delicate emissions poetry zine
volume IV, issue 3
august 2025
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a note from dusti
I cherish your patience regarding the August 2025 issue. The accomplishments of my Appalachian summer carried me straight into a brand new adventure, and delicate emissions poetry zine will be published on the Acadian prairie of Lake Charles, Louisiana, for the next few years. I'm excited to keep going while continuing as a student, a poet, a playwright, a theatre professional, a literary manager and editor, a dramaturg, and university instructor and tutor. Publishing and sharing poetry outside of my academic obligations bring me an incredible amount of joy.
As usually happens, the poems this time seemed to select themselves around a loose theme. We start with Annelies Mohle compelling us to plant a seed; Chris Bridgen sends us off with thoughts of connections and what we might be missing in our inattention. In between, we grow, sputter, curse, and wonder alongside Rick Hollon, Aspen Greenwood, Sara Cline, and Basil Boultbee. Whether your planting season is just starting or winding down, you'll find something brief and provocative for your impressive brain.
You can order a physical copy of this issue -- as well as a couple of our back issues -- here.
And now...the poetry.
Your friend,
dusti rw levyfounder & editor
I cherish your patience regarding the August 2025 issue. The accomplishments of my Appalachian summer carried me straight into a brand new adventure, and delicate emissions poetry zine will be published on the Acadian prairie of Lake Charles, Louisiana, for the next few years. I'm excited to keep going while continuing as a student, a poet, a playwright, a theatre professional, a literary manager and editor, a dramaturg, and university instructor and tutor. Publishing and sharing poetry outside of my academic obligations bring me an incredible amount of joy.
As usually happens, the poems this time seemed to select themselves around a loose theme. We start with Annelies Mohle compelling us to plant a seed; Chris Bridgen sends us off with thoughts of connections and what we might be missing in our inattention. In between, we grow, sputter, curse, and wonder alongside Rick Hollon, Aspen Greenwood, Sara Cline, and Basil Boultbee. Whether your planting season is just starting or winding down, you'll find something brief and provocative for your impressive brain.
You can order a physical copy of this issue -- as well as a couple of our back issues -- here.
And now...the poetry.
Your friend,
dusti rw levyfounder & editor
Spring
by Annelies Mohle
make the bed soft
add a warm blanket of compost
burrow deep down,
leave the seed in its cradle
before reaping
comes sowing,
water, awaiting
the birth, a sprout
we watch growing,
knowing its worth.
Imagine
by Sara Cline
your surprise when
you pull the thorn from your side
only to find it
a cork, the sole stopper
keeping your viscera
from becoming visceral,
and now you are
hemorrhaging like a soda can,
shaken, holding all these things
you cannot shove back in—
your intestines, cradled
in two hands like a birth-wet baby,
or a pigskin, but what can you do?
no one expects to miss
the damn rock in their shoe
The First Garden
by Aspen Greenwood
You grew quietly,
like a bean sprout under frost—
nothing, then everything.
My back ached.
The ground cracked in me.
I dreamed of digging,
hands in warm compost.
You kicked. I dropped
a bowl of potatoes.
It felt like harvest—
pain, sweat,
then a wet cry.
They placed you on my chest—
red-faced, root-wet,
smelling of rain and milk.
Tickseed
by Rick Hollon
your first allegory: a lungful
lifting dandelion hopes
to the sky over town
though the subsequent years
found you more akin to
coreopsis,
clinging
Rooted.
by Basil Boultbee
Divots across flat rocks
like veins,
or a road map to our past,
to a world before the world was told
it exists.
Little swirls like snails
or a cochlea
all tied together like root bulbs.
Sufjan Stevens glues wings to his back
by Rick Hollon
and sings of absent mothers
drawn away down old rivers
do wings give him the vantage
the perspective to map our turns
our dead-ends and dying beeches
vacant ash forests scraped clean
and the parking lots hungering
never full never satiated never
flush with the good clean mud
pressed beneath their pavement
Kinds of old
by Chris Bridgen
Frugal with love's sediment.
Fills the soul, spills over
old valves. Build us a
hull; ballast of nearby walls
Tracing the distant recesses
of hairlines, listening to an
old sound from somewhere, rock-
hard lies burning golden abdominals.
Being convinced again instead
of just knowing. Convictions
easily overturned in the court of
whatever passes for mania.
Music for music for airports
by Chris Bridgen
Waiting in one place but dreaming of another.
Airports the sum of a certain existence. Adding
two distances between objects creates one future
in lieu of a present. Paths to delays and old coffee,
echo of heels tapping morse on hard floors. Flavour
and tone give senses space, as with jazz.
The strangers dotted around would smile
if their dreams shuffled closer. Music for the music
for the airports. The restoration of arrival,
the primacy of departure.
This Issue's Poets
Basil Boultbee is a Canadian writer in love with the sea, the soil, and their strange island of inbetweens.
Chris Bridgen lives in Ottawa, Canada, and enjoys how poetry sneaks up with a quiet tap.
Sara Cline is a Texan poet, University of Washington MFA alumna, and recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in Eff-able, A Velvet Giant, and on Poets.org.
Aspen Greenwood is a writer who believes poetry is a form of activism. Drawing from their background as a swimming teacher, Greenwood intertwines their commitment to social change with physical and mental well-being.
Rick Hollon (they/them) is a genderqueer writer from the American Midwest. Their poetry has appeared in Kaleidotrope, perhappened, Delicate Friend, miniskirt magazine, and elsewhere.
Annelies Mohle is a writer and teacher from rural Ontario. She has since been published in fron//tera and Canadian Stories. She can be found on Instagram @jottingthingsdown.
About the Editor
Dusti RW Levy is a queer disabled poet, essayist, performer, and playwright, as well as a 2025 National Dramaturgy Fellow at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Dusti is an assistant editor at Thirteen Bridges Review, and is the editor and publisher of delicate emissions poetry zine. You can read their poetry in FUCKUS Literary Journal; boats against the current; and the tide rises, the tide falls, among others. Their essay "Posthuman Illumination" is forthcoming in Issue 8 of Windmill: The Art & Literature Journal of Hofstra University. They are on the staff of Contemporary American Theatre Festival as a manager and accessibility specialist, and an artist panel reader for the Jewish Plays Project. Their ten-minute play, Queer for the Shabbat Bride, was recently a semi-finalist in the On One Foot! Ten-Minute Play Contest. Dusti is an MFA candidate in creative writing at McNeese State University. Raised mostly in the desert Southwest and having spent many years on the High Plains and in Cascadia, Dusti now splits their time between the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, the Louisiana Prairie, and the coastal plain of Alabama.
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