Darkness follows us.
Car tires sneak
through these streets.
Above, headlights
smile and rumble
in on-coming traffic.
Below we keep our lives
hidden like graves.
We shoot out the sun
and day vanishes
into concrete as we
listen to the apostrophes
of tired blind men
click their canes
down unnumbered
alleys. The dust
under this bridge
never settles.
We look
into the muddy sky
where the gray light
of night pulls us
away. Always
the traffic to remind
us we breathe.
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.
