Contributors, Imprint, issue 3
Full issue coming out in the second week of December.
Posts
JOY
Welcome to JOY, a special popup edition of Temple in the City. This edition isn’t meant to change the world or make light of the darkness so many feel and see around them. But we hope it will act like a sudden sunburst. A reminder that good things, beautiful things, glorious things happen all the time, all around us. Life grows in the most inhospitable places. We grow with it, whether we like it or not.
Some of the work here is just a few words. Or just the right words. Sometimes nonsense words or nonsense use of words. Words to make you smile or laugh or feel, for a moment, the warmth of a friendly sun, the touch of a loving breeze, the touch of another being, human or animal, equally in the dark, equally looking for strength to keep going. That moment can fuel the next moment, and the next. It doesn’t need anything else. It just is.
This idea started as a single, one-off micro edition but joy can’t be captured or limited. So we’re going to keep it alive and moving by making it an ongoing, open-ended issue. When a spark of joy comes our way, we’ll add it here.
Please let this issue wash over you. Let it give you some relief amid the burdens of being alive, with all that trying. Don’t ask it to be anything more or less than it is, then give yourself that same kindness.
We hope you find joy, here and everywhere you can.
Contributors
Karen Baumgart, Denise Bayes, Jessica Coles, Kristin Houlihan, Patrick Johanneson, Rachel Abbey McCafferty, Ben MacNair, Kathryn Reese, Slawka G. Scarso, Brigitta Scheib, Sumitra Singam, Karen Walker
Two poems, Ben Macnair
A poem about Christopher Walking
This is a poem about Christopher, walking,
because he doesn’t feel like driving.
He just needs some bread and some milk,
easy to carry in his on-ya bag.
I know that you are expecting this poem to
be about the Hollywood star Christopher Walken,
with his idiosyncratic way of speaking,
of dancing, and being in some classic films.
But no, this is just a poem about some bloke
called Christopher, going for a walk
because it is a nice day.
Cairo
We didn’t speak until Cairo,
I felt it rude to interrupt,
and he did seem to be having,
such a good time,
telling himself stories that
no one else would believe.
Every sentence lasted ten minutes,
every paragraph was an hour,
every silence, a wasted opportunity
to shoehorn in another topic,
that wasn’t all about him.
Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair
Temple in a city nominations
Congratulations to all nominated authors
Best of the net 2025
Sumitra Singam, Bird swallowers
Rachel Rodman, He Always Lied, I Always Told the Truth. And Then We Fell in Hate
Kathryn Reese, Post-vespers
Pushcart Prize 2025
Cole Beauchamp, If Only
Emily Rinkema, Lou
June Gemmell, The Homecoming
Kendra Cardin, A change in the recipe
S.A. Greene, Brian Wilson is dead and why can’t I stop crying?
Dominic Walsh, Slice of life, in absentia
Best microfiction
Elizabeth Rosen, Endeavor
Slawka G. Scarso, And then she told Jack off
Sumitra Singam, You-and-Kate in a field, loving me
Vijayalakshmi Sridhar, I heard you became a father again
Huina Zheng, The pin inside my body
Poetry, Kathryn Reese
Stim
The alphabet is an instrument and she’s in the kitchen strumming “Coco banana!”
as she goes about breakfast. All the buzz—a whirlpool of milk, cocoa, banana
vanilla, cinnamon, honey smeared on the bench. She’s gone into improv—
doesn’t need the conductor. Just stage crew to clean or pass her cocoa, banana
cinnamon cinnamon honey no mango banana pushed through a sieve
the lumps pushed from her mouth, the fruit pushed through her fist, banana
all we did right—and even that pushed into the underside of the red tray table
and abandoned. She made a bridge: coco-coco-coco-banana
peels to the sky. A whirlpool of milk. The buzz. The breakfast. The honey
the honey the honey, the love. The incorrect proportions: cinnamon, cocoa, banana
The sludge. The quiet part.
What can’t be said, the alphabet, the instruments, the broken strings. The reason (banana)
we can’t enter that room (banana) the cocoa marshmallow the soothing
the strumming. The long note. Banana.
Kathryn Reese writes poetry & flash. She lives on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical microbiology and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Literary, Kelp Journal and Australian Poetry Journal. She was a winner of the Red Room Poetry’s #30in30 competition & the Heroines Women’s Writing Prize 2024. https://instagram.com/katwhetter? BlueSky: @kathrynreese.bsky.social
Poetry, Kristin Houlihan
Hibiscus
Lone blossom
First of the season
Fuschia joy
Kristin Houlihan is a disabled poet, wife, and mother striving to live and love to the fullest while bedridden with Long Covid. She is cofounder and Poetry Editor at Epistemic Literary and Nimblewitlit Magazine, and her chapbook of micropoetry, Lift the Mask, is available widely. www.kristinhoulihan.com, Bluesky: kristinwrites.bluesky.social
Poetry, Karen Walker
Roof Manifesto as read atop 4402 Zurich St E on July 14 2026
Tomorrow, everyone will be talking about our art. Will be looking up.
Terribly simple the art. The word.
Roof.
Three letters on four walls.
Art expects trouble:
“authorities” broadcasting, “Come down immediately,”
know-it-all pigeons (warning: they’ve actually read the roof literature we said we did) cooing rooftop psychology about why we don’t and therefore write
about rooftop bourgeoisie
: infinity pools, potted palms, spiced chicken lettuce cups.
Roof Viktoria and Roof Allison, that’s why we’re up here.
Never ever take the shining corrupting elevator, Roof Akiel.
Fire escape escape.
Roof revolution, Roof Michelle and Sherri and
others barely in favour of ourselves.
So repeat after me:
Roof, roof, roof.
Roo roo, roo,
Oo, oo, oo
then just f. F this, F that far, far below.
F everything heavy and rotting, sticky or not worth the $29.99.
Go mad. Up here, lose consciousness but carefully.
Roof is where world soul goes to get away.
In the question of aesthetics, height is key.
I shall now dispense with gravity.
Float hand in hand Roof Joe and Roof Kamal.
Blow away, risky Roof Rosa.
In the question of connections, key is how the roof sits on the building and hangs from the sky.
Dispense with convention to free the o to fool and roam, to meow and moan as if in the throes:
yoof
moof
yoof di moof
Roof is where it ends and begins.
poof
boof
goof
boof boof
spoof
proof.
Karen Walker draws and paints and writes in Ontario, Canada. Her recent work is in Full House Literary, Weird Lit Magazine,Trash Cat Lit, Blink Ink, Switch, Turn and Work, and Temple in a City. @kawalker.bsky.social
Two poems, Jessica Coles
Meet the enchantress, wherever she is
on the way to the pond where
I contemplate the innocence of frogs
I remove my shoes, leave behind
scarf and belt that disrupt ecosystems of narrative
hem of my skirt teaches forgotten lessons
how to rot with purpose
who could reject an offer of metamorphosis?
I grow extra joints to leap from logic
weave moss, reed, algae into wisdom
this marshy garment redefines sweetness:
witch-selves I drowned re-emerge
to croak twilight joy
Ignius Benevolus
Joy is an elusive light, a path that leads
to insubstantial ground
in dark forests, untrustworthy flutters
and sparks at the edges of sight:
what guides my doubtful steps?
Perhaps not all flickers of
luminescence intend deception.
What if delight can be captured, what if hope’s phantasm
has solid edges—in the right shadow?
Perhaps you teach my feet
lightness, how to dance through swamps
so that when toes meet water’s edge
reeds coalesce into cobblestone
shifting shape like the joy of being
beckoned down a safe path that restores
my faith in ethereal candles
that lures me
home.
Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her family, a tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet, a tarantula named Miss Dashwood, and a green keel-bellied lizard named Bao Long. Her work has appeared in print and online at Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Full Mood Mag, atmospheric quarterly, Stone Circle Review, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Capital City Press Anthology (Vol. 4), Ghost City Review, slips slips, and elsewhere. She has self-published two chapbooks, Unless You’re Willing to Evaporate and The Lyrics Prompt Poems: Ultimate Collector’s Edition (prairievixenpress.ca). Find her on Bluesky @prairievixen.bsky.social
Poetry, Karen Baumgart
Karen Baumgart lives in Australia and adores beautiful quotes, pink things, cats, and chai lattes. She loves working in human services policy, especially when it enables marginalised people to have a voice. Karen used to be an English teacher and is quite certain that writing is, indeed, the best therapy. Instagram: @miss.cake.girl Bluesky: @cake-girl.bsky.social Twitter / X: @cake_girl__
Outtake
Inquisitive photo bomber interrupts the shoot.
Two poems, Yuan Changming
To depart (free haiku)
Means to move along with sunlight
& leave your shadow longer & longer
Behind, or the other way around
The Chinese Spirit: a Mythological Review
Unlike your legendary Alexander the Great
None of us has come to conquer; nor are we
To be conquered (even by God), let alone any
Human artifacts or behaviours, including science
And tech blockades & tariffs. Rather, as Confucius
Has taught us, we always avoid talking of strange
Phenomena, feats of strength, disorder or sprits
Whereas we do worship our
Ancestors, especially those never accepting defeat
Such as the ever stubborn Houyi who persisted
In shooting down all the nine extra suns as they
Made the world too hot; the determined
Xingtian who soldiered on long after his head
Was chopped off; the old Mr. Fool who must
Remove the mountain blocking his way rather
Than relocating his cottage; the simple-minded
Jingwei who kept filling the East Sea with twigs
Where she was drowned; the devoted Dayu trying
To contain the Flood instead of escaping from
It in an ark as did your Noah, (so cute & creative)
Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2149 other publications worldwide. A poetry juror for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write prose in 2022, his hybrid novel DETACHING, ‘silver romance’ THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS available at Amazon.
Poetry, Toni della Fata
Baby, are you a believer?
I don’t believe in God anymore.
But I believe in foxes, standing on the hood of my neighbour’s 2024 Toyota,
in blood moons in the dead heat of summer,
in gravestones with handwritten notes taped to the marble, spelled incorrectly in a foreign language,
in crumpled birthday cards and sun-stained photos in a shoebox underneath my mattress.
“Ci vediamo,” see you soon, I remember telling myself,
at the foot of your bed,
the mausoleum,
the pier,
at an apartment in Montreal’s east-end.
I believe in the text messages you sent me,
in the accidental photo you took of yourself in the hospital,
they sit undeleted, like cremated ashes on my phone.
“Don’t remember me like this,” you said in broken English, because you wanted me to understand,
I promised that I wouldn’t but of course that was a lie.
I believe in the clock reaching half past noon, one April afternoon, sitting in my high-school’s music room, dread creeping like a morning glory up my throat.
I believe in early spring sadness, budding with the daffodils in the ditch off the cemetery’s main road.
I believe we’ll always be tethered together, your electric pulse in mine,
Though I spent years fighting it,
I close my eyes,
Watch our images,
blur,
overlap,
collapse.
Maybe if I can’t believe in God, I can at least believe in You.
Toni della Fata is a lesbian writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is a professional daydreamer, whose work focuses on the fringes between fiction and reality. When she isn’t writing, Toni can be found in a nearby stream counting fish or somewhere on the coast collecting sea shells.
Three poems, Joshua Walker
If It Still Hurts, It Means You’re Awake
That’s the rule. The rest is metaphor.
Your heart- a pit viper curled in a shoe.
Your breath- a coin flipped into a dry well.
Your name – an echo
that winces when it’s called.
If it still hurts, maybe you outlived the ritual.
Maybe the smoke didn’t take.
Maybe your ribs learned
to sing without permission.
Once, your doctor asked if you heard voices.
You said: only when they need something.
He smiled like that meant “no.”
If it still hurts,
it might be the prayer decomposing.
It might be God peeling your name
off his tongue like a scab.
It might be
you,
again,
asking to be known
and bleeding when you’re not.
You Were Born With Your Hands Full:
A splinter of moon,
a dead wasp,
your grandfather’s last breath.
You’ve never known how to be empty.
Even now
you carry pills,
lost buttons,
a girl’s hair from a bus seat in 2011
you never got to return.
Grief taught you balance.
Joy taught you guilt.
Your shoulders forgot
how to drop.
Once you told someone
you couldn’t cry anymore.
They said:
Then let the salt come through your palms.
You dig holes in the dirt
just to watch them stay open.
You believe in silence.
But not the kind
that forgives.
The Mouth Remembers Before the Mind
The salt of her skin,
the word you swallowed
so hard it grew teeth.
Your tongue is a reliquary.
There are prayers lodged
in your molars.
One cracks every time
you lie about being okay.
Sometimes you dream
of bees nested in your throat,
buzzing secrets your body
never agreed to keep.
You speak in thorns now.
You call it healing.
You call it poetry.
You call it
not dying.
Your mother’s voice
was the first ghost
to take up space in you.
You were seven.
You still are.
You wake with a taste
you can’t place
a little iron,
a little mercy,
a little god.
Joshua Walker is a poet and storyteller, also known as The Last Bard. His work explores memory, identity, and the fragile beauty of survival amid hardship. Drawing on personal experience with mental illness and a deep love for myth and lyricism, Joshua crafts poems that are raw, intimate, and unflinchingly honest. He shares his voice widely on social media and continues to build a community of readers and fellow seekers.
Bluesky@bigjosh84 Insta/threads@bigjosh84thelastbard
Two poems, Peter Cashorali
The Lover
If you’re a hallucination that’s okay. If you’re the relationship with my mother when I was two that’s fine. If you’re the product of my having been born in 1954 and living since then in a temperate zone of the planet, sure. An aspect of capitalist consumer culture? Okay! Maybe you are just a trick of the light, made of the afternoon light and Thai food. Don’t you get it? I don’t need you to “really exist.” Just be with me.
Real
You’re faking it, and suddenly you’re not. You’re fooling yourself, and the real thing assembles out of your foolishness and is here. Surely there are wrong ways to go but on every path here it is, the where, the what, the who you seek, and despair of finding, and always knew was fake, that dug the cellar of your grief, that was how your family made its fortune, that your father gambled away when he was young, and the fortune roamed the world, searching for you on every road in back country so no road was the wrong one, that one morning at daybreak steps up to you, clasps your cold hands in its own and says, “Oh my God. You really do exist.”
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist
Poetry, Ronita Chattopadhyay
Burnt vegetables and spilled milk or what I will miss when you are gone
and, yes,
extra sweet tea
because you have always refused
to believe in spoons and
used your unaided hands
for measuring everything
and misplaced items
that would turn up
in the most unexpected places
like your spectacles in the fridge
and your ability to sew,
to patch up things
that seemed irredeemably torn
and your smile and your face
and your touch.
Ronita Chattopadhyay (she/her) is an Indian poet and writer. Her micro chapbook Preparing to be Wrecked has been published as part of an anthology (Grieving Hope) by Emerge Literary Journal. Her work has also appeared in The Hooghly Review, Akéwì Magazine, streetcake magazine, Porch Lit Magazine, FemAsia, among others, and anthologies by Querencia Press, Sídhe Press, Rough Diamond Poetry and Bare Bones. She loves mountains, books, music and tea. Socials: ronita.bsky.social (Bluesky) ronita_c (Twitter/X)
Poetry, Todd Matson
Author/Artist Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States. His poetry has been published Feminine Collective, San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, and featured in Poetry for Mental Health. He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by several contemporary Christian music artists, including Brent Lamb, Connie Scott and The Gaither Vocal Band.
Poetry, Peter Gutierrez
Afterparty
There were tides inside, lap-rolling and full of swimmings with and
Against the waves, lagoons of shifting plastic, and seabirds fighting
With the shore birds fighting with the waterfowl, intarsial contrails
Of diving, flying over, falling into. Nearly every morning she awakens
Only partly, the slosh of dreams and the chilled saltiness of reality
Staggering her back into jumbled half-action.
The clear light and the unclear, and how the two of them liked to switch
Between the two.
The clear undercuts the unclear, which is fun in a jungle
Sort of way—you never knew what phenomena you’d encounter in the fog.
Focus on breath in, hate out.
Breath in, hate out.
Janus felt the negative leave his core, or
At least decided that’s how he’d describe it
Later.
Breath in, hate out.
Or should that be breathe? He hated those online
folks who didn’t grasp the difference. (Spells & spellings.)
In any case: in through the twins, observing thoughts
As they froth and ferment. Then: out through the lips,
Fumigating the caverns of contempt in the digestive knowledge
Management system.
Distantly, a jet plane quiet-thundering through the clouds;
On the next block, a Sonata slides by, its tread smooth and humming.
He could sit here and listen to the dawn-sounds, the sound-
Makers afar and invisible, and be happified for the rest of his
Life, he mused.
His wife, Eleanor, enjoyed a different pathway into the light:
Influenced by an influencer, she went out each dawning before
Anything else. Barely dressed, barefoot or flip-flopping along,
Ellie followed the notion of forcing undesired action into being,
Doing that which she didn’t want to do to skill her mind into
Facing the unknown; specifically, the rest of the unraveling day.
As a strategy, this swelled and broke like an egg. Those summer
Mornings in Maryland, inches past daybreak, and she could feel
The hint of heat, the tingly precursors of rain, the immediate world
Still coated in night’s silences. This emergent love of the pale,
Creeping minutes in a pale and creeping hour derailed the project
(As happens sometimes). Later, a post she drafted explained it,
How what she’d avoided became what she desired, and undid all
The wisdom of the shift. Yet also brought the amor fati peace that
Newsreel chatter, sparkly cocktails, party favors, and elbow-brushings
Had failed to.
Her husband, whose name is likely Janus, was, is, and will be
Ever unaware of the sutured joinings of her Buddha nature.
Peter Gutierrez is a poet and writer with work in Bruiser, Exist Otherwise, Not One of Us, and Lxminxl; his books include the story collection From Bad to Worse and the novella The Trees Melt Like Candles. You can find him online @suddenlyquiet.
Poetry, Ben Nardolilli
Waiting behind
Tonight’s stars are a bunch of people pleasers
Shining brighter than ever
And bringing out all the favorite constellations in a row
I stay inside with my lights on, blocking it out
I have no desire for their show
We do not deserve to look away from earth, not now
Ben Nardolilli is a theoretical MFA candidate at Long Island University. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Door Is a Jar, The Delmarva Review, Red Fez, The Oklahoma Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and Slab. Follow his publishing journey at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.
Contributors, Issue 2, Light
Introducing our dazzling contributors
We’ve named this issue Light. As in at the end of the tunnel, but also exposure. The light that disinfects. Light that illuminates or is painful enough to seek the relief of cloud. Light as in without heaviness, what can drift in even the slightest breeze. The spray of a wave, the bubble in a river. The relief of letting go. There are so many forms of light in this issue. We hope you’ll love it.
Denise Bayes Kendra Cardin Peter Cashorali
Yuan Changming Ronita Chattopadhyay Toni Della Fata
Josh Dale Monica Dickson Travis Flatt
June Gemmell Peter Gutierrez Megan Hanlon
Kyla Houbolt Colin James Ben Nardolilli
Todd Matson Lance Mazmanian Emily Rinkema
Elizabeth Rosen Vijayalakshmi Sridhar Joshua Walker
Karen Walker Huina Zheng
