Michael J. Galko

Dusk on the Osaka-Kobe Shinkansen,

Imagining Myself Still at Nara

My back is to the emperor’s eye.

I am facing the chimes

hung from the temple’s eave.

In the light breeze

they touch below sound,

then darken suddenly.

If I stay facing east

and night falls before the shadow passes

I will never know

whether it was cloud

or beast.

Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review and the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contests. Recent poems will appear in Stillwater Review, New Plains Review, Spillway Magazine, Rappahannock Review, Atlanta Review, and Rockvale Review, among other journals.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Crossing I-75

It’s been a long first quarter

of violence and disappearances.

I’ve never felt so aware of God

and so reluctant to attend an Easter

service. I putter in sudden traffic,

hit the filter button. Exhaust

wafts up. There’s been, I'll bet,

an accident somewhere ahead,

which I’ve read happens more

on Texas highways than just

about anywhere. My last crash

was nine years back. The stats claim

I’m due to have the air smacked

out of me again. I wish I could

say I’m compassionate, but,

losing dollars off the clock, I, too,

start to fume, hear my own brain rot

that somebody better have paid

with his life to make us wait

this long. I punch off the radio,

which is trying to tell me about

an innocent man held in an American

concentration camp in a country

named for Jesus. Finally, Christ,

the flash of lights, the tow truck’s crucifix.

We cruise slowly on the loop.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran is an emerging writer who has over 40 published poems and essays—most of those within the last year. She studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor University and the University of North Texas, writing critically, in her master’s thesis, about apprompted poems with "Lines by Someone Else." Her recent writing appears or is forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Baltimore Review, Passages North, Porter House, Third Coast, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, and elsewhere. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas. She is working on her first poetry manuscript, tentatively titled The Voyagers. Instagram. Bluesky. https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/kdawngibson

Kathleen Hellen

respect, you know (just a little)

okay, she’s not pretty

she’s not butter icing on the cake

but you

loaf of funky chicken. you

stale baguette. a stew of i-can’t-help-myself— you

speak of “my girl” Bernadette. pretty selfish. you

happy when she’s twisting off the lids. mashing the potatoes— you

just want someone to do that thing to bread. make a loaf

that isn’t you. Truth is: you

lucky she’s not fed up with your

elbows on the table. fed up with

that toothpick in your grin.

Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pedestal, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, SmokeLong Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. www.kathleenhellen.com