In Conversation

3 photos by Carrie Cantalupo Carrie Cantalupo is mainly a poet but finds poetry in her internal viewfinder while out in the world. She loves the quirky and unexpected!  She lives in the Bohemian Valley in Northern Michigan.  She loves to write, read, hike and look for rocks on the Lake Michigan shoreline.

Seeing Is Believing Belief is elastic. Yesterday, to the screams of horrified tourists, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a cathedral in Linz, Austria, appeared to go into labor. People believe what they need to believe to persevere. “Do you see the donut,” the cancer specialist asks, suddenly sounding anxious, “or just the hole?” …

Laundry Tim Watkins sent Mom love letters from prison. On average, it looked like, about once a month. His last one, sent the day before Ohio zapped him, said, “Well, I’m up to die tomorrow, babe. They’re finally going to plug me in. I love you, goodbye.” We’ll never know if she ever wrote him …

Juliet Cook reviews {f}ragile Nests by Pella {f}elton A short review of a complex collection, {f}ragile Nests by Pella {f}elton (Roadside Press, 2026)           You never saw me as I am. Not fully.           No one           ever did. (But you came closer than most). The closest we got was           when you applied my eyelashes in the dressing …

Fuck Your Spaceship “AI won’t replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don’t.” —Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI “We do in all honesty hate this world.” —Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult Those who shun AI will be left behind the spaceship won’t take us when the comet comes. …

In Search of the Incorporeal Handjob, or                                  My Night with the Huntsville Paranormal Investigators I don’t always have money. I know you see the pimp cane I carry and think, now here’s a man who lives a life dedicated to leisurely pursuits. Looks can certainly be deceiving. The big ass diamond on the end …

Rent Control in a War Zone And that’s what you get for always falling in love with the tectonics beneath my bum get rear ended she comes between us with her sex our shared Covid has me driving 12 different kinds of burrito rigs where the techies and Teslas always double park always put the …

Being Here Now This house purrs, pops, ticks hums and idles like a car but with oxygen. Hundreds of leds, lasers and color changing lights shine through crystals, onto walls and ceilings, sounds like a summer night in North Carolina fifty years ago when the night was alive with multitudes. Creating as we go, every …

[life in the void] steady on course from the beginning of time funny how logic works how we can rely on its parameters in the living world while the living world came from an unprecedented occurrence in the farthest reaches of an abyss we’ve yet to fully understand the real truth is we’ll always be …

So Here’s the Deal The same world The same species That can hack one another To pieces with machetes Can also move heaven and earth To find a child in a collapsed building The same world The same species That can mass-incinerate Millions of humans in ovens Can also send rovers to Mars Or drive …