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Aliah Lavonne Tigh

Body Under Another’s Tradition

By Aliah Lavonne Tigh Everyone in Anatomy pairs up,
receives a small baby pig.
The scalpel shines like water or a mirror—if you look, you see
yourself: gloved hand pushing a blade to open
the other animal’s chest. Someone drops
a knife, shouts,
Clean it up. This is how we learn to
dissect a body.
Jaden Fields

Just Is - Where There Are Black People in the Future

By Jaden Fields It is the steadiest “I love you”
Until the moon loses their footing in the sky
Which is to say - never
Or
I love you beyond time
Or
I love me beyond time
Mandy Shunnarah

ode to the hare

By Mandy Shunnarah We might have told them, if they’d asked,
the poppies wouldn’t make it to their melancholy
island, no matter how swift their sails snapped
across the sea. Then again, we love our land more
than they love theirs; we long to return, not flee.
That’s why you don’t see us boarding clippers
to claim to ground not ours. With our bountiful
fertile crescent, who needs more plenty?
Ladan Osman

Silhouette

By Ladan Osman I enter: carpet, curtains,
large, framed pictures of robed white men,
a glassy glare over a forehead, below the voice box,
students in bland shades.
I don’t belong, the luxury of thinking,
the wealth of talking about thought,
privilege of ease among important people.
Robin Gow

Chasing Helicopters on the Way Home from a Bowl of Spaghetti

By Robin Gow Someone I love is turning into an asterisk
and so I am running and the vultures are
as hungry as they’ve ever been. The size of genders.
The size of fatherhoods.
Tonee Mae Moll

Burning Haibun as Portrait: 9 months on HRT, Georgia on MS Word

By Tonee Mae Moll The font, not the nation, nor the southern state where lawmakers are folding the idea of the monster of my body into votes from folks whose homes they know are marked for flooding. I suppose I mean typeface—I’m supposed to remember the difference— like all exquisite things, we’ve got this etymology that feels apocryphal anyway. Anyway, let’s suppose I am a transitional shape.
Opal Moore

Spring Mix, for Ahmaud

By Opal Moore A small bird built a secret nest
beneath my balcony. There must be
hatchlings there, out of view.
She flies back and forth, small prey
in her beak.

Some kind of wren, I think.
Small, brown and quick. No time for
singing midday. Duty
is her instinct.
Sasa Aakil

Black Mermaids and Swimming and Red Hair and Ancestry

By Sasa Aakil They say, Ariel could never be black.
That black folks don't have red hair and can't swim no how.
They list all the reasons we have no right to this title
and I can only think of Hasan.

Brown skin boy with hair red as fire.
Quick wit, quick smile.
Born with sunset resting atop his head like crown.
Jose Hernandez Diaz

Ode to My Older Sister, Letty, for Being the First in the Family to Go to College

By Jose Hernandez Diaz I’m not sure if you knew it at the time, but you showed us, your younger siblings,
A great example. Maybe you were just happy going away to college,

Away from the responsibilities of watching over younger siblings all the time,
But I always remembered having pride when I’d tell people my sister

Is an English major and even more so when you became a teacher.
Rena Priest

Basket Lady and Greater Evils

By Rena Priest We tell our children stories
to keep them by our side:
Basket lady will get you.
She’ll put you in her basket
and carry you away,
deep into the forest
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