TThe mirror in your apartment

where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind             I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks

Tsyotsya but there is only the empty kitchen          in the tower block in Volodymyr
The rhomboids of light on the linoleum floor             when I cleared your things

The cupboards musty with damp flour               packs now hard as tombstones
you had so many graves for the living                one night a fox flicked past your window

brushing the uneven ground                          the way a pianist coaxes a piano
But there was no sound                                   as when you pray now

Tsyotsya keep talking                                          even death will hear you.

Tsyotsya is the Ukrainian word for Aunt.

Steve Komarnyckyj‘s literary translations and poems have appeared in Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of three PEN awards and a highly regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating “what it means to be human” (Sean Street).

Bus Station

Izium, November 2025

The kiosk glows, a radioactive sugar cube.
Two for Kharkiv, please. We wait, scrolling—

a glide bomb kissing the ticket office—
its roof sways like a ponytail.

A last stripe of day creaks red in the west.
The sky and river clamp shut the wound.

The bus roars into the arena. Driver
wants quick off this tarmac steppe.

There’s nothing left to burn,
but that won’t stop them.

Anna Bowles is a freelance editor and activist who blogs about her travel and volunteer work in Ukraine at annabowles.substack.com. Her first pamphlet, Landscape with Mines, was published by Mica in December 2025. Her Instagram is @annabowleswriter.

the end of small things

(after Mary Ruefle)

from this day forward all rituals
will be banished
we will be locks without keys

the way we peg washing
will be wrongdoing

all clothes abandoned
along the dusty rail-line
in ghostly extinction

no morning coffee to be shared
online cross our worlds

this is my cup, let me see yours

in which I boil my kettle
while she burns
her school notes to make a fire

no more these settled mercies
when our skins are peeled
back as hides

when our hair is woven into coir for someone’s else’s mattress
when we darken our faces with coffee grinds to stop burning
in a sun that insists every day on rising and rising

the sun too should stop.
and the wind.
and the rain.

because there is no shade
now that ritual as been exiled

the comfort of habit cannot be found
in small things
or the warm hand of a brother

Lynnda Wardle’s work has appeared in publications including Gutter, New Writing Scotland, Magma, New Orleans Review. In 2007 she was awarded a Creative Scotland New Writers award. She is studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow www.lynndawardle.com

Note from the poet: The poem was written for a young poet, Amera Atiyya Abu All‑Husein, whom I met through a University of Glasgow project connecting creative writing students in Gaza and Glasgow. Amera is currently living in a tent in Gaza after her home in Rafah was destroyed. My poem is for her — for her courage, her voice, and the small things she continues to hold onto despite grief and hardship. She is a gifted emerging writer. Her book, The Diary from Gaza can be found here and on Instagram she is @amera_atiyya_