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

Jed Myers

Self-Portrait in Blue

I am that blue the blood is before

it hits air. Serene sorrow of the vein

delta back of my hand as a blue dawn

seeps from the night. Blue as the third

note, the mi, bent minor to weep

from a harmonica’s reed, blue irony

pulling the fifth flat too till it’s full off-

key to get us all into that blue room

where at least our aches will mingle

like the blown smoke blued by a neon

Blue Ribbon logo lit up in a window—

I am that blue of this oceany planet

shot from a lonely robot photographer’s

orbit, blue of such saturation not

one neural net out there won’t turn to it

from the everywhere-else-speckled dark,

blue the high circuits beam down in pics

of our fratricide cyclones and prison

cities, face of the Earth blue as the blue

baby choked on its birth fluid, blue

gleam on the two-edged stainless blade

my father shaved with, teasing death—

I am that blue shade of these vapors

who gossip and titter just to my left

ever since I first met the blue stare

out of that portrait, my mother’s father

dead by her thirteenth year. Blue

as the metallic swirls sold as blueberry

in the cold dome of vanilla reward

for finishing off my slice of brisket

despite its blue-green iridescence. Blue

haze of the distance. Makes you look,

blue. Like you might see through it—

Jed Myers is author of three books of poetry, most recently Learning to Hold (Wandering Aengus Press, Editors’ Award, 2024). Recent honors include the Northwest Review Poetry Prize, the River Heron Poetry Prize, and the Sundress Chapbook Editor’s Choice Award. Poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Poetry Review, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle and edits the journal Bracken. www.jedmyers.com