The food is cold and so his mind drifts
a blue fin angling toward deeper water
the sky’s thin music
like a woman’s singing
from the other side of a wall
and so he tongues that night’s gristle
he can spit it out later
he can cover it up like a cat
his heart throbbing
muscular butterfly among the marigolds
though now he nods/speaks little
to the swagged faces
animal/vinegar stink of a sister
a brother’s waxen scalp
his parents higher up
with their bronzed teeth and wrecked liquors
he waits for the shove-off into dusk
when he can drag the short blade
through woven bark
the initial or full name signifying possession
or un-thought-through greed
then the longer blade pinched open
for deeper cutting
sometimes so quickly
accidentally
the skin, even the shirt tails
are blurred with bloody moth-prints
though he sometimes draws it
on purpose, a dare
over a thigh or forearm’s bunched skin
so he can follow each layer’s snap, release
a fraying rope inside the dermis
and sense something give
the whole elegant structure collapsing
a girl’s hard breathing beside him (her turn next)
as blood oozes from the hardly bleeding wound
spit rubbed in to make this tribal
the names still un-carved
the witness still to be carved
the girl’s arm laid out in a stench of creosote
for eternity is a steel blade in a child’s hand
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.
