I could hold up my phone
and learn what bird makes this call 
like six cuts of a spade 
followed by a long sigh,
but a house going up needs
more to hold onto: repetition,
perhaps, or a brief un-
knowing. Meanwhile, six months
for the science building to fall, 
and still not really down. Backhoes bow 
through their rough archeology
as if grazing on the foundation.
All spring I watched cranes 
claw open the classrooms, marked 
weeks to summer by floors razed 
which sounds like gone up 
but is spelled like piles of torn concrete, 
more wire than you’d think
now gathered like snarled hair, the nest 
gone wrong. There’s a fence to protect 
us from it, or protect it
from us.  I couldn’t really see
change until I was gone— 
then the difference when I returned,
sky where there hadn’t been sky. 
Now birds, a chickadee flying
to the feeder for a single peanut
he takes to the tree. Back,
then away. Five peanuts. Winging off
through the pollen that floats
like asbestos, a man on a lift
to spray it with water, keep away
from our lungs. Below him, 
another machine stalks through 
looking for salvage.

Laura Donnelly (she/her) is the author of Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press) and Watershed (Cider Press Review), and her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Poets.org, SWWIM, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and teaches at SUNY Oswego.

My body wears no armor,
how lucky it’s got me. 
I keep it warm in pencil skirts,
it gets it all for free. 

My body has a stock portfolio 
of poetry, lipgloss & stews. 
It never feels fed enough
& constantly spews. 

My body does not play by rules,
it does what I would not. 
I’m fond of eggs, Netflix, words,
it only finds bodies hot. 

My body turns out all types of trash
like dead cells, migraines & tears. 
I work it out, shampoo it, keep it tidy
from bunions to ears. 

My body knows no street smarts,
just calculus, Hulu & lust. 
I stand by it as it breaks to pieces 
& heal it in good trust. 

My body hasn’t thanked me yet,
it loves dismantling me. 
I shove it Sisyphus-style uphill
& let it nap along the sea. 

My body never talks to me,
it has no social skill. 
I cater to its slightest whimsy,
it’s waiting for the kill.

Grace Lynn (she/her/them) is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.

I will cradle your head in my hands
like you once did for me
You smell of light lavender and a hint of black coffee
the same as always
Your voice more hollow now
never losing the cadence
as when you’d call us to put the clothes on the line
Your fingers walking along the edge of the tightrope
nimble and with precision you help me
learn the art of moving from basket, 
to commitment, to being free
now those same fingers are hooked up 
to the beepy things you hate so much
when I tell you you can’t go home for the 17th time in 8 minutes 
Your tone becomes clipped
explaining why you can’t stay here
I tell you
“Home is when I’m with you”
You calm
I comb your hair now a faded hue of slate
You are the reason I am here
Your body now getting ready to leave me
You grab my hand with surprising strength
even though your tendons have softened with time
You stroke the back of my hand softly
with your fingertips
I become 5 again

Dayna Hodge Lynch (she/they) is a Black femme poet from North Carolina. Dayna received her B.A. in English, a minor in African and African-American Studies at Loyola University of New Orleans, their MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and MLS from North Carolina Central University. Her work can be found in Rattle, Rappahannock Review, Potomac Review, NZ’s Tarot, the B’K, and daynahodgelynch.com.

Dear Deddi, 

You’d never believe this hole-in-the-wall I found. 
Grits were on the menu—with cheese, butter, salt and pepper. 
Steak was offered smothered and covered. 
You know I don’t like meat like that. 
But I sat and looked at the antique chestnut wallpaper 
Same as the place off of 74, like you used to take us. 

My mind got confused this morning. 
Last night's tequila might’ve had something to do with it. 
Elements of my day reminded me of you, how you’d forget to get gas, 
I could’ve sworn I heard you say “Babygirl” 
or “can I hold some money til payday?”

It’s muscadine picking season now. 
You remember when we went hunting but I couldn’t kill a fly 
so y’all put me on “berry brigade?” 
Those wild deep purple muscadines are still my favorite. 

We got the big January snow you called about 3 days after you [redacted]. 
I made snow cream with too much vanilla extract and not enough cinnamon, the oatmilk wasn’t bad. Whirling whispers of death thick anointing the wind as the flurries fell to earth. 

 I’ve found I can time travel in my mind back to before you [redacted]. 

Holding the blue reel in my hand before dangling the Spotted Brim over by the bass littering banks before…

How am i supposed to be here without You?

Dayna Hodge Lynch (she/they) is a Black femme poet from North Carolina. Dayna received her B.A. in English, a minor in African and African-American Studies at Loyola University of New Orleans, their MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and MLS from North Carolina Central University. Her work can be found in Rattle, Rappahannock Review, Potomac Review, NZ’s Tarot, the B’K, and daynahodgelynch.com.

A barrel, the hawk
           staring down the sun-

golden wild cups
           closed globemallow-

rain comes,
          a fragrant death-

pinon branches bow
          in the rain, the road-

first, I will tell you
          about the scars-

that become paths
           on hillsides-

then the fawn, without-

Izzy Forrest (they/them) is a poet living in Salida CO with their huskies and wife. They are a current first year MFA poetry candidate at Western Colorado University. They work full time in LGBTQ+ healthcare and spend their free time trail running or playing at the river with their dogs. Their most recent work has been featured in Beyond Queer Words, Tulip Tree Press, and Central Colorado Writers.

In the tall, tall weeds I can still see America.
The house on 285 has changed their flags since the last election

            The house on 285 has put up a pride flag. I see
            Amish people at Walmart, we both stare at each other’s otherness.

We both stare at each other’s queerness.
Love is the comfort of a worn in couch.

            We make love on our worn in couch.
            Our touching: That unruly thing.

Our touching: That generous thing,
like the garden we grew last summer.

            The garden we grew last summer
            gave our neighbors tomatoes and Anaheim peppers.

Our neighbors made salsa from the tomatoes our garden grew.
In the tall, tall weeds I can still see America.

Izzy Forrest (they/them) is a poet living in Salida CO with their huskies and wife. They are a current first year MFA poetry candidate at Western Colorado University. They work full time in LGBTQ+ healthcare and spend their free time trail running or playing at the river with their dogs. Their most recent work has been featured in Beyond Queer Words, Tulip Tree Press, and Central Colorado Writers.

The clouds are dissolving the mountains, an accumulation of visibility from mist. 
Gentleness, do us this favor when facing the obdurate, a balance of power,
weather shaping environments, one of rough, mighty crags and hard edges,
the other rounding in rumples disappearing together as if lifting off.
So these mountaintops gradually float like great galleons
with the mysterious illusions of nature as lyricism,
a hologram in the process of painting its own colors transparent.

There is such great urgency when fog is smoke instead,
that dry fiery bristling below the shifting line of plumes,
as if trees were caught in oily red waves of wreckage
to call while cracking and falling adrift.

What scale of justice or weight for these two pictures
of the very same landscape circumstances are responsible for
via global warming or the time before all of that?

One is an Asian-influenced haiku of the most elegant brushwork on satin,
and the other apocalyptic realism documented as fact
for what was once abstract in theory. 

Oh, an attempt at intelligence and a love for language,
pretentious or not, how to go on having belief in the point of art
as a conscience which bears witness
should the beautiful natural world perish along with us
who would sustain?

So citizens, planet-inhabitants, just like lovers ask
& that must be impetus enough against the great chance
of futility, of failure, versus sticking it out, making strife -
sustenance.

Stephen Mead (he/him), a mixed-media artist, first began seeing his poems published in little literary print magazines in his mid-twenties, until in the late 1980s when he moved to Provincetown, Mass to focus more on visual work. Around 2000, making use of the internet, he began publishing his art and writing combined. In addition to his art being shown in physical gallery spaces, since then his poetry, essays, art and hybrid-work (collage-films, sound-collage downloads) have been published internationally in over one hundred both print/online magazines and artistic platforms. He also has an Amazon author central page where many of his art-poetry books and novels may be purchased. Currently he is resident artist/curator for the Chroma Museum, an online space depicting over 600 artistic montage renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall.

From the collection, Drive Through the Night.

Red lights mix with rain
                    —spilling blood
         across the windshield.

Not a road long enough 
to outrun the dawn.

The darkness hums 
with deafening regret. 

Walking the wet streets, 
seeking absolution.

Finding only 
the ghost of us.

Not a road long enough 
to outrun the dawn.

Let the sun rise.
I am ready.

L.M. Browning (She/they) is a writer, publisher, and advocate whose work spans over two decades and fourteen titles. They are the founder of Wayfarer Magazineand Wayfarer Books, independent platforms committed to amplifying voices from the margins. Browning’s literary contributions have earned six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gold Nautilus Medal for Poetry, multiple Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Silver Medal in 2022. Their innovative approach to publishing led to two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association, a TEDx talk at Yale University. In 2022, Browning retired from writing.

From the collection, Drive Through the Night.

Shame be damned—own the ruin of yourself.
Wear the failure like a vintage coat
	—torn, tattered heart—
	you are a worn-out classic,
a soul of arcane salt and grit.

Outcast, 
	iconoclast, 
		stand fast.
Beyond the black and white blah of button-down norm 
		we clash and crash
	in the candle-lit dusk
of conscious dreams and darkest desires

I return to the wild, 
dig my heels in, 
bare my teeth,
and stand this new ground.

L.M. Browning (She/they) is a writer, publisher, and advocate whose work spans over two decades and fourteen titles. They are the founder of Wayfarer Magazine and Wayfarer Books, independent platforms committed to amplifying voices from the margins. Browning’s literary contributions have earned six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gold Nautilus Medal for Poetry, multiple Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Silver Medal in 2022. Their innovative approach to publishing led to two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association, a TEDx talk at Yale University, and a degree from Harvard University through grant programs. In 2022, Browning retired from writing.

Exhibit A: Petition for Dissolution

She always wanted to visit Bruges, but we settled for an eight-hour bus ride to San Francisco. She hoped a new pair of lace panties—with a hole in the crotch—would summon our unicorn.

The trip led to our first and only threesome with a divorce lawyer who took her time dissecting the insect of our marriage.  

As she flipped through the pages, I could smell the sebum of her hair calling to me from nights before, when I buried my nose in her hindhead—the tickle of a thousand antennae.  

We shrunk into a fetal position, like conjoined bananas on the top bunk of her bed.  
I slid the vibrator ring onto my finger—wide enough to accommodate the girth of the average American penis—and placed it above her panties. Her stifled moans seeped out the back of her head.  

Exhibit B: Testimony

Even though her roommate was a “buen vato,” according to her Tío, she didn’t like the way he fell silent whenever they were alone in the kitchen. She also cleaned the tub after he showered, scrubbing away the constellation of red and green snot rockets the showerhead missed.  

Aside from the bathroom, they also shared a wall—one she suspected filtered more than sound. Her presence slipped into his ritual, a rhythm she pretended not to feel. She shushed me when I laughed. She kept doing so at any sound originating from me, including when I shifted my weight on the bed or farted.  

This was the first time I ever elicited an orgasm from her, and there was no box on the forms to memorialize it. The pungent yet fresh signature of that achievement mingled with laws we had promised to follow before an officiant, under the courthouse’s aileron.  

There was no space in the warmth of the xeroxed sheets to fit the night her pupusas gave me food poisoning—or how she nursed me back to health in her brother’s bed, kissing me only when I closed my mouth and pecked.  

“Why do you have to make your lips so smoochy?” she said, puckering hers like the sucker of a leech.  

“I don't know,” I replied, “maybe because that's the way I fucking kiss.”

Nowhere to attach a recording of how I denied 30 pieces of silver to deliver this one flesh to its doom, when I refused to take the lawyer’s offer to get me half of the fifteen grand she failed to disclose.  

We never managed to get pregnant, even by accident. Especially during the one-year period we didn’t have sex, when she spent six months in El Salvador—“just visiting”— and returned with an HPV diagnosis stamped in her passport.

I wore my silver wedding band on my right hand and giggled when girls I wished I had the courage to sleep with asked:  “Are you married?”  

We did, however, fuck up my mom’s credit—from the times I called her in Central America for hours at a time. The debt outlasted the marriage. 

She never told the lawyer how I got over the fact that she lied about being a smoker because “everyone smokes in San Salvador.” Or how I discovered pictures on her computer of her ex grabbing her ass.

Then there was the picture in light-sensitive emulsion, her pale hand draped on his naked leg. Why was she touching him like that—her brother’s best friend—that Greek-sculpture inner quadrant, browned by the sun of Semana Santa? Why him? Why his gorgeous, rotisserie-chicken quadricep?

But I guess there was no way for me to describe that I never cheated on her— 

technically.  

Or how the weight of another woman’s breasts felt lighter in my hands having crushed my own ribs seeing her cry “Please! Don’t leave me!” earlier that same night.  

Exhibit C: Judgment

When her gaze lowered to read the documents, the line of lash mascara forming on the crease of her upper eyelid reminded me of our first date—where we didn’t talk or hug or kiss, but merely allowed our hands to dance like Daphnis et Chloé, ignoring time as we unraveled every single one of our dermatoglyphs.  
Or how she made me get “miel” at McDonald’s for her pancakes, and I brought her syrup.
“No, dundo,” she said, lips barbed with stingers—the kind of laughter she saved for when I landed on the sticky end of my broken Spanish.
“I want bee honey, not ‘miel de maple.’”
The sweetness, lost in transliteration.
I handed her the pen—the latex-free grip, ribbed for her pleasure. And as she signed, I finally saw her dream—how we could, someday, build a home in Santa Tecla—just for a moment, before it all became true.

Jose Oseguera (he/him) is a writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Water Stone, Pinch and Sonora Review.
He is the author of the poetry collections “The Milk of Your Blood” (Kelsay Books, 2021) and And This House Is Only a Nest (Homebound Publications, 2024).

      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.

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.

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.

	(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).