EDITOR’S NOTE
As we enter this new year, 2026 with uncertainty, in a nation at its brink once again, we face so many unsurmountable changes from a rogue police state of ICE which continues to terrorize neighborhood after neighborhood, watching the horrors still being carried out across the globe in Palestine, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Haiti, among other regions; community is needed now more than it ever has been before.
Although we normally reserve this for our main issues, as opposed to our minipacks, we’re adding our Variety4Justice links, which normally consist of orgs and mutual aid networks out here putting in this work as spaces you can donate to, or to inform the masses, with resources and tools to help fight the encroaching tyranny of within our own nation. So please before you even get to a table of contents, please consider donating, sharing, and/or learning from the organizations listed below.
For our first Mini Pack of 2026, we are featuring four stellar poets, two of which hail from our WNY homebase. From the vivid imagery in Jennifer Maloney’s prose poem, “I Went to the Demonstration,” Yamilla Tate’s beautiful, yet heartbreaking confessional in “For Tata,” the relationship dynamics centered around Disability in Johanna Hall’s “Post Impressionism Type 1,” to the powerful economy of language in by McCaela Prentice’s micro poem “Kissing Stained Glass Doves,” we’re so happy to feature these amazing voices in our first minipack of the new year!
Sincerely,
J.B. Stone, Asela Lee Kemper, Lauren Peter, Maddie Petaway EIC, Poetry Editor, Poetry Readers
ISSN: 3070-4057
VARIETY4JUSTICE
BIRDwatch standing for Buffalo Immigration & Refugee Defense, is an all hands-on-deck organization protecting communities, filled with tons of resources on how our neighbors here in Buffalo can protect, and stand against ICE.
Workshops4Gaza is a collective of writers, artists, and creatives of all sorts, who organize for all proceeds from our workshops are donationbased and go directly to Palestinians in Gaza. Suggested donation amounts reflect our desire to both honor the time and expertise of our instructors, as well as remind people of the immensity of the need in Gaza.
Stand With Minnesota is a directory of various mutual aid organizations, helping various organizations across Minnesota combat ICE and their destructive presence in the state.
FOR TATA
by Yamilla Tate
Dear Tata,
You might not know me –[but my very life is an act of knowing you.]
My mother’s aunt made mother by way of nothing but love… and for that I was named after the nickname you wove for my mother. So though I never accompanied my Mami in your womb –it seems I always was at the tip of your tongue.
Legend has it, you were a master seamstress. I believe it –black and white photographs of Puerto Rican glamour all handmade, every stitch a precise letter of a wish, a recounting of sleepless nights fixing the family school clothes, thread lines tracing the path to the local river… I guess those factory bosses saw all [that]: //all that light I was born too late to bask in// I guess they wanted those bits of sun you brought to NYC in a rickety airplane…
I wonder if you ever told them your husband nearly died for their country. I wonder if you ever reminded them they could sit in a factory because men like your husband did the dirty work for them. I wonder if “I have a husband” became a verbal tick for you. I wonder if they responded “I don’t understand your accent.” I wonder if it was your will that I understood two languages before I could walk.
Tata –when I was a little girl, the first time I ever sewed produced a perfect end result. Today, I employ my motor skills for bass playing (like your father)
and I wonder –Was it your will to keep me traveling (like your father), away from factory bosses?
I regret to inform you I also had to leave our Isla del Encanto. When I visited the city –I searched for traces of you in Spanish Harlem failing to comprehend the full extent of the wisdom [of women like you.] You did not leave your legacy bound to buildings and streets vulnerable to white purchases… Mami has always told me of your best friend back in Harlem: a Black American woman – Tata, my family you never met is Black American too. I wonder if she migrated from the South too. I suppose you missed her after flying back home… (considering Mami heard so much of her) I think she missed you too –throughout those cold city winters, in the summer // the building steps must of felt so lonely. …I like to think I am the embodiment of a friendship that transcended a lifetime… The stars that made me were: your laughs together again, at last. I understand the wisdom of women like you both –your legacy is women like me.
And I know women like you and her have never been listened to, and Tata, I know you never learned to write but I wrote this poem for you! And Tata, I know women like you, and her, and me are never listened to, [but Tata] // I perform this poem for You //
And Her, And Mami, And Granny, And Us.
Dear Tata,
I wish I could have loved you
in person.
I WENT DOWN TO THE DEMONSTRATION
by Jennifer Maloney
On my belly. The asphalt melts beneath my face and body, receives me into itself, shapes itself around me like the homely depressions in a kitchen drawer: knife, fork, spoon. It cocoons me, soft as a mattress, exhaling its oily breath into my nostrils. The asphalt loves me, needs me even, accepts my blood the way the earth accepts rain, with gratitude. It holds me in its tarry palm, fingers curling round me, never asking how I came to be here in its petroleum embrace, the rendered bone and flesh of the dinosaur, ancient and changed but enduring, unending. It’s crumbled; there are pebbles of it in my hair, crowning me, a diadem. Creating me queen. Bits of my teeth are scattered about me, pink and white as cherry blossoms. Thus am I adorned in the House of Asphalt, Kingdom of Roadway, this place I have joined with, become one with, a bride in every way virginal, only just now broken, my husband piercing me again and again under pounding, polished boots. He envelopes me, cradles me in his reeking arms as lovingly as if I were a child, yet the heat that bakes against my cheek reveals his desire.Asummer wedding, the hottest day of the year, my lover makes a home for me within his melting body, and our guests swarm over us in fanatic, frenetic joy, my body chewed like bread and wine, my lover’s body our marriage bed, the two of us at the beginning of this long, long road.
POST-IMPRESSIONISM (TYPE 1)
by Johanna Hall
i tell you that mixed episodes are mania underwater & because you can swim we imagine different things
& because my extended metaphors have acquired the distorted form of whatever comes after first impressions i resolve to never bring it up again
there's a moment between my new digital camera taking a picture & being able to take a new one where anything could happen
there's a moment a bird decides the sun is rising & it's always before i would have
i put on sunscreen on cloudy days but otherwise don't protect myself which is why you know so much
which is why i grow my nails out too long to make a fist & ask you what you know while the impasto of polish is drying
you tell me i'd sell my soul to have this even just once & that i don't have to i worry come summer's end i'll still feel the tight curling of hunger
but you give me a picasso embrace the kind he painted before the blue
before the women he tore into pieces
there's a moment a lover becomes person rather than muse or audience
i sum up every way i could go wrong & the summer flings & ripples
i give myself over to the tide of an early work
i float on my back cut lengthwise refracted
KISSING STAINED GLASS DOVES
by McCaela Prentice
you have stolen all the strawberry light. in your fist, a heartbeat quiets.
the day I met you was soft too. the clouds rolled low and kissed me back.
in the greenhouse, a motley of browning blossoms mute my footfall and I go quietly with you.
CONTRIBUTORS
Yamilla Tate is an emerging writer based in Buffalo, NY. She has performed at EVA’s Poetry Fest, Pure Ink Poetry Slam, and at the Beyond Boundaries Film Screenings & Discussion Series, and was named Caffe Aroma’s first Poet of the Month. Her work is deeply influenced by pride in her Black and Puerto Rican heritage, the LGBTQIA+ community, and in exploring the various intersections in peoples’lives. Her poem Untitled Obituary was published by Just Buffalo Literary Center as ‘Poem of the Week’ and she can be frequently found reading at open mics, performing at poetry slams, zine festivals, and other spaces selling her exceptional variety of zines, and typewriter poems.
McCaela Prentice (she/her) is living and writing in Bangor, ME. She is enjoying the Percy Jacksonrenaissance. Herpoemshavepreviously appearedin HAD, GhostCityReview,and Denver Quarterly. Her first full length poetry collection "PULP PROPHET" is forthcoming with Kith Books
Johanna Hall is a writer living in Charlottesville, VA, and has been published by t'ARTMagazine, 3Elements Review, Fruitslice: A Queer Quarterly, and the Catholic Literary Arts Society. Johanna’s Instagram is @johannahallwrites and you find more of Johanna’s work at the author website, johannapoet.com.
Jennifer Maloney is a Best-of-the-Net nominated writer of fiction and poetry. Find her work in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Synkroniciti Magazine, Literally Stories, Litro Magazine and many other places. She is the co-editor of the poetry anthology “Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film” (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021) and the author of “Evidence of Fire, Poems & Stories” (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2023). Jennifer is also a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.
