Every time I look up, it’s still there – the skeleton of the once bustling village where my / father grew up.

Begin with a name.

The summer before I published my first — and so far, only — book, my husband Alonso and I finally saved enough money and time to spend a week in Paris.

Every poem I write opens with a parent. How else / do I bless the ones that birthed me?

We sit across from each other to play the game Othello.

In the house is a horse, or the house itself is a horse.

in the beginning there were no lines no markers of where & what belong to whom / or why

Still dark out when my father pulls / the trigger.

the mother circulates through Berlin’s arteries, / smacking through streets and bike lanes until a / DHL worker delivers her to my front door.

soundtrack: fall in love (remix), slum village / because it just might, / i dance like my life depends on it.

Mixed media artist Ellen Wiener on the featured art for issue 16.

I said goodbye to my father for the first and last time, after his death, in the quietest place in the United States.