Issue #7 February 2025

When I Take The Podium

By Leonora Anyango

When I take the podium
That day when I declare myself a poet, and let the world behold
What my pen had been penning, yesteryears, and today
I will feel light, and stand right and bright
I will beckon my heart, from deep within my being
And nudge it to celebrate, the dawn of my dream
When I take the podium


When I take the podium
That day in that place, unfamiliar and unknown
I will behold the elegance, and the splendor untold
I will adjust my shoulders, and elongate my neck
I will scan the throng, and proclaim my prowess
And render my voice, to echo its own echo
When I take the podium


When I take the podium,
That day when I take the mantra, to solemnize my words
I will speak with candor, and recite with relish
I will pace the rostrum, with a glorious gait
I will hear them ask, “From whence cometh she?”
And I will gaze straight, and recommence my words
When I take the podium

Curor

By Desirae Mercedes Chacon

Come, here neath this flesh
That covers bones and susceptible to ailments
Receiver of the sword & the blanket of our souls
Liquid Gold belonging to the depths of our corda
The animus to our spiritus
The rush of a Lover’s River
The payment of battlefields
Emergence of Nations
Elixer of Vita
Which waters the ground with sacrificial moments
Blush upon a virgin’s countenance
The colour of the crimson skies
Come here and bring warmth to these chilled bones
Frosted in winter
Laid down for eternity
Sealed in ivory encasement
As I reach for the calidum agilla
Cauterized by blazen snowflowers
Liquid of Calda
Bringing me heat
As your demeanor
As I walk upon Nix
As I walk in fields
As I inhale
Exhale and Breathe
The Breath of Life
Vapor Calidus
Syncretic clouds from Lungs with Caelum
Painting the Caeruleum and Album of the Vault of Heaven
Rain down upon me within the Chambers of my Heart
Awash me in your fine innocence
Silken in Purity
Abundant in Love

they’d pay a lot of money

By Amanda Wilde

for a way to bottle sanity
directions to the fountain of youth
passion sans pain
to solve the fractal equation
break the light barrier
time travel

they’d pay a lot of money
to remember
to forget
her body
what it looks like
what it feels like
what it does

they’d pay a lot of money
for a cure
to never reset another password
the secret of life
5 more minutes
1 more day

they’d pay a lot of money
for someone to love them
the way i love you

Summer Mornings

By Kendra Gauge

Rule number one: No mental crisis before coffee.

Wake up. Feel the gentle breeze of the box fan from the foot of the bed and wait for the alarm that lets you know it’s really time to wake up. Stare at the water stain on the ceiling and wonder when you’ll fix it – where on your infinite list of house improvement projects is the stain that’s spread across your ceiling, growing for years? You wonder if the home might improve by removing you.

No.

Remember your rule – how can you be sure it’s really a crisis and not just a lack of legal substance abuse?

Slide your feet to the floor. Stare at the walls you meant to paint a year ago, the half-finished first coat with dark teal taunting from beneath. You’ve been down this rabbit hole – it reminds you of your own inability to complete anything. Every book on your shelf you’ve never read. Every hobby you bought supplies for just to give it up, collect dust. Every partner who left in search of more; significant and othered. Every failed suicide attempt still makes you a failure.

Stop.

Stand.

Stretch.

Remember—no crisis before coffee.

Drink.

Live.

Green Glass Butterflies

By Aleshia Passantino

By Aleshia Passantino

Pain.

Pain, Bena thought, as she grabbed her chest and fell to her knees. The lawn mower slowed its growl. Her hands slipped from the clutch of the handle that she had held so tight to.

Oh God, not now, not like this.

Her body lay on the ground surrounded by the natural landscape she had been trying so hard to contain. She was returning to an innocence only a child could know.

Verbena Bradley was born ‘poor white trash’ in Itta Bena, Mississippi. It was a brand she would end up running from for the rest of her life. All forty odd years of it. She got the nickname ‘Bena’ because she was born six weeks early. She weighed a mere four pounds. Her Mama called her ‘Itty Bitty,’ which went on to be ‘Itty Bena,’ which ended up just ‘Bena.’

Bena’s Grandmother Flosey was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, to a family of sharecroppers. They didn’t know reading, writing or arithmetic.

The family moved south to Itta Bena after the devastating tornado of 1936. They chose Itta Bena for its rich Mississippi Delta soil and its wealth of cotton.

In that moment, laying there somewhere between life and death, Bena wondered how many of her ancestors had also died under the canopies of trees, pulled to the reprieve of the shade from the crops only in their final moments of life.

Breathe, was all she could think. The sound of her breath lapped like waves on a deserted beach.

Bena had spent much of her life wishing to be on a deserted beach, hoping no one ever saw her. Random memories began to flash through her mind as if on an old projector.

She thought about how her sister used to tell people that she didn’t speak ‘til she was four years old.

There was a reason for that.

She had to keep other people’s secrets.

In the first four years of her life, she had made herself invisible by not having a voice. Learning to live in a home with a predator taught her the stealthy stillness needed for survival. It was a superpower that she perfected well into adulthood. Her voice seemed to bear no weight in the world.

Bena didn’t remember the vow of silence she had taken as a child, but she knew that it had shaped the way she perceived her role in the world. An observer. Masochistically patient.

She enjoyed the process of observing things.

It started with animals. Butterflies at first. She remembered the green glass brandy snifter Mama had given her to keep the dead butterflies in. Bena always had thought it odd how that alluring, elegant glass found its way into her hands. It seemed so out of place in her world. It was probably given to her mama by someone she had helped along the way in exchange for a charitable deed.

Her mama was a kind soul, and she took Bena with her when she went to visit sick relatives or friends whom time had forgotten. Bena remembered playing quietly while they would have coffee and visit. She would eavesdrop on conversations about the person’s estranged children, the knocks that life had awarded them or what the pastor had preached on that week to save them from the hellfire and brimstone. Then Mama would help them wash their hair or tend their garden or whatever it was that they needed help doing.

Bena would observe as the elders struggled to hold their coffee cups. She watched as they slowly made their way through the homes they had lovingly built for their families. Lonely homes with addresses and phone numbers forgotten. These people seemed to have been discarded along the way.

Once the machines of our economy, these sharecroppers, farmers, miners and mill workers were eventually separated by the sieve of technology and progress. Society saw them as people that couldn’t keep up and they were banished. From the conversations that Bena overheard she knew that they chose not to keep up. This new way of life simply wasn’t for them. They were tired. Hardened by the elements of the environment in which they lived.

Bena remembered their weathered faces. Their hunched backs and scarred leather-like hands that were wrecked by clawing their way through life. They had seemed so weak and frail to Bena, but as time went on, she admired them for their strength. These early gatherings in her life became a sturdy foundation built from perseverance and reserve.

These visits with the sick and the dying were some of Bena’s first memories. She belonged there in these places where more substance was found in silence than words. These gatherings brought her comfort. 

She remembered the smell of death. Musky and pungent, yet oddly sweet. She got very familiar with this smell at a young age, and it broke her in a way that one breaks a wild horse.

She was born wild, and she had wanted to keep it that way. She related to things wild and free in a way that no one understood. Bena thought of how she would sit on the side of their old, dilapidated houseboat on Roebuck Lake, feet dangling in the water, and hold out her hands and wait.

Butterflies would come find her. They would land on her small palms. She could remember the dainty feeling of their wings, the apprehensive touch of their antennas. Most of the time it was when they were sick and tired like Mama’s elderly friends. She had many memories of sitting with the butterflies in their last moments of life.

She became their caretaker. Bena learned compassion on these occasions. She could feel the energy leaving their lifeless bodies. Their final resting place became the green glass brandy snifter.

It was tragic and beautiful, she thought, and through it, as well as her time spent with her Mama helping others, she learned the beauty of death. The great poetry of life playing out in her tiny hands, a place where words weren’t necessary.

Those early years taught Bena to weep for something other than herself. Something other than her scraped knee or her smaller portion of cake.

She learned to feel pain alongside another living thing. She learned that sometimes, another creature’s pain can hurt you worse than your own. It was in that sharing of grief that she learned vulnerability.

There’s a quiet in chaos that can only be relished if we are open and aware.

Bena wasn’t sure if this was her own thought as she lay there motionless contemplating life or a higher power speaking to her, but it sounded like her mama.

She had been so busy and preoccupied that the universe stopped her in her tracks and forced her to look deeper. She was now at the mercy of fate.

Who will love my children? Bena thought.

As she slipped away from the middle suburbia address that other people longed so desperately for, she was relieved to be on the cusp of being rid of it all. The mowing, the dusting, the vacuuming. A never-ending controlled chaos that she now loathed.

As good as she had been at keeping it all tied together with a string of hemp, the idea of having it all instantly go away was a feeling of free that Bena had quietly and selfishly longed for. The things that had really mattered to her throughout her life had become hazy, dissolving like mist on mountains.

She had allowed the world to take those simple standards away from her through Facebook, Instagram and all the ‘stories’ we like to tell.

What about the real stories I didn’t tell my children because I was too busy making up fairy tales for everyone else? Bena thought. It’s too late to fix it. Bena tried to cling to her life for the sake of her children.

Try as she might, it was as if a butterfly was escaping the cocoon, longing desperately to fly away from it all. It reminded her of a simpler time. The time when she was a little girl. A time when she believed she really could fly if she found her ‘happy thought.’

Freedom.

Oh God how she had longed for freedom. Freedom from the exhaustion that pretending created. It would have been so easy for her to just run away from it all but the love for her children held her back.

Something I was good at. Running.

She thought about that word ‘running.’ It was as crisp as biting into a fresh fall apple just picked from the tree. Delicious. She knew one bite would never satisfy her.

The wind kicked up around where her lifeless body still lay in her front yard. Leaves began to fall on the lush green manicured lawn. It occurred to Bena that those same leaves would have fallen whether the grass had been mowed or not. The smell of the season was so fragrant around her. Smells that were familiar, although she couldn’t put her finger on them. Whatever they were they made her feel like a kid again.

She thought of her home in Alabama, the one that her family had moved to after her Daddy took the job at the Ruberoid plant. The sound of Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight” wafting through the open windows from the record player out to the driveway. Mama longingly singing. It brought with it the tinny smell of the window’s screen heavy with the stench of mold and Daddy’s cigarettes.

Bena often played in that dirt driveway as a child until her daddy’s friends started dumping their oyster shells in it. There was something magical about Alabama dirt. Bena could taste it in the tomatoes that Mama grew in the garden and the mudpies her older sister Charlotte forced her to eat.

Home.

How she longed for one again. To be protected, not the protector. She hadn’t had a home in the fifteen years since Mama and Daddy had passed away.

Bena heard a warm, comforting voice that encompassed her as she lay dying.

Mama? Is that you? Bena thought. She could smell the faint scent of roses. Mama had always smelled of roses. Bena didn’t know if it was soap, perfume, powder or the oils rubbed off from the garden, but she remembered that smell.

The guide never answered, but Bena sensed in her being that it was her mama.

“Stand up. I want to show you something,” the familiar voice said.

Suddenly, Bena was a child running in the woods. She was barefoot. She had a red and white outfit on. The shirt was sleeveless and the shorts read “Runner” down the side.

“Runner. My second brand in life,” she said. “This one I gave myself.”

She was dirty and bruised from playing hard outside all day, and her sweaty hair was a tangled mess.

Gross, Bena thought.

“Beautiful,” her mama said. “Look at that smile. Do you remember that feeling?”

“Of running through the woods barefoot?” Bena asked.

“Of being happy.”

Bena thought about it. She remembered the freedom of being a child. Of waking and running outside to seize the day. Spending the days wandering from task to task. Tasting honeysuckle, eating figs, blackberries and scuppernongs that were still warm from the sun. Their fragrance so sweet.

She remembered making pine straw houses with her sister, Charlotte, riding an old piece of discarded tin roof down Pine Hill, searching out the latest fort in the woods and drinking from the water hose on a hot day.

Those forgotten times were submerged in the mundane of adulthood but steeped in nostalgia. Bena hadn’t given them any thought lately. She was too busy pretending to be a grown up.

There had to be times that were hard for her family when she was growing up. She knew there were. She remembered having to scrub black mold off the walls of their tiny home, the walls so thin from past cleaning that holes would start to emerge. But looking back now, she chose to only think about the feeling of the grass cooling under her bare feet in the yard after a long day of adventure.

“When the bats come out it’s time to come home,” Mama would say.

Bena remembered running from the bats toward home, knowing it would mean she’d have to get cleaned up, washing away the remnants of the adventures of the day. She was at her best as a child. She did it well. She ate mud pies and caught fireflies and ran among briar patches chasing butterflies. She did it all with reckless abandon. The sun filtered through the trees of those sacred woods behind her house as if to say, “Welcome, we’ve been expecting you.”

“I do remember,” Bena said to no one. “I remember being happy.”

Her lifeless body lay in the middle-class suburbia front yard where she had always been surrounded by people but utterly alone.

If she had been in her woods, she could have had the protection of the birds and the squirrels, or the centaurs and fairies that she was certain were hiding somewhere beyond the boundaries of her yard. She could be anything she wanted in those trees and, if nothing else, she could be herself. Free to not speak to scream. Free to roam shirtless in the sun. Free to lay in the dirt and dream.

Bena made sense there in those trees. The world made sense. Snakes were snakes. Although frightening at times, they were accepting and rather uninvolved. The playing field was level. It had been a world so different than the world she had created for herself as an adult. Less scary.

“Bena,” Mama said, “I say this with all the love that I have for you. You have spent your life trying to manage the chaos and heartbreak. Not just for you, but for everyone around you. You’ve done it with the utmost of intentions, but I am here to tell you something that I wish my mama had told me. And that is let go. Let go of the thing that needs to be done right now and look around you. Sometimes it can wait. There are sunsets and gatherings with loved ones that can’t. The sun will go down. Loved ones will pass. This grass in your yard will still be here, growing. But your children will be all grown up. They won’t be standing at your knees looking up at you asking you to play with them forever. Come back with me. Let me take you back to show you what you’ve been missing. Let me remind you of the important things that you have forgotten.”

Bena turned to her mother. A tear ran down her face. The significance of the moment set in. She closed her eyes tight and squeezed Mama’s hand.

“Yes.”