conjured a new origin story. For once I owned the sidewalk, crossed barriers with ease that said “No Trespassing.” Photographed the guard in

Runner-Up : 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize In the night crawl to the window where owls call, walls get in the way. An empty womb is still a womb. Children hope three-legged races have finish lines. Cameras catch the end of a horse race. Watching the pole vaulter or bending with the high jumper, we want to soar too. The records we could set if we could fly, but we rise and slam down: repetitively. Canadians raise an elbow to what used to be a peaceful border. The best books d

Runner-Up : 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize A narcissus bulb half-buried half-bared to the sun gnawed by animals flowered into the earth like a brain into a skull clumped and cramped the crowd of waxy petals pushed out walls made a chamber of the dark * Another day another baby born beneath the besieged city of Kyiv (you will grow underground is what you will do) * God is a dark night said St. John of the Cross, praisi

Winner : 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize A brown-haired boy holds a stuffed Saint Bernard & waves at me. His chubby arms are freckled, flecked with blonde hairs like a little golden bear. The bow of his lips blushed & cracked from perpetual licking. I wonder if he is afraid of never waking up, like me, or locks the door at the burst of a beer can against the living room wall. Behind his pintsized body, sunlight leaks out through the trees in reddish pink. He braces his legs t

I’ve been thinking about boxes this winter. As I type this in early January, I’m realizing the holiday season could also be called the cardboard box season. Each trip to the dump requires breaking down a variety of different-sized cardboard boxes to flatten and shove into the back of my car. Like boxes, prose poems come in many different sizes, some of them quite boxy and others not at all. In its block form, there’s something geometric about the prose poem and the pleasures