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House Hunting

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

We’re looking for something spacious
as the interior of a poem,
so roomy you can get lost in its images,
hallways that roam along
to unexpected turns of phrase.

We’re hoping to find something close
to all the conveniences—
fresh air perfumed with meter,
trees that tousle their limbs
seductively in breezes,
hills curvaceous as villanelles.

We’re searching for a place that fits
our personalities—a kitchen of clean
steam and courtesy, delectable soups
and sestinas bubbling on the stove,
a bath where unsullied truth
freely flows from all the taps,
a bedroom that masters
the art of moon phases and meteors.

We’re seeking a home we can fill with
blankets, dog fur, cat fur, the enjambment
of too many books.
A home that will hold steady looks,
silly askance glances,
even a few cross words once in a while.

A home that weathers moods well,
the way streams wear every broken rock
down to pebble shine.

We don’t mind winding avenues
of rhyme, and have no preference
about windows, so long as they’re
always wide and wise.

We don’t care for one-way stairs,
though being able to stare at a view
of empathy is essential.

We want a home in which light
is as bright as the scent of lavender,
a home where the sound of rain
on the roof is our hearts’ sonnet
as our arms reach for one another
in the night.

And we want a home where the silence,
however rare, is always and ever holy.


Lana Hechtman Ayers, MFA, has shepherded over eighty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in print and online in places such as RattleSnake Nation Review, and Verse Daily, as well as in her nine collections.

Grandma’s Refrigerator

Nonfiction by Abigail Mathews

Grandma’s refrigerator is the color of the world. It is everywhere.

When the sky is no longer dark, but painted with rising yellows, then the smell of the kitchen is nearing, and I am reminded of milk jars and oven mitts.

Oh, when the flowers finally bloom, and the yellow petals fall to the mud, I see cigarette smoke wafting out windows, and oven-crisped cookies sliding from the pan onto dirtied white floors, and Grandma’s refrigerator is humming.

And the bumblebees are humming, and their yellow hue is familiar.

If the soil were to be peeled back and the dirt dried by the yellow sun, then the grass would turn yellow and die, and the flower roots would turn yellow and die, and the leaves have turned yellow and died, and I wonder when it became Fall again.

It was just yesterday that the dragonflies nibbled my ankles, and the skin on my shoulders were freckled, wasn’t it? The air crunches again, as does my chest with my fiberglass inhales. My yellow lungs heave like the chest of my grandfather.

The Autumn air brings a stale smell, but it is not a painful stale, because it is the stale smell of grandmother, and you remember how she cooked for you while you sat at the kitchen table picking apart napkins, and she wore an apron lined with yellow lace.

And the lace was as thin as her skin and as yellow as her refrigerator.


Abigail Mathews is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she is pursuing a major in creative writing.

In a Living Room

Poetry by Tanner Rubino

Warm yellow sun slipping
Down couch cushions
Of a
Loveseat, light green-grey
Stamped with trees and hatch marks
Potted plants position their shadows
Like vines along the vertical lines of the door
Winds peel petals from autumn branches
Solar eclipse of oak leaves across my eyes
Light fights like the leaves
To hold on
Neither can do it forever


Tanner Rubino is a fourth-year Professional Writing student at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Her work has been published in Champlain’s newspaper, The Crossover, and their magazine, The Well. When she’s not writing, Tanner likes to spend time outdoors or inside attempting a new art form.

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