Laura Benson, Louise Longson, Vikki C, Kim Malinowski

SHE STRADDLES BORDERS
Louise Longson
hides in corners
quoins nooks
recessed mouth-full of stone
she is shadowbeast
deep-
carved relief
in wanton / loose / restless pose
holding wisdom above the door
she is the key-
stone
bearing bridges
she holds the wall
of a well the slab of a tomb
she slips
from meaning to meaning—
object / subject / abject
wide-open
cunt agape
she welcomes you
( back )
over a threshold
into the womb
SURROGATE BEAUTY
Vikki C
We begin at the closing of floral-semantics. Cultivating,
where light choirs soft, a clavicle for low-key acoustics.
Whatever we fail at here is a veil, blind to its own sheerness.
The mountain darkens. Offers its protest-field to our limbs.
We creep, as animalia, as precious quartz, ringed in devastation.
Because antiquity sounds its instrument through a valley,
your breathing leafs me open with each high wind.
Our names are reclaimed by a kind war, but never mercy.
A glint of a village smoking in its burnished romance.
We diagnose each depression as late ocean trauma. I heed
the lanterned pass, shedding possessions. Extend my grief
to fresh predictions of flood. To the remote haven they charter
through a corrupt lens. I taste the inchoate. The vapour of
non-human reservoirs. Desist in the liminal we can’t embellish.
Deny the funereality of a gaze. Your veins burst into echinacea.
Translation: you learn of pleasure more than once, without regard.
We must indulge now, in this solemn honey. In our dwindling cirque.
Hard frost, planetary pause. A climatic self, disowned by its natural mother.
FIND ME IN SEARCH OF MY SUNFLOWERS
Kim Malowinski
beaten and muddy with blood.
Cuts on my hands so torn, scraped sunlight,
history searching for love in dirt,
stratigraphy on my tongue.
Artifacts flower too savory
dusty with someone’s love and with mine,
my too dry touch and my loamy silt fingers.
Can you see petals so majestic
but so hard, buried in earth,
waiting to flower?
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.
Vikki C. is the author of two collections including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s work appears in Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Sweet Literary, Harpy Hybrid, The Winged Moon, Ice Floe Press, Hyacinth Review, Dust Poetry, Black Bough Poetry & The Belfast Review, among others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize & Orison Best Spiritual Literature.
Kim Malinowski is the author of Home, Phantom Reflection, and Buffy's House of Mirrors. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and the Rhysling Award. She writes because the alternative is unthinkable.