A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

Katie sits at the end of the bar of the Silver Saddle Saloon as she had every night for the last year. Lisa, the bartender, had already left out a corn dog and a plate of fries for her. Her feet dangled above the exoskeletons of ruptured peanut shells as she sat upon the round, cushioned seat of a tall barstool. Her eleven-year-old legs were not yet long enough to reach the foot bar.

It had been two years since her dad, Jimmy, had taken off for “Taos to see Grandma Flora,” leaving her with just some moccasins he’d picked up for her at the State Fair, a worn Dwight Yoakam This Time cassette with a ribbon that kept unspooling, and a cheap brown cowboy hat her mother made her throw away soon afterward because it had been infested with head lice. She got to wear it just once, when he took her to see the George Strait movie, Pure Country, at the neighborhood Cinema Twin. “I’m a big fan of George Strait, Katie. But you know, mija, who’s the best of them all? That Dwight Yoakam. He makes me want to see the world!” He’d picked her up singing, “I ain’t as fast as yoo-oouu,” with an exaggerated twang. Once she was on her feet, he tipped his sweat-stained Silverbelly cowboy hat. The motion revealed his dark mestizo hair and the same honey-brown, almond eyes she saw in her own mirror. Then, he started to dance. Whenever Jimmy danced, he dropped his right shoulder and dragged one boot half a beat behind the other. Katie used to laugh and do her best to imitate him.

The movie was just weeks before he left. He said he’d be back, and they’d go get hamburgers at the downtown joint with the little train that ran along a track suspended around the perimeter of the entire restaurant. He’d taken her there once and shown her how to get ketchup out of a glass Heinz bottle by pressing the two raised bumps near its neck. He never did come back for her, and in fact, he never came back at all.

Jimmy had never lived with her mom, Noelle, and her. He came and went when he pleased, unlike her mom who was always there. She and Jimmy had met in high school, and she had barely graduated when she found out she was pregnant with Katie. She left culinary school and eventually found work as a cook at a local restaurant. She could make something special out of almost nothing. Her mother laughed easily and would flip between the local alternative and pop stations while she cooked, preferring Nirvana or Ace of Base to the country music Jimmy loved. She would sweep her blond hair up while she chopped vegetables, letting loose tendrils fall across her blue eyes. However, after spending all day cooking for strangers, most nights she came home and made boxed macaroni and cheese, sometimes dressing it up a little with sliced hot dogs. Once in a while during the winter, she carried home a large pot of green chile stew from the restaurant. She would come through the door with her cheeks red from the cold, calling for Katie to sit at their budget-bought table for two. She’d heat up some of the stew in the microwave, keeping the rest of it in the fridge. The smell of roasted green chile peppers, pork, and garlic filled the house. Those were Katie’s favorite nights. They'd eat off that pot for a week.

It was just she and her mom for one whole year after Jimmy didn’t return. Then one day it was just Katie. She came home from school to find her mother torn apart just like the ruptured peanut shells and smeared with thick, clotting red ooze just like the Heinz she and Jimmy would smear on their burgers. She never told anyone, and she never knew who had done that to her mother. If anyone found out, she’d be placed with a foster family or, worse, Jim’s mother, whose favorite English phrase seemed to be “you little shit.”

Because of her mother’s restaurant hours, Katie had spent plenty of time alone even before she died. She walked herself home from school, locked the door behind her, and started her homework without being told. If her mother worked late, Katie heated leftovers in the microwave or made one of the simple meals she knew how to cook. She knew how to take care of herself.

She didn’t want to be alone, but leaving was worse. A foster family would take her away from the only home she knew. Plus, she might not be there if Jimmy finally came back, and he might find the house empty and disappear again. Most of all, she couldn’t bear the thought of strangers digging up her mother and carrying her somewhere Katie couldn’t follow. Even beneath the loose dirt and splintered boards in the backyard, her mother was still home. Katie couldn’t let anyone take that away from her.

But she had felt someone or something watching her that night as she buried her mother beneath that thin layer of loose, dry garden soil and splintered boards left in the backyard by the previous owner. And, in the back of her mind she’d worried they’d come for her, too.

Tonight she eats her fried meal, preparing for another night of two-steppers and the occasional line dance. Sometimes Bubba the Bojon ends his shift at the steel mill and stops by, too, checking in on her and asking how school went that day. Bubba knows Jimmy abandoned her and suspects her mother leaves her alone too often, but Katie never gives him enough of the truth to make him understand how bad it has become. He never presses her about it anymore, but every other week he drops groceries off on her back cement stoop. Things like Captain Crunch, milk, deli meat and cheese, and hot dogs.

When Lisa doesn’t feed her, Katie makes macaroni and cheese at home from a box she's scooped from the bottom shelf of the corner store and put in her backpack on the way home. If Bubba has brought hot dogs, she slices one into the pot the way her mother used to. It never tastes quite right, but she eats every bite anyway. She has not attempted the green chile. There are too many ingredients she can’t afford and too many things about the recipe her mother never got the chance to teach her.

Bubba walks through the door just as she is finishing her last bite. He steps up to the bar, dropping his heavy paw of a hand protectively onto the back of her shoulder. “Hey, honey. How was school?” He glances down at the greasy paper crinkled in the crumb-laden basket. “Looks like Lisa got you something good to eat. You saving any of that for me?” She laughs and is about to tell him about winning the spelling bee at school that day when the music lurches to a stop. They both look up. A man in a large black cowboy hat that shades his face wearing tight, dark Levi’s, and a belt with a large skull buckle is talking with Steve in the music booth. Suddenly, the stereo crackles and a bleak, whining melody cuts in. The singer stretches his words into an aching, lonesome drawl: 

“I’m a thousand miles from nowhere. Time don’t matter to me. I’m a thousand miles from nowhere and there’s no place I want to be.”

As the singer begins his next refrain, the man in the big black cowboy hat sways his hips to the tune. Slowly, hauntingly, he seems to glide closer and closer to Katie and Bubba with each measure. His right shoulder dips with the beat. One boot drags half a step behind the other.

Katie stops chewing. Something about the movement tugs at her memory. The stranger glides between the dancers without touching any of them. No one turns to look at him. No one moves out of his way. The silver skull on his buckle catches the light each time his hips sway.

When he reaches them, the air around Katie turns cold enough to give her goosebumps.

Just as a soft electric guitar rings out and the singer croons, “Oh-ayyyyy-yeaaahhh,” the man leans close to Bubba’s ear and whispers something. Katie cannot make out the words beneath the music, but Bubba’s smile disappears. His hand goes slack against her shoulder. Without looking at or speaking to Katie, even when she tugs his hand, Bubba gets off the stool and follows the stranger out the back door of the saloon, toward the dumpster and dark gravel lot, and beyond them, miles of open fields. Katie jumps from her stool and rushes outside after the men. She peeks around the corner and stifles a scream.

The back door slams shut behind her. The song follows her outside, muffled now, its melody warped by the saloon walls.

The gravel lot looks empty. Heat lightning flickers beyond the fairgrounds, briefly illuminating the dumpster and the dry fields behind it.

“Bubba?”

Something scrapes against the other side of the dumpster. Then comes a wet, tearing sound.

Katie takes one step forward. Then another. Gravel crunches beneath her shoes. She wants to call for Lisa, but fear has closed a fist around her throat.

Bubba’s boot appears first. It lies on its side beyond the corner of the dumpster, the toe pointed toward the fields. His leg stretches into the darkness behind it.

“Bubba?” she whispers again.

His open eyes reflect the distant lights of the State Fair.

Bubba is no longer Bubba, only another emptied-out, oozing shell with a hollow where his belly once was. His lips are distorted into a shape she’s never seen on any living person in her short life.

Fear stuns her in place; it floods her system and she’s certain she’ll stay frozen to that spot. Then she takes in Bubba’s injuries again. The ribbons of skin dangle from his ribs into his chest cavity. Her mother had looked exactly the same when she found her. Beneath Katie’s fear, something catches fire. This thing took her mother. Now it has taken the only other person who truly loved her. “Hey!” she growls, “I know you’re still here!”

The killer peeks out from behind the dumpster and looks her directly in the face and smiles, blood dripping from its grotesque, inhuman maw. There is something horribly familiar about it, though she can’t place it. It isn’t a man. It’s an effigy of one. A fiend.

He snarls and smirks, then runs off like a scavenger disturbed at its meal. She gives chase through the fields, even though she knows she has no weapon and doesn’t know what she’ll do when she catches him.

She hunts him all the way to the old steel mill. The abandoned steelworks sprawls across the riverbank, its brick mill buildings and rust-blackened silos standing like the skeleton of a dead giant. Smokestacks pierce the sky while broken windows stare blankly across acres of cracked concrete and twisted steel.

She stops to focus. Her eyes follow the fiend as he disappears into one of the looming industrial buildings. It’s night, but the full moon shines brightly enough that she can still make out the back of his head, mostly obscured by the large black hat still perched there despite it all.

She hesitates. Out here, the moon is generous. Inside, there would be none of its light. Only abandoned equipment, silent furnaces, rusted catwalks, and the slow drip of water echoing through the darkness.

But she’s finally caught up to him. And she knows now that he’s the one responsible for killing her mother.

Other ripped bodies had been found scattered helter-skelter across town in the late summer her mom died. Then nothing. Until now, the week of the State Fair. He is back. And it isn’t the work of some wild beast or a would-be Jack the Ripper. The killings are his doing.

This thing has come back.

She steps through the slightly ajar corrugated steel door the creature hasn’t bothered to shut behind it. Her small frame slips easily through the opening.

Inside, a narrow crack of moonlight illuminates a thin path across the concrete floor, but she stays to her left, following the wall instead. Her hand brushes against a metal storage cabinet. On one of its shelves sits a flashlight with a factory sheen aluminum handle wrapped with a masking tape strip labelled “Trevor,” in permanent marker. She knew teenage boys liked to mess around in these ruins at night since Bubba used to complain about them. She’s glad for it tonight.

She eases the cabinet door farther open.

Brown spiders scatter from beneath the cabinet, and she jumps backward just before they can scuttle over her feet. She shudders, taking a slow breath to steady herself before reaching in again.

She flicks the switch. Nothing. She shakes it and tries again. The weak beam barely cuts through the darkness, leaving the surrounding shadows intact. Dust drifts through the dull cone of light as she sweeps it toward the center of the cavernous building and moves deeper inside.

There, standing before the row of silent furnaces that stretches the length of the building, is the fiend. Its broad shoulders rise and fall with slow, deliberate breaths.

He is just waiting for her.

The black cowboy hat. The blood.

The smile.

Then, for the briefest instant, the creature’s face changes. It’s not the monster anymore.

It’s a man’s face.

Jimmy’s face, smeared in blood and gore, still smiling wider than any human mouth should.

“Daddy?”

The fiend’s smile widens and he lunges.

For an aching second, Katie smiles back. Her father had set out to be away from her and ended up a thousand miles from nowhere. Whatever he found along the way had come home in his place.

At the last second, she two-steps aside. His shoulder crashes into the furnace. Katie tears the black cowboy hat from his head, grips Trevor’s flashlight in both hands, and brings it down on his exposed skull.

Once.

Twice.

Again.

By the time she stops, the flashlight is bent and Jimmy-the-fiend’s smile is gone.

“Sorry, Trevor,” she whispers. She picks up the black hat, puts it on her head, leaves the old mill behind, and follows the train tracks home.

Author’s Note

This story is deeply personal to me. I wanted to capture the particular texture of my 1990s childhood in Southern Colorado—a place shaped by a melting pot of cultures, blue-collar families like mine, and generations of people who worked with their hands. Although the story is entirely fictional, it draws from lived experiences and places them within a speculative horror story. 

The father in this piece is closely modeled on my biological father, a mixed Indigenous, Hispanic, and Celtic man who struggled with his demons until his life ended violently. Writing him meant sitting with the complicated heartache of feeling abandoned while still carrying the few good memories I have of him. It also meant honoring the history that shaped him. His mother grew up in Trinidad, with Indigenous and Spanish family roots stretching back to Taos and other parts of the region. During the Great Depression, she was often left alone as a young child to find beans or whatever else she could eat. At its heart, this story is a love letter to Pueblo: to its complexity, its struggles, and the ways its landscape has changed since the ’90s while so much has remained the same. It is also a nod to its steelworkers and railroaders. My stepfather, whom I recently lost, worked as a welder at the steel mill for decades, while my grandfather and great-grandfather were Pueblo railroaders. Their labor—and the complicated lives behind it—is woven into this place and into me.

About the Author

KJ Brantley is a Pueblo-born mixed BIPOC horror and dark fiction author of Indigenous, Iberian-Mediterranean, and Celtic-British descent. Her work explores motherhood, feminism, identity, neurodivergence, trauma, and psychological horror. Drawn to the intersection of entertainment and social commentary, she crafts stories that are both unsettling and emotionally resonant. Her current novel-length work is a finalist for the 2026 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Gold Rush Award.

An active leader in the horror community, KJ is the co-owner of Broom Book & Candle, a horror bookstore, café, and wine bar opening in Denver in fall 2026. She also serves as Executive Director of the Women in Horror Arts and Media Association, host of The Uncanny Women Podcast, and founder of the SoCo Women in Horror Fest. She lives in Colorado with her husband, two toddlers, and an ever-growing stack of spooky books.

Pueblo Boulevard Elegy

I’ve had so much ache
in my back lately, and
my coughing fits have me expecting blood.

The doctor diagnoses walking pneumonia.
I’ll be okay, but everyone says it’s going around.
It could be

what causes the line
of three black limos and a hearse
en route to cemetery gates

on the southside. Maybe it started
as a shadow, first disguised as a cough,
just like mine, from a few days ago

when the person felt just fine.

It pains me to pass the procession,

now in my rearview because

we’re all under dozens of innocent
turkey vultures, circling and serving as welcoming committee

to a tragically, cloudless day.

Dream of the Monk's Belongings

After the big move, I unpacked, sorted, and emptied boxes in the garage. My daily life fell out of order and mixed with sacred texts and artifacts honoring the long-dead monk. I couldn’t find his name, but I knew him to be depicted in thick, red robes and flowing, white tunics. He also wore a goatee. Two of my students arrived because I promised them books and an important pamphlet. We got into an inconclusive conversation about chemistry and astronomy while I rummaged. Within the boxes, I noticed the monk’s possessions outnumbering mine. My search finished when all the boxes lifted into the air, and my unimpressed students agreed to return. I knew I needed a ladder to rifle through the floating boxes, and if I pulled any of them out of place, they would all crash down, breaking what was mine and his. I asked out loud if I should build the monk a garage shrine. The silence preached the delicate balance of material things alive in the sea of air.

Ode to a Pair of Dangling Shoes

A block over from home,
on a power line, twenty feet up,
two black high tops are tied
to each other
by white laces.
I imagine a kid precisely
arced them on the first throw
as a farewell to worn-out kicks,
forever knotted out of reach.

I do not see them as
a “Welcome to the ghetto” message
or a harbinger for blighted houses.
Instead, I smile for the pair
dangling and snared

above, a lucky shot
that invites us to let our soles
touch the sky.

Author’s Note

My most recent book, Dream of the Bird Tattoo, includes sueñitos, little dreams held in prose poems. I continue to transcribe dreams and to fit them into a liminal space where reality and strangeness converge as prose poems. It's good for the mind and good for the process. The other two poems are small odes to Pueblo based on small moments of witness, accompanied by speculation on what I don't know and what I imagine to be the circumstances and small gestures that brought forth the inspiration for the poems. 

About the Author

Juan J. Morales is the author of four poetry collections, including Dream of the Bird Tattoo, The Siren World, winner of the 2026 Reading the West Book Awards and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Morales has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, and Longleaf Writers Conference. Recent poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Slowdown Podcast, High Plains Pueblo Radio, and Inscape. He lives in Pueblo, Colorado, occasionally teaches for Lighthouse Writers in Denver, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado College.

Hey Pops, can I talk to you for a second?

27 years of rotten teeth

and miasmic verbs

neglect, oppress,

             kill

27 years of wondering

where in the world is my equator?

That balance point where I trusted

that even when I dangled off kilter

I was still dancing gracefully

            on an axis

27 years till my father,

sober in a rare moment of silence

escaped his bulletbound youth

and like a dream slipping away

from his fist

whispered you are worthy

Custody

Sever your claws at the wrist.

Children sometimes knock drinks on the floor.

Smell the humid honeysuckles, sticky sweet, 101 in east Texas

is nothing to the bruise

you wrenched in your daughter’s small shoulder.

Commodity and custody are not the same thing.

Cleave your claws at the wrist, spill blood upon the healing ground.

Was one dead infant daughter not good enough for you?

What happened the night she died?

When your daughter lay still and blue,

her grandfather’s big hands pushing

two gentle fingers upon a tiny sternum,

summoning kin in stifled air?

I think I’ve seen enough,

so let me declare as your brother:

Cleave your claws at the wrist, renounce the title of mother.

Author’s Note

My youth was tumultuous. My family was cliche Southern Gothic - cursed by generations of trauma, violence, religious rot, decay, and riddled by the undertones of sexism and racism. I’ve spent years trying to unpack my own place in this inheritance of pain and I’ve been using writing as my weapon against it (two of the poems looking at this crooked family tree are included here today). Much of this relates to my father, who taught me the principles of how to be a good man, a good person, but didn’t always execute it himself. That confusion still haunts me and I’m desperately using poetry’s ability to find meaning in the ether to excavate what lies beneath that curse. Maybe then, instead of being just another victim of the southern grinder, I can instead help lift some of the weight that beast placed upon our generation’s shoulders.

About the Author

James A. Rice is a writer, teacher, and musician hailing from Southern Colorado by way of Southeast Texas. He holds a BA in English from Colorado State University – Pueblo and is currently a student in Western Colorado University’s Creative Writing MFA program where his primary focus is on poetry. Featured here are two poems pulled from the manuscript he is currently crafting as part of his final graduate thesis at Western.

Family Bible

On or under issues of Southern Living

piled atop the coffee table—altar

of the one t.v.—it abided, a pit in the seasons’

by-and-by, wind scouring branches

for the word beyond the window,

the creek stone silence for a song.

Though I learned in time it is a cry.

After Daddy laid on a switch, my still small

voice would wilt to root again,

feeding on that music, striking like Mama’s

hydrangea cuttings, far into invisible

earth. Most mornings you lose, but this

I remember. I toppled my mug of milk,

the one printed with the image of a dog

paddling blue chop. I watched

as white washed the black leather

then entered the book, the words where

they waited, mute, before the history channel

coursing on the wall. All mouth emerging

to lick me clean, my father, towering,

boomed, This is the most important thing –

and cradled the book close to his heart,

where I imagined it would be. In the silence

we waited for the words. My mother says

what is brought into the world cannot be

taken from it. Of course, I agree. We sit now

and we eat, he and I, learning

how to listen, how to hold one's tongue,

which is not the same, I have learned, as silence.

Sitting near him, face to face,

the story is there in skin—furrow

and crease, the deepening line. And we read.

Pastoral

  Devil’s Den, Delta, Alabama

The river splits in flumes

through muscled boulders, mica flecked

as, above us, a hawk homes a comm tower

masquerading as a pine. The small late life,

pale pink, inside its curve of beak

expiring, as the feathers rush, splaying to fold

in neurotic wind.

                       I turn, watch you in the sun,

its body dropping like a palm to end

atop your open length, marble slick,

in each now as it comes – this and this –

sandstone nudging, imprinting skin.

The hawk shifts and grows small as heaven.

New, this sense of omnipresence, even

today, descending the mountain, through cells,

thresholds of warmth long after the sun

has passed, the slow accumulations of a day

nothing for what we leave, which must

go on as someone, somewhere. I settle

for the river, what lives wait in its yoke

like your own, lids lashed and rolling in a dream

I will not see. I push my fingers through a hip

of pouring glass, bone-cold to the wrist,

watch the water have its way with the light,

my fingers opal, amethyst, sapphire, until a part

of me, however small and durable, softens

and burns, water singing over and against

its own falling body.

                         I see your veins of sky

and this shelf where we lie. I see the thread

of river is in you, one going and the same,

there behind the school, where the rapids rose

into hush on brick, your back against it,

an entire life treading beyond the bend. Let it.

I can see and still feel nothing. But wake up.

An Inexhaustive Guide to the Upper Blackland Prairie

It’s so easy now, the moment, this summerwork of seeing,

you hardly can believe it. How the light didn’t end

but constellates now on siding at the students' house next door,

clots on pine brushed blue, a clear pane signed in whorls

of fingers' oil, drawn curtains, drawn blinds, a stray crooked one.

Meanwhile memory, tired-eyed traveler, goes on hitching,

moving over the pooled faces of US 40’s waters,

a little grass, a little diamond-glass on the shoulder.

Shadows bunch and blow past like strung-out sighs

while the town, its mirage of lights, is not for miles yet.

You would go back, tell him you found it.

Not rest, or your measure, but a kind of clearing,

or silence come aboveground. There, though, on the road,

gesturing ahead to the curtailed villages of truckstops

like stations on your cross-haunted way – the bloodred

heart, the green and terrible lizard, the shell – semaphoring

like your father might have done, because you must

pass through them to get to here, a place that even now

you cannot name. What would you say? The stars? Look?

Memory’s hand settles on your arm (in the other

an oily bunched bundle). He takes your look, but goes on.

It’s the way you were taught, up from the dumb stones

of home, the burnpile circle and chemical creek, its water

gathering, giving back the corrugate shed and sodium bulb.

Your boy is there in the deep eddies, his face burning, brine-hot

but cooling in the clear coursing away from that house,

distant, sheetmetal white. He does not dive or reach for a rock,

fish for a word, does not paint his cheeks and nose in clay,

vine his body in the armor of God, should his father come,

leather bright in moonlight about his waist. The boy knows

he is no one yet and lingers in this regular joy, his seamless before.

The tongues of minnows nip his skin and shellfish tuck

into their lightless spirals. Now, wherever you are, the sun pours,

flattening to silver pools on the blue pine boards next door,

hiding nothing, requiring nothing, a terrible grace,

and now you know it’s suffering that must bestow form,

a story. We come back. There’s mica in the driveway’s clay,

English ivy up the horseapple trunk, your sunsplotched

forearms, hands too dry. You salve them with sweet almond.

You look hard to be sure that you’re here.

Author's Note

In any given moment, we’re all caught between desire and expectation. Thrown into the deep-end at birth, we learn to swim in a language we inherit, then later come to a kind of understanding of ourselves by virtue of it and the people that surround us—family, friends, teachers, political leaders, etc. The poems here, each in their own way, are about that disorienting tension, how it’s possible, common even, to love someone, a parent, let’s say, and at the same time want terribly to be free of them, to stand alone in a landscape and see what one is made of. What is left? Anything? I think of these poems as cutting between the silent spaces of the natural world (a river bank in Alabama, a prairie in Texas) and language, which for me encompasses religion, tradition, history, and all the rest. Ultimately, though, those two poles must always be connected. They need each other to make any kind of sense. It's in that travel between seeming opposites that tension becomes energy and life feels truly meaningful, worth living with the people you love.

About the Author

Dan DeVaughn is the author of The Passion (Omnidawn, 2028). He received an MFA from the University of Oregon and PhD from the University of North Texas. A Lecturer in the English and World Languages Department at CSU Pueblo, he lives in Colorado Springs with his partner and their two dogs.

It's All Coming Back to Me Now

is more 90’s than 90’s. Something

about shouting alone in a beautiful

and empty mansion leaves me purple

as a bruise. Celine Dionne cuts a Mary Shelley

in an ivory garden. Piano keys

scatter like pigeons. I remember I believed,

so hard, in this version of

love. If you do ____

like ______, she sings. But didn’t

I do it all? Shouldn’t

I, at least, care? At

the end of the rope – a velvet

nothing. Not even a motorcycle crash, to prove

I once gave any kind of shit. A friend asks,

but who will play you in the movie

of your life? And meant which actresses,

plural. I could not even answer – among

a multitude, I contained

nothing, lost

in a darkening show-stop crowd.

August on the Downward Slope

The jumping off-point is the level

of a leaf. Clark Coolidge

wrote some nonsense, and we walked

the room to it in grad school classes

while he got better, was recovering

from poetry sickness. The measure

of the day is not the day, the beat

of the news like a bird on the brain,

flashing window screens of infamy

blocking a garage-door light. The backyard

sings with crickets after dark, the velvet

evening pulls itself over the neighborhood

like wide-wale corduroys. There’s still time,

all of it, to borrow what you need

to borrow, these dumb words, a leaf

in the hand, hot-green and smelling like

tomorrow morning.

Bluebeard's Subaru

His car seat

rolled with candy wrappers,

receipts from late night mini marts

& lipsticked paper cups

like the skulls

of Bluebeard’s wives.

He said, It’s important

to me to be loved

exactly the way that I am

and I heard the dare

like the click

of a gun in the dark.

Two weeks & another 

hijacked candy kiss later,

I was a teenager again

stomping through weeds

with my Jan Sport backpack

on the side of the road.

What was left of love

rolled unconditionally

around my feet

with all the Solo cups

of the world

and I was ashamed

as if I never saw the mile marker

as if I didn’t know

a kiss could fuck the world.

I would be cool

until it killed me & so far

it has not killed me

yet.

Author's Note

“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” was inspired by the sheer bonkers-ness of the Celine Dion music video. Written by Jim Steinman and originally promised to Meatloaf, Dion made it a hit in the 90’s. The video is truly over the top.

“Bluebeard’s Subaru” is based on the fairy tale of Bluebeard and a crappy lover. I can’t say I wasn’t warned about the other girls, but did I go there anyway? Of course I did. Villains are, of course, extremely charming (even in a filthy car).

“August on The Downward Slope” references a walking meditation I took part in as a graduate student at Naropa. We listened to Clark Coolidge read one of his poems while walking in circles and staring at our feet. If you have never tried this, I highly recommend it, as it gets you completely looped without having to use any substances whatsoever.

About the Author

Amber Ridenour Walker is the author of Surfacing: Poems (Free Lines Press), I Thought This Would Be Cooler (Bottlecap Press), and a handful of other limited-edition chapbooks. Her poems and short stories have appeared in such places as 20 Minutes in Portland: A Special Edition of The Portland Review, 580 Split, Tiny Spoon, LEON Literary Review, Bombay Gin, and the Sonic Salon podcast. Amber holds an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and she currently serves as English Adjunct Faculty at Pikes Peak State College.  She was born in a small agricultural town in central Washington State and escaped as soon as she was able to.

Author's Note

It’s a beautiful planet out there, especially off the beaten path where time and soil swallow the old world. I drove past the home, windmill and abandoned railcars and two miles later decided I had to turn around for a closer look. My wife and I wondered about the eager family who, long ago, moved into a new home hoping to build a life on the unforgiving plains. Were they the only family for miles with a windmill in the yard? Did they believe their creations would endure? Resting in the earth, are they humbled by the inevitable erosion wrought by time?

About the Author

Erik Moeller wanders with his wife and dog between southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. They travel back roads where they find pronghorn antelope, wide open spaces and ghosts of generations past. 

Ghazal for J

Every night I climb out to search for home, some small window.

For a season, it was you, all barefoot summer, all yes, all window.

Safe was new for your mother. She thought she had been rescued,

thought God was there, on the wrong side of the Stonewall window.

We made a patchwork family on drunk playgrounds, singing freedom,

drawing with purple crayons: a square on the wall to call window.

We laughed into morning bowls, Apple Jacks and chocolate milk, you

invincible in your bathrobe and stolen halo before the tall window.

Now even the vampires have wrinkles. Every moment is this cigarette,

crackling in red, out gray, turning to smoke drifting out the fall window.

There is still time. On the railroad tracks, I find your painting, one back

corner empty. I write I miss you, scribble Brook, and scrawl window.

Ghazal for the Outsider

At the station, in the rushing crowd, I am still, a rock in the stream, an outsider.

My aching heart sees you everywhere, but you are a cloud, a dream, an outsider.

Only you understand me, only you know the whole dusty road I have traveled.

Only you know my mother tongue, know I am not what I seem, an outsider.

You disappeared the very night of my surrender, climbed out the window

while I slept. I awoke in a burned field, alone in a moonbeam, an outsider.

Since then, I wander, pretend to forget you who does not want to be found.

I am a river-weeping ghost, a widow ripe at the seams, an outsider.

One day, I will get off this train; one day, you will be there. Until then, I reach

out the window, Brook’s empty fingers trailing the slipstream, an outsider.

Ghazal for Unbraiding

Alone at the playground, I swing under the sunset and drink the spring air, unbraiding.

The sky is alive. Ribbons of rose, honey, and marigold melt into the glare, unbraiding.

Alone with the cat, her soft cheeks and sandpaper tongue, her rumblepurr,

flowing into my chest. She kneads and nuzzles my neck like a prayer, unbraiding.

Alone with the TV, I learn about the war. The girls’ school was one of their first targets.

At the edge of the rubble, I crumble with the mothers while the fathers stare, unbraiding.

Alone in the bed, I untangle the day, hunt for the moment the ocean turned

into thistles. Waves of words of love and hate roll and crash into despair, unbraiding.

Alone behind closed eyes, I become the sound of the birds and then, the witness.

I fade into the fabric of the universe, absent, present, and aware, unbraiding.

Our minds out to sea, I am alone with you at last. We fall into our secret language.

Brook dissolves in the saltwater and you run your fingers through my hair, unbraiding.

Author's Note

I'm generally against rules, especially in poetry, and I wrote exclusively free verse for most of my life. Then, about two years ago, I tried writing ghazals, sticking to all the classic rules of the form. Something mystical happened: it was so tough that my poems had to take unexpected turns, turns that revealed strange images and truths I would never have found otherwise. I was in love. I never looked back, and now I'm working on a whole book of them. 

"Ghazal for J" is for one of my oldest and dearest friends. "Ghazal for the Outsider" follows the Sufi tradition of addressing the Divine or Unknown in the second person, as the beloved. And in "Ghazal for Unbraiding," I imagine the self dissolving in different moments, different ways, like love or beauty or pain or meditation. Like a braid, coming loose.

About the Author

Brook Bhagat (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction, and two new collections, Exodus with Red Delicious and I Drink from an Ear: Ghazals, forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2026 and 2027. She has won contests at Loud Coffee Press and A Story in 100 Words, and she was a finalist for the 2024 Spiritual Literature Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal, an Assistant Professor of English at Pikes Peak State College, and a hardcore Bob Ross junkie. Learn more and contact her for readings and poetry workshops at Brook-Bhagat.com.