Bill Schulz

Bill Schulz is a native of Portland, ME. Since graduating from Deering High School, where a guidance counselor suggested he settle for a job as a stock boy, Bill has, in order, lived in the following locations: Hebron, ME; Geneva, NY; Durham, NH; Glade Valley, NC; North Sebago, ME; Gorham, ME; Steep Falls, ME; Gorham, ME; Portland, ME; Falmouth, ME; Gorham, ME; Portland, ME; San Francisco, CA; Berkeley, CA; Portland, ME; Freeport, ME; Portland, ME; Windham, ME.

He'd prefer to live in Anghiari, the Province of Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy.

He has worked the following jobs: library shelf specialist; poet; grad teacher; teacher; landscaper; weekly newspaper reporter; daily newspaper reporter; communications administrator; project manager; HMO developer; marketing manager; physician/hospital contractor; health plan contractor; diocesan director of parish planning (closing parishes); executive director; consultant; Whole Foods cashier; 211 operator; painter.

He holds masters degrees from the poetry workshop at The University of New Hampshire and theology from The Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, CA (30 years later.)

He is the founder and former editor of Hole In The Head Review.

He never did work as a stock boy.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

GS with “Tanka” by Shizuka Omori, Translation by Yuki Tanaka

Why return to the sky if not for the birds

Composing their own choreography that

Criss crosses like skates on ice. I couldn’t

Figure eight on the pond. When I first step

Into the clouds I won’t be back

Like the Buddhist monk who saw the

Deer in his mind & transformed the second

He died into a fawn. No, to be a person

Who lived once is enough: to be the pronoun

I & know You Dear Luck if lacerated

By this life is absence like a river by

Its meaning indecipherable like lines the

Skaters make on ice, or cranes against the sunset—

Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions.  He works as a caregiver and Medtech in Erie, PA.

Shagufta Mulla

I Am That I Am (Exodus 3:14)

When I return to the quiet wholeness

that I am without thoughts, I’m holding

a gila woodpecker feather—

black, white, black bars—dropped just outside

my driver side door at the hotel.

I don’t live here anymore. Phoenix,

I used to say I hate you—your paternal heat—

but I was already inflamed with an unfinished past,

unfinished pain that birthed incessant

thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.

When I return to my little desert treasure—

daughter made of stardust—

small enough to fit in a cupped palm,

big enough to evoke God(-size awe),

     I Am

watching a woman hold a feather—

her little-girl-heart looking up—

watching her search the many mesquite trees,

but there are no birds around—

just a million little leaves

that let (almost all) the light shine through.

Shagufta Mulla is the art editor of Peatsmoke Journal, a veterinarian, and a copy editor for online publications. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Five Points, Wild Roof Journal, Okay Donkey, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She won second place in poetry for the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, and in 2021 she won Blood Orange Review’s poetry prize. A former Arizonan, Shagufta now lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Instagram.