DC Pride Poem-a-Day is proud to present 30 new short videos, in celebration of National Pride Month. Each video features a different poet from the greater Washington, DC region, reading a poem on the theme of heritage. Videos highlight the talent and rich diversity of poets from the nation’s capital who identify as LGBTQ+. Check back each day in June 2023 for a new poem!

  1. “Ghazal for Lost Women” by Danielle Badra

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    Ghazal for Lost Women
    

    Under the harvest moon there is always a camel & the camel is always a far lost woman,
    
lost to the world she once inhabited of red wine and unleavened wafers. Woman
    

    wafting scent of orange blossom seeping from attar syrup cooled on the kitchen counter,
    
counter to the culture of her mother who baked with anise seeds instead of walnuts. She
    

    walled herself inside her fearful heritage when the once world’s center certainly collapsed,
    
collapsing her English into Arabic attempts for fresh watermelon, bateekh woman.
    

    Bateekh, her favorite word to pronounce when she was unfamiliar with phlegmy letters.
    
Let her return to the camel & the camel return to her a sense of discomfort like the day she
    

    hid beneath pines playing with the boy next door a game that made her feel monstrous.
    
The monsters under her mattress were really inside her all along, terrorist woman,
    

    terrorized by the thought of an evil side to her bloodline, of suicide bombers and martyrs,
    
martyrdom was never all that appealing in comparison to mediocrity, the average woman.
    

    Rage is relative to bloody knuckles and what it was they were fighting for. For her huriya,
    
freedom is relative to the laws that bind, she was bound only to her body, scarred woman.
    

    Scarab beetles stood for reincarnation in Ancient Egypt, said to push across the sky the sun.
    
Deadly woman, deep is your longing for the land of memories, dwelling place of desires, al-shams.
    

    Danielle Badra (she/they) is a queer Arab-American poet from Michigan who currently resides in Virginia. She is the 2022-2024 Fairfax Poet Laureate. Her book, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and published through the University of Arkansas Press in 2021.
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    Previously appeared in Like We Still Speak, University of Arkansas Press (2021). Reprinted with permission of University of Arkansas Press.

  2. “Gabriel” by Malik Thompson

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    Gabriel
    

    after Adrienne Rich
    

    O monstrous divinity,
    
 O grisled seraph with
    

    skull of man &
    
star-bleached wing,
    

    your beautiful face
    
veiled in dark fire,
    

    the coil & shudder
    
of those insatiate flames—
    

    unspeaking beast
    
fallen from the moon’s
    

    umbral half. Everyone’s eidolon
    
cloaked in the mythos
    

    of scripture.
    
Archangel,
    

    you visit me nightly—
    
in my bedroom, looming 
    

    for another hushed
    
evening. Tender soul
    

    or impending tempest?
    
You breathe wind
    

    into your celestial horn,
    
unleashing a god-flecked 
    

    squall—cracked asphalt
    
washed off
    

    in hallowed rain.
    
His message
    

    drenches his body,
    
so I pull 
    

    further back—
    

    Malik Thompson is a Black queer man from Washington, DC. His worked is featured or forthcoming in Poet Lore, Voicemail Poems, and MQR Mixtape, among other publications. Thompson is a Tin House alum, and has received support from Lambda Literary, The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Brooklyn Poets, and Obsidian Foundation.
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    Malik Thompson is a resident of Mt Pleasant.

  3. “Jewish Tourist in Toledo, Spain” by Jessica Genia Simon

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    Jewish Tourist in Toledo, Spain
    

    Stones are more reliable than men.
    
On the walls of this Catholic church,
    
once a synagogue, then a mosque
    
a Cross adorns the throne, but a Star of David
    
hides in a ceiling tile; a Converso.
    
Arabic appears through whitewash; a Morisco.
    

    In a souvenir shop, a man shows me
    
a statue of The Virgin Mary
    
that used to hide a mezuzah
    
on a door jamb, points to his forearm,
    
“Jewish blood.”
    

    He tells me his grandfather kept
    
the key to the Toledo home
    
abandoned after the Inquisition.
    
A Palestinian man holds onto a key
    
to his grandfather’s house
    
in Jerusalem, a house that may
    
or may not, still stand.
    

    There exists a certain amnesia
    
in countries and pious men.
    
One God paints over another,
    
switches the symbol above the door.
    
Men chisel granite,
    
build cities atop cities,
    
say there is nothing beneath,
    

    but stone remains. No matter
    
how deep truth is buried,
    
time turns rock
    
to fossilized braille.
    
Men hold onto keys
    
and history flows down
    
tributaries of memory
    
to etched stones.
    
I turn to leave Toledo, cross back
    
over the bridge as the city ebbs away
    
through the window of the train.
    

    Jessica Genia Simon began writing poetry at age seven. Her poems have been published in many journals including the Atlanta Review and Super Stoked: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from the Capturing Fire Slam & Summit. She works at a gun violence prevention nonprofit in D.C. and lives with her wife, daughter, and orange tabby cat in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her first poetry collection is Built of All I Shape and Name, Kelsay Books, 2023.
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    Previously published in Built of All I Shape and Name, Kelsay Books, 2023. Reprinted with permission of the author.

  4. “Why I Can’t Say the Word Lesbian Without Thinking of My Therapist” by Emily Holland

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    Why I Can’t Say the Word Lesbian Without Thinking of My Therapist
    

    At Sarah’s thirteenth birthday party, someone
    
said Your mom is—what
    

    
—sinner
    

    is abomination is
    
the thingGod warned us about.
    

    There must be something, they said,
    
in the bloodinsoluble—
    

    how it turns red when touchedby oxygen,
    
we, too, turnfrom God
    

    when touched
    

    by someone like her.
    

    . . .
    

    Prom night, after dancing,someone said
    
Your sister is—what
    

    —acting different
    

    cut her beautiful brown hair
    
down to the root,
    

    pruned it back
    
so farit might not grow again,
    

    acting lessfeminine, more
    

    in control.
    

    . . .
    

    My first year at college
    
someone said You are—what
    

    —lesbo
    

    descendant of dyke,
    
divergence in a long lineage.
    
Tainted bloodline.
    

    Desire never matters here.
    

    These are the possibilities passed down to us: to be
    
or to become
    

    or to have always been.
    

    These are what we call signs only
    
in hindsight:
    

    smell of bubblegum chapsticksharing a sleeping bag
    
tucking her hair behind an earwanting to hold her hand
    
or touch her cheekthe way best friends never do.
    

    Emily Holland (they/she) is a genderqueer lesbian writer. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in publications including HAD, Shenandoah, DIALOGIST, Little Patuxent Review, lstw, and Black Warrior Review. They are the author of the chapbook Lineage (dancing girl press) and the recipient of multiple fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is currently the editor of Poet Lore, an adjunct professor at GWU, and the chair of OutWrite, DC’s LGBTQIA+ literary festival.
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    Previously appeared in Wussy. Reprinted with permission of the author.

  5. “What Persephone Taught Me” by Casey Catherine Moore

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    What Persephone Taught Me
    

    I can survive amid summer wildfires.
    

    When I can’t see, but still perceive,
    
with singed hair and crimson eyes,
    
mind and body constantly reeling,
    
and a pulse I can never stop feeling.
    

    I can survive under winter darkness.
    

    When my leaves are gone,
    
the ice rain is heavy,
    
I am unsteady,
    
and my branches freeze
    
and fall to the Earth
    
with a thunder crack.
    

    I’ve survived
    
fires and floods,
    
hurricanes and tornadoes,
    
summer volcanoes,
    
and days and weeks without rain
    
when the shakes begin to addle my brain;
    
and long winter nights
    
when the ice enters my bones
    
and flash-freezes me within my mind alone.
    

    I am
    
I am still
    
I am still here.
    

    I survive by soaking up the summer sun
    
to radiate later from my skin
    
and by saving winter ice under my tongue
    
to cool my core on the Dog Days
    
when everything rages within.
    

    My roots always burrow deeper into Earth,
    
sending sweet fruits of Ceres
    
up through my feet, into my trunk, and out
    
to my fingertip branches and wearied leaves.
    

    I am
    
I am still
    
I am still here.
    

    Surviving the seasons made me know
    
the strength of the root.
    

    Casey Catherine Moore is a bipolar, bisexual writer, educator, and activist. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina with a focus on Classics, Latin poetry, and women’s and gender studies. Moore’s work can be found in academic and creative publications including the Comparatist, Sinister Wisdom, Samfiftyfour, Oyster River Pages, and Bourgeon. She is the co-producer and co-host of Homo Stanzas, a queer spoken word showcase, and she has been a featured poet for Busboys & Poets, The Nail Salon, Capturing Fire, and the 2022 March for Medicare for All Rally in Washington, DC.
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    Casey Catherine Moore is a resident of Cathedral Heights.

  6. “Self” by Jona Colson

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    Self
    

    What am I made of? Eggs over easy
    
and white toast. A mid April notion
    

    of love under spring’s harsh blossom,
    
or a basket of red coxcombs and daisies
    

    beside my father’s casket.
    
It’s hard to think beyond the house
    

    on the hill—the garden filled with
    
corn and radishes. When I was five
    

    I slept by a watermelon in the full moon
    
and woke up to walk in the grasslands
    

    that are now covered in new homes and fences.
    
Perhaps I am merely anxious puffs of breath at 3 a.m.
    

    since my mother said I am cursed and belong
    
elsewhere only to be missed someday.
    

    Jona Colson’s poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the 2018 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He is the co-editor of This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (2021). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review and elsewhere. His translations and interviews can be found in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College in Maryland and lives in Washington, DC. In 2022, he became co-president with Caroline Bock of the Washington Writer’s Publishing House and edits the bi-weekly journal, WWPH Writes.
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    Jona Colson is a resident of Dupont Circle.

    Previously appeared in Said Through Glass (Washington Writers' Publishing House). Reprinted with permission of the author.

  7. “The Act of Breathing” by H.L. Sudler

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    The Act of Breathing
    

    When first we wake
    
We consciously experience the act of breathing.
    
That first deep inhale
    
Through the mouth, through the nostrils.
    
We open our eyes
    
And our eyes are opened.
    
When we inhale,
    
We breathe in everything that has come before.
    
Last night, yesterday, the day before, last week, last month, last year,
    
Decades and centuries ago.
    
Our youth, our childhood.
    
When we inhale,
    
We breathe in everything that has come before.
    
Fill our lungs with it, and also our memory.
    
Words of our mother and father, words of our grandparents.
    
Words of lovers and teachers and friends.
    
Words of enemies and rivals and sages and mentors.
    
Don’t touch that fire!
    
Look before you leap!
    
Obey your mother and father.
    
The price of love is steep.
    
Stand up straighter!
    
Stand your ground!
    
Love your neighbor.
    
All things come around.
    
When we inhale,
    
We breathe in everything that has come before.
    
Smells, tastes, feelings, sounds.
    
Also: past lives and history.
    
Also: the sins of our fathers, our founding fathers.
    
Liberty! Rights! Evolution! Framework!
    
But also: enslavement, suppression, division, appropriation.
    
When we inhale,
    
We breathe in everything that has come before.
    
But for the African American breathing is precious;
    
For any breath could be our last.
    
And so we breathe in.
    
To remember, to recall, to honor.
    
To summon the strength, patience, and determination that imbued the spirits of our ancestors
    
Who likely paid a greater price for their lives than we could ever imagine.
    
And we breathe out.
    
To release our pain, to clear our minds, to push forward, to calm down.
    
The act of breathing is a skill.
    
For some more than others.
    
The catch is to not hold your breath!
    
Living neither here nor there, trapped in time!
    
But to put both feet on the floor.
    
To exhale.
    
And with one big push
    
Stand tall and move on with your day.
    
With one big push
    
Stand tall and move toward your waiting bright future.
    
This is the act of breathing.
    

    H.L. Sudler is the author of six books, including Patriarch: My Extraordinary Journey from Man to Gentleman, CafeLiving’s Favorite Cocktails (with Keith Vient), Man to Gentleman: A Beginner’s Guide to Manhood, his short story collection The Looking Glass: Tales of Light and Dark, and his thriller novel series Summerville and Return to Summerville. His short story The Way of All Flesh was selected for the PATHS Humanitarian Writing Award. He has served as a magazine publisher, a newspaper editor, and a contributing writer to numerous anthologies and periodicals. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in Washington, DC.
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  8. “Š” by Natasha Sajé

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    Š
    

    Slovenia
    

    at the room of a sleeping child, a finger to the threshold
    

    teeth drawn together
    
hissing softened by lips
    
echoed in the cave
    

    little roof (strešica)
    

    difference between a chocolatier (Kraš) and lime-
    
stone (kras), white rocks
    
struck by moon
    

    as in sugar
    
which can be made from beets, cane, corn, maple, fruit, and milk
    

    its sweetness rhymes with bees
    

    we say one thing is not another thing
    
and in this language every letter is pronounced
    

    cup gathering a drop of sound
    

    dusty taste of the water
    

    filmed skin after walking in the river
    

    sound the residue of letters
    

    I’d like a letter that splinters
    

    language from its parents to build
    
a house of sticks overlooking the sea, letting waves
    
instruct me—air
    
rushing through my teeth is also air
    
that could have passed through the tailpipe of a bus
    

    I want happiness without a hole in it, the heroine says,
    
and the reader knows she’s doomed to a life of rifts
    

    some ideas are so deep you can live in them, deeper than the highest
    
mountains are high, subterranean stalactites forming
    
gypsum flowers like wallpaper
    

    in such darkness the pale pink
    
olm, his degenerated eyes covered
    
by skin, can live to a hundred years of age
    

    wan cousin of the newt or salamander
    
finding his way via smell
    

    even Proteus, shepherd of the sea’s flocks, cannot
    
protect him from polluted groundwater
    
and his own rarity
    

    he lives only in one place on earth
    
a place where š is uttered
    

    and might, if things were different, be
    
a dragon in the ocean’s waving
    

    fricative, or at least a snake with a crown
    

    none poisonous in this quiet country
    

    Natasha Sajé was born stateless in Germany and grew up in NYC and suburbs. She lived in either DC or Baltimore 1978-1998, at which point, equipped with a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, she took a teaching job at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Now retired from that job/exile, she lives in DC with her Veterans Administration employee (and Boston sports fan) wife. Natasha teaches poetry and non-fiction writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of five books of poems; a memoir-in-essays (Terroir: Love, Out of Place); and a postmodern poetry handbook.
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    Natasha Sajé is a resident of Cleveland Park.

    Previously appeared in Vivarium (Tupelo Press, 2014). Reprinted with permission of the author.

  9. “Federal Hill Fourth of July” by Heidi Mordhorst

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    Federal Hill Fourth of July
    

    We leaned into the hill as the night exploded toward us.
    
The grass grew high and green and thick.
    
Into the thick the high the hill exploded as grass
    
Night leaned toward green and we and us grew
    

    Thunder worked a fire in the star-shattered air.
    
The noise engulfed the breathing throng.
    
Breathing athunder the star-throng engulfed
    
The noise shattered the fire worked in air
    

    Only you and I, fingers touching, stand alight.
    
A current holds us to the ground.
    
Fingers alight you the only ground I stand
    
A current touching to hold us and
    

    Heidi Mordhorst is the author of two collections of poetry for young readers as well as contributions to journals and anthologies for adults and children. She taught in public school classrooms for 35 years and recently served on the NCTE Excellence in Poetry Award Committee. Mordhorst now offers multiarts poetry programming for young writers at school sites around the DMV and at her home studio in Silver Spring.
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  10. “Taxi Driver Brother Man” by Sunu P. Chandy

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    Taxi Driver Brother Man
    

    Winter fling and I trying to get home
    
Sunday night from the dyke bar.
    
But taxi cabs are not stopping
    
for Black girls who look like Black boys,
    
or for Indian girl in baggy pants
    
hanging out with Black bois,
    
not looking like attorney in suit
    
with white friends and briefcase.
    

    Winter fling and I finally get a cab
    
and have the nerve to start kissing.
    
After all that is why she got on the plane
    
and came to this city –
    
no cousins that she needs to visit really.
    
We start kissing and Taxi Driver Brother Man
    
says, I don’t take that in my cab. We stop immediately,
    
and we stop completely. But his disgust
    
too potent perhaps, Taxi Driver
    
Brother Man pulls over—Just get out.
    
Angry and afraid, the cold unbearable,
    
we wait and wait, once again.
    

    Next day I see a brochure about how city cabs can’t discriminate
    
on the basis of sexual orientation, or race.
    
Would Taxi Driver Brother Man have kicked out
    
a straight, white, kissing couple?
    
Don’t think so. Don’t think so.
    

    Do I call the enemy, the TLC, the Taxi
    
and Limousine Commission
    
on Taxi Driver Brother Man?
    
The same place that takes away their licenses,
    
for bullshit reasons?
    
Don’t think so. Don’t think so.
    

    And would I feel the same way if my dad
    
was the taxi driver and the two girls kissing
    
were some punk Lower Eastside white girls?
    
Don’t think so. Don’t think so.
    
I might be saying, Why they gotta disrespect
    
an older South Asian man with this mess?
    
What’s wrong with them?
    

    I don’t want to be kicked out Taxi Driver Brother Man,
    
and I don’t want to turn you in either.
    

    A few days later I am speaking on a panel
    
with Taxi Advocate Professor Man. I pretend I am down
    
for their cause, completely. But what I really want to know
    
is, when is Taxi Driver Brother Man, gonna be down for me?
    

    Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney.  She’s a queer woman of color and lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Chandy is the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India. Her collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, won the 2021 Terry J. Cox Prize, and was published by Regal House in March 2023. Chandy is delighted to highlight the book’s incredible cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.  Chandy is also the legal director at the National Women’s Law Center, and on the board of the Transgender Law Center. Chandy was honored as one the 2021 Queer Women of Washington.
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    Previously appeared in My Dear Comrades, Regal House Publishing, 2023. Reprinted with permission of the author.

  11. “The Silence of Ice” by Ron Leo Vogel

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    The Silence of Ice
    

    We sit at the kitchen table for dinner
    
my father at the head, the rest of us
    
at our determined places, the 5 o’clock ritual
    
talking in silence                     the black-ice lake
    
offers a different silence, I skate alone
    
blades slice the ice surface, space and time embrace
    
a freedom as fast as the clouds and I can fly
    

    I stop where a leaf, shriveled and veined
    
lies frozen, silent and clear
    
once green and vivid with summer
    
like a secret freezes a life to ice
    

    I tell my parents, my father is silent
    
the three of us seated at the kitchen table
    
until the gasp, from long-trapped air
    
under frigid layers, and now appearing
    
purple with rage, fractures the familiar surface:
    
Don’t talk about gay in this house!
    

    Ice is black when it freezes
    
so fast in time and space
    
there are no air bubbles
    
to trap, to suspend
    
in silence – we sit at the table
    
frozen for two more decades.
    

    Ron Leo Vogel (he/him) writes poetry and essays. The son of immigrants who fled war in Europe, he grew up in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He was awarded the Prentice Prize in German from Wesleyan University where he translated short stories. His recent work has appeared in the literary journal Pensive.

  12. “You Will Not Always Hear Cicada and Birdsong” by Kristen Zory King

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    You Will Not Always Hear Cicada and Birdsong
    

    They are impermanent,
    
like a paper cut or heartburn
    
or the dogwood with its blight.
    
So you etch your name
    
to a small pane of glass,
    
plant foxglove in the garden,
    
use a knife to carve love
    
into the tender flesh of birch
    
and say: I was here. Beg:
    
Remember. I, too, watched
    
light filter through the window,
    
hoped it would tell me something
    
I didn’t already know.
    

    Kristen Zory King is a writer, teaching artist, and yoga instructor based in Washington, DC. Find King online at KristenZoryKing.com.
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    Kristen Zory King is a resident of Mt. Pleasant.

  13. “Blossoms” by Kathi Wolfe

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    Blossoms
    
for my aunt
    

    When I was seven, I didn’t want to grow up
    
to be an old maid like you. I knew only
    

    a hubby, two children – a girl wearing red
    
Mary Janes and a boy with blue suspenders –
    

    and a dog like Lassie would do for me.
    
But I loved to lick the icing of the pretty
    

    pink cupcakes you brought to our house.
    
“It was swell during the War,” you said,
    

    when I was 15, “I left the Pine Barrens
    
for Washington, D.C. I met Eleanor R
    

    at a Hot Shoppe. I was so excited – my
    
hands shook when she lit my cigarette.
    

    Later, I fell in love with Rose by the cherry
    
blossoms.” I don’t know how things with you
    

    and Rose came to an end. You never
    
mentioned her again. Now, In D.C., alone, no
    

    kids or dog, years after my lover’s death,
    
I take a breath and carry on your life.
    

    Kathi Wolfe’s work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and other publications. Wolfe’s most recent collection is Love and Kumquats (BrickHouse Books). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Wolfe was a 2008 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellow. She is a contributor with the Washington Blade, the LGBTQ+ paper.
    Previously appeared in WWPH Writes. Reprinted with permission of the editors.

  14. “Gandhi, or 5’5″” by Mariah Barber

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    Gandhi, or 5’5″
    

    From what the textbooks portray Mahatma Gandhi stood at about 5’5″
    
A rather frail looking man I’m sure could have only been 100 pounds, soaking wet
    
But the strength he carried in his heels was enough to weigh out the shackles of apartheid that had held India in imbalance for centuries
    
The peace that he exuded from his palms pressed together in prayer was enough to restrain the crooked views buried deep in generations of hate resetting DNA straight
    
My brother stands at a solid six foot one
    
More head than body I had no idea of the weight he bore in his bones
    
Only a junior at my old Alma Mater
    
His almond eyes have always possessed a sense of hidden wisdom
    
Knowledge well beyond his mere sixteen years
    
My mother called me at last week in the smallest voice I’ve ever heard escape her lips
    
Her words hit me like a sucker punch to the ribs,
    
Her voice pin pricking the air from my lungs
    
When she uttered the words: :
    
Riah what has gotten into your brother who he is trying to be Gandhi or something refusing to eat because I won’t sign his paperwork to join the new LGBT gay group at the high school what do you know about this?
    
It took me a moment to process the full of all she said but after sometime I reply with as much reverence as you can hold for a queen who’s just lost the last droplet of respect as she denounced her throne by clumsily dropping her last sentence
    
I’ll talk to him
    
I’ve always wondered if the dial tone that soon hit my mother’s eardrum more like a red flag or a cold shower calling for her to wake up from her complacency
    
To open her eyes and ears to the world around her to see the beauty in what she intended to be an insult
    

    Because I’m proud to call my brother a freaking modern day Gandhi in a world full of bigots
    
I wish she could clear the hate from her sight cause like oil it’s left her blinded to what true love looks like
    
It cuts me deeper every time she calls to see if I’m still with her
    
Or why my brother still hangs out with his lesbian best friend because people may get the wrong idea
    
Or how her eyes slice my soul every time she stares at my rainbow pin
    
Or how I was afraid to share this poem because I didn’t want people to know what she thought of me
    
How little she thought of me
    

    If my brother was Gandhi
    
I would be his bindi
    
His third eye helping him to see through the destruction of this world
    
I would warn him that they will try to bend and break him
    
But that’s why God built his bones like white columns on a temple
    
That’s why God put all that knowledge between your temples
    
I would show him how they would try to break him bend him into society’s often tight fitting molds
    
Try to turtleneck his soul
    
But his heart was never meant to be covered or closed
    
leave that to the doors and windows
    
So when they will try to straight jacket his personality
    
know in the mist of four white colored walls
    
you’re far from
    
crazy that just the world’s way of trying to put you in another box
    
but always meant to be more of a circle man
    
Full of unity and life
    
you’re in good company
    
all compasses and cloudscape lenses
    
Hell people even tried to make this earth flat out of fear
    
so you see past prejudice and for that the world will always seem threatened
    
you must be a muhadma of a man
    
taking their advice with a grain of salt
    
because you remember in another life you too had to protest that too
    
And when you didn’t join America they tried to beat you into compliance and Water you down with the Adderall they inject into you bloodstream
    
But know Gandhi was imprisoned too and they never had even the slightest handle on his spirit
    
So stand even when others are too foolish to sit
    
Pray even when they say your cause is already forsaken
    
Call out even when the abyss is so dark you assume you fell on deaf ears
    
Cause today more than ever this world needs a person as spherical as you to lead it
    
Name it
    
And call it
    
And if you must sign truth when ignorant hands are either too shaky or in clenched fists
    
Cause sometimes forgery is necessary when no authentic love surrounds you
    
And I love you
    
Even when the world forsakes you
    
I realized I never hung up on my mother just clicked over to the other line
    
Hell When Gandhi calls you don’t keep him waiting
    

    Mariah Barber is an author, certified health education specialist, DEI consultant , and researcher who has been working in public health for over a decade. Barber holds an MPH in community, social and behavioral health as well as a B. S. in public health with a concentration in community health and a B.A. in international studies with a concentration in Latin America. She has a dual certification in cultural competency and global understating as well as an immediate language proficiency in Spanish. Historically, Barber‘s work has been focused on the intersectionality between biological and social sciences on a global scale. Additionally, her professional experience includes working as a radio personality, spoken word artist, content curator, mentor, moderator, researcher, counselor, facilitator, writer, researcher advocate, organizer, teacher, podcaster, blogger, public speaker and educator which all influence the passion that she brings to public health initiatives. Her mission and mantra in life is: “Some People Do, Some People Never Do, Some People Overdo, How Do you Do?” Barber does things to uplift unheard voices.
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    Mariah Barber is a resident of Noma.

    Originally appeared in “Of Mics and Pens and Gods and Other College Courses“ in the documentary “An Education.“ Reprinted with permission of the author.

  15. “Memorandum to the Young Homosexual” by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

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    Memorandum to the Young Homosexual
    

    I’ve seen you looking, boy.
    
No, of course not at an old queen like me, my southerly titties
    
sheathed in silk and sequins and Turkish cigarette smoke.
    
Still, I do have my admirers, even if you won’t find them
    
in the bars or the bathhouses or the brambles.  We gather in my apartment
    
well east of Tompkins Square Park. Jimmy, Stephen, Reginald always
    
come. Henry and Lars, too. Good men all, though not without their
    
foibles. Stephen, for example, has always been paranoid. Still
    
fearful of arrest. Yes, even in my apartment. Even to this day. I know
    
it’s a bit out of the way, but the invitation is always open. Although the
    
refreshment is light—wine, cheese, crackers— and the attire is casual, it is
    
still a royal court of sorts. All right, a salon then, if you insist.
    
Or perhaps an oral history archive or a museum of relics?
    

    I’ve seen you looking, boy.
    
It takes one to know one, and I know that of which I speak.
    
In my day, you see, interfacing wasn’t virtual.
    
Encounter required touch. And to make that happen, the body and its
    
language had to be read, a literacy which required years for mastery.
    
There was nothing instinctive or “gut” about it.
    
The stakes were high, mind you. You could end up in handcuffs—
    
and I don’t mean the velvet ones—in a cell with pimps and killers
    
and with your name on a list in the papers and out of a job.
    
You could end up pummeled or slashed or slain and dumped
    
into the river or beneath an overpass, the traffic whirring overhead—
    
the stuff of pulp novels minus the campy covers or noir
    
without the hard-nosed dick to rescue you. Of course, you still could.
    

    I’ve seen you looking, boy.
    
I know of the gaze drawn to strapping workmen.
    
Sometimes I saw them on the way to my office job,
    
shirtless at a building site, whistling at women going by,
    
eating a sandwich in wax paper and swilling I-never-knew-what
    
from a blue metal thermos. I still recall that shade of blue.
    
Sometimes in the diner Helena, my girlfriend from the office,
    
and I favored for lunch. Their pastrami sandwiches were legendary.
    
No, Helena was not my beard. She was a friend, a worksite-specific one,
    
to be sure. Sometimes I would see men by the piers at night or early
    
morning, when the ache got the better of me and repartee and bourbon
    
were no longer enough. My reading skills were most essential
    
in the darkest dark, without aid of moon or flash- or streetlight.
    

    I’ve seen you looking, boy.
    
And I am not impressed; you have much to learn.
    
You need to master the art of the surreptitious glance.
    
The eye should lightly graze; avoid the full-fronted stare,
    
but don’t assume a position of coyness, either.
    
You aren’t a demure maiden or a geisha.
    
Don’t conceal your smile by your hand or shadow.
    
Your shoulders should not slouch,
    
but they needn’t be militarily set back, either.
    
You will have to do all this in a matter of seconds. Little thing like you,
    
your life may depend on it. And no, that’s not hyperbole.
    
Is there a Helena in your life? Come to our next gathering, sweet pea.
    
I’m sure Lars can rustle up just the right young lady for you.
    

    Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, writer, and Yiddish literary translator. He is the author of two books of fiction, Beloved Comrades: a Novel in Stories (2020) and Prodigal Children in the House of G-d: Stories (2018), and six volumes of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). Taub’s most recent translation from the Yiddish is Dineh: an Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze (2022).
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    Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a resident of Brookland.

    Previously appeared in The Education of a Daffodil/Di bildung fun a geln nartsis (Hadassa Word Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission of the author.

  16. “Love of Hate of Love” by Chris Biles

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    Love of Hate of Love
    

    I practice punching
    
at the kitchen table
    
on the couch
    
in my sleep
    
I make a fist
    
study the veins that press out
    
against the skin of my forearms
    

    I see my life there
    
heritage of hate
    
the blood runs thick:
    
my rage, my joy
    
the tender twisting of the two
    
competing
    
contradicting
    
– my love of hate
    
rising in my pulse
    
with the power of perceived necessity.
    

    I make a fist
    
and see my life there
    

    Then I pause
    
release
    
breathe
    
lay down my hand
    
let it rest on the kitchen table
    
beside the gentle whorls of woodgrain
    

    I study the stillness
    
and the weight of reality hits
    
as I wonder
    
if my narrow fingers
    
veins
    
running the length of my forearm
    
would still look this way
    
if I took it too far
    
would still look this way
    
in the stony stillness of death
    

    I practice punching
    
at the kitchen table
    
hating your hate
    
but now I ponder your reaction
    
if I hugged rather than hit
    

    I hate your hate of love
    
but
    
now I realize
    
your hate of love
    
makes my life powerful –
    

    now I realize
    
just being
    
I hit
    
like a heavy
    
hammer
    

    Chris Biles currently lives and works in Washington D.C. where she enjoys playing with the light and the dark, and losing herself in music, anything outside, and some words here and there. Biles was a finalist in the 2022 and 2023 DC Poet Project, was honored by the Monologues and Poetry International Film Festival with an official selection in 2021, and is published in a number of literary magazines, journals, and anthologies in print and online.
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    Chris Biles is a resident of Foggy Bottom.

    Previously published in Another New Calligraphy, April 2022. Reprinted with permission of the author.

  17. “Poems Knocking at My Heart” by Saundra Rose Maley

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    Poems Knocking at My Heart
    

    I
    
A young woman dreams
    
under a cinnamon tree
    
waiting as the tree blooms
    

    three times
    

    II
    
how long will I love her?
    
how long will I walk this earth?
    

    III
    
my robe fell a thousand times
    
into the shadows of our straw mat
    

    IV
    
I cannot sleep
    
the rose quartz bowl
    
where she washed her hands
    

    her face
    

    stands too near the bed
    

    V
    
I take my brush
    
and write sad poems
    
in the snow
    

    startled plums fall
    

    Saundra Rose Maley is the author of the poetry collection Disappearing Act (Dryad Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Dryad, Gargoyle, and Innisfree, among other journals, and in the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems about Washington, D.C. She co-edited A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright with Anne Wright (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) and the two have just completed So Much Secret Labor: James Wright and Translation with Jeffrey Katz.

  18. “To my mother at the start of the pandemic” by Gowri Koneswaran

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    To my mother at the start of the pandemic
    

    Dear Amma,
    
How do we mourn
    
what surrounds us?
    

    How we do the doing,
    
keep the walls from falling,
    
pantries stocked,
    
silent soundscapes.
    

    Yesterday we talked about
    
motivation and none
    
and time and
    
endlessness.
    

    Of nourishment and cooking
    
and feeling too tired to try.
    

    Of my childhood and your mother
    
making my favorite curries and
    
stitching her sari blouses
    
all the years she lived with us.
    
And how I never knew it was you
    
who sewed my dresses.
    

    I informed you that I’d loved
    
the plastic headbands you’d purchase,
    
and broke them, one at a time, on purpose.
    

    Hiding on the staircase, boiling with
    
the anger children can summon, directing it
    
at the hardest objects in my possession.
    
I knew they would break, not bend.
    

    We spoke of your Hindu wedding and
    
how your parents’ church objected.
    
You reminded me that no religion
    
could cleave us.
    

    Then you asked me to give
    
your love to my partner.
    
Just one year after you met her
    
and learned of my truth.
    

    I have nothing else to ask of you.
    
Only, can we keep growing together?
    

    Gowri Koneswaran is a queer Eelam Tamil writer, performing artist, teacher, and lawyer. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Environmental Health Perspectives, Lantern Review, and The Margins. Her advocacy has addressed animal welfare, environmental protection, the rights of prisoners and the criminally accused in the U.S., and justice and accountability in Sri Lanka. She is the Literary Arts Programs Director at Split This Rock, a copy editor for The Abolitionist Newspaper, a Kundiman fellow, and a senior legal officer with PEARL.
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  19. “Born Backwards” by Tanya Olson

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    Born Backwards
    

    Feet first Ready to run
    
Problem for the doctor
    
Danger to my mother
    
Forceps locked around
    
my skull Three firm tugs
    
leave a permanent dent
    
Such the queer
    
way to begin
    

    An early reader My first job
    
to toddle down the driveway
    
Fetch the paper Read the headline
    
aloud White House Defends
    
Air Raids Farm Prices Recover
    
Never learned to read Just read
    
A skill already inside me
    
Games on the way to see Grandma
    
Spell what we saw P-I-G pig
    
C-O-W cow D-O-N-K-E-Y
    
donkey What we heard on the radio
    
That’s Elvis E-L-V-I-S They say
    
he’s back but he never really
    
went away
    

    I stay with Grandma for a week
    
at the beginning and end
    
of each summer Jobs at home
    
don’t have a name but
    
Grandma calls them chores
    
Feed sheep Weed beds Pick beans
    
You get the low ones I’ll get the high
    
ones Together we’re a perfect pair
    
Those summer weeks are the purest
    
love I will ever know Fertile seeds
    
in hungry soil
    

    At lunch the radio plays
    
funeral music Deep voice
    
Service place and time Grandma
    
tells me something about every
    
name we hear Kin Job Where
    
she saw them last We nap
    
and wake to watch General Hospital
    
which I always think is The Doctors
    
because of the way it starts When
    
the party line rings not our ring
    
Grandma turns down the sound
    
Raises her eyebrows Puts a finger
    
to her lips Picks up and listens
    
long enough to know what she
    
needs to know
    

    Before bed I read to her
    
from a chapter book She buys
    
them from yard sales Saves them
    
when the library throws them out
    
This one describes how a dairy
    
is run When I correctly pronounce
    
pasteurize Grandma shakes her head
    
in awe How would a little girl
    
even know that word I swear
    
sometimes you must have lived before
    

    While I am away the yellow
    
apple tree at home gets split in two
    
by lightning My father builds a stand
    
in its still living half For you For reading
    
he explains when I return High enough
    
to see over the corn Having never
    
seen an ocean I imagine I am a sailor
    
spending weeks at sea From my nest
    
I work through the sack of Great Kid Classics
    
Grandma gave me when I left
    
Up there I eat the apples that continue
    
to grow at hand In each lies
    
a tang of fire
    

    One songy poem roots in me
    
that summer A caught fish
    
turns into a woman and promptly
    
runs away That summer I live
    
off the ground surrounded by
    
the rustle of tall as me corn Below
    
a constant thrum of wasps
    
drunk on the windfall apples
    
Every morning I battle Roo
    
the meanest rooster who ever
    
lived His flash of spurs
    
when I gather eggs hurts
    
my feelings All Roo knows
    
is to protect his flock
    
my mother counsels And to him
    
you are just the giant girl who steals
    

    Chores for Grandma are gentler
    
Feed the bottle lambs Give them
    
their names But lambs are scary too
    
Such hunger when they spot me
    
carrying the milk bucket The power
    
and need in their unrelenting suck
    
Before she opens the pasture gate
    
Grandma rubberbands breadbags
    
over my shoes While she makes
    
supper Grandma ties a string
    
to each end of the flyswatter
    
so I can wear it over my shoulder
    
and play it like a guitar She claps
    
every time I spin around and announce
    
Hello My name is Johnny Cash
    
When my parents come to take me back
    
I introduce them to the lambs
    
Share the names I have chosen
    
Peanuts Popcorn CrackerJack
    
My mother feeds them apple slices
    
while they gently lip her hand
    

    My friend Clark insists the only
    
people who want big gardens
    
as adults never worked in one
    
as kids He’s not entirely wrong
    
about this Every day is something
    
Hoe Dig Plant Weed Water Pick
    
My least favorite job is plucking
    
hornworms off the tomatoes
    
I drown each one in the coffee can
    
of kerosene we use to light
    
the trash barrel A song for each
    
as they go Return to sender
    
Address unknown Lay down
    
in the corn to hide and read
    
Frankenstein the final book
    
in my summer series The monster
    
learns to fit in by watching
    
The monster runs so as not
    
to hurt what he loves The monster
    
promises I will be with you
    
on your wedding night The monster
    
doesn’t see himself as a monster
    
but the world does not agree
    

    My contentment that summer
    
will not last Soon I begin to dream
    
of leaving Believe to really be
    
I must go somewhere else
    
Clothes Jobs Books Music
    
the ways I build this distance
    
I still love Elvis Still read
    
voraciously Grow only
    
tomatoes Name animals
    
thematically This year
    
my dentist correctly
    
identified me as a wellwater kid
    
No fluoride in those early years
    
make the teeth you have today
    

    Some book taught me I was different
    
than my parents Some book told me
    
queer kids run I always misremember
    
how that fish poem ends The woman
    
gets away but the man vows
    
to find her and keep her
    
until time and times are done
    
He believes together they will
    
pick silver apples of the moon
    
He thinks she will sit forever
    
by his side Happy to watch him
    
pluck the golden apples from the sun
    

    Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and is a Lecturer in English at UMBC. Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014 American Book Award. Her second book, Stay, was released By YesYes Books in 2019. In 2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review prize and she was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem “54 Prince” was chosen for inclusion in Best American Poems 2015.
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  20. “Color of Choice” by Alex Carrigan

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    Color of Choice
    
­
    
For Henrietta Lacks
    

    Red was always around you
    
and will always be what’s left of you.
    
The chips of nail polish that could be
    
found under your bedroom vanity.
    
The blood the doctors at Johns Hopkins
    
drew from you for yet another test.
    
The imprints left from digging your nails
    
into your palms as the news is delivered.
    

    Red was around you the night you revealed
    
your secret to the women in your life.
    
You waited until you and your companions
    
were at the top of the Ferris wheel
    
before you told them you have cancer.
    
Their faces turned red from the glow
    
of the light bulbs along the rail.
    
Or maybe it was the grief that was
    
finally painted over them as they wished
    
the world could move again.
    

    Red will always be around you,
    
from the faces of your five crying babies
    
to the dress you wear in your gallery portrait.
    
You love red so much that you made sure
    
it will always be around, for that color
    
is the one bit of immortality drawn from you,
    
separated into slides and test tubes,
    
injected and radiated, shot into space,
    
your life an ever-multiplying cluster
    
of red circles pressed under glass,
    
defying entropy and proving you
    
will always be around.
    

    After Jesi Bender
    

    Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. He is the author of May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), and Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Barrelhouse, Sage Cigarettes (Best of the Net Nominee, 2023), Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019), and more.
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  21. “The Holy Temple of Drag” by Rasha Abdulhadi

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    The Holy Temple of Drag
    
for Pulse and all my endangered kin
    

    I sweat out my fever that night
    
in the holy temple of drag,
    
watching my baby sister in a mustache and codpiece
    
invite us all to take a walk on the wild side,
    
wholly supplicant to the divine glamdrogyny
    
that could be called down to dance through you
    
if you could wrestle free enough
    
if you could accept into your heart the saving power
    
of glitter. and rock-n-roll. and rhythm-n-blues.
    
and stank nasty love songs sung along from every stall
    
in the gender neutral milk hotel
    
every friday, saturday, and sunday night
    
offering a new watermark on your excitement
    
Until this sunday, 
    

    when my fever was breaking,
    
and you were dying, you and your partner, you and your
    
mother, you and the bartender and bouncer and the 18 year old
    
girl dancing her heart out and I can’t understand
    
how you weren’t me or my sister
    
with our shaved-head glitter-eye swagger
    

    or our friends, our drag sistren and brethren
    
in a neighboring state where we partied
    
in defiance of laws that tried to deputize and sanctify hate 
    

     and I wondered
    
if the fbi had baited a hook whose sharp sting
    
went sideways– or worse, if that barb
    
landed right where aim sent it
    
none of us, blackbrownredyellowqueer
    
tongues embroidered by other languages,
    
have expected safety for a long time, if we ever could or did
    
I do not mistake police or politicians for my friends
    
no matter what the press statement says
    
My best allies have always been resistance. Rebellion
    
really brings out my eyes. I find courage
    
is a look anyone can pull off and sanctuary
    
exists only in the interstices we hold open for each other.
    

    and I wondered too
    
if this was personal, a story about the hidden body
    
of the gay Muslim—as occluded as the twelfth imam
    
who one day prophesy says may return
    
perhaps then gentle in form as a rainstorm
    
whose lips fear no kiss.
    

    and it seems that nothing
    
will feel like justice until we heal
    
and that I must give myself
    
to my nieces and nephews
    
like a bridge.
    

    My southern, my muslim,
    
my arab, my baptist, my palestinian, my buddhist, my queer butch eyeliner
    
families, hear me: my self feels like the battlefield over which the daily news is
    
fought, the truth spiraled downfield to mark gains
    
for one military or another
    
while I’m trying to hold the world inside my skin
    
and calling all my kin to hear how they’re hanging on.
    

    and you—
    
you texted your mother that night
    
to tell her you loved her.
    

    may I, on the night I die, with the best of my courage,
    
have the last words on my lips be
    
I love you. I love you world that broke me, I love you slaying
    
hand, I love you betraying friend, I love you
    
family that would not see me, I do not fear you for I knew
    
my silence would not save me, make me invisible or hide me
    
from surveillance that can find, detain, deport, or execute me
    
just as surely as the hand of any man trying to terrorize my temple,
    
and so I will not surrender these sacred spaces
    
or let them become mute monuments. I am not here to hug any racist,
    
and even if we will never be safe:
    
it is you I am am pledged to, always.
    

    Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner disabled by Long Covid. Rasha’s writing has appeared in Kweli, Poem-a-Day, Electric Lit, carte blanche, Anathema, Shade Journal, FIYAH, Mizna, ROOM, Strange Horizons, Beltway Poetry, and Lambda Literary. Their work is anthologized in Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology, Snaring New Suns, Unfettered Hexes, Halal if You Hear Me, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. A poet, and speculative fiction writer and editor, Abdulhadi is a member of Muslims for Just Futures, the Radius of Arab American Writers, and Alternate ROOTS. Their new chapbook is who is owed springtime.

    Rasha Abdulhadi is a resident of Washington, DC.

    Previously appeared in Split This Rock's Virtual Open mic. Reprinted with the author's permission.

  22. “Lucky or Lovely” by Natalie E. Illum

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    Lucky or Lovely
    

    after Alice Sebold
    

    I wanted to tell you, Mama,
    
It wasn’t a sharp plunging
    
into blackness. It wasn’t a hard fall.
    
Not like the time I broke my kneecap
    
roller-skating in kitchen, or the night
    
I was kissed into oblivion.
    

    All I know is there were dark smudges –
    
treetops too far below, that the buildings appeared
    
like Northern Lights. I tried to remember
    

    the equation for speed, to calculate my death
    
like a 9th grade math problem. But there was
    
only time to think of your devastation,
    
your devotion. How I would move beyond
    
your forever loss. I wanted to absolve the impact –
    
whisper my small happinesses. But my memory wavered
    
like this plane; I was combustible.
    

    I love you, Mama. A bone-shattering love.
    
Please know I wasn’t a broken bird. I was freed
    
from the velocity of flying. I rose
    
as my body collapsed, I soared
    
above the wreckage.
    

    Natalie E. Illum is a poet, disability activist and singer living in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of five Poetry Fellowship grants from the DC. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, a Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship, and is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee. Illum is also a singer-songwriter of the band All Her Muses, whose album, Not speaking in metaphor, was a 2023 Wammie nominee for Best Pop Album. She holds an MFA from American University, and was a founding member of the mothertongue collective, an monthly LGBTQA open mic and workshop series that ran for 13 years.
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    Natalie E. Illum is a resident of Shaw.

  23. “Dear David” by K. Tyler Christensen

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    Dear David
    

    for David Wojnarowicz
    
(b. September 14, 1954 – d. July 22, 1992)
    

    You died on my eleventh birthday
    
while I blew out my candles you drew
    
your last breath death by government neglect
    
artist/activist/writer/thinker/hustler
    
AIDS took you and your friends from the world
    
of art and politics and I am your inheritor
    
your queer progeny a descendant spreading
    
your words as if they are your ashes
    
spread on the White House lawn I spread
    
your words to the bent ears of this generation
    
of lovers to anyone who wakes up
    
in this killing machine called america
    
and who knows what it is like to have a target
    
at their back to be marked as expendable
    
to be subject to the eradicating impulses
    
of the united states government who spread
    
the lie of the ONE-TRIBE NATION
    
and falsely promise freedom then indict us
    
for who we love abandon us when we show up
    
sick in the world they have created
    
for a select few           I spread your words
    
not as if they are your ashes
    
but because they are your ashes—
    
they are what is left of you.
    

    K. Tyler Christensen (any pronouns) is a writer living in Washington, DC. They are a professorial lecturer in the departments of Literature, and Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies (CRGC) at American University. Their chapbook, That Boy from Idaho, was published by Ghost City Press in 2020.
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    K. Tyler Christensen is a resident of Brookland.

  24. “How I Became a Writer” by Tanya Paperny

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    How I Became a Writer
    

    cut paper, hand-bound black cardboard
    
ruler, X-Acto knife, self-healing mat
    
Stone Soup submission mandates, “My First Book”
    

    a facility with language
    
Santa Monica Public Library on 7th Street
    
bilingual “family home”
    

    three siblings born in a country that no longer exists
    
handmade Papier-mâché puppets
    
who refused to speak English
    

    log of a 1994 Moscow trip —
    
“it was very, very dirty there”
    
“I saw the place where they cut off people’s heads”
    

    Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
    
an attempt to circumvent silence
    
escape the “family home”
    

    looking out the window of a Greyhound bus
    
looking out the window of an Amtrak train
    
neglected industry along the Northeast Corridor
    

    мастер и маргарита, горе от ума, жалобная книга
    
third-culture kid but not quite
    
longing, diaspora, fracturing — the seductive lure of trauma
    

    Tanya Paperny is a writer, editor, translator, curator and community builder in Washington, DC. The child of Soviet Jewish refugees, her works deals with the aftermath of atrocity. Tanya’s essays, poetry and reporting have appeared in LitHub, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, The Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere.
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    Tanya Paperny is a resident of Edgewood.

  25. “To Live In That Country” by Dan Vera

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    To Live In That Country
    

    glimpsed, imagined, and longed for,
    
to live within those borders
    
that once seemed impregnable,
    
whose language baffled yet enticed,
    
whose customs lay beyond all understanding,
    
its shared traditions and inside jokes,
    
its annual celebrations, its
    
quiet memorials to overcomings,
    
to hard fought victories,
    
to beloveds lost and remembered,
    
to have the joy of one day becoming
    
a proud and cherished citizen
    
of this country, long fought for
    
and now resplendent,
    
to live in the country of our queer loving.
    

    Dan Vera is a DC-based writer and editor. An award-winning author of two poetry collections, he co-edited Imaniman: Poets Writing In The Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute, 2016). His poetry appears in various journals, anthologies, and academic curricula. A featured reader around the country including the Poetry Foundation, Poets House and Dodge Poetry Festival, Vera co-curates the literary history site DC Writers’ Homes and chaired the Split This Rock board.
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    Dan Vera is a resident of Brookland/Michigan Park.

  26. “Kourban” by Holly Mason Badra

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    Kourban
    

    The adults would say it to the kids, Kourban.
    
Like the sound a sheep makes, it goes “Core-baan.”
    

    Kourban-e-bim, Kurdish translated into English means:
    
I am willing to sacrifice myself for you. I sacrifice myself to you.
    

    A table of 12 chairs filled with aunts and uncles playing cards—
    
A young girl, I come up to my mother and whisper something into her ear,
    

    I hear her tell them the secret as I walk away;
    
I hear them say, Kourban.
    

    Not knowing then just what it meant, but knowing it made me feel
    
Both pleased and embarrassed— Kourban.
    

    And now, when my own nephew is soft in my arms,
    
Opening his little hand to the early moon, saying “hold you, hold you,”
    

    I look at him and the thing in my chest is Kourban.
    
Escaping my lips, Kourban.
    

    Holly Mason Badra received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University where she is currently the Associate Director of the Women and Gender Studies program. Her work appears in The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, CALYX, and elsewhere. She has been a panelist for OutWrite DC, RAWIFest, and DC’s Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here events as a Kurdish-American poet. Mason Badra is also a reader for Poetry Daily.
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    Previously appeared in The Northern Virginia Review. Reprinted with permission.

  27. “The Vista from the Mediterranean Sea” by Robert L. Giron

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    The Vista from the Mediterranean Sea
    

    Picture a tree, one with deep roots,
    
going deep into the ground,
    
spreading out amongst the land,
    
with branches twisting like
    
the sinew of flesh
    
Not unlike the olive tree,
    
bark rich in hew and texture,
    
bearing fruit, as then, now and
    
into the future—
    
There amongst the rock, cacti,
    
wildflowers cover the terrain
    
lush with life out towards the sea
    
as bees swarm about drawing in
    
nectar from blossom to blossom
    
Then the rich lather of honey
    
bathes the hive and we
    
the bearers of knowledge gather
    
treasures to last a life time
    

    Robert L. Giron is the author of five collections of poetry and editor of four anthologies. His poetry and fiction have appeared in national and international anthologies among other publications. He discovered recently that his ancestry covers most of Europe and the greater Mediterranean area, including Indigenous roots from Mexico/Texas—just a man of the world. He currently is an associate editor for Potomac Review and is the editor-in-chief of ArLiJo and is the founder/publisher of Gival Press.
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  28. “A Testament of Love in the Yogurt Aisle of the Mansfield ShopRite” by Caly McCarthy

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    A Testament of Love in the Yogurt Aisle of the Mansfield ShopRite
    

    Every day
    
for the last twenty-seven years
    
my father has worn
    
a self-appointed uniform
    
of khaki pants,
    
a collared, button-down,
    
blue and white pinstripe shirt
    
with a Land’s End,
    
navy blue,
    
V-necked sweater.
    
He readily admits
    
that he cannot multitask.
    
And, yet,
    
he buys me yogurt.
    

    In the supermarket parking lot
    
he deposits twenty-five cents
    
to release the contraption
    
that locks one cart
    
to the next,
    
jangling the chain
    
and freeing the big basket on wheels.
    
Probably
    
he doesn’t need it.
    
It’s overkill
    
for thirty-two ounces
    
of semi-solid milk,
    
but he is a man who appreciates ritual.
    

    Following the perimeter of the store,
    
the refrigerated path
    
to the promised land of culturally sound bacteria,
    
he arrives in Aisle Twenty-One
    
and consults his list.
    
It says:
    
Stonyfield Greek,
    
non-fat,
    
vanilla yogurt.
    
He consults the wall.
    
It says:
    
organic, fruit-on-the-bottom, with almonds, sans fat, gluten-free, bound to make you joyful and prosperous, please consider reading The Paradox of Choice.
    

    The refrigerator case
    
is a matrix of variables,
    
a prime application
    
of conditional probability statements.
    
My father has never
    
excelled in math.
    
Nevertheless, he skims the non-fat selections.
    
He cannot find one
    
to my specifications.
    

    He pulls out his phone and dials.
    
I am in his “Favorites” list,
    
but he is of a generation
    
that commits to memory the phone numbers
    
of the people they love.
    

    I am in class,
    
and my phone is on vibrate.
    
He leaves a message,
    
asks me to call him back,
    
he wants to make sure
    
that he’s looking for the right thing.
    

    To pass the time until my class ends,
    
he walks around the store,
    
takes his blood pressure
    
at the machine near the pharmacy counter;
    
it’s 110 over 78.
    
He writes it down,
    
will tell us all at dinner
    
how impressive it is,
    
especially for a man of his age.
    

    He checks his phone.
    
I haven’t called back,
    
but he needs to return to work.
    
He hedges his bets and walks to the Courtesy Desk,
    
explains that there’s no
    
Stonyfield Greek,
    
non-fat,
    
vanilla yogurt
    
in Aisle Twenty-One.
    
On their loudspeaker
    
they interrupt Maroon Five
    
to ask Someone in Dairy,
    
to Call 2-4-5, Someone in Dairy,
    
to Call 2-4-5.
    

    Dairy calls 2-4-5.
    
There is a case of my yogurt in the back.
    
They ask how much he wants.
    
One container
    
will last me a week.
    
Maybe he knows this.
    
Maybe he doesn’t.
    
As long as I’ve known him,
    
my dad has steadfastly believed
    
in buying in bulk.
    
He asks for three.
    

    Caly McCarthy (she/her) is an ace writer who loves finding new ways to cook beans and usurp capitalism. She serves as the Marketing and Communications Coordinator for Fairtrade America and also as a reader for Poet Lore. Her work has been published in Christian Century and enfleshed.
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    Caly McCarthy is a resident of Cleveland Park.

  29. “sepulcher” by Ishanee Chanda

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    Sepulcher
    

    there is a thistle of sage growing on my grandmother’s grave. it is sprouting in lumps. grief clings to its leaves. she lies underneath the earth, shattered finger bones still reaching for the five o’ clock shadow on my father’s face. he hangs a painting of her in his bedroom. she sits stiff in a chair full of dead wood, her face shining with something sickly. he sleeps in a garden of her grave. wakes up with dirt in his ears, flower buds peeking out from underneath his eyes. he says she sings to him when he sleeps. when he leaves us to follow her, we are left pulling bouquets of wildflowers out of our sheets.
    

    Ishanee Chanda is a prose writer and poet from Dallas, Texas. She is the author or two books of poetry titled Oh, these walls, they crumble and The Overflow. Chanda enjoys eating her weight in Thai food, singing loudly to Taylor Swift, and rolling out a fresh batch of pasta dough every night.

    Ishanee Chanda is a resident of Brookland.

See Poems from: Current Year 2022