When in Rome: Nov ’25

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Editor: Vallie Lynn Watson

Managing Editor: Taryn White

Guest Editor: Jade Turner

Associate Editor: Leah Joseph

Assistant Editors: Robbie Hess

Interns: Margaret Brantley

Heather Ryan Kelley, “Aesop’s Fable,” oil on canvas.

Letter from the Guest Editor by Jade Turner

Fiction

“Outlook Good!” by Mikki Aronoff and Katherine Silver-Hajo

“Solomon and the Cheese Arm” by Eli S. Evans

Poetry

“Sweeney Among the Alley Cats” by James Enelow

“[Only lines from Lord Byron, Thomas Lux, and the script for The Princess Bride] (or I’ve hired you to help me start a war)” & “[Only lines from Pablo Neruda, Diane DiPrima, and Script for X-Files (1998)]” by Jessica Huset

“[Only lines from Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, and Script for The Lost Boys]” & “[Only lines from Agha Shahid Ali, Countee Cullen, and Script for Gremlins]” by Zebulon Huset

“At a Highway Seventy-Five” & “Between the Rows of Corn” by Abby Manzella

“Budding” by Jianqing Zheng

Art Gallery by Heather Ryan Kelley

Artist Statement by Heather Ryan Kelley

“Ulysses”

“Finnegans Wake”

“Tome”

“Prayer (FW 259)”

“Aesop’s Fables”

“The Volcano Lover”

“Peck’s Anatomy”

“Anatomy Fragment”

“How to Know the Minerals and Rocks”

“Perpetual Novena”

“Seeing America”

“Seeing Stars”

“World Book”

Bonus Feature:

Ekphrastic Poems and Centos from McNeese State University’s
Fall 2025 Form and Theory of Poetry I

“On the body (Cento with Emma Bolden and Shaindel Beers” by Dusti RW Levy

“Innocent Eye, 2000” by Madeline Ricard

“After a Painting by Heather Ryan Kelley” by Michael Robins

“en route” by Jerry Sloan

“Cannibal” by Chelsey Wright

Heather Ryan Kelley is professor emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she taught painting and book arts. She has a BFA in printmaking from Southern Methodist University and an MA in painting from Northwestern State University.

Kelley’s work is held in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Cornell University Library, SUNY at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, James Joyce Centre, Dublin, Ireland, Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, Special Collections at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library, Kansas University’s Spencer Library, Special Collections at the University of Houston, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT, Austin.

Kelley is represented by the Baton Rouge Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art.

Her website is: https://heatherryankelley.com/

__________

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.