In sipèstisyon (YesYes Books, 2026), Mckendy Fils-Aimé’s debut poetry collection, language is lacerated by the breath of memory. Titled sipèstisyon, the Kreyol word for superstition, the collection speaks through and against the smothering regime of English by assembling a sonic Kreyol terrain. The oral form of superstitions is invoked to elevate the acoustics of resistance and revival. Truth-telling, herein, does not merely vibrate the ache of trauma and violence but appears as an affective experience suspending us within the temporal orientation Fils-Aimé’s speaker migrates us toward. Vanishing lines are brought closer and vocabularies overflow.
Though memory is often attributed to interiority and the past, Fils-Aimé writes it as a lived condition, as history. It is the marrow from which all contemplations, anguish, and wounds surface and coincide. The first poem, “sipèstisyon” comes to warn us of the fragility of memory: “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory” (6) all the while it is made into an entity, an object of interest that can be plundered, with the speaker asking, “if memory is a museum // what happens if it’s ransacked?” (6). It is here where Fils-Aimé’s collection dilates: in the collapse of memory’s infrastructure. We are thrust into the nonlinearity of remembering—its illegibility, obscurity, and entropic tendencies. How, then, must we speak of ruin after it has happened? How do we absorb the shame, not so much as an exercise of erasure, but of personal absolvement? The speaker answers within a position he has occupied, in the register of the interstitial aftermath.
“mwen pa pale kreyòl” (which translates to “I don’t speak Creole”) agitates his own shame of linguistic in-betweenness when, in telling a story in Kreyòl to someone, the speaker is criticized for the nasally sound he’s making, “laughing at the kreyòl i create / from the cinder blocks & cement // of english” (9). Here, his usage of Kreyòl appears to be awkward, clumsy, with the person listening condemning him that he has made a mockery of their architecture by building it with American machinery (9). The speaker laments this remark and at the same time accentuates the linguistic hybridity he settles between: “owning two skyscrapers // of dialect pressed against the skyline of speech. // i dream of two thin tongues, one in each of my nostrils / & how to sever the one closest to you / at the root” (9). The lexicons of Kreyòl are diluted through the sedimented structure of English, the body of words stiffening in its utterance; and seemingly, at once, the speaker has in front of him a hallway of locked doors with not enough keys to open them (9).
Fils-Aimé vertebrates the somewhat gelatinous nature of memory through language. In the following poem “my father apologizes for giving me a western name,” we are placed at the mouth of the speaker. He wonders if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body, / if my tongue is just another island impaled / by French & American flags” (10). “soup joumou” finds itself in the speaker’s mother’s tongue as well, “shriveling like a snail / in the salt / of my English / i wanted to swim / against the current / of whitewash” (11). What I found striking is how the locus of the mouth is seemingly where Haitian heritage is reinforced as a migrant, reconstituting what it means to institutionalize the very voice they use as something that can both be disciplinal and transgressive. There is this, likewise, an excess and abscess of two languages; and oscillating between them is an embodied but disorienting experience. When the cadence of Kreyòl bleeds into English’s rhythm, the dissonance experienced from being an immigrant becomes less conceptual and more operational. Suddenly, visibility is determined on which is more audible.
Though Fils-Aimé lingers in the tension of what I observe as “unbelonging,” we see in the poem “bilingual” that reconciliation of being fragmented. He writes:
too bad we can’t push the rewind button on a lost language, can’t rewrite an alphabet on the chalk-brushed blackboard of erasure. best we can do is fill in the fissures of our vernacular & smooth out the chipping.
listen, pay your teachers no mind when they say we speak broken French. they’ve never had to reassemble the remnants of their mother tongues after mourning (48).
Here, the speaker reconfigures fracture into fascination—“we open the china drawer / of our mouths, there’s copper / more than anything else” (48). These lines ultimately resonated with me because I understand this continuous, cascading residue that colonialism leaves within a language, this enduring afterlife of language compounded into a container that co-opts it. But Kreyòl is not complicit in becoming a spectacle of the English language. As it fills its own fissures and remedies its own precarities, the isolated fragments, at once, choreograph its autonomy. What Fils-Aimé does here is essentially translating that echo of a lost language into resonance, apprehending the vanishing voice not by strangling it (like what America does to non-English vernaculars), but by suturing it within the already existing polyphony coalescing in the myths, folklores, and superstitions he already understands.
Language gives memory texture, friction, fibrous moments. In “Invocation for the God of Laughter,” language is exhalation, “a boisterous song // from the quiet orchestra of our lungs…. / O language excavated / from the moments when language is lost” (57). This is perhaps one of my favorite poems out of the collection as it nears its closing. I am fond of this idea—of this interstice—where language cannot be flattened into a smooth surface; that there is this disruption in voice: song, laughter, the very act of breathing. Actions that operate on the very basis of sound and community and are therefore non-isolatable. It is from here I find the power in sipèstisyon. Superstition becomes saturated with chortles, guffaws, rapturous ruckus, bellows, wheezes, giggles (57-58), aural elements which cannot be colonized into syllables. Though what they do is splinter and multiply across the sky.
We return to the mouth by the last “sipèstisyon.” At this point, superstition has become almost like an inquiry into the possibility of fruition, of the future, of foundation. It reminded me of Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” where her speaker has “learned Drink in a country of drought” because Fils-Aimé’s speaker is a “seedless orchard—a drought in a grove / called potential. but I’m as resilient as a fig, / as defiant as a field of echinacea” (66). Both speaking about the aftermath of colonial violence, there is this fluidity that is bred from trembling at the perimeter of loss and reclamation. Fils-Aimé ends his collection with arms unfurling, “to stuff / fistfuls of sunlight into my mouth. / watch me nourish & be nourishment. / watch me become my own harvest.” (66). It ends in a truth we all know too well: there is resonance that remains after undoing power. Language noises out its own emancipation and immersion. And it breaches syntactic containment, seeping, leaking, and unraveling memory with it.
Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.
I began keeping a journal in the summer of 2022. Fifty three years prior to that event, Joan Didion wrote that “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Is this true now, when all the world seems no longer a stage, but rather billions of public digital diaries, pulsing and flashing across our collective vision? Does this make all of us “anxious malcontents”? Probably. I like reading other people’s diaries. I am interested in them. I am interested in writing and privacy and publicity; I am interested in knowledge and its dissemination.
In my work, I have argued that the fields of literature and history are inseparable – indeed, that they are one and the same. All history is a work of fiction; all nonfiction works of history. In this way, we understand ourselves.
I read constantly about the past. I read constantly. I understand myself through that material. Mark Kurlansky and Lilian Faderman convinced me to study history when I read their books on my A Train commute to high school. Wandering through Dublin in 2023, I spent hours on park benches reading the works of David Foster Wallace. Crying inconsolably in the woods of Vermont, I finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or. Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends was near biblical to me during my sophomore year of college – I would carry my annotated copy in my bag at all times, turning to a page at random and consulting when needed with my liturgy. The year prior, I had done the same with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ novels on Brown’s quad my senior year was a twisted revelation. Driving across the country, my companion and I took turns reading aloud from Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, which I finished alone on the floor of a motel bathroom. This is not a reading list so much as an autobiography.
In the college library, I taped photos of my favorite historians to the wall above my desk. I dressed as historian Hayden White for a costume party. It seems, at times, I am incapable of undergoing a conversation without invoking my personal pantheon of feminist scholars: Andrea Dworkin, Amia Srinivasan, Andrea Long Chu, Silvia Federici. Their intellect sparks against me. I simmer in pretension. My friends laugh at the way I speak through a web of references, often inscrutably so. I write notes on what I read in my journal, beside pasted-in receipts and postcards. I draw pictures of Mo from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For to keep the ephemera company, speech bubbles with snarky commentary hanging from her mouth. I draw, write, collage, and the forms and media blend and blur.
I like it, my diary. I like to read history and fiction and poetry, which is to say, other people’s diaries. I like works which are expansive, experimental, interdisciplinary, multimedia. I am excited to read your work, so you should let me read it. I am a good reader – I pride myself on it. I am in search of something, as are all of us who read (perhaps there’s a joke about Proust to be made here, but I’ll leave it to the experts). I am inexpert and excited. I am happy to be here. I am balancing a book on my head.
Lia Ortner (she/her) earned her BA in History and Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2025, with her thesis on Medieval literature being granted the John A. Thomas Memorial Award. For the past year, she has been in Athens, Greece on a fellowship with the American College of Greece. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Lia is an educator, historian, killjoy feminist, amateur semiologist, and collage enthusiast. She enjoys drinking coffee in bed.
Following the release of Kimberly Ann Priest’s full-length poetry collection, Floralia, Tara Rahman spoke with Priest about the collection’s botanical language, hybrid forms, and haunting representations of trauma, survival, and embodiment. Here, they discussed the use of flowers as both medicinal and poisonous symbols, the fragmented formal structures through which grief and dissociation are articulated, and the collection’s intersectional attention to gender-based violence, media spectacle, power, and the difficult work of healing.
Tara Rahman: What is the significance of the recurring botanical terminology (i.e., plant classifications or taxonomy) and rare or toxic flowers in Floralia, such as the poppy and impatiens psittacina (parrot flower)?
Kimberly Ann Priest: Spending time in nature has always been, for me, a balm. I go to nature for refuge. I bring it into my living spaces for solace. I love to have flowers in my home. But nature, in all its expressions, is not a simple metaphor for beauty and good. Nature is fierce, dangerous, and poisonous, while also being tender, vibrant, and medicinal. The flowers in Floralia expose their many personalities. The opium poppy, for instance, “can be dried and used for decorations, boiled in water to produce a bitter tea, or crushed to make a low dose of morphinans.” It is also the source of an illicit drug: opium. Asks the speaker as the primary narrator of the book: “How does one classify a thing useful either living or dead? Useful for both good and ill purposes?” (67). My answer: I don’t know. We are speaking of humans, of course. How each of us make choices to do harm or heal, to do evil or good, and, of course, the gamut of choices in between these poles. How do you classify us? We can’t be pinned down to all bad or all good. We are people living in the throes of others’ choices and absorbing the consequences of those choices ,and this fact alters where we exist on the spectrum of classifications day by day. What I am communicating with these flowers is our worth and the importance of honoring that worth—to not crush, discard, or abuse it. I’m communicating the power of choice and our ability to choose to treat these fragile blooms with absolute respect, tending to their purpose as testimonies of what is beautiful, desirable, and medicinal.
TR: The poems throughout Floralia experiment with various forms and structures, including sedoka, monologue, and prose. How does form influence the articulation of grief in these poems, such as “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips” and “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”?
KAP: Gosh, grief is so incredibly disruptive. It’s not linear or organized. It makes its own decisions about how it will enter our memories and our days. This is especially true with grief from a traumatic experience. The poems in Floralia speak to the fragmentation an individual experiences after trauma and how it disrupts mental processing, emotional regulation, and relational attachment. When writing trauma—not as a narrative fact but as an embodied experience—hybridity typically provides more room for formal play that mimics this experience. With the “City Lights Radio” broadcast, I wanted to show the way sexual trauma splits the mind, fragmenting memory, and how this dissociation can feel like you exist in a body of multiple interpretations of the self. I’m not speaking of a personality disorder, but rather the struggle to integrate identity after what you believed about the world and the self in the world has been shattered by a traumatic experience that challenges your belief. In the sedoka poem, there is a single voice lamenting the fresh wound of assault. That fresh wound is not easy to communicate if one can communicate at all, so the expression is sound and color and metaphors based on feeling as the speaker is trying to connect these expressions in a way that makes some sense. It’s supposed to feel a bit senseless while also being driven by identifiable emotion at intervals.
TR: How do blank spaces and brackets serve as a tool for communicating the complex, often inarticulable experience of sexual abuse in Floralia? In addition, how are these devices a vehicle for reinforcing the motifs of silence and repressed feelings (e.g., guilt, shame, fear) in your collection?
KAP: I think the question answered the question! The blank spaces and brackets are meant to communicate emotional disruption and dysregulation. Reading these poems isn’t a fluid experience. Guilt, shame, fear, grief—it’s all heavy, jarring, overwhelming then numbing. These emotions cycle. They stop and go. They expand and collapse. They can feel illuminating then suddenly spar. So, also the poems in Floralia.
TR: In “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia,” the Alive Young Woman tells the Ghost Woman, “…You may not remember the situation of your death…but your disembodied self still carries the trauma of the events.” In “ghosts,” the speaker states, “It has taken me a long time to realize I am human…I give details about how the past intrudes into the present and how this is scar tissue in my bone and in my veins…” What role does memory, embodied trauma, and dissociation play in the speaker’s relationship to her body?
KAP: It’s everything. This is sort of the question of the whole book: what role do these experiences play after trauma? I think my answer to this question is multi-faceted. Working through this dissociation, painful memories, and how trauma lives in the body (as does the women in the prose poems that head each section) is what allows us to survive these traumas. So many people don’t work through, so they continue to manifest harm to the self and others. But many also do work through and, as a product of working through, become wise. They extract medicine from the pain and offer this medicine to others. I hope that this is the enduring legacy of my own work, that all these poems I’ve written in Floralia and other books provide a roadmap for others to travel who also require healing from painful traumas. I don’t think I answered your question directly, perhaps because it is difficult for me to separate what we might consider the body and soul and all the things that fracture the soul. The body holds this fracture. It is the container. Trauma moves through the veins, rewires the brain, and physically manifests the pain we carry in our spiritual parts. It’s all one. To care for any part of the human is to care for all parts.
TR: Tell me more about your choice of language and syntax in the linked sedoka poem, “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips,” such as the repetition of “his body, not mine” and rhythmic enjambment (e.g., lines “…good blood drum be good / little orange-beat-beat-good-should…”).
KAP: This poem is an attempt for a freshly assaulted woman to make sense of her experience. I imagine this as an internal dialogue that doesn’t make clear sense. Her repeated attempts to clarify distinction of bodies is a desperate attempt to place a separation between herself and her assailant. But the poem communicates a lot of sound and color as you have noted, that feeling of trauma throbbing in the veins. She can’t make sense of everything. The body is overwhelmed with feeling. The mind moves in and out of reality.
TR: In “His mother”, the speaker states: “…after he slipped / into the room to feel her soft nourishing breasts and be her / little white begonia three more times…” How does this poem complicate attitudes toward gender and survivors of sexual abuse? How does the portrayal of the mother figure as “nourishing” subvert these expectations (and the expectations of relationships between abuse survivors and perpetrators)?
KAP: This poem and elements of Parrot Flower was inspired by the story of a man who became a serial rapist. His early childhood was marked by intense trauma: his mother sexually abused him repeatedly. Culturally, we cannot escape the reality that women and girls are more frequently sexually harassed and abused at the hands of men, but boys are abused, too. Typically, they are also abused by men, but in the story I was examining, this boy (who became a rapist) was abused by his mother. Naturally, this shaped his psyche and corrupted his desire. The cultural narrative that we live inside, in our case a patriarchal narrative, determines which gender is freer to perpetrate harm without consequence. Here in America, men are freer to perpetrate harm, and they are more beholden to maintain the power balance that patriarchy demands. This maintenance can be so subconscious, with all of us participating in major and minor ways and not even realizing we are doing so. But I think it’s important to contemplate our origins—we were all small children once. We were all poised for any possibility. Both boys and girls are recipients of cultural narratives and whatever harms they embody. While I don’t think we will ever live in a world where these harms completely discontinue, I wonder how much good it would do each of us to contemplate the fragile genesis of every person we meet and how we can tend this genesis with greater wisdom and care. For Brent Brents, the serial rapist, the power and control dynamic of using women was also his source of nourishing himself. He needed to both hurt his mother for abusing him and receive her sexual/emotional tending. How devastating is that? And how devasting the choices he made to perpetuate this harmful narrative. But like all of us, and like Parrot Flower demonstrates, he did have a choice.
TR: Another line in “His mother” that I’d like you to speak more on is, “…he extinguished his cigarette on her twiggy arms—that’s what young boys do—then left.” What are you hoping to have readers contend with in this last statement?
KAP: Simply the power and control narrative that men are often introduced to from a young age that positions them as the ones entitled to have power over another. This power narrative, sadly, usually manifests most clearly in their relationships to intimate partners even if it doesn’t to the rest of their social circle. And this power dynamic is a form of coping. Culturally, we have often invited boys and men to cope with their pain through bullying—typically bullying their intimate partner or other people, like children, who are dependent on them for survival. Men, more than anyone, need to change this narrative by doing deep inner healing themselves and teaching boys that power and control tactics are not an alternative to doing the work of healing their wounds. Culturally, we do possess better medicine. It’s available. Men and boys can engage with this medicine, too.
TR: In “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”, the Male Announcer refers to the media phenomenon of “Missing White Woman Syndrome” in his dialogue, stating: “Telegenic, photogenic, the young woman memorialized in the center photo was… the most ideal progenitor of terror in the American imagination…” and that “It [e.g., sexual abuse, kidnapping, murder] could be any girl, any white girl—a pretty one.” Speak about the need for an intersectional lens in better understanding and calling attention to the issues of gender-based violence, exploitation, and drug addiction.
KAP: In this piece, I’m highlighting the voyeuring aspect of news media in relation to stories of sexual harm against women and how, culturally, white women are the focus of media attention to the dismissal of crimes done against women of color and even boys. In highlighting this, I am not saying that this is beneficial to white women. I am revealing a cultural obsession. This obsession is not beneficial to anyone because it is not about care and concern for women of any color, including white women. It is more about what provides good entertainment in media and will capture the minds of viewers. There are certainly other lenses we could consider; for instance, the fact that those with wealth receive more positive media attention than those in poverty. The point is that news media and other medias are agenda-driven, needing viewers and ratings that translate to dollars to survive, and this media agenda manifests as incomplete or one-sided information about the world we live in. It also encourages us to observe the world from an easy distance on a screen and perhaps miss the stories and needs of the people around us. I don’t know how to solve this dilemma. It is likely unsolvable. I do my best to avoid news media, not to be avoidant of happenings in the world, but rather to focus my attention on research that expands my worldview as well as the stories of individual people in my community that need direct care. Not an easy thing to do in the present historical moment.
TR: In “On bluelight.org,” the speaker observes: “People do you know. [Survive.] Mostly women.” How does this (often disproportionately) precarious struggle of women to survive, especially from marginalized backgrounds related to race and class, intersect with your own views and reflections on survival throughout the collection?
KAP: I think it’s just that—the fact that survival is disproportionate. We can pretend it’s not, but it is. And its disproportionate in a variety of ways. It’s not a simple narrative of straight white men having more power than anyone else. It’s also a story of which straight white men have this right and who they are willing to share power with at any given time. Money matters. Fame matters. Family background matters. Religious affiliation matters, etc. But the fact that any of these elements matter when it comes to who survives and maintains control is the problem at the heart of all of this. Perhaps our lingering questions should not be centered on what intersectional elements place a person at the bottom of society with little hope of survival, but what intersects to place someone at the top? And when someone finds themselves at the top, how can they quickly begin to disseminate and relinquish this strong hold on exceptional power? What can they give up? What can I give up when I have too much right to power? This is the ultimate question. The poem you refer to is simply referring to the fact that, in the narrative of gender, women are more often caught in the throes of survival than men, doing more work to maybe someday enjoy thriving.
TR: You open each key poem (“City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”, “Parrot Flower”, and “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips”) with epitaphs quoted from other poetic works, including Kimiko Hahn’s “Toxic Flora”, Song of Songs in the Holy Bible, and Patti Smith’s poem “rape.” Why did you choose them? How are they significant to the larger narrative of the collection? What should the readers take away from these epitaphs?
KAP: In this collection, each epitaph is setting up the drama that will unfold in the next section. Firstly, I love the book Toxic Flora, the poem that is Song of Songs has informed so much of my worldview about desire, pleasure, and the dedicated fierceness of love, and anything Patti Smith writes is an education in excellent writing craft. Altogether, the lines I chose from these writings highlight our fragile natures, how we can be broken and discarded, altered by toxicity, and filled with questions about how we will be seen and understood after harm. They resonate with Who am I now? and How do you see me? I have carried these questions myself, hence all the poetry to unravel my own stories of harm and what these harms communicate to me about my value in the world. As the woman classifying flowers in this book dedicates herself to discovering the medicinal wisdom of her experiences, however painful this excavation may be, I hope my reader will understand that these fragile blooms are worth tender cultivation. If they have been damaged, they are no less worthy, but cultivation is not all about gentle caresses and sunlight, it also requires eradication of toxins and predators, PH balance and good soil. The work is difficult, intentional, and takes time, but in the end, you will have welcomed and restored a beautiful bloom.
Kimberly Ann Priest is a writer, visual artist, and author of Wolves in Shells, winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry, as well as tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her writing is deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, eco-poetics, eco-spirituality, ecofeminism, women’s studies, neurodivergence studies, classic film studies, narrative justice, arts-based research, and writing for therapeutic purposes. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
Tara Rahman (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MSc in Global Development from SOAS, University of London. She is also a recent graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing often focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities. In her free time, she enjoys reading literary and YA fiction, watching anime, and spending time with her tripod cat, Tuntuni.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor EMDASH, is from The Night Is What It Eats by Danielle Hanson (Codhill Press 2026).
Aphorisms for the Eyes
An eye is a jellyfish caught from the see.
A glass eye is like a fake accent.
An eye is the most fragile thing you can’t drop.
A goddess decorating a tree with eyes.
The eyes will always have it.
A tear is the fruit of the eye.
How does one look for a lost eye?
An eye is a target.
There are two eyes in I.
The lashes are the gates of the eyes.
Not only cloudy eyes produce rain.
He was sentenced to a thousand eyelashes.
He asked for a thousand more.
Danielle Hanson (she/her) is author of The Night Is What It Eats (Elixir Press Prize), Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize), and Ambushing Water (Finalist, Georgia Author of the Year), and editor of the poetry anthology Objects in This Mirror (Press 53) and a book of literary criticism. She is Marketing Director for Sundress Publications, inaugural Poet Laureate of Costa Mesa, California, and Writer-in-Residence at UC Irvine.
Photo Credit: Juan Camillo Garza
EMDASH a.k.a Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) (she/they) is a poet-who-also-writes-fiction, educator, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve received support from LAMBDA, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Chinese American Museum of LA, Jersey City Arts Council and more. She has learned as much from community organizing and open mics as she did from her Rutgers-Newark MFA in Poetry. They’re published in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, Alocasia, Underblong and elsewhere. She proudly hosted, produced, and curated The Word Bookstore Open Mic for two years.
Yeah I’m rans bu mos people can’ ell. Maybe hey can ell I’m nonbinary bu mos days hey jus misgender me “hey mam” ( hough I’m no ). I was born his way, I always knew I was a boy growing up bu back hen I was called “ omboy” which a leas had “boy” in he name. Puber y blockers weren’ a hing hen, bu sex-change surgery was and I ried every angle bu my paren s wouln’ buy i , so I s opped asking and grew up wi h he wrong hormones coursing hrough me. I looked like a sor of girl bu fel s ill so much like a guy bu hen over ime I admi I grew o apprecia e my female hink bu s ill, I never did adjus o my body so I wear loose clo hing I wear a rucker cap a lo (mos of he ime backwards) and have never been a fan of mirrors bu I don’ wan surgery anymore because i ’s surgery… and I have already been hrough oo much. I ’s a personal decision o live (as I do, a “ hey / hem) and I was glad when hose pronouns became ubiqui ous because hen I defini ely fel more seen. Bu of course “ hey/ hem” since he las elec ion isn’ qui e as accep ed jus like I’m no qui e as accep ed… Presiden rump said in his inaugura ion speech I don’ even exis ! I was in Canada during ha momen so didn’ hear him bu he said here are only wo genders and hey are dic a ed by your body a bir h. rump is mis aken on his, jus like he is abou so many hings. He go rid of our rans flag and he go rid of our le er “ ” in LGB bu he can’ ge rid of me no ma er wha he akes away or how he spells ha e.
National Bestselling author J Brooke’s (they/them) debut poetry book, I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, received a starred Kirkus review, is a USA Today Bestseller, is included in Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2026, won Driftwood Press’s Editor Choice Award, and was Ashland Press’s 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Finalist. Brooke’s other honors include Pushcart & Best of the Net nominations, The Iowa Review’s 2025 Nonfiction Prize Finalist, Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize Winner. Their work appears in Electric Lit, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive and the Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus. They can be found at JBrookewrites.com.
Photo Credit: Juan Camillo Garza
EMDASH a.k.a Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) (she/they) is a poet-who-also-writes-fiction, educator, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve received support from LAMBDA, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Chinese American Museum of LA, Jersey City Arts Council and more. She has learned as much from community organizing and open mics as she did from her Rutgers-Newark MFA in Poetry. They’re published in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, Alocasia, Underblong and elsewhere. She proudly hosted, produced, and curated The Word Bookstore Open Mic for two years.
So yeah, I know it feels late telling you this I mean sure me having had a trans kid— pretty grand omission right?
Hear me out on this particular elephant room-sauntering— it’s not like K appeared trans all his life just different to me
in a takes one to know one way. Really mostly we were flipping pancakes, carting K & his sibs to basketball, soccer, jujitsu, art
music lessons same as any other attempting non-dysfunction fam with queer parents navigating difficult weekend fathers and K
adamantly hetero before lesbian -leaning finally realizing he was he so we jumped right in helping transition along the way sourcing
gender affirming medical care ushering K through changing his legal name birth certificate driver’s license passport under-
wear hoodies socks watch razor shave cream deodorant hair gel nose piercing even warranting a shift. I admit having post-op
post top surgery squeamishness changing his drains, thankfully his brother A, trained as EMT, rescued us both, so I got away
only double knotting trash bags filled with blood-soaked gauze. K asked me to edit most family and childhood photos he looked
not masculine in, so I cut them up tiny before igniting in a fire pit fire burning K’s old bras too as we celebrated ashes tangoing
across our lawn while Sia sang Chandelier loud out of the blue- tooth speaker K knocked over reaching for his third Herradura.
Wild joy like that night needs to be protected, so I tuck it tight. Bind it close to my heart—never risking it being diluted by a big gender stew.
National Bestselling author J Brooke’s (they/them) debut poetry book, I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, received a starred Kirkus review, is a USA Today Bestseller, is included in Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2026, won Driftwood Press’s Editor Choice Award, and was Ashland Press’s 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Finalist. Brooke’s other honors include Pushcart & Best of the Net nominations, The Iowa Review’s 2025 Nonfiction Prize Finalist, Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize Winner. Their work appears in Electric Lit, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive and the Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus. They can be found at JBrookewrites.com.
Photo Credit: Juan Camillo Garza
EMDASH a.k.a Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) (she/they) is a poet-who-also-writes-fiction, educator, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve received support from LAMBDA, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Chinese American Museum of LA, Jersey City Arts Council and more. She has learned as much from community organizing and open mics as she did from her Rutgers-Newark MFA in Poetry. They’re published in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, Alocasia, Underblong and elsewhere. She proudly hosted, produced, and curated The Word Bookstore Open Mic for two years.
I pull again and again yanking poor innocent fibers imploring they offer
impossible space for me to hide I’d toss them all begin a fresh downsize
to medium or small jettison my soupy slouchy swimmy threads dump donate
or burn the motherfuckers I desire that outcome if only I can just blink it onto
me, awake to hands exploring my torso my flat smooth chest no longer breasts
inhaling exhaling proudly satisfied and yet I don’t get it that surgery I do not
choose surgery I do not elect it fearing instead the scalpels needles anesthesia
I wonder was it the tonsillectomy I did not need, elective surgery I didn’t elect
at 4 when I didn’t get a vote or was it that rhinoplasty at 17 against my will
still no vote no voice my body bones and skin I had in the game no control
like my uncle Stanley punctured at 42 by drains tubes liquid in and liquid out
emaciated once handsome stud I loved visiting him that last hospital time that
could have done it But the lump under my arm in my armpit (even my lymph
nodes avoid my breasts) so scary one doctor calls another for a favor to see
me See them today it’s important please and I go and they poke
and avert their eyes frown prod order the MRI ASAP as I dress
recalling all those times I begged god please don’t give me cancer
don’t make it cancer anything but cancer but if I must cancer
god, please breast cancer then radical bilateral removal not
elective but medically mandated dissolution solution my problem
But I skirt death again the tests show the lump is just some something acting
up inside me, a minor revolt I need no surgery so I won’t get surgery and I live
on in the body I was mistakenly wrapped inside Unwanted gift to myself I remain
National Bestselling author J Brooke’s (they/them) debut poetry book, I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, received a starred Kirkus review, is a USA Today Bestseller, is included in Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2026, won Driftwood Press’s Editor Choice Award, and was Ashland Press’s 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Finalist. Brooke’s other honors include Pushcart & Best of the Net nominations, The Iowa Review’s 2025 Nonfiction Prize Finalist, Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize Winner. Their work appears in Electric Lit, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive and the Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus. They can be found at JBrookewrites.com.
Photo Credit: Juan Camillo Garza
EMDASH a.k.a Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) (she/they) is a poet-who-also-writes-fiction, educator, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve received support from LAMBDA, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Chinese American Museum of LA, Jersey City Arts Council and more. She has learned as much from community organizing and open mics as she did from her Rutgers-Newark MFA in Poetry. They’re published in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, Alocasia, Underblong and elsewhere. She proudly hosted, produced, and curated The Word Bookstore Open Mic for two years.
When I bit Barbie’s head off, when I stole Jim’s racecar pajamas, wearing them underneath. My baseball cap seemingly surgically attached from kindergarten through college I waged war whenever asked about
wearing tops on bathing suits. When I swigged Sprite, imitating you drinking Heineken, emulating you wiping the drips with my sleeve instead of napkin. I wore a sweatshirt over two t-shirts both always stained
(one from mustard the other blood.) Hating you teasing me, saying I wanted to marry Joe Namath— yeah, no. I wanted to be Joe Namath and you knew it. When I said call me “Sport” instead of “sweetheart,”
shoving my hands deep in my pockets, practicing spitting, knuckle-cracking, peeing while standing. Toothpick in mouth, sticking out, like a thug or a gangster. All those times begging through a payphone for authentic cowboy boots, begging
for thick brown leather belts pleading for LL Bean Black Watch plaid flannel, desperate for a men’s navy blazer— my holy grail— the secret inside pockets where I’d conceal
a pocketknife, lighter, playing cards, marbles, string. I used to write you from my bunk in camp, with a flashlight write asking for a men’s 10-speed, GI Joes, sling shots, boxing gloves, Daisy Rifle,
boomerang, chemistry sets, erector sets, a set of real walkie talkies to communicate clearly, hoping I could be understood. I’d shave my face stealing shaving cream you left behind,
slapping on your old aftershave, imagining your big sandpaper hands bookending my face. I’d thank grandpa whenever he’d chuckle at me saying, “You could pass for a starting linebacker!” “You
definitely walk like Bucky Dent” said Uncle Stanley. My favorite however, remains, “You move like a bull in a china shop”— which mom said a lot, between her cigarette puffs describing me to myself, forever making zero sense. After you left her,
leaving me too, alone fishing around in the dark for loose quarters, dimes, nickels I’d save up, never spending. Your remnants, I saved in this empty cigar box I hid under my bed. Keeping it wrapped in tin foil, dropping it on your blanket in the end, coming out to you.
National Bestselling author J Brooke’s (they/them) debut poetry book, I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, received a starred Kirkus review, is a USA Today Bestseller, is included in Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2026, won Driftwood Press’s Editor Choice Award, and was Ashland Press’s 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Finalist. Brooke’s other honors include Pushcart & Best of the Net nominations, The Iowa Review’s 2025 Nonfiction Prize Finalist, Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize Winner. Their work appears in Electric Lit, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive and the Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus. They can be found at JBrookewrites.com.
Photo Credit: Juan Camillo Garza
EMDASH a.k.a Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) (she/they) is a poet-who-also-writes-fiction, educator, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve received support from LAMBDA, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Chinese American Museum of LA, Jersey City Arts Council and more. She has learned as much from community organizing and open mics as she did from her Rutgers-Newark MFA in Poetry. They’re published in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, Alocasia, Underblong and elsewhere. She proudly hosted, produced, and curated The Word Bookstore Open Mic for two years.
The reasons I read poetry are so numerous, and each of them so meaningful that explaining them all would probably take a lifetime. For the purposes of this review, I’ll mention one: to have ordinary human experience transmuted into something that feels new, revelatory, and even magical. Which brings me to the poetry collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025) by Yamini Pathak. This book contains some of the most dazzling poetry I have ever read, bar none.
Each of the book’s sections is named after an element of a raga, which is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music. More than just a piece of music theory, the word “raga” itself in Sanskrit is related to color, to dyeing, and the soul. That is the essential mission of a raga: to evoke a particular emotional state in the listener, to color the soul and the mind, if you will. That Pathak would choose this as the framework for her book is more than fitting, not only because Pathak’s poetry is itself endlessly vivid and evocative, but because she explores a vast emotional territory.
The first section, after the prelude, is named Thaat. A subheading simply denotes it as “The Parent Scale.” The first poem of the section, “Ghazal for the Children Born Far from Home,” demonstrates with its brilliant couplets that this section is aptly named:
Rama scaled the ocean/Bheeshma died pillowed on a bed of arrows Their ghosts in your marrow unstirring, this is my sorrow
In the bazaar you petted unblemished baby goats, you didn’t know they were meant for slaughter, this is my sorrow
Exiled from a language where yesterday also means tomorrow You wander thirsty with no tongues, this is my sorrow.
Dedicated to her sons, the poem is a perfect example of Yamini’s poetic ability as well as the themes of the first section of the book. She is able to conjure huge depths of emotion, acknowledging the sadness she feels at her sons growing up without their ancestral tongue but also endless possibility as she mentions the time-bending aspect of that tongue and the magical imagery of the religion she was raised with. Where there is beauty, there is violence; where there is sorrow, there is the memory of joy.
It isn’t just the poems themselves that make this book memorable, though. It’s often how they are ordered. The final three poems of the second section demonstrate this to devastating effect. All poems seem, in some way, to be looking back at some place, or some person, that cannot be returned to. They all deal with the death of the speaker’s father. In “On a Far Afternoon,” as the speaker’s father is dying in the hospital, they pass by “a hall / where marriages are sealed by flame. / Every morning a white mare / grazed outside.” It’s a line that Gabriel García Márquez would’ve written. In the next poem, “Everest,” she describes the moment when the painting of the same name by Nichola Roerich brings tears to her eyes when she sees it in a gallery. The only indication that these tears might be for her father comes in a line that is all the more searing for its candor: “Only a week since my father died.”
Then comes “Hunger,” the last poem of the section. The bulk of the poem describes how the narrator prepares a cauliflower for a meal, listening to Yo-Yo Ma talk on a podcast while she does so. The façade, like any façade, has cracks, and the grief seeps through: “I imagined a space like a cavernous chest, / the cello pulsing at its heart…My own chest vibrated, empty.” The experience of beauty is likened to receiving “a glimmer of impermanence.” And as Yo-Yo Ma’s band plays at the end, they “intone a dirge.” Here, it’s Pathak’s restraint that recreates the enormous tension of trying to hold yourself together. It’s heart-stopping. This section is named Alaap. Alaap, Pathak tells us, is a melodic improvisation in a raga that “defines the raga, its mood, emphasi[s], secondary notes.” The mood of this raga, then, seems to be the mood of departure, of memory, and grief.”
The last section is called Pakad, which is a “musical phrase that establishes the identity of a raga, encapsulating its essence.” An overarching theme here is more elusive. These poems are focused more on the day-to-day experiences of the narrator, such as perimenopause or dealing with unpleasant coworkers. (It also contains a poem called “Poem with No Apology,” which is one of the best love poems I’ve ever read. The line “I love you like I love a novel that makes me sad / it has ended” is one I will wish for the rest of my life I had written for my girlfriend.) I think, though, that this smattering of experience and emotion is the point. It comes the closest to the experience of actual selfhood, of real life, and, having read the book, it appears that this is the essence of Pathak’s raga. The reminiscences that have come beforehand have shaped the person the narrator is now. What we, the reader, are supposed to take away from that fact, I’m not sure; Pathak is a better writer than to provide an answer for us. Maybe, going back to that love poem, it is to love the places and people we encounter “like a burning building, like there’s no more time to waste.” Or maybe it comes in one of my favorite poems of the collection, “The Cosmos Asks Three Questions,” in which the universe itself speaks to the narrator:
At the airport, that woman by the sliding doors, homeless and babbling like a river with stones in its underbelly? She could be you, escaped from a parallel universe through a rent in my fabric…The galaxies are pitted with black holes, gravitational lenses that bend and distort light so that everything is chimera, illusion, Maya…If you led a blameless life, you need not fear my teeth.
Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Half and One, Gauge, won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize, and made the Shortlist for the 2025 Letter Review Poetry Prize. His debut poetry chapbook, The Remains, was published by Bottlecap Press in March of 2026. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.
The very first time I consider ending my life I am four. Me and my brother are permitted a walk
after dinner (us leaving only after folding our napkins and politely requesting, may I be
excused?) to explore resort terrain in places like Acapulco— places that put jealous faces on teachers
when we go back wearing tans, delivering show-and-tell trinkets like leftover pesos and piñatas. We skip,
hop on one leg run fast along pristine paths snaking around spa buildings, tennis courts, giant swimming pools. We
impersonate a tightrope act, balancing along floating docks yachts cling to by rope. I stick with my brother, older
by five years he is constantly checking his glow- in-the-dark Timex, deciding when to turn back. This one night is different: I’m not
excused to accompany my brother on a walk. I’m excused instead to head to theladies room (I only call it that to her—
to my mother or she won’t allow me my exit) I never use that word otherwise and never ever enter doors saying it. Instead,
I slip into mens rooms or when on vacations like this I’ll use those bathrooms marked restroom next to the pool. Coming
back, I hear my brother whistling to himself, so I go quietly find him. BOO! I yell so he jumps laughs chases me and I run then hide
behind a tree. He is better at pretty much everything, except not at hide-and-seek, or jax, or red-light- green-light 1 – 2 – 3 or
kickball or rope climbing. And if I hold my breath when I hide, he gives up, yelling, Come out! Come out! Wherever you are! without ever finding
me. This night after he yells come out I reappear, begging for one more time so he covers both eyes and counts. I take off, running on grass instead of cement
so my patent leather shoes go silent. I head to the Pro Shop— darkened and closed at night— the headless mannequins in tennis outfits attract but also spook me so
I try to look / not look and I squint a bit and zoom upstairs to the second level— open air, a canopy top and heavy chairs jumbled like cutlery thrown down a staircase
by folks dragging them into odd positions to watch tennis matches on the courts below. Ready or not here I come shouts my brother, peeling hands from his eyes, walking
looking behind trees, trying his hardest but not even coming close to finding me. From my perch I see him in a way I rarely can— tippy top of his head
where his part divides his hair. So neat looking— impossibly hard straight- line side part like he used a ruler. I see his Timex glowing (he wears it outside his shirt cinching tight
his sleeve like a belt around a slim waist) super unmanly my father says… Except my brother doesn’t care when anyone says stuff like that, simply preferring
not moving his sleeve out of the way to reveal time. My eyes drool seeing the tops of his loafers too— perfect shiny brown penny loafers I want to possess
so badly. Instead of pennies I’d put pesos inside those slots, but my mother says maybe to me getting a pair after I outgrow shoes I wear and hate. Pretty much wanting
everything my brother has and pretty much getting none of it. Except if his Timex breaks he’ll get another, and I’m promised his broken one. Why do you want a broken watch
not able to tell time? Leni asks. It won’t matter I tell Leni because I can’t tell time, I say. Really, I just want to feel the tight band squeeze my skin— feel
the burning metal heated by sun like what happens when I let my teaspoon soak in hot tea— I use it under the table to burn my hand, singeing me a little, leaving a mark behind
on my palm like a real tattoo like Popeye has. I don’t like Popeye, but I like sailor uniforms a lot— I like I’m Popeye the sailor manI’m Popeye the sailor man… that song
I hum to myself whenever I’m eating Alpha Bits or Apple Jacks. I think it’s crazy I’m not allowed anything basically every other kid gets to do, and yet I can make myself breakfast
from cereals no other kid ever gets to eat. Sugar I appreciate but it can’t stop me thinking about suicide. Not this very first time on this vacation in Acapulco— while I’m
playing hide-and-seek with my brother I hear screaming, Jimmy! It’s my mother calling him Jimmy! She just keeps screaming until he pops up like toast popping
out from the toaster— then he jumps to attention like my GI Joe saluting Yes? My mother, still screaming, Have you seenthat sister of yours? My brother’s head
darts side to side like a pinball desperate trying to discern from where her voice is screaming. From my perch I see her smoke first, clouding above tall hedges quickly
moving in our direction. Peering over the railing to the tennis court below I know if I jump, I won’t bounce
like a tennis ball,
or even like a racquet hurled hard at the rubber surface by older kids getting mad during lessons. I know I will die quickly— upon impact, leaving my body
lying in a jumble like on CSI before the sheet covers the corpse I imagine my blood spreading outwards, a fat puddle all around me like red wine infecting a cocktail napkin when
the glass gets over-filled. I imagine my mother, still smoking, looking down at me. Would she touch me? I wonder, see if I have any life left in me? I decide she wouldn’t—
instead, she’ll have my father lift me up and carry me— my corpse— away to where? Where will my body be kept until vacation ends and we all go home for my funeral? Why
I don’t jump this night doesn’t matter. What matters is I think something I can never unthink. That matters a great deal to me. Even if I didn’t think about dying more
than other kids growing up in unhappy families, I now knew something— I now held the power to control one perfect thing in my life— even if it ended up becoming the last thing ever in my life.
Now armed, I was a fire fighter commanding infinite water extinguishing violent flames. Later, while catching hell from my mother I pretend- fall asleep amidst screaming and my heart
pounding like it does when I’m in trouble. Except now, cushioning my heart beats as a piano damper pedal muffles sound, floated this new, light, soft impossible freedom—
freedom to get away, for good. That carried me off to sleep this night, an angel cocooning me safely upwards.
National Bestselling author J Brooke’s (they/them) debut poetry book, I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, received a starred Kirkus review, is a USA Today Bestseller, is included in Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2026, won Driftwood Press’s Editor Choice Award, and was Ashland Press’s 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Finalist. Brooke’s other honors include Pushcart & Best of the Net nominations, The Iowa Review’s 2025 Nonfiction Prize Finalist, Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize Winner. Their work appears in Electric Lit, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive and the Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus. They can be found at JBrookewrites.com.
Photo Credit: Juan Camillo Garza
EMDASH a.k.a Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) (she/they) is a poet-who-also-writes-fiction, educator, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve received support from LAMBDA, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Chinese American Museum of LA, Jersey City Arts Council and more. She has learned as much from community organizing and open mics as she did from her Rutgers-Newark MFA in Poetry. They’re published in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, Alocasia, Underblong and elsewhere. She proudly hosted, produced, and curated The Word Bookstore Open Mic for two years.
