Acedia Journal Vol. 1

Erin Jamieson

My Brother's Wedding

Elizabeth Crowell

Fitchburg Line

A Visit to The Whaling Museum...

Paradise Pond

Ace Boggess

Anxiety You're Feeling

What Kind of Dangerous or...

Anshi Purohit traces of suns within unearthed...

Terry Jude Miller

this poem may not be built to scale

Mubarak Said Night Walk With a Snail

DS Maolalai

Late in July

South Circular

Shamik Banerjee

Where are the days?

Sorry, Chatterton

16 18 19

William Doreski

Such Local Effects

Jose Joel Robles

SURROGATE

Sarah Das Gupta

A Prayer at First Light

Clark Elder Morrow Nelson's Chairs

Alexandra Naparstek

The Cruel and The Tender

Ted Theodosopoulos

On the march through memory

Michael Theroux

Wooden Gems

Jan Wiezorek

Philanthropy

Red Bell 26

Senna Xiang

Hibah Shabkhez

Dream Journal

Kathie Quinn Yang Souvenirs

Staff & Guests

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Lachlan Chu

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Miles Kofman

MANAGING EDITOR

Hailey Feldman

GUEST ARTIST

Sasha Filippova

To contact Acedia Journal for inquiries, address queries[at]acediajournal[dot]com. For an exchange with the editor-inchief, address editor[at]acediajournal[dot]com. If you would like to be featured as a guest illustrator or designer, contact the editor

Until capacity is reached, applications will be open for unpaid staff positions. View www.acediajournal.com/readership for more details.

Letter From The Editors

Dear readers:

In the spring of 2023, when the three of us began working on this project, it was truly a feat to predict where everything would land. Much like the season of our inception, the world was a study in inflorescence. We have yet to—and may never— recover from the global pandemic, or the Ukrainian war, or the Canadian wildfires. But the health of a plant is as much a matter of the roots as it is of the soil. All that happens now can be traced back to one or more locus of origin.

And this, this particular historiography, has become the foundation of our inaugural enterprise. In this issue, our twenty contributing poets decide what exactly that word means to them: trace. Some of our pages dedicate themselves to significant recent events, and others to fragments of history visible in the present. Each author is of a unique demographic: in age, in nationality, in experience.

As editors, we are so proud of the diversity of voices this journal is now privileged to contain. But know, dear reader, that this is only a stanza. The first of many.

Do enjoy, The Editors

men alongside riverbanks, kicking dust from their shoes, tying loose ends, & whistling south.

—Jan Wiezorek, Philanthropy

ErinJamieson

My Brother's Wedding

I wasn’t invited to my brother’s wedding but my mother, who slipped into the bathroom to cry, remembers it

in fragments—

Jamaican dishes:

ackee & codfish

jerk chicken

pepper pot stew

favor bags

filled w/ homemade tea candles

Mother-son dance where she asked if he was happy but the music was too loud & she never got an answer

ElizabethCrowell

Fitchburg Line

The train clatters behind my house a dozen times a day. I am so accustomed to it it might as well be a toy falling on the floor in another room. Thoreau heard the same from his cabin on the pond. We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us, he said.

After the last suicide, which proved too well his point, someone said there had to be something done about the trains, which go deep in the woods before the slight crest as if its path were an allegory of a danger to the soul. Apparently, the lost boy had grazed for many days the parallel, wild brush where the train cut through.

One of our children dreams of movies he will make, his mind is a thick-penned story board. The other hangs her point shoes on a nail in the wall, so the happy dogs won't eat them. At Crosby's Market, I buy soft bread, eggs, milk, and in the morning they will arise, taller, thicker with their mysteries. Sleepless we lie in the covers, in the cuff of old love, the last train going by now, as fast as the first.

A Visit to The Whaling Museum in New Bedford,

Massachusetts

Next to the whale’s skeleton the human one is meant to demonstrate how large the head that stored oil to light our dimmest rooms. We can see our ribs, hinged and emptied

of our hearts and guts, contrast with this room-sized cage and spine. Though displays boast corsets, lamps with their burnt wicks to say we are half-clever in our way,

there is no fathoming our best skill. Nimble-souled, we sift and save some days scrape memory from the blubbery detritus of Time, off the wet deck, washed away.

Devout to such distortion, caught off-guard, we are hooked by any instant, and then, barbed.

Paradise Pond

From the gray-shingled boathouse came the instructor’s ticking voice and music.

The young women’s ballet shoes on the floor, were thumps or whispers, all depending.

Then, the women came out the windowed door, with their white tights, flushed faces,

tight-hair buns, dark leotards; I turned towards them as if something were amiss or I were waiting.

The instructor came out, white-haired in a gauzy wrap. I tucked my chin to my bent knees

and looked at the autumn leaves reflected in the pond, and too, at the island in the middle with its weeping willows and fresh-mowed grass. This will be fast, I thought.

And once in winter, one time, I skated on the gray ice, and thought,

I will do this from now on, but I did not, and too,

there were silly races with costumes and rowboats, and then, years later, I came alone to sit

by the pond, my chin tucked to my bent knees, as if I were waiting, or had missed something.

AceBoggess

Anxiety You're Feeling

How I’ve been since first memories of others existing. Irrational, sure, like fear of clowns or not forwarding a chain letter, but right in the virus world in a way that has me desirous of the opposite: incursions into chaos, banging a madman’s drum. I’m almost the age of Harry Haller when he set a date for choosing. I test his urge to explore decadence, dinner parties filled with brutal words, pungent fumes, flesh that toys with my divided self. While you’ve been more like me, Reader, this page depicts me more like you in better times you speak of with fondness as if as filled with joy as you believe.

What Kind of Dangerous or Exhilarating Activity Are You Thinking About?

question asked by Savannah Dudley

I’ve put aside kitchen knives. Ski mask didn’t survive. I’ve capped the rattling bottle, corked the jug, kept filthy cigarettes in place in a pocket on my chest. I haven’t clocked a kid in the head with my aluminum lunch box in almost forty years.

I lead a sedentary life as if awaiting a push toward misadventure.

I love the word ‘misadventure.’ It implies action. Also, goofs that land a man in the stew, stir, hospital, or morgue.

I’m afraid of more than death, or less than, I should say.

Outside my door, the virus taunts like a stranger flipping off convicts through the window of a cell.

traces of suns within unearthed constellations

they hide in their graves next mooncycle, joining hands in the dark. these lithe creatures splashing aged water on buzzcut heads. these outlined ancestors

observed by your successors through a hologram mired in sores. ancestors at a distance,

modern globes facing the presence of bullet eyes. distance prompts your invitation, your folded palms amid frothed cream clouds, brazen contours set quietly ablaze. an invitation for the stars, cherub-cheeked, plum-fingered children grapple with tracing figures. starry night sky brings dying suns, history obscured between a phase of mortality and tracing paper.

TerryJudeMiller

this poem may not be built to scale

it does not need to save the world it needs only to save me—save me like home canned tomatoes acid & red & surrounded by glass

this poem is the last phone booth in America

I starve for touch—the sensorium of fingertips like a whisper on flesh

a rebellion against conformity I don’t have the heart to act

my age—magnolia flowers in the night like ghosts in the dark—hint of home

and watershed—of all the ways there are to be in the world—I’m

an open casket—an acolyte of the ridiculous—a voice reflected

like a face in a cracked mirror—two faces stare back—two songs sung

this poem will not save the world it may not even save me

Night Walk With a Snail

the last thing we do after reminiscing about the apocalypse; we gather skeletons, tendons and all the wicked things. boys are birds. birds are wind. and we take our beliefs to the sepulchre. we leave our homes and hike to the red sea; we swim. we drown and the sun swims on our faces. we continue learning to swim in the eyes of our ancestors. we hit the road back home and there's a haven in the wilderness. aches stacked our limbs. we barf our despair on top of the road, we continue to mouth our songs; there is home on every horizon. we sing about apartheid, we use a broken piece of sweat gland we mould the metaphor of our accent we split into dissimilar forms: round, slender & wrinkled we dilute our poetry, we pulsate our hearts [a bomb blast]. we write a poem about where we hide to saturate our days, and we reflect on the reason for picking imagery over a morsel of food. we choose a metaphor—a route to our home that is unfurled with enigma we tell our stories, our mouths holding the brick of a country— our tales persist to follow a butterfly that explodes beneath our nails we define the eye of a school teacher when he eats his meal inside a blackboard we sketch our home, we dream it, we build it, and we sleep on the threshold.

Late in July

they've gotten the garden heater working. it's late in july— in the hedges the wrens are getting restless. cats patrol and the air is a pollenated pinkish like the residue tipped from a pill organiser. my mother is out, sitting with a friend, cackling and opening the next bottle of wine. she never drank much when she was younger. never in front of the kids. now she's catching up on us. the old neighbourhood is thick with retirement and laughs rise occasionally between propped-up back garden brick walls painted ivy like nesting seabirds from the dry seagrass stretch between that small golf course and beachfront on dollymount strand.

DSMaolalai

South Circular

buying a beer at the bleeding horse tavern, just round the corner from a bedsit I lived in five years ago—south circular road. mushroom damp. swimming pool, torn tile-grout damp. and almost a bunker inside a back garden and six steps below the front door. wondering if the barman remembers me coming by smelling of mildew and looking for somewhere more dry to spend my evening getting wet as an otter. not getting a nod and considering asking for hot whiskey to wind up his memory because that's what I drank all the time then when I was cold in the marrow of bones.

Where are the days?

Where are the boughs where tweeted claret swallows?

The Sun is beamy but the day isn't bright.

Where are the days of rillettes and lush meadows?

Where is Big Tim who laboured on the fallows? His hut is no more on the hummock's height.

Where are the boughs where tweeted claret swallows?

Why torrid is the evening breeze that blows?

Where is its coolness that brought me delight?

Where are the days of rillettes and meadows?

The longspurs don't glide o'er the Apple rows, On leas there are no cows or goats in sight.

Where are the boughs where tweeted claret swallows?

About a playground, not a child here knows, Spring is no more the time for flying kite.

Where are the days of rillettes and meadows?

The sky has air, yet only smog it blows, My town is full, no fullness it shows.

Where are the boughs where tweeted claret swallows?

Where are the days of rillettes and meadows?

Sorry, Chatterton

If only on that blighted day, O lad, Dear Lord had pity your downcast heart Filled it with joy, then you would not be sad, But blessed to lead the greatness of your art. The garret shook and mourned when you had strown The pages of your verse all o'er the place; Your inkpot wept and grieved your wooden throne, And knew therefrom they'd never see your face. If only true insight could fill the eyes Of critics who refused your poetry, Your matchless mind would live to prove 'twas wise Beyond its age and time for all to see; Some decades later, when your skill they crowned, In sorrow's bane you had already drowned.

WilliamDoreski

Such Local Effects

Toddlers glance sideways our way, startled by the shadows we cast.

Remember the long hot summers of childhood? They ended with traces of wild grape and storms of gnats. As our friends lie flat in hospitals or gnaw at their shawls and weep we ply our routine till it squeals

like the sodden ghosts of prey. The grass in front of the bookstore

conceals a thousand secrets only the smallest dogs can rout.

The toddlers speak to the dogs in a language we've forgotten.

Their parents look as puzzled as parents always look when

the genius of childhood exposes its pink underbelly and howls.

Seated at a black metal table, we sip our coffee and consider

how best to unfold a day shaped like a sailboat in search of wind.

The shadows we cast are part of us the way digestion is part of us.

Such local effects matter more than the nuclear stockpiles lurking in well-lit places underground. The toddlers look over their shoulders

like owls observing prey The light that casts our cast-iron shadows

whimpers with apologies no one over sixty or under ten

accepts, the angles too rigid, the scripture too illegible,

and the grass evolving so quickly it will surely be flesh by noon.

JoseJoelRobles

SURROGATE

The fluid that I sipped inside your womb bleached my skin and drenched the mind, the breasts that I sucked wrought a word on my face and nurtured my youth, and the shoulder that I leaned on, the only person I knew, pressed my body to become like the hero of today The table where we sat absorbed all energies and kept them inside: What about your nods? I laid under your feet to reap pods of rips and the untold sorrows that pushed your heart down and tore your behind-door tears. The footsteps that I followed brought me to you; then, I found mine.

SarahDasGupta

A Prayer at First Light

The first, thin crack of light beneath the edge of the blind seeping, crawling into a new day. Through the labyrinth of poplar branches the shy, first rays of sunlight gleam. Hesitant, strong only enough to beseech, as yet no imperious fire. The tangled heap of sheets, your imprint now there again? Feigning sleep, no lover of light or lark, your first sun was always halfway climbing up the sky behind the grey tower blocks. That was your new day. The first breath of pale, pink petals of light beyond the river, dancing pinpricks floating downstream, coils of smoke, rising like incense from the ashes of the funeral pyres along the banks, were the stuff of dawn myths and legends, a beauty you never saw. Like night workers going home, you loved darkness and the curtained room. Like lovers, you cursed that light which marks forever the end of night's enchantment. Already the clang of trams, the cries of street traders, puncture dawn's silence. That time when alchemists scatter a few moments of precious, golden light. You often slept till midday arrived with all its heat and passion. Wherever your ashes carried you, may the dawn forgive those tangled sheets and the light break, somewhere.

Nelson's Chairs

At a furniture museum once I saw Two chairs said to have been Lord Nelson's. Yellow faded straightbacked Chairs with almost all their arms, Roped off and looking weak with age. Even a hint of ghosts from his time Had fled from them, and there was no Faint fragrance of a former age. Too much time had passed; there can be Too much time, and so much time that Sheer time itself

Shears and severs things

From even other things, and creates about them

A hangdog disconnection or Estrangement from every other object.

Nothing of the Regency lingered, and Nothing of the present seemed suited to them. The slightest slip of a seancelike air Altered, a bit, their vacuity.

Only where the silk was worn Did some hint of the past

Come across. But even that was an absence. Only what was lacking remained.

There comes a point when so much time has passed That blatant artifacts become Only their barren selves, divorced from all auras And any other umbra. Your shoes (if they last)

Will someday—in another world of suns and moons— Have nothing to do with you—or anyone at all.

Things excuse themselves until They look like things but are no longer, really, There. Nelson's chair, which might boast To an envious and admiring world That it once nested the bottom of Lady Hamilton, instead sleeps behind An invisible wall of withdrawal And doesn't even glower. Mummification Awaits your microwave, and even your most Personal purse and pocket things.

Orphaned and Unreal. Where do old objects go, one wonders, When they hang around so long? They're both here and gone. We sniff A whiff of the venerable From ancient bric-a-brac, But what those things are Has abdicated, leaving only their crowns around. Their inner tide has ebbed, leaving a frail and lacey Edge or line to mark on the sand Where they once made their greatest advance. Dumb unliving things may die Before they disappear

AlexandraNaparstek

The Cruel and The Tender

June 1933, Ukraine, USSR. Holodomor.

We found refuge in the holes dug for our children in the frigid dirt. The holes-turned-graves insulated

our sons' and daughters' lively bodies. It has been weeks since we have seen bread. Today the soldiers came

to wheel bags of grain from the farmers. There are bodies on the road—we gather and eat whatever meat we can find

before the soldiers come to incinerate our fathers, mothers, strangers. What use does a body become once diminished to ash?

We fall into the cruel and tender act of eating kin so that we can bathe in the Dnieper the next day.

Our fathers strangle their children with newfound tears in this drought to quicken Death's arrival.

Our milkless mothers shrink, swell up, and weakn in their hips so we cannot birth new sons and daughters.

We saw Stalin's daughter plump. We watched the kacaps eat bread from the grain we grew.

TedTheodosopoulos

On the march through memory

The ghosts that speak my latent truths On the way to the gates of every which way Where monsters and marvels abound Not withdrawing, regrouping instead Catching my breath and rebound

From leisurely if awestruck meanders To hurriedly expectant sojourns Lacking proofs of resilience but nonetheless Remaining almost entirely resistant to Those blind and deaf forces that ravage us.

Well-wishing knowns and unknowns about us But alas the clockworks that bring us together Seem destined to amble on past without care Were it not for that nod, imperceptible almost but Nonetheless there not explaining itself but existing

Resisting the urge to turn back, take a peek into The slowing down time by my memories’ abyss

Gasping and gaping and ready to devour me Promising myriad alluring tales closer And closer to the end but I hold fast

There’s another time I tell myself even if No time ever existed and I know so well Even then I hold fast for eternity, chipping Away at the translucent cloud that surrounds Me and you, the kitchen, the tea set, the air

In the churchyard, a chill enveloped us

Once again reminding me of the story that time Left behind for us to remember her by now

She’s gone, behind those incongruous frescoes Quite out of place yet soothing my heartache.

MichaelTheroux

Wooden Gems

In the maze of willow wands cached for the curious to discover wooden gems, in deep green cover

Careful hands of the river sands caressed each bit, over and over small toys of Time, the River's lover

Hard cores of buckwheat, sagebrush, acacia trimmed by weather and water of each thin limb, of all loose matter to reveal the innermost burl, refined by current's eddy, by the swirl of time swept among beds of reed and rush

Gnarled roots of cliff-weary cover find their way to the roiling river to spin and splash amongst the froth loosening bark, humus, moss cleansed of life, finally tossed hidden well, but never lost

Treasures of Time, the River's lover cached for the curious to discover in the maze of willow wands

JanWiezorek

Philanthropy

As if to halt the inevitable wearing of skin above bone, the men walked bottomland of Missouri River weeds, expecting their donated parcel to become more than itself— like a chain linking plaited stitches of land to continuous spirals of men alongside riverbanks, kicking dust from their shoes, tying loose ends, & whistling south.

SennaXiang

Red Bell

Tell me again about the hotel, where the sun pearls through dirty windows onto our backs. I turned off the TV. I looked inside

the empty mini-fridge, the closet with an empty iron and a hefty safe. I had a dream that two out of six elevators were broken,

Dear red bell, does it scare you, existing for emergency?

Look—there's a smudge on the glass, which proves how careless

the staff are. We wanted to be artists, so we took the right turn out of the hotel

onto the highway and watched cars create blood out of nothing. Watch—the road markings

rimmed in red. Nothing is sacred in a hotel: even the Bible in the nightstand is smeared

with neglect. Hotels regulate the custom of forgetting: my odor, my abandoned shoes,

my memories. All escorted out the key-cardguarded door. My lover says he still loves me

but I close the door on a stranger so I wouldn't have to reciprocate. One a check-out day, I cry through the bathroom, leaving tears draped like towels for the staff to erase. Uninterested in consequences.

I watch the rapid glimmer of the coast, wondering how far I could go before I forced myself to retreat.

Smell the powdered eggs burning in the metal trays. It is time, it is time. I re-fuse the entangled wires of my life, refuse the continental breakfast, refuse your apology for breaking my life

in two, one half still at the hotel, the other existing solely for emergency.

HibahShabkhez

Dream Journal

In the dawn my scrabbling fingers Seek the lost poem-seed. Along The soft cusp of sleep and waking, I wrote it all down:

Each night-whispered line a pure, bounding song; Each word a smouldering coal.

Of the glory moonlit singers

From dreams into memory knit, Scratches on an ill-folded thing Are all I have; but: Now that I know what it means to give it All broken things have my love

KathieQuinnYang

Souvenirs

I am starting a collection: the beginning of all the nice things that you have said to me. I want to put into old pasta sauce jars the golden light on apartment windows, which you pointed out as beautiful, and your words painted in blue. The battered ways of saying I love you. I want to trace every one of your laughs and hang them up in a gallery, and I want to display the raised eyebrows and warm hugs in which you linger— slowly, not hurrying to get anywhere, not rushing to leave me.

IsabelleWei

Ornament

Around the clock, in any fold of shelf, you’ll spot the cathedral my cat has usurped: rooms filled with bowls of goldfish —cheddar, of course— & stuffed animals, trinkets. His chamber holds strings, bows. Baubles in bulk. Words hang from the ceiling unbidden, dangling sautoir: o -shaped ornament. There again, old papers —densely violet, adorn & undo in concert. Soak the ornament’s metamorphic wings: plume not warbler; sand not shore. What optic gaze caught this word, ornament, with its core a name: name. What can be found in its body? men, a starless orca, the bonds of or & nor, never only ornament. Is this why I still keep these writings, these magazines: notes made odd, & oddly for myself, to undress names from shells: the cat in cathedral, the rink in trinket —shining, violet: oh the ceremonial rite in write.

Biographies

ErinJamieson

Erin Jamieson (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, including a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the author of the poetry collection Clothesline (NiftyLit 2023). Her latest poetry chapbook, Fairytales, was published by Bottlecap Press.

ElizabethCrowell

Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.

AceBoggess

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road, 2021). His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

AnshiPurohit

Anshi Purohit is a high school student passionate about psychology and creative writing. She's been published or is forthcoming in several literary magazines, such as Eunoia Review and LEVITATE. She also contributed to the Eleventh Hour anthology and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

TerryJudeMiller

Terry Jude Miller is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from Houston. He received the 2018 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Prize for his book, A Drawn Cat’s Dream. His work has been published in the Southern Poetry Anthology, The Lily Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, The Oakland Review, and in scores of other publications. He serves as 1st Vice Chancellor for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

MubarakSaid

Mubarak Said TPC XII is a passionate writer, and poet born and raised in Bajoga, Gombe state, Nigeria. He is the 3rd runner-up in the poetry category of the 2022 Bill Ward Prize for Emerging Writers, the winner of the March edition of the Threposs poetry contest, longlisted in the Gimba Suleiman Hassan esq poetry prize, and also a guest contributor at Applied Worldwide, US. His works are forthcoming and published in Peppercoast Lit, Brittle Paper, Artlounge, daily trust and many others.

DSMaolalai

DS Maolalai has been nominated eleven times for Best of the Net, eight for the Pushcart Prize, and once for the Forward Prize. His poetry has been released in three collections, most recently Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019) and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022).

ShamikBanerjee

Shamik Banerjee is a poet and poetry reviewer from the North-Eastern belt of India. He loves taking long strolls and spending time with his family. His deep affection for solitude and poetry provides him happiness.

WilliamDoreski

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Venus, Jupiter (2023). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

JoseJoelRobles

Jose Joel Robles loves to write poems and short stories while teaching Religious Studies to senior high students at Xavier University—Ateneo de Cagayan, in the Philippines. A husband and a father of one, he utilizes some of his spare time in writing.

SarahDasGupta

Sarah Das Gupta is a teacher from near Cambridge, UK. She has also worked in India and Africa. She started writing six months ago, after a period in hospital. Her work has been published in many magazines in ten countries including US, UK, Australia, Canada, India and Nigeria.

ClarkElderMorrow

Clark Elder Morrow, born in Philadelphia, is a published poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Mere Orthodoxy, The Reformed Conservative, Coffin Bell Journal, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, HCE, Blue Streak: A Journal, The Vocabula Review, and The Sand Canyon Review. His latest nonfiction book is Moral Majesty, Spiritual Splendor, published in 2021 by Wipf and Stock Publishers. Morrow is also a professional award-winning actor and radio personality, as well as a national speaker on youth-related issues. Morrow currently resides in Southern California.

AlexandraNaparstek

Alexandra Naparstek is a senior at Florida State University studying literature and biology. They have been previously published in Inlandia Journal, Ephimilar, and The Kudzu Review

TedTheodosopoulos

Ted Theodosopoulos has been teaching Math and Economics at The Nueva School since 2017. For the past sixteen years, he has been writing poetry, in both English and Greek, and has worked on several literary translations, most recently Dora Tsogia’s new play, The Peach Tree (premiered in Athens, 9/14/21).

MichaelTheroux

Michael Theroux writes from Northern California. His career has spanned field botanist, environmental health specialist, green energy developer and resource recovery website editor. He is shifting from the scientific and technical environmental field to placing his cache of creative writing, a challenge indeed at 72 but much more satisfying.

JanWiezorek

Jan Wiezorek writes and paints in southwestern Michigan. The London Magazine, Abstract Magazine, Minetta Review, and The Orchards Poetry Journal, among others, have published his poems. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and wrote the ebook Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011).

SennaXiang

Senna Xiang’s work is published in Gasher Journal, Kissing Dynamite, and The Lumiere Review. Her writing has also been recognized by the Scholastic Awards and the Adroit Prizes, and she is a 2023 YoungArts Winner in Creative Nonfiction. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions 2022.

HibahShabkhez

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic languagelearning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Rougarou, Backstory Journal, Porridge Magazine, Boats Against The Current, Samjoko Magazine, Five Minutes, and a number of other literary magazines.

KathieQuinnYang

Kathie Quinn Yang currently studies neuroscience and French in Boston. Influenced by quiet New England, they started writing poetry from a young age. This dependency on writing has stayed with her into adulthood where it often leads to a hasty scrawl in the middle of the sidewalk.

IsabelleWei

Isabelle Wei is a Korean-Chinese writer, journalist, and poet. She is the recipient of the 2023 Yamabuki Prize and has been recognized by the Poetry Society of the UK and the John Locke Institute. Recent/forthcoming publications include Tabula Rasa Review, The Expressionist, and Live Canon, among others. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.