Poetry Contributor
Naoise Gale is a twenty-year-old autistic poet who writes about mental health, addiction and eating disorders. She has been published by Cephalo Press, Versification, Anti Heroin Chic, Rabid Oak and Sad Girls’ club. She was also runner up in the Parkinson’s Art Poetry Competition 2020, and commended in the Poetry Space Competition 2020. You can find more of her work @Naoisegale13 on Twitter.
Karla Linn MerrifieldPoetry Contributor
Karla Linn Merrifield has 14 books to her credit, including her 2019 Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North, Cirque Press, and is currently writing a new poetry book, My Body the Guitar, to be published by Before Your Quiet Eyes Holograph Series in 2021.
Because the Moon is Tuned to Open G
Ann Howells
November was caustic. December astringent.
Chimneys became harmonicas.
Windows shook like tambourines.
January skies curdled, built cobblestone ice.
Walkways shattered into concrete jigsaws.
February scythed ice sheets from rooftops.
The dog, shamefaced, left puddles and piles
embellishing the stoop. March felled a neighbor —
purple ankle propped and, ironically, iced.
April lawns hover beneath snowfields and drifts.
Daffodils claw upward through frozen earth.
Karla Linn Merrifield
for Laury Egan
Now in the hour of tempest’s descent
with chaos-shaping clouds, wind, snow, waves
causing closure of schools, closure
of highways and railways and subways,
and the many-jeweled bridges of the boroughs,
but none for the widow across the Hudson River,
atop the highlands, who keenly observes
the rewriting of Sandy Hook, the erasure
of dunes, the deletion of beaches, beach grasses.
It is no wonder she shrinks from storm’s hysteria
as it thrashes its way into epochal history.
In the house of the dead, a blizzard smothers
a diminished spirit and her brittle heart crashes.
Maia JoyPoetry Contributor
Maia Joy is a queer biracial poet and musician from Boston, MA. A two-time Silver Key recipient from the Massachusetts Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, she is currently studying music and creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is a member of the Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House. Some of her work can be found in Star 82 Review and JFA Human Rights Journal, as well as on her social media @maiajoyspeaks, and her website, maiajoyspeaks.wixsite.com/website.
Ann HowellsPoetry Contributor
Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years. Her books include: Under a Lone Star, Village Books Press, 2016, Cattlemen & Cadillacs as editor, Dallas Poets Community, 2016, So Long As We Speak Their Names, Kelsay Books, 2019, about watermen on Chesapeake Bay, and Painting the Pinwheel Sky, Assure Press, 2020, persona poems of Van Gogh and his contemporaries. Her chapbooks include: Black Crow in Flight, published through Main Street Rag’s 2007 competition and Softly Beating Wings, 2017 William D. Barney Competition winner, Blackbead Books. Ann’s work appears in many small press and university journals.
Peter Stewart O’Grady
Sometimes it’s crisp frozen leaves,
mud crunched steps, the crazy paved
surface on frozen puddles, the shapes
of naked trees, and the sun slung low
into your blinking eyes, your shadow
stretched out further than you want.
Snow lying unviolated by footprints.
Those shrinking days that invited
the cold to reconfigure everything
for the year ahead, and their slow
stretch letting Christmas seep in
under the door, tempt us to reserve
a moment to toast by the fire, watch
logs exhaust themselves to ashes.
Sarah LeavesleyPhotography Contributor
Sarah Leavesley is a prize-winning photographer, journalist, poet and fiction writer. She was Resident Artist 2019 for The High Window poetry journal and runs LitWorld2 photo-poem journal, as well as designing covers for V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint. Her website is at www.sarah-james.co.uk.
Anna Lindsay
Numbness narcotised while I was unaware.
I knew the cold was coming,
watched winter take you, breath
by icy breath, into its lair,
and saw you, grateful, sink without despair
into its one-way care.
I felt I could fend off the cold,
and thought I was prepared
for icicles to sting before the spring—
never realising I was already pinned,
hunkering in hibernation, soul-systems stalled,
sensation numbed, heartbeats dulled
to torpor through the years.
I thought the cold was distant, well-controlled,
’til light’s frail tendril found its way
into my darkened den. Now I comprehend
that grieving sleep was after all obeyed:
that what I’d dreamt was waking
had simply been heart’s faking:
snow-cold, breath hold, hurt-souled…
But now a new year calls, thaw’s set, and I
awake from slumber’s thralls.
Winter’s melting: spring strokes my hair.
Dane HamannPhotography Contributor
Dane Hamann edits and indexes textbooks for a publisher in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University and later served as the poetry editor of TriQuarterly for over five years. He has published a chapbook with Sutra Press and micro-chapbooks with Ghost City Press. His full-length collection, A Thistle Stuck in the Throat of the Sun, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2021.