Volume Six Pebbles
Bios
dailies
they’re up there waiting
for the Perseids
I’m down here catching
thistledown
14.VIII.23
*
everyone needs help
doesn’t help
when it’s you that
needs help
3.IX.23
*
in the silence
she dreamed
a silent garden
made in silence
5.IX.23
*
from Ruth Berlua
the lion-tamer says
please speak quietly
or the lions will stop
listening to me
7.IX.23
*
the philosopher’s advice
for wooing: buy a hand-
kerchief and post it
asking is this the one you lost?
13.IX.23
*
Santoka’s menu
cook on your own
spinach
eat with a companion
soup
14.IX.23
*
after Archilochus
the Lion
he knows all sorts
the Sea-
she just flows
17.IX.23
*
how life sometimes is
i’m looking for you
out the window
you’re stood be-
hind me in the door
24.IX.23
*
here they come
the –ber months
with snow jobs
in the offing
25.IX.23
*
after Chuang Tzu
brace yourself
in still waters
float through
the angry gorge
3.X.23
—Alec Finlay
wintersunstillpersis|
—Robin Smith
deep field
creasing the folds
of another bird
—petro c.k.
A trio of leaves
float on top of a puddle—
archipelago
—Patricia Wallesverd
Melon Field
I took off my shoe in a field of melons. The melons were ripe. I knew this because of the sound they made. Like fish flesh sliding off bones. Like a zipper enclosing memory. I ate a melon and spat out the seeds. The seeds grew into my daughter. She took my shoe and cradled it in her arms. We decided to keep in touch.
—Elena Zhang
Dinnertime
groceries brought home
to cook a delicious meal
let’s get takeaway
— Joanne Macias
Collage of blackbirds
Pasted across the blood-blue sky
Thicken the clouds
Quiver on
— Anthy Strom
Winter Along The Afsluitdijk
The red warning lights on the turbines flash tempered bloody needles
onto a dead-calm carcass:
Jonah for a moment, I stare through
the whale-bone darkness
waiting for you.
— Marcus Slingsby
Syrah
LALADADASYRARAHH
LALALANDASKAPITAL
SIRIZZRITZYSTRING—
THE—OR—EEE—SIE—
— Rose Knapp
in fallen leaves/a boy’s stray footprint/paper crane
peace (pēs) n. [Latin, pax, a state of calm free from disturbance]
see WAR
— Colleen Farrelly
mountain man
fear of grammar
politics & dogma
in the workplace
— david woodward
Poem For An Anonymous Man
Quite tenderly
Clothe affection singly
Patroness at large
End paraphrase tonight
— Pierre Minar
i remember that arm
i could never learn to knit. moldy strawberries
in the fridge & another blood test. every morning
i poop whether i like it or not. the country is in
turmoil and i am hopeful. a man with an axe
follows us home
— Eli Dunham
Tanka #3
because if under
duress we abandon our
symbiotic ties
the holy vibrancy of
coral bleaches sickly
— Celeste Colarič-Gonzales
A Tactile Golden Age
Meet the polka-dotted toadstools
punctuating old theme parks.
You could concentrate – really concentrate – then.
— Sue Blaustein
old orchard gate breath snagged on rust
— C.X. Turner
hallucienda
dear skull black oak
cloud vertebrae mimics tides
one hand two leaves
a mask of knives flowering
first dream last chance
— Tony D’Arpino
Camaraderie
See me smile feral, luscious, tender
Give me bruises and screaming joy,
Blood beat, beat, beat,― too loud sounds
I’ll find sweet in such spaces.
— Patricia Fleming
wake-mouth, open field
depth and dactyl and vowelglide
studding bark collar
tongue-led, gutter sousing in
strange and pretty edition
— Jane Lewty
Acacia
Yellow red ultraviolet plum atavistic acacia
Trees reaching upwards to the Heavens
Banishing banalities of evil dying binaries
— Rose Knapp
blue glow left to my own devices
— petro ck
July
spring is hard in time for endings
sourness can overtake the larks sharp calls
herrings split from bay to lime toned backyard
lawns prolong the path to peppermint fresh halls
— Emily Cronan
Red Room
A giant has set me
in a red box, a bedroom blushing
for what it has watched— the loud heart
of a sizeable crimson rose
— Ken Anderson
Regrets
I launch something into the toilet
that used to be wine
and smells like self contempt.
—Sadie Maskery
It’s My Heart I Smoke
–Lesle Lewis
A break in the trees. Frog-shaped, it’s
a kind of cure-all when everything cries out. My
regret wrapped sweater-tight, its somber heart
kept soft enough to surprise a lake. I
feel it leap toward the wood and its smoke.
— Stefanie Kirby
rubeola poptimiasmus
if you were on the floor
you were likely exposed
— Jenkin Benson
nursing
a black eye
rain beating the roof
— Stephen Curro
Emily as Lead-Colored, Renowned, Cabbage-Like
The sweetest goal
is to become lost in each
other’s nonsense
— Darren C. Demaree
Biopsy
The surgeon and his miniaturized melon baller.
The pathologist’s palette of interrogations.
A glacial headwall of verdict, two weeks high. And groaning.
— Robbie Gamble
Wishbone
What else needs to break
before your dreams
come true?
— Matt Cilderman
Agnes
Your casket, a pioneer
in my brain. I collect a fossil
of Amazing Grace.
All these stopped notes of grief +
— Chrissy Stegman
apostrophe i too belong
— Jahnavi Gogoi
CROSSOVER
skull snap in the cremation fire,
the only proof that your body
has crossed over,
a sound loud as truth
and just as final
— Vidya Premkumar
The Quiet Car
My heart surgery was going well, the train conductor told me. He said, be aware of your surroundings. I told him not to worry, but when I looked around me, I wasn’t so sure. Who were these other patients in the car? And where the hell did all of their hearts go?
— Elena Zhang
euphony angels
each slant rhyme carved
into marble
— Kat Lehmann
democracy
dedication does
demand droves—damsels, dandies
denounce decorum,
dignity; done drabbling,
dull dolts degrade decency.
— nat raum
broken yolk
a voice
lowers
— C.X. Turner
3.19 pm
The Wasp is drowsy,
fidgeting in your fingerprints,
its yellow belly grazed by the dust,
that you left when you dropped the news
about my job.
—Benjamin Macnair
Teasel
petrified octopus
under fuller’s earth
the zodial map increased
a hand in a hand
cupping sky wool
— Tony D’Arpino
day dreaming I caption my future
— Tazeen Fatma
Terrible haiku—
At my happiest
Furthest from you
— Patricia Fleming
Dane County
over the ash of my mother the ash of my father
and through the ash dune grasses continue to grow
the sand drift, shore-wash, and ash
wind-lifted like the lost down of a darkling gull
— Jeff Burt
eggshell
ivoryalabasterantique
champagnecoconutporcelainbone
oldlaceparchmentparched I was
punishing myself
all day jogging into the sea
—Lisa Kouroupis
scammers
sell laughter
in the cemetery
—Mykyta Ryzhykh
baleful stares I don’t say hi to the butcher
— petro ck
If you embrace the world,
will the world hug you back?
Well, if you don’t, it won’t.
I guarantee you that.
― John Menaghan
River Cipher
The city atrophies into an old map.
Pebbles nap on the riverbed.
Karma falls asleep on the automatic door.
The heron smudges the forehead of the sky.
― Chrissy Stegman
Dadaist Mantra
DADAOMDADAOMDADAOMDA
DADAONEDADAONEDADAONE
DACHAOSDACHAOSDACHAOS
DANONDASENSEDANONDASENSEE
DAIRRDAATIONDAALITIESDAEROSE
—Rose Knapp
Sunset
The body gives itself up in spasms of light.
Pain at a fractured rate. Every mirror,
a witness. We have no longing.
Noting what bruises easily.
The seaside.
— Robert Frede Kenter
Curse me first and thank
Me later for revealing
The scarred signet, proof
That devotion can untie
Bondage disguised as juncture.
— David Koehn
dog
ain’t never seen
no dog
i never loved
— david woodward
heat wave . . .
making their debut
sea monkeys
— Monica Kakkar
Remodeled
A nation suffering authoritarian rule
is like breaking a bone: The fracture
will form a callus then harden to bone
remodeled but never the same.
— Deron Eckert
apologies
after an ambush
ache accelerates; after
alabaster, ambient
arrhythmia appears and
acquires an antidote
— nat raum
Blackout
He doesn’t remember much after the lurch and pitch and thick smoke pouring from the Humvee like the broken logorrhea that he spills on me while drunk.
— Colleen Farrelly
faux smokestacks
dark chalk marks more so
or my name’s not erasure
snowbank gloomier
from the hotel swimming pool
a Portuguese man o war
— Jeanne Morel / Anthony Warnke
what of the muck you’ve become
snaking into me, barely sustaining
I kept in the soils of your temperament
your dawn to musking, deer sweat, navel
red as charlatan you diphthong’d to song
— Nikkin Rader
last leaf
questioning the semantics
of existence
— Jahnavi Gogoi
marshmallow
aflame on the stick
a boy’s breath
— Diane Webster
Passenger
He stared straight ahead phantom legs
danced above imaginary break pedals.
In the passenger seat transparent answers hid,
darker than Baikal’s depths.The road ahead
fiery: A sunset Hades knew would never rise.
— Marcus Slingsby
if only for the hour waning skylight
— Kat Lehmann
Snow canopies trees.
The calendar says April.
January won’t leave.
— Patricia Wallesverd
Island of Wak-Wak Press (Orebro, Sweden) recently released Ken Anderson‘s The Ward at Twilight: Goth Poems, nominee for the Elgin Award. Red Ogre Review Books (L.A.) released his The Goose Liver Anthology (Mother Goose Meets Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology), also a nominee for the Elgin Award. His first poetry book was The Intense Lover.
Sue Blaustein is the author and publisher of In the Field, Autobiography of an Inspector (2018), The Beer Line (2022) and All the Secrets Around Me (2025). She retired from the Milwaukee Health Department in 2016 after 25 years as a food safety inspector.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz Country, California. He has a chapbook, A Filament Drawn so Thin, from Red Bird Chapbooks, and a book The Root Endures due out from Sheila-Na-Gig in fall 2025.
Stephen C. Curro is a total nerd residing in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. His work has appeared with NewMyths and Scifaikuest, among other venues. You can keep up with his shenanigans here.
Matt Cilderman is a public school teacher in NJ. Publication credits: Chaffey Review, Foliate Oak, Right Hand Pointing, Red Wheelbarrow Poets, and an anthology by Tuleberg Press.
petro c.k. vacillates between being a vessel and a vassal in search of verisimilitude. He also edits the experimental micropoetry journals dadakuku and Post-Ku.
Celeste Colarič-Gonzales (she/her) is a writer, artist, editor, educator, and mother living in Oakland, CA, on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land. A teacher of Creative Writing and Composition, dual M(F)A candidate, Marcus Fellow and 14 Hills Editor at SFSU, she’s the recipient of several awards, including the Ann Fields Poetry Prize. Find her words+ in/forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Isele Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Blood Orange Review, NELLE, The Ana, Corporeal, Cosmic Daffodil, Woodcrest, and Transfer, where she’s served as Poetry Editor and Editor-In-Chief.
Emily Cronan bos here is a multimedia artist and writer from San Francisco, California. Their original play Nova Goes Below premiered in March 2025. INSTA SUBSTACK
Tony D’Arpino is an American poet living in England. His most recent book is Sky Tree Sky (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), a long poem based on the journals of the Scottish botanist David Douglas. He won the Winter Anthology contest in 2023 and is also a Djerassi Fellow.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-four full-length poetry collections, most recently Now Flourish Northern Cardinal, (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025). He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.
Eli Dunham (they/them) is a nonbinary, neurodivergent poet living in Sacramento, CA. They were a finalist in the 2025 National Poetry Series and a finalist in the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Their poems can be found in Dream Pop, Heavy Feather Review, Mantis, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere. Sometimes they post here.
Deron Eckert is a Pushcart-nominated poet and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Review, Atlanta Review, Wild Roof Journal, Blue Mountain Review, Rattle, Stanchion, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. INSTA
Colleen M. Farrelly is a mathematician and haibun writer. She’s a 2025-2026 confluence fellow, a Pushcart nominee, and a 2026 guest editor at Contemporary Haibun Online. Her recent pieces appear/are forthcoming in Rattle, Consequence, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and STREETCAKE, among others.
Tazeen Fatma is a talkative introvert who believes in writing with a purpose. She likes to pen verses and stories with honest emotions.She has been blessed with acceptances from renowned journals worldwide.
Alec Finlay is a poet and artist whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. In 2022 he completed I remember: Scotland’s Covid Memorial. His publications include Not Sealions But Lions by the Sea (Broken Sleep, 2025), The Walkative Revolution (Guillemont Press, 2025), and play my game (stewed rhubarb press, 2023).
Patricia Fleming is an artist, poet, stitch witch, with a passion for deep friendships, emotional intimacy, and the audacity to do it yourself. Their works exploring emotional intimacy and dark-personal themes are part talisman, spellwork, therapy, bitter valentine, and sacred heart. Patricia transplanted to Milwaukee in 2022 and loves exploring their new home city. WEB INSTA WFOP
Jahnavi Gogoi is a Canadian writer with roots in India. Her poetry often explores themes of belonging and identity, as well as loss.
Monica Kakkar (she/her/hers) values her freedom and peace. Two of her haiku have been nominated for The Haiku Foundation’s 2025 Touchstone Award for Individual Poems. Her haiku have won awards, reached final shortlists, been translated into three languages, and published on four continents. She enjoys location independence and has no social media presence except here.
Robert Frede Kenter is a writer & visual artist with innumerable projects & publications incl. EIC/publisher, curator & collaborator with international artists & writers at Ice Floe Press. Recent books: In the Blueprint of Her Iris a collaboration/hybrid with Vikki C., Father Tectonic (Ethel Zine Press), recent poems in Storms Journal, Cable Street, Ballast, Silver Branches/ Black Bough, Streetcake Magazine, Blood & Honey, HarpyHybrid, Otoliths, and many more. INSTA. BSKY
Stefanie Kirby is the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest; Remainder (Bull City Press, 2025); and Opening, forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press. Her poetry appears in Best of the Net, West Branch, Gigantic Sequins, Harpur Palate, Astrolabe, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado’s Front Range with her family.
Rose Knapp is an experimental poetess and sound artist. She is a transfemme androgyne. She has poetry collections with Hesterglock Press, Beir Bua Press, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. She has publications in Fence, Maintenant, WEB BSKY
David Koehn—author of Sur, three other full-lengths, three chapbooks, a prosody book, and other textual oddities—publishes when planetary alignment permits. Koehn’s writing appears in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Diagram, Gargoyle, Greensboro Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Volt, and ZYZZYVA. Koehn is a lecturer in creative writing and comp at San Jose State University. Pronounce Koehn like Cain, as in sugarcane, Novocain, cocaine, or candy cane.
Kat Lehmann is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her haiku collection no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song. Her mini-chapbook of sudo-ku (the multi-haiku form that she created) is available as a 2025 free download from Ghost City Press. WEB
Jane Lewty is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Bravura Cool (1913 Press) and In One Form To Find Another (CSU Poetry Center). She teaches art history and creative writing at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Her third collection, VESPERS, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in Fall, 2026
Joanne Macias is a multi-disciplinary creative, having featured in both online and print publications including Living Stories, Best of Times, The Sour Collective, Five Fleas Poetry, Short Stories Unlimited, Eloquentia, and many more. Focusing on no set genres, she loves to challenge reader perception through unique scenarios in everyday settings. If not writing, she is either teaching poetry or being distracted by the neighbour’s cat.
Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. TWITTER
Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea. Her short story collection, Overboard, will be published by Acid Bath Publishing in 2026. BSKY
John Menaghan has published 4 books with Salmon Poetry (All the Money in the World, She Alone, What Vanishes, & Here and Gone), been nominated 5 times for a Pushcart Prize, and had his poems appear in numerous journals, including Ambit, The Hopkins Review, Brilliant Corners, Poetry Ireland, Atlanta Review & American Arts Quarterly.
Pierre Minar was born in Lebanon, lives in Texas, and misses New Jersey. His writing appears in Hobart, Bruiser, Keith Journal, and a chapbook called Transmissions from My Yearning Chair from Bottlecap Press. INSTA
Jeanne Morel is the author of three chapbooks, most recently I See My Way to Some Partial Results (Ravenna Press). Her poem, “Loss & Other Forms of Death,” was selected by Leila Chatti for the 2021 Fugue Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Black Sunflowers, The Inflectionist Review, Great Weather for MEDIA, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and has been nominated for a Pushcart in both poetry and fiction.
Marianne Paul is a Canadian writer who discovered Japanese-styled micro poetry later in life, and has since worked hard to downsize her words. Her chapbook, Body Weight: A Collection of Art and Haiku, won the Haiku Canada Marianne Bluger Award.
Vidya Premkumar is a poet, visual artist, educator, and founder of Jñāna Vistar, based in Wayanad, creating Japanese short-form poetry, essays, art, and books on gender, education, resilience, and wonder.
nikkin rader has degrees in poetry, anthropology, philosophy, gender & sexuality studies, etc. time is spent with their fiancé, three cats, and dog. you can follow their twitter & insta. INSTA
Jessy Randall‘s poems, comics, and other things have appeared in McSweeney’s, Poetry, Scientific American, and Women’s Review of Books. She is the author of, most recently, two collections of poems about historical women in science: Mathematics for Ladies and The Path of Most Resistance (London: Goldsmiths, 2022 and 2025). She is a librarian at Colorado College. WEB
nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, editor, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. Past and upcoming publishers of their writing include Split Lip Magazine, Poetry.onl, Baltimore Beat, Poet Lore, beestung, and others. WEB
Mykyta Ryzhykh is an author from Ukraine, now living in Tromsø, Norway. Nominated for Pushcart Prize and Touchstone prize. Published many times in literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal. His book Tombboy will be published in 2026 by Lost telegram press.
Shloka Shankar is a poet, editor, and visual artist from Bangalore, India. A Best of the Net nominee and widely published haiku poet, Shloka is the Founding Editor of Sonic Boom and its imprint Yavanika Press. She is the author of the haiku collections The Field of Why and within our somehows, and co-author of the haiga anthology, living in the pause. WEB INSTA
Marcus Slingsby was born in Yorkshire in 1973. During his 20’s and early 30’s he travelled the world; working the 1st to wander the 3rd. He lives in Friesland with his family.
Robin Smith is a honeybadger cyborg who loves spaghetti. They do other stuff like edit for whiptail: journal of the single-line poem and be presidential at The Haiku Foundation.
Chrissy Stegman is a poet and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in Rattle, River Heron Review, Gargoyle, UCity Review, Okay Donkey, Gone Lawn, and BULL, among others. She is the author of Somewhere, Someone Is Forgetting You and a nominee for both the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize.
Debbie Strange (Canada) is a chronically ill short-form poet and artist whose creative passions connect her more closely to the world. Strange’s haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks (Snapshot Press, 2024), received third place honours in the 2025 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards. WEB
Anthy Strom is a poet based in High River A.B. Their work has recently appeared in Croak and Bitter Melon Review. When not writing, hiking or cat-wrangling, they can be found desperately battling the mint that has currently taken over their garden.
C.X. Turner writes poems about dandelions, frozen fingers, and frogs. Passionate about Japanese short-form poetry, she is the author of evergreen – a collection of haiku, senryu and tanka (Alba Publishing, 2024). INSTA ETSY
Patricia Wallesverd lives in northern Wisconsin with her husband and a dog named Dorothy. She finds much inspiration in the nature that surrounds her.
Anthony Warnke‘s poetry has appeared in Cimarron Review, North American Review, Salt Hill, Sentence, Sixth Finch, and Sugar House Review, among other journals. His chapbook Super Worth It was released by Newfound Press. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches writing at Green River College and lives in Kent, Washington.
Diane Webster‘s haiku/senryu have appeared in failed haiku, Kokako, Enchanted Garden Haiku and others. She had micro-chaps published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. WEB
Laura Wetherington has two poetry books: Parallel Resting Places (Parlor Press), chosen by Peter Gizzi for the New Measure Poetry Prize, and A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books), selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. Laura works as the poetry editor for Baobab Press and teaches with both the International Writers’ Collective and UNR-Tahoe’s low-residency MFA Program. She is currently making visual sonnets and working on a book-length collaboration with Hannah Ensor.
david woodward aka un-known lives just south of Montreal with his wife and son. Some of his most recent pieces were discovered in the engine(idling (poem nominated for Best of the Net), North Dakota Quarterly, The Field Guide Poetry Magazine (Featured Poet), Wilderness House Review, and upcoming in The Universes Poetry Magazine in the U.K.
Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, and X-R-A-Y, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025.
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