by Barbara Brooks

The green tint on the hills slowly grows darker.
Columbine blooms in the back yard.
The last call of winter’s white throated sparrow
leaves only the locals at the bird feeders.
 
Asters put forth their leaves with the promise
of blooms in the Fall. Blond daffodils rock
in the spring breeze. The smell of grass
after its first cutting. Waking up to the chatter
of wrens.
 
Mornings enter the screened window.
Dog lazes in the Spring sunlight.
Weekend coffee on the deck hearing only birds.

* * *

BARBARA BROOKS is a retired physical therapist and author of 3 chapbooks, The Catbird Sang, A Shell to Return to the Sea, Watercolors.  She is a member of PoetFools writing group. She lives in Hillsborough, NC with her dog.

by Ruth Holzer

​How slight they look— 
my husband and my mother
on a bench beneath the flowering cherry,
from where I stand
on the far side of the pond,
having walked away from them,
just for a minute.

* * *

RUTH HOLZER is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage and Float. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a multiple Pushcart, Touchstone, and Best of the Net nominee.  

by Lindsay McLeod

Say what you like
but I made sure
she had the space

to be right or wrong
to be brave and proud
determined and complete

able to wear in equal
measure her ferocity
and bare vulnerability

and to let the world
like it or lump it
right alongside me.

* * *

LINDSAY MCLEOD lives by the Port in South Australia where he is driven by his cattle dog, Mary. He has won a few awards for his writing, which appears most recently in Ephemeral Elegies, Rat’s Ass Review, Snakeskin, and Meniscus.

by Joshua Walker

I wake before dawn,
the quiet pressing against my chest.
I make coffee the way I always do,
sugar measured by habit.
Light moves across the kitchen
without stopping.
My son murmurs.
My daughter shifts beside him,
hands closing around the blanket.
I fold the laundry I meant
to fold yesterday,
shirts,  socks
returning to their places.
A note on the counter
from last week’s goodbye
waits where I left it.
I read it aloud.
Evening gathers slowly
in the living room.
I sit with it.
Some days healing is quiet.
Breath leaves.
Breath returns.

* * *

JOSHUA WALKER is a poet based in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in Potomac Review, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Solarpunk Magazine, and elsewhere. He writes about language, memory, and the quiet architecture of ordinary life.

by John Grey

A single carved heart made this tree part of my story.
My hand shook as I dug blade into bark.
 
Though I pressed lightly, it felt as if the heart ran deep,
was there already, and I was merely tracing it.
Then the initials, cautious at first, emerged slowly, sweetly,
like sap warming its way to the light.
 
Through many seasons, many wandering years,
this etching, this loving declaration, remains.
 
Ah WS, where are you now? What does it matter?
Never engaged but we’re engraved.
And this tree keeps the small truth of us.

* * *

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters, and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

by M. Frost

I’ve tried for a year to contain myself, to trim
the fat, to fit into the box (or the clothes from before).
To scrape words off my plate to meet the word count. I’m trying

to be smaller, but every day’s an incremental failure.
The tempting adjectives entrench, then an adverb 
sneaks in deliciously. I succumb, buy the larger of the men’s pants, 
the roomier women’s blouse. My bra bulges like the anpan I tried in Japan.
I cover it with shirts that don’t care. Order another syllable.

* * *

Find M. FROST in The Hopkins Review, Little Patuxent Review, Strange Horizons, and others, with chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press) and The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak). 

by Ruth Holzer

What would I not give
to lie in that first remembered room,
​to fall asleep as the lights
of cars on Main Street
slid across the ceiling
like friendly ghosts,
and my sister breathed softly
in the bed next to mine.

* * *

RUTH HOLZER is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage and Float. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a multiple Pushcart, Touchstone, and Best of the Net nominee.  

by Terry Trowbridge

I did not know my kid likes kingfishers
until, 24 years old, they saw one
flying over the orchards,
tilting itself during a long glide,
shoulders facing the sun
within earshot of Lake Ontario.

My kid was all smiles and surprise,
noting they did not know we had kingfishers,
remarking on the bird panoply that soars above us.

Now they live away, at college, home weekly.
One of my privileges of parenthood
is learning what they see here, renewed,
educated to reinterpret our place.

* * *

Canadian farmer TERRY TROWBRIDGE's poems have appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Nashwaak Review, The Great Lakes Review, Pamenar Press, The Ex-Puritan, Studies in Social Justice, and ~200 more places. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding during the polycrisis.

dropping into
the beggar’s hat–
spring rain


​park bench– 
an old man’s small talk
with pigeons

                    Martina Matijević ​

Venus suspended, a low-slung crescent moon ready to catch her

​                                                                                            Clodagh O Connor

​

spring rhythms
the woodpecker performs
a drum solo 
​
​
seventeen years
in the making . . .
cicada serenade 

                  Valentina Ranaldi-Adams

​

​one petal
all the difference
to a daisy

                    Julie Schwerin

 * * *
​

by Claire Kroening

Today, burnt coffee clung 
to the back of 
my throat. A bitter 
epilogue of your 
sweetness.
Today, tears patter 
into empty china 
cups; moon-drenched 
lyrics shakily 
forgotten. Today is a 
reminder of our last.

* * *

CLAIRE KROENING is an award-winning writer and freelance editor/proofreader residing along the great lakes. Connect with them on Instagram @clairerosek. 

by Leonard St-Aubin

Beloved of the sky,
said Emily Carr,
these tall pines against blue sky
​—that will never be timber--
trunks slender, twisted 
where they bent to find the sun
through the shade of hardwood trees,
and dropped low branches
'til only their tops,
feathery, exposed, catch light.
Now, like northern palms,
they rise up above
the bare winter canopy,
only they are green,
illuminated 
by afternoon sun,
each cluster of fine needles 
a starburst, lit or backlit,
vibrates, imperceptibly
a hymn to the sky.

* * *

LEONARD ST-AUBIN divides his time between Ottawa and a summer home in PEI. His poems have been published in RED: The Island Story Book (November 2025), in Bywords.ca and in the Pownal Street Press collection FIONA.

by Suzie Pearson

Emptied.
Standing as a monument to
      every discount,
      every sale,
      every closing down event,
      “everything must go”.
Packets, unopened, aged with neglect.
Boxes remain sealed.
A forgotten moment of need.
Duplicates waiting in the depths of shelves.
A reminder of what was lost.

* * *

SUZIE PEARSON’s poetry has been published in Whispered Words (Writer Shed Press, 2024), as well various online magazines. She's also received a highly commended in Wolverhampton Literary Festival Poetry competition and appeared at WoLF 2025, and participated in both Ironbridge & Shrewsbury Poetry Slams 2025. Find her at @wordsfromanotebook  and www.wordsfromanotebook.com 

by Shama

Water chalked out marks on the apartment walls,
roping me in; the macaque screeched--
its toy lungs failing.

The rising brine strengthened
its noose. I swatted flies circling
the swollen coffee table.

The carpet's frayed hands
released their hold of Lego bricks,
from which you once made a house.

Mothballs rolled down and rattled
in the drain filter as I pulled the plug
and scavenged my leftover pieces

from your jetsam.

* * *

Shama has work featured in Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, The Pierian, and elsewhere. She writes from an old dusty corner of the earth and can sometimes be found on Bluesky @entangledrhyme.bsky.social and IG @entangledrhyme.

by Barbara Brooks

It tumbles like a torrent from the sky
soaking the ground. Drowns the newly
planted grass in a cloudburst.
 
I focus a prism on sorrow to see
if hope can be found.
 
But I can see none, only forests
razed to the ground, mountains
stripped of their tops. I notice
only the world being torn down,
dug up, burned.
 
Sorrow covers me with smog
and disease.  It forms its own glacier
that slides down to cover
my thoughts with soot and dust
from distant corners of the world.
 
In the lengthening days, I wait.
 
* * *

BARBARA BROOKS is a retired physical therapist and author of 3 chapbooks, The Catbird Sang, A Shell to Return to the Sea, Watercolors.  She is a member of PoetFools writing group. She lives in Hillsborough, NC with her dog.