With gratitude to Best of the Net poetry judge Cyrus Cassells, editors Shipra Agarwal, Darren C. Demaree, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal, Ariadne Alexis Macquarie, Chekwube Ozieh, Mohammed U. Yusuf, social media manager Caroline Majewski, poetry coordinators Sarah A. Chavez and Robin LaMer Rahija, and an impressive cast of assistant editors and readers.

With new poetry from Robert Fillman, Betty Stanton, Trystan Popish, Youtao Cao, Indu Parvathi, Danielle Lemay, Laurel Anderson, Suzanne Langlois, Whitney Rio-Ross, Edie Popper, Veronica Fletcher, Julie A. Cox, Race Harish, Deborrah Corr, Lauren Frey, Claire Gunner, Michael Blaine, Dorothy Wall, James Champion, Kianna Greene, Karen Bramblett, Ariel Machell, Reyzl Grace, Maryfrances Wagner, Elijah Perseus Blumov, J Kramer Hare, Matthew Harrison, Nicole Shepherd, A. Michael Schultz, Bunny Goodjohn, David Anson Lee, C. Sessums, Ron Stottlemyer, and Michelle McMillan-Holifield.

Find these and other poems on Bluesky.

Featuring new work from Mary Grace Mangano, McLord Selasi, Dagne Forrest, Suzanne Langlois, and many others, we’ll be publishing new poems online every week and building toward a finalized print edition this December. Join us online as the issue unfolds!

With new poetry from Dan Alter, Rongfei Mu, Megan Peak, Vismai Rao, Lorrie Ness, Tallulah Howarth, Lao Rubert, Jeanne Julian, Olivia Jacobson, Annie Bolger, Mike Taylor, Wendy Wisner, Rachel Beachy, Jen Feroze, John Wojtowicz, Marc Alan Di Martino, Choiselle Joseph, Julie Benesh, Esther Lay, SM Stubbs, Callie S. Blackstone, Jennifer Randall Hotz, Jennifer L Freed, Prosper Ifeanyi, Laurie Koensgen, Oliver Brooks, and Amy Riddell. Find these and other poems on Bluesky. Also available in PDF and ePub.

Also, what may be the biggest day in the history of American protest is just around the corner! See you in the streets for No Kings on Saturday, October 18th.

Plagiarism can be tricky to detect at first – we have a lot of sympathy for journals who unknowingly publish plagiarized work. But once there is suspicion of plagiarism, it becomes very easy to find more examples of it in your name. In this instance, it took about ten minutes to discover we had a serial plagiarist on our hands: another piece from a different author ripped off and published in a subsequent issue of the same unsuspecting journal.

Imagine admiring someone’s work well enough to steal it, and then imagine that writer you admire getting a call from an editor who’d discovered obvious evidence of plagiarism you committed. Editors and writers talk – none of this happens in isolation. And when it does happen, it often happens all at once. A poem you lifted months or years ago can trigger an avalanche of discovery that can all but bury your career as a writer. We don’t care if it was AI that got away from you or a more deliberate smash-and-grab: as editors, we must protect the work of writers who publish with us.

Next we reached out to the journal who published the stolen pieces, which in this case was a journal affiliated with your university. Contact information with the journal wasn’t easy to find, so we went straight to the chair of the English department. They did right by us and started the process of taking the stolen poems down. We subsequently read the university’s posted policies about plagiarism and academic dishonesty, and through those policies we gleaned an awful sense of how much difficulty and embarrassment this must have cost you. The section on revoked scholarships was particularly upsetting. We hope it didn’t come to that.

We and the poet whose work you vandalized have decided not to name you, and we’ve decided not to name your school (who, again, did nothing but right by us). Naming and shaming can be a deterrent in theory, but after carefully weighing the particulars we decided that naming you on social media would have felt too much like punching down. But please, in the future, do not give random lit journals this kind of power over you. You’re really bad at this – you clearly had no idea how lightly you covered your tracks, or how much worse you made the original poems for hacking away at them.

The worst part is that your own worthy heart was right there the whole time, just begging to be interpreted and heard. We hope you have a redemption arc ahead of you, kid. One you write yourself.

With new poetry from Abigail Lilith Ravenheart, Kathy Ray, Leila Farjami, Svetlana Litvinchuk, J Kramer Hare, Chris Dahl, Krysia Wazny McClain, Mickie Kennedy, Lily Jarman-Reisch, Haeun (Regina) Kim, Małgosia Halliop, John A. Nieves, Joan Roger, Angie Hexum, Barbara Daniels, Kimberly Gibson-Tran, Brendan Payraudeau, Nia Cao, Veronica Kornberg, Ben Cooper, Sarah Brockhaus, Marisa Campbell, Rachel Becker, Margaret Kasper Reed, Ron Stottlemyer, Junxin Tang, Gareth Nurden, and Eóin Flannery.

Find these and other poems on Bluesky! Also available in PDF and ePub.

One way to inoculate a weary heart against the spectre of rising fascism — or any other kind of unneighborly behavior — is to listen to Mr. Fred Rogers, the soft-spoken but steely-eyed children’s television showrunner and minister. “Look for the helpers,” his mother would say to him whenever there were scary things in the news. “You will always find people who are helping.”

As individuals in dark rooms with lit up phones at late hours, there’s not much we can do. But when we support and join with the people who are already helping, we become helpers ourselves. One person the editors of Rust & Moth would like to help is Jeanette Vizguerra, an immigration and labor activist and mother of four who’s called America her home since 1997. She was threatened with deportation during the first Trump administration and successfully claimed sanctuary in Colorado churches at that time. With support from Democratic lawmakers across the state, including Michael Bennet, Jared Polis, and Joe Neguse, she was able to stay. However, with Trump’s return to power, she is being targeted again. Vizguerra was detained by ICE on March 17th and as of this writing is still in detention at a privately-operated detention center in Aurora, Colorado. We invite our readers to learn about her story and consider donating to her GoFundMe page, which was set up by her children to help pay for her legal costs. And if you find yourself getting lost in the complex legal details of her case, feel free to step back and simplify her situation down to five words, spoken by one of her children during a vigil for her release: “I want my mom back.”

 https://www.gofundme.com/f/4ekfk-help-reunite-my-family

We also encourage our American readers to sign up for Indivisible’s weekly emails, which come with calling assignments to elected officials — such coordinated calling jammed Congressional phone lines to the point of failure last month. You don’t have to talk to a staffer directly to have an impact either — calls left on machines in the middle of the night are just as impactful. (We’re looking at you, fellow introverts and night owls.) There are many people in the world, both inside America and out, who cannot risk a phone call to their government. If you can, please consider calling on behalf of those who can’t.

https://indivisible.org/

Finally, if your workplace is represented by a union, please consider joining. Organized labor and the power to strike are among the most powerful weapons this country has against tyranny. If you can’t find a local branch, you can start by contacting the AFL-CIO.

https://aflcio.org/formaunion/contact

The stakes are too high for isolated action; mere tributaries aren’t strong enough on their own. Now is the time for rivers — for mutual aid, coordinated pressure, and calls to Congress every night. We encourage everyone led to suffering by this morally bankrupt administration to join with us as we join with Jeanette Vizguerra, our local unions, and Indivisible – or with anyone already doing the good work in your name. 

– the editors, Rust & Moth

With new poetry from Lisa Marie Oliver, Gail Griffin, Elizabeth Kuelbs, Reyzl Grace, Rachel Neve-Midbar, Katie Massa Kennedy, Ziqr Peehu, Jordan Adams, Allison Mei-Li, William Aarnes, Hannah M. Matzecki, Nicole Desjardins Gowdy, Blair Benjamin, Erin Murphy, Lee Collins, David Rosenthal, Matt Cariello, Rupert Fike, Seth Copeland, Julian Koslow, Melanie Perish, Kale Hensley, Megan Eralie-Henriques, Carolyn Guinzio, Franziska Roesner, Jill Michelle, Ken Craft, Susannah Sheffer, and Dagne Forrest.

Find these and other poems on Bluesky!

Paper Birch, by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Cabbage White Butterfly, by Nathan Manley
A Mother, by Sam Szanto
Meditation on a Morning Dose, by Ken Hines
pomegranates, by Katerina Matta
Elegy, by Dilys Wyndham Thomas

With new poetry from Jared Beloff, Alison Hurwitz, Joshua Coben, S.M. Badawi, Mike Bove, Will Summay, Jennifer L Freed, Sarah Carleton, Finlay Worrallo, Debmalya Bandyopadhyay, Wren Donovan, Anushka Sen, T. De Los Reyes, Benjamin Patterson, Karen G. Berry, J. Greenberg, Robin Arble, Erik Kennedy, Ava O’Connor, Melody Wilson, Joanne Epp, Peter Leight, Katherine Hagopian Berry, Ken Hines, Suzanne Langlois, David Elliot Eisenstat, Julie Choffel, Matthew King, Geraldine Connolly, and Bex Hainsworth.

And to all our readers, if you tire of old and decrepit digital haunts: come find us at our homestead on Bluesky!