This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from The Weather Inside by Stevie Edwards (University of Arkansas Press 2026).
Manifesto of a Dormant Pansexual
My sexuality used to be a Lisa Frank folder with a unicorn on it. Now it’s more of a KitchenAid
stand mixer, but I’ve got rainbows on my underpants for nobody to see. My sexuality used to be
a wild, ravenous thing. Now it’s on a low-carb diet and tries to get out and walk for ten thousand steps a day
but usually fails at it. My sexuality is married to a sexuality. Facebook thinks my sexuality
is pictures of Emma Watson and Selena Gomez. It’s true I slow down as I scroll through
their glam shots, but I’m more of a whiskey and flannel fan. My sexuality misses coming out
to brunch, wants to order the sweetest item on the menu—sweet grit cakes
and peach compote with whipped cream, Yes, please! My sexuality keeps ordering
a yogurt parfait and coffee, something sensible. My sexuality is a nice summer breeze
tousling my hair. My sexuality is I only shave my pubes when a bathing suit is required.
My sexuality is a one-piece bathing suit, has gotten shy with age, only wants one person
to see their midsection. My sexuality is often covered up but has a rib tattoo you’ll never see.
My sexuality has never really liked porn. My sexuality was once a pillow princess.
My sexuality is ambivalent about strap-ons but is happy to split the check for dinner.
Dr. Stevie Edwards (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Her next book, The Weather Inside, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2026 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series edited by Patricia Smith. She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. She is on the Editorial Board at SAFTA.
Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon
Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from The Weather Inside by Stevie Edwards (University of Arkansas Press 2026).
Childless
A stranger’s pregnant belly plops over elastic-waisted jeans, and a wish kicks its legs inside me. I wish it
would sit still. Forest fires blaze through Quebec, orange smoke obscuring the sky
of the mid-Atlantic, ushering in the new normal: Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
burning brush and rushing through subdivisions, making ash out of loved lives.
Is delivering a child into the smoldering of the Anthropocene an act of selfishness
or hope? Still, I want to feel my breasts milk-heavy, like little wine bags.
When I hold my friend’s tender newborn, I pretend she is my own—
journey out of her nursery into the secret life where I am a mother, where the little spittle
on my shoulder is my daughter’s spittle, and therefore made lovely. Her tiny fists
yank my loose hair and pull me back into the room where I coo
and cuddle her as her big eyes search my face, saying nothing of the coming dark.
Dr. Stevie Edwards (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Her next book, The Weather Inside, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2026 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series edited by Patricia Smith. She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. She is on the Editorial Board at SAFTA.
Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon
Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.
One of the first books I was deeply affected by was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reading it in an early year of high school, I was struck by the narrative style and how it showed the universal experience that all we know is shaped by all we’ve already known. This fascination and obsession with perspective only grew from there, since playing a remarkable role in the books I love most.
Today, the favorites on my bookshelf still lend themselves to this defining characteristic, but they sit alongside many others as well. Political theory books, research books from my undergrad, books I received as gifts, and aspirational books that I haven’t gotten around to yet. For me, books are one of the only things I’ll allow myself to buy whenever I wish. This has created the effect that often, when I want something new to read, I can go to the library that I’ve begun to curate of books I want to read but haven’t yet.
One of those classics on the shelf is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was the next memorable book I loved. For similar reasons as Faulker’s book, the fragmented, post-modern narrative resonated with me. One of my all-time favorites on the shelf is Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s work tells the story of the Great Migration, but tells a true history through the individual stories of three different migrants. Her extensive research and detailed storytelling have the effect of recounting a major shift in American history through poetic narrative. What provoked me about Wilkerson’s book was also what provoked me about my more contemporary favorites: the use of individual experience to exemplify the effects of living through history and political change.
Currently, I’m obsessed with books and genres that live mostly in reality, with a tinge of magical realism. Sometimes, these are the classics, like Isabel Allende and Julio Cortázar. One of my favorite short stories is “Apocalipsis de Solentiname,” a short story by Cortázar which explores dark magical realism and political unrest. However, László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance achieves something akin to this feeling of magical realism in its own dark but insightful world. Krasznahorkai paints an apocalyptic world. He does so not in a broad setting, but in nuanced details of how his characters feel and see; the apocalypse isn’t something that hits them all at once, but a state of emotion and divinity that they live under.
I love this apocalyptic writing for the same reason that I love magical realist writing: I understand these worlds with little tinges of fantasy and strangeness as much more akin to the world we live in now than a more “realistic” fiction. These edges that are colored differently, a world that is painted to be almost too vivid, resonates more with the great miraculousness, but also the great catastrophe, of the real world. These tinges of fantasy reflect something sacred in human life, whether you want to call it divinity, emotion, or the human experience.
Leila Tilin (she/her) is an aspiring writer and researcher, and she holds a BA from Pitzer College, where she studied American Studies and Spanish. She has a particular interest in writing and learning about the intersection of religious belief and politics. Tilin finds this convergence to be at times detrimentally dangerous, at others, astoundingly hopeful. She is interested in literature as a means for inquiry into belief systems and as a mode to participate in the creation of meaning in the world.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Rosa Castellano. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, July 26th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
The theme for July’s Xfit is “Snippets.” Before this month’s Xfit, try to keep your ears open. Bring along a few snippets of overheard dialogue or conversations to spark ideas for new poems. If things have been quiet in your life, a favorite lyric or literary line will do just as well!
Originally from Tampa, Fl, Rosa Castellano is the co-founder of the Richmond Poetry Festival and one of two Poet Laureates currently working on poetry projects for the city of Richmond VA. Her writing appears in Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Bomb, Write or Die, and Lit Hub among others. Her debut poetry collection, All is the Telling, is available now from Diode editions.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.
In “The Poetics of Disobedience,” Alice Notley says, “Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it.” Notley is using what she calls the “Dis word” or the “Dis form,” that is, what language is not, what we cannot do, what we must refuse. Notley’s “Dis form” is especially evocative when paired with a long history of expansive, disabled poetics. We are encouraged, through Notley’s “Dis word,” to imagine the inabilities of language and the body, constraints which allow us to imagine beyond our realities. In this workshop, we will take the inabilities of our languages and our bodies and use these as dis-modes to generate new, original work. By emphasizing what the body cannot do, we will attempt to complicate a poetics of embodiment.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Abigail Raley via Venmo: @Abigail-Raley-2
Abigail Raley (she/they) is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in The Offing, HAD, Hanging Loose Magazine, The Stone Circle Review, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. They are a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2026 artist resident at Ragdale Residency. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is pursuing her PhD at Case Western Reserve University. Their debut poetry collection, Wet Specimen, was published with Sundress Publications in 2026.
Amid beautiful, velvety, esoteric illustrations by Ángel Faz and Jack (Anna) Jackson, Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi’s poetry nestles like a jewel. In a debut poetry collection traversing everything from motherhood and political activism to the digital age and ongoing global crises, Hirsi does so deftly, boldly, and without flinching.
Dreams for Earth (Deep Vellum, 2025) is comprised of sixty-three poems that are broken into six sections. Hirsi is never cautious about style or structure, utilizing a new poem format which she terms ‘orb’. Among other rules on rhyme scheme and patterning, the structure comprises 24 lines in 8 tercets. There are five ‘orbs’ in the collection, but the unique style is far from being the only structural feature Hirsi engages with. Deliberate spacing, clear visual mimicry (see Again Birthing Again Birthed Again Again Again [46], and August. Blackberries Everywhere. [81], etc.), alongside incomplete and overflowing lines. This enjambment in particular leaves thoughts half-finished, guiding the reader to different, yet natural conclusions. Each use is interpretive, strongly aligned with the breadth of the poetry––by which I mean Hirsi warps the tools at her disposal far beyond their intended purpose to better suit her rhythm and narrative. The resulting impact is like watching a master at work, particularly identifiable in Kill the Messenger.
Similarly, the two halves of some of Hirsi’s poems (Anticipation, among others) exist in duality, as lines to be read all at once. This duality, however, extends beyond the structure of the poems and into the themes themselves. Hirsi’s uncompromising womanhood and motherhood seamlessly co-exist: to fear and to be feared. Or in Hirsi’s words, “My daughter brings new reasons to live but also new reasons to fear” (47 Orb: Bloodletting). This was one of a few themes that carried a certain, memorable glow, with the two identities reconciled through a shared understanding: “No pill will make me forget crimes of men with power” (116 Thresholds).
Another theme that runs through the collection like a sparkling, meandering river: Hirsi’s faith, which glints through her language in moments of impressive clarity. Although she discusses her references and inspirations in the ‘Notes’ section at the end of the anthology, citing Patterns and An Astrology, echoes of the Old Testament and faith ring throughout, interrogative and resounding in their questions, “If God can break a promise / we can’t expect much of mortal men” (27 Patterns). But it was Hirsi’s perspective that I adored. The interweaving of faith with spirituality and nature: “What is the Fibonacci sequence but God singing” (78 Hubris).
Hirsi offers not just a vision for the material needs of Earth to be met, but one where we understand each other and the world around us—the soil beneath our feet, the birds, the beasts, a dream to live in tandem with nature. This idealism is not untested or passive. Rather, the collection reaches deeper into that desire, toward an underlying fear that the sacred natural things are being perverted by technology and heartless science, a sentiment underpinned by a greater plea to bring back community. Hirsi conveys an infuriating sense of powerlessness over how taxes are spent funding genocide, how the miracle of creating new life is reduced to “geriatric pregnancy” (115 Thresholds), and how there is: “no validation of the force wielded by The World” (115 Thresholds). We are aligned with the speaker––simultaneously a voice of the inner consciousness, a YouTube user, and a dating app participant. Hirsi asks what it is to be human in the present day. But the voices with which she asks are the real magic of the collection.
From as early as the first poem, two voices emerge: the first, a dreamer—the tree who grows despite the fears of “disease drought men who think they own”; the second, the shadow that the dreamer casts in bright sunlight. The fear of being a poor mother, of being unfit for generational wisdom, “I have trouble feeling worthy / of hearing so much guidance” (34 Of Naming and Not). From the first, we are given a gentle schooling: worldly advice from one still so wide-eyed and hopeful. The second is darker, offering fragments of understanding. As with deciphering an ancient text, one must be comfortable with not understanding everything. Some things are not designed to be understood. Laid out flat and picked apart. Hirsi’s poetry has teeth. It will not surrender any interpretation without effort.
This is the same tone the collection takes to political commentary. Hirsi refuses to be silent, and her struggle bleeds through every page to offer splinters of a non-white perspective in America: “Those advising against our home birth don’t / know all the ways this country tries to kill us” (45 Again Birthing Again Birthed Again Again Again). But her protest extends beyond her borders, specifically to the Palestinian genocide. When reading Fecundity, I am reminded of the words of Omar Al Akkad, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
And so, I think of the second installment of a DREAM FOR EARTH, “Yesterday was the time to become ungovernable” (94)—a call to anger, to become monstrous. And yet Hirsi asks us to imagine if “there were no divisions / if there were no stores / just joy / like children finding flowers / or discovering pockets / or the feeling of The Sun on a cool spring day” (61 Poem About Pockets). Dreams for Earth is beautiful.
I did not have enough room to discuss all my favorite poems from this collection, so here is a brief list of my favorites and the power they hold for me.
Orb: Do Not Disturb, for its inscrutable grief and unique genesis.
Dreams for Earth, for its blazing hope, vision and boldness.
Patterns, how do you kill a frog? You boil it slowly, with routines and patterns it recognises, and you remind it that ‘this is all normal’.
Frequently Asked Question, for its doomed, tragic hope.
Solidarity, for its pain and its refusal to stop moving forward.
Remarks by President Biden on Recent Events on College Campuses / his truth in his lies, for the clarity and passive revelation beyond its structure and insight.
Tell the Children, for the revolutionary importance it places on teaching children wrath just as much as love.
Dreams for Earth is available from Deep Vellum in paperback and eBook format.
Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specializing in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work has appeared in The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from The Weather Inside by Stevie Edwards (University of Arkansas Press 2026).
The Other Woman
Rotten stem of a girl. Snakes for brains. I once was a siren wrapped in garbage. No,
I was the garbage. I made a game out of ruining: if I let a spaghetti strap slip off
my shoulder, swirled my tongue around a glass’s salted rim, and unhinged the jaw
of my want, I could swallow entire lives, how a woman pinned all her happiness in the soft
heaven of her love’s beard. I enjoyed hurting the women I didn’t know, enjoyed knowing
my pile of flesh and grunts could snatch the attention of men away from the women
who called them home. Like the woman who called and called while the phone went
to voicemail, while I conjured shivers up and down her beloved’s muscled calves. I was good
at slithering and bad at sitting still. I’m sorry. I didn’t understand loving yet, didn’t know love could be bread
and blood, sugar and sky. Now I wait for the other woman to arrive and make a snack out of my joy.
I am waiting for her to chew my sinew, to clean my bones bare and teach me despair.
Dr. Stevie Edwards (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Her next book, The Weather Inside, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2026 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series edited by Patricia Smith. She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. She is on the Editorial Board at SAFTA.
Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon
Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from The Weather Inside by Stevie Edwards (University of Arkansas Press 2026).
Rogue
In second grade, Kendra, the storybook blonde girl from the manicured subdivision
who took singing lessons, said to me, quiet and cruel, in the closet with cubbies
we kept backpacks and coats in, that I was weird. Her eyes squinted when she said it,
like she was trying to pinpoint the exact freckle or tremor or Kmart crewneck that contained
my weirdness. Jenny with the light brown pixie said I stared out the window
too much. And my teacher told my mother I never spoke in class, wouldn’t volunteer
to read aloud, though I could read. And they were all correct about me,
I feared, as I spent recesses playing make-believe with myself, Frankenstein’s
monster roaming the playground, searching for my promised companion. Some days
I was plagued by diseases the babysitter told me she wanted to cure—Dimondale Elementary’s
first Ebola victim transversing the monkey bars at record speed, blood dripping from my eyes.
Saturday mornings I would wake early and start the coffee for my comatose parents,
curl up on the couch next to my big brother, who I suspected was weird, too, and escape
into cartoons. My favorite was X-Men because the mutants got to be heroes
for their weirdness. My hero was Rogue, who was untouchable.
If you touched her skin, she absorbed your life force. I never liked it
when grown-ups hugged me. I knew it was dangerous to get too close,
that it was best to keep your gloves on if you didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
Dr. Stevie Edwards (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Her next book, The Weather Inside, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2026 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series edited by Patricia Smith. She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. She is on the Editorial Board at SAFTA.
Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon
Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from The Fault by Marcela Sulak (Black Lawrence Press 2024).
TO LISTEN ONE MUST LOVE SEEDS.
To listen one must love seeds. Or, to love, one must listen to seeds. I forget. This morning on the bridge across the ancient mills,
the cart driver collecting the garbage stopped to count the courting cattle egrets. He was crooning their vital statistics to his shadowed assistant.
The egrets were fluffing their feathers, and editing the stats. To listen to this morning is to love seeds. To pull the pole beans, pop
the casings, line the pockets. Every day I gaze upon the scales of the anona, fruited away in the canopy of my orchard, and every day
the anona grow plumper, taking their time, un-anxious to please me. The oranges in their nets don’t orange. They are enjoying their green phase.
The seed banks of the world change places—the one in Syria moves to Iraq. The one in Norway begins to lend out seeds and then to collect.
There are gun banks buried underground—one in Texas—these are called caches. When you dig guns up they grow and grow. To love bodies, one must scratch holes
and listen to seeds. These. This morning picking beans, my shoe slipped into a pocket of air. It was a cache of vole. To love voles one must hunger,
muster hunger, desire darker ways of seeing, seed the dark, and must love ceding.
Marcela Sulak (she/her) has authored five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault, and the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her six translations of poetry collections from Czech, French, and Hebrew, have been recognized by PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is managing editor of The Ilanot Review, and she directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon
Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from The Fault by Marcela Sulak (Black Lawrence Press 2024).
THE SPIDER
Yesterday I cried until there was no yogurt left until all my mother’s cabbages rolled out of the hallway closet, until the river crouched into a green pool and blinked, I cried until the too much order signaled its disorder until a box filled with little bars of soap appeared until the spider finished rolling up its white package of meat in the garden until the neighbor’s barbecue pits were loaded up onto the back of the truck and the children popped up like mushrooms though clearly there had been no rain.
Marcela Sulak (she/her) has authored five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault, and the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her six translations of poetry collections from Czech, French, and Hebrew, have been recognized by PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is managing editor of The Ilanot Review, and she directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon
Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.
