This is how you keep your head down; this is how you thank God for this country: loudly so they hear / you;

in people. That whatever gods / I choose, I choose to love

I buy an old city bus, which will / whisk me away from this sinkhole I’m circling.

Last night I dreamt of / walking to Auger Beach / at dusk / only to find the tide / too high again:

In this moment that has come to happen / in other moments, the notes / of birds nestled in my asking.

The new year begins in winter white embroidery— / trumpeter swans and needle-slim herons piercing / drainage ditches.

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.

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

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

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.

Michelle’s poetry and collage act as a bridge between beloved, departed souls, ancestors lost to undocumented histories, and unborn future lineages.

In a world where writers operate within the confines of page and word limits, Sionnain Buckley is a visionary without regard for parameters. In her poem, “The Time-Space Synesthete Draws You a Picture of What You Can’t See” Buckley renders a world where time has a shape, where every word has weight, and where the experience of glimpsing through the speaker’s vast, synesthetic scope will leave an indelible impression in your worldview.