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Nov 2025 Issue #39 Poetry
featuring
Amelia Badri, Sarah Banks, Rachel Becker, Sheila Black, Elya Braden, Oliver Brooks, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, Shane Chase, Joe Dahut, Amelia Díaz Ettinger, Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice, George Franklin, Renoir Gaither, Kelly Gray, David Henson, Mary Beth Hines, Ruth Hoberman, Don Hogle, Brittany N. Jaekel, Matthew Johnson, Yuna Kang, Sarah Kersey, Karen Lozinski, Robert Manaster, Melba, Juan Pablo Mobili, Oak Morse, Emily Nielson, Thomas Page, henry 7. reneau, jr., Ismael Santos, Ava Serra, Greg Sevik, Jamie L. Smith, Matthew Isaac Sobin, J.R. Solonche, Emmanuel Umeji, Sam Yaziji, Nelle Yvon
Amelia Badri, Sarah Banks, Rachel Becker, Sheila Black, Elya Braden, Oliver Brooks, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, Shane Chase, Joe Dahut, Amelia Díaz Ettinger, Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice, George Franklin, Renoir Gaither, Kelly Gray, David Henson, Mary Beth Hines, Ruth Hoberman, Don Hogle, Brittany N. Jaekel, Matthew Johnson, Yuna Kang, Sarah Kersey, Karen Lozinski, Robert Manaster, Melba, Juan Pablo Mobili, Oak Morse, Emily Nielson, Thomas Page, henry 7. reneau, jr., Ismael Santos, Ava Serra, Greg Sevik, Jamie L. Smith, Matthew Isaac Sobin, J.R. Solonche, Emmanuel Umeji, Sam Yaziji, Nelle Yvon
If you are a poet, prophet, peace-loving artist, if you are tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between; if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl & you value the humane treatment of every creature and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo welcomes your best work.
Amelia Badri
|
A Cuttlefish Pumps Blood to the Gills with Two Hearts Where did your love go tonight? Who is wrapped in your arms listening to your heart? Lisps. Bedhead. Milkweed that attracts butterflies and bees. Warm tea. Once the way to a heart. I’m stuck in a sand bed where the clams sing their half-hearted praise. The moon just laughs. Cross my heart, she’s insane. Will you come back here and hold me? Oh, bless your heart. The ocean wants to eat me. Should I swim away? Eat your heart out, says the salt and wind. The sun sinks his fangs in as we dip in and out of the sea, collecting shark teeth like angry hearts. I know “Men were deceivers ever, one foot in the sea, and one on shore” but aren’t we hooked? Take it or leave it. I am what I am. Empty, yet happy. If you stay, you can’t be so chickenhearted. A lady on Family Feud says Popeye’s favorite food is chicken, that’s how humiliated I feel. Kevin Hart would make a good Popeye, I say to no one except the too quiet plea of your heart. There are heartbeats stuck in my hair and holes in the sail. Can love revive here? Today― I’m sargassum. I’ll be there. Like shameless algae, let us steal the doubling of a cuttlefish’s heart. |
Amelia Badri is a Guyanese-American poet, mother, and teacher from Miami.
Sarah Banks
Longleaf Pines, Autumn
October, but the air still heavy,
hot at dawn when I walk the trail
through a stand of longleaf pines
dry from drought. The woods, once dense,
now thinned enough to see the road
where fellers cleared the dead trees―
chopped their crowns then leveled
the trunks down to the stumps.
The remnant pines stand statue-still,
and through their limbs, the sky
softens to blue before an amber sun
edges above the horizon. I watch
a car move down the road.
Further down the trail, the stand remains thick
with pines, their trunks and branches dense
enough to hide the road. Despite
the autumn heat, the daylight hours shorten,
so they shed their chestnut spikes.
Still, deep green needles fan like feathers,
and their fresh, citrus scent
ribbons through the air.
From their branches, birdsong
begins. The starlings recite
their collection of notes, but past
the pines, an engine hums. I hear
a car move down the road.
October, but the air still heavy,
hot at dawn when I walk the trail
through a stand of longleaf pines
dry from drought. The woods, once dense,
now thinned enough to see the road
where fellers cleared the dead trees―
chopped their crowns then leveled
the trunks down to the stumps.
The remnant pines stand statue-still,
and through their limbs, the sky
softens to blue before an amber sun
edges above the horizon. I watch
a car move down the road.
Further down the trail, the stand remains thick
with pines, their trunks and branches dense
enough to hide the road. Despite
the autumn heat, the daylight hours shorten,
so they shed their chestnut spikes.
Still, deep green needles fan like feathers,
and their fresh, citrus scent
ribbons through the air.
From their branches, birdsong
begins. The starlings recite
their collection of notes, but past
the pines, an engine hums. I hear
a car move down the road.
Sarah Banks is a nurse living in Madison, Mississippi. Her poetry appears in Rust + Moth, Gyroscope Review, Thimble, Autumn Sky Poetry, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Fiction on the Web.
Rachel Becker
|
Swim Team
I was green as chlorine with a flailing stroke & thighs that chafed. But they had me practice with the sharks. Torpedo skinned, lithe in their shiny rec league suits, they lapped me again & again. Now, I know open water like I know my own flesh & blood. But I no longer know my father. The coach— I only remember his Reeboks― told me I could take a break after a four hundred. How long was a four hundred? In the bathroom I threw up all the water I’d inhaled from failed flip turns & & found blood in my suit, rust-colored slurry. I’d expected something more puckered & proper, like the sour cherry red of a papercut, fresh & enticing. Whose idea was it for me to join too little, so late? Maybe it was mine, & I went along with it, the way a goldfish consents to its bowl. I came in last at my only meet, everyone pity-cheering for the girl who tried. That was the summer my father stopped letting me bait a hook with a live lure, maybe a coincidence, or maybe he knew I couldn’t even bleed right. Vertical Divider
|
My First Best Friend
That July, like the scouts we weren’t, you mapped every inch of the scraggy lot behind the tire swing, its hilltops of thorns, charms of hornets, random bamboo, all between our two houses of honey and comb. You tricked my younger brother into eating poison ivy. I saw you. When his face ballooned like a sail, we both stayed silent as winter bees, an ambient alliance. I gorged myself on honeysuckle and raspberries tart as tits while you watched, and together we broke milkweed stalks, mashing them just to see the milk sap, their milk guts. I thought you’d fess up, eventually, or that I would. But instead, you stopped calling. Even as adults, we don’t speak of that time, as if it were a sink hole hidden by spoiled leaves. You are the same now, sipping from a salt-rimmed glass, like you don’t really need it. You never needed me or the honeysuckle. |
Rachel Becker’s poetry recently appears or is forthcoming in journals including North American Review, Post Road, Rust & Moth, Wild Roof, Crab Orchard Review, and RHINO. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is a poetry editor for Porcupine Literary: a journal for and by teachers. The recipient of a Poet and Author Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, she was also a finalist for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Prize. She lives in Boston.
Sheila Black
The Many Maps of Home
In 1987, we lived in the archbishop’s palace in Chalandri,
the family before – diplomats like us had favored
Federalist décor – plasters of presidents, sere under the
Athenian sunlight, chairs with clawed feet and brocades
in American flag tints: flat red, royal blue. At the gate the boys
in the guard house gave us cigarettes and joked
about the difficulty of keeping us safe, us daughters, our
father, the story was we might one day be blown up
for being American at a time when bitterness
clung for betrayals after the war, or later in the 1960s
and 1970s, when funds were paid to the colonels, the generals,
to kill the revolutionaries. I never knew what the date
November 17th meant or not until later. The yard full of
sprinklers, lit up as if for a 4th of July party: white stars
the occasional string of blue, the swooning drift
of pop music through one of our open windows. We
snuck out nights and bribed the guards with cartons of
Marlboros to keep quiet—which we bummed back from
them in rapid succession. You wrote me postcards form
New York—a drug like entering a warm bath of ginger
ale. The way we did not fear, though we should have,
to have occupied such silvery privilege, the afternoon
teas, the languorous evenings on the balcony, shaking hands
or bowing our heads formally before the prune-like shipping
magnate and his bored young Turkish wife who held
herself as if trying to turn sideways and disappear.
Putting on a necklace of real diamonds, a loan from a friend
of a friend, around my neck. I think now only of the villages
we drove through. Petrol cans, the dirtied stucco walls, an
old man holding a goat in a field of stones who addressed us
in unexpected perfect Americanese, “Hey guy’s, how’s it going?”
forty years in Milwaukee, working in a friend’s diner; he
repatriated, came home, here where he could see the pallor
of the Acropolis below, the carnival lights of the tavernas,
bouzouki music played for tourists. The terrorists were said
to be glamorous. You wrote me of taking the Greyhound to San
Francisco, how a body under the duress of addiction becomes
a bird, a wren, say-all finger-bones, light as paper, waxy
feathers that appear to melt away into air as dusk melts
through the trees in certain sad dusty towns where nothing
can ever become quite dark enough—always the lunar glare
of truck stop or the water sound of highway feeding into
field, mountain, a ribboning of roads and errands, other places,
which fill you with anxiety for you will never reach them.
The boys at the gate lent us their hats for a costume party.
We told them to come as themselves when they came off
duty. One took me by the wrist as if he might kiss me but didn’t.
He said it made him anxious, the thought there might one
day be a bomb. I tried to picture it, rushing through a car
like a train giving off sparks, and where would you go, how
would you feel yourself leaving, what time would there be
to count off or remember? I wrote you I missed you like the
taste of blood when you bite your lip, the salt that reminds
you what it is to be inside your one precious body. You did
not write back—by then you were living outside mostly or
on friends’ couches one after the other, the houses of people
who didn’t want you there.
In 1987, we lived in the archbishop’s palace in Chalandri,
the family before – diplomats like us had favored
Federalist décor – plasters of presidents, sere under the
Athenian sunlight, chairs with clawed feet and brocades
in American flag tints: flat red, royal blue. At the gate the boys
in the guard house gave us cigarettes and joked
about the difficulty of keeping us safe, us daughters, our
father, the story was we might one day be blown up
for being American at a time when bitterness
clung for betrayals after the war, or later in the 1960s
and 1970s, when funds were paid to the colonels, the generals,
to kill the revolutionaries. I never knew what the date
November 17th meant or not until later. The yard full of
sprinklers, lit up as if for a 4th of July party: white stars
the occasional string of blue, the swooning drift
of pop music through one of our open windows. We
snuck out nights and bribed the guards with cartons of
Marlboros to keep quiet—which we bummed back from
them in rapid succession. You wrote me postcards form
New York—a drug like entering a warm bath of ginger
ale. The way we did not fear, though we should have,
to have occupied such silvery privilege, the afternoon
teas, the languorous evenings on the balcony, shaking hands
or bowing our heads formally before the prune-like shipping
magnate and his bored young Turkish wife who held
herself as if trying to turn sideways and disappear.
Putting on a necklace of real diamonds, a loan from a friend
of a friend, around my neck. I think now only of the villages
we drove through. Petrol cans, the dirtied stucco walls, an
old man holding a goat in a field of stones who addressed us
in unexpected perfect Americanese, “Hey guy’s, how’s it going?”
forty years in Milwaukee, working in a friend’s diner; he
repatriated, came home, here where he could see the pallor
of the Acropolis below, the carnival lights of the tavernas,
bouzouki music played for tourists. The terrorists were said
to be glamorous. You wrote me of taking the Greyhound to San
Francisco, how a body under the duress of addiction becomes
a bird, a wren, say-all finger-bones, light as paper, waxy
feathers that appear to melt away into air as dusk melts
through the trees in certain sad dusty towns where nothing
can ever become quite dark enough—always the lunar glare
of truck stop or the water sound of highway feeding into
field, mountain, a ribboning of roads and errands, other places,
which fill you with anxiety for you will never reach them.
The boys at the gate lent us their hats for a costume party.
We told them to come as themselves when they came off
duty. One took me by the wrist as if he might kiss me but didn’t.
He said it made him anxious, the thought there might one
day be a bomb. I tried to picture it, rushing through a car
like a train giving off sparks, and where would you go, how
would you feel yourself leaving, what time would there be
to count off or remember? I wrote you I missed you like the
taste of blood when you bite your lip, the salt that reminds
you what it is to be inside your one precious body. You did
not write back—by then you were living outside mostly or
on friends’ couches one after the other, the houses of people
who didn’t want you there.
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections and three chapbooks, most recently For the Loneliness of Walking Out (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2025). Poems and essays have appeared in Blackbird, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and hopes for rain in Tempe, AZ, where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
Elya Braden
|
|
Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Rapist
after Wallace Stevens
I
He finds me in the bottom of a glass.
II
He names his daughter Charon. She ferries
me, blind and limp, across the Acheron
into his waiting arms.
III
He and the night wear the same face.
IV
Is he the reason I was afraid
of heights? His body a ledge
from which I cannot leap. All
the painted ladies line up, their eyes
vacant as windows.
V
The ghost of my vomit haunts his bathroom.
VI
It is August, but his mouth
swallows the sun, an eclipse
of perfidy.
VII
Father and daughter: two sides of one net.
VIII
His breath a wind assaulting
the Ficus trees. They surrender, spill
green leaves onto gray sidewalk―
pages ripped from my blank book.
IX
His toxic waste poisons my Love Canal.
DO NOT ENTER — his three-year legacy.
X
Water cannot flush him
from my flesh. His fingers
erupt from every crevasse
of cellulite cratering my thighs,
until I am a sea anemone waving
from the bottom of the Bay.
XI
He is the secret I never tell,
the poem I never write.
XII
The seagulls shriek and jostle
in Ghirardelli Square. Chocolate
lavas and roils, sickened by his glance.
XIII
He is a crow-shaped shadow
staining the brick path. Black
feathers flutter from my lips.
after Wallace Stevens
I
He finds me in the bottom of a glass.
II
He names his daughter Charon. She ferries
me, blind and limp, across the Acheron
into his waiting arms.
III
He and the night wear the same face.
IV
Is he the reason I was afraid
of heights? His body a ledge
from which I cannot leap. All
the painted ladies line up, their eyes
vacant as windows.
V
The ghost of my vomit haunts his bathroom.
VI
It is August, but his mouth
swallows the sun, an eclipse
of perfidy.
VII
Father and daughter: two sides of one net.
VIII
His breath a wind assaulting
the Ficus trees. They surrender, spill
green leaves onto gray sidewalk―
pages ripped from my blank book.
IX
His toxic waste poisons my Love Canal.
DO NOT ENTER — his three-year legacy.
X
Water cannot flush him
from my flesh. His fingers
erupt from every crevasse
of cellulite cratering my thighs,
until I am a sea anemone waving
from the bottom of the Bay.
XI
He is the secret I never tell,
the poem I never write.
XII
The seagulls shriek and jostle
in Ghirardelli Square. Chocolate
lavas and roils, sickened by his glance.
XIII
He is a crow-shaped shadow
staining the brick path. Black
feathers flutter from my lips.
Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Oxnard, CA, and is an editor for Gyroscope Review. She is the author of Open The Fist (2020) and The Sight of Invisible Longing (2023). Her full-length collection, Dragonfly Puzzle Box, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. Her work has been published in Anthropocene, Burningword Literary Journal, Panoply, Thimble, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.
Oliver Brooks
Self-Portrait at the Worm Grunting Festival
I’d like to think I was the one summoning the worms,
speaking with their council—those sentries of the soil
fighting through centuries of earth only to be caught
for groundbait by sage children rubbing stakes together
like güiros or kindling overhead, rasping to the rhythm
of the fiddlers’ fingers flying fast over catgut strings
and the pungent aroma of food trucks glazing the air
with braised ribs and boiled peanuts—but I never
much liked grubs on the ground, sidewalks after rain,
or robins extracting elastic from earth, yet here I am
in tiny Sopchoppy (population 500), sweat-sodden
and sopping through tents peddling leather, glass,
hand-painted oyster shells, faux gemstones hot-glued
to driftwood—inching through throngs of city folk
longing for wilderness and worms, the diplomats of dirt―
as if only in the muck could we escape, as if only
the edicts of mud could free us from our urban shadow,
our great excavation coming soon.
I’d like to think I was the one summoning the worms,
speaking with their council—those sentries of the soil
fighting through centuries of earth only to be caught
for groundbait by sage children rubbing stakes together
like güiros or kindling overhead, rasping to the rhythm
of the fiddlers’ fingers flying fast over catgut strings
and the pungent aroma of food trucks glazing the air
with braised ribs and boiled peanuts—but I never
much liked grubs on the ground, sidewalks after rain,
or robins extracting elastic from earth, yet here I am
in tiny Sopchoppy (population 500), sweat-sodden
and sopping through tents peddling leather, glass,
hand-painted oyster shells, faux gemstones hot-glued
to driftwood—inching through throngs of city folk
longing for wilderness and worms, the diplomats of dirt―
as if only in the muck could we escape, as if only
the edicts of mud could free us from our urban shadow,
our great excavation coming soon.
Oliver Brooks is a Tallahassee-based poet and MFA student at Florida State University. His work appears in New Delta Review, Cream City Review, Variant Literature, Saw Palm, Rust & Moth, 3Elements Literary Review, and elsewhere. He serves as Poetry Editor for Southeast Review.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
|
|
Something I Meant to Tell You
was that in the early hours of that one morning―
when I said I had to leave before you rose, and you tugged
on my arm just before I got up from the bed, and you asked me
to stay one more minute but I looked at the red numbers of my glowing clock
and considered the documents at my desk, the walk and bus ride to the office
all the way down that one city street where groceries had shuttered and sometimes garbage cans
were left spilling over, no one to come get them
anymore
and I said I couldn’t stay, and I shook your hand from me―
was that perhaps I should have stayed that one minute
longer, should have settled beside you the way we did
at the beginning, and I don’t know that it would have changed everything
that would happen later—the ticket stub to somewhere else,
the argument that started on a pathway between two buildings
and kept on going on the phone and then later in silence―
but it would have been the minute I remember best, your body
shaped against me, your breathing soft and shifting as you fell
asleep again, as you always did when I settled against you,
because, you said, I was home, and maybe that would have mattered
more than the rest of whatever else happened, whatever else
could have happened, had I stayed a minute longer, and you had
understood what it would mean to never have to let me go.
was that in the early hours of that one morning―
when I said I had to leave before you rose, and you tugged
on my arm just before I got up from the bed, and you asked me
to stay one more minute but I looked at the red numbers of my glowing clock
and considered the documents at my desk, the walk and bus ride to the office
all the way down that one city street where groceries had shuttered and sometimes garbage cans
were left spilling over, no one to come get them
anymore
and I said I couldn’t stay, and I shook your hand from me―
was that perhaps I should have stayed that one minute
longer, should have settled beside you the way we did
at the beginning, and I don’t know that it would have changed everything
that would happen later—the ticket stub to somewhere else,
the argument that started on a pathway between two buildings
and kept on going on the phone and then later in silence―
but it would have been the minute I remember best, your body
shaped against me, your breathing soft and shifting as you fell
asleep again, as you always did when I settled against you,
because, you said, I was home, and maybe that would have mattered
more than the rest of whatever else happened, whatever else
could have happened, had I stayed a minute longer, and you had
understood what it would mean to never have to let me go.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with markers and metallic paint, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023) and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Rattle. Learn more at shulycawood.com.
Shane Chase
|
Return to Ether Up the World
The last round came even stalking the burn of moon reds. Masked men in green and black. Heavy weight eyes bulged with Oakleys, sticks at their side. The envelope of their lips behind the gauze leaves me puzzled. Wanting to at once bring them down to the ground and plant my feet on their chests, knowing the measures of all one can’t combat a bubbled star as it expands out. Enchanting fear sinking in the back drop holiday picture. I’m ridden with illnesses I’ve picked up along the way. Passing what is bad in me out on the letter, mouth and wriggling my toothy pencil out of the shirt pocket to press a free word into the air. |
Dwindle 3 Strong Lines
Throw the pigs ears into what a radio waves. Curdle the stars mixing in black water. I have cast my sons dead hands in pavements. Forever non-being goes on. Our names mingled by the street noise. Bring your heart to boil. In what I couldn’t hear his leveled vocals, til the silence betrayed the birds, flocking together. |
Shane Chase is a poet and educator from Southwest Florida who writes to memorialize the dead and dying world. He received a BA in English Literature at University of Westminster in London, UK. He is interested in poetry’s attempt at creating an event in language, and making works that are more than just captions to experience. Chase has been published in Clepsydra Literary and Art Magazine, Wells Street Journal, South Dakota Review, Re:AL Literary Magazine and more. He currently lives in New York City.
Joe Dahut
The Uncanonized
My friend injected his first cycle of test
and sent his fist through the wall
but he’s too drunk to stand up
so before taking care of it, I close my eyes
and I’m back mucking the stalls with José,
a tight joint snared between his lips
filling the troughs as the docile barn cat
watched, coiled like a snake. He brushes
the horses, and I begin scraping manure.
In grammar school, the nuns taught us carefully
that miracles performed for glory alone were selfish
deeds, that real martyrs would be sleepless, selfless,
and sick. I got news from my employer
that the man who worked the stalls
had died and no one knew his name.
I fiddled with a pocket knife
that could hardly skin an apple
and hung up the phone quietly.
My friend injected his first cycle of test
and sent his fist through the wall
but he’s too drunk to stand up
so before taking care of it, I close my eyes
and I’m back mucking the stalls with José,
a tight joint snared between his lips
filling the troughs as the docile barn cat
watched, coiled like a snake. He brushes
the horses, and I begin scraping manure.
In grammar school, the nuns taught us carefully
that miracles performed for glory alone were selfish
deeds, that real martyrs would be sleepless, selfless,
and sick. I got news from my employer
that the man who worked the stalls
had died and no one knew his name.
I fiddled with a pocket knife
that could hardly skin an apple
and hung up the phone quietly.
Joe Dahut is a poet, essayist, and teacher living and writing in Brooklyn. Prior to that, he was a collegiate pitcher at Drew University, where he earned his BA in English, and a fly fishing guide in Kodiak, Alaska. He earned his MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he taught creative writing.
Amelia Díaz Ettinger
|
|
Querida Amelia,
I read your request and felt the long breeze
left by so many of mine who had gone carrying
my chromosomes dispersed like seeds among foreign air.
You are no different than them, and yes,
I see you carry that part of me in the way you hold
your shoulders straight and your muscles tight.
In you, there are shadows of Adelitas in the way you care
for your children. Tonantzins dance within your cells as you value
landscape and creature, though you kept it dormant
in your chambers.
When did you march with the daughters of rage and hope?
This would have added stone
to a life without my borders. But I know you search my history
and wonder what if a rebozo had been wrapped for comfort
through your life, and the coquí you lived with had been only an illusion,
of song from a land far away.
It has taken you too long to make this request;
why should you be entitled when so many of your sisters
died at an early age without the comfort of your succor?
Still, I wonder if I should claim you now when you had abhorred
and denied that part of me that is so much of who you are?
Yet I do consider that you took that first breath under the careful
eye of Popocatépetl. The air that makes my womb of magma and
fire
that carries forth through generations. You wonder where
you can call home so to this, I say,
My shore is still within your reach,
México
I read your request and felt the long breeze
left by so many of mine who had gone carrying
my chromosomes dispersed like seeds among foreign air.
You are no different than them, and yes,
I see you carry that part of me in the way you hold
your shoulders straight and your muscles tight.
In you, there are shadows of Adelitas in the way you care
for your children. Tonantzins dance within your cells as you value
landscape and creature, though you kept it dormant
in your chambers.
When did you march with the daughters of rage and hope?
This would have added stone
to a life without my borders. But I know you search my history
and wonder what if a rebozo had been wrapped for comfort
through your life, and the coquí you lived with had been only an illusion,
of song from a land far away.
It has taken you too long to make this request;
why should you be entitled when so many of your sisters
died at an early age without the comfort of your succor?
Still, I wonder if I should claim you now when you had abhorred
and denied that part of me that is so much of who you are?
Yet I do consider that you took that first breath under the careful
eye of Popocatépetl. The air that makes my womb of magma and
fire
that carries forth through generations. You wonder where
you can call home so to this, I say,
My shore is still within your reach,
México
The Shadow in My Grandson’s Blue Eyes
my grandson is six and admires
our biceps—flexing and extending
mine are large and dependable,
from years of mountain climbs
his, a miniature perfection of a future man
we are on our way
to climb in an indoor rock gym
—Nana, do you really know how to climb?
his skepticism is warranted―
he hasn’t seen one so old take risks
even on an artificial wall
there are so many things I have seen and done
as we ride, he leans towards my elbow
and asks if I am brown
yes, I say, he smiles and tests
his fist towards my skin
the contrast takes our breaths
his blue eyes crinkle with a smile
proud that our muscles are large
proud that we can climb
proud to have each other’s hearts―
the certain belay of inheritance
as we ready in a gym that smells
of sweat and rubber,
I help him with his harnesses, he laughs―
a tiny cascade that ripples light as chalk―
and we watch each other climb
he chooses a boulder
I hope more difficult routes for me
but then— we lose sight of each other,
and he panics,
runs the length of the gym
looking for his Nana
his call forms a stone in my stomach
I find him in the center of a group
that surrounds him, a swarm of bees
their circle keeps me away from him
—I’m his Nana, I say, with an accented tongue
I can’t escape
and the white man retorts: —You can’t possibly be
my grandson looks up to me―
could this also be another truth?
and in that moment, I knew
a weed-seed carelessly planted
my grandson is six and admires
our biceps—flexing and extending
mine are large and dependable,
from years of mountain climbs
his, a miniature perfection of a future man
we are on our way
to climb in an indoor rock gym
—Nana, do you really know how to climb?
his skepticism is warranted―
he hasn’t seen one so old take risks
even on an artificial wall
there are so many things I have seen and done
as we ride, he leans towards my elbow
and asks if I am brown
yes, I say, he smiles and tests
his fist towards my skin
the contrast takes our breaths
his blue eyes crinkle with a smile
proud that our muscles are large
proud that we can climb
proud to have each other’s hearts―
the certain belay of inheritance
as we ready in a gym that smells
of sweat and rubber,
I help him with his harnesses, he laughs―
a tiny cascade that ripples light as chalk―
and we watch each other climb
he chooses a boulder
I hope more difficult routes for me
but then— we lose sight of each other,
and he panics,
runs the length of the gym
looking for his Nana
his call forms a stone in my stomach
I find him in the center of a group
that surrounds him, a swarm of bees
their circle keeps me away from him
—I’m his Nana, I say, with an accented tongue
I can’t escape
and the white man retorts: —You can’t possibly be
my grandson looks up to me―
could this also be another truth?
and in that moment, I knew
a weed-seed carelessly planted
Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a bilingual poet and prose writer born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico. With an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Biology, her work bridges science and art, exploring identity, displacement, family, and nature. Author of three poetry collections and two chapbooks, her work appears in journals like Cider Press Review. She is a 2025 Edna L. Holmes Fellowship recipient and lives in Oregon, writing on ancestry and the natural world.
Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice
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Exchange
My friend Stanley, a Kenyan teacher,
observes how American houses open
to green lawns and the street
when he visits Atlanta in late June.
The walls in Nyeri and Nairobi―
well, in neighborhoods with money―
are hot pink bougainvillea hung,
copper soil abutted. And one year
at our Nairobi hotel―Israeli snipers,
behind large-eared trees in planters, atop
the garden’s ledge. And one evening, just
the city park between my students, colleague, myself
and the Dusit D2 hotel bombing,
al-Shabaab shootout. And the text
that pinged my phone that same night―
Kenyan military choppers still beating overhead―
an alert from my school in Atlanta,
its signal in an instant bounding
piedmont tidewater ocean
desert forest mountains―
8,000 miles of ridges, road, and valley.
Code red lockdown
on our campus at home.
My friend Stanley, a Kenyan teacher,
observes how American houses open
to green lawns and the street
when he visits Atlanta in late June.
The walls in Nyeri and Nairobi―
well, in neighborhoods with money―
are hot pink bougainvillea hung,
copper soil abutted. And one year
at our Nairobi hotel―Israeli snipers,
behind large-eared trees in planters, atop
the garden’s ledge. And one evening, just
the city park between my students, colleague, myself
and the Dusit D2 hotel bombing,
al-Shabaab shootout. And the text
that pinged my phone that same night―
Kenyan military choppers still beating overhead―
an alert from my school in Atlanta,
its signal in an instant bounding
piedmont tidewater ocean
desert forest mountains―
8,000 miles of ridges, road, and valley.
Code red lockdown
on our campus at home.
Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems published in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Still: The Journal (Judge's Choice Award), and elsewhere. In addition to her debut poetry collection, Lodged in the Belly (2024), a chapbook, Roar of All Septembers, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. A long-time high school English teacher with literature degrees from Brown University and Indiana-Bloomington, she lives in Florida with her wife. Reach her at jhdracostice.com/.
George Franklin
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Hibiscus Leaves
There are no blooms on the hibiscus
On the patio. It doesn’t get
Enough sun. The shadow of the house
Blocks it most of the day, but right now
It’s a mass of bright green leaves that make
Me feel hopeful somehow, whatever
That means. These days, I’m feeling my age.
I look around at my books on their
Shelves, the paintings and the photographs,
Even the espresso machine in
The kitchen, and worry this is all
There is to a life: cookbooks where the
Recipes seem too complicated,
But the pictures of the dishes are
Beautiful, inherited Limoge
Porcelain never used, leather bound
Editions unread. The dog asleep
Under the table lets out a howl,
Then another. He’s caught up in some
Ancestral dream, chasing a wild boar
In the woods of East Texas or fields
Of Johnson grass higher than his head.
That animals dream is something else
That makes me hopeful. Heraclitus
Distinguished the world we share when we’re
Awake from the private world of dreams.
He said, “Follow the common.” But I’m
Not so sure. Some mornings, I wake up
Early and look at you, asleep still,
Maybe on another continent,
Walking by the Rio Cali or
Making breakfast in your apartment
Or studying downstairs in that room
With the terrazzo floor at the house
In Colombia where you grew up,
Smells of sancocho cooking upstairs.
You tell me that in your dreams sometimes
I treat you badly, leave you on your
Own at a party or disappear
Into a crowd on a busy street.
I’m sorry. Tomorrow night, I’ll try
To behave better, take you out for
Coffee at Café Macondo in
San Antonio or for a walk
Up the hillside, until a crack of
Sunlight returns you to our common
Waking. This also makes me hopeful,
Though I don’t know why. Whatever hope
Means, it’s not just a synonym for
Some idea made of words. It’s a
Feeling made of light on hibiscus
Leaves. It disappears and then returns,
Like a private world shared between us,
Your hand resting on the tablecloth.
There are no blooms on the hibiscus
On the patio. It doesn’t get
Enough sun. The shadow of the house
Blocks it most of the day, but right now
It’s a mass of bright green leaves that make
Me feel hopeful somehow, whatever
That means. These days, I’m feeling my age.
I look around at my books on their
Shelves, the paintings and the photographs,
Even the espresso machine in
The kitchen, and worry this is all
There is to a life: cookbooks where the
Recipes seem too complicated,
But the pictures of the dishes are
Beautiful, inherited Limoge
Porcelain never used, leather bound
Editions unread. The dog asleep
Under the table lets out a howl,
Then another. He’s caught up in some
Ancestral dream, chasing a wild boar
In the woods of East Texas or fields
Of Johnson grass higher than his head.
That animals dream is something else
That makes me hopeful. Heraclitus
Distinguished the world we share when we’re
Awake from the private world of dreams.
He said, “Follow the common.” But I’m
Not so sure. Some mornings, I wake up
Early and look at you, asleep still,
Maybe on another continent,
Walking by the Rio Cali or
Making breakfast in your apartment
Or studying downstairs in that room
With the terrazzo floor at the house
In Colombia where you grew up,
Smells of sancocho cooking upstairs.
You tell me that in your dreams sometimes
I treat you badly, leave you on your
Own at a party or disappear
Into a crowd on a busy street.
I’m sorry. Tomorrow night, I’ll try
To behave better, take you out for
Coffee at Café Macondo in
San Antonio or for a walk
Up the hillside, until a crack of
Sunlight returns you to our common
Waking. This also makes me hopeful,
Though I don’t know why. Whatever hope
Means, it’s not just a synonym for
Some idea made of words. It’s a
Feeling made of light on hibiscus
Leaves. It disappears and then returns,
Like a private world shared between us,
Your hand resting on the tablecloth.
George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including A Man Made of Stories (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing. Individual poems have been published in South Florida Poetry Journal, Nimrod, Rattle, Gramercy Review, and New Ohio Review, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez's Último día/Last Day.
Renoir Gaither
Nights at the Slippery Noodle
A memory of Etheridge Knight
Etheridge lit another
cigarette, then proceeded
to tell us about the cancer
growing unabated in his
lungs, long imprisoned
by habit, bad luck, bitchfaced
arcana of growing
up fellaheen, black,
and gifted.
Life’s a dirty fig
ripening on the infield,
kicked by a child down
a dream-diving road, yet
heavier than Dexter Gordon
yanking notes from nowhere
like a drunken flower.
Check out West African
poetics in Black preaching,
he said. Yup, one-stroke
recitations from Benin.
Fog-washed rivers―
Yazoo, Mississippi,
Bayou Pierre—welled
in his yellow-mad eyes;
Korean War shrapnel,
like murderous birds,
had honed the night
cramps of his soul;
he bled.
In a room where Dillinger
and gang once romped,
a shadow-dancing MC trilled
his name. And Etheridge
padded to the stage
like Orpheus in his cups.
His phrases, shouts,
sin-chansons, blues
rained down,
ecstatic,
reet,
emptying.
A string of modal
chords making peace.
Like a Jesup wagon
winking at swamp gas,
smeared in dried
mud and moonlight,
he pushed on through
night’s soft shroud,
as a young brother,
seated alone, back
’gainst the wall―
cool,
high,
digging
it―
bawled:
Awww, man. Amen!
A memory of Etheridge Knight
Etheridge lit another
cigarette, then proceeded
to tell us about the cancer
growing unabated in his
lungs, long imprisoned
by habit, bad luck, bitchfaced
arcana of growing
up fellaheen, black,
and gifted.
Life’s a dirty fig
ripening on the infield,
kicked by a child down
a dream-diving road, yet
heavier than Dexter Gordon
yanking notes from nowhere
like a drunken flower.
Check out West African
poetics in Black preaching,
he said. Yup, one-stroke
recitations from Benin.
Fog-washed rivers―
Yazoo, Mississippi,
Bayou Pierre—welled
in his yellow-mad eyes;
Korean War shrapnel,
like murderous birds,
had honed the night
cramps of his soul;
he bled.
In a room where Dillinger
and gang once romped,
a shadow-dancing MC trilled
his name. And Etheridge
padded to the stage
like Orpheus in his cups.
His phrases, shouts,
sin-chansons, blues
rained down,
ecstatic,
reet,
emptying.
A string of modal
chords making peace.
Like a Jesup wagon
winking at swamp gas,
smeared in dried
mud and moonlight,
he pushed on through
night’s soft shroud,
as a young brother,
seated alone, back
’gainst the wall―
cool,
high,
digging
it―
bawled:
Awww, man. Amen!
Renoir Gaither writes from St. Paul, MN. A former academic librarian, he has recently published in Callaloo, Washington Square Review, and the South Florida Poetry Journal. He obsesses over jazz, politics, and hifi gear.
Kelly Gray
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By the Rabbit Hutch: A Tub
Show the rabbits my nakedness. They will not tell anyone. For a week there is an ache between my legs that is quick to enlarge like swollen fish swimming in slick waters. Pull the fish apart to find the organs of the thing: the opening and closing organ, the blood sac organ, the egg organ, the gilled organ of sex. What can be moved with a hand can be turned dark red with the mouth. The rabbits shuffle in their small, perched home. The fish in the bathtub are gleaming white like rocks in the beak of the raven. They swim in and out of the swelling. The green of the forest is a sermon on descent, like a man speaking into my neck. The moss crawls up and down the trees. Furious workings. The rabbits kept alive. |
After the Surgery the Garden Bruised
The slip is dirty but I wear it every day with men’s shoes. I like the way they look smart between the ferns and the dying parts of the pathway, the dark brown in conversation with the spotted slugs who glide under my house in silent migrations into the flower beds, then back again, so that while I sleep their mucin bodies reproduce beneath me. I have not kneeled for months now. Not in bed, not in flowers. My knee is marked by a pink scar that becomes purple and pale in the same breath, like testicles. I don’t like telling anyone about this part of recovery. Before I left for the hospital I dug up the lilies that looked like tropical birds. I cooked their bulbs, I fed them to the neighbors, I hoped everyone would be kinder. Now the garden blooms like the inside of a body, only dark expressions and arteries too close to the skin remain in flower form. My veins are always trying to leave my legs. Racoons hang. Blood peaches hang. I used to sleep in trees. In the tall one that split, like me, branches splayed. |
Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls//of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Chapbook Prize, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025). Gray’s work can be found in Witness Magazine, Cream City Review, Cherry Tree, and Southern Humanities Review, among other journals. Gray lives with her family in a cabin in the woods and in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry in rural public schools.
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David Henson
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The Confetti of Our Skin
For some it starts with a toe, but for most of us, it’s a finger. Within a week our whole hand is translucent as paper. Because it is paper. Within a month, we’re paper people. Scans reveal bones hollow as straws, blood a kind of slurry, organs resembling sophisticated origamis. When we touch our lovers, their skin brings back memories of a long-forgotten novel. It’s hard to adapt. Paper tongues are thin but have a thick accent. Our eyes see only black and white, and everything seems crinkled. We don’t melt in rain, but take hours to dry. Instead of shedding dead skin cells, tiny flecks of confetti surround us. Scissors give us nightmares. Our customs evolve. We have ticker-tape parades when we die; we’re the streamers. Instead of bathing, we dust ourselves. The children don’t seem to mind. They take turns flying each other like kites. We teach them to fear fire. And to treat the trees like gods. |
David Henson and his wife have lived in Brussels and Hong Kong and now reside in Illinois. His work has been selected for Best Microfictions 2025, nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net, and two Best Small Fictions. His writings have appeared in various journals including South Florida Poetry Journal, Bright Flash Literary Journal, Literally Stories, Ghost Parachute, Moonpark Review, and Maudlin House. His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com. His X handle is @annalou8.
Mary Beth Hines
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Harvest
after Edvard’s Munch’s “Fertility”
remember
me wielding a willow-
strip basket brimful
of cherries blush
globes spilling
through an orchard
honed to a leaf-drunk tree
and you young
on a postulant knee
savoring my trembling
slipping grasp
my almost
breathless letting go
to bend set down pluck
from the bowl
the succulent best
shined to blaze
on my long
cotton dress
sweeping the sun-
sloshed green-glossed
fields silking my calves
ankles bare feet
and the ache
in the garden
for that first sharp bite
tongue’s keen leap
hat knocked off blue skirt blown
on the ruby-raptured ride to sweet
bruised aftermath
after Edvard’s Munch’s “Fertility”
remember
me wielding a willow-
strip basket brimful
of cherries blush
globes spilling
through an orchard
honed to a leaf-drunk tree
and you young
on a postulant knee
savoring my trembling
slipping grasp
my almost
breathless letting go
to bend set down pluck
from the bowl
the succulent best
shined to blaze
on my long
cotton dress
sweeping the sun-
sloshed green-glossed
fields silking my calves
ankles bare feet
and the ache
in the garden
for that first sharp bite
tongue’s keen leap
hat knocked off blue skirt blown
on the ruby-raptured ride to sweet
bruised aftermath
Mary Beth Hines is the author of Winter at a Summer House (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her recent work appears in Cider Press Review, Presence, Solstice Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She writes from her home outside of Boston, MA. Https://www.marybethhines.com
Ruth Hoberman
Suburban Necropastoral
Some disastrous accident?
we stared into the dark:
not till morning did we see the copper beech
down—thick chunks sprawled on the sidewalk
like body parts.
Nematodes, the weight of rain. It’s like that recently,
so much falling. So much
eating us hollow—ash borers, lies, lice—moving
in, setting up shop, breaking
our hearts.
Who invented clothes?
my granddaughter asked last week. God,
I said, just to have a story: after apples,
shame, then clothes, and
off went Adam and Eve to the mall.
Soon cemeteries arrived—those swards colonized
by embalmers and mnemonic stones―
then walls, then words (another name for walls). Telling
snakes where to go, though really
since before the fall there’s been no end
of flowing. Capillaries
everywhere, cadavers contiguous with tree roots.
Just last week, a chipmunk
strolled the windshield
as we hit fifty on Storrow Drive.
Now my son-in-law traps and carries them off in cages―
another expulsion.
Pesticided lice streak my hand with brown:
for them my head’s a marshy
reed-strewn place, a home. Things slide,
one into another. Is the fish
in the kingfisher’s gullet fish or bird?
What do we call the plastic beads
in the kingfisher’s belly? And what am I,
seeing my face in the dog’s sad eyes?
Some disastrous accident?
we stared into the dark:
not till morning did we see the copper beech
down—thick chunks sprawled on the sidewalk
like body parts.
Nematodes, the weight of rain. It’s like that recently,
so much falling. So much
eating us hollow—ash borers, lies, lice—moving
in, setting up shop, breaking
our hearts.
Who invented clothes?
my granddaughter asked last week. God,
I said, just to have a story: after apples,
shame, then clothes, and
off went Adam and Eve to the mall.
Soon cemeteries arrived—those swards colonized
by embalmers and mnemonic stones―
then walls, then words (another name for walls). Telling
snakes where to go, though really
since before the fall there’s been no end
of flowing. Capillaries
everywhere, cadavers contiguous with tree roots.
Just last week, a chipmunk
strolled the windshield
as we hit fifty on Storrow Drive.
Now my son-in-law traps and carries them off in cages―
another expulsion.
Pesticided lice streak my hand with brown:
for them my head’s a marshy
reed-strewn place, a home. Things slide,
one into another. Is the fish
in the kingfisher’s gullet fish or bird?
What do we call the plastic beads
in the kingfisher’s belly? And what am I,
seeing my face in the dog’s sad eyes?
Late Summer, Long Marriage
The garden’s gone rococo―
all color, curl and prod; lobelias ablaze,
day lilies unrolling flirty orange ribbons,
thistles crazy with bees.
Inside the dog sprawls over the cool grate sleeping, twitching
as she chases rabbits across the vast athletic field
summer afternoons become―
was it fourth grade or fifth I spent the summer running
toward some yawning net they called a goal?
A mirage, running toward. More like flight,
then settling in: this married we of forty years. Grown up
or overgrown?
Rococo from rocaille—rocks, pebbles, shells displaced,
shaped into scrolls and tendrils, asymmetrical turrets liable
to tumble―
Why do you always? he sometimes says.
Why do you always? I sometimes think.
He gardens. I praise the tomatoes.
He takes the dog to dog parks; I walk her along suburban streets,
watch her tug, taut-leashed, intent
on something I can’t see. Forget
birds, I tell her. Forget rabbits.
Just walk.
Somedays we settle down to a jaunty trot.
Somedays it’s tug-of-war the whole way home.
The garden’s gone rococo―
all color, curl and prod; lobelias ablaze,
day lilies unrolling flirty orange ribbons,
thistles crazy with bees.
Inside the dog sprawls over the cool grate sleeping, twitching
as she chases rabbits across the vast athletic field
summer afternoons become―
was it fourth grade or fifth I spent the summer running
toward some yawning net they called a goal?
A mirage, running toward. More like flight,
then settling in: this married we of forty years. Grown up
or overgrown?
Rococo from rocaille—rocks, pebbles, shells displaced,
shaped into scrolls and tendrils, asymmetrical turrets liable
to tumble―
Why do you always? he sometimes says.
Why do you always? I sometimes think.
He gardens. I praise the tomatoes.
He takes the dog to dog parks; I walk her along suburban streets,
watch her tug, taut-leashed, intent
on something I can’t see. Forget
birds, I tell her. Forget rabbits.
Just walk.
Somedays we settle down to a jaunty trot.
Somedays it’s tug-of-war the whole way home.
Start Again, Morning Says
Damp rag: dig out that dust deep in the paneled doors,
beneath the bed. Strip moss from the windowsills,
time from its crannies. What’s stolen inches toward
unseen: this land you stand on, rivers, etc. Meanwhile
the seven-year-old wants to help a pill bug cross the street.
Things seldom shift according to our will I tell her
when it circumnavigates her hand. Last week the dog
chewed the couch’s bottom out from underneath.
Ripped fabric, clouds of stuffing hanging down!
We unscrewed the legs. Didn’t try to change the dog,
who lounges now on the low divan. Look how she lies
on what offers itself—snuffs, shuffles things around,
sleeps. Start again, morning says, and coffee concurs:
says sun, says swallow, says forget what’s stolen
(barely glimpsed in yesterday’s recycled heaps)―
lives, cities, salmon, etc.—where the damp rag
won’t reach. Start again, morning says, and we do.
Damp rag: dig out that dust deep in the paneled doors,
beneath the bed. Strip moss from the windowsills,
time from its crannies. What’s stolen inches toward
unseen: this land you stand on, rivers, etc. Meanwhile
the seven-year-old wants to help a pill bug cross the street.
Things seldom shift according to our will I tell her
when it circumnavigates her hand. Last week the dog
chewed the couch’s bottom out from underneath.
Ripped fabric, clouds of stuffing hanging down!
We unscrewed the legs. Didn’t try to change the dog,
who lounges now on the low divan. Look how she lies
on what offers itself—snuffs, shuffles things around,
sleeps. Start again, morning says, and coffee concurs:
says sun, says swallow, says forget what’s stolen
(barely glimpsed in yesterday’s recycled heaps)―
lives, cities, salmon, etc.—where the damp rag
won’t reach. Start again, morning says, and we do.
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living with her extended family in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in such journals as Ibbetson Street, Nixes Mate, Salamander, RHINO, SWWIM Everyday, and Constellations.
Don Hogle
Because You Asked
(Answers to Frequently Asked Questions)
1. There were twelve, each more difficult than the one before, the twelfth being the
capture of the three-headed hound of Hades.
2. On the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21st.
3. Subtract thirty-two and multiply that result by five ninths.
4. Augusta, not Portland.
5. If a side of a street has an Alternate-Side-of-the-Street-Parking sign showing multiple
days, street cleaning regulations will be in effect on that side of the street only on the
latest day posted on the sign.
6. No. There is no photographic evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ.
7. Sue Ellen’s scheming younger sister Kristin, as played by actress Mary Crosby.
8. If you cut into it and the juices run clear, then it’s fully cooked. If the juices are red or
have a pinkish color, it may need to be cooked a little longer.
9. Two tablespoons fat and two of flour for each cup of liquid.
10. Most boys do it every day.
11. It depends on the season.
12. We may never know.
(Answers to Frequently Asked Questions)
1. There were twelve, each more difficult than the one before, the twelfth being the
capture of the three-headed hound of Hades.
2. On the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21st.
3. Subtract thirty-two and multiply that result by five ninths.
4. Augusta, not Portland.
5. If a side of a street has an Alternate-Side-of-the-Street-Parking sign showing multiple
days, street cleaning regulations will be in effect on that side of the street only on the
latest day posted on the sign.
6. No. There is no photographic evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ.
7. Sue Ellen’s scheming younger sister Kristin, as played by actress Mary Crosby.
8. If you cut into it and the juices run clear, then it’s fully cooked. If the juices are red or
have a pinkish color, it may need to be cooked a little longer.
9. Two tablespoons fat and two of flour for each cup of liquid.
10. Most boys do it every day.
11. It depends on the season.
12. We may never know.
Don Hogle has published over a hundred poems in journals in the U.S., U.K., and Ireland. A chapbook, Madagascar, was published in 2020 (Seven Kitchens Press). His debut full-length collection, Huddled in the Night Sky, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. He lives happily in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com
Brittany N. Jaekel
Parrot
in the atrium of grandma’s
hospital, where the light fractures green
& yellow
the old parrot comes down
his claws brass weights
on my shoulder
I’ve no one to talk to, he says
Is that right?
I ask
Is that right?
Is that right?
the dream changes
I am in a wood
along a coast
drab with gray snow
Chicago in ruins
the white bellies
of rockets torn
to shreds, shrapnel
leaning on trees
the ground aches
grandpa, years younger,
walks with me
alone
he seems on the brink
of erasure
he changes to one man
to another
the land trembles,
wobbles, floats
the shrapnel
sings, the trees
are bare
in the atrium of grandma’s
hospital, where the light fractures green
& yellow
the old parrot comes down
his claws brass weights
on my shoulder
I’ve no one to talk to, he says
Is that right?
I ask
Is that right?
Is that right?
the dream changes
I am in a wood
along a coast
drab with gray snow
Chicago in ruins
the white bellies
of rockets torn
to shreds, shrapnel
leaning on trees
the ground aches
grandpa, years younger,
walks with me
alone
he seems on the brink
of erasure
he changes to one man
to another
the land trembles,
wobbles, floats
the shrapnel
sings, the trees
are bare
Brittany N. Jaekel writes from the outer reaches of the Twin Cities. Her work has previously appeared in RHINO, Burningword Literary Journal, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. She currently serves on the editorial team at Great Lakes Review. Learn more at https://brittanynjaekel.com/
Matthew Johnson
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Kevin Conroy
I was flung back to a scene
Where I was cross-legged and had eyes of open wonder,
Engrossed in the television set,
Seeing how the Dark Knight was going to subdue
The villain of the week this time, when I heard
That the Batman of all seasons, Kevin Conroy, had died.
I still hear the voice,
Warm like the beams of a hearth fire in Wayne Manor,
Crackling and flickering
With such strength and light and life.
I read how you said that being both Batman and Bruce Wayne
Was natural to you as an actor, as you had been a closeted gay man
In a world that feared and hated you,
And the lines and self began to blur,
As you put on painted smiles,
And a mask…
I was flung back to a scene
Where I was cross-legged and had eyes of open wonder,
Engrossed in the television set,
Seeing how the Dark Knight was going to subdue
The villain of the week this time, when I heard
That the Batman of all seasons, Kevin Conroy, had died.
I still hear the voice,
Warm like the beams of a hearth fire in Wayne Manor,
Crackling and flickering
With such strength and light and life.
I read how you said that being both Batman and Bruce Wayne
Was natural to you as an actor, as you had been a closeted gay man
In a world that feared and hated you,
And the lines and self began to blur,
As you put on painted smiles,
And a mask…
Where the Loudest Applause is Heard at Graduation
Grandma’s hands,
Folded tight in tissue-wrapped prayers,
Are held together
Like a promise that had been kept through years.
Uncle, restless, bounces on the balls of his feet,
Impatient to spring from his seat,
Releasing a flurry of balloons that kiss the ceiling;
It would rise, unbound, towards the embrace of heaven’s host,
To join the gathering of ancestors and angels,
If not for the roof above.
The dress shoes of Alphas, Deltas, and Omegas
Step in time, a dance of festive trance,
Their hallowed steps resound;
It is a cadence cast upon the hallowed floor of academia.
When a diploma lands in the hands of a black graduate,
A chorus of shouts and cheers erupts,
Ringing out from the back row,
Where the hairs are curled,
Echoing like the final beat of a drum circle:
And the tom-tom, at rest, marks the pulse of Graduation Day.
Grandma’s hands,
Folded tight in tissue-wrapped prayers,
Are held together
Like a promise that had been kept through years.
Uncle, restless, bounces on the balls of his feet,
Impatient to spring from his seat,
Releasing a flurry of balloons that kiss the ceiling;
It would rise, unbound, towards the embrace of heaven’s host,
To join the gathering of ancestors and angels,
If not for the roof above.
The dress shoes of Alphas, Deltas, and Omegas
Step in time, a dance of festive trance,
Their hallowed steps resound;
It is a cadence cast upon the hallowed floor of academia.
When a diploma lands in the hands of a black graduate,
A chorus of shouts and cheers erupts,
Ringing out from the back row,
Where the hairs are curled,
Echoing like the final beat of a drum circle:
And the tom-tom, at rest, marks the pulse of Graduation Day.
Matthew Johnson is the author of Shadow Folks, Soul Songs, Far from New York State, and Too Short to Box with God. His poetry has appeared in The African American Review, London Magazine, and others. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, along with honors from the Hudson Valley Writers Center and Sundress Publications. Johnson was a finalist for the 2023 Diverse Book Award (Grand View University) and serves as managing editor of The Portrait of New England and poetry editor for The Twin Bill. Visit www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com
Yuna Kang
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0.8.09.2023
My mother was a fish, but not in a substantive sense, instead, she did not love me: matricide by the numbers dwindling, the stars felt at ease to peer down and sigh, discontent. And the content of our love was this: Rikki Tikki Tembo, a collection of old picture books that told me that love was more powerful than words, and I looked up to where sunlight would slant over the grey carpets, and I would not hug her, or hold her hand, when she came to pick me up from school. And gradually, gradually, she grew to forget: the substantive ways in which we prove love– cooking, hugging, kissing, and all the old stories that imply happiness, even the kinds we do not know. |
Yuna Kang is a queer, half-deaf, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She loves postcards, crows, and cats. Yuna is also the recipient of the 2024 New Feathers Award. Their website link is: https://kangyunak.wixsite.com/website
Sarah Kersey
EMDR Therapy
Fine. I’ll light every Monday on fire,
become an arsonist to lessen
my distress, trust the orange tongues
of past lives won’t bloom into a forest
fire. Simple. Step one: arrive at therapy.
Step two: close eyes. Step three: don’t
flinch when years blend: wildfire Augusts
one in the same with February droughts,
shredded shirts no different than boots
of blood. Sometimes they swap words,
my abusers, switch bodies, faces, names,
meaning I lose track of which hands pull
and which push me over the edge. I’d prefer
being burned alive. After, I lie still, counting
my fingers, toes, bruises, trying to identify
myself in a cloudless present, summon
healing out of ash.
Fine. I’ll light every Monday on fire,
become an arsonist to lessen
my distress, trust the orange tongues
of past lives won’t bloom into a forest
fire. Simple. Step one: arrive at therapy.
Step two: close eyes. Step three: don’t
flinch when years blend: wildfire Augusts
one in the same with February droughts,
shredded shirts no different than boots
of blood. Sometimes they swap words,
my abusers, switch bodies, faces, names,
meaning I lose track of which hands pull
and which push me over the edge. I’d prefer
being burned alive. After, I lie still, counting
my fingers, toes, bruises, trying to identify
myself in a cloudless present, summon
healing out of ash.
Sarah Kersey earned her MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University in 2022. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Poet Lore, Poetry South, Hunger Mountain, and more. She was a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2022 International Poetry Contest, as well as in Sunspot Literary Journal’s 2022 Geminga contest. She teaches English at Gonzaga University.
Karen Lozinski
Last Day as Ophelia
I decide to live in the echo of
your stamped tin soliloquy you
didn’t know I listened to, the last of
your voice the softest drops in
a high noon thunderstorm. I am
quick to gather the words to my body,
pulling them like the fabric ocean of a
ballgown to my legs and chest
a garment I’ve been consigned to
wear for at least the last eleven years
so you have to know the crinoline
aches with every scrape of the ground.
Where will we wash ourselves next
is not a visceral concern, more
directional than I’d like but I’m still
willing to link arms with you in the
rapids—you plunge into the churn
without consultation. I know heavy
garments and deep water don’t mix
so I pluck each footfall on the rocks
along the river with exacting care.
I see you surface here and there
drawn to daylight’s glisten on your
skin, your copper hair. When I
reach the cerulean pool at the base
of the falls I cannot find you.
I pull myself free of this dress and
dive into coolness that startles me
on a molecular level and find I don’t
need as much air as I’d thought,
scouring the hard bottom for your
presence. When I surface, I see your
form come over the falls, arms out in
an upside down cross. I ready myself
to catch you. At last.
I decide to live in the echo of
your stamped tin soliloquy you
didn’t know I listened to, the last of
your voice the softest drops in
a high noon thunderstorm. I am
quick to gather the words to my body,
pulling them like the fabric ocean of a
ballgown to my legs and chest
a garment I’ve been consigned to
wear for at least the last eleven years
so you have to know the crinoline
aches with every scrape of the ground.
Where will we wash ourselves next
is not a visceral concern, more
directional than I’d like but I’m still
willing to link arms with you in the
rapids—you plunge into the churn
without consultation. I know heavy
garments and deep water don’t mix
so I pluck each footfall on the rocks
along the river with exacting care.
I see you surface here and there
drawn to daylight’s glisten on your
skin, your copper hair. When I
reach the cerulean pool at the base
of the falls I cannot find you.
I pull myself free of this dress and
dive into coolness that startles me
on a molecular level and find I don’t
need as much air as I’d thought,
scouring the hard bottom for your
presence. When I surface, I see your
form come over the falls, arms out in
an upside down cross. I ready myself
to catch you. At last.
Karen Lozinski hails from New York City and lives in New Orleans. She's a multidisciplinary artist who earned her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. At work on a novel and a poetry collection, her writing appears in Mantis, The Citron Review (2024 Pushcart nominee in fiction), Chapter House Journal, Red Ogre Review, The Dead Mule, The Argyle Literary Magazine, The Broadkill Review, The Bookends Review, The Naugatuck River Review and many more.
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Robert Manaster
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Behind Closed Doors at City Hall
The patient beating of the animal heart. - Edna St. Vincent Millay Onto plush so blue, step as soundless as the diving of a starving loon. Cathedral windows, oak-paneled wall, a framed field where golden centaurs roam, a chandelier glaze like the heart of a silver elephant—in here, wait to charge, wait to break the city staff's will, like the lurking red-tailed hawk on its branch. In here, the animus of gain (or loss) is a lion's stare. |
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Be Numb in Numbers: a Playing Out
I Take 210 trailers once upon a 20-acre time. Take all trailers still there with folks in them: 60, 70, or 80 — who knows? So, forget it. Just take the ghosts of 210 homes & multiply the silence. II In their place, plan 223 four-, 43 two- & 23 one-bedroom units― that's 1,001 beds. Include 1,040 parking spots plus 1 clubhouse 3600 square feet. Add to this master draft the fiscal skills to finish these and other additions. III Look at 2 bids. There's no place like home, there's no place like home. Send out (by law) the 1 year’s notice. IV Call on the 7 dwarves to match up with benefits the city figured out for who-knows-how- many mobile home tenants who move: Doc Repair, Sleepy Replacement, Grumpy Help with bad-credit, Bashful Help with old-to-new-home move, Dopey Rent differential, Sneezy Move, Happy Grant of $500. V Take thousands of possible endings and hundreds of lives affected then divide & subtract until what remains is this 1 fragment: ever after. Vertical Divider
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Breaking News
And zoom in on disheveled man up on a ledge, back against brick and weakly bending his knees, and from an open window a young man's head edges out. Cut to woman at news desk in turquoise blouse. Thank you, Sandy. We'll keep everyone updated—but first, some local news. Blah-blah-blah. Cut to mayor—blank face, white shirt, brown tie, stiff pose—saying, blah-blah, blah-blah in measured tone. Cut to city building, the one with sandstone brick at Green and Vine. Cut to fall wind's fray in tree full of yellow leaves. Zoom out from tree drooping over a mobile home to bare lots throughout park. Cut to red truck towing a home away—(drop clip of that shouting at park's tenant meeting)― Cut to Closed sign. Cut to woman at desk in turquoise blouse, nodding, Next, in health news, see what happens when blah-blah-blah. Cut to clip before commercial: warble-rush of sirens― color of glossy red lips |
Robert Manaster's poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Image, Maine Review, Rhino, and Puerto del Sol. He's also published poetry book reviews in such publications as The Rumpus, Colorado Review, and North American Review. His website can be found here: http://robertmanaster.net
Melba
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The Language of Petals
You said grief has no tongue,
but I’ve heard it bloom.
In the pause between your inhale
and the way you whisper my name
like something wilting.
I carry every ache like seeds in my mouth―
soft enough to swallow,
bitter enough to root.
This is how women become gardens
where no one expected to find life.
You said grief has no tongue,
but I’ve heard it bloom.
In the pause between your inhale
and the way you whisper my name
like something wilting.
I carry every ache like seeds in my mouth―
soft enough to swallow,
bitter enough to root.
This is how women become gardens
where no one expected to find life.
Melba is a Dominican-American poet and author of Unplanted, Yet Flourishing, a deeply personal collection that explores the emotional landscape of infertility through poetry, nature, and healing. With raw vulnerability and symbolic imagery, her work offers a path from silent grief to quiet strength. She is also the founder of Poetic Nectar Collective, a creative space born from this journey. Connect with her at poetic-nectar-collective.company.site, or on Instagram at @poeticnectarcollective.
Juan Pablo Mobili
Crossing the Border
I saved every passport
that I was issued, shown
at one border or another,
wondering each time if
the men who questioned
my credentials, longed
to be guards since
they were children.
Airports are as harsh
as Purgatory, immigrants
in charge of sweeping
the scorched feathers
and saints remaining silent
confusing complicity with holiness.
After my passport is stamped
I walk on home soil, still
a foreigner after decades of abiding,
hiding my accent under my coat.
I saved every passport
that I was issued, shown
at one border or another,
wondering each time if
the men who questioned
my credentials, longed
to be guards since
they were children.
Airports are as harsh
as Purgatory, immigrants
in charge of sweeping
the scorched feathers
and saints remaining silent
confusing complicity with holiness.
After my passport is stamped
I walk on home soil, still
a foreigner after decades of abiding,
hiding my accent under my coat.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Worcester Review, Louisville Review, and SoFloPoJo, among many others, as well as publications in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. He received multiple Pushcart nominations, and his chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022. In January of 2025, he became Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York.
Oak Morse
We Glee Now
Mary Agnus, we're quaking // ever since mistaken for 1619
like rotten flaxseed // shoulder tote log yokes // eyes eyeing
our boot laces // taverned into who we not are // south yard
keeping flies from open flesh w/ corn husks // Galveston News
O je ojo tuntun // O je ojo titun // we glee now // though
Emancipation procrastinated // got to skip-to-loo // Mary Agnus
cannot hay here // too many Satans in barn // ants eating baby
cobblestone road, you were dragged // lost flashback if we go
hack nerves out your throat // Massa can’t never be enough hero
unbury lips // a new horizon for us to stitch // before conch shells
roar daylight // sure there's coyote // white cap klan but that's
endless // everywhere // O je ojo tuntun // O je ojo titun
barrel cry me audacity // got to spring // even if we can’t leap
into codes & symbols to read // geechee geechee upstream w/
Dread Scott fangs // bayi bayi // don’t let linen caress your con-
science // it's too easy to crawl back // to plantation coated in
mint molasses // miraging to tuck our faces // keliod crip'd
owner’s initials under right eye // say you heard ancestors'
psalming there's peaches // persimmons beyond // if you need
white man to follow // let it be Lincoln // it’ll add less to hollow
say we Texans hearts were not quite ready then // like slung into
Serengeti // O je ojo tuntun // O je ojo titun and now we
butter up audacity // safety is sap when found in uncertainty
Mary Agnus you have husband to hawk // his hazy face thick
decades since bartered away // say you’ll reign they had our
sweat // but they cannot have sunrays // let crows barricade
screen door of big house // stone windows with rutabagas
our black tails got blacksmiths to be // Katherine Jackson
Wilson’s MaRainy // Ebony magazines // once we unleash
after strength // we gain heritage // & National Holiday Biden
beam // & we gon dazzle // disremember the brine & I promise
you Lord gon love us fine //
Mary Agnus, we're quaking // ever since mistaken for 1619
like rotten flaxseed // shoulder tote log yokes // eyes eyeing
our boot laces // taverned into who we not are // south yard
keeping flies from open flesh w/ corn husks // Galveston News
O je ojo tuntun // O je ojo titun // we glee now // though
Emancipation procrastinated // got to skip-to-loo // Mary Agnus
cannot hay here // too many Satans in barn // ants eating baby
cobblestone road, you were dragged // lost flashback if we go
hack nerves out your throat // Massa can’t never be enough hero
unbury lips // a new horizon for us to stitch // before conch shells
roar daylight // sure there's coyote // white cap klan but that's
endless // everywhere // O je ojo tuntun // O je ojo titun
barrel cry me audacity // got to spring // even if we can’t leap
into codes & symbols to read // geechee geechee upstream w/
Dread Scott fangs // bayi bayi // don’t let linen caress your con-
science // it's too easy to crawl back // to plantation coated in
mint molasses // miraging to tuck our faces // keliod crip'd
owner’s initials under right eye // say you heard ancestors'
psalming there's peaches // persimmons beyond // if you need
white man to follow // let it be Lincoln // it’ll add less to hollow
say we Texans hearts were not quite ready then // like slung into
Serengeti // O je ojo tuntun // O je ojo titun and now we
butter up audacity // safety is sap when found in uncertainty
Mary Agnus you have husband to hawk // his hazy face thick
decades since bartered away // say you’ll reign they had our
sweat // but they cannot have sunrays // let crows barricade
screen door of big house // stone windows with rutabagas
our black tails got blacksmiths to be // Katherine Jackson
Wilson’s MaRainy // Ebony magazines // once we unleash
after strength // we gain heritage // & National Holiday Biden
beam // & we gon dazzle // disremember the brine & I promise
you Lord gon love us fine //
Oak Morse lives in Houston, Texas, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and an MLIS from the University of Southern Mississippi. He won the 2025 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Award and the 2024 A Public Space Writing Fellowship. Oak has received support from PEN America and has won fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Twelve Literary Arts, Cave Canem's Starshine, and Clay, as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. His work appears in POETRY, Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, Electric Literature, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among others.
Emily Nielson
What I am hoping to build
for Milli
There is a moment when the pilgrim, halfway to Santiago,
throws down their wooden cross and says, This right here
is enough. All of it, even the wet wool. Nothing, the pilgrim says,
is as desecrated as we once thought. That’s what I’m looking for:
the communion that happens at a hostel days before the cathedral,
a life built of Wednesdays. The second week of Advent, on repeat,
all purple candles and predictable liturgy. Seattle is halfway to where
I thought I would be, and I want to start building shoddy roofs
with all the angels who failed out of woodworking class. If nothing
keeps out the rain, let me live among it. Let me eat on the tables
Jesus built in his first few years as a carpenter, the ones
that do not alchemy wood into anything other than what it already is.
I want to build something like that: the rhythm of holding
and then letting go, being a softer landing, again and again,
the heaviness ebbing into something lighter. There are other paths
I could have chosen—we both know this. I know so much
will be asked of me, more than I can give. There is, I imagine,
a version of the story where Virginia Woolf stands at the bank
of the river and decides it looks too cold, goes back home
and makes instant oatmeal, watches reality TV instead.
That is as much grace as I need— the inconvenience
of who I thought I’d be turning me toward the life I am already
living. I do not plan to build anything different. I will wait
in line to fill prescriptions and never roast the tomatoes in time.
I will leave out mugs half filled with cold tea and it will be
as much communion as I need. The routine of the same
television shows, the hours on the phone, the people I am
honest with. All my ornaments, shaped like Texas and Ohio.
All the dog eared books. All of it, enough. All of it,
not what would keep Virginia Woolf alive but what will keep
me alive, what will mark the place, miles before the cathedral,
where I surrender the guidebook at the altar of my expectations,
where I know that this is it, that it is time to build.
for Milli
There is a moment when the pilgrim, halfway to Santiago,
throws down their wooden cross and says, This right here
is enough. All of it, even the wet wool. Nothing, the pilgrim says,
is as desecrated as we once thought. That’s what I’m looking for:
the communion that happens at a hostel days before the cathedral,
a life built of Wednesdays. The second week of Advent, on repeat,
all purple candles and predictable liturgy. Seattle is halfway to where
I thought I would be, and I want to start building shoddy roofs
with all the angels who failed out of woodworking class. If nothing
keeps out the rain, let me live among it. Let me eat on the tables
Jesus built in his first few years as a carpenter, the ones
that do not alchemy wood into anything other than what it already is.
I want to build something like that: the rhythm of holding
and then letting go, being a softer landing, again and again,
the heaviness ebbing into something lighter. There are other paths
I could have chosen—we both know this. I know so much
will be asked of me, more than I can give. There is, I imagine,
a version of the story where Virginia Woolf stands at the bank
of the river and decides it looks too cold, goes back home
and makes instant oatmeal, watches reality TV instead.
That is as much grace as I need— the inconvenience
of who I thought I’d be turning me toward the life I am already
living. I do not plan to build anything different. I will wait
in line to fill prescriptions and never roast the tomatoes in time.
I will leave out mugs half filled with cold tea and it will be
as much communion as I need. The routine of the same
television shows, the hours on the phone, the people I am
honest with. All my ornaments, shaped like Texas and Ohio.
All the dog eared books. All of it, enough. All of it,
not what would keep Virginia Woolf alive but what will keep
me alive, what will mark the place, miles before the cathedral,
where I surrender the guidebook at the altar of my expectations,
where I know that this is it, that it is time to build.
Waiting In Line at the Bureaucracy of Grief
Here the water tower towers over a building built of stucco.
The furnace burns recycled learner’s permits and the forms
I didn’t know I needed (I needed them). These hours spent
bowing down to bureaucracy are never returned or remembered
but there is a little boy carpeting the floor of this waiting room
with his art the green marker is his best medium.
Bring me a coloring book and three tiered box of crayons,
the knitting projects I started and never finished,
and everyone who shouldn’t have died. Bring me coffee in a cup.
Let its graphic be the birds perched on a wire and so intent on staying.
Say migration is the word we use for going somewhere
else. Bring me all the postage I need to reach God’s address.
The way onward is never linear it is a path of cobblestone
marked with misplaced earrings. I printed out the transcription
of an airplane safety video. In case of emergency rewind
the VHS tape and origami old journals into who I am now.
I have lost hours days, maybe to the bureaucracy of grief
of feeling. I can worry for all of us, I said once and I meant it.
Let the afterlife be like the DMV with all its long lines
and bad reviews but let someone call you up eventually
to read your mortgage statements, match your face with your face,
promise you something more: another form to fill out, a line
to wait in. Promise me it goes on—there are secret offices here,
two way mirrors back doors that lead somewhere.
Here the water tower towers over a building built of stucco.
The furnace burns recycled learner’s permits and the forms
I didn’t know I needed (I needed them). These hours spent
bowing down to bureaucracy are never returned or remembered
but there is a little boy carpeting the floor of this waiting room
with his art the green marker is his best medium.
Bring me a coloring book and three tiered box of crayons,
the knitting projects I started and never finished,
and everyone who shouldn’t have died. Bring me coffee in a cup.
Let its graphic be the birds perched on a wire and so intent on staying.
Say migration is the word we use for going somewhere
else. Bring me all the postage I need to reach God’s address.
The way onward is never linear it is a path of cobblestone
marked with misplaced earrings. I printed out the transcription
of an airplane safety video. In case of emergency rewind
the VHS tape and origami old journals into who I am now.
I have lost hours days, maybe to the bureaucracy of grief
of feeling. I can worry for all of us, I said once and I meant it.
Let the afterlife be like the DMV with all its long lines
and bad reviews but let someone call you up eventually
to read your mortgage statements, match your face with your face,
promise you something more: another form to fill out, a line
to wait in. Promise me it goes on—there are secret offices here,
two way mirrors back doors that lead somewhere.
Emily Nielson is a queer poet and writer based in Dallas, Texas. She has a B.A. from Southern Methodist University and is currently working towards her M.S. in Counseling and Development at Texas Woman's University. She is published in a forthcoming issue of Poetry South.
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Thomas Page
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BIOHAZARD
After The Gap in the Door, a painting by Caitlin Nobilé (2023) Twilight tints maroon through the bay windows as I bleed crimson onto the celadon floor. No more ammunition left to eradicate the zombification flowing in my veins. As I bleed crimson onto the celadon floor, I think of all the dusks that we will have to miss to eradicate the zombification flowing in my veins. Just close your eyes, count to ten, and let me go. I think of all the dusks that we will have to miss after you leave me to fend off the rabid dogs, just close your eyes, count to ten, and let me go― I am not of the living anymore, just reanimated. After you leave me to fend off the rabid dogs, no more ammunition left. I am not of the living anymore, just reanimated as I bleed crimson into the celadon floor. |
Thomas Page is a poet and writer based in Maryland in the DMV metro area. He graduated with his MFA in creative writing from the University of South Florida in May 2024. When he isn't writing, revising, or grading, he likes to travel around the country seeing all the kitsch it has to offer. His work has appeared or will appear in Meniscus, Rock Salt, Progenitor, Unstamatic, The Florida Review, Unfortunately, and How We Made It Over: Educating for Social Justice in the Spirit of Love.
henry 7. reneau, jr.
photo by Mercedes Herrera.
e-race-ure
this poem is my Black voice → → → as loud as
you can count , plus many more
. any resemblance to a person , or persons , living or dead
, is not an echo
→ → → but the pressure point by which all things
pivot → → →
[a fulcrum] , as in e pluribus unam , but
in[di]visible
as the weight of just a discarded sliver of existence
on the cosmic scale . a kiloton of deadweight dread
that rests its wide haunches in my lap
like a silent murmuration of angels
who are mute , and therefore terrifying → → →
is meta/phorical , but
profoundly and destructively consequential
in the now
. if i am free , why does it feel so small ? so
in[di]visible
→ → → is not an emotion
but a state of be-ing
on the hem of society
: a Negro problem
, a purple echolalia of bruises
Black and blue[s] from within
. is a decay- /ing . an atrophied momentum
that retards all we wish to do / acquire / or overcome / as if
discombobulated and spun into the masticating gyre
of a maggot’s hunger
. race- /ism → → →
like you know a thing by how it is itself on the inside
, a traditional- /ism
, a cultural- /ism
, a legislated /-ism
→ → → a socially biased
absence of our presence . a redaction
of worth [⅗ of . . . what ?]
, the whole → → →
minus the sum/ some
. the exclusionary distancing
of post-racial → → → away from
, a further that seems forever
farther
→ → → and we mitigate
as if turning consequence over in our palms → → →
like we had been in great danger
and were maybe , still in it
, until the air is made of trepidation [mud and bleached bone]
and there’s nothing else to breathe
, as if
we were incrementally
be-ing e-race-d → → →
this poem is my Black voice → → → as loud as
you can count , plus many more
. any resemblance to a person , or persons , living or dead
, is not an echo
→ → → but the pressure point by which all things
pivot → → →
[a fulcrum] , as in e pluribus unam , but
in[di]visible
as the weight of just a discarded sliver of existence
on the cosmic scale . a kiloton of deadweight dread
that rests its wide haunches in my lap
like a silent murmuration of angels
who are mute , and therefore terrifying → → →
is meta/phorical , but
profoundly and destructively consequential
in the now
. if i am free , why does it feel so small ? so
in[di]visible
→ → → is not an emotion
but a state of be-ing
on the hem of society
: a Negro problem
, a purple echolalia of bruises
Black and blue[s] from within
. is a decay- /ing . an atrophied momentum
that retards all we wish to do / acquire / or overcome / as if
discombobulated and spun into the masticating gyre
of a maggot’s hunger
. race- /ism → → →
like you know a thing by how it is itself on the inside
, a traditional- /ism
, a cultural- /ism
, a legislated /-ism
→ → → a socially biased
absence of our presence . a redaction
of worth [⅗ of . . . what ?]
, the whole → → →
minus the sum/ some
. the exclusionary distancing
of post-racial → → → away from
, a further that seems forever
farther
→ → → and we mitigate
as if turning consequence over in our palms → → →
like we had been in great danger
and were maybe , still in it
, until the air is made of trepidation [mud and bleached bone]
and there’s nothing else to breathe
, as if
we were incrementally
be-ing e-race-d → → →
henry 7. reneau, jr. does not X-speculate, Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It is not that he is scared of change, or stuck fast in the past; instead, he has learned from experience that the crack pipe kills. His work is published in Superstition Review; TriQuarterly; Prairie Schooner; Notre Dame Review; Punt Volat; The Ana, and Oyster River Pages. His work has also been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Ismael Santos
Desperate aisle
Steer the cart around the store
Boxes of cereal, gallons of milk.
The cart moves forward,
Aisle of coffee, sugar.
Move the cart to the left,
People block aisles, stare.
Move the cart to the right,
You hear sighs, groans.
Whichever way the cart moves,
The aisles shrink of food, of sense.
You careen around, trying to find enough,
But that is the trick: scarcity breeds more scarcity.
Intentionally, the cart in your hands slips away,
Towards the exit doors, away from empty shelves.
The cart is making a run for it,
The streets are singing, yelling.
You could go chase it,
But you stand still, next to the milk aisle.
You try and remember what you were doing,
Old wants seem to wane.
The cart is outside, you’re sure of it,
Moving and racing into the humid night.
The cart is careening over cracked concrete;
The cart does not wait to cross the street.
The cart bangs into the sides of cars.
Overhead, the moon is shining, full and bright.
Steer the cart around the store
Boxes of cereal, gallons of milk.
The cart moves forward,
Aisle of coffee, sugar.
Move the cart to the left,
People block aisles, stare.
Move the cart to the right,
You hear sighs, groans.
Whichever way the cart moves,
The aisles shrink of food, of sense.
You careen around, trying to find enough,
But that is the trick: scarcity breeds more scarcity.
Intentionally, the cart in your hands slips away,
Towards the exit doors, away from empty shelves.
The cart is making a run for it,
The streets are singing, yelling.
You could go chase it,
But you stand still, next to the milk aisle.
You try and remember what you were doing,
Old wants seem to wane.
The cart is outside, you’re sure of it,
Moving and racing into the humid night.
The cart is careening over cracked concrete;
The cart does not wait to cross the street.
The cart bangs into the sides of cars.
Overhead, the moon is shining, full and bright.
Ismael Santos is a first-generation Latino American poet and cybersecurity analyst born, raised, and still living in Miami, Florida. Specifically, in Little Havana/Calle Ocho/the Latin Quarter, and when not working on computers, Ismael loves cuban coffee and Walt Whitman poems. Ismael has been published in anthologies such as Waterproof, the poetry anthology Chameleon Chimera, An Anthology of Florida Poets, and in the first issue of Heatwave.Visions, titled "Swamps of Time".
Ava Serra
Letter Drafts to My Gynecologist
1.
Dear Glinda O pussy witch
Origami expert of fallopian
tissue Maiden
attendant of endangered shrines―
this pink, glittering bubble is shrinking
blink-quick from good witch
magic—gold coins stuffed
in my ears’ cinema-sepia shells—shrinking
into Houdini’s ruptured appendix, a poppy field
head injury—not a one-way ticket to Oz.
2.
Dear Glinda We agreed:
seldom can anyone predict
an updraft’s wet mayhem or the anvils
from a convection cell. You can forecast it
no more than you can pinpoint where a cyclone
will fling itself and a farmhouse it uproots
once a storm’s gone rogue. No amount of tulle
clouds can transfigure a witch into an omniscient narrator.
I get it. But I volunteered for a magic trick,
not a slow murder by flying monkeys.
3.
Glinda Permit me, please,
to exit this wind shear and lightning ribbon.
Tell me I can retire from storm-chasing, that this is the part
where the floor of false gold falls out; this is the part where
you excise Kansas and Tornado Alley and asbestos
snow from my body and I drop into the emerald
eye of Oz. I click my heels, you wave
your wand, and we whisk away in the Wizard’s Wall Street
air balloon—pretty pink estrogen-
injected bubbles and ruby slippers be damned.
4.
Glinda There’s already a whole
Wizard order after my autonomy in anatomy.
I don’t need my own house hunting me too―
bamboozling me like a scarecrow, poaching like a lion.
According to the Wizards behind gold
curtains: before menopause—the natural
end to my body’s wicked viridian witchcraft―
to remove the anatomical source of my monthly
self-sabotage and guerilla warfare is the ultimate cinema sin,
so you and I settled on slippers and estrogen in excess.
5.
Glinda We settled on the magic
of modern medicine, skipped the trial phase
due to the stages of rust corroding my parts.
But Doc, these past 28 days on the pill―
I’ve been twining around Kansas, twisting
around in cyclones in waking and in sleep. These past 28 days
have me bawling for Auntie Em through a smog throat
stocked with lit cigarettes. Frankly, these past 28 days
have me the closest to cutting myself
out of this motion picture—skipping straight to
6.
Glinda Since the onset of this supercell:
there’s been a new pair of scissors, a broom
head bristling with scalpels—something carnassial
in my hand every morning. My revived suicidal ideation
naps like dawn-lit dew under my bed. I have no idea when
it will next wake and strike. There’s no foreshadowing
wayward water buckets and melting. Hence,
a narcoleptic’s insomnia. Ergo,
the coma of my healthy death-fear. Thus,
not the solution.
7.
Dear Glinda I tire of supplying the red
dye for birth control’s sparkling shoes. These pumps
cut off my circulation for days at a time and still
don’t fit. It’s been documented for decades―
Since the days of Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton,
and Judy Garland. There’s no use in beating the dead
horse of this plotline. The Wizards are enraptured
by the Broadway adaptations, the million-dollar re-reproductions
but I want out of the storm, out of Kansas, off the pill―
a one-way trip to Oz without a house falling on me.
8.
Dear Glinda This sacked set of bones
was once my body—not a tornado seed, not a Wizard’s
production. It was a little rain-worn. It was a shrine
endangered ever since I showed up on the front stoop,
but it didn’t start as Kansas. It wasn’t
always full of squall and smoke. It was Oz-
adaptable, Technicolor, ready for real gold
bricks. A body mine. Once,
before the studios and slews of scripts,
I had a penny’s worth of good
9.
magic in me.
I want it back now.
1.
Dear Glinda O pussy witch
Origami expert of fallopian
tissue Maiden
attendant of endangered shrines―
this pink, glittering bubble is shrinking
blink-quick from good witch
magic—gold coins stuffed
in my ears’ cinema-sepia shells—shrinking
into Houdini’s ruptured appendix, a poppy field
head injury—not a one-way ticket to Oz.
2.
Dear Glinda We agreed:
seldom can anyone predict
an updraft’s wet mayhem or the anvils
from a convection cell. You can forecast it
no more than you can pinpoint where a cyclone
will fling itself and a farmhouse it uproots
once a storm’s gone rogue. No amount of tulle
clouds can transfigure a witch into an omniscient narrator.
I get it. But I volunteered for a magic trick,
not a slow murder by flying monkeys.
3.
Glinda Permit me, please,
to exit this wind shear and lightning ribbon.
Tell me I can retire from storm-chasing, that this is the part
where the floor of false gold falls out; this is the part where
you excise Kansas and Tornado Alley and asbestos
snow from my body and I drop into the emerald
eye of Oz. I click my heels, you wave
your wand, and we whisk away in the Wizard’s Wall Street
air balloon—pretty pink estrogen-
injected bubbles and ruby slippers be damned.
4.
Glinda There’s already a whole
Wizard order after my autonomy in anatomy.
I don’t need my own house hunting me too―
bamboozling me like a scarecrow, poaching like a lion.
According to the Wizards behind gold
curtains: before menopause—the natural
end to my body’s wicked viridian witchcraft―
to remove the anatomical source of my monthly
self-sabotage and guerilla warfare is the ultimate cinema sin,
so you and I settled on slippers and estrogen in excess.
5.
Glinda We settled on the magic
of modern medicine, skipped the trial phase
due to the stages of rust corroding my parts.
But Doc, these past 28 days on the pill―
I’ve been twining around Kansas, twisting
around in cyclones in waking and in sleep. These past 28 days
have me bawling for Auntie Em through a smog throat
stocked with lit cigarettes. Frankly, these past 28 days
have me the closest to cutting myself
out of this motion picture—skipping straight to
6.
Glinda Since the onset of this supercell:
there’s been a new pair of scissors, a broom
head bristling with scalpels—something carnassial
in my hand every morning. My revived suicidal ideation
naps like dawn-lit dew under my bed. I have no idea when
it will next wake and strike. There’s no foreshadowing
wayward water buckets and melting. Hence,
a narcoleptic’s insomnia. Ergo,
the coma of my healthy death-fear. Thus,
not the solution.
7.
Dear Glinda I tire of supplying the red
dye for birth control’s sparkling shoes. These pumps
cut off my circulation for days at a time and still
don’t fit. It’s been documented for decades―
Since the days of Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton,
and Judy Garland. There’s no use in beating the dead
horse of this plotline. The Wizards are enraptured
by the Broadway adaptations, the million-dollar re-reproductions
but I want out of the storm, out of Kansas, off the pill―
a one-way trip to Oz without a house falling on me.
8.
Dear Glinda This sacked set of bones
was once my body—not a tornado seed, not a Wizard’s
production. It was a little rain-worn. It was a shrine
endangered ever since I showed up on the front stoop,
but it didn’t start as Kansas. It wasn’t
always full of squall and smoke. It was Oz-
adaptable, Technicolor, ready for real gold
bricks. A body mine. Once,
before the studios and slews of scripts,
I had a penny’s worth of good
9.
magic in me.
I want it back now.
Emerging from Metro Detroit, Ava Serra (they/she) is a non-binary writer and former caretaker of large carnivores. In addition to an award from the Academy of American Poets and a Pushcart Prize nomination, their works appear in multiple anthologies and have been published in Salt Hill Journal, Arkana, Lavender Review, Grey Sparrow, White Wall Review , among others. They hold an MFA from the University of Maryland.
Greg Sevik
Erling
had a horse.
completed eighth grade.
picked up my grandmother in his car when she ran away from home.
offered her a yoyo, a prelude.
had, as a young man, red hair.
was born in North Dakota, 1932, son of Norwegian immigrants.
moved to California in the 50s, swimming pool business.
moved to Colorado in the 70s, furniture business.
went by “Earl.”
was a lifelong Republican.
had a gun collection, an antique collection, a preternatural collector’s sense.
drove a Mercedes.
referred to diplomas as “pieces of paper.”
said “We was.”
had pet expressions like “Money is in buying.”
pointed to the cows and said, “Look at them chickens.”
pointed to the chickens and said, “Look at them cows.”
had heart problems.
had zipper-scars.
pursued acupressure, acupuncture, tai chi.
balanced like a crane on the livingroom floor.
played racquetball with men half his age, his serve a pop and thunderous peal.
was a vegetarian.
purchased whole and organic before it was cool.
never drank alcohol.
loathed cigarette smoke.
said, “Church is okay for people who need to be led.”
drove his grandson to North Dakota.
found that the family farmhouse was torn down.
did not cry, but hardened into a melancholy stone.
argued politics with a whipping of words.
apologized the next day.
had pet expressions like “It takes a lot of people to make a world.”
had, as an old man, frost-brittle hair.
turned fragile and bone-pale.
shrank.
had one last heart attack.
was given nitroglycerin by his wife.
did not make it to the hospital.
had, before that, a cat named Sam.
stood in the mudroom to watch Sam eat, because otherwise Sam wouldn’t eat.
had a horse.
completed eighth grade.
picked up my grandmother in his car when she ran away from home.
offered her a yoyo, a prelude.
had, as a young man, red hair.
was born in North Dakota, 1932, son of Norwegian immigrants.
moved to California in the 50s, swimming pool business.
moved to Colorado in the 70s, furniture business.
went by “Earl.”
was a lifelong Republican.
had a gun collection, an antique collection, a preternatural collector’s sense.
drove a Mercedes.
referred to diplomas as “pieces of paper.”
said “We was.”
had pet expressions like “Money is in buying.”
pointed to the cows and said, “Look at them chickens.”
pointed to the chickens and said, “Look at them cows.”
had heart problems.
had zipper-scars.
pursued acupressure, acupuncture, tai chi.
balanced like a crane on the livingroom floor.
played racquetball with men half his age, his serve a pop and thunderous peal.
was a vegetarian.
purchased whole and organic before it was cool.
never drank alcohol.
loathed cigarette smoke.
said, “Church is okay for people who need to be led.”
drove his grandson to North Dakota.
found that the family farmhouse was torn down.
did not cry, but hardened into a melancholy stone.
argued politics with a whipping of words.
apologized the next day.
had pet expressions like “It takes a lot of people to make a world.”
had, as an old man, frost-brittle hair.
turned fragile and bone-pale.
shrank.
had one last heart attack.
was given nitroglycerin by his wife.
did not make it to the hospital.
had, before that, a cat named Sam.
stood in the mudroom to watch Sam eat, because otherwise Sam wouldn’t eat.
Greg Sevik is a poet, translator, and English professor at the Community College of Baltimore County. He was co-winner of the 2025 Pratt Poetry Contest, sponsored by Little Patuxent Review. His poems and translations have been published or are forthcoming in Avalon Literary Review, El Portal, Inventory, Iron Horse, Rattle, Vagabond City, and elsewhere. His essays have appeared in such publications as the Emily Dickinson Journal and Style. He lives in Baltimore, where he is working on his first book.
Jamie L. Smith
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Love in 2025
My beautiful friend materializes in my doorway, Her black and red floral headscarf matching the bra peeking beneath her blouse. We wrap around each other, rocking back and forth a few moments in the center of the sunlit room. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was booking a flight to Tehran when the missiles launched. Her family is okay. She couldn’t reach them for a while. She asks me about the shootings. One a week ago in my last city at No Kings. Another two days ago outside the bar I laughed my early twenties away inside. We’ve both been told we’re safer where we are, lucky to be elsewhere. We both know they’re right. We both know we won’t listen. Vertical Divider
|
Paper Cities
In the field behind my building fourteen cranes blink tirelessly through the night. A new tower rising into tomorrow. Most of the ground is hollow. Warrens of parking garages, train tunnels, and underground shopping malls trace their knotted way below the surface. Sometimes when my boot strikes a cobblestone loosens and the dull thud echoes back through the thin earth. Oh, hollowed ground. Oh, scraped sky. I would love to see what you’ll become but not enough to stay. |
Jamie L. Smith is the author of The Flightless Years and Trojan Horses: Voices from the Opioid Crisis, winner of the 2025 Unleash Book Prize. Her chapbook, Mythology Lessons, was the winner of Tusculum Review's 2020 Nonfiction Prize and is listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. Her poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Best New Poets, The Good Life Review, and others. Please visit jlsmithwriter.com
Matthew Isaac Sobin
On the Third Anniversary of His Death
I remember to take a detour
Through a wood with three kinds
Of pine. Secretly hope to see a bear there
A naturalist said to smell Ponderosa, inhale
Scent of butterscotch. Instead eyes overflow, and I
Forget all about my nose, except to say, I remember
Its function, breathing thin mountain air, between
Photographs of innumerable wildflowers. Later I
May research their names. Hardly a thought to
Lose breath on the climb to the second falls,
And I return to my poem about that final
Night, and the line: here’s what I don’t
Understand / horses are euthanized
For a fractured ankle / & humans
Linger until asphyxiation. I wish
I could say I’m wiser than the
Poem was. Or I saw a
Black bear. Missed
Him, tugged away
By the weight
Of the air
I remember to take a detour
Through a wood with three kinds
Of pine. Secretly hope to see a bear there
A naturalist said to smell Ponderosa, inhale
Scent of butterscotch. Instead eyes overflow, and I
Forget all about my nose, except to say, I remember
Its function, breathing thin mountain air, between
Photographs of innumerable wildflowers. Later I
May research their names. Hardly a thought to
Lose breath on the climb to the second falls,
And I return to my poem about that final
Night, and the line: here’s what I don’t
Understand / horses are euthanized
For a fractured ankle / & humans
Linger until asphyxiation. I wish
I could say I’m wiser than the
Poem was. Or I saw a
Black bear. Missed
Him, tugged away
By the weight
Of the air
Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. Recent poems have appeared in ONE ART, Stanchion, ballast, Stone Circle Review, and Hog River Press. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Spiritual Literature. His chapbook Blue Bodies was published by Ghost City Press in their 2025 Summer Series. When he’s not teaching middle school, you may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California.
J.R. Solonche
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HOW THE ERIE LEFT TOWN
The crossing-gates
went first,
and with them
the flashing red signal lights.
Then the tracks,
after a century
bolted to the earth,
were gone.
And the oak ties,
black as soot,
were taken,
and the spikes
like rusted carrots
were gone,
pulled up,
harvested for scrap.
Finally, the air
left town,
heavy with a
hundred years of bells.
The crossing-gates
went first,
and with them
the flashing red signal lights.
Then the tracks,
after a century
bolted to the earth,
were gone.
And the oak ties,
black as soot,
were taken,
and the spikes
like rusted carrots
were gone,
pulled up,
harvested for scrap.
Finally, the air
left town,
heavy with a
hundred years of bells.
Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Emmanuel Umeji
joy’s border demands a psalm
to make it through a wall,
it has to be binged with enough music
to make it drowsy & fall
like the walls of Jericho.
same miracle is what I’m expected of
when I come before the border
of your country. all I have in
my hands is the corpse of a love
I used to grow for a country
that hates to see me
breathe. one that keeps
sending coyotes
into my sleep, one
which made me spend
nights playing
hide-and-seek around
wrecked buildings,
bullets doing the seeking,
my feet being the wind
straying,
looking for a safe spot
for hiding—your country.
but it seems the wall
here demands a psalm.
to make it through a wall,
it has to be binged with enough music
to make it drowsy & fall
like the walls of Jericho.
same miracle is what I’m expected of
when I come before the border
of your country. all I have in
my hands is the corpse of a love
I used to grow for a country
that hates to see me
breathe. one that keeps
sending coyotes
into my sleep, one
which made me spend
nights playing
hide-and-seek around
wrecked buildings,
bullets doing the seeking,
my feet being the wind
straying,
looking for a safe spot
for hiding—your country.
but it seems the wall
here demands a psalm.
the weight of carrying
I grew up in this boat i later learned is my mother.
that after the sea swallowed her husband, she strapped us
all to her back, knelt before the water and cried hard enough
to become a boat—carrying all our weights at once as we ferried
on this sea. from the distance, two tumours emerged in a pirate
ship: each taking away my elder brother and sister, all the turbulence of this grief hitting hard on my mother, dying
to see her wreck. but she keeps pushing through,
knowing whatsoever may wreck the ship must
wreck its remaining people aboard.
I grew up in this boat i later learned is my mother.
that after the sea swallowed her husband, she strapped us
all to her back, knelt before the water and cried hard enough
to become a boat—carrying all our weights at once as we ferried
on this sea. from the distance, two tumours emerged in a pirate
ship: each taking away my elder brother and sister, all the turbulence of this grief hitting hard on my mother, dying
to see her wreck. but she keeps pushing through,
knowing whatsoever may wreck the ship must
wreck its remaining people aboard.
Emmanuel Umeji (TPC IV) is an Eastern-Northern Nigeria poet and writer, currently enrolled in a BA program in linguistics. He is the winner of the 2026 HIASFEST Star Prize, an Assistant Librarian at the African Poetry Books Library, HCAF, Nigeria. His work is published/forthcoming with MIZNA, Chestnut Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, Poetry Sango-Ota, MAAR Review, and NWF Journal. Find him on X/Twitter/Instagram: @EmmanuelUmeji
Sam Yaziji
Lagrimas Negras
A subtle vinegar rises from the bubbling mass―
your hands (calloused as they are, and shedding)
stir the black softening lake, and sift for something
buried in that void. Compay’s raspy voice joins
the low drone of stove, and some of your hairs
flounder down into the cauldron. Your absent
husband’s polo drying in the window starts
to catch the drops of a churning sky. It is in
remission, but you still can see the slender demon
in every nook of tattered house. Sandimba,
the one who steals things. Your back is to his
humid gaze, all your stealable things cradled
in your ceramic breast. But the pressure builds,
the heat too much, the rain now a torrent―
may I lend my hands to stir together your beans
and vinegar and hair and black tears?
____________________________________
Author's note: titled after Compay Segundo’s version of the song "Lagrimas Negras" (Black Tears)
A subtle vinegar rises from the bubbling mass―
your hands (calloused as they are, and shedding)
stir the black softening lake, and sift for something
buried in that void. Compay’s raspy voice joins
the low drone of stove, and some of your hairs
flounder down into the cauldron. Your absent
husband’s polo drying in the window starts
to catch the drops of a churning sky. It is in
remission, but you still can see the slender demon
in every nook of tattered house. Sandimba,
the one who steals things. Your back is to his
humid gaze, all your stealable things cradled
in your ceramic breast. But the pressure builds,
the heat too much, the rain now a torrent―
may I lend my hands to stir together your beans
and vinegar and hair and black tears?
____________________________________
Author's note: titled after Compay Segundo’s version of the song "Lagrimas Negras" (Black Tears)
Sam Yaziji is a writer from Miami, Florida. He is currently an MFA student in poetry at San Diego State University, where he also works as the production editor for the print edition of Poetry International. His poems have appeared in Zone 3 Press, Bicoastal Review, and Apocalypse Confidential.
Nelle Yvon
Portraits of my Father
Once, on a night walk in Mammoth, the dark hung so heavy
I couldn’t see my fingers an inch from my face.
The universe cracked open and my father pointed
out nebula clusters, the north star, the dippers.
We stood sentry with the lodgepole pines,
creatures snuffling the forest floor around us.
Our outings always held a little danger, a little awe―
like the time we watched sun set like a fat satsuma
over Palm Springs, rattlesnakes rippling across sand,
dozens of them, at the height of snake season.
We statued as they slunk by, tiny sand dunes
in their wake.
And when I was seven, someone cut us off in traffic
and we stopped short. I hit the dashboard, blood
on my forehead, in my eyes, and my father raged
out of the van at the next red light, tire iron in hand. He smashed
the driver’s window, dragged him through it. I lost count
of the steady punches, stared at the street sign: Sepulveda Boulevard.
We peeled out before the other guy rose from the asphalt
and found a gas station miles away to clean ourselves up.
The cut at my hairline an angry third eye, my father’s fists raw meat.
Our blood soaked through every paper towel in that Texaco.
On our way out the back, I turned. It looked like we left
a heap of red carnations in the sink.
Once, on a night walk in Mammoth, the dark hung so heavy
I couldn’t see my fingers an inch from my face.
The universe cracked open and my father pointed
out nebula clusters, the north star, the dippers.
We stood sentry with the lodgepole pines,
creatures snuffling the forest floor around us.
Our outings always held a little danger, a little awe―
like the time we watched sun set like a fat satsuma
over Palm Springs, rattlesnakes rippling across sand,
dozens of them, at the height of snake season.
We statued as they slunk by, tiny sand dunes
in their wake.
And when I was seven, someone cut us off in traffic
and we stopped short. I hit the dashboard, blood
on my forehead, in my eyes, and my father raged
out of the van at the next red light, tire iron in hand. He smashed
the driver’s window, dragged him through it. I lost count
of the steady punches, stared at the street sign: Sepulveda Boulevard.
We peeled out before the other guy rose from the asphalt
and found a gas station miles away to clean ourselves up.
The cut at my hairline an angry third eye, my father’s fists raw meat.
Our blood soaked through every paper towel in that Texaco.
On our way out the back, I turned. It looked like we left
a heap of red carnations in the sink.
The Closest He Comes to Apology
At home after his doctor’s appointment, my father
asks me to join him for coffee. Shows me his in-progress
windchime, holes drilled with precision. A row of shiny
aluminum pipes awaits fishing line on his worktable.
He wanders room to room and offers me a good walking stick,
his ratchet set, cans from the foodbank—anything I want. He talks
about the deer that bed down in his yard and the yellow-orange butterfly
weed he planted to attract Great Spangled Fritillary and Edward’s Hairstreak.
We chat about how hot it’s been and the new bench he built in his shed.
When I hug him goodbye, he thanks me for the company
and sneaks a grocery bag of russets into my car where they roll
underfoot the whole drive home, penance to become Hasselback.
At home after his doctor’s appointment, my father
asks me to join him for coffee. Shows me his in-progress
windchime, holes drilled with precision. A row of shiny
aluminum pipes awaits fishing line on his worktable.
He wanders room to room and offers me a good walking stick,
his ratchet set, cans from the foodbank—anything I want. He talks
about the deer that bed down in his yard and the yellow-orange butterfly
weed he planted to attract Great Spangled Fritillary and Edward’s Hairstreak.
We chat about how hot it’s been and the new bench he built in his shed.
When I hug him goodbye, he thanks me for the company
and sneaks a grocery bag of russets into my car where they roll
underfoot the whole drive home, penance to become Hasselback.
Nelle Yvon lives in Georgia and writes poetry about the doomsday cult of her youth. She is the managing editor of Beyond Bars, a literary journal that exists to amplify the voices of incarcerated writers. Most recently, Nelle's poems can be found in Portland Review, ABRAXAS, and Tulsa Review.