Poetry

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AT LIFE’S BIG ROUND TABLE

I’m just here at life’s big round table
With everyone else, my typical African mother
Brighter than life to my right, my soft-hearted African father
Right in my front like a stream of dreams, my two black vibrant
As the mid-day sun brothers at my flank and like everyone else
We too are dipping our black hands into life’s bottomless bowl of myths
And heaving into our black mouths our own fair share of life’s boundless miseries.There’s a new plague, in the world, on the loose. There are places, as we speak, receding into oblivion. There are men, somewhere in Sudan, as we speak heaving their last breath. There are children your daughter’s age, somewhere in Palestine, yearning for death’s cold embrace. There are boys your son’s height & stature, somewhere in Congo, rummaging dumpsites for crumbs.But unequipped, yet, by providence with fate-rewriting spells I’m forced, like an equestrian statue, to remain staid at life’s big round table with everyone else, enjoying my own fair share of life’s miseries. There are turbulent tales in my heart begging to be ferried by the wind to distant soft arable lands, eager to blossom under the spell of sunshine into jasmines, to shade songbirds that shall one day tell the world about their woes.Although, there are fire ants gnashing against the frail wall of my chest, dear wailing neighbors tell me how can I help pulverize your ancient aches and anxieties?Although, the shimmering rice in the aluminum pot on fire can only appease the famished gods of one belly, dear passer-by won’t you detour your caravan & come underneath the shade of my leaking roof tonight to share in my abundance?
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Written by Abdulmueed Balogun.
Abdulmueed Balogun is a black poet from Ibadan. He's been published in: Zaum Magazine, Boudin and elsewhere. He tweets from: AbdmueedA
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BETELGEUSE

A large old star that has left the main phase of its lifeMost are green-blue like agave, lichen,
and auroras. Rorschach inkblots of leaky
blood vessels that are deeply photogenic.They fight with one another to star in
my universe; asteroids and meteors
spiraling in concentric orbits.Right here, on the back of my knee,
a luminous galaxy of pooled plasma,
from squeezing the stainless steel pole.This one, a hazy eddy in my armpit from
free-styling like a rogue planet. Virgo and
Ursa congeal on lips no longer waxed.For an hour each week in the studio, this
pole is mine, a silver veil in muted red light.
I lick her; clutch her with my inner thighs.Here, I’m alive and beautiful enough.
My clots! My clusters! My cosmos! Oh,
how I grieve when you begin to fade.
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Written by Sherry Shahan.
Sherry Shahan holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry and Short Fiction.
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Bring Oil & Offering

at night i find worship
to my lonely altar. i
bring oil & offering
but sometimes just my prayer
found deep in bedsheets. ihave not seen my god tonight
& i wonder if he will ever
be there. i'm toldsomeday i will find my god
in the form of another man's love
but my worship riles patient
searching for an unfamiliar tongue
i do not speak. sowhen there is no other man left to pray. i
explore my temple gates
where i invite my self-love to dance
upon graveyards of sea salt & sugarplums
that my great crashing waves
carry away. ican only fight my loneliness for so long. so
i search for more than justleft midnight mass. on lonely
night standsi ate body & bread
only for a few communions. but still ibring oil & offering
but sometimes just my prayer
found deep in bedsheets.
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Written by Mercury Sunderland.
Mercury Sunderland (he/him) is an autistic gay trans man from Seattle. He's been published by University of Amsterdam's Writer's Block and UC Davis' Open Ceilings.
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By the Clock-in Machine

I am blinking under cameras in
a well-lit room.
I look at my hands, ID between
the fingers, and you are there
at the clock-in machine
close enough to touch.
Sometimes in my mind I approach you
boldly, a whack on the shoulders
that you hunch a little when in your head, but mostly,
I just smile, and think about leaping.You smile a little gently, too,
the bold bold bold of my brain pacing its way across the
high-traffic roundabout of my head unhalting its course
my fingers grasping (warm smile) across the wideness of shoulders (warm greeting)
along your spine (I'm doing fine) and I bend my head close (head up)
and I share a breath (deep breath in) with your collarbones
and in my mind (exhale) I exchange stories like oxygen (selective question) and tap your mind like a spile
and you do me the honor of smiling (smile a little) a little hungrily
and (gentle reply) ask me something in response
because that's what people do (all I can do to help, man)
when they like each other (small touch)
and they don't (shift past) have to go on their way
and make plans (goodb-)
and distance.
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Written by Arielle Auberry.
Arielle Auberry is a sociology student at ACC. When not writing diatribes disguised as poems and essays, she is probably trying to find her keys.
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Fast Fashion

There’s something in my skin
disagreeable with fashion.
I used to think
my outer layers shed so easily
per the rites of adolescent unmattering,
my body a wrecking ball
barreling through notions of (self)
preservation. Tatters became
my clothes, gravel bedazzling
breakaways that tore away
to portrait frames displaying
tree trunk thighs, twiggy tibias, knurled ankles
speckled with bark beetle debris
eating pinked peels of knee.
But now that the crane has calmed
its breakneck flailing, the ruinous
tides of my momentum
surrendered to gravity’s ebb,
I still find fabric disintegrates
against my flesh. How many teeth are left
embedded in this sinuous gallery of scars?
Am I nothing more than surface
tension? Sweat unspools in waterfalls
softening jagged rocks unevenly.
Frass unravels all
around me, pinholes pouring out
possibilities I can’t hold
together. Wreckage is more
purpose than byproduct, fatally
flawed designs stitched along the seams
beneath my armpit and skull.
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Written by Steven O. Young Jr.
Steven O. Young Jr. is knitted within the Great Lakes' mitten, where he occasionally. slathers soundstages with his body weight's worth of paint.
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Full Moon in Detriment

That which doesn’t kill you
makes you paranoid,
suspicious of the other shoe
tip-toeing ‘round the issue.Yet we can’t keep our nose
out of it,
let alone clean —
deep in the muck,
laden
in red flags
cut from spun wool;
trusting one’s
digit,
triggered
at the pulse.Me, up?
I cannot stand
to die in my
sleep,
nor can I sit
idly
as hearts
betray
the trust
they seek.But is it theirs
or mine
jaded by time
climaxing
in the scorpion’s sign?
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Written by Tara Slaughter Szkutnik.
Living vicariously isn't—this Tara Slaughter Szkutnik knows as reader and author of what inspires. When not free associating, she summons her red pen.
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HOME IS A VITAL ORGAN

Growing up I never understood it.
The way people clung to the place they were raised in as if it were a limb. A vital organ.
A piece of their identity for which they must desperately cradle, lest it fall from their arms and shatter.I don’t think I would’ve ever understood it if I hadn’t left. It never used to matter to me.
That place I will always call home. That place I will never return to. I now live in a land of cracked soil, mountain drives, and skiing trips. I want to belong here; I see the beauty in it all.
But I am an impostor.
My limb, my vital organ? It will always belong to that place. The one before.
That shaking, roaring, inky mass of resentment I want to feel is a lie. I am an impostor, can’t you see?I am a girl who swears there is ice in her bones despite the warmth of the sun and the memory of afternoon rain that lives in her blood.
I am a girl with a stain of red clay on her soul that will never scrub out. I am a girl of forests.
A girl of morning dew.
Of sticky summers and Sunday morning traffic.
A girl who spent her nights lulled to sleep by the frogs and crickets that coated the night with their song.It will always be a part of me. I understand it now.
I too, shall cradle it, the way it cradled me.
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Written by Zoe Coon.
Zoe Coon is a student and self-proclaimed artist who finally fell to her visceral urge to create after too long spent running from it.
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I Swear to God This Is A Poem Because—See?—I Hit <RETURN> A Lot and at Random and Daring Intervals, And It’s About Aging

This piece is called “I swear to god this is a poem because, see?, I hit <RETURN> a lot and at random and daring intervals,And it’s about aging.”And now the young folk are saying “Aw hell, not another old dude fucking whining about getting old.”To which I say, “¡Watchense, jovencitos! With a little luck, and only if you play your cards right, you might get old enough to one day wake up and wonder which part of your precious body is going to hurt first the moment you try to roll out of bed.”I swear to god this is a poem.I lie in this humming, throbbing MRI machine, told to hold still while I listen to classic jazz.Seconds tick, kneecaps click, and someday a doctor will tell you that you’re not just sick.I HATE poems that rhyme—especially the ones about time and what it does to us.I’m at that stage where every hint of praise is followed by the qualifier for his age.Repeat: I HATE poems that rhyme.I, an elder statesman of Gen X, realized recently that young people really don’t want to talk with you. They look through you, as if you’ve faded to the point of becoming a spectre, a ghost, a frail, sinister phantom whose decrepitude is more virulent than the first wave of COVID, and whose unattractiveness is irrelevant because, as I’ve just established, you’re invisible.But of course they see you. They just don’t acknowledge you.I swear to god this is a poem.The MRI tech scolds me for moving and I have to apologize for the sudden coughing fit that blurred her image. Fuck me, I think, I’m old enough to just break into coughing fits for no reason.When a young person—say between the ages of 18 and 30—notices you notice them, I’m convinced that they invariably tell themselves the same thing:“Gross. He thinks I’m hot.”Even if they are, I don’t, and if it’s obvious that they think they’re hot, then I really don’t. I once wrote into the dialogue spoken by an elderly Mexican character that youth and beauty are not virtues, but rather temporary conditions, and that virtue comes in what you choose to do with them while you’re in possession of them.Every generation thinks they invented sex, music, and slang.I swear to god this is a poem.Duke Ellington’s rendition of “Caravan” bleeds from the headphones. I shiver beneath the heated blanket and the MRI tech assures me that I’m doing great, only twenty more minutes…And I reflect on how I utterly wasted my youth and whatever claim to beauty I might have had.I once pretended to be so pretty that my girlfriend cocked her head at me one night before going out and said,“Let me put makeup on you. Let me do your eyes.”A half-hour later I gazed into the mirror and, reluctantly and flush with modesty, proclaimed “Holy fuck, I look amazing!”Forgive me. It was the Eighties.And, almost four decades later, I have to admit that I probably did look amazing, but not in a way that would have been sustainable, like, in ways that would get you a job, or allow you to make friends, or let people see you as a real person and not a monster.I swear to god this is a poem.Just ten more minutes, Thomas, the MRI tech says over the headphones. I don’t correct her mispronunciation of my name. She sees me as she’s been trained to see me—an old jock who has destroyed his body from soccer, football, fencing, taekwondo, Muay Thai, boxing, half-marathons, marathon, Iron Man, street beatings, car accidents, nose broken seven times, , seven broken fingers, five knee surgeries, three concussions, 10-inch titanium rod in my left shoulder...All manner of vain and unnecessary stupidities.Maybe the only thing that can keep us feeling young is to watch—and shamefully gloat over—our parents growing frail. Not that we want that for them, but isn’t it inevitable?We just don’t want it to be inevitable for us.I sat next to my mother’s bed at the assisted living facility, the same bed in which she would die twelve months later, at the height of the pandemic. I tried not to notice how her brown skin had become sallow and spotted, and how the chin she had once so diligently waxed now bristled with gray beard hairs.My mother gazed at the photo of my daughter that I had brought. “She’s so pretty, mijo.”“She is,” I said.“Good thing,” my mother growled with a tinge of bitterness. “Life’s so much easier when you’re pretty.”“She’s smart, too, mom.”“Aún mejor,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’ll help, too.” My mother rubbed her chin stubble with the back of her hand and sighed. “¿Sabes qué, mijo? The boys in school, they never liked me because I wasn’t pretty like the white girls, and I was smart. It took me way too long to stop feeling guilty that I was both of those things. Ugly and smart.”I thought about a photo that my sister treasured, an old image of my mother in her senior year of high school. She wore a sweater, tight over her ample bosom, and her red lips contrasted with the makeup that made her much more pale than she really was. It’s true: my mother wasn’t gabacha-pretty. More like handsome and formidable. It embarrassed me to think that she was trying to pass as a white girl in that photo, but who was I to judge a young Chicana who would go on to raise two problematic children from two problematic white men who, in very different ways, abandoned her to single motherhood.“At least I was smart,” she went on. “Not like your tía, Rosita. She was always the prettiest of us, the one the boys wanted to take out and kiss and put their hands all over.” My mother shook her head, “Okay, Rosita was beautiful, but mijo she was so dumb! Like, durrrrrrrrrrrr!” She twisted her face into a spastic mockery of someone struggling to achieve coherent thought.“You’re not ugly, mom,” I said, shocked at her cruelty towards her youngest sister. “You never were.”My mother signed again and studied the photo of my daughter. “She’s so pretty, mijo. Is she smart, too?”I swear to god this is a poem.Hang in there, the tech says. Just five more minutes.It is with shame that I admit that I envy young people. Not because they’re young and I’m not, but because they look forward to having all the time in the world, wandering the earth blissfully ignorant of how much of that time they’ll fritter away, how much of their souls they’ll upload to apps bent on profits over substance.I’ve just spent three minutes tapping my foot to Brittany Spears’ “Toxic” at the coffee shop where I’m writing this. Was that time wasted?My sister and I have never been close, but for some reason that I’ll never understand, she once convinced me to get in her car and drive east, toward the Central Valley. The brown hills of the Diablo range were dotted with California black oaks, and I wondered for the hundredth time why I was doing this. Was I subjecting myself to this journey in order to feel closer to my sister, or was I legitimately curious about what the curandera/medicine woman would predict for us?At twenty years old, I was confused as fuck about what what life had in store for me, about whether I was destined to be a good person or a bad person—or worse, a nobody. Maybe my sister was worried for me. Or maybe she was embarrassed that she was going to a curandera and wanted someone with her to fade the shame.I remember thinking that fortune tellers—and tarot cards and astrology and palm reading—were total bullshit, yet there I was, watching the gnarled trees pass by my window. All I know for sure is that back then you had to have a damn good reason to leave San José and willingly drive over the mountains to dusty Manteca.The curandera’s living room was dark and shabby. The piney musk of copal perfumed the air and I couldn’t help but think of the scene in La Bamba where Lou Diamond Phillips and Esai Morales travel to Baja California to visit a shaman. This woman’s cluttered and depressing double-wide was nothing like the fictional witch doctor’s shack, decorated with rattlesnake skins and bull skulls.The middle-aged woman’s hair was blue-black and her gold hoop earrings dangled almost to her shoulders as she stared intently into my eyes. In them, she said, would become manifest my future, what life would have in store for me. After an unbearably long time, she leaned back in her chair, folded her hands on the table at which we sat, and pronounced, with all the power and solemnity of our Mexica ancestors, that I, Tomás Joaquín, would one day do something that involved…wait for it…computers.I swear to god this is a poem.Okay, you’re done, the tech says, interrupting Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.” You did great!At the end of it all, will some higher power announce with cheery finality that I’m done and that I did great?Will this place be better for my having used up so much food, water, and oxygen in the time that I occupied it?Will my daughter resist what I fear is the inevitable human temptation to resent our parents for growing ancient and losing their minds and making us orphans?I climb out of the borrowed medical scrubs that have old stains in places I’d rather not think about and wonder how many of the people who wore these baggy blue pajamas before me were scared, or angry, or resigned to what time had done to them.I think about curanderas and Thelonious Monk and orthopedic surgeonsand short-term memory.I think about how my insurance isn’t going to cover near enough of what this shit’s gonna cost.I think I remember swearing to someone that this was supposed to be a poem.
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Written by Tomás Baiza.
Tomás Baiza is the author of the novel, Delivery, and the collection A Purpose to Our Savagery. His manuscript, Mexican Teeth, will appear on Inlandia Press in 2026.
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I See You in the Stars

I see you in the stars and…
              sometimes, I think you put them there.
Like you were choosing paint for a wall and…
              decided you liked glow-in-the-dark.I see you in raindrops and…
              sometimes, I think you made the clouds.
Like you were pressing fingers into a mattress pad and…
              decided you needed a safe place to dream.I see you in city lights and…
              sometimes, I think you made rainbows.
Like you were staring out of dirtied, grey panes and…
              decided you wanted stained glass windows.I see you in flowers and…
              sometimes, I think you gave them delicate petals.
Like you were choosing blankets for the winter and…
              decided you liked silk the most.I see you in the sunset and…
              sometimes, I think you made beauty.
Like you were living in a monochromatic neighborhood and…
              decided you should paint the front door purple.I see you in snowflakes and…
              sometimes, I think you invented intricacy.
Like you were dying your hair and…
              decided each strand should be a different color.I see you in the stars and…
              sometimes, I think you’re too far away.
Like you were in my head and on a plane and…
              decided you weren’t coming back.
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Written by Emma Lidbetter.
Emma Lidbetter is a writer who wants to connect the world. She frequently writes about grief, falling in love, and the overarching feeling of hope.
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