Just Another Souvenir / Across the Road by Vandana Kumar

Just Another Souvenir

It’s nice to belong to a city
And own a souvenir shop
Magnets for a fridge
T-shirts double the price outside
That sort of place

I love to follow the outsider gaze
the curious tourists
Not knowing the local language
Doing all kinds of currency conversions
Silently in their heads

I wonder which homes
In which countries
Will be gifted
Those bubble-packed mugs

I wonder if one of those mugs
Would break in transit
If a pen to be gifted, would leak

I wonder if the memory of a city they visited
And its famed beauty
Gets defiled by these
If it makes my city
And its products
As ordinary as theirs




Across the Road

Across the road
There is this couple holding hands
Like there was no tomorrow
As though they would lose each other
Miss the train to nowhere
If they let go of each other

They haven’t done an iota of shopping
No bread
No eggs
No ham
So that their hands aren’t engaged
Holding things from their mundane list
The omelette can clearly wait

The dogs on my side
Bark just once
and lay down

Across the road
Might be a promise of forever
This side of the street
There is only the hum of air-conditioning
An inertia
That won’t swallow this summer afternoon sun

Vandana Kumar is a French teacher and multiple award-winning poet from New Delhi, India. Her poems have been published in over 150 national and international websites and anthologies of repute. She is a Pushcart prize nominee 2023 and her poetry collection ‘Mannequin of Our Times’ has won several awards.

Albino Turtles / Half-caste by Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan

Albino Turtles

On tiptoes, my little one
leaned into the concrete tank,
squealed at the different one,
a bent index jabbing
at the unusual silver-blue
of the painted tank —
the colour that lurks
in murky moonstones.
The absent colour on the shell
glared back at us.
You are the last ones for the day,
the minder shrugged. The albino turtle is rare,
one in thousands, a million, she said,
it would never survive its sea,
and any darkness
a deep blue might conceal.
I took a picture, and in its frame,
on the still ripples of transparent
water, our reflections were caught,
my son laughing, and I
watching, in my half-caste skin.




Half-caste

Half-caste I, my face
rarely blotched,
my eyes as serene as colour zoned
amethyst crystals, I stand like
a weed stalk waiting
for the push-pull hoe
in the church hall, drenched
by the sermon, insides
quivering ever so slightly, yet
they only see that I don’t
cross myself when I should have,
and their eyes flicker
with the question,
Did his mother not teach him?

Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan is a nephrologist, clinician-educator, and researcher based in Kozhikode, India. His debut poetry collection, The Coppiced House (Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 2024), was followed by Almanac of the Sickle Moon (Hawakal Publishers, 2025). The Coppiced House received the Kala Prathibha Award at the Kala Literature Awards 2026.

Carrots / More Than Words by William Ogden Haynes

Carrots

After the fire, they stood in the pilsner light of a late
summer afternoon, squinting through the still-rising

smoke from the rubble. They were looking at the
bones of their family home scorched black, with only

the chimney left standing like a gravestone. Ancestors
of the family had lived in that old shotgun house for a

hundred years. But now, they’ve lost everything. All
that remains is a seared, crinkled snapshot, darkened

silverware, a ceramic doll turned black, a charred
refrigerator, cracked dinnerware, and skeletons of burnt

furniture. The house was the anchor of the family through
four generations and those irreplaceable burned artifacts

marked the milestones of their lives. But soon, the memories
will gradually fall away, like when grandma washed carrots

from the garden in the kitchen sink, flushing the soil they
grew up in, down the drain, as if they came from nowhere.




More Than Words

You read the words. They speak of love
and loss, dreams and despair, of the

overlooked beauty in the mundane. But,
a poem, if written well, goes beyond the

literal meaning and grammar. It begins
as a small disruption you can’t ignore, a

mosquito that comes and goes, whining
in your ear. Poetry borrows the familiar

and gives it back transformed into something
relevant to you. That love it describes, becomes

your girlfriend, and the loss speaks of your
grandmother’s death. It unlocks a room you’re

already in and strikes a match, lighting it
just enough for you to see the revelation.

Poetry does not explain but stimulates. A
poem is more than words on a page. It’s about

the moment you find yourself in a stranger’s
work and feel it was written for you alone.

William Ogden Haynes is a poet and author of short fiction from Alabama who was born in Michigan. He has published several collections of poetry and many of his poems and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. http://www.williamogdenhaynes.com.

Lucy''s Gift / For a Time by Frederick Wilbur

Lucy’s Gift

Home between semesters,
she waits tables on a busy Friday
evening at Vito’s Pizzeria
in our Blue Ridge Mountain village;
mountains older than the Roman Empire.

Smiling, face glistening, she
bustles from booth to booth.
The pre-football game crowd
is animated, noisy; the pizza
take-out line is nearly out the door.

A woman, only a few years older,
with two squirmy kids, notices
the tattoos on her arm—
hummingbird and lily-of-the-valley—
and kindly admires them.

They’re for my grandfather, Lucy explains.
Oh, so sorry he has passed,
the woman whispers like a secret
the other customers don’t need to know.

No, no, he’s still alive, Lucy states factually,
delivering the check and piling
empty plates with an efficient clatter.

The woman leaves a tip she cannot afford,
writes on the receipt, “to help with funeral expenses.”




For a Time

There is nothing to be gained from loss. Twyford James

Puny raspberries dropped by drought,
makes picking them a meaningless effort.
Though concentrated in flavor no doubt,
we sacrifice the reward of a prized quart

to foraging deer. Grief has no sell-by
date or self-help renewal to wholesome
apology or well-phrased alibi.
To heal hurt, we must accept the tedium

of this season and hope for consolation.
Harvest is always racing against rot
which infects as a desperate addiction.
As pure as grief can be, it is not

a sure anodyne soothing all sorrow,
but a might of mercy we can only borrow.

Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps and The Heft of Promise. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine.  He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).

Where’s the Guy Who Wrote All Those Poems? by Robert L. Penick

It’s just neurons in my head, firing.
Bumble bees and wilted flowers,
a song heard once on a tinny radio.
Regret hanging like smoke in a treetop.
Think twice and it’s gone.

I still use a pen, hold it
between fingers fat as cigars
while coaxing out a line
every twenty-three minutes.
This sport is not fit for broadcast.

Remember, Michelangelo was a bit
of a beast. And Picasso.
And Jackson Pollock, that idiot
who liked to spatter paint.
At least I keep my shoes clean.





Robert L. Penick is not someone you would notice on the street.

On the Marble by John Swain

We lay our palms
on the marble

behind the candle
illuminating the moon stairs,
incense smoke
gates the door
like aloes seal
the sheer nightgown to your body,
we pour oil
from a horn
onto lowering torches,
the night follows
the stone hallway
like a luna moth,
you whiten the rain
on our graveclothes,
and we rise as the chandelier fires
become a unified flame.

John Swain lives in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, France. His most recent chapbook, The Daymark, was published by the Origami Poems Project.

Palace of Light / Fierce Wind by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal

Palace of Light

It appears
naked,
moonlight,
round and white,
like milk, like water,
like liquor infused,
not blinding like the sun.
It conjures ghosts 
at midnight 

on the first day
and seventh day
in April. Its body,
a palace of light.
It lives in
the sky
in trembling glow.

Fierce Wind

The fierce wind
sparked my memory

of the night 
I dreamt you left me.

The fierce wind
took all the flowers

away and
the fragile birds were

grounded. Their

wings were not so strong.

The fierce wind
took away the smile

from my face.
I flew away to

the center

of the hurricane.

I dreamt I

died inside of me.

Born in Mexico, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal lives in California and works in Los Angeles, His poetry has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, Poppy Road Review, and Unlikely Stories. His latest book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.