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Evaporating, the face slid, eyes first, into oblivion.
A cloud of a mouth opened, spilling
blue words like soft rain, inking into a waking dream.

Sleep. Rest your head in the grass.
Let wanderlust guide you
from the edge of hard things,
ignore snapping mouths of decision,
unlock yourself into a stagnant life.

Pause. Slip out of duty like a loose shirt.
Hide from the biting hum of time. Click.
Let sing-song slippery wings whisk you,
weeping into flight. Escape, escape.

No one but you knows this place, its dark webbed corners,
where mind weaves absence and regret into cramped stillness
whispering, Wait. Let the leaves fall into another evening.
Of all that’s undone, there is none tonight left to do.



E. F. Schraeder holds an interdisciplinary doctorate emphasizing applied ethics and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, most recently Chapter Eleven (Partisan Press). Dr. Schraeder’s work has appeared in Birthing Monsters, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Mystery Weekly Magazine, The Feminist Wire, and other journals and anthologies.
Current Issue
10 Aug 2026

the sleeping are so hard to distinguish / from the dead
We'd only lived in Arizona four years—it was our retirement place. But I'd died there, and she'd dumped my ashes out in the desert without fanfare, without any poem or prayer, unless you considered, “Jesus, Marty, don't leave me. Why'd you leave me, you old bastard" to be an elegy.
Nature, desecrated, refused to yield more than bone
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