Note from the Editor: Mike Bove, Spring 2026

In my part of the world, February is still deep winter. It's cold out. There’s snow outside my window. Depending on the day, my driveway is coated in either ice or salt dust, and making the quick dash to the mailbox and back still requires a coat. Sometimes a hat too. And yet, here’s the Spring 2026 issue of Hole in the Head Review. We’re calling it the spring issue in the name of coming warmth, in the name of increasing daylight, and in the name of hope.

Speaking of light, we’ve paired this issue’s poems with María DeGuzmán’s luminous crystal photographs from the series “Quartz Secrets”. The images are bright celebrations of attentive looking, just like the poems we’ve collected here from gifted writers far and wide.

We’re also thrilled to include the winners of the 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize:

Winner: Olivia Jacobson

Runners-Up: Mary Buchinger and Tricia Knoll

Of these poems, this year’s judge Bill Schulz says:

First, congratulations to Olivia Jacobson, the winner of the third annual Charles

Simic Poetry Prize and to each of the finalists.

I read and reread each poem many times before selecting Photograph of My Father,

Age Seven. The poem is a quick 19 lines and few words. It's deceptively simple and

powerful– each word, each line moves the poem forward, from the commonplace to

hesitancy, fear and eventually to a cautious, hesitant hope. 

I am especially grateful to Mary Buchinger and Tricia Knoll. Your poems have stayed

with me.

Thank you to the editors for sending along such a strong group of finalists. You

made my task difficult in the best kind of way. Charlie believed in and respected the

importance of each word in a poem. I think he'd admire this year's submissions.

This year’s Editor’s Choice is awarded to Joanna Young’s poem Dark Rooms, a piece that struck me with it’s clear, thematic use of darkness to bring forth the visible, bad or good, that surrounds us all.

We hope you enjoy our Spring 2026 issue. Here’s to the light.

Mike Bove, Editor

Pretty Handsome

Separated by five decades, excommunication and death; your image resembles me. The way

your frown, your mouth and mine hold our truth in photos because we know no masks, we wear

our truth like mad mugs in disgust for costumes poorly placed over our masculinity. Yours an

early 1900’s corset black, mine, a faux battle dress and garrison to merino wool raspberry beret,

not airborne but property of an airborne battalion in Fayette-nam, Fort Bragg, First in Flight,

North Carolina, Home of Delta Force and Robin Sage—green beret training grounds and I

wonder if you ever travelled outside our home state to see for yourself what the textbooks

neglect to mention. I wonder if you even found out there were others like us all along, hiding

under a vast array of masks and costumes, marriages and kids, or hung as witches and burned or worked to death as faggots or enemies of the state, I think that’s what the nazi’s called us but I

hope you found a way to love who you loved and that special one who loved you back knew

exactly who you were and loved you because of that who you were. Did you find a way to love yourself even when the family refused to love you back? Was your husband, father, brother an alcoholic too, were you like my living aunts, Deborah and Tracey who were too afraid to acquire

a taste for fermented hops. Somehow I doubt it. I think you drank it like I had to just to survive

the reflection of yourself—a person forced into cis-drag—a brutal conversion therapy. Did you

let your girlfriends paint your face and pull your eyebrows out at their follicles just so you could become more becoming? I hope you became what you wanted and not only what they made you.

t love smith (they/them) is a queer, trans/non-binary poet stewarding unceded Wabanaki land. they are a Stonecoast MFA Candidate and Assistant Development Director at WMPG. t is the founder of Trans Poetics Archive. The archive published Maine’s First Transgender Poetry Anthology, Monster Beauties, in May 2025. t’s poetry has been published in new words press, Island Ink, and presented on local radio shows and podcasts.

First Date

In a tucked away corner in St. Boniface Cemetery, under the deep shade of the maples,

two boys, young men, on a date, I assume, two boys sit so close that their leg hairs touch.

Next to them, on the grass, a bottle, a paper plate, and a knife, the guys have been cutting

up a melon, the flesh is in their mouths, the juice remains, sticky on their fingers, and it

runs off the plate, and into the grass, and down into the soldier’s grave where they sit.

Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon, is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in 2 Rivers View, Action/Spectacle, I-70 Review, The San Pedro River Review, The Madrid Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.