Alera Ojomoh Dermody

Mandoline

Mm come close, food still on my tongue as I sleep
I am eating so good again, Dear Reader
 
Soft glossed waves of burnt sugar. Water.
Careful, slow, slower. Yes.
Crystalline into dissolved tanned sweetness, pour
 
Meaning my thighs are touching again, praise God
Pressed together like palms at house church or a closed
 
salted orange pistachio mixture, blend the 60 grit to a wet
 
mouth
Yes Lord, incense kissed to your ear
 
I am singing like Phife
And yes, sometimes I am toothless
Knocking my gums praying for the sounds of  bone crack, a drip of pennies
 
smooth praline. Let harden.
 
Afterall, a tongue sometimes wants to toil softness
 
I am gifting my throat refuge from stone offerings
My hungry breathing, a type of measure
Adorn myself with slick wine tattooed smiles from plastic white cups
 
Shatter cooled mixture into disparate cathedrals. Set aside.
 
It always goes to blood and food for me
 
Give me the good chocolate– I’m hoping hip dips
Will trap someone who is so sorry and quiet and never home
When weekends come,
 I’ll cage them between my thighs like a small bird, feed them sparingly
 
Slice blood orange. Repetition.
Careful; a mandolin, nicked palms.
 
So to not grow too big for their cage
 
Sift cocoa into batter. Bake. Let rest.
 
I baked a cake and ate the whole three layer mess of it, thin slices at a time
And I am having, like, the best day since Jesus invented the calendar
And you know how the heart works

Spread cool chocolate ganache.
Garnish with blood orange, shards of praline. Salt.
 
Sometimes there’s just no time for a plate
Every new slice I cock my head back and cackle
Summon rain
Summon you to sit, yes you
child, gold flaked and humming
 
These long days I allow turning towards a body as a type of soil
I take my soft belly and pat like I would my mother’s and my grandmother’s
Want often hidden by loose fitted cloth, at home bare and a fixture
Press my ear to its earth
Hear its shifting
And whisper I love you I love you I love you I love you back

Alera Ojomoh Dermody is a queer Nigerian-American baker, student, and poet living in San Diego. She interested in community foodways, queerness, blackness, and softness. She is pending publication, and relatively new to publishing but has loved writing and constructing stories since she was a child.

Hollie Sikes

Here's What I Remember

here's what i remember:
you teach me how to light a match.
 
i heat water in the microwave for
lukewarm tea in the middle of the day
 
and the ants march solemnly
back and forth between the cabinets
 
and the birds pause to rest on
the undulating bridge of a power line 
 
and the air conditioner groans
and clicks to life like clockwork
 
and there's a certain smell that hangs
from the walls of this borrowed room
 
and my car sits still and lifeless
at an angle on the asphalt
 
and my favorite mug tastes like
sugar and ceramic and self-isolation
 
and my father comes home
every day around noon and i spend
 
each moment bathed in the knowledge
that your call will come when i ask
 
and i'm so sorry for the world with
all of its icy uncertainty and blinking turn signals
 
but i learned to light a match today.
and i'm glad i exist.

Hollie Sikes is a writer, musician and design student currently finishing a degree in architecture at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She released a zine of poetry titled “i’m afraid of you but i love you” in 2020 and an EP titled “The Cynic” in 2021. Her work has appeared in The Pigeon Parade Quarterly. Some of her other work can be found at holliesikes.weebly.com.

Michelle Moore

Sushi Rupture

Paper cranes flit above us 
on suspended fibrils of string 
 
as we ogle the dry aquarium
with its tantalizing seabed 
 
and listen to the master explain 
why orders come in pairs, 
 
hito kire and mi kire—
words for one slice and three— 
 
the same as those for to kill a man 
and to kill myself, respectively. 
 
He warns two people must never clasp 
the same morsel with their hashi, 
 
as funeral bones, retrieved from ash, 
pass among mourners in this fashion, 
 
a ritual meant to dignify death
though it's life that needs prettying. 
 
And yet how deftly he handles a blade, 
our master—so unlike our awkward butchery 
 
of these artful delicacies, as if they were 
a stand-in for some greater, unfixable thing.   

Michelle Moore’s poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Commonweal, Rattle, Black Dirt, and Apalachee Review. They are also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Deepest Blue (Rager Media, 2007) and Longing for Lightness: Selected Poetry by Antonia Pozzi Translated from the Italian (Poetry Miscellany Press, 2002).

Caleb Wolfson-Seeley

Tips for parenting during lockdown

The advice says 
keep a routine,
get outside,
limit snacks,
oversee crafts,
make learning fun,
reduce stress,
avoid conflicts,
be everyone,
have everything,
breathe;

So she collected a possum skull
stranded in a rushing stream,
scraped off its flesh,
rinsed its blood and brain matter,
boiled away its fat,
and immersed it in hydrogen peroxide
in a yogurt container in the garage
until the bones were bleached pure
and the fanged jaw
smirked down from the shelf   
to show her children
what a mother can make
out of the putrid decay
left at her feet.

Caleb Wolfson-Seeley is a baker and father residing in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He was a 2022 finalist for the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship for early-career writers of fiction whose work speaks to issues and experiences related to inhabiting bodies of difference.

Onna Solomon

Orchard Triptych

1.

The woman watches her boys
plucking from the burdened trees—
giddy, they leave
a trail of bitten apples.
A partial list of words discarded:
cherub, rib, sin— No matter
how she tries she can’t escape
the stories embedded in the blood of her
as she stands dappled in sun—
golden light dipping through clouds
making her think
of hands reaching.

 

2.

Eden revised: Look. Innocent
her children gallivant through the garden.
Her wisdom notwithstanding. Her knowledge
of what is good notwithstanding.
No matter what she consumes
of the daily news: rapaciousness
of judges, clergymen, doctors—no matter—
Her sons laughing and hiding
amid the dying golden leaves.

 

3.

A partial list of words discarded:
snake, taste, blessing, grace. She watches
at a distance—her children darting past
her husband’s grasp—uncertain
if he sees what she sees: the myth of it—
the bodies of their bodies, little souls dancing
down the worn rut of a path
unaware of the thorns and thistles
wondering at the bounty
as if it were put here just for them.

Onna Solomon's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, and Crab Creek Review, among others. Her poem “Autism Suite” was awarded the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI with her husband and two sons.

Jonatan María Reyes

1.7

translation by Shannon Barnes

the end of the street seems
a small suburb, a misplaced
community refusing to fade 
skillfully clinging to      
postmodernism. but it’s actually
a street with no exit 
with an abandoned McDonald’s
covered in graffiti and posters 
now a place for punks and 
rodents of all kinds to hang.  
the end of the street 
makes more sense than the rest of    
the city. sometimes the only remaining
light post comes on and
flickers, and is all the logistics
needed to keep the street 
from fading into nothing.

Jonatan María Reyes is from Santurce, Puerto Rico, author of Perdíamos la gracia y el verano (Fedora editores, 2016), Data de otro ardor (Verbum, Spain, 2018), Databending (Barnacle, Argentina 2019) and Lo común también cruje (La Impresora, Puerto Rico, 2020 / Herring Publishers, Mexico, 2020). In 2018, he received the XI International Poetry Prize “Gastón Baquero”, and in 2021 was named an inaugural Letras Boricuas Fellow by Flamboyan Foundation. He is a finalist for various poetry awards. Some of his texts have been translated into Italian, Greek, English, French and Portuguese. He also writes screenplays and edited the poetry magazine Low fi ardentía.

Shannon Barnes is a translator and Spanish Instructor from Hamilton, Ohio. She is the translator of a series of poems written by Puerto Rican poet Jonatan María Reyes. Shannon earned her M.A. in Spanish and a Graduate Certificate in Translation and Interpretation from the University of Louisville. She also received her B.A. in Spanish from Miami University, where she is currently employed. While Shannon is not teaching or translating, she enjoys spending her time outdoors

Zachary Lundgren

THE ART MUSEUM

is a collection of stories we’ve              all been told, but just keep 
forgetting what they                              mean. A boy
 
and a girl walk by.                                They are beautiful
the way a field                                      looks without a fence to speak for it.
 
They stop at a painting,                        Serov’s Girl with Peaches, and the boy takes
a picture of the girl                              posing with a hand
 
on her hip. She smiles like                    she invented this day and I
suddenly remember all                         the languages I’ll never learn.
 
It’s funny. They don’t even                  seem to notice the painting, how
the yellow leaves genius                       themselves in the glow of the morning
 
window, or even the peaches,              or the girl. And then I hate them
for this. Why? Am I just                      the jealous water
 
and they the beautiful hunters              looking down at me
for their own reflections?                     What would that really look like?
 
A school shooting and                         another terrorist
writing his last e-mail to                       another million dead bees
 
and another child smaller than              a bird washed up dead another
night I divorce and then fall                 in love with a blue screen.
 
Why not cut our mouths open?            Because we will not be eating
later. The museum walls are                  white as some type of mutilation.
 
If art is the beauty of inwardness,        this mutilation always
makes me so hollow                            so mouth-heavy

Zachary Lundgren received his MFA in poetry from the University of South Florida and has been published in several literary magazines and reviews, including The Columbia Review, The Wisconsin Review, Clockhouse, Beecher’s Magazine, and The Louisville Review. He recently received his PhD in rhetoric and composition and teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.

Duncan Campbell

New Vacancy in the Wind District

There was a remark on softness—
of a rescue helicopter answering the sirens,
& someone did hear the infant
crying indistinctly, unseen, & arrived
with gentle hands in response.
But it wasn’t until hours later, walking together
through the cemetery, that neighborhood farthest
from contact, as night transfigured the gravestones
into dim mirrors, that we listened
for desire. A thunderhead
whittled away the constellations. Returning
home, we touched the air that departed
through our open windows to be among the sizzle outside.
You agreed I was growing into my father
but with my mother's anxiety, & what was most true
is you knew me well enough to know this.
Holding my hand, you led me through our fucking
in the dark, lightning quietly lamping the clouds. Once,
you woke me from a nightmare you measured
through the changing tempo of my breath.
Your hand on my arm, a hook
dredging me from the coarse sponge of night.
In the good dream, the winemaker told us
every grape in the vineyard passed through his hands
at the harvest, & we sprawled blissfully into our chairs
to watch our own contentment flourish, until I forgot
how it ended. Memories fasten best
if we connect them to what we already have,
meaning retention dilates through empathy & experience.
(I remember Inez plucking at the skin around her fingernails,
fraying the dead cells into string,
& the mood I held in watching, unconvinced of even
myself, is how the newly dead must feel
as they first stumble upon the blue-shadowed grapes
in the easy maze of the vineyard after.
Beyond the rows, farther away than any of us
could hope to remember, a forest of eyelashes swirling,
within each lash a wish
waiting to be plucked by a breath.)

Duncan Campbell lives in Vermont. His poems have most recently appeared in Barnstorm, the Northern New England Review, and Outlook Springs.

Jack Jung

Wandering Stars

Consortium of oracular undulancy,
A troop of constellations made of constant lies,
Drop the bombs! Set us on fire eternally!
The cereals won’t get cooked until
This dismantlement of dreamed-up walls is over.
I will run out in my birthday suit for the war,
Forward unto dawn without her rosy-fingers.
Let this irate steadfastness on the Infinite
Treadmill break any proposed purpose, and burn
Holes in the night sky like a polka dotted field
For the light to get through the cloak
Of Nyx. Multiply, multiply. Yes, say a lie—
This bewitchment of your Big Brother-
Esque watchfulness, Starry Night! You are
A fat tree of incandescent lighting hung
With wet eggplants; a pure conception
Of a supernova. Swiftly take off the bandage
From a fresh wound on this singed flesh,
Let life pour out from the raw cut.

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His translations of Korean poet Yi Sang’s poetry and prose are published in Yi Sang: Selected Works by Wave Books. He is Visiting Professor of English at Davidson College.

Joshua St. Claire

Ortolan

yesterday my new moon eyes were your armagnac neat
tomorrow this snifter will spatchcock your skull
but today today your tweets are a towel in my teeth
this towel is the globe of our world
 
please like it
 
don’t gag while I sop my song down your throat
I won’t gag as I eat your embryos in the dark
don’t gag while you do what you must must must
 
please like it
 
still signing
still singeing
still singing singing singing
 
please like it
 
even in this dark 
even buried in embryos
even as the armagnac covers my head
 
please please please like it
please like it like it like it
pleaselikeit   plik   plik   plik
 
 
my song
 
stuck in your teeth

Joshua St. Claire is a CPA who works as a financial controller in Pennsylvania. He enjoys writing poetry on coffee breaks and after putting the kids to bed. His work is published in the Inflectionist Review, Blue Unicorn, ubu., and bones, among others, and has received nominations for the Pushcart.

Koen Paszkiewicz

Genealogy

Your mother watered your wounds
when she named you slut
and planted herself in your womb.
 
She made healing into a tomb;
rooted fear like a chicken-legged hut–
her water spilled into my wounds.
 
I hold seances in the living room
to exercise the myths you shut
in the grave of your womb
 
(like flowers) boys enter your home, you assume
they want to consummate their smut;
they learn from the water in mother’s wounds.
 
You’ve seen the scars on my sister’s arm plume
and find new ways to fertilize her cuts
with liquid chagrin in your womb.
 
Your dad’s love looked like a belt, a broom;
burgeoning bruises come in a glut.
Be grateful he watered your wounds
 
at all. They beat their God, proverbial doom
into you, their children, their bitches and mutts,
and buried prayer in your womb
 
like a spell. His body and blood, which you consume
has poisoned the piety in our gut,
His water pours from our wounds.
 
I hoard guilt like an heirloom
and tear open fingers climbing out of your rut,
dirty water infects my wounds
and worms writhe in my womb.

Koen Paszkiewicz (they/ them) is a non-binary poet and creator. They received their BA in English with a focus in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and their MLIS from North Carolina Central University. Nowadays, they’re working as a librarian in SC, and spending most of their spare time blogging, writing poetry, working on their book, and filming video essays about literature and cinema tropes. Their work has been featured in Queen Mob's Tea House, THAT Literary review, Flora Fiction, and Angel Rust. Their linktree is https://linktr.ee/ozymothmandias

Malka Herman

Independence Night

Last night, I took a walk
with a blank page
and his dog.
I didn’t feel the rain
until it stopped falling.
We tramped through fields of commas,
two lonely, run-on sentences.
The air reeked of dying
fireworks.
Above, swollen and red and angry
was a moon
from another planet.
When I was seven,
I came home to new pictures
on my bedroom walls.
Of course, I threw a fit
on my strawberry rug.
Demanded their return.
The last boy,
he ended the story
before I finished reading it.
Plucked the pen from my hand
midsentence
not even leaving me with the dignity
of punctuation.
Now, I take walks with blank pages,
refuse to see words pressed on their skin,
put them back on the shelf
unopened.

Malka Herman is a writer and lawyer based in California. Before law school, she worked for Penguin Random House, lived on a ranch, and taught creative writing in Hong Kong. You can find more of her work in Toasted Cheese, The California Law Review, and William & Mary Law Review Online.

Lila Rosen

Birdwatcher’s Elegy

it is an exceptionally hot summer,
and you and I watch
the lakes curl into themselves,
             echoing through fish scales
             and spanish-stacked tile
 
children are sitting at the water’s edge,
tracing letters on palms and
throwing their sun-soaked bodies
into the water
 
I have to tell you
I am uneasy in this space,
I do not know how to love
someone standing so close
 
I have torn out rib bones
and fastened them to wind chimes,
             I do not need them anymore,
             it cannot live here anymore,
instead
 
my grief sits in trees,
tied up in little red birds
among little green leaves
 
We are identical, you and I,
our throats are not meant
for living things
             they are only
echo chambers of birdsong

Lila Rosen (she/her) is a 17 year old poet from Norfolk, VA with a fondness for the mundane. She hesitates to define her writing as it changes constantly. You can find her on twitter @_lilarosen_

Milagro Moreno

masculinity must be a form of insanity

if before i knew how to fuck i was fucked up fisting the holes in the wall with my small hand if the bible taught me how to fuck and pray as if they were the same thing if i am constantly in prayer if i once cried god’s name while i fucked and it’s the closest i ever came to prayer if i read the miracle of forgiveness but remembered thou shalt not tempt the lord thy god if the first time i fucked was as frustrating as a prayer if it still made me feel more like a man if cheating made me feel more like a man if i still feel like a virgin most days if i have never named anything man i would not also name threat if i am a threat dodging my mirror like a fist no i have never wanted this body it has always wanted so much from me i have never wanted any of its sorcery my body is a god that forces me to worship every night a god whose hunger licks my bones whiter than gag a god who blames me for its insatiability if my body doesn’t need to speak to be heard if it owns everything between my legs & lips if i somehow still refuse to leave

Milagro Moreno is a genderfluid trans femme scorpio raised in the southwest. Her favorite color is inside-of-a-mango yellow. She wants to see Megan, Thee Stallion and Zuli, La Duraca collaborate. In her free time, she practices Daoist Qi Gong and is training to be a b-girl. She would tell you more, but she don’t know you like that. Follow her @la.lenguita.afilada on IG.

Syd Warren

In the Bones, I Lie

Scour the paint
          Straight through the drywall
                    Until biceps ache and nails bleed.
 
On hands and knees
          Horse hair against baseboards
                   Until it’s white until it’s white.
 
Windows to the overgrown thistle
          Washed inside and outside and inside
                    Plucking trapped, motionless flies — fly.
 
Closet ripped open
          Smells like you, air feels like you
                    Clothes in a box or in a plastic bag?
 
Can’t sit down, no time for rest
          Must get it right must get it clean
                    Reveal the sturdy bones holding me
 
 
                                                                           together.

Syd Warren is an allied health worker supporting children along the autism spectrum. She spends her weekends organizing the swarm of words in her head and posing for avant-garde, artistic, fashion, and horror photoshoots.

Cecil Morris

What Helen Told Her Sister

His penis erect bent down then left then up again
like a swayback horse with a touch of scoliosis
or a section of drain pipe that someone or something
had stepped on and tried to straighten after or a finger
crooking to say come here baby, come here.  In her hand
it felt like a thick corkscrew but inside, thrusting away
as was its nature, it felt straight enough and vigorous,
direct and business-like.  A journeyman cock, she said.
Serviceable.  It seemed not to impede his pleasure
or hers.  She wondered though how it got that way.
Was it hereditary?  Was he the last (so far)
of a long line of crooked cocks?  Or had nurture
made it so, too many years of wearing underwear
constricting or always crossing his legs one way
or sad love unrequited?  Would he be dildo-straight
if he wore those loose-fit boxers or thoughtlessly
man-spread when he sat, his legs flung wide open
as if to advertise and invite?  So, it was not a pornsicle
dick or supermodel prick with six-pack abs to stroke
and pecs to lick and attitude as bold and bristly
as Texas desert.  No, it was not a mythic Grecian
phallus carved in rigid marble and bigger than life. 
It was more a handy kitchen gadget almost forgot
at the back of the drawer but perfect for certain jobs.
She said, I think I will keep it, Phoebe, at least for now.

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and enjoy. He has had poems published in 2River View, Cobalt Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Poem, South Carolina Review, and other literary magazines. He likes cruciferous vegetables too little and ice cream too much.

Tyler Raso

Movies make me movie me

It’s old news, now.
The great orange nose
of the sky. Knelt beneath it
 
all day like a guillotine. Call
me when you get
home. I remember when
 
we stood over the highway
and the guard rail
was a dagger sticking out
 
of the cliff. Do you still
have that blue
in your head? Yeah, me
 
too. I’m waiting for
the bus. A teaspoon of
gasoline weird with a rainbow.

Tyler Raso is a queer and disabled poet, essayist, and multimedia artist. Their work is featured or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Journal, and elsewhere. They currently teach, write, and study in Bloomington, IN. You can find them on Twitter @spaghettiutopia 

Caroline Fay

tiny grief

Tiny grief the size of a hand inside
of another hand you don’t show to
anyone else.
 
Grief so small you’re afraid to call
it grief; the pool of liquid left from
a sweating glass,
                         only you notice
 
the mourning doves calling, low and
full of salt.
 
Call it good grief, the kind where
Reddit users say you’re normal and
the DSM-5 gives you a sticker for
knowing how to swallow. 
 
A grief you didn’t expect. The day I
found out you died and I walked six
miles down Massachusetts Avenue
calling people who knew you,
 
handing them their own grief
                       through a cellphone,
blue silence hanging between us like a
water balloon on a string.
 
Picture yourself then the world then
the universe and what goes beyond it.
 
A grief made out of an extraterrestrial
Hallmark card that tells you your
loved ones live on stars and the person
who’s bought it seven times.
     A stack
of identical space-themed sympathy
cards waits at a distribution center in
Liberty, Missouri.
 
Imaginary grief for what hasn’t even
happened, but eventually will. The
things you can’t bring yourself to say
aloud;
 
tiny griefs made again & again
 
of every moment you felt good and
didn’t want it to stop.

Caroline Fay lives in Portland, ME with her partner and rescue dog Bandit. She uses poetry to explore topics on queerness, mental health, and love. Her work has been published in the Wellesley College Review and can be heard regularly at readings with the Portland Poet Society. She can be found on Instagram @selectivethinking or binge-watching Seinfeld in bed.

Carson Wolfe

free love at tamera

Love is a state of being that can’t be possessed or regulated by laws
— Tamera.org

I bet my tour guide hosts somatic orgies
when outsiders like me aren’t here, observing.
In the community garden, he is a Greek god
plucking acidic grapes from a vine, testing
for ripeness. The village is motionless, sedated
with a silence that spreads over the bed of chamomile.
Everyone must be inside their eco-huts shagging.
A casual day in the practice of what I believe
free love to be - a nudist free for all. Maybe
It’s more civilised than I think. Maybe
I’m not European enough for this. Maybe
when the guidelines say authentic consent matters,
it means that upon residence, each girl is tested
on her ability to say no. I’d be required to show
I’ve never accepted a piece of cake I didn’t like
just because it was bought for me. Or drank
from the red sea parting my mind
 
from my body, just because it was uncorked for me.
That I’ve never passed out at a party,
woke to legs spread over a bed of lavender
sheets, breath fogging the hourglass of my thighs
and pretended to be asleep.

Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet exploring patriarchal violence and queer family making. They are a recipient of the Aurora Poetry Prize and an Ergon Theatre contest winner. Their work has appeared with Button, Hobart, Fourteen Poems, and is forthcoming on Reform Radio. They currently serve as a teaching assistant to Megan Falley on her renowned workshop Poems That Don't Suck.

Caroline Fernandez

Period One with the Radical and Period Two with the Priest

Period One:

My gym teacher told us in Sex Ed that we could ask anything we wanted and by anything, she meant anything that she wasn’t allowed to bring up herself. Short, cropped blond hair, muscular arms folded across her chest, she glared at us, her face firm and defiant as if she had all the time in the world to listen to fourteen-year-olds in crisp white shirts and kilts talk about their after-school activities. I wondered how many times she fought the system to allow us the right to ask, I wondered what risks she was taking with her own career to teach us to protect ourselves, to control our own futures, to own our bodies, their changes, the life that could grow in them, the choice to decide what life would have in store for us. As she stood there in front of us, I could hear in the silence the fears, the what ifs, the maybes. But nobody asked.

 

Period Two:

A priest visited our religion class to tell us about sex. He sat there, an emperor before his kingdom. We sat in front of him, row after row of teenage youth, open minds teeming with questions, like how far am I allowed to go, is it OK to feel good, and will I be disowned if I’m attracted to someone like me? In the name of the Father, we were ripe in our knee-highs, hormones throbbing through our neatly ironed uniforms. The priest stretched a brand new twenty-dollar bill in front of him and said, this is your body. There was a collective shudder as he crumpled the bill, poker-faced and cloaked in the shadows of wisdom. This is your body after you give it away. I could hear the crackle of the bill, our bones and flesh, as his fist tightened around it, his knuckles whitening as we all watched. Afterwards, they passed it around, a used specimen on display for us to examine. I felt the wrinkles in the bill, the permanence of its scars. There was no ironing out these grave errors.

Caroline Fernandez is a writer from Toronto, currently based in Dubai. She has been published in Torchlight and Tipton Poetry Journal. In 2020 she was nominated for the Allegra Johnson Writing Prize. She holds a journalism degree from Concordia University and is pursuing an MFA from Vermont College. You can find her on social media as @caro2point0