This quarter was rife with mischievous witchery: Political insults and commentary, the thoughts of money galore going in all directions other than where it might be most needed; such colour, and who knows what will happen, what power-players will lead us on from Obama's reign.

A subtle, magical realist story about a woman who has drifted away from books, only to find herself drawn back into reading through memory, unease, and the living presence of stories.

In “Grandma’s Story,” Bill Frank Robinson lets family history spill out through Grandma’s memories of circus roads, prizefighting, early automobiles, love, loss, and Lonnie’s fateful encounter with Todd Toolbee. The piece blends humour, grit, and oral storytelling into another vivid Archie family chronicle.

Marian Brooks’s Your Honor is a darkly comic story about guilt, self-deception and public respectability. When Dolores damages a neighbour’s car and drives away, her moralising husband condemns her, only to reveal a far more violent hypocrisy of his own.

Mir-Yassar Seyedbagheri’s story is a haunting study of grief, guilt and a mother’s failure to speak love while there was still time. Searching her dead son’s desk, Betty finds his final story and turns it into both confession and communion, as memory, remorse and smoke blur into one last whispered "I love you."

A gently humorous and thoughtful encounter with mortality unfolds during a woodland gathering devoted to death and funerals. Among bluebells, burial plots and frank conversation, Jim Hatfield considers how we imagine our final resting place—and whether even death must somehow suit the life we have lived.

In the silence left behind by departed lovers, memory and longing return to haunt the night. Moving between regret, fragile hope and dream, Ronald E. Shields explores the heart’s desire to begin again, even when morning offers no certainty of release.

Smoke, bourbon, music and failing memory gather around the lingering voices of old loves. Akeith Walters creates a tender, rueful portrait of ageing and recollection, where forgotten details blur but the emotional presence of the past continues to whisper through the darkness.

In the quiet of a winter evening, an ageing dog, an emptier house and the memory of children returning home become measures of passing time. Mickelson reflects on ageing, absence and the shrinking orbit of daily life, while longing for the warmth, noise and companionship that once filled the rooms.

A small lock of hair, kept in a porcelain box after a death, becomes an intimate vessel for grief and remembrance. Barry Charman’s spare poem finds tenderness in this simple relic, where loss is held quietly on a shelf and memory waits to be awakened by the smallest familiar thing.

Dillon turns away from the familiar language of military glory to focus instead on the terrifying space through which soldiers pass: a hurricane of fear, loss and uncertainty. Against marching boots and straining guns, the poem searches for the fragile instant between one moment and the next, where life is reduced to pure, startling clarity.

Adam Kluger’s “The Party” is a wickedly comic dialogue of literary appetite and social performance, where talk of prose, platform, food, friendship, and flesh turns darker by the line.

Stephen Zelnick’s “New World Poetry” follows Rubén Darío from Nicaragua into modernismo, politics, myth, and cultural resistance, tracing the music and force of a poet who carried the New World into literature.

No Share in the Common Treasury by James Graham is a powerful memoir-essay tracing the author’s family history through generations of hard labour, poverty, grief, and exploitation. Moving from County Antrim to Glasgow, Ayrshire, and the long working life of his father Danny, the piece blends intimate remembrance with political conviction. Through the lives of farm labourers, factory workers, mothers, widows, and underpaid servants, Graham argues for dignity, shared ownership, and a fair place fo

Capsize by Joseph West is a brief, sharp meditation on the hidden weight of mental distress. Using the image of a capsized boat as both joke and lifeline, the piece captures the strange mismatch between inner weather and the ordinary world outside, where the sun still shines and strangers still smile. Honest, self-aware, and quietly hopeful, it follows the speaker through a bad day toward the knowledge that the feeling will pass, and calmer shores can be reached.

In “A Recall for Seamus Heaney,” Tom Sheehan writes a haunted tribute of memory, inheritance, and return. A dark kitchen opens into older Irish landscapes — curraghs, field fires, stone walls, hunger, exile, and Roscommon calling — until the speaker walks toward himself through the echoes of the past.

In “Trout Fishing with Rommel’s Last-Known Foe,” Sheehan turns a quiet fishing scene into a vivid act of remembrance. Beneath bare alders and October crows, an old soldier’s memories of shrapnel, desert warfare, buried comrades, and Egypt’s shifting sands rise through the present, binding battle, survival, and memory into one powerful elegy.

In The Gun, Emily Bilman confronts the psychology of violence through the figure of a lone gunman whose rage turns first upon others and finally upon himself. Stark and compressed, the poem traces a terrible passage through alienation, guilt, bloodshed, and self-destruction, ending with the haunting image of the weapon as a “sin-eating gun.”

The Summer Gallery gathers public-domain, photo shopped and digitally adapted images and contributor artwork from the quarterly issue, ranging from fairy-tale illustration and Symbolist unease to richly coloured landscapes. Together, the images form a varied visual companion to the season’s poetry, stories and essay

Scott Mallory traces the rise of ruthless businessman Caleb Toolbee and the private tragedy that shadows his success. When Caleb’s violent son Todd attacks a disabled mechanic, the encounter ends in death, leaving a community to weigh wealth, power, revenge and the painful limits of justice.

Set beside the glittering waters of Venice, this poem captures a private moment of devastation unfolding within an ordinary afternoon. A young woman receives painful news, and the beauty around her is transformed by grief, memory, and the sudden breaking open of the heart.

A windswept journey along the Devon coast, where ruined defences, fishing villages, sea birds, and broken shorelines become vessels for memory. The poem evokes a landscape haunted by history, hardship, and the lingering presence of lives shaped by the sea.