HYPNOPOMPIA_2024-2025

AGAPANTHUS COLLECTIVE

Hypnopompia

Annual 2024-25

The Agapanthus Collective Issue #7: Hypnopompia Annual 2024 Editors: Jay Tarashi Surosree Chaudhuri Arli Li Cover Art: Arli Li Layout: Tomo K.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Reader, Our first issue was called Lucid, with the idea of bringing consciousness to a dream. Since then, we have had the honor of conveying the dreams of many wonderful contributors. Hypnopompia harkens back to our origin, and reflects our recommitment to the work of uplifting authors from myriad backgrounds.

For the past couple of years, the operation of this magazine has been reflective of the health and well-being of those at the core of it. The slow stretch of sinew that has been unmoving for a little too long has been painful at times. There is also an excitement to it, a rediscovery of hidden strength. As we blink the sleep out of our eyes, we look to the rays of light that shine through - the creative energy and support of our contributors and readers.

We thank you all for the patience and kindness you have shown to our team. We hope that this issue can serve as a small, treasured window into many different worlds.

Much love, The Editorial Team

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CONTENTS Timeshare — Robert Beveridge The Nose Hair — James Croal Jackson Again, I See the Dawn — Rochelle Jewel Shapiro Smooth for Now — Marianne Brems The writing teacher — DS Maolalai Arthritipod — Mary Ann Dimand A dedication — Lexi Herbert The Nomad — Ivan Niccolai Dinner — Lilli Nilsson Till Death — Lilli Nilsson Steel Echoes — Morgan Boyer Trauma Goggles — Cadence McCracken look in look — Eva Allison cat got your tongue? — Isobel Burke Zoochosis — Zoe Korte The Ocean is F(l)at — Ash Reynolds Ode to My Surgeon — Cadence McCracken Conversation Over a Late-Night Snack — Remi Ladia Questions on Filopappou Hill — Larena Nellies-Ortiz Astrologists at odds — Grace Piontek Contributor Bios

6 7 8 10 11 12 13 14 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 28 30 31 32 34 4

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Timeshare Robert Beveridge when you open the door and the world changes from b&w to color you ask the bartender for a kansas when they ask you say it’s like a manhattan but with extra dust and not as crowded

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The Nose Hair James Croal Jackson There is a strand of gold that sometimes grows in my bed of black hair that shows in my beard in the sun.

Two weddings these past two weekends, and you were kind to not tell me about my long, shimmering nose hair you claim no one noticed.

Driving home from work the other night, I saw a shooting star, a long strand of golden light over Pittsburgh’s skyline.

It reminded me of you, but I forgot to mention it.

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Again, I See the Dawn Rochelle Jewel Shapiro of my childhood when women stood lonely in Edward Hopper windows, still in their full slips, or already in flowered housecoats.

They took in these moments after their husbands left for work and before their children woke up clamoring for those tiny boxes of cereal, perforated for easy opening, the milk poured right into the boxes’ wax paper lining, a miracle— only a spoon to wash.

Soon the laundryman would deliver the wet wash and each side window opened, rusted pullies creaking as clothes were clothespinned to ropes that spanned alleyways in arcs.

The women shopped wearing one of their three weekday dresses, stockings rolled over rubber bands just below the knees.

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Tasks, tasks, tasks, then dusk when front windows opened again and women leaned out, shouting down to their children Get upstairs in Italian, in Greek, in Yiddish, in German, in brogues, in dialects.

But at dawn, all spoke silence.

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Smooth for Now Marianne Brems Like the smoothness of refried beans or soft serve ice cream, their perfect skin firm and sleek as they fill your order, their smiles creasing only temporary folds that spring back with the vigor of fresh elastic.

A quickness punctuates their movements with an energy they never imagine will fade, their minds full with resistance to parental restrictions, fear of not fitting in, earning money for school.

We need them for their need to serve, for their swift agile response, for their supple willing smiles, before they grow into heartbreak, face the demands of child rearing, struggle to make ends meet, that will loosen their skin, leave uninvited crevasses that only time will tell them really don’t matter.

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The writing teacher DS Maolalai a friend has been teaching creative writing classes. he began as a sideline; his main income now – what with covid and everything else – with the best of his students, (he mentions in passing) now trying some small competitions. “I shouldn’t have worked so hard teaching her,” he says, through a mouthful of sandwich when I meet him for lunch. “be fucked if I lost out to something I’d made what it was.” he is sprawled out and wearing this long woollen coat he had bought because it made him feel writerly. I tell him don’t worry – that maybe he’s a terrible teacher. “I hope so”, he says, “god I hope so. can do damn all else now, except hope”

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Arthritipod Mary Ann Dimand “Pray, which leg comes after which?”

Arthritis in my knees has made of me a centipede. I lie, distracted, pondering each new path—its curbs, its stairs, its slopes, uncharted threats and options. Where are there benches, on ways to what trains, with what stairs? Will I clot the narrow flow through close-set walls? I plan, replan, in nescience of the on-the-ground, plan toward iterative perfection beyond my then horizons. (What slopes, what slicks, what hasty traffic, what iced puddles?) Patience, time, and hard-seized knowledge must map my spaces to my brain to free my eyes to rise from pavement, till the sky is in my sight. My time, not flesh, in segments.

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A dedication Lexi Herbert Alone in brolga bushland while the car runs idle, the pleasure of letting sleeping dogs twitch.

When I saw the scrub wallaby acting sentinel on the beach, I willed him deeper into the reserve, wished him away from the black water.

I found pleasure in the silence of the road instead of the view from the mountain.

The summer that Caroline’s small white hand slipped between my two false ribs.

She tugged loose a floating thought. An alert, a threat – her hair wrapped around it in a web, or a net.

Wherever she goes to find answers I’ve not been invited.

The axe in my hand is heavier than the wood upon which I release it.

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The Nomad Ivan Niccolai This wasn’t cool deracination, or temporary autonomous zones at the weekend rave, this wasn’t bohemian-chic festival aesthetics, being a living breathing accident of nomadic origins. This was confusion and loneliness.

Why were all the languages and accents so alien, so simply not quite right?

What wouldn’t the nomad have given for a placid, white picket fence upbringing, and how surprised he was seeing picket fence kids doing everything they could to bury the picket fence over layers and layers of affectations. There was cold comfort in being a topic of interest for 15 minutes, before they saw something that startled them, that gave them pause. A raucous laugh, just a little too loud, revealing crooked teeth, dark humour and an unkempt joy. Nomad knew exactly what it was they saw and the moment they saw it, because he’d been staring at it all his life.

He’d been trying to hide it and fix it and plaster over it and make sense of it ever since he could remember.

This was quite possibly an infectious void of incompleteness, of jangled edges that wouldn’t fit together, a doom drawer of dusty knickknacks and old mementos and unfinished stories with abrupt endings. They looked at it with incomprehension, assumed a failure of curation, but suspected something just a bit more unwholesome.

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Nomadic by birth isn’t visually pleasing, it isn’t a quirky assemblage of carefully selected tchotchkes and mannerisms. It’s an incomplete collection of items that should long ago have been thrown away. Those objects hold the key to foreclosed, contingent places. Pins randomly strewn across a map. Places the nomad technically had no right to return to, belong to, or to yearn for. Dusty gifts from a long-gone lover. A frayed paperback much underlined from an Eastern European author who understood exile, a poem scribbled on a piece of office paper written for him by an Italian sergeant, a Zambian tax return, an expired German passport, a South African bank card, an Ivory pillbox. Parts that don’t make up a cohesive whole, yet are all there is.

There would still be moments when wistful yearnings would stir in his soul for places far away, or a sense memory would hit him in the guts with an inhuman force of a recollection. He couldn’t explain his yearning for mountains and the comfort of racing in their precipitous roads, or the smell and the wideness of the sky in the savannah. Appenzeller cheese had him back in the Alps, hearing the cow bells and the clinking of tin milk palls, a roast beef prepared by a Tuscan friend had him at his grandmother’s dinner table, remembering her comforting gossip and lessons in Italian spite.

Skincare and exercise and tasteful clothing and therapy and imitation can get the nomad far in simulating being a real person. Polishing the jagged edges around the void. But they can sense the uncanny valley, the unbelievable messiness of his innards, which they just put down to not-being-from-around-here, except that’s everywhere.

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At some point the detritus in nomad’s dusty doom drawer rotted, fermented, and something potable emerged from the broth. Something synthetic, sufficiently synthesised, to meet the exacting aesthetic standards the nomad had evolved over decades of comparative cross-examination and observation. All the nomad knew now was that the world didn’t need to be voraciously devoured and sifted through to find what was missing. It was too late for that. The question had slipped away in the night, dispensing with the motive that drove the reflex to find and repair and analyse. The nomad had seen himself a masterless dog, an ugly illegitimate creature of happenstance, not recognising the beauty of his sharp claws and sleepy snake eyes and acrobatic tongue.

He’d obsessed about hierarchy and foolish canine concerns like where to fit in and where to belong when there were svelte skittish geckos to hunt. He’d thought about torts and wrong-doings in a dog-like, zero-sum way, but now age and fermentation had transmuted him into something decadent and feline. He thought of immediate pleasures and had a shorter memory.

He realised, like cats innately do, that life is both short and vulnerable, but boredom is equally intolerable. Could it really boil down to a careless arithmetic of pleasure? To the introduction of salubrious levels of chaos, and the wisdom to know when to withdraw from other people’s chaos when it exceeded his risk tolerance levels? Things don’t go to plan, they never had, there never was a plan. Desire overrides meaning. Feline chaos glimmered in his drooping snake eyes. Cats know that everything was always about developing a working relationship with the void, and that life is a realpolitik calculus of leverage, ambition, and whimsy. Feline artifice proffered far more possibilities for chicanery, and the nomad, now drunk on the elixir of the void, was at long last comfortable in his own skin.

Time to hunt and play. Time to adorn the event horizon with fairy lights, drink deeply from its fizzing cauldron, and make peace with that voracious void.

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Dinner Lilli Nilsson The table is grand–bare, breathing, Oak. We bring what can be shucked: Our silk and stalks. Selves.

We shoot sparrows and steam asparagus, Unclean as it is. Bluish and bruised as us.

The dizzy night hurls on. We dance Feet wet with her trembling, pitching Silver and sails. The stalking is sweet, The stalks tender. The night and her light Damp and a layer less made.

Wood groans. The evening winks and drains. Each of us become a mother To these soiled and ceramic children, Tall with bones and ears and the potato’s winking eye.

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Till Death Lilli Nilsson Anemone sways, a lover at her lover’s wedding: bending and unmoving, weeping and unmoved.

Then starfish spreads her legs and the whole crowd leers, turns, watches the lover become the loved as she’s pressed beneath the snail’s twisting shell and briny gaze, then The taking of vows—a stinging interlude—silence in kelp’s cut stems, a series of sighs. A hazy ache between lactuca’s pleats. Our whiskered mussel, hoary and chipped with age, watching anemone. Ordaining this union.

Bubbling his discontent.

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Steel echoes Morgan Boyer Hear the ghostly echoes of a steel-rod producing factory’s siren roaring, trying to silence the cries of union picketers. Come ye, lovely, to the three-story duck that was here for a mere month that people took pilgrimages to witness and worship. Our bars shoplift the carcasses of churches and inhabit them like maggots. A student with drooling mascara, filling herself with the corpse’s fluid, trembles out with one high heel on, screaming into her phone outside of the retro-themed bowling alley next to the Dunkin Donuts on West Liberty Avenue.

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Trauma Goggles Cadence McCracken I can see the silhouette of my rapist in your shadow, an origami paper tiger crouching behind each iris.

I fold myself all over to strike back against the chalk outline of the last time we kissed and felt something.

I sever my pointer finger, throw it into the crater and name you comet, something that orbits my gravity as I brace for impact. After extinction, I am fearless.

I stare directly at the sun and challenge it to “fuck or fight”. I place both hands between us, make shadow puppets on my face, and call that history.

Beneath my feet, the groundwater smells like whiskey.

I sink my ladle deep and drink like burning redwoods.

This is the season of wildfire ink. My pen used to mark the boundary between dystopia and reality.

Trauma is a liar, the way poets are.

I hate poems. I can’t remember the words.

I cast an army of drafts into the genesis of us and the line breaks.

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look in look Eva Allison the ladybugs lay dead curled into the limbs of each others deflated stomachs. i stare at their unmovement and want more for the both of us–to scrape some sort of life out of the dirt– we all deserve to die noticed. sometimes, when the rain corrodes the sidewalk i watch my shadow fall beneath the water, a reflection of no person, just being. the paradoxes claim this isn’t true. yet, when i unravel myself out, the sequence goes like this look in look through a pile of organs, finding only plain function in the function of finding a plain pile of organs, looking through, this sequence of unraveling myself goes like this i claim this isn’t true, the paradox of no person, just being. i watch the water fall beneath my shadow, the sidewalk a reflection of when the rain corrodes and dies. sometimes we all deserve to be noticed. yet, the dirt scrapes the life out of the both of us, i stare and want more then deflated stomachs. but now there’s unmovement curled into the limbs of each others dead, the ladybugs lay

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cat got your tongue?

Isobel Burke i close my eyes and i am left in the dark like an inkwell overturned, a mind stained black aphantasia is the inability to visualise. studies have shown people with aphantasia demonstrate higher autistic traits. i learned how to read when i was 3 and think in full sentences. my mind is a dark room and on every spare inch of any spare surface— walls, ceiling, floor, bed frame, table legs— are words, my words i stumble when i speak, a dancer with two left feet, stuttering and pausing, searching for the right words and failing— my words come out wrong: illegible scrawl and ink bleed, unfinished, marked up in red and bad

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imso rryimju streallynotgoo dwithmywo rds “what did you say?” imsor ryimnots tupidipro miseimbet tertha nthis “Isobel, you’re mumbling.” imsor ryimsorryi msorr yims orry im “sorry about that!” i couldn’t get the words out when my nana asked what was wrong with me. i handed her my copies of crush and war of the foxes, defaced with highlights and black lines, and felt very foolish humans have been speaking for thousands of years i can’t imagine an apple but i can show it to you— i can carve its curves out of words, remind you of red, not like blood, but like a sunrise, vibrant but not deep, take you by the hand and run your fingers down a length of black electrical tape to clarify i’m not talking about our skin when i talk about taking the kitchen knife by its charcoal handle and pushing its cold edge just below the surface — i can’t say how i feel, either, but i can tell you there is a lockbox at the bottom of the lake i spent my youth at that i am afraid to fish back up because the thing i hid inside will not be put down twice.

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Zoochosis Zoe Korte I don’t want to put numbers to song, put mint in my tequila.

I don’t want to feel it in my teeth, don’t want to run in my sleep like an old basset hound, make the children giggle and point at my brain that is dreaming of hares, my brain that grew legs just to tear up blue grass, my brain that stinks of matted roots and damp minerals churning in my wake. I just remembered there are two crayons in my box called wisteria and purple mountain majesty, and I would like some time to scribble. All I do is waste daylight, butter, paper, oxygen, crayons. I’ve been saving up my whole life for today, the day I get to start wasting it. That somber little scribe would be horrified that I’m bastardizing wisteria this way. If I can’t make them proud, I’ll make them shudder.

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The Ocean is F(l)at Ash Reynolds i.

I was sixteen before I saw the ocean (and could remember it)

(and could appreciate it) and the first thing that struck adolescent me the first thing the ocean told me

whispered its susurration in my ear: Look to the horizon Look to the horizon Look to the horizon

with every wave that crashed; I looked and saw flatness the same baldness that plagued me at home

where the cornfields bullied me

and the even horizon spared me no second glance. ii.

I spent my childhood laying in Illinois fields my spine unnaturally straightened on the springy grass while my belly reached for celestial bodies above.

I dreamed of passage out, I dreamed of mountains and craters, I dreamed of undulating hills and violent oceans. I dreamed of shrinking my belly so it was flat like my tiny backyard. You cannot build a treehouse on a meniscus, my father said; I could not build a flat life for my roundness.

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iii.

The line of the ocean’s horizon

extends out on either side

geometric definition:

the two end points will never touch—

it is infinite in its star-crossed skyline

and though the waves spill

secrets on the shore

little mumbles they do not scream and I always pictured them screaming.

No—they caress, they are the cymbal when the drummer just barely taps

rain on a tin roof shhh in a library. iv.

Flat searches for flesh to feed on, the devoured can attest: hearts hard-boiled and left blaming themselves; the curves of the aorta mimicked in the parabolas of bodies their equations are left unsimplified, unsolved teetering between consciousness and gut feelings; the guts: they are winding and wild and anything but flat, except in alternate universes—their gods’ fingers are imbued with the power to airbrush.

These gods demand sacrifices of all that is holy before flat becomes convex, then flat again.

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v.

My round body met the flat ocean it splashed over my chest

and atop my SPF’d shoulders our mutual expansiveness gave me permission:

Take up space.

Fill your container.

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Ode to My Surgeon Cadence McCracken In the operating room, the doctor becomes God’s proof reader, red penning the parts of her that got smudged in the printer, becomes a carpenter, takes an angle grinder to her corners and makes curves where once she had armor, becomes a painter, dapples blush on the delicate parchment of her collar bone, softens jaw, lifts eyebrows like a sandstone sunrise, grows lip into ripe juicy fruit, stretches the canvas of her skin, folds her pink flesh like origami into the masterpiece it was always meant to be.

The doctor becomes an hourglass, speeds up the eons to mold the geology of her body.

We watch great curtains of rain sweep across the topography of her chest, eroding new hills and valleys.

Time and estrogen softens flesh like soil, and this desert becomes brushland, becomes aspen grove, and we hear a little girl’s laughter echoing through the undergrowth.

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The doctor becomes an engineer, creates a canal to let the thunderstorm in and she is water now able to receive, able to transform ecstasy, and now she knows what it’s like to experience pleasure for the first time.

Her body is alchemy.

Her body is one entire planet.

She has lived so many lives, and now it is this one.

Despite the growing pains, transition is a privilege, this creation myth we bloom from ash.

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Conversation Over a Late-Night Snack Remi Ladia Sit, eat, the kitchen table your altar and the halo of refrigerator light Rendering you godly, and when I set the porcelain before you it is That steady clink: the only sound for miles, save for the exhale of Steam and hot breath and teeth clicking shut around another soft Sweet bite. It is the warmth more than anything. It is the smoke Unfurling in my stomach -- cavernous, never full -- that thaws, it is The heat of the bowl between trembling hands. I would be so greedy As to swallow a star if given the chance. If given the chance, I would Eat just about anything. How much more truth can you stomach?

I dreamt I was cutting fruit for you and woke up with a knife in my hand.

Your fingernails sink into the flesh of a tangerine, tipping slices over The steep edge of my bowl. This alone should be proof enough. No Birds sing, no sun shines, no sound floods the kitchen -- the kitchen!

And still we sit, eating not for survival but for pleasure. This should Be proof enough that we are content. The pith unfurls with the peel.

Exocarp beneath my finger-nails. A segment between your lips like A sunny smile. A segment between my lips like yellow teeth. Gorging.

A surfeit of something good. The empty peels on the table, curling up Towards the sky in remembrance of what was once there, reaching Out and asking me to take their hands. So? Will you take them? The Earth curves upwards, too, and the sun downwards; the moon pulls You near and the waves beckon you closer. Tug-of-war. Let the incurve Of the bowl draw you in. Sit. Eat. We are in the kitchen. There is no Place for hunger in a kitchen so full.

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Questions on Filopappou Hill Larena Nellies-Ortiz Cicadas chirp from stooped pines, fragrant cypress dappled shade of silvery olive trees softening the merciless morning heat Here I am resting, sweat slicked thighs against cold white marble, the bench, low and sturdy stone that belongs on this patch of dry earth rise up to see the sea as the rest of the city wrestles for space To whom and what do we owe ourselves? does the pebble we reach for with a crooked shock of white through its amber middle long to be held?

I’ll find it later, like an old creased grocery list a reminder of what I needed, or wanted Does loneliness ever get lighter? it’s so sly, the captive life the endless reel of things, people, thoughts that grab our wrists with promise tells us to wait for happiness that just you wait, this will make it right How did a ripe orange make me so happy? forgotten in the refrigerator until now it’s syrupy juice dripping from my sun parched lips Some days I just whisper thank you thank you thank you to log and lodge the blessings in my bones, under my breath 31

Astrologists at odds Grace Piontek There was earth magic in your doorway I walked cautiously into rooms ever-changing hard armor over all treasure I was beset by sharp swords your tongue deft and lingering over places vulnerable I would spend all shades of daylight discovering inside was a sleepless architect I conversed with during each phase of the moon to work and woke anew connection another red feature which I thought was a campfire

my bed your kitchen our next six months

and you thought was the first silver train leaving for Chicago.

Questions on Filopappou Hill Larena Nellies-Ortiz 33

Contributor Bios Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry on unceded Mingo land (Akron, OH). He published his first poem in a non-vanity/non-school publication in November 1988, and it’s been all downhill since. Recent/upcoming appearances in Utriculi, Rat’s Ass Review, and New English Review, among others.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, and The Round. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com) Rochelle Jewel Shapiro's novel, Miriam The Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2005), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. She’s published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines. Shapiro’s poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and she won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability. Her poetry collection, Death Please Wait, was published by Box Turtle Press. Currently, she teaches writing at UCLA Extension. For more information about her and her work, please visit https://rochellejshapiro.com/.

Marianne Brems is the author of the full-length poetry collection Stepping Stones and three chapbooks In Its Own Time, Unsung Offerings, and Sliver of Change. Her poems have also appeared in literary journals including Cider Press Review, Front Porch Review, Remington Review, and Lavender Review. She lives, cycles, and swims in Northern California.

Website: www.mariannebrems.com.

DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has nominated twelve times for Best of the Net, eight for the Pushcart Prize and once for the Forward Prize, and has been released in three collections; Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016), Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019) and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022)

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Contributor Bios Mary Ann Dimand was born in Southern Illinois where Union North met Confederate South, and her work is shaped by kinships and conflicts: economics and theology, farming and feminism and history. Dimand holds an MA in economics from Carleton University, an MPhil from Yale University, and an MDiv from Iliff School of Theology. Some of her previous publication credits include: The History of Game Theory Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1945; The Foundations of Game Theory; and Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics, among others.

Lexi Herbert is a Melbourne-born writer living in New York. Her previous work has appeared in Beat, Brain Freeze and Farrago, and is upcoming in CWYR. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fall 2024 Fellowship finalist.

Ivan Niccolai is a queer cult brat bastard who grew up across twenty countries. He currently resides in Melbourne, Australia and writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

A California native, Lilli Nilsson is a recent English and Anthropology graduate at Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts.

Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and a graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic. Boyer is a neurodivergent bisexual woman who resides in Pittsburgh, PA. Cadence McCracken (she/her) is a sweet and fierce trans femme poet, multimodal artist and expressive arts therapist thriving with grit and grace in Oakland, CA. She makes her home exploring subjects such as gender, addiction, heartbreak, justice, threading strands of magical realism and incendiary performances into criminally authentic works that live and breathe with love on the page or stage. Cadence is Grand Slam Champion, National Poetry Slam semi-finalist and four-time competitor, as well as a two-time representative at the Individual World Poetry Slam. Her work has been published in Ink and Marrow, Agapanthus Collective, and What Are Birds, as well as video platforms such as SlamFind and Write About Now. In her spare time she enjoys ecstatic dance and trail running.

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Contributor Bios Eva Allison is a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke College, and she is the 2024 recipient of the Ada L.F. Snell Poetry Prize from the college. She was a finalist for the 2025 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and you can find her writing in recent or upcoming publications in Beneath The Mask Journal, boats against the current, Blue Villa Magazine, and more. In her free time, you can find her reading and searching for that long-lost crochet hook.

Isobel Burke is a queer Canadian poet born and raised on Vancouver Island. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Prize for Poetry and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including PRISM International, The Malahat Review, ANMLY, Anti-Heroin Chic, and 13tracks Magazine. More of her work can be found @poet.unmoored on Instagram Zoe Korte is a mad and queer poet with work in new words {press}, Roi Fainéant, Maudlin House, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. They have earned degrees in English, Spanish, and Ancient Greek from the University of Missouri. They also serve as the assistant acquisitions editor and social media manager for Sundress Publications. They live in St. Louis with their partner and two tortoiseshell cats. You can find them on Instagram @zoekpoetry or Bluesky @ mostlymosspoetry.

Ash Reynolds (they/them) is a nonbinary, queer, ace poet living in College Park, MD, USA with their rescue dog and 41 houseplants. Ash has written their whole life but is new to getting their work published. Find Ash gardening, Lego-ing, and squirrel- and bird-watching from the kitchen window.

Remi Ladia is an aspiring Vietnamese-Filipino poet from Virginia and will be attending Cornell University in the fall as a member of the class of 2028. Though her intended major is computer science, creative writing has always been a passion of hers and is something she hopes to continue to nurture alongside her love for math and the sciences.

Larena Nellies-Ortiz (she/her), is a poet and photographer from Oakland, California. Her poetry has been featured in Bitter Melon Review, Libre Literary Magazine, Local Wolves Magazine, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Wordpeace.

Grace Piontek (they/them) is a visual artist and poet. Through their work, they explore identity, self-expression, and gender fluidity grounded within observations of the natural world.

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