Introduction to 4th Quarter Poetry (Oct 2025)
Please welcome the group of familiar contributors as well as new folks from across the country and around the world who offer some of the best speculative fiction poetry of 2025:
Noel Sloboda (York, Pennsylvania)
Visitation
Lauren McBride (Lubbock, Texas)
Lost in a Word
Brian Hugenbruch (Binghamton, New York)
…like breaking glass
Anna Cates (Wilmington, Ohio)
At the Ruins of Sarpedon
Gretchen Tessmer (Gouverneur, New York)
Lunch Date
Becky Parker (Lyles, Tennessee)
Cry of a Barren Woman
Hannan Khan (Mailsi, Punjab, Pakistan)
Love.exe: Connection Failed {Error 404}
Rachel Gorelik (Phoenix, Arizona)
the statue
Gerri Leen (Sterling, Virginia)
Smoke and Mist
Sam Barbee (Winston-Salem, North Carolina)
Mother Nature Protests
With respect to augmenting your poetry with art. Rarely will a single image be successful. Please understand that this is a time-consuming process, which I take very seriously. Sometimes I create artwork by merging several images as overlays in PowerPoint. Before I learned the utility of PNG images, I merged JPEG images by making one partially transparent. The beauty of PNG images is that they allow me to superimpose them on JPEG images with no ghosting for a much cleaner presentation. When searching for images, some of the best images I found were not free because they were acquired by Getty, Shutterstock, and Adobe, to mention a few. The free images from Unsplash are often disappointing (their good ones usually require payment). Wikipedia offers images that are licensed under Creative Commons but are often very limiting in creating a montage or collage, but can be helpful when all that is needed is an image of certain pieces of artwork, like paintings by the masters. Ironically, giants like Shutterstock often commandeer images that were free to the public, e.g., NASA images, which I will use, crediting them (while making sure any third-party contributors don’t offer an obstacle). On occasion, I will use AI for assistance. This might produce a negative knee-jerk reaction from some folks because the words Artificial Intelligence have been villainized and are received as curse words. As the poetry editor of a reputable magazine, I’m asking you to trust me in making informed decisions on AI-generated images; that is, they do not infringe on anybody’s rights. For this issue, I have relied on Wixel for some of the poems. It’s often obvious that the images originated from a manipulation of clip art collections; however, I also perform a reverse Google search to get reasonable assurance that no part of the artwork comes from copyrighted sources. It takes me at least one full hour to find and/or create, then verify the legitimate use of the artwork that complements your poem. Thank you for understanding my intentions and my process, and why I cannot replace images I worked hard to create.
If you don’t produce an MP3 from the start, please remember to convert your audio files from MP4A to MP3. You can do it for free and painlessly yourself: https://www.freeconvert.com/m4a-to-mp3/download.
John C. Mannone
Senior Poetry Editor