What is this thing I must sing to?
I stand up, sit
Down, then
Stand again.
My mind a fan blade pivoting
In patches in sunlight
And wind,
Scent of peony.
I wait for the bird half
Of my body
To reveal itself,
That sliver of food I carry
In my heart to feed the dead.
As if their leaving
Might finally mean something.
As if that bluebird
Coming down
Out of the pine
Might finally stall
At the feeder’s edge.
One cloud inlaid on the river
Like polished marble.
Light fraying to fading
Horse-shapes
Between the trees.
If one eye must quit its listening
And release its silver,
Then that wren is still there
On the lawn
Lashed down by ropes
And strings of wind,
Quietly feeding.
On the way out when I walked
To some arbitrary vantage,
A spot in the yard;
On the way back
(When I leaned down
And touched a poppy)
To the same.
Wet and tufted, unwounded.
I have taken for granted too long
The tongue’s relationship
To the lip,
So long
A saint might be teased
Out of it.
A mirror carried from darkness.
Then tremble, then seed.
Then then.
Time leaping forward just
For the thrill of it.
Logic like crystallized gypsum.
We sit: the morning and I.
Consciousness: our sleeve of honey.
Glass heart, glass eye, glass
Tongue, glass spine.
I can’t tell—
Of Buddha’s two deaths—
Which to prefer—
The one with poison
And a rush of blood
Or the one tamed
With willingness and grace.
Daylight sharpens
Its immaculate knife.
How does a bird know
It’s been lifted?
How know we have cheated sweetness
(And/or death)
Out of muscle and burning spoke?
Mia Karvonides joined Solstice Literary Magazine as a fiction reader before moving into the assistant fiction editor role. She is currently working on a novel in stories and her writing has been supported by GrubStreet’s Short Story Incubator ’25-’26, The Kenyon Review Online Summer Workshop 2026, and other advanced writing programs. As a person with a complex chronic illness, she pursues opportunities to learn from other writers with disabilities. Mia earned her BA from Wheaton College and her JD from Vermont Law & Graduate School. She was a civil rights attorney for over 20 years in the education sector. Beginning in fall 2024, she has volunteered at the University of the District of Columbia Urban Agriculture roof garden. Mia is an avid reader and devotes much of her time to writing.
Lee Santos Silva (he/him) is an essayist, poet, and literary scholar whose work explores identity, queerness, cultural memory, and belonging within diasporic Cape Verdean communities. His writing engages the intersections of race, sexuality, migration, and history, often centering storytelling as a form of resistance and social intervention. A 2024 Luso-American Fellow with the Disquiet Literary Program, Storyboard Residency recipient, and Kimbilio fellow, he continues to develop work that bridges creative expression, literary scholarship, and community engagement.
Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in Poetry. As a trauma-informed educator, artist, facilitator, and mother; she uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, cultivate healing, and to explore the complex magic of mothering. She has received fellowships and awards from Tin House (now the McCormack Writing Center), the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, the Brother Thomas Fellowship, and St. Botolph Club Foundation, among others. Tatiana is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, teaches at GrubStreet, and has been on faculty at Emerson College, among other institutions. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and more. She is represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.
