Explore Diverse Voices

In the beginning, they were like goldfish, barely visible as they floated beneath the surface of the tepid bathwater. It was Sunday in England, the day we had a bath.

It wasn’t that the eagle didn’t love you,
that his plumage wasn’t cut like a paper
snowflake is cut, repeating itself like a heart
is cut, or repeats itself—No.

Tonight a wind plays attentively
–mindful of that loud clashing of blades—

When I was a junior in college, a friend handed me a copy of When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. We’d been intimate with each other’s obsessions and sleep schedules, sharing a bed to save money, hardly ever using it at the same time.

We could go years without it ever happening, and then word would spread that we were going to get to see a movie.

I like life enormously—

Yes, when it’s a big dog looking to catch
my eye and lean in heavily against me
with its thick hair, its petal soft ears,
and I like life when it doesn’t behave,

You wake up one morning alone at 70, your wife of 30 years newly dead from lung cancer, having promised at the start of your relationship to stop smoking and then deceived you all those years.  How was it that you didn’t smell it on her?  Didn’t find the cigarettes? 

a woman was carrying a bundle,
in the bundle were dead children
and a wooden head, a memento.
a wooden bell. at times what you need to know about a dream

First an earthy earth,
then another—no, the very same
suddenly unearthly.

No one’s clear on how to live with wanting.
The dog snatches gloves from the table

When I first saw Nestor, he was sitting in a wrought-iron chair in the hibiscus–filled courtyard of Havana’s Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center.

One sees all manner of life rock up in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. You have the red-faced teens with their embarrassing infections sat next to the bleary-eyed mammies comforting scabby-arsed babies.

Christine Lavant in “Earth if you had two lips” speaks passionately to Earth in a voice that may well speak for humanity in our time, believing we are friends but also fearing that we are destroying ourselves by the lies we tell ourselves concerning the way we treat it.

There’s a storm gathering in my attic:
Pokémon cards, old novels, broken lamps
and art projects, paint chips flaking to the floor,
that picture of my younger self that haunts me.

You’re back, Halina says, not looking me in the eye, and leaves me
bitter black cherries on the table. As a child, I believed these
cherries to be food for rooks, because even sparrows wouldn’t eat
such bitter fruits. Only the rooks and sometimes me. The culture

I can’t tell if the apartment really is as empty and cold as it seems, or if I’m just irreparably lonely. The man from the leasing office and I stand here together, both wishing we were elsewhere.

“It’s a decent size,” I proclaim, just to say something. I can hear the blood pooling in and out of my brain.

Self-perception, identity, and the quiet injuries we inflict upon ourselves.

Mark Rothko’s vast rectangles interpose
themselves. There’s this too: pink light h

Like some unseen blight burrowed deep in the local vines, divorce kept preying on Boundary Street. The trend seemed a stealthy contagion drawing closer and closer, its malign influence headed squarely at the Copeland’s corner lot.

My dad tells us about the Hindenburg while we’re following the Goodyear blimp on our way to the dump. We’re in the back seat of the old red Saab, my brother and me, strapped into our super-duper seatbelt contraptions, the ones my dad bought at Sears, the ones that crisscross over our chests and pin us there to the cracked vinyl seats, the seats that smell of my dad’s Vantage cigarette smoke, cut with the spice of the pink Canada mints he keeps up near the emergency brake.

Margot never liked her name, which was unfortunate because she was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to hear it. Margot.

The trouble began three days ago when Tingting had stopped answering Betty’s calls, messages, then emails. For two days, before she arrived at the high school where she taught orchestra, Betty had waited outside Tingting’s pharmacy clinic.

You are not allowed to speak once the lights go out, and the doors are locked. No one wants to hear your songs once it’s dark, and you’ve been shut away, but you keep singing anyway. Your name is Evangeline, and you will never let it be forgotten.

Mephistopheles and Faustus had been eating roast duck
With pancakes and scallions in a Chinese restaurant
In Midtown, and after dinner, they’d gone for a walk

Pondering fearlessness, “Sans Peur” grapples with the big things like where kittens come from, where lamb comes from, and how we must get through life both knowing and not knowing stuff.

the year is nineteen ninety-nine
judge judy is playing
with my pre-rolls some group sings happy

When I make sofrito with my mother’s hands I peel the garlic and then smash its teeth like someone unfulfilled. I chop the onions into small pieces of shattered dreams and shed not a tear for what could have been.

In the trees outside her second-story home office, birds chatter manically, the way they seem to on only spring mornings. Somewhere along the street, a neighbor’s dog is caught in a cycle of howling, a plaintive, almost desperate sound, as if in a state of pain or alarm.

I remember I was at the end of a long twisted phone chord in a corner of my parents’ front hall when you first asked me out the summer before we went to college. You said I’d like to take you to Houlihan’s for dinner, knowing I liked the booths in the back that were shrouded by plastic vines and noisy strands of beads.

streams of dust behind the town. dust
and cornfields as if it were the crash site
of a space probe which had disgorged violet
figures, shields, old car seats lying in the grass.

That day in the neighbor’s front yard it was so hot
everyone stripped shirtless, in cutoffs, shorts, knees

How delicious and fragile we humans look,
pacing the diving platform in a bikini
or board shorts, arms and legs

About a well-meaning but fumbling anti-poverty non-profit in Bangkok

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

Puzzle pieces, each from a different set, end up with gaps to fill
with mind and whatnot. From afar they’re curlicues fluent in
longing–there’s too much to say about longing we’d better leave it

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

A deeply honest account of a fractured relationship in Featherville.

Several years ago, I bought some coffee filters, and after opening the pack, I realized they were the wrong size for my Mr. Coffee, too small. I held the ripped-open package of 100 coffee filters (now 99) and faced a quandary.

for i royal black sabah lil gallish gal flashed
my baby sphinx butt on may 1st weighin in
at 3 pounds up from 2.5 just
2 weeks ago ohhhh how i bozoed

The early 1670s. Snow descends like quiet thoughts. Antonie nibbles
on sugary fresh-baked speculaas, as Johannes sips

upon an earthen cup of java, ponders the tumultuous scene buried
behind the master’s easel, throngs of rapt observers

Here, flown -over spring is empty
field of just -tilled earthskin, light brown
last year’s leftover stalks, cobs, leaves,

My dead dad’s ashes are kept inside an arcade game. Well, technically he’s my stepdad, and his ashes are kept inside an urn. But the urn is stashed in Star Castle, and Star Castle is stashed in Gamezone, and Gamezone is stashed in Lanford, New Hampshire, which is at least an hour away from my dead dad’s (empty) grave plot.

When I travel I touch my passport often,
as if it was a talisman, or the foot of a rabbit

This morning, in tallish grass beside my car, a dirty baseball
sat like a runaway moon beside a rabbit working her athletic
jaws across the lawn with a typist’s frenzy for QWERTY

This hand-lettered colored pencil comic is a raw reaction to the discovery that what you thought were ‘normal’ thoughts are actually mental illness.

The sun is off
In prayer
In breath abide
Words’ apogee

The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple.

Blay, Yaba. “How the ‘One Drop Rule’ Became a Tool of White Supremacy.” LitHub, 22 Feb. 2001.1 CBC Radio. “Black Teen Shot in the Head After Knocking on the Wrong Door Doing ‘Exceptionally

We talk about other things, but not class
in class. I think in class we don’t talk
about class because the university has

This is evidence, like fingermarks crimping upper arms,
like the bruise on the cheek bearing the shape of his ring,
the zigzag grooved in the X-rays.

I want to be the woman flying
toward art, who prefers the surreal

painting over any man, even new love.

A day before the long drive to Northampton, where I would join friends in a book talk about war and language, I arrived at a small town emergency room, signed in, took a seat, and for the next half hour mulled over what had led me there.

It’s easy to forget that anything could happen, until something does. On November 11, 1979, a Sunday, I was working at my father’s horse farm on Vly Summit Road in Easton, New York, about ten miles south of Greenwich.

Reclining on my side, face masked, I ride
in the rear seat. Raise the back of my hand
to feel if I have a fever. Yesterday, I boiled!
This girl’s body heat turned high to kill germs.

The first customers to enter the door into Geraldine’s newly opened shop, Spiritus Mundi, were skeletons.

Not people in skeleton costumes.

I leaf through an old world atlas my grandmother gave me when I was thirteen. Published in 1942, the red-brown cover is thick and hard, protecting a hefty five hundred pages. I’m intrigued by the countries whose boundaries have since relocated and the nations that no longer exist. In the eighty-plus years since the maps were compiled, islands have appeared and disappeared, mountains have changed shape, lakes have formed and dissolved. Through this, I understand that a map captures only one moment in time.

One, I imagine she’s in the throes of
writing her first graphic novel, this young
woman, a remarkable piece entitled New Tales

Monument Valley was the properly mythic place for meeting this mythic event, a solar eclipse. 

Weather flew across the field. Over the horizon the land tacked to a cloud. The field continued into night a far town lit.

The unforeseen arrived on an autumn day some twenty years ago in Canberra, Australia. I had been living there for fifteen years, having immigrated from the U.S. to spend my life with a man I had met on a train in

The toilet was lidless, its porcelain chipped and stained, squatting in the middle of what would become the kitchen of the place that somehow was going to be our family home. The year I first saw it was 1968, the Second Summer of Love, which really wasn’t about love, not in the New York of garbage strikes, the shooting of Andy Warhol, and the rioting in Morningside Park.

My first psychedelic trip was at a hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, a few miles from Yale University. My husband and cousin were eating pizza in downtown New Haven, while I was hooked up to a saline IV drip, a wet washcloth draped on the back of my neck, watching the show Friends. Everything was luminous while simultaneously mundane. 

Spring means I have to go outside again
and pretend to like it, put on the yoke
of growth for growth’s sake, socialize in the
hard sun, eat with bees, shave and paint my toes.
The tyranny of good weather is here:

I begin to pray for the world. Believe me
it’s involuntary—a lamp chain’s pulled,
my bulb filament glows….

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

At the end of “Barbie,” different models through time flash on the movie screen alongside the credits. It was then that I remembered I own a Barbie.

On the day he died Jack DeFazio stood and waited for a number to materialize, an idea to emerge from the dark recesses of the casino, a word to become flesh above a green table. Nothing.

someone cherished the tiny beasts,
sleek and defenseless:
the crocodile, the adder, the cat, the dog,
a couple of birds.

A large, gold-framed portrait photograph of my maternal great-grandfather dominates one wall of the attic room where I write. With increasing frequency, I find myself musing about the similarities and differences between us.

Incubation period I un know in
redacted lines Nav guidance touches
on hospital foster care agency
the yearning of two & three Longing

He sits in front of a wall of glass, and his glass, which was made of plastic, was already empty.

An excerpt from FREE TO BROWSE: The Internet as a Space of Survival for Trans Teens and What Happens When That Space Disappears.

For Japanese Americans, today, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance, when we look back to 1942 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066; this proclamation removed 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and put them in concentration camps in desolate areas of the West and South.

I sank into the red sofa, too heavy to stand again. A small wooden table in front of me held a few books and my computer, connected to the TV by an HDMI cord.

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

The second time I heard him play, he sat
facing his windows overlooking the river.

Standing and praying, a man in a black yarmulke.
His body rocks, swaying back and forth,
his lips moving, murmuring. My lips,

Begin with a blank slate, a face scrubbed clean, preferably with a GRISI sulfur bar, but anything noncomedogenic will do.  If using the former, take care not to rain amber water droplets on the white lace toallitas or pink ceramic tile sink so Amá doesn’t trip.  

When our father died, there was a group email. The five of us on one long chain, subject line: Dad’s obituary. Someone suggested I write it, on the grounds that I was the lawyer, and the one who wrote things. I did what was asked. I sketched the outline of a life—dates, jobs, the usual virtues—then sent it round for comments.

New Hampshire has the largest Irish American population of any U.S. state. Irish Americans are a perennially aggrieved and mediocre people; they love to drink, and they gravitate toward New Hampshire, perhaps partially because the state motto, “live free or die,” appeals to their sense of responsibility.

In reverse, the red ribbon on the gift box
loosens, it opens, the sterling silver charm

shaped like a trumpet, returns to the charm rack.
The earth above you floats clumsily,

Artist Statement: I believe the portrait can disclose more about the subject than what is found on the surface. The subject, either willingly or subconsciously, shows us more than they intend. The camera can see more than the naked eye, moving past our persona and catching a glimpse of who we really are. With this

In the early days of that frigid winter, Whitt spent half his time staring out the kitchen window. His beloved guitar leaned unplucked and gathering dust against a wall.

Between the decaying doublewide
and the beast maw
of development lies
this last remnant of soil like home,
grey-edged and drying against
the encroaching green, a fermenting
pumpkin patch caught
in permanent dusklight

For this journey, forget practical things.
Begin with touch and smell, silk and mohair
bird feathers, silver frog for joy, comb

Dear Ethel,

I lost your ring.
It was the only thing of yours we had, other than the letters you and Julius exchanged.

i’m an alcoholic. a coke head. an aborter. bipolar and on a slight sedative. i’m jealous of ways other’s brilliance makes me feel small. i’m passive with peace and love. i’m distributable and often diabolical. i’m dying. i’ve died a million deaths in these last

I said to my kids, “Trust me, you don’t want to know. You’ll wish you could go back to not knowing, but by then it’ll be too late.”

A superhero origin story, his “power” the unbearable gift of knowing death’s inevitability.

Michał Sobol is an awarded Polish poet whose poetics is marked by restrain and condensation, at the same time displaying existential tension. Sobol transfigures ordinary experiences into philosophical, political, or historical moments of unease or disquietude.