• Poems

    Suzanne Underwood Rhodes: “Beloved Enemies”

    Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

    Beloved Enemies

    (Rohwer Internment Camp, Arkansas, 1942-45)

    Child, you don’t know what you are asking!
    To tell about the camps? Why would I smudge your smile
    with my stories, sully your home here in Virginia
    with the great oak shouldering your swing that lifts you up,
    up, and down to earth again. Your pony, Wind, grazing
    in the sun-dappled field of bluestem and butterflies.
    You are my happiness!

    Should I relive that prison of sorrow and privation,
    I who am old with a foot already in heaven?
    But write this on your heart: we were strong and patient.
    We were gaman, facing our suffering with dignity.
    And you will be gaman too, little bird, when someday
    you fly into a storm.

    You beg and beg! Your dark eyes ask to understand,
    and I think maybe you are older than your small years.
    So, I will tell you a thing or two.

    Once I lived in a world like yours, but our trees dripped lemons
    not acorns, and the air was cool with spray from the sea
    where your Uncle Haruto and I swam and were children at play
    under the sun’s watchful eye. So many pretty shells we gathered!
    We always wondered what creatures had lived inside.

    When the Order came, they made Papa sell his orange groves, his store,
    our house on Adalaide Street, and all for a song. That means for cheap!
    “Get up! Hurry, no time to explain,” he said, shaking us awake.
    Don’t cry!” he commanded. “Get only what fits in your suitcase.”
    “Go without Mei Mei? No, Papa!” But he opened the door
    and out my cat fled into the night, and with it, our lives:
    We would not come again.

    And where, you ask, did we go? Thousands of us, to a race track!
    A horse stall for a house that stank of manure! A cot apiece in each little box.
    “Kimi has fever!” Mother said to Papa, her eyebrows worried, her hand cool
    on my forehead. (I liked when she called me Kimi, not Helen, my school name.)
    The fever raged, forced open the gate of an underworld. I saw the ocean
    rising like a tower, Mei Mei crying for food, a rifle pointing at Papa.

    On a day when the California sky spread sunshine like honey,
    we were rounded up by the hundreds and put on trains—infants
    and elders, youngsters afoot, parents clutching what they could.
    Oh, the tears that mingled with ours in the stuffed car, tears
    silently shed by neighbors and strangers, but none by the aunties
    shrunken with years, their faces frozen as death. In that darkness
    Mother shone the warmth of her smile. “See, I brought a book
    to read you,” and as if pulling a rabbit from a hat, she opened
    a surprise sack with a story and lollipops for the journey.
    Day and night the train raced and screamed, thrusting us toward
    a great unknown. “Will it be a pretty place?” I asked Papa.

    Mother stepped first off the train that gray, muggy morning,
    her shoulders squared proudly, suitcase in hand, and we followed—
    Papa, Haruto, and I, the heat bearing down like a heavy cloak.
    A brisk blonde soldier waved us to our barrack, Block 9, Unit 3.
    “Welcome to Rohwer, Arkansas. You’re lucky. Only four of you.
    We got families of six, seven, eight fitting into these swank hotel rooms.”
    Papa’s face burned from an inner fire but he said nothing.
    Our new home was no more than a prison cell, all of twenty square feet.
    The whole camp was a prison dressed in fancy words like “Relocation Center,”
    everything bound by barbed wire and guarded with guns.

    “Mother, I have to pee,” I said,
    but our room had no toilet or running water.
    Those were outside, shared by all the beloved enemies among us.

    That night Mother unscrewed the single lightbulb in our room
    and in the dark, unfolded from her suitcase the red kimono
    of family weddings, and slipped into its silk her funeral song.

    “I have no more words for you now, little bird, Katori.”


    Suzanne Underwood Rhodes     is the Arkansas Poet Laureate and the author of five poetry collections, including Flying Yellow, a semifinalist in the North American Book Award, and two books of lyrical prose. She has recent poems in Bracken, Dappled Things, Slant, and Bellevue Literary Review. She teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and is an adjunct instructor of English at John Brown University.

  • Poems

    Howie Good: “Away From the Light”

    Howie Good

    Away From the Light

    1
    Every space has light of some kind, and yet we act as if it isn’t there. What an experience, to be in total darkness at one in the afternoon. There’s a lot of screaming and praying to Jesus. We suddenly become archaic remnants of the predigital age. This might be the future. How it’s destroyed. We don’t have anything to stop it. I’ll stand and watch it get dark. Does that surprise you? No one is outside the system. Even when you ride the train, all you see is black forest with nothing in it.

    2
    I come and I go and I come and I go. A woman with whirlpool eyes stopped me on the way. I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Oh, she’s drowning,” because she didn’t look like she was drowning. “Is that Jesus behind the KFC handing out tickets to heaven?” she asked. I arrived too late to wave them goodbye. The next day it’s raining and very muddy. People want to know is it climate change. Some are trembling. There’s no cure or treatment. It’s hard not to see God in that.

    3
    There are rules, presumably, that govern the universe, despite the rise of masked police or the Nazi graffiti defacing Jewish-owned shops. The new regime is already in an advanced state of decay. Am I the only one who hears the explosive warning cries of the seagulls? You might not know this, but Jesus was commonly addressed as “Rabbi.” The thin, ghostlike figure drifting toward me along the shoreline has a yellow Star of David patch on his sleeve and tears in his eyes.

    Howie Good latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

  • Poems

    Khayelihle Benghu: “The Order I Carried Out”

    Khayelihle Benghu

    The Order I Carried Out

    I. The Order I Carried Out

    They said it was necessary

    that word polished like a badge.

    I held it in my mouth

    until it tasted like iron.

    There was a moment

    small as a match head

    where I could have said no.

    But the room was full of ranks,

    and my spine learned obedience

    before my tongue learned truth.

    Even now, I remember

    how precise my hands were,

    how calm the air became afterward

    as if violence, done correctly,

    deserves quiet.

    They thanked me.

    That is the part

    that keeps me awake

    not the act,

    but the applause.

     

    II. Inventory of What Remains

    No blood on my hands

    that would be simpler.

    Instead, I carry fragments

    a voice I ignored,

    a truth I bent,

    a silence I fed.

    Tell me

    which part condemns me most?

    The world moves on easily.

    It forgets with discipline.

    But I have become

    an archive of small betrayals,

    catalogued in bone and breath.

    Sometimes I try to forgive myself

    practice the words

    like a foreign language.

    They don’t stay.

    Because somewhere inside,

    a version of me still stands,

    watching

    and refuses to look away

     

    III. In the Presence of Uniforms

    They wore certainty

    like a second skin.

    Every command

    arrived already justified,

    every action

    pre-approved by power.

    You learn quickly

    how doubt becomes dangerous

    how questions

    sound like disloyalty.

    So I swallowed mine.

    It tasted like metal,

    like something forged

    and forced into shape.

    Even now,

    when no one is watching,

    I feel the ghost of that discipline

    a voice that says,

    obey first,

    understand later.

    I am still unlearning

    the order of things

     

    Khayelihle Benghu is an emerging writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

  • Poems

    Daniel Mask: “Made of glass”

    Daniel Mask

    Made of glass

    Looking up with my head back
    to the steel-blue sky.
    —A voice.
    Mumbling echoes—
    even music now, a circus of strangers
    milling like ants—below.
    Against the wind’s velocity,
    I heard myself speak
    as if someone were listening.
    When I was young, this building was taller,
    or so it seemed.
    Made of glass,
    a few broken windows,
    except the top floor—
    the netting gone.
    For a while this structure stood empty,
    abandoned.
    It felt misplaced in time,
    forgotten before it aged.
    I never thought I would be back up here
    where the ledge still holds weight
    and nothing is asked of me.

    The building’s shadow drifts harsh
    in the open window—
    A voice folded outside, half-heard,
    then heard again differently.
    For a moment I leaned forward.
    I lost my footing. The crowd gasps.
    I was already elsewhere.
    The air tasted like fried oysters—
    the way I remember the beach.
    On the top floor, back when, a barbershop
    with a view of the sunset over the fishing pier.
    From the barber’s chair, I noticed how
    everything paused.
    The voice returns in fixed fragments, caught
    —over my shoulder half-remembered.
    I lean further, not knowing why,
    into the space between us.
    The crowd shifts.
    I smell the salt—the same salt

    from the beach below the barbershop,
    a bull horn blares with a gull’s cry,
    —folding into the evening.

     

    Daniel Mask has poems and a photograph published in Rattle, Gyroscope, Red Cedar Review, Tulane Review and an
    essay in 30 West. He has a Master’s degree from the University of Houston and is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer. His work shares a preoccupation with being a witness to what humans hold sacred—and how that burden, often unrecognized, is processed, concealed or transformed. He finds it does not come from transcendence or resolution but from endurance. 

  • Poems

    Katherine DiBella Seluja: “Because terror”

    Katherine DiBella Seluja

    Because terror

    is frozen in ice in zero-degree weather. Because a woman being of service
    can be killed. Because she might start the day scrambling eggs

    and then leave them cold on the table. Because longing is filled with many types
    of hunger, driving is filled with so many distractions and one of them is carrying a gun.

    Because another name for nurse is terrorist.

    Because, “That’s fine dude” is a simple sort of blessing. Because her children wait
    on the backdoor step watching red squeeze from the sky.

     

    Katherine DiBella Seluja is a nurse practitioner, a poet and a micro fiction writer. Her most recent collection, Point of Entry (UNM Press, 2023) focuses on issues of migration and ancestry. She is a co-author with Tina Carlson and Stella Reed, of the collaborative collection, We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019), winner of the New Mexico- Arizona Book Award and the Southwest Design Book Award. Katherine co-edited with Dale Wisely, an anthology of grief poems, Memento (Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, 2025). Recent work can be found in South 85 Journal, Intima, and Taos Journal of Poetry. Katherine is a poetry editor at Unbroken Journal.

  • Poems

    Miriam Sagan: “The Old Soldier”

    Miriam Sagan

    The Old Soldier

    was trapped in his label—not his given name, but the name he acquired in the story. He hadn’t always been old, but he had mostly been a soldier. Now he wore the tattered remnants of his uniform and carried an army- issued rucksack. Some things were not visible—the later years as a mercenary—with all the money now spent. The season with guerilla fighters. They’d burned a village to the ground, something he did not want to remember. These days, he liked to just ramble around. The landscape was quotidian northern fairy tale: four seasons, flowering hedges, geese flying in formation. He liked to pick raspberries in season. Pop a red juicy berry in his mouth. Swallow. He’d never been in love. Well, maybe when he was fourteen, with a girl from his own village who had long pigtails. He’d seen her swinging on a gate and he’d felt something in his chest that felt like hunger—something soft, red, pulsing. Something sweet.

     

    Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. SShe founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces.

  • Poems

    Sarah Gokhale: “Britney”

    Sarah Gokhale

    Britney

    I’m on Zoom with my manager, Stephen, at 7 A.M. giving my three weeks notice because my coworker sexually harassed our other coworker and our organization took the harasser’s side, but I’m distracted because Sasha keeps FaceTiming me to tell me that Britney Spears just got arrested for a DUI and I’d so much rather dissect that situation than this one, but I can’t bail so I have to act serious and calm while I explain to Stephen that the disgust he feels in our harasser coworker’s presence is very importantly not the same feeling as the actual fear for my bodily safety and autonomy I feel around him and after my second time trying to explain this to Stephen I hang up and call Sasha about Britney and then I gawk at Twitter pictures of Connor Storrie and Francois Arnaud from the GLAAD awards last night in my car without air conditioning while I wait for my burrito to be ready at the taco truck where a likely undocumented dude backs up straight into my car and we don’t know how to solve the problem because he doesn’t have insurance and I don’t know where my insurance card is, and my Spanish is at its worst when I’m on ketamine, which I only did this early in the morning because I just quit my job because my friend got raped, and those things make me feel stressed, and nobody at the taco truck speaks English, but it’s fine because the dude who ran into me gives me a $100 bill and we fist bump and call it even.

     

    Sarah Gokhale is a producer from Orange County, California. Her favorite condiments are Trader Joe’s jalapeno sauce and burrata. Her Mexican street dog’s favorite condiment is cream cheese. Her favorite soccer player is Rose Lavelle. She thinks Electrolit is better than Gatorade. Her favorite American cities are NYC, Albuquerque, and Philly. https://twobrainsonecell.substack.com/.

  • Poems

    Jimmy Pappas: “What I Learned in Vietnam”

    Jimmy Pappas

    What I Learned in Vietnam

    That it’s always best to avoid hand-to-hand combat.
    That the black market is a great place to go shopping.
    That a flush toilet deserves to be called a throne.
    That tear gas has earned its name.
    That rats can grow to the size of a small dog.
    That some soldiers get their kicks by taking pictures of mutilated bodies.
    That marijuana can be laced with opium to make it addictive.
    That morphine users on the street keep a dog nearby for serum.
    That prostitutes can be just as worthy of love as any other person.
    That it’s always nice to be called Number One.
    That bigotry exists everywhere in the world.
    That you should always accept food from someone who can’t afford to give it to you.
    That chopsticks are used to push rice into your mouth.
    That human beings get swept away by forces beyond their control.
    That we must keep relearning how people are always the same, only their culture is different.
    That, in general, soldiers on all sides try to do their job right.
    That, in general, civilians go to a war zone to make money.
    That cigarette, beer, and weapons manufacturers make a fortune on war.
    That wars must be separated from the soldiers who fight them.
    That men fight in a war because they love it.
    That every father is proud of his son going off to war.
    That soldiers who return home from a war zone suffer from terminal ennui.
    That human beings can live through the most devastating of injuries.
    That saving the life of every soldier wounded in combat may not be the best idea.
    That only a small percentage of personnel involved in a war are combat soldiers.
    That war goes unnoticed without cameras to film it.
    That freedom is an illusion I never want to live without.
    That once you enter a war, it will never leave you.

     

    Jimmy Pappas won the Rattle Chapbook Contest with Falling off the Empire State Building and the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story.” His nominations include two for the Pushcart Prize, one for the Best of the Net, and two for a Touchstone award. He moderates a weekly, themed Zoom event called “A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends.”

  • Poems

    AP Ritchey: “A Reunion”

    AP Ritchey

    A Reunion

    Despite no running water,
    a crib without a mattress,
    and drugs visible on the coffee table,
    the caseworker,
    following court orders,
    reunited the family.

    She signed where indicated.
    Initialed the margin.
    Drove home
    with the radio off.

    That night,
    drying dishes,
    she stared past
    her reflection
    in the kitchen window
    at the empty playpen behind her,
    the dark television
    no longer showing cartoons,
    and the unopened boxes of
    mac and cheese
    stacked on the counter,
    and stood there
    long after.

    AP Ritchey’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Zodiac Review, Rat Bag Lit, After/Thought, SciFi Shorts, and Typishly, among others.

  • Poems

    Charlotte Poitras: “Gunshot”

    Charlotte Poitras

    Gunshot

    You dragged your own lightning to prison
    because you believed
    it deserved punishment
    instead of healing.

    They released it
    the next morning.

    I once offered you a blanket
    so you could sleep.
    You folded it away.

    The fire rummaged through its own house first
    but never managed to inhale it.

    It had already devoured yours
    and still wanted more.

    A Molotov cocktail
    ate through your insides
    ten metal carcasses per night.
    Your flesh blackened
    from the inside out.

    Fire-breather,
    you aimed your torch at her
    dazzled the ones who came
    seeking blindness.
    The light was so violent
    the alarm never rang.

    “The embers will exhaust themselves.”

    My charred fingers
    dialed three numbers
    hoping the ringing in my ears
    would dissolve into:

    “He’s holding the match
    but hasn’t struck it yet.
    We can’t stop him.”

    I testified
    right hand raised
    about the ember inside you
    the one that threatens to swallow everything,
    the forest fire
    tearing our roots from the soil.

    They let you burn.

    I cried
    Fire. Fire.

    No one attended
    my cremation.

    A straw fire dies on its own
    once you find
    a brick hearth
    to cradle your heat.

    Flame,
    you do not extinguish.

    And I warm myself
    by remembering
    I tried
    to smother the disaster,

    But no water
    would flow.

     

    Charlotte Poitras is a queer neurodivergent artist-entrepreneur based in Montréal. Her practice is autobiographical or documentary, spanning literature, theatre, visual arts, and audiovisual work, with over one hundred publications. Her mission is to listen to the world and transmit the murmurs that society has failed to hear.

  • Poems

    B Wagner: “Just Passing”

    B Wagner

    Just Passing

    As a child with pet hamsters
    I learned the basics needs for a decent life.
    Clean water, fresh food,
    A safe place to sleep
    (Away from your excretions).
    A roof overhead.
    A few scraps of felt for softer nests would be nice.
    A feeling of being cared for.
    Not essential.

    I knew in my bones when that first one died.
    I didn’t need to check the rise and fall of its little ribs.
    Its head lolled, rolled backward
    At an impossible angle.

    Today I passed a man lying on the ground,
    Surrounded by plastic bags, his feet dirty.
    I can’t be certain if his chest moved.
    But the position of the head seemed ok.
    I walked on.

     

    B Wagner is a research physician developing drugs to fight AIDS, cancer, and severe autoimmune diseases. She has worked as an infectious disease doctor, treating patients with HIV/AIDS. My work explores themes of nature, healthcare, and the early death of her wife. Publications include The Scarred Tree, and in several anthologies, including The National Library of Poets.

  • Poems

    Howie Good: “Maggots”

    Howie Good

    Maggots

    Men at the highest levels of government
    whose diseased brains breed maggots
    eagerly plot the next round of war. History knows
    of things we refuse to acknowledge,
    the gratuitous collapse of civilizations,
    the corpses of children buried under the rubble.
    Any hill town or industrial city can be
    rechristened with bombs.

    Howie Good is a widely published but little-known poet whose new poetry collection is True Crime from Berlin-based Sacred Parasite Press.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “Fitting”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    Fitting

    The day of the air raids
    everyone around me placed an index finger
    on their lips
    don’t make a sound
    press into that corner
    pretend you are not there
    how much I wished I were
    the mouse
    slipping into dark cracks
    vanishing toward nothing
    but I survived that day.
    I grew larger and larger
    until my narratives
    could no longer fit into holes.
    Sometimes I still try to squeeze into cracks
    only to pull my sunken parts back out.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “A Letter from Rojava”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time
    —Elie Wiesel

    A Letter from Rojava

    Dear World,

    If you sell me to a museum,
    kindly place my severed parts
    behind glass.
    Annotate the mushroom cloud
    hovering over my history.
    Display the knife
    lodged in a sliced land.
    Hang my grief
    along the walls.
    Play my exiled songs loud
    until the space turns indigo.
    Show that these bones
    are not composed of myth.
    But do not place “was”
    after “this genocide.”
    There is no space for “was”
    in the grammar
    of a million mourning hearts.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “Aftermath”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    Aftermath

    Each time he finishes spraying,
    picking, or pruning,
    he gazes out over the vineyard
    as if the buried might rise again.

    Before resettlement,
    my dad drove a shovel truck
    the engine’s growl
    tearing through the grey air
    along mountain slopes.
    He carved roads
    that sometimes led
    to the darkest destinations.
    On his way to work,
    he’d pass bodies in uniform –
    piles of them
    and had to bury them,
    war after war
    after war.
    Now, forty summers on,
    dad stands among the vines,
    listening for voices
    we can never hear.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “Outliving the Day”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    Outliving the Day

    Some days stretch so far
    I feel I have outlived
    a clock bloated with revolutions and genocides.

    My insomnia stands like a mountain
    from which killed dreams
    bleed into the sky.
    I keep counting
    until minutes turn to ghosts,
    until my back becomes a mother’s back,
    bent around her child,
    limbs loose and pendulous,
    head fallen backward
    under the weight of war.
    Which world
    has he crossed into now
    whether he is sheltered,
    given food and toys,
    or told, once again,
    he does not belong
    to this life.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.