when will it be enough?

when you have died, and your body is rotting in the ground, and the acidic rain burns below the soil into your bones, will you admit that it mattered?

when I cannot have children, because the impact of another human, another body, replacing yours in the world’s ever growing carbon footprint, would be too great a burden to bear, will you see what you have done?

when the lakes run blood orange with the pollution to fuel your corporations, when I can barely breathe for fear of your filth in my lungs, when I only get half the years you did because you have preemptively killed me, will you acknowledge the way you ruined us?

I want to grow old with my brother, with the love of my life, with my college friends and neighbors I was raised with from just down the street, I want to have not only ten and twenty and thirty year high school reunions but fifty year reunions, sixty years of marriage, seventy years of fruitful life

I remember joking wryly with a friend of mine in middle school, when we were all of twelve years old, that it didn’t matter whether or not we’d be successful in our careers because the world would burn before we even got the chance to start

you have stolen my future before I even got the chance to develop my past

and for all of the worry instilled in my generation, all of the documentaries violently pushed before our youthful eyes, still too big and round for the faces we hadn’t grown into yet, still glassy with the childhood curiosity that is supposed to reflect promise and potential placed before them but rather shone with infographics threatening two degree celsius increases to the world’s average temperature, video clips of hurricane wreckage in Puerto Rico, of California on fire, of evacuations from the mountains just a few miles away from my home

for all of this worry, you changed nothing

you stole our innocence in the name of a problem we are now responsible for solving

you caused this, you recognized this, yet you have continued to dig deeper, year after year, with these irreparable damages in the name of profit margins, stock prices, projected growth and 

money,

money,

money,

money makes the world go ‘round, money is worth everything, money is worth me, my future, my health and my happiness and my hurt

because where would we be without your stupid fucking money?

maybe we would be in a world where white rhinos did not just become functionally extinct

maybe we would be in a world where my cousin doesn’t have to check the air quality index every time she leaves her apartment because she lives in a major city

maybe we, I, could enjoy the teen years like you got to without this crippling fear, this doubt, this imminent doom that is largely out of my own control

I am terrified

I am so scared that humanity won’t pull through, that we won’t get our shit together and find a way out of your crisis, and I will not get the life I deserve

and you won’t even admit you are in the wrong

so when I am lying in the grave that you dug for me -

no, the grave that you dragged me into -

I will cry out one last time, and I will push this pain

out of my body, out of my spirit and my life and my person

and I hope it finds its way back to you in this universe

you will feel the slap of my death across your face as if it was imprinted with my own hand

and someday, somewhere, I hope you suffer for it


Sincerely,


Your Daughter 



____

Catherine Malden is a student at Duke University studying Computer Science and English, with a minor in Creativing Writing. She is currently a sophomore from Denver, Colorado. This is her first time publicly sharing her poetry.

by Sam Herschel Wein

She can be tired, awake until 2AM then making 
breakfast at 7AM just in from 6AM jogging, 
two blueberry pancakes slid onto the plate 
from the buttery pan, she’s exhausted, her own mother 
ailing for 13 years, losing her memory, forgetting 
who we all were, then dying, she’s crying, hiding behind
the door so no one can hear. She works 12-hour days
at the hospital and her eyes sink to the floor 
when she gets home, still, she cooks dinner, 
her husband who says thank you says I feel guilty 
all of a sudden, she never followed her dreams, 
she wanted to be a writer? A musician? A lawyer? 
But he doesn’t question too much, falls asleep 
on the couch, and my mother washes the kitchen 
up with her face, still unchanged, she looks like 
how I remember her, at the dinner table, 
coming out and 17 and in my tennis clothes, 
she’s crying, sighing, for days, around the house, her face, 
next to mine in my bed, hymns, guitar, her gentle, 
perfectly pitched harmonies, every moment with her 
sends my mind back into my memories, like when she 
would make homemade pizza loafs that sliced into rolls 
whenever my friends came over, her face, working 
incessantly, the kitchen, the holiday dinners of brisket 
and chicken and brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes 
and lemon curd dripping over a matzoh-meal dairy-free cake, 
the gentler evenings, when we’re all relaxing and she worries, 
and she’s up late nights, every nights, that exhaustion, 
a lifetime, but it’s still her face, after I write the poems 
about her, after she says I should stay quiet just be quiet 
about being gay, after she shows up to my chapbook 
release party, and I think, look at us, trying 
so hard to look like the love we have to give, to look like 
two hands assembling homemade cookies, 
5 different kinds, onto silver trays, passed down 
from her mother, from her mother’s mother, to me




_____

Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a Chicago-based poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Poetry Press Series. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent work can be found in perhappened mag, The Adroit Journal, and Sundog Lit, among others.

by Sam Herschel Wein

              I show up 
my mother says
              to your readings 
she starts to cry
              and you write 
              about me like I’m the villain 
              in your life. 
My dad sits. He is wearing a tie. 
She has removed her good shoes.
I am on the bed, with a red face.
              All I did was drive you to soccer practice
we sit in a silence
heavy as calico comforters kicked
off the bed, furled on the floor.
How do I explain? 
It wasn’t just soccer. 
It was evening guitar, and baked goods, 
and helping me move, and and 
and. But never admitting that she hated 
that I was gay. That she couldn’t hide it.

              The poems are working, I said. We are sitting 
              here. We are beginning this conversation. And.





____

Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a Chicago-based poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Poetry Press Series. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent work can be found in perhappened mag, The Adroit Journal, and Sundog Lit, among others.

by Chelsea Dingman

Some find it in shit. Some in dirt. Some in tears. 
Three tortoises in sun. Butterflies surrounding them.

Drinking their tears in a Peruvian jungle. Elsewhere,
four of us. 1985. There were never five. The Columbia

valley. The turtle we got after our dog was mauled
while we were sleeping. How I walked home each day

wanting to feel alive. Which is different from not wanting
to die alongside my father & my dog & my mother

who had cancer she kept hidden with her
cheque book & the decades of men who storied our lives

as though any man would do. As though fathers
didn’t keep turning up dead, like all the good 

gods before them. And there was nothing I could do.
Nowhere to surrender salt water to the world & ask

to be surrounded instead. Just quiet. The river
passing slowly beneath bridges. Rain falling.

Commensalism: the estrangement of selves
into tenses: before & after the shadow

of a girl had fled & I was left. Lonely. My mother
waking to the dog torn apart in the garage. 

Her tears, as she held the collar in her hands
that morning. As I peered in a casket, black

stitches peering back. I refused to cry. If only
I would’ve known how to be surrounded. 

How to offer something of myself to keep something else
alive. It is always morning in this story. Or mid-afternoon.

Or night. It is always 1985. December. Or it is 2007
when I have my first miscarriage in Florida

& the light is thin as December 
in my heart & I am tired of pretending miscarriage

isn’t a form of self-harm. Or it is 2020 & I find
myself with a new child, but I can’t stop

crying because I fear I might die, soon or too young,
dehydrated by her hot mouth. The lives turned to salt

in my hands as my brother goes to rehab
after almost dying & my mother is in hiding

again. What would any good god do? Or what god
would do any good? I don’t know what it means

to be loved. A woman I work with loses her life
as I research & write. Still, her daughters 

wake up alone. What is there to do but cry?
In Florida, I become dehydrated just by being 

outside. There is no shortage of people
crying. Nor guns firing across golf courses

& campuses. I am never more afraid 
than when I am alive. I vow to leave. My children

clasped in my hands. But each country I touch
makes me cry. Each time I am turned to salt

again, called orphan, or woman, or service animal. 
And my first country, my mother: not dying. 

Not mine. Which is to say: there was a gun
in my father’s hand one night. 1976. As he drank

& she cried. As I struggled to stay alive inside
her. But that is their story, not mine. I leave Florida

to walk my children past my childhood
river. A pipeline cuts through houses

where I walked away in the dim winter
light. I find myself standing by the river,

looking for a place. Nowhere that isn’t dear
around us. Where I am alive in the cries

of my children, raucous or raw,
& everything that is our lives. 




____

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Her third collection, I, Divided, is forthcoming from Louisiana University Press in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

by Lyd Havens

The summers of my youth were friendless. I stole 
maraschino cherries from the bar my father 
worked at, hid in a booth and tried to knot the stems
with my tongue. He taught me how to use 
the dust mop. I switched the cue balls out 
for the 8’s. I traced my hand and tried to predict
my own future. The fries were burnt. Sandy 
snuck me Sprite in a shot glass. After clocking out,
my father drank too much. Ten more minutes. 
Twenty more minutes. Outside, the street signs 
melted; eggs fried on the sidewalks. Even then, 
I wore close to the bone. Stop being so antsy, 
my father said. I wanted to be an actress 
until I realized I can never veil my emotions.




____

Lyd Havens is the author of the chapbooks I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here (Nostrovia! Press, 2018) and Chokecherry (Game Over Books, 2021). Their work has previously been published in Ploughshares, The Shallow Ends, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Lyd lives in Boise, Idaho, where they will graduate from Boise State University in December 2021.

by Lyd Havens


You will be like a foal, says my mother 
when I talk about re-entering
someday. The fleeing is still 
so vivid, as if it hasn’t ended yet.  
Un-greened pasture, stagnant 
womb. I fantasize about the crowds 
I never questioned; the lake full 
of tamed jellyfish on the other side
of the world. It’s true, my legs feel so new 
these days. They fold like a deck
of cards under me when I stare 
at the sky. Kumquat light 
staining the shingles. A small tornado 
of feathers in my backyard. I want to ask, 
where is the bird? Does it miss itself? 



____

Lyd Havens is the author of the chapbooks I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here (Nostrovia! Press, 2018) and Chokecherry (Game Over Books, 2021). Their work has previously been published in Ploughshares, The Shallow Ends, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Lyd lives in Boise, Idaho, where they will graduate from Boise State University in December 2021.

by Monika Cassel

A man watches news about us about you					
I’m in the house speaking with my daughters
about where and how many how were hurt
and what will happen now

outside, afternoon sunlight 							
falls against my words, across the lawn,
climbs the maple the twin windows reflect. 
Which daughter will dawn?

Evening light. The crows wonder what help 					
comes. Every day a web—the cloudbank 
settling on the hills, house to house,
—what more to give my children? 

Give today the cloudbank. Here am I alive 					
and in a body awake. Clouded. House shut tight.
I cannot say how to bear I do not know what word
I hold no. I’ll peel and chop the garlic soon for dinner,

catch a syllable now— grief, carried,						
swims words from house to house,
city to city. I might hold my daughters’ hands 
but often they decline.

Ask me to name the tree across the street. Ask me				
where I come from. I grew in my mother in a country at war
as she grew in hers, as my children grew inside me in another before 
I was birthed. By the fire a place to curl up 

& quiet the crows that congregate 						
on neighborhood trees. My daughter—tall, tall—
asks me to hold her. My words bubble up the gray coils 
of the power substation across the street. My hand a fence. 

She tells me a little about her day. She shuts the door, 			
I answer. The spice smell of her hair slices soft 
through the clock of my own childhood. I walk out, see 
the west hills over other houses when I round the corner. 

The year’s last tomatoes pale red. People call out names 		
quiet hum of the machine tired rain on the cheek 
a hummingbird pale moon shading darker. But see 
who was lined up who is the target

here not here when on our street we say					
no never here a no man’s land not 
a long journey home lost the child now grown
remembers the motion of travel

not here we think a lost home a child							
nothing left the child now grown remembers
but no once again the man watches
the screen shows one thing.

So much I have carried something is broken sometimes 			
the hand rests where it was building. The crispness 
of a daughter who wants. The soft curl of her limbs when 
she hides in her bed. 
 
The beater paddle’s clang bread leavening never knowing 		
which day night dark upon the city lingers across 
treetops soft cheese cut into blocks a pot of milk dropped 
and left where it fell come 

let me catch you								

cowed. Careful. Count me, here 						
—I do not know 	light crowded 
like fog. Where are the hands coming
like the sound of crows 

this one keeps singing me this one’s round, 						
this one’s quiet? To birth is to fail someone—
I’m hoping twilight’s end the undone I was carved 
a pinprick wanting to choose wishing no surprise 

though joy keeps striding into new qualities of 				
light knowing one word too many can snap 
a sentence again. Joy when I am not alone lingers
I swim words.

We mark our ballots here 								
a sparrow 	we swim upstream who knows 
when I can sleep
with fruit with the heavier air

who knows what is unmarked. Whose loss? 					
Names written		my house 
yes here again I come soft
you are here here here come quiet



___

Monika Cassel‘s poems have appeared in The Laurel Review, Phoebe Journal, and Construction Magazine, and her translations from German have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Asymptote, among others. Her chapbook Grammar of Passage (flipped eye publishing 2021) won the Venture Poetry Award. She is a degree candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson College’s MFA program and is a teaching artist with Writers in the Schools in Portland, Oregon. Twitter: @MonikaCassel

by Jocelyn A. Chin

I watched the film this spring
with my 	          whole family:

the television became to us	a mirror
reflecting dreams of

digging through the finest dirt,
                           breathing the driest air,
                           fighting our love at night,
                           wasting water,
                           praying harder,
                           hating our grandmothers because they do not smell like America,

giving thanks to the snake on the open log
making visible
the danger we hold	ourselves.

Ai. 	Are you a father, or a farmer?
	Are you Asian, or American?
	Are we healed, or have our hearts been broken?

Mountain Dew was Mom’s favorite drink when she moved here, too.



____

Jocelyn A. Chin is a current undergraduate student at Duke University who is happiest when reading a novel in a hammock flooded with afternoon sunlight. When not at school studying public policy and creative writing, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her beautiful family and the best dog in the whole world. Jocelyn finds that her writing oftentimes leads her back to nature, into the lives of others, and closer towards home.

by Jocelyn A. Chin

Apples wait in our kitchen’s
brown wooden bowl. And you – you wait with
cupped hands, wait for my return, wait to catch my tears as they
drop. Eager to please, you pat my back with your small palm.

Eat this apple, please, 
for the days are
growing shorter, this flying, tumbling
hourglass of spraying sand, no longer waiting. This world
insists that you grow like a weed each night, before I see you.

Just take the fruit, please, and go out to the sun, play with the
kids next door and remember to share.
Lift your sticky fingers to the clouds, you’ll reach them too soon;
my gifts of LEGOs and sweets no longer satisfy your
needy mind, your bursting body, the round
O your mouth forms when encountering a curious question – I beg you
please don’t grow up. In my dream, in the afternoon, at our
quivering white hammock, you lie in wait, hoping to simply
read a book of poems, with me. Becoming your older
sister has been the very best gift I have ever received. Think!
The way your lips lose their childish lisp, our mother tongue, the way our
umbrella will be too small to cover your shoulders so
very soon, the way you cup your palms, and wait.

Why don’t you bite into life’s bright apple, and
xiao a little, smile for me? Twenty precious white pearls, teeth to the wind–
you could eat the world alive. Thank you, for your joy, your love, for unveiling to me
zoe – for I must believe now, in eternal life.




xiao – Chinese, meaning laugh, smile
zoe – Greek, meaning life, abundant, eternal life




____

Jocelyn A. Chin is a current undergraduate student at Duke University who is happiest when reading a novel in a hammock flooded with afternoon sunlight. When not at school studying public policy and creative writing, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her beautiful family and the best dog in the whole world. Jocelyn finds that her writing oftentimes leads her back to nature, into the lives of others, and closer towards home.