Irma Kurti: Petals

Tell me, did you touch these palm trees, Dad?

Did you look at the immense field of lilies?

Did you stop for an instant with the camera

in your hand to stare at the slice of sea that

appears in the space between the buildings?

Did you think of me in that instant, just as

you are now my fixed thought? Did you

marvel at the peace of the green trees? Did

you try to decipher at dawn the rustling of

leaves?

I gather fallen leaves from the ground and

hold flower petals in my hands. They are

the few and rare memories left from your

walks then.

Irma Kurti is a poet, writer, lyricist, journalist, and translator. She is a naturalized Italian and lives in Bergamo, Italy. Kurti has published 119 works, including books of poetry, fiction, and translations. Her poetry has been translated into 40 languages. 

Phil Wood: Snail Trails in the Rockery

Eyes, located on tentacles,

see light and dark, shadow.

No colour flowers their world,

no focus to see the details.

And yet the lower tentacles...

Touch will navigate their quest.

Crevices to cross, mountains

to ascend, moist leaves delight.

Intimacy is filigreed in silver.

Am I to resent their success?

Phil Wood was born in Wales. His lifestyle interests include learning German, watercolour painting, and chess. 

Holly Day: Da Capo

He’s too afraid to name the storm clouds

building up behind her eyes: it’s another migraine, it’s not,

it’s something worse, and they won’t give it a name,

this feeling, even with the ease

that classifying dangerous things sometimes brings.

Even with a name, it’s still cancer rotting her out,

even with a name, it’s hard to talk about

like an unwanted pregnancy, like an impending abortion,

like a dog you have to get rid of. If only they could talk about it,

if only we could talk about it, if, if. If.

Your hand brushes the spot in my breast

where the lump can’t be removed, the knot

that wells up bigger than our future, bigger than the two of us

could ever be together. In your sleep, you whimper

as your wrap your palm around my poisonous breast, pull me close;

this is as close as we will ever be

from this point on.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in The NoSleep podcast, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in  Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.

Jim Murdoch: How Poems Work

We lead you up the garden path

with promises of a pig in a poke or

a quickie behind the tool shed or

a pissing contest or some such shit

only to lose our nerve and leave you

with your pants at half-mast and

your imagination flapping in the wind.

Jim Murdoch: Scot, gatophile, honorary woman, classical music aficionado, Whovian, novelist and producer of half-to-three-quarter-(and-occasionally-actually-fully)-decent poems for over half a century.

 

Patrick Deeley: The Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient Greek hand-powered orrery variously dated to a period between 87 BC and 205 BC, and retrieved from the wreck of a Roman cargo ship in 1901.  Machines of similar complexity did not appear again until the 14th century in western Europe.

Thwacked, along with the ship that carries it,

twisted free of rope shackles, it drops

through planks groaning and splintering apart,

splashes into the Aegean Sea.  Lingers

afloat, as if the fate of everything on earth

is about to be decided, with slurps and gurgles

happening in and about it, lost

amid the shrieks of men and cargo’s wreck. 

Sinks, silently spiralling, offers the illusion

of being a sea chest devoid of weight. 

Emits bubbles, stirs dregs of silt that slowly lift

as it shoulders its way to the abyss.

Settles and stays, its bronze lustre dimming,

nuzzled by fish, which perform odd tilts

and takes around it, seeing themselves

in a mirror, pirouetting for an entry to shelter

or even status; eager – we may quip –

to solve the riddles it keeps, find their own

evolution magically quickened

by dials and pointers, gear-train complexities

not to be matched for another millennium. 

There they plate its surface, vast

blurry generations of them vivifying it, dying

into it – accumulations of flesh, rust

and oblivion.  It seizes up – the world no wiser –

this Egyptian calendar, tide watcher,

planet tracker, analogue computer. 

Until, finally salvaged, the gleam of its genius

reaches us – but with a caution, perhaps,

as to how great feats or engines of civilisation,

raised against barbarity and loss,

are prone still to slip back into the darkness.

 

Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children's writer from Loughrea, Co. Galway.  His tenth collection, Keepsake, appeared from Dedalus Press in 2024.

Steve Wilson: We might settle ourselves, for a moment,

if, against the rush of

our Monday workday,

 

beside an alleyway trash bin

and the city’s inevitable detritus –

 

empty pint glasses, kebab wrappers,

an errant wool scarf –

 

in this crystalline winter sun

we discover a sooty yellow cat lazing

 

unperturbed within such warmth, within such

simple dawn-light contentments. 

Steve Wilson's poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; as well as in six collections, the most recent entitled Complicity (2023). He lives in San Marcos, Texas.

Jean L. Kreiling: In the Cereal Aisle

He never let go of his cart—he’d learned

to think about his balance—as he turned

his trembling head toward well-stocked shelves. He bent

to read the boxes, squinting and intent

on choosing well, convinced that his selection

could mean strong bones, efficient gut, protection

from aging’s worst offenses. Or at least

that’s how I understood his stance, his creased

and bushy brow, his unfazed concentration

as others scurried past. His dedication

to this task meant that I, behind him, paused

as well, and thought about what might have caused

his left shoe to have worn down at the heel—

a chronic limp?—and I began to feel

protective toward this man whose pants were baggy,

his cardigan threadbare, his white hair shaggy.

And as he studied low-fat shredded wheat,

granola (maybe drawn to something sweet),

the oatmeal with more beta carotene,

and Special K (the one marked “high protein”),

he maintained an unhurried dignity.

And so I waited—not impatiently,

but with a vague affection for this man

I’d never know. As I too turned to scan

the rows of cereals, I kept one eye

on him. He chose the oatmeal, with a sigh

that seemed to unclench his entire frame—

relieved that he’d achieved one crucial aim,

made one good choice. Or else his sigh revealed

a weariness to which he would not yield.

If I were lucky, I would be that old

someday, my shoes would need to be resoled,

and I’d be strong enough to shop here, too.

Today, I probably don’t have a clue

about this man, or what his sighing meant.

He slowly shuffled off, still slightly bent.

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Home and Away (2025). Her work has been awarded the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors.

Kristin Roedell: Bethlehem in Minneapolis

The deer cast long shadows

on the pasture fence;

with three crowned heads,

they are wise creatures walking to the city

for the birth of a necessary miracle.

There is a murmuration of starlings

pointing fingers east.

The wind blows the alder’s branches

towards a war in crowded places.

Boots and guns are moving

through distant streets.

Far away a father hides a small girl

in a toy box; she lies next

to a raveled bear.

Her door is kicked in by masked men;

her mother turns up beseeching palms.

In the window a needful star

lifts too late.

Was this the child?

I pick up the phone in the night.

There is a vast web of connecting whispers

far away. It links building to building

and home to home.

I hear voices say

She is gone.

They were here.

Hide. This

is where they are now.

Kristin Roedell graduated from Whitman College (B.A. English 1984) and the University of Washington Law School (J.D. 1987). Her poetry has been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Switched on Gutenberg, and Ginosko. She authored Downriver (Aldrich Press, 2015) and Lessons in Buoyancy (Poetry Box Press, 2026).

Maurice Devitt: Snowdrops at Altamont

Tales of Brigid crackle from the car radio

as we drive the roads, slick with dew,

through towns and villages – Baltinglass,

Blessington, Rathvilly, Tullow –   

streets empty, as residents prepare

behind closed doors, for whatever

the new year will bring.

We arrive, expecting a carpark filled

with the emptiness of winter,

the slow sweep of grey coats

across gravel, only to be greeted

by the giddy joy of friends meeting up,

snowdrops waiting politely in the wings,

their shy beauty blinking through the mist.

Maurice Devitt is the curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site. His Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection ‘Some of These Stories are True’ was published by Doire Press in 2023.  

Nancy Byrne Iannucci: Unanswered Questions

When I can’t get into you,

I get into a white magnolia tree,

where the Northern Flicker pecks & pecks above me

without severing a branch. I listen to its knocks

like the knocks in my head, thinking of the days ahead

and unanswered questions. I examine its leaves like tasseomancy,

following its veins, running with it, like the veins that run through us.

I see bits of gold, a trail of corn silk that the deer have left behind,

leading to a secret thicket. All I know is that it feels safe there,

safe with you, despite unanswered questions.

Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a New York-based writer and author of four chapbooks. A two-time Best of the Net nominee, she was short-listed for the 2025 Poetry Lighthouse prize. Her work appears in Thrush, Maudlin House, and 34 Orchard. She lives in upstate NY with her three cats. Web: www.nancybyrneiannucci.com IG: @nancybyrneiannucci