Zentyatze Echeverria Shot By Enrique Leyva

you think you’re waiting for love to find you when in reality it has saved you in a thousand different ways since the sun rose today

Cherry Harvest

polynesians: have oral history that references a faraway land of andes-like mountains in the east, cultivated sweet potato (a plant native to central america, not the pacific), literally call sweet potato by the same word used by the quechua and aymara people indigenous to the andes, left physical remains on islands a few km off the coast of chile, have genetic links with native south americans

white academics: hmmm it’s very doubtful polynesians contacted south america.. they probably just stopped permanently at easter island for some reason after systematically navigating the entire south pacific. the sweet potatos floated to them across the ocean

“I whet my lips to speak your name. To kiss your hands, curling into the posture of prayer, they could almost have been carved from stone. I swear: If idolatry was my only sin, then it’s because god wasn’t watching.”

— Torrin A. Greathouse, from “Ekphrasis on Nude Selfie as Portrait of San Sebastian,” Poetry (vol. 221, no. 2, November 2022)

pt I selected works from my drawing final, inspired by transmission towers

“To forget how you tasted those leggy afternoons when our bodies spilled like wine across the floor, is to admit a hawk into the house. Is to wring a rag of water. When I’m in the thicket with my smaller hungers, I don’t need to know every cave and what it stores, cool and damp, for you. I don’t need to know how many nests are lined with your hair. There’s nothing tame about twilight, this old song shaking the sweetgum leaves— when I thirst I dream like a violin waiting the bow.”

— Amie Whittemore, from “Nocturne,” Birmingham Poetry Review (no. 49, Spring 2022)

Nedra Glover Tawwab, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, The Six Types of Boundaries