Featured Reader
Virtual Event on November 11th, 2025–6:00 P.M to 8:00 P.M.
Live stream will be available on our YouTube Channel at the time of the event!
Kathleen McClung
Kathleen McClung’s newest collection, Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies, arrived in September from Finishing Line Press. Her five previous books include Questions of Buoyancy (Longship Press, 2024); A Juror Must Fold in on Herself (RATTLE, 2020); Temporary Kin (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020); The Typists Play Monopoly (Kelsay Books, 2017); Almost the Rowboat (Finishing Line Press, 2013.) Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She teaches at Skyline College, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and privately and serves on the poetry staff of The MacGuffin, an acclaimed literary journal based in Michigan. A 2024 finalist for San Francisco poet laureate, she holds masters degrees from Stanford University and California State University Fresno and is the winner of the Morton Marr, Maria W. Faust and Rita Dove national poetry prizes. She lives in San Francisco.
“Thelma and Louise” Alternate Ending
for Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis
No driving off the cliff into blue sky.
Instead, you pocket the ignition key,
surrender to a system that will try
you fairly, understanding fully why
you shot a rapist, why you had to flee
and drive off in a panic, warm night sky
embracing, sheltering. You testify,
the courtroom still but steeped in empathy.
Surrender to our system. Wise allies
will counsel you, lend hands and minds, untie
hard knots of fear and guilt, and therapy
will feel like driving into vast blue sky
yet bind you to our earth. Your bright, new life:
belonging to a sisterhood of Me
Too and surrendering the search for why
it happened on your fishing trip. Mourn. Cry.
But hold fast to your ingenuity.
No driving off the cliff into blue sky.
Surrender. Craft new systems. Do not die.
“The Wizard of Oz” Abecedarian
for Clara Blandick
Auntie Em, believe her. While you, Henry and the farmhands huddled
below ground, Dorothy ran with Toto in her arms,
crossed dry Kansas soil, her gingham
dress slapping like a ship’s sail. She used
every muscle to pull against the storm cellar door.
Frantic, she stomped again and again with her shoe.
Girls everywhere witnessed the advancing tornado, wished
her family underground would hear her, rescue her. But no,
instead, we saw your house swirl into the sky, Dorothy inside,
journeying alone, so far from her kin. Em, you must be
kind. Be patient with her. Reconciling may take a
long time for you both. She has slept among poppies, seen so
many colors you never will, appraised radical
new ideas, dreaded sand draining through a witch’s hourglass.
Oz has changed her.
People do return to their roots, embrace wholeheartedly their
quiet kin, resume crocheting projects, braiding
rugs, canning for winter. Listen closely to her
stories, though, Em. She may speak fondly of scarecrows, lions,
tin men. She may stammer about dark sky
under the wings of flying monkeys, a man’s
voice and face enormous in a hall until Toto,
with his small dog mouth, pulled back a curtain
exposing an unremarkable fellow, a huckster in a bolo tie.
Your faith will be tested, Em. Sit together in the parlor, repair
zippers in trousers for the farmhands. There’s no place like home.
Drought
A quiet morning in the house
hummingbirds rev their engines
in the yard the air holds its breath
already hot at eight am
trees so dry they crackle
but the lone tomato plant
her rusted shoots feigning drought
straightens her desiccated spine
births tiny miracles that swell a bit each day.
My mother’s hands were like that
in her last year sandblasted to a satin finish
when I’d lift them they turn to piles of leaves
we’d crunch underfoot on the
way home from school—confetti in our fists.
The wind picks up at four o’clock
blows moguls round the soft Sonoma hills
gnaws at my belly, reminds me
of the gate I built between my father’s house and mine.
Each of us longed to stroll the other’s land
but the latch, famished for oil, rusted shut.
Twin fears of engagement
clenched their teeth around our hearts
sloughed our will like the dead skin of hope.
In the dream the breeze rustles
his baby-fine hair—my birthright—
makes me long to hear him jawing with the Blue Jay.
Gone are the rippling waves it cuts
whistling through a scrubby field of hay.
© Sandra Anfang
Published in Third Estate Art’s Quaranzine
Elise Kazanjian
Elise Kazanjian is a San Francisco poet/writer who spent her childhood in Northern China. Her work has appeared in New Verse News; the 2025 Marin Poetry Center’s Anthology;Fog & Light: San Francisco Seen Through the Eyes Of The Poets Who Live Here; the 2024 Nature of Our Times (Kent State University); Poet Laureate Lee Herricks Our California; The San Francisco Chronicle; among others.
She has worked at Sunset Magazine; as Foreign Editor, CCTV, Beijing, China; and as a San Francisco pawnbroker.
She is a co-author of the 2024 Season Lightly With Salt, and feels inspired when writing with one of her more than 100 ink fountain pens. Currently, she is working on a chapbook.