Y entonces mi piel Se convirtió en barro. Ya no había ruido, Solo mi respiración And suddenly my skin Became clay. there was no more noise, only my breath Aleyda Marisol Cervantes Gutierrez, es una mujer de maiz, living in occupied Puyallup Territory. She graduated with an interdisciplinary major titled "Solidarity Across borders: Understanding Experiences and Imagining New Realities through Storytelling" and a minor in Education and Social Justice.

I daydream of Chinook, Coho, Chum, Sockeye, and Pink salmon spirit traveling through waters, while a three-hour meeting sat me still a grueling schedule, more bills, anchoring me to a mortal life while the traffic lights turned three colors the soil underneath reached out for a touch, and below I hear stories, two lands finding space in one person, maybe those…

Candles just lit, flanked by family & friends singing Happy Birthday, I notice my phone not on silent. Six months since we last spoke, this third call from you in ten minutes—nearly two decades earlier: you planned for me to be the final call, and I picked up. I search for your voice now, try to steady your breathing…

within the operating room where minutes before we thought she may not survive: I become someone new newborn before me eyes alight with wonder where does her glance begin and mine where the timelessness of touch and lineage become Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) was selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize.

Absence takes up space we never get back. He never showed up, Mommy's voice on loop, Did I ever tell you your father did that? Flanked by bags, outside the airport on black scorched asphalt we sat. A tight sobbing group. Absence takes up space. We never get back what we didn't share. How do I take back what I cannot know?

Maybe the shared lineage was grief, how a chord collapses time when each key bows beneath a finger gentle as a casket into earth; maybe it was how the recording tucked in a dusty tape deck, flung 1,291 miles & nearly six decades, somehow started to sing; maybe the geography mapped my adolescent jaw long before I'd carved a voice, unclenched by awe:

Slow rhythm of a saxophone slow rhythm of heartbeat slow rhythm of soft breeze slow rhythm of river ripples all in a smooth flow of jazz bumping and swinging with a smile resonant with moonlight thrumming on dark waters. Jianqing Zheng’s new poetry books include Visual Chords (2025), Dreaminations (2026), and Soulful Dancer, which is coauthored with William Ferris. He has received three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission.

What is the word for when you arrive A little too early for an appointment So that you can spend some time Walking through the park first? Above the water the sky is gray And swirly the way it looks in Pictures of space. Branches of the trees are slick And the building lights shine Through the gaps in the trees…

You greet me at the door and you promise To dry the things inside my shopping cart. These are: a book, a coupon card for eye mist, And one limp notecard listing random words. I'm pretty grumpy since I'm so soaking wet. You spread my things across the kitchen table Setting each one atop rags that you wrap as if paper.

Our greetings are so plain that I'm reminded of blank pages waiting to be murdered with poems about death. "These scallops cost over $40," I say, tasting the hangover hiding badly on my mouth. "Well, you don't drink or smoke, so you need something," someone who supposedly knows me answers. "True," I lie, thinking of all the dead goldfish flushed away and replaced,

After Siaara Freeman When you were young your father left and you felt sad. Years later he came back saying he could teach your flowers tricks. You helped him with those flowers, enjoying his company and the day, then he ran out of things to say. You brought your flowers to the park to let them go. There were kids…

I walk with purpose in a clockwise direction the way of the sun to circumambulate this Mount Wrightson Wilderness with reverence and introspection I amble with a joyous heart plod at a measured pace celebrate freedom in wildness where life slows and cares are mostly on hold where little goes unnoticed even a resting Great Horned owl for this adventure, I raise a beer…

I now replace desire with meaning. —"Friends with No Benefits", Megan Fernandes and if i split this orange between us will you gather the peels and compost something to me? maybe plant with it a tree and get apples instead. solid enough to harvest across multiple lifetimes to survive. the way jesus quadrupled bread and fish, or water into wine…

My father read all of the Robin Hood tales to us and bought me a Sherwood Forest band of characters, small light-green rubber figures that we used to enact those stories. As I remember it, Robin and I battled for Maid Marian's affections, one or other of us winning the day, but one day my younger brother, still at the age to put everything into his mouth,

—dedicated to all of us Let x and y represent any two people bound in a union. Then projecting the multiple dimensions of love onto a plane with x and y axes, the lines x=1 and y=1 indicate when each individual is whole and the line x+y=1 when the sum of them together is whole, anywhere along that line each surrendering something to the other,

The painted wooden owl, a whirligig of sorts, with wings for arms, is rooted at the corner of the lot, a showboat more than sentry to scare off who knows what. No matter the wind, gentle breeze to gale, one wing spins one direction and the other the other, the poor bird not knowing where it's trying to go, a lot like us these days.

It's much less what you observe on your daily walk in the woods than what it can bring to mind— take the tree whose tri-forked above-ground root grasps a boulder and wraps around it, the pair a giant claw-and-ball foot like the one on the ornate dresser from which you pulled the shirt and shorts you're wearing this morning, nothing short of…

Row of spruces at the back of the backyard, grown so tall, starting to block the scenic view of sunsets over the faraway western hills. From the bathroom window, I see the spindly top of one start to tremble. No wind, not even a breeze stirring any other tree. As the shaking intensifies, a red shirt pokes through the needled branches—wiry man with a cutting tool…

After work we meet at Donnely's Pub to sort through this revelation, this attraction we felt for months but until this morning had gone unspoken. It was a flirtation that helped us survive the workday, eight hours answering calls from customers who had been in an accident. Our job was to file their claims, to be patient and kind, to explain how deductibles worked.

They found my brother's pickup in the alley behind Renaker Baptist. There was no sign of him, but they did find his skull necklace and silver lighter. They will call back after searching storm drains, honkytonks, abandoned houses on Elmarch Street. I sit with my sister-in-law at their kitchen table where she has placed a bowl of sweet potatoes and skillet bread.

When I drive past the new baseball field, fresh sod and home plate illuminated from the highway by state-of-the-art lights, I feel sorry for the suburban boys and their expensive bats, plush dugouts, raked dirt smoothed out to prevent adventures. How sad for them never to have played one inning at the oldest graveyard in Cynthiana, Kentucky, where anyone who died in my hometown…

Soon after Mother had gone away, there was always fish in the steamer. I'd started with just the fillets, still battered and reeking right from the fresh meat cuts, and steered clear from the frozen aisle. I could not fathom the thought of setting the bar lower than it already was when no one relative has ever steamed bijou chunks to begin with.

In the middle of an empty bedroom, the shadows are paper-mache tonight. The quiet you've left me is palpable: Like kicking boots off into a corner, Like treading through old towns in snow. I let my anxieties fall to the floor, heaping soundlessly as clothes, and wake from that bad dream. This poem is soft and warm in my mouth,

Tucci's absolutely fake autobiography made my dad laugh really hard. I didn't really get it. Did you? And then, with our pencils out-Colonial, how do we turn this digital writing into something that aches and returns. What's the most reliable printer? The weight of "and I'm hopeful" is a classic anaphora. It's, like, those moments where Tucci speaks with that overaccentuated "g’lottels’top" that reminds me we are haunted.

Sorry, I never earned "Chicu." I, student pushing against the Dutch Masses, read that you said "The Poem is like a migraine." Does discomfort follow? I close my kaleidoscopic eyes against the swirling cream of the paper. What does it mean to glue "the social sphere" to its "mode of capacity"? If I had not zipped up my jacket I would not…