This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).
BOUND FOR
Lightning so angry half the lights floated blacked, flickered, came back
and I filled my bathtub with water in case of a true outage, an emergency-emergency. Why were you
at the bottom of those pools that—in the dark— beware me of blood? I look to the water. I see
you clawing at your own throat,
strangers promising He’s in a better place.
What better—what life after this—too late
for naloxone, too late for Heaven,
new earth. I sit here perpetually inventing lives more terrifying to live—
as if reality were not enough. I hope you never know how far, how deep my grief dragged me—the everydayness
of walking empty grocery stores, parking lots, quiet fluorescents, the quiet telephone.
I think that I am alive—once,
you said Lobsters, you said something with their chromosomes, you said the only thing time does for them is grow—
I think that I am alive now because you are not.
If there is a world in which the dead speak, let them tell me what it’s worth—your name so difficult to say.
Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).
Beside the black poplars
my father ran against his own spectre’d brain his sadness his cramped hunger cabinet kicked the water-logged soccer ball through the acre and back
the dead translate our bodies as reeds voice a marsh find their way back like fugitive monks from a night we’ve never seen tucked beneath their robes the books they bear are their bodies
their fingers are long shadows their cheeks scuffed as sitting-stones their shoulders torqued like St. Sturgeon suspended from his tree and feet grandmother’s and feet worm-worn spars of wood and feet father’s feet his mother’s tributary the perennial bones unfurl grass through the grass
C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
I started reading seriously in college, but I began telling stories much earlier, in elementary school. Before I knew enough Chinese characters to write stories, I filled my notebooks with drawings of imaginary worlds inspired by the fantasy stories I loved—Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy. I even invited my friends to become characters in those worlds. I have no idea where those notebooks are now, but I still remember the immense joy of inventing stories.
As I grew older, I discovered English as a more adequate language for my storytelling. I dreamed in Chinese before I learned to write. English became the language through which I learned how to shape those dreams into fiction. Its precision, syntactic flexibility, and ability to render subtle shifts in time and perspective opened up new possibilities in my writing. Learning to write in English not only expanded my imagination but also gave me the tools to transform imagination into literature.
I took my first introductory creative writing class during my freshman year at NYU and wrote a series of memoir vignettes. That class was the first time I realized writing could be a lifelong pursuit. Around the same time, I began reading literary fiction. I was captivated by William Faulkner’s nonlinear manipulation of time, drawn into Fyodor Dostoevsky’s morally turbulent world, fascinated by Orhan Pamuk’s intricate labyrinths of memory and identity, and impressed by Alice Munro’s expansive portraits of Ontario. Their works reshaped my understanding of what fiction could do.
These writers encouraged me to ask questions that continue to guide my own work: How do we define ourselves? Where is the boundary between the self and others? How do we navigate the tensions between languages, cultures, and histories in an increasingly interconnected world?
Today, I am committed to writing about the Asian diaspora. Inspired by writers such as Yiyun Li, Kyle Liang, and Shangyang Fang, I explore displacement, belonging, and cultural inheritance through fiction. As an Asian immigrant in the United States, I am still searching for my own place within American society. That ongoing search shapes my writing and motivates my desire to support emerging writers and help bring their voices into the world.
Yuanhao Lin is a fiction writer from Beijing, China, and an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Columbia University. Their work has appeared in Breakwater Review. In 2025, they were shortlisted for the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize and the Madison Review Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction. When they’re not writing, they enjoy cooking and playing Mahjong. This summer, they plan to read W. G. Sebald and learn how to make Schweinshaxe.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).
Repeating the names of the dead the names of the dead
I hear that water keeps sound endlessly, a field ringing with voices.
Your names have been lost down the river we grew beside, the river that killed some of us.
Caught like flood debris against the wingdam.
Taking off down the Delaware toward Trenton, and further on to the sea’s ringing vacancy.
Or, like how light through water frays toward darkness and the riverbed.
All of you down there, current.
I open my lips, and water makes me home.
C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).
River of Lamentation
I grew up swarming for the love of men who are now mostly old, or dead and naked in dirt. I find them crawling over old photos, not ghosts, but hives of caught light.
Faded at 24, Uncle Al in the clutch of colorized film. He gazes at an open fire. The river is brackish with summer.
The dead are a kind of grain. A resident imperfection in life’s material. In the footage of Reactor 4 Shevchenko shot three days after the meltdown, radiation opened its eyes and mouths. It still speaks its life, and eats the tape. In his photo, my uncle bears a grain he never did in life. His eyes distance, his body gone.
Static is the war of the ants, like the living skull my brother lifted from the blackberry thicket when we were young. Ants sutured on it false flesh. When he threw it back, the thorns raked it naked. Grains, ants, my grandfather’s eyes, the year before, caught in film, caught before the basement. He died
in exhaust -ion. At their funerals I looked for them in the bushes, but nothing crawled back from dying, only light.
C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.
Catherine Garbinsky (they/she) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
Abi Pollokoff’s night myths • • before the body(Red Hen Press, 2025) is a tour de force of inventive language. She constructs an incredibly original poetic landscape via fragmentation, punctuation, dichotomy, and white space—one saturated with feminist critique and riveting social commentary. Pollokoff’s writing is extraordinary and surreal, carrying readers into an intimate meditation around the multiplicities of womanhood.
Like rainfall, the atmosphere of night myths • • before the body is simultaneously staccato and seamless. While reading, I was immediately struck by the innovative creation of compound words that endlessly dot these pages. Within one of the first poems, “wildflower mythology,” words like “stemwrapped,” “soilsoaked,” “goldthreaded,” and “shadowplucked” surprised and delighted me. Although none of these are in the dictionary officially, they felt so deeply accurate, visually-clear, and aesthetically coherent that I would easily vouch for their inclusion. Pollokoff here puts forward her own mythological voice with these words; she establishes her artistic voice and epistemological vision early in the collection to articulate her own becoming. Borrowing from the compound word “wildflower” itself, Pollokoff brilliantly sees patterns already existent in language and generously extends them to other natural phenomena.
Pollokoff’s structure, ordering, and paginal layout are also designed with curiosity, attentiveness, and care. With the eye of an architect and the mind of an artist in communion with her world, she places the sequence “lilies & these eroded” in the center of the book. Pollokoff writes:
weigh the phrase against its foliage: so much vastness in the gasping roots so much in the gasping tides • here & over that way here & over that way & here & here & here &.
Her gorgeous language describing lilies on a shoreline brings together earthy diction like foliage and roots and water imagery. The open vowels in “gasping tides” connect to the vastness of nature. The repeated phrases in the second stanza excerpted above mirror immemorial natural cycles. In the notes section, Pollokoff notes her intention to match “the nadir of the speaker’s emotional self-consideration” with “the vertex of the book’s ‘v.’” The foresight to be mindful of the physical artifact of her book with the speaker’s interiority is nothing short of remarkable. Pollokoff beautifully gives her speaker a chance to refract, reflect, and grow across the second half.
I resonate strongly with “particular reminders when prayers for the body aren’t enough” for its reflection on womanhood, and more generally, living with a body that changes. Pollokoff’s poignant questioning include vivid images to capture philosophical reflection; for example, “it’s not a question of streets or piano keys / it’s not a question to fill veins with tendrils of curved bark” and “is the body swallowed in fabric to hide / or to hold it.” Anyone who has selected particular articles of clothing based on feeling insecure or ashamed of their body will recognize this speaker’s experience. The title also evokes the social norm to express ‘thoughts and prayers’ instead of offer action to help someone in need. Pollokoff’s poem is a reminder full of smaller reminders for those who wish they were a different shape or who are struggling with changes in their body; she conjures fruits, wrists, cityscapes, and muscles to help readers towards self-acceptance by sitting with their beauty.
The poem “to forest is to hide a woman” also touches on the experience of holding self-doubt and self-love. Pollokoff writes:
i swarm. myself to be a. body. to become. a woman i am. leeching woman lisping & claiming. a name. for which i do. not ask i do not ask. to woman i do not want. to quiver i. want. to know what my insides are. i want. to know what. is a woman.
i want to know how. my insides are i. want to catch the dripping. light of stained. glass hanging from. rafters. & drink it into. me. hold it. hold it close to. breezes &. sing a little. in the light. don’t make light.
Such wants—to be known, to be understood—are universal. Pollokoff’s fragmented syntax makes a stop and go effect, mirroring the thought process of someone holding uncertainty and desire inside them simultaneously. The periods force me to read more slowly, and through that adjustment, I’m able to recognize more multiplicity of meaning from these words. For example, there would be less room for curiosity in the opening of the second stanza excerpted above if it simply read: “i want to know how my insides are. i want to catch the dripping light of stained glass hanging from rafters…” Because of Pollokoff’s deconstructed and then reconstructed sentence structure, phrases like “my insides are i” echo more clearly, loudly. Moments of defamiliarization with phrases like “light of stained” also piqued my curiosity, making me want to read again and again.
Pollokoff’s commitment to sustaining such an inventive, clever, and transformational poetic across the entirety of night myths • • before the body makes this thoughtfully crafted collection a standout in contemporary poetry, and one I will return to many times. Her unique diction and deep care for humanness will reach those looking for both a cerebral and emotional reading experience.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).
Augury
as the dogwoods told,
a living cousin grew so hungry he sold his porno magazines and shotgun and collector’s items his Nintendo and his cheap clothes and still his hunger fumed he turned on smaller cousins and wolfed them
there was fleeing there was chase chaste descriptions of both cousin in the dog in the woods ran so fast its eyes ignited mad stars in its skull body stretched like grip seeking trees blurred boundaries until there was no difference
a curse courses through this family for trespass for living for no other reason than the rain is pissed and decides it so
our ravening family’s great-gray-fogbank-miasma sealing us below the driven-under farmer’s field we fall and pool tease stagnant waters from the water table breed new winged bodies keening for old bloo our specters never miss a feast the arras forever torn to reveal
the slaughtered grandfathers spilled like a pot-roast on dirty tiles the hanged moon the McMansion’s too-legible portent foundation licked by housefire our witness speechless doused in carnage like butter
C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).
The oracle haunts the 24-hour diner
In this vinyl temple, I am the living ox preserving the heart of a butchered king. I wake sealed lip-to-lip with my frail reflection on plate glass. Coffee, darker than the server’s dyed hair, renounces second-hand headlights off the highway. I interpret my cream chipped beef, wanting for entrails. In this heat, it won’t outlast the flies. The server, batter-white as Bergman’s Death, kills tea bags, kills crosswords, kills hours. I utter as I eat, purloin each moment down my throat like a poached egg. Before dawn, I abjure home like I abjure the huddled ruins of complimentary toast. I take one misguided bite, scatter the remnants for sunrise: crumpled eidolons, stale visions. Northbound, the 18-wheeler splits my reflection, and day tumbles out like new-birthed snakes.
where you are, I cannot t e l l
C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is an excerpt from Midwest Shreds by Mandy Shunnarah (Arcadia Publishing 2024).
Detroit, Michigan
SKATER HOUSES
Detroit is a city made for skaters. It is the home of the RollerCade, the oldest Black-owned roller rink in the country, which has been operated by the same family since 1955. It’s also the home of Detroit-style skating, a synchronized couples skate. It’s a city that was made by and for those who roll. And that’s without even mentioning cars. The city’s skate scene can be depicted, too, without harping on its infrastructure. Much has been written about the Motor City’s empty buildings, with laments for the city often manifesting as poverty porn or like a script for an apocalyptic movie. Too many hipsters have gone with camera in hand in search of beauty in the destruction in the name of creating art that so depersonalizes the destruction from the people whose lives are most affected by it. But there is much more to Detroit than this. In terms of street skating, empty buildings and unmonitored, unguarded private property are the stuff of dreams, and skaters here, like skaters anywhere, make use of what they have. I myself was born in a city of broken concrete, jagged, bent handrails, unmown grass, and abandoned factories whose tenants had moved overseas, leaving behind husks of buildings, empty and wanting. My dad worked at a steel mill for thirty-two years until the day its doors permanently closed, and I refuse
to pretend there’s a silver lining in deindustrialization and the poverty that comes with it. All this is to say, I went to Detroit in search of new stories. I drove miles of winding roads past glittering lakes to arrive at Dan Mancina’s house. His five-month-old Newfoundland puppy greeted me with a howl and bounded to a hole he’d exuberantly been digging. “Not much of a seeing-eye dog,” Dan joked as he pushed dirt back into the hole and tamped it down.
***
“I didn’t even skate at that point,” he said. “I was over skateboarding. I was over the whole scene. LA was way different than the Midwest skate scene, and I wasn’t really feeling it. It was just not what I thought it would be. It was super cliquey.” That, combined with his deteriorating vision, made him think he was done with skateboarding for good. There was a two-year period where he had no drive to skate at all. It was a dark, depressing time. There’s something about skating that’s almost encoded into skaters’ DNA. If you have the inclination to skate, you won’t be able to stay away from it. There’s an instinctual pull that won’t let you avoid the adrenaline rush of wheels under your feet for too long. “I’m way happier and I’m a better person when I’m on my board,” he said. When Dan picked up a skateboard again, he was more determined than ever. He started making a series of videos to challenge the public’s assumptions about what blind people are capable of, and he started filming himself skateboarding. The videos took off on Instagram. “It was weird having people call me inspirational at first. It’s still a little weird,” Dan said, chuckling. “I’m just a skater. I don’t see myself as
inspirational, but it feels good to know people enjoy watching my skating. And the bonus is that people are inspired by it, especially those who are visually impaired or just found out they’re going blind. It’s cool to hear from them.” Dan is still primarily a street skater and will skate any accessible place, especially if there’s a good ledge, round bar, or flat rail. He enjoys going around and finding new spots, though he doesn’t often find them at skate parks because accessibility is almost always left out of the design process. When Dan goes to a skate park, he has a process of walking the park to figure out what he can skate. More often than not, the obstacles are too small. Because Dan skateboards with his white cane, he has to be able to locate the obstacle and get a sense of its height and length before he can skate it.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian-Palestinian writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their work has been published in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024, and their second book, We Had Mansions: Poems, was published by Diode Editions in 2025. The latter is a Finalist for the Ohio Book Award. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review and Assistant Editor of Sundress Craft Chaps. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is an excerpt from Midwest Shreds by Mandy Shunnarah (Arcadia Publishing 2024).
Davenport, Iowa
SKATE CHURCH
When you walk into Skate Church, you’re not just walking into Skate Church. Housed in the same building, a former furniture warehouse now called the Center, are a number of nonprofits. There’s Quad City Harm Reduction, which helps people who are addicted to drugs use them safely by giving people clean needles and Narcan. There’s a donation- based coffee shop in the back. There’s a food pantry and thrift store. There’s a studio where they screen films and teach hip-hop classes. The sanctuary, which includes a low stage with a cross on top surrounded by folding chairs, is in the middle of it all. And in the very back is an indoor skate park, which sprawls across two floors through a maze of ramps and bowls. It’s much larger than the pictures online would have you believe. Pennie Kellenberger, who has been running Skate Church for twenty- one years, knows everyone in the Center by name. And they know her; she’s the one they go to for help. It had been raining in Davenport the past few days before I visited, and one houseless man’s quilt had gotten wet. He wasn’t sure how he’d be able to dry it, since this was no job for a household dryer and it would likely need to be professionally dry cleaned, so they brainstormed solutions. Would the church dryer be able to dry out a quilt on site before it became irreparably mildewed? Probably not. Could they
replace the quilt with other blankets? Pennie would check her supplies. She mentioned she’d just given away her last sleeping bag. She often gives supplies away the same day she gets them. Demand is high, supply is low, and the need is constant. “Are your shoes wet?” she asked the man. He nodded. “Take them off and dry them out,” she said. The man looked a little unsure, as though he shouldn’t be walking around barefoot in a church, but Pennie insisted that it would be okay, and he agreed. After all, Christian iconography often portrays Jesus barefoot. It’d be a hell of a thing for him to judge. At the Center, “come as you are” is a philosophy that weaves throughout the organization. It’s the same philosophy that led Pennie to start Skate Church over two decades ago. “We kind of fell into it,” she said. “We started doing skate ministry because I was working at the church across the street and I realized that the kids I was drawn to didn’t fit the kids inside the church. They didn’t feel as comfortable being inside the church, so we started doing things outside in the parking lot. They’d come with their skateboards, so we started building ramps.”
***
“One thing skaters have in common is you can’t stop them. Persistence is a personality trait that threads through every skater,” Pennie said. Skaters skate in defiance of the police, of the government, and of private property, so it only makes sense that skaters would skate in
defiance of the church too. Institutions, no matter how much power they believe they have, cannot stop skating. They can either get on board (pun intended) with skaters or prepare for nonstop opposition. Skate Church is a testament to the fact that if you listen to the people you want to serve, they’ll tell you what they need. “When we started, there wasn’t a skate park in Davenport,” Pennie said, although one was built about ten years after Skate Church was established. “But my goal isn’t to build skate parks, it’s to build up people and communities. I didn’t set out to build a really cool skate park, I set out to build really cool people.” I don’t believe in much, but I do believe in skating. I believe in the wind on my face when I go down a ramp. I believe in sweat dripping down the small of my back and pooling under my breasts. I believe in knee pads and helmets, compression socks and freshly cleaned bearings. I believe in doing a trick you’ve been too scared to try for months and feeling powerful when you realize you have the skills and just needed to dispense the fear. I believe in falling and immediately doing the trick again so I don’t give fear time to settle in my bones. I believe there’s something about skating that makes it feel bigger than it is, like it’s a reason to live and a metaphor for life, like it’s a calling beyond the mortal self. It’s enough to make me almost—almost—believe in God.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They are the winner of the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in July 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review and Associate Editor of Sundress Craft Chaps. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
