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
Writers + WORKS
Mary Christine Delea
Beth Brown Preston
Robbie Gamble
Amelia Díaz Ettinger
Tim Kahl
Mike Wilson’s
Jennifer Campbell
R. Joseph Rodríguez
Paul Ilechko
Kathryn McDanel
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Tim Kahl is the author of five books of poems, most recently Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019), California Sijo (Bald Trickster, 2022) and Drips, Spills, Bursts, Tangles, and Washes (Cold River Press, 2024). He is also an editor of Clade Song. He builds flutes, plays them and plays guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos as well. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.
The sycamores are stripping themselves slowly
in this heat. Their bark peels off in a heap
during this summer striptease. I can't stop
watching their big bobbing leaves, so green
they give new meaning to all the verdant teasures
I have ever seen. I may behold the solid
Bradford pears for their springtime shimmer of
petals; they create their winter litter in March
with all the white they spill. It's an enlightenment,
sprinkles of blossom and reason scattered on
the ground. Soon the plums will start their
concert of falling, and the figs will interrupt
at every avid moment. The towering oaks
toss their acorns to the floor and call foul.
All the trees seem to be appeasing the ground.
What kind of criticism has caused this display?
So many will say it has cut them to the core,
damaged their brittle wits to where they can
only believe in their own quiet habit of
carefully submitting. They follow how each one
is falling, driven by the hard data the wind carries
which shapes their days and decisions.
Gaslight
The subject of the opera was light itself.
It scattered on the dark leather furniture
where the shut-in rehearsed her day.
The sun drew down into night
and rose again in the morning.
The days began to flicker and run together.
That was when the soprano sang of phantoms,
her former selves returning
during a haunted waltz.
The gas in the room drifted.
The past resumed its taunts
in the play of lights.
It Held the Silence
It held the silence like a cup holds ice,
like a wheelbarrow carries stones from the tilled gardens
where we had once grown rumors as tall as sunflowers.
They were ancient. They came packaged with our phones
that the boys explored with special vehemence
and the girls expected would nest their voices into clots.
From the tops of transmission towers it fell,
a strange and statically-charged thrum
that echoed through the canyons of the boulevards
and brought on the spooky feeling of the cryptic dark.
The light of day was losing its power to move us;
instead we were led by the light of our phones.
When it became clear we could no longer contain it,
that it injured the part of the brain geared for self-control,
we sharpened our expressionless glare. Contempt rose
for those who might initiate chatter and wild gatherings.
The capable were singled out for particular scorn, their clattering
hands finding a way to hold the new way together.
The signals had always been there marking the great quiet.
Devices were mounted on walls for a chance to measure it,
quantify its eerie talent for getting us to abdicate to its charm.
We surrendered to the sound of some frequency binding us
to each other, overconnected, placated by a strange stillness.
We were satisfied with how well it held the silence.
Blue Getcha
Blue.
Getcha. Blue Getcha.
You betcha. Yeah. Can do.
Grace note talk-through. In the background
a long solo, blue getcha. Though
no time to catch up on sleep, so . . .
blue solo. Blue getcha go. To
tenor sax exit.
In a hurry,
replies
to the night:
blue getcha.
Blue getcha. The clickety clack bass walk talk about the sky at night. Stars.
Stars and sandbags stop the river overflow.
Train movin' slow—autumn leaves.
Accidentals and the inner globe.
Steel toes on the veterans who show up to
use it up, keep it, keep it up to tempo—
a little sneaky snare to pop. Pop pop.
Rimshot —— gettin' actual,
down to it,
blue getcha.
Blue static. The cufflinked animal.
Fresh blue on the timing target. Blue stamina.
Electricity flyin' all around the gentle giants,
a matter for October to pick up
throw out a blue envelope on the downbeat.
The past so precious, you gotta
go, go, go, go, go.
Gotta know the total opposite of instant breeze.
Fujifilm these mysteries, this workin'-to-please
and go.
Blow blue, baby.
Blow. Blow.
Blow blue getcha—
together in the widest side show.
The Damaged Cult
The food of humans is all made of souls.
We love the rim of the wound.
Someone bites at the coming of spring
and tosses live fish into the sweetness of the gut.
The quiet mercy expands to include the military.
They drill in the dark with folded hands.
When the crowd tangles with the cathedral's sanity,
the abusers shade their eyes from the crucifixion.
The exquisite dinner is released from the spiritual thicket
like the bird of ancient games played with collar and blade.
A hand is certified large with a fork and fired gun,
and the common prayer covers the name on the grave.
The hidden plan tends to the burial of the peasant.
Some imaginative machine possesses and governs.
A man dreams he has studied how to perfect leather.
He draws wool around his neck in the winter prison.
He is the nocturnal hunter who ambushes bruised flesh
and sparks the initiates to take charge of the damaged cult.
Critiques of the Trees
2 AM Staccato in Kansas City
Holy flowers floating in the air
were all these tired faces
in the dawn of Jazz America.
–Jack Kerouac
I’m nursing my fifth or sixth cocktail
as you inhale your seventh or eighth Manhattan
We’re drunk, so nothing matters
except for the jazz band massaging up and down every scale except for the orange skins twisted in whiskey like DNA strands except for you bluffing about being our designated driver
A musician blows into his saxophone
and the room,
red and warm as the womb,
spins in lazy circles
as a man twice our age—
no,
three times our age—
kisses your cheekbone.
& while the trumpet buzzes,
the notes sweeter than honeycomb,
I think of the Beatniks
promising jazz is free-form,
a stream-of-consciousness
waiting for the tension to resolve.
But we’re a thousand miles from home
when the music dissolves, and I’m woozy with rage because you’re still bluesy,
swaying on the dance floor,
with the old man
who opens his wallet
like a mouth that’s always hungry to buy more.
When the music finally stops,
the old jiver grabs your arm
and I don’t like the way his fingers press into your skin like he’s trying to play you
like you’re ivory keys, and he’s all brass
It’s 2 AM in Kansas City
when he baritones,
“Don’t worry, I’ve got money, doll.”
It’s 2 AM in Kansas City
when I drive us back to our motel on improv alone. It’s 2 AM in Kansas City
when you say,
still boozy, “He’s waiting outside.
I’ve got something to sell.”
It’s 2 AM in Kansas City
when I block the door with my body,
waiting for the night to resolve
and you strip down to your underwear
to cry
Smoking a Cigarette Inside the Bonito Lava Flow
My American Spirit’s cherry tip
is ashing and smoking,
and inside the earth’s crust,
there is magma boiling,
awaiting another season of fire.
One day lava may
flood this land again,
but today
I’m astounded by the Ponderosa pines
stubbornly poking through the basalt rocks,
eager to grow in a cinder cone.
I rub my hand against the bark,
sniffing butterscotch,
and dig
the steel-toed tips of my hiking boots
into the ground,
trying to root into the moment,
but my cigarette is already half-gone
and the sun is already resting halfway
in the cobalt-blue sky.
Code Gray While Waiting for a Friend
I.
The receptionist clacked her acrylic nails
against the front desk’s veneer,
warning everyone who limped,
crawled,
or stumbled inside the emergency room
they’d have to wait
while nurses called codes over the intercom.
The static hiss of the speakers lessened
the cacophony of
retching,
groaning,
and panting.
Behind pale blue curtains,
doctors are bringing patients
with gunshot wounds and overdoses
back to life.
I slouched into the hard plastic of an ER chair,
waiting
as time condensed itself into
layers of vomit,
scabbing wounds,
and hissing oxygen tanks.
As a rotation of alcoholics
succumbed to cirrhosis by filling
their complimentary barf bags,
I started to believe only the faces changed.
II.
The ER nurses uttered code blue
(an adult is having a heart attack)
with the same passion a grocery store clerk
displays when needing help scanning iceberg lettuce,
but the nurses paused longer for code white
(a child is dying)
and used more inflection for code black
(the patient has died).
The waiting room
twitched most
when the intercom
crackled code gray.
III.
Exhausted,
I flitted in and out of consciousness
until a security guard escorted Code Gray
into the waiting room.
Once released,
she paced the waiting room,
cinching up her gown before the fabric wrinkled on the floor. I marveled at the walking skeleton,
dragging her feet as security pulled her along,
leaving behind a trail of scuffed rubber
on the freshly waxed linoleum.
Bruises ringed around her wrists like galaxies— little universes the size and the shape of police handcuffs. Her frail body a roadmap of wrinkles,
but her eyes
glimmering,
a deep,
eternal,
piercing,
baby blue.
IV.
Code Gray plopped down in the seat next to me, humming old Bob Dylan songs to herself,
banging the plastic chairs with her fists,
stomping the floor.
She swayed in the chair—
a frenetic pendulum
manic with motion,
as if she’d dissolve
if she lost inertia.
She muttered,
“I’ve been here before;
the wheel turns…
it turns,
it’s turning.”
She reminded me of a smooth stone,
skipping and skidding
across dimensions,
trapped in multiple timelines.
“We’re all connected; it’s the same,” she murmured,
lost in fragments of truth
crystalized in cirrus-clouded thoughts.
V.
The security guard asked Code Gray if there was anyone she could call, handing her a phone.
With knobbed fingers,
she twirled the cord into curlicues like a schoolgirl.
She beamed
a toothy smile,
and then marveled over the dial tone,
“Oh, honey, don’t you know
I don’t have anyone here anymore?
I can’t reach anyone with a phone,
not in this realm.”
She turned to me,
grinned,
and grabbed my hand,
rubbing her sandpaper palms
against my lifeline,
static electricity waltzing
between our fingertips.
She whispered,
“It’s okay;
all energy goes to the same place.”
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Kathryn McDanel is a poet who chases lost moments. Her work has been featured in Atlas Obscura, Oakland Arts Review, High Shelf Press, and other literary journals.
Amissa Momento
..Echolalia blue as the wind’s wilting tail shaping
me as I discover who I am stiffening beneath
the adaptive sun that leans forever to the left
I gaze out over the beach there has been
no response to my letters and as I wait here
so far from the ground that I feel closer
to the brassy sliver of sleeping moon I finally
identify that which is essential and begin
to discard the rest a hot breeze ruffling my hair
joy so close now that I can taste it there are kites
overhead red stripes on golden glimmer cloth.
Imaginary Cave Sonnet
The time that we were lost in a cave
there was no cave it was all in our imagination
the bitter cold and the seeping damp the carved
wooden statues painted silver and gold
and the deepest red we thought we heard them
singing as we passed through doorway after doorway
and somewhere far above us we knew that
it was snowing the snow thickening the deep
white surface of the frozen lake I could see
it from my bedroom window that rattled
as the wind pummeled the house which was not
and had never been a cave there was nobody
else here except for me the walls painted black
as despair waiting for the ceremony to begin.
Preparation
Goslings swirl around their unmoving parents
but all you can think about is an overdue PowerPoint
it’s a long way from here to the estuary
and the trees are mostly oak and maple and white-
trunked sycamores that ease their way down
into the swift water of the creek last night
we ate at our usual restaurant and you had your usual
salad back home I cleaned my bike in preparation
for an upcoming ride pumped tires lubed
chain we climb hills as both penance and adventure
but the largest hills are always the ones we don’t reach
somewhere ahead of us on the way to the sky
the higher the clouds you say the deeper
the shadows as we carefully navigate
the scatterings of goose droppings that stain
the sandy path edged with Queen Anne’s lace
and I understand what you mean and squeeze
your hand in silent acknowledgement.
Lost and Found
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Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter. He was born in Barnsley in the north of England, and attended Royal Holloway College, University of London, for his Bachelor’s degree. He now lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Free State Review. His first full-length book, “Fragmentation and Volta”, was published in 2025 by Gnashing Teeth Publishing. His second book is planned for 2026 publication by Sheila-Na-Gig. He reads for Marrow Magazine.
Was it Miles Davis' "Kinda Blue" bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of "The New Negro?"
or "the flowering of Negro literature"? Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?
In the lyric of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong's voice?
or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
or in a Black child's first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.
-35-
A White Rosary
A white plastic rosary pale and polished,
Curled like a worm waiting on the nightstand
Beside the bed is my gift to you
In the event of my death.
Also to be found on my nightstand
Is an album of recent photographs
Taken of my sons and a calendar of angels
In memory of our mutual departed friends.
I remember one cloudy and restless Ash Wednesday Witnessing the bold tattoo of charcoal
Across your forehead beneath your shock of white hair, Your white hair gleaming in the early morning light.
As a child I possessed a similar white rosary. Beads fashioned of quartz with an image
Of the Christ suspended from a silver cross.
Faithfully every Sunday my family attended Mass.
Finally, when I renounced my father's religion, At the young age of twelve,
Much to his disappointment, I refused
To acknowledge how much I needed confession.
I feared the priest hiding in his shadowed box.
I did not want to tell him of my strange desires,
And my sensual, haunting dreams.
But Father told me to recite ten Hail Mary's in contrition.
And so my rosary for which I no longer had any use
Disappeared into my mother's black lacquer jewelry box.
I hope this present of a cheap plastic rosary
Will please you when I am gone. And, for you
This gift will assume eternal value.
-50-
Collage - after Romare Bearden
Gather out of star-dust:
memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights in our rented place on West 131st Street laughing and talking the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings
when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then,
the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues. Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs, clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original Charleston, the fine old step, the swing and the sway.
Gather out of moon-dust:
There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms. Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow.
Lessons on how to become a "real poet," while Claude McKay
joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.
Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes. Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust:
a time for the "new negro."
For Pullman porters to unionize
and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to exercise
her wings of gossamer silk and satin.
Music warbled from an ebony flute
while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews.
Was Christ Black?
Do angels really play trombones for God
in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten?
Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed?
As I gazed from the window at the skies
of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night.
To hear "Go Down Moses" sung in church on a Sunday morn.
Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones. Daddy Grace.
-52-
Childhood
Music became a halo, a birthmark, the praiseful signifying voice warning me not to live in the past, nourishing my young mind. While rehearsing a sonata on the family piano, I forgot
the repetition of finger exercises, the scales, the tempo
on an otherwise quiet Sunday evening when no one was listening save my daddy who thought of me as perfect and knew
each note to every song by memory.
When I turned twelve
a backyard party entertained me with a stack of 45s, rhythm 'n' blues,
dancing, chilled sodas, and the sizzle of an old-fashioned colored bar-b-que.
A time for sprouting breasts, long, lanky legs, and knobby skinned knees.
While the Four Tops wailed their sweet soul Motown symphonies on the phonograph,
I looked down from my bedroom window on the second floor
as fate come a-knockin at my door. It was all so right.
Years later, memories of being twelve returned to me like the ghosts
of failure with the sound of unwritten songs in my ears.
And, my father, who once thought I was perfect, forgave me.
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.
Birth of the Blues
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Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections with the Broadside Lotus Press and Aquarius Press/Willow Books, and two chapbooks of poetry. Her new poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025). Her poetry, fiction and reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.
Carving the Turkey, a Dream Poem
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Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including Mud Season Review, The Petigru Review, Still: The Journal, The Coachella Review, and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic. His awards include the League of Minnesota Poets Award, Maine Poets Society Award, and Chaffin/Kash Prize of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Seated like Pilgrims on long benches
before a table, waiting for the Indians
to serve us
I notice my tablemates stand
on our bench, shuffle back and forth in a
one-step dance to unheard Motown tunes
Thrilled and fearful, I scramble up and
join them, clumsy and nervous I might fall
a step to the left, a step to the right
we dance in unison with marvelous skill
and some jump to the ground and duckwalk
like Chuck Berry, spin like James Brown
all in good fun, but something’s off
something White people don’t get
Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo
was the predominantly-Black venue
for the 18-year-old White boy’s book launch
of his manifesto plagiarizing
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s White Replacement
Theory, a venue for live streaming his
sick turkey shoot, assault rifle screaming
n ____-n_____-n_____-n_____-n_____
the way Whites speak it without lips and Blacks
hear it without ears and politicians
massage it in the body politic,
a salve for the saddle history rides
on the horse of the American dream,
declaring that the Market’s not Friendly
and who can never, ever, be on Top.
Banning Critical Race Theory
I dreamt
bubble-
popping
words were
nailed shut in the Klan coffin of can’t-say-that
suffocated under a hood, Dixie’s Ipse Dixit of
legally blind, made tongueless, truth twist-tied.
We must
bury the
body and
administer
systemic
injustice
or else
we all get
a knee on
the neck:
G. Floyd
Rollers carefully tend and guard dung balls // roll them from their original site to new ground /made suitable for baby beetles to dine on by other dung beetles // dwellers find raison d’etre on top of another animal’s droppings where dweller dung families literally eat themselves out of house and home / then immigrate throughout the area in search of more masses of manure to extend their descendants // but any awards for greatness and grit go to tunnelers digging through egesta hills / males bury balls of droppings into the ground where females exist eager to sort the gifts brought to them / escorting each precious globe to the bottom of her underground tunnels where every ball will soon hold an egg // and in each of them / all those tiny beings / a Jungian memory of a grace so grand that ancient Egyptians glorified all as sacred beings // named them scarab // given their hard shell and horns / environmental consciousness / physical strength and ability to use stars and sunlight to guide them // I cannot comprehend why we no longer worship such beings / we humans have proven that we are capable of shitty behavior many times over / for no reason at all / I guess we just need to start rolling it / eating it / birthing in it / making it our names
Divorce
No escape from the same planet,
the earth hard under the moonlight
as you lie there, in your nightgown,
in the grass of the backyard.
You are better than this
a voice from the past whispers
but you think you are not—a clumsy life
of mistakes and bad choices
has led you here to this dirt.
That house is too filled with him
for you to ever feel comfortable
inside again. Two shadows
living together but never
connected.
You stare at the stars.
It helps to see them, to be flat
in the yard looking up
as if this is normal because you no longer
have any compass for what
life should be.
And once all the pain is gone,
you will have escaped the agony
of indifference. You might even
be able to find comfort in any house,
in any yard, even upright.
How to Write about Birds
Know this first: everyone has already done so.
In love with an athletic type: Wet feathers look so much like
your hair coming off a swim.
As metaphor for dark desires:
The bird wants to be dropped
from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.
Questions have been asked: Whose turn is it to open-throated sing?
Wishes have been expressed: Let’s be owls tonight
As if when Hesiod told us to
Take note when you hear the
clarion calls of the crane
we all decided we could do nothing but. When Noah sends a raven to dry
the earth’s flooding, flying into a world of water the bird disappears until
it lands on Poe’s chamber door to terrorize a broken-hearted student.
Nevermore.
Open any book of any type to a random page and within ten pages each way,
you are sure to find a bird. An argument over a sound: lark or nightingale?
An ugly duckling that turns into a beauty.
There’s owls and gulls and chickens
and even Agatha Christie had pigeons.
But you still wish to write about birds, yes?
Can you recreate a dodo’s call? Compare a bird’s four-chambered heart
to a human’s four-chambered heart? (What to make of 4?
Four and 20 blackbirds?)
Care to write about eggs, migration, nesting, or diving,
or would you rather get political, tell us about the male chicks
that are crushed alive, being of no use to factory farms?
Adore a nightingale or be a woman thick with birds?
Wonder why finches have attacked your children
or marvel at boys nursing an injured goose?
I cannot stop you. I am at fault here myself.
It is the albatross of every writer,
a tail feather we cannot shake.
Off you go, on a wing and a prayer—let your ideas take flight,
may your words soar like an eagle, and, like a duck taking to water,
write your birds and feather your nest
with the profits of your scribbling ornithology.
Sources for How to Write about Birds
Robert Wood Lynn, “Augury”
Anne Sexton, “The Ambition Bird”
Ari Banias, “No More Birds”
Ada Limón, “Midnight, Talking about Our Exes”
Hesiod, Works and Days (c700BCE)
The Bible, Genesis 8:7
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Act 3, Scene 5
Hans Christian Anderson, “The Ugly Duckling”
Agatha Christie, A Cat Among Pigeons
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Toni Morrison, Sula
Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds”
Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose
Samuel Tayler Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Dung Beetles: Three Species
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Mary Christine Delea has a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing and is a former university professor. She continues to teach through in-person and online workshops and in a variety of her volunteer positions. She is originally from Long Island and now lives with her husband and cats in Oregon. Her poems have been published in one full-length collection, three chapbooks, and numerous publications, most recently, Pictura Journal, The Maier Museum of Art Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, and Inkfish Magazine. Delea is currently working on a number of book manuscripts.
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Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She is the author of Supposed to Love (Saddle Road Press), Driving Straight Through (FootHills), and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems titled What Came First (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in Bacopa Literary Review, NOVUS, and Clockhouse and is forthcoming in Healing Muse, Freshwater, and Slipstream.
PROVEN WINNERS
The best years for the weigela
are not the best years for us—
we prefer a half-eaten,
crushed bush at the start
of spring, one you have
to question about wherewithal,
one that felt the brunt
of six feet of snow
deadening it along
with all the other bushes
and ornamental trees
more than once in a season,
one that could not foresee
the sun returning to allow
a life-saving exhalation.
We needed the bad year
to remind us of dwindling chances
for luck, reason to bet it all
on this moment. Our variety
of plant is called spilled wine,
but the ruby blooms
will face the lance
and suspend drops of blood
for us again this year
and surely the next.
PROVING UP
It doesn’t have quite the same consequence
these days, but that doesn’t mean
I try any less. I water the vegetables
when my husband tires of the novelty,
stand beside the celery forest
and cull the red leaf lettuce
into sensible furls. The property
has been improved by our touch.
We revived the neighbor’s discarded hostas,
improbable purple flowers reaching
to our sliding open doors. We hauled in
two trees, a split stem birch
soon the tallest in the development.
Our sugar maple offers a circle
of shade or neat pile of leaves
depending when we need it.
The blueberry bush pleads our case,
allowing a velvet pile of sweet in the palm.
And the bees. They swarm
the hydrangea, shaking
the white cones with their frenzy.
The house is clean enough, filled
with fancy and all the things
to keep an eye on time. As far
as I’m concerned, the comfort
my cat feels lying on her back
in the foyer means we’ve marked
this territory our own, and no one’s
coming for it.
BECAUSE TONIGHT
The sky is full of indigo slivers,
sharp clouds cutting across
the late summer background.
Mysterious silverfish scattered
in the light of our old apartment
and it felt like learning something
of the world. An iridescent lightshow
is ready to go at most key moments—
do you gag or admire the brain’s
kaleidoscoping perspective?
Do you spend all day discerning
what she remembers and what
she is pretending to still know?
Don’t even suggest AI can help now—
it was never there in the first place.
Every ocular migraine
released by a butterfly
alighting a continent away
is both chance and inevitable.
When my memories scatter,
colored orbs coiling down
a marble run, something tells me
I’ll recall the silverfish and their hologram
when peering into the bathroom mirror
whether or not it is my own.
FAKING IT
It’s not that the doctor,
nurse, and technician
weren’t genuine.
It’s not that I couldn’t
understand their words,
read the concern on their faces.
I simply couldn’t determine
the proper time to make a scene.
Who am I to call out in anguish,
tugging on a stranger’s coat sleeve,
raising my voice through
all that detailed civility?
And to what end
should my tears drop
down the long hallway
of half-opened doors
where others battle their own
limbs and organs?
Somewhere deep within,
my veins and cells
perform a one-time symphony
and I should respect that.
The machines and screens
see the performance
so I needn’t look.
It’s raining outside,
white petals dropping
from pear trees
that took bloom early.
They are not done either,
they’re just faking it.
Franciso Oller, Puerto Rican Painter
I rained from an abandoned passion
not quite a still life, but a plain painting
dipped in the loveless brush
from biology’s colors,
my mother was Frida, my father Oller,
both their worlds had sounds of castanets,
knitted mantillas, and transient lust
where their hands circled sand, books
and rosaries—crucifixes burned
their sinners’ lips—
I was surrounded by water
salted by the high mesa
and went from Altiplano to Cordillera
full of sun, heat, and total loneliness
Biography in Blue
like the synthetic hair
of a gifted doll when I was eight,
that made me love
her even when I could not
then, there was the blue
of my quinciañera’s dress
and the accompanying blue cake
my cousin, Awilda, baked
and placed on a glass tray
that splintered blue’s prisms
like the migration to the blue
to this Western sky
and the blue to find out that my cousin
had died in December and three months
had passed without a notice
or a dream to call her out
except maybe in this poem, while skiing
in Anthony Lakes' where its deep winter blue
entangles with the blue waves of Old San Juan
and the memory of us strolling
on those cobbled stones,
she with an Italian boyfriend,
and me with the jealousy of a chaperone
too young to have these wants for romance
and still, this poem fights with me,
it wasn’t meant to be about this girl
the girl whom I loved, the woman I deserted
just as all those I left behind
the island of my capture
the blues that were exchanged
so early in life, just to be able
to love in the open trails,
does my lover remember
the blues of forget-me-nots that hid
our half-naked bodies in those open hills
at Morgan Lake, while the blues sang,
form an iPod deep in his pocket
later there were the blue of tired days
of bad choices and misgivings
but there is the salvation of blue,
the one that makes me want to dance,
and remember a dear cousin
kindest acts
and yet, the blue most arrant,
is the blue reflected
in my children
and their children’s eyes
Conversation With Therapist
What brings you here today?
my brown
is bleached
to submission
Does that happen often?
i wonder
i mean, for people with equivocated
roots?
Equivocated? You mean colonized
abandoned or berated what am I missing?
i see
you do?
what anchored your image to color?
I watched a disoriented butterfly
this ghastly winter and saw
myself in flight
Mirador-Calakmul
of course, the birds have always known,
some carried the history in their feathers
and the plants were their co-conspirators
to the secret —a thousand settlements
buried
fauna and flora version of a child’s hide-and-seek
—vegetation camouflaging the shapes
of the ancient refinement under their palmed
green hands and a profusion of bromeliads
the birds with the vantage point of flight
wonder how long it would take them
to find the ruins of a civilization long-time
judged as savages
Virga Clouds
do they feel
the loss of their water
as it sublimes in midair,
just like caustic memories?
imagine our pain
just like theirs,
never reaching
the ground
like untouchable vapor
like unresolved despair
their water never
close enough to lessen thirst
muted shouts into pillows
and closed doors
allowing hurt
to accumulate
just like water
never finding the ground
but maybe if it did,
the flood would drown us
Let Me Introduce Myself
-
Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a BIPOC poet and prose writer whose work weaves mythic memory, ancestral legacy, and the resilience of everyday family life. Her writing often explores the intersections of identity, nature, and healing. She is the author of three poetry collections and two chapbooks, with a fourth collection forthcoming this fall. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including CALYX and Cider Press Review. When not writing, Amelia finds inspiration in Oregon’s landscapes, where nature becomes both backdrop and sanctuary.
as if I was dispatched
as ordinance
pale and penile
a proper caliber
hauled by mule team
up onto a commanding ridgeline
overlooking the entire campaign
battalions of dust-caked readership
as far as a spyglass could see
Ovid Eliot Milton Neruda
and all of their lieutenants
how brazenly they splattered
shrapnel and verse
across pages and ages
Listen! can you hear the fairy rings
emerging through lawns and glades
under a waxing moon
phantasmagorical colors in spectrums
first scented by sows
then ewes and swarming queen bees
piquant manifestos
knit through a womb
never appropriated
into the throes of enlistment
now the mules twitch
in their regimented traces
while the queen helps herself
to another serving of royal jelly
and I’m moved to douse
my coveted fuse
stand down
amongst wonderments
Clothes Make the Man
In my house are nestled many closets
In the closet I call mine hang many shirts
Shirts that mostly fit me Among these
are many shirts of blue oxford
chambray denim flannel plaid
In my father’s closet his shirts were mostly white
I recall some were speckled with blood
from procedures at the hospital
Mostly they dangled on their hangers in the dark
In my blues I tender a spectrum of many blues
Unbutton me
Edifice
Walking downtown on Broadway
I round the dogleg bend at 10th St
and there, some twenty blocks south,
the fairycastle parapets of the Woolworth Building
glide into view, glowing in rosy sunslants
streaming in from the west. The first time
I saw this tableau, I nearly dropped to my knees,
and even now, some forty years later,
I pause for a catch in my breath. It’s like
the opening of the Schubert piano sonata in B-flat,
those warm tall chords framing the melodic
boulevard above the pulse of the city, an ominous
bass trill in the far-left hand like a subterranean
third rail. Schubert was a builder, an architect in sound,
constructing ever more lofty tonal landscapes.
He died at thirty-one, while I have managed more
than twice his span, accomplishing much less,
scuttling through decades to founder
on an occasional gasp of the sublime
like right now, on this street corner, where I step back
from the pedestrian stream to pencil a few lines
underscoring the moment. The Woolworth
is my favorite façade in this city, a lavish wonder
in its heyday, dubbed Cathedral of Commerce,
a more pleasant word for crony capitalism.
It’s been repurposed into luxury penthouse blocks
for a rarified few, while so many broken ones
still wander the streets, and I feel awkward now
bathing in its otherworldliness, on a balmy
October day, the city thrumming and muscular,
[stanza break]
this neo-Gothic plinth pressing creamy filigrees
upon the sky like a cascade of Schubertian
arpeggios. We know that wars are erupting
laden with the inevitable
duty to clear away rubble
once factions exhaust themselves into armistice.
So many heavy, uncertain hearts. How radical
for eye and ear still to yearn for beauty—
beauty yes, but also bread, shelter, peace.
-
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems and essays have appeared in Consequence, Post Road, Salamander, The Sun, and Tahoma Literary Review. He is the poetry editor for Solstice Literary Magazine, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
Poetry Canon
-
R. Joseph Rodríguez is the author of This Is Our Summons Now: Poems and Youth Scribes: Teaching a Love of Writing. He teaches reading language arts and creative writing at an early college high school is currently completing a manuscript titled A Glorious Fire: Poems. His areas of research include language acquisition, literacy education, and literary criticism. Joseph and his students read banned, challenged, censored, and confiscated books—from the classics to contemporary classics—and practice academic, creative, and technical writing as scribes. He lives and teaches in Austin and Fredericksburg, Texas.
-
R. Joseph Rodríguez is the author of This Is Our Summons Now: Poems and Youth Scribes: Teaching a Love of Writing. He teaches reading language arts and creative writing at an early college high school is currently completing a manuscript titled A Glorious Fire: Poems. His areas of research include language acquisition, literacy education, and literary criticism. Joseph and his students read banned, challenged, censored, and confiscated books—from the classics to contemporary classics—and practice academic, creative, and technical writing as scribes. He lives and teaches in Austin and Fredericksburg, Texas.
Marathon for a Union
“The revolution is here. [. . .] This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
—Christian Smalls, US labor organizer, The Guardian, April 10, 2022
In worn sneakers,
the workers gather
listen intently and pound the pavement
to protect themselves and their families
in this new gilded age upon the world.
The workers scurry across the acres of cement
warehouses and crowded assembly lines filled
with cardboard boxes and cartons and products.
(Somebody awaits this endless serpentine of stuff!)
Timed monitors on ankles and arms
with handheld devices timing the seconds
of worker-driven, ergonomic economics
and agile metrics, rates, and speeds for the corps.
Beneath the push and pound and aches of output,
the workers unite for the marathon of endurance
they know so well with many hurdles of tasks
and paramount operations and orders to fill
fast—day in, day out—of endless laboring!
The dignity of the marathon runners reaches
the working masses, a swelling of the sweating and tears
of Chrises and Jasons and Xiomaras at MTA bus stops
with shared rides and tent gatherings for victories,
for a brave run, a necessary race, as one.
Rarámuri Runner
Do you see María Lorena Ramírez Hernández running on this page?
Lorena appears light-footed with long black hair and a colorful dress flowing,
but she is not running from Athens to Sparta. No.
She’s running . . .
into these mountains
and canyons of the Tarahumara: her dress on the move and overflowing, swishing . . .
and Lorena keeps going on . . .
f
e
e
t
carrying her ever so lightly and gently as deer
and as she touches earth, awakening earth’s birdsong.
The cheers get louder, but all she hears is earth singing, whispering . . .
en la sierra su canto hondo y familiar
humming as she reaches
valleys and keeps going forward as an ultramarathoner with might.
Here’s Lorena, and the sun’s with her:
without brand-name shoes, only her homemade and homespun sandals matching
light speeds: Lorena’s secret is to keep going . . .
and no distance is too far away
past the 26.2 miles / 42.2 kilometers—
and Lorena’s running . . .
off this page—just look! . . .
Oprah in Texas
1998, Amarillo
Oprah sits in court
to be freed in speech.
Cattlemen want her quiet,
as she beefs with them.
Oprah unsettles beef
sales of the cattlemen
who want profits, wins.
The cattle remain silent.
Oprah lassos the theater stage
when she enters and waves.
The crowd claps and roars
and the eye of Texas, white.
Oprah wears yellows and
blues and reds with boots,
a power mic in hand.
A reckoning of sorts unfolds.
Oprah dons a cowgirl hat
and learns the two-step
dance with Patrick Swayze;
the world watches in glee.
The jury listens to libel laws.
And Oprah’s name is cleared.
Yes, beef is for wholesale,
but not all want beef.
Oprah wonders words
to share about all this,
then says, “Free speech
not only lives, it rocks!”
Oprah’s voice still rings
in towns that rise up
to be freed in speech
and deed for victory.
Ode to Gloria Walking Home
Gloria walks the borderlands barefoot
and soothes her body with ripened aloe vera.
Lavender and eucalyptus scent her long walk.
(Neither Cabeza de Vaca nor Thoreau are here.)
So many sisters wave across her homelands
as she inches her way across the fields and lomas and valles,
listening to the cantos of the chachalacas welcoming her home,
sure enough she will meet los antepasados and her descendants.
Gloria stops at the schools she attended years ago.
Her name’s still etched boldly on desks and in books and stories:
GLORIA EVANGELINA ANZALDÚA
. . . carved deep in the spines and scribes’ codices.
Her name waves like a ribbon in the sky and on earth
and flying flag-like across hemispheres and universes.
Gloria sits in deep meditation and reflection on the borderlands
as she turns pages and, like the tlacuilo, makes meaning of all that unfolds
in the worlds she inhabits and imagines for the people on a long walk home.
Gloria speaks languages that summon the people from their slumber
to act now in the present, to stand up taller and bravely in these times,
to make shields and armor and hope in the longest of hours and nights.
Gloria, sister, your name still sings in corridos and sonnets and stories
about wounds and scabs and scars in healing: some seen, some hidden.
Contigo, you whisper. Caminando se siembra y con hermandad.
When I Heard the Literacy Expert
after Walt and for Carla, brave ones among us
When I heard the literacy expert,
When my lessons were dismissed by her as too multicultural,
When the volcanoes of my mind and classroom were disrupted before me,
When I was told to focus on the units of informative and narrative writing,
When I faced the notion that I knew nothing about the art of writing and reading,
When I realized the sanctuary of my mind erupting in unison y en comunidad,
When I nodding heard the literacy expert lecture me with condescension,
How quickly distressed I became so tired and sick, too,
Until awakening and gained my footing out in the universe,
The greatest laboratory of our world, in the heating earth,
Looked down at my feet and back at all the walking paths.