famine as a symphony

Poetry / Chloe Weng

:: famine as a symphony ::

you listen to her play piano through her father’s phone
on saturdays, when he calls you and shows her off,
as if to preen and proclaim: look, i succeeded.
recall how once, you dismantled a piano
and pulled apart its strings like tearing yóutiáo sticks,
revealing soft dough underneath the crispy exterior,
grease sticking to your fingers like calluses.
this is what happens when there is a famine:
you chew through treble clefs, swallow piano strings
whole to relieve your hunger. metal ridges scrape
the flesh of your throat, and the coppery taste that
emerges as acrid bile becomes your water.
in the paddy fields as mud cakes up to your knees,
strings jut out of your stomach, rake over your shoulder,
rice grains slip through callus-worn hands.
she will tell you in secret that she doesn’t like
piano lessons—recitals churn her stomach.
and you will bite back—the reason you are given this ache
is because your stomach is full.
saying thank you is something she will gain with age—
when that day comes, you will show her everything
you have swallowed—not yóutiáo but bloodied piano strings.
she will think herself as carrying a debt, but that strain of debt
is uniquely American—what you will truly mean is
i am proud of you. that is family—to be impaled
by a lonely, yet rewarding ache of hunger.

From the writer

:: Account ::

One of the key quotes that has changed my life is from my grandfather over the phone: “下次用中文给我写首诗吧” (“Write a poem for me in Chinese next time”). Unknowingly at the time, these words struck a chord in me, and I felt inexplicably sad despite the laughter in his voice. I could barely write an essay in Chinese, let alone spin the characters into lines and stanzas, and my poetry often strayed away from my roots except to speak of the erosion of my cultural ties. For years I have accessed a part of myself solely through the lens of loss, and the consequences surfaced during that innocuous Saturday night phone call.

I had planned to visit my grandparents for the first time since before COVID-19 next summer. With over six years of distance, a thought lingered in the back of my mind, making a home there: How much of me do you remember? And, more frightening: How much of you do I remember? Only my grandfather has recently developed brain cancer, and I’m now told that he will pass before this visit happens, robbing me of answers to both questions. Without being as fluent in my mother tongue, and the only thread of connection being occasional calls, my grief takes on a particularly fragile shape. I contemplated how to reconnect with my family and culture, of generational cycles and love and pain that can only be half-described in either language of mine.

Thus, I wrote “famine as a symphony” as an attempt to trace those roots. This poem is what I will tell my grandfather when the time comes—that I understand exactly what he has sacrificed and how I can make it all worth it, how I can keep him in my memory. I kept the language simple and plaintive—family, for me, has always been nakedly beautiful in that way.

Chloe Weng is an emerging writer based in Houston, Texas. She edits for The Hyperbolic Review and is the author of the poetry book Archived Nightmares. Her work has won multiple awards, including a Scholastic Gold Medal, an NCTE Achievement Awards in Writing First Class Distinction, and a Bronze Award from the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest.

See You In The Lobby

Poetry / Justin Carter

:: See You In The Lobby ::

	
When Diana Taurasi says to the ref
see you in the lobby, I think

about when she put her fist 
through a door after a playoff loss

& how, if she could, she’d do
the same to the officials. It’s a shame

the phrase contains the connotations
of violence because otherwise

it’d be such a beautiful thing
to say: see you in the lobby

of my dreams, see you in the lobby
of that hotel we stayed at

the night of our wedding,
how we fell asleep before we even

put the jalapeno corn away,
& the last time I saw someone

in a lobby—your parents, at the hospital, 
beckoning them in to see our child.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem comes from my manuscript Laterals, a collection that uses sports as the lens through which it investigates things like love, parenting, death. I grew up loving sports and part of me always wanted to be a sports writer, though I went the “get an MFA” route. But there’s not a lot of money in academia and at some point I found a paid sports blogging gig as a side job while I pursued my PhD and slowly that just kind of became my main thing, until I ultimately left academia. I didn’t write any poems for maybe three years until it seemed like I might be gone from that world forever, and then at some point, the words just showed back up, and my poems kept tending toward using sports as its way of understanding my life. I think working a day job where I’m always writing about other people, about athletes and games, has made me veer in the complete opposite direction in my creative work, to dig deeper into the personal, but told through this particular frame.

Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.

3 Poems

Poetry / Christian J. Collier

Collier-Self-Portrait-with-Two-Roads

Collier-Locomotion-2003

Collier-Dirge-for‑A

From the writer

:: Account ::

These three poems are part of my thesis for grad school. The central theme of the work is an array of things and people that have haunted the speaker over the course of his life. I think, as an American man, a Southern man, and a Black man alive today, allowing myself to be more honest and open in my life and in my creative writing has been a necessary endeavor, especially given the discourse surrounding manhood and masculinity the past few years. Additionally, by turning inward and writing about not only myself but where I grew up and moved back to as of a few years ago, I gained the ability to speak outward in a manner that was new for me. I’ve arrived at a place where I can reject, interrogate, etc. many of the ways I was conditioned or, as a means of survival, conditioned myself as a man. As a result, I challenged myself to extend grace to former selves as well as the flawed individuals who have, since the 90s, left deep impressions on me, and I see each of these poems as being illustrative of that task.

Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.

3 Poems

Poetry / Blas Falconer

:: Gold ::

We came looking for it.
A little farther. A little longer. 

One brick, then
another. A house. A chapel. We will

live here. We will pray here.
And if some finds its way

into our pockets, who
will blame us? The small stone

biting your hip all day.
Tracing the impression with

your finger at night.
Mosquitos rising up

in a cloud. A streak of blood
smeared across your hand.

The fevers. The heavy sleep.
The raids. The fires. Everyone

looking. Everyone looking
away. Which way? Dear God,

which way now? Find me,
it says, sinking deeper

into the ground. I am not here,
it says, waiting for you.

:: The Belltower ::

                                              After Campanario, Jose Melendez Contreras, 1960


It is alarm—this panic of
sparrows loosed from

the belltower, the night air
come to life. They

cannot settle, not while
you’re here. The bell

like a stone, the dome
a heart, the birds ringing

over the rooftops, someone
somewhere, waiting for you.

:: Ars Poetica: A Cento ::

Over there, says the wind
a sail ready to depart
with my little joy

four centuries of dawn casting themselves into the landscape
my plainest song
Let it be a duel of music in the air

to open my arms to nothing
rolling in a blue without ships, without port
something like a world paused in its history

In each dawn we will dissolve together
and collapse in echoes across the earth
and all the stars will come down singing

There is so much sea swimming in my stars
Only leave me as I am, ringing


                                                           —for Julia de Burgos

From the writer

:: Account ::

For a few years now, I’ve been writing explicitly about Puerto Rico, considering not just my experiences there or family legend, but its history, art, and language. One poem examines the collapse of Arecibo’s observatory, once the largest single-aperture telescope in the world. One studies the abandoned settlement of Caparra. The three poems featured here come from that project. “Gold,” a persona poem, is written in the voice of those who’d first come, who’d do anything, for the wealth that they imagined waiting for them. “The Belltower” was inspired by a painting, Jose Melendez Contreras’ Campanario (1960). The Cubism-influenced image renders a flock of birds in flight, alarmed perhaps by the sound of bells marking the hour. “Ars Poetica” is a found poem inspired by the work of the great Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, who my grandmother recited and lauded throughout my youth. Years later, I long for this place that loomed so large in my childhood, that shaped so many of the people dearest to me. Sitting down to write is a way of returning to the island—the countryside, the town square, the sea—and the people I once knew there.

Blas Falconer is the author of four poetry collections, including Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024). He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Falconer teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and is the editor-in-chief at Poetry International Online.

Found: Lines from My Mother’s Emails, 2002–2012

Poetry / Melissa Fite Johnson

:: Found: Lines from My Mother’s Emails, 2002–2012 ::

	

First, I don’t like this new Hotmail format, do you? Sorry I was kind of
winey-piney when you left and put the guilt on you. In truth, it had been
a nice day. I know you’re very BUSY but, of late, you don’t respond
to my e-mails, which is frustrating to me (especially my last one
about my missing cell phone). I finally found it for I had to ASSUME,
if you weren’t responding, you didn’t have it. Let’s keep politeness going,
and even if it’s very brief, respond to each other’s e-mails. Sorry
if I’ve been too needy. I was disappointed, but that’s life. Thinking of you
in your very BUSY week! (Be sure to take your vitamins). It’s disappointing
that your brother doesn’t keep in closer touch. He “fades away”
every weekend. These days I miss seeing you! Maybe the nicer thing
(for my feelings) would be if you’d said to your friend, “My mother and I
usually meet for dinner on Thurs. nights but you’re more than welcome
to join us” or “She has Bible Study at 7:00, so I could come over then.”
Hi Busy Daughter, I miss you! I’m sorry about yesterday. I overreacted
to what I felt was a hurtful situation. Every year, I’ve gone to Dad’s grave.
You would’ve known if you’d cared enough to ask or shown some interest.
And let’s face it, I wouldn’t have had to be there for you to go to Dad’s grave
with Marc. Has he ever even seen it? It’s sad how things are evolving
between us… I will try to control my temper and my comments more.
Sad about Patrick Swayze’s death, huh? Hi Busy Daughter.
I sure understand how busy you are. I miss you! Today it’s 12 years ago
that Dad died. Dear busy daughter, I know you can’t do the movies
until Sunday, but are you able to do dinner tonight? That’s fine, but maybe
(when school starts), we can get back to that Thurs. night tradition.
I understand where you’re coming from but, truly, I hardly see you
(once or twice a week). I’ll miss you, dear daughter! I’m sorry about
all I might have done to upset or hurt you in your childhood and teen years.
Circumstances (for all of us) were not ideal (with Dad’s health situation)
and I’m sure that stress and worries caused me to say or have done
some hurtful things. I agree it doesn’t excuse my bad behavior but I do feel
it does help to explain it. I don’t want to have the few, precious times
we’re together end up being painful. Well, maybe I’ll see you Thursday night
or not. It must be your lunch or planning time for you to write such a nice,
long e-mail. I know you DO try and you’re a precious daughter. It’s me, not you.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I used to believe my mother was two people. Twenty percent of the time, she was who I wrote about in the essay The Account published last November. The other eighty percent of the time, she was her “real” self, loving and kind—the person in this poem. Growing up, I told myself to weather the not-her times and focus on the true her (much as I would later do with an alcoholic boyfriend when he drank). As I entered my twenties, the decade of my life this poem spans, this kind of rationalizing became harder, and so did our relationship.

In 2014, I insisted we go to counseling together. My mother brought to our first session the email I’d sent her stating that if she were anyone else—a friend, an aunt—I would’ve cut ties with her long ago. In that email I went on to explain all the reasons why, but my mother didn’t bring that part. She brought the three sentences that hurt her and literally cut away the seven paragraphs that hurt me. When I filled our therapist in on the missing context, my mother said she didn’t remember any of those incidents. She didn’t deny anything, but she shrugged and said, “Her memory is so much better than mine.” We tried counseling for a year, until she moved to Kansas City to live with her new partner.

I wrote this found poem in 2023, after I finally decided to end our relationship. Reading through our old emails in search of understanding and closure, I realized that lines I once considered loving and kind were actually incredibly manipulative. The word “busy” in particular is a weapon. Honestly, it felt healing to cut and paste her words to suit my purposes—the reverse of what happened in that first counseling session. Compiling this poem helped me realize that while my mother has apologized to me, as she did at the counselor’s and in these emails, she has never addressed the specific hurts I’ve tried to discuss with her. Those she cut away; those she didn’t remember. Instead, she was sorry for all she “might have done.” My mother wasn’t two people. All of her words and actions were the true her, and they were all reasons to leave.

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.

Corolla

Poetry / Brooke Harries

:: Corolla ::

	
You will have everything you wanted
when you no longer need it. You will
own a car and have hours to drive,
but will no longer be a smoker. 
That turn to the highway that made 
no sense will separate from another 
dead end and you will hold each 
like a sprig of garnish. You will drive 
to Maine alone, eat a lobster, 
and the warmth of melted butter will 
remind you of popcorn, then of teeth, 
then losing the first few, and your mother, 
the Tooth Fairy, unfailing in that one role. 
You realize you forgave her before too late.
Your heart hurts for the day you cleaned
her apartment as the September sun set, 
one sibling shut in a home, another 
wandering off. How you drove back 
to the city in your friend’s Corolla. 
You are no longer friends with her. 
Your needing wasn’t mutual. Sometimes 
you heard her tell her other friend I love
you on the phone and wondered
who said it first. You miss her and 
you miss your mother and your sisters
and you are in Maine with a book 
on a dining table. You will want to 
hurl yourself onto the hotel bed and call 
someone out of the blue, but you turn 
on the TV and watch Forensic Files 
without sound. The jumping wavy lines 
of its title flare yellow and red across 
the screen and you elect to search 
for some ice. You slip your key 
into your hand and enter the hall 
with the plastic bucket. You find 
that nothing, not the click of a door 
opening nearby, elevator, fire escape, 
janitorial closet, escapes your clattering 
loneliness. You eye the paisley floor 
like peacocks in traffic staring at you 
through their desperate show.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Corolla” is from a collection of poems that explores the nuances of growing up with a mentally ill mother through the lenses of gender, economic struggle, spirituality, and the confluence of the natural and modern in my current home in the Deep South. Backgrounding domestic imagery and dailiness, the poems meditate on thwarted intimacy in various relationships. As my speaker’s voice moves between a humorous and plaintive tone, the poems make music out of painful recollection. Music and song lyrics also appear as subjects, signaling ties to memories that are inescapable. Food appears in the poems too, linking my speaker’s past and present. My aim in writing these poems was to be companionable to readers, to honestly examine childhood memories, and to account for why certain moments correlate with the past so strongly. Although my mother has passed away, I have not written conventional elegies for her; rather, I have been compelled to write poems that investigate mundanities that she would have noticed, often centering scenes on the lonely moment an old wound is remembered. Working against reification and oversimplification of complex characters, I hope to bring more questions to conversations about gender and mental illness.

Brooke Harries’ work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, North American Review, Puerto del Sol, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship, the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry, and the Joan Johnson Award for Poetry. She has an MFA from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Reason I’m an Organ Donor is Because I Watched Angel Beats When I Was Fourteen

Poetry / Jessica Nirvana Ram

Nirvana-Ram-2025

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve always wanted to write about why I became an organ donor but I never knew the context within which I wanted to write about it until I reached a point beyond suicidal ideation. To look back at my thought process with clearer eyes, with growth, helped me recontextualize this idea of offering oneself up. It is pretty normal in my poems to offer up body parts as metaphor so to think about it more literally it was like seeing through fog a bit. Like oh, I’m loved differently now, I don’t have to section myself off for love. It is given, freely and this love makes me want to stay alive. How liberating it was to reach the end of this poem and say: I want to live. There’s also something about this form, the backslashes, that mirrors the content for me. This sectioning, like pieces coming together to form a whole, how there is no whole without the pieces. I’ve been writing in this form a lot, it frees up my brain in a way traditional lineation cannot and I find myself arriving more succinctly at truths when I reframe a poem into this form. It both slows it down and makes it more fluid to me, like rests in a musical score, an addition to the cadence, a notable beat. Some people consider this a prose poem and I don’t know that I agree. It feels fundamentally different than a prose poem, and it isn’t usual lineation—perhaps then its own category? Either way, I enjoy tinkering with it. Seeing how it shapes my language. Unearthing it bit by bit.

Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet. She is the author of the poetry collection Earthly Gods (Game Over Books, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. Jessica was a 2022–23 Stadler Fellow, she currently works as the Publicity and Outreach Manager for the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. She lives and writes in Lewisburg, PA.

To the Dog Who Wanted to Fetch the Moon

Poetry / Justin Rigamonti

:: To the Dog Who Wanted to Fetch the Moon ::

	
Whose human said, Pepper, baby, it’s too far,
we can only watch. Who wouldn’t understand
too far if you spelled it out. Who sees a ball
up there and longs to circle it, nose it, take it
in her mouth. Pepper, baby, it’s okay, I know
you won’t give up. Welcome to the melancholy
club. We’re out here nightly, gazing, longing
to lay a hand on her immaculate light. Would it
be cold, would it be hard? We know, and yet
you drop your ears, ignore your human like we
ignore the scientists—they say we’re doomed,
leashed to a small blue stone. It’s true, but look,
there she is, bone white, stunning. The god
of everything beyond us. And so we howl.

From the writer

:: Account ::

My nearly finished manuscript starts with a poem about a game my brother and I used to play: we’d close our eyes and try to imagine we’d never existed. It felt like reaching out and touching the cold, black surface of the void. And the question my book asks is what it means to desire anything in a life that might’ve never happened. To be a subjective consciousness that rose from nothing and will return to it and wants things in between: it’s a dazzling, infuriating, and beautiful thing to be, right? Many of the poems in the book are sonnets because I love the simple mechanism of the volta as a way of creating a brief sense of clarity, “a momentary stay against confusion.” Which is also how it felt to watch the internet video of the dog that inspired this poem—the dog who reminded me so much of myself and my poems, little mammals whining sweetly for something utterly beyond them. Watching the video consoled me for a moment, softened the corners of my bewilderment, and like a sonnet, cleared the air.

Justin Rigamonti teaches English at Portland Community College and serves as the Program Coordinator for PCC’s Carolyn Moore Writing Residency. He’s also the Poetry Coordinator for Chatter PDX, Portland’s new Sunday morning chamber music + spoken word event. Justin’s poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Frontier Poetry, American Poetry Review, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and New Ohio Review.

FeelingWise ™ (patent pending)

Poetry / Caitlin Thomson

:: FeelingWise ™ (patent pending) ::

	
In the impossible future you can order emotions, 
via an app like Uber Eats but for your heart. 

Initially therapists panic and announce a boycott.
They remind everyone that they have terminal degrees

and are focused on the long road of living, not the 
emotions felt right now, but on crafting a better, future you. 

After their initial panic dies down, and the early studies roll in, 
the boycott is forgotten. Their number of patients is unimpacted. 

They might even occasionally indulge in a discreet visit 
from the delivery person themselves.

Like any food delivery service the results are a bit 
of a mixed bag. They almost always don’t get nuanced 

emotions right. When you order a post vacation high, 
you tend to be left feeling over caffeinated.  

An order for the giddiness of first love generally results 
in a sluggish feeling of contentment.

Sometimes the orders get mixed up and you are left 
feeling righteous anger, 

while your neighbor across the street experiences euphoria. 
The hangover from both is brutal, 

and you are left regretting 
what you did with all those eggs.

From the writer

:: Account ::

All of these poems were written during National Poetry Month 2024. I have been writing with the same group of poets now for over a decade. Some I only know via the private Blogger account we all share, and some I now know beyond that.

I think most of my poems this spring, and lately, struggle with this tension between writing purely about ideas and writing about actual lived experience. I personally enjoy writing just about ideas, hypothetical poems if you will, but the poems I’ve always been able to publish are poems about ideas through the lens of personhood.

For a long time I’ve kept my hypothetical poems apart from my personal poems, submitting them only in the context of each other but finally this spring I’ve decided to acknowledge that my thoughts and ideas are as much a part of me as my lived experience, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

Caitlin Thomson’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Penn Review, The Adroit Journal, The Fiddlehead, Barrow Street, Wraparound South, and Radar Poetry. You can learn more about her writing at www.caitlinthomson.com.

Statistics

Poetry / Kerry Trautman

:: Statistics ::

	
My blood created two daughters whose blood 
I fear for, now they are long dry from the fluid 

I floated them in. If statistics belong in poetry, 
let it be known that one in four pregnancies 

ends in miscarriage. None of mine did. But I would 
bleed a year away if it meant my girls could

keep whatever they want. An average US pregnancy 
will undergo 5.2 ultrasounds. A technician imaging 

my abdominal aorta once swore she could see 
straight through to the table, engrossed in how fully 

my pulsing vessel exposed itself. One in four women 
is sexually assaulted. I’ve never been. Have I ruined 

my daughters’ odds? Five percent of rapes in 
the US create pregnancy. Forty million 

MRIs are performed in the US each year. I want 
to see inside my daughters’ current and future bodies—

eliminate any anomalies, pain. One in eight women 
gets breast cancer. As an ultrasound technician 

hovered over a tumor in my left breast, I couldn’t seem
to convince the biopsy needle to find malignancy 

for the sake of my daughters’ breasts. My body is
old, but good could still be done toward its 

end. Like the music the nurse forgot to pipe into my 
leg MRI until I had only five minutes left inside. 

We all want to know how long until our luck runs 
out. There is resilience we don’t want to discover 

we have. My MRI shrieked and banged and 
robot-laser-clanged into my soft tissue, ending 

with five almost-lovely minutes of Miles Davis. 
My ultrasounds could not divulge future damage 

in me or in what I created. My MRI showed fluid 
ballooned around my joint. Lucky me—nothing broken.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Everyone talks about how much easier it gets to be a parent as your kids get older. And it is true, in a lot of ways. However the challenges they face become these very “adult” things, that we are still powerless to solve for them. That sense of parental vulnerability never changes. Our children are always these open wounds in us we need to protect. In late 2023 and through early 2024, I faced some health issues—an ankle injury and a breast tumor (which thankfully turned out to be benign.) I also had my first colonoscopy in this time period, which made it into an earlier draft, but which I edited out (you’re welcome.) The medical procedures I underwent had me thinking about all of the vital information we are able to discover about our bodies, and yet how much we can never know. We bear children, raise them, then release them into this world of vast unknowables.

Kerry Trautman is a lifelong Ohioan whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has served as judge or workshop leader for the Northwest region of Ohio’s “Poetry Out Loud” competition annually since 2016. Kerry is a theater-lover, and in 2024, her one-act play “Mass” received a staged reading as a winner of The Toledo Repertoire Theater’s “Toledo Voices” competition. Her books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020,) Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas (Gutter Snob Books 2022,) Unknowable Things (Roadside Press 2022,) and Irregulars (Stanchion Books 2023.) In 2015, Unknowable Things (then titled Leaning Into it) was a finalist for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Stevens Award and a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Series 1^st Book Award.

2 Poems

Poetry / AJ White

:: Elsewhere’s Rain ::


My father watches me drink from
the corner of the motel room—
his stubble his grey face
I don't know him
but for years he will
keep getting in—
he is grasping after
my hand hauling me
across the void
the earth drags through.

                    ✦

Indigo hillside tidal wave,
wet stars luring tongues out of my interior—
the moon's white eye,
milk grin—
sky's cold atomic bonfire,
starlight more cleansing than rain.

                    ✦

All that year I ran down to the river
hoping to sober
but waiting to die—
the river grew a mouth
& drank me, much later
I grew covetous & flew.

                    ✦

There is a gleaming
& a concealing in this life,
an inner &
an outer proof.


                    ✦

Great wheel of the world
with light-year spokes,
my planet an aquamarine
marble in a shooter's game.

                    ✦

In the gutter, under
my toe, softer
than anticipated,
chickadee.

                    ✦

Blue throat of daylight,
death's six-walled jade tomb.

                    ✦

If life is not a miracle it is
a profound chemical emergence—
yet so often daybreak disappears
all I know of life on earth.

                    ✦

Black door in the mountainside,
blue door in the blade forest—
white door interlocutor onto
red-door grey-flesh room.

                    ✦

Stop, & feel the planet in its death roll—
which is meaner, gravity or light?

                    ✦

When at last you departed from me
I became you, watched you bloom
in sadness toward me,
hid within pity's wide mouth
like a minor chord:
sovereign, defiant & true.

                    ✦

From a secret place, suddenly,
clouds become what you want to see.

                    ✦

My hands hymnal into cistern;
rainclouds blister into rain.

:: I Was Here Before & Will Be Here Again ::

I watch a time-lapse animation of the Appalachians squigging up into existence over tens or hundreds of millions of years. How colossal were the sloths &, consequently, how slow? They appeal to me. Lightning strikes & the ridges blaze & perhaps the sloths escape or not. There are pain-deep blue lakes & scaled fish in them & this is the earth. Myopic, we concocted heaven, too naïve to see that we are born into it, we are the angels, tested under the same rubric of all tests: pretend this is real. Don’t you rub up against the set variables, sliding scales, are you not sure in quiet moments that, even if you don’t know which it is, your life is a language or ethics problem leading to a single answer alone? You know your answer already yet feel compelled to evince a choice because as we choose, again & again, we are learning which conditions correlate with whom choosing what. This is called literature, & the exam confirms the hypothesis: I am everyone & I choose me. There was a time when I did not feel this way, when you held my hand & loved me, then it felt like I could die, evaporate calmly into mist. Sometimes now the sky darkens & I walk into the dreams where I see you thinking lead us not; deliver us. Wish that I could keep just the won wisdom of arrival & not recall the journey here. Do you remember the great flames? They will return, you will see that they were always around, in the adjacent room that’s forever been there but that you’d never dreamed of opening. Open it: the lover sits at a small table sipping tea, doesn’t speak as you walk past them to the window above the sink, unsash it to harsh light. When you turn around they are not there. But they are not gone.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Man, what isn’t in “Elsewhere’s Rain”? It’s a signifier salad spritzed with petrichor. It’s honestly a bit over-laden: personal narrative (I could take you to that motel room—the carpet was wine red), color-theoristic iconography, wordplay, a dead bird, a line I took from another of my poems then gave to a friend then took back, a shoutout to Jean Valentine (as is the whole poem), etc. Elsewhere’s rain is one of my favorite phenomena: the dark curtain of rain you can see on the horizon when it isn’t raining here. My past life, my active addiction, looks to me now like elsewhere’s rain. I can see it, off in the distance: an opaque, static haze.

Some of what isn’t in that poem is in “I Was Here Before & Will Be Here Again” because, you know, life is cyclical, and one day I might drive back into that rain again. I hope not, but I might. Sorry to get existential, but it’s importantly true. I have been through a lot and will go through it all again in some form, the good and the bad and the amorphous. I hope the middle section of this poem, which is the last poem in my book, where I allow myself to preach, once, briefly, is not too annoying. There is much we do not know about why we are here. But I suspect, in terms of some unknown variable(s), our universe is a test. Perhaps it is being run for the benefit of something that no longer exists. Everything—your whole life—feels like a test because it likely, in some ultimate sense or degree, is. Data may well be collected or collectable at the universe’s end by something, even if you do not think you will be discernable as an entity within it.

AJ White is a poet and educator from north Georgia. AJ’s debut poetry collection, Blue Loop, was selected for the 2024 National Poetry Series by Chelsea Dingman, to be published by University of Georgia Press in September 2025. AJ’s poems have won the Fugue Poetry Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and an Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Tara Betts. Other poems have been published recently in Best New Poets, Overheard, West Trade Review, and in the anthologies Ecobloomspaces and Green Verse. AJ lives and teaches creative writing in New York.

2 Poems

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.

poems from Zombie Vomit Mad Libs

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 ::

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.

2 Poems

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.

Keeping a Home

Poetry / Abbie Kiefer

Kiefer-Keeping-a-Home-2024

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.

3 Poems

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.

2 Poems

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.

2 Poems

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.

2 Poems

Poetry / Aurora Shimshak

Shimshak-Poetry-20241–1

Shimshak-Poetry-2024–2

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.