Boy's Guide to Pyrotechnics

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  our cousins  their

foam napalm  their burning tires

they go too glassy to teach

there is a raccoon in the cemetery

there are stakes fence-wired

into a headstone crucifix  this

is not ours  this

won’t ever

be ours.

Alicia Wright is a writer from Appalachia whose work appears or is forthcoming in SWING, APARTMENT Poetry, As It Ought To Be, New Croton Review, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pictura Journal, and her first poetry collection will be published by Pulley Press in 2026. She currently resides in West Virginia. You can find her on Instagram at @ajwright304

Lost

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 year, it seemed a miracle. Search not for “lost”

items in France; the word “perdu” implies

they’re gone for good. Ask for “forgotten” things

at the Office of Found Objects, Objets Trouvés.

But my son is lost, and I haven’t forgotten, decades

since he wasn’t born, since I allowed

his tiny body’s destruction. No sweet-talking that one;

I saw the vacuum jar. Memories

of what will never be, I find and find

again, like acorns stashed in the ground by blue jays,

sprouting to oak seedlings in an unmowed field.

Alice Haines’s poems can be found in: Does It Have Pockets?, Dunes Review, The Healing Muse, Northern New England Review, Off the Coast, Pangyrus LitMag, Pine Row, Portland Press Herald’s Deep Water column, Relief: Journal of Art and Faith and Touchstone Literary Magazine. Several of her poems have been finalists in Maine Postmark Poem Contests. A retired physician living in Maine, she volunteers at a free health clinic. Together with her husband, she enjoys nurturing native plants, tracking wildlife and birding.

In Praise of Plastic Flowers

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 it showed them what plenty might look like

on their tables. Every day is an argument in favor of surprise.

I show my daughter how to twist a plastic plumeria blossom

the color of margarine into her dark hair

because real plumeria blooms far away from where we are

while the Dollar Tree near our house is bountiful with 10¢ knockoffs,

and I remember how little beauty has to do with exactness.

It is more concerned with what we hope about the contradictory world:

that it remains both soft and callused, rare and everywhere,

that it is what it has been and what it could be too.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest. www.abbyemurray.com