October 27, 2026
Explosion
By Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Carefully she closes and locks
every window, curtains frowning
across the glass
as if she can keep bullets
and bombs outside with her small brown
mothering hands.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter (she/her) is a Crone who finds awe in the simple daily miracles of life. She is a professional harpist, poet, and hobbyist photographer and runs a small farm. She has had poetry and photography published in a number of print and online journals, including VoiceCatcher, Calyx, SageWoman, and Palette Poetry. Jennifer has three grown children and a husband and lives in Vancouver, Washington.
October 14, 2026
Denial
By Rachel Miranda
In every ferocious masked ICE raid
Ordered by The Man in Charge
I see the schoolgirl cornered behind the stacks
Kicked in the shins for talking funny
Until the blood runs down her legs
Dazed and wondering what happened to those Emma Lazarus lines she loved
In every mendacious lawsuit
Brought against a place of learning under the cloak of “antisemitism”
Even as the nightmare of Gaza unfolds and unfolds
I hear the hollow clink of coins they lobbed at her, landing on the cafeteria floor
“Go back where you came from, kike!”
Not a word she would have chosen to add to her English lexicon
She reads The Diary of Anne Frank
Weeping for weeks
Her young mind stalls at the savage othering; it’s not just on the playground
This malignant delusion that a pile of crushed lives will buy—what? Invincibility?
Still, she tells herself, the Diary’s words live on
So she scribbles notebooks full of poems, stories, songs
In every banned book and silenced reporter
I see her small eyeglasses snapped in half
Her notebooks and textbooks shredded to ribbons
Left in her middle school locker like sacrificed animals
A barely anonymous warning
Not worth reporting for the bigger trouble it will invariably bring
In the half-century that passes
Her scribblings long abandoned, carefully supplanted by denial
She tells herself America is moving forward, if elliptically
And when the blindfold falls away
The voice she resolves to raise again is eclipsed
By the lethal shadow of illness that steadily siphons away her breath
Comes a day when The Man in Charge
Cheered on by the perpetually-unassuring Big Brother “Insurance”
Dictates that she is a loser in every sense
That instead of receiving a new lung
She should be left to die—a drain on productive society—
One small homage from The Man to the Third Reich he so admires.
“Never again,” the ghosts of her people intone.
The Man and his acolytes don’t get to decide how her life will end.
Grappling, warring, begging for air, she spends months she doesn’t have
To claw back the denial issued by Big Brother
And when she wakes from the strange twilight after transplant
She whispers, “How soon can I hold a pen?”
Rachel Miranda emigrated from Switzerland to America at the age of eight and currently lives in the greater New York area. She is the author of The World at Our Table: A Euro-American Cookbook of Family Favorites and writes a Substack series called Air Hunger. Her creative writing appears in a range of literary journals online and in print. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Bennington Writing Seminars and continues to savor every chance to play with the English language. Her debut novel, Broken Chocolate, was published by Vine Leaves Press in March 2026.