Autumn 2025 (7:2) Felix Eshiet Mother Tongue, Foreign Mouth In Precious Okpechi’s “Other Principles of Floatation” (after which this poem is written), the weight falls on the “indestructibility of the spirit” using the concession “no matter what.” The message is simple: whether light or heavy, the universe keeps the body—and by extension, the spirit—afloat. In “Mother Tongue, Foreign Mouth,” the indestructible is “mother tongue/first language,”  and the entire poem is a house built around “conflict of tongues.” This poem tells its own story, but most importantly, it begs a question every speaker of a second language should attempt, at least once in their lifetime: Must a second language erase every fragment of a first for the speaker to be understood?

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Emma Janssen Portrait of My Uncle, Going I wrote this piece in a weekly writing session with my best friend and high school poetry teacher. They are always my work’s first readers, critics, and admirers, and I couldn’t be more grateful to them. In this poem, I wanted to write about grief, but primarily the feeling of grief from afar. I hope this poem resonates with those who have family who live far away, as I do, or who mourn family members they don’t remember. With the caesuras and line breaks, I hope to capture the disjointed feeling of mourning from afar and the melancholy of long pilgrimages across an ocean to attend a funeral or sit

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Emily Harman Failed Sonnet Along Minnehaha Creek The Minnehaha Creek flows through the neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, where I grew up. I spent countless afternoons as a kid exploring the woods lining the creek, often returning home with the scratches and bruises to show for it. As I got older, these wounds took on different shapes. I hesitated for a while on using the word “failed” in the title of this piece—what this poem is actually doing is queering the sonnet, which is the furthest thing from failure. Though I know that now, there was a long period of my life where those two words were much more synonymous. This poem’s inability (or refusal) to adhere to

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Sian Maciejowski Inheritance Inheritance began with watching my mother’s hands—ordinary gestures that held both tenderness and survival. The poem explores what is inherited and what is resisted, looking at how memory, language, and displacement flavour our lives. At its core, it’s a meditation on maternal legacy, cultural fracture, and the transformation of grief into sustenance—whether food, art, or story. Mama pounds spices with a worn pestle from the market.   I watch her hands— wrinkled like the skin of an elephant— turn fresh chilli to dust,   and wonder what she endured to break something so easily.   She cracks eggs— delicate as a surgeon— and scoops the throwaway  shells into a bin made from old bags.

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Maria Giesbrecht A poem about death and tomatoes Anticipating grief is a unique form of gratitude, I keep telling myself. My poem is an exploration of cyclical sadness, and how it begs to exist woven between aliveness. I wrote it early this summer, when everything around me was bold and blooming, and all I could conjure was death. I’ve learned, sometimes it is like that. The plants in my garden reach for the torso of the deck—a skeleton of cedar. Something dead holds something alive. The saddest story we can tell. And father’s eyes were first romas, then oozing beefsteaks— in ten years:               heirlooms. Two wild,        

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Dilys Wyndham Thomas A Museum of Waxwings I am told all poets have at least one poem about birds, and this is mine. However, it is first and foremost a poem for my mother, who has dementia. She loved autofiction, so I like to think she would have appreciated its honesty. a lone magpie caws from the pines outside quells the hum of the refrigerator defrosting the silence of afternoonwhile we sift and sort through our mother’s home only the taxidermy case remains a parting gift from one of her loversnot present at this spooling of a life    he helped unravel        and fill with absence                

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Muhammad M. Ubandoma Lung Canary I wrote “Lung Canary” at the age of 18. It is one of the most thoughtful and grief-filled poems I have ever written in my life, expressed in the simplest language I could find. While writing, I felt overwhelmed—each word weighed heavily upon my breath, almost more than I could bear. Yet, in that weight, I also discovered a strange beauty in how the language unfolded, carrying my emotions until the very last line. This poem is a tribute to all those in the world who have suffered from silicosis. May you find comfort, may you feel healing through these words, and may God’s grace see you through. Tales from the Queue

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Kosisochukwu Precious Onuoha Bathtub Vortex When I first read Allison Titus’ “The Department of Quiet Failures” in 2023, I felt x-rayed—every secret, shamefully small part of me exposed. And I felt relieved. As a sore loser and someone who plays jump rope at the edge of “desperate for validation,” I’ve submitted to only a handful of magazines in the few years since I began writing poetry, just the ones I truly loved. I find it both ironic and delightful that my first published poem is one about rejection: about how it feels to be turned away as a writer and, by extension, as a person. This poem is both a response and an homage to Titus’ insistent

Autumn 2025 (7:2) Taylor Hamann Los Postlude with Minor Complications This poem, like many of my poems, began as a single moment of emotion. Perhaps surprisingly, that emotion was intense frustration. However, as I placed more images on the page and revised what was already there, the poem bloomed into something more. That’s my favorite part of the writing process—the surprise when a poem becomes about something completely different from what you expected when you first began writing it. I’ve already turned this soil over & over, dropped a hook into the lake,   sharpened my tongue against a whetstone’s edge, waiting for a whitetail   to flick its ears toward me, then bow its head & say, Yes, you’re