Lorren Richards 6/30/25 Lorren Richards 6/30/25

Shoe-Box

On —, I learned how
To peel unripe plantains with a butter knife
and double-jointed thumbs.
On —, I wrote Poppop a sign that said DO NOT
come here asking for money. He never learned
how to write in English. On —
there is a dead end, a trellis of sour grapes,
a basketball hoop with a net petrified by time.
The older cousin who touched me lives
on —.
No one locks their doors. Every house is my family.
Dinner comes with rice. I stay up late
to hold stray kittens until they die, aspirating on formula,
raccoon-faced, buried in a fuzzy sock.

–Lorren Richards

Lorren Richards is a Puerto Rican poet from Salem, New Jersey, and the recipient of the 2025 Philip. H. Wang Memorial Prize in Poetry. In their work, they most privilege connection and accessibility, hoping that their poetry can serve as a conduit for conversation and a soft place to land.

Lorren Richards 6/30/25 Lorren Richards 6/30/25

Capillary Action

Is when
the basement –
that’s where
we used to
keep clearance – floods,
and the water tastes
fabric, then climbs.
I didn’t
get biology until
I worked retail
and met Darwin
at the back
counter, where
I slid a
tagging gun’s
needle through
my thumb. The
hollow of the
thing filled with
blood fairly quickly.

–Lorren Richards

Kyle Trethewey 6/30/25 Kyle Trethewey 6/30/25

IMPERFECT CIRCLE

–Kyle Trethewey

Kyle Trethewey is a poet and a lawyer. They live in Seattle.

Kelan Nee 6/30/25 Kelan Nee 6/30/25

Lately

–Kelan Nee

Kelan Nee is a carpenter, and poet from Massachusetts. His debut collection Felling was released in May 2024 by and was the winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller prize. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Yale Review, Adroit Journal and elsewhere. He lives in Houston where he is a PhD candidate in critical poetics and the Editor of Gulf Coast Journal.

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan 6/30/25 Jeffrey H. MacLachlan 6/30/25

Producer Tags

heaven in the seat / fog god fragment / pulp star wiper juice / red light passion / jaws pry sleet breath / symmetrical assassin / scope this crash out / skeletal extraction / stage grass fume plays / trunk urn smashes / railroad wrist track / peacock gasses / rust tar elbow sprout / body bag stagnant

–Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan also has recent work in Puerto del Sol, The Round, The Vassar Review, among others. He is a Senior Lecturer of literature at Georgia College & State University.

Emily Adams-Aucoin 6/30/25 Emily Adams-Aucoin 6/30/25

THE MADONNA WITH THE PEAR

—Albrecht Dürer, 1511

Those months were pools of thick mud I waded through.
I could’ve been sleeping, but I wasn’t. None of the relief
from leaving the dream. With one arm, I carried my daughter,
my legacy of how I eventually decided to love the world.
With the other, a ripe, yellow-green pear heavy for its size.
I was leaving, then, which explained the resistance. Leaning
against the knotted flesh of a leafless tree, I knew I was lucky,
even as the mud enveloped my feet, fed with icy water
from the nearby sea. It was winter, and I still had
sweetness. My daughter cooed to me in our language.
I took a large bite of the pear, and the juice dripped down
my chin. Mud rose to my ankles, then my shins. Believe it
or not, that was higher ground. There was nowhere else
to climb to. Lost in the wet and dark of December,
we had to wait there for the light.

–Emily Adams-Aucoin

Emily Adams-Aucoin is a writer whose poetry has been published in literary magazines such as Electric Literature’s “The Commuter,” Meridian, Identity Theory, Sixth Finch, North American Review, and Colorado Review. She’s a poetry editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly, and you can find her on social media @emilyapoetry.

Dean Browne 6/30/25 Dean Browne 6/30/25

Reverb

The grandson I am knows
all about bleeding pig in the yard,
filching apples, auctioning
all but the rushy acres
of an inherited farm, being robbed,
conjuring brown trout
through bullrushes with the unlikeliest lure:
cheddar, chocolate.

How constellations marshal above fields humming with frost,
Orion, the Pleiades. The night mountains.
How they swallow the shadows.
Shoebox burials by moonlight in the cillín.

A great grandfather was from Aghnameadle, Tipperary.
A great grandmother from Knocknagoshel, Kerry.
A grandmother, their daughter, herself from Charleville, Cork,
arrived, via teashop shifts and dances in London,
in Aherlow, Tipp again, my navvy grandfather’s place,
then my mother’s. Then mine.

ii)

I’ve heard that a horse’s skull
strategically placed under floorboards
acted as an amplifier,
made ceilidhs more resonant
when fiddles sped, dancers
stamped rhythm. Add bottlecaps,
add coins, it became a tambourine.
How grey-haired grandchildren
found them, pulling up floorboards,
and held the skull of a horse as if
it was just the skull of a horse.

–Dean Browne

Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Recent poems have appeared in London Magazine and New York Review of Books. His first collection After Party will be published by Picador this year.

Dean Browne 6/30/25 Dean Browne 6/30/25

Anniversary

Another blast of confetti
from the parade float, bunting
from some one-shop village
with a church, called Kilmuck.

Local occasion commemorating
one or other of the helpless rabbits
history bloods its lurchers on.
Laughing boy on dad’s shoulders,

mother withdrawn and scrolling.
For three nights the sandman
has bivouacked elsewhere
and tendered barely a grain,

the country doctor’s flummoxed.
Does it hurt when I press here
or here or here? Have you anyone
else to chat to about this?

Well, that’s your choice.
Wouldn’t recommend it.
And how’s Cormac getting on?
I sat the Leaving with him.

–Dean Browne

Dean Browne 6/30/25 Dean Browne 6/30/25

Today I Want to Miss Only My Favourite Shoes of All Time

More akin to ousted nestlings now
than brogues, the laceless caramel suede
withered scrotal. Once, daylight was kinder,

bouncing back off the polished toecaps. Cloudlike,
cushioning low arches nicely. I felt handsome,
airborne. The sex.

My spirit, iridescent organza.
Should have enshrined them. I stormed them
into French onion soup

weather too often, they went the way of all things
beautiful: wore up one side,
the wet seeped in.

Whatever craft joined the sole steadfast
degraded, came unglued.
You must imagine them reduced

to a flipflop smackety-smack against
the path’s dodgy pop-up flags.
I thought of the deep-fried sleaze of chitterlings

killed on the cusp of fun-loving.
Thought of beachcombers in oilskins
liberating from the sand and wrack

these two buffeted currachs
that returned as skeletal relics west.
My various travels strewn

for dissection on the cobbler’s bench
like stunned bats

any second to flap wild about the room.

–Dean Browne

Cameron Cocking 6/30/25 Cameron Cocking 6/30/25

SPRING LIGHT

In the big architecture of the afternoon
there is nothing which does not seem
to cast itself into the infinite air
and somehow to set itself down
right where it just was, an ongoing memorial
of seagulls screeching at budded branches,
the silver lake across the highway
and the orchid’s silver roots at the window,
a loose wind from the traffic
luffing the nets on the tennis courts.
I can’t help feeling
there is another kind of afternoon
that wants to be seen and known
but that I can’t figure out where to look.
A few white planes fly straight across a wet silk sky,
an excavator sorts a few scrap-iron hills,
four red lights blink atop the John Hancock building
among countless grey buds out my window.
Quietly and swiftly, white pigeons come forth
from the railway underpass, sparse bits of magazines in their wake.
A string of cloud breaks loose, turning
pale green, purple, grey, in the light between
a few glass buildings far away. Noiseless sheer water
trembles around the dock’s pillars
where a flock of seagulls has just gathered,
all facing the same direction.
Each thing is proof only
that it can’t be found, with muddy grass
shuddering among trees’ long shadows
and white spring light, gone so quickly
that it seems always we are too early,
that it has not yet arrived.

–Cameron Cocking

Cameron Cocking lives and works in Chicago where he is a Writing Advisor at the University of Chicago. He received his MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst in 2024. He was the recipient of the 2023 Daniel and Merrily Glosband Fellowship, selected by Mónica de la Torre. His work has previously appeared in Conjunctions.

Ben Hyland 6/30/25 Ben Hyland 6/30/25

PAM’S FINGERTRAP

–Ben Hyland

Ben Hyland’s poetry is collected in four chapbooks – most recently, Shelter in Place (Moonstone Press, 2022) – and has been featured in multiple publications, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Hawai’i-Pacific Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal. As a career coach, Ben has helped hundreds of jobseekers find employment, even throughout the pandemic. Readers can connect with him and follow his work at www.benhylandlives.com

Farīd-al-dīn Aṭṭār, translated by Ali Asadollahi 6/30/25 Farīd-al-dīn Aṭṭār, translated by Ali Asadollahi 6/30/25

In Candle’s Words

Translator’s note:

What you are reading below are thirteen Rubāʿiyāt of Farīd-al-dīn Aṭṭār (c. 1145 – c. 1221). Attar is one of the most noted writers and mystics in Iran’s history, who directly influenced many prominent poets of his time. In the West, the best-known work by Attar is Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr (The Conference of the Birds), which has been translated into English by distinguished authors like Edward FitzGerald (1889), and Sholeh Wolpé (2017).

I chose to translate these poems from Moḵhtār-nāma (The Book of Choice), chapter 48: “On Candle’s Words.” All pieces in this chapter begin with: “The candle appeared and said.” Moḵhtār-nāma is a collection of Attar’s Rubāʿiyāt that has fifty thematic chapters and contains more than 2000 quatrains.

My motivation for translating these eight-century-old poems stems from the thematic approach of these pieces and their motif openings, which seemed very similar to modern poems to me.

To learn more about the concept of the candle in Persian literature and Attar's view, the “Candle” article in Encyclopedia Iranica can be of help: “The light of the candle is symbolic of physical beauty and, on another level, of spiritual radiance… The weak light of the candle provides a contrast to the brightness of the sun. Because of the shape of its flame, like a tongue, the candle is a teller of secrets.... The burning of the candle gave rise to more dramatic imagery. Drops of liquid wax are the tears of the suffering lover, the smoke his sighs, and the flame itself his passion. But, when the candle represents the beloved, then the lover is the moth (parvāna), which cannot resist the light and is drawn into the flame and consumed. The candle is also a source of paradox: It comes to life only after its head is cut off, destroys itself by living, and weeps (molten wax) while laughing (a reference to the flickering flame).” With this symbolic understanding of the candle in mind, Attar's quatrains take on a deeper meaning.

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شمع آمد و گفت: دل گرفت از خلقم

کافتاد ز خلق، آتشی در فرقم

چون زار نسوزم و نگریم بر خویش

آتش بر فرق و ریسمان در حلقم

شمع آمد و گفت: پا و سر باید سوخت

هر لحظه به آتش دگر باید سوخت

وقتی که به جمع روشنی بیش دهم

گر خواهم و گر نه بیشتر باید سوخت

شمع آمد و گفت: یارِ من خواهد بود

پروانه که جان‌سپارِ من خواهد بود

اول چو بشویمش به اشکی که مراست

آخر لحدش کنارِ من خواهد بود

شمع آمد و گفت: بنده می‌باید بود

در سوز، میان خنده می‌باید بود

سر می‌ببرند هر زمانم در طشت

پس می‌گویند زنده می‌باید بود

شمع آمد و گفت: در دلم خونم سوخت

کآتش همه‌شب درون و بیرونم سوخت

این طرفه که آتشی که در سر دارم

چون آب ز سر گذشت، افزونم سوخت

شمع آمد و گفت: این تن لاغر همه سوخت

رفتم که مرا ز پای تا سر همه سوخت

خشکم همه از دست شد و تر همه سوخت

اشکی دو سه نم بماند و دیگر همه سوخت

شمع آمد و گفت: می‌فروزم همه شب

کز سوختن است همچو روزم همه شب

هر چند زبان چرب دارم همه روز

از چرب زبانی است سوزم همه شب

شمع آمد و گفت: بر تن خویشتنم

دل می‌سوزد که سخت شد سوختنم

با هر که در این واقعه فریاد کنم

سر بُرَّد و آتشی نهد در دهنم

شمع آمد و گفت: جانِ من می‌سوزد

وز جان، تنِ ناتوانِ من می‌سوزد

سوگند همی خورم به جان و سرِ خویش

وز سوگندم زبانِ من می‌سوزد

۱۰

شمع آمد و گفت: چون من‌ام دشمنِ من

کو کس که به گازی ببُرد گردنِ من؟

گر بُکْشَنْدم، تنم بماند زنده

ور زنده بمانم، بنماند تنِ من

۱۱

شمع آمد و گفت: عمر خوش‌خوش بگذشت

دورم همه در سوز مشوش بگذشت

گر آب ز سر در گذرد سهل بود

این است بلا کز سرم آتش بگذشت

۱۲

شمع‌ آمد و گفت: بر نمی‌باید خاست

تا پیش تو سرگذشت برگویم راست

نی نی که زبان من بسوزد ز آتش

گر برگویم ز سرگذشتی که مراست

۱۳

شمع آمد وگفت: جان من می‌ببرند

وز من همه دوستان من می‌ببرند

ناگفتنی‌ای نگفته‌ام در همه عمر

پس از چه سبب زبان من می‌ببرند؟

The candle appeared and said:

With people, I’m upset; thanks to them, there’s fire upon my head.

How can I not flame feebly to shed tears over my body?

With this fire in my head;

While in my throat I feel a thread.

The candle appeared and said:

Top to toe I should burn.

With a new flame, then and now I should burn.

As I shine more in a crowd, willy-nilly, more and more

I should burn.

The candle appeared and said:

My lover, she will be… the moth, my devotee.

If I baptize her with my tears, first

At last, her grave is

beside me immersed.

The candle appeared and said:

You should be a servant.

You should smile in the midst of torment.

Every time they cut off my head in a tray;

then stay alive! they say.

The candle appeared and said:

In my heart, my blood is seared;

since the fire burned me, in and out, throughout the night.

Surprising, what I had in my head, the flame,

burned me more, as drowned I became.

The candle appeared and said:

My whole weak body burned.

I’m crumbled to ash, from foot to head;

that’s the reason why I went.

The dry burned and the wet burned;

just some tears left, else to dust, all returned.

The candle appeared and said:

Through the night, I burn bright.

As I blaze, all my night looks like the sunlight.

Days, I hold my oily tongue and nights

being oily-tongue makes me ignite.

The candle appeared and said:

I feel pity for my body

since my burning’s become wild.

On such an occasion at someone if I whine,

he beheads me and puts fire in mouth of mine.

The candle appeared and said:

I feel fire in my soul and

my weak body’s burning, owing to the soul.

I swear on my life and my head;

As I swear, my tongue burns in whole.

The candle appeared and said:

Since I'm my own enemy,

where’s somebody with a wick trimmer to behead me?

If they kill me, my body stays alive and

my body dies, if I revive.

The candle appeared and said:

Little by little, life passed me by.

My turn is over within a desperate cry.

It’s easy to keep your head under water;

the hardship is above my head, I have fire.

The candle appeared and said:

I shouldn’t stand before you to tell you

what I’ve been through.

No! No! If I tell you the truth

my tongue burns anew.

The candle appeared and said:

They come to kill me and

my mates are disappointed in me.

All my life, I kept the secrets, I've never said something wrong;

so why do they cut my tongue?

–Farīd-al-dīn Aṭṭār, tr. Ali Asadollahi

Ali Asadollahi is an Iranian poet, translator, and editor based in Tehran. He holds an M.A. in Persian Language and Literature from the University of Tehran and is the author of six books of Persian poetry. Over the past two decades, his poems have appeared in numerous leading Iranian literary journals, where he has also served as poetry editor for several publications. A permanent member of the Iranian Writers’ Association (est. 1968), he has received several literary awards, including the Iranian Journalists’ Poetry Prize and the Young Poets’ Book of the Year Award, both in 2010. His poetry and translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Consequence, and The Los Angeles Review, among others.

Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25 Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25

[in which the jackals whisper secrets]

in which the labors aren’t imagined.

–Aaron Lopatin

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25 Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25

[in which the jackals joy, redeem]

In which the crocus bursts in bloom.

In which the lonely leap like deer.

In which the nettles rise in smoke.

‘

In which the owls eat their young.

–Aaron Lopatin

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25 Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25

[in which the jackals judge the nations]

In which the fingers shrivel from the fig tree.

In which we calf & kidney them together.

In which the Jackals crown their Jackal heads.

In which the wicked fools are wicked fools.

–Aaron Lopatin

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25 Aaron Lopatin 6/30/25

[in which the jackals prophecy against me]

In which we raise a banner on a hilltop.

In which the leaping goats are seized and slaughtered.

In which in terror, look aghast:

castles turned to desert.

–Aaron Lopatin

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

Valeria Rodrigo 6/30/25 Valeria Rodrigo 6/30/25

Autopista José Antonio Páez

I wish I could braid your hair for school
tied to my ankles An ode to a boy in the green uniform.

Relic as gift, inscribed in the church of calypso
livers for the fantastical unreturn.
A red cap that does not fit your hair.
El profe and I get stopped at the end of this via crucis I was born

with a mouth That bites a wound paralyzed in governance.
You are but a tooth of your parishless prophet
You know his fictions
I know your ordains
I must bargain my tendons so you can stand
by my body on the table of my back to create something

new: A question. My hair recoils from the obedience in the grasp.
Arm to trigger, the legacy of beauty at the GNB. You will release
my joints with the same blade you cut my cousin’s ear, confused
for a shell in the wrong sea, both 19 and deaf to your own blood
Extending cruelty will be the monolith that extends us shredding

your flesh feeding the gun for your permission to enter Auyán’s stolen scale
would you have written or touched, do you still sing?
I must weigh your heart to condemn you: How old were you when they left?
We will replace those departed. You take us out back and trespass
Our dignity, we forgive you even then: you are a person too

Finally I turn to my father in a gaze huella en huella I place a promise, a hand over
The window fragmented in our sweat. I would send for zephyrus if I could speak.
I would send for relief si me dejarias poder, I am a nun nulled to a sold return
You are a monk in green, violenced to a lie of glory, about me in honor
of being a woman: in exchange for my price Quinimari rushes to salvage

obsolete heroes. In another life we would’ve given you fruit.
Our salvation untouched but in deherozing exhale, you knight
me another breath,

I suffocate a thank you.

–Valeria Rodrigo

Valeria Rodrigo is a writer from Valencia, Venezuela. She is currently studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been featured or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Azahares, and Hayden Ferry's Review.

W. M. Lobko 6/30/25 W. M. Lobko 6/30/25

Sam

Sam sent me some architecture in the mail.
The box was the biggest thing around:
the guys in Receiving needed to take off
their own roof, & didn’t want to sign for it,
something about liability if it all collapsed.
When I opened it up I saw what they meant.
HVAC vents were dangling like limp
hospital tubing, gargoyles hung all angry,
thirsty for the water that would name them.
It was like part of an imperium
had been cared off & necromanced,
but it just stood there calm amid the cardboard.
So I rang up Sam & asked why, why me?
Didn’t you like it? Sam asked. I said
I liked it fine, was very grateful & all that.
Then we had to check in, how was mom’s health
after that fall, how would the voting go.
A few years passed. When we hung up
I saw Sam’s language up in the cloistered light,
then mine there too, like landed butterflies flexing.
The structure giant had been listening,
adding our breath to its hoard. I thought
that was the juncture in which I’d fall quiet.
But really it’s when I started to speak.

–W.M. Lobko

W. M. Lobko’s poems, reviews, & interviews have appeared in journals such as Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Spinning Jenny, & Guernica. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, & was a semi-finalist for the 92Y / Boston Review "Discovery" Prize. He studied at the University of Oregon & currently teaches in the New York City area. Read more at wmlobko.com.

Susan Barba 6/30/25 Susan Barba 6/30/25

At Madame Hagopian’s

Are you hungry, my child?
Are you thirsty?

Clean your boots very well, then bring them to my room.
The streets in Marsovan are narrow and dirty.

Where are the girls?
They were at the windows of the church.

My uncle was a bachelor. My aunt was a poetess.
The rich and the poor are alike before God.

Pride is a flower that grows in the devil’s garden.
Death is a black camel that kneels at every man’s gate.

The most useful insects are the bee and the silk-worm.
My cat is not so strong as your little dog.

Formerly there were many princes in Italy; now there is only a king.
The king and the queen will be in Rome on the 10th of December.

England has a wise old queen. The English navy and the German army
are mighty. The Turkish soldiers are brave.

The city of Trebizond has 45,000 inhabitants. I do not think that there can be
a more beautiful old castle in the world than that of Heidelberg.

Here are the books you ordered.
The gentleman I walked with brought them.

These boys are diligent. Those men are idle.
If he is rich, why does he not pay his debts?

The sun is bright. The stars are distant.
Love all, trust a few.

My neighbor has 3 pounds of sugar. The princess has two palaces.
It is said that the American soldiers won the last battle.

That bitter medicine was for my brother-in-law.
Where are the red ribbons Miss Arpinaz bought?

The quieter a life is, the happier it is.
Will you take a walk with me after dinner?

Your brother has been to London, so have I;
but he cannot go to New York this year, nor can I.

He saved himself by jumping through the window.
The house was half-burnt. And he went out, and wept bitterly.

Hasten to finish your letter for the courier will come in half an hour.
What did the Englishman promise you yesterday?

There is a nest in the belfry. The doors of the schoolhouse are old.
The leaves of the flowers are yellow. The tail of the black dog is long.

With the heave of the shovel.
The ship goes down to the river. The years of the famine.

When will you set out?
Shall you soon come back?

I have three dresses, a silk one and two woolen ones.
It is very cold tonight, therefore I advise you to take a coat.

Come nearer. One needs much money to make this journey.
If you have some good wine, give me a bottle of it.

This poem is an assemblage from Kevork H. Gulian’s Elementary Modern Armenian Grammar (1895). Gulian was a professor at Anatolia College in the city of Marsovan (Ottoman Empire) until 1915, when the Armenians at the college were murdered at the order of the Ottoman government; his Grammar was a primer for Western Armenian, now listed by UNESCO as an endangered language.

–Susan Barba

Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sun and geode, which was a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, PN Review, and elsewhere. She works as a senior editor for The New York Review of Books.

Susan Barba 6/30/25 Susan Barba 6/30/25

The Destiny of a Great Man is a Muse

in memory of VG

I returned to a severe pruning. Whatever wood the men felled
carted elsewhere leaving absence midair. The trees’ astonished
and uncertain countenances. From midtown’s brood chamber
up the northeast corridor breathing steel and strangers’ exhalations.
Fist-clenching chill. Each votive bud on the magnolia poised to
burn. Dogs bark but the caravans keep rolling, your medzmama said.

–Susan Barba