Memoir

You were warm and fleshy pressed

into my hip, a constellation of varied

wails, a series of smiles in ellipses.

I cannot not write you into the world

because you left it; you did not live

in narrative. There is no story but

my story. And my story is only

a series of repeating gestures:

reaching, holding, releasing.

Our language was syllabic and

visceral and so ordinary that

time has emptied it from me.

Your legs once gripped my hip, an arm

rested on my shoulder, the other rose up

toward the sky, index finger pointed as

you mouthed moon.

Sarah Kaufman's poetry has appeared in Cloudbank and Parabola Online. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she works as a psychotherapist in private practice.

The Bounds of Girlhood

Because I was raised / in a home half-buried / by dirt in the Maine woods, / it took longer to

learn how women were liquids, / filling up sweater sets, teacups, / and garden beds. Same as a coyote, / when I left the dark of my den, / I saw the world with its drifting / scents, its paths that stream around / obstacles. The panorama seemed boundless / limited only by how far / you’re willing to wander, how calloused / your soles turn when carrying you through / the day, how

hollow you’ll allow / your belly to become. Beyond / the threshold, pines poke the abdomens of

storm / clouds and force the rain out of them. / Roots drill as deep as they can sink / their feet, stretching toes around bedrock. / In the virgin woods there’s nothing manmade / so everything blooms— vertical, horizontal, / interstitial. Tell me, why shouldn’t I take up space, probe / the

edges of the earth with my fingertips / and tongue. Liquids investigate, / know their containers by filling them, / contouring bodies to the shape. Walls / tell liquid what’s possible, / but forget she

can fill and over / run. What shape is water / when there’s nothing to contain her?

Sara Lynn Eastler is the Managing Editor for Qu Literary Magazine and a freelance contributor to the Southern Review of Books. Her poetry has recently been published in Cagibi, SoFloPoJo, Passengers Journal, Anodyne, and Lucky Jefferson. She has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Midcoast Maine. Instagram: @saraeastler Website: saralynneastler.com

Joy Ride

I enter a large restroom no horizon in the distance, look for a stall, climb into a car. They’re always occupied, you say, your face in the rearview mirror. I don’t believe I know you, but you’re in my car. A car you’ve found in someone else’s story, but you can drive—can’t you— to a city beside a frozen river, cactus country, Provençal—land of poetry and myth. You’ve begun to sound like a gangster, my French is poor, waters to cross and did I mention I have to pee. Two boys walk by, pick up her voice its accent, mimic her words, punch one another, laugh and walk away. You’re in the seat beside me now, older and beginning to fade, and when I look again a slight depression in the cushion’s all that’s left of you. The pedal has found my foot and the car begins to accelerate—

Patrick Cahill’s The Machinery of Sleep (Sixteen Rivers Press) appeared in 2020. A second collection, If We are the Forest the Animals Dream, also from Sixteen Rivers, appeared in 2025. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. A cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal, he was also a contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County (WordTemple Press). Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.