ALOCASIA

Plantcestors

Aren’t we all just seeds to start?
Seeds planted in the eyes of our creator
Progenitor of our existence
Is that why we feel kinship 
with our plantcestors?
Deeply rooted in kéyah 
we develop limbs and leaves
and systems of connection 
We, too, become life bringers  
of thoughts and ideas 
of kindness and community 
sometimes of biological kin
“We are all connected”
is not just some trite phrase
It is remembrance 
that we are all unified 
by the molecules that make us 
You, me, and the tree 

 

Flourishing

When I was five 
my kindergarten teacher 
assigned us to grow a plant 

I asked my dad for help 
he went to the trees outside our door 
He collected a chinese elm seed 
it looked flat, pale yellow, and crepe papery
I doubted such a small thing 
could create something 
like those huge elms outside
I should have known its capacity
For I was also a small thing 
Who flourished under my dad’s care

We placed it in a pint sized 
paper milk carton with the top cut off
he filled it three quarters full with dirt from the yard
We, mostly he, watered that seed 
A few weeks later that seed sprouted
That’s how I learned my hands could be magic

Almost forty years later and that tree
has grown to be a large shade tree
and my dad still waters it weekly 
I had forgotten about that tree
but he has not
Its canopy shading and sheltering 
a new wave of progeny
in the form of apricot seedlings 
That tree has flourished under his care

 

Rebecca Kinkade-Black is a Diné amateur poet. When she’s not writing or tending to her plants, she likes to spend time with her wife, her parents, and their dog.

The ancestors are always with you, 
even when you’re smoking weed 
in Central Park.

Greet them with every sunrise; 
wear a piece of turquoise 
in all your outfits. 

And you will be blessed and loved 
every day. Because every time 
you do, they’ll see you

And be happy.

 

June Beck is a Diné writer from Arizona. He dabbles in photography, cross-disciplinary storytelling, and comedy. His work has previously appeared in the Adroit Journal.

half-buried in orange sand
the wind-carved wood
remembers its cactus skin,
its blossomed breath-
each petal a jewel
plucked from its crown
in flashes of bright plumage-
days measured in
rustling phantoms,
the sky itself a song.

 

Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) bi cis anarchafeminist writer from Mi’kma’ki. She is the author of the ecohorror novella Green Fuse Burning and the Elgin Award-winning horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars. Find her on bluesky @tiffmorris or at tiffanymorris.ca.

For the common sunflowers along the Upper Fruitland, NM ditch

How do I write
                 a poem about resilience—
I want to talk more about the water,
                 about streams and lakes.
Sun rays that never sit still.
                 I imagine turquoise clusters,
matched with bright magenta masaní scarves
                 tied around our wrists, clasped
cloth in our mouths. Wait / ałtsé’ —watch, as wild flora
                 and pollen twine along our skin
like wild horse hairs.

                 How do I write a poem about resilience—
how many times will I be asked to write a poem,
                 a song, a prayer, a sermon,
a land acknowledgment, an obituary—
                 about resilience?

Instead, I want to talk about the slender riverbanks,
                 the farmland ditches that masaní told shí dóó shícuzzins
not to jump in, because ‘waterdogs,’ imaginary beasts,
                 might drag us under.
I want to talk about childhood dirt banks
                 covered in wild sunflowers.
Taller than my seventh-grade self, arcing like the rez cats that
                 come and go, always coming and going.

Shimá used to drive us down the ol’ back roads,
                 I’d slouch in my seat and stick my feet
out of the window—squealing like a toddler
                 every time a sunflower touched my toes.

In the rearview mirror,
                 I watched their sturdy stems spring back up—
arching as if they held the sun.
                 How many times will I be asked to write a poem
about resilience?
The wind spreads their seeds, their roots become
                 clenched veins, tethering.
I want to walk more in beauty, in memories
                 and blossoms that kiss my skin.
And I wondered if that dream counts as
                 resilience.

Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). Her maternal grandfather is Ashííhí (Salt People Clan) and her paternal grandfather is Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. She has received fellowships from GrubStreet, Lambda Literary, The Diné Artisan + Author Capacity Building Institute, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, The Highlight Foundation, and Monson Arts. She has work published from swamp pink, Poets.org, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Magazine, Thin Air Magazine, The Chapter House Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her writing centers healing, kinship, language-learning, and Diné narratives. She is an incoming MFA Fiction graduate student at Vanderbilt University.

Lovers

You’ve burned your bush,
now look to mine—and I’m
the guilty party? Najash
winds amidst my fruits,
snaking star-
burst to the heavens. My angel,
nor in the mist, the common
gloss, Know the taste
of mine own hunger.¹
Between us lies
a mount of hope, O

innocence, deserving
paradise. The garden

of eating spreads
like coverts, banquet
unabashed before
my glory. Boy,
you or no One made me—

I burst full formed feral
from that flock, all
furtive untamed blossoms.

---

¹ The lines “nor in the mist, the common gloss” and “O innocence / Deserving paradise” is from Milton’s “Paradise
Lost” (1663) when Eve sets a banquet for Adam and the angel Raphael in the Garden of Eden.
² The term “Garden of Eating” is derived from Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England
(2000).

King of Pentacles

I wash my garments in wine,
robes in the blood
of grapes, scrub a smudge
of excrement away & for what?^1,2
Oenology.³ You beg, Come,
to terroir, reign
over us.⁴ I shall, & when
I arrive, I will surely consume
you all.6 Mouth-feel: your flavors,
most haunting and brilliant
and thrilling and subtle and

ancient
on the planet …⁵

   Be not afraid, beasts

of the field, for my pastures
of wilderness do spring⁶
relentless. I am the true
vitis in noble

rot. My father is husband-
man, my mother (vine
of my blood) done planted
me here by waters.⁷ Abide in me,
as I in you, for without me
you are nothing—ullage.⁸ You,

thin-skinned, temperamental, ripened
too early. Why can’t you thrive

when neglected? You …
and your constant need
for care and attention.⁹ See?
Right there. That’s beautiful, quaffable,

so far from transcendence.¹⁰

---

¹ Genesis 49:11 reads, “he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.”
² “Smudge of excrement” is said by the character Miles in Sideways, credited to Charles Bukowski.
³ Judges 9: 13 reads, “Come thou, and reign over us”
⁴ Jeremiah 8:13 read, “I will surely consume them, saith the LORD:”
⁵ The character Miles from Sideways (2004) says of Pinot, “I mean, oh its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and… ancient on the planet.”
⁶ Joel 2:22 reads, “Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field: for the pastures of the wilderness do spring”
⁷ Ezekiel 19:10 reads,” Thy mother is like a vine in thy blood, planted by the waters”
⁸ John 15:1, 4 reads, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Abide in me, and I in you … for without me you can do nothing.”
⁹ Lines x – x are a paraphrase of the famed monologue from Miles in Sideways.
¹⁰ The last three lines are a paraphrased exchange between Sideways characters Jack and Miles.

 

Jessica Doe, PhD is a queer Aniyunwiya (Cherokee Nation) writer, artist, and scholar. Her work centers on Indigeneity, decolonization, and reclamation. Learn more at www.thischerokeerose.com. 

I stare the yarrow down—
enviously, I watch it turn the awful dirt to oxygen.
I have seen this flower grow alongside Highway 64
beneath the guard-rails, out the gravel-stones.
at home in the smog and the lead pollution.
damn that weed—
its easter-hued petals and hardy genetics;
its tolerance for the intolerable.
the garden store displays it in a section on the patio,
the “clay soil” row, with the coneflowers and rudbeckias
that happily sit in their sticky-wet soil,
their grainy silt, their muddy flower-beds.
it hurts my eyes—
their unbearable gratitude.
their Spring showing, their bold blossoms.
red yarrow, in the hostile clay, thrives.
can’t I?

 

Jake Salazar is a writer based in the Midwest, where he studies poetry at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He is a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. Jake currently lives in St. Louis with his two cats, both incisive critics.

An intoxicating fragrance of blue hyacinth
pulls a gentle blanket of tranquillity over 
forlorn eyes. Warming spring sun lulls us
into a foolish haze. Cross keyed primroses 
in Druidic robes of hopeful yellow guard
the pearly gates of heaven. On the threshold, 
spy the wallflower sentinels standing tall
warding off evil like a Mediterranean eye.
Marsh-bound iris holds sure, steadfast with
a relentless hope no slick mud could diffuse. 
Shoots spring forth from crimsoned ground.
See white daffodils mourning, wide-eyed,
heralding death in numb prayer over graves
of massacred peoples, watchful and judging.
Slender foxglove holds immortality in its cups,
leaves spear-like in a tense bravery manifest. 
Martyrs drink their fill of her bounty and ascend.
Transformative lungwort awakens travellers
into fresh renewal, promising a life eternal. 
Witness the gentil nature of lily-of-the-valley
ushering in new beginnings, a novel shot at
mythical happiness. At the end of the Garden, 
a lone white poppy bobs its solemn head, 
nodding off to sleep.

 

Dihya Ammar is a disabled Imazighen writer, artist, and scientist based in Scotland. When not writing, they can be found gardening, tending to their ever-growing animal family, and cooking up a storm. Their work has appeared in Green Ink Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, 3rd Word Press, among others. Their website is: dihyaammar.wordpress.com.

The pua and the plait

Fucking isn’t like making lei / with lei can start over / take it all apart / use the same pieces / put her back together again

Can weave and unweave / pull and tug at the cords / resilient and pliable / she can take my calloused hands / and turn them beautiful 

With lei you can run your fingers / through and around the curves / of the pua and the plait / an endless twirl / the very essence of her a god

Fucking feels like taking / like wrecking the softest grove / a delicately folded pulsing stone / cracked open and spilling / the magic out

I take the grove and the stone / the pua and the plait and swallow / her poli pulsing inside against mine / the grove murmuring against my chest / speaking heart to heart

What was I saying again?

Fucking is like making lei / with lei can start over / take it all apart / use the same pieces / put her back together again.

 

When harvested

When harvested,                                                                 Unborn—cradled
does the Taro forget                                                           straight into the mud,
              where he is from?                                                                where he is from.

Does the Taro dream? The barbershop buzzes. Trap mixes and Kung-Fu flicks fill screens mounted on walls. Of gold chains and hood riches. That’s $14k braddah! A used-car knocking against your chair on occasion. Does the Taro Dream? Of low-skin-fades and cold brews on the couch. Step—snip—buzz—laugh, step—snip—buzz—laugh, the barber sings softly to himself. Of baby mamas and baby mama dramas. Hoo, yessah! That’s my son, one certified hammah! High and tight’s and take-it-all-off’s, and hair raining onto the floor. The fragrance of leather and wood, tobacco and pine, wafting in and out of the shop. Does the Taro dream?

                              Of staying home and growing old here. Of having the same barber till he mate or you mate, whoever like die first. Of going into the same shop in Waipahū, where the fucken parking is shetty. Of staying home and getting drunk with the boys every weekend. Of being the kine people that wake up 6am to grab a spot at Sandy’s and barbecue all day. Of going to all your friends’ kids’ graduations at the same school. Of learning to golf, or sail, or paddle, or work ʻāina. Anakala hobbies. Does the Taro dream? Of leaving Hawaiʻi for cost of living? Downsizing into our little grass shacks again?

  Aʻole.

The Taro chooses a mid taper, tips his barber fat,
and cradled, he keeps it moving. The voices of his brothers
             ringing in the ears wherever he goes

But it will not be home.

 

 

Ryan Tito Gapelu is a Sāmoan poet and English teacher specializing in contemporary Pasifika poetry, literature, and creative writing. His work blends traditional Sāmoan and Pasifika themes with western literary forms, exploring identity, storytelling, and decolonized poetics.

Feed me at Sandy Lake

This poem is dedicated to the hundreds of Anishinaabe people whose lives were taken due to starvation, disease, and exposure during the fall and winter of 1850. In the present day, we bear witness to these same starvation tactics inflicted by the hand of the United States Government and its allies on innocent civilians in the name of “spreading democracy” to “uncivilized animals.” May there come a day where Indigenous people worldwide are liberated from oppressive, colonial forces. May we witness that liberation in our lifetimes.

---

coarse woolen blankets striped with muddy saffron /   kermes   /     inky walnut swaddled
  fickle
                promises of annuities & spoiled rations

jaspilite / fleshy granite limbs trudged through blinding opalescent fields

dreaming of dense boreal
                                                             moss blanketed forests teeming
with whitefish
                                              blueberries             and                 manoomin

sinew faces / iron soaked moccasins / children’s willowed bodies flecked with rosehip seeds

my sister returned to the earth with her coarse woolen blanket
                                                                                                           & birchbark basket as her companion
two        /              four      /                eight

relatives join her each night to dance amongst the stars

those of us left here at Sandy Lake

wait                      another day                                                                             for the delayed annuities
we wait              another week                                                                           another month

I boiled my moccasins to share
& we dreamed
of bellies warm with smoked whitefish

                                                                                            cranberry stained fingers
& the intricate ridges of bulrush mats which lined our wigwams back home

we dreamed
bodies fusing with the moss
swaddle me in cedar

i want clean water god dammit

 

Anangookwe Wolf is a visual artist and poet currently based in Lenapehoking. They have performed at The Poetry Project, Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter, and you may find their poems in Yellow Medicine Review.

I have spent my days
turning again and again
toward warmth
inviting friends and even
strangers to dance across my flesh
feeling myself grow
thicker
rounder
heavier
with their offerings
old promiscuities create
possibilities for new ones
what I offer has changed
and so have the faces 
of my visitors
but not my joy in receiving them
this new abundance
pulls my gaze toward earth
the promises of rain moistened soil
and the view of places I 
might sink into and call myself
home

 

Jenny L. Davis is a Two-spirit/Indigiqueer citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her 2022 poetry manuscript, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series, and her creative writing has been published in SAPIENS; American Indian Culture and Research Journal; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and is forthcoming in Gathering in the Glittering Field: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry, among others.

I get all my nourishment from myself.

(I’m sooo chill!)

When you’re not looking, 

I satiate my thirst
and longing by looking 
for you in the sun. 

(I barely need any water!) 

I drink all the dregs from the air
and soil. (You can forget about me 
for weeks!) I parch everything 
in my appetite for a sweet watering.

It still won’t be enough.
I hold on to every drop for a dryness 
that I know will inevitably come again
until the next time you come again. 

I love you regardless.
Seem content. 
Pretty. Vibrant. 
Thick green skin.
What a glow! you’ll say.

I’ll survive. I’ll be here (no pressure!) 
You can come back 
when you can (and that means
you‘ll always come back!)
But when you water me?
I can burst into a bloom.

When the care comes, with some consistency
I know it’s safe to spare some energy for this pink indulgence of a heart.

 

Sarah “Nnenna Loveth” Umelo Uzoma Nwafor (they/she) is an Igbo lesbian poet, performer, and facilitator. Their work explores Black g*rlhood, Black queerness, Igbo Cosmology, Sensual play, and rituals of healing. Nnenna published their chapbook, Already Knew You Were Coming, with Game Over Books in January of 2022, and a  full length Self-Published collection of poetry, Situationship Bingo, in 2025. Nnenna has also been featured on Button Poetry, WBUR’s ARTery, VIBEs Magazine, Ujima #Wire, and elsewhere. When Nnenna is not writing, they are somewhere being romanced by the intensity of life. When they speak, their ancestors are pleased. Please follow their work on IG @pleasure.as.compass or at pleasurearthealing.com.

you nightmare’d sucking colors from the rhododendrons
left with a garden of floating fish eyes–open, unblinking,
their lashes crusted with pollen. it left your morning
empty-bellied, anxious energy stewing until your knuckles
could dig into soil again, hoping to edge off the impossible
hands of decay. the bees were creating habitats of the was 
and could be, while watching you play some type of God 
in a garden, disturbed stamens carrying on wind to itch
at the earlobes, you brushed at them as the sun began
to stain the land in its ochre spit. in this moment,
the desperation of your hours felt more beautiful,
for if even birds present garbage to their lovers, 
what does it matter if some of the carrots have wilted?

 

syan jay is an agender writer of Dził Łigai Si’an N’dee descent. They are the author of Bury Me in Thunder (Sundress Publications, 2020). They were the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and Frontier Poetry’s 2019 Frontier New Voices Fellow. Their work has been published in POETRY, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, Room Magazine, and more. You can find more of their work at syanjay.com, or follow on Instagram for writing news and touring: @syansays.

Eden, use your words

I never bit into
an apple. Instead I circled
a spot on one

with my inner
wrist until the spot was
soft enough

for this apple
to be placed on the dirt, its
veins emptied,

apple juice pooled,
its beet-red bodice becoming
unclear.

I could then
vocalise. I never spoke
until I wrote

my first words—
I never had the conversation
until that fruit

came along &
I made it look quiet
enough for it to

listen. I even
climbed trees before
I was a gardener.

Because there was
always a ferocity inside the
supple-worded child.

Ghost apples

It’s a darken cube, relatively stable, leapless
like truths, a shape with lines:
              form. Whether I washed in the rain or I parted

it in the middle, the feathers
hang on the bones of my body in perpetual swing—

if you part my blood in the middle
               you can hear the motion silenced by eternity,
an ivory curtain over my mouth.

I was raised to float above time & I am no better
than that ancient tear hanging

                in me like golden wallpaper, the fruit bloom,
it’s never over, I’ve never moved
on— more akin to the type to float under the ice.

 

Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta writer, born in Australia. Her poems have appeared in Overland journal, Mascara literary & more. She runs the substack Ladybug Central at dorothylune.substack.com

Honey in the End Times

From my face hundreds of petals 
bloom, unfolding until 
my stamen is revealed: 
a yellow tongue beckoning for bees. 

I exhale fragrance. Pollinators 
dive into the sweet nectar of my saliva, 
crawling down my throat to 
fill my trachea with a pussywillow 
purr-like buzzing. 

I am skunk cabbage corpse flower.
Beetles burrow into my skin
before whispering to my mycelial wake.

Blind, I creep cracked concrete, 
repopulating cities. 
Colony collapse endemic
until I end it all. Living 
beetles wasps butterflies bats moths fill me.
So too their ghosts. 

I am a horrible hive of haunted honey. 
People flee my halo of swarms. 
I am queen of queens, 
hybrid of insect and human, 
chimerical, vengeful goddess of the pyrocene. 

Sidewalks shatter beneath me. 
Buildings shudder above,
collapsing in sharp, crumbling rubble. 

First come dandelions. 
Then daisies and cottonwoods. 
More and more flowers and trees 
erupt in my wake until
the sky is golden with fire and pollen. 

 

Raspberry Elegy

The raspberry canes grew jungle- 
thick and my sister and I carved 
tunnels through the prickles,
red juice running from overripe 
berries like the blood
from our scratched-up limbs.

So many berries that we even had some left over for jam
after filling our bellies and ruining our suppers.
The scabby old canes were the best.
They bore the most fruit. 
Hidden deep in the thorny thicket,
a barbed-wire fence no grown-up would ever dare cross.

Until they did.

My sister and I wept.
Tractors rumbled like tanks,
grinding treasure into chewed-up tracks.

They would have poisoned the land, too.
Sprayed weed-killer, as though raspberries are weeds,
all to plant Christmas trees
to be murdered each December.
Dad told them that weed killer would poison our spring.
Poison our ponies. 
Poison us.

And so the land lay fallow,
rebirthing itself with 
goldenrod, 
timothy, 
wild oats, 
daisies, 
red clover.
The next year, ponies 
grazed a newborn pasture.

 

Shantell Powell is a two-spirit swamp hag and elder goth who was raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid all over Canada. She’s a graduate of The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, LET(s) Lead Academy at Yale University, the Novel Immersive for LGBTQ+ Writers at GrubStreet, and she double-majored in English and Classics at the University of New Brunswick. She’s held residencies with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Roots. Wounds. Words., IMPACT Festival, CAROUSEL Magazine, and Femme Folks Fest. She is a Pushcart nominee, Aurora finalist, and 2024 Brave New Weird winner. Her writing appears in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, On Spec, Strange Horizons, SolarPunk, as well as in numerous anthologies. She’s been a barn mucker, belly dancer, comic/game shop manager, aerialist, woods worker, industrial/goth DJ, professional naked lady, and coffee slinger. If she ever grows up, she wants to be a space marine and/or a storm chaser. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. You can find her on BlueSky, Mastodon, or at her writing blog, Nudity is Only Skin-Deep.

forage: waagaagin 

black rocks sleep in secret
under our feet
holding quiet memories of a time before

we circle the lake
up on the clifftop among trees burnt by lightning
young ferns unfurling, you and i 

your voice shimmers
like wind skipping across the water’s surface
we’re not really here, yet we are

children of the forest and sun
walking among berries yet to come
we live to bloom wild
like sunset-colored columbine

to the beat of an old drum
we gather
under a blanket of sky
we come to the lake to belong, to be free

 

ode/ode’

I.
with your medicine
we can talk with plants
in their own language
gleaming green resounding
in eardrums, throat, and heart
we sing to roots and chlorophyll

II.
open us wide like a spiderweb 
stretching to all corners of the world
alive, enchanted, trembling
like shadow and snow
songbird and butterfly
mossy rock and stormy sea

III.
dance and remember

 

Cherolyn Kay Fischer is a second-generation water protector, parent, and musician who learned poetry from her mother. She writes to mend relationships with nature, honor ancestors, and make sense of the upside-down world we live in. Cherolyn has Anishinaabe and European heritage and lives in Mni Sóta Makoce / Minneapolis, MN.

POLLEN SONG

like a tree
breathing
seedlings
on the windowsill,                       June

    rides the wind,                 loving
    tender, slow                              & frictionless,

    June                carries                   drifts

gliding               his gentle hand guiding
stamen to        release, against aching
stamen             June breathes seeding &
rhythmically               growing & tastes of warm

   nectary                       & powdering fecundity
   & brushing evergreen          to evergreen        June

   sighs
   into  your  belly        &
                bends you twitch
                like a valley,                  June        sails
                & pollen                         comes rushing,
                comes forth,                comes coasting, comes
                vastly
                as the sea.

earth justice zadok (it/he) is an agender Afro-Anishinaabe and Lakota poet and citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians (Waganakising Odawak). He is a 2025 Indigenous Nations Poets fellow and his work has previously appeared anonymously in various independent zines circulating along Nkwejong / the Greater Lansing area (Grand River and Red Cedar River’s convergence point). earth justice zadok once had a dream of heaven as fast clean air and endless mountain valley. it loves open pinelands and the wild blueberries that grow there.

At night I dream in green:
wet leaves pressed to my skin,
the hum of insects,
a jaguar’s steady gaze
in the cathedral of trees above.

I have never felt the weight of Amazon heat
settle on my shoulders like breath—
but I’ve heard it
in the hush of my father’s voice
when he speaks of home.

My father carries a jungle in his chest.
And when he breathes,
I can hear the vines moving.

He came from the belly of the world,
where children fall asleep in hammocks
beneath the open mouth of grandfather sky.

The stars blink like elders.
Marci Amma, moon keeper of stories,
cradles dreams
in her quiet light.

In the mornings,
the boys pick plantains for grandmother,
who fries them in coconut oil over flame—
sweet smoke curling into songs
only the ancestors remember now.

I carry it too, La Selva—
its language tucked beneath my tongue,
its rhythms stitched into my skin.

I do not speak
all my people’s words,
but I hold the silence in my hands
as if it were a seed.

One day, I will plant it
in soil that knows me.

One day, I will open my mouth,
and a river will come out—
singing everything
I thought was lost.

 

Ena Elder-Gomes (she/her) is a queer, Indigenous mother from the Yanomami nation, currently living on Wolastoqiyik land. Ena’s work is rooted in a deep love for the natural world and guided by the teachings of Pacha Mama (Mother Earth). She has performed spoken-word poetry at community open mics and has been published in CUUWA Magazine.

No one warned the Cordyline when Malang’s soil decided it was done pretending. That morning, a single andong merah stood sideways in its pot, not toppled, just… refusing the vertical. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the tilt of the porch. It was something older, slower, and a bit more personal than erosion.

I bought it with a plastic bag full of change after closing a motorcycle loan three streets away. The customer wore gold rings that didn’t match his teeth. He’d asked me if I wanted the keys to his old scooter for cheap, but I said no. I wanted a plant. I wanted something still.

The seller had too many. Andong merah, glossy, stiff like a nervous tongue. “You don’t put that too close to your wife,” he’d warned with a smile. “It listens.”

I laughed too fast, paid, walked away with a leaf poking my neck. It felt deliberate.

It lived by the back window. Hera didn’t notice it for three weeks. Chan tried to eat its soil once. I said no, gently, but something sharp crept into my tone that made Hera look at me differently.

The andong didn’t grow. It leaned.

At first I thought it needed more light. Then less. Then more again. I turned it, watered it, whispered something about commitment. It stayed crooked.

When we fought, I found myself dragging the plant into other rooms. It became a habit. When things felt tense, I moved it to the bathroom. When things felt quiet, to the kitchen. When we reconciled, back to the window.

The more I moved it, the more it leaned. Like it was watching. Or trying to get away.

One night, Hera asked why I kept shifting it around. I told her it didn’t like stillness. She said, “Neither do you.”

She was right. I don’t stay in one place unless I’m paid to. My body belongs to motion. Fieldwork taught me that.

The plant was the first thing that made me sit.

Chan began speaking in broken images. “Red stick leaves,” he said one morning, poking at the plant with a pencil. “Not nice.”

I asked what he meant. He didn’t explain. Just blinked and shuffled away, dragging his tiny feet like he was trying to scrape something off.

My coworker died in a crash. I didn’t go to the funeral. I visited his house instead and left a cutting from the Cordyline in a bottle. I told myself it was a tribute.

That same night, I dreamed the plant grew legs and walked into the street. It caused a jam. The horns sounded like alarm clocks. One of them was mine.

I woke up sweating. The plant was still by the window, tilted like a question mark.

We fought again. Hera said she missed being touched like I meant it. She said I only remembered to kiss her when our son did something wrong. I stared at the Cordyline like it had answers.

She noticed.

“Don’t look at that,” she snapped. “Talk to me.”

So I did. And she listened. But something had already leaned inside us. Not just the plant.

I stopped moving it. Gave it a new pot. Better soil. More filtered light. Nothing changed.

But then Chan started drawing it. His lines were uneven, the leaves too big. But he drew it every day for a week. One day, he added eyes.

“They see me when you’re gone,” he said.

I didn’t ask what that meant.

The Cordyline bloomed once.

Just once.

A pale pink cluster, soft as breath and gone by morning. Hera didn’t see it. I didn’t take a photo. I didn’t even tell her.

I kept the memory like a coin in my pocket. Too small to spend, too precious to lose.

I got promoted. More clients, more trips, more excuses to escape the house.

The andong tilted closer to the wall. It stopped catching the light. It seemed to want darkness. It started shedding leaves like secrets.

I told myself I didn’t have time for grief.

Chan got sick. Nothing serious, the doctor said. But at night he muttered things in his sleep. Once he said, “Don’t let the red leaf fall.” I stayed up watching the plant, trying to will its color to hold.

The next morning, one of the oldest leaves was on the floor, dry and curled.

I swept it up quietly.

Hera found an apartment listing open on my phone. She didn’t yell. Just nodded. Said she hoped the new place had space for your little red spy.

She packed without urgency. Like she’d been waiting to do it.

I wanted to say she was wrong. That I wasn’t leaving. That it was just a tab, just a maybe, just a passing thought. But I couldn’t even lie properly anymore.

I stayed in the house.

The andong stayed with me.

Chan came on weekends. Hera didn’t stay long. She had a life to repair. I respected that.

I started leaving the plant alone. No more moving. No more coaxing. It leaned toward the empty wall like it finally found peace in pretending nothing else existed.

One evening, the plant stood straight.

I didn’t believe it at first. Thought maybe I’d bumped the pot. Or shifted the floorboards. But no.

It was upright.

Not tall, not bright, not beautiful.

But upright.

Like it had decided something.

Chan noticed. He touched its stalk gently.

“Better,” he said.

I asked why.

“It doesn’t watch me now.”

Then he turned and asked for pancakes.

Weeks passed. The plant didn’t bloom again.

But it stopped shedding.

I fed it. Watered it. Didn’t expect anything.

And one day, I found a new shoot.

Small, red-green, soft at the edges.

Fragile like a beginning.

The twist didn’t feel sudden. It was more like a quiet answer.

I had spent years trying to force things to grow the way I wanted.

This plant had waited for me to stop.

It had never refused growth.

Only control.

The Cordyline still leans sometimes.

But now I let it.

Growth doesn’t always mean straightening. Sometimes it’s bending in a way that still means rising.

Like love that lingers.

Like a story that doesn’t end.

 

Fendy is a writer and creative professional based in Malang, Indonesia. His work explores the intersections of nature, memory, and the surreal. Outside of writing, he spends his time composing music and studying the quiet language of visual art.

excerpt from Swift Cinder

[for Milton Apache]

buckshot splitting air, cracking space, ricochets off tree bark, tree limbs
scattering brush           climbing
high up into Bear Canyon, into the mouth of the sky

— Wednesday, April 09, 2014, roughly around 3:00 in the afternoon
a specific moment and time
no different than the odious Big Bang
setting a single course of action          as a determinant event
billions of years in the making
first refractive light against planets and stars
lifting split light                              against lit faces
bringing a specific moment                                    fastidiously forward
toward a series of momentary collisions

Season Of Reformation (11/23/1990)
The Aspen’s Turn: yellow, gold, and then orange
They fall to their final destination,
with one breath from their creator.
A slight rustle of a stream; in the cool undergrowth,
Where the deer take their last drink; before migrating
into the mountains.

                                              The fresh snow falls.
A glimpse of an assorted array of confetti
               A path leading up to the road; dead shrubs, and trees.
                              A few birds chirping in the distance
                                              The sight of death.
                                              The sound of life.
                                                                                                A dew-drop on a marigold
                                                                                                               A touch of god.
                                              A flower in a meadow
What makes you pick this certain one out
                                                                of a million?

envelopment of toiling flame                      engulfing in combustion
gas, subatomic particles                              obit out of control
nucleus circles                                                  expansion girds into guard rails
                  flying fenders
in swift swirls                                                      of oil sludge, petroleum, plastic, and
metal
— the gestalt sending his ghost into nearby thickets
— in a dream

he devours kisses (11/23/1990)
as night follows daybreak,
spring calls the rain-washed valleys
and a butterfly passes through the rows,
apple trees turn a plum purple
to a flourishing flush with white edges
furnishing the garden

leaves susurrate, drowning his plea,
they feast on another butterfly,
which lands on the apple tree branch,
sharp slivers sink into the butterfly’s
head and thorax,
tree limbs devour the butterfly
as apple carcasses litter the grass
he is still afraid 

a circular wave intertwines his hands,
first right, then left, reminding him of butterflies,
weaving his fingers into the tree branches,
what remains is the pungent smell
of wilting pink blossoms
as he tries to escape, the cactus needles cling harder,
he screams as he reaches for his mother
laying beneath the apple tree

across the stream, a spider web recovers,
the butterfly had its leg caught,
but through struggle the butterfly recoils,
and becomes restrained,
— his mother faces upward toward him,
                                                  but the stare means nothing
trees shutter in the distance, under the moon,
between two ridges, indigo skyline brushes against
the mountains, the apple trees lose their brilliance,
and flowers lose their prism,
spectrum rays cease to a cold grey,
absorbing our breath, our kisses

                                              t’eesh    [ash] flakes fall softly
                                   t’eesh    [ash] flakes fall in soft particles
                                      t’eesh    [ash] releases soft particles
                                        t’eesh    [ash] releases all particles

leaving a gold vacuum of space

[there] — kú’yuu

                                                                                                               kú’yuu — [there]

                                                   [there] — kú’yuu

                                                                                                               kú’yuu and [there]

indiscriminate object strewn                       forming dashboard
a quick buck shot echoing along,
                                                                                  Highway 70
the collision translates a probability                       cohesion of metallic abrasion
                                                                                                 of beauty

upon impact    birds scatter, then cease,
and a resounding shotgun blast
ricochets off tree bark darting up the canyon
                                                                             — over
                                                                             — and over
                                                                             — and over
                                                                             — and over

an abbreviated oblique asymptote                     never meeting its
                                                                predetermination
                                                                coordination
                                                                or terminus

Crisosto Apache is from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. Institute of American Indian Arts, MFA Alumni, and a professor of English. Crisosto is also an editor-at-large for The Offing Magazine. Apache’s books are GENESIS (Lost Alphabet) & Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award and a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Authors League Award in poetry, with a poetry collection is(ness), forthcoming fall 2025 from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. Apache is also a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Monsoon on Diné

in respect and gratitude, for Brett Ramey

There is a young man who has come from his own res in Kansas
to this epic landform, to work for the season while living in Flagstaff.
He is the one who schools me about rain,
about the holiness of snow in the mountains
that is the sourcewater for creation stories flowing down
into ancestry: in the snows near Navajo, in the Blue Lake near Taos where
the people of the Red Willows live with names they give themselves that are longer
than our shared language. What is it in our lives that allows
us to break the source from which we draw life,
to treat as anything other than sacred
the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat. We, foolish,
hold precious those rare things, and
beat and bruise what sustains us daily.

I honor his story shared to root me:

There is a monsoon season on Navajo and Hopi, and those rains come in July.
For years, he tells me, they came on the same day,
on the same minute if we are willing to believe
the records and oral histories and if we will
every year the rains have come later. They start in premonition of cloud
coming down mountain, rising up over mesa edge.
For days the clouds build and roil and then rain will fall
and disappear
into the air, dissolved
into dryness.
For days the air will drink, and if we were there
we could see if we could
the rain fall above us
and not land on our faces
or on the farmer who
tends the fields of tiny corn whose
patience is strained with waiting.
For days the air will drink, until it thirsts no more,
and then the water comes, and the water floods.
And the farmer must believe that the burm he builds will hold the water,
that the plants he sowed will hold the earth,
that the earth will hold us all for another season.

Originally published in Shell Houses, The Head & The Hand Press, 2017

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.