Trouble by Catherine Kyle

BY CATHERINE KYLE

Trouble

I dreamt I was a tree, deep in a forest. My roots were wound around a boulder covered with moss and needles I had shed. A voice in the dream said, “See—you’ve become so accustomed to this pain, you’ve grown yourself around it.” 

Even then, my roots did not let the boulder go. Even then, they clung to it like a precious creature sheltered, a satchel held close to the chest.

*

I do not know how to speak about this. I do not know the word for watching someone I love become, voluntarily and involuntarily, swallowed by a garment they put on. I do not know the cry to make as the fur grows over their hands. I do not know what plea to scream as the collar grows over their face. As the line between the sleeve and their skin disappears. 

A thing that transcended words. Words, the most reliable life raft I had known. 

*

I dreamt I was battling a beast in the woods. Snow made crystals on the ground. In the dream, I was flat on my back, lifting a shield with one exhausted arm. The beast pounded on it, scratched at it, knocking its jewels loose. It roared terribly, shaking snow from the bare branches. Its body moved, reckless and relentless. But the eyes were those of someone I loved. In anguish. As horrified as I was.

The eyes spoke in words I do not know. The beast’s breaths, rising through the cold air in puffs, were words I do not know. 

*

I do not know what to say when someone I love says, voice shaking, “If it is here, I will drink it”—then goes to the market, returns home, and fills the shelves with it. When my questioning of this, soft as a sparrow, is met with snarls and barks.

Whom am I speaking to, in these moments? The person, or the beast? 

* 

How many monsters can a heart contain? How many selves can dwell there? I imagine myself the way the beast must have seen me—a hindrance, a noisy gnat. 

I imagine myself the way the person must have seen me, but here, there is only a void. I imagine myself as two eyes pleading, the silence of lifting a shield. 

*

When everything explodes, when the powder keg of the home finally flashes into cinders, I dream I am hanging from a single board of its wreckage, dangling over a cliff. Smoke pours from the ruins of the home. The board I am gripping is charcoal. A voice in the dream whispers to me, “All you have to do is let go.” 

I know I will hit every rock on the way down. I know the sea is there to catch me. 

I unlock my fingers like roots from the board. I fall and fall and fall. 

* 

Foam and salt slice every red wound. I float on my back, gaze skyward. I have no name for the pillar of smoke at the cliff’s edge that used to be a home. I have no name for the absence of a figure that might have stood there and gazed back. 

I swim because the stars have no language, just presence. I swim because the waves have no words, just a pulse. I swim because my own heart is present and pulsing. I let these things carry me on. 

Catherine Kyle is the author of Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other poetry collections. She was the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award, a finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize in poetry, and a finalist for the 2021 Pinch Literary Awards. She works as an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing.

Checking my Dead Mother’s Horoscope by Alicia Turner

BY ALICIA TURNER

“the dead / borrow so little from / the past / as if they were alive.”

A Little White Shadow — Mary Ruefle

Shadow Work (on Checking my Dead Mother’s Horoscope)

It’s a Tuesday morning.
I am scrolling through an online obituary guestbook to relive my mother’s life.

She’s immortalized on the top of the page — the photo a scanned copy of a Polaroid from a throwaway camera that I once begged her to develop.

She’s wearing a solid white t-shirt — one that she changed out of just moments after the photo was taken, in fear of spilling something on it.

I always remember the minor moments, but not the mess. And I hate that about myself.

My mother went missing and was declared dead on the same day: Tuesday, October 17th, 2006.

Her body wasn’t found until weeks later, in the passenger seat of my uncle’s beaten-down, blue truck, nestled in muddy water and the river’s rage —

which is to say that she gave herself back to the earth and is the reason the earth has something to grieve.

Then, at fourteen, I colored it painfully ironic – that blue was her favorite color, and she never stopped moving, and she loved to swim. I was sure when the truck accelerated that she saw the sky in the rear view. Tested time, balled up her fists, and fought fate. Told fate to “Go fuck itself,” like she’d tell anyone who held her down, who told her to be still.

My mother was a twisting, turning thing. My mother was reckless in still water.

***

I’ve always said with certainty that October 17th was “blue.” On that day, the rain was relentless. I didn’t bring an umbrella to school because no one predicted it —

not even the weekly forecast in the back of the countertop magazines (* that my mother would refuse to get rid of solely for the horoscope sections). She was a real-life laugh track and a heavy heart (a proclaimed Leo rising), who loved to have her life be read back to her.

But not me, no — all Virgo. I’ve always been too afraid of flying off the page, to show up for life, to slow down. I’ve always been too careful to go puddle jumping for the fear of tracking messes – but my mother encouraged it. She liked predicted chaos, as simple and complex as it was.

***

This is the part where I transition into telling you that I tracked her body for weeks. And I tell you that the water was too elevated to find her. That October 17th was blue because it bruised me like a punch to the gut. Like a gut feeling. And you want to tell me that “it’s not [my] fault,” but I am not a blameless God. I am no God at all.

But on that day the moon was in Virgo.

And the moon controls the tides.

And rivers eventually end up flowing into oceans.

I make-believe that the sky helped me intuit the words she needed to her — and trust that I had the best view of her life.

While irrational, I wish I would’ve called it sooner. Not waited for her to call.

Not pretended to believe in underwater voyages where I spent whole days holding my breath.

Because now I think of her every time I find a phone book.

I think of her every time it’s bright out and twice when it rains.

I always check the weather before I leave the house, because I like predictions. Predictability.

And I always check my horoscope.

***

Today, it tries to teach me the difference between surface and depth:

“There’s a grand water configuration mysteriously guiding your hand.

Have you heard the water is still rising?”

From somewhere behind the shadow work, my mother’s starry-eyed news reads:

“Dear, Leo: Be cautious. Water is the only element that can extinguish your flame. But do not fear — your life is loud, all blazing. You are an incessantly-lit cigarette – no ashes. The river’s mouth is always hungry for more — but so are you.

You will never be caught dead in a white t-shirt, to be a stain on your own life.”

Alicia Turner holds an MA in English and is a grant writer & storyteller. She can be found writing confessional, conversational poetry in an over-priced apartment somewhere in WV. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Four Lines (4lines), CTD's ‘Pen-2-Paper’ project, Voicemail Poems, FreezeRay Poetry, Defunkt Magazine, Sybil Journal, The Daily Drunk, ExPat Press, Rejection Letters Press, Screen Door Review, J Journal Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Screenshot Lit, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, Cartridge Lit., Space City Underground, époque press, among others.

After Life by Aimée Keeble

By Aimée Keeble

After Life

When I die, I'm reunited with my parents for thousands of years. I look exactly like I did at twelve and my mom looks thirty-five which makes her happy. My dad is kind of a blur between thirty-seven and eighty. The cocker spaniel is back and so is the cat that ate my hamster. But he's outside because he was always outside. We have a great time, all four of us. There are always half-fizzy two liters of 7Up in the fridge and I wonder if there is any significance to this. We play board games a lot, especially Splat which I think disappeared from retail sometime in the early 90s. It feels good to be in memory. Mary Poppins comes on the TV a lot during the Holidays, and we normally make time to sit down together and watch it. Outside the windows, the sky is gold and moving.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, my dad says to me.

Can you spell it?

S, I start.

No, he says.

S, I say again.

Wrong! He cries out.

I say S a few more times and he's looking at me with his forever eyes, smiling like he's always known he's smarter than me. And I'm so glad about that.

Can you spell it? He asks again.

I look at my mother but she's holding the cocker spaniel like a baby and Dick Van Dyke is talking to penguins. Animals can be distracting.

Can you spell it?

I give up, I tell my dad. I want to fall asleep on the sofa before the movie ends.

I,T! He yells. He's delighted.

I get it, I say. That's so stupid.

The movie ends but I'm awake, trying to backtrack my mind into getting to the answer.

Move on, my dad says.

I can't, my brain won't let me, I answer.

It's dark now and I stand in the doorway calling the cat's name. He doesn't come and so I go further into the yard and say his name a few more times. I turn back and close the front door and stand in the hallway, enjoying the safe night feeling. In life, the cat was the first to go. My dad would have been proud of him.

Aimée Keeble has her Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Agency. Aimée lives in North Carolina and is working on her second novel.

A Visit to El Cementerio Viejo by Isa Guzman

BY ISA GUZMAN

A Visit to El Cementerio Viejo
for Titi Paula

Before the trip, I drew the Ten of Swords.

It was the first time going back to La Isla for close to ten years. The first time I would be there as a woman. The last time I was on the island, I was saying my goodbyes to Titi. It has been years, but it was too difficult to imagine the island without her. It wasn't possible to acknowledge it. In my mind, I could still envision her living her life at her house in Ceiba Sur. Feeding the stray chickens, or dogs, or people with whatever she had left in her small kitchen. There was no other truth.

As expected, the trip started out rough. We had to go from San Juan, in the northern part of the island, to Juana Diaz, a town well on the southern coast. We were expecting a long drive, but because of some complications, we only left the capital as the sun was going down. We would drive into the night.

I had gone to the island with my chosen family, and we all had our plans to reconnect with the aspects of island life that always eluded us. Puerto Rico is a place we so desperately want to call home. Distance and time estrange us. I think it is easier for the rest to say this is home, but not me.

Watching the island from the passenger window, I couldn't help but feel each sword pierce me. Who could ignore the failing infrastructure? Unlit and incomplete highways? The empty buildings? The for-sale signs on dozens of houses? That unrelenting thought that I was just a visitor, or worse, an intruder, with no business being here? Even the mountains appeared to turn their faces away from me.

I carried these swords over the next few days and nights. It was difficult to appreciate the views, the sounds, and the calm. There was an impending collapse inside my chest and mind. I spent Sunday night wasted on the balcony of our rental, overlooking a mountainside covered in trees. In the worst of it, a hallucination overwhelmed me with images of figures walking back and forth through the trees. An army of ghosts who refused to approach the house, but would stand in the middle of the road and stare up at me.

Then my turn came. We agreed to a day to take a few hours to drive to Juncos, and make that all important visit. I wanted to visit my family house, but first I had to pay respects to my Titi and the rest of my familia at the Cementerio Viejo.

The day was rain. At least, all I can recall is the rain that poured as we approached the town. My heart jumped at the first houses we saw. The basketball court. The cemetery itself. Little had changed. In fact, the area was doing well compared to many other towns on the island. As soon as we stopped, I got out of the car and began walking straight to my destination with only the graveyard attendant called after me to take his umbrella.

As always, I wandered around the painted white stones. Every time my parents and I would visit the island, we always set time to pay our respects. Every visit was a strange incident. Often, we got lost. My thoughts were racing with memories of under-cooked chicken, lullabies, mosquito nets, quenepa trees by her driveway, the stray dogs she took in, and her coffee I never got to taste. I was lost. Lost, lost. Right until I noticed the unmarked grave, apparently occupied by a witch, situated right next to my family's tomb.

The rain hadn't let up. A trembling took over my limbs. It overwhelmed me with the quiet and finality of the moment. The first time presenting myself as the woman I am. The tears came easily, but I hadn't expected how clear my voice would be. I began speaking in fluent Spanish. Something I had never done. My Spanish is beyond rota. I began talking to my great aunt, my grandmother, and everyone else interred in that tomb. Spoke with them about my struggles with my gender and all the horrible experiences I’ve gone through and hidden. Spoke with them about all my hopes and dreams. Spoke with them in earnest about the hopelessness that defined these two years of both the pandemic and my transition.

It wasn't a confession. I was searching for acknowledgment. A sign that I could be accepted and loved. So many regrets had tangled themselves inside my body. My self-imposed silence being the most prominent. As the words kept flowing out, the silence of the area finally eased me. I felt as if I was being listened to. I was being listened to. At my last words, a plea to protégeme y cuídame, the rain let up. Some sun broke through the clouds. It was the cue to leave in peace. A moment of tremendous love. Not only for the possibility of the acceptance from my family, but a tremendous self love that brought me to this moment. To speak myself without fear.

Isa Guzman is a poet and recent Brooklyn College MFA graduate from Los Sures, Brooklyn. Dedicating her work to the hardship, traumas, and political struggle within the Boricua Diaspora, especially the LGBTQ+ (Boriquir) communities within it. Isa helps lead several projects including: The Titere Poets Collective, The Pan Con Titeres Podcast, La Esquina Open Mic, and La Cocina Workshop! She have published her work through several magazines, including The Acentos Review, The Bridge, Public Seminar, and also appears in several anthologies, such as The Other Side of Violet, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. You can follow her through their social media: @Isa_Writes.

Poetry by Kathy Paul

By Kathy Paul

Kathryn Paul is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Her poems have appeared in The Examined Life; Last Leaves; Abandoned Mine; Rogue Agent; Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine; Hospital Drive; The Ekphrastic Review; Lunch Ticket; Stirring; and Pictures of Poets. Kathy lives in Albuquerque, NM

Peak Hurricane Season by Laura Andrea

By Laura Andrea

Peak Hurricane Season

Fall eeks into the tropics during sunset. Six in the afternoon beats its way inside through the blades of the box fan on my bedroom window. It’s still too hot to rip apart childhood novels and high school textbooks in a newfound passion for collage. It will be until at least late November. The poetry will have to find itself, black out itself. 

I don’t remember locking the bedroom door. A habit stuck in a cycle of breaking and reforming, a specter onto itself. It’s the only way to assure the stillness promised by autumn. Hurricane season is entering its peak and the greens are greener. From the right angle—surrendered on the ground—they can cover up most of the sky. The blue is the giveaway but only if you’ve bragged to an expired lover about it. 

Reaccustoming myself to perpetuity is taking some getting used to. If the seasons don’t change the people less so. The door is always swung a smidge, not that we need more than a crack or keyhole to breach back into something better left. Death here isn’t cyclical, seasonal, or expected—but violent. Purposeful. No skeletal trees and marigold yellow leaves to remind us rebirth is normal. Rebirths are suspect. 

We can play at it though. Midday sun yells at me for traversing the busy street. It’s not my fault the sidewalks are parallels, never to cross paths. Refuge takes the form of a good ol’ American store seasonally defined even at this perfect latitude. I hold a baby’s long-sleeved flannel, soft and flat and perfectly orange. The store is empty save from employees stocking the clothes that won’t sell in this heat. The shirt is cheap because it’s small. Would make a worthwhile shoplifting story. It’ll never get lost in my hands, so I hang it back on the rack. They have clean bathrooms; the crying should happen there. 

If only the beer would stay chilled in my hand, nightfall could trick me. Like a fake engagement ring worn only to bed. It fits better on my thumb anyway (freakish knuckles). The humidity induced sweat activate the ink. The green ring stain around the wrong finger is embarrassingly permanent. More green. More goddamn green. 

Relentless. A metaphor too confused to seduce anyone. Greed, innocence, nature, jealousy. 

It’s all gotta go. 

The pile is intrusive. Moved from desk chair to bed to nightstand back to desk chair, like stubborn laundry. A dry erase marker, a trio of little alien men, an alcohol wipes package, two shirts, a hat, a palm tree tapestry. On occasion the pile will decorate the floor, but it imitates a hill too well. Putting everything back makes me scream so I tape them to the empty teal wall. It’s green enough to be punished too. 

The wall faces two windows. After long enough it might yellow the assortment of plastic. 

Midnight welcomes light storming. It’s finally dark enough drown the green even though I still feel it there. The window doesn’t even feel cold under my hands pressing against it. I must look like an apparition, the blackout curtains draping my back. Every flash of lightning forces me to blink. To hide the phantoms roaming the green. 

It’s been a year or maybe a day. Time keeps folding in on itself and looping around. Bedroom furniture shifts around again but there’s nowhere else to put these old books except under the bed. Not enough pictures of 17-year-old me were taken so she rips herself from those pages and stands at the foot of the bed. She’d roam, but there’s little space for foot traffic and doesn’t want to get yelled at. 

If I win tonight, she’ll join the green, below. If I don’t, we’ll stare at each other through the mirror usually covered with the tapestry. If she’s especially willful, she’ll wear me and visit the house. It’s slightly off and exactly the same as she left it. 

Lately it only rains at night. It’s almost cold. Almost fooling. It’s hard too. Reminder of what is to come, the danger zone we’re about to enter and how the past months’ heat was a warning. Summer is a ghost haunting the Caribbean. Autumn is its white bedsheet. 

Laura Andrea is a writer and educator from Carolina, Puerto Rico. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. Her work can be found in Contrapuntos, Acentos Review, and Boundless Anthology, among others. They’re the author of ‘genderbi’ (Ghost City Press, 2022) a poetry microchap, and writes the column 'Monsterfucker' for Final Girl Bulletin Board. You can follow their day-to-day on Instagram & Twitter @lauranlora

A Child of Air by Ruth Nakamura

By Ruth Nakamura

A Child of Air

A large part of me connects to earth. I am solid ground, cannot swim well, though I enjoy being in gentle shallow water. I am rounder, heavier, curvier. Give me bread, wheat-stalks of the earth, ground and transformed, fluffy, give me a few slices of buttered bread, French bread from the market, oven bread from the Pueblos, let me use it to mop up red chile ladled atop over-easy eggs as a meal, mini harvest, and I am happy. 

But I am also a child of air. Give me the moon in a jar, an imaginative work of art or story, let me wallow, introverted, in creative writing, journaling, dream records. As the season changes, I look to the sky. Easily, I float there, follow the migratory birds. I can picture their journey, the temperature of the wind over each feather. The subtle colors they bend into the cooling evenings, ghosts of lavender, soft rills of pink. 

The long lines of Canadian geese traveling south along the Rio Grande river bring autumn in their wings, in their songs, a trill I grew up hearing, down in in our river valley home. A thread of sound to weave that feeling of changing light, a rounder, softer, dimmer gold, into my bones, a siren call to lift stifling heat, carry it away on monsoon clouds.

What is it about the season that makes creativity so prolific for me? Many of my poems unfold in the rite of autumn, her ritual of leaf flame. The entire world I inhabit steps into a kind of nostalgia, settling deeper into itself as I sink my feet into muddied banks of Guadelupe River, stand on the sluggish brown bank, become still as a snowy egret hunting the moon, her feathers speared with light of cottonwood gold. I wear the mask of Dia de Los Muertos. Think of marigolds and monarchs while there is still gilt to be seen, I too am filtered through the lens of dying leaves. 

It must be that I am witness to death. All around, insects are on their last flight, they glitter more than ever, the blaze of cicadas, the leap of grasshoppers, the gathering songs of butterflies, frantic, edged, then slowed and dulled, the last of the leaf chomp on my giant sunflowers, a feast for birds. 

It must be that I am witness to leaving. I take down the hummingbird feeders, they need to travel south with their colors and their songs, while wrapping myself in sweaters against desert chill, or tapestried jackets, don long sleeve ware to knit the warmth they must travel to find. The bluebirds. Gone. The geese, heralds, take weeks and are far more visible, bodies and bodies, a mass exodus. 

It must be that I am witness to gathering. The preparation of winter birds, they fatten themselves at the birdfeeders, gorge upon my giant sunflowers, grown from twenty-year-old seeds my dad gave me. Squirrels in the mountains run up ponderosa trunks with fattened cheeks. Mammalian fur thickens. The chile is roasted in front of grocery stores or we buy it in bulking sacks, pounds of it, peel, roast, repeat. Its splinters of smoky sharp smell breathe fall into the air. It is our leaving-summer-song. 

I stand here fully welcoming the season. Preparing for the stew with buttered bread, the early dark, the stacks of wood, the morning frost, smell of cedar woodsmoke sharp and clean as a blessing beneath starlight. A break from wildfires. Sometimes from the wind. Sheltered in the valley of mountains. A longer sleep. An assessment of memory and dream brought on by the call of the great horned owl at 2 a.m. 

It must be that all these things, they are old hand mirrors we hold up to peer within, finding ourselves inside, on the fringes. If we allow true sight, we find the connection to the world we walk. We are not separate from Her natural rhythm. 

Things go to ground, to inner sanctum. And so do we.  

The Dark Lull by Melissa Pleckham

By Melissa Pleckham

The Dark Lull

Nothing’s ever completely dead.

In the 1971 film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death — a film so slow, so subtle that one hesitates to call it a horror film, let alone a vampire film, although that’s exactly what it is — this line is uttered by the pale, red-haired woman whom the titular Jessica is surprised to find squatting in the farmhouse she’s recently acquired with her husband and friend. The trio have just crossed the fog-veiled Connecticut countryside in a black hearse with the word “LOVE” scrawled in crimson on its door; Jessica, fragile as fine china after a mental health episode only vaguely alluded to, demands the hearse stop at a weed-choked cemetery for grave rubbings. She hangs the headstone-sized tissue paper trophies around her bed, runs her fingers across them delicately. This, we are shown, is a woman for whom death is a part of life in a very tangible way.

So when the red-haired woman suggests a seance one night after dinner, and responds to Jessica’s friend’s skepticism with this line that calls into question the very existence of death itself, or at least death as any sort of permanent or all-encompassing state, Jessica seems to smile in agreement, readily playing the part of medium when beseeched. There are no Victorian parlor theatrics in this film, but the scene — and the line — have stayed with me just the same. It’s a film that I like to revisit as the heat and chaos of late summer begin to melt imperceptibly into the dark lull of autumn. But this year, the line resonated with me more than ever. I kept it in my mind, I ran my fingers over it like Jessica with her grave rubbings.

Is it true that death is a myth? A fairy tale? Does anything, anyone, ever die completely?

The last October before the world stopped, I spent Halloween in the labyrinth of bones beneath the city of Paris. It was my first visit to the city, and my first Halloween spent out of the country. My husband and I wanted to do something special, unforgettable.

We walked to the catacombs from our hotel in the 6th arrondissement. It had been raining but that morning was cool and cloudy, the air sweet and sharp. The day before we’d visited Père Lachaise, the trees lining the stone paths of the cemetery crowned with gold and orange. Jim Morrison’s grave was surrounded by a fence, the ground nearby strewn with gifts, offerings. On the way out we passed a mausoleum with its door partially ajar; in the dark, we could see cigarette butts, an empty liquor bottle, and, stretched stark white against the stark white marble, a large bone that looked like a femur. Shocked, we looked away. “Someone’s been partying here,” I said. “Some French kids.” 

But who can say who threw that party? Who can say who was invited, who attended? Nothing’s ever completely dead.

At the catacombs that Halloween morning, we could be certain more bones awaited us in that dank darkness beneath the city of light, down that endlessly spiraling staircase, through that electric torch-lit tunnel, on the other side of the archway that demarcates the start of that self-proclaimed Empire of Death. The catacombs sprawl like veins beneath the skin of the city, a second Paris that is far less lively but no less full of lives, or at least the earthly remains of those who once lived them.

I had never been in an ossuary before, and once I adjusted to the darkness, to the feeling of being so far underground, what struck me most was how peaceful it was. How quiet. How the skulls stacked almost to the ceiling felt both very relatable, very human — alas, poor Yorick! — but also so far removed from the one on my own shoulders, atop my own spine, that held the organ that made all of my hopes and dreams and loves and fears and observances and sensory perceptions possible. Every skull in those catacombs had once held a brain like a precious jewel, every bone signified a human soul that had walked the streets above us, the streets where we were so charmed and beguiled by the romance and mystery of Paris.

Are the catacombs scary? Of course not, although I wouldn’t want to be trapped down there alone. So I suppose I might concede that the tunnels, the darkness, have the capacity to frighten. But the bones? Those are beautiful.

Are the catacombs scary? Of course not. Nothing’s ever completely dead.

Autumn’s lull would take on a different meaning for me the following year, and the one after that: The pandemic forced a different kind of pause, a different kind of reflection, a different kind of encounter with death than I’d ever experienced before. I remembered our Halloween in the catacombs often that October, sometimes with sadness as I wondered if I would ever have the opportunity to travel internationally again, but always with gratitude for the experience we’d shared.

This year, at the tail end of a summer that so far refuses to end, refuses to concede its loss to the looming autumn, my heart again wanders back to those cool dark halls coiled beneath Paris. I walk there in my mind like a meditation, relishing the mystery, wondering at my own mortality. No matter how strong we may feel, fall is a time of year where the crunch of a leaf, the singe of burning pumpkin, the thrill or sadness of a sunset that comes sooner than we were expecting, reminds us that to live is to know that our hearts are limned with lines like a cracked teacup, that the veil between worlds is tissue-thin, spread soft against stone, could tear at any time.

And it reminds us: Do not fear. 

Do not fear. Nothing is ever completely dead.

Melissa Pleckham is a Los Angeles-based writer, actor, and musician. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Flame Tree Fiction, Luna Luna, Hello Horror, Under the Bed Magazine, and FunDead Publications’ Entombed in Verse poetry collection. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association. Her short screenplay "Moon-Sick" was awarded Best Werewolf Short Script at the 2020 Hollywood Horrorfest and was a Finalist at the 2021 Shriekfest Horror Film Festival. She also plays bass and sings for the garage-goth duo Black Lullabies. You can find her online at melissapleckham.com and on social media at @mpleckham.

I Have The Cat (A Ghost Story) by Nikki Reimer

By Nikki Reimer

I Have The Cat

Moving day brought an explosion of ladybugs. They were all over our belongings stacked on the front lawn, crawling on the desk, four and six and eight on each box. For any other insect I’d have called it an infestation, but the word didn’t match this saccharine state of things. Bright red spotted walking gumdrops blanketing the objects in the yard. Like in one of my childhood colouring books or the opening scene to a Disney film; an infestation of twee. 

 It’s a bright early October day. The air is crisp. The light slants through the air like through glass and I’m trying to feel my body in the world but reality warps and bends away from my touch. My brother has been dead one year, seven months and 14 days. My husband and I are moving house for the third time since the day Chris didn’t wake up. My arrhythmia acts up from the stress. Heartbeat fluttering up into my chest. Mothwings.

 The first move was in June 2012, four months after he died. My husband packed up our apartment into a U-Haul. Two cats in two carriers went next. Little ginger tabby Amy buckled into the back seat, her big sister Bella on my lap. For thirteen months we lived in my parents’ basement. Four traumatized adults and three cats trying to negotiate a grief both shared and alone. My brother’s grey Adidas runners neatly stowed behind the door where he left them the night he died. 

 I had thought we might find a way to process together, but my parents drank in front of the tv every night, and no one wanted to talk. Eventually I gave up and joined their boozy stupor. 

The second move was in July 2013. I had found us a house, a post WWII saltbox with a rent so low it should have given me pause. The shingles were in rough shape, and there was an electric wall heating unit instead of a furnace. This is what’s known as ‘foreshadowing’.

 After my brother, my cat Bella was my best friend. I adopted her soon after I moved out of my parents’ house, and we grew up together. She was a beautiful medium-haired tortoiseshell with green eyes and a throaty voice. We bonded like only two misfits who grow up together can. At night I held her tight to my body like a teddy bear. She was 16 and she’d survived the move from the coast, and the year with my parents, but a month after we moved into the saltbox she got sick and we had to let her go. Summer turned to fall and the saltbox turned out to be improperly heated. We broke the lease and found another rental. Moved for the third time in October.  

***

Boxes line the long hallway, shadowed and eerie. There’s no ceiling light in the oversized living room and we don’t seem to have enough lamps, so half the house is shrouded in darkness. 

 I’m navigating the maze poorly. Hit my shin, say fuck. I don’t know where anything is, and the long painting boxes are giving me ominous vibes. I’ve never been a fan of horror movies but I know the tropes, and it occurs to me why so many horror movies open with the move to a new house. It’s the embodiment of liminal space. Airless and destabilized. A deconstructed house lets the ghosts roam freely.

 Amy’s a sweet baby girl but it’s too quiet without Bella. I've moved away again from the spaces that held my dead and it’s breaking something inside me that can’t be put back together. One night I fall apart completely, wail and scream on the couch, demand my poor husband tell me where Bella has gone. 

“Where do cats go? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know, baby,” he says softly.  

I can’t be consoled. I won’t be consoled. I want to be dead myself. 

*** 

The Facebook message from my friend Matt the following week was surprising. We were super tight in junior high and high school. I used to call him my big brother. But he’d moved out east and we’d lost contact. It happens.

I need to talk to you. Can we talk on the phone?

He's only recently learned about Chris, and he’s so sorry. Sorry that my baby brother is dead, and sorry that we’ve fallen so far out of touch that it took him so long to hear about it. 

I don’t mind. I understand. It’s comforting to hear from him. I only feel close to ok when I’m with people who knew Chris too.

Matt explains that his wife is into what my psychic friend Jen would lovingly call 'woo.' For their anniversary they’d gone to a medium together. 

They were trying to make contact with Matt’s wife’s dead grandmother, when someone pushed her aside. The medium described the interloper’s appearance. It’s my brother.

He said, I bet you’re surprised to see me.

The medium tells them that Chris is there because he’s worried about his sister and her mental health.

Through the medium he says, Don’t worry about me, I’m ok.

 It seems both implausible, and entirely plausible. My brother was sweet and cynical, sarcastic and joyful and loving. His empathy was boundless. If you were hurting he’d do anything he could to let you know you were loved. Pushing an old lady out of the way to make sure I knew he was alright was in character for him, though he'd be apologizing profusely to her afterwards. I want to believe this visitation could be real.

Then, said Chris, through the medium, through Matt, I have the cat.

 And Matt said, “Does that mean anything to you?”

Nikki Reimer (she/they) is a multimedia artist and writer, and chronically ill neurodivergent prairie settler currently living in Calgary / Mohkinstsis. She has been involved with art and writing communities, primarily in Calgary and Vancouver, for over 20 years. They are the author of three books of poetry and multiple essays on grief. GRIEFWAVE, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, was published in February 2022. Visit reimerwrites.com.

Poetry by Valentina España Orta

BY VALENTINA ESPAÑA ORTA

Es cara bajo

My body is a hematoma.
I want to kick up sand with my legs 
like an escarabajo, 
dig into the cool earth 
and rest still

underground

get spent in the digging,
stop to feel 
the blanket over the bruise,
tickle me silent.

My sister has been eating frutas maceradas 
left in a jar inside your fridge.
Me voy a comer a mi mamá!
she said on the phone when I asked how she was doing.
You'd always bake that special fruit cake 
for her to eat the whole thing in a day.

But we'd lived too many years in different countries 
and your voice was the only thing I'd eat
so let me drop inside the earth,
drown out all that's become noise 
and hear my body disintegrate
as I find your ash in every river 
— drink all of that water.

Dream Me by Daphne Maysonet

BY DAPHNE MAYSONET

Dream Me

In my dreams, when an emotion jabs low, my nerves ripple from that single bruise of joy or fear. The intensity—how the story feels—triggers my mind, punching a hole through the fiction. This is how Dream Me is born into consciousness. She is moonstruck and comes alive, like a werewolf under cryptic orders. But instead of losing her humanity, she gains it. Dream Me is not lupine, but lucid, interrogating the dream’s logic with an agency that somehow fought sleep’s little death to arrive. 

* * *

I think it happens because I’m too neurotic to give my mind away to synapse-firing fantasy. It’s partly why I don’t do drugs. My imagination is unpredictably hostile. It’s not one through which to take a playful stroll with reckless abandon. Being in my brain necessitates the armor of the faculties to swat dark recollections and wrenching feelings. Having survived a trying childhood, it’s not lost on me that this mind patrol caretaker may be working around the clock to keep me from true life stories for my own good. 

I once went to a trauma counselor who described how his patients acted out their memories with each other in elaborate psychodramas to uncover erased details. I pictured sitting around with other troubled adults in feathered wigs and fake Dominican accents, helping me recast dysfunction and fuzzy abuse in new technicolor horror. I can never imagine knowing more about the casual violence in my family history than I do until the next time my mother or sisters drop another tragic story on me in broad daylight. As far back as I can recall, I’ve wanted to know less. People have asked if I think I’ve suppressed memories. If so, I’m grateful to the superego wolfmadré who’s protected me all these years. Someone should. Might as well be me.

* * *

When I am asleep and Dream Me is summoned, one of two things happen:

1. If the dream is good, I leverage my newfound autonomy to do what I want. And with this wondrous freedom—to fly, to travel to the world’s ends, to swim without breathing—all I ever want is love. Plain, everyday love. There is no greater supernatural force, no more mysterious treasure. The bounty of a dream kiss is always the most I can achieve. Dream Me could write my next billion hours of sleep with romantic endings, and it would never fill the bottomless hole from which all fire to do anything at all burns Dream Me with greed. 

But the second option is when Dream Me really shines. 

2. It goes like this: I’m the bad guy. I have committed some heinous crime—sometimes murder, preposterously bloody ones—and I’m caught. The monster of my own nightmare. Sometimes it happens while I’m already on trial, and other times the transgression has only just begun. It doesn’t matter. My overwhelming fear of what I’ve done is too much. Dream Me awakens in her way, bringing the relief that reality so rarely provides: absolution. The revelation is powerful enough to bring me to full consciousness, and I wake, sweaty in a cradle of bedsheets, birthed into the dumb gratitude of someone experiencing a miracle. A guilty woman walking free.

* * *

Dream Me rejects the church of sleep and has my baby photo on her altar surrounded by white rose petals. Dream Me prays for me to me. Dream Me stretches an impossibly large wing over my entire body so that night cannot see me, and I cannot see myself.

Daphne Maysonet is a Caribbean-American writer whose poetry has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Chautauqua and The Acentos Review, and whose prose has appeared in alternative newsweekly The Memphis Flyer. She received her MFA from the University of Memphis, where she served as lead poetry editor for The Pinch. She is currently working on a collection of poetry, leading community workshop Memphis Writers and teaching college.

Poetry by Ana María Caballero

BY ANA MARÍA CABALLERO

Birthright

I sat with every good witch in Bogotá  
just to dispel your rage—

Elsa, Elizabeth, Nelly, Camila, 
Lucy, Ernesto, Sergio, and Blasta. 
Upon each cot, upon each couch,
concurring truths voiced 
by deliberate mouths.

For a year, I performed the prescribed tasks:
scrub the joints with rosewater seeped 
in sea salt during tea tree, eucalyptus, 
sandalwood baths.

At home, spray each door with licorice 
mist. At work, sulfate, alcohol, sage 
ablaze on a pan. 

My homework last month to recite 
on the road, the Ho’oponopono 
Hawaiian forgiveness song:
No, you are not pain:
you are my brother, 
my beloved Master of 
Grace.

The future, present, past cast 
by Blasta’s stars. She points to Saturn, to Mars 
in hard aspect in my chart’s family house. 
My sign is Cancer. I am 
gentle, gentle as crab.

Yet, Blasta confirms your cut is not my claw:
just you and I born under every guise—
Husband & Wife, Father & 
Daughter, Mother & Son.
Brother & Sister, our latest run, 
our latest crack, 
at one more slight life 
toward wise.

I sat with every good witch in Bogotá  
just to dispel your rage—

Elsa’s filters, Lucy’s needles, Nelly’s Reiki 
massage. Feldspar, pyrite, your printed name 
blurred by water beneath 
clean glass.  

I brew parsley, beetroot, cardamom, wheatgrass,
and browsed online 
for clay emanations 
of Hindu gods. 

One by one, I trace Elizabeth’s steps: 
on yellow cardboard sketch a musical 
clef, then set seven candles each in purple, 
white, green onto the symbol’s circular cores.
White for light, green for mind to materialize, 
and purple to burn 
emotional sores.

God box, angel cards, universal tarot:
Hierophant beside the Hanged Man both laid 
in reverse.

A tepid yes, then, an absolute no
below 
Camila’s jasper 
pendulum swirl.

Upon the first sign of new sun, 
I murmur the Gayatri mantra’s numinous chant
(Om bhur buvah swaha…)
while at the first sign of new moon,
a hired hand performs a lemon peel stab.

I sat with every good witch in Bogotá  
just to dispel your rage—

Sergio draws my gemological map.
Each gem a pattern, a specific instruction 
dialed by the earth for me to 
extract. 

I call after the second and third amethysts crack—
Dig a hole, he says. Their job is done.
Bury the crystals, return them to land. 

Water slaps by Ernesto’s clan of urban gnomes,
before sitting down to his tobacco ring of smoke, 
water dripping from my head while I read King David’s psalms
until, in the chimney room, 
the black cigar jar finally snaps.

But, when your sickness came, I seek surgical 
help via Lezahlee, the head witch of Carmel—
I swear, I say, I already forgave. 
Besides, my craft is not there, 
yet.

She burps, as she does when she knows:
The tumor is old. This lesson is his, 
not yours. 

True, your tumor is message,
indictment of flesh
from its source. 
But it’s as much mine as it is yours, 

for you are the story
I am born to rewrite. 

Mother likes to tell how, at three, 
I selected your name.  

Forever my birthright—I am bound 
to you 
by spell.

Ana María Caballero is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her first book of poetry, Entre domingo y domingo, won Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and was second place in the nationwide Ediciones Embajales Prize. She graduated with a magna cum laude degree from Harvard University and has been a runner-up for the Academy of Amercian Poets Prize. A Petit Mal was awarded the International Beverly Prize and was also a finalist for the Kurt Brown Prize, the Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Awards, the Essay Press Prize, the Split/Lip Press reading cycle and longlisted for the 2022 Memoir Prize.

Jenn Givhan on Representation, Creativity, and The Sacred

An interview with Jenn Givhan
by Lisa Marie Basile

Jenn, welcome to Luna Luna! I am such a huge fan of your work — and am consistently inspired by your spirit, your ideas, and your literary and personal offerings of magic. Can you tell us all about your newest—incredibly beautiful and important—work, RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON?

“Like the call to write, the call to love is ever about the marginal spaces that separate and bind us—the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life, to each other, despite or perhaps because of the pain. ”

— Jenn Givhan

Eva Santiago Moon is a budding Chicana bruja—whose bruja mother died in childbirth, so Eva was raised by her conservative and well-meaning sister Alba, who isn't interested in their cultural roots of witchcraft but instead nurtures her family in the kitchen with traditional comida. Eva deeply wants a coven and mother/sister figures who likewise practice the ancient spiritual ways of brujería and curanderisma. When we meet Eva, she is the intensely depressed mother of two magickal, biracial children, a glassworking artist who hasn’t created lately, and the wife of a rootworking, hoodoo-practicing university professor, Dr. Jericho Moon, who owns a magickal shop that Eva affectionately calls "the circus" because she met him at one of his magickal showcases under billowing circus tents.

Eva is a strong, independent Latina mother deeply invested in her cultural roots but has lost her way. While many psychological thrillers focus on rich, white women, Eva is Chicana, lives in the Southwest, and is the mother of biracial children. This story focuses on the holistic spiritual and magickal practices of BIPOC people embodied through Eva and her husband, Jericho. When we meet her, she is at one of her lowest points, suffering from PTSD, depression, and a feeling of disconnect from her roots. 

I’ve found that folks of color, particularly Latinx and indigenous communities, are often marginalized and overlooked in the media and literature (although I’m excited to see much more representation in the witching communities with the rise of brujería in the mainstream). We want to see ourselves represented across the genres and not just in stereotypical roles.

Eva is a fully fleshed-out protagonist, not trying to be a perfect wife or mother, with flaws and troubles that are not necessarily connected to her ethnicity and some that are—just as real Latinx folks in this country. She drinks and says what is on her mind but profoundly loves her family. She is a woman who has lost her way and will find it, a mother struggling to care for her family while maintaining her self-worth during a terrifying murder investigation.

We’ve been told to believe that darkness within ourselves, any manifestation of shadow, is our enemy, but Eva’s dark path as a bruja is the dark night of the soul (la noche oscura del alma) that leads her to deep truths and understanding that will embolden and strengthen her if she can trust herself. We need to listen to our inner voice and our ancestors’ wisdom and not let ourselves be gaslit or steered off course by society or those with skewed or selfish agendas. This story is about believing in oneself and trusting the support system one has created. As Eva comes to understand—she is the spell. Her magick is not external but internal—she's had it all along.

“We’ve been told to believe that darkness within ourselves, any manifestation of shadow, is our enemy, but Eva’s dark path as a bruja is the dark night of the soul (la noche oscura del alma) that leads her to deep truths and understanding that will embolden and strengthen her if she can trust herself. ”

— Jenn Givhan

The inspiration for this story came from my childhood memories and PTSD, as well as a harrowing experience with a narcissistic abuser who had me all twisted up, and I wanted to show how even smart, talented, powerful, empowered women can be susceptible to these gaslighting serial abusers. As a practicing bruja who has healed both personal and ancestral trauma in myself and my family through brujería, I wanted to share the tools and practices that have strengthened and buoyed me in an accessible way. There are many wonderful nonfiction books on magical practices and witchcraft, but I’ve found that my magic is within my imagination, so I wrote a novel. 

The protective magick of this thriller is based on the actual practices of people of color, including my familial practices. It resists stereotypes even as it embraces many classic elements of psychological thrillers and magical realism — such as a character with a murky, traumatic past that blurs or muddles her grip on the present situation, a haunted character who misunderstands what the ghosts are trying to communicate, a strong woman who is being gaslit by at least one man in her life, and a woman who needs to embrace her power. When she does, she kicks some serious ass and rights major wrongs. There's also a focus on sisterhood and counting on other women rather than being jealous or turning to men for help, which all of the above stories and shows portray as well, though not necessarily together.

Even the Charmed reboot, which has so many amazing elements, tends to focus on mainstream Wicca as the central magick, even though the protagonists are strong BIPOC/Latinas. My story looks toward the magick of people of color—brujería,  curanderismo, hoodoo—even as it shares many commonalities with Wicca and other Western pagan practices and beliefs.

The use of folk magick of people of color in RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON is portrayed as realistic throughout, with some magical realism elements common in Latinx literature and culture to offer a grounded and realistic presentation of folk magick while still allowing for the deeper resonances of metaphor that horror and supernatural thriller audiences have already come to expect by nature of the genre, such as giving into the subconscious where belief resides.

In other words, an audience who is already primed to believe that the dead can be conjured to help solve a murder mystery is also ready to suspend disbelief about other elements of folk magick – thus, I make a case for the metaphorical aspects of folk magick and how it helps protect people of color and isn’t just superstition. In this way, I’ve alchemically fused my thematic message within the structure of the work itself—creating, I hope, a place where belief feels organic and relevant. 

Can you describe your literary influences and inspirations? What is the through-line or framework through what and how you write?

My work tends toward magical realism and dark psychological motherhood that reflects on an often darker sociopolitical landscape, but the shadow work exists to reveal the light, and that’s always my goal–to shine that hopeful light amidst the darkness.  

Among my influences are Toni Morison and Ana Castillo, and some of my recent faves are Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Victor LaValle’s The Changeling.  

In my witchy reading, I’ve enjoyed Stephanie Rose Bird’s books on hoodoo (perhaps especially Sticks, Stones, Roots, and Bones) and Juliet Diaz’s Witchery, which have helped me infuse and create my grimoire early on in my path. 

I've also been reading and watching ALL the psychological thrillers I can get my hands on since I was a teenager, and lately, especially books/stories like GONE GIRL and GIRL ON THE TRAIN, all the many countless iterations. But I repeatedly noticed how often the protagonists are white women who live in metropolitan areas, often wealthy or from wealthier backgrounds.

There are very few characters of color and even fewer with major roles. As a Latina/indigenous woman raising a multiracial family, I have often felt excluded from these psychological thrillers on a social/structural level, although I am deeply interested and invested in examining women's mental health and psychological issues, including how we’re perceived, treated, and stigmatized culturally. 

My goal for my writing is always to cast women of color in leading roles, active and empowered, fully constructed with flaws and issues outside stereotypes, which means that I am also interested in examining mental health issues in women of color. RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON (like my second novel, JUBILEE) examines a Latina protagonist's PTSD, memory distortion, and anxiety—and contextualizes it in a larger patriarchal, abusive landscape. In many ways, I set out to write a Chicana Girl on the Train.  

“My goal for my writing is always to cast women of color in leading roles, active and empowered, fully constructed with flaws and issues outside stereotypes, which means that I am also interested in examining mental health issues in women of color.”

— Jenn Givhan

I’m always interested in showcasing how writers approach writing — including the hard stuff, the stuck stuff, the mundane struggles, the deep emotional Work that is often neglected in conversations around the craft. Can we peak behind the proverbial curtain of your general creative process? Do you adopt any rituals while or pre-writing?

As I connected with my indigenous and Mexican Ancestors and became more invested in brujería and curanderisma, I began cultivating spaces of honoring the sacred and divine within my home and creating portable altars that I could move throughout the house in a process organic to my creative rhythms and needs as a mamawriter, meaning, my mind/heart/flow has to be fluid and in-flux to allow for the rhythms of my day as they unfold (sometimes homeschooling the kids, tending sick kids, summer days, days my kids need or crave more attention from me, as well as days I’m more chronically ill and navigating self-care needs).

So, for instance, I might set up an altar on the side of the bath where I’m taking a hot Epsom salt soak to help alleviate some chronic pain or unwind after a tough day, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Honoring the sacred with a portable altar and altars throughout my home (my work/writing/teaching space) became a reminder that we carry the sacred within us, and it’s accessible to us anytime, anywhere.  

“Rest is creative. Rest is essential. Rest is sacred. ”

— Jenn Givhan

This also helped me forgive myself and eventually learn not to judge myself, so no forgiveness was needed because no wrong was committed when I could not write or perform a ritual or practice “self-care” in any other capacity than rest. Rest is creative. Rest is essential. Rest is sacred. 

Just as the altar’s sacred space reminds me of the goddess/Spirit/Ancestors within and around me, the altars remind me of the Muse available and accessible anytime, anywhere. The altar is an invitation to openness and receptivity. If we build it, the Spirits will come. But really, the Spirits are already all around us, ready and waiting for us to quiet ourselves enough to listen. So perhaps it’s more, if we build it, we will come to what the Spirits have already fashioned for us out of stars and earth and Universe and light and truth. 

In my writing, this willingness to listen to Spirit and not beat myself up that the material/concrete matter of the pub biz (publishing business) may not understand, accept, or want or applaud what I’m doing and what the Spirit/Ancestors bring me.

Because I deal with trauma-induced responses and depression and anxiety, I need a tangible reminder (lighting candles, holding crystals, and pictures of my Ancestors and Goddesses who sustain me, including Mother Mary and Frida and My Bisabuela and Coatlicue) so that I don’t feel so trampled upon that I stay down in the mud. If I’m down in the mud, Spirit is showing me the stardust to scoop up and bring back with me to the page.

The sacred that we honor (Goddess/Ancestors/Creator/Spirit) also exists within us. We honor ourselves when we honor the sacred. When we honor the sacred, we claim our value and worth as inherent and undiminishable. We are the fire we light, the crystal we hold, the prayer we utter. We are our Muse. 

In this interview series, I’ve been asking writers to share how their heritage, culture, or belief system shapes their work. How do you approach writing or creativity through these lenses?

As a Mexican-American/Chicana and indigenous writer from the Southwestern border, my work explores how we can create safe spaces through the traumas of mental illness, racism, violence, and abuse against women. I strive to speak the multivalent voices of women I grew up with: the mothers, daughters, childless women, aunties, and nanas who have become my voice.

My work concerns many Latina women's complex relationships with family—it is both a liberating and subjugating force, buttressing and repressive, mythical and real. I explore the guilt, sadness, and freedom of mother/child relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on when we’ve no other reason but love. I read Beloved as a young teenager, and every day before and every day since has been marked by the idea that you are your own best thing.

Like the call to write, the call to love is ever about the marginal spaces that separate and bind us—the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life, to each other, despite or perhaps because of the pain.

All my creative work tends to mother because it comes from a place of reclaiming and healing. My work recites my mother’s chant she sang to me and now I sing to my children when they’re hurt: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana. Translated literally, it asks a frog’s tail to heal. Of course, a frog’s tail, if cut off, grows anew. My work asks for impossible healing. And then makes it possible.

Who are some writers or organizations that you’d love to shout out?

Authors Publish

Irena Praitis

Rigoberto González

The NEA

The PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship

Van Jordan

Lynn Hightower

Leslie Contreras Schwartz

I could go on and on – I ADORE the writing community and am immensely grateful daily.

Was there an a-ha moment that led you to write or create? Was there an experience that reaffirmed what you do and why?

I was in the book section of Target perusing thrillers with my family and discussing cover art for my novel RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON when a tween girl turned the corner and shyly asked, "Excuse me, but I overheard, are you a writer?" 

Me: "I am!”

Her: “Oh my gosh, that’s so COOL!”

So then, I asked her: "Are YOU a writer?"

She shrugged and said: "Well, I mean, kind of."

I looked at her with what I hoped was all the confidence I've pulled to myself since I was a young girl & said: "You ARE. I know you are."

Her: "You're right, I am."

This isn’t the moment I began writing, of course. This was just a few months ago. But our pasts, presents, and futures are connected, so imagine this is also me saying this to myself as a young, traumatized bruja, a young girl with no one to teach her or guide her in her Ancestral magic, but with a mama who loves her fiercely. Imagine this is Spirit holding this conversation in the seed of myself, waiting for the right season to bloom. Imagine that future bloom carrying me through the darkness.

My tween daughter Lina and I write middle-grade fiction together; we’re now finishing a novel to send to our agent, Rebecca Friedman. My daughter is the other future iteration of my creation that reminds me who I am—the Goddess with me always, within me, always, as a seed, an egg, waiting. Wise. Witchy. Wonderful.

What's your biggest piece of advice to someone who might be embarking on a creative journey like yours?

Mija, your journey is your own, and let no one veer you from the brightest light shining within yourself, guiding your way. You don't need anyone else's rules or guidelines, or input. Yes, we need companions and helpers and sisters and friends. Wise guides sometimes. Our Ancestors. The Spirits. 

But we are also our wise teachers. Versions of ourselves are yet to bloom. 

For too long, I've worried about what others think, and in the publishing biz, it's too easy to get steered off track and onto others' paths. In Capitalism, we're taught to pin our worth to earnings, product, output, and money. 

Even in the creative world, the contest and competitive and prestige models can make us forget what's truly important – always, always, the creating itself. 

As Eva says in RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON:

"Many people think there is a clear-cut between lightwork and dark, the way so many misunderstand curanderas and brujas, thinking of healers versus Witches, as though healers are a positive force and Witches a negative. On the one hand are medicine folk, who pray to god and Mother Mary and the Saints and intercede to remove the malcontent of those who would use their power for darkness; on the other hand, are brujas who deal in curses and hexes and death.

The lines are not so drawn. Light and shadow are not binaries nor poles but are sourced from the same spring of energy.

When we stand beneath the cover of forest canopy away from the sun’s heat, the shadow that keeps us cool is not an entity created by itself, nor has the light ceased to shine.

Shadow can protect us. Darkness, too, has its blessings.

Brujas know this. Mama knew this."

What seems like a shadow path is sometimes necessary and invaluable. Trust yourself. Trust your light and shadow. Creation happens during both phases. Mija never stops creating. You are all of creation, waiting. Let go of fear. Let go of shame. Let go of anyone else’s opinions or advice. Let go of this advice. And create. 

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous poet, novelist, and transformational coach from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Rosa’s Einstein (University of Arizona Press) and the novels Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing), finalists for the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards. Her newest poetry collection, Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press), and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing), drop this fall 2022. Both new books draw from Givhan’s practice of brujería. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Givhan has taught at the University of Washington Bothell’s MFA program and Western New Mexico University and has guest lectured at universities across the country.

Jenn would love to hear from you at jennifergivhan.com, and you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for inspiration, writing prompts, and transformational advice.

3 Poems by Sharon Mesmer

BY SHARON MESMER

Sharon Mesmer's most recent poetry collection is Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books). She's also the author of several fiction collections, most recently, Ma vie à Yonago, in French translation from Hachette. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine/The Cut, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review and Commonweal. She teaches creative writing at NYU and the New School.

Mary-Alice Daniel: "I Think of Poetry as Remaking An Original Cosmology"

An interview with Mary-Alice Daniel
by Lisa Marie Basile

I would love to hear all about your recent creative journey and pursuits and, of course, your coming books, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing and Yale Younger Poets Prize winner Mass for Shut-ins. I love talking to writers who work across genres, especially. So let’s dive in. What’s happening creatively right now?

I considered myself primarily a poet till 3 years ago when I started my first book of prose, a nonfiction work that accidentally morphed into a memoir. It began as an inquiry into the hidden Black history behind the state of California, which was named after a Black warrior queen from 16th-century Spanish mythology. The book came to include the origin stories of my West African ancestors—then sprawled to encompass my immediate family’s migrations across 3 continents. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing will be published by HarperCollins/Ecco Press on November 29th. It’s now available for preorder at major and independent bookstores.

While I was in the intensive editing endgame of my memoir, Rae Armantrout sent an email that changed my life. Mass for Shut-Ins, my first book of poems, and a project spanning a decade, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. It’s coming out in March 2023, and I’m now in the frantic final stage of its own editorial process. Three warning signs illustrated within the manuscript headlined the press release announcing my win. Perhaps concerningly, that number has doubled to 6. I offer something obsessive, ominous. My favorite observation about the volume is: “What drew me to your book—the darkness made it stand out. True darkness.”

Mary-Alice Daniel via Instagram

Wow, what a response: “What drew me to your book—the darkness made it stand out. True darkness.”

As both a reader and writer, I have always been drawn to darkness myself, to the layers beneath what we reveal, to the uncomfortable, to the almost ineffable language of sorrow. How do you manage the dark when writing? Do you ground yourself, do you dive head-first into it, or does it alchemize into something else when you write about it?

For some reason, when I read this question, I was immediately reminded of a cheesy Bane quote in the last movie of the Dark Knight trilogy. Tom Hardy says, "You think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it."

Probably because of the fundamentalist tenor of my religious upbringing, it's the nature of my brain to perceive everything as a preamble to the prospect (promise?) of Hell. I keep my fingers crossed that I'm wrong about that eventuality, but... it's a concern. Writing is one way I sift through the ideas of damnation and doomsday that I've internalized.

Can you tell us a bit about your general creative process? I’m interested in the quirks and rituals and obsessions writers have. Or, you know, maybe it’s mundane. Basically, how does the Muse exist within you?

I start worrying about some little idea that perplexes me. An absurd aspect of human nature; the oddity that is the English language (my second); the internal logic of a conspiracy theory or cult practice. I then spend literal years unpuzzling it, piece by piece. I’ll spend one whole day fussing over the punctuation of a single line; I’ll waste the entirety of the next day changing everything right back. There’s a natural byproduct of this waste, though; I learn things.

And what about your inspirations? Who are they, and how do they influence your work as a writer or creative? How might they have influenced your recent work?

Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

My favorite musician now is Sufjan Stevens. When I listen to him, I feel that connection between those who inherited an imposed faith, a fraught relationship with the spirits. It’s been with us both since birth, seen in our relatively unusual names. He was the Midwestern kid with a Muslim name; I have a Christian one despite my overwhelmingly Islamic ethnic group, the Fulani of Niger/Nigeria.

The most magnificent work of art I’ve ever seen is Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. A+ nightmare fuel.

The one book I recommend to people (I generally don’t) is Sum by David Eagleman. It presents 40 possible versions of an afterlife, written from the perspective of a neuroscientist with a sublime imagination, a whimsical style. When I’m up all night, harassed by the dread of death—I really, truly, honestly have to die one day?—every once in a while, I get almost excited for some great ride ahead.

Deadpan stand-up comedy is the soundtrack to all my writing sessions.

“I’ll spend one whole day fussing over the punctuation of a single line; I’ll waste the entirety of the next day changing everything right back. There’s a natural byproduct of this waste, though; I learn things. ”

— Mary-Alice Daniel

Throughout this interview series, I’ve been asking writers to share a bit about how their religion, culture, or heritage shows up in their work. What about for you?

If I do a reverse engineering of my work, I see that one of its most significant elements is syncretism, which I define as “the phenomenon of disparate religious traditions colliding.” My native tribe is nearly synonymous with Islam, but I was raised by Evangelical parents in what they made a field of “spiritual warfare.”

Around the ill-defined edges of this apocalyptic battlefield, the indigenous religions of Nigeria survive—within my family, mostly in the form of superstition and credence in curses. I think of poetry as remaking an original cosmology from these contrastive influences.

This is so powerful: "Around the ill-defined edges of this apocalyptic battlefield, the indigenous religions of Nigeria survive—within my family, mostly in the form of superstition and credence in curses. I think of poetry as remaking an original cosmology from these contrastive influences.”

Can you share one or two lines, or even a poem, that inhabits/gives life to this merging of influences?

Mary-Alice Daniel: Here is an excerpt from "For My Uncle Who Died of AIDS Contracted at the Dentist's Office.”

Was there an a-ha moment that led you to write or create? Was there an experience that reaffirmed what you do and why?

“Around the ill-defined edges of this apocalyptic battlefield, the indigenous religions of Nigeria survive—within my family, mostly in the form of superstition and credence in curses. I think of poetry as remaking an original cosmology from these contrastive influences. ”

— Mary-Alice Daniel

When I lived in Connecticut for 3 of my tween years, I walked home in half-light. After school, 4 p.m., it was already getting dark. My portable CD player got me through those depressing walks: inside it spun the songs of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Fela Kuti. I wanted to sing lines like theirs. I can’t sing, so I write.

Who are a few contemporaries/mentors/writers who have made an impact on you?

Only 3? This is a really hard question. Of dozens, the first who come to mind are: poet Safiya Sinclair, who is my role model even though we’re the same age; Kwame Dawes at Prairie Schooner, who champions my work; Elizabeth Scanlon at American Poetry Review, who likes my weirdest stuff.

And finally, what might be your biggest piece of advice to a writer?

Find critics of your work who practice radical honesty. We all have blind spots; they are dangerous.


Mary-Alice Daniel was born in northern Nigeria and raised in England and Tennessee. After attending Yale University, she received an MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Mass for Shut-Ins, her debut poetry collection, won the 2022 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her first book of prose, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) will be released on November 29, 2022.