Past Lives... That's Still a Thing, Right? by J. Diego Frey In my most recent past life, I was almost exactly the same I am now (same job same body shape and fear of spiders same wrinkled cotton wardrobe) except that my hair was curly my name was Margery and my beard was longer. Oh, and I had tentacles where my ears are now. Personal-sized octopus arms, about the thickness of a Marks-a-Lot brand magic marker and long enough to hold in front of my face a cob of buttered corn, which I would eat using the same chewing motions that I do now. In the life before that, prior to the great gene wars of the 2050s, I was shorter, and chubbier, hairier in all the wrong places. And I sold pet insurance to the nervous widows of Omaha. There must be some record of the life that proceeded that but the ether is murky. I was a sort of famous vaudeville act a few lives prior to that. On stage, animal noises would resonate through my enormous, hairy proboscis. In make-up, I had the head of a donkey. My showbiz-name was J. Donkey Frell. A big nose and a fey artistic tendency described my person through an extended series of lives during a dozen generations preceding this, always one of many similar, short, hairy men, weak of will and chin falling always to the sad symphonies of war or at least the singing telegram of venereal disease. Little known fact: Chlamydia…got its name from a character in an unpopular satiric opera I wrote in Vienna in the 1800s. Mostly, though, the spirits describe me as just a surfer of the lower to middle layers of society in a succession of Balkan territories. Notably, once, in the 17th century, I was, due to a clerical error, the Pope for three weeks. Remarkable—my eyeglasses prescription has been almost the same in every life. I don’t want to brag but the gypsy told me that a few thousand years ago, I was a red show pony named Fernutis— rumored to be quite handsome. The gypsy rules our lives. She twists the fabric of time and reality into dental floss. Do not forget to tip the gypsy. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This is a newer poem by me—first draft written maybe 3 years ago. It’s a much longer poem than the previous example. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the short poems, always worrying about overstaying my welcome. But lately I’ve been trying to stretch things out a bit. Mark Doty talks about pushing yourself past the end of your draft to discover where the poem is going to go after your current last line, and it turns out that can be a fun exercise. Mostly I hope that I am keeping the energy all the way through this poem. It starts out with a nice juicy image, so most of my revisions have been along the lines of enriching the subsequent imagery (hmmm…just noticed how close the word imagery is to the name Margery…). Thanks for sticking with the poem over all 23 stanzas! I hope this poem will be an anchor for my new, yet-to-find-an-interested-publisher collection, Froot Loop Moon . .................................................................................................................................................................................... J. DIEGO FREY is a poet living in the Denver area, which is where he grew up and never completely escaped. He published two quite likable collections of poetry, Umbrellas or Else and The Year the Eggs Cracked with Colorado publisher Conundrum Press. jdiego.com Next - Interstellar by David Romtvedt Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE CITY HAS CHANGED Mona Mehas the city where I grew up has changed for the better I don’t remember coffee shops where poets read their work or parks with gazebos where drummers taught children I recall empty storefronts and homeless people on park benches the nicer parts of town were hidden or possibly off limits growing up poor produced a mindset difficult to leave behind the place has had an upgrade but I’ve moved away I visit friends from childhood my hometown seems foreign turn back time to the days of my youth I want the new town an area rich in culture and art music flowing from shop doors I want to grow up there in that improved city perhaps then I would change for the better "The City Has Changed" is a poem about the breakthrough experiences that made me see my hometown in a different light. For a while, I refused to believe it but after more time, I finally opened my eyes. 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

I'd Rather Be Influenced by Patrick Ramsay to send more postcards. To kiss with more tongue and let cantaloupe juice run all the way down to my elbows. I’d rather be influenced to cook more quiche and make cold brew at home. To wake up early and stay in bed. To be better at remembering my friends’ birthdays. To vote early. I want an algorithm that worships heirloom tomatoes. The sound of that one summer cricket outside my window. Peach sorbet with tiny spoons. The way the mountains go copper at dusk. The chatter of your dog laughing in a dream across the room. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Gwarlingo , "The Sunday Poem." This poem marked the beginning of a new season in my writing. It emerged when I felt like I was finally settling into my life in Utah after years away. More importantly, I was settling into my own voice as a poet. I was slowing down. Whispering instead of yawping. I was making the case for a slower life, one where influencers focus their attention on unsellable glimmers of life beyond the algorithm. James Crews featured it as The Sunday Poem on Gwarlingo and it went viral. Funny enough: many folks sharing it online were the influencer-type who inspired it. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PATRICK RAMSAY is a queer poet & owner of the indie shop Happy Magpie Book & Quill. He explores land, community & heart in Ogden, Utah. patrickramsaypoet.com Next - Before Thirty by Patrick Ramsay Next

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< Back to Breakthroughs Issue TO MAKE IT NOW David Romtvedt Grandma stands in the kitchen, still alive. Her first man died in the twenties, forty years later the second went the same way. She stays alive so we celebrate another birthday halfway through her eighties the year I turn thirty. On the lawn her second son plays volleyball with his own grown children. Her eldest son, my father, watches and makes loud jokes. Like we expect when we come to this city, it rains. Everyone plays on, slightly damp. Later there’s a kind of horseshoes with giant darts and a plastic ring. We eat heavy American Food and sit in lawn chairs or on benches at borrowed tables. One grandson brings his two children but not their mother. The aunts call him brave to raise these children by himself, a man alone. Grandma loves her great-grandchildren, their tiny eyes and hands. All afternoon she drinks bourbon and water. I have made my retreat to the kitchen where I wash dishes. My aunt thanks me. Of course it is I who must give thanks. Grandma comes in wanting another drink, aware that now some whisper she shouldn’t. “But why not,” she asks, “Why shouldn’t an old lady drink if she wants?” She tells me I am good and wonders if I think it bad she drinks. I have no answer but pour out more bourbon and wash more dishes. She comes close to me and puts her arm in mine. How odd that I would grow up a poet. My mother has shown her a poem for my other grandmother, dead fifteen years before. “A lovely poem,” she says, “I had to read it twice. I didn’t understand at first how a woman could be a bird or a tree, then the second time I saw what you meant.” I am grateful to her for this and we are quiet. With so many people there are plenty of dishes. Then she says my name, tells me she too would like a poem, that would be something. Grandma sets her glass on the counter asking if I can write a poem before a person is dead? I rinse the soap off my hands and promise I will. “To Make It Now” originally appeared in the Crab Creek Review and in the book A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know (Copper Canyon Press, 1992), a selection of the National Poetry Series. Fifteen years after my maternal grandmother’s death I wrote a poem for her, which my mother sent to my paternal grandmother who then asked if I could write a poem for her, too, but before she died. I had no idea what to write and told the story of this request to an older poet I knew and admired who smiled and said, “But you see, don’t you, that’s the poem right there, the story you just told me.” In writing it down, I began to think in a new way about the making of a poem. Previous DAVID ROMTVEDT is from northern Wyoming. His most recent books are Still on Earth (LSU Press, 2025) and Forest of Ash: The Earliest Written Basque Poetry (Center for Basque Studies Press, 2024). davidromtvedt.com Next

The Worrier by Nancy Takacs Now that you are her, what will you do? I’ll walk across the swinging bridge and light a clove cigarette. How will you roam? I’ll drive a Packard convertible, my man in a long dark coat beside me. In the countryside, where will you land, and what will you eat? We’ll find a bar in northern Wisconsin. We won’t eat. What are you wearing, and what do you look like? An indigo dress, a little black cloche. I’ve outlined my lips to look like a sweet maroon bow. What songs will you sing? “Heart of My Heart” And “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard.” Who will know you better than anyone? My silk chemise. What undergarments do you wear? None. What tree do you wear instead? The plum. Why? Because it’s a palm full of dusk. What word will you use? Flagrant. It’s time for this. Where does the word go? It rises from under my bare feet when I leave the beach. What is strange about you now? There is nothing strange. What is common? I have loved the first light. Where does the light go? It goes under the letters in captions of what I say. Where does the scent go? It goes into my eyes, my mouth, the way I turn my head so that you will imagine lilacs. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Initially printed in The Tampa Review and The Worrier: Poems (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). I guess this poem is a favorite of mine, as it’s the first Worrier poem I wrote, and it called me back to write more Worriers, that became a book. I like the film star because she is strong, even though she is, in a sense, voiceless. However, in the poem, she has a voice. She takes charge of where she is going, is confident about her choices, and plays with the reader a bit. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NANCY TAKACS is an avid boater, hiker, and mushroom forager. She lives near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin, and in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah. Her latest book of poems is Dearest Water . nancytakacs.org Next - Junk Email by Nancy Takacs Next

The Organization of Bones by Joel Long Let’s rearrange the bones by size while the goat looks on. Let’s line them up to cardinal points so shadow tells the time. The double doors may open for me to look over your brown shoulder, your dark hair that covers your skull where the rivers are falling and the trees are green with birds. Start with the bones of the ear, small sand, then move to the tarsals, these glyphs made for waving the hand, the hinge in the dark circuit of the blood, but here they are soldiers at May Day, such precision, such a proud song. The goat begins to hum and nibbles the threshold, fur bristling like vellum before the monk takes out the blade. The warmth of your body is so quaint against the arrangement you’ve made, a relic of what you are, the past so filled with warm bodies and singing goats, a thousand setting suns indifferent to the coming night. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I was moved by Salgado's photo, Children Playing with Animal Bones, Brazil, 1983 , the three children in their own bodies rearranging the bones into symmetrical lines, making sense of the bones in some way. Of course, the light in the photograph is beautiful in its arrangement as well. With any ekphrastic poem like this, I hope to find release from the artistic image so that the poem finds its own voice tinged with the atmosphere of the trigger artwork. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JOEL LONG'S book of essays Watershed is forthcoming from Green Writers Press. His book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review , Ocean State Review , Sports Literate , Prairie Schooner , Bellingham Review , Rhino , Bitter Oleander , Massachusetts Review , Terrain , and Water-Stone Review , among others. He lives in Salt Lake City. Next - Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us by Kase Johnstun Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AT THE END OF OCTOBER Dennise Gackstetter All day I worked to ready the garden for winter, kneeling on the earth to trim spent seed heads and crispy curled leaves, bowing low to cut brittle stems and browned stalks close to the ground. From far overhead I hear sandhill cranes call to each other in flight, their harmonic clicks and whirrs and bugles traveling through the clear expanse of sky. I leaned back and turned my eyes upward, but I did not see them. I stood and searched across the brilliant blue and still, I did not see them. Standing amidst untidy piles of plant debris saturated in sunlight, I continued to listen long after their voices faded away. This poem expresses the deep reverence I have for the world in all the ways it reveals itself, and in all the ways I can meet it. It stands as a breakthrough for me because I successfully engaged the power of narrative in a prose poem. My poet friend, Star Coulbrooke, called this a strong example of “incantatory prose.” Through sound, rhythm, and repetition, I conjure deep sensuous qualities that invite the reader to share in the visceral magic of the moment. Previous DENNISE GACKSTETTER is an artist, educator, and writer. Recently retired from Utah State University, Dennise was a Principal Lecturer in Art Education and the Art Education Coordinator. She was a part of the Writing Team for the new Utah Core Fine Art Standards. She lives happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE DYING ROOM Paula Harrington Our father was seventy-six when our mother died. For almost three years, he’d been taking care of her while her health failed and her mood plummeted. She morphed from a fun-loving, kind, irreverent redhead into a cranky, frightened, white-haired old woman. The whole time, Dad somehow managed to remain solicitous of her. He loved to cook, so he would make her tasty little treats. A pioneer in the kitchen, he was hip to small plates long before most Americans knew they existed. His real agenda, though, was to get our mother to eat something. Anything. Her illness had made her lose her appetite, so whatever he cooked—no matter how tempting — she’d turn her nose up at it. He’d bring her a ramekin of ratatouille, say, with a flaky fresh biscuit on the side. Or a half-serving of baked stuffed scrod with two spears of steamed asparagus and a dab of lemon aioli. Maybe a few spoonfuls of his trademark pea soup flavored by a hefty hambone. “Here, Peg, try this,” he’d say, as if she were his taster and he was seeking her professional opinion. She would take it politely and thank him. But we all knew she didn’t mean it. What she really wanted to do was throw the food to the floor and never touch any of it again. But as furious as she was about getting sick and enfeebled, she did her best to fake it. She’d scrunch up her face, take a careful nibble, then concoct some excuse for putting the food aside. “Mmm,” she’d say. “Very good, Kev. Maybe just a little too salty.” Or “Oh, scrod. Wonderful. Did you remember to put dried parsley in the breading?” So Dad realized he had lost the woman he loved—the “real Peg”—well before she died. And we all knew we had lost our beloved mother. The day she finally left us for good, we dressed her in a coral-colored nightgown and matching robe. She lay all afternoon and into the evening in a hospital bed we’d set up downstairs while friends came and went to say goodbye. One brought her yellow roses, another rubbed sweet-smelling cream on her hands. She was already in a morphine fugue, though, only letting out the occasional noise that sounded like a cross between a mumble, chuckle, and growl. I guess you could say we gave her an old-fashioned Irish wake while she was technically still alive. After night fell, our brother came over with his guitar from his home nearby. Then he, my two sisters, and I sang Mum out. Our last song, I remember, was “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. There is a road, no simple highway Between the dawn and the dark of night And if you go, no one may follow That path is for your steps alone. Like a child again, I cried to myself, No, Mum, no! Don’t find that highway. But, of course, she already had. When she breathed her last, Dad was upstairs in their bedroom of forty years. We had encouraged him to get some rest, but the truth is I don’t think he wanted to be there when Mum actually passed. My brother didn’t either; he went home around 2 a.m. I understand how they felt. If you’d told me I could have been in the same room when my mother died, I would have said, impossible . Now I am glad I was there; it seemed only fair. She brought me into the world and I helped send her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that. So, in the end, only my sisters and I were present. Just the women of our family, which also seemed about right. For all our adult lives, the four of us had stayed up together whenever I, the family wanderer, came home to visit. My sisters would drive down from their homes in New Hampshire and Maine, and we would chat away with Mum about our lives, family friends, politics, books, and world events until we fell asleep in place. On the sofa, in the arm chairs, sprawled on the rug, flopping against each other, sharing sofa throws and pillows for bedding. That last night of her life, it felt only natural for us to lie down on the floor around her bed. We looked at each other and knew what to do. “The party’s over, Mum,” one of my sisters said. “We’re shutting our eyes and going to sleep.” Then we stayed still and quiet until, minutes later, we heard her death rattle. “The dining room has become the dying room,” my other sister whispered. Then we got up from the floor, linked arms, and went to tell Dad. "The Dying Room" first appeared in Grande Dame Literary Journal . It tells the story of my family's coming together for an old-fashioned Irish wake for my mother while she was technically still alive. My personal breakthrough was that I could be present in the room when she actually died because "she brought me into the world and I was helping to bring her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that." Previous PAULA HARRINGTON is a Maine writer and the former director of the Farnham Writers' Center at Colby College, where she also taught writing and literature. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris and is the author, with Ronald Jenn, of Mark Twain & France (University of Missouri, 2017). Her essays have appeared in Grande Dame Literary , Colby Magazine , and the Mark Twain Annual . Before entering academia, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue EXTRAS AT THE GATES OF EDEN Alison Moore They were hired for the crowd scene, the one near the end where Eve resists temptation—a cheering section, of sorts, for humanity. But they were never called, nor sent home with severance pay. So they wait patiently, then not so patiently, as humans do. The Styrofoam cups and newspapers, which at first were put neatly into trashcans now blow freely, sticking between the bars of the gleaming gates of Eden. It seemed like a good gig at the time, but they’ve just run out of cream; the catering truck departs. Rumors arrive: They got it in one take, Eve was a pushover, the snake handler didn’t even get overtime, let alone scale. In anger, he left the snake behind. It’s coiled now, in the tree, listening to the grumbling outside the gate. All but one finally go home. A boy peers through the bars at the tree still heavy with uneaten fruit, at the serpent, disconsolate now, in the boughs. “Want one?” asks the serpent, half- heartedly, trying to look interested again. But the boy, having read the script, says, “No way— look what happened to her.” The serpent contemplates the clever little face, then watches the strong back of Eve still visible in the distance heading out into the world, before she had a word for home. Subject now to climate and natural disaster, the myriad dilemmas of the wondering mind. Rent to pay, loves to start and end for the right or wrong reasons, the heartbreaking desires of her children for all the flimsy things the world is already hard at work making. The shadow of her own death, throwing itself over everything, dogging her to the grave. Traffic jams and bad connections, chain letters, and real estate scams, shoddy workmanship and dead-end jobs, unpublished novels and always, always men who will try to trick her. All this for knowledge of the fine line between good and evil. What a trade-off, the serpent thinks, but not unkindly. He knows what was lost on the fundamentalist screenwriter, what slipped through the script, was the metaphor of bitten fruit: skin broken open, the risk of marred perfection for the awkward oozing ecstasy of music, sex, and art. If this is sin, he thinks, then let’s have at it. The serpent stares at the fox- faced little boy, flicks his forked tongue once, for special effect. “Chicken,” he hisses. “Eve,” he says, “had nerve.” I have to admit I view the story of the Garden of Eden and Eve’s role in the expulsion as a biblical breakthrough. She may have been blamed for the loss of paradise, but I think she wanted to taste all of the world, not just some of it. In order to do that, she had to see the serpent as part of the whole picture, not the shadow of Satan and temptation. In my mind, she did the right thing: she bit down and broke the law. Previous 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

Before Thirty by Patrick Ramsay I streak through a golf course in nectarine light and self-destruct a little bit. Not in a Salamander Letter type of way, but like an old truck whose engine blows right after the warranty is up. I cancel the party. Detonate my relationship. Call in sick. Call my old therapist with the tattoos. Ask him if he’s still engaged. Send up a flare. Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to realize the word hello and help are one autocorrect away from twinhood. I kiss everyone. Kiss goodbye to my savings account. Greet one thousand new hobbies with the fervor of a young dog. Tongue out. I only have so much time left to be reckless in my twenties. I was twenty-eight the first time a twink told me he loves older guys. This. This is why all the queens call thirty gay death. I feel too young, too childless, too cut loose to be someone’s daddy. But maybe he was right. My mortgage, the chicken coop, the poodle-mutt rescue dog. I used to be stupid. Gloriously, aimlessly stupid. But at some point along the way: A bungalow, a career, a real live-with-me, go-to-weddings-and-farmers-markets-together partner. Someone must have tricked me. Tricked me into learning what a 401k is. What a deductible is. How to become interested in interest rates. I’m going to be sick. Sick and grown up forever. And thirty is a perfectly fine age. It’s the death of the I did this in my twenties thing that I’m mourning. Who damned me to grow up this fast? To man before I really was done boying. This is the part where I’m supposed to assure you that a job can be a dream, and mowing your own lawn, also a dream. But gut laughs, mushroom trips, occasional sex with strangers—also, also a dream. I know I know, that growing older grows on you, but youth is a temporary meadow with soft scruff, and I guess this is the long way of saying I’m afraid of losing something I didn’t know was worth anything. Anyway, call me when you get this. Need to borrow your drill again. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This unpublished poem came out fully formed, like a platypus frog or a nervous confession. I was one week from turning thirty and wrestling with what that meant. As a gay man, aging is such a prickly arena, and many men treat thirty like a sunset of their dewy youth. This poem reflects on all the glorious stupidities of my twenties and what it means to realize (maybe a little too late) that you might just have become a man before you were really done boying. And I still don’t own a drill. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PATRICK RAMSAY is a queer poet & owner of the indie shop Happy Magpie Book & Quill. He explores land, community & heart in Ogden, Utah. patrickramsaypoet.com Next - Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room by Paul Fericano Next

Fireflies by Kevin Prufer He was fifteen and feeling hassled and he asked his mother to please fuck off, so she slapped him hard and told him to get out of the car because he could walk home. + As he walked, his anger smoldered. He imagined her car crushed against a tree, he imagined her pleading for help as he strode right past toward home exactly as she’d commanded— + and half an hour later, as he rounded the corner to their yellow house, he saw her blue Honda in the driveway, and knew she was already at her desk because + it was evening, because she had homework, because she had her accounting class early in the morning at the college and still he was angry, though his anger had lost its focus— + why had he said what he’d said? Why had she slapped her own son? Anyway, he wanted to hate her + but it was a beautiful summer evening, the chirring of crickets, the fireflies— he would remember the fireflies years later rising and falling in the gloom, + his old gray cat uncurling on the porch steps, walking up to him, purring and rubbing her cheek against his leg there beneath the streetlamp. + The cat was long dead, but his mother was still alive. Just today he’d brought her another mystery novel, then sat with her in her hot little apartment while she went on about what someone or other said to someone else, he didn’t try to keep track, + but as she spoke, his mind reached back to that evening long ago, how he’d stood in front of their old yellow house in the hot evening, his hatred dissipating among the now-extinct fireflies that rose and fell above the rhododendrons. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I’ve always been interested in the way a poem can move through time, making use of white space and shifts in narration to accomplish that movement. Also, how memory works in a poem—how, in this case, the boy’s conflict with his mother in his memory is every bit as real as the present day, when she has grown old and reads mystery novels in the hot little apartment they never lived in together. It’s this telescoping of time and memory that excited me as I wrote this, and the complex dissipation of childhood anger. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KEVIN PRUFER'S newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches , which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them , which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize Anthology , The Paris Review , and The New Republic , among others. He also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors. kevinprufer.com Next - Automotive by Kevin Prufer Next