Poetry / Traci Brimhall 

:: WHAT WOULD I DO IF YOU RETURNED AS A CARDINAL? ::

The light threading through morning’s confusion 
isn’t you. The surprised penny isn’t you either.
Hornet at the hummingbird feeder devastates

like wildfires or narrative. Hunger for signs doesn’t 
bring any. The spiritual equity of the monarch 
is still a fortune written for someone else’s hope. 

Sometimes God is mysterious, and sometimes God 
is a knife, an artery rushing to greet the air. Your fear 
fostered so much of my suffering. My childhood 

a revision of yours. The alpine adolescence—
a cosmetology of fireweed, aster, buttercup. I pruned 
your roses, massacre of red flags bloodying the ivy. 

God rejected me for my own good. I trespassed into 
the matador’s closet for the secrets, but I was as alone 
as a medium in a haunted house, quiet as what remains 

of your body. In the mirror, you and not you. My hair 
straighter, thinner. Though I still can’t control it, I care 
for it. The quilt you never made but the music you did, 

your manicure clicking across piano keys. The comfort 
of unhealthy patterns blushing harder than rubies. 
I would do what I couldn’t as a child and turn from you.

:: BODY, REMEMBER ::

Wake up, nerves. Remember touch, breath, touch. 
Oh body, remember those mouths, those hands, 
how you desired all of it, especially blindfolded. 

The best of everything has been love, those pounds 
of joy. Forget toes stubbed on bed edges, bike pedals 
hitting shins, joints sugar-swollen and complaining. 

Remember the infant doppler looping lemniscates 
over your torso, listening for the baby but finding
the native darkness of your interior, blood rushing 

like horses galloping underwater? And remember 
those pop songs you danced to in darkened kitchens 
so passing cars couldn’t see your hips’s enthusiasm 

for a good bass line? Remember last night—the car’s 
engine bragging its speed, shaking the marrow of each 
bone?  You were alive with a great rage, monstrous 

and capable. But don’t worry, you were only an animal. 
One day you’ll get to die like everything you admire, 
and your beloved will forget your face. Remember 

it is not because he failed to love you well, but because 
his brain doesn’t hold faces. Your brain will hold so 
little then, too, so you can become what’s next. It will 

be beautiful, body, your cells undressing, forgetting.
And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow 
like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Both of these poems were writ­ten while spend­ing time with one of my best friends, the poet Brynn Saito. For the last (almost) 20 years she and I have writ­ten togeth­er. After our MFA, we trav­eled togeth­er most sum­mers and wrote togeth­er, and even if some­times we are just trav­el­ing to each other’s homes, we con­tin­ue to write togeth­er almost every day we’re togeth­er. We walk our dogs togeth­er, make tea, pull some tarot cards, and give each oth­er prompts. Both of these pieces were writ­ten in Col­orado, where we cur­rent­ly spend time togeth­er in the sum­mer. My book Love Prodi­gal con­tains many love poems—love as a roman­tic part­ner, love as a par­ent for a child, love as a child for a dif­fi­cult par­ent, but only one poem explic­it­ly about the love of friends. Which is a shame because the love of my friends has been some of the most sup­port­ive and sus­tain­ing of my life and how I learned a lot about what love should look like. But beneath the clear sub­jects of the love poems in the book is the love of my friends who write with me, who laugh with me, who talk deeply with me, who keep me in love with my own life.

Traci Brimhall is a pro­fes­sor of cre­ative writ­ing and nar­ra­tive med­i­cine at Kansas State Uni­ver­si­ty. She is the author of five col­lec­tions of poet­ry, includ­ing Love Prodi­gal (pub­lished Novem­ber 2024 by Cop­per Canyon). Her poems have appeared in pub­li­ca­tions such as The New York­er, The Nation, The New Repub­lic, Poet­ry, The New York Times Mag­a­zine, and Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry. She’s received fel­low­ships from Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Parks Ser­vice, the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, and Pur­due Library’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the cur­rent poet lau­re­ate for the State of Kansas.

Poetry / Duy Đoàn

:: poems from Zombie Vomit Mad Libs ::

[Climate Changed]

                                               The earth is a star.

We’re already dead.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zom­bie]

One had this prob­lem where they were always look­ing for the radius of things.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]                                 




                                      The crossing over was slow




                                                                                  She couldn't remember.
                                                                                  She couldn't
                                                                                  forget.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zom­bie Babies]

(love let­ter,                          one baby to anoth­er):




hot damn
ur not fuck­ing around
u real­ly know how to see things
thru

_________________________________________________________________________________

             
                                            
                                                           [Zombie Babies]

                                                           (love letter,
                                                                                 the other baby to the first
                                                                                 baby):

                                                           I like that you use the
                                                           infinitive

                                                           that way we don't have to worry
                                                           about their conjugations
                                                           when you're an outcast you can
                                                           only really trust the other
                                                           outcasts

_________________________________________________________________________________

        [zzzzz Zombies]

        The thing is

        they were all wearing masks           when they were asleep                    .

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombies]

emaciating cat staring out the window

(wind chimes jingling)

__________________________________________________________________________________

                                               [Zombies at a Cross Signal]

                                                                                                                       . . . .

                                               candy apple. For in our hearts we are


                                               go      children

                                               slow

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]

                                               Her hair is radiant.      Like, radiant

                                   radiant. It has that post-illness hasn't-been-

                                   washed glow to it.

_________________________________________________________________________________

           [Zombies]

In the next world, there's a line of haircare products called
Convalescence:

           Crack (Dandruff Control)
           Luminol (Tea Tree Oil 60% Real)
           Glowstick (with Yuccalyptus®)

and cocaine is on the endangered species list.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Alcoholism]

pregame = blunt force trauma
blunt force trauma blunt force trauma = postgame postgame
= still functional organs after resurrection

_________________________________________________________________________________

        [Two Zombies]

                    Look how even now he pretends to be her little synesthete.

        His truthlessness
        never mattered. Their toxicity neither.


        They meander and bump into things;
        connection's still real.

_________________________________________________________________________________

                                   [Zombie]

                         His vomit hit the top of the lectern and then the bottom so
                         quickly it sounded like a trochee.

                                                                                                 ticktock

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombies]

emaciating cat staring out the window

(wind chimes jingling)

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zom­bie]

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]


Maybe then she remembers
                                                           briefly

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Zombie]

she once saw the northern lights.

__________________________________________________________________________________

From the writer

:: Account ::

i                                                                                                                                   

These zom­bies wan­der through­out my col­lec­tion, Zom­bie Vom­it Mad Libs (Alice James Books, Novem­ber 12, 2024).

The zom­bies most­ly mind their own busi­ness, meandering—sometimes togeth­er, some­times alone.

ii                                                                                                                                    

Hor­ror is my favorite movie genre. Zom­bie movies are one of my least favorite hor­ror sub­gen­res. I can name only three zom­bie movies I admire and only one that I love. It’s not that I dis­like the zom­bie as a mon­ster in nar­ra­tive. I actu­al­ly think they’re cool and essen­tial to lore about the super­nat­ur­al. It’s just that I find most zom­bie movies uninteresting—so many zom­bie movies are lit­tle more than bor­ing action flicks, cliché alle­gories, or sil­ly gore fests.

When I first start­ed writ­ing the poems that even­tu­al­ly became this book, I wasn’t writ­ing zom­bie poems. Most of the poems I was writ­ing were about artists who com­mit­ted sui­cide (actor Leslie Che­ung and many poets), mad libs, and rela­tion­ships (lit­tle the­atres of romance, fam­i­ly, and friend­ship). As I was writ­ing, I nev­er thought about the poems becom­ing a col­lec­tion until they began gath­er­ing momen­tum togeth­er, in small bunch­es, and com­mon images and themes start­ed emerg­ing.

Some fun things kept hap­pen­ing. Epi­gram­mat­ic zom­bie sketch­es would show up from time to time in between writ­ing the oth­er poems. (I like to think that the sketch­es are like the epi­gram­mat­ic poems in Marie Howe’s Mag­da­lene, a big inspi­ra­tion of mine.) Look­ing back, I think these zom­bie poems were my own rewrit­ing of the zom­bie movie, writ­ing zom­bie mythol­o­gy the way I like.

iii                                                                                                                                  Vam­pire movies are my favorite hor­ror sub­genre. Many are lush and eye catch­ing, have strong themes, and are about romance (my sec­ond favorite movie genre). (I’m not includ­ing Twi­light.)

Prob­a­bly one of the biggest influ­ences on me as far as poet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty and love of film is Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home at Night, a Per­sian-lan­guage Amer­i­can West­ern hor­ror film. Amirpour’s mag­ic is mes­mer­iz­ing. Her tim­ing and fresh eye for con­nec­tion becomes evi­dent in her abil­i­ty to weave togeth­er a wide range of emotions—the dif­fer­ent types of emo­tions elicit­ed by meet cutes, wry humor, vio­lence, or tragedy.

There’s a skill­ful restraint in her han­dling of scenes and in her han­dling of the vam­pire sto­ry. She doesn’t get into the whole mess of trite tropes that oth­er vam­pire movies fall into. She nev­er seems con­cerned with com­ing up with her own unique ele­ments of vam­pire mythology—how to han­dle mir­rors, how to han­dle gar­lic, how to han­dle stakes, how to han­dle infec­tion, how to han­dle the sun. In a way, Amirpour’s vam­pire, who is the voice of jus­tice in the film, is just a girl who walks home alone at night, adven­tur­ing and then bring­ing her roman­tic inter­est along for the ride.

I hope Ana Lily Amir­pour will direct a zom­bie movie one day. Maybe I hope that because it’s too bad I don’t like zom­bie movies more. What­ev­er hap­pens, I owe a huge debt to Amir­pour because she inspired my zom­bie poems in a way that helped me like zom­bies more.

Duy Đoàn (pro­nounced zwē dwän / zwee dwahn) is the author of We Play a Game (Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press), win­ner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lamb­da Lit­er­ary Award. Duy’s work has appeared in the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Poem-a-Day, Keny­on Review, The Mar­gins, and Poet­ry. He received an MFA in poet­ry from Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. His sec­ond col­lec­tion, Zom­bie Vom­it Mad Libs, is forth­com­ing from Alice James Books, Novem­ber 12, 2024.

Poetry /  Kasey Jueds

:: Second Silence ::

Look up
between the winter

and a goneness,
refusing 	

what snow
permitted songbirds

to understand. You were
your own ghost, surging

through a closed throat, faithful
to these maples

until snow knotted deeper
the window, the sky.

How you scattered
inside the angel’s hands, inside

the birds: a letter
unsent, shriven

in the face of the cold
to come, covered by Later

in her perfect meadow
of milk. That freezing place

arrives coiled
through a second silence, left

to the docile
animal alone.

:: Leafless ultramarine, winter envelope ::

slipped beneath the wrists’
                       translucent skin.
                                   Unknow birds
           where cold works
                                               to soften a name,
                       where the woods, insistent,
           describe ghosts,
                                   this exact failing.
Since there is a tree,
                       there is           this wind
           blotting
                                   the lamp-struck dusk,
                       the empty teacup’s
           pink-flowered cracks. 
Swathes of black, pinned
                                   to mountains, mix vanishing
           with the shapes of pines.
                       To sunder means 
to inhabit corners,
                                               a single streetlight
           sometimes covered with snow.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve been try­ing to write even a por­tion of my love for the Welsh artist Gwen John, and her paint­ings, for decades. I did make one poem for her, 25 years ago, a poem I liked and kept. And then, noth­ing. Or: some attempts, all of which felt life­less, flat. I gave up, though I con­tin­ued to think and read about her, to vis­it her paint­ings when I could. Then this past Feb­ru­ary I took a class with the lumi­nous poet/teacher Mol­ly Scha­ef­fer, and one week Kylie Gel­lat­ly was a guest. Kylie talked us through—so generously—her process of mak­ing col­lage poems. I had tried col­lage before and didn’t take to it (though I love scis­sors and glue sticks). But this time, cut­ting my old failed poems into indi­vid­ual words and shift­ing them around on a blank page, I felt a burst of new­ness and energy.

These two poems, to and for Gwen John, feel, in a side­ways, sur­pris­ing-to-me way, so much more to and for her than any of my oth­er attempts over the years. I remem­ber my Bud­dhist teacher say­ing to me once, “Some­thing is always happening”—probably in response to my com­plain­ing that noth­ing was hap­pen­ing in my prac­tice or my life. In the same way, some­thing was hap­pen­ing dur­ing that emp­ty-seem­ing time, the years I was dis­cour­aged and feel­ing far-from, giv­ing up and start­ing again, try­ing to write toward Gwen John

Kasey Jueds is the author of two col­lec­tions of poet­ry, both from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press: Keep­er, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Star­rett Prize, and The Thick­et. She lives on ances­tral Lenape land in a small town in the moun­tains of New York State.

Poetry / Abbie Kiefer

From the writer

:: Account ::

The work of writ­ing insists on hav­ing my time and attention—sometimes in ways I wish it didn’t. Nec­es­sary domes­tic tasks are often pushed aside in favor of poem-mak­ing or get done begrudg­ing­ly and with impa­tience. I find that being in the mid­dle of a writ­ing project can make me impa­tient in my par­ent­ing, too. A short­com­ing, to be sure, but one that I try to be hon­est about and address.

This poem con­sid­ers the val­ue of mak­ing art and of mak­ing order and what we do with our ambi­tion to cre­ate. It’s also—for me, at least—about what it can mean to keep a house: in this case, to fold the per­pet­u­al heaps of laun­dry, but also to make the home a place where its peo­ple can learn and care for each oth­er and be frus­trat­ed and keep car­ing for each oth­er anyway.

Abbie Kiefer is the author of Cer­tain Shel­ter (June Road Press, 2024) and the chap­book Brief His­to­ries (Whit­tle Micro-Press, 2024). Her work is forth­com­ing or has appeared in The Cincin­nati Review, Cop­per Nick­el, Gulf Coast, The Mis­souri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The South­ern Review, and oth­er places. She is on the staff of The Adroit Jour­nal and lives in New Hamp­shire. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com.

Poetry / Julia Kolchinsky 

:: Tell me it gets easier ::

               every new parent asks,
It doesn’t, I say bluntly & something
               inside us shatters a little, not 
hope, too large, uncontainable 
               in the body, like sky or the layers 
of ocean my son knows
               are named sunlight,
twilight, midnight, abyss, & trenches,
               the further down 
the closer to war. Tell me
               it gets easier, they ask
to hear difficulty or darkness
               are temporary, but the depths 
are endless not because 
               they do not end but because 
we’ve never reached the bottom.
               In water, the difference
between float / sink / swim / drown
               are matters of breath & motion,
little to do with light & everything
               with ease. 
Endurance a resistance all its own.
               It doesn’t, I say again, my face
reflected in the shallow sink
               that just won’t drain.
It never gets easier, I exhale.
               We just grow used to bearing
difficulty. We hold our breaths 
               long enough 
to reach the surface.
.

:: When a friend texted to say her son’s fish died & the child won’t stop wailing ::

I told her if my son had a single wish 
he confesses would bring our cat 

back from the dead though he was only 
a year old when I found Ele P. Hant

motionless in his litter box 
even in death the cat named elephant 

was the most respectable animal 
refusing to sleep in my bed for a whole week 

the way he had for eleven years & my one-year-old 
spent most of his life pulling & smacking & chasing 

the cat with hands the opposite of what we think 
is love but what does a child see as tenderness? none of us 

remain children long enough to know & I asked 
how long they’d had the fish? more than a year she said pandemic  

pet meant to help her son through absence & if not 
replace grandparents & playmates at least give him someone
 
to watch through water & it must have helped 
teach him how we can love without 

touch & this morning I write to see 
how they are doing her son was inconsolable 

she’s worried what this means for bigger 
human losses & I said my son is only afraid
 
of two things: getting a shot & losing me 
all other pain abstraction I say our people 

make every loss catastrophe & every death 
all death & Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote we are all walking
 
cemeteries carrying our dead inside us 
but she writes there has been no mention
 
of the fish or its death & kids are resilient I say we 
are resilient I say resilience & every time 

the word distances from its origin “an act 
of rebounding” jumping back resilience 

meaning not survival but our ability to exist 
that much more distant from one another

:: The day after the longest day of the year::

is longer & hotter & the sun 
              rises as if it knows 
                             it will refuse to set 
              & solstice is a lie 
from an elsewhere
              language meaning 
                            “to stand still” 
              when really 
my son wakes 
              with an urge 
                            to whirl & keep
              whirring knowing no 
stillness & in a single 
              day he has 
                            too many 
              highest & lowest 
points for even his own
              must-know-the-exact-
                           count-of-everything
              brain to quantify 
& I am crying in the car again
                            with his little sister 
              strapped in her car seat 
the hour of daylight
              seems a whole-day long 
                            & she asks Mama, please 
              play “Astronaut in the Ocean”  
because it’s big brother’s 
              favorite & he’s not here
                            after his solar flare hands 
              struck my chest 
the way meteors have pelleted 
              the moon for eons & she’s  
                            so used to being pocked 
              there’s no pain 
anymore just pressure & dent 
              we’re underwater & I don’t hold
                            my breath or breathe
               & no I say to my daughter
trying to explain 
              another’s sadness
                            to a three-year-old 
              who knows only 
her own & screams 
              hot tears I want “Astronaut 
              in the Ocean” & the sun 
                            turns liquid at the wheel 
              & I scream too & we’re both 
sobbing now the sun rising higher 
              & for an instant 
                            through the windshield 
              glare & winding 
mimosa blooms
              Arkansas’ unbearable heat
                            catches in cement 
              & the sun swims 
still in the road ahead
              & I give in & play 
                            “What you know 
              about rollin’ down 
in the deep? . . .” & our tears 
              start to dry in all that wet
                            sunlight & she asks 
             Are you happy 
now, Mama? & yes
              I tell her I am 
                            & when I come home 
              & for a split second 
of radiant stillness 
              my son wraps hot 
                            around me 
              I’ll tell him I am happy 
knowing the sun keeps burning 
              & he cannot stop 
                            long enough to ask

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems come from my forth­com­ing book, PARALLAX, which deals with par­ent­ing a neu­ro­di­verse child on the autism spec­trum under the shad­ow of the war in Ukraine, my birth­place. The book is an account of tak­ing care of the many bod­ies depend­ing on mine, while con­tin­u­ing to take care of my own through the act of writ­ing. As my now eight-year-old express­es his own fas­ci­na­tion with death, vio­lence, and the grotesque, my strug­gles with par­ent­ing over­lap with pro­cess­ing present-day war on the same black soil that took so many of my ances­tors dur­ing the Holo­caust by bul­lets across ter­ri­to­ries of the for­mer Sovi­et Union. These three poems take on the exhaus­tion and non-stop momen­tum of par­ent­ing. Poet­ry has become a way of both pro­cess­ing and escap­ing from the over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence of your whole self being need­ed whol­ly by some­one else, and in some instances, of your whole self being sub­sumed by the needs and desires of oth­ers. These poems are my way of con­nect­ing back to my own voice. My song. My body. My whole­ness. They are a way of cre­at­ing and reach­ing out to a com­mu­ni­ty of fel­low par­ent poets to remind us: we are all in a ver­sion of this beau­ti­ful strug­gle togeth­er, and even when it feels impos­si­ble, we will get through it. And even though it does­n’t get eas­i­er, we get stronger and more able to bear the dif­fi­cul­ty. We are here and will con­tin­ue to be here for our chil­dren. And the page, the poem, the lyric impulse, this will con­tin­ue to be there for all of us. 

Julia Kolchin­sky (for­mer­ly Das­bach) emi­grat­ed from Dnipro, Ukraine when she was six years old. She is the author of three poet­ry col­lec­tions: The Many Names for Moth­er, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). She has two forth­com­ing books, PARALLAX (The Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas Press, 2025) final­ist of the Miller Williams Prize select­ed by Patri­cia Smith, and When the World Stopped Touch­ing (YesYes Books, 2027), a col­lab­o­ra­tive col­lec­tion with Luisa Muradyan. Her writ­ing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review. Her recent awards include Hunger Moun­tain’s Ruth Stone Poet­ry Prize, Michi­gan Quar­ter­ly Review’s Prize in Non­fic­tion, and a Sus­tain­able Arts Foun­da­tion Grant. She is at work on a col­lec­tion of linked lyric essays about par­ent­ing her neu­ro­di­verse child and the end of her mar­riage under the shad­ow of the war in Ukraine. Julia is Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing at Deni­son University. 

Poetry / Eduardo Martínez — Leyva 

::After The Shooting, You Have A Panic Attack In The Supermarket::

On a Saturday morning, you drive across Francis Scott Key Bridge,
mindful of cyclists and joggers; the tourists blocking the sun from their eyes
to catch a glimpse of the imperious monument looming over everyone.
Another stone God they’ve come to worship. But you’re here because you’re hungry. 
Stuff your cart with spreads and fancy cheeses that in another life, you could 
never afford, walk through the shiny, polished aisles, greeting others with a nod or 
short, quick smirk. You feel warmth around your eyes. Open the carton of
eggs to examine each one. Looking for cracks, checking the expiration dates.
When all of a sudden, you think, was this how it was? Was this how it happened?
A moment so boring, you’re already thinking of the next boring moment,
and the one after that. Is this it? Lifting and tapping a cantaloupe, looking
for black, welting spots on an heirloom tomato, thinking of the week’s lunch
or lesson you haven’t yet planned. Picturing your students on Monday morning,
staring into the white board’s clean, blank face. Waiting. Remembering all those times 
you hushed their panic during lockdown drills, as you shoved your heads underneath 
tables and desks. You thought yourself ready. Is it? This? Funny how life happens, no, 
funny how life needs death for it to happen, be compared to. Valued. But you knew this 
already. Coming in from the parking lot, barely missing that red light. You knew.
Just as elsewhere, someone is slipping their feet into a new pair of shoes,
while parents set the table for breakfast, sisters get ready to sell raffle tickets,
And brothers forget to heave their hearts to their throats before getting into their cars, 
rushing for a carton of milk they meant to buy earlier that week.
They knew too. You hope. Every one of them. 

:: What’s Above Us Is Either Dead Or Still Dying ::

Suddenly there’s the urge to ruin 
every garden I see,
uproot every goddamn flower
until my hands are the throbbing red 

that traumatizes most people.
It’s no longer hunting season, which means 
I can roam freely with the others, if
they’ll have me. They won’t. 

To live through the breakdown, 
one must first understand
the thing that breaks
is always breaking, quietly. 

As such, I try to go unnoticed, 
swept all the rooms I’d been in 
before exiting. Leaving behind
a certain kind of warmth in cushions 

and furniture, unique to those types 
of animals that know of no master’s 
touch. And I think of myself lucky 
having survived all these years 

calming my own blood down 
whenever it felt loud and unbearable, 
and I was alone. Have been alone 
and will be. By this time of night, 

the foragers have crept back
to their rooms, sleeping off
the afternoon’s chores, leaning 
into their loved ones, leaning into 

their very own flesh, the art
they get to live in. Clean and honest. 
It is quiet enough for me to see myself 
as something other than tragic. 

More than an itch on the palm’s open 
surface. As vast and with purpose
as the sky above, silently spreading itself 
over my little, borrowed room. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

These two poems appear in my debut col­lec­tion, Cow­boy Park, which won the 2024 Felix Pol­lak Prize in Poet­ry and is forth­com­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Press. Cop­ing with grief and trau­ma is one com­mon theme through­out the book.

In 2019, my mom sur­vived a mass shoot­ing at a Wal­mart in my home­town of El Paso, TX. Since then, I’ve been cap­tur­ing the after­math and the emo­tions that haunt her and rip­ple through our fam­i­ly. Ini­tial­ly, I was par­a­lyzed by fear, hes­i­tant to write about the event and the survivor’s guilt that gripped our fam­i­ly. The poem—“After the Shoot­ing, You Have a Pan­ic Attack in the Supermarket”—reflects on those weeks when I had to per­se­vere despite bat­tling pan­ic attacks, sleep­less nights, and an inabil­i­ty even to name the trau­ma we endured. I am still on this jour­ney, writ­ing toward under­stand­ing and solace, even after all these years.

I penned “What’s Above Us Is Either Dead or Still Dying” when I returned to poet­ry after a long hia­tus. Liv­ing in Province­town dur­ing the off-sea­son, sur­round­ed by fel­low cre­atives, I immersed myself in writ­ing with­out dis­trac­tions. It was a time of pro­found self-reflec­tion, growth, and heal­ing. I embraced fail­ure, shed my fears, and learned to sit with my grief. Most impor­tant­ly, I learned to be kind to my words and, ulti­mate­ly, to be kind to myself.

Eduar­do Martínez-Ley­va was born in El Paso, TX to Mex­i­can immi­grants. His work has appeared in Poet­ry Mag­a­zine, The Boston Review, The Jour­nal, Fron­tier Poet­ry, Best New Poets, and else­where. He’s received fel­low­ships from Can­to­Mun­do, The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Cen­ter in Province­town, the Lamb­da Lit­er­ary Foun­da­tion, and a teach­ing fel­low­ship from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, where he earned his MFA. His debut poet­ry col­lec­tion, Cow­boy Park, was select­ed by Amaud Jamaul John­son as the win­ner of the Felix Pol­lak Prize in Poet­ry and is forth­com­ing in Novem­ber 2024 from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Press. 

Poetry / Chelsea Rathburn 

:: Why I Can’t Watch Poltergeist ::

Because the horror played in endless loops
on HBO the summer I was eight

and my cousins made me watch when no adults 
were home, then told me that I couldn’t tell. 

Because the trap door to our attic hid 
inside my closet, just like the one in the movie, 

so my closet no longer softly glowed 
but seemed to seethe with light from one bare bulb, 

and my cousins all swore it was a portal 
to the Other Side, and though I called them liars

I worried it was true. Because when I learned, 
years later, about the ancient burial mounds 

of the Tequesta that Henry Flagler leveled 
to build Miami’s first grand hotel,

I thought of the scene with the muddy swimming pool
and all the angry skeletons roiling in it, 

and their fury seemed reasonable, and the land cursed. 
Because even though I’d like to read it now

as an obvious metaphor for mindless consumption 
and American greed, I’m afraid that I’ll be eight

again, pressed into the couch cushions, convinced
that I could call my worst fears into life,

and certain that if they came no one would breach 
the lip of the attic door to rescue me.

:: The One About the Haunted House ::

At first, the jokes we made about the ghost 
were jokes, our way of laughing off the lights 
that turned on by themselves in empty rooms 
and the pictures that kept falling from the walls. 
Neither of us believed in ghosts, but we named 
ours Bobby, after the former occupant.
Oh, that’s just Bobby, we’d tell our dinner guests 
when the range hood fan began its frantic spin. 
We’d explain how it all could be explained – 
faulty wiring, shoddy nails – and besides, 
he didn’t die here but in a nursing home.
We didn’t believe in ghosts but by all accounts 
ours was a kind man when alive (we learned 
he’d been married once to a local politician
not known for being kind), and the haunting, if 
it was a haunting, seemed less malevolent 
than bewildered. Neither of us believed 
in ghosts, then things got louder and stranger,
and the problem of our not believing 
seemed smaller than the problem of the ghost 
we didn’t believe in, and though I felt 
ridiculous, I bought crystals and Googled 
exorcists and tried to keep the fear 
out of my voice in front of our daughter. 
It was a joke that sent him packing: my husband 
shook a fist at the ceiling and threatened to call
the ex-wife if he acted up again, 
and just like that, the noises stopped. Our cups 
and plates no longer flew off of the shelves,
and his leaving became a kind of punchline,
though I felt a little guilty no one missed him, 
once I was certain he was really gone.

From the writer

:: Account ::

For the past few years, I’ve been writ­ing poems about home and foun­da­tions (phys­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal, sta­ble and oth­er­wise). While I’m inter­est­ed in the ways peo­ple choose to build safe spaces in the world, more often I find myself con­sid­er­ing the pre­car­i­ty of home, explor­ing things like infes­ta­tions, haunt­ings, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, and the long reach of pover­ty or abuse across gen­er­a­tions. In a sense, these are ideas that have pre­oc­cu­pied me since I was a child in Mia­mi, Flori­da, liv­ing first in a series of apart­ments and lat­er in a house my fam­i­ly real­ly couldn’t afford. As a kid, I was con­vinced that we would lose our house, so per­haps it’s no won­der that the movie Pol­ter­geist, which I saw when I was far too young, ter­ri­fied me. When I was writ­ing “Why I Can’t Watch Pol­ter­geist,” I had to rely on syn­opses and screen­shots because I could not bring myself to see the movie again. (I’ve always had extreme­ly vivid dreams, and even watch­ing the trail­er for a hor­ror film can give me night­mares for a week.) Giv­en how ter­ri­fied I was as a kid of being dragged to the Oth­er Side through the attic trap door in my clos­et, I’m odd­ly not that fright­ened to find myself as an adult liv­ing in a house where uncan­ny things hap­pen. I’m still hes­i­tant to say that I believe in ghosts, but Bob­by – who’d tak­en his leave when I wrote “The One About the Haunt­ed House” – still shows up from time to time.

Chelsea Rath­burn is the author of three poet­ry col­lec­tions, most recent­ly Still Life with Moth­er and Knife (LSU Press, 2019), win­ner of the 2020 Eric Hof­fer Prize in Poet­ry. Her poems have appeared in Birm­ing­ham Poet­ry Review, Cop­per Nick­el, Poet­ry, the South­ern Review, and oth­er jour­nals. Born and raised in Flori­da, she has called Geor­gia home since 2001 and cur­rent­ly teach­es at Mer­cer Uni­ver­si­ty in Macon. Since 2019, she has served as the Poet Lau­re­ate of Georgia.

Poetry / Aurora Shimshak

From the writer

:: Account ::

In my first MFA poet­ry work­shop at UW-Madi­son, our pro­fes­sor asked that we invent our own forms. That fall I was going for walks in a restored prairie close to my apart­ment, and the milk­weed along the path was plen­ti­ful. Dig­ging my thumb into one of their pods to release the fly­ing seeds felt like a slice of child­hood, a pathos appro­pri­ate to the mem­o­ry-based poems I was writ­ing. I looked up how many seeds a milk­weed pod held—200 to 250—and decid­ed my words would be those seeds, tight­ly packed, and that some of them would fly out to form their own poem.

I’ll put poems into milk­weeds when they’re not work­ing in oth­er forms. “Milk­weed to Unsor­ry” is a com­bi­na­tion of two poems that weren’t work­ing on their own—the first about my mother’s text mes­sages, the sec­ond about the sig­nif­i­cance of my niece crawl­ing into her lap.

“Milk­weed for the Bed­wet­ting Child” was a fif­teen page poem before I con­densed it into its lit­tle pod, keep­ing only the best lines and lan­guage. The fly­ing poem’s “shame gar­ment” tied to my stepmother’s throat was a sur­prise, new lan­guage that bub­bled up when I need­ed seeds to fly out. 

Auro­ra Shimshak grew up in sev­er­al rur­al com­mu­ni­ties and small cities in Wis­con­sin. Her work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in Best New Poets 2023, Cop­per Nick­el, and Poet­ry North­west, among oth­ers. She teach­es writ­ing to under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and those incar­cer­at­ed at Oakhill Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion. Her man­u­script, Home Movie of a Girl Not Swim­ming, was a final­ist for Milkweed’s Bal­lard Spahr Prize.

Poetry / Martha Silano 

:: Terminal Surreal ::

or is it surreal terminal? Something’s going on 
with my mitochondria. Something to do 
with oxidation. My cells 

need help with ridding my body of toxins, which explains 
the bear bile I drank twice daily until it turned out
it was doing nothing 

but making me nauseous. Surreal swirl of feta cheesecake 
topped with macerated cherries. Ooh, that tastes good. 
My husband calls to tell me he just heard 

the first red-winged blackbird of the season, saw bald eagles 
dive-bombing mergansers. I’m just sitting here pretending 
I don’t have ALS, that somehow, I’ll live. 

50 degrees and partly sunny: my kind of day! To forget, 
while I’m listening to honking geese, that yesterday 
a friend went into hospice, 

that the amount of misery is equal to or greater than the number of eggs 
a termite queen will lay in a lifetime—165 million. 
I learned today about the mountain stone weta, 

a cricket that, when it gets cold, freezes 85% of its body. When the blizzard 
passes, it comes back to life. Meanwhile, another eagle’s flying overhead, 
this one solo, heading south until it’s out of sight.

:: Abecedarian on a Friday Morning ::

Almost like it was, this moment, this juncture of
blood pumping from arteries, back through veins,
circling in and out of chambers, my heart’s pending 
demolition, like the not-for-billionaire’s buildings 
east and west of us, like these sturdy, strapping legs
for how long strong? I walked them yesterday past
gators and a pileated woodpecker, a blue-headed vireo 
hardly visible in the wax myrtle, its white-spectacled
eyes, the good news of its population on the rise. 
Just before, I heard a cardinal in the cattails, the kkkkrrrr
kkkrrr of a little blue heron in lettuce leaves I 
learn are native or introduced (fossils in Wyo-
ming and India). It’s hunting for insects, fish, maybe a
North Florida hopper, a tadpole, or the elusive 
Okefenokee fishing spider, who knows, or a 
pig frog, which I was really hoping to see.
Questions arise throughout our deep dive into 
racoon love as four babies making high-pitched
squeaks run along the boardwalk, stopping only 
to make sure their pals are still nearby, cuz no one,
us included, wants to be alone when they die. When this
vacation from the void closes shop, my lungs losing their 
winsome urge to rise and fall, when I can no longer
xxx and ooo, even via text, breathe deep the gathering gloom, 
yak, yap, yawn, yes, yarn, yield, or do that lub-dub thing, until 
zapping myself with a cocktail takes me where I haven’t been.

From the writer

:: Account ::

The deal is that in Novem­ber 2023 I was diag­nosed with ALS. I knew some­thing weird was going on with my body in ear­ly 2023, but it took at least six months to wend my way from doc­tor, to doc­tor, to doc­tor, to neu­rol­o­gist. When I first found out I was ter­mi­nal, I did every­thing I could to pre­tend it wasn’t true, that this couldn’t be hap­pen­ing to me (aka mag­i­cal think­ing). In ear­ly 2024, I could still walk five miles, but then it dwin­dled to two miles, then one mile, then half a mile, then to no walk­ing at all except around our home and to the front yard to sit on my trusty chaise longue, where I bird­watch, look up at the sky, and watch/listen to song­birds. Today, thanks to a small dose of amphet­a­mine, I’m able to spend a lit­tle more time on that chaise, or in my bed for hours, writ­ing and revis­ing poems, read­ing books about the nat­ur­al world, and doing way too many cross­word puz­zles. As I was com­ing to terms with my diagnosis,I used poet­ry to make sense of what was hap­pen­ing to me, poems that com­bine the dai­ly chal­lenges of liv­ing with a neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­der with the med­ical, the meta­phys­i­cal, the cos­mo­log­i­cal, along with the won­ders of the plants and ani­mals that I am grate­ful to engage with daily.

Martha Silano has authored sev­en poet­ry col­lec­tions, includ­ing, most recent­ly, This One We Call Ours, win­ner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Poet­ry Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024), and Grav­i­ty Assist, Reck­less Love­ly, and The Lit­tle Office of the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion, all from Sat­ur­na­lia Books. Acre Books will pub­lish Ter­mi­nal Sur­re­al, a book about Silano’s expe­ri­ence of liv­ing with ALS, in the fall of 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poet­ry, Paris Review, Terrain.org, The Mis­souri Review, New Eng­land Review, and Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, and in many print antholo­gies, includ­ing Cas­ca­dia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecol­o­gy, and Poet­ry (Moun­taineers Books, 2023), Dear Amer­i­ca: Let­ters of Hope, Habi­tat, Defi­ance, and Democ­ra­cy (Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2019), and the Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry series (Nor­ton, 2009).. Awards include North Amer­i­can Review’s James Hearst Poet­ry Prize and The Cincin­nati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poet­ry Prize. Her web­site is avail­able at marthasilano.net.

Poetry / Edward Thomas-Herrera 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Ear­li­er this year, I was for­tu­nate enough to encounter a poem by William Ward But­ler enti­tled Dear I Can’t Believe It’s Not But­ter [Let­ter #2]. It’s a short, beau­ti­ful piece that starts off rather com­i­cal­ly (as the title would imply), before tran­si­tion­ing into some­thing much more pro­found. I loved it. As a result, I became intrigued by the idea of writ­ing a poem addressed to some­thing that wasn’t alive. Mem­o­ries start­ed flood­ing back about a ter­ri­ble French cof­fee press in our—well, just read the poem. It was nev­er my aim to get as dark as it did, but I’ve always believed that when you allow the words and images to tell you where they want to go, you should do every­thing you can to step out of their way. In the end, you’ll reach some­thing (hope­ful­ly) more mean­ing­ful. When dis­cussing this piece with friends, one of them wise­ly not­ed, “We inad­ver­tent­ly reveal so much about our­selves when writ­ing about inan­i­mate objects.”

Edward Thomas-Her­rera is a Sal­vado­ran-Amer­i­can poet, play­wright, and per­former liv­ing and work­ing in Chica­go, Illi­nois. He has a very long resumé of stage cred­its with which he refus­es to bore you, but he’s hap­py to tell you his poet­ry has appeared in Tofu Ink Arts Press and Beaver Magazine.

Poetry / Joshua Zeitler 

:: My Desires Have Invented New Desires ::

	from a line by Hélène Cixous

I believe in a God who does not exist
           as a discrete entity, but as a collective
yearning.
                 The only way to be Godless
	    is to be satisfied.
			                   Once I added sugar
grain by grain to tea, sipping in-between
	      to test.
		           By the time I tasted sweetness
there was no tea left.
		                       What have I become?
	        I asked my empty cup.
				                          Once I dropped
a teacup because it lied to me.
				                       The break
	        was singular,
		                         clean;
			                             I studied it
	        like a holy text, cutting my tongue
on the sharp edge.
		                  The only way to tell
	     a story is to begin with desire
or blood,
	         drop by drop.

Once I wanted to plant a pill in my body
	     like a seed.
		                  Once I wanted to tell a story
about how I became the thing that grows
	     rather than the dirt.
			                          The only way to dig
is with your hands,
		                   on your knees.

	In this way, digging is like a prayer.

In this way, the prayer becomes God.

	The only way to name a thing
is to interrogate its desires.
			                          To cover
	their mouths and let the years pass.

The only way to pass the years is to want
	       time to stand still.
			                        The only way
to make time stand still is to name its desires.

	In this way, every name is a lie
born of yearning.
		                In this way, every lie
	       is its own holy proof.
			                              Once I learned
my name was the only true part of me left,
	      I cupped it in my false hands.

What shall I become? 
		                        I asked,
				                       wondering
        	if I should let it drop.

From the writer

:: Account ::

In one month from writ­ing this, I will have an appoint­ment with my gen­er­al prac­ti­tion­er at which I will request to begin gen­der-affirm­ing hor­mone ther­a­py. I’ve been think­ing of this appoint­ment as a poem: a com­pact moment, discrete—I enter the office, I leave the office—and yet spi­ral­ing back­ward and for­ward through my life. Over a decade of doubt, of inde­ci­sion, of weigh­ing what I might lose against what I might gain, has led to this one appoint­ment. And after? I can only guess. Being non­bi­na­ry in a rur­al envi­ron­ment isn’t easy. I have long strug­gled to extri­cate the way I see myself from the lim­it­ed ways that the peo­ple around me see me. Do I have the courage to pur­sue my own hap­pi­ness at the expense of oth­ers’ expec­ta­tions? Many days, I don’t know that I do. But this desire has exist­ed in me so long, it has become its own being, a liv­ing thing I can’t ignore.

I don’t pre­tend that my iden­ti­ty has any bear­ing on the mer­it of my work. When I first began sub­mit­ting poet­ry, I grap­pled with the first sev­en words of my bio­graph­i­cal state­ment for a long time. Joshua Zeitler is a queer, non­bi­na­ry writer…Who cares? The inevitable answer: I do. Words from Joy Ladin in Trou­bling the Line echo through my mind: acute, defin­i­tive, life-chang­ing. I some­times won­der whether I would iden­ti­fy as non­bi­na­ry if I weren’t a writer. This is not to say that I doubt the valid­i­ty of my iden­ti­ty, but that writ­ing has allowed me the free­dom to explore those spaces of self that might oth­er­wise remain long, threat­en­ing shad­ows in the monot­o­ny of my day-to-day life. Poet­ry expands to accom­mo­date the com­plex, unsta­ble, con­tra­dic­to­ry rela­tions between body and soul, social self and psy­che (Joy Ladin’s words again), which cap­i­tal­ism can­not. My writ­ing and my iden­ti­ty are mar­ried, inextricable.

And then, of course, there is the ques­tion of the name. When I sent out that first sub­mis­sion (anoth­er moment that acts like a poem), I knew I was mak­ing a choice. It didn’t have to be per­ma­nent, but I would be bet­ter off if it were. How­ev­er my name might not fit who I have become, I decid­ed, it was a gift from my moth­er. Our rela­tion­ship has become frac­tured, per­haps beyond repair, and so I think of my name as the one thing from her I will keep, a way of hon­or­ing her. Which ways of being are closed off by this choice? Which are bro­ken open? If there is an answer to be found, I will find it on the page.

Joshua Zeitler is a queer, non­bi­na­ry writer based in rur­al Michi­gan. They received their MFA from Alma Col­lege, and their work has appeared in Pit­head Chapel, Paci­fi­ca Lit­er­ary Review, The Q&A Queerzine, HAD, and elsewhere.