When My Childhood Friend Asks Why None of My Poems Are About Trees

by Tammy Smith I’d rather write about my roots, ripeand in season. My nature is the rough thickness of my father’s bark when I didn’t know which branch of government wielded the most power. His nostrils flared when I forgothow many members sat in the Houseof Representatives. I’d stare at Mom’s empty chair, hum a few bars of her favorite…

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I Will Not Die From Silence

by Ruby Hansen Murray if the Chihuahua doesn’t dash outsideand bark me to the end of his yard. I am pet-deprived after our dogs pass within weeks of each other, black animals, lumbering and goofy. We took them to the refuge to run on the beach across from Tenasillahe where tugs and cargo ships pass.Afterwards, I knew the dogs at each house…

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The They Who Is Us

by Al Ortolani The plumber arrivesafter my vain attemptsto fix the sink, towelson the floor, ache in myback, pain in my ass as they say. And who is this “they”we speak so often aboutexcept those who remind usof every simple mistakein our clumsiness or ignoranceor naivete. “They” is the smart kid on the block…

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Issue 2.02 is Live!

by Jeffrey Heath Our Fall 2026 issue is now live on the site. You can view the free PDF edition here. Print and Kindle editions are also available via Amazon. Jeffrey Heath, Founding Editor, EIC - January House Literary Journal

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This Eleanor

by Emily Rinkema When her parents flew in to celebrate her 30th birthday, Ellie hired actors to be her friends. She prepared gift bags for them, purchasing and wrapping the gifts, adding chocolate to one bag, a bottle of Champagne to another, and then she handed them out at noon at a coffee shop downtown. Tina took the job for the money, obviously, but also because Pedro was doing it, and maybe this would lead to something more.

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Melting Point

by Sofia Mosqueda Show me how to kill with your mouth open. If America is a melting pot, I am the heat that burns. When I was five, I drew my self-portrait with a brown crayon; classmates laughed when they said I picked an ugly color. Did you know girls learn to value their physical attractiveness as young as three years old?

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The Donkeys of Castelbuono

by Lorraine Hanlon Comanor In the medieval borgo of Castelbuono where the streets are too narrow for standard garbage and recycle trucks, six female Sicilian donkeys — the males considered too stubborn for the job —- form a sanitation team, tickety-ticketing their way over the ancient cobblestones to each house. Here their handlers sort garbage and recyclables and fill their double baskets.

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The Panopticon

by Jessica R Gordon After WCWi) the womanEveryone wants to know the point:Everyone’s asking, what does it matterto see the woman eat her plum, juice running down her chin, her hand covered in pulp, her unwashed hand—what does it mean to notice an unwashed hand? To examine each dirty fingernail,each singing its life of grime, hopeful starts, …

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Two Poems by Ellen Devlin

Lullaby The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise —Emily Dickinson small days, when thinkingslows I eat unpeeled pears,clockless-watch snowfallthen nap near window sunand hum myselfto sleep.then fear blows throughunsealable windows,breathes me helpless,puts me betweennew margins,yet there is a mercyin the narrowing—when I can’t extendthe metaphor, recall…

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Tinker Bell at 60

by Beth Sherman Before you met Peter, you were a will-o’-the-wisp, a spinning leaf, a bit of dandelion fluff. You slept atop lily pads and when the sun tapped your shoulder you splashed across the lake on the back of a toad. You danced with moonbeams. Tickled the bark of a weeping willow. Flew between clouds, your gossamer wings twinkling like a forgotten star.

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the sea urchins are singing

by Rose Ernst purple and green spikes raving in the wavesclusters of brainless lovelies living their best lifeup above on the dockshe plops sugar lumps into her teastringent bite rakes her tonguea chomp at the melon slice frowning at nothingsnaps her bikiniand dives inwashing off the melon sweetnessand below the sea urchins rave…

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2027 Pushcart Prize Nominees

January House Literary Journal is pleased to announce our nominations for the 2027 Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, published since 1976, has become "the most honored literary project in America". Winners are expected to be announced between Spring and Summer of 2027. Congratulations and good luck to our nominees! Loop by Alicia Potee…

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Tucked in Trees by Callan Jaida Jones

Mx. Callan Jaida Jones (they/them) is a queer and disabled multidisciplinary artist based in Mohkinstsis / Calgary, on Treaty 7 Territory. Jones holds a BFA (Honours) in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and their photographic work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. They received the Flash Forward Award from the Magenta Foundation for work created during The Peel Project and The Canadian Wilderness Residency, two canoe-based artist residencies in the Arctic.

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Death at Close Quarters

by John Grey There’s a nest of waspshigh up in the garage.And a brown snake curled upin the long backyard grass.A black widow spider crawls across the ceiling.Everything is dangerous.Everything is close.Meanwhile, my fatheris spraying and swattingand chasing with a hose.My mother watches from the window.We’re just kids.It’s just like an action movie to us.

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In a Fist of Darkness

by Susan Milchman (a golden shovel after Anne Sexton) Death offers me a dream i am small & curled into a damp cave wrapped in moist earth & the smell of softening skin i am here trapped in this bone-bound fate hours away & not yet aware of the weight of losing the sky to this avalanche of stillness my fingers crawl to…

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Fence

by James Keith Smith When the Detroit zoo lost its funding, the animals disappeared from their enclosures and one by one began to roam the streets of Livonia. Chimpanzees howled like maniacs outside the library. Children on summer break followed a skinny polar bear, who carried a deflated basketball in its mouth, into the forest behind the elementary school. I wanted to call my wife and tell her about the animals—the giraffe who ate the leaves off our pear tree, the peacock on the roof—but when she’d packed up her things for her sister’s, she made it clear she’d call when she was ready.

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White Stones

by Ted Mc Carthy We are coming at lastto the white stones we read about;white coigns on warm wallswhere flowers lean like weeds.The sea has become a memoryand we still on it;further, wave by wave,from those streets,their evening stragglers,the growing common urgeto trade a year of lifefor a generous word.

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Two Poems by Béthany Pozzi-Johnson

mosaic wings outstretched it’s here, hidden to all but the gentle ones - the broken end of a branch, hollow,an inch across, filled with small pearly gecko eggs,upon which I place the soft, expired body, lifted from the waves The Stonea stone moved, swam through the lava-bound tide pool, flicking its stone tail like a fishmotionless…

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Swimming With My Father

by Arya F. Jenkins Dressed in a two-piece red bathing suit with a frilly bottom at six, I waited for my Dad to come home from work every day so we could surf waves together. For him to sweep me up onto his shoulders as we raced to the beach across the street from where we lived in Talara. Dad’s long, pale legs sprinting over random boards and piles of weeds to the brilliant shoreline of the Pacific.

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you are here  /  where we are

by Cecil Morris here time comes to unwind seconds kick off their shoes, stretch their long legs out and prop their feet—holey socks and all—on the low tables and the old magazines minutes don’t even cover their mouths when they yawn wide as a donkey braying displaying their awful teeth their horrible wet tongues that no one wants to see…

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Waking Up I Don’t Know Where I Am

by Chenyue Wang “举头望明月，低头思故乡。” —李白 《静夜思》I walk barefoot along the lakeof my desires, until the surface blues my toes.Dithering over which language will conjure it, I neverreturn home in my dream. I measure its magnitude on a scale.Asia, China, Beijing, Dongcheng District:my bedroom in a grey Soviet-style apartment. But ifI could, I would transmit an image in the toponyms—

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poetry / palms / pointed

by Cara Wang poetryi’ve distilled tomorrow to poetry / printed out my words on A4 paper / burned / swallowed my cremation / under the afternoon sun / the stomach becomes a charnel house / for this dream / send the text / watch black text spill over white. / will you burn that too? palms i’m peeling the pig-skin off / my fingerbones / because the dermatologist didn’t give me / cream / for my hands / i hate the way / the night is hung / with shattered stars / who were they / yesterday?

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I am Handed My Beloved in a Bag

by Megan Stillwell I am thinking of a funeral pyre,the ashes and gravelthat a human are worth,the light of our photons exploding —the carbon and phosphateand zinc and iron and char,the particles from the sameproverbial flood, from the sameprovince of being, the same earth,the same city, the same town square:the one where you were born, the one…

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Proxy

by Susan Brink O'Flaherty The PET tech accompanying me to the bathroom is heavily made up, with enormous, pillowy arms she’s somehow squeezed into a long-sleeved t-shirt. I can see all the dimples and undulations of her flesh through the thin light pink lycra under her scrubs. “I’ll be right here, sweetness. Call out when you’re done.” She keeps the door cracked––her blue scrubs and pedestrian pink and white Reeboks are visible from the toilet seat.

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Friendship

by Arielle Arbushites Two men on bikes, chatting,stacking about 160 years between them, wisps of gray hair flying,legs pumping as if in slow motion until One of them pushes ahead, still talking. “What? I can’t hear you!” calls the Otherfrom behind, legs moving faster to catch up,not hesitating for a moment, chasing the attempt to listen more, harder, again.

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Artwork by Howie Good

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry collection, True Crime, was published in Berlin by Sacred Parasite this year.

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Straight-Line Winds

by Kate Dobrovolny Silver maples with their rough, peeling strips of gray bark and shimmering silver-bottomed leaves dominated the neighbor’s backyard, shaded the wild ginger and ostrich ferns, and drew shadows across our property lines, until a storm straight out of Kansas seared off the east side of the mother tree, ripping a jagged hole in the canopy, hurtling a giant lance down…

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A List of My Fears

by Michael Daley The light at dawn dragging night away like a child silenced trying to screamHow afraid I was of the pigeons cooing in the eavesIn that big bed a fever glowered on the crumbling city wallsMelted into terrorsA childhood like that without release The complicity of the abusersWere they dreams or shapes older than hallucinations take?

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Humanoid Beats Usain Bolt’s 100m Record at Beijing Robot Games

by Kip Knott The five-day games demonstrate China’s rapid progress in advanced robotics… Associated Press When the robot breaks the tape,its stops dead center on the trackand turns slowly in all directionsas if calculating whether the crowd is actuallycheering for its victoryor voicing their terror as they realize that a robot may have just become…

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2027 Best of the Net Nominees

January House Literary Journal is delighted to announce our nominations for the 2027 Best of the Net anthology. The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. Congratulations and best of luck to our nominees!

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