August 2025: raining

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Dear Readers and Contributors,

""A writer lives between the periods of sentences."
— Don DeLillo

The editors are grateful to all who submitted to this issue and congratulate all whose work appears here. My love and thanks to c0-editors Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Natalie Wolf, and Clare Rolens.

Yours,

Dale

Spider Dailey

Clean Clothes

It's raining, and her laundry

is hanging

on the ceiling fan,

dangling

in the thick

monsoon air.

Spider Dailey roams the desert.

Matthew Caretti

Fleet

I look up “lifespan
of dragonflies”

wonder at the shimmer
of their wings

the beats per minute
by my ear

a tinnitus of loss
before they’re off—

lost souls revisiting
the living

themselves squinting
at what’s yet to come.

As an English teacher, Matthew Caretti spends a good bit of time pondering what it means to compose a sound sentence, which, he thinks, is to make it poetry.

Terrible Lizards

Grinding through
a crash course
in meteor watching
like dinosaurs learning
the hard way
what it means
to lose everything,
to be erased from
the known world
suddenly unknown
and lost in time
until someone decides
to dig a bit deeper.

Bob Lucky

Telling Stories in the Dark,
A Missing Episode of The Twilight Zone

Imagine a world
where everyone
goes on a digital strike
for twenty-four hours,
doesn’t use devices
for checking likes
or shopping online
but sings
songs composed
while kicking tin cans
down a street or skipping
stones across a pond,
and then the phone rings
and it’s grandpa,
the dead one.

Bob Lucky, author of My Wife & Other Adventures, lives in Portugal, where he bimbles from one café to another.

J.I. Kleinberg

J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, where she tears words out of magazines and stares at them until they turn into poems.

Judith Yarrow

Fin of Trees

Across the valley
the black body of the hill
dives into the night,
its fin of trees cutting
through a red net of clouds.

Judith Yarrow has been published in two chapbooks and various literary journals over many years. Find more of her work at jyarrow.com.

McKinley Johnson

till death

A woman on the news listens
to her dead husband’s heart
beat in a stranger’s chest,

they both cry,
and, after a second,
I join them,
think

this must be
what love is about—
how else can you explain

the flesh,
the lack of it.

McKinley Johnson (he/him) is a poet from the foothills of Appalachia.

Lara Frankena

Domestic Scene

My husband lays the new knives out
and immediately cuts himself
because we’re so used to dull ones

so I wash and dry instead
and slide them into a knife block
straight out of a slasher film

in which a cleaver is raised
against whatever horrors
lurk in the dark.

Birth Experience

I still can’t understand the locals

so whatever a midwife says

my doula repeats

though they all understand me

perfectly

when I scream.

August, Southwest Michigan

Thrilled to discover

native prickly pear cacti,

my budding naturalist

picks up a broken-off pad

and drops it into the pocket

of his paper-thin running shorts.

Lara Frankena is a Midwesterner by birth and a Londoner by chance.

Kristina Warlen

The Decanting

I opened the wine too early

and the wound too late,

and both made a sound I wasn’t meant to understand.

Kristina Warlen writes literary and speculative fiction that explores memory, grief, intimacy, and emotional fracture, blending realism with the uncanny in forms ranging from flash and poetry to kink-forward stories.

Nina Nazir

Light

Nina Nazir chisels, fashions and forages for poems because she can't think of anything better to do right now.

Robert Perchan

Dementia Haiku

The older you get
the more and more it feels like
an epidemic.

Robert Perchan has poems and prose poems all over the place—good, bad and indecent—and continues to eat and drink in Busan, South Korea, under the bemused gaze of his translator wife, Mi-kyung Lee.

Lesley Lambton

Haunted
For Jacklyn

There are no ghosts
in this house
they left as you did
packed with your toys in a box

the dolls twisted and naked
and left in the dark again.

Lesley Lambton, who currently lives in the Isle of Man, has had poems appear in several anthologies and journals including Connecticut River Review, The Worcester Review, Right Hand Pointing, and SWWim Everyday.

Claudia Serea

Since I Was Little, I Knew

anything that I imagine in detail

won’t happen,

that’s why I think

about ways to disappear,

freak accidents, a fall,

a heart attack,

that’s why I think about death,

its fluttering red scarf over our heads—

because if I can imagine

its every crease and fold,

it will never touch us.

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-American poet, the author of seven poetry collections, most recently In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023). Serea won a Pushcart Prize, the Joanne Scott Kennedy Memorial Prize, and the New Letters Readers Award for her poems. She is a founding editor of National Translation Month, serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets, and co-hosts their monthly readings.

Boyd Razor

On not getting there

Xeno’s arrow freezes

half-way there—again—

as if to say to me,
“What are you waiting for?”

Boyd Razor is the last of the Romantic assistant comptrollers in his part of the county.

Kateri Boucher

Flower

I'm sure there are days

when the flower misses

the comfort of the seed.

Kateri Boucher lives in Detroit, Michigan, where she spends her time working for an Episcopal Church, studying theology, and wandering through the city’s many strange fields.

Anne Reiner

Identity

They say you become a New Yorker

when you ignore screaming

on the street, but New Yorkers know

it’s when you’re the one screaming.

Anne Reiner is a poet and biostatistician living in New York City.

J.R. Solonche

Two Clouds

When the two clouds came together,

one from the east, the higher one,

slowly, the other, the lower one,

from the west, slowly, they looked

like lovers in a slow-motion scene

of a tear-jerker, and it rained.

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

One Sentence Poems

is edited by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Clare Rolens, Dale Wisely, and Natalie Wolf. It is an Ambidextrous Bloodhound publication. Thanks for reading!