Shadowplay 2026 Issue 4

Editorial -a cento using the works from Shadowplay Issue 4 The brown thrush signals end of day, after a whole life building, to be called a ruin. Your visions droop and wallow, sticky weeping wounds all black and tarred, the remains >A globe in the branches turning and burning brightly into the deep heat of that day ...faint cries coming over the water, along >Your curse cut me, and through the scabs, clamped inside the jaws of life, I wrest my sleeves, their dead and dried up leaves curly at the base. Jagged slivers spew out >On the pavement like heavy rain, I was mute with the muteness of a flamboyance of trees. Silence changes shape to begin anew >And then at her feet of ivory and ice, my shadow crosses snow, with a distance as vast as that which isolates the stars, a new brittleness in my chest >Let's not talk of ghosts, though. I hear them moaning a deep, continuous roar, a thing of beauty >I've felt myself morphing into another being, pointing toward a small silhouette. Stems push through broken stones of the mirror surface, having trudged through >We're gliding through a passageway, the souls off to mourning songs and hunger, litter strewn, litter cleared, the leaves shaggy like billy goats.And I, off to perch into something else. My rusted ribs cave, cracking like the rattling of small stones, the skywards swoop of my movement on cobalt-sheened wings. Hope, the birds are still calling. Jenn Beachler Editor-in-Chief of Shadowplay

Pagina's: 108, Paperback, Independently published