Women Who Submit

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during August of 2026. Three of our committed members heard about their publication opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!

Congratulations to Marya Summers whose poem “Portrait” was published in Artemis Journal.

At the center of a vortex of light,
she will re-create herself –
a windblown silhouette
approaching centrifugal grace

A storm, a twister, a twisted sister –
she once was the chaos of grief

Kudos to Amy Raasch whose three poems “Air Hunger,” “Heard at Mom’s Funeral While Wearing a Green Dress,” and “How My Mother’s Kitchen Table is Like Van Gogh’s ‘A Pair of Leather Clogs'” were featured in Outskirts Literary Journal. She also published the poem “Exit Interview” in The Pinch and “Broken Sonnet for the Phone Call I Didn’t Pick Up” in Tahoma Literary Review. Excerpt of the latter is available below:

I heard Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” sung
in Spanish at a funeral last week, twice —
Processional and Communion. Stained glass shook
loose & boomeranged rose-gold sharps into tall-boned
Jesus till he swayed between stone femurs
like a receiver in a phone booth waiting
for his last phone call from God. Your last call
went to voicemail, then you hung up on yourself.

Shoutout to Jay O’Shea whose fiction piece “Bloodford Creek” appeared in The Dread Literary Review.

The way I count it, the night my brother had that run in with the dog was around when the chicks started dying. A scream of tires woke me, and I looked out the window in time to see the old Chevy a phantom under the porch light. Billy tumbled out of the passenger seat, missing the porch and hitting his head on the column. He slumped there as the truck door slammed from inside. Another screech, another sharp swivel, and mud struck Billy, the porch, and probably our front door as well. I grabbed the Narcan from my nightstand and pounded down the stairs, not caring if I woke Momma and Daddy. When I reached Billy, he had pulled himself upright, looking at the naloxone in my hand.

Huge congratulations to Julia Gaytán whose book Ion Love has been released with Riots of Roses Publishing House.

Kudos to Jesenia Chavez for her publication of three poems “Rainbow Dress,” The Night of the Election,” and “Coyotes” in Flowersong Press’ Anger is a Gift: An Anthology of Resistance and Response Poems to the 2024 Election.

Shoutout to Stephanie Barbé Hammer whose poems “Riding the Metro D Line” and “Found Poem on the Amtrak” appeared in Beach Chair Press Magazine. Excerpt of the former is available below:

The marvelous machines have come
At last to Beverly Hills!
They zip through tunnels then slide
You up shining metal
Stairs and boxes
To a whole different
Part of the city! –
It’s miraculous: it takes HOURS to drive these
Congested LA distances and
Walking? Forget about it – but
Now you can go to the theater or the stadium or the
Museum or that big Beauty of a main
Train station in 26 minutes.
Or the reverse – which is what
I do.
“Excuse me” says a very young man in
An orange vest to me on the platform
“Here is your paper map”

Congratulations to Anne Ramallo who published “Awake” in Radical Catalyst Art and Literary Journal and “Luna Moth” in SillyGoosePress. See excerpt of the latter below:

Why do I return
to what burns me? 
Why do I beg
the porch light
when there’s so much 
jasmine sighing honey
into night’s dim corners?

Some of us emerge mouthless,
speaking silently in scent.
Born for love alone,
we starve with wings entwined.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during June of 2026. Four of our committed members heard about their publication opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!

Congratulations to Lois P. Jones for publishing two poems “Frida as Bell” and “Housekeeping: Muzot as the Great Keep” in Rhino Poetry’s Fiftieth Anniversary Issue.

Huge kudos to Anne Ramallo whose two poems “High Praise” and “If Birds Had Tongues Like You” were featured in Mosslight Magazine Issue One (excerpt of the latter is available below). Her work was also featured in the poetry anthology Made From Midnight: Delirium with Poets in the Pines.

My chest heaves with secrets
that drift between the blue and breeze—
gossip between brook and stone,
the silent longings of sequoias,
the mushrooms’ complaints,
as they suck venom from earth.

Shoutout to Bonnie S. Kaplan whose poem “Marina del Rey, California, 1986” appeared in White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology.

Congratulations to Lili Lang whose poem “If I had 101 Lives” was picked up by Blue Marble Review.

I was once posed an icebreaker
It started out clean and easy
With a would you rather
Eat worms or have spiders crawl over you in your sleep
Then because I hang out with
Perpetually pretentious poets with something to prove
Who are always slightly high
They asked
What would you do if you had 101 lives
And me
Being simultaneously melodramatic and emotionally repressed
Thought
I would save one for my mother

Huge kudos to Desiree Zamorano whose short story collection Amarisa’s Cooking Pot: Tales of Life in All its Wonders was published with University of Nevada Press.

Shoutout to Elizabeth Galoozis whose poem “If my family had never emigrated from Greece” appeared in Whale Road Review.

When you inevitably arrive,
I take your hand
to help you on my boat,
surprise you
with my tenderness.
Make dark eyes at you
as we dangle our feet
and I tell you
about my island.
I find myself wondering
why, my whole life,
I’ve been drawn
to women like you.

Congratulations to Jesenia Chavez whose poem “Aquí, no hay mentirosas” was featured as part of Mentirosas: the Zine.

Cuando era niña, todas las mujeres que yo conocía decían la verdad. No, no mentían, más bien se aguantaban, había mucho que nos querían ocultar, pero las chiquillas chismosas como yo, escuchábamos todo. Si te tocaba suerte, y no te ibas a dormir, podías ver cómo se desahogaban entre ellas, soltando las penas.

Kudos to Angela M. Franklin who published an interview article entitled “Catching Lightning with Ariana Benson” in Lunch Ticket as well as two poems “Reflections of a Smoke Detector” and “2000 episodes” in Inlandia Institute’s 88 Unashamed Black Mental Health Stories. Excerpt of the former is available below:

So much has been written, and so much and not enough at the same time about the experiences of slavery, the brutality, the suffering, the just profound loss. Every day you were enslaved. You lost something every day and understood that somehow love still existed. In all of that, there are love stories of enslaved people. There are love stories of children of the enslaved. And we’re the product of that, right. We wouldn’t have survived if the love had died, and so, finding a way to write about the love just because I feel like I hadn’t seen that. And I feel like I knew it existed and wanted to find a way to balance them and to hold them both in our hands at once.

Shoutout to Gracie Azua whose poems “home land” and “My City Lives In One Zip Code” appeared in Acentos Review (excerpt of the latter is available below).

Arms outstretched, my fingertips reach end to end of my city

As beautiful as the day I left her,

Smells collectively of discounted weed and overpriced manure

Roaming down her streets and avenues

I can remember, 

The señor sleeping on the bench next to the veterans memorial everyday

Sitting on a rusty metal bench with flaky blue paint

His meaty, grayed hands holding onto his shopping cart.

He held his smile like a sword against the summer heat, 

While I stuffed myself in the corners

Of the dusty library across the street,

Congratulations to Joyce Loh whose creative nonfiction piece “We Could Send It by Post” was featured in Pure Slush’s New York Great Cities Vol. 3.

Kudos to Elise LeSage whose article “The Lazy Writer’s Guide to World-Building” was published in The Writer’s Chronicle.

In middle school, I took a stab at writing my first novel, vaguely postapocalyptic sci-fi. This was 2011, when dystopias like The Hunger Games dominated the market. Though I was enamored by the trend, I found outlining the practical parts of my apocalypse—Who dropped the nukes? What powered the surveillance cameras?—rather tedious.

I never finished that manuscript. In fact, for a few years, I turned away from writing fantasy and sci-fi completely. Leave speculative spaces to the authors willing to create their own Silmarillions, I figured. I just wasn’t cut out for the game.

Huge shoutout to Audrey Shipp whose poetry collection Poetry/Poesía/Poésie in AfroDiaspora was recently released.

Congratulations to Marya Summers whose poem “August Complex with Vehicular Homelessness” was featured in Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art.

As fire progressed and ocean pounded
even in the heaving, glaring
terror of that night, I became a soft
lamp glowing inside. Ahead, fire
glowered at the ridge, the tree line ominous
orange-red; behind me, the black
tantrums of the Northern Pacific
crashed, shaking my little camper
where I’d taken refuge on a seaside
cliff from a convergence of lightning
fires that chased me

Kudos to Romaine Washington whose poem “Sandprints” appeared in Inlandia Institute’s 88 Unashamed Black Mental Health Stories.

Shoutout to Lauren Eggert-Crowe who published the poem “Pandemic Pantoum” in The Florida Review‘s Spring 2026 issue.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during May of 2026. One of our committed members heard about their publication opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!

Kudos to Marya Summers whose poem “August Complex with Vehicular Homelessness” was published with Georgia State University.

Shoutout to Amy Raasch whose poem “Animal or Machine” was featured in Poetry International.

A poet famous for formalism says the poem is a robotic dog.

A poet obsessed with the 16th Century says the poem is a lyre with shotgun arms.

A poet married to a finer poet says the poem is a trash bag tied in a perfect knot.

A poet who fled war at age five says the poem is a chimera caped with a torn Russian flag.

A Midwest-born poet says the poem is his pet horse, cooked & eaten when winter takes the farm.

A poet who played Lady Macbeth in high school says the poem is a fake knife with real blood.

Huge congratulations to Rachel Turney whose poetry collection Retired Wannabe Club Kid was recently released with Parlyaree Press.

Kudos to Christy Umberger whose poem “Westward Call” appeared in Altar Magazine‘s first issue.

Monday afternoon, between work, therapy,
and car tune-up, a farewell walk,
where I cry, resting a hand
against my grandmother elm,
guardian I fell in love with,
despite my kicking and screaming
for spring before winter.

Shoutout to Barbara Berg for her publication of the poem “We need a mathematical solution for our neurons” in Poets for Science (excerpt available below). She also had her poem “To change the shape of wood, you must understand its properties” picked up by As It Ought to Be Magazine.

I folded into myself for years, by fold I mean in half, then quarters, then eighths.

What might be unclear or missing is how a body folds.

Today, as usual, it’s the DNA I missed.

Outside, I hear a buzzing and a hummingbird in a tree surprises me.

I caption a photograph: The wound of a firecracker plant.

Congratulations to Byurakn Ishkhanyan whose creative nonfiction piece “The Human in the Words” was featured in Ark Review.

Witness 1: My autistic daughter is driving me crazy. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

Witness 2: I feel, I like sports and videogames. I showered this morning. I had pizza for dinner.

It’s 3 a.m. I am nursing my daughter and playing the Turing Test on my phone. Here, one of the two human players is assigned to be either the interrogator or one of the two witnesses. The second witness is the AI. The interrogator’s task is to figure out which witness is the human. The witness’s task is to convince the interrogator that they are human.

In this round of the game, I am the interrogator and I ask the witnesses, “What makes you human? Tell me in sixteen words.”

Kudos to Emily Mohn-Slate whose interview appeared in Two Sylvias Press’ Weekly Muse. Read “Interview: How Motherhood Can Inform Poems” on Substack here.

Shoutout to Mahru Elahi whose creative nonfiction piece “Boghz بغض as Re-memory: an Iranian American Counternarrative to Diasporic Zionism and U.S. Imperialism” was published with Mizna.

In the summer of 2024, I moved Baba into a memory care facility. His room overlooked the gas station on the corner. I hung a painting that he has owned since the 1960s on the wall of his new room and hoped the familiar sight would bring him comfort. It didn’t seem to help. He kept asking when he was going home. 

After painful months of deflecting, there was a pronounced reduction in questions about his departure. Baba settled into the rigid routine of mealtime, chair yoga classes, and naps in the facility’s loungers. His sharp political analysis returned, and I was relieved. Though the florid monologues on imperial theft and plunder that I grew up with were now a thing of the past, his pronouncements had evolved into poetry: weighty words and phrases. Baba called the white man he befriended (a fellow resident with a quick smile) farangi—foreigner—and chuckled with delight. 

Congratulations to Michelle Smith whose poem “Impression” appeared in Don Kingfisher Campbell’s Turtle Island Poetry #5. She also published the poem “15 To Serve” with Don Kingfisher Campbell.

Kudos to Christine Heriat whose fiction piece “The Hum of Mataiva” was featured in The Hamilton Stone Review Issue # 54.

Since losing the last election, Nino had found fault in John’s every decision. He’d protested renovations to John’s office on the grounds that they weren’t “traditional,” without any idea of what it was like to sweat through video calls and struggle to find an outlet for the new printer. John suspected it was spite couched as custom.

Eventually, Nino would figure out John’s plan, what with them being neighbors. Nino lived windowless and doorless, in line with “tradition.” Traditional nosiness.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

Happy spring! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during March of 2026. One of our committed members heard about their publication opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!

Congratulations to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo whose poem “In the Resting Place” appeared in CALYX Online.

– For Octavia Butler

There’s a memory I keep of a woman
cleaning a headstone. Her bird-bone hands
grab at crabgrass and clear weeds.

She washes dates of debris
with water and tears. So fevered
her work, I grow shameful

for never realizing a tombstone needs tending.
If no sister, or aunt, or mother exists
to weed a grave, how long does earth wait

to swallow it whole? Reader, you might think,
Why didn’t she write “daughter” or “child”?
Maybe that’s because, like Octavia,

I have neither.

Kudos to Marya Summers who published the poem “Shooting from the Lip” in Wayfarer Magazine.

It was the hour of showdown. The miraculous hour.” –Patti Smith

You have never had a gun.
But you have always stood
your ground, mouth like
an automatic weapon,
ripping through the preposterous
bodies of arguments, counterfeit
claims, more holes
than substance. No matter

what it cost, you were willing
to pay it, loaded
your mouth with another round
while the enemy looked
to cut you down: napalm
the bank account, close
the ranks so that everyone

told the same fiction, intimidation
by exile, by hunger, by confiscating
the last comfort that propped
your spirit.

Shoutout to Sibylla Nash whose essay “Black History Month Celebrates 100 Years, Can it Survive the Trump Administration?” was picked up by Clio and the Contemporary.

For anyone who’s ever taken a course in Black studies, there are certain mainstays like the documentary Eyes on the Prize, an unflinching look at the Civil Rights Movement, and anything written by Frederick Douglass. Even if you haven’t taken a Black studies or Black history class, you no doubt encountered Black history celebrations during February, when folks who have made a difference in the struggle for equal rights receive their flowers.

Unfortunately, the study of Black history is not so easy anymore with the current administration dismantling avenues to celebrate the achievements of Black luminaries and recognize the Black community’s contributions to the United States. It’s unclear what future generations will understand about slavery, racism, and Black resilience when there is a concerted effort to erase it.

Congratulations to Lauren Eggert-Crowe who had three poems “While my father was dying, I kept having dreams about my exes,” “The algorithm thinks I’m pregnant,” and “Talking about attachment theory with young people in a lamplit room” published in the New England Review. See excerpt of the former below (the other two poems are available in print):

The hospital was in Taylor Swift’s hometown

Two days before he died, I ate a bagel sandwich

in a coffee shop selling drinks named for her new songs I hadn’t heard

keychains for sale, tumblers with her face

The zeitgeist moves on without you

In each dream, I had urgent news to share

It was important that they knew my fault lines had ruptured

I was one kind of land and then boom I was another

Kudos to Jacqueline Lyons whose poem “I Am Not a Robot” was featured in Broadsided Press’ Signs of Life: Artists and Writers Respond to AI.

Congratulations to Lorinda Toledo whose article “How a Pulitzer winner resurrected a forgotten U.S.-Mexico border rebellion” was published by the Los Angeles Times.

“Autobiography of Cotton” is the story of a consequential labor strike carried out in the early mid-20th century in the borderlands of northern Mexico. Rivera Garza’s genre-bending work ultimately pays homage to the too-often invisible laborers who cultivate the land and build the cities on both sides of the border.

“My hope is that readers might see how artificial borders are, how tangential they are in regard to greater, larger projects, both at the very personal level, but also at the institutional and the state level,” Rivera Garza said in a recent Zoom interview from Paris. “And how organic migration is to our lives. Movement in search of better conditions — that is the basis of what we do as humans.”

Kudos to Emily Mohn-Slate whose two poems “Are all your poems about your kids?” and “Nobody Here Knows Pittsburgh is Beautiful” were featured in NELLE Issue 9.

Shoutout to Daria E. Topousis for her publication of fiction piece “Aurora Borealis” with CALYX Press.

Congratulations to Julie Pearson whose creative nonfiction piece “The Devil’s in the Details” appeared in Disco Kitchen.

I have this memory that nobody in my life can corroborate. I’m a first grader, at a school assembly in the auditorium with the blue curtains on the proscenium stage. I’m sitting on the floor listening to some visiting group of young adults tell us about the devil. Satan. Lucifer. They’re worked up, they’re impassioned. As a younger kid, I’m sitting toward the front of the crowd, and I can see their wide eyes flashing with trepidation like they’re telling us a ghost story.

I haven’t really heard much about the devil before this moment, but he doesn’t sound great. The thing is, they’re not being very clear about who or what the devil actually is. He sounds like a scary monster.

Until a fourth grader—an “older kid” and therefore an authority figure—raises his hand and says, “The devil killed my dad.” The speakers all go nuts over this, it’s the best thing they’ve ever heard. “Yes he did,” they say. “The devil did kill your dad!”

Kudos to Azalea Aguilar whose three poems “Ways to Say I Love You,” “The Primas All Marry White Men,” and “El Alto” were featured in the latest issue of Latin@ Literatures. See excerpt of the latter poem below:

teach our girls
how love can save
from danger approaching
when you and your father
took shelter
bolted as lightning struck
illuminated path
towards that concrete slab
in La Paz
rain screamed sideways
he held you
from winds wrath
covered
your fear with his
taught you threat
can teeter
you tell how sky
seemed to tremble
how quick
downpour came

Shoutout to Jasmine Vallejo-Love for their publication of five poems in Mud Season Review. See excerpt of “An Abecedarian for My Multiple Diagnoses” below:

Avoiding discussing mental health is a family value.

Black sheep–I dare to break tradition
cautiously toe-dip in Al-Anon, see from a

different lens. Graduate to cognitive behavioral therapy–
explains so much. Being Bipolar, I dissociate,

feel held hostage on a plane I’m supposed to pilot,
get easily overwhelmed, stuck, catatonic when not manic.

Having tools at my disposal made all the difference,
illuminates the rapid pendulum of emotions.

Congratulations to Jennifer Blackledge whose two poems “We watch a video of my daughter’s second birthday party” and “The Word of the Day is Sitzfleisch” appeared in The Summerset Review. See excerpt of the former below:

after dinner and cake for her twenty-second.
Three dogs and two couches ago,
the kitchen half-painted.
On the little screen we
light the candles over and over
again, again
and let her blow them out.
She dances to a tiny electronic piano
and spins until she can’t stand up
to the applause of everyone who loves her.

Kudos to Ronna Magy who published a poem “What Mothers and Daughters Talk About In Fitting Rooms” in The Muleskinner Journal.

Mom, maybe I’ll find you in lingerie’s fitting room again. Pink

curtains. Saleslady’s plastic tape circling my 12-year-old’s flesh.

You repeating Honey, stand still. Let her measure. Do you remember

we talked about garter belts? Sticky menstrual pads? Looped rubber

snaps? Sweaty women waving paper fans in July heat. And I asked

Where does the blood come from? How long does it last?

Wear pink lipstick, you advised. Polish your nails. Dab on blue

eye shadow. You never know.

Shoutout to Joyce Loh whose fiction piece “Something Borrowed, Something Blue” appeared in Pure Slush’s London Great Cities Vol. 2.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during February of 2026. Three of our committed members heard about their publication opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!

Congratulations to Erica Castro whose creative nonfiction piece “Detention Centers, My dearest America” appeared in Daxson Publishing’s Together We Rise Voices from the Frontlines of Freedom Anthology Rebelling against Injustice.

Kudos to Anne Ramallo whose poem “When I Dream of Whales” was published in Cosmic Daffodil Journal: TIDAL LIGHT.

The ocean is alive with them—
orcas break its shimmering surface, stretching snouts
at a cerulean sky. Humpbacks and blue whales
twist pleated bellies, thrust their ribs like dancers
while I watch, laughing,from the tip of my own iceberg.

Something’s swimming beneath the precision of language—
beautiful, dangerous, ready to tip yachts,
straining, heaving, coming up for air and,
for one gloriousREM cycle, consoling, pressing love
into my skin through outstretched fins.

Shoutout to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl whose poems “Just Down My Street” and “Reclamation” were featured in Daxson Publishing’s Together We Rise Voices from the Frontlines of Freedom Anthology Rebelling against Injustice.

Kudos to Mahru Elahi whose creative nonfiction piece “Passing: A Softball Tale” appeared in Seventh Wave’s 2026 Community Anthology.

When I try to name where Ali and I fell along the racial spectrum, the word interstitial comes to mind. It was 1982 and we lived in the gaps, the only Iranians at our Southern California middle school. Iranians in Amrika were racialized before the 1978 Revolution, it was just that we were considered benign, exotic even, definitely not dangerous.

Ali’s skin was lighter than mine, with the blue-green cast of an abalone shell’s interior. His curly black hair, regal nose, and baby doll lashes might have made him attractive, but Ali’s mouth was a blunt weapon. He made the Science teacher cry. After that, I only saw him in PE.

Congratulations to Audrey Shipp whose article “How I Navigated My Way to a Memoir Deal from a Small Publisher” was featured in Jane Friedman.

Last year, as I began the query and submission process for my hybrid memoir, I knew I was going to submit directly to small publishers. I’d heard from industry experts about the difficulties non-celebrities face trying to publish a memoir. As recently as January of this year, a Jane Friedman newsletter referred to an article that notes non-celebrity memoir as the most difficult nonfiction genre in which to publish. Thus, I began my querying journey as a non-famous person knowing that agents are paid from a percentage of an advance, and the chances of securing a large advance from a big publisher were slim to nil.

I became familiar with the pitch-query-submission process after taking a series of courses from various creative writing and publishing providers. With Jane Friedman and Allison K Williams, I’d taken a slew of courses on topics such as writing the proposal, publishing paths, and book marketing. And following Courtney Maum’s guidelines, I learned how to pitch hybrid memoir specifically. As a result of my coursework, I wrote a 26-page proposal that I submitted on occasion since not all publishers required it. Although I didn’t always use the entire proposal, it was an incredibly useful resource because I pulled out sections related to my comps, my audience, or other topics that I could use for individual submissions. 

Shoutout to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo whose article “Writing a Dream Into Reality” appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Kudos to Carla Rachel Sameth whose poem “The Fragility of Home” was featured in the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered: the Motown Poetry Revue.

Huge congratulations to Toni Ann Johnson who recently published a book But Where’s Home?: A Novella and Stories with Screen Door Press.

Shoutout to Melinda Palacio whose poem “Canopy over Milpas and Alphonse” was picked up by La Bloga.

The friend I invited to lunch declined, not for fear of ICE.
She is not worried for herself, but for me.
‘Can’t make it, watch out for ICE,’ she said, fancying herself funny.

I go along with the joke as nothing will keep me
from stopping by the restaurant that’s easily overlooked
with an empty dirt lot next to it, low ceiling.
Thick roots give rise to spindly branches and a lush.
top heavy Laurel Fig, an outstretched canopy over the world.

I tell my friend I have a strategy for defeating ICE.
Say I will expose how much of a good citizen I am

Kudos to Michelle Smith whose poem “Eight Shaved Heads” was published by LA Art News‘ Poet’s Place series . Two more poems of hers “For the Love Creme Brulee” and “Nana’s Heart” were featured in Four Feathers Press Online Edition: Love (excerpt of the latter available below).

Shiny sterling silver
Sparkly and cool to the touch
Inside soft red velvet
A jewelry box reminds me of Nana’s Heart.
No music, no jewelry, nor an empty find.
Memories open of childhood past and love,
For our matriarch,
Beautiful teacher, disciplinarian, and kind.

Congratulations to Lili Lang whose fiction piece “Love and Blood” was picked up by Die Laughing Literary Magazine.

Shoutout to Joyce Loh whose fiction piece “Something Borrowed Something Blue” appeared in Pure Slush.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*