By Colette Tennant

Students get rangy
before a three-day weekend,
and someone just burned
popcorn in the lounge next door,
and hawks have been
boiling over our campus,
and I don’t like that word
for circling hawks.

Circumference of hawks would be better –
Emily Dickinson would have liked that.
I’ve seen hawks fly so high,
I think they’re nesting
near the headwaters of heaven.

Colette Tennant has two poetry collections: Commotion of Wings (2010) and Eden and After (2015), as well as the commentary Religion in the Handmaid’s Tale: a brief guide (2019). Her poem “Rehearsals” was awarded third by Billy Collins in the 2019 Fish Publishing International Writing Contest. Most recently, her poem was accepted by Eavan Boland for Poetry Ireland Review’s Issue 129. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and others.

By Joseph Johnson

Maybe it was Milton or Caedmon who
first claimed the Tree of Knowledge held apples,
which says more about English poets than
of the preference of divine arborists.
They proposed that any great fall must be

By Lucas Krueger

Was I meant to be a priest? Not the celibate ones,
the ones who can’t marry; I think God believes in fun.

By Rich Hadley

I am my childhood pastor
preaching in the old time way
anointing my stubborn and defiant congregation
on their unwashed, calloused hands and eager foreheads

By Kimberly Vargas

Broken white crackers

Lay my sweater on a wooden pew
upholstery circa-1950
if the AC gets too cold, I’ll button the wool

Across the aisle, my boyfriend pulls his mother’s whispers
into his ears: “Do you really think it’s a good idea to date a girl
from a broken home?”

by Gale Acuff

In Sunday School today Miss Hooker said
that everybody must die, sooner or
later, which scared me because I’m only
ten years old to her twenty-five and I
love her and want to marry her one day
and that scares me, too, love I mean, almost
as much as death, I mean almost as much
as death scares me. On the other hand, does
love scare death, too? I might pray about that
tonight, before I go to sleep, after
I say the Lord’s Prayer and the others
for my dog and my folks and for the test
I have in English tomorrow, that I
might pass it. I don’t want to die but if

by Maggie Babb

we bomb
them Monday
after Monday
fledglings stagger
bodies flounder
laser guided
hawks dive
we bomb them Friday
into Friday tiny
red bursting maple
buds obscure bobbing
tiny rafts rise
and fall drowning
sanctified we bomb
them Wednesday to
Wednesday
precision guided
honeybees cover
golden dandelions
fleeing bloodshed
with their thrumming
easy prey small
circular error probable
satellite guided smart
seeds breach erupt
swell corpses pile
we bomb
them Thursday
intoThursday sensitive
urban zones open mouthed
exclusive robins seek
munition worms
we bomb them
skunk cabbage unfurls
inverse cube law
reveals tender tendrils
purple green
coils
of despair

Maggie Babb is a working poet and prose writer with an interest in Investigative and Documentary Poetics. She is a member of the Hollowdeck Writers Guild in Maryland, USA. She lives with her African Grey parrot and German Shepherd.

by Logan Garner

Of the moisture in the earth,
and the dark, musty soil,
ripe and rich with the film and girth
of one million earthworms:

Of the peat and muck, wet
and dripping brown water by the ounce
from a single squeezed handful:

by James Nicola

If God makes deluges and droughts,
I don’t think I can fathom God.
Is He unbalanced, is He unwell,
cursing with plenty, blessing with less
than enough? How can I, starving, bless
the feast? Alas, I’m stolider than
that, or smarter, or stupider,
to pretend that Nothing is a feast.
      And in your absence I cannot pretend.

If God’s The One Who makes you absent,
what the h— is He, that I
should glorify? Pray? I would, sure,
except I don’t dare make a sound
for fear of cursing, for which I’d
be damned, and apart from you forever.
But then you return, and I’m insane
with joy. And no hunger, drought,
      or deluge can make me not praise God.

James B. Nicola’s full-length collections include Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018), and Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond (2019). His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award.