Belief at Low Tide I hear a choir—a morning concert? Closerthe bodies dressed in white hymn on a wedge of sand. I pause in palm-shade, a godwit probes the surf. A thin man readsthe black book and a young girl shelters in the choir of larger bodies. Afraid. To disturb them. Drawnto their mass. Stay shadowed, skeptical. Before the plunge of the osprey, they take her hand out where eels submerge.I hang on the horizon, distracted by bright clouds. (What is it I now believe?) Fall backward—hair, face bathed, eyes immersedin salt, in liquid light. Leave…before they lead me into the sky. Mark McKain’s work has appeared in Agni, The…

Watching a Beach House Be Pulled into the Ocean   It’s not the same as seeing our kid’s sandcastles eroded,      one detail at a time bleeding into lumps. And this is surprising—            how much stays together, how much the house remains a house, even as the stilts under it collapse.      It’s as if to prove Eliot right about the way the world ends,            that things linger on, haunting the borders, the edges where one world falls into another. They beckon us      to look through their windows, so strangely clear           …

An Agnostic’s Christmas I’m watching my wifedress the Christmas treelike she’s choosing clothesto wear to a coronation the tree lights sparkle inbeauty for any faith, or none at allwhile the heart-shaped ornamentfilled with a friend’s ashes hangs between the Elvis bulband the fabric star my latesister-in-law embroideredand, oh, the tree is dying too we pretend there is magicto this one winter day, that pealsthe bells crafted on the backsof so many in need. Even the creche on the mantle is wanting—wehaven’t unpacked the Baby Jesusand the others yet— so the mangersits empty and waitingas do I. Tom Barlow is a widely published Ohio writer of poetry, short stories and novels.…

Between Shelley’s “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” (not to mention the many dissertations about this topic), what it means to be a part of a community of artists continues to evolve. How do we use our voices, individually and as a community, to engage in democracy? Anacapa Review‘s David Starkey posed a few questions to James Morehead, co-founder of Poets for Harris. What is Poets for Harris and how did it come about? A few hours after President Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election and that Vice President Kamala Harris was his preferred candidate, Win With Black Women (led…

Jackpot Under the ancient oak, little gold coins— glowing islands funneled through leaves— tumble jackpot at my feet. These dollops of light—flimsy as a wish slipping through fingers— nevertheless hold encroaching heaviness at bay. And even when darkness sometimes submerges the bright archipelago, the islands are not consumed but somehow escape and resurface shimmering elsewhere. William Holden It was the hour, I’m sure— at least partly— one of the wee ones, shadows thick as sludge, light wrapped, or maybe rapt, in smokey gauze. So when I first saw him—soft fingerpainting in black and white, sitting shirtless on a table edge, doughy flesh surfacing from black ink, enigmatic answer from a…

The Work of Summer I race the sun in the wild mustard field, the monarchs lace the northern hemisphere of my lungs. Boredom is dangerous, chambers enclosed in sugar maple rings, daylight opens each night at its seam. Out of the granite boulders, scree, out of hiding from my own body, out of hiding from myself, I am a honey, a wax, a gold light. I run to the scent of water, my head is a beehive— Andrea Carter is from Southern California. Her work is forthcoming or appears in The Comstock Review, Catamaran, Painted Bride Quarterly, Terrain, The Common Ground, SWWIM, and The Florida Review. A finalist for the…

and the word for longing is your name entire deserts of itpierced by Joshua Trees ochers sages oxidesdusted toward the soft horizon some purpled bowl of mountainsholding the wide of what it means to always want something otherthe barrenness of that choice a heart sievedlooks out and sees emptiness the clear shimmer of all that isn’t yoursburning in the afternoon sun the steam of it ragingagainst your quiet hungry skin   *titled after Jai Hamid Bashir’s poem “And the word for moonlight is my name.”   Sandra Crouch, MA, is a poet, floral designer, and letterpress printer living in Nashville. Her poems have been published in HAD, Jet Fuel Review,…

Over There Although we know they maynot be better necessarilyover there, we know at leastthings are different, and we sense we would be differentourselves all these yearshad we been born, broughtup, nurtured over there, been given opportunitiesto play the barefoot games,had we had the friendswith the perfect trochee names who lived on streets withno sharp corners but with treesthat grew, merged over roads,melded light like arches, in houses shadowed withpianos and portraits in oil,who went to the alabasterschool on the low, smooth hill with a library on whoseshelves are only first editionsbound in leather and hallsechoing a bronze tradition like a language strangerthan ours, older and stronger,the language of flawless…

Au Marché Uzès The smell of roasted chestnuts—New York City, I am eight years old. My brother takes the subway to his junior high. I am the only child still holding my mother’s hand when we leave our building on West End Avenue. The park if we turn right, the subway if we turn left and then the city, immense, an entire country. My mother buys me a bag of chestnuts, warm in my hands. This is her city, nothing worries her or if it does, she doesn’t let me see. Not yet. Not for a long time. Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. The 2024…

Fever From my bed, a window full of sky. The air washed with light. A flight of stairs down to bath, bread. A banister to ease the way. My husband brings me tea, a cold cloth for my forehead. Time unravels the pale hours. Now it is morning. Now noon. I am seven. I am five. Dolls jumbled on shelves, faces white, lean into one another. The fever breaks slowly. The thermometer is shaken down. My father rises from the cot where he has been lying beside me these long years. He is just shadow and light. I could stand up right now, push off and fly out of this…