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Laura Benson, Louise Longson, Miranda Kyle, Cory Hutchinson-Reuss


HOMAGE, LAURA BENSON
HOMAGE, LAURA BENSON

SONG OF THE SEA TROUT

Louise Longson


Born in the graveldrift       shift 

of a restless river  


cold


in summer   

creatures burrow in sand-

dunes to escape the cut

of wind


and in the sheers 

shapes of the longdead 

have furrowed their ancient lives

into the sediment    and


time passes       stretches

sails on an infinite spar


as i grow from egg

to alevin    parr

silver smolt     


night-


migrant shoaling

baptised

in a slackwater sea




EULOGY TO A MATHS EQUATION

Miranda Kyle


This floating jelly,

                                                               [ dislodged ].

We’ll never know what’s written in your code,

what you’d spend your little wills trying to understand or how

you'd feel about the cold-

and what little we know:

I am left imagining you

in the middle of nowhere

suspended:

Location, Unknown

black comb through viscera,


                                                                        [ disrupted ]


                                                        egg                                      yolk.


I hope you can forgive the violence of need

it’s dark and suffocating cloak

for your specific computation shall never be replicated again.

capricious are the forks we choose

and to your scrambled polynomial,

I lament.









DEAR V, DEAR SKY SIFTING ITSELF INTO FALSE SPRING—

from river archive

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss



In morning’s


northern lung.

Jar of anger.


April snow, 

literal. 




A quarrel of wrens and sun-

figments. A small will.









The old technologies aren’t

obsolete. A buried 


season lying still

in rhythms of snow. Lean


an ear to rumors in branches.


Sense slow heat with its syllables

passing through.













Some sort of trace, maybe,


a truce with the elements. Or

your collusion. Every year


I almost

lose myself, the verdant scent


hammered thin yet shimmering,














its citrus edge of magnolia 

from home, in the air 


a metallic gong.

Hour, ripple, syllable.


My analogue 

memory. Variable apricity.




(Faint warmth of the child

you were, I was.)






Laura Benson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Birmingham, Alabama with an interest in sacredness and ritualistic practices. Benson’s practice is, at its core, an exploration into the creation of a personal mythology. This entails creating work across a variety of mediums including clay, collaged images and found objects, metal, fabric, printmaking methods and oil painting. It also includes a focus on storytelling, folklore and religious myth. She finds art-making to be a valuable avenue for uncovering and exploring the mystical and mysterious aspects of the natural and supernatural world.


Louise Longson is a Pushcart-nominated poet and  2023 winner of the Kari-Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize with the collection These Are Her Thoughts as She Falls (Ballerini Book Press), and the Hedgehog Press Proper Poetry Pamphlet competition with chapbook The How in the World (published 2025). Louise’s poems are widely published in print and online. Her previous chapbooks are Hanging Fire (Dreich 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press 2022). She works in mental health recovery in Oxfordshire.


Miranda Kyle (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ohio. She has self-published one poetry zine titled Lost Causes and looks forward to publishing more in the near future.


Cory Hutchinson-Reuss is the author of Triptych, forthcoming from Milk &amp; Cake Press in 2025. A

collaborative chapbook of her poems and the visual art of Giselle Simón was published in 2022 as

part of the Prompt Press Gallery Series. Originally from Arkansas, she holds a PhD in English from

the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, where she is an adjunct assistant professor at the

University and serves as Associate Poetry Editor for Brink. Find her at coryhutchinsonreuss.com and

on Instagram @atasteforthebitters.

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