Issue Five - Oct. 2026 | Hood Of Bone

FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader,

There are times I find it a difficult and strange task to introduce the kind of work that I love. I’m a terrible summarizer, the worst dream-teller, an expert at muddying once-visible depths. It’s why I’ve been so drawn to poetry: it’s its own mind. It can be faithless and wretched, dextrous, the least congenial. And it can move differently, outside of the realm of complete sense and intellection– what is convincing about the poetry and art we aim to publish in Hood of Bone is something else.

This fifth issue of Hood of Bone will be the first of its kind: paraphrasing Jane Hirshfield, we are moving into the self and away from it. Quoting Jane Hirshfield, “No matter how carefully we read or how much attention we bring to bear, a good poem can never be completely entered, completely known. If it is the harvest of true concentration, it will know more than can be said in any other way. And because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.”

Leave us at arm’s length. Look at us from some gauzy hiding place. Deny us understanding.

Yours,

Grace Ezra

TWO POEMS

by Mary DiPrete

MEDIAN LINE

The moon

and related light. What was,

after all, left

of the spilled

lilies, the deer jaw

and the space

between them

I will watch

flicker relentlessly

from this rearview

mirror. Tonight,

gasoline

and marrow,

memory and molt. I will

steer towards the dead

malls named for

dead poets,

with their movie theaters

full of faces

and forgetting. Some things

are like the wind,

I mean how it maps

the empty

fields

NEGATIVE FOAL

After we'll say it was like

it pulled itself from the rafters

alone, that the belly shivered

in the waves like grass. What held

the architecture of her body together

was only breath which was almost

more elemental than breath,

more like wind. Tautologous

symmetry that collapsed and poured

out of her in blood and heat

and another body. All of this

happened in silence. After

we'll say it was like if you took a glass

and threw it on the ground to break

into another whole glass.

When the legs come

will the ground hold them

DOUBLE HEADED DEER

Sam Slipkovich

2026

Shetland wool crochet filet

24"x48

EXHALE (OF MISSISSIPPI FUNERAL CLAY)

by Jade Zora Dean

With so many airplanes in eyes crashing this funeral like syringes stabbing a

thorax some surgical syntax to slip in a breath sliced thin

climb inside a fresh cavity surrounded by a toothpick pine prison bars,

collapsing at every rust-red breath— clay piled up by the coffin, preying to mars

for an intrusion extrusion, drown pouring pooling around necks so bent like mighty rivers, heavy and hot leaden with threats itching up

visceral versions—paralyzing visions—fleeing for life

from fear of hearing faggot in every bathroom, echoed between every glance, at every gathering up the subtitles are

an offering on platters of ridicule— deep fried and fishy

like "Your mom looks like Elton John!" at the fucking funeral,

but everyone cries for her mother-in-law who despised her corrupting guts—when really gutted about her

dyke daughter so in surrender, surrounded by the tongue-tied, woven white flags, over conquered bleach bones, with white doves caged, grimaced

teeth, blown-through smoke-signaled from the tips of burning fags

rotting in humid heat

and lungs seethe and stillborn words slip from breath-held

lungs bathing in so many icy looks— it stuns

how strange, strangled groundwater still ruddy, stains

satin cheeks

With kin in the casket, at last, breathe

but peace is just an empty body perceived

from within and those sins

received an undead grasping

at the threads in every rasped breath

reeling on some suffocating morsel

so stuck in the mud, sinking while

in a soil-thick exhale humid with

relief and grief

we watch difference being buried

in Mississippi clay, six feet deep

ANGEL SET

Sam Slipkovich

2026

Cotton Crochet filet & silver foil

57" x 45"

TWO POEMS

by Dustin King

GNAT

Gnuisance

in the corneal membrane.

Backstroking grandma's glass of over-oaked chardonnay.

Dumped in the grass.

You could try and not breathe

or consult your local Avon representative.

Skin-So-Soft, tea tree oil, witchhazel,

a sprig of mint behind each ear.

None of that does a good goddamn.

Summertime gnats and their cousins

mosquito and tick

guzzle DEET like peach tea.

We megadose on garlic,

keep a Swisher Sweet lit.

Breed bats.

Pray a whole lot of Gnostic nonsense.

Put our hands to the heavens

so the specks stray to the highest point.

Spin in circles with the grandkids,

and grandpa faster and faster

until we collapse in the front yard.

Short answer: you don't.

You suffer and cuss.

SWALLOWTAIL

Start naming things

& there are more and more questions

like have you been so soundless

since you first slurched from your twitching chrysalis?

Nevermind.

Your fluttering mimics my brain activity

& I have a modern American's slutty attention span.

Flash of hindwing, nectarine-flecked.

We invent a word for you: flutter.

You flutter after a dragonfly,

handsome in his own right, across the backyard,

land on my toe, refuse the finger I extend,

extend your proboscis, suck.

Scrumptious-looking

yet pipevine-bitter to predators.

I kind of like that you only look sweet

offbalance in the wind,

black and blue iridescence,

sunning like a vulture in the mid-morning glare.

THE BOY

after Richard Siken

by Alex Carrigan

The plane hits turbulence right as I read about Siken's housemate's girlfriend's kid. For the first

time in half a decade, I remember my ex-roommate's kid. That excitable boy who was over every

other weekend in my first apartment in the DMV. The boy wasn't as wild as the one Siken knew.

He would only talk to me or acknowledge me if we happened to be in the kitchen at the same

time. One time, I was about to leave the apartment and he stopped me to talk about how he and

the other kids at his day camp dressed as clowns that day. He spoke at double speed about the

face painting and clothes they wore until his dad demanded he let me leave. I later learned the

boy was a junior when I heard him break a glass while he and his dad were in the kitchen making beer. He went by a name longer than his given one the whole time I knew him. I haven't seen either of them since COVID, and now that he's probably a teenager, I still hope he finds things to

be excited about in life. I'll probably forget him again now that the plane is beginning to fly

smoothly again, but it was nice to remember him briefly.

BABY FORD

Sam Slipkovich

2026

Wool & cotton filet

31" x 37"

PART WITH

by Chad Foret

Baby alligators part

with appendages

at exit 23, courtesy

of cars called by

climate. I'm partly

with you, some

pieces in the past.

We party near

a slip winch dirt

nest, fish for

fun past Pass

Manchac. Proverbs

say a troubled

house will notarize,

send you wind,

but what if that is

what we want,

something to surround

us when seabirds

won't, & what does wind

send except what

it was with or some of what

it was, salt, scent,

a passing over people present

now in part, near

hatchling halves?

TWO POEMS

by Karl Miller

APOLOGY TO A DECEASED SIBLING

A few weeks

afterward

I called you

in a dream

& was happy

you picked up

conversation flowed

like things were normal

but after a while

my mind wandered (as it's

prone to do) & when

I asked you

about your dog

a third time

there was only

silence

ORLANDO & HERE (& EVERYWHERE)

yrs ago we working

would take on the

our kids rafters

to the parks over

now the the pool

hotel deck

where we

used to

stay have their birth-

is a day parties

strip mall I found an old piece

& tom of tape cracked

sawyer's island & discolored

is almost the balloon long

gone

SABIAN SYMBOL

Sam Slipkovich

2026

Linen & crochet filet

22" x 22"

CONTRIBUTORS

ALEX CARRIGAN (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Confessions and Cold Coffee (forthcoming 2027, Troublemaker Firestarter), Now Let’s Get Brunch (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in HAD, Only Poems, Sage Cigarettes, Pine Hills Review, and more. Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.

JADE ZORA DEAN (she/they) is pursuing her M.F.A. at San Francisco State where she serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State Review. Her poetry has appeared in The Ana and is upcoming in New Words {Press} Issue 8. Jade's poem, "Not Hiding, Unseen" was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. She loves to use art to tap into the empathy of those who submit to aesthetic experience.

MARY DiPRETE makes poems and other objects. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Ghost Harmonics, The Brooklyn Review, & Peach. She has worked as a professor, a farmhand, a bartender, an elementary school arts teacher, and a lead pipe surveyor. A devotee of the Beaufort Wind Scale, she is from the backwoods: the wild and the feral.

CHAD FORET is a writer and editor from southeast Louisiana. Recent poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in If Memory Serves, a food writing anthology from Good, Printed Things; Action, Spectacle; Fairy Tale Review; Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine; San Pedro River Review; and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of Scenes from a Rain Country (Lavender Ink, 2022) and Watching Machine (Osmanthus, 2026). Learn more at chadforet.com, or follow him on Instagram (@chad4a).

DUSTIN KING would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When nothing good is playing, he teaches Spanish and exchanges dreams with loved ones in Richmond, VA. His poems pop up in New Letters, Prism Review, Door is a Jar, and other rad spots. He is a poetry reader for Sublunary Review and co-curates the poetry and performance event "Yodel Farm." He had two chapbooks out in 2025: “Last Echo” from Bottlecap Press and "Courteous Gringo" from Seven Kitchens Press.

KARL MILLER's fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals; he also wrote the plays A Night in Ruins (Off Off Broadway, 2013) and Afterward (LA, 2021). A Best of the Net nominee, Miller lives in Coral Springs, FL.

SAM SLIPKOVICH is an artist and designer from Nashville, TN. Their work is primarily meditations on phenomenological moments in semantic, queer pantomime; grief & loss, light and shadow cast, the burning feeling in your chest. They make quilts and tapestries as means of gentle storytelling with these moments with their dolls featuring as characters.