Leavings—Janet McMillan Rives
We walked the full length of both streets
in our neighborhood, roads really,
two parallel paths cut through a forest
connecting town to the highway out.
In daylight the trip home would have been
a two-minute run through the trees
but at night, pitch black, no streetlights
we hugged the roadside, took our time.
Under tonight’s sky—moonless, starless—
I wonder why on that long ago walk
we didn’t just slip into the woods
and never come out.
At the top of the first road where no homes
had yet been built, we paused.
You pressed a gold oval into my hand,
my signet ring, J on top of M
like a child riding a rocking horse.
Why had you kept the ring all those months?
Not to wear it—it would not have fit
a hand no longer boyish. Perhaps for the same
reason I saved the flimsy silver disk
with our names etched by some carnival machine.
Janet McMillan Rives lives in Oro Valley, Arizona. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beyond Words, Lyrical Iowa, Raw Art Review, Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Crosswinds, Creosote and Canary. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Into This Sea of Green: Poems from the Prairie (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Washed by a Summer Rain: Poems from the Desert (Kelsay Books, 2023), and On Horsebarn Hill: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2024). Her hybrid memoir, Thread: A Memoir in Woven Poems (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2024.
Everything Roadtrip—Ricky Santer
A day like other days
when galaxies spark of insect innards
caught by your speeding windshield
and a graffitied water tower
declares that nothing is safe.
When tufted humps of land parade
along the browned freeway median
where on its starboard, carpets of
lavish kudzu suffocate the trees.
When a long truck with naked lady
mud flaps passes you by with pigs
crammed into its low cages. Then
Alleluia for that roadside heap that
recasts as tire skin not creature
and the sun breaks through a tender
rainfall when you take the exit
to a back road where your Fiat
rumbles through a rainbow that bends
down to the welcoming dirt.
Rikki Santer’s poems have appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Heavy Feather Review, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including 2023 Ohio Poet of the Year, Pushcart, Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and my forthcoming collection, Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books.
Signposts—Sharon Hilberer
Past the end of the road
on a high bluff, staring seaward
toward Labrador
we stayed away for weeks
rinsing the mind
of the usual preoccupations.
No petty decisions—
a block of cheese, a box of crackers
wearing the same sweater day after day
alert for the famous winds that can upend trucks
wary of moose in their season of rut
walking and watching
the extreme tides, the wild waves.
But travels end and we’re
back to our nice bathroom,
closets full of clothes. Home,
with its messages, calendars, mail,
the alarm clock, (that horror),
a good shower, at last
a close look in the magnifying mirror—
the mole just west of my nose
has sprouted bristles both black and white
that point away from my face
in several directions:
This many miles to Barcelona.
That many miles to Nome.
Sharon Hilberer lives, works, and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the northern prairies of mid-continent USA. Her writing is found mostly in her friends’ in-boxes, but also recently in publications including Of Rust and Glass, Superpresent, and Moss Piglet.
Reading—Owais Farooq
Listen, it isn’t debatable.
Roads memorize the weightless touch
And sound of their beloved feet.
They speak to the lost traveller
In warm whispers, like a mother’s
Trembling lips beckoning her child.
Of course, sometimes it isn’t easy.
Mainly when like old stories,
They’ve multiple possibilities.
Often, just outside my room
Near the T-junction on evenings,
I stand deciding which way to take.
In this age, to be candid
I’m still trying to learn
The art of fully reading roads.
Dr. Owais Farooq is an aspiring writer from Kashmir currently based in Delhi, India. He
holds a PhD degree on the poems of Agha Shahid Ali, from the University of Delhi.
Unfinished Highway—Himanshu Kumar
We were promised a highway that never ends.
A clean line into tomorrow,
where the sky stays open
and the signs don’t lie.
Instead, we find barricades,
patches of old gravel
stitched into new asphalt,
the past still showing through.
A half-built bridge waits
for hands that may never return.
Somewhere ahead,
a curve tightens its grip—
a warning or an invitation.
The highway isn’t done.
Neither are we.
Himanshu Kumar is a poet and translator who migrated from the City of Nawabs to the City of Djinns, where he has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students for more than a decade. His latest creative pieces have
appeared in Masks of Sanity: The Monster Within (2024), Train, Tracks and Tales (2024), the prize winners issue of the Mocking Owl Roost (2024), and Powerless: Anthology of Thematic Poetry (2025). He is currently looking at you
while you are trying to find the most suitable adjective to appreciate his work. He can be reached at himanshukumar.hk@gmail.com.
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