Dennis Lee

IN YOUR HEART

Let me sleep in your heart,
let me wake in your heart–
rendezvous in the plaza of souls.

You one me, you two me, you
done me you do me–
come nest in my heart with its holes.

DENNIS LEE’s

most recent publication is Heart Residence: Collected Poems 1967–2017. A book of his essays on writing, Wrestling with Cadence, will come out later this year.

 Tatum Taylor Chaubal

Prairie Dog Town

Lord give me a sewn spine and a name
worth dropping if I’m asking too much
let me live in a prairie dog town in a hive
of waxy hexagons I will busy myself

accordingly this city was not built for me
every corridor a cul-de-sac hydrangeas
heaving upon every yard but mine
I’m asking too much when I leave let me

fix my address in the underground
a burrow for my coterie I can see it now
roots and dust chintz and lamplight
hear the neighbours chatter through the dirt

fix my address in the honeycomb
walls stashed with pollen I’ll sweep cells
sweet-gild the halls until it’s my turn
to sip buttercups for now I’m going

nowhere in this city rail crossings
lift bridges every corner made for waiting
please lord of prairie dogs and honeybees
if I can’t find it put me in my place

TATUM TAYLOR CHAUBAL

is a writer and heritage planner. Originally from Texas, she now lives in Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in Five Points and Frontier Poetry. She has co-edited three anthologies for Coach House Books on the histories and memories of marginalized communities in Toronto.

 Adrian De Leon

Return Migration To A Feral Safari

Declaring as a game preserve and wildlife sanctuary a certain parcel of land
of the public domain embraced and situated in the island of Calauit.

—Ferdinand Marcos Sr., Presidential Proclamation No. 1578, s. 1976.

I.

the despots bowed
to tiger kings:

this country’s almost-
royal name, maharlika,

adorned with crowns of debt.
a proclamation followed

its nomos, a briefcase,
America remitted to America.

the king, Imelda’s Noah,
archived her Africa

into his ark. two by two,
Ferdie filled another ship,

Calauit flooded over,
dumped on arid rock.

remember: a clearing
was first a verb.

II.

the plow uproots
for fantasies to seed:

bamboo ravines between
Tagbanwa barrios,

an eagle spirals
the boar, watched from

ferocious water, waking
around the ark, a long blemished

neck cranes above deck,
the giraffe’s inhale, thick as Kenya,

hooves grating unfamiliar steel.
an arrival, a catastrophe,

an affliction: the ship
infects the shore.

III.

our return
is a clearing:

the despots peddle
the horrors they world

atop a grave,
they leper away

the secret-keepers
for the sumptuous

homecoming,
a balikbayan.

the royals euphemize
a crime scene

pamper a prison
a sanctuary

to defer
its revelation:

a zoo is a home
skinned to death.

ADRIAN DE LEON

is a writer and public historian. His most recent works are barangay: an offshore poem (Buckrider Books, 2021) and Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). His two forthcoming books are Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland (University of Washington Press, 2023) and Tatay: Notes from a Wayward Son (Doubleday Canada, 2026). Born in Manila and raised in Scarborough, he currently lives in New York, where he teaches U.S. and Philippine histories at New York University.

Jedidiah Mugarura

From Nyamuteza: Three Poems

I, Atwine, say to get together & be comrades like the dry reed
& grass is of your mother’s fingers. She makes ebiibo
baskets to carry omugusha, sorghum seeds and oburo,
the ones of millet, for a drink that strengthens the bond
of camaraderie. There is no end to tenderness. May I say,
as the song I heard you sing before I heard you speak,
that our future survived, for the grain that does not wait
too long for nights to find their hymn tired. Tomorrow,
bring us enkyeka calabashes with the brew whose embiire
plantain was the last your washed feet mashed, whose
sorghum grain’s crackling voice under the stone, Kahendarino
rocked back and forth on the millstone, is our song with no outro.
Draw your ear to the brim of the enkyeka and listen. Together
with the drink of the kernels, bring ekiibo basket with kabalagala
ripe bananas to sweeten our lips so our words to each other remain
full of vowels and thickened, not afraid as we still were of each other,
as we are of the sandmen from outside countries that carry papers issued
to them by the people in rotating chairs, air conditioning and five white shirts
for each weekday that authorize them to flood our enclosures to lakes.

sleep? The Atuhaires’ house too had no roof
but the undressed mattress their last son urinates
on at night was not straight but bent at the passage-
way of the house with no top because there
was no door. I found the ceiling on the floor
and a mosquito net bleached as hail, hanging
from the hollow the ceiling left behind, running
along the still standing frame of the passage-way.
Is it only the rain of planets that brings
us to end growing entookye? Mauda received
a letter from the government in the year two
one thousand, ten and seven, that she was in
way of the pipe that was to suck oil from the
lake that disappears locusts, to Tanzania & she
should turn to maize or (re)turn to millet or sor’ghum
which she will be able to harvest as fast,
they say, when they begin to break the ground
for the pipeline. You never again build another
family kitchen like the lab you had before the
stars heated up so hot for the moulders’ feet. The
hearth gets colder and colder with each migration.

JEDIDIAH MUGARURA

is a storyteller descended from the people of Nkore. Their storytelling seeks to find and reimagine the missing vowels to the songs we once sang before colonial violence, to project a future of agency and possibility for those still negotiating their bodies in empire. Their poems appear in Contemporary Verse 2, Brittle Paper, and The Humber Literary Review. You can read their short story, “Can I Show You Magic?” in issue 5 of Lolwe. “Special Boy” is their latest short fiction out in issue 133 of Transition. Their play, Tomorrow Never Came, will be staged in New York in June 2025.

Etienne Marsolet

Goldfish

Selection from 80 Fishes

Celestial dragon-eyed song of comet
vespers wisping glinted into gold-plated sonata
ornamental koi-pond oxygenates fabergé egg
gestates ovals ohs at coats
butterfly wings reflect origami supernovas
pensive cat reclines fine china
tiffany crystal fishbowl tuned chopin
swimming in chanel no 5

ETIENNE MARSOLET

is a poet and artist from Saguenay, Quebec. Previous works of poetry have recently been featured in Oversound and Poetry Daily.

Jimmy T Cahill

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

Erasure Poetry from Animation Theory Texts

I. Bugs is planning for his imminent death

Old Father Time and he have a fight,

The good-natured battle escalates until
the numbers and hands on a clock hide from fear;

Old Father Time and he have a fight, and they whizz through the ages

II.

Here
Objects—hats, neckties, coffee cups—rebel against routinous everyday life.

riotous
lifeless things
reshape the world.

It is a pretty idea

III.

The Jazz Singer (1927)
a continuous, sirenlike sound.

Large eyes
large eyes that look at us.

IV.

(Then he made the pink of dawn,
riotous daubs of colour
in the Cheek-bone.

‘Blushing

V. Ghosts Before Breakfast

the wife’s fearful recognition that
“cheesecakes are bad.”

prudish and yet vicious.

the wife’s fearful recognition that
“They will make you pay for that”
—a quip he tries to ignore.

VI.

HOWEVER,
and
then,
but,
just dare to
HOWEVER,

VII.

For José Esteban Muñoz

a)

There’s a Great Big Beautiful Yesterday
Creating the World of Tomorrow

In other words,
a futuristic community that would
“always be in the state of becoming”

In other words,
Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

JIMMY T CAHILL

is a non-binary and queer writer of poetry and science fiction/ fantasy. Their work has been published in small presses across Canada. Pieces from The Silly Archive chapbook have also appeared in no press (2018) and Opaat Press (2024). Jimmy’s in-progress YA fantasy novel, HYPERLAND, was generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. More about them can be found at jimmytcahill.com