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

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 & 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.