Insomnia by Cynthia Hardy The pillow has heard it all: the litany of undone things. The horses stamp the barn at night; each thump of hoof against board accuses. Not nearly enough hay, they tell me, and where’s all the green stuff? Snow fills their paddock to their knees. And what about my words to you? Should I have said íf instead of when; what then? The darkness spreads full and warm. Blankets tangle. The cat pats my cheek with her untrimmed paw. Should I change the litter box now? Call a long-lost friend? The horses set out across the land, looking for the barn they deserve, red paint and all. A stream flows year round, its banks curve, green plush, to the clear water. There are other horses, none with shaggy coats or dirt-packed hooves. The cat wants to be in the dream. She perches her wiry self on the black mare’s back and weaves, tail spiraling for balance as they gallop off. You rise, say, I’m going with them. Fine, I say. My eyes blink; blink propagates blink. I sweep the blankets across my shoulders like some Versace robe, a gown of sleep. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue From We Tempt Our Luck , finalist in the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Chapbook Contest, 2009. This poem reflects some themes I often go back to—the horses, a cat or a dog, the impact of winter on the psyche, insomnia, and dreams. It was also a response to a set of prompts I set myself from bits of found language—in this case, the word “Versace.” The “you” in these two poems may or may not be a real person. .................................................................................................................................................................................... CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, with a new poetry collection, Rude Weather forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Next - Mākara Beach by Michael McLane Next

Worry Poem after Barbara Ras by Alexandra van de Kamp I worry about the sighing of my mother’s bones each time we hug. That a tornado-sky, that low- humming, humid clutch of clouds, will zero in on my heart one June night. I worry that I won’t hide under the butcher-block table nearly fast enough to dodge the bullets, sooty rain, golf-ball-sized hail, and pigeon shit a life can happily fling our way. I worry I’m just a story tucked inside other stories, like the hatboxes my grandmother stored in her dank, Rhode Island basement. A teetering stack with department store names like Bonwit Teller printed in black dusty script across the round lids. And let’s not forget the invisible: the mosquito the size of a torn eyelash, the grudge that lodges in your chest for years, and the virus mutating with the giddiness of a party guest who keeps pouring herself new cocktails from the vodkas, gins, and tequilas lined up at the bar by some generous host. I worry I worry too much. . I am not the problem-solver our world craves. I am no beekeeper, no geneticist mapping DNA. I’m a shy activist and a distracted cook, inclined to burn boiling milk and peas, to leave the tea kettle shrieking. Each thought a firefly with its tipsy glow careening inside my head as if it could answer a question I’ve not learned to ask yet. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Previously published in my third book of poems, Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, 2022), this “Worry Poem” is one of my favorite recent poems because I could list a wide range of worries I had experienced but had never put into words yet. It was partially inspired by reading Barbara Ras’s poem, “In the Last Storm I Tried to Write the History of Secrets” (The Blues of Heaven , University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), which has a wonderful list of worries within it. I also can struggle with endings in poems, and, thanks to a fellow poet’s advice, I played around with rearranging the original order of the last 5-6 lines and ended up not needing to come up with a new ending—it had been in the poem all along, just in the wrong place. This is a poetic lesson I have applied to other poems—rearrange lines if you are stuck and see what the poem unlocks! .................................................................................................................................................................................... ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. Her most recent book of poems is Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, 2022). alexandravandekamppoet.com Next - This Poem is Backlit by Alexandra van de Kamp Next

Tiananmen Mother for Zhao Ziyang by Michael Wells The Beijing breeze whispers mournful strophes. Tears like the mountain rains follow slopes to tributaries until they become one with the rippling waters of the Yangtze. I am a Tiananmen mother. My eyes have swelled with this sadness before. The wetness follows a path well-rehearsed. My nights are immense. I am a lone bare branch in a dark cold world. They replicate that June night etched in my soul over and over. My son stood in the square armed only with a vision and they came— The People’s Army. My son stood in Tiananmen Square, amid a sea of other sons and daughters and they came— armored tanks clanking along the streets into Tiananmen driven by fear, ordered by paranoia. Our sons and daughters toppled to the earth at their hands. Crimson crawling into every crevice of these ancient streets; a stain still upon us today. I cannot count the nights I have wept for my son since. Today, I weep for another. There is no official news but the Beijing breeze whispers again, this time for the death of the old man. There are guards outside my door. The lump in my throat is big, I cannot begin to swallow. That is how I know the truth. Guilt always gnawing at my heart. I could not help my son that June night. Again as I am helpless. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published by the Independent Chinese PEN Center. This is one of my favorite published pieces because of the story of its metamorphosis. I was at a writers retreat in a small community in Iowa and in a larger breakout group session we were instructed to write a small one to three act play. This was something I was not keen about doing. I think I recall saying out loud, I’m a poet not a playwright with a distinctly sarcastic tone. So I wrote what was on my mind at the time in a two act play. When we later read the work aloud it was very positively received. I came home from the retreat with it and a number of other drafts. I liked the concept and the subject and reworked it into a witness poem with a strong anmemorable impact. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL WELLS calls Kansas City home but claims the San Francisco Giants as his baseball team. He is an alumnus of the Writer to Writer program. His genre is primarily poetry. He likes his wine white and his coffee black. michaelwells.ink Next - And Tenured was Dropped from the Dictionary by Michael Wells Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Hairbrush David Romanda I hand her a hairbrush (her brush). You have the floor , I say. She says, Brush or no brush, you’re going to interrupt me before I can finish. That’s bullshit , I say. See? she says. You finished your sentence , I say. At least twenty seconds pass. She’s holding the brush, but doesn’t speak. I reach for the brush. She shakes her head. She says, I’m not finished. “Hairbrush” was originally published in Columbia Review . Often, when you’re fighting (arguing) in a relationship, neither party is completely “following the rules”—that’s the breakthrough in this one. Previous DAVID ROMANDA 'S work has appeared in places such as Columbia Review , Poetry Ireland Review , and PRISM international . He is the author of three books, including Your Lover Stabbed in the Streets (Frontenac House, 2025). Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. romandapoetry.com Next

Lincoln and Lydia after May 2020 Black Lives Matter protests by Alison Moore They’re all gone now—those thirty-six gladiators who stood on the steps in dark helmets and shields, ruining Lincoln’s view. The only person left is a woman cleaning up the mess with a mop. And a mask. Lydia, her nametag says. Earlier, she’d scrubbed the graffiti: Y’all not tired yet? off the wall. She thinks Lincoln’s sat in that chair, had a front row seat to history long enough. You can’t just sit there, she says, now that you’re woke. Get up. Show us what you got. Lydia sets down her mop. She can see that a hundred years in a hard chair has settled some in his hips. She shares that particular pain, holds out her hand to him. He thinks she must be a nurse, so he grips her arm, and slowly, ever so slowly, rises up until he stands, 28 feet from his head without his hat down to his size twelve shoes. She helps him navigate all 57 steps, then 87 more to the edge of the reflecting pool. A Kennedy half-dollar she once threw in for King, for hope, still shines from the bottom. What time is it? he asks. What country? Take a look, she says, the South is rising all over again right across the river, and the better angels have long since hit the road. At seven score and eight long years from Gettysburg, twenty score since that first ship from Angola to Virginia; he’s out of his depth here, even though the five feet of water he’s wading into now comes only to his knees. Some went too far, she says. I didn’t go far enough, he admits, halfway turning around. I know, she replies. …but still… It was a lot for those times, considering you got shot for it. She urges him onward. We just buried George… she says. …and I don’t mean Washington. They pick up the pace, heading for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, arriving at the gate out of breath, limping. You go on ahead, she says, knowing she’ll never get any closer tonight without becoming invisible. Abraham, she reminds him, hurry. There’s someone robbing our house. He pushes through the fence in a fury, and throws all his weight against the White House, braces his back against the front door. It’s five minutes ‘til midnight now; she’s watching him. Someone or something is pounding— he can feel the blows in his back as he gives his last full measure to bar this particular portal. On the other side, something hoots and howls in epithets, throws condiments at the wall. No matter what, the thing that got itself in there, should not be allowed to get back out. A house divided against itself cannot stand. He can still see Lydia, her face behind the bars of the locked gate. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time, she calls out. He nods. He said that. It’s still true. She is counting on him she’s going to hold him to it, even if there is a man with a gun over there. Immortal in marble, he’s more than ready. He’s bullet-proof now. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Lincoln and Lydia” was written after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C. When I saw a photo of troops at the Lincoln Memorial, I was shocked. I participated in the March on the Pentagon in 1967 along with Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and thousands of others fed up with the Vietnam War. For this poem, I couldn’t help but think of the people who had to clean up the mess, and Lydia came from my imagination; she had more than a few things to say. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ALISON MOORE is s a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction, and tours with the multi-media humanities program, "Riders on the Orphan Train" which she co-created with the musician Phil Lancaster. ridersontheorphantrain.org Next - Predictions of the Past by Alison Moore Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue I Saw Her Standing There Scott Abbott Die Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Summer 2024 Since my last visit to this museum, I have written about the standing metaphor in works by Bosch, Holbein, and Bruegel and today have new contexts for paintings I’ve seen here before. Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of “Charles V” (1532) , for instance, features the grotesque Habsburg underbite of the repressive ruler whose son Philip II provoked Bruegel’s “Two Chained Monkeys” (1562) with Antwerp in the background denouncing Habsburg hegemony. Moving from painting to painting today, from room to room, feels like turning pages of a magnificent and increasingly familiar book. I round a corner and there she stands. I visited her nine years ago and she’s been in my thoughts more often than she’ll ever know. Of all her admirers, she knows that I’m the only one who pays exclusive (well, almost exclusive) attention to how she stands. Sandro Botticelli, who loved her first, loved her so much that he painted several versions, this one @1490 . Another resides in Turin’s Galleria Sabauda . One was perhaps seen in Germany by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Others may have been burned in 1497 by the puritanical Dominican Girolamo Savonarola. Most famously, she rises from the sea on a scallop shell in the Uffizi Gallery (“The Birth of Venus,” 1484-86) . She stands less firmly on that scalloped shell than she does on the solid grey surface in Berlin. She stands alone here, with no one waiting with a robe to clothe her nakedness or to intrude on our intimate encounter. I lean down to study her feet, trace her arches with my eyes, note the weight that presses her left foot into the ground—yes, presses, see the slight indentation. Her right foot touches the ground more lightly than the left, the right knee slightly bent, contrapposto . The toes are long and thin, the ankles strong, the tops of her feet slightly swollen. Feet at work. I stand up straight again, stretch my back. Two people have entered the room and are gazing at me curiously. In the presence of a life-sized and fully naked woman, they have seen me bent down over her feet. She stands on her feet, I could tell them. That wouldn’t help. They leave the room. I stand back to follow the contrappostic curves, a more interesting standing, more relaxed, more supple than the upright stiffness of a figure with two feet simply planted on the ground. Above the weight-bearing foot, her leg rises to a raised hip shifted to the side. Her torso rises vertically in contrast to the slanted hips. Her head reclines to the right. This is a gently curved standing, a balanced, strong, and beautiful stance. The navel punctuates her torso just above the center of the painting. Her vulva is covered by lush, swirling, golden-brown hair that hides and yet replicates the folds of the sex below. So much golden hair! Loose and braided, artful and wild. Twin breasts, one almost matter-of-factly hidden by a hand. Her sideward, downward glance is thoughtful; she’s not interested in a viewer like me. Stripped of mythical context, she is simply a standing woman. A person “clearly and distinctly oneself” would “stand,” Schopenhauer writes, quoting Goethe’s “Grenzen der Menschheit,” “with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth.”[1] Against a black background, on and above a bright strip of well-grounded earth, Venus stands unaccompanied, unadorned, distinctly and thematically her bipedal self. [1] The World as Will and Representation , v. 1, tr. E.F.J. Payne (Dover) 284-285. After exploring the range and flexibility of the standing metaphor in major works of literature, art, and philosophy over the course of three decades, I had no idea how to end the book. The answer came during two weeks in Berlin. Visits to three museums on three successive days inspired short essays on Botticelli’s “Venus,” Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea,” and Giacometti’s “Tall Standing Woman.” Previous SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor emeritus of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next

Belief by Mike White Flowers fitted into the shape of a cross. Organ music with no known point of origin. The arrangement of his coarse hands in the casket. The too-white shirt. The little touches he taught us you better believe show up on the bill. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This is a poem built up of fragments that I hope still manages to coalesce into a micro-narrative and, in some sense, a cameo portrait of an individual personality. That the personality in question is shown lying in a casket is rather typical of my work. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Next - Without Question I Am by Mike White Next

Nano Taggart < Back to Breakthroughs Issue On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three Nano Taggart 00:00 / 01:12 On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three Nano Taggart We can’t help and we can’t help but postpone grief with something. Our hero had given up but hope has again regained hold. Isn’t it strange that zero isn’t nothing? And so we learn you can buy time (once it's running out) with winter’s inversion bearing down so low we could lose the sun if we didn’t know where to look. It's strange to know that zero had to be invented as I notice Natalie’s row of unlit candles has collected a thin skin. What would you mail a twenty-five-year-old who's dying? Hand- written notes from all of us. Knick-knacks of short purpose? We feel as though we’ve cut a larger hole around a hole. It’s stranger still that zero was invented independently and all over. It’s not the same as nothing. We’re making a list. A short list. Originally published in The Shore , this poem addresses the helplessness that hollows us out once we hear the clock's awful ticking on a loved one; in thiscase, Clark Gunnel (d. June 15, 2012). It went through more drafts than I can count over the course of more than a decade. Previous NANO TAGGART is a founding editor of Sugar House Review , and would like to meet your dog. Next

Star Coulbrooke < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Red Camaro Star Coulbrooke 00:00 / 02:47 Red Camaro Star Coulbrooke Monday, September 1st, 1997. I’ve had this Camaro ten years to the day. Got it when I was thirty-six, in the prime of my life. Red Camaro Sport Coupe with a story. Today I’m selling it to my neighbor for his daughter’s sixteenth birthday. The daughter, pouty smile, dark curly hair, bare feet, and a wild reputation came over for a test drive Friday night. Said, when she came back after fifteen minutes, My dad told me if I liked it I could have it. I really like it. I’ve liked it too. I’ve loved that red Camaro. Loved it and depended on it, bought it from a friend, used it for my job selling insurance and investments. That car was the wild card I drew when my husband, who had a couple of lucid months toward the end of our 23 ½-year marriage, my husband who was feeling magnanimous said, Why don’t we refinance the house and buy you a car? You choose the one. My husband, chastened by his last few escapades against the doctrine of marriage and continuing in a rare stretch of generosity, did not complain when I added to the mortgage loan our daughter’s wedding and a full set of furniture for our recently-finished basement. By the time his mood swung back to surly, I’d made my plan of escape. The title was in my name. I had the keys. I stepped on the gas pedal and raced right out of my old life. Kept the new furniture. Found an apartment I couldn’t keep—couldn’t pay rent and utilities working part-time and going back to school—so I gave the furniture to the married daughter who sold it when she ran into hard times. Now I’m selling the red Camaro, my symbol of freedom. It’s a blood-letting. I’m weak and shaky with anticipation. That wild young neighbor girl will drive it to school and boys will chase her and she’ll get in trouble. But it will give her new freedom, that car, and maybe it will give her life new meaning. Yes, this is the way I’ll imagine it all. The men in her life will find they don’t own her. Just like I did, she’ll escape in that declaration of red Camaro, that symbol of wildness and freedom, that independent woman’s car. When Covid hit in March 2020, I retired from my job at Utah State University, helped my husband build an addition on our house, and took care of him until he died from cancer in June 2023. I thought I had lost my ability to write poetry. But I turned to memoir writing and started mining pieces from my old journals. They have turned into prose poem memoirs, a new style for me, a real breakthrough. Previous STAR COULBROOKE was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, and is founder/coordinator of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle , and City of Poetry. mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/star-coulbrooke Next

Robert Okaji < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Trigger Alert Robert Okaji 00:00 / 00:53 Trigger Alert Robert Okaji Trigger alert: I'm dying. I am dying , and nothing will change that, not philosophy, not chemicals, not will. Not even the sky nor the ground it beguiles somewhere out of sight. Consider the horizon as loneliness, as line curved through eyeshot and smoke. As nexus of sun and diagnosis. Of relief and slumber, the pain in my wife's smile when she kisses me goodnight. I am dying , and I cannot picture the universe without me, or me, nonexistent, bodiless, simply not here. "Trigger Alert" first appeared in Stone Circle Review . I wrote the poem about four months after receiving a diagnosis of late stage metastatic lung cancer, a terminal illness. It's one thing to be told you're dying, and another to admit to yourself that your being is indeed finite, that one day, not far off, you'll no longer smell the morning coffee, you'll not feel your wife's body next to yours in bed, you won't cheer for the inept Dallas Cowboys, you won't do anything, you will not be anything, you simply will not exist. Previous ROBERT OKAJI has late stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. His poetry may be found in Threepenny Review , Vox Populi and other venues. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Curse of Seventy-Eight Mona Mehas My sister just turned seventy-nine; I called on her birthday, said congrats. “I broke the curse!” she said, “Damn the stats!” I’m afraid to take this as a sign. Sperm-donor passed at seventy-eight; my sister just turned seventy-nine. Sisters called him Dad, with blood aligned— no, his sperm does not a dad equate. At seventy-eight, our mother died; she’d a weak heart and a crooked spine. My sister just turned seventy-nine— I’m growing old, my age amplified. First sister, same age. Was it bloodline? At dinner, unspoken, thinly veiled superstition and fear, now exhaled— my sister just turned seventy-nine. "The Curse of Seventy-Eight, from my book Hand-Me-Downs (LJMcD Communications, 2024) , deals with the day I came to grips with my own mortality. Previous MONA MEHAS , a Pushcart Prize nominee, writes poetry and prose from the perspective of a retired disabled teacher. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Resistance and Resilience--Redacted (LJMcD Communications, 2026) . Mona has also written two science fantasy novels and is President of the Poetry Society of Indiana, as well as the Indiana co-Leader of Authors Against Book Bans. monamehas.net Next

Flag (2024) by M. L. Liebler An American flag Rippling savagely In the late winter sun. The stripes waving On and on. A revolutionary Handshake with the cold wind. This flag’s fist is the future, Its shoulder turned Towards the past. What do I have In common with that? A piece of cloth? What Can I do for that Which it stands? I am as indifferent As I was as a young boy. My early years coming back On a raging northern wind. It was my Cub Scout Three finger salute To all the injustice, The racism, And the mean Spirit that blows As aloft as yesterday’s Symbol without a home. A man without a country. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem and the one that follows, though written almost 35 years apart, both highlight the distress I have had with America since Vietnam. Now, in the 21st century we enter another dark chapter in American history. Many Americans seem happy to vote for a man who has 90 felony charges, a rape conviction, stole Top Secret documents from the American government and bilked the country out of $400+ million dollars in unpaid taxes. Moreover, the Supreme Court has granted immunity for all crimes by presidents in and out of office. This means that all the soldiers who gave their lives for the freedom in the USA have done so for nothing. We now have a dictator and a king. This November was likely our last election, and we will see more of our rights and freedoms taken away by authoritarians disguised as a “Christians.” If this weren’t so tragic, it would seem unbelievable. It couldn’t happen here! Ultimately, my feelings reverted to how I felt as a pre-teen in America. I thought we had moved past this, but we are returning to the 1950s. Young people will have to fight the old culture and political wars again. I hope they have learned something from our past struggles. .................................................................................................................................................................................... M.L. LIEBLER is a Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer. His 15 books and chapbooks include Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (Wayne State University Press, 2008) which was awarded The Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence and The American Indie Book Award for 2009. A Wayne State University Distinguished Scholar, he directs The WSU Humanities Commons and The Detroit Writers' Guild. mlliebler.com Next - Decoration Day by M.L. Liebler Next