Katherine Soniat

Broth

The night he dies I dream of riding boxcars,

the sparks flying.

Hear the bells     the crossing gates

coming down?

Red Xs stitch my eyes      shut.

Never has a conductor faltered so oddly.

Hills roll by in tired profile like the hours

he lay back    pushing away

spoons of hot golden soup.

Katherine Soniat's eighth collection of poems, Polishing the Glass Storm, came out from LSU Press (2022). Her ninth collection, Starfish Wash-up, was recently published by Etruscan Press in 2023. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 (LSU PRESS). The Goodbye Animals in 2014 was awarded the Turtle Island Chapbook Prize. A Shared Life won the University of Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of Year by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Notes of Departure was selected for The Camden Poetry Prize by the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts & Humanities in 1984. New & Selected: Authority (Poems, 1985-2025) was recently completed and includes nine collections and a group of new poems.

Joshua Zeitler

Townie

I always said I would leave this place. Run

first chance I got. Chicago. Boston. Seattle.

Anywhere. What anchored me here? I didn’t know

what chicory was until you named it in a poem.

Suddenly it was everywhere I looked. Then,

all at once, nowhere. A thin white sheet

pulled over all. The wolves’ teeth of winter

claiming you. That last night of hospice

I read poetry to your sleeping body, as if

it could cradle whatever was budding in you.

I’ve seen chicory balled tight as a noose knot,

open as a tentative palm testing for rain, but never

have I watched it unfurl. Never witnessed it clench

like an impotent fist shaken at the heavens.

There are miracles, I suppose, yet to be pried

from the ribcage of the world, of this place

in the world. Imperfections hiding in immovable

foundations. I could leave it all. But then I hear

your gravelly voice call my name. I answer.

Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, Pithead Chapel, Pacifica Literary Review, and elswhere. www.joshuazeitler.com Instagram. Bluesky.

Jenny Doughty

Fish

I love their luscious liquidity,

their dappled metallic flamboyance:

sleek silver surface-spinning sardine schools,

trout hiding rainbows under riverbanks,

abyssal fish with gargantuan eyes

and primeval phosphorescent strangeness.

They are aliens among us. We're doomed

to know each other only through glass.

They are powerless in our world.

As a child I rode in a glass-bottomed boat

over the Red Sea's coral reefs and saw

swimming among orange coral branches

bright clownfish, groupers, parrotfish and damsels

and later dreamed I dived in with them,

miraculously had no need to breathe

but moved in all dimensions, as if

I were of fishy form and mind myself,

became part of that oceanic vastness,

feeling their freedom and flexibility,

capacity to see things from all sides,

imagined a heaven without limits, no land.

Jenny Doughty is originally British but has lived in Maine since 2002. Her first book Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber was published in 2017 by Moonpie Press and her second, As for the Rose, will be published in spring 2026 by Main Street Rag. Instagram. www.jennydoughty.com