#15 Harbor Review
Subliminal
Viraje IV. Distribution and splicing
by Fernanda Morales Tovar
EDITOR’S NOTE
The work in issue 15 explores what we know outside the conscious mind. Helen Guek Yee Mei’s “The Layering Portrait” tells a new story with each viewing, understanding is under the surface. JL Conrad’s “Prayer” asks us to view our own mortality, to question what can be found in our own kitchens. Each piece is layered. Each piece changes when we return, when we reach beneath the veneer. How will we change you? What will you take into your subconscious? These are the questions raised by this issue, and we can’t wait for you to spend time with these pieces. Let the poets and artists work their deep magic in your innermost mind.
Allison Blevins, Publisher
December 2025
What is at the heart of it
by Subhaga Crystal Bacon
is fear, though I resist: (write it! disaster).
I wake each day into my aging body.
Moments in the gray light, shades drawn
over the eastern sky, wintry mountains
to the north. The dog twitches in dreams.
So much to lose once I fail to awaken.
Where will it be, this I that I love so much?
The earth will spin in black silent space.
The sun will burn and burn until it burns out
like the wild young I used to be. (If I live
to twenty . . . to thirty). Now nearly seventy,
my heart shocked and burned into obedience,
my gut both large and delicate; everything becomes air.
I lift the shades, give the dog her breakfast,
see the pink of sky (red sky at morning)
fingering the telephone wires like cat’s cradle.
Light and color will dissolve with the day.
I step into my boots. I face forward into what comes.
The Layering Portrait
by Helen Guek Yee Mei
Ode to Lip Gloss During a Pandemic
by Kara Dorris
You miss kissing my lips, & his. More than hydration,
you are the Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers of my past.
The Pina Colada & Strawberry Shake on strings
around my neck, to fiddle with when
anxious. A status symbol for a Fish Out of Water(melon).
Like the Fruit Rollups & Dunkaroos I buy but don’t eat,
you are echoes of first dates, Six Flags rollercoasters
where Cotton Candy cannoned out of our noses.
You are the Cherry Coca Cola slushes my father bought
us at 7-11. The Banana Mania of teen girls
practicing oral sex. The Razzmatazz of dance
recitals & jazz hands. A summer of cheap snow cones
(lip gloss + ice cubes). I’m not saying you are a feminist
manifesto. I recognize manmade, chemical nostalgia when
I taste it. But I miss it all the same.
numbness or abject horror
by Brooke Walker
Prayer
by JL Conrad
after Frannie Lindsey
For the boy
who will soon go
out into the night
& come back
& who now still a child
stands in the kitchen eating
a chocolate chip cookie
made with browned butter—
O Lord, let me live
long enough to leave
the light on.
Frame
by Mica England
This Body Is Not All That I Am
by Shagufta Mulla
I
Another unbirthed white belly on I-5,¹
and I descend again
from fur and fractures
of time.²
II
The doe in the forest stops
between cedar of Lebanon and floating
morning motes—our gaze melding, momentarily
forgetting our cosmic crucibles of crushing—
mortar and salt,
stainless steel and windshields,
scraped and seeded pelt—³
and I remember being cut from Oneness,
from the bluest eyes of Saturn
suddenly birthed into unending
brokenness. Mom, did you see that parts of Us
are now bees, fitted with wings and rings of dripping
yellow gold?
Mom?⁴
And I wonder if the doe remembers too.
¹ Deer unraveled on the road.
² My mother’s hip-to-hip scar—
post-hysterectomy, post-IUD,
post-nationwide-lawsuit.
³ Have you ever had someone pry
open your cervix with a hooked metal
instrument, with only It doesn’t hurt
to numb the pain?
⁴ Hey. Hey. You’re fine. Get up. It’s time to go.
Untitled
by Shelbey Leco
Wrack
by Emily Harman
Low tide brings a heron steepled
on one leg, the other tucked flush to its breast.
Shells, most of them empty. Driftwood ribbing
the sand. Here we were always barefoot,
wind-knotted hair strung in ropes against our backs,
pockets heavied with agates and basalt.
At the beach’s edge, hollow tubes of bull kelp
lined our path through the debris.
That we had no plan made everything possible
again. Seaglass glinting green and blue.
Once we found a starfish, salt-crusted and brittle,
dead of some untold cause. When I held it
against the sun in my pruned fingers,
gulls blocked out the muted light.
Even then we weren’t sure if what we were mourning
was something taken or left behind.
Viraje IV. Distribution and Splicing
by Fernanda Morales Tovar
As if grief were a 1964 Buick Special
by M.A. Scott
tires on gravel, motor humming, it backs into the parking spot in my chest. I get into the passenger seat and let it drive. Opening the glove box to check if that is where I left my compassion, I find only a packet of oyster crackers and a plastic soup spoon. My grandmother is in the back seat with two paper grocery bags. One is filled with Tetley tea and Garibaldi biscuits, the other, my great-grandmother’s bones. On the side of the road, my mother waits, wearing a dress made from a feedsack. Mother gets in and takes the wheel. With teacups and doilies, radio cackling AM static, they are ready for adventure. I get out of the car and count my ribs. Putting my hand in my pocket, I pull out a puff of lint, breathe it to life in my palm – Daughter. She and I wave as they drive away.
My room
by Yan Jiang
WORK OF ART
by Margaret Diehl
inspired by a painting by Camilla Fallon
I
“In any work of art the more you study it
the more patterns ripen.”
I said this in a dream
a character caught in a net
my words mashed up in her mouth.
Hearing myself as another
I built a reply that had no sound
only feet
pushing through soft
effervescent resistance.
II
The boat is a body. The body is a world.
The two people are making love or
escaping
and the background is the sea
or the night between the stars.
III
Inside and outside rhyme
and diverge immeasurably, a treat
like having an ax in the kitchen drawer
also wildflowers.
I glean kernels from a universe
inhabited by persons indigenous to solitude.
In our boats, we imagine
we are alone together
Canal Sunset
by Andie Dale
A Sestina in Parts
by Rosa Sophia Godshall
Rockpool
by Aileen Angsutorn
Woke up to the lake gone sky
by Maggie Blake Bailey
all white and snowstorm static, edge lines lost to fluster, winter
falling all at once and always closer to the window. Still cars
and walkers, their dogs spun out to finally need fur, to laugh
as our legs skid and widen. Still streetlights and houses. I can tell
the trees whatever I want from this side of the glass, I can tell the sky
I am safe because this sort of freefall is built for lies and lying, small
weights that build until limbs break, the arrogance of salt
underneath the hours and hours of depth and deepening, sound
trapped so close to starting points.
I curl—
wanting to stop and burrow, sink and sleep,
to be pattern and movement— when the tech
in the dark room, rakes her ultrasound wand over my soft folds,
seeing my inside as light and shadow, static and threat,
I tell myself I am nothing to see. I tell my body: quiet.
But My Heart Told My Head
by Indya Pearce
My Brother’s Other
by Ranudi Gunawardena
Mornings you woke up wanting
to climb, light combed
through the coconut leaves, falling
in bands on your face.
You arched in the language of bare
-backed boyhood, your ribs
opening fingerlike from your
spine, blades of a frond
sprouting, splitting the curving
midrib. In your hands, the rope
was curling into a coarse, care
-ful infinity. My body
pressed to shadow, I was sinking
into the sallow skin of tree trunk.
All Eyez on Me
by Amuri Morris
contributors
Aileen Angsutorn Lees is a photographer and artist based in Scotland. She has photographed for magazines, newspapers, and cultural organisations, among others and has exhibited her work across the UK and online. Her interdisciplinary project, Decolonising The Outdoors, dismantles narratives of dominating land and extracting nature, imagining anti-capitalist futures. @aileenang_
Amuri Morris is an artist based in Richmond, VA. She recently graduated from painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. Throughout the years she has acquired several artistic accolades such as a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and has participated in over a dozen exhibitions. She aims to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience. You can find more of her work at www.murisart.com.
Andie Dale is a photographic artist specialising in alternative processes including cyanotypes, anthotypes, and photoweaves. She has exhibited internationally and at the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art and is preparing a solo exhibition at Foxlowe Arts Centre in 2026. Her work reveals beauty in nature’s overlooked details and fleeting moments.
Brooke Walker is a queer disabled artist and writer from rural Pennsylvania. Their art is primarily digital, including collage, photography, and illustration. Their work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal and The Flow Photo Contest. They are also a public speaker on mental health and suicide prevention.
Emily Harman is a poet based in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fugue, Bellingham Review, Chestnut Review, Wildness, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Emily is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Montana, where she teaches creative writing and serves as Poetry Editor for Cutbank. She can usually be found outside.
Fernanda Morales Tovar (b., Mexican, 1992). She earned her MFA and BFA in Visual Arts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She did an Academic Research Stay at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Her work has been exhibited in various museums and institutions in Mexico, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Chile. She was a beneficiary of the "Young Creators" in the Painting category, Fellowship of the Secretariat of Culture of the Government of Mexico, as well as being part of the Arte Lumen Collection of Mexico.
Indya Pearce is an emerging visual artist working in painting, photography, and drawing. Her practice draws on mythology and personal narratives to navigate social, political, and internal struggles. Through layered depictions of the body and portraiture, she explores themes of identity, relationships, and self-worth.
J.L. Conrad is the author of the full-length collections A World in Which (Terrapin Books) and A Cartography of Birds (LSU Press), as well as the chapbooks This Natal House (Harbor Editions) and Recovery (Texas Review Press). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections and five chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Redivider, DIAGRAM, and swamp pink, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023).
M.A. Scott is the author of the chapbook Hunger, little sister (Ghost City Press, 2024). Her work has recently appeared in Jet Fuel Review, MORIA, and Stonecoast Review. M.A. grew up in Rhode Island, and currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley where she likes to spend her time with tarot cards and trees.
Margaret Diehl has published two chapbooks of poems Exit Seraphim, by Ravenna Press (2023), it all stayed open (Red Glass Books, 2011), two novels and a memoir (Men, 1989, Me and You, 1990 and The Boy on the Green Bicycle, 1999, all from Soho Press) as well as poems, short stories, and essays in literary journals, including Kestrel, The Chattahoochie Review, Kenyon Review, The American Journal of Poetry, AMP, Cloudbank, Main Street Rag, The Adirondack Review, Sequestrum, and Gargoyle. She lives in New York City.
Mica England (they/she) is a queer artist-writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A worrying amount of their placements are in Scorpio. Their favorite Gorillaz song is Empire Ants. You can find more of their work at micaengland.com.
Ranudi Gunawardena is a Sri Lankan poet whose work explores the wombscape, childhood in rural landscapes, and the uncanny in nature, among others. Her work has appeared in literary magazines such as Action, Spectacle; Chestnut Review; Magma; ONE ART; and Shō. She studies at Williams College.
Rosa Sophia Godshall is the author of Many Miles (Harbor Editions). She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, through Florida International University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a degree in automotive technology. Rosa lives in Palm Bay, Florida.
Shagufta Mulla is the art editor of Peatsmoke Journal, a veterinarian, and a copy editor for digital publications. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Thirteen Bridges Review, Five Points, Hole in the Head Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram @s.mulla.dvm.
Shelbey Leco is a 30 year old female who is a native New Orleanian. She enjoys many mediums of art but predominantly works with mixed media and collage materials. She finds beauty in taking trash and arranging them to create an entirely new image, in hopes of telling a conveying story for her audience. The goal of her work is to spark conversations and creativity.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them), a Queer elder, lives in rural Washington on unceded Methow land. They are the author of five collections of poetry, A Brief History of My Sex Life, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books, and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Transitory, from BOA Editions, 2023.
Yan Jiang is a Toronto-based author and illustrator. Inspired by nature, human emotions, and everyday beauty, her work creates surreal, immersive worlds. In today’s fast-paced culture, Yan strives to offer quiet spaces for reflection and connection, inviting viewers to engage slowly and thoughtfully with her art.