Fall 2025
Fall 2025
Cover artist Autumn Wright’s delightfully quirky take on the still life invites us into this year’s edition of Relief, in which creation brims with surprises. Alice Haines’ “The Grand Jester” sings with the joyful tumble of discovery; Yance Wyatt’s “Unsolicited Marital Advice from Big Mouth Billy Bass” presents a woman’s time of reflection punctuated by the interjections of a vocal fish; Willow Groskreutz’s “The Weight of Winter” paints a sweeping vision of Alaska’s landscape and a life story shaped by ice and aurora. Relief 2025 contains pride, grief, wonder, desperation, and explores the unexpected angles we find in our experience of it all.
Poetry
Tani Arness
Abishag’s Mother
Jennifer Avignon
minor miracles
Andrew Bashford
Manna
to walk in the woods or to pray
Elijah Perseus Blumov
The Martyrdom of Rabbi Yishmael
Tricia Gates Brown
Matins
Kali Joy Cramer
The Redeemer in Drag
Julia Daniel
Echocardiogram I
Kate Deimling
Thin Times
Lauren Delapenha
Peniel Sonnet
David Dixon
In Which St. Francis Hums Along With John Craigie on Spotify Singing Oh, You’re Doing it Wrong, Dissecting the Bird Trying to Find the Song, It’s a Miracle You’re Here at All While I Cram for the Anatomy Midterm in the Cadaver Lab
Sharon Dolin
Dawn Prayer
Eve’s Daughter
Ben Egerton
& When We Get There Will We Have Been There Forever? 44.
Richard Foerster
Prayer
Alice Haines
The Grand Jester
Maura H. Harrison
Most Common and the Greatest
Kaley Hutter
Jam Jars
Bethany Jarmul
Imago Dei Revisited
Ryan Keating
I Will Not Be the Universe
Andrew Lansdown
Birds
Martin Angel Martín
Dare We Hope
Clay Matthews
From What I’ve Tasted of Desire
Miracle of the Nesting Doll
Steven Peterson
Seen on a Paris Street, Easter Morning
Sarah G. Pouliot
Seventy Times Seven
Esther Ra
prayer of an inadequate penitent
Whitney Rio Ross
Ghosted
Self- Portraits as Flannery O’Connor
Kelli Sallman
Communion
Richard Smith
The Mosquito’s Soul
Alyssa Stadtlander
Bridge
Contraries
Jennifer Fair Stewart
Compulsive Beauty
Croagh Patrick, or Michael on the Heights
Jeremiah Webster
Meritocracy
Tommy Welty
To Live in the Mercy of God
Karly Noelle Abreu White
Second Samson
Diana Woodcock
What Is Real
Creative Nonfiction
Marcia Krause Bilyk
Baited
Renée Giovarelli
Turning of the Bones
Willow Noelle Groskreutz
The Weight of Winter
Kaley Hutter
First Cry
Marta Regn
Like Cows, Like Cobras
Angela Townsend
Interrupted
Fiction
Rebecca Fox
Sunseekers
Yance Wyatt
Unsolicited Marital Advice from Big Mouth Billy Bass
Angela Townsend
Above the Canopy