Spring 2026

Contents

Also available as an audio issue and by podcast

Editorial

Be Quiet Like the Tree | Caroline Langston

Poetry

The Temple | Andreas Fleps

Unfaithful | Randy Koch

Hymn (3) | E. R. Skulmoski

The Spatter of Waterfalls | Joshua Coben

The Other Life | Daniel Thomas

Moving Day | Brian G. Phipps

Survivor’s guilt | Mary Lanham

Variations on Mercy | Lindsey Weishar

Can and Bottle Man | Skip Renker

Where's that boat going? & We are wearing history heavy like a raincoat | Caleb Horowitz

Gravel at Every Turn & Oceans of Salty Sky | Annette Sisson

Blind-Vein | David Anson Lee

Awkwardness | Arthur McMaster

Great and Holy Monday | Marci Rae Johnson

Nonfiction

Cinctura | Jeffrey-Michael Kane

Cloud Study | Daniel Cooperrider

Visual Arts

Thresholds | Chen Wenwei

The Needle’s Pierce | Maura H. Harrison

Poetics of the Discarded | Lori Goldberg

Interview

The Language of Dance: Ballerina Dorothy A. Rogers-Walker
In Conversation with Christopher Honey

Reviews

The Still-ness of Space | Jessica Hudson
A Review of Lost Cities by Valencia Robin

Permeable Devotion | Darius Stewart
A Review of The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly

“There is a world just inside this one” | Robiny Jamerson
A Review of Wonderstudies by David Bailey

Contemplative Practices

My Writing Meditation | Pico Iyer

Found Poetry as Spiritual Practice | Christine Hiester

Cover Art: Lori Goldberg. Orto Series 1, 2025. Acrylic ink and fluids on watercolor paper. 18 x 24 inches.

Vita Poetica Vita Poetica

The Needle’s Pierce

Maura H. Harrison

When I work on creating art quilts, I am focused on discovering that moment of wonder as explored through color and texture.

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Vita Poetica Vita Poetica

Poetics of the Discarded

by Lori Goldberg

My painterly gestures express a sense of randomness that mirrors the intricate chaos of the forest—a symphonic cacophony teeming with life, where mycelium and roots communicate to sustain it.

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Reviews Vita Poetica Reviews Vita Poetica

The Still-ness of Space

A Review of Lost Cities by Valencia Robin

by Jessica Hudson

In her lyric hybrid collection Quiet Night Think, Gillian Sze shares William Carlos Williams’ definition of a poem as “a thing made up of . . . words and the spaces between them,” and asks, “What is this space that poetry offers?”

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Reviews Vita Poetica Reviews Vita Poetica

Permeable Devotion

A Review of The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly (Graywolf Press, 2025)

by Darius Stewart

Reading Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things is like inhabiting a house that has weathered a series of heavy storms—the windows are still intact, the floorboards are worn smooth from years of use, yet there is a calm, lamp-lit hush in every room.

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Reviews Vita Poetica Reviews Vita Poetica

“There is a world just inside this one”

A Review of Wonderstudies by David Bailey (Mount Vision Press, 2025)

by Robiny Jamerson

For a poetry collection that occurs primarily along dirt paths, dead-still Sierran hillsides, and campfires, Wonderstudies by David Bailey is anything but solitary.

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Emma Russell Emma Russell

My Writing Meditation

by Pico Iyer

Every morning—it’s been forty years now—I wake up early, often before first light shows through our windows, and make an eight-foot commute to our dining-table. Slowly, unfailingly, I prepare two pieces of toast and three cups of strong tea and consume them.

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Emma Russell Emma Russell

Found Poetry as Spiritual Practice

by Christine Hiester

I bring an unassuming pyrex glass dish of clipped words with me to workshops and retreats, the promise of revelation tucked beneath the delicate strips, and I delight in the inevitable surprise of the attendees when they find just what they need.

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