Noah Soltau teaches about art, literature, and society to the mostly willing. He is managing editor of The Red Branch Review. His debut collection of poetry, Titanfall, is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. His most recent work appears in Cutleaf, Door is a Jar, and elsewhere. He lives and works in East Tennessee.

Travis Stephens is a tugboat captain who lives in California. His book of poetry, skeeter bit & still drunk was published by Finishing Line Press. Visit him at: zolothstephenswriters.com.

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including “Cleaning the Gutters of Hell (Zeitgeist Press, 2023) and “The Ants Crawl in Circles” (Bone Machine, Inc., 2024). https://tohmbakelaspoetry.wordpress.com Instagram: @flexyourhead

CS Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.

Aaron Lelito is a writer and editor from Buffalo, NY. His micro-chapbook, Secret Meetings, was published by Ghost City Press in 2025, and his poetry collection, The Half Turn, was published in 2023. His work has also appeared in Sage Magazine, Door Is A Jar, Stonecoast Review, Barzakh, SPECTRA Poets, and Santa Fe Review. He is Editor in Chief of Wild Roof Journal.  ​Instagram: @aaronlelito

Dark-skinned girls with bad wigs aren't prepared They spoke patois on the patio   A Japanese fan from China cooled the air in the city  They would never know they were baking in a kindred kind of heat The rooster stood by the door and looked at you  Like you told it to cocadoodledo  And he said “Make me”    A Spanish guitar sweats a little melody for a girl when nobody is around to listen  A brown-skinned woman wears a pink dress  And god smiles  Because god loves brown-skinned women in pink dresses  She( god) says “Ohh she’s too sharp” it's a shame they won't be allowed to wear that type of dress in public for another century in Earth years”    But in about a century,  A brown girl, tangentially related to this one, finds the dress at a thrift store in Harlem  And she wears it to the club  And gets disrespectful with a boy who ain’t no good in the bushes at the park at 3 am  Her ancestor,  Now in heaven,  Watches this happen on DTV (descendants TV, like MTV for Angels)  And sucks her teeth

The blue of the storm shades has greened over  And the rooster was dinner about 94 years prior to this happening  But the first woman still thinks  That boy is a bad wig  ​The kind you see in Tyler Perry movies that white people compliment you on  And he partakes in coonish behavior  And there is nothing for a brown girl  In the kind of man who tells you you're pretty for a brown girl  And then marries a white woman    Who will divorce him for never doing any labor  Physical or emotional  Around the house    And he fumbles out of her then fumbles all over her and doesn't apologize  And that is the moment when the second girl realizes what her ancestor has been telling her    A bad wig is not a Spanish guitar  It will never sweat you a song It can only get nappy and tangled  And if you put it on your head  All it will ever do  Is make you look like a fool

Jennifer Handy is the author of the chapbooks California Burning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Dirt (Finishing Line Press, October 2025).

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. His poems have been collected in four books: Unattended Fire, The River Underneath the City, Muskrat Friday Dinner, and Meet Me Where We Survive. He is also an editor at Low Ghost Press.

Peter J. Grieco is a retired English professor and former school bus driver. His poems have been widely published in small magazines on-line and in print. His book length series of poems include: “At the Musarium,” a collection of semi-procedural verse based on word frequency lists, “Misinterpretations of Dreams,” a series which interrogates Freud's seminal study of dream life, "Structuralist Poetics," which attempts to come to terms with post-structuralism, & "A Week on the Concord & Merrimac." celebrating Thoreau. His collection of ekphrastic verse, “The Blind Man's Meal,” is available from Finishing Line Press.

Chandra Alderman lives in northeast Ohio. Her heart belongs to Pittsburgh, PA. Her writing and photography have appeared online at Thirteen Myna Birds, The City Poetry, Octopus Review, Trailer Park Quarterly and Live Nude Poems. She’s working on a collection of poetry and is still trying to compose a perfect bowl of soup.