Reginald Dwayne Betts

At two a.m., without enough spirits
Spilling into my liver to know enough
To call my tongue to silence, Miles learned
Of the years I spent inside a box: a spell,
A kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,
But History: I robbed a man. This, months
Before he would drop bucket after bucket
On opposing players, the entire bedraggled
Bunch five and six and he leaping as if
Every lay-up erases something. That’s how
I’d saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating
Presence recompense for the pen; my father
Has never seen me play ball is part of this.
My son has seen me drink whisky in the morning
Is the other part. Tell me we aren’t running
Towards failure is what I want to ask my kid,
But it is two in the a.m. and despite him seeming
More lucid than me, I know it’s the cartoons reflecting
Back from his eyes, not a sense of the world. So
When he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know what’s
Happening is some straggling angel, lost from
His pack finding a way to fulfill his dream,
Breathing breath into this kid who crawls into
My arms, wanting, more than stories of my past,
The sleep that he has fought against while I
Held court at a bar with men who celebrated
The fact that when the drinking was done, I’d
Return to the home where my sons waited.

Amanda Nadelberg

Toward summer or its dependence
On demarcations in the sandy vial
Some tree spelling astronaut onto a
Planet’s arm, it stopped making sense.
I am not an apothecary or a wave
Or a dog by the 15th hole, I am not
A light sparking a whole country’s demise.
I will never be a towel holding someone’s
Sunscreen while they wash it off in foreign
Seas. My hair goes up and down, it’s true
As it is I am not a bag of tea nor will I ever
Be exceptionally happy. Let the director
Know I was distressed by the construction
Noise, that I had no known allergies that
My parents convinced me I was wanted
And why wouldn’t you believe them.
If the earth when it opened dragged away
Our sense of faith, doubt was an
Invention I preferred to ignore in the
Manner of solicitations by mail.

Kay Ulanday Barrett

For Guillermo Ulanday

When you’re well into your 30s and you have no heat in the entire
building and you loath that actually you’re used to this, that poverty
had been a training, poverty was a practice imposed on you since
childhood. So somehow, small-you knows how to keep warm
when it’s 5 °F outside with blankets towering a fort on your bed.
Yes, you’ve called & reported & notified sources to get the heat
back on. That’s not the point. What you remember as a child
is reading at candlelight or small space heaters you pretended
were robots or re-starting the electrical fuse when a space heater
took too much juice. You remember your mom crying a couple
times, looking over at your freezing grandparents, all of them
cloaked in the same formula: a hoodie, scarves, bubble jacket,
defeat. She continued to boil water for steam on all the stove
burners and with shivering hands ma would mumble, “we left
home for this? We left home for this?” She would cup her
hands blowing breath and each exhale felt like a wish to return.
And your grandparents just sighed & rocked each other in the
basement. All of us wearing starter jackets, the same kind ma
would sell along with phone cards to her kababayan as yet another
side hustle. You, a curious child who knew there was another
home but had never been there yet—would walk over and ask
your mama, hug her tightly, would nudge your grandparents
and hold their worn hands, to tell them about their home,
and so they did. The waiting hours became tides of the beach,
sunglow sweat, harmony of palm tree leaves catching wind,
endless fishing boats dragging nets that appeared to be its
own kind of cursive in sand. There we were, everyone huddled
in the smallest circle in a Chicago northwest apartment, waiting
for it to get warmer, waiting for our bodies to feel home again.

Sally Wen Mao

Dead nature or still life, I don’t know what I am.
Let me be still and alive for a moment, on this table

with the mutant persimmon, the comb with missing
teeth, and seven white hairs from my scalp.

The Henri-Charles Guerard etching Les Cocottes de la mort
pairs five pieces of origami with a human skull.

If you stare hard into the sockets of that skull,
you may see the hibernating animal. It breathes a bit,

but faintly. The heart in its ribs knows it is hunted
not for medicine but profit. For greed. This season ahead,

I will try to hibernate. I will draw the same portrait
of a dead woman in graphite, gouache, ink. November,

I line her brows. December, I color her ears. I attempt
chiaroscuro to make her surfaces appear three-dimensional.

At many points in life, you will lose your will to keep
going. I will this woman into existence. I will her into life.

It is desperate as hell. Outside the studio, the kingdom falls
down. The ice sheets migrate. Another planet, they plead.

Another social order, I plead. In the dappled darkness,
I sip burnt coffee. Degraded, the soil goes from soft

to fibrous. Degraded, the water stops irrigating its land.
Degraded, the reef turns white with fear—it ghosts

the seafloor. It halts. Degraded, a woman is still a woman.
She might turn red, burn a bit. She’s already an undesirable

color. I try to correct. I paint over her face before she suffers
more. Now the portrait is a still life. All we see of her form

are her hands reaching toward the basket of bruised
pears. All they seek is fruit. All they find is darkness.