Tag: poems

Three Poems // Leo Rose Rodriguez

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Image: Sebastian Schuster

ONE FOOT IN THE NEW YEAR

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ

for Rosh HaShanah

I travel the earth
with one foot on each side
of gender, a border
as imaginary and dangerous
as any nation’s boundary,
no secure footing in either.
But most places I enter,
I have to choose anyway.
I don’t have time to explain
to the cab driver why my face
and name are at war. When I state myself,
who hears how carefully I’ve chosen?

I travel the line past the cop car
parked outside the synagogue,
past the greeters checking names
to deter intruders on our most
sacred day. I realize I’ve never asked
before if there are cop cars at Eid.
Would they be any protection?
And there is another unsteady stance:
one foot beneath the pile of bodies,
one foot on their necks.

Nobody gives a shit about your definition,
sometimes. A word means what
it always has to them. A name,
a curl of hair, a shade of white,
a slanting slogan. They pull you
off your feet and drag you
over the border with one glance.

Every day, I step over a fault line
that stretches to the earth’s molten core.
I’m one foot in a new world,
one stuck in what is.

BECAUSE WE DID NOT DIE

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ
               I fold my arms across my lover’s
hard-won breasts, sink
my weight onto one thigh gripped
tight between
hers, our naked skin luminescing
in the dim twilight of our new apartment.

Reach across time, I’ll tell you
we did not die.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS HAPLOPHRYNE MOLLIS

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: BEST READ ON DESKTOP, OR IN LANDSCAPE ON MOBILE.
BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ
Let me sell my bones to you.
Let me be a ghost to my own life, to become yours.
My teeth have hunted for a niche that holds them perfectly,
                   someone who will let me stay 
                   at her side, no
                   become her side as mine atrophies.

You don’t have to feed me,
you don’t even have to look at me. All you have to do
is let me remain, laying down the burden that is my self,
                                let me deliquesce into you. 
                                A flap of scales,
                                a deformed fin, a translucence

glowing in the deep. Ghostly seadevil,
let me become a ghost to my own life,
					     but don’t let me alone.

Leo Rose Rodriguez is a queer, neurodivergent writer and artist based in Minneapolis, on traditional Dakota land. They are the author of chapbooks “Fatherland, Motherland” and “…and this would be Moshiach”. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Rise Up Review, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere.

three poems from Buffalo Elegies // Alexander Shalom Joseph

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Image: Brandon Stoll

These poems are from an as-of-yet unpublished collection entitled “Buffalo Elegies”. “Buffalo Elegies,” is a collection of twenty-three poems that reflect on the devastating impact of the near extinction of the American Buffalo during the brutal colonization of the American West. This chapbook is a series of 23 poems elegizing the sixty million buffalo who were massacred and honoring the 23 buffalo who remained. This work explores the historical slaughter of these animals, emphasizing their significance in shaping the Western landscape. The poems vividly contrast the once-thriving buffalo herds with the current empty and haunted environment, highlighting the profound loss and ongoing silence left in their wake. Ultimately, the collection serves as an elegy, mourning the buffalo and the indigenous cultures connected to them.

BUFFALO ELEGY #4

BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH

to the west are the rockies
those granite tombstones catching clouds
memorializing that storm
of brown fur and short horns
the fallen nation of hooves
there used to be so many buffalo
there are none left here
we killed them all on purpose
haven’t you seen the pictures of their skulls stacked stories high?

right here there was once
a breathing snorting stomping tidal wave
trampling this dirt into soil
but the mountains are so quiet now
and so are the plains

we think they are peaceful
but they are not peaceful
they are dead
this mountain range is just a marker
on the largest mass grave
the world has ever seen
and has so quickly tried to forget

BUFFALO ELEGY #9

BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH

standing in the midst of a sold out stadium show
I look out at forty thousand bodies
it is more people than I have ever seen at once
I do some quick math
and realize
that the number of lives
held in this expanse
of concrete and heat
is nothing compared
to the massacre known as western expansion
that intentional near extinction of the buffalo
it would take one thousand five hundred full up stadiums
to equal the population of the herd
that were exterminated
sixty million reduced to twenty three

this is when my mind begins to swim
this is when my I begin to drown
this is when I start to sink
into how much is really gone

and I look out over the city
from the bleacher seating
not seeing the sunset
not seeing the crowd
not seeing the show
seeing only what is not there
but is only thing that should be

BUFFALO ELEGY #12

BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH

I drive these highways
which mirror past migrations
and for brief flashes
I swear I can hear their feral drum
through this valley
I swear I see the dusty cloud ghost of their stampede
on the horizon line at dusk
but I know what I am seeing
is just hopeful daydreams
for the fact is
we live in a cemetery
above their unmarked countless graves
I look out at these gorgeous vistas
the places people come
to take pictures of on vacation
and I see beauty
but I also see what isn’t there
it’s like a painting
without a foreground
just a sprawling landscape
with the subject
erased from the grasslands
from the back of coal trains
this
is a small attempt
to fill in the emptiness
it is an attempt to scream
“there was so much else here”
there was once
a living storm
a rush like fresh blood
that came to give life
to this dried up dirt
this
is a reminder
that we are not living
in a mere landscape painting
of the rocky mountain range
there was once a subject
and it was not us

Alexander Shalom Joseph is an award winning author of seven published books, most recently The Clearing (Middle Creek Publishing, forthcoming October 2025) and Living Amends (Galileo Press, forthcoming 2025). He has an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Education. Alexander lives in Colorado, writes a weekly poetry column on Substack and teaches writing workshops in libraries, schools and prisons across the Colorado Front Range.

Two Poems // Monica Fuglei

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Image: Märt Laarman

MY DEAR NAMELESS OF THE SEINE,

BY MONICA FUGLEI

Caught a glimpse of you last week in the manikin room,
tip-toed past a group gathered around the body that wears
your face, a protection circle, as if the light they shone in your eyes
some kind of candle magic to manifest the real of you
from the past, from the river, from the floating, from the dead, to
the today, into this rubber corpse, mechanical breath catching,
as a reignited heartbeat scratches itself into the screen
of their smartphone.

They never asked Are you okay? Never whispered Do you mind?
Never wondered Can we make a mask? Never implored could they
Copy it? Make you famous? Make you most-missed, most
kissed? Your unclaimed body, claimed, controlled, sold.

You are everywhere: your face on walls, CPR dolls, written in literature,
cross-stitched, encased in poetry, sold on Etsy, and I dream your no,

your eyes closed and finally they hear your no, your no in death smirk opening wide,
your no as purchased faces melt into waters your no, your river Seine bursting in no
rushing no through art galleries and Red Cross classrooms, your scream no, flooding
the world in no, in your no bursting from doorways, in the churn of dark water
pushing no into your death mask, your no into the sunshine, into fire and flame
into ash into no into goodbye into reclamation.

BECAUSE EVERY GIRL HAS A POMEGRANATE POEM IN HER

BY MONICA FUGLEI
I remember last summer: three or four
fruit lined up, 
how the French call them grenades,
their brilliant speckled red,
these tiny bombs.
 
I remember how I’d pull out the meal prep plastic – 
quart-sized, like a restaurant kitchen, 

then how, to music, I’d drag the knife 
lightly along the skin trying not to draw 
juice from the aril, how carefully I pulled
the fruit apart, catching any seed 
that fell. 

And here is where a poet would park metaphor or simile – 
              this fruit is knowledge, 
              harvest like murder,
              fruit blood red and bleeding, 
              fruit ripe like a thought, 
              fruit as fertility, 
              fruit as fecundity, 

fruit complex as the woman’s mind and
it’s always a woman isn’t it? With the cutting
and the work and the pulling and the intricate 
web of hanging on, 
her hands – my hands – 
around delicate skin 
barely holding this juice
to seed, and then my
crushing and 
pulping and

drinking, and I would harvest the work
to pass on to my children, would pause in the dripping, 
in the wasting, hands a deep crimson, 
this harvest collected moment by moment,

this quiet time in the kitchen, where
I ran a finger through yellow pith and packed each 
ruby seed in small food storage gently, thinking about death.

Monica Fuglei currently teaches in the Department of Composition, Creative Writing and Journalism at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. A 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has recently appeared in Progenitor and Mason Street. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s usually knitting or tweeting on #AcademicTwitter.

Hoppin’ Lowrider Has Him Mile High // Kevin Foote

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Image: Fernando Castillo

HOPPIN’ LOWRIDER HAS HIM MILE HIGH

BY KEVIN FOOTE

They tell me his momma doesn’t pick up my calls because the
cell bills are stacked high, hiding under the foldout table
tilting in the muddy field along Blosser.

They tell me his momma doesn’t pick up my calls because
the translator on the three-way call wouldn’t know the Mixtec
word for the kind of tears she weeps,

Somewhere between
He’s such a sweet boy believe me, and
All this just for fucking cheaper cilantro, and
Howling wheels appear each night,
Rolls forth a monster of oil and rubber,
Lashes out at him whenever my prayers to La Virgen
make their way from my lips,

Its red hand closer ‘gainst his eyelash curves and cerebral grooves
as he grows up, and as silence sizzles down where I cannot go,
where do I go, Profe? Where do we go from here?

They tell me he won’t bring a knife into my class again,
because the voices won’t stop but his enrollment here will
before anything makes the news.

They tell me graduation is big here, to get a good spot along
Hidden Pines as all the semis packed with cilantro bunches,
broccoli heads, hearts expectant, generational joys, fists full of
wonder, palms opened by the psalms of broken mothers’
broken dreams, will honk, as they cruise past our school.

They tell me the best lowriders in Northwest

will be bouncin’ high,

kids and mommas and a few abuelitas buckled in tight, smiles
brimming, laughter floating freely,

mixing with subwoofers and applause

and the boy for whom I can do nothing,

somewhere beyond our line of sight,
beyond these Sherwin-Williams green
and iron oxide brown fields,
these salt-washed cheeks,
these grey cement cul-de-sac circuits,
where hydraulics creak and squeak as they bounce higher and
higher and higher and…

air horns, wooden ratchets, hoots, hollers, applause.

Did the ‘84 cutlass, with the pearl blue and pink trim,
with the shimmering spinning hubcaps– that one,

yeah, the one bouncing the highest.

Did it launch him high enough?

Can he hear what we hear, a mile high?

Kevin Foote (he/him) is a writer, teacher, and explorer. He was born and raised on The Central Coast of California, but now calls Green Mountain his home. When he’s not in class with his students, he loves investigating restaurants in the Denver region, trail running, and inviting friends and followers into the writing process online and in poetry slams. Kevin’s first collection, Cabin Pressure, is a work full of the woe and wonder of teaching, the unsung moments of victory in mental health struggles, and the unabashed joy of experiencing the natural world along The Front Range. You can see his published poems and works in progress on @feastsonfoote

Two Poems // Sonya Wohletz

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Image: Antonio Vivace

PROMISE: CHIMAYÓ, NEW MEXICO 2011

BY SONYA WOHLETZ

Six thousand feet familiar; the old land grants—sundered
snow lines. Wherein the altar

rises like a fang above the arroyo.
Mourning shrubs staggering in every direction,

withered veins of pink scree;
the strangled herbs of a long-ago wilderness

that promised the same cure that now
can only serve a cunning and calculated death—

for the drought-stiffened hills,
for the blood chalice leaching, as in an act of betrayal—

ice snaking its delicate throat while the
bone/sprung heart seeps its syrups to the cottonwoods.

And there, divided between the horned moon
and the deciduous cycle of trails,

that shrine waits for her, for us,
for those that labored the acequias,

for those shot down at the approach of Good Friday.
Hundreds of miles of penitents

stringing along the Camino Real
after the image of a dead man,

hanged on the green tree of life,
an ivory tumor above the well

of promises. I curled myself
into its depths, while the peregrine winds

rolled through the ponderosa, the piñón.
And thought it meant

to revive me, though I suffered from
a misuse of suffering that no miracle

could calm. I could only feed;
feed the elements captured in those dense idols.

And I recall the friend that brought some
miracle dirt to my mother when she

could no longer remember the place
where the marriage was celebrated,

where it sustained itself in banquet,
as a union of forms, as promissory anguish,

now writ in the yeso & minerals
upon the bultos of those bad centuries.

I contemplate their
blessed and barren ground, inflicted

inside my yearned-for humility, a plastic bag
near the feet of the plastered virgen,

who presided our home impassively.
Or, perhaps she did doctor us—

scale by slimed scale. Each year of the failed family.
And did her Christ then

slide his death into your skin as you
sank your breath

into the blue night, speaking—no, proclaiming—
(for what I can’t quite name)

in dream, as though recalling the command—
Thief, enter through us.

PROMESA 2: CHIMAYÓ, NEW MEXICO

BY SONYA WOHLETZ

The tree of life rises above the pocito,
wherein the earth—tunneled with strange injury.
I pin a heart to your holy name
and feed my blood, my bandage,
to the green roots of the mountain.
A miracle appendaged—
vision in the cure of wilderness,
its profound herb, grown solitary.

Sonya Wohletz is a writer and poet living in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poetry, Bir Sıra Sonra/One Row After, was published by First Matter Press in 2022. Her second book is forthcoming with South Broadway Press.

Editor Interviews // Tyler Hurula

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Tyler Hurula (she/they) is the pinkest poet in Denver, Colorado. She strives to be the most queer and polyamorous person they can be. You’ll likely find her parading around in a tiara with hot pink lipstick going to an art walk or discussing the intricacies of the latest horror movie she’s watched with anyone who will listen. Author of chapbook Love Me Louder (Querencia Press) and Too Pretty for Plain Coffee (Wayfarer Books). They have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, and were a finalist for the Write Bloody 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest.

If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.

Andrea Gibson
WHAT DOES THIS QUOTE MEAN TO YOU?

This quote is from a poem by Andrea Gibson called What Love Is and I think love is connection, and anything we do is ultimately about connection and love, and the way to do that is by being honest and vulnerable. When you show up in that way, all you can do is hope it resonates with the people you were meant to find.

WHAT BOOKS HAVE MADE AN IMPORTANT IMPACT ON YOU AND WHY?

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This book is gorgeous. Vuong finds all of these beautiful truths in what it means to be human in the middle of so many things that are not beautiful. He gives himself the freedom to say what he needs to say and to be completely vulnerable by writing it for a mother who will never read it. 

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

I love all things horror, and this was the first book I read by Tremblay. It is absolutely devastating and hopeful, and the only horror novel I’ve ever sobbed at the end of. 

My Friends by Fredrick Backman

I am still in the middle of this book, but knew after the first page it would be one of my favorites. Backman is one of the most emotionally intelligent authors, and is able to encapsulate at the root what it means to be human, and how we all connect and relate to each other, even when we have completely different experiences.

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

I took a workshop with Patricia Smith awhile ago and she repeated a quote by someone and I can’t remember the exact quote or who it was originally from, but essentially it was something about when you’re looking for facts, go to the news, but when you’re looking for the truth of something, look to the poets. We have to create and connect with people. Art is how we navigate and contextualize the world. It is how we highlight the truths around us, how we find our human-ness in others, and how we are able to see the human-ness in others as reflected in their art—in how and what they create. In My Friends by Fredrick Backman, he says “art is what we leave of ourselves in other people” and in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong says “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”  I like to think that all of my poems are just asking “do you see me?” Art is one of the purest forms of connection, and without it, we have nothing.

HOW HAS WRITING AND ART HELPED TO FORM THE PERSON YOU ARE TODAY?

I grew up in an environment where there were so many secrets I was expected to keep, which led to a very lonely and isolating childhood and young adulthood. Through writing, I’ve been able to share those truths and surround myself with a community and people dedicated to practicing vulnerability and authenticity. I have grown into myself, and have learned to love the whole of myself through writing and art. It’s given me permission to feel all of the things, and be open to experiencing a multitude of truths from a multitude of people.

WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU?

Building community is so important to me. We simply cannot do this life on our own, and the more people and perspectives we surround ourselves with, the more capable we are to grow together and care for each other.

Cherry Picking in Washington D.C. | Amy Wray Irish

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Image: Lika Yer

Cherry Picking in Washington D.C.

BY AMY WRAY IRISH


First, the cherry trees blossom, bursting open into 
skirted ballerinas filling the boulevard and the White 
House and the whole nation with pink and white 
petals (aren’t they pretty?) until their frills fall away
and they begin to swell, to reveal their pollination sin, 
forcing them to bear fruit

                        		                 far too soon. 
Young wombs chock full of false promises, bellies sick
on syrupy cherry-flavored stories poured down throats, 
forgetting the choke and force feeding of suffragettes 
by funnel and pretending to forget the funneling of dollars 
away from pre-natal planning and post-natal everything, 
easier to just shut up and take

 				                          whatever gets shoved in.
The options are a) poison or b) bitter dregs so they swallow
and say that it’s sweet but how would they know a good taste 
in their mouth the truth on their lips

 				                          if they’ve only been fed lies.
They don’t know someone cherry picked their words 
and their world. They unknowingly devoured each unripe 
soundbite and even ate the pit believing they were blessed 
and precious and special, told they were so pretty and so
holy, not knowing it was only so they would pick right 
at the polls

               			                  then be easily pushed aside. 
Drooping and forgotten, the poor little flowers are falling
from the pedestal, dropping from labor and lactation and loss
of blood, wilted from so much “women’s work” squeezed 
from their failing bodies, bound now to the bed 
they made, unable to pick up their broken pieces 
to start over or escape 
                                                  
 				                          but hey, 
remember how they were pretty, once?

Amy Wray Irish (she/her) believes poetry’s job is to be both brutally honest and eternally hopeful. Irish has two contest-winning chapbooks (Down to the Bone and Breathing Fire) and numerous other publications. Her work is forthcoming in the 40West Anthology, and the 2026 We’Moon Daily Calendar. Read more of her work at www.amywrayirish.com.

Three Poems / Tres Poemas | Guillermo Lazo

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Image: Laurent Perren

Night Train to Chicago

BY GUILLERMO LAZO

Let’s get off at Osceola
And grab our coonskin caps, boys.
Forgetting the farmer’s fields
And head for the wild patch of land
In the corner of yon field
And flatten our bodies
Against the ground
Filling our nostrils with
The smell of black Iowa dirt
Near the Des Moines River.

Let’s shoot an azimuth of 270 degrees
Due west and head westward
Past the lank, slank
Cowboy towns of Durango
Or what’s left of Neal’s
Larimer Street.
Let’s even taste that black
Dirt ‘til it feeds
The red bones in us and
We’re moving like Natty Bumpo
As coyotes at the edge of town.

La Otra

BY GUILLERMO LAZO

Tú eres la tranquilidad
En mi cerebro ruidoso
Y por tú cara
Puedo ver el rostro del universo
El universo es el cosmos
Es lo que hace nuestro mundo posible
Qué hace tú posible
Hoy es muy intempestivo
de integrar nuestra materia
en una canción de existencia
como la lluvia en la arena
qué hace tú posible

Kynthos

BY GUILLERMO LAZO

On a gravelly road in Germany
In the early morning light
I write the name of my beloved
In the dirt
With the toe of my combat boot
As I pull guard
Her perfumed card
Calls me
From the Rocky Mountains westward
Half a world away
As I stand guard
Over 37 years of topsoil
In the early morning light

She is the Greeks to me
She is Kynthos – Diana
Protectress of the wild young
Purveyor of knowledge
And she is America
With real wilderness
And rawboned hands and puritanical ethic
And miles and miles of endless onset.

Guillermo Lazo was born and raised in Chicago. Univ of Illinois BA Ed 1974. Univ of Colorado BA Literature 1986. Editor and Publisher of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Arts (Poetry Magazine 1978-1984). Author of Surround Me As Burlap (Pueblo Poetry Project 1980 Pueblo, CO), Ching Poems (March Abrazo Press, Carlos Cumpian ed.), Bathers of the Med Sea (1989 Baculite Publishing – Canadian Printing). Articles: Confessions of a Marrano (Halapid Magazine Anousim Society of Crypto Jews 2001).

Three Poems | Joseph Wilcox

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Image: Azka Rayhansyah

Assimilation

BY JOSEPH WILCOX

i destroy myself
with a slow grind
pressing my body against
the bitter wheel at any sign
of sharp success
polishing away the burrs
of hope and joy until
i am pebble
forgotten
in the crush of boots

Passion

BY JOSEPH WILCOX

at easter brunch
as we douse the bulge
of egg casserole
and sweetbread
in our stomachs
with fresh hot coffee
like a post-coital cigarette
my brother
extolls the virtues
of the stock market
how he cheers
the ups and downs
as he buys
low
and his millions
grow
he pauses
righteousness rising
to rail
at the cross
of his tax burden
the unconstitutional waste
of government taking
his money
and the onus
of minimum wage
that shrouds his body corporate
to my sister
who earns $15
an hour
retail

Factious

BY JOSEPH WILCOX

don’t you see?
if we are fighting each other
we are not fighting them
if we are fighting each other
we won’t go to the shed
to find our pitchforks

would you like to borrow
one of mine, friend?

Joseph Wilcox studied at the Jack Kerouac School, started a theater company, and raised a family in Colorado. He lives in Aurora where he writes science fiction and fantasy, and poetry in the sleepless hours of the night.

Kneading Dough | Mimi Khoso

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Image: James Wainscoat

Kneading Dough

BY MIMI KHOSO

We’re gathered here in this sacred place
Darting looks of judgement and envy
You still manage to pull a sour face
As the imam gives the khutba about how to love thy neighbor
I look down at their feet, calloused but not withered
It’s as if I can read their lives from their feet

Every untrimmed nail and hard blue vein
Running after children
No time to thrive, only maintain
Resilient, despite the shock of motherhood
Dressed in burnt orange Salwar Kameez and glass gold bangles
The baby coos and gurgles until the azan comes
Then its shrill cries and a burst of tears
How dare their mother do something for herself?
Religious commitments don’t end
Such tribulations only make them more clear

Babies, an extension of their mother until around age four
Then one day their need for cuddles suddenly ends
And the only remembrance is saggy pillows and stretch marks
Designed like directions on a map

Despite the sleepless nights and loss of time
Soon the baby discovers their own independence
He sits nicely as his mother prays sunnah
He fixes his own hat when it falls
Like kneading dough, she forms to the chapter of her life
Her tests become her triumphs, her loss is what she gained

I make a dua after Jummah, thanking God for His preference
The little things I cherish, take the good with the bad
How can you appreciate God’s gifts?
If it’s honey all the time
Sometimes we have to feel the sting

Mimi Khoso is not great at short biographies, and the pressure it causes to make an appealing impression in short summary. She does understand the need for it however; she was born in Georgia in 2002, and has moved all over Georgia and Texas during her childhood. She doesn’t have any professional credentials for writing poetry.  She believes that once you discover your passion it gives meaning to your life. Her favorite book is The Beguiled by Thomas P. Cullinan and her favorite song is Saanson Ki Maala, based on the 16th-century poem by Mirabai then popularized by sufi singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. She has realized what makes celebrated films and timeless music profound is in its words. One of the great pleasures in her life is reading and writing and she is not fully able to explain why. When she converted to Islam over four years ago, she read of its deniers claiming the Quran to merely be a great work of poetry. To that, God responded to produce a verse similar to His if you can.