Fall 2025 Digital Lit
“Before / After”
F I C T I O N
GONE TO BABYLAND Bethany Bruno
“The sea does not stop. It keeps roaring, relentless, guilty and loud, drowning out every human sound.”
NEWTON’S ORBIT Tarik James Ghiradella
“Instead, she said: “It’s drifting, isn’t it? You can see it but you can’t stop it.”
He froze. He hadn’t told her. She couldn’t know.“
“The Company at its core is an adult daycare; we talk members through their bad days, we clean up their messes, we build charcuterie boards for snack time.”
SOMEWHERE, FILED AWAY Catherine Shukle
“Her body offered up because she thought it was all she had to give him. And then, just like that, it was gone.”
P O E T R Y
“It’s your voice and it’s not. Your body and not.
Between flesh and mind, love and friendship”
DISPLACED MONARCHS Brigittine French
“we, farmers’ daughters who became their mothers,
with certitude that books
dates
and equality”
“an hour to kill, an hour to spare
I have mercy on my hours”
“what do waves whisper? / to be loved / enough / that i could scatter”
“You glimpsed the truth,
you think,
at least part of it,
sitting at work today–
through a window and a door“
“We stumble over the barrier and into a world only remembered by forbidden feet and the nozzle
of a spray can. Our words fill the air around us, bouncing off the flat walls and down“
THE ARITHMETIC OF AFTER Meg Taylor
“A stubbed toe can split a day,
so can a birth,
so can silence finally broken.“
IN JAPANESE MEMORIAM Wakako Ueshima
“One of three hundred sixty-five,
immortalized
reduced
now the lonely One”
“no clay feet: airborne in a dust devil
no place for light
or holding water,“
POST RETIREMENT SYNDROME Daniel Edward Moore
“Who would have thought these days would find me,
hypersensitive, easy to caress, like a toothbrush“
GHAZAL FOR NEW YORK CITY Erika Gill
“in Central Park I melt, slowly by stages, into a frozen strawberry lemonade
outside of Strawberry fields a sudden void scoops my soul into concavity“
“Howlin’ Wolf’s
wang dang doodle
boomeranging
in a somersault
all street long“
“Here, the parking lot is flooding. Seeping
into the soles of my boots.“
C R E A T I V E
N O N – F I C T I O N
“Even if they could arrest time like the superheroes on their underpants, your bleak benediction would help no one.“
LOVE PEOPLE, COOK THEM TASTY FOOD Misty Archambault
“Inviting me into your home and allowing me to see an empty refrigerator is a personal insult, the passive aggressive equivalent of spitting in my face.“
CONCENTRIC CIRCLES: A TAROT READING Christie Ellen
My mother’s smile contrasts with something in her eyes. Is she nervous? Tired?
“I glance at the clock. Dismissal isn’t for another 15 minutes and I normally take the bus home. Why is my mother here? “
“We talked about it like the promised land. Cinderblock, sand.“
INTENDS TO COMPLY Georgene Smith Goodin
“I was supposed to bring their father but, instead, I brought fried chicken.”
Cover art: “Rupture” by RUNA
Fall 2025 Welter Masthead
Poetry Reading Team
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