No Blankets
by Patricia Russo
They wanted the bed to be comfortable. It was the most they could do. Not the only, but the most. But there were no more blankets left in the world, and the birds no longer shared their feathers with the ground. Rugs, someone else’s grandma said. We could do it with rugs. I know a house where there still are some. But that house had never existed in waking life, only in a dream she remembered from when she had been young.
There were no blankets left in all the world, but children still had the right to dream that things would be better when they woke up, so they gathered together all the dog hairs they could find, which wasn’t as many as you’d think, in these days, and started to spin them into thread. It would take a long time, they were well aware of that, but time still existed on this barren world. There was more of it than they knew how to cope with. At least now they had something to do with their hands in the endless, endless hours between twilight and dusk.
Killing a Deer at Tutuwai Hut
by Alex McCrickard
worm song
by Marten Baxter
the deep, dark loam’s an astral plane
and i sail its waves alone
i the gut-string
i the sinew
i the coil of jellied muscle:
bravest navigator worm
tides beyond your comprehension
rips & whirlpools, wrecking shoals—
no match for one as bold as me
i steer by tiny stars of quartz
my moon’s the grave mouth up above
my wind the gravebreath’s fecund hush
the rain here does not fall as drops
but sinks through soil until my world’s
a sodden blanket all around:
a sodden world for captain worm
the secret sea of captain worm
O boldest, bravest Captain Worm
Patricia Russo‘s work has appeared in One Art, The Sunlight Press, Vagabond City, Hex Literary, A Sufferer’s Digest, Eulogy Press, and Crow and Cross Keys.
Born in Scotland just before the 1960s and educated on Merseyside, Alex McCrickard has worked in construction and retail. He has been writing for a couple of decades and has had work published by Spelt, Stone of Madness, Poetry News and Gutter.
Marten Baxter (they/them) is a queer mad writer, musician, and recovering academic. Their work often explores relationships with the more-than-human world as well as mental health, gender & sexuality, and political upheaval & resistance. They have recently returned to poetry after too long apart.
This issue was guest-edited by Eleanor Ball. Eleanor is a librarian and assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa. She was a 2025 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her poetry and essays have been featured in Barnstorm, Orion’s Belt, Small Wonders, Stone Circle Review, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere.