Guest Editor
Editor’s Choice “Dedication with No Book”
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“Unititled Study”
Morenike Olusanya, popularly known as Renike, is an award-winning visual and book cover artist, and illustrator. When she’s not creating masterpieces or challenging herself to learn more, she is a mentor to artists that need guidance. She also enjoys working with authors, helping them to bring their vision and books to life by creating beautiful book covers and inner artworks for them. She has designed and illustrated book covers for Notable people including Aminata Touré, Germany’s first Black female minister, award-winning American author Coe Booth, and Jamaican-American author Nicola Yoon.
Her personal work focuses on presenting black women in soft and subtle tones, which is in direct contrast with the way black women are often portrayed, rooted in the stereotype that they always have to be strong. The core message in her work is to represent black women growing and existing as young people who are experiencing life in the world. For Renike, art is an avenue to record her personal journey through life. It is her way of creating a relatable and safe environment where black women with shared experiences are their full selves, whoever that might be. She says that one of the greatest compliments she has ever received is hearing women say that her art creates a safe space for them.
Renike has a Bachelors Degree in Visual Arts (Graphic Design) from The University of Lagos, Nigeria. She has been featured on platforms like Vogue, CNN Africa, Culture Custodian, Okay Africa, The Guardian, and others. Renike has worked with brands like Dark & Lovely, Hulu, Routledge, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Wilson’s Juice Co and Olori Cosmetics, amongst others. She was recognised as one of the honourees on Leading Ladies Africa’s 100 Most Inspiring Women in Nigeria in 2021 and was nominated for The Future Awards Africa Prize for Art and Literature in 2022. She won the Lord's Achievers - Special Recognition Award: A Lady Making Impact Through Art in 2022.
Poetry
INDEX OF POETS + WORKS
Ann Fisher “The Line Between”
Daisy Bassen “Naturally”
Frank William Finney “Up on the Roof in Smoke”
James Seaton “Paradox”
Januario “Marginalia”
Jesse Raymundo “Devotion”
JL Maikaho “Riddle me this”
Kat L’Esperance-Stokes “Backseat Driving”
L. Ward Abel “Anxious Sky”
Sukhvir Kaur “giants”
Thomas Mixen “Worldwide Renaissance”
Valley C. Shaia “divisible by two”
“ echoes”
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Jessie Raymundo teaches high school literature and composition at PAREF Southridge School. He is a graduate student in the Department of Literature at De La Salle University-Manila. His poetry has appeared in various publications in print and online. He lives in a small city in the Philippines with his cats.
Charcoaled in the mouth of March—
even the flowers, their fingers bruising
over these prayers & twisters we have
no names for. Around us the rust remains
unrepentant as we trace the tremors of thirst,
the silence of supper. My tongue
twists this tale into the shape
of your sins. I’m thinking of rain,
whether the window we’ve whittled down
to devotion will drown or smolder.
I’m pressing an ear against your heart—
the misfired words I take upon my tongue.
Light, you’ve carved me with sorrow.
I’m afraid I don’t know what to make of this
fractured glare, this face full of sampaguitas.
Some gardens frighten me. In their mouths,
I imagine, eyes wait. Although it’s not
in your nature to be baleful, you’d batter
bodies if it meant making this world
more visible. How to tell delirium from atrium,
recovery from wreckage? There's no way
to detach this morning from its dawn.
Take me to the evening that outlives all
other evenings, that unseals hectares of bruise
blue with blasted petals to touch on.
Take me to the dusk that drags
the moon across the sea,
my heart leavening & leaving its hunger.
Devotion
Atrium
by, Jessie Raymundo
The shovel still ridicules
the mud for the imprints
in its bosom
as though the tip of its
head did not plunge
into the wet foundation.
The tiger still throws
a ferocious tantrum at
the antelope,
who protests to retain
his flesh, who shouts to
his brother
when danger awakens
from its sleep searching
for breakfast.
The stone still complains
of the diamond’s raw
brilliance,
as if equality is owed
to him, as if he didn’t bear
the Earth for his shine.
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James Seaton is a poet, spoken word artist, and author based in Brooklyn, NY. He has performed pieces about topics ranging from race to faith and identity at venues like the 2015 NAACP ACT-SO national poetry competition, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and BRIC Brooklyn. He published his debut poetry book, “Light Pollution: a collection of poems,” in February 2022.
Paradox
...he asks me
why it is my furrowed brows crease my forehead
and i say with a smile behind my lips
darling,
i have known women who drink storms for morning tea
and
sup on the whirlwind of cyclones
whose voices vibrate thunder
(the same that keeps you up at night)
whose hands are monsoons
that weave over barren land to paint full bloom
and
their spines are not like yours or mine
(grown too comfortable in life)
their spines--resurrected from ancient bleeding earth
now a composed terrain
overwhelming fortresses
and all the while
the sun sleeps at her feet
my land
many times before
i have been told that i am not pretty enough
perhaps my sun-kissed skin
is a shade of melanin too threatening
or maybe it is that mother nature’s grass
grows wild on my legs
...it might be that the temples erected upon my chest
are not great enough for your hands
but still
they try to dig their flags into the flat of my belly
as a show of strength:
that they were able to weaken my knees
and force me to collapse at the feet of conquest
...but no flags stand on my shores
because this land is not for sale
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Sukhvir is a J.D. turned stay at home mum to a vivacious toddler by day and an aspiring writer, scribbling away under fluorescent lighting by night. She weaves elements of her Punjabi heritage, faith, childhood, and love stories into her poems. You can find some of her pieces published in the Santa Clara Review, Poets Choice, Treehouse Literary Review, Anti-Langorous Project, and Prevention at the Intersections.
giants
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L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester Review, Main Street Rag, others), including a recent nomination for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is the author of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry. His latest collection, Green Shoulders: New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow) will be released this year. Abel resides in rural Georgia.
Roiled, the season of hurricanes
reclines into a soft chair of gulf
water and onto the great green wet
tops of pine that seek that ocean
all along the coastal plain.
It lulls. We are lulled to repose
within our homes, we mimic small
cliffside dragons, winged as if ready.
But we escape notice until the ground
gives way. Still we burn
all the way down.
Such are these eroded clay fingers—
clawing to make canyons of our
falling earth. Sky grows anxious.
The song begins. No one knows
the words except
birds.
I will finish this thought—
a reflection of the western gloam
wanes, resists,
flames-out over tides
as tables predict their highest
daily brim.
I grasp that all this will happen
even after I’ve died
which challenges
the concept
of gone.
Anxious Sky
I want to finish this thought
by, L. Ward Abel
your protagonist sells her debut novel after going to auction
Envying a fictional character is real,
I’m certain of it, though I haven’t divined
How I will prove it to anyone. Perhaps
PET scan imaging dappled yolk-bright,
Vermeer’s weld, dyer’s mignonette the yellow
That all other yellows are judged against,
Just as bright, neurons ravenous
Coveting that which is most distant,
The imagination of the imagined,
An unruly sentience. Only in a novel
Could I write a grant captivating enough
To obtain adequate funding and my name
Would need to be Kit Marlowe.
Are you jealous? That scans madder.
Naturally
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Daisy Bassen is a poet and community child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Salamander, McSweeney’s, Smartish Pace, Crab Creek Review, Little Patuxent Review, New York Quarterly, and [PANK] among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Erskine J Poetry Prize. She was nominated for the 2019, 2021, and 2022 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family. Her fiction is represented by Jennifer Lyons of Jennifer Lyons Agency.
Website: daisybassen.com
Twitter: @dgbassen (for now, anyway!)
FB: @Dgbassenauthor
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JL Maikaho is an emerging Nigerian poet, storyteller and essayist. Her works explore diverse themes from women's rights, ethno-religious conflict and climate change; to romance, mysticism and surrealism. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Brittle Paper, Nnoko Stories, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. A SprinNG fellow (2022 cohort), she's also a scholarship recipient of the SprinNG Advancement Fellowship, has been longlisted for the Bill Ward Prize for emerging authors and shortlisted for the MAFEELDA Essay contest. JL writes from Gombe, Nigeria and tweets @JLMaikaho.
Scaffolds of reason
but a poor spirit can break bones
and you land into dark clouds
into violent floods.
Who granted eagles immunity
soaring above gloom and dejection
It means they miss out on the healing rain.
See, the vultures too are sign
that death can replenish life
that nocturnals do not abhore the sun
but revere its light from a respectable distance.
It is a thing of majesty
how they spread their wings
in a way that says
a dark knight doesn't fear flight
no matter how dark the night.
Yet in these wings, a certain kind of
darkness dizzies the heart
like aloneness seeking salvation in a desert
like an oasis complaining about drought
because she heard about the lucky bamboo
whose roots were not annointed to search
excruciatingly for their sustenance.
In her defence
why must the date palm evolve to be content
with never being able to quench her thirst
always tethering on starving to death
her rigid bones often the only
succour for many a voyager
lost in the valleys of traumatic stress
taking her strength in exchange for their
yoke and this is no joke
now riddle me this:
what would be born if nothing had died?
Riddle Me This
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Januário Esteves was born in Coruche and was raised near Costa da Caparica, Portugal. He graduated in electromechanical installations, uses the pseudonym Januanto and writes poetry since very young. In 1987 he published poems in the Jornal de Letras, and participated over the years in some collective publications.
Charles Baudelaire
Despite Paris experiencing the industrial revolution
in suffocating soot and exploitation of
children and workers to the delight of
bourgeois moral decay sailed like
a sailboat loaded with plague that brought to
the alleys a nauseating smell under a sky
metallic that corrupted fearful souls
and installs the tedium and dismay of an anguish
virus that can only be corrected through
artificial paradises in the city that is hell
seeks in the drunkenness of hashish the cloak
diaphanous reality that makes you see better the
things of redeemed errors and insults are not
avenged the just mighty and subtle opium
relax you maliciously in sweet voluptuousness
of the spleen and in the sickly flowers of evil.
Marginalia
Miguel Torga
It was in the earth that he felt good digging
telluric roots of the past, cold anchorite
and spartan persisting in the crags of memory
entangled in doubt, lying on the boulders
alvitrava greek odes close to the damp floor
among the oaks in ascetic rigor
from the hard earth that marks you for life
as the heather shines on the granites
emerges in singing the pain that moves him
look upon the afflicted as a pious physician
peacefully revolted by the hungry violence
of virtue of tenderness of beauty, always shouting
in the revealing light of the warmth of intimacy
between the terror and the crying that gags him
in the river of lamentations that makes him uproar
retaining faith in immediate and earthly things.
Marginalia
by, Januario
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Ann Fisher lives and writes at the base of the Green Mountains in Vermont. She is Fiction Co-Editor of Mud Season Review. Her most recent work appears in Samjoko Magazine; you can find her poetry and prose in About Place Journal, Heartwood Literary Magazine, and The Sonder Review, among others.
underneath the porch roof
I’m cool and safe,
screens protecting me
from all manner of flying irritants
thick line of impenetrable shade
incremental, shrinking
soon, the long eaves will succumb
to the sun’s trajectory
expose the porch
to blazing heat of afternoon
I’ll close the blinds
cut off the view with hope
of keeping cool
isn’t that the problem though-
some of us have porches
and hope
bathed in easy shade
whispers of billowing leaves
only the slightest of interruptions
while others stand
bare-backed in the sun
leaving this long line drawn
in shadowed demarcation
we gather
food on our plates
laughter &
the taste of the sea
on our tongues
a tide of talk
passing with the róse
the rise of friendship
white sailed, snapping
once strangers waving
from distant boats
now shored together
in this island kitchen
awaiting a bubbling
blueberry buckle
The Line Between
Around the Pine-Planked Table
by, Ann Fisher
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Kat L’Esperance-Stokes was born in Santa Monica during a lightning storm. After, she fell in love with folklore, horror, and the concept of home. Now you could find her in Vermont for school or on Instagram (@katlstokes) and twitter (@katsurless).
The baby boy in the back seat wouldn’t remember this when he’s older you think (mainly because you had a hard time gathering the pieces from back then)(nevermind counting the miles since the first road trip into the humid swamp of your paternal). You hadn’t met your father yet. It would be a month before you do (and a year before he’s all you and the baby boy in the backseat now know and now run from) (yet he’s who the baby boy in the backseat and you keep finding). (it’s always a gut punch). Still it's our father that we find in canned soup and (trimmed or unkept) beards. We both run (you run from him (not your father or the baby boy but a man who doesn’t resemble either) even though you promised you wouldn’t. Not this time, this time I'm staying you had sworn.). But this was before (under the streetlight absent night and taking a breath to swallow the stars that have been dying since) mom stopped in Louisiana to stretch her legs. (remember you’re getting ahead of yourself, back to the backseat). Back to the baby boy in the backseat that will make you a mother by needing a mother (you’re a bare-chested child but he needs a mother more than you need anything) but right now your mother is in the driving seat pulling off into a motel parking lot. Your baby boy brother wouldn't remember this but there was fireflies. He called them stars and our mother let him. She wasn't one for correcting. Still isn’t.
Backseat Driving
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Thomas Mixon has fiction and poetry in MAYDAY, Pinhole Poetry, Paragraph Planet, and elsewhere.
They’re blowing leaves next door
onto staked-out tarps. In Germany
they’re burning lignite straight
through winter’s longer nights.
In southern Pakistan the bellowing
from a stray cat continues past
the forty day temptation mark,
as water takes it time to leave.
It’s darker than it should be
in Dakar, the sudden wind and sand
puncturing cars. Inside our hearts
the valves conceive the rhythm
to this worldwide renaissance.
It’s a dirty beat. In London
climate activists throw nosh
at the Virgin of the Rocks.
There’s a metaphorical beast
in the cave, whose growling
can’t be heard above the rush
of coarser amplitudes, of blood.
Worldwide Renaissance
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Valley C. Shaia is a graduate of JMU, VCU, and Lesley U with an MFA in Creative Writing for Young People. Additionally, she is a member of Tin House YA '22 and a scholarship recipient of the Highlights Foundation. When she's not writing her Lebanese-American fantasy novel, she chugs coffee at indie RI bookstores.
i am divisible by two,
he says,
Sexuality & Psyche.
& he does not feel the need to
pursue either of my realities
any longer.
in the pages of his story,
i am a chapter.
perhaps not even that, perhaps
hardly worth a mention.
he included me for the sole purpose of
driving his plot forward,
as he does with everyone else.
i thought i was a bookmark.
i think i am wrong.
i like to imagine he craves a single detail that,
in the end,
i do not afford him.
he has seen all parts of me besides
Anger & Grief.
tomorrow, he will see one.
in his mind, he will see the other.
him, aloud: i don’t think i should sleep here tonight.
me, within: i will not cry in arizona.
over & over, my mantra,
i repeat it as
aftershocks of his declaration
seize my brain, as the
hours stretch past like
putty,
clinging to the corners of that
terra-cotta bedroom.
he details in uncertain ambiguities how
he has decided
i am binary
& he is no longer willing to make the
proper calculations this
relationship requires.
meanwhile, i am making my own calculations:
the travel i endured,
the invisible expenses of the past
five months which will
never receive their
cash-in value.
him, aloud: i am an artist. i do not have the time.
me, within: am i not? do i not?
so much has changed,
he claims,
inside the six weeks where we
labeled our progressing love story.
it seems he doesn’t remember how
he slipped into
my messages &
made me think i was
falling for the Nice Guy.
months of casual inquiry turned
personal investment,
where the question of whether or not we
were on the same page
went from theorem to
proof,
where he said,
he was doomed the moment he saw me.
where he said,
he wanted me in arizona.
him, 10/19: i’ll be honest.
him, 01/19: i don’t lie.
me, now: you won’t. you do.
perhaps, i am retroactively collecting what
i am now owed through the
myriad of gifts that appeared in the mail.
the shirt on my birthday.
the sunday package of my favorite cookies.
on christmas when
i earned
an imported bottle of scotch with a love letter & an
engraving which sent me to my knees for him
for the first time.
he thinks, he is the one who is owed.
he thinks, he is sacrificing his story.
so
he summons me across the country to
claim his consolation prize, to
divide me by
two
in his king-sized bed.
& as he splays me across the sheets &
doesn’t
tell me he missed me,
i intrinsically know he is
laying me bare in
more ways than one.
he has reached a choice in his manuscript.
he is an artist & this is what
his scene detailing me calls for.
this is the Perfect Break.
echoes creep,
decomposing fruit hidden
under floorboards.
ply up wood &
find the collection of
sundries still burdened,
weighing down the
cottage of me.
filth of ages.
twentyeight ages.
twentyeight years,
tucked away within
pine boxes.
here!
come see ribbons
buried,
circus whips
my mother
ringmaster
used to
tame.
here!
feel cotton
money,
picked by
me &
spun for my
sisters.
here!
heirlooms of
partners past.
rotting rose petals &
shards of hearts.
still draw blood.
watch:
more shed off.
glass needle
doghair.
echoes, echoes
through this house.
no witching hour.
free to come &
play.
some trifle more than others,
bursting out of
hidey-holes &
dancing
round the room.
be stronger,
i whisper.
be braver.
but there are days with no
exorcism, &
they hiss,
you are not enough.
rendered to my
knees
from all the
noise.
newly broken
among rabble.
time dawns when
floorboards will not
cage.
divisible by two
echoes
by, Valley C. Shaia
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Frank William Finney is a retired university lecturer from Massachusetts who taught literature at Thammasat University in Thailand for 25 years. His work has appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies including The Bluebird Word, Drawn to the Light Press, Pocket Fiction, and Portrait of New England. His chapbook The Folding of the Wings was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022.
Kat used to crawl out the window
to the nearest roof
to catch rays
in her swimsuit and shades.
Her plank was the bridge
that saved our lives
when the three-storey fryer
where we lived caught fire.
Back on the ground
the talk went round:
A crone on the first floor
smoked in bed.
Her last cigar,
the coroner said.