My mother and grandmother were born in ‘the land of the lake,’ or La Comarca de la Laguna, a cradle of fertile land between the Sierra Madre mountain ranges in the northern Mexican desert

As I look out upon a landscape now heavily shaped by American colonialism, I know another world is possible.

A farmer with a wolf, a goat and a cabbage must cross a river by boat.

The year I meet granpa my hands mimic clouds. / Charybdis turning turpid pools / beneath his globes— vision I have awaited.

I started asking rivers to feed me as a child—literally, with flesh from fish, then figuratively, with flashes of comfort.

There is a river, lost or hidden, that is impossible to pass six days each week.

The Opera House power vault / blows and knocks out the local grid / on our first day of work together.

I’m writing this much later than I should be, in part, because I’ve just had another birthday, and as I age, I become more reluctant to do more than one job.

The court had decided I was the most logical choice for the bull’s care. I was sufficiently neutral as a production assistant, and I’d already been tasked with managing him at the studio.

We don't know. / Despite thousands of years spent / conceptualizing moralities of power, / theorizing hierarchies / or their abolition…

Can everyone hear and see me okay? No? Oh, I was on mute, let me just … There we go.

"Why is it that the more transsexual I get, the more employable I feel?"

At the height of the pandemic, I became a new kind of laborer: a student-teacher, a strange, two-faced role.

Teri Vela’s “Superstition Sonnet” invites readers to dispense with everything they think they know about the sonnet. It is not the rules of a form, but the warp and weft of intergenerational violence and prevailing softness that tethers these intricate lines together into a powerful reverse origin story.

In her dazzling suite of text poems, image poems, and art, Tina Lentz-McMillan designates the negative space in every page as an intimate collaborator in her story. Her speaker is an un-silenced witness: of obsession, desire, and the ache of longing—and of what (and who) lives on even in the liminal territory of erasure.