"Poor Thing" by Abbie Langmead

One year since pity moved
into the present tense, and my mother
into the past. I don’t lie when people ask
the natural questions of family life, until
the awkward question of how long is broached.

When am I allowed to live again?
Reanimated after falling
into the river, nothing more
than a childlike memory
that gets reconstructed day
by day as I relearn how to speak.

Frankenstein was always about a child
and her mother. The irresponsible
science was just a ploy to get men
to care the slightest bit about
a creation myth that wasn’t made
from their rib. I know that,

but they didn’t. The others in that house
wet with rain instead of sick,
although both stick to the skin
and linger longer than they’re welcome.
I don’t know if Shelley would’ve
Understood me. I don’t think she and I
would get along in the slightest,
two stubborn women butting heads
while both claim to be revolutionary.
Reminds me of my mother, or hers.

At the Tower Records on Dawson Street
I told a friend I thought it was a terrible movie—
that I felt like womanhood was more than
being a baby and getting your brains fucked into you
by Mark Ruffalo. I’m sorting out
what the word “woman” means, or if I am one,
but there has to be more to life, isn’t there?

She disagreed with me,
not about the definition of womanhood,
but about what the film meant, and what regaining
things after you’d lost them looked like.
What is the shape of all of this being, and what
do we make space for?

One year into resurrection
and I don’t know if I believe in it at all—
this world where there’s no number to call
when things get screwy, no one to return to
when your mind is stuck in the black and white.
something monstrous happened. I am still
remembering what it’s like to watch love decay.

I don’t know how to accept these pithy sympathies.
These are the facts of a life reborn,
in a place where she’d never been,
and where nobody knows who I was
when she was still here.

---

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.

"A Theology Lesson on Sherman Street" by Abbie Langmead

On the way to synagogue one day my dad told me about Hell
And Heaven, or at least what he believes of it.
The story went a little something like this:

We don’t know anything for certain.
I won’t guarantee you an afterlife
When I’m gone. But the only after
Life I’ve ever heard are people talking
About you, remembering you.

If someone thinks of you and the times
Where you hurt them, they’ll place you
In Hell, in this immobile ash of sin.

Heaven is the kindness you give someone
That lasts forever. That is afterlife, no,
That is immortality.

I didn’t tell him that on that same strip of road
My mother and I also talked about an afterlife.
When she talked about legacy, she said:

If people remember your father,
They will know he was a good man.

If.

My father is soft-spoken and godly,
Although he’d hate both those characterizations.
I mean that I think that people will put him
In Heaven when the time comes.
I know that I will.

And that will be all I have,
Because despite all the scriptures and Talmud
He reads, he too doesn’t believe
In hauntings. He’s promised me that
Any psychic or medium who claims
To have a message from him will be a liar.
He can’t tell me that they’re all liars, Just like he can’t say whether Heaven and Hell
Are real, or just metaphors like he likes to say.

But he won’t say anything after he’s gone,
He doesn’t believe in mediums now and refuses
To let me get wrapped up in the foolish nonsense
That my mother and grandmother adore.
Anyone who speaks for him is a fraud

That’s for certain.

---

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.

"Moonshot" by Scott Burwash

Two seasons have passed since I last saw you,
alone in the fen with your antlers and bare expressions.
They tell me that I will get better in time,
but I spend most days folding paper cranes to no end.
The thing I never said to you lives under my tongue,
pregnant with guilt and hoping for absolution.
If you flew to my open window tonight
I would ask you to stay with me until the rain comes back.
Do you still have the pressed flowers that my grandpa
gave you or did they spill onto the floor like everything else?

Covering my eyes now.

Waiting for everything to still.

---

Scott Burwash (he/him) is a writer of poetry and prose with previous work appearing in Apeiron Review, Eclectica Magazine, and Dark Harbor Magazine. You can find him on Instagram and Bluesky (@scottburwash).

"Margaret" by Robert Wilson

I wait in the pickup/drop off area listening for the warning bell from the South Shore Limited
from Chicago. Small birds the color of clouds balance on the rails, rust collecting on their toes,
three pointing forward, one pointing back. The birds startle as the train floats to a stop like a
funeral procession for momentum, then commuters, scholarship Catholics, and my daughter,
descend. She carries a Fair Trade Bag and wears a pewter Christmas necklace made of two
crossed swords, and sat facing the wrong way so all she could see was the past. My mother died
three late nights and one dawn after my daughter was born. They are both named—one, then the
next—Margaret. A woman of that same name lived inside a dragon seven hundred years ago and became one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. Most railroad crossings are uncontrolled, a matter of chance for all who pass. We should be grateful to have a limited body, like mine, like yours.

---

Robert Wilson is a writer whose poems have most recently appeared in Welter and SoFLoPoJo. His poem Dolphin Tour was nominated for Best of the Net in 2023 and his poem Spring Tide was the 2024 winner of the Water to Words contest sponsored by the Seneca (New York) Park Zoo Society. He lives beside the ocean in Cape Haze, Florida.

"ASH" by Elizabeth Benge

Do you remember the night you shattered?
The floor outside her room was littered
with debris—gloves and masks and empty
vials, remnants of the war you lost.
They took her body away and left you,
staring at your own hands. She was young and pregnant, you said,
as if that alone could summon her back,
as if that one fact could erase
the hours you spent inside that room,
chasing her heartbeat with desperate fingers
until there was nothing left to catch. The Delta surge had us all burning.
You were untouchable,
a stone in the storm, the doctor
we all looked to when our hands shook.
But you stood there hollow-eyed,
cracked open and emptied out.
And I saw how easily it could happen to me. The next morning, you were gone.
I kept waiting for you to come back,
to fill the eye at the center
of the chaos, but your pager lay silent
on the counter, and your name stayed dark
on the schedule, a hole that widened
with every shift. I didn’t want to be you.
But the patients kept coming,
their lungs filling like waterlogged boats,
their eyes searching for anyone
who could promise they'd float.
I stepped into your storm
one trembling foot at a time,
and the weight wrapped me
like a second skin. There was no time to wonder
if I was ready, if I could be
what they needed. I knew what
awaited me. I had watched it
erode in your hands, felt
its shadow cross my heart. This work is a quiet violence,
a tender, brutal unraveling.
To hold each life sacred,
to lose it anyway, and to keep going
with blood-stained sleeves,
knowing all too well
that one day, I might split open
just like you did. Still, I put on my mask,
my gloves, my shield. I steady
my hands, quiet the shaking,
stand at the bedside of the next
and the next, facing down the ghosts
that press like fog against the walls.

---

Lizzie Benge is a sleep medicine physician, first-year attending, and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Lizzie writes about the intersection of medicine and humanity, capturing the quiet, powerful moments that reveal the resilience of patients and doctors alike.

Four Poems by Lauren Arienzale

simple

to live one hundred years
in a quarter of the time

and still savor tomorrow

that is my gift

containing

and here i am,
spilling the confetti of my psyche
wild and colorful and violently messy
on the floor of your office

and here you are,
calling my chaos wonderful
and holding up my madness
with the upmost care

queer experience

the words leave your mouth
how i imagine
fire must spread

it is an ember of good intentions
and then
a forest fire of twisted holiness

because you say, “i’ll pray for you,”
but really mean,
“we’ll never meet in heaven.”

bloodline

the day you died
i stood by the body
while they cried and prayed and argued

the plague was only in its first summer
then, and i was foolishly hopeful

wishing on shooting stars in the backyard
and begging the solar system to make me braver.

---

Lauren Arienzale is a cat mom, doctoral student in clinical psychology, former organic farmer, and lifelong poet. She is the author of the independently published poetry collection, "Mud Pie.” Her work has also appeared in Scapegoat Review, The Closed Eye Open (Maya’s Micros), and A Plate of Pandemic. Check out her website: laurenarienzale.com

"untitled for baths" by Emma Durbin

I used to run into the woods and sing with the trees.
I used to return home, run the tap, and steam my problems away.
I used to love baths.

Now I have a cheap tub,
aged caulk,
too many roommates,
and an aching block of anxiety across my chest.

I used to love baths.
But now all I can do is shower and remember:
That outdoor rain-head in Italy
with the lemon shampoo
and my almost private view of Vesuvio.

But now all I can do is shower and remember:
That hot tub in Washington,
open and under the stars.

But now all I can do is shower and daydream: A hot spring.
Bright and colorful lights dancing above our heads.
The taste of sweat and rain and forest on your breath.
Wishing it was me there, with you.

---

Emma Durbin (they/them) is a Chicago-based playwright, poet, dramaturg, and theatre producer. Their writing often centers women and people who are experiencing gender marginalization, and the bonds they form in search of survival, community, and joy. Plays in development include: landscape (workshopped at Mirrorbox Theatre and Valdez Theatre Conference, 2022 Premiere Play Festival semi-finalist, 2024 Irons in the Fire at Fault Line Theatre semifinalist, 2023 NAP Series at Normal Ave finalist, and 2023 LAB Series at The Inkwell Theater finalist), Witchcraft, Bitchcraft (2022 commission by Pocket Theatre VR), and overgrown (winter 2023 Jackalope Playwrights Lab). Emma is a co-founder and artistic producer of Freshly Brewed, a new play development series for emerging Chicago writers, produced by The Understudy Coffee and Books and fiscally sponsored by Raven Theatre. Emma attended the New Play Dramaturgy Intensive at the Kennedy Center with Mark Bly and has a BFA in Playwriting from The Theatre School at DePaul University Dean’s Prize Recipient). Please visit emmadurbin.com to learn more.

"The Last Night You Went Outside" by Wendy BooydeGraaff

You’ve always been a sleepwalker. I’d wake nights, the moon shining on our bed, on the rumpled indent where you were when I closed my eyes and leaned my head on your shoulder. At first, I’d get up, find you brushing your teeth in the kitchen, or packing a plastic bag in the living room: books, candles, playing card packets breaking through the thin grocery store logo. I’d discovered if I said anything, you’d grow agitated, you’d shake and become stiff in your refusal. Once, you hit me across the forehead when your arms swung wildly to grab back the wastebasket you were drinking from. The purple-yellow bruise from the watch you wore lasted days. I bought that cakey makeup to cover it up, though the social worker still came to our place, asked me uncomfortable questions. Why hasn’t he come back now, when I need him?

I began to ignore your nighttime travels. I’d lock my desk and hide the key. Everything else you’d put back in place when you awoke at noon. There’d be a few hours of normalcy in the evening and then we’d accidentally fall asleep. I’d stay in bed, sleep through whatever it was you did—you’d never remember, you were asleep. The rift between us grew. You were always leaving. You didn’t mean to, you said. How could I blame you, you said. How could I not? I said. You left. You kept leaving. Subconscious leaving is worse than physical. You didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand you.

The full moon came again, woke me up. How had I not heard the dead bolt unlock, the creak the door makes after the suction sound upon opening. I stood in the shadowed doorway, you stood in the beam on the sidewalk, looking down, fiddling. Then you lifted your arms straight up. I didn’t see how or where you went. You were gone. The beam was gone. I walked to the spot I had last seen you, crunched something under my feet. Your watch, the face splintered with embedded sidewalk grit. I carried it to our room, put it on the nightstand where it had never been because it was always on your arm. I slept on my side of the bed, expecting you back by morning, but the watch stayed there in its new place, as did you.

Wendy BooydeGraaff's short fiction, poems, and essays have been included in Stanchion, Slag Glass City, CutLeaf, Ninth Letter online, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States.