after Langston Hughes

but it was to you?
& him, too? Who

am I to say what
was, wasn’t, or, 

for that matter
what is or isn’t

true? I will say
nothing’s new,

that freedom’s
just for a chosen

few, also that it
won’t do, this

promise long
past due, & so

many singing
the blues, bop,

Bach & Bessie
too.  You, me,

then America
will be.

Rick Benjamin (he/him) lives on unceded Chumash land in Goleta, California, and walks each day on indigenous trails. He teaches courses at the University of California Santa Barbara, among them poetry and community, the wild literature of ecology, and literatures of both social and juvenile justice, while also working among elders, young people at a local Boys and Girls Club, in art museums and youth detention facilities. He served as the poet laureate of Rhode Island from 2012 – 2016.

The locals in these damp, colorless lands
don’t ask how you are because they don’t care
and don’t pretend to. They assume it’s shitty.
When asked by tourists or Americans,
they might say ugh at best. Or they might vomit.
In once grand plazas that are almost ruins,
small groups of people sit alone together.
Such are the times. Such are always the times.
When locals need to enjoy their grief, they go
to restaurants with tables set for one.
A raspy alto sings such sorrowful songs
they weep into their thin, unsalted soup.
These restaurants are packed on holidays.
To understand this culture, you must eat there
alone.
There is no menu. They bring what they have.
Don’t expect wisdom from your meal. The food
will not be good, but it will satisfy
if you savor everything placed before you.

Richard Newman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Blues at the End of the World (Kelsay Books, 2024). His work has appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Clockhouse, I-70 Review (featured poet), Innisfree Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, and many other magazines and anthologies. He currently teaches Creative Writing and World Literature at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. Before moving to the Maghreb, he and his family lived in Vietnam, Japan, and the Marshall Islands.

A few days after getting a new phone number

Strangers left messages on my new phone
for weeks, how much they’d miss me, how they wished
we’d chatted one last time before I died.
A colleague posts for our departed friend,
You were always there for me. Now you’re not.
then tags her, an account full of farewells.
Parents preserve their child’s room, his Lego
castle almost completed for decades.
We set an extra plate for them at meals,
see them in hummingbirds outside our windows.
They leave us feathers, heart-shaped shells on beaches.
Never stop pestering the dead with prayers,
plastic flowers, and sake. Let the dead
go about their business of being dead.

Richard Newman (he/him) is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Blues at the End of the World (Kelsay Books, 2024). His work has appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Clockhouse, I-70 Review (featured poet), Innisfree Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, and many other magazines and anthologies. He currently teaches Creative Writing and World Literature at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. Before moving to the Maghreb, he and his family lived in Vietnam, Japan, and the Marshall Islands.

There are books that ask you to witness. This is one of them.

Wallpaper Dogs arrived in my hands the way certain things do—quietly, without fanfare, and yet with the unmistakable gravity of something that matters. I didn’t read it so much as I moved through it, the way you move through a place you recognize without having been there before.

Allard Broderick writes from a system—from the many-chambered interior of a life shaped by dissociation, by childhood harm, by the long and unglamorous work of healing. They do not tidy this up for us. They do not offer the clean arc we’ve been conditioned to expect from stories of survival. What they offer instead is truer: the shards, the silences, the places where language itself breaks apart and the image must carry what words cannot.

The poems do not perform their pain. They inhabit it. “Purity” opens the collection with the image of a child navigating a dangerous home—street lights as curfew signals, peeling wallpaper, the particular vigilance of a small body that has learned the world is not safe. By the second page you understand that this book will not be protecting you from anything. And somehow, that feels like a gift.

What moved me most was the range. The collection holds, in the same breath, the devastation of “Martyrdom” and the tentative, hard-won hope of “Dare I.” It holds “Consent” alongside “Dandelion Spectacles.” It holds grief and defiance and even, occasionally, humor—the wry, unsentimental kind that only people who have truly suffered seem to earn. Broderick’s illustrations move through the same territory, the portrait work in particular carrying a rawness that language sometimes cannot reach.

I’ve sat with a lot of writing about trauma. Much of it circles the wound without entering it. Wallpaper Dogs enters it. And then, not easily, not neatly, it finds its way toward something luminous. Not healing in the resolved sense. Not arrival. But the stubborn, extraordinary act of continuing.

This book is for those who know what it is to survive in a world that preferred your silence. It is also for those willing to be changed by what they read. Both groups will find something irreplaceable here.

Shop Bookshop.org for Wallpaper Dogs

after a pause, I posed a hypothetical to the class. 
if all Blacks pooled 
their political power 
to reimpose chattel slavery 
with white backs bearing the lash, 
could the bill pass? 
after questioning the amendments 
to be repealed or replaced, wondering 
which racial groups would throw in—
whites willing to wager their skin 
in solidarity—they all said, no. except 
the boy who misheard the question. 
thought Blacks were suggesting 
our own re-enslavement. 
the class laughed. 
but teachable moments are meant to be chased 
like the North Star or a runaway slave.
the new question: 
a bill to place us back in chains. 
working textile factories 
instead of cotton fields—
t-shirts over tobacco. 
fearing assault rifles 
more than whips. 
with a veto-proof majority, 
was it possible, even if 
a Black president 
sat behind the Resolute Desk?
I wish I was surprised by the silence 
following their debate-less acceptance 
or how it shook their white faces red.

Matthew E. Henry (he/him) is an educator, essayist, and the author of six poetry collections. He is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, the creative nonfiction editor at Porcupine Literary, and an associate editor at Rise Up Review. Henry’s publications include Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Terrain, and others. Matthew E. Henry earned an MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com.

Each month, Wayfarer Magazine offers a gathering place for voices rooted in truth and resistance. We are proud to make space for what’s often overlooked in the mainstream because we believe the edge is where real change begins. Below is your preview of what’s to come.

Thanks for walking with us.

In Solidarity

—The Wayfarers

I find hope hides sometimes, 
and each time it does 
it’s something I 
never seem to find,
but it always finds me,
in the most unassuming of moments,
most unlikely of places,
never staying where I left it, 
but lingering 
at the end of a long parting,
or in an old dream spun 
from another’s yarn,
at the bottom of the warm basin 
where your memory waits 
for rough hands to remember,
sometimes in the tender slopes
of your throat where the head 
meets the heart, or in the eyes 
of the alley cat waiting, 
neck outstretched, 
one last caress before he feasts,
or in the rustling sheets 
of wiggling feet, eager to rest 
in each other’s sleep,
always in the calm, ritual of living
hope arrives, 
and no matter how long or short 
the absence, the embers 
still crackle and burn 
a chair always empty 
with the promise 
of that weary wanderer’s return,
and of course, I’ll forget all this, 
only to discover, 
all over again,
like it’s the very first time, 
where today’s hope 
for brighter days resides.

Originally from Minneapolis, Michael is an international artist, whose career as an actor, writer, and teacher has spanned the globe. He’s also a proud graduate of Juilliard’s Drama Division and NUI Galway’s MA in Writing. As an actor, he’s performed on stage, screen and behind the mic in the US, EU and UK. Some notable highlights include 5 seasons on TNT’s The Last Ship, Richard III at the Lyric Theatre Belfast, and narrating Pax and Pax Journey Home with Harper Collins. His poetry has been published in journals such as Vox Galvia, Pendemic.ie, Smashing Times, and Spellweaver, and his debut collection Where The Dead Poets Sing is now available from Wayfarer Books. On the stage and on the page, he draws from classical and contemporary influences, as well as a deep love of myth and storytelling in the bardic tradition.

As a teacher, he’s taught acting, voiceover, and creative writing at arts institutions such as The Loft Literary Center, The Guthrie BFA Program, Galway Arts Centre, and NUI Galway’s Huston Film School. He’s also served as a dialect coach on stage and screen on productions such as Sky TV’s Django and Radium Girls at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.

From Copernicus Martian Research Station. 
Day 1363. 2089 A.D


Transmission open and secure.

If anyone is listening…
Not much has changed.

I wish I had something meaningful to say. 
We all do, but I think the isolation 
is affecting the crew, and if I’m honest… me too.

We have everything we need to live,
hull secure, water filtration 96%
Thank God, but my days are spent…

No sunshine. 
Nothing but recycled air. 

I am not alone, but…
everything we’re working toward 
just seems so…

The work will span generations 
we all know that but still
I feel hollow. 
Not quite myself.
An alien on an alien world.

And what’s worse,
all these images of Earth,
a home I can no longer call my own,
fires, floods, deserts, and cyclones…

What have we become? 
When a dead planet is our only hope?

I wonder, often, if long ago, 
Martians once walked this paradise 
we’re trying to grow, if they too reaped 
what they sowed, consumed themselves, 
the planet, their home, 
Nature their first fear, final hubris…

I don’t know…

But I must learn to dream in the dark
I must wake and I must see.
This long night will not last, 
but it will fall and it will sleep 
over Earth’s fields, rivers, and trees, 
over every border, every sea.
I must wake and I must be
the alien spring, growing, patient 
beneath lifeless rock, the final seed,
I must learn to dream in the dark.

Originally from Minneapolis, Michael is an international artist, whose career as an actor, writer, and teacher has spanned the globe. He’s also a proud graduate of Juilliard’s Drama Division and NUI Galway’s MA in Writing. As an actor, he’s performed on stage, screen and behind the mic in the US, EU and UK. Some notable highlights include 5 seasons on TNT’s The Last Ship, Richard III at the Lyric Theatre Belfast, and narrating Pax and Pax Journey Home with Harper Collins. His poetry has been published in journals such as Vox Galvia, Pendemic.ie, Smashing Times, and Spellweaver, and his debut collection Where The Dead Poets Sing is now available from Wayfarer Books. On the stage and on the page, he draws from classical and contemporary influences, as well as a deep love of myth and storytelling in the bardic tradition.

As a teacher, he’s taught acting, voiceover, and creative writing at arts institutions such as The Loft Literary Center, The Guthrie BFA Program, Galway Arts Centre, and NUI Galway’s Huston Film School. He’s also served as a dialect coach on stage and screen on productions such as Sky TV’s Django and Radium Girls at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.

 Dear E., What if you found me out here, in the mud and muck, 
in the runoff of my own snowmelt, naked, shriveled, shivering, 
throat exposed and utterly alone? What if the fight got so hot 
that the glaciated armor encasing my heart finally thawed? 
Would you build me a fire? Wrap me in your fur? Feed me 
with me your wildest desires? Let me lick the last trickle of what’s 
left of your wettest wishes? Or, would you recognize me, then, 
for the deserter I truly am? I, too, am a raving wood kern, so sick
of battle that I cast my chipped shillelagh into a thicket of thorns
and tried to hide in mud’s embrace. But mud doesn’t soothe 
cowards. So, I tried to bury myself before I was truly dead. Can you
ignore that? Will you kiss the dried blood from my blue lips? Use your 
finger tips to probe my wounds and remove any doubt that I have –
without deserving it, or even wanting it – resurrected to once again 
provide some kind of protection?. Yes, my fingers know how to fight, 
my hands know how to make war. And, I would again, if only I could
remember how to make love. Teach me. Give me a reason. Let me be 
helpless, soft, limp even…and I promise I will rise again. I will crawl
through thorns and thickets. I will let the sharpest rip until they paint
my pale skin red. I will find my weapon, then. I will wield the passion
that only a once-dead man can. I will. I’ll do this until I’m dead again. Will. 

Will Falk (he/him) is a poet, attorney, and community organizer. He writes poems while traveling across the US to offer free legal services to communities fighting against extractive projects like mines, pipelines, and clear-cuts. His poems have appeared through Chapter House Journal, ONE ART, Sheila-na-gig Online, and Wayfarer Magazine, among others. His first poetry collection is When I Set the Sweetgrass Down (Wayfarer Books, 2023).

“and all rain is holy water” she says

three raccoons came to the bird feeder this morning
before she had her first cup of hibiscus tea
before it started raining
a woman was taken off a TriMet bus
yesterday by ICE
on her way to work, she was late
she is in the detention center in Tacoma
her children in custody in Portland
it is raining between them
the fog rises from the Columbia River
a Great Blue Heron lifts her wings
rises along the mud flats
her family in Oaxaca, Otavalo
her family in Rose City Park
her family in detention
her family in deportation proceedings.

She fingers the rosary in her pocket
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Rosewood prayers
“I will never forget you”
she says to her children, niños
segregated by fear
immigration regulations
she cannot see the clouds
behind the wall
the gray edges of sorrow
remembers the flight feathers of the heron
the silver chain of the rosary
rosewood, rose water
the deer eat the wild roses in the backyard
a doe, two fawns, black-tailed
she will be black-listed
is black listed, dreams of the three sisters
black beans, corn, delicata candy stripe squash.

Her daughter has roses on her rain boots,
splashes in puddles, sings the alphabet song
in English, in Spanish, waiting for the no. 2 bus
dreaming, she walks through the waters
of the Rio Grande again
raccoons gather at the river
“and all rain is holy water” she says.

Gwendolyn Morgan (she/her) is a Pacific Northwest poet, hospice/animal chaplain and artist. Flight Feathers, her fourth book of poetry (Wayfarer Books), found its filoplumes at Centrum Artist Residency and is a Nautilus Gold Winner in lyric prose and hybrid works. She served as Clark County Poet Laureate 2018-2020. Gwendolyn and her spouse Judy infuse their poetry and music with elements from the natural world. As a queer multiracial family in a multispecies watershed, they are committed to hospitality and welcome for all.

Behind every artist, writer, and dreamer lies a terrain of risks and discoveries that can’t be plotted in advance. To create is to wander into the unknown, guided less by certainty than by curiosity. Each guest is asked the same ten questions, but their answers reveal something far greater—an unfiltered glimpse into the raw and deeply personal terrain of a creative life.

Created by Connor Wolfe (they/them), founder of Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, “Uncharted” is an invitation to step off the map and explore what it means to live and create beyond the expected.

Uncharted with James Crews

On Kindness, Creative Rebellion, and Saying Yes to What Matters

Issue 43. October 2025

James Crews (he/him) makes a compelling case for attention, gratitude, and everyday grace. The editor behind the bestselling anthologies The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, he’s been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. Crews is also the author of four prize-winning poetry collections The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment as well as the short-essay collection Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection. When he isn’t speaking or leading workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion, he’s at home with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of southern Vermont. In the conversation that follows, Crews reflects on how poems can reorient us toward wonder, connection, and the steadier parts of a difficult world.

1. What’s lighting you up creatively right now?

What’s bringing me alive lately is creative freedom. I always start my days with a large cup of coffee and free-writing in my notebook for a few pages, practicing radical acceptance of whatever wants to come (what Julia Cameron has called “Morning Pages” in The Artist’s Way). It’s easy to fall out of this habit, to forget how important it is to give my heart and mind this kind of free range to explore. Just this morning, I felt lit up again telling the truth about what I love and don’t love about my life. And the thing that arose over and over, which has helped me to stay in creative flow, was stability. It’s not a very exciting notion for most creatives, but I realize that my daily practice of sitting down at my desk first thing and opening the door to whatever arises has helped me create a strong foundation from which the rest of the day unfolds. I often think of the well-known Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I’ve often spurned stability and consistency as too boring and uninspiring. Yet in the last five years, the wise consistency of continually showing up every day to the page, and not seeking out the drama that once marked my life, has brought about more creative abundance than I ever could have hoped for.

2. What’s the last thing that truly captivated you—an idea, a place, a piece of art, a poem, a moment?

I have written elsewhere that “only moments matter,” and this is one of the mantras I try to live by. Both of my parents died quite young—my father at 43 years old, from complications of Hepatitis C, and my mother at 64 from sudden heart failure. Spending time with them in their final months and days showed me over and over that the so-called smallest moments are the ones that stay with us the most. The moment that sprang to mind when I first read this question may not seem all that earth-shattering or relevant, but I have carried it with me for weeks now. My husband Brad and I were walking a piece of land here in Vermont, where we’re trying to find a place to create a farm and retreat center. It was the perfect summer day, and we pulled over on a mostly deserted road to walk the unmown fields of the property. I’d been overly busy, and felt a little resentful that I’d taken time away from my packed schedule to drive the hour there and back. Yet as soon as we began to step through Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a sudden sense of peace fell over me. I looked down to see a black swallowtail butterfly nectaring on a pink clover flower, and seemed to feel my soul at last rising to the surface again, just in this single moment of close attention. Ultimately, that piece of land didn’t end up being right for us, but that bit of what Anne Lamott has called “soul time” continues to stay with me, a reminder of what’s most essential, the space I need in my life through which to cultivate a sense of wonder. It’s as if watching that butterfly flex its wings and drink showed me again how I might nourish myself, spending time away from work, distraction, and news.

3. What’s a recent experience that made you feel deeply present?

I always feel most present when I am immersed in a poem or essay, or when I’m listening and responding to someone else’s work. I host a monthly writing community on Zoom called The Monthly Pause, and just a few days ago, I found all of my worries and fatigue falling away from me as I listened deeply and generously to what folks had written during our time together. I believe this practice of receiving, even living inside a piece that someone has created, makes me a better writer myself. I stay alert for phrases and lines that stand out to me, and reflect that back to the writer, focusing on what draws my attention. I do the same in my own work too, especially during the revision process. No doubt, this kind of generous listening seeps into daily life as well, making me more attentive, more alert to inspiration whenever and however it slips into me.

4. What’s a piece of art, a book, or a conversation that’s been living in your mind rent-free?

My best friend, whom I have known for 25 years now, recently visited me. As we walked through a local nature preserve, she confessed that she’s been struggling to stay present to where she lives, and to the work she’s doing right now. She foresees a move down the road eventually, but doesn’t want to just reject her daily experience, missing out on what’s actually there to appreciate. Lately, she said, she’s been seeing each new day as the perfect tangerine, round and fragrant and filled with its own particular sugars. It’s up to us whether or not we choose to feast on the tangerine of each given day, whether we even start to peel it, or decide to leave it untouched. Needless to say, this conversation has stayed with me, and has made me even more present to the gift of a new day, even when there are parts of my life I’d rather reject.

5. What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done in your creative work?

One of the bravest things I ever did was publish my first anthology of poems focused on kindness, Healing the Divide. This was an act of rebellion for me not only because of the theme, but also because I gathered only accessible poems that spoke to a larger, more mainstream audience. I was teaching beginning creative writing at SUNY-Albany at the time, and the idea came to me following the 2016 election. The students in my classes came from diverse backgrounds, many of them from in and around New York City, and I could tell that, given the rhetoric and actions of our government, they were losing hope in humanity. Poetry has always been the lens through which I see and process the world, and so I thought it would be helpful to put together a book that might give them more faith in the future. The book I eventually published would go on to reach far more people than I ever could have dreamed, but I’ll never forget returning to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I had done my PhD, for a reading. One of my former classmates was commenting on the collection, and I told him how surprised I was by its success. “Well,” he said with a discernible sneer. “It’s not all that surprising. Target sells T-shirts with the word ‘kindness’ printed on them.” I could feel the sting of those words, meant to belittle the book and its accomplishments. But having been on a reading tour for the anthology, and seen how my own students and many other readers connected with these poems, I knew that, no matter what anyone else thought, this book would touch many lives, and give poetry a wider audience. I remain proud to this day that I said a difficult “yes” to this departure from the more “literary” projects I was trained by academia to pursue.

6. If your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them the most? What would disappoint them?

If my younger self could see me now, he would be shocked that I make my living speaking to large groups, leading workshops and retreats, publishing books. I first came to poetry in the third grade when my teacher Mrs. Brown required us to memorize and recite a poem to the whole class each week for a unit in our English class. I don’t even know where the thought first came from, but one week I found myself standing at her desk, turning five different shades of red as I asked her if I could write, memorize and recite one of my own poems. She clapped her hands, excited by the idea, and I became a writer in that instant. After I shared my poem, people came up to me—the quietest kid in class—and complimented what I had written, saying they couldn’t believe that came from me. It felt like a miracle, that something I had created out of nothing, sparked a reaction like this in people who had never even spoken to me. Since then, I knew I wanted to write, wanted to share my work, but I never thought I would be fortunate enough to do it as part of my job. I also never thought one could be both introverted and still comfortable enough speaking to large audiences. In spite of all this, I think my younger self would be disappointed that I sometimes lose myself too much in the business of “adulting,” and often stray from the wonder and awe that brought me to writing in the first place. This is something I’m working on right now, allowing myself what feels like an indulgent amount of time some days to “do nothing,” just walking or sitting in the garden, exploring a town I’ve never been to, sitting at a cafe for hours without the armor of my laptop and a task to do. This type of spaciousness feels necessary to my creativity. Yet the older I get, the more rare it seems, the easier it becomes to make excuses to avoid it.

7. What is a truth you’ve had to unlearn in order to grow?

One so-called “truth” I’ve had to unlearn is that an artist has to suffer in order to create their work. Because of our grind culture, and the myths surrounding creativity, I believed that if it felt too easy, it wasn’t worth doing. I’ve always worked hard, but I thought that writing should feel difficult, that I wasn’t living up to my potential somehow if I wasn’t struggling. I grew up in a very chaotic home where my father was often switching jobs, and we moved every few years, often falling behind in the rent. My mother also lived with agoraphobia and other mental illnesses, so stability was hard to come by. We never knew when she might have another panic attack, or when we’d have to move suddenly from a beloved house. I think I got addicted to constant movement and drama, and carried that over into my adult life and writing practice. In therapy over the years, and in my marriage with my husband, I’ve worked to unravel this addiction, and to embrace the fact that one can be a happy and productive artist—without all the drama. I’ve learned to follow what feels good, what flows more easily through my writing.

8. What question are you currently trying to answer through your work?

I lost my mother a few years ago. She had been ill for many years with multiple sclerosis and COPD, and I’d acted as her caregiver for most of my life. But her death came as a shock to my system, leaving me without a sense of equilibrium or purpose. I realize, looking back, that I took her for granted, even with the awareness that she was not well, and even given the fact that I had lost my father 20 years before. The recent death of Andrea Gibson, a poet who influenced my own work profoundly over the past few years, reopened this wound, and has me asking this question in my poetry and essays: How can I live close to death, and welcome the braided nature of sorrow and joy into my daily life, without also dwelling in anxiety and fear? In other words: How can I live without taking anyone or anything for granted? One thing that’s been helping in this quest is a quote from Andrea: “Remind me/all my prayers were answered/the moment I started praying/for what I already have.” To me, this speaks to our constant human dilemma, of how to radically appreciate what is right here in front of us, even in the midst of sorrow, even with life’s inherent imperfections and failures. Their quote also speaks to the realization that, when and if circumstances shift, we might ask for this very imperfect and beautiful life we spend so much time trying to escape. Most likely, someday, we will want it back.

9. What is pulling you forward right now?

Honestly, some days not much pulls me forward. My heart breaks constantly for the ways in which our country has been overtaken by casual cruelty, the ways our government is ignoring the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and vulnerable groups everywhere. It is very easy to lose hope in the face of such violent rhetoric and outright lies. One thing that buoys me is finding a sense of purpose, both in writing every day and sharing my work with others. My husband and I recently edited a book of love poems by LGBTQ+ authors and allies called Love Is for All of Us, and being out on tour for that anthology, traveling all over the country and visiting bookstores in many different communities, renewed our spirits. Gathering in the name of something larger than us as individuals—love, tenderness, and belonging—helped us and everyone who came to our readings tap into a deeper well of energy. I try to be very intentional with the work I create and put into the world. I want the poems, essays, and anthologies I share to help make our planet a kinder, more beautiful place. I also recently interviewed the singer/songwriter and poet Carrie Newcomer for my writing community, asking a similar question: What’s keeping you going at this fraught time? She replied simply, “Leaning into beauty.” When I heard her words, I felt an opening up of permission in my body and in myself to do the same. Right now, I’m watching endangered monarch butterflies, bumblebees, and hummingbird moths feed on the purple blossoms of butterfly bushes we have allowed to grow wild in our backyard. Small moments of beauty, and small kindnesses I offer and receive—what the awe researcher Dacher Keltner calls “moral beauty”—all help pull me forward on the best days. And remembering that they are possible on my worst days helps me look ahead to better times.

10. If your creative work is a map, where does it lead?

If my creative work is a map, I think it leads to more mystery. The more I practice writing and other forms of creativity, the less I feel I know. For a long time, I think I thought the map would lead to success, fame, or a teaching position as a professor—but it has only led me more deeply into myself and my own experience, more deeply into the mysteries that govern our existence. I was once lucky enough to take a weeklong workshop with the poet Li-Young Lee, and I’ll never forget what he said: “Writing is a self-clarifying act.” As we move through the layers of self, however, we keep finding more layers. More and more lately, I seem to have left behind all maps, and now feel guided by Something I don’t quite understand, but which feels both present and real. I retrieve and receive more than I believe I actually create. I don’t mean to say that I don’t still strive, but it feels more like an act of service to what the poem, essay, or book wants to be, rather than what I want it to be. More often, I am trying softer instead of harder. If my creative work is a map at all, I suppose it’s one of those complex, nearly indecipherable subway maps with countless stops on the journey—but with no discernible destination. At one point, this might have felt frightening to me, but what a joy it still is to ride this train, getting on and getting off where it feels right, not needing to know where I’m headed anymore.

	(for Kenny)

Awake before the sun,
I fill the little white cup
you gifted me in parting
last night with freeze-dried
Colombian instant coffee,
the aroma robust and earthy and South American
	exotic.
The dusty vents spew ice this morning.
I shake, and I spill
powdery white creamer along
its chilly lip, on the dull tile floor.
Leave the taste of French vanilla
	for the ants today.

My resealable bag of cappuccino 
crinkles between slender brown fingers
rippling from my locker
throughout the dorm, tickling
sleeping ears.  I pause.
Scoop.

Red safety lights glow ominously overhead,
a tenebrous warning:
pivot! you are alone now,
as I tap the steel nozzle.
I hiss, pull back for it is hot,
ripe for the taking like the old
blankets discarded on your bunk,
browned with stray coffee.
I drown the mixture in steaming
water and it, like us, becomes
changed entirely—a mélange 
both congenital and external.

On my way back,
I pause, look left.
Your empty bunk jars me;
I expect your body like a felled tree
in the sad space you called home.
Both hands wrapped
tightly around your little white cup,
I cherish its newfound warmth
tempered by insipid chestnut-stained plastic.

There is no mattress
no body nobody
no scattered belongings
hanging haphazardly from the tray up top.
There is only me, an eddy
of snores, and this little cup.
I snap on the pale red sip-lid,
slide white latch open. Scent sighs
into the air, cloying and nostalgic
and like you leaving, 

inescapable. I sip.

III.
	(after Mary Oliver and MARINA)

1.
Wrapped neatly,
loosely, tied delicately
with light white yarn
and smoky gloom heavy,
I peered down intently
into the tiny box filled
with starving darkness Leo presented

last Fourth of July.
How fitting, reasonable,

thoughtful

to gift plain death to loved
ones, seasoned with ascetic apology
marinated all spring in whiskey
and cocaine, on Independence Day.

(God… bless America!)

2.
I jumped in…
	deep.
Fleshy feast for lustrous
thick black. Ignominy aside—
vast emptiness is fecund
obdurate	voracious.
Loquacious and soporific
its tendrils are congenital
ardent like dormant viral 
infection. A cake walk:
to be human. The box is a gun.

3.
Food for maudlin white flowers.
We, the leftovers, often querulous.
Through the lachrymal fog—
its ossified fingers both searching 
	& guiding—
mewls a fatherless cherub
pink 	vulnerable 	sibylline
coddled in soft expansive darkness
the fastidious gray specter of death
—miasmic in his ubiquity,
his effrontery redoubtable—
howls in cold wind.
In dewy grass: neonatal innocence.

The most prudent use of sorrow:
	to love recklessly. 

Kashawn Taylor (he/him) holds a BA in English and Psychology and an MA in English and Creative Writing. Before his incarceration, he established a strong academic foundation, which he has continued to build upon during his time in prison. His “prison writing” has been featured in several publications, including Prison Journalism Project, The Blotter Magazine, Minutes Before Six, Evening Street Review’s DIY Prison Project, and Indiana Review. His first collection, subhuman, is now available.

The land speaks 
with gestures of instant significance. 
 
Trees drop snow 
in sudden tumbles of meaning.   

Faded memories begin to glow, 
rekindled in embers of fires 
built to thaw frozen battlegrounds
before we dig in. 

Magic walks the trapline with us.  

Sometimes with the fox’s straight, sure steps. 
Sometimes with the wolverine’s wandering trail. 
Sometimes disappearing with the grouse’s brushing wings.  

At first, the words are simple echoes. 
Voices from a distant fog— forgotten, but not inaudible.  

At an empty trap,
we open the faded green, army surplus pack
to find leather and licorice,  
castor, anise oil, fermented salmon eggs,
a little beaver meat, raspberry jam, 
and the slightest tang of rum,
an original anti-freeze. 

Then, while we smear 
the blue marten lure on pine trunks, 
color bleeds into clean white snow 
and smells spill out. 

We remember when he said
“the land gives you the words - 
words to fall in love 
with the scent of this place.”

Will Falk (he/him) is a poet, attorney, and community organizer. He writes poems while traveling across the US to offer free legal services to communities fighting against extractive projects like mines, pipelines, and clear-cuts. His poems have appeared through Chapter House Journal, ONE ART, Sheila-na-gig Online, and Wayfarer Magazine, among others. His first poetry collection is When I Set the Sweetgrass Down (Wayfarer Books, 2023).

“The Moon nuzzles its way into comforting Cancer,
where attention turns to our emotional needs.
Feelings become more important than facts.”
            –Leah Whitehorse, Astrologer


Waking at four o’clock in the morning
the day after Thanksgiving
she dreams in Arabic
the back yard still moon-lit

Raccoons eating birdseed
squabbles near the bird bath
three Great Horned Owls
illuminate the starry sky.

She refuses to turn on the computer
go to a store, go anywhere.
When did Fur Free Friday 
become Black Friday?  

When did a day of gratitude be hallowed
by a day of greed?
She walks before the sun rises,
greeted by Barred Owl.

Rose Hips bright red, round
like rosary beads or mala beads.
She gathered with Muslims, Baha’i,
Native Americans, Episcopalians, Jews,

New Thought, Methodist, Catholic,
Pagan Sisters and Brothers 
Thanksgiving Eve service
everyone sang, prayed, ate together,

honoring gratitude, praying for peace.
The Christians forgot and brought pork and non-kosher food 
no one said anything, though she thought
of course it was the Christians

like the Americans in Istanbul 
drinking hot tea and arguing over the price
of rugs hand-tied by children.
They forgot.  We forget.  

She forgot to leave carrots out for the Eastern Cottontail Rabbits 
and four were hopping around the yard, waiting when she returned from her walk.
Even the raccoons looked into the picture window, expectant.
She bows to the birds and animals.

She sees children in West African 
waiting for Jollof Rice, Fufu, Peanut Stew.
They have been waiting since she lived there three decades ago.
Military jets fly too low.  The Grey Squirrel freezes.  Everyone freezes
as if there is a Cooper’s Hawk 
or Barred Owl in the Japanese Maple again.

Once she knew how to write and speak simple sentences 
in several languages.   She has forgotten so much.  We have forgotten.
The borders are opened and closed again.  Refugees are dying.
A tornado goes past the local bakery 
while the owner was making cinnamon rolls.

When she bikes to work the next day, 
she talks to the woman living in her car with her cats.  
She has a large bag of cat food 
and a loaf of homemade bread in the seat.
A lone coyote walks across deer meadow, 
pausing in the frozen stubble 
of burdock and winter wheat glazed by hoar frost.

She calls to it without opening her mouth.
The coyote turns slightly toward her, listening for voles.
The woman bends down to look at bird tracks, 
Italic letters in the frozen mud and ice.
A half dozen Cormorants fly high overhead, black wings on violet-blue.

As in her dream, she wraps a hijab around her head,
wears a long skirt, walks the streets of Istanbul and Damascus
the woman who is homeless is walking with her cats 
the Turkish women invite them in for tea.

Gwendolyn Morgan (she/her) learned the names of birds and wildflowers and inherited paintbrushes and boxes from her grandmothers. With an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and an M.Div. from San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, she has been a recipient of artist and writing residencies at Artsmith, Caldera, Into the Depths of Winter, and Soapstone. Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea, her first book of poems, was a winner of the Wild Earth Poetry Prize, Hiraeth Press. Snowy Owls, Egrets and Unexpected Graces (initially published by Hiraeth Press and currently published by Homebound Publications) is a Nautilus Gold Winner in Poetry and a Foreword Review Indies Book of the Year Finalist in the Nature Category. Her poems have appeared in: Calyx, Kalliope, Mudfish, Tributaries: A Journal of Nature Writing, Wayfarer, Written River as well as The Cancer Poetry Project 2, and other anthologies, blogs, and literary journals. She is the Clark County Poet Laureate 2018-2020 in Washington State. Gwendolyn and Judy A. Rose, her spouse, share their home, music and creekside walks with Naomi, a rescued Cardigan Corgi & Chesapeake Retriever mix.

Let me tell you what I’m looking for:

A skein of dyed wool.
A recipe for preserved meat. 
Practices I can grip
from the roots. 

Songs sung around solstice time,
stories woven from so many seasons in one place.
Flags of bright-patterned fabric
from before the spangled banner. 

My father’s father left the fjords
to become a soldier. 
I was told he only ate eggs 
on the train from New York to Seattle.
It was the only word
he was sure of in English. 

He became American
but still longed for salty fish. 

All the questions I never got to ask 
hover in the evening air. 

I wish he could tell me about
the tall fields of summer grain 
what he knew of farming, 
what seeds he stitched
into rows each spring, 
what songs our ancestors sang 
when they went out to fish,
whether he liked the sound of wool
spinning into yarn.

I’m looking for a scrap of cloth 
to hang in the window 
without stealing
from anybody. 

Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. She’s taught writing in a variety of contexts: classrooms, research stations, graduate programs, parks, libraries, and beyond. Emilie calls on her years of experience as an outdoor educator and curriculum developer to help students connect with themselves, one another, and the places they find themselves in. Emilie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Wayfarer Magazine, and Crab Creek Poetry Review (where her poem was a semifinalist for the Crab Creek Poetry Award). Her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book award was chosen by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as a monthly book pick from the Poetry Foundation. Emilie is currently an outdoor educator, a professor of creative writing, a poet in the schools, and at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens and youth. She lives on Coast Miwok land in San Rafael, California. Find more of her work and words at emilielygren.com.

After days of deep grief		

the air feels like ocean. 
But no amount of swimming lessons
readied you for this fall beyond sight. 

You try to leave the house
without ripping open.
Walk the dog.
Send mail.

But everything is a trip wire
reminder of what has been lost.

The broccoli—
what you coaxed him towards as a child.
An orange— he ate so many. 
Model airplanes and finger paints.

His favorite kind of bread
lines up in neat rows
at the grocery store.

One whole row
has been removed. 

At the back of the shelf, 
bread bags fall into one another, 
barely propped up,
shaped around emptiness. 

Your hand will never stop reaching
toward what he loved. 
The empty row will never be refilled.
A space you’ll keep stumbling over
with heart and eyes.

Hands that want 
to busy themselves, 
send a letter, 
twist over 
and over 
on the heavy shore. 

Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. She’s taught writing in a variety of contexts: classrooms, research stations, graduate programs, parks, libraries, and beyond. Emilie calls on her years of experience as an outdoor educator and curriculum developer to help students connect with themselves, one another, and the places they find themselves in. Emilie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Wayfarer Magazine, and Crab Creek Poetry Review (where her poem was a semifinalist for the Crab Creek Poetry Award). Her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book award was chosen by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as a monthly book pick from the Poetry Foundation. Emilie is currently an outdoor educator, a professor of creative writing, a poet in the schools, and at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens and youth. She lives on Coast Miwok land in San Rafael, California. Find more of her work and words at emilielygren.com.

The God I know 
has lots of sons 
and daughters 
and those who don’t 
identify with either of those labels. 

The God I know 
walks the streets 
and carries water; 
sits with those who
know nothing but pain. 

The God I know
is the bedrock of the land, 
the crash of the ocean 
and forgotten paths 
up the back of the mountain. 

The God I know 
loves without borders 
and seeps into parts 
of the world that seem devoid of light, 

carrying a whisper of something 
we may never understand 
in a language we knew 
before we were born. 

The God I Know, Part Two

The God I know
walks across borders,
children in hand,
because it’s the only thing
left to do.

The God I know
rocks toddlers 
who shiver in fear 
because what they know
feels gone forever.

The God I know
walks with parents
who wonder what they could have done
while worry sits, silent and heavy
on their shoulders.

The God I know
whispers in the ears
of those who wonder about following orders
from others who are afraid 
of what it means to love your neighbor.

The God I know 
loves without limits 
and weeps into the parts 
of the world that seem far too broken–
that God wants us to remember

there is no such thing
as other people’s children
and we belong to each other, 
just like the source of all things 
belongs to all, unwavering even today.

The God I Know, Part Three

The God I know
sits on the street with those 
closest to fear as pain and grief collide.

The God I know
wonders when we will figure out
what it truly means to love one another.

The God I know 
reminds us that thoughts 
and prayers alone aren’t enough.

The God I know 
calls for right action, the sort that 
opens hearts and minds in new ways.

The God I know
points to a bridge, one with
the capacity to carry heavy loads.

The God I know
walks across the bridge 
to offer peace to a stranger.

The God I know
whispers continually that not 
all is lost even when we think it is.

The God I Know, Part Four

The God I know
is Rizpah on the mountain 
seeking justice for her boys.

The God I know
sees color in a way that 
honors stories of the other.

The God I know 
calls us all into figuring out
what it means to be a good neighbor.

The God I know
isn’t afraid to show up
in inconvenient places.

The God I know
remains, even amidst
uncertainty, confusion and heartache.

The God I know
is clear that while we may be one human race,
the color white has wielded power for too long.

The God I know 
moves to crack and crumble privilege
into something that looks more like love.

The God I Know, Part Five

The God I know
doesn’t ban love from church
when some people don’t agree 
with how love presents itself.

The God I know
doesn’t underwrite decisions
that claim some lifestyles
are more holy than others.

The God I know
doesn’t strengthen rules 
that exclude and shame
in the name of praise.

The God I know
doesn’t inspire interpretations 
of the Word that say, “you’re wrong.”
You love who you love, and that’s beautiful.

The God I know
opens hearts
minds
doors
to unify all people
through every storm,
no matter who you love.

The God I Know, Part Six

The God I know
adds love to spaces between
everywhere across the globe.

The God I know
sits with kids who need school to feel safe/fed/heard, 
parents and teachers doing the best they can with the tools they have.

The God I know
walks next to the unhoused,
those ordered to shelter in a place they didn’t have.

The God I know
heals through the hands of many
offering peace when war seems to be waged from within.

The God I know
cradles the sick and those who love them
with a story that promises death isn’t the end.

The God I know
fills a newly quiet earth
with birdsong and clear skies at dawn.

The God I know
is the truth of trauma and miracle
existing side by side.

The God I Know, Part Seven

The God I know
is still on the mountain, Rizpah
seeking justice for her boys.

The God I know
is a Black man face down on pavement
gasping for breath at the hands of police.

The God I know
is more outraged by white supremacy’s violence
than church doors ordered shut.

The God I know
is a white person
confronting her own racist ideals.

The God I know
is calling us all in
to do the anti-racist work

of rebuilding the kingdom
one truth at a time until
all lives really do matter.

The God I Know 
(Despite Everything)

The God I know
doesn’t occupy lands
and support the oppression
of a people for decade
after decade.

The God I know
doesn’t kill the children
of one people
to liberate the children
of another.

The God I know
doesn’t condone violence
of any kind as justice
no matter how righteous
that violence seems to some.

The God I know
sits with parents of children lost and living
on both sides of the blockade
as they do their best to tend their pain
and embody love in a war zone.

The God I know
keeps laying bricks
on the bridge to peace
even when more parts of that bridge
are blasted away every day.

The God I know
helps bear loads too heavy
to carry up mountains
we may not summit
in this lifetime.

The God I know
takes the packs of the weary,
sets the table with hope, and
invites us to sit together to listen
long enough to find a new way forward.

Heidi Barr (she/her) is a writer and wellness coach whose work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She is the author of several books of creative nonfiction, including Collisions of Earth and Sky and Woodland Manitou, and co author of 12 Tiny things. She’s also authored two other poetry collections, one cookbook, and is editor of “The Mindful Kitchen,” a wellness column in The Wayfarer Magazine. One of the inaugural Poets of Place for the lower St. Croix Valley, her poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including the St. Paul Almanac and South Dakota in Poems. She lives with her family in rural Minnesota, where they tend a large vegetable garden, explore nature, and do their best to live simply. Learn more at heidibarr.com.

how empty sits the room once filled with his laughter.
how like a womb scrapped clean it has become. a city 
of exile. an utter desolation. i close the door behind me.

the weeping of his sister—cutting through our walls 
like a knife through the throat—is matched only by 
his mother’s screams. how the Lord has made her suffer. 

this grief envelopes. barbed wire around the heart, 
a plastic bag over the head. bitterness churns my stomach 
to bile on the bathroom floor. 

but the Lord is good to those who wait for Him 
in silence, mouths filled with dirt. His compassion 
will not be absent forever. His mercies will lift the weight 
crushing precious things when the unseen is accomplished. 

today she will not be comforted.

Matthew E. Henry (he/him) is an educator, essayist, and occasional fiction writer. He is the author of the full-length collections Said the Frog to the Scorpion (2024), The Third Renunciation (2023), and The Colored Page (2022), as well as the chapbooks Have You Heard the One About…? (2023), Dust & Ashes (2020), and Teaching While Black (2020). He serves as editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and as nonfiction editor of Porcupine Literary. Henry holds an MFA, an MA in theology, and a PhD in education. His collection, Promises to Keep, is now available from Wayfarer Books. He writes about education, race, religion, and dismantling oppressive systems at www.MEHPoeting.com

whose children must i dash against the rocks,
sledgehammer with the righteous indignation 
of the oppressed? 
                  You brought me here, left me 
in this strange land. i am alone for raising my voice. 
for singing Your songs. for not forgetting. 

                  You are my Tormentor, 
the Devastator of my family. 

where is my double revenge? which of Your children 
may i destroy for all You’ve done to me? is this 
Your answer— here in this splintering mirror?
in the blood pooling at my feet? 

Matthew E. Henry (he/him) is an educator, essayist, and occasional fiction writer. He is the author of the full-length collections Said the Frog to the Scorpion (2024), The Third Renunciation (2023), and The Colored Page (2022), as well as the chapbooks Have You Heard the One About…? (2023), Dust & Ashes (2020), and Teaching While Black (2020). He serves as editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and as nonfiction editor of Porcupine Literary. Henry holds an MFA, an MA in theology, and a PhD in education. His collection, Promises to Keep, is now available from Wayfarer Books. He writes about education, race, religion, and dismantling oppressive systems at www.MEHPoeting.com

It began sitting in a home, listening. 

A slowness settling bones down to earth, roots and dirt, worms and mushrooms anchoring attention in time.
No big deal, she said—just aliveness sensing itself—pulsing, warm, the sun unable to keep up with the snow.
No big deal—slow all the way down, search this body once and for all for its soul. My mouth tasting all it wants. My feet marching up muddy mountains.
No big deal narratives of conflict abound but so do those of resolution.
You sat down head falling back laughing the black coffee in your mug sloshing out onto you nightgown—Do you see that ghost?

Patterned light through closed lids is its own intelligence, No big deal.

The foundation is listening—this is how we learned to speak. Mom and Dad pushing air from their lungs, vibrating cords in their throats. Their own sandcastled perspectives given to us through tone, inflection, rhythm.

This is how it works. No big deal.

We shape each other’s soft, fleshy bodies with our words.

Rebecca Brenner (she/her) is a writer, journalist, and mindfulness meditation teacher. Her work has appeared in TIME, the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and elsewhere. She serves as president and co-founder of Mindful. Summit County, a nonprofit devoted to mindfulness as a tool for community care, and is active in local LGBTQ+ advocacy and community-building efforts. Paper House is her debut memoir-in-verse—a personal reckoning with the intergenerational impact of addiction, loss, and the enduring bonds that continue.