Love Fish to Wander (footnoted one-line haiku) | Jack Phillips
Pisces1 loves the night to wander2 and my soul3 the whole fish.4
About the Author:
Jack Phillips is a naturalist, poet, nature writer, and founder of The Naturalist School, a nonprofit organization devoted to wild creativity and poetics of place. He is a Pushcart nominee, a poetry editor for Magpie Zine, and his poetry has appeared in The Dewdrop, Amethyst Review, Wild Roof Journal, Canary, EcoTheo Review, and others. He lives in the Missouri-Kicakatuus watershed and teaches ecopsychology at Creighton University School of Medicine.
Yellow brain fungus curls & coils on wind-toppled, black-dappled, decaying white birch boles. Look closer. These luscious, translucent lemon pudding folds do not feast on the tree itself, but slowly consume the mycelium of the rosy crust fungus directly engorging the rotting birch. Quiet fête: What eats is eaten in return.
About the Author:
Clif Mason is the author of two full-length poetry collections, AS JAGUARS DREAMED ON THE EARTH’S DARK FACE (a magical realist novel in verse, Cathexis Northwest Press) and KNOCKING THE STARS SENSELESS (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), as well as three chapbooks. His work has appeared in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, The Classical Outlook, Poet Lore, and Orbis International Literary Journal (UK), among many others.
—he asked his friends to run the water cold in the tub
and unwind the prologue of antichrist
while he slips unbidden / blindfolded below the cooling skin
a slice of porcelain not quite bone in a kiln
—that they touch for a brief
his loneliness / fill the belly of bits that
he might know which part of the body it is
so it was like preparing food / the exultation and wreckage of the pretty boy in the bath
with the authenticity of his muted heart flashing
phonating over / the grievance
of frozen peas from a spoon
but for every prior day / spackle over it
and maybe for the linger of a particular voice-color
i was a child stomping about in gutter after rain for it seemed
a great mystery was left in living but also count the cost
to be seen just as i am
—we didn’t know yet, what was driftwood
or how the final note would be
shaken from the wire
—not for N.
Bonus audio of JC reading her poem:
About the author:
JC Talamantez’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Salamander, Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, Water~Stone Review, Nimrod, Colorado Review, the Florida Review, and others. She teaches philosophy at Texas State University.
In the ride, I know I am empty. Alone In my demand for what continues & What will follow the treachery of trees.
All day I ride around with fruits juggling In the playground of my belly. There is Water on the floor, I carry thirst in a jug.
Outside, the trees have gone through Gestation. Their hands now developed In the threading of ropes. They have
Mastered their hunger, more so how To harbor its decorum of dominion. I try to avoid the lesson. Ride far
From the quarrel of birds amongst This banquet of bruise. I probe A door, & a hand meets me there.
It is all mine. This presence. This Abundance of annoyance for the Length of a journey. I am not alarmed
That we share a love of trees as much As our hatred for this hour of agony. To be full of love too is to decline
What gathers the birds. When We switch mouths, we marinate Our tongues, wounds dipped
Into spirit. We become the source Of our bruises. There is no measure For how much ruin a being can carry.
About the author:
I Echo (b. Chris Baah) is a Ghanaian-Nigerian writer. He is the Founding Curator of NENTA Literary Journal, where he also serves as a Poetry Curator. He has work in Mudroom, Ußwali, & elsewhere. He is also studying for an MFA at George Mason University.
Browsing in my campus library I chance upon a colorful print of what Chinese sky watchers dubbed (in ancient Chinese) ’The Guest Star’ because it burst into the blue in 1054 and
faded two years later as if it never existed. An 18th century English astronomer, through a telescope, this time at night, rediscovered it, a tangle of yellow-red and white legs around
a bluish face, and dubbed it ‘Crab Nebula.’ I love crab butter, the yellow and lime-green gooeyness my mother let me eat out of Dungeness crab carapaces bought in Chinatown and
steamed Fisherman’s Wharf style. Now halfway through grad school, I haven’t sniffed crab steam in seven years. “We’re meant to be,” I whisper. “Prepare to be cracked and sucked
out of your chitin.” The Crab and I blush. We’re in cahoots, as only prey and carnivore can be, and we understand that I will ravish him right here, in front of the library’s panoramic
windows for the universe to see. Beneath the main print are ultraviolet and infrared images. In every image, the crab looks battered and machete-hacked—like me. Below it all,
in black & white, ‘4500-6500 light years away’—its distance. This is what art feels like, how truth and beauty, being un- reachable, are likely millennia away from what’s rendered.
Bonus audio of Kenton reading his poem:
About the author:
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, RHINO, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, Plume Poetry, Poetry Wales, Rattle, Best Microfiction 2026, and other venues. His debut poetry chapbook is due to drop from Bull City Press in 2027. He writes from Northern California.
there is a moment in the life of every barnacle when
it does not know if it will live or die
i don’t mean this like how you or i
might succumb to terror or despair but
at its cypris stage the barnacle doesn’t eat
it just floats hoping to crash
head first into something
hard enough to hold it
and hang on for another
thirty years or so
About the author:
Steve Minnich makes space for reading and writing in Richmond, Virginia. His work can be found in the pages of HAD, pioneertown lit, Sublunary Review, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of the zine Carry Water and would love to read with you. Thank you for reading.
It’s been two years since we’ve danced in the dark without a child between us.
Now that she dreams in her own bed, we explore the strange land of our mattress, the foreign landscapes of our changed bodies.
Our hands begin to remember the way. Remember the secret language our hips spoke to each other?
Even in the moonless dark, your whispers found my ears. In the night’s sensory chamber our hands see each other in a way our eyes forget by daylight.
The braille of your spine beneath my fingertips. The contours of your hands across my thighs.
We fill each other with breath, discover the familiar in the strange landscapes of deserted islands.
I urge my brain to abandon its thoughts, pause this poem it insists on writing you, forget the moon, all the wars outside our door,
to let go so that I can hold you tighter, as if to hold you is to hold the sky— collapse the universe between us.
Bonus audio of Svetlana reading her poem:
About the author:
Svetlana Litvinchuk is the author of Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (Fernwood Press, 2026). Her poetry has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and the Best of the Net, and appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, swamp pink, Redivider, About Place, Moon City Review, ANMLY, Iron Horse Literary Review, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of ONLY POEMS, Events Coordinator for Chill Subs, and a columnist for Sub Club. Originally from Ukraine, she now tends her garden in Missouri.
Because, Michael, when you said you must gift all your tenderness to the women who planted flowers in your body, I understood. Because I carry, too, the debt of tenderness to the women in my life. Unlike you, every man I’ve known has lingered, bone-deep in presence. They handed down what time had taught them, and time, through them, keeps teaching. But where they tried molding a wall, where they tried turning me into the opposite of tender, the women made me a garden. Where they taught me to shut the door, flowers pressed through the hinges, bloomed and held it wide open. Look, I know how to hold a butterfly and not tear its wings. I know how to water a flower without drowning it. I know how to cradle ache and not mistake it for the end. Once, I almost lost it, my hands curled into the shape of a tangerine, to summon red out of a man who called me fruity and laughed. But softness arrived on time and rescued me, my anger peeled back into fingers. Not everything needs to be responded with violence. This, I know, because now, my rage smells like lavender when it comes. I owe this to the women, to the supple beings of nature, this softness of mine. Look at me, velvet as nature. Look at me, not hardened but held.
About the Author:
Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. A Fellow of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship (2023), he is the co-winner of the Folorunsho Editor Poetry Prize (2025) and the second-place winner of the Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize (2025). He made it into the finalist pool of the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship (2026). He tweets @JoemarioU38615
Tarn Wilson is the author of the books The Slow Farm, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. She is taking a break from prose and shamelessly flirting with poetry. She has recently been published in Only Poems, Pedestal, Potomac Review, Rattle, Sweet Lit, and more.
Walking away from O’Connor’s pub on a cold February night in Doolin, each step further away from the music – the same jigs and reels already here two hundred years ago tonight in this place of austere beauty, the crashing Atlantic forever tackling the rocks below the village – it wasn’t the cold that froze me there or anything else that might have prepared me for what I saw when I looked up, the crystals so thick against the black I felt I could reach up and grab a handful without any need for a getaway.
Transfixed, I called out Look up! and just as I, you stopped in mid-stride.
A “Wow!” of wonder escaped your lips – As Above, So Below – your breath repeating a foot in front the milky midnight way above.
There we stood, Herd Boy and Weaving Maiden …
gazing forever across the sky at all that is and might have been.
About the Author:
Dan Thompson (PhD) is a U.S. Army veteran and former editor-in-chief whose creative and critical work has appeared in a wide range of literary and scholarly journals, including, within the past year, issues of Feral, Canary, Eclectica, The Raven Review, Black Coffee Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others. In an earlier life, he worked as a music producer for educational videos and as a DJ at a country music radio station.
