“MERMAIDS EATING OYSTERS” by Stephanie Burt & Mara Hampson

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How do they get the things open? If they smashed the closed wholes against rocks, as otters do, the fragments could cut their delicate tongues. Instead they sing. They journey in cliques to the oyster bed, then hum at a resonant frequency, so that the oysters, charmed or fooled into attention, start to open themselves up to their underwater world.

The pearl harvest comes as almost an afterthought: no one needs more than a few, unless for ball bearings and other mechanical uses, where polished pebbles do as well. Fine oysters, once eaten, survive in outline and memory because the mermaids save individual shells, some for ornament, more for construction, building slow shelters, sharp-edged hiding places, for when the trawlers pass overhead.

Good oysters taste creamy and semi-sweet, since the mermaids and their environs are already salty. Other words mermaids might use include tender and wholesome.  Some of us believe that mermaids eating oysters heal their vocal chords, necessarily more powerful than ours, since mermaids’ speech must carry underwater: otherwise they could speak only with their closest neighbors. Young mermaids whose voices will not carry get asked to eat oysters by the half-dozen in order to shape and strengthen their sound.

Except for those cases—rare and vexing ones—most mermaid cliques regard the first oyster as a rite of passage: the first time a young mer sings to open an oyster herself, she gets to display the shell. It’s a sign: you can now use songs for other purposes—tempting sailors, or keeping sailors away; repelling sharks, dolphins or orcas (distinct songs for each); attracting and directing food fish in schools.

New York harbor oysters feel stodgy in the mouth, enormous, nutritious, with strong shells, but not much prized compared the Gulf of Maine. Nonetheless mer populations lamented for decades the apparent extinction of oysters in Long Island Sound. They cheer the replenishment of the oysters beds: one of the few human schemes they approve. Some even sing new songs about the far future, when they will live alongside us again.

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. SUPER GAY POEMS, a collection of 51 poems (none by Stephanie) with an essay (by Stephanie) about each one, came out (as it were) in April 2025; her book about Taylor Swift will follow in October.

Mara Hampson is an aspiring artist and jill of all crafts. They live in Boston with their cat Pico. She bites (the cat, not Mara.)

“Fantasy with Christopher Plummer’s Captain Von Trapp” by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

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Tonight, yes to the boatswain’s whistle,
yes to the scold that won’t reach your eyes
& yes to that eye contact

while you pull off your gloves
& pin my arms back when we’re dancing
the Laendler. Yes to the clap of us

in the courtyard, yes to the path
of guitar-callused fingertips: neck,
collarbone, back… Yes to your lips

at my ear crooning Edelweiss.
O homeland of saltwater bodies 
coming undone.

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her debut poetry collection, SONGS FOR THE LAND-BOUND, was published by June Road Press in 2024. Violeta lives with her husband, teenage children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania.

“CALLIMACHUS AGAINST HIMSELF” by Stephanie Burt

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Whatever our era needs, it isn’t you,
	all erudition and pointlessness. Go block a tarmac.
		Get to a travelers’ dorm and stand in the doorway
when the sons of Ares arrive. Make your latest hardback
	(nobody’s buying it anyway) into your shield.
Stick around here. Speak plainly. Don’t pursue
	conjunctions and conjugations, the way you used to do,
		down switchback trails, through vines and thickets of grammar,
past setts, through every epiphyte and eave.
	It’s not like they’re coming after you first: you’ve concealed
		your rage all your life behind curtains of time, place and manner.
	On the other hand, it’s still your nation.
It’s not like they’ll let you back in, if you choose to leave. 


						(Greek Anthology 11:321)

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. SUPER GAY POEMS, a collection of 51 poems (none by Stephanie) with an essay (by Stephanie) about each one, came out (as it were) in April 2025; her book about Taylor Swift will follow in October.

“A choice is a fiction”: On Koss’s Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect

MPJ

by Erin Vachon

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss. Diode Editions, 2024. 47pp. $12

Reading Koss’s debut collection Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode, 2024) is like studying a brutal fight between two pranksters: a poet and the universe. Both fighters approach the match with scathing humor and unexpected swerves. The universe really kicks the poet’s ass for a time, enlisting support from a mother wielding a demon-repelling Bible, a father self-mythologizing into should-have-been music legend, and an uncle enlisting a teenage lover to fuck his teenage relative (albeit unsuccessfully). Death multiplies the brute impact in lost loves and friends. The universe plays dirty, rubbing devastation in the poet’s face—even the medium who foretold death dies. Koss counters overwhelming absence with self-aware poetics, refusing the silences which suffocate abuse and trauma. The poet staggers to their feet, triumphant against their history by insisting: “I spoke the unspeakable.” They offer poetry as counterbalance to every blow, springing up again and again. Dancing Backwards is a queer reckoning, bare knuckled and unrepentant. Koss’s debut collection is proof that poets get the last laugh, even if they’re spitting blood onto the mat by the end.

We may need queer poetry now more than ever. Dancing Backward is a collection on queer survival, demanding witness with biting humor. Koss captures the overwhelming effect of traumatic accretion, when one exhaustion stacks upon the next. Pain is silenced, not by one person, but a family or a community. You write a prose poem about death when not one loved one, but everyone keeps dying, and you must testify to the cosmic joke of moving forward, despite. You lose trust in the medical field not because of one therapist, but a catalog of them. In “My Therapist Sez,” a montage of therapists blurs into a therapist-monolith, breaking all boundaries within the medical space. Koss opens the psychiatric revolving door of ridiculous authority from the first line: “My therapist says he has to cancel our first appointment to go trick or treating.” Therapist-monolith skirts one toe over the line, then another. They say, “his wife is leaving him because he never got his Ph.D.” Complain about their dog who shits everywhere and buy the poet dinner. Identify the boundaries they cross, before assuring, no, they don’t want to fuck the poet. Say they’re gay, also admitting they fucked their brother. Under an assault of red flags, the poet attempts to mourn their partner’s death, hoping for someone to listen. They speak about a kundalini awakening accompanying four years of unrelenting trauma, a composite of “life crises, energetic rewiring, or paranormal experiences.” Monolith-therapist details their own “spiritual” orgasms in response. Koss describes a therapeutic process which not only devalues its patient, but leaves them with more to carry. Their poetry simulates the sheer exhaustion of subjecting yourself to therapy as its own trauma. I read Koss with deep relief, another queer person launched through a listening machine on repeat cycle, offering up a trauma history with each new face. Koss’s poetry captures the futility of explaining pain to someone who predetermines your worth through outdated language, who meets your trauma with fumbling abuse posturing as empathy.

Koss circumvents problematic systems by refusing to play the game, leaning into gaps and fictions: “The swell thing about fragmented / histories is the liberties one / can take when filling in the blanks.” A sister wields a rock band as stand-in genealogy: “My sister / tells people my mother / is a go-go dancer for the Butthole / Surfers.” The lie outlines the truth, a space where another answer should be. In “Love Song for a Friend (Kim),” Koss creates a list of lost opportunities after a friend’s death. They repeat, “Didn’t have sex with you” to heartbreaking effect, like a mind wandering back to wasted moments, over and over. Their final grief lingers: “What I’d do to you if you were still here.” Koss often backtracks through alternate timelines and allows different possibilities to remain. “Friday, Saturday” retraces their partner’s suicide, doubling each moment: “You have not yet killed yourself but are missing,” then “You are dead or not dead.” Each moment is a liberation and a mental trap. Did this happen? Or that? Koss not only allows questions to stand without answer, but insists that they do. Their poetry creates Schrödinger’s Cat conundrums that preserve life alongside death, without glossing over the realities of loss. Dancing Backwards is a Möbius strip of queer love and grief, honoring every shade of emotion at once.

If Koss breaks a rigid relationship to trauma and violence, they also understand this ability to be privileged. A poet moves their chair “in relation to the TV,” safe from “its explosions, its propaganda, and its subliminal messages.” This, they argue, is how “art is conceived.” Dancing Backward is the performance of shifting perspective, suggesting that poetry is always a privileged act, even when painful. When Koss ponders the murder of young girl found handcuffed to a swing set in “Flint Girl Handcuffed Along Dort Highway,” they picture that “she questioned the act without / anger, with an open sense of wonder / he taught her how to meditate that day / those hours and minutes     sitting     still      waiting.” Death is a main character in Dancing Backward, fickle and permanent. When more victims die, Koss writes, “I could be the dead dyke on the highway / Frozen to pavement.” In shifting toward death, they come back to life. They refuse to shy away from inevitability, reclaiming their dead self, listing the “Ten Things to Remember ‘Bout Me When I’m Dead” like an introduction to future events. They name themselves as a ghost as well, alongside those that they grieve: “Grandma I haunt your home / years later.” Ghosts becomes as present as the living, while Koss lingers at the border between worlds, wondering at those who wander on the other side. If the collection title promises to dance backwards towards pluperfect, Koss imagines alternate pasts before the past, times which make as much sense as a strange present.

Koss writes one of the fiercest collections that I have read in a long time. Their voice is wry and self-aware, like the grounded friend you wish you had met a long time ago. Half of me wants to shoot copies of Dancing Backwards out of a cannon at every inept therapist and abuser, demanding if they see themselves in the poetry. The other half of me wants to gift Koss’s collection to every queer friend forced to survive the same, assuring them we will win in the end. Dancing Backwards is life-giving for everyone fighting for their lives against an unsparing universe. I wish I wrote this formidable collection, but I am so glad that Koss did instead.

Koss is a queer, mixed race writer and artist with numerous publications in both print and online journals. They were published in Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, and other anthologies and won the Wergle Flomp 2021 Humor Poetry Contest with “My Therapist Sez,” first published in diode poetry. Find them on Twitter and Instagram, or stop by their website to keep track of their activities.

Erin Vachon is the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus and the Senior Reviews Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. They write and edit outside Providence, RI. 

It Keeps Me Like a Garden: A Review of Carla Sofia Ferreira’s Debut A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us

MPJ

A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira (River River Books, 2024). 89 pages. $18

by Tom Snarsky

A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira (River River Books, 2024)

When I was a high school teacher, I always shared one poem with my classes at the beginning of the year: “A Journey” by Nikki Giovanni. I didn’t give my students much context beforehand, we just jumped into the poem’s opening: “It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . .” I thought of this poem immediately when I saw the titles in Carla Sofia Ferreira’s A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us that mention students (e.g. “Today My Students Tell Me,” an all-time favorite from the collection re: which more later), or even poems dedicated to them (“In This Poem, Bert & Ernie Are Gay”).

It is, paradoxically, both hard and delicate to be a teacher while also being Giovanni’s “fellow passenger”—when you teach youth in secondary + postsecondary contexts, as Ferreira has and does, you bring your own identity into a room where many others are actively being formed, including by what you say and do. In her article “Invisible Identities,” educator Erin Smith wrestles with the question of how much of her own journey, specifically surrounding mental health, to share with her students: “When I first began teaching, I didn’t divulge anything about my own mental health journey to students. For one, I thought that might delegitimize me as a teacher somehow, even if I was speaking in past tense. I also thought, frankly, that I would scare them.” Ultimately, Smith decides to share parts of her past experience with her students, partially in the hopes of connecting with them when they might feel at their most alone and partially because, “at the end of the day, I am only the teacher I am because of my past, however painful. I want my students to know that I have lived and struggled not for them, but alongside them” (emphasis mine). Even in the face of a hyper-politicized educational climate, which has placed more scrutiny than ever on what teachers say and do, Ferreira’s book unapologetically presents the poet-teacher as a vibrant, several-dimensional, multilingual singer of the many sorrows and joys of life, and in particular of the education it has in store for all of us. The book is a record of many different ways to make sense of the world in verse, and dazzles as much for its pluralism as for the emotional, formal, and imagistic precision of its poems.

***

There are many pieces from the book I could quote at length, but I’d love to spend time with my personal favorite, “Today My Students Tell Me”—in particular, this section:

[...] a student tells me that I seem
like the kind of person who is good at tending plants,
that I seem exactly like someone who would care for
dying plants and maybe even heal them, only I am the one
adding maybe, because they said it with such conviction
and another student agreed with them like this was simple
and true, and I laughed, I told them they were wrong, that I wish
I were more like my grandmother, who was in fact a tender of gardens
and all green things [...]

The first time I read this poem I was drawn to its subtle music: the way it dips into iambs for “is good at tending plants” feels like a perfect sonic parallel for the rhythms of care that phrase postulates, and there are little consonant breadcrumbs that reinforce the different connections between the poem’s characters and concepts/images (“person” and “plants,” “care” and “conviction,” “grandmother” and “garden” and “green”). Ferreira’s poems have a very intimate connection to music, which we’ll unpack a little more in the next section.

Like all great poems, this one has more to reveal than what the ear picks up alone. First is the airy line break on “care for,” which points gently at the fact that even though the object coming in the next line is “dying plants,” the student here sees Ferreira’s speaker as a carer writ large: this speaker clearly cares enough for their students to invite these kinds of ribbing-yet-kind characterizations and comparisons from them. And it is, indeed, them, in both the singular and plural: the line break on “only I am the one / adding maybe” plays with the irony that Ferreira’s speaker’s self-doubt is individual, while the students’ positive assessments are coming from the collective (and with certainty: “they said it with such conviction / and another student agreed with them like this was simple / and true”). This is also a playful inversion of the kind of building-up that is so often the bread and butter of the student-teacher relationship: anyone who has taught adolescents has had at least a hundred versions of the conversation where you not so much convince a student that they can do something, as you reassert it insistently (and necessarily simply, like a fully self-evident fact) until you both believe it.

So much of good teaching happens along the melodic lines of community and conversation that the reader hears in this episode, and there is also a bittersweet note that sounds across the enjambment of “simple / and true.” The reader is reminded that a majority of what students and teachers encounter outside of the context of a classroom community will be neither simple nor true: although Ferreira’s speaker cannot protect their students from this reality, they can share space with them and even bits of their own life story, like the moment with which this episode concludes, when the speaker invokes their grandmother. I love this moment of the poem so dearly because it once again inverts a classic discursive move of the classroom teacher, who can ask a student a question (or offer a small conjecture based on a little bit of data, new haircut, new shoes, how’d the game go yesterday, etc.) and then, by the happy accident of how the student responds, the teacher ends up learning something about the student’s life or their family or their interests—adding a vital shade of humanity to the student/teacher relationship. This moment in Ferreira’s poem shows how this dialectic is fundamentally a two-way street, colored in on both sides of the dividing line by student and teacher alike deciding to share.

In particular, Ferreira’s speaker chooses to tell the students about their grandmother, “a tender of gardens / and all green things.” There is a lovely visual parallel between the line-ending phrases “tending plants” and “tender of gardens,” the former a description of the speaker offered by the students and the latter a description of the speaker’s grandmother offered by the speaker. This extends the building-up beyond the classroom walls and across generational lines in a way that connects the poem up with one of Geography’s grandest motifs: temporal and familial cycles of care. A double meaning of “green,” both in the literal sense of plant color and in the more figurative sense of being new, even naïve, invites us to consider that we all exist at varying stages of vulnerability and imperfection along this timeless continuum of care: just as wisdom passes across generations, and is remembered, youth gives the energy of its indomitable spirit back to teachers and grandparents, with a side of cheek. This back-and-forth ouroboros prepares us beautifully for the poem’s ending: “this tenderness, even just this shared / nodding of heads, that it takes care of me every day, that it keeps me like a garden.”

***

In the foregoing, we have settled into Ferreira’s Geography in one of very, very many ways a reader could enter the text. Teaching high school students is my own personal gateway, but the book teems with further possibilities: in addition to being a book of the teaching and learning that occurs in classrooms and across generations, it is also a collection about ecology and cultivation on a local and global scale: “I am wondering / if I can hold it all like this packet of seeds and also if the earth / here will let them grow” (“In This Garden I Am Growing”). It is no less, too, a collection of love poems, the addressees and objects of which span family, history, and the many different kinds of intimacies that make up a life: “In my thoughts, I call you Grandma / though I never called you that in life. / I keep forgetting what it means to live a life / with you not in it” (“Poem In Which I Can Say Polka Dots, Tenderness, Icicles Without Translation,” one of the other poems in the collection that directly and poignantly addresses “Avó,” the speaker’s grandmother). Furthermore, the book is a compendium of form and of the joys of spoken and written language as only an English teacher can communicate them, made up as it is of poems working across forms (odes, elegies, centones, ghazals, letters, self-portraits, even a ransom note!) and singing the praises of punctuation (one poem opens with the indelible phrase “Plums she gathers like ampersands,” and there is even a poem called “Ode to the Semicolon”!).

Finally, Geography is a carefully crafted parallax along two different, but coincident, cultural lines: Fado, a venerable Portuguese musical tradition encompassing songs of longing and melancholy (which often take as their subject matter life at sea and the struggles of the poor), and The Ironbound, a working-class neighborhood in Newark with a strong Portuguese immigrant community. Ferreira’s first micro-chapbook is entitled Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press, 2019), and some of the poems included both there and in Geography enact Fado’s complex relationship with sorrow, grief, and love on the subjects of an Ironbound upbringing: family, local flora, even “The playground of concrete and gravel and parking spaces” at St. Lucy’s (a Catholic Church in Newark that is host to the American national shrine for St. Gerard Majella, an Italian saint who grew up in poverty, worked several jobs, and would go on to become the patron saint of expectant mothers). Everywhere in Ferreira’s collection, even on the periphery, there is this intermingling of the work of poetry with the spirit of joy, of wisdom that passes through generations and creates the maps by which we know ourselves, our neighborhoods, and our beloveds. (One of my favorite things about the book is that the Acknowledgements section runs to six pages, in order better to contain “an incomplete catalogue of gratitude,” a riff on Ross Gay that ends the book as warmly and openly as it began.)

***

At the end of the year, I’d share one more poem with my students: “Homeless Heart” by John Ashbery. “When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy.” A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us is imbued to its marrow with this feeling, the joy of a collective work and emergent togetherness, tinged by the sadness essential to song: “I am tired of living alone. I am growing a garden / like my life depends on it because it does” (“In This Garden I Am Growing,” that “depends on” one of the book’s winks to fellow NJ poet William Carlos Williams). This joy shines with the same brightness as a graduating class, while still pulling little threads out of the hearts of educators and family members who can feel the way the passage of time will quickly turn this joy into memory. When I read Carla Sofia Ferreira’s luminous collection I am reminded of two things: first, of the students I had who were bilingual in Portuguese and English, for whom this book would be an unequivocal affirmation that their language and experience is the language and experience of poetry. Second, that time and our transition across generations and from one cohort of students to the next does not have to be all grief, or only grief: that I am instead free to follow Ferreira’s example in order to describe my finitude differently, “to love afternoons turned into morning, and / to love with both hands and eyes closed what is already leaving me.”

Tom Snarsky is a former high school math teacher and the author of the full-length poetry collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water, both from Ornithopter Press. His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in summer 2025, and his book MOUNTEBANK is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in spring 2026. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats.

A Review of Ayesha Raees’ COINING A WISHING TOWER

MPJ

COINING A WISHING TOWER by Ayesha Raees (Radix Co-op, 2024). 72 pages. $17.95

by Burgi Zenhaeusern

COINING A WISHING TOWER BY Ayesha Raees (Radix Co-Op, 2024)

As little as we write in a vacuum, we read in one, and I feel that a reading memory is akin to a body of sounds and images, of wavelengths all in a jumble (like an orchestra before a concert) until the wavelengths of one text hit another’s, producing an accord of sorts. Coining a Wishing Tower rang with collections as seemingly unrelated as Benjamin Niespodziany’s whimsical and poetic one-act plays in Cardboard Clouds, the sparse poetry and rich interiority of Josie Foo’s Tomie’s Chair, or the sharp-eyed portrayal of existing between heritages of Monica Youn’s From From, and Maureen Seaton’s wryly celebratory Sweet World; and of all these, particularly Seaton’s short poem:

I think in spirals;


	therefore,


		I am infinite.

The numbered sequence of prose poems in Coining a Wishing Tower manifests a spiral formally—by the use of anaphora for example—and thematically. Unlike a circle, a spiral implies direction—inward/outward, up/down, as in the -widening scope of the collection’s narratives. The spiral embodies and symbolizes infinity as recurrence in changing contexts and as continuous motion. Poem number 40 could be read as a metaphorical, mini abstract of the collection’s spiral storytelling while also presenting one of its central themes. I quote it here in its entirety:

Google says: No! Cats have one life just like any other living creature! The fiction of feline immortality is due to how cats function! In awed resilience! Prone to survival! Yet in a fashion that is always barely! To survive and heal and continue, cats strive in chapters, skipping from one existence to the other, from birth to separation to shelter to settlement to abandonment to ravagement to wilderness to car accidents and then to eventual demise. Each chapter becoming a disappearing act from the last, a knowing deeply settled in a body, a knowledge that permanence is a human fantasy, that in the end, living is dying many times in one singular life, to grow and adapt is a technique to survive, to give adherence to a lineage is continued as a mark that we were all once here, occurring in the narratives of the ones that will lead us into the future. (50)

On its own, number 40 may not be a captivating read. Its effectiveness is rooted in its placement deep within the fabric of the poems’ sequence; and all it says—with the concise language and matter-of-fact tone characteristic of the collection—feels necessary: key information thrown in as if an aside and easy to overlook, thus imparting understatement and irony. This poem smiles at itself and at the reader by the time they come to it. There are other moments where the hint of a wry smile shines through the dioramic series of scenes—scenes arranged like lit windows of a building otherwise in the dark, behind which various dramas unfold.

Prose poems especially favor fragmentation, a stop-and-start flow, loose ends, a permeable border between the imaginary or interiority and what counts as empirical reality, and play. The poems in Coining a Wishing Tower do this with ingenious imagery and a combination of memoiristic and myth- or fairytale-like stories, which keep getting recontextualized, underscoring the speculative and ever-shifting nature of all stories—the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell each other, and what we hear—depth acquired by offering layers and the freedom to peel them back or not.

The collection begins and ends with House Mouse, who is one of its mythlike figures and undergoes a metamorphosis. It is also an alter-ego of the speaker who left her home in Pakistan for the US, a long-imagined destination:

1.
House Mouse was running to the mountains but nothing came out of its climbs. Every peak held another peak, and every reach held another reach. At the end of all possible height, House Mouse found itself inside a tower. The tower looked like a black, elongated box, sharp at the edges, smooth and silky on the sides.

Behind all there was was just was: a view called beautiful only because it was now distant. (11)

In the course of events, House Mouse dies, House Mouse returns, and nothing is the same, as in all coming-of-age and emigration stories. The tower is House Mouse’s living shrine in both senses of the word: “to be alive” and “to live in.” Its significance overlaps with the Ka’bah’s significance in the speaker’s life. House Mouse’s story with the tower is in part a meditation on faith/trust and religiosity, especially on the tension between wish, prayer, and ritual, and the pervasive question of authenticity. “Coin” and “coining” as verb/noun imply shaping and monetizing simultaneously, as in the minimal statement “A wish a coin” (20)—a softening of distinctions, resulting in fluidity and an interrogation of intentionality.

Godfish, another mythlike figure, “lives in the crystal clear aquarium behind the crystal clear window of a giant wooden house in New London, Connecticut” (13), where it is the focus of both the moon’s and the cat’s unconditional love, while it itself is happily infatuated with an oblivious sun. Their impossible love is trusting as a child’s, and reciprocity is assumed rather than sought. Its story is as sad as it is endearing. An untrodden “Desire Path” leads to the isolated wooden house:

22.
A Desire Path is created through an inevitable erosion by an animal. It is a constant back and forth trod in the same narrow area. It is a natural act that connects two suffering destinations in their lack of constant hold. No one liked coming to the giant wooden house in New London, Connecticut, where the winter had a bad bite, the summer brought strange pesticides, and spring hardly lasted in the rain. There was no path, no trod, and no desire deep enough for any kind of create. (32)

Here, the usage of the infinitive as verb/noun creates tension by blurring the line between in progress/motion and outcome/stasis, foreshadowing a similar blurring of animate/inanimate later on. The wooden house isn’t simply the setting for “windings, convolutions, and unnatural happenings” (26). Unwittingly or not, it impacts the action. Godfish’s story might also be read as a parody of the biblical fall from grace—“Paradise Lost” in a “giant wooden house” in New London, CT.

Maybe the speaker chose New London as an imaginary scene for her quasi-American “dream” because it could well embody small town USA: mostly white, overly tended lawns in summer, cold in winter. She sets New London, CT’s remoteness against one of her first encounters with “America” in the form of Happy Meal toys, pinpointing the ubiquity of US culture everywhere, including in her Pakistani childhood, yet with an added local flair. The localness is what she needs to trust: that something in her heritage remain inviolate and resistant: “These toys are different from the toys American children get. I believe. I believe. I believe.” (42)

Coining a Wishing Tower also reflects on different ways of learning and knowing. At one end of the spectrum is the speaker’s mother, who imparts traditions—knowledge built on experience and relationships over a long time—and at the other, knowledge obtained by way of Google—factoids and an uneasy trust in them. Both meet in the speaker’s imagination. As House Mouse and Godfish, they tell a story of aspiration and discovery, of leaving behind the assuredness of home, of loss which can be a form of liberation, as can adulthood. The prose poems’ multifaceted interiority shifts borders, strews sand, sows doubt, then wonder, and joy about yet another beautiful re-invention of the wheel. Ayesha Raees’ Coining the Wishing Tower has added its clear voice to the chorus on my bookshelf.

Burgi Zenhaeusern (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020). She co-edited the translations of the anthology Knocking on the Door of The White House (zozobra publishing, 2017). Her work appeared, most recently, in Sugar House Review, JMWW, Little Patuxent Review, Moist Poetry, and as broadside (Ashland Poetry Press). https://linktr.ee/burgitree

Two Poems by Catherine Rockwood

MPJ 
Inverie, Knoydart, June 2024

By the harbor again and once again low daylight.

When the mountains are illuminated 
we receive them.

Somewhere uncoastal, southward,
teens

are keeping themselves alive 
as they can in little towns

where hairdresser shops 
outnumber other business.

No. Strike that. 
Even here

where robins land 
on sustainable pub-tables

to receive a peanut, shelled:

here 
in these isolated

regenerating districts
with their managed woodlands

and fences, 
their reiterated

statements of difference 
from the mainland 

here too
teens

are keeping themselves alive
as they can 

in low light
near breathless June waters. 
Boston Seaport, July 2024

Where the unpredictability of the body
meets weather 
is the world.

To weather is to survive
and fall apart.
Like this.

I am weathering, every day
and laughing sometimes:

loving my children
according to their specific ways

even as cloud comes right down to the water
and summer loses its sum

becomes mer

a salty fog we swim in, having missed

the sea.

Author’s Note: I guess what I found by Loch Nevis and Boston Harbor was a surprising commonality of quiet gray haze and overcast skies. That’s a more frequent phase of summer now, when it isn’t bright/scorching or cloudy/scorching. * I also found a surprising but to me sustaining commonality of care. Wherever I was I ended up thinking about kids, both my own and the children of others. The work children do to live their lives. The quotidian deprivations and difficulties that are, even in a best-case scenario, part of growing up. The way this present time is different, yes, but not cut off from how kids have lived in the past and will live in the future. The way we must and will go with them.I placed myself next to the sea a lot, this summer.  It’s much on my mind, the sea, and what our relationship with it will be in the coming decades of climate instability.

*(fuck Exxon, fuck Shell, fuck BP, etc., and their enablers) 

Catherine Rockwood lives fairly close to Boston. She/they reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine, and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Two chapbooks of her/their poetry, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion and And We Are Far From Shore, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.

Two Poems by Chris Corlew

MPJ 
WINDY MORNING KAYAKING PRATT BEACH

today I take
only what the Lake gives me

what oceanographer can measure the height of swells
on sight? 	no conquest only quagga mussel infestation

today the Lake wants me like a 	pawing 	overeager lover 
& I sprawl myself on top of its welcome

today is white-capped 	& the first time 
swells knock me off my kayak shoulder missing lake bottom rocks

humble thyself homie
in the sight of the Lake

northwestern winds 		& no room for ego
do you want to go home? 	do you want your arms to yearn to

nag in neglect until before bed when you do push-ups?
or do you want to have fun?

no concern for horizons 	no pondering time in these swells
only the water in front of you

paddle droplets on a life jacket
puddles in the boat

ribs in the sand after & pluck
a hair from the back of my thumb
THE TREES MY DUDES THE TREES

headbanging kelp forests 	the sea-cats
of Chile’s beaten coast hunt with agility implying they
could probably guard Kevin Durant one-on-one		(in the dark

the stoned horror writer
makes a note of vampire bats on screen)	evergreen rainforests where I

would maybe melt out of reverence 		can I kiss the mapungauri’s hand?

                                                                    ambush is easy enough when you
                                  look like a leaf the narrator says about frogs

reincarnate me as a dew drop above the Valdivian Forest
seems a million times more
purposeful & fulfilling than 21st century USA

the trees the trees are so many can you
		see the trees & not praise the trees my comrades-in-leaves?
can you see the Chilean palm trees mix with Valdivian species & not worship the earth?

                                                    the trees the trees marvel at the trees
                                  & cacti grow in the clearings

the trees depend on monito del monte
to swallow their seeds whole & shit out germinating pods in sticky residue
this animal is 40 million years old we’re talking first mammal old

that should be sacred the trees should be 
considered a holy site

                                  & the monkey puzzle tree resistant 
                 to volcanic ash can you even believe
how big the world is? 		how tall the trees?

can you even believe how impossibly small
even a 20-story apartment building is? & yet each life contained within a treasure? even thousands of miles from these sacred trees? 			what a treat
                                               to be alive to be stoned & up late
& watching a streaming service I only have
so my son can watch Mickey & Bluey & Spider-Man 	(& I can watch Star Wars)

& no there’s more there’s the divine
dewey & shaggy with cacti in the clearing 
the trees my dudes the trees

we end as we began
water-bound
confronted with wave battering

Author’s Note: Summer—and by extension kayaking season—is fleeting. Yet the water is eternal if we manage it properly. There should always be a Lake Michigan and therefore should always be summer days I can spend cradled and held atop its currents, one of millions of grateful water passengers. I’ve never personally seen the beauty of Chile’s landscape or wildlife or people or culture, but I really hope to one day, and it bums me out how much climate change could affect all of that. So these poems, to borrow an idea from my friend and co-host Bob Sykora, are attempting to freeze two marvelous moments in time: a day I went kayaking and a night I spent watching a nature documentary. With hopes that this act of reverence through art can honor such sublime connection with the wider world and inspire more.

Chris Corlew is a writer and musician living in Chicago. His work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Whisk(e)y Tit, The Rumen, Cracked.com, and elsewhere. He can be found blogging at shipwreckedsailor.substack.com or on Bluesky @thecorlew.

“Band Camp” by Millie Tullis

MPJ 
There were jokes.
When I put my clarinet reed 
in my mouth (fourteen 
and C-cupped) I was told 
I had a cute sucking face. 
But Band Camp was clean.
Mostly Mormon kids. 
Mostly nerds. Almost half
never-been-kissed-kids.
Not literally clean. 
Across from the football
field the college dorms
we slept in stank.
Boys’ apartments north 
of the parking lot. 
Girls’ south. Four 
to a room two 
to a bed. We braided 
each girl’s hair into 
increasingly complex 
patterns. We sweated.
The baby hairs curled 
against our foreheads. 
Volunteer parents cooked
family reunion meals 
in the parking lot where 
our two genders met and filled 
paper plates. We ate 
along the lot’s edges. 
We perched on concrete 
curbs. I played the clarinet. 
I marched. Then 
I played the tenor 
saxophone and marched. 
I liked being the only 
girl carrying a sax. 
I carried the reed
with just my bottom lip
and a little teeth. At fourteen
I liked being called girl. 
I liked sleeping by a girl 
in the dorm of girls. 
I offered to turn her hair 
into a chestnut crown. 
I did not like playing 
the clarinet or the sax.
I liked being in it. 
I worked to keep 
my small piece 
of wood wet 
play some notes right.
My job was to not
disappoint.
I liked marching. 
I liked being a point 
of the straight line. 
I could almost step
without sound. 
I knew where to 
stand and I knew 
where I was.

Author’s Note: I attended my younger sister’s viola recital early this summer. While listening to her perform, I thought about the role music played in my life when I was younger and jotted down the start of this poem. When I was a teenager in marching band, my relationship to music was simultaneously quotidian and erotic, a chore and a gift. For me, the marching band’s body-heavy work revolved around a week-long summer band camp, where we communally ate, slept, practiced, played, sweated, marched.

Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Millie is EIC of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.

“Summer Song” by Sophie Farthing

MPJ 
I have decided to be fat.
I am going to eat a snickerdoodle,
	two snickerdoodles, and after
	the last crumb's swallowed I
will not run until my knees twist.
I will walk slowly through the heat
 	and drink up birdsong.

I have decided to be fat.
Butter and cheese belong with grits,
	and if you do not fry the hash browns,
	are you really living? I will
sweeten my iced tea with honey, roll
the broccoli and Brussel sprouts
in olive oil, split dark cherries with
	my tongue and
	suck out the scarlet.

Saturday scones and strawberry preserves,
Cat's cradle stir-fry in the wok, and I
	have decided to be fat.
I will float in soft dresses,
	wave my inked arms, sing
		when they are silent,
nourish the blood bursting
	from my red pulsing heart.

Author’s Note: This poem plays with food words, swings its stanzas around, celebrates. This poem is on the move! This poem is a toddler bouncing around with their hands full of birthday cake.

Sophie Farthing (she/her) is a queer poet and artist living in South Carolina in the USA. Her work has appeared in outlets including Right Hand Pointing, Beyond Queer Words, Impossible Archetype, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She is the 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry from the SCAA.