Sandra Yannone: Fire at the Big Top
An erotic circus of the glittering, gaudy, and heartbreaking, Fire at the Big Top is nothing short
of electrifying. Yannone has crafted a subversive world of queer performance and expression,
where poems are crowns, matches, acrobats, clowns, knives, and rings and their leaping
movements unfurl like colorful scarves or flaming swords. The most intricate magic trick, this
collection shows us how sex and love can turn the mundane into illusion and spectacle.
—Ansley Clark, author of Bloodline
The Circus Fires Corona 1944/2024
XI. The Lion Tamer
And as for the whip in air I create? I crack it hard
With a dramatic flick of my wrist and a flair,
And this is mostly for show like the charred
Matchstick (that I presume set the air
On fire) remains separated from its once burning
Flame. Who tames whom in this pair
Is the more insightful answer to earn in this ruin,
This riddle. One is lion, yes, and one is roar.
No. One is flammable, the other is not. We are
Two sides of the same coin the carney flips
To draw you in to his trickery. Heads or tails, I dare
You to believe it matters which. The lion’s lips
Or mine kissing your upturned mouth—either will
Provoke the utmost combustible, charming thrill.
Sandra Yannone (she/they) lives bicoastally in Washington state and Old Saybrook,
Connecticut, where she serves as poet laureate. In 2027, she will assume responsibilities as
Managing Editor of Connecticut River Review. Salmon Poetry published The Glass Studio
(2024) and her debut collection, Boats for Women (2019). She is
co-editor of Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic (Salmon 2026) and series editor for Seven Kitchens Press’s A.V. Christie
Chapbook Series (women poets over fifty). She serves on the board of the Olympia Poetry
Network and on the advisory committee for Poetry by the Sea. Her poetry and book reviews
appear internationally in print and online in Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, SWWIM and
many others. She co-founded and continues to host the international, intersectional,
intergenerational online reading series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry. Headmistress Press
honored Yannone as card #85 in its Lesbian Poets Trading Cards series.
Visit Sandra online
at www.sandrayannone.com
Visit Sandra’s page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Sandra’s collection from your favorite retailer:
Joanne Harris Allred: Friends, You Drank Some Darkness
In a life of steady losses, how do we find—how do we recognize—the sustaining gifts that the
world can provide us? These poems are an attempt to answer this question that haunts the
introspective soul. For me, they gleam with bursts of joy in the darkness we drink daily.
—Gary Thompson, author of Broken by Water: Salish Sea Years
Perhaps a Reply
That twilight you were out walking
and the first star pierced through
I was trying to reach you.
That night last summer when the moon
ripped a cloud to cotton rags
I was the breeze whispering thistle, thistle.
Riding the spider fire of lightning
I’ve thundered through your town.
No scattered seeds lead back to me,
only small etchings that brighten your moments
as snow lights a fretwork of bare, black trees.
I’m hoping you’ll read between lines and remember
me as you do the crackling cicadas in a field
of sunflowers you wandered as a child.
Listen. My voice is like Bashō’s
temple bell whose sound comes from the mouths
of flowers after it’s stopped ringing.
Joanne Harris Allred is the author of four previous poetry collections: Particulate (Bear Star
Press), The Evolutionary Purpose of Heartbreak (Turning Point Press), Outside Paradise (Word
Poetry Press), and Whetstone, which won the Flume Press Chapbook Competition. Her work has
appeared in many publications, including Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, and
Quarterly West. She was born and spent her early years in Salt Lake City, Utah, but has lived
most of her adult years in Northern California where she taught in the English department at
California State University, Chico. With her husband, Jerry, three children, many dogs, and
several iterations of chicken flocks, along with a lush companionship of wildlife, she lived many
years in Butte Creek Canyon outside Chico. Their home here burned in November 2018 in the
“Camp Fire.” She now splits her time between a coastal community in Humboldt County,
California, and Butte Creek Canyon. The landscapes of both places inspire, backdrop, and are
often the subject of her poems.
Visit Joanne’s page at MoonPathPress.com
Sam Campbell: Echoed
Echoed is a mechanical queen, a steam donkey, the soil of forgotten gods deep in our fingernails.
Campbell’s ability to shift perspective from the internal to the cosmic, line by line, poem to
poem, maps a deft exploration of the chemical madness that makes us human. His words find the
holes in our language until they become the holes—holes vast and magnetic, holes we begin to
crawl into without permission.
—Philip Schaefer, author of Pagan Era, winner of the 2025 Barrow Street Poetry Prize
Morning Embers
I wanted to be a desert,
but I was just a drought
heavy with heat and desire
to sustain myself with whatever
I dried to death. I killed the creeks,
pulled the green from the groves,
took from you a harvest so famine
could stare through your window.
I liked to let the clouds
mother across the sky,
to feed your desperate breath
abreast of my yawning weather.
I made the shade torture
by telling you of its temporality.
I raged a wildfire on your horizon
to burn your home into a memory.
How still you stood as it crept.
A monolith of defiance and flesh,
your scent scorches in my brain
as I weep the land to life
each morning I dream
of you and the fire.
Sam Campbell was born and raised in Cary, Illinois. He attended Concordia University, St. Paul
on a football scholarship where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with creative writing
emphasis. He earned his MFA in creative writing at Boise State University. As a teaching
assistant at BSU, Sam studied theories of literary criticism, lyric poetry, and rhetoric and
composition. Since then, he has taught composition and literature courses at Truckee Meadows
Community College; University of Nevada, Reno; Western Nevada College; Sierra Nevada
University; Lake Tahoe Community College; and Prince William Sound College. A Best of the
Net nominee, Sam is author of the poetry chapbook Echoed (MoonPath Press). His work appears
or is forthcoming in
Lindenwood Review, El Portal, Harpur Palate, DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin,
Hoxie Gorge Review
, and Poetry City, USA, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor
of English at Prince William Sound College, in Valdez, Alaska.
Visit Sam’s page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Sam’s collection from your favorite retailer:
