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Cynthia Manick

Dear Prairie: A Brown Girl Letter

By Cynthia Manick How does it feel to be something man hasn’t touched? Nothing
feeds your shape – how tall you want to aim, the texture from
root to tip, or the colors you choose to shake off like makeup.
It must be nice to have no load bearing walls – nothing to hold
you down or box in all you want to be.
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem

Raath Ki Rani

By Sham-e-Ali Nayeem The other night I sensed her
fragrance makes presence
known before witness.

Heard faint flowers
unseen anklets worn by
ghosts of Hyderabadi streets.
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?
Issam Zineh

Form & Occasion

By Issam Zineh The grammarians are up
in arms, and the war over
the semicolon has been reignited.

Today, the legislator notes his preference
for certain kinds of killers. Those,
one might say, with a European sensibility.
Aiya Sakr

Shahrazad, circa 2024

By Aiya Sakr On the day of the first flour massacre,
nothing I have ever said has been untrue.

Fourteen thousand and three hundred white
PVC flags flutter in the early spring morning.

By the time I cross the lawn, the IDF have killed
another child, and another flag springs up

Like a poppy.
This simile is too easy.
Kyle Carrero Lopez

Torricelli

By Kyle Carrero Lopez In 1994, U.S. Senator Bob Torricelli (D-New Jersey) introduced the Cuban Democracy Act, designed to “wreak havoc on that island.”

I’ll wreak havoc on that island I’ll ravage

that island I’ll plunder

that island see torn asunder that island
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.
Gbenga Adesina

PARADISE

By Gbenga Adesina North of the country, a road led to the desert.
Dust was the first sentence. The Sahara
was a white darkness in the distance,
and beyond it the glint of a Great Lake.
We drove past fields of ginger and wild purple onions.
There was a public garden and a ring of white egrets
around still water.
Tala Khanmalek

alternate universe in which family is abolished

By Tala Khanmalek here, in this place,
we do not describe each other as family,
or even, as chosen
family. here, in this place,
we reckon with the ongoing past.
Chrysanthemum

Alias

By Chrysanthemum Scheduling a follow-up with my PCP, I prepare
for disaster. Inevitable as flood, I hush a moniker
kept in confidence, wager my informed consent

for a Hancock granting passage. Gates are flimsy
metaphors. It’s more of a worn-down levee, dike
ready to burst without notice.
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