scene

a windowless apartment. somehow, a pathos survives, cluttering around the white-walled living room.

centered is gorgeous red Pakistani rug, pinned down by two loveseats, still in their plastic cover after twenty years of marriage. the overhead light is cool white.

             downstairs and down the street, although the street doesn’t matter to this story, is the store.

similarly cluttered, an Upper West Side convenience store in 2008. there is a narrow deli, a machine that slices meat, a loud radio, and an aisle of packaged snacks. metal doors lead to the basement.

time is spent between these two spaces.

cicadas in the apartment I

I cannot have sex right now! I am busy
thinking about bugs. how cold
they must have been to confine
themselves to my apartment. when the earth dropped
in just six hours, and the red ones cannot reproduce indoors,
but can enjoy, in clusters, the west facing sun      
through the window  
while they are still able to do so.

the day will rear back in, and when it does,
I will convince the bugs out. all of them, and their webbed glass wings.
I fear I am unable to perform
violence nor gentleness, I think,
eying the bug on the lace shower curtain. I know
someone who was once alive. organs
clung to the threading. open
insides. hostile
indoors. my pelvis
and images of men
who have been
alive
and will be     . palms
pressed to the skull
of an insect.
cold tile—
    spring

cicadas in the apartment II

I am always ending the story short. like
an overturned nest       knocked by wind
eggs     scrambling the
mother will return to massacre.
but will be alive, baying
                 over the concrete. but I am rambling. I am    what I am trying
to say is:
they are alive—the bugs         all thousands of them,
slid from my apartment the next easy morning as if to
chide me for melodrama. I

(a large, fleshy thing)              am always reducing myself
to the plight of women: indoors          anxious
to tug the knob            so not to disturb
the cracks in the wood. all the life      in there:
carpenter ants, just burgeoning wasps, and those
                 ghosts who have slammed that frame without care
yowling after the wife
en route to toss the trash.

                 these are all the things I fear. life,
the potential, the memory.

I was trying to avoid cruelty, I cry,
kneeling at the window’s glass. and I hear the bugs reply
in their high, monotoned chorus: to
acquiesce is not a form of power,
but another shred of cuticle
peeled back until dry,
stinging only at the moment of detachment. plucked skin
                 —yes, that is skin, and that is my body it was attached to, and there is a hard,
red wound under that slow,
frequent pilling.          the bugs

were born clawing
in herds out the earth. knowing
that a house sparrow,
                 (a creature so pleasant I have paid it no mind)
will take its fill. unhinge its wings,
                        and soar with a body in the mouth. I saw this happen, so I know
it is real.          stained glass wings: an oasis
in concrete sprawl. the grass
chimes on,      metallic

buying new school clothes

I have just finished tearing off my lips
and am rushing to greet Mother at the door.
she asks if I want to go to TJ Maxx.
I squawk something gnarled, unable to enunciate
due to the jagged gap in my face. she laughs,
Don’t be like that, you need new clothes for school.

I take her hand and walk to the next room.
alone sits Father in the living room, shirtless on a long black chaise.
his pepper chest curls above his beer belly. his face is pregnant, he looks straight ahead.
he does not acknowledge my body in the entrance, does not notice my lack of mouth.
you know, beti, I would never hurt anyone.
not even your mother.

I exit the room.

now Mother is standing in the apartment hallway, holding up two shopping bags.
don’t tell your father about these bags!
he is unruly when we spend the money.
I am glad my lips are gone, and far from scabbing over. I do not like
to make mistakes. I recall a time
before I had resigned to calamity. I’d beg for reason,
and gnaw my lip,
as I did with my cuticles
before I picked them to nubs.

and Mother is still before me, a bag in each hand.
her holey orange shirt hangs off her skin.
It has worn her since before she conceived,
and it has stretched,
or she has shrunk—,
she looks so tiny in this house.

and I grunt a nod, and tuck the bags under my shirt.

I must cross the living room to get to my bedroom. Father is
in the living room, and he has tripled in size.
his receding hair tickles the ceiling, he has tripled
in size, but his eyes
are still small.

my teeth fit perfect like exposed brick and
I clench until one dislodges.
I toss
the front one in his direction.
his elephant ears perk and his body
clamors. I pry out another, and another,
and hurl them both,
and repeat the process.

he is further now, lifting the couch, running
his bloated hand over the hardwood floor.
I am almost to the bedroom door.
but the plastic crinkles
under my shirt.
he hears me.
now he runs in my direction,
shaking the furniture, the ceramic pots, the silverware rumbles
off its surfaces.

I release a sound.

he does not hear it. Mother appears
and pleads, It was me, I bought it.
so I sound harder, I push myself between them.
they thrash against each other, 

but their hands push through me.
I had chewed off my arms, my lips, my chest, my
                 am just eyes and ears.

I’m bad at cutting mangos

it’s tough    around the seed
always too much flesh or
a knife, right into the–



                 /

                 when her son collapsed, Umma took the double decker train to Long Island everyday
                 work, visitation, and always again


                 post-op, fresh staples to his scalp. I haven’t heard a sound like that

                                  more and more painkillers, and a tolerance still so high


                 /

when he collapsed, he was cutting me a mango. I asked him do it, because I wanted him

off the couch.

                 when the thud, I wanted

not to notice         greased black hair, his head

                                                                                      streaming the kitchen tiles

                 /

anti-seizing medication from a clear orange cylinder. when papa finally visited,
he stood by the door.
I have seen him cry twice: over the death
of a fish, and his mother.

            /


                                                                                                       ice melting in a short plastic cup,
                                                                                      I am witness to such tenderness

*

Mina Khan is a Korean-Pakistani American poet from NYC. Her writing spans across nations, generations, to discuss ecology, cyclicality, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. Her work has appeared in AAWW’s The Margins, Tupelo Quarterly, Epiphany Magazine, and more. Khan holds a BA from Wesleyan University, MFA from Columbia University, and is a Tin House alum. Her debut, Night Shift in Perfect English, is out now.

Judith and the Head of Holofernes

                        after Klimt

1.

Give me a beguiling tongue,

I whisper to the Lord
when the general approaches with his infinite army.

I bathe in oil of lily,
put on my gold, my robe

2.

of joy.

            My teeth, polished ivory beads.
            My lashes, death-heavy.

In his tent I fall to my knees in homage
until his servants lift me.

Three years and four months
since my husband.
In widowhood I have not grown dry but

3.

gorgeous with grief, with hunger.

The general says he’s never seen
such breasts,

                        like dolomite
                        tipped in nectar,

or such a halved and pitted wild apricot

4.

of a navel.

He sends his men away.

Ecstasy has a scimitar’s edge.
Under his purple canopy,
I lead us to it

5.

slowly.

He says he’s never touched
hair so dark,
black and fathomless as
the mind of God, before God
conceived of stars

or women.
(I told my people,
Never put the Lord to the test. Let Him
use you as His instrument. He
expresses Himself that way.)                    

Drunk, the general shuts
his eyes, says I could die

6.

in you.

I never knew how much I wanted.

Use me, I say. Please.
I am speaking to the Lord, but
the general doesn’t know.

My opened garment, green and blue.
How I move within its folds.

                        Lord, isn’t this how you created the world?
                        Out of passion, out of death?
                        Maybe genesis itself was a kind of
                        killing,

7.

                                                Yes,

                        an ending to millennia of stillness,
                        a cutting through a peace as dark and rich as my hair,

                        and we and the gazelles and every apricot

                        are scattered echoes of a cry that combined release
                        with pain.

To realize this
is oneness,

followed by a rush

of red.

I have never known how much I wanted
to feel the head of a man
at rest

like a planet
in my hand.

Widow’s Song 

This world I walk with rhythmic steps
is wholly you—

                                                no less than you.

What are pyramids and sun temples to my eyes?
Crumbs fallen from your lips.

What is a carpet of pine needles
to my bare feet?

                                                Tender menace

of your touch.

What are anemones and stars in saltwater tides?
                         Your clean, clairvoyant organs.

One night you said, Your heart’s beating
hard, then slept

                                                with your hand across my throat.

Even parted, we are a drum:
                                                your tears are still

on my wrist, and I’m pulsing always against
the skin of your life. The gods use us to make music

                                                only they can hear. 

*

Rose DeMaris is a poet and teacher. Her poetry appears in New England Review, Narrative, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and on poets.org. She has received Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. Her translations of poems by Palestinian Lebanese writer May Ziadeh were spotlit by the Academy of American Poets.

art is a funny thing

As you know, there’s good art and
bad art. There’s also art that I understand
and art I don’t understand.
Sometimes, they overlap.

So there’s art I don’t understand
but respect, and art I don’t
understand
and have no clue if
good or not.

But this – this I understand.
Not only do I understand, I know
for a fact that it’s bad.
So bad! I used to
make
art
just like that.

Immigrant Poeting

Mid-sentence, I pause
and think —
You know what?
Pretty fucking good
my English
is

                                        NOW
                                        WATCH ME
                                        RHYME

THREE SMALL POEMS FOR ONE BIG CAT

i.

To think,
inside a lion, a snake, a rat,
and a cockroach,
lie a soul as
tender and sweet as yours

I contemplate letting them
nibble my fingers too.

ii.

You must know
something about my love,
but do you know

when you sleep
on my lap, I watch
the back of your ear
                              twitch
and picture you stroking
my hair.

Suddenly,
this urge to
purrrr

iii.

How many cat poems
can one write
before she becomes
a cat poet?

Cause I will
do it.

*

Yifei Glass is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Glass wants to write prose poems that fly low to the ground, and if anything, she’d like to be remembered for her poems about her cat, who she lives with by the water. English is her second language.

Unremember

One way of bringing you back is to observe
your garlanded frame as art: dying, obsolete
unappreciated between origami and handmade candles.
Another is to bring back the heat of imitation
leather from hospital guest beds. Who knew waiting rooms
were carriers of sweaty fevers, making it impossible to sieve
dream from memory: What could I have said to raise you
from the dead? What do volumes of elegies contain that I don’t?
Their own inabilities to say the unsaid to the one who will
unsee unhear untouch unmove un-understand, understand
I am trying to backpack through the geography of a future
without you, my compass, and no one has written a Lonely
Planet Guide titled 100 Getaways Without Mother, or
let’s produce a reality TV show for contestants to adventure
through losses on a shoestring budget: Today you are
not allowed to take the deceased’s name. Today you are
not to remember the way she smiled when she said yours.
You cannot hold faith as a torch light over reality’s head.
You will be disqualified if you re-enter the symmetry
of this world with longing as your wild card. For your last
challenge, you must dump the vanishing remains into a glass
exhibit and create an event of everything that is, label it was.

Keep Me Burning

I practiced crossing my legs the way my father daggered
his eyes at mother if I wore shorts. Twin openings
exposing more than what they could hold inside.
It took me three sex-ed classes & a crushed pamphlet
to know that I must fold and hold my body like a score
of eggs on a crowded subway. My period premiered
the night we went to watch Godzilla which wasn’t as scary
as the sports teacher asking bleeding students to sit separately,
in a lotus pose, a quick whip if the line of our panties showed
through the pinafore. We played telephone with our hands
instead of running in the sun. In Moral Science, the only girl
with waxed legs passed a chit under the smooth wooden desk,
it read When he touches, I feel hot & cold at the same time. I lay
naked on our marble floor, fevered. Under his ripped, full-body
poster. I touched myself the way my sister braids and wiggles
her toes, over the phone, under the sheets, coral pink, her words
like submerged seeds on strawberries (who knew those were
achenes, the berry’s ovaries). I asked mom what was the big deal
about sexing and she asked me if I’d eaten all my fruit at lunch.
What would Madonna have done?  I vibrated all around
my pimpled years with a Walkman or a home karaoke mic
between my thighs knowing there was a sound inside
that would leak on any given Sunday in choir as he’d hit
his solo bits of Give Me Oil in My Lamp. If only there was a way
to touch the difference between fill and feel. If only I knew
how I could make origami of my shame and let it fly fly fly.

Gridlock

My boyfriend did not leave me because I had arthritis that would make caring for his parents difficult. That was his official reason. My body held that deficiency until he told me why, truly—I’d been with several men while he had been only with me. He couldn’t understand why I’d stop at him. I loved him. I loved that he cut up tough meats on my plate into bite-sized pieces when my degenerating fingers couldn’t compel a knife. I used to delay scratching down his back, a gesture that instantly made him come. His house was on Saat Rasta, seven roads radiating from a traffucked circle. The evenings I drove to him, citing overtime at home, my widower father would ask the maid to not cook dinner. Cooking dinner for one is wasteful. I sought love at the expense of my father’s hunger, his shoddy supper of roadside bunmaska or anda-pav. I am starving you to fetch you a groom, Papa, long-term gain! I did not say. I never felt guilt, only anger at my father’s unwillingness (not inability) to care for himself. To re-strike a friendship, I met my (ex)boyfriend for a late night show at the Imax dome. My phone died. The film was Life of Pi. I will resist the lush metaphors that the movie provides because this is no time for meandering by beauty. When you live on your father’s clock, there is no time for meandering. I drove home to find my father had alarmed aunty-uncle-cousins to track me down. Cabbed through the city to trace my whereabouts. My father shepherd-dogging me. I shepherd-dogging boy(s) simmering their sticky outbursts. From within the cramped motor-whirring centre, arose spokes and exhaust fumes.

Business School

I’ve wondered what Mummy’s voice sounded like—internal scream,
knife against serrated thumb, or bitten tongue, when she discovered
she was terminal. I’ve wondered who pioneered the hatchet of keeping
this classified. Her, Papa, or their unmelodious duet.

The way they sneakily sold my second-hand purple Zen
the week I left for business school. We are big on savings.

I’ve wondered what sound soothed Mummy’s ears, cementing
her will to protect me from her upcoming absence—my victory yeses
in table tennis, my gratuitous yawns, or my drunken bray as Summer of 69
blessed the hostel halls. Those were the days I learnt

how with puffery, hyperbole, blowing up insecurities
you can sell anything: car batteries, contact lenses, gassed water.
Those were the days my father with silence, sparser calls and
strategic dilly dallying sold me a world where my mother was being saved.

*

 “Unremember” and  “Keep Me Burning” from Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Preeti Vangani.

 “Gridlock” and “Business School” from Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Preeti Vangani. Reprinted by permission of River River Books.

Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet & writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Her work has been published in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize.Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA through which she facilitates poetry workshops rooted in writing grief through joy. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.

CHILDREN AT CHURCH

I kicked a boy once.
Causing him to fall down
a loft. Another boy kicked me
once while my brother watched.
We were dogs in the house
of the Lord; vengeance huffed
our closets and halls. One squat
night of a summer retreat, we circled
a bonfire. Our brows spat
halos of sweat and deodorant
as we chanted our vows
to be inquisitors, martyrs, and if
the Lord willed it, Mary Magdalenes.
The new boy beside me said he noticed
my faith. Wouldn’t I join him
and the others for s’mores?
Between us, smoke convulsed. I whispered,
Lord, thank you for this test. I will
not fail you. I will resist! . . .
             I stepped into the gallery
of Christians and marshmallows
and CK One and the sudden nick
of a callous in his warm palm.

PAINTING OF MAN AND TREE

on Three Sphinxes of Bikini

As a child of God, I question nothing,
not even the man’s head

sprouting from earth.
I studied the trunk, the vertical

channel that suggested both wood and arching
muscle. I knew I shouldn’t linger,

not on its broadness and strength,
nor the abundance of that curly

summer foliage. I might run my hands over
a tree but never a man. Even a man

who is more than himself. Look there.
Within the leafy crown quiver human bodies,

bellies and thighs suspended in upward-
churning gas gasped from the site

of impact. The painting lives
in Fukishima. It’s true I don’t love God.

There was nothing he told me
that the back of a man’s neck did not.

*

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, which is longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award, and she is the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). She won a Pushcart in 2024, and was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

Living inside a single screen as pieces of life
slide past is like throwing yourself in the trash

And I have thrown myself in the trash

My only hours

The Internet plunged me into a glowing
rectangle of sadness

And I plucked myself out again

Dripping with poison

And dropped myself back in again

Once upon a time

I was a soul glowing and curled in someone’s
arms

Then I’m eyes that lean into a glowing screen

Living inside a single screen as pieces of life
slide past is like throwing yourself in the trash

And I have thrown myself into the trash

The books I once read

My children’s little faces turned to me like little
screens

My children’s little faces turned to me like little
moons

My posture

My neck

The curves and folds of my brain bathed in a
sharp white glow

Like a brain bathed in a liquid solution

A solution made of a white glow

Who knows

The dark folds my brain may have had

Who knows

How sad my brain may have been

Encased in a dark shell of bone

All alone

Living inside a single screen as pieces of life
slide past is like throwing yourself in the trash

And I have thrown myself into the trash

Where I reside now with all of you

Who knew

Before all this

What different kinds of trash we are

Finding among the trash

Some beautiful trash

And other trash which frightens me

Scary trash touches my scary eyes

Living inside a single screen as pieces of life
slide past is like throwing yourself in the trash

And I have thrown myself into the trash

My only hours

One thing I loved about the Internet

When I loved the Internet

Was how I could see the shapes of souls
unfurling their tendrils in words

Having found tendrils of sweet minds unfurling

I’ve had to shut the drawer on the tendrils
sweeping out

I’ve had to shut the drawer directly on the
tentacles

I miss the fragile tentacles of souls

*

Emily Bludworth de Barrios is the author of the poetry books Rich Wife (University of Wisconsin Press 2025) and Shopping or The End of Time (University of Wisconsin Press 2022). Her work combines lyrical and associative forms to consider class, material culture, and the conditions under which women make art. A recipient of the Four Lakes Prize and the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, she divides her time between Houston, Texas and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Her website is www.emilybludworthdebarrios.com. 

Pear

What’s green canteen of effervescent water?
Vessel of white fibers churning into sugar
In the grinder of the mouth, pouch of
Floral mush? Green mixed tint of
Your grandmother’s yellow teeth?
Yellow of forsythia shrubs a flash,
Green beam swimming in sunlight,
Smooth skin thinly wraps crunch?
Radish-kin, jicama-cousin. You bite
Into its hips like a good chocolate bar,
Work your sweet mastication down
To its music box ballerina stem &
Woodsy core where its seeds live,
Hibernating pear-baby hearts.

Apple

As I was biting into the apple,
a fearful fruit worm popped
out, shivering & pleading,
Don’t eat me! I considered
sparing rhagoletis pomonella,
maggot-lunch-interruptus,
but I could use the protein,
insects being the new surge
of a brave epicurean future.
Who am I to defy progress?
I readied to chomp & devour
when flashed a sudden bright
Christ & the fat, luscious larvae
transformed into an airborne fly.

Sunday Aubade

Maple syrup poured over Greek yogurt, walnuts
sprinkled like petrified miniature
lungs, light-brown,

or brains, aerial viewed: my early-eyed sustenance
on a cloudy break-of-day: silence
grown out of departed

shadows: the green couch like a garden
wild with rectangular topiaries:
bitter tea tempered

with milk, verging on expiration, I sip
daintily as the sky-blue wash
of the walls

cascades, as I slipped feline under a throw:
time seemed stilled, yet
I live in it,

porous construct of an appearance of a life
where you appear through
an unseen door

into my room, bedsheet-and-pillow creases
on your morning face, lips
of a bygone era.

*

Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and NYFA fellow, authored the poetry collections Amphibian (forthcoming, April 2026), Threshold, and Imago; and the chapbooks Postcards; Aviary, Bestiary, and Subways. He works at Columbia University, teaches at Fordham University, and resides with his husband in Jackson Heights, Queens.

The Skin Finds Its Way Home

For years, my mother was the map of the world.
Now I ask my body where it wants to go, where
                                                it will feel safe.

As soon as I walked into this house I knew it would be mine.

Because my skin remembered the future—
how my children would run up and down
the stairs, their finger stains
on the turmeric-yellow walls.

I make mango smoothies and place
a welcome mat at the door.
The stop sign at the corner, an octagonal
heart, beats a small panic every time I leave.

Back at home my skin relaxes
its hairs            lowers its fine blades
in the way of all fearful things returning
to their lair.

And Just When You Think You’ve Attained the Heart

of the labyrinth it doubles back
If there is a place to walk toward
this might be it:
what coils and uncoils like a surprising
octopus in a grove of silver birches swaying
hello. Sound of water
over river stones in memoriam
to lost babies. Once, hidden like a bird
I watched a woman walk, balanced
on the narrow outlines: who was she
when she teetered on the edges?
Arms airplaned—
              for balance?     for        ?         
              for joy?

Woman

on the reversal of Roe v. Wade

Say fallen,
and I give you the arch
of a spine, make a bridge between
animal and anointed.

Say ointment, for I have doctored
myself, scraped my wounds—
you laid them out
like contrails for the world to see.

Say control,
and I’ll stretch.
In my enduring will nest
the buds of new beings.

Say body,
I sing my throat raw,
breath as holy as
the first blow of spring.

Say spring,
and I leap like
a spark in charged air
like a hiss

like a flame     like refusal

Agni: An Invocation

Under the auspices of fox and feather, once again
I knelt at the trinity—
water, wood and wing. The vessel wishing
for the stove, for what needs to be simmered,
fanned through ancient attention, blown
breath through quiet coal. Cold marrow
astonished to flushed heat, the autumnal body
freshly molten, molts into                     : what am I now?
            where can I go?
Draw me a map, I beseech my kindling tinder heart

“The Skin Finds Its Way Home,” and “And Just When You Think You’ve Attained the Heart” appear in Yamini Pathak’s collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025).

*

Yamini Pathak is the author of poetry collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025) and chapbooks Atlas of Lost Places (Milk & Cake Press, 2020) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press, 2021). She is a member of the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort and serves as the editor of Inch with Bull City Press. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, and VONA. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and has been a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize (South Asia). Yamini holds an MFA in poetry from Antioch University, LA, and her poems appear in West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals.

gods & kings

the men in my bloodline
walked like storms—
not toward peace
but through it,
like it was something
to be conquered.

i was raised
on gospel & grief,
on silence served
with sunday wine,

where the only prayers answered
were the ones we learned
not to ask.

they called themselves kings
but ruled nothing
but the dinner table,
stacked with unmet apologies
& full plates of rage.

i learned early:
a crown ain’t nothing
but a cage
if it don’t fit your head.
& god?

god was the whisper
between beatings,
the breath i held
beneath my tongue
when i wanted
to scream.

what kind of god
watches his sons
break their own hands
just to be worthy
of touch?

what kind of king
never teaches his heir
how to cry?

i’ve been unlearning
the myths since—

laying down
every armor
passed to me
like inheritance,

rewriting scripture
with softness,
with salt.

i ain’t looking
to reign.

i’m looking
to rest.

i don’t want to be
a god or a king.

just a man
who can look in the mirror
& call himself
free.

My Grandmother as Prayer Warrior

for the woman who knelt so we could stand

She never raised her voice—
not once.
But the house would tremble
when she prayed.

No need for pulpit or praise,
she sanctified the living room rug,
made altars out of ashtrays,
turned grief into gospel
with nothing but breath
& a Bible missing its back cover.

When the world gave us nothing
but “no,”
she’d murmur our names
into her cracked palms
like they were seeds
& whisper:
You gon’ bloom anyway.

This is the woman
who baptized me
in sweet tea & second chances,
sang Precious Lord
while shelling peas,
& taught me
that prayer don’t need pretty—
just purpose.

She prayed like fire:
not to burn the wicked,
but to light the way for the lost.

My grandmother didn’t fear no devil—
she’d already buried too many
to be scared of ghosts.

I watched her lay hands
on my mother’s grief,
rub the sorrow from her scalp
like it was dandruff,
like deliverance could come
through repetition.

She believed in a God
who listened
especially when the angels didn’t.
Believed in a love
that outlasted funerals,
believed in me
when I was nothing
but shaking bones
& poems too scared to be called holy.

& when I write now—
when I teach,
when I fold grief into metaphors,
when I let my voice quiver
but not disappear—
I know it’s because
her prayers
are still ringing through me.

I am the answered prayer
she never got to see bloom.

Still, I rise.
Still, I speak.
Still, I carry her name
like scripture beneath my tongue.

Because my grandmother
was a prayer warrior.
& I?

I am the war.

1000 Paper Cranes

He holds them
in his filthy, dirt-covered hands—
delicate wings smudged
with the proof of his undoing,
creases heavy with everything
he never said out loud.
I watch him,
this boy I once bled for,
folding promises into birds
that were never meant to fly.
They say if you fold a thousand,
your wish comes true—
but he never made it past ninety-seven
before calling it love.
The truth is:
no matter what we hold—
paper birds, broken hearts,
a past we pretend doesn’t still breathe between us—
we will never be perfect for each other.
Not in the way the poems promised.
Not in the way our hands once trembled
against each other’s skin
like we were trying to rewrite God.
We were too much ache
& not enough sanctuary.
Too many prayers
folded into silence.
Too many nights
I spent convincing myself
that pain was just
another word for staying.
So I let go—
not because I stopped loving him,
but because I finally loved myself
enough to stop confusing
his chaos for destiny.
& still—
some part of me
wants to believe
that somewhere,
those cranes
are flying.

*

Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his poems navigate silence, ancestry, and resilience, creating sanctuaries for voices too often unheard. His work has been featured by Diode, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more across platforms that champion the power of story to honor every body, every history, and every voice.