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Gone Lawn 56
sturgeon moon, 2024

Featured artwork, Untitled, by Abbie Doll

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Vic Nogay

Late summer with a lover by a man made pond


Pond algae bloats, overfed and merciless. Mosquitos reign where fatheads sour, their rotting bodies gather and release, grease-slick at the surface of this olid basin. My lover boors, summer is dead. As I plead my dissent, See the dragonflies? How they mate in midair? How she spirals and hooks her body for him... the portentous decay of phantoms out of fish bodies congests my heart inside my throat.

Suddenly repulsed, she freezes, faking her own death in revolt. But in this false idyll, these discordant loves find putrescent ends. She hits the water in gravid protest, dying anyway.


Vic Nogay is a Pushcart- and Best Microfiction-nominated writer from Ohio with work in Fractured Lit, Lost Balloon, Barren, Little Engines and more. Her micropoetry chapbook, under fire under water, was published in 2022 by tiny wren publishing. She is the Micro Editor of Identity Theory. Find her everywhere and nowhere @vicnogaywrites.