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POETRY

Niceville

Collin Callahan

A woman with hair like a telephone
line full of birds
touched my face and asked me
to her place
for lobster ravioli.
Her laugh scratched
like the concrete underbellies
of park district swimming pools.
I told her about
the television judge. After cinnamon
speckled tiramisu
she slipped me a kiss
and tightened my earmuffs.
The world grew
quiet and I learned to converse
with my fingers. They told me
I am no good.
They told me
she moved to a goat farm
in Vermont. 

The sun tips
over like a giant egg.
I inhale
computer duster through a red straw.

Artwork by Chris Norcross

Chris Norcross is a Philadelphia based Artist and musician. His work has appeared in various journals, including Chaleur Magazine, Wild Roof, ICEVIEW, and Slow Time. His current project examines the voyeuristic sentimentality of alienated spaces and people.
Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His first collection of poetry, Thunderbird Inn, won the 2022 Minds on Fire Open Prize. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, SLICE, Cream City Review, Hobart, Carve Magazine, Witness, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Collin holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas—where he was awarded the 2017 Walton Family Fellowship in Poetry—and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He is the recipient of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors' Prize in poetry.

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Erica Wright is the author of seven books, including the poetry collection All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (Black Lawrence Press) and the essay collection Snake (Bloomsbury). She was the poetry editor of Guernica for more than a decade.

Read More »

If I Erase My Body

Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet & educator from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. She is the author of the poetry collection Eveningful (2024), which was selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2022 Lightscatter Press Prize. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Glass: A Journal for Poetry, The Boiler, & elsewhere. She previously served as writer-in-residence at Texas State University’s Clark House and currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.

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Hiba Tahir is a YA author and 2022 graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.

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