'the dark towards her' — poetry by Jordan E. Franklin

Break: poet and her friend share (a joint, a bench)

For Kay

and the park, once endarkened, gleams
and all the grass lets out a choral breath
and all the streetlamps bleed amber
like honey
and the smoke burns through the anxiety
in the poet’s chest
and the projector upstairs breaks before
she can hit the ground
and all the canaries with their gas masks
perch warm in her lungs
and school was weeks away
and home was hours away
and her body obeys
and her arms can fit around her
and her grin rose green again
on the third puff
as if painted with re-agent
and all the cats and dogs broke
the dark towards her
and she’s Snow White’s song —
glowing epicenter of life,
Demeter with Persephone
in her arms, sprouts seasoned
between two kindling fingers
and Morrissey was wrong—the light
goes out
and her friend ignites it, passing it again
and the heat’s a baptism
and this is what her mother told her
prayer was—the words over-
flowing the mouth

and the being held.

---

poet’s day: “The Night Eats the World”

After Derek Ellis

There are no miracles here. I can’t take back
all I put inside this earth. I climb the walls
to watch the white break, hoping my father
hasn’t lied again—that he stays where he fell
into the dirt. Now I know he isn’t the rain.
The lightning in the distance is neither
his tongue nor God’s ready to scold me
for my doubt. Out here, neither the pen nor
the bullet withdraws. There are no more self-
edits. No more pills. No cross outs, the land
before me empty and blank as a page. Beyond
it all, meaning writhes free of its straps.
In this hungry, unbroken Night, I am alone
again. I lift my pen. Finally, I mean what I say.

---

Jordan E. Franklin hails from Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton and a PhD from Binghamton University. She is the author of the poetry collection, when the signals come home (Switchback Books), and the chapbook, boys in the electric age (Tolsun Books). Her work has appeared in Breadcrumbs, Frontier, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Southampton Review, Torch Literary Arts, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize, the 2020 Gatewood Prize, and the 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project Award.

'This tentacled blue' — poetry by Jennifer Martelli

In memorium. Rest in beauty, poetry, & power, dear Jennifer Martelli. These poems, she said, were part of a manuscript inspired by Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria.

Stain

The blue ink bled onto my white bed sheets:

blue spreading through three layers of clean

cotton, deep as the thirsty bleached cloth

would allow. The rain must have ended

when I slept, and my felt-tip pen fell loose

between my legs, the soft nib all dried up

and emptied. And now, how will I ever fix

this mess? This tentacled blue. The sun

broke through the east windows and the hue,

violet. Ventricle blue. Look at all the words

I didn’t write. Not even my hands, splayed

wide, not both of them, could hide this stain.

---

Are we demons / or are we birds?

— Open Again, Thom Yorke

My grandmother forbade birds in her home—
not in a painting, not on a silk scarf, not on a tin of cocoa powder, not Dove soap, not on a sack of Birds’ Eye vegetables, barely even the ocular NBC peacock.

Last night, I woke again at 3:00 am, and thought of her long needle— how she could knit an afghan in one night while watching television, how she could make thick ropey braids that ran up and down the length of wool.

I’d fallen asleep with the TV on mute, its blue light surrounded me.
My east-facing window let in one star, a crescent moon.
And the sound of a bird calling at night.

What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?
I caused a friend’s pain, then comforted her? I told my father I would dance on his grave? I was fearful of my own children’s loneliness?

Things that fly in the dark aren’t always bats.
For some birds, the mockingbird, it’s safer to hunt at night.

---

Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Braving the Body Anthology, Verse Daily, Plume, Diode, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was also longlisted  for the Massachusetts Book Award, and My Tarantella, also longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and named finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com

'we could be orchards' — poetry by Disha Trivedi

AUTOPSY OF DESIRE

In the mirror my mother and I have the same eyes, but when I fan my lashes to prick myself with eyeliner, the lashes, they smile. Oh. Need like a seed at my center. I wish I had more than this smile made of plastic, gunmetal, the last scrap of pancake made from last scrap of powder, my father with apples crushed into batter, the apples from orchards my lover walks over, his feet pressing rinds into earth, all that pulp, all that matter. Tell me I matter, and I will lay down like the wine to be gathered. Tell me I matter, and I will walk like a wife from the mirror, oh, take my red teeth, which is to say, kiss me. In the mirror my mother and I decide upon future, and I take the scissors and cut both our hair to be sisters like we could be orchards; I am both root and flower, her hands ripped like mine will be ripping love from above like trees torn with apples. I take the whole branch. I pluck love like a pebble placed on both eyes. Mine, yours. I could give you coins if you open your mouth to take coins. Tongue on tongue on rib. Open my mouth and fit the rib in. Tie ribbons in the holes in this torso. Tie branches too. Tell me I matter, and I will lie down like a river for your orchard to feed on. Red as the ribbon of lip on my lip. Tell me I matter, and I will lie like a lover will lie like a mother will lie like a hand on a hand on a fist on forever, if forever is just the seed at the center to be cut.

---

THE MARE

I’m back here, in the slow.

Grief howls in like an animal,
then stills. Huffing. Uncertain

of forms and environs. Time becomes impassable
until lover comes and holds me,

just my thumb,
so tightly,

to prove that life still
loves me, and will leave me

be if that’s what’s needed
for me to come home.

Come home. Out of the slow,

to river. To hooves cut into wood floor.
A horse stands in the room with me.

She’s grey and she’s tired.
She just wants to walk home.

---

Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her work appears in The Shore, Rust & Moth, The Women's Issue anthology from The Harvard Advocate, and elsewhere. She is an editor and co-founder at M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird.  

‘the hour of my deathspell’ — poetry by Shari Caplan

Controra

It is the hour of my deathspell.
I wear a corona of rosemary smoke,
I contrive an entry into forbidden cloisters
of my own soft places where wait
the chimera, the child, the knife.

What we eat now, here in the shadowbed
heartbitter and darksweet tangs like medicine.
This is the hour of nourishment.

---

Summer of Cucumber Mint and I’m Leaving Him

of apricots and apathetic picnics her sweat an invisible necklace
on my clavicle crushed wild grapes and his hands kneading my thigh
summer of my fingerprints patterning his sunglasses summer of depression
glass clinking gin oyster ocean of dreams dissipating

summer of his long walk out of my mind
of flatness while he dazzles Marseille
of no moonlit guitar summer of a postcard in place of a plane ticket

summer with no sea to shock my nipples of his journey ripening
without me his potency unpicked peaches dropping onto dry grass

summer of reunions and hoarse karaoke at the queer bar
crop tops celebrating soft bellies summer of repressed madness
leaking onto pavement of penny pinching
summer of lies told with good intent
summer of his green blades slicing me to the quick

gloom girl summer in a red bardot bathing suit with a homemade Brazilian
in case he wants to summer of rock-hard plums of throwing his pebbles
back into the sea of regret and egrets spied from a shadowed canoe

summer of whipping my top off summer of retrogrades and vintage bandanas
of licking him in my imagined future of rhyming footsteps up to his bed
in the bruised haze of twilight

summer of come back for the love of god for the love of love for the love
of me for the plot for the pleasure
summer of the heart climbing out the window

summer of the lingering goodbye a tout a l’heure lingerie wept onto his floor
my elbow carving his scapula summer of the drowned oracle

summer of thorn and bumblebee of eternal rage amid the sweet-faced
buttercups of sunflowers crowding his doorstep like fangirls summer of his rise

summer of his exit summer of cancelled plans of crab legs sun-rotting
of his palm catching the drips of his palm lifted to his lips
summer of irrational irritation summer of uprooted beauty

---

Shari Caplan (she/her) is the author of "Exhibitionist" (Lily Poetry Review Books, Paul Nemser Prize, 2024), “The Red Shoes; a Phantasmagoric Ballet on Paper,” (Lambhouse Books, 2023), and “Advice from a Siren” (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Grimoire, Drunk Monkeys, and others. A poet, actor, and event organizer, Shari works at the intersection of poetry and performance and seeks to invigorate our collective imaginative potential. To learn more visit ShariCaplan.com.

'this blood I libate' — poetry by Miriam Navarro Prieto

Almost Asleep / You Called Those Flowers Dragon Mouths  

The house you decided to trade for a life in the city is there,   
and then it’s not there anymore, just a void on Calle Real   
and I like it. Other times I would prefer not knowing   
how they redecorated, how many walls fell   
in the quest for the ‘open concept’ inside a pueblito so small   
nobody knows what that is (neither do I, in fact),   
but there it was: the ugly new patterns, the ochre tiles,   
the plastic-covered couches  
on the real-estate advertising my brother sent me.     

There I go, breaking in with a key   
that works as if they never changed the lock,   
ignoring the aftertaste of brandy   
and misogyny and dead ​​rabbits,   
I go straight to the patio, move stones,   
look down the well:   

 You, giver of life, bringer of death,   
swollen ankles, small frame, golden gaze,   
bones enduring cruelty, inflicting pain,   
twisted tongue, maternal   
love,   
come   
​​​up.   

To your power over my present I sacrifice   
these torrijas to placate your temper,   
this blood I libate to prove my resolve   
(ignore the lacking of eggs and milk and honey,   
accept your granddaughter with her refusal and her ​​hunger).   

 Come   
up.   

Then you talk at last,   
you recognize your faults,   
I cry and remember all the good parts.   

Now you can go back down,   
hunger appeased, recipes shared,   
soil over the well. Flowers planted   
where they always were,   
named as they should:    
bocas de dragón.

---

Miriam Navarro Prieto (she/her), Spanish artist drifting from performance art to drawing, currently mainly creating poems and artwork on autobiography, ecology, gender, queerness, and the politics of memory. Her first self-published poem collection Todo está vivo is also available in English as Everything Is Alive, translated by the author. Her poems have been featured in Capsule Stories and The Pinch among other journals, and her illustrations in The Winnow. Ecognosis, her second poem collection in Spanish, was a finalist for the I Letraversal Contest, and her poems in English have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net in 2024. She sends out a monthly bilingual newsletter on her creative process, with plants trivia, and translated literature.

'the tidal pull of night' — poetry by Jane Lewty

HYMN

1. Blame the ventral tegmental area, I’m going to coalesce
2. A pervasive sense of disquiet spreading. Like that Magritte-sky feeling I get
3. One day I will tell you about fury

1. No lyrid meteor shower, but tomorrow something will happen
2. A glitch in the deadpan awe of coherence, perhaps? Unbound energies tend
3. Fricatives elide, which means that often

1. We’ve cause to linger; be glacial in the tidal pull of night as if
2. to summon forth ghosts. Wounds can only be healed in reiteration if they’re there:
3. Every still life-esque is fury. Perhaps

1. all ceremony aspirationally bleeds into the future
2. Honored as wounds in the first place. Like lace under-evening-wear, maybe
3. you’d like to keep me affixed for longer?

---

STILL LIFE, AT 4PM

I started something:
the chronology of a day, mine
a fracturing sky, held
by smoke, spring, birds-eye,
rain tiny & florid. Outside is hard.
Hiding is perhaps easier
amid candles & room-angles
Or screens & their search. So, then
what is the difference between your existence
and that of a saint?

Well, that I never had – never –
such a feeling, tripping over joy.
Look at this work: the stare
goes nowhere into the world
but here – soft-cornered squares
in squares, squared wire with temper-
ing. Faint vapor of faces upped & hurled, lit
by flares. Since we’re not young, I need to
say I got what I wanted. Nothing warped,
no pain soft-rolled,
numbed & sleep-
talked into. The colors, they say bring me something
I can live with. We sit in the stretch amid storms,
convulsive ones. The surprise light is not heavy,
the petal-ing of orange only
where it ought to have been,
the loner-squalor of white
somehow fluoroscoped
& common to the bodies. Look outside: the sidewalks
are drying. With this set of placements:
mine, mined, my day, mine own
my hindself & new self
it is still hard to see oneself seen as.

---

Jane Lewty is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Bravura Cool (1913 Press) and In One Form To Find Another (CUP Poetry Center). She teaches art history and creative writing in Baltimore. 

These poems are forthcoming in Vespers (Kuhl House Poets, 2026).

'Guernica and grief in the image' — poetry by Sal Randolph

In the Image

Guernica and grief in the image, grief of mothers in the image, grief of fathers and children in the image, places where we once ate sweets in the market in the image, concrete in the image, wounds and death in the image, and again, is love wrong, I mean, morally wrong? There is revolution in the image, but I’ve lost the revolution the way the war was lost, and lost, and lost again. There is rising up and being beaten in the image. There is broken in the image, and strength in the image. And I wonder where I am in the image, if I am that leaf that was once on the tree when the tree stood, or if I am the bewildered bird looping the sky looking for home and there will never be home not for me not for you not for anyone in the image, there will simply never be home. I am not at home in the image, and I am not at home when I put the image down. And I know you want the image to stop being, I know you want the image never to have been, and I know, also, that you are glad hearted to be in the new image, in the forest of hands and the shouting up and the side by side and the walking and the writing and the speaking and the signing, and where, you are wondering, is that person I thought I knew, the one I thought would be here.

---

The Old Love

Let me love who I love, let me awaken, no, I mean let me wake up, let me wake up in the ordinary way, in the light from the window in the noise of the street in the noisy parakeet’s screaming, in the unknown of the stuttering day, in the unfolding coffee, in the screen, in the portal, in the thin knowledge of what is happening elsewhere, in Bernadette’s sink with the white clothes where I am getting clean, ordinary clean, whether I’m young in this story or not, whether I’ve cut my hair down so far it’s the shortest wherever I go, if I could drive myself a little mad with raw desire and experiment, if I could just love, only that, or, that again, the way a man stood in a crowded room and said we could never love anyone new, that it was always the old love coming around again, which means, I think, that it was never actually love in the first place, but then why did it begin with O, why did it end in silence, and I wonder about Louise alone in her house next door, retreating to the upper rooms, but anyway, let me forgive it all and let me put down the heavy things by the door and come inside at the end of the day.

---

Sal Randolph is an artist and writer who lives in New York and works between language and action. She is the author of The Uses of Art, a memoir of encounters with works of art. Her poems have been featured in BOMB, jubilat, La Vague, Oxidant Engine, Pamenar, Sound American, Vestiges, and elsewhere; her art work has appeared internationally at museums and in exhibitions including the Glasgow International, Ljubljana Biennial, Manifesta 4, and the São Paulo Biennial. Sal Randolph is a Zen priest and co-founder of dispersed holdings, a publishing project.

Her weekly is Free Words (salrandolph.substack.com).

'in this in-between time' — poetry by Mira Mason-Reader

On finding my grandmother

It’s always that time between night
and morning anymore. When no one thinks
about bellies or how to make friends at work.
I find myself here, inspecting how a peek of
my waist might appear if I lifted my arms (just so).

But today is not a day to be perceived. Today is
a day to commune with my grandmother
in this in-between time, to find her in
every shade of purple.

---

On finding you in the moonlight

As if everything shifted one degree to the left, off kilter;
like being pushed on a merry-go-round with one eye open,
watching the sky shake and then blur. How tentative this
space is, like the awe-filled acknowledgement
of conceding my crush out loud.

How softly the moon considers the shape of you–
touching you, neck down to belly, measuring your length
in dandelion stems, in candy wrappers.

Listening to you breathe next to me,
I’ll stay as long as you want.

---

Mira Mason-Reader is a writer and dancer living in Oregon. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing program from University College Cork, her work is forthcoming in the New York Quarterly and has appeared in Shō Poetry Journal, Grand Little Things, Cordella Press, ELKE, The Walrus Literary Magazine, and Voices and Visions Journal, among others.

‘the howling dark and bright’ — poetry by ire’ne lara silva

I see the poem when I dream

—after the painting by Octavio Quintanilla

in my

waking life my hands feel white fur soft and warm how do i say its musk is the scent of turquoise with an edge of burnt copper all of my memories rinsed in acid was it fury or was it tenderness all the burning

i hear

tiny huizache blooms falling in a sideways blizzard of xylophones have i ever tasted anything that wasn’t music on my tongue that wasn’t arpeggios or broken chords spiraling inside my body

what is

a body this shifting thing this impermanent thing this dark shining thing this dying living thing that dances when it breathes this fire thing that thunders even when it’s still that runs when it should tremble

is the

body more real when it pushes against another body or is it more real when beginning and ending lose all meaning i drove once through a cloud at dawn drove on a white caliche road and the world was pink and without dimension

my eyes

tasted spun sugar and if it had been even remotely possible i would have driven forever but the road came to an end i think it came to an end i think my hands touched time and black bone and all the howling

and then

i hear the coyotes the day howling of coyotes and the night howling of coyotes and the coyotes are calling me calling me to return to them and the howling is a lullabye and i coil my body and close my eyes

and i

dream and then i see the complete shape the skeleton the flesh the muscle the fur the fire the running i see the whole animal alive and free and hunting when i dream i see my entire self when i dream i see the entire poem

---

grief, revisited

they say grief is a shadow a black hollow a
deep well a silence without dimensions a
grunting limping thing an ache that fades
and fades and fades
they lie or i was built
wrong i know no fading thing i know i am i
live this bright howling thing electric arc’ing
lightning in every color everywhere all at
once
years have passed and it surprises
me still ambushes me punches me in the gut
a sudden memory an unexpected song the
intense yearning to share new things
how
casual other people are with their love or is
it that they are careless with their grief
tossing it over the first cliff they come to say
to it no i will not shelter you
it is not seemly
to weep and weep i will not let this loss or
any loss make me a child inconsolable and
alone i will pack this loss away in a heavy
box lock it seal it it will never see the light of
day no sound will escape it
i am animal in
my grief the passing of time means nothing
always something wailing always something
whimpering always the beast laying on its
side scratching at the earth
i know no other
way love and grief are in equal measure
each other’s kindling anyone would say it is
too much to ask to be loved this way too
much to say
if you love me love me this way
and if you lose me grieve me this way but
what are we if not fragile vessels of flesh
just barely able to contain all the howling all
the howling dark and bright

---

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers, two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, a comic book, VENDAVAL, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2025 Storyknife Writers Residency, the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction, a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Her second short story collection, the light of your body, will be published by Arte Publico Press in Spring 2026. http://www.irenelarasilva.wordpress.com

'all these lives swell up' — poetry by Marie Nunez

Crush/Wound

To set fire to veins is to scorch all fruits off the earth. A succulent desert is born. I eat ice cream every night, thinking, this is how you love in the middle of a dry season. Instead, the sugarmilk dissolves into water, into weight, and suddenly, we are no longer girl but ghostwoman. She wears her own topography, carves and decorates and hides all that she is. In an ancient mother tongue, this would mean supernatural grace. In this world, it only means, caution,

danger ahead.

---

Without

Absence is heavy when the landline rings at midnight and there, in the hollow silence, vibrates rage on the voice machine. Absence amplifies in the beginning of summer when all your friends celebrate in cataclysmic fashion in their signature youthful rebellion. Absence plateaus into a more permanent sadness come autumn. Absence is the one. Absence is the best friend turned heartbreak turned death because no one taught you the importance of time and momentum until adulthood. Absence is learning everything on your own. 

Absence is–

---

In The Midst of Healing

I.

I need to shut up before I disappear once again. At the center of myself will always be ghost. Sweetness says to slow down more often. My tongue doesn’t know how to speak these mindful languages, so she invents poetic emergencies to keep her busy. 

II.

Aloneness is allowing myself to be okay. To be more than that. This mood so exotic, I try to liken it to the history of my mothers. The first, always praying. The second, always wandering. The third, now working beyond the man. All these lives swell up. This manyed something gets to be too heavy sometimes. 

III.

The assemblage of my disorders is not to count all the ways I fail to love. But to continue to face the sun with enthusiasm and let that light feed my heart. To flirt between golden & not because yes, even this darkness contributes to my overall essence.

---

Marie Nunez has an MFA in Writing from VCFA. She has had work published in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Half Mystic Journal, and Ghost City Press. Her debut poetry book, I Bloom in the Dark, will be out December 2025 through Querencia Press. 

'something about becoming' — poetry by Isabelle Correa

AT 17

I wonder about the masculine
urge to prepare for the inevitable
apocalypse by buying steel bats
and acres of horses, the desire
for inevitability itself,
the engine behind legacy.
By a lake from my childhood
I slipped a boy into my mouth
in the grass in the afternoon
like a dream, like America shot
in the veins at the beginning
of the end. This is history
in my body killing it for fun.
What have we learned so far
from skinny dipping and spinning
doughnuts in the dunes? Church
can be anywhere. My heart belongs
to everyone but me. Mother is a myth
I made myself believe in on nights
I couldn’t fall asleep. Father is future-
less concrete. Last week I bled
in my uniform and left chemistry
early before she got to the elements.
Now I’ll never know the elements.
Oh well. I like to sit in the heavy heat
of the car after everyone else
heads inside. Maybe then
I will teach myself something useful.
Something about becoming.

---

LEARNING TO EAT MEN LIKE AIR
—title from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath

Three girls in our first apartment.
18 last spring. Believers in the sin
of the flesh. We could recite the book

of Romans while drawing
infinities with our hips. We could tie
a cherry stem with our tongues

into a cross. Freshly liberated, we were
learning the basics: how to separate
lights and darks, how to carry keys

like claws when walking at night,
how to take someone
in our mouths as if we did not

exist. We had boyfriends
like splinters in our hands.
In the dark, a hushed we can’t

but we did, and we didn’t break
or burn. Sucking skin,
we spat them out.

---

Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington state living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and is the author of the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. She is a winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize with Write Bloody Publishing for her debut full-length collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Pank, The Rebis, and more. Find her on Instagram: @isabellecorreawrites and on Substack: A Poem Is A Place.

'an amalgam double-ravenous' — a poem by Mallie Holcomb

bulimia (n.)

from ancient greek boulīmia,
literally “ox-hunger” as an affliction–

from boȗs, “cow”

and Līmos, “starvation;
the goddess of famine.”

an amalgam double-ravenous;
sunken sallow and holy,
hollow-loined, void-bellied
but bovine, waddling still
colossal alone in the
sacred wasteland and taken
by a hunger not human,
but both animal and divine.

---

Mallie Holcomb holds a B.A. in English from University of North Carolina Asheville. Her poetry has appeared in Ghost City Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and The Emerson Review. Lately she has been working in nonprofits, practicing yoga, and testing the veracity of “we publish both established and emerging poets.”

'we dream up black horses' — poetry by Alyssandra Tobin

---

Alyssandra Tobin is the author of PUT EYES ON ME NOT LIKE A CURSE, a chapbook published by Quarterly West in 2022. Her poetry appears in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, New Ohio Review, Grist, Fugue, and elsewhere. 

'I felt like I was disappearing' — poetry by Amirah Al Wassif

When My Arm Flew Into the Air

When my arm flew into the air,
I calmed myself by believing I must be dreaming.
Any moment now, I would wake to the sound
of the gecko that’s been living in my room
for the past four months.

I haven’t killed it.
I don’t want to.

I didn’t feel like I was flying.
I felt like I was disappearing.

You know that strange training—
when you teach your body to die,
and bit by bit,
you start to feel each part fade?

I smelled the okra stew
our ninety-year-old neighbor was cooking.
I saw a large yellow butterfly
telling a joke in Salvador Dalí’s ear.

He was trapped inside a painting
hanging across from the neighbors’ window.
I saw him laugh.

And I thought:
He really was mad.
Or maybe I’m the mad one.

It’s not easy to watch your arm
lift off into the air.
Not easy to ask:
Did you really detach from my body?
and hear it answer
in a voice beyond logic—
the voice of a muffled child,
as if his parents had rushed the burial,
believed he was gone too soon,
sealed the coffin,
and drove away.

When my arm flew up,
I thought:
This is delirium.
Maybe I’m dying.

Maybe I’m about to write a new poem—
one that will be rejected
by many editors
but adored by one person,
who will carve it into the bark
of a massive fig tree.

And after he walks home,
the fig tree will stir from its long sleep
and finish writing the rest of the poem.

I don’t know exactly what happened.
But I do know this:

Whatever part of you flies off
becomes braver
than it ever was
before.

---

Yesterday, I Met My Jinn Double

Yesterday, I met my jinn double.
Her fingers were shaped like forks.
She smiled at me three times—
with an upside-down mouth.

The roughness of her skin reminded me
of the last time I touched a leaf with my bare hand.

A long time ago,
back when trees could still be touched,
back when trees belonged to the earth.
Back when grape clusters were earrings—
and ropes to escape.

I knelt before her and whispered:
“How many times have they killed you?”
And I heard the echo:
“How many times have they killed me?”

I’m not her.
I don’t want to be her.
I’m free.
I flutter from flower to flower,
tasting mulberries,
playing with clay.

She points to the moon,
trying to pull it down with a rope.
I got scared.
I wet myself.

I’m not a child—
but fear makes everyone do that.
The baby next door does it.
So did my grandfather—
and he was a bank manager.

No one is bigger than fear.

She comes closer.
Her feet were shaped like hooks.
I step back.
Then again.
And again—
until I disappear.

Or wake up
from the dream.

---

Amirah Al Wassif is an award-winning poet with several publications to her name. Her poetry collection, For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate was published in February 2019 by Poetic Justice Books & Arts, followed by her illustrated children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories in February 2020. Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company published her most recent poetry book, How to Bury a Curious Girl in 2022. Her forthcoming poetry collection, The Rules of Blind Obedience will be released in December 2024.

Amirah’s poems have appeared in various print and online publications, including South Florida Poetry, Birmingham Arts Journal, Hawaii Review, The Meniscus, Chiron Review, The Hunger, Writers Resist, Right Now, Reckoning, New Welsh Review, Event Magazine, and many others.

'light in my teeth' — poetry by Lisa Marie Oliver

Aubade with Light In My Teeth

Daybreak. Broken fever.
Drip of the eggshell sink. Light
in my teeth. Quavering smoke-brain,
mute steps. Panel of bright fronds,
pink orbs presses window panes.
Last night, the mimosa tree fell.
I did not hear it. How not to gorge.
How not to fear. I’m not afraid
he said before he died. Almost
last words. I did not understand
the way he was brought down
minus any thunder. How to respire.
How to describe a silk tree’s last
gasps. How to shrine the afterwards,
unquiet altar of branches traced
with morning. Cool brow.
Bark-husk. Honey. Resin.

---

12 questions
after Bhanu Kapil

On a mountain trail at the ocean we visit an alder with split trunks intertwined, call it ours.

*

Every day, I feed crows and hummingbirds. A seagull perches on my neighbor’s roof, watching hungrily. 200 miles from home. 144 hours as the bird flies.

*

In this metaphor I’m all three variations of birds.

*

After my lover dies, I visit the tree. I offer feathers, skin, hair, shells.

*

A pale whelk on the sand: apex, suture, whorl, rib, striations, outer lip, aperture, spire.

*

Memory is a heavy hooked beak.

*

I walk fully clothed into the ocean. Seagulls squat on wet sand, mired with rain. For one brief moment, I remember nothing.

*

Despite expectations and desire, there is nothing silent beneath a wave.

*

After he dies, I pull out my hair. It takes many days to break my teeth. Feed them to the seagulls. Throw each arm into the sea. These knees. My cleaved feet. Bury them under marram grass until all that remains is a useless engorged heart.

*

Rain all night. Fog shore. No partition between wave and sky.

*

A balcony with a view of basalt sea stack. He is too sick to leave the bed. I eat quietly to not wake him. I’ve never tasted anything so perfectly sweet.

*

Whenever I consume a huckleberry.

---

Lisa Marie Oliver is the author of "Birthroot" (Glass Lyre Press). Recent poems have appeared in Harbor Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rust and Moth, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her son. For more: lisamarieoliver.com