Happy holidays! This issue completes our first full year of publishing voices, and we’re ecstatic that poets not only found this start-up rag, but believed in it, submitted to it, and have been broadcast by it. We couldn’t think of any better way to trumpet this issue in other than with Akua Lezlie Hope’s “How She Blew,” and since we’re launching during Hanukkah and very close to Christmas, and since we received one of the most smile-inducing, holiday-set poems we’ve heard in a while, we couldn’t help but end the issue with Craig Kurtz reading “A Christmas Cat.” Thanks also to Akua Lezli Hope for submitting some AI-generated art for our featured image this issue, and thank you as always to everyone who submitted and all who come by to sit a spell and give their time to take in and consider others’ voices, thoughts, and feelings. Here’s to making 2023 better: cheers, and the best of words to all.
Issue #4 – Playlist
00:00 – 00:58 A message from the editor
Akua Lezli Hope
01:03 – 01:48 “How She Blew”
01:53 – 03:52 “Dogon”
Leslie Cairns
03:57 – 06:41 “Haunting of a Lilac Girl”
06:46 – 07:01 “Crickets Die Too”
Eric Burgoyne
07:06 – 08:37 “School Field Trip”
08:42 – 09:47 “Organ Donor”
Jerome Berglund
09:52 – 10:40 “at the Princess Depot”
10:45 – 11:08 “there is something onerous and intimidating”
Craig Kurtz
11:13 – 12:32 “Good Literature”
12:37 – 14:08 “A Christmas Cat”
Issue #4 – Individual Contributors
Poem: How She Blew
Poet: Akua Lezli Hope (website, IG, Etsy, Twitter)
Bio: Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker using sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, & wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments & peace. In print since 1974 with over 450 poems published, her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest book award winner), Them Gone, Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (2021 Elgin Award winner), and Stratospherics (micro-chapbook of scifaiku @Quarantine Public Library). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, SFPA award, NYSCA grant & multiple Rhysling & Pushcart Prize nominations. She created Speculative Sundays, an online poetry reading series, edited the record-breaking sea-themed issue of Eye To The Telescope #42 and NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first (Sundress Publications 2021). She won a 2022 NYSCA grant to create Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry. A 3rd generation New Yorker, she exhibits her artwork regularly, sings songs from her favorite anime in Japanese, practices her soprano saxophone & prays for the cessation of suffering for all sentience from the ancestral land of the Seneca, the Southern Finger Lakes region of New York.
Poem: Dogon
Poet: Akua Lezli Hope (website, IG, Etsy, Twitter)
Bio: Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker using sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, & wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments & peace. In print since 1974 with over 450 poems published, her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest book award winner), Them Gone, Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (2021 Elgin Award winner), and Stratospherics (micro-chapbook of scifaiku @Quarantine Public Library). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, SFPA award, NYSCA grant & multiple Rhysling & Pushcart Prize nominations. She created Speculative Sundays, an online poetry reading series, edited the record-breaking sea-themed issue of Eye To The Telescope #42 and NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first (Sundress Publications 2021). She won a 2022 NYSCA grant to create Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry. A 3rd generation New Yorker, she exhibits her artwork regularly, sings songs from her favorite anime in Japanese, practices her soprano saxophone & prays for the cessation of suffering for all sentience from the ancestral land of the Seneca, the Southern Finger Lakes region of New York.
Poem: Haunting of a Lilac Girl
Poet: Leslie Cairns (Twitter)
Bio: Leslie Cairns (she/her) holds an MA degree in English Rhetoric. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She has upcoming flash, short stories, and poetry in various magazines, including Cerasus Magazine, Coffeezine Mag, Swim Press, Bright Flash Literary Review, Londemere Lit, and others. Twitter: starbucksgirly
Poem: Crickets Die Too
Poet: Leslie Cairns (Twitter)
Bio: Leslie Cairns (she/her) holds an MA degree in English Rhetoric. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She has upcoming flash, short stories, and poetry in various magazines, including Cerasus Magazine, Coffeezine Mag, Swim Press, Bright Flash Literary Review, Londemere Lit, and others. Twitter: starbucksgirly
Poem: School Field Trip
Poet: Eric Burgoyne (@ericinislands)
Bio: Eric Burgoyne lives on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Teesside University in Middlesbrough, England, and MBA from Reading University in Berkshire, England. His poems appear in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Dawntreader, and Paddler Press, among others. Social: @ericinislands.
Poem: Organ Donor
Poet: Eric Burgoyne (@ericinislands)
Bio: Eric Burgoyne lives on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Teesside University in Middlesbrough, England, and MBA from Reading University in Berkshire, England. His poems appear in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Dawntreader, and Paddler Press, among others. Social: @ericinislands.
Poem: at the Princess Depot
Poet: Jerome Berglund (blog, Twitter, IG, FB)
Bio: Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born and raised. Since then he has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Berglund has exhibited many poems employing a variety of forms online and in print, most recently in Vermillion, Hey I’m Alive Magazine, and Fauxmoir. You can hear him reading other works at Viewless Wings, Cathexis, and Wordgathering.
Poem: there is something onerous and intimidating
Poet: Jerome Berglund (blog, Twitter, IG, FB)
Bio: Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born and raised. Since then he has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Berglund has exhibited many poems employing a variety of forms online and in print, most recently in Vermillion, Hey I’m Alive Magazine, and Fauxmoir. You can hear him reading other works at Viewless Wings, Cathexis, and Wordgathering.
Poem: Good Literature
Poet: Craig Kurtz
Bio: Craig Kurtz, a Special Ed TA, busks poetry on weekends (as Wortley Clutterbuck), in downtown Charlottesville VA, a block from where Thomas Jefferson hung out (and trafficked slaves). Recent work in Quadrant (Australia), Pacific Review (USA) and Stand (UK). He also understands cats.
Poem: A Christmas Cat
Poet: Craig Kurtz
Bio: Craig Kurtz, a Special Ed TA, busks poetry on weekends (as Wortley Clutterbuck), in downtown Charlottesville VA, a block from where Thomas Jefferson hung out (and trafficked slaves). Recent work in Quadrant (Australia), Pacific Review (USA) and Stand (UK). He also understands cats.
Stanza Cannon 