The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes (Porkbelly Press 2024).

My Dying Sister’s Words Are Gone

It’s no use to call now. I buy
signal lamps instead.

I touch my lamp
and hers glows pink.

She touches back,
my lamp glows blue.

All those years we didn’t talk.
Now we signal.

Pink. Blue. Pink.

In Sunday school we sang
This little light of mine

I’m gonna let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel?

Hers was always
the loudest no!

Now even the song
is gone.


The poems of B. Fulton Jennes have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Comstock ReviewMER, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the winner of the 2025 Subnivean Award, the 2023 Millennium Award, the 2022 Lascaux Prize, as well as many other poetry competitions. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook, Dirty Bird & Myrt, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts “Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners,” a monthly online reading series.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes (Porkbelly Press 2024).

Content Warning: animal death

What My Dying Sister Believed, Then Didn’t

The farmer yanks our dog,
shot dead for killing his chickens,

from his tractor bed,
thumps her onto the porch floor.

I’ll bury her in that damned hole
you three dug
our father says.

I finger blood-crusted fur,
long for my sister’s comfort.

But she won’t come out
to say goodbye, tells me

That’s just her body.
Sally’s already in heaven.


Years later—married, converted—
she speaks of Sheol, the Hebrew

house of the dead. There’s no heaven
she tells me now.


The poems of B. Fulton Jennes have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Comstock ReviewMER, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the winner of the 2025 Subnivean Award, the 2023 Millennium Award, the 2022 Lascaux Prize, as well as many other poetry competitions. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook, Dirty Bird & Myrt, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts “Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners,” a monthly online reading series.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes (Porkbelly Press 2024).

What’s an Atheist? I Ask My Dying Sister, 1965

A Christmas Eve visit
to a widow’s home.

She’s an atheist, our father hisses.
Don’t say a word about presents.

What’s an atheist? I ask
on the widow’s doorstep.

She puts a finger to her lips,
tightens her grip on my hand.

Someone who doesn’t believe
in God. In Jesus. In heaven.


Not even in heaven? I whisper.
Where will she go when she dies?

In a box. In a hole.
In the dirt.


The poems of B. Fulton Jennes have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Comstock ReviewMER, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the winner of the 2025 Subnivean Award, the 2023 Millennium Award, the 2022 Lascaux Prize, as well as many other poetry competitions. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook, Dirty Bird & Myrt, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts “Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners,” a monthly online reading series.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


Sundress Reads: Review of Blind to the Prairie

Sundress Reads black and white logo featuring a bespectacled sheep drinking tea, reading a book, and sitting on a stool.
Book cover of Blind to the Prairie featuring blues and yellows, including an illustrated farm as seen from above.

Blind to the Prairie (Bottlecap Press, 2025) by Tate Lewis-Carroll is a slow and tender reflection on seeing. In this collection of haiku, Lewis-Carroll captures the rhythms of the Midwestern landscape, capturing the very moments of its emptiness and subtle abundance. The chapbook invites the reader to slow down and notice the thin seam between perception and disappearance, in contrast to the fast-paced, modernized world around us. Through astonishing precision and modesty, Lewis-Carroll transforms the ordinary scenes of fields and geese into revelations of mindfulness, weaved between the philosophies of to see and to be seen.

Blind to the Prairie might appear deceptively small, yet each “breath-length” poem expands into an entire ecosystem of sound and silence. The chapbook opens with a preface in which Lewis-Carroll elaborates on their belief in the connection between haiku, nature, and peace of the mind. It reads like a manifesto, saying, “Our bowls are too easily filled. Our bones have become too dense for flight.” Haiku, a Japanese poetry form interwoven with the emptiness of the natural world, serves as a practice of unburdening, of learning to be filled with nothing. That philosophy reverberates through the collection, where the poet’s eye does not seek meaning in the prairie, so much as dissolve into it.

Early poems establish Lewis-Carroll’s blend of humor and careful, creative observations, reading,

“spring recital—

the clarinet section

wets their reeds.” ( Lewis-Carroll 3)

Through a simple metaphor, Lewis-Carroll makes the ephemeral tangible, depicting spring as a performance of lively beings rather than a season of unmovables. Similarly, they also draw the stagnant into the living through seven, simply syllables: “morning mist— / my neighbor’s silo comes and goes” (3), whereby personifying a man-made to be transient as fog, Lewis-Carroll captivates us into a world where the economic, sturdy beings are humbled to the natural world, creating a harmonious collaboration between what has been perceived as nonintersecting. Later, in a delightfully wry turn, “storming— / sunny / on TV” (4), the poet captures the absurd disjunction between mediated weather and lived weather, creating a funny contrast between the storm outside and the screen’s detached forecast.

These brief poems, though light in touch, are deeply anchored in observation. Blind to the Prairie documents a world in motion yet perpetually still. In “beyond fields, more fields,” Lewis-Carroll encapsulates the endlessness of the Midwest, the wandering of infinity where the flatness is perceived as both a physical landscape and a philosophical stance. Here, the repetition of “fields” suggests monotony and wonder, in which Lewis-Carroll sends forward an invitation to see sameness as an art of infinite variation.

Midway through the book, the haibun “White Prairie Fringed Orchid” acts as centerpiece, rooting the entire collection. Written in prose, it begins as a travelogue through Illinois farmland and turns into a reflection on the effects of environmental neglect. The narrator observes “litter glitters in sunlight among the overgrowth of clovers and poverty grass,” before discovering the endangered white prairie fringed orchid, framed as a delicate survivor in a field of monocropping corn. When the poet calls to the farmer, asking him to name this rare bloom, the farmer replies, “Weed.” That single word sets up the book’s tension, crafting and navigating the distance between human attention and voluntary blindness. The haibun does a great job of setting the scene and theme of the entire chapbook— which revolves around the often neglected details of nature. The piece prose highlights the theme of environmental pollution and contamination, weaved in between the scenes of nature appreciation.

This haibun recalls the ethical waves of Bashō’s journeys, yet it is distinctly American in its landscape and critique. The Midwest, with its “27 million acres of Illinois farmland” (10), becomes a mirror for human detachment from the natural world. Lewis-Carroll writes without scolding, and instead layers the piece with a blend of irony and tenderness: even in describing environmental destruction, there remains a tone of gratitude for what survives.

Lewis-Carroll’s language is spare yet sophisticated. Each poem functions under a haiku lens, bending light just enough to reveal the subtle textures of daily life. There is restraint in their use of sound with soft alliterations and consonants that mimic the rhythm of breath and the soft, capricious winds of nature. Their attention to line breaks is also impeccable with intentional designs of pauses. Take “ball of twine— / holding nothing together but itself (11)” as an example. The line break embodies the poem’s meaning: a taut suspension that almost, but not quite, holds.

Blind to the Prairie stands out for its craftsmanship. Bottlecap Press’s presentation of a crisp layout and generous white space, along with the luminous cover painting by Harold Gregor, all supports a minimalist aesthetic. The design and aesthetic of this book feels like an extension of its content, the sprouting of profoundness in the unassuming.

These poems in Blind to the Prairie will make you look twice at roadside weeds, moonlight and the cadence of your own breath. They restore wonder to the everyday and ask what it means to see truly. In a culture that moves too quickly, this collection offers the potency of stillness as a form of resistance and pensive, astute observation.

Blind to the Prairie is available from Bottlecap Press


Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She can be seen on Dialogist, The Weight Journal, Inflectionism, Headmistress Press and elsewhere. She has been recognized by The Word Works, Longfellow House and more. She loves cultural journalism.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025).

Willingly

If  the  last sound I hear  is a whir of sparrows, an  all-at-once ascent  from the apple
tree, air  pulsing  above  the branches, it would be a kind of permission. Like the luff
of a sheet flung above the  bed, again and again. That great  whoosh  of air takes  me
far  out on the water, the  sail breathing  in and out. Coastline  fading  like memory.

immense heaven
feeling the tug
of other galaxies

Light  sifts  through  the blinds tonight the way  my  mother  sifted  cake  flour  into  a
blue  porcelain bowl.  A dusting  of  twilight  now  on the  chair,  across  the  vanity. In
her  last  days  my  mother  swore  she  saw  wings  on  the  wall  of her  hospice  room.
First,  it was  a large  bird. Later,  an airplane. Look,  she  would  say,  hoisting  herself
up on her elbows, can’t you see the wings there on the wall? Not  a  shadow  of wings,
but the  wings themselves. She  was insistent. It’s just the  light  playing  tricks, Mom.
What else could I say?

But I’ll admit that sometimes I can see the moon fall across the water, even though
I  live  inland  from  the  shore.  I  hear  its  swash,  the   riffle  of  beach  pebbles.  A
commotion of gulls.

glass lake
trailing my fingers
through the clouds


Barbara Sabol (she/her) lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her book, IMAGINE A TOWN, won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Prize. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Arts Alive Outstanding Literary Artist of 2024 award. Barbara’s haiku and haibun have been published widely, and her haibun have been recognized by the Haiku Society of America, short-listed for a Touchstone Award by the Haiku Foundation in 2024, and awarded a 2025 Rachel Sutcliffe Haiku-Arts Prize. Barbara conducts workshops through Literary Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Falls Library. She earned an MFA from Spalding University. When not at her desk, Barbara is working in her garden or walking in the woods. She lives with her bird carver husband and wonder dog.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025).

Letting the Kneeler Down

Forgive me the absence of all feeling. My heart a pink spike.
I am a disposable animal, in exile from heaven. A bitter thing.
You must see I am attached to earth’s delights—dark red petals,
sap frothing and rising. Distant father, are you stirred also?
I see beauty on either side of heaven: here, a yellow bird;
there, pleated wings, white fire.

Unreachable father, could you possibly exist? Lies have passed
between us like tiny aphids on the trailing rose. And silence.
If I say I love you, will you lift the weight of solitude? I speak
to you on my knees, my hands an empty clump of longing.

                             after evening rain
                             dark birds fold their wings

—cento sourced from the eight “Matins” poems from The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

Barbara Sabol (she/her) lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her book, IMAGINE A TOWN, won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Prize. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Arts Alive Outstanding Literary Artist of 2024 award. Barbara’s haiku and haibun have been published widely, and her haibun have been recognized by the Haiku Society of America, short-listed for a Touchstone Award by the Haiku Foundation in 2024, and awarded a 2025 Rachel Sutcliffe Haiku-Arts Prize. Barbara conducts workshops through Literary Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Falls Library. She earned an MFA from Spalding University. When not at her desk, Barbara is working in her garden or walking in the woods. She lives with her bird carver husband and wonder dog.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025).

In the Wound of Night

                —after Constantin Brâncuşi’s sculpture, Sleeping Muse

I envy her perfection. More than beauty, her tranquility,
like a level’s bubble, centered, even in this busy, brightly lit
gallery. A dream blooms inside the elegant head, at rest
on a pedestal. Cast in white marble, an ageless patina smooths
brow and cheek. The air around her shapes itself into clean,
linear features—an abstraction of woman, one you might know
at midnight; an evocation in the morning.

moon flower—
the night garden
fragrant with light

Tonight, in my ink dark bedroom, I imagine her crescent cheek
cradled on the pillow next to mine. Her mouth is inscrutable.
The marble softens at the Cupid’s bow, allowing only the slightest
parting of her lips. I taste her cool breath as she descends into the deep
end of sleep; into a pool of lassitude.

A smile plays at the corners of her mouth. Her dreams must be
sweet, and so magically elsewhere. Lapis skies swirl with gold stars.
Exotic forests with sated tigers. I, too, close my eyes but my dreams
tousle out in the hall of my childhood home where people move
through dim rooms. There, no one has ever died. Everything
and nothing changed.

the ceiling fan’s
rhythmic pulse—
missyou missyou missyou


Barbara Sabol (she/her) lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her book, IMAGINE A TOWN, won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Prize. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Arts Alive Outstanding Literary Artist of 2024 award. Barbara’s haiku and haibun have been published widely, and her haibun have been recognized by the Haiku Society of America, short-listed for a Touchstone Award by the Haiku Foundation in 2024, and awarded a 2025 Rachel Sutcliffe Haiku-Arts Prize. Barbara conducts workshops through Literary Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Falls Library. She earned an MFA from Spalding University. When not at her desk, Barbara is working in her garden or walking in the woods. She lives with her bird carver husband and wonder dog.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025).

Chimera

Trick of the light, I think, when the seal’s head crests in the water
of this small cove where I’m swimming. A distance of ten strokes.
Less. We keep that distance a long minute―me treading water, riveted.
The seal dips, rises, turns a dark eye toward me. Curious, but not enough
to come closer. On impulse I swim out to where he last dove. Just
sunlight there, spangling the water.

sand mandala. . .
the journey inward
until the wind


Barbara Sabol (she/her) lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her book, IMAGINE A TOWN, won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Prize. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Arts Alive Outstanding Literary Artist of 2024 award. Barbara’s haiku and haibun have been published widely, and her haibun have been recognized by the Haiku Society of America, short-listed for a Touchstone Award by the Haiku Foundation in 2024, and awarded a 2025 Rachel Sutcliffe Haiku-Arts Prize. Barbara conducts workshops through Literary Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Falls Library. She earned an MFA from Spalding University. When not at her desk, Barbara is working in her garden or walking in the woods. She lives with her bird carver husband and wonder dog.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Mapping the Borderlands by Barbara Sabol (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025).

The Wild Wood

Mid-winter darkness is already falling as I trek through a foot of new snow,
searching for my dog, Lumi. Venturing off-trail through the woods, I hold out
my lantern, the only source of light this moonless night. The park ranger says,
“Coyotes probably got her.” I’d rather imagine that she has entered an enchanted
kingdom where a rabbit, seeing that she is lost, snuggles her in its burrow
or that she has found shelter in the bole of a tree.

hobo spider
i too
spin my web

This morning, a call from a hiker who spotted a dog matching Lumi’s missing dog
picture. I drive to the edge of the park, miles from where I lost her three days ago. Atop a steep hill that arches down to the river, I call her, long and loud, the way
my mother would sing my name when the street lights came on. A form takes shape
at the bottom of the hill―a snow swirl or my small, white dog? Rib-thin, mud-slushed,
exhausted, she comes limping toward me. I scoop her up, cradle her under my jacket
and together we bow to the benevolent mysteries that move through the forest.

second bloom
frost flowers
glaze the field


Barbara Sabol (she/her) lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her book, IMAGINE A TOWN, won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Prize. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and the Arts Alive Outstanding Literary Artist of 2024 award. Barbara’s haiku and haibun have been published widely, and her haibun have been recognized by the Haiku Society of America, short-listed for a Touchstone Award by the Haiku Foundation in 2024, and awarded a 2025 Rachel Sutcliffe Haiku-Arts Prize. Barbara conducts workshops through Literary Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Falls Library. She earned an MFA from Spalding University. When not at her desk, Barbara is working in her garden or walking in the woods. She lives with her bird carver husband and wonder dog.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Palm Up, Fingers Curled by Abby Lewis


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Palm Up, Fingers Curled by Abby Lewis (Plan B Press, 2023).

Content Warning: sexual violence

                                    Trout Fishing

She sits across from him at the small coffee shop,
gazes out the window speckled with rain.
She can see their reflections—the sudden,
sharp fish hook of her jaw, his long fingers
curled around the saucer of coffee between them—
so many things that can snare a person.

He looks at her, notices the soft seams of her sweater,
how the wide neck leaves ample room for her to maneuver,
snug and free as the trout that slipped away from his fine hook
last summer at Watauga Lake. The sudden glint of steel
off sunlight, the slight jerk of his hand on the rod in anticipation.
He could feel the hook claw harmless at the scales even then.


Abby N. Lewis (she/her) is the author of the full-length poetry collection Reticent (2016) and the chapbook This Fluid Journey (2018). She has two masters from East Tennessee State University, and she is currently pursuing an MLIS degree. Her creative work has recently appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Across the Margin, Black Moon Magazine, and Red Eft Review. Her book reviews can frequently be found on Chapter 16’s website. She lives in Tennessee, where she wears many hats as a librarian, educator, tutor, and reviewer.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised.  Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz