Rat

a 'graft' for Edwin Morgan

The rat catches
in the catch of the rattrap; is mangled
rat-tra
The double-t stretched like a spring
on the breezeblock floor
in the bark shed warmed by the burner.

On my spade now; one more word I have killed
and hurled, a form cleaving to it.
The rigid claws are pale
as the light rows over the garden.

–Daniel Fraser

Daniel Fraser is a writer from Yorkshire. The author of Lung Iron (ignitionpress), his work can be found in places like: HAD, London Magazine, LA Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Drift, and X-R-A-Y. He lives on the Irish coast with his twin boys

Overgrowth of a Holiday

i will
calculate
the happiness
of
jailbirds
by
the number of teeth
or,
spaces
where teeth were,
filling
a smile.

and i will
love
an oral history
of love
better
than the children
born of it;
love love's
first
and only hours;
eternal and brief;
unmortified.

and,
if you
border on twilight
like a dismal uniform will,
you are the horizon
hung from shade; a
woodsman
hacking
at a hollow
tree fallen
mossy with
years. and i

live deep inside.
celebrations,
spilling all over.
myself,
counting
the dark splinters
that fly.

–Livio Farallo

Livio Farallo is a co-editor of Slipstream. His work has appeared in north Dakota Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, The Cardiff Review, Blotter, and elsewhere.

Wedding Day

The morning glories the neighbor called invasive are ready
for a new logic, the sky deepening into Iris blue.

The market has not yet swayed the landlord, the old house
not yet gone the way. Next door, the beautiful baby

tilts toward the first muggy drops as her mother hands
her over, running to pull pink slips from the line,

whispering, like a woman in a movie, baby here comes
a summer storm-even the plastic yard chairs prickle

in planetary anticipation. When Jacob emails to offer
oysters left from a wedding, I walk to his porch and kneel

to lift them from the cold mouth of the icebox. The town
dreams of lemons and lace, of cocktail sauce and a bride

and groom readying out into the institution. Clouds
swollen to capacity; the tall white yuccas flaming upward

like candles. Something about abundance will always
overwhelm. Once home, the briny shells stay untouched.

–Sarah Edwards

Sarah Edwards is an editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Annulet, The Yale Review, Brink, Ninth Letter, The Southern Humanities Review, Joyland, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others.

Aperture

I love the bench that overlooks the baseball
field that overlooks the house that looks like
"Church, Sprott, Alabama, 1977": A shock
of white among pine. It's mine. I try to love
the gap, the blur, the way things collapse
or expand with just one look: Now morning,
next evening; reprising worth the risk
like Heaney's double-take of feeling.
Or how—at my brother's games, before
everything changed —my father led me
along the clay fringe in time-killing loops
he called trips around the earth: We are
in Russia, he'd say with each clover scuff.
Now Malaysia. Now Italy. Next, Mexico.

–Sarah Edwards

Sarah Edwards is an editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Annulet, The Yale Review, Brink, Ninth Letter, The Southern Humanities Review, Joyland, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others.

Thin Idea

A thin idea hit me sleepy.
My brain smoked hastily, and
the reality imagined itself.

My brain smoked hastily, and
a thought floated downward.
The imaginary reality was dead.

A thought floated downward,
although
the reality imagined itself.

Although
a thin idea hit me sleepy,
the imaginary reality was dead.

–Duc Van Khanh Tran

Duc Van Khanh Tran is currently a Ph.D. student at National University of Singapore and has started using mathematical poetry forms to write poems since senior year in college. He writes poems in English and Mandarin Chinese, with poems published or forthcoming in Juste Milieu Zine, 《新大陆》，《雨林诗刊》etc. Updates on publications of his poems can be found on duc-van-khanh-tran-poetry.carrd.co/,

With You at One A.M. Under the Swann Street Ginkgos

Rayon go the wind chimes
what do we have here
rum's morse ticking

November gives a huge rat
a purpose in the gutter, touching
that's the knee, oh I get it

I can be now more than me
that's the gist and I think
I think I can rise in the pace car

The spectrograph
prodigious of a caterwaul (we're talking)

Smooth, breasting a creek I have
heard late of your carapace
a good news

not now to say you can
preach the dickens out me clean
all marble needs a rasp

soft on a honey vein
hotsprings often produce travertine
slabbing

but see that's a whole other charter
it will suffice say will it to get down
yes, and be yourself

with my self for a lurch a span a night
yes, agreed and all
but how wide is a leaf
or molten—but then it cools enough
and you can lift it
safe with two bare hands

–Seth Kleinschmidt

Ezzat Abouleish is a Midwesterner from the banks of Wisconsin’s Rock River. After many years spent on and off the air as a radio producer and disc jockey, he is now an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

On Writing Poems

She used to make tables of exceptional seeing.
Then she was rearranged.

People still sit
at the tables. And watch: the dawn

is long is exceptional
seeing.

I sometimes sit at the tables, resounding
in her craft
of woof. Her shaping
the affects of small deconstruction
like all shapings.

She was rearranged with a disease with no known cause.

The dawn is like running among floating bright tables.

Marx is dead.

Hold on.

–Ezzat Abouleish

Ezzat Abouleish is a recent graduate from Yale College where he studied philosophy and political theory. He served as a poetry reader for the Yale Review and an editor for the Yale Philosophy Review. He twice won the Yale Creative Arts Award, once for his poetry and once for fiction. The submitted poems would be his first publication. They were developed under the mentorship of Louis Glück during her final workshop

Wreck

After the news

The rain shuffles like a child

walking around
my room.

There is no inside
or outside. The air?

Same air. They beat
the windows.

They beat them.
I dreamed idly:

unmarked buses,
dulled spoons.

It was not
the nightmare

I waited for.
Who sits outside

even now.
In the rain,

the burgeoning hail.
Falling

like a child.

–Ezra Lebovitz

Ezra Lebovitz is a writer based in Philadelphia, where he is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He can be found in the public parks and waterways of the mid-Atlantic

Rainbow Trout

Like all those words leading up to
the picture of a big rainbow trout
in the Complet Angler by Izaak Walton

Or like the mountain loads of epistolary commendations and recommendations
leading up to a single rose in some

Other book which I forgot.

Like something which leads up, a
mad cadenza from the clavicembalo
not mere a bourgeois entanglement

In Christmas. but the adventure is discursive: it starts and stops. why
red and green I never got that

The girl with a Powerball hat crouches for
lost cards, I make my way to a parked car for your cigarettes. We are

Somehow always traveling and never
letting go. Even in sleep find one finds
he craves a blue picture. Hey pal,

Tone down the cuphemisms. We need
direction if we're gonna get to our
infinite destinations on time. How

To avoid relativistic word-soup, and
get to the real chowder. Ah, my friend
the news is blue,

We were supposed to be there last Christmas. Today
I saw a white furry caterpillar struggling
In the blue water I didn't move on him. No, not I. A heron
went ahead, I appreciated it and you
when you stood bewildered

Searching in the dark yard for the lost
dog or cat or something else
which I did not see and envied.

–Benjamin Shapere

Benjamin Shapere is a senior at Columbia. A collection of his poems Perfume Anthrax (Progress Print, 2026) is forthcoming.

Songs to Guiomar

I

I could not see
if what your hand,
Guiomar, might contain
was a yellow lemon, or strand
of daylight in golden skein.
Your mouth smiled at me.
I asked, "What will you share?
Fruitful time your hand chose
from all that your garden grows
in its prime?
Or a fair
stiff evening's pointless time?
Gold magic of hours when you
are gone?
Copy in still
water? On fire from hill
to hill, the true
dawn?
Does love break in two
the spool that used to hold
its twilights, now grown old?

–Gerald Friedman

Gerald Friedman grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and now teaches physics and mathematics in northern New Mexico. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, and his translations from Machado have appeared in Ezra, Dialogist, RHINO and Poet Lore. You can read more of his work at https://jerryfriedman.wixsite.com/my-site-2

From “Parables”

There was a boy who dreamed
a cardboard horse of his own.
The boy opened his eyes:
he didn’t see it, though.
Again of a little white horse
the boy started to dream,
and caught it by the mane...
You won’t escape from me!
Barely having caught it,
the little boy awoke.
His fist was tightly clenched.
The little horse had flown!
The boy grew very serious
thinking there’s nothing real
about a dreamed-of horse.
And no more would he dream.
But the boy became a youth
and had a love, and spoke
to his beloved girl:
Are you real or no?
When the youth reached old age,
he thought: It’s all a dream,
the dreamed-of little horse,
likewise the horse that’s real.
And when death came to him,
to his heart the old man posed
the question: Are you a dream?
Who knows if he awoke!

–Gerald Friedman

Gerald Friedman grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and now teaches physics and mathematics in northern New Mexico. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, and his translations from Machado have appeared in Ezra, Dialogist, RHINO and Poet Lore. You can read more of his work at https://jerryfriedman.wixsite.com/my-site-2

Tryst

Before the fox leaps,
I catch a glimpse of the vole
dining in the night weeds.
How he gambles
everything he has—
A small sum of flesh.
A prized clover.
Overhead, the pinking sky's
cloudwork spreads and sets his hunger going, despite
what he knows
is frozen in the high fields.
If he's lucky, evening
comes. And he dives
back to his hole,
more alive than before—thinking
only how he loves
to live and die so close
to those striking foxes,
and asks
nothing, nothing
of his brief heart.

–R.K. Fauth

R.K. Fauth is the author of A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (TTU Press, 2024). Fauth’s writing has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Fauth is a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, and a winner of a Treehouse Climate Action Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She has held fellowships with The Fulbright Program, The Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She currently lives in New York City.

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.

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

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.

IMPERFECT CIRCLE

–Kyle Trethewey

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

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.

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.

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.

Reverb

i)

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.

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 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.