Introduction by Samia Mimo

It is a pleasure to introduce Shayna Wilson to Matter readers. In this folio of poetry, Wilson turns a refined and intimate eye towards her own life. Crossing 96th St follows the gentrification and red-lining of Manhattan through her devotion to 96th Street. Despite the mischaracterization of her home, Wilson insists change can be made because “if policy build the divide / policy can dismantle it / block / by / block.” However, Wilson’s second poem focuses inward. You Melt My Heart intertwines the deep mutual love between the speaker and her grandmother, and the quiet, accumulating guilt of not reaching out more often. This poignant poem deals with the balance of love and distance by questioning why “its hardest / to return love / to the ones who give it freely.” Across these poems, Wilson explores complicated histories and private tenderness in a single frame, while dealing with how love can foster. 

Crossing 96th Street

Five apartments shaped my childhood,

their ceilings watching my growing body

as if they were witnesses

to every version of me I evolved to be.

With each move, my eyes widened.

Not just in age,

but in awareness.

I learned Manhattan speaks its biggest truths

in the smallest distances.

From the Upper East Side’s pristine streets,

grand brownstones lining each block,

tree-lined sidewalks swept clean

before most people woke,

and then across 96th street-

the heartbeat of Harlem,

where something in the air

shifted.

                                              Sidewalks grew cracked,

                                              and corners collected trash

                                              that never seemed to leave.

                                              Some blocks were loved,

                                              others neglected.

                                              Long before I learned of redlining,

                                              I felt its outline

                                                              under 

                                                              my 

                                                              feet.

                                                             1930 maps drawn

                                                             with biased hands, painted

                                                                                              Black,

                                                                                              Latino,

                                                                                              and immigrant neighborhoods

                                              with warning labels: Hazardous, risky, undesirable.

                                              Families locked out of mortgages,

                                              denied homes and investments,

                                              while desirable white neighborhoods

                                              were showered with loans, development, and opportunity.

                                              Those red lines never faded-

                                              they seeped into the concrete.

                                              I now walk along their consequences 

                                              every single day.

A mere ten blocks

separate my Harlem home

from the Upper East Side.

Yet the difference stretches farther

than any map could measure.

The cute cafes and bookstores

that once felt ordinary

now feel like luxuries

I no longer see.

                                              Instead,

                                              Mc. Donald’s signs burn through the night,

                                              casting a glow over cracked storefronts

                                              where local businesses could have thrived.

                                              cherry Valley –

                                              A small chain grocery store

                                              in the place of Whole Foods –

                                              with aisles left sparse,

                                              bruised apples under buzzing lights,

                                              green lacking to the eye.

                                              Buildings sag with the weight of years;

                                              Rats slip through gaps

                                              where investors never bothered to enter.

For years,

I hesitated to bring friends home

holding my breath for their reactions:

                                              Why are there so many projects here?

                                              I almost got jumped by a homeless man!

                                              They notice the disparities

                                              between my streets and theirs.

                                              Their words press against me,

                                              like another boundary line.

But change is not too distant to reach.

New homes, rent-stabilized and standing strong,

funding flowing into worn bricks and cracks,

filling the gaps.

The question was never why some neighborhoods flourish-

the answers are written everywhere.

It is why we continue to allow others not to.

If policy build the divide,

policy can dismantle it,

block

by

block.

The next child who crosses

the 96th Street boarder

Should not feel the weight of two worlds

split by a line that never should have been drawn.

Let them walk freely,

unburdened by history’s reminiscences,

into a Manhattan where every block

is equally cared for.

You Melt My Heart

Grandma was the first person

to see me

February 28th, 2009.

The first face I saw at the hospital,

the day I was born.

It was as if that moment

stamped me onto her heart

forever.

Her contact sits in my phone-

Grandma,

beside the purple heart

I placed there at age ten.

Why did I think

a single emoji

could hold a lifetime of love?

Westchester weekends at her house,

cuddled in the cream den

beneath the fluffy Mets blanket.

Grandpa suggesting movies –

Mary Poppins, ​

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,

Are We There Yet?

Grandma saying –

let her pick.

After many goodbye hugs and kisses,

train tracks hummed beneath me.

I pressed my forehead to the window,

Grandma getting smaller and smaller.

I could no longer see her dimples –

only the curve of her hunch

shaped by time,

wrapped in her big brown puffer.

I wish knew then

how precious it was –

seeing her mouth

through the window

you melt my heart.

At gymnastics meets

her cheers followed every flip.

While bleachers sat still,

she stood on her feet,

her high-pitched voice

ringing louder than the rest.

She loved me so endlessly

I sometimes stepped away,

unsure of how to return it-

but my presence alone

melted her heart.

High school carved a distance.

Visits turned into screens

once a week,

a month.

Her long texts

full of heart GIFs

filled the spaces I left empty.

I pinned her contact,

but even a pinned heart

can be forgotten.

My mind lost in homework,

self-centeredness,

forgetting the one

who loved me most freely.

I said tomorrow,

set reminders

that took more effort

than pressing call.

Thanksgiving came,

her surgery kept her home.

Mom offered the phone –

Grandma wants to say hi.

The phone felt heavy

with the weight of every call and text

I had let go unanswered.

Her voice was soft, drained.

Haven’t talked to you in a while.

Our small talk felt thin,

like she barely knew me now.

The usual flood of love

before every hang up

was gone.

The silence pinned me down,

my slouching body

trapped in my seat.

Now I sit with the thought

that tomorrow isn’t promised.

What if she’s gone

before I make this right?

I don’t know why its hardest

to return love

to the ones who give it freely.

She melts my heart,

so the least I can do

is call.

*

Shayna Wilson bio.

Shayna Wilson is a junior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, where growing up in the city has shaped her awareness of the social conditions that surround her daily life. These experiences have fostered a passion for addressing issues such as homelessness from a young age. She serves as Co-President of the Homeless Coalition, a student-led club dedicated to improving the lives of people experiencing homelessness through drives, events and community initiatives. These interests inspired her to join the Writing to Make Change class offered at her school, where she began developing poetry as a way to engage with social issues and advocate for change. While her writing centers on social justice, her primary academic interest lies in astrobiology and human performance in space. She is a mentee at the Mason Lab in New York City and a Neumann Nexus Fellow, and she hopes to further her knowledge in this STEM field.

The Guy V. Molinari    

    – In honor of the Staten Island Ferry    

She shuttles in her guts the zoned-out
throngs who take for granted the watery
caesura from home to work to home
immersed in the glow of cellphones
while the verdigris torch salutes them.

In this amalgam of steel formed into faux
stone, cement and wood, in echos’ echo,
passengers shuffle toward seats like atoms.
They repel any touch of the coat sleeve,
any sidelong look, and they only feel

the glare of a watch at the end of a row,
or rapper’s spectacle of neon-pink laces
untied to trip on and recover, bouncing to
the buzz of earplugs, while the crescent
prow glides from the groin of the dockslip. 

A barrelled, tan policeman pets his pitbull
dazed by the harbor’s glittery plateau—
Wall Street trader bedraggled in pinstripes
squinches his eyes to blips in the market—
and who is this child waving a dollar found

gummed to his shoe?  Enter Yankee-hatted
homeless who crumple like foil. Enter oil-
soiled janitors who slip on gloves for the
5 o’clock shift under the din of passengers
debating gas’s rising prices in New Jersey,

New York. How you need a jumbo mortgage
to buy a café latté, that this ferry is free!—
which ricochet off laminate cabinets
clogged with lemon-tinted life vests.
We jolt as we dock to a fugue of horns,

and nun kissing a cross before the stampede.    

Mrs. Moore on Elizabeth Street                                

—I am sick of the seam-tight jeans, bleached,
blanched    the fried voices    The NYU students

flitting in the duel of shadows under the scaffolding
of Elizabeth Street    where boutiques are never

on sale   —rushing to shop, to class   and some
blonde thing cantilevers Cliff Notes over the cliff

of a dumpster   drops two used tubes of lip gloss 
—coral blaze & birthday suit   which plump my lips  

taste like thrift-shop frosting in Shreveport, 1960
at Aunt Millie’s funeral  —the coffin coated in hot-pink

carnations   and now designer cakes sell in pricey cafés
on Avenue A   where a cop thumbs his belt loops

and dreams a bit   —he’s my shrink & my shroud, 
winks & slips me 20 bucks to get him coffee, a donut

& late edition of the Post   and I let him rant, for sure   
how these rich girls will suffer too  —brush your gums  

pay your taxes   —I have a little business selling orphaned
heels the girls abandon when they spill out of bars 

—mismatched pairs only 50 a pop from my yellow cart 
and I dress in faux Chanel, of course, and wash at Star-

bucks so nobody thinks “homeless”  —a Brand these days
without a zip code, tho the City gave me a Box P.O.

but weren’t we all a step in the shoeless exodus
from Leviticus to Psalms?  I still dream of Aunt Millie,

her sugary picnics, my boy laughing into tatters
under a magnolia —my willowy girl preening her gown

swinging like a bell   —her name, ‘Marguerite’, a hymn
I whisper to bathe me in filaments of sorrow

while Jesus bends blue over shards of my children
in the rosary window   —and this freshman (no hello)

politely asks if I can find a mate for her blue silk stiletto
and I tell her, first, I do have a name.  It is Mrs. Moore.

*

Native of Vouliagmeni, GREECE and Martha’s Vineyard, MA., Stelios Mormoris is CEO of SCENT BEAUTY, Inc., which markets beauty products worldwide.  Citizen of Greece and the U.S., Stelios was born in New York, and lived most of his adult life in Paris.

He received a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University, and an M.B.A. from INSEAD [Institut d’Européen d’Administration des Affaires] in Fontainebleau, France.

He has been published in Agni, Beyond Words Literary Review, Book of Lit Matches, Crab Creek Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review,  Fourth River, Gargoyle, Good Life Review,  High Shelf Press,  Humana Obscura, Midwest Poetry Review,  Narrative Magazine, Nassau Literary Review,  Press, Spillway,  Sugar House Review,  Tupelo Quarterly,  Verse,  Whelk Walk Review and other literary journals.  

My thoughtful father

still comes with a piano under his arm
but he does not play
to avoid disturbing my poems.

Sometimes he brings a canvas,
an old brush, vivid memories of red
or blue, but he only draws with his black pen,

sitting far from my desk.  He does not want
the cat he draws from memory
to scratch my last stanza.

As much as my father tries, he fails
to remain quiet, his unplayed sonata
still louder than my words, his cat

still fussing with the brush. I can tell
from his long sighs, they are not friends.
I suspect they met after he died.

Paper Boats

We’d sail paper boats along a sidewalk curb, after a heavy rain, until
they turned again into newspaper pages, moored at the sewer mouth.

Unfulfilled promises turned some of us into resentful sailors,
and the weight of reality made the rest of us inconsolable explorers.

When we folded the coarse paper into vessels a filthy puddle
was still a river, the muck the water dragged an undiscovered continent.

The Bare Bones of a Fairytale

Once upon a time you are born,
and, suddenly, you are a fawn summoned

from your forest, to a far far-away-land
where they speak the language of the hunters

you were spared from.  Your life becomes
about the sound of the breaking of a dry twig,

twitching between being naïve and being alert,
pretending to be calm, but still too afraid

to realize you are a young deer able to speak.

*

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal and Louisville Review, among many others in the United States, as well as international publications such as Impspired (UK), Hong Kong Review (Hong Kong, SAR), and The Wild Word (Germany). His work received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and his chapbook, “Contraband,” was published in 2022. He’s also a Guest Editor for The Banyan Review, and currently finishing the manuscript for his next book of poems.

*

Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Image, Poet Lore, The Poetry Project, Four Way Review, Stanford University Press, and Spillway, among others. Hayes is a contributing editor at Tupelo Quarterly.

*

Mary Pacifico Curtis writes poetry, memoir and literary criticism, and is the author of Between Rooms(2016) and The White Tree Quartet (2018) and a memoir, Understanding Moonseed (2022).  She has had a Silicon Valley career in PR and branding, and as an entrepreneur and VC. Mary lives with her husband, two dogs and wildlife that share their terraced California home. Her first full length poetry collection, Hawk’s Cry, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press.

Andalusia

At the train station in Córdoba, we rented an aging
Gray Renault and drove to the mountains, the car’s
Maintenance light flashing red the whole time.
From both sides of the road, rows of olive trees
Extended their camouflaged limbs, saluting
The afternoon sun, while small rivers carried
Dust and run-off to the south.
On the hill above Almodóvar del Río, the towers
Of a castle, mirage-like, stood without blinking. 
The highway pointed north, and the engine strained
Until I shifted to a lower gear.  Then—again,
On both sides of the road—there were orange groves,
White flowers and early fruit, the scent
Of oranges all around us and inside
Our rented car.

In Puebla de los Infantes, lunch was almost over
When we found a parking space on a street
Cut into the side of a hill, a row of cars perched
At 45 degrees, brakes firmly engaged.
One restaurant was still open.  We ate
Quickly—Ximena’s reading was in less than
An hour.  ¿Dónde está la biblioteca, por favor?
“Drive down the hill and ask someone else,” two
Andalusian ladies replied.  By chance, we saw
The sign, and a man exercising a brown
Stallion by the parking lot.  Ximena read well,
Poems about her country, her parents, our life
In Miami.  The crowd was happy to hear her. 
She’d come all the way from Colombia, where
There are also mountains, but instead of olive
Trees and oranges, there are mangoes and bananas,
Guerrillas and paramilitaries.
Another poet gave her a copy of his book, and
We drove back to Córdoba in the dark.
I stopped at a gas station to buy bananas
And oranges.

Reading the Classics

There was a used bookstore just above
86th Street—I don’t remember
The name—where I overheard someone
Say the Greeks had no word for “success.”
It was at a time in my life when
I didn’t feel particularly
Successful.  My marriage had become
(Don’t lie—it always had been) a string
Of ugly fights.  Each time, we wondered
If the words we’d said meant there was no
Going back, no forgetting this was
What we both really felt.  The people
Who lived above us would comment through
The ventilation shafts, imitate
Our insults and laugh.  They also liked
To play songs from Camelot and sing
Along.  The woman next door received
Visitors, men who strangely brought bags
Of groceries.  She’d put on music
With a loud bass, and I’d see them leave
Later when I went to walk the dog.
Her boyfriend waited outside, either
Sitting on the steps or in his car.
Eventually, they moved, and a
Korean family who’d bought the
Bodega on Columbus moved in.
I started taking Greek classes at
The New School.  I remember the sun
Setting on Fifth Avenue in the
Summer, neon lights of restaurants
And bars, moments when the streets emptied,
When it felt good to walk to the class
Where we’d translate some lines of Plato,
Heraclitus, or Sophocles, and
Nobody mentioned the word “success.”

A Doppelgänger

                                    Ere Babylon was dust
            The magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
            Met his own image walking in the garden.
                                    Shelly, Prometheus Unbound

Borges met his younger self on a park bench
In Geneva.  Or, it might have been his older self;
These things are hard to figure out.  I had
A doppelgänger also, but not me at a different age.
I discovered him when I gave a reading once
At a bar in Boston.  Some people showed up
Expecting him and left when they realized
Their mistake.  We never met, but I’ve seen
His picture.  He had those long sideburns they
Call “mutton chops” that were popular back
In the 70s.  Sometimes, friends mistake his books
For mine, at least one book of poetry and a work,
I believe, on Eastern religious practices.  He
Traveled to India for sure, while I only know
Asia from museums.  I suspect he was the more
Intelligent of the two of us.  He could read Sanskrit
like Eliot, but I don’t know his poems.  I avoided
Them on purpose, afraid I’d meet myself, with
Whatever consequence that might entail.
It’s generally bad news to encounter your
Other self.  Still, a few nights ago, I read online
That he’d died last year.  I had to look away
From the screen.  He wasn’t that much older
Than I am.  Now, the only chance we’ll have
To meet will be on a park bench by Lake Geneva
Or walking in a garden in Babylon.

*

George Franklin is the author of seven poetry collections, including his recent: What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.  Individual poems have been published in Matter Monthly, Solstice, South Florida Poetry Journal, Rattle, Cagibi, New Ohio Review, The Threepenny Review, The Comstock Review, One Art, and Cultural Daily.  He practices law in Miami, is a translations editor for Cagibi and a guest editor for Sheila-Na-Gig Online, teaches poetry workshops in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day. In 2023, he was the first prize winner of the W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize, and his work has been featured on the public radio podcast The Slowdown.  His website: https://gsfranklin.com/

Variations on a René Char Riff

How to end this long, diluvial night
in a landscape scaled in grays?
Waves of grief can teach you to float.

You’ve lost a mother, a tidal
wave of friends to the death parade.
No end to this long, diluvial night.

You feel your self disrupted,
moored to prolonged despair.
Waves of grief can teach you to float

in their gaps, gifting you time,
breath and strength
to end this long, diluvial night.

Struggling against the dark, the tide,
your fingers navigate the way.
Waves can teach you to float

grief like a whale catching a current
of air, or a full moon’s watery face.
Drift to the end of this long, diluvial night.
Waves of grief can teach you to float.

Pastoral

Thomas Gray’s tomb lies under yew tree shade.
Resurrected from churchyard sun,
light is particle and wave.

Branches dating back to the ice age
have survived their trunks,
re-rooting for more yew tree shade.

Carved into English longbows and shaped
into Renaissance lutes despite toxic dust,
yews are chastened and chaste.

Legend has it that three seeds were placed
in Adam’s mouth before he was laid underground.
The yew branch planted to mark his grave

became a tree at Golgatha, the place
of the skull, where Jesus succumbed.
Love kills and saves,

like adjuvant taxol extracted from sacred
yew needles and bark—too much and your pump-
heart slackens, like ewes dreaming in shade.
Dosed, you’re celestial—ash and ray.

Lucid Dreamer

Maybe you’re the one falling,
the one helpless to stop what’s
set in motion or stilled

into pirouettes, and the villain
smirking behind the juniper tree,
or maybe you’re the bluff itself,

the complicit clouds,
the air parting like a sea of reeds,
the descent transformed

into bottomless thought—
our collective unconsciousness
churning out similar dreams of chased

and chasing, gawking
naked in crowded streets,
or riding that tunneled dream

of repressed desire—
and if Aristotle was right
that dreamers sometimes know

they’re dreaming, brains stalled
between REM sleep and waking,
then can’t we rewrite the stories

we tell ourselves, maybe foil our own
most desperate plots to know finally
the dreamer from the dream?

Skipping the Leap

If it takes the Earth more time than we can spare
to complete its orbit around the Sun—
almost six extra hours, if rounding off—
and we never accounted for gains,
the seasons would shift, and in 700 years
there’d be snow in June in the Smokies,
though with wild fires and floods
there may not be a planet left to drift.
Where do those hours go before we get them
back each leap year—almost one full minute per day—
not enough for a power nap or the hour
we lose and gain from saving daylight,
pesky as a pound we try to shed for good.

Would those seconds lost each day
be enough to secure good habits for life,
like flossing teeth or touching toes,
doing squats to strengthen quads,
or massaging scalps to coax hair to grow?
Could those seconds have delayed
the truck that T-boned my cousin’s car,
reaching the crossroad too soon,
or have been enough to restart my ex’s heart
after skipping too many beats,
unlike when leaps are skipped every 400 years,
like rubato measures when tempo rights itself—
a little like robbing time.

*

Nancy Naomi Carlson won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Author of sixteen titles (eleven translated), her poetry and translation books have been reviewed in The New York Times. A recipient of two NEA translation grants, she’s the Translations Editor for On the Seawall. Piano in the Dark (Seagull Books, 2023), a “Must-Read Editor’s Choice” from Poetry Daily, is her third full-length collection. Her translation of Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi’s When We Only Have the Earth (University of Nebraska Press: African Poetry Book Series) arrives March, 2025.