ISSUE 21 SNEAK PEEK
Donut Shop Pantoum
by Natalie Louise Tombasco
​
“It’s a sad day,” the counter girl says, “we’re all out.”
But even on National Donut Day it don’t matter to me; sticky
sweet goes down like a jagged pill without water. The orange
of this place—Golden Gate Bridge, persimmon—a pigment
of anguish. A national holiday? I’m here only to rhyme dough
with Rimbaud, to be alone with Mrs. Butterworth & styrofoam.
The cash-only sign’s color is that of Carrot Top, Mario Batali’s Crocs.
I never read The Odyssey, but I think I get the gist
as I swim alone in a sea of styrofoam & high-fructose corn syrup.
In this Indiana trash town, I watch coffee drip from delicate
instruments, thinking of Homer Simpson with a fluorescent lyre
& deep-fried, glazed hole of d’oh! yelling O small,
tortured town, you are the apricot-stuff of poetry—machinery-gunk
color like circus peanuts, bad spray tans, prescription bottles.
Empty trays of glazed O’s behind her, she goes for the jugular:
“It’s a sad day,” the counter girl says to a regular, “we’re all out.”
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If I Say, the Butterfly Is Beautiful, Dad
by Michael Mark
​
he’ll say, it’s a bug.
If I say it likes him,
he’ll say, who needs friends?
If I say, once it was a caterpillar,
he’ll say, next it’ll be dead.
If I say, it’s a symbol of change,
he’ll inch his butt to the bench’s edge,
rock back and forth, back and forth,
like the physical therapists taught him
to get momentum, to stand safely,
then after three settling breaths
he’ll turn and start shuffling
towards the car.
If he’s feeling steady enough, if
the breeze isn’t too hard, he might
spread wide those bony elbows
look back at me
and flap them.
The Moon is Two Half-Moons Joined Together
by John Sibley Williams
​
Her body still // yoked to histories retold // so often even her great- grandmother, who lived it, cannot // remember the river’s name she // crossed to get here. Tigris. Rio Grande. Euphrates. How the men & more // men & when the men were done, they’d touch finger to forehead to chest to shoulder & zip up their flies. How sometimes the world // works like that. The bullet passes right // through & on the other side another // language to learn, another god to // feed, & a child that wears half your face. Try not to take it // as a sign, how they see // you, momma says. The books the kids don’t read don’t mention it. This name. That first name. The constellations it takes to turn // sky into map. How boys still // rock-paper-scissor their way to cruelty, which hurts // less than their taking her // as white, which at least means they love // what they see. & a red clay stain that once
was a river.
The Performance (Architecture 28)
by John Gallaher
​
Mother. Noun. My mother died piece by piece. It took
a decade. And now I get a replacement, going through adoption records.
“Better not fuck this up,” I tell myself, because I think I’m funny,
which means I’m always apologizing and realizing I’m not so funny,
like how I walked into the dance studio just now
to say hi to Robin and Natalie before the high school football game,
and without taking the temperature of the room, which only
occurred to me later to imagine, I made some comment
about Natalie’s dance makeup, which turns out to be
just the thing she and Robin had been stressing over an hour,
because makeup, for halftime dancers, is ¾ of the world,
and I just blundered in with “Ew” or “Ugh,” funny dad,
look how funny I am, and so Natalie leaves saying “I hate you”
and Robin won’t talk to me. And I know this. And what the fuck
is wrong with you, in this town, in this world, saying “ew”
about this makeup that she didn’t want to wear in the first place,
but the dancers have to wear the makeup the theme committee
comes up with, and The Incredibles is stupid, of course it is, yes,
everyone knows that, but to say so is—we must not say so—
and why didn’t I already know that, why do I continually
not know that? I’m trying to think here. Let me think.
I’m sitting in the stands with Robin. It’s halftime. The dance team
takes the field, performs. Natalie has a trick where she
stiff-arm rolls forward and then flips over the backs of two
other dancers who lean forward. After, she comes up
to where we’re sitting to say hi, and she’s all smiles.
“I usually slip the first time I do that trick,” she says.
“And I didn’t slip in practice, so I thought for sure I would
then. But I didn’t.” And so everything is fine. Ha. Funny joke,
this shape we take, as water takes shape, that we rise to
and fill. As all the years there ever were are right now.
If I Don't Die.
by Omotunde Oredipe
​
News reaches us of men burning
at home. The police disperse
the crowd with tear gas and bullets.
We have all seen the footage. I can
still smell the fear, that Saturday afternoon
when the air crackled as the rifles chorused.
My father told me that during the war
the children were told to dive into the
gutters if the ground tremored or planes
roared overhead. I imagine my father
in a ditch somewhere, his skinny arms
flat in front of him, his nose in the dust,
as I hold my own breath under the bed,
in the dimming light of the guestroom.
Father Lord, If I don’t die
I promise to tell daddy about the TV stand I broke.
Amen.
The Story
by Mary Anne Rojas
they never thought it would happen. that it would ever leave
its house, free and wandering. that it would visit other
people’s homes, drink coffee with them, read a poem aloud to
their lover. the white people thought it came in bouquets, like
wrapped flowers with uneven edges. the white people thought
it would have a bow that you can unwrap gently. the white
people dreamed of the anticipation—how it would be like to
watch it flutter with ease, increasing volume with air. the
white people thought it would have sounded different, like
something more formulaic, like notes to hymns, or the way
one reads how to put together a table. the white people
thought it was dead and that language doesn’t come from dead
things. the white people thought it was a ghost. the white
people thought it would have warned them before arriving.
the white people ran to church. the white people thought it
wouldn’t have taken up so much space. the white people
thought it would have stayed in her office. the white people
thought they were free. the white people thought that it would
have sounded different. the white people thought it would
have behaved. the white people thought it would sound like
them. the white people thought it could be softened into
baby’s breath and lilies. the white people thought there
wouldn’t be smoke. the white people thought that thunder
only came from earth. and then, one day the white people
said, “Did you hear that?”
Motherhood
by Jennifer Garfield
​
“Who by fire? … Who by barbiturate?”
—Leonard Cohen
I’m keeping a list of all the bad things that can happen to the people I love.
There are, for example, 67 ways my children might die in a house fire,
even though we play stop, drop, and roll each night before bed. Remember
the Arizona twins who drowned in the canal when their mom lost control
of the stroller while swatting a bee? See what I mean? It’s like a tragedy
cornucopia, each fruit its own sweet horror. Pick dismemberment. Pick
poison. Pick sexual assault. And we haven’t even begun to explore
the medical options. Leukemia is a big one. That Jewish disease
that makes your pee like maple syrup. Don’t forget measles, though I, too
had forgotten that one, until I learned our neighbors are anti-vaxxers.
And then there’s the gun-owners on the corner, and I don’t even need
to write that one down, since the entire world is a list of ways to die
by bullet. I’m a teacher. I keep umbrellas in my classroom to use as weapons,
sit the rugby players by the door just in case, and every so often I wonder
which doorway the shooter (shooters?) will enter from and will it be
while we are talking about metaphors? Will I have the guts to do
what the police officer advised at the training—(Pull his motherfucking arm off)—
which didn’t make me feel empowered or in control of my destiny at all?
In Lexington, I heard their police shoot blanks during active shooter drills
at the high school. Teachers must decide to shelter in place with their class
or run based on how close they think they are to death. If you make the wrong
choice, a cop will leap from the hallway corner and say bang. You didn’t make it.
This is the stuff I’m talking about. When Jamie Closs was found
after being kidnapped and held captive by the man who murdered her parents,
​
my first thought was, this is quaint. He had a single weapon: one lonely,
innocent rifle. It was a comfortable, old-school crime. A back-of-the-milk-carton
crime. When we were mugged and the baby was 2 months old,
my body and mind detached and everything happened in slow motion,
like they say it does. The pockmarked man drew his knife, hours later
held it above my head, and it was an eternity or two before that blade
swept the air above the stroller. I remember it glimmered
in the early morning sun like a jewel. Perhaps I was thinking,
You don’t have a gun? Remember when the JCC’s had all those bomb threats,
and the preschoolers, who were swimming, had to carry the babies outside?
They didn’t have time to get their towels. I picture my daughter
in her pink flamingo one-piece, frog goggles, wrinkled toes, those drops
of chlorinated water that gather on her upper lip. Then her thin, shivering arms
wrapped around someone’s baby, four feet dragging across the snow-dusted ground.
My Bubbie believes terrorists are building underground tunnels leading
into elementary schools. She honestly believes this is happening as we speak.
What terrorists? I ask. You know who I mean, she says. In my mind,
my daughter blows a bubble and someone bursts it with the tip
of an AK-47. I feel a little better writing this all down. My kids are asleep.
I just checked, and they are still breathing. The default, I know, is to live.
I Can't Stop
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Being a person who looks for the dark side.
Looking up crime statistics at Disneyland.
Looking for monsters under the bed.
Also, I can’t stop taking pictures of flowers
even though mostly we have nine months of rain.
I can’t stop wondering if the hummingbirds here
are doomed, if the snow geese will be poisoned
at an abandoned copper mine lake in Montana,
if that virus will reach us before we develop a vaccine.
So, I can’t stop writing the apocalypse story over and over.
I’ve imagined the end before I’d even begun—
I wrote a nuclear winter poem when I was seven.
There was a boy in a symbolic green raincoat.
I watch football thinking of the boys with broken bones.
I watch wars thinking about people brought home
with missing limbs, nightmares, tremors.
I can’t stop thinking about the jellyfish massing
in our warming ocean coast, the orca carrying her dead calf.
When I’m in the MRI tube, I can’t help but think
of all the episodes of X-Files or House where people
had seizures within the MRI tube, for unexplained reasons.
Tonight I wonder if twenty-four years of marriage
are too many. I look at the picture of me at nineteen,
my eyes still hopeful but also afraid. I wonder when
someone I love will die. I wonder how many more holidays
I will celebrate. I told you, I can’t stop introducing you
to so many clouds on my horizon. I’d rather tell you
about my nonstop love of Rainier cherries
or kissing in the rain. My nonstop love of even
old arcade games, the sound of them. I can’t stop
thinking of the Doomsday Clock, how close we are
to spinning out, our planet into the full blast of the sun.
CONTRIBUTORS
​
Clarissa Adkins has poems in Poems2Go, The Pinch, Whurk Magazine, Passengers Journal, and River City Poets’ anthology Lingering in the Margins, among others. She has a full-length book being published by Lily Poetry Review Books in April 2021. Clarissa earned a Best of the Net nomination for her work in Parentheses International Literary Arts Journal. She enjoys reading for Sugar House Review and received her MFA in poetry from Lesley University in 2018. When she’s not writing, you can usually find her teaching yoga and high school English.
Deborah Allbritain is a poet living in San Diego, CA. Her poem “Sorrow I Will Lead You Out Somewhere,” was chosen for the Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize in 2017. Her poems have been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net and have regularly appeared in many journals, and anthologies. Her book manuscripts have been semi-finalists and individual poems have been chosen as finalists for the Wabash Poetry Prize, Bellingham Prize for Poetry, Florida Review Editors’ Award, and the Comstock Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have been published in The Dunes Review, The Nashville Review, Greesboro Review, Verse Daily, Spoon River, and others.
Alecia Beymer is a doctoral student in English education at Michigan State University. Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review and The Minor Bird. Her research is focused on literacies formed by space and place, considerations of the inter-connected resonances of teachers and students, and the poetics of education.
Mary Buchinger is the author of four collections of poetry: Navigating the Reach (forthcoming), e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (2018), Aerialist (2015), and Roomful of Sparrows (2008). She is president of the New England Poetry Club and Professor of English and communication studies at MCPHS University in Boston. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Diagram, Gargoyle, Nimrod, PANK, Salamander, Slice Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. MaryBuchinger.com
Ian Cappelli is the author of the chapbook Suburban Hermeneutics from Cathexis Northwest Press and is an MFA candidate at George Mason University. His work’s been twice nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net; has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Lunch Ticket, Roanoke Review, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others; and is included in Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2020 anthology.
Star Coulbrooke is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, UT. Her most recent poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle, and City of Poetry.
Mary Crow’s poems have been published in American Poetry Review, New Madrid, Hotel Amerika, A Public Space, Interim, Poet Lore, Denver Quarterly, Illuminations, Cimarron Review, and Indianola Review. She has published three chapbooks of poetry and three full-length books, plus five volumes of poetry translation. Her awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colorado Council on the Arts as well as three Fulbrights. For 14 years she served as Poet Laureate of Colorado. She is retired from Colorado State University’s creative writing faculty.
Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. Her work has appeared in Obsidian, Columbia Journal, Glass, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and others. Jeni edits poetry for Kissing Dynamite and organizes The Dream Project at WeKeepDreaming.com.
Liza Katz Duncan is a poet and teacher in New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, Vinyl Poetry, Phoebe, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.
Katherine Fallon’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Colorado Review, Juked, Meridian, Foundry, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. Her chapbook, The Toothmakers’ Daughters, is available through Finishing Line Press. She shares domestic space with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.
Neil Flatman is an alum of the Tin House summer workshop and The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bombay Gin, Ithaca Lit, Palette Poetry, Cathexis Northwest, and The Paragon Press, among others. His poem “Objectify” was included in the anthology Written Here.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, WA. She’s the author of five books of poetry, including her most recent, Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press). Her work appeared in journals such as Ploughshares and Poetry. Her web site is Webbish6.com. Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6.
John Gallaher’s most recent collection of poetry is Brand New Spacesuit (BOA, 2020). Recent poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He lives in rural Missouri and co-edits The Laurel Review.
Jennifer Garfield’s work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including Salamander, Frontier, and Threepenny Review. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing Parent-Writer Fellowship. She is a high school English teacher near Boston.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which is co-edited by Sarah and Virginia Konchan, is forthcoming from The University of Akron Press. Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
Lilian Ha is from Ha Noi, Seattle, and New York City. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, Sweet Tree Review, Rogue Agent, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Prelude, among others. She currently reads for Columbia University’s undergraduate literary magazine, Quarto.
JaLeah Hedrick is a midwestern writer, originally from Indiana. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, F(r)iction Online, and the Manifest West Anthology. She currently lives in Nebraska with her partner and their cats.
Siew David Hii lives in Hattiesburg, MS. His work appears or is forthcoming at Salt Hill and Hobart.
Katherine Hollander is a poet, critic, and historian. Her first collection of poems, My German Dictionary (Waywiser Press), won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2019. Her poetry, criticism, and scholarship have been published in Literary Imagination, Hunger Mountain, New German Critique, and elsewhere. Hollander is a reader for Sugar House Review and the editor of a new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, forthcoming from Bloomsbury/Methuen.
Spencer Hupp is a poet and critic from Little Rock, AR. His recent work has been housed with Michigan Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, Measure, The New Criterion, and The Hopkins Review. He lives in Baltimore where he is an MFA candidate and instructor in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Miss Lost Nation, winner of the Anhinga-Robert Dana Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015 and in journals such as Ecotone, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, New Ohio Review, and Ploughshares. A recent recipient of a literary arts fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she is an associate professor in creative writing at Idaho State University.
Tara Kipnees is a writer and poet who lives in New Jersey with her husband and two kids. Her work has been published in decomP magazinE, Moon City Review, Serving House Literary Journal, and Salon, among others.
Casey Knott is the author of Ground Work (Main Street Rag, 2018). She works in education, mentors students, tends to her urban farm, and helps edit The Wax Paper literary journal. Her poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including, Harpur Palate, Red Rock Review, Cold Mountain Review, Midwest Quarterly, The Meadow, Rumble Fish Quarterly, and Poetry City, USA.
Kathleen Loe is a poet and visual artist living in Hudson, NY. She teaches poetry at the The Writers Studio, Hudson Branch. Having grown up in one house, in one small town in the deep South, a desire for change has been a big feature of her life: she has moved 32 times, and the resulting discoveries, chaos, and longing for home are at the center of her work.
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 22 books, including Flannelwood (Red Hen Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
Francis Lunney’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Appalachia, The Southern Review, and Blueline. He had a poem aired on WCAI’s (Cape Cod’s NPR station) Poetry Sunday program. He works as an elementary school reading specialist in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA.
Oksana Maksymchuk’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, The Common, and other venues. She won first place in the 2004 Richmond Lattimore and in 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions. Her translations were featured in Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. With Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2017). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts. Maksymchuk holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. She has taught at Northwestern University and University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. OksanaMaksymchuk.com
Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Waxwing, The Poetry Foundation’s American Life in Poetry series, and other lovely places. MichaelJMark.com
Kathleen McGookey’s most recent books are Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). Her work has recently appeared in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, December, Field, Glassworks, Miramar, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, and Sweet.
Native of Boston and Martha’s Vineyard, MA, Stelios Mormoris has been a marketing executive in the beauty industry, working with L’Oréal, Yves Rocher, and COTY. He is currently the CEO of a new company, EDGE BEAUTY, Inc. A dual citizen of Greece and the United States, and raised in New York, Stelios has spent most of his adult life living in Paris. He has published work in Gargoyle, Humana Obscura, Midwest Poetry Review, The Nassau Literary Review, Press, South Road, Spillway, Verse, The Whelk Walk Review, and other literary journals. Stelios is a contemporary artist, and specializes in abstract oil painting. SteliosMormoris.com
John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: North American Review, Crazyhorse, Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Massachusetts Review. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his MA from University of South Florida and his PhD from the University of Missouri.
Cindy Juyoung Ok was a high school physics teacher for many years, and eating contest winner for longer. Poems can be found in journals like jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Conjunctions, and writing has recently been supported by the James Merrill Poetry Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and the Truman Capote Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Jason Olsen teaches writing and literature at Utah State University. He has one book of poetry, Parakeet, published by BatCat Press in 2017. His book Mark Gruenwald and the Star Spangled Patriotism of Captain America is forthcoming from McFarland Books. He lives in Price, UT with his wife and two children.
Omotunde Oredipe was born and raised in Lagos and studied at South Carolina State University, where he served as the Poet Laureate (2016–2017) and founded the Poetry & Ideas Organization. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Southampton Review, and The Carolina Quarterly.
Joel Peckham has published seven collections of poetry and prose, most recently God’s Bicycle (futurecycle) and Body Memory (New Rivers). Forthcoming books include the full-length poetry collection Bone Music (SFU Press), and the chapbook Much (Uncollected Press). He is also co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose (New Rivers). His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Brevity, Cave Wall, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, River Teeth, The Southern Review, and The Sun.
Journeying from the womb of the Bronx, NY, Mary Anne Rojas (she/her/ella) is a woman of the African diaspora, a poet for justice, and a cultural mediator. She is the founder of The Gift Foundation, Inc. and The Protest Review since 2020. Her undergraduate work is in English and Africana & Latino Studies from SUNY New York College at Oneonta, and her graduate work is in transnational studies, concentrating in Caribbean and Latin America studies from the University at Buffalo. Currently a graduate student of Global Public Health at New York University, Mary Anne spends her time understanding how social and cultural factors can contribute to the health of a community through the intersection of joy and resistance. When she is not reading, she is navigating multiple worlds, drawing thinking-system maps for radical social change, engaging in community protest, and writing poetry as a tool for breaking silence(s).
Jennifer Ruby is a poet and teacher who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A graduate of the MFA program at San Diego State, her work has appeared in the Porter Gulch Review, and the PEN Center USA anthology of post-election poems, Only Light Can Do That, among others. She enjoys long walks in the woods and listening to baseball on the radio.
Derek Sheffield’s collection Not for Luck was selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Through the Second Skin (Orchises, 2013), runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity, 2020), which he co-edited. Sheffield is the recipient of the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. He lives on the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org. DerekSheffield.com
Samn Stockwell has been widely published, and her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Plume, Smartish Pace, and others.
Mary Ellen Talley’s book reviews appear online and in print journals such as Compulsive Reader, Crab Creek Review, and Empty Mirror. Her poems have appeared widely in publications including Raven Chronicles, Gyroscope, and Banshee, as well as in multiple anthologies. Her chapbook Postcards from the Lilac City was recently published by Finishing Line Press.
Henry Taylor is professor emeritus of literature at American University, where he taught from 1971 until 2003. Before that he taught at Roanoke College (1966–1968), and the University of Utah (1968–1971). His eight books of poems, most of them published by LSU Press, include The Flying Change (1985; received 1986 Pulitzer Prize), and This Tilted World Is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, 1962–2020. He has received Fellowships in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry. He and his wife, fiber artist Mooshe Taylor, now live in Santa Fe, NM.
Natalie Louise Tombasco is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Florida State University and serves as the assistant interviews editor of the Southeast Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Butler University and grew up in Staten Island, NY. Her poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Antioch Review, Southwest Review, Sonora Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Meridian, Salt Hill, Third Coast, The Rumpus, and The Boiler, among others. She was a runner-up in The 2019 Pinch Literary Awards in Poetry.
Millie Tullis is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Juked, Pembroke Magazine, and Gingerbread House Lit Mag. She reads for Phoebe as assistant poetry editor and lives in Fairfax, VA with her partner and two large cats.
Hannah V Warren is a PhD student at the University of Georgia where she studies poetry and speculative narratives. Her chapbook [re]construction of the necromancer won Sundress Publications’ 2019 chapbook contest, and her works have haunted or will soon appear in Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, and Redivider.
Mike White is the author of the collections How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017). His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review. He lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, teaches for Literary Arts, and is a poetry agent. JohnSibleyWilliams.com
Holli Zollinger is a self-taught artist who has made a career of her talents: drawing, painting, and surface design. She is continually inspired by her surroundings living in the desert town of Moab, UT. She is highly motivated by the art of creativity and incorporates the color, texture, and pattern she sees in the world around her. Holli’s work has been published and featured worldwide. HolliZollinger.com
A native of Utah, Shari Zollinger divides her time between her work as a professional astrologer and independent bookseller. She has been known to write a poetic verse or two with published work in Sugar House Review and Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. She recently published Carrying Her Stone, a collection of poems based on the work of Auguste Rodin. ShariZollinger.com