"Knock on the Door" by Rohan Buettel

July 20, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

What should you do when you hear
a knock on the door in the middle
of the night? Quietly slip
out the back, climb the fence
and hide in the neighbour’s yard.
When the authorities search,
they’ll decide they’ve missed you.
If you hear a noise out the back,
turn off the lights and take cover
in a cupboard or another bolthole.
After a cursory search
they may conclude you’re gone
and round up the neighbours instead.
If living in an apartment block,
place heavy furniture against the entry,
make it hard for them to come in.
Never answer the bang on the door
in the middle of the night, though
you’ve never done anything wrong,
know years in the gulag await,
know they never admit their mistakes,
hide or flee, don’t make it easy,
know they’ve come for you.

Rohan Buettel lives in Canberra, Australia. His haiku appear in various Australian and international journals (including Presence, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest). His longer poetry appears in many journals, including Rattle, The Goodlife Review, Meanjin, Meniscus and Quadrant.

"Americano" by Ryan Walker

July 18, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

I am on the floor, somewhere in the Midwest,
repeating numbers to the yellow feathered man
and his friends who live on Sesame Street.
Uno. Dos. Tres. Cuatro. We count. We sing.

I reach for the screen, try and reach through,
“Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?”
Cinco. Seis. Siete. Ocho... I am counting. I am singing.
I am alone on the floor, somewhere in the Midwest.

I am in Mr. Lamping’s Advanced Placement Spanish,
Repeating phrases and words and dad jokes: “No piscina pool.”
We sing a song about months, and another about fish swimming for God.
I trace his thighs with my eyes.

Mr. Lamping tells me how naturally I roll my r’s.
I imagine him rolling his r’s against my neck, my back;
Pero mira cómo beben los peces en el río.
Pero mira cómo beben por ver al Dios nacido*.

I am finally in a land I have so long pursued,
shopping in mercados and asking, ¿Cuánto cuesta?
I walk the gulf sipping at fresh pressed margaritas
before looking for something else to fill me.

My language lessons fail me in dark alleys.
Between bodegas, pesos exchanged for fucking hustlers.
Boca... Cuello... Polla...
He asks, “Does I hurt you?” Solo un poco.

I am escaping 45**, chasing Mediterranean dreams,
lost in Barcelona somewhere between Gaudí structures and endless paella.
My eyes on cobblestone passing bathhouses and hustlers, craving pan over polla,
connections that feel like anything but home.

I find a panaderia and fumble for euros. Buenos Dias I say to the cashier.
Bon dia he says to me. I speak Spanglish. He speaks Catalan.
I order pan and cafè americano, setting euros in his palm,
exchanging currency and touch. I sip...

I sip…

*From “El Peces En El Rio” by Villancicos

**The 45th President of the United States

Ryan (he/him) is a Pushcart nominated, queer writer from Dayton, Ohio, and a member of the Miami Valley Writers Network. Ryan earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University’s Bluegrass Writers Studio. His work has been featured in Flights, Longridge Review, Red Noise Collective, Miracle Monocle, The Uncommon Grackle, No Tokens, and others. Ryan's flash fiction Binge was long listed for Hunger: The Best of Brilliant Flash Fiction 2014-2019, and his hybrid form chapbook Americano was long listed for multiple awards. Ryan’s essay Dress was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. When he isn’t advocating for the Oxford comma, Ryan is [exploring] a town near you. Follow him on Instagram @ryan.wrote.it or visit ryanwroteit.com.

"Kireji" by Craig Cotter

July 16, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

Too much grey,
walls, floor—
would I be happier
if the room had more colors?
I’d like us all to be content

Black Converse
run through the room and outside
silver eyelets
sparkle—
Mike’s back!

Pine trees out the window
don’t move
yes they do
they grew 60 feet
I waited

Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals in the U.S., France, Italy, the Czech Republic, the U.K., Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, India and Ireland. Books include The Aroma of Toast, Chopstix Numbers, and After Lunch with Frank O’Hara. www.craigcotter.com

"Blazed Poem #4" by Basil Payne

July 13, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

Sometimes I worry that the sun is gone,
whipping my head towards the window

to check for light,

Fear like the smell of chopped garlic
that won’t leave the sliver of moon

underneath my nails.

In about two-billion years, it’ll start to
die, eat itself up from the inside out.

We all know that.

But I’m scared the billions will pass
when my back is turned, a simple fatal

oversight.

So I always have to check. I’m scared of
dying without changing my name to

what it should be

or before I can see an emperor penguin
dance for the first time or last before

their extinction.

At 23, time slips past me and takes
the sun with it. I wish the sun would make

more iron for my blood

Or at the very least take that shit back to
where it came from. My life is a blink but

when I’m high

It’s a millenia. Too many blinks and I’ll
never see the sun again.

Basil Payne (they/them) is a queer poet-artist living in Logan, Utah. Their work can be found in Sugar House Review, Sink Hollow, Oyster River Pages, Sheepshead Review, Progenitor, The Southern Quill, and occasionally Utah State University's Projects Gallery.

"Never Nothing" by Basil Payne

July 13, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

Sometimes in my nightmares I’m God,
not the regal haloed man
or an omnipotent beast,
just me in a robe.
Never by choice, I’m exalted
by a passerby angel
or I’ve found that God retired
and I’m the closest option.

As god, my first action is to cry.
My hands, still small, shake
but carry the weight of life.
I can never find my siblings,
who the angels say
God never created.

My second action as god is run
through the blue storm I brewed
and search, tear up
the building blocks of a world I created
Prayers pile up in my holy email inbox
but I can’t get back to my computer.
The terror of responding wrong.

My third action as god is curl
in on myself and become smaller.
My siblings never existed
nor anyone else I loved.
Bit-by-bit, pieces of life fade away,
opaque then transparent then translucent then gone.
Nobody screams when they fade,
I’m the last speck of color they see.

And I’m left all alone again
when I wake crying.

"The Plan" by Roger D'Agostin

July 09, 2025 by Lauren Rose in flash fiction

I saw it when I was seven, when Joe Mitchell pushed me in the pool and laughed and
slapped his wet swim trunks until his hands turned red.
Not at first. After I sank, after Joe poked me with the skimming net.
There’s no light. People say that happens. It's not true. I did leave my body, though. I
watched Mrs. Mitchell turn me on my stomach and smack my back while my head hung over the pool filter and stared into the tangle of hair and bugs and leaves.
I saw everything.

***

At the trial, the lawyer told my mom if I crap not to change my diaper. But I didn’t go.
Even when Mrs. Mitchell said she hadn’t been drinking, and she checked for a pulse and
performed CPR.
It doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be me again. The only body part I can really
control is my right hand. But not my arm so I can’t scratch my nose. Or lift a spoon to eat
cereal.

***

Dad used to tell Mom the Lord works in mysterious ways. Mom would shake her head.
But it's true. When Mrs. Mitchell pounded my back I felt like I could walk right into that
tangled mess and begin to make sense of it all. But I didn’t have time. I rejoined my body. It's
like going down a water slide except there's no water which I now think is so ironic.

***

Mondays are bath days at the care center. Lately I’ve been the last one. That's good,
because the nurse isn't careful and I fall and see all this hair in the drain.

When it happened again and my hand landed over the drain I grabbed it. I held it the whole week until Saturday morning when Mom visited. She uncrinkled my fist and tiny white puffs of mold had blossomed like clouds. She screamed when she saw that paradise. Then she ran into the hallway to find Dad, so he could see too.

Roger D'Agostin is a writer living in Connecticut.

"Progress" by Arianna Smith

July 06, 2025 by Lauren Rose in flash fiction

The skyscrapers pierced the close clouds; their reflections glittered on the surface of the bay.
“I don’t know anything about San Francisco,” the woman said. Her voice traveled on the water.
The guy pocketed his phone, and his face went dark. “You can learn.”
“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “SoCal will always be home.”
"Not for me.” His laugh was warm, even on this cold, damp night.
Your home is beautiful, she'd said at dusk, a year ago, up in that apartment on the fourteenth floor above downtown L.A.

It’s not home. It's just a rental for work, he’d murmured against her bare shoulder later, at dawn. “The place where I stay here is more beautiful,” he added now.
"You don't call that place home, either.”
"I would if you lived in it.”
She didn't blush at his words. Apparently she’d grown immune to the awkwardness of his raw honesty. The sole of her sneaker squealed against the dock railing. “If that's how you feel, then come back and live with me in Long Beach.” He turned his head toward her. The skyline was mirrored in the lenses of his glasses. His voice was low but warm this time. “Perhaps.”
She reached out to him and squeezed his hand.

"Body Pool" by Sam Spring

July 02, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

She was a drunk
As was I — what a life.
I would recommend the high road
If I could ever have found it.
Instead, my parents found us,
Drunk and dazed in a pool
Of our own bodies on their porch,
The morning light just
Coming on in the East.
They were mortified.
We were silly.
And we never spoke about it
Directly.
The memory blurring like
Landscapes on a train —
The shame, the guilt, that sinking feeling
And the whole world spun on.

Sam Spring is a 28-year-old nomadic writer working to save up for a van. He dropped out of SMC to sell bongs online and is the lead singer of the band ‘Tennis Club’ with their music being streamed over 7,000,000 times. Sam bounces around the West, staying with lovers and friends. He has work appearing in Passengers Journal, The Wisconsin Review, and Denver Quarterly, among others. Find his writing, music, and art here —> www.samspring.me

"The World at Large" by Sam Spring

July 02, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

The tin crimped flowerbed
Raised up off the tired
Fading brick floor
Held so gently the pink
And red geraniums
That bobbed in the
Sweet afternoon breeze.
The jasmine died weeks ago
But even the sight of
The brown leaves,
Far out of season,
Still held the ghost
Of that feeling
The smell painted on my brain.
Within the redwood fence line,
Atop the lazily-bricked patio floor.

"Poor Thing" by Abbie Langmead

June 29, 2025 by Lauren Rose in poetry

One year since pity moved
into the present tense, and my mother
into the past. I don’t lie when people ask
the natural questions of family life, until
the awkward question of how long is broached.

When am I allowed to live again?
Reanimated after falling
into the river, nothing more
than a childlike memory
that gets reconstructed day
by day as I relearn how to speak.

Frankenstein was always about a child
and her mother. The irresponsible
science was just a ploy to get men
to care the slightest bit about
a creation myth that wasn’t made
from their rib. I know that,

but they didn’t. The others in that house
wet with rain instead of sick,
although both stick to the skin
and linger longer than they’re welcome.
I don’t know if Shelley would’ve
Understood me. I don’t think she and I
would get along in the slightest,
two stubborn women butting heads
while both claim to be revolutionary.
Reminds me of my mother, or hers.

At the Tower Records on Dawson Street
I told a friend I thought it was a terrible movie—
that I felt like womanhood was more than
being a baby and getting your brains fucked into you
by Mark Ruffalo. I’m sorting out
what the word “woman” means, or if I am one,
but there has to be more to life, isn’t there?

She disagreed with me,
not about the definition of womanhood,
but about what the film meant, and what regaining
things after you’d lost them looked like.
What is the shape of all of this being, and what
do we make space for?

One year into resurrection
and I don’t know if I believe in it at all—
this world where there’s no number to call
when things get screwy, no one to return to
when your mind is stuck in the black and white.
something monstrous happened. I am still
remembering what it’s like to watch love decay.

I don’t know how to accept these pithy sympathies.
These are the facts of a life reborn,
in a place where she’d never been,
and where nobody knows who I was
when she was still here.

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.