This War Shall Not Leave Us

by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

From Aleppo to Afghanistan

This war shall not leave us,
It will chase us from city to city, 
From country to country,
It will chase us till we’re exhausted, 
Till we are ready to die,
This war will follow us, like the un-faithful 
Out to destroy god, it will follow us 
Like a faithful hound, sniff out
Children’s blood, tear out the song  
In their throat, erase the words  
They spelled wrong; all wars  
Love children, all wars are a revenge 
Against childhood, this war will stalk our  
Shadows, it will give us time
To gather our wounds, 
Stitch our sorrows, and when we are 
Almost sane, once again  
Prey to crumbs of 
A new hope, war, old friend,     
Will come for us and turn 
The future of our memory 
Into a tweet

---

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer, and political science scholar. He is the author of The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown (Headpress, Copper Coin, 2021). His poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Rattle, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, Mudlark, Acumen, Hobart, Glass: A Review of Poetry, and other publications. His first collection of poetry, Ghalib's Tomb and Other Poems (2013), was published by London Magazine Editions. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, 3AM Magazine, etc.

About this poem, he writes, “This poem does not have a date. It is written across time. Time that is more broken than continuous. Like our experience of the little wars that are happening across the globe. I call them little wars as they are limited to regions. But wars are wars, and lives are lives. You can measure destruction, you can number death, but you can’t measure, or number, grief. War is a macabre game adults play with children, because war is blind to hope. No poem of war will stop war. It can only connect the world’s grief.”

Broken Off & Pass the Torch

by Aramis Calderon

Broken Off

My pocketknife is named 
Control.

It was made from a piece of steel
Left in my heart
By my father.

It is my everything:
A weapon
A tool
A comfort 

I cut everyone with it.

---

Pass the Torch

In war there is always fire.
The command to shoot, open fire.
When we get shot, we receive fire.
To stop shooting, cease fire.

If we shoot the wrong target, check fire.
We clear life in jungles with fire.
For steel rain, we call for fire.

In cities, we set tires on fire.
In deserts, we set fields of oil on fire.
In the sea, we set ships with men on fire.

Until our end, we carry fire.

---

Aramis Calderon is a Marine veteran with a pen. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa. His current area of operations is Tampa Bay, Florida, where every week he meets with fellow veteran writers in the DD-214 Writers’ Workshop.

About “Broken Off” he writes, “My father taught me to be in control and always have a pocketknife. Decades later I realized these things were one and the same, and they caused people more harm than good.”

About “Pass the Torch” he writes, “This is an observation of mine about our use of fire in military language and actual warfare.”

The later generation

by Ana Doina

“we dig a grave in the breezes”
—Paul Celan ‘Death Fugue’

My parents were stunned into a blank stare 
by the numbers. Grandfather mumbled them 
instead of prayers, but for me, the numbers 
have the same significance as the burning 
of Carthage. It was. It is what got us here. 
Sorrow has little to do with numbers. No one 
comprehends what is outside senses and reason – 
millions of state-approved, orderly executed murders.

What hurts still, is looking at pictures – 
the sensual curve of Aunt Sarah’s shoulders, 
the sly seductive pose Cousin Paul takes 
in all his photos, Uncle Adam’s fastidiously 
manicured long hands, little Margaret’s silk dress 
and shy smile – a family portrait. Pictures never 
intended to become historical documents 
or to survive as symbols of pain in anyone's memory. 

The cousins my kids never had. The multiple ties 
of a family with treasures and apple pie recipes 
handed down from mother to daughter. All of it
burned, lost. What hurts is grieving for the lives 
I’ve never been part of, for the stories silenced 
before they could tell their first tales. Like a lunatic, 
I longingly want to remember what never took place. 

What I have instead are monuments, statistics,
documentaries. What I have instead are cemeteries 
where the horizon is the only point of reference 
among graves, graves to lay stones on. And I wonder 
where could I lay a stone for those whose burial ground 
is the smoke and the soot of their own flesh and blood? 

And the absence of that stone hurts again.      

---

Ana Doina is a Romanian born American writer living in New Jersey. Due to political pressures and social restrictions, she left Romania during the Ceausescu regime. Her poems and essays have been published in various literary magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and online publications. Two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2002 and 2004. One of her poems was awarded an honorable mention in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience contest in 2007.

About “The later generation” she writes, “I grew up after the Holocaust and during the Cold War. The destruction the wars brought to all of us is one of the themes recurring in my writings. As the inheritor of that tormented past, I am trying to explore through poetry the lament and the wisdom left behind by that history.”

a culture of war, whatever that means & our soviet kitchen was small

by Tatiana Dolgushina

a culture of war, whatever that means

I feel there is inside of me the entire history
of a Soviet century, all of its people
either living or,

all of its words, sounds, echoes,
have stacked themselves into a bundle
and been placed
inside the hardest spot,

the spot inside the child, within me

how can war be inside children
how small do I have to reach
for it to stop being?

how far does I have to go
to lose understanding, words,
echoes
of a world that holds me

that is not found anymore.

at night in my mind, I whisper
to myself phrases in Russian
that I hear sometimes, on tv, or

by the Russian lady in the town
who calls me ‘rabbit’
as one would if one were
from that world, and I absorb her
other-worldliness like mine, one

that is no longer exists, her sad eyes
penetrate the air, she switches to
‘English’ to hide that other existence

but I insist, I pretend I don’t understand

when she speaks it, so her sad eyes
return to me, and I see in themselves
a mirrored reflection, a myself
a child in a war, standing
a two children heard by nobody,

---

our soviet kitchen was small

a man was sitting next to the window
swirling a metal spoon in the tea cup 
making a loudly sharp noise.

my mother burst out at him: will you
stop! 
he replied: how do I stop
mixing my sugar, and she said: figure it
out. 

I had my own cup of tea and
I swirled my sugar in circles silently,
trying the laws of physics of my
four year old reality, 
and I said: this
is how, my small hands gripping
the metal spoon, trying to evade
another scene. 

in a room where the air
is so dry there is never mold
on the windows, where the snow
breaks the glass with its sharp
teeth. 

the man kept on smiling
at the request, as if no more a
ridiculous thing could be asked
of him, as if the whole thing, us
in that kitchen, was absurd,

what with the walls
listening in, the government telling
us of what reality is, hiding
documents from abroad, 
taking us

if we didn’t listen, 
like it has others

my mother’s continuous outbursts, 
her anger, was like a joy
to find, to find
that one is still living.

---

Tatiana Dolgushina was born in Soviet Russia and grew up in South America. Her poetry has been published in Hobart, CALYX, TAB, The Write Launch, The Lindenwood Review, and Red Booth Review. She holds graduate degrees in both biology and poetry. Her multilingual and immigrant identity are central to her work.

About “a culture of war, whatever that means” and “our soviet kitchen was small”, Dolgushina writes, “These poems are reflections on the violent effects of a dissolving country on a child, the creation of a refugee, and the life-long displacement that losing your home culture creates. The linguistic fluidity of the writing is a necessary expression for the writer who had to grow up learning 3 languages as she moved from country to country after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a parallel to the chronic confusion she experienced.”

The Screaming Eagle’s Daughter Laments & Me and Your Shadows

by Kate Falvey

The Screaming Eagle’s Daughter Laments

There are children born with your name
that you left too soon to know.

There are children you knew but did not know
because how could you, swifted from your 

D-Day jump into some sales job and the arms of 
a sweetie of a sinless wife who baked you pound cakes, 

pressed your hankies, and stilled your nerves
imperfectly with unfamiliar loyalty and love?

Understanding took more time than we had
together, you hustling your charm out the kitchen door

each night, trailing a forcefield of need and 
jittery intentions like the haze of a lost cause. 

There were always the thrums of the be-good-to-your-
mother ritual kisses brisked on the tousle of heads 

paused before the lamb chops or meat loaf you couldn’t 
share, your eventual job tending bar meaning you slept

all day and worked all night so missed the orange crayon 
on the wall, the sauce-and-stew-pot forts clanging,

the shards of paste snipped from troubled hair, the
pipe cleaner faces twisted into scatty puppet shows.

I played dolls with your medals and pins, 
sorting stars and purple hearts into burnished or

faceted families, laying baby wings into a cardboard
cradle, blanketed with a screaming eagle patch.

The eagle rightly scared me with its snapping beak 
and snaky tongue, head severed from its flight.

I didn’t know then why its fierceness looked forlorn,
or why a scruffy kind of pride seemed fissured in its 

dreadful, distant, agitated seeing, why its roughness 
seemed if not a sham, then at least an unconvincing 

camouflage for something it kept close and wouldn’t 
share. I always wondered what it was looking at or for

and why it couldn’t lift its death-defying wings 
and brave the earnest impact of the ordinary air.

---

Me and Your Shadows

I.

I don’t think you were my hero
or if I had a notion of what that even meant.

You made magic, vanished a stuffed dog with bells 
in its ears and two sloe-eyed raggy purple tabbies

from your blue pajama lap to the far away 
window side of our Queens living room. 

You must have sung all those old familiar tunes
or how would I know them all? 

There is a snapshot of me in an oversized striped 
jacket, holding on a straw boater as I dance

on the big red brocade couch. I was surely
singing Me and My Shadow, imitating your

suave soft-shoe and Irish tenor croon. I doubt
the hat and jacket meant you sang barbershop

with some guys from the bar but who knows what
you got up to when not in your brown easy chair

with me patting your unshaven morning chin saying
rough, Daddy, rough, and you saying you weren’t

sleeping, sweetheart, but just resting your eyes.

II.

So when your drinking crashed into 
a neighbor’s car and the local newspaper
I was enlisted to fix the broken headlights

in our home, trust totaled, 
seemingly beyond repair, 
no road forward showing.

Desperation called me to active duty,
when I was too young to effectively serve, 
though brash with indignation and 

rudimentary resolve. We sat at the early
evening kitchen table, coffee on the marbled
formica, awkward with shared shame.

You never talked about your exploits 
in the war. A few iconic stories explained
your medals and your youth: ducking to 

pick up a puppy in a field under fire,
bullets whacking the air above your crouch; 
plaster from a farmhouse blasted into your eyes,

your eyelashes plucked to minimize infection; 
swimming a boat across a river; 
your lung collapsing; 

landing in the brig and only losing 
your little rank – something about decking 
a bully officer, something about 

being a grudging acting sergeant 
after that; the clickers not clicking 
after landing in Normandy; saving someone.

The theme was always luck, 
not heroizing thrills. You quashed the notion 
of any kind of bravery but before I was myself

well beyond eighteen, I couldn’t know how shaky
eighteen is, how green, how staggeringly young.
So when I gently broached your terrifying drinking

you surprised me into stories of your war, the old
faithfuls, to be sure, the ones I knew, but more
of your confusions, questions, terrors, ghosts 

than I’d ever known before. Snow deeper than
whatever boots were had in the Ardennes, the pine 
and birch howling spikes of bitter winter 

as you trudged and huddled and pushed 
into frigid compliance, blood steaming
in a landscape of blasted skulls and limbs.

I held your hand as you talked into the safety 
of the coming dark, in the sunny kitchen 
you sipped your sweetened morning coffee in,

with the daughter you were sure would be 
a victor in whatever fields she fought in,
whiskey coursing through memory like 

the saddest river in the saddest song
pulsing in a jagged throat which struggles
to swig blasts of unforgiving air.

III.

Here’s my definition of an Irishman:
You have a fear of heights and you 
volunteer to jump out of planes. 

Under enemy fire was the clincher to this, 
my standard joke, a sort of punchline
to underscore the crazy.

My lanky father, skittish on the high dive at 
the Lake George public beach. I was burdened
and exposed in my pre-teen flirt of ruffled dotted

two-piece, on the last low-rent family get-away 
I’d ever deign to join. He startled me by swaying, 
quipping about the long way down then leaping – 

pounding gamely into the cold drum of the lake. 
I still can feel the spikes of the mortified splash 
when I quake in free-fall

with pent bravado 
and try to flout my own 
relentless and ignoble fears.

---

Kate Falvey’s work has been widely published in an eclectic array of journals and anthologies, a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books), and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded and edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.

Falvey writes, “I played with my father’s purple hearts and bronze stars as a child, enjoying the snap of the box lids, the textures of metal and cloth. There was nothing puffed up about my father. He never boasted of exploits or heroism. If anything, valor was minimized and talk about what happened in his war was virtually nonexistent. Bits and pieces were revealed through the years, and I supplemented with research about the campaigns he participated in as a member of the 101st Airborne Division, 506th parachute regiment, Company B. Of course, the tentacles of the trauma—not much acknowledged with WWII vets—were omnipresent and insidious.”

War, Dream & I’m looking for you

by Milica Mijatović

War, Dream

If you’re quiet enough, you 
can almost hear nothing,
the kind of nothing that scares
you into thinking you’ve gone
deaf, except you haven’t
because your sister is screaming, 
except she isn’t even born yet,
and neither are you, but you’re
definitely here, your tears
are bodies falling
only two klicks away,
you’re here, and you’re running
toward what looks like a finish
line, except here finishes 
don’t exist, and even though
you know whom you’re running
from, you turn around to look
one last time at your burning
home, except it isn’t your home,
it isn’t even your war,
but you are here, and you grip
your chest because something
in there aches, but your sister
is screaming somewhere 
in the distance, so you have no
time to grieve, not while the alarms
are sounding, not while the troops
are marching, not while your people
are watching, except no one 
is here but you

---

---

Milica Mijatović is a Serbian poet and translator. Born in Brčko, Bosnia and Hercegovina, she relocated to the United States where she earned a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Capital University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Consequence, Santa Clara Review, Barely South Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. 

About “War, Dream” Mijatović writes, “‘War, Dream’ is about a recurring dream I’ve had since childhood. I come from a war torn place, and I wasn’t even born until after the war had officially ended. I was only two when the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia happened in 1999. So in a lot of ways, I feel I’ve inherited war. This poem attempts to explore the complexities, the consequences, and the presence of war in my life.”

About “‘I’m looking for you” Mijatović writes, “Back home, there’s this house across the street that was ruined during the war and abandoned. It’s been that way for a few decades now, and no one knows whose house it is, not anymore. ‘I'm looking for you’ is a poem about loss and rubble and absence. It’s a poem about an aftermath, about dealing with said loss and rubble and absence.”

Water Cooler & Vultures

by Adnan Adam Onart

Vultures

Just to get started,
I place a boy, face powdered in dust,
in front of a dilapidated building 
walls covered with graffiti in Arabic
so that he relieves himself peacefully
pushing forward his abdomen
swollen from hunger.

Not very far away from him,
but in a separate stanza,

I lay three headless corpses
next to their severed heads
with terrified eyes gouged out
in a town square completely deserted.
I am the bearded one in the flock; the other two are of the bald kind.

First dives 
the one, who made his fortune 
selling oil in the blackmarket.

Then the other, 
an expert in money laundering 
to purchase tanks, humvees,
heavy machinery with a nifty 40% kick-back.

I soar – two big circles.

This is going to be a fantastic poem, 
I buzz with rapaciousness, 
before entrusting myself 
to what you call “gravity.”

---

Water Cooler

Let’s just nuke them, he says
—a software engineer with an advanced degree
from California Institute of Technology,
let’s erase Baghdad from the face of the earth,
tapping his bony fingers
on the water cooler
as if it were the head of a bomb.
The whole group laughs.

A nine-year-old replies
—in a demonstration in Istanbul,
talking to TV reporters
sober as if the future of the Iraqi nation
depended on him:
War kills children.
He points to a picture he holds:
a group of boys and girls
playing hide-and-seek
among the ruins 
of some demolished buildings.
These kids are my brothers and sisters.
I don’t want them to die.
Despite all kinds of noises
—men shouting slogans,
cars honking,
police banging their clubs 
on their Plexiglas shields—
a terrible silence surrounds him.
Nobody laughs.

---

Adnan Adam Onart lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colere Magazine, Red Wheel Barrow, The Massachusetts Review, among others. His first poetry collection, The Passport You Asked For, has been published by The Aeolos Press, together with Kenneth Rosen’s Cyprus’ Bad Period. He was awarded an honorable mention in the 2007 New England Poetry Club Erika Mumford Award. He is one of the winners of the 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition. International Poetry Review published a translation he made together with Victor Howes from Edip Cansever, a Turkish contemporary poet. 

About his two poems in Collateral, Onart writes, “These two poems were written in reaction to the events surrounding two recent wars in the Middle East. ‘Water Cooler’ was written in association with the invasion of Iraq and the protests it generated around the world. ‘Vultures’ was triggered by the civil war that has been taking place in Syria, and many forms of profiteering it generated in that geography. But the poem tries to highlight the paradox: even writing a poem about war is a form of making a profit from it.”

PTSD Paperwork

by Ron Riekki

Statement in support of claim of
death. The downloadable pdf
is available for your headaches.
Related forms include suicidal
ideation and learning how to cope
with cutting. If you are not en-
rolled in a current divorce pro-
ceding, you can go directly to
the waiting room. Mental health
services include waiting and more
paperwork. When you are doing
the paperwork, you can work in
breaks of waiting and while you
are waiting, you will be able to
stare at other vets who are also
waiting. The waiting rooms will
be bland, but have strong hints
of past traumas if you look
closely or smell weakly or think
unclearly or touch anything.

---

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). About “PTSD Paperwork,” he writes, “I wrote this poem after being confronted by a statistic that veterans have a suicide rate 50% higher than those who did not serve in the military.”

The Poem Writes Itself

by Ayşe Tekşen

The poem writes itself,
but I’m the one who creates 

the dangling spots of heartaches, 
the coughing pits 
of billions of bleak units,
the time 
of timeless injuries, 
the scare 
of scarecrows,
the adversity 
of four-dimensional falls.

The poem writes itself,
but I’m the one who tickles
the world’s unworldliness, 
our chaos, 
the structure 
of smiling stars, 
the surprise 
of the sun’s prize, 
the rivers
of unaccustomed youth, 
the skin 
of unpeeled bones.

I am to kill the Phoenix’s nest 
to make it fly 
when unborn, 
when dormant
and still ignorant
of the voiceless voice of the dazed, 
the sleep of stones,
the water on ocean deep deserts. 

I may sign every poem, 
but the poem writes itself.

---

Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, The Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, The Courtship of Winds, Mojave Heart Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rigorous, Rabid Oak, The Thieving Magpie, Headway Quarterly, The Roadrunner Review, Helen Literary Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Pensive, and The Hamilton Stone Review. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Room and The Manifest-Station.

About this poem, Tekşen writes, “Human truth. What is its definition? It is ever decipherable? If it is, then, through what will it be deciphered? Through pain? Some suffering? And if so, where are they from? Where does violence reside? Against the time’s current, the man always swims in his own paradox toward that unholy place where the poems write themselves, where the creator juxtaposes with his own creation, and where the poet is only one of the many faces the creator wears.”

How to Find Your Tongue & The Guinea Hog

by Nancy White

How to Find Your Tongue

swallow smoke from a burning home
say the name they were going to give 
you till you were born a girl 
make an ovarian overture perch

on a swing before the resulting 
crowd and sing if they throw 
roses cucumbers don’t flinch
go to the butcher and buy a long cow’s tongue

examine it closely there on the counter
until you feel you’ll never be hungry again
remember the smoke tasting bitter
and how it loosened the hinge?

study the raised receptors like 
mushrooms like eyestalks the pink 
and gray the tendons and flanges
ask your friends to join you

ask them to kiss you better
ask the best to demonstrate
say it’s okay to show you on a lemon
when they’ve all gone home

quietly eat the lemon don’t 
be surprised to come up gasping feel 
the hole now in the middle of your head
and just past that the tongue

---

The Guinea Hog

Companionable. Curious.
They come home in the fall
for their own butchering.

Smaller than your other hogs
but crosses are never 
such good company.

I’ve bred them with big hogs.
The meat’s good but can’t get
that nice personality.

Feels bad when they’re so
pleased to see me in September,
trotting out of the woods.

I’m glad to see them too, long as 
I don’t think about it. Not 
the best money but the best hog.

---

Nancy White is the author of three poetry collections: Sun, Moon, Salt (winner of the Washington Prize), Detour, and Ask Again Later. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, and many others. She serves as editor-in-chief at The Word Works in Washington, D.C. and teaches at SUNY Adirondack in upstate NY.

About “How to Find Your Tongue” she writes, “We are born with a natural drive to communicate and to express ourselves, but trauma can steep that need with fear, leading to silence. I often write about the struggle back to speech, and nothing embodies all the pleasure and strangeness of communication like the tongue itself. It makes a great metaphor because it does so much for us—eating, talking, kissing, and more—and is a funny-looking and even ugly part of the body to behold. In this poem, we’re thinking about the role of the tongue in speaking but also thinking of it as something that does get eaten. The hidden violence in our meat-eating, the physical ugliness of the tongue, and the other imagery all evoke (I hope) the more brutal side of our struggle to find a way to win our voice back after violence or other trauma. I hope this poem also captures the triumph we experience when we do win back our voice.

About “Guinea Hog” she writes, “Killing enters this poem too, and again I’m contrasting it with innocence or a natural state of sociability, in this case, that of the hogs. The raising and butchering of livestock that homesteaders and small-scale farmers practice is both more humane and more challenging. How can we kill animals we know? Are we more or less complicit in cruelty and violence if it happens in an impersonal way, off-stage, and we just buy the burgers and fry them up without thinking much about it? In this poem I tried to capture the farmer’s fondness and also his matter-of-fact approach to killing these hogs. I hope the poem comes across as appreciative, sad, with a tinge of uneasiness. Part of what’s sad is the hogs’ trust and friendliness, but also, for me, their inability to communicate or to understand what is happening. They become a metaphor for all the trusting people who suffer at the hands of others, those who turn to their fellow human expecting acceptance and receiving quite another thing altogether.

Mother Poem #9

by Ellen June Wright

I hope when I hear of my mother’s death 
I can wail Hold on my child joy comes in the morning  
words floating up from uncharted fathoms
not overcome by what I lost, grateful for what I had.

I hope I can trumpet the news of mother’s passing, 
glory in her life so man-complicated and so long,
remember that a woman can start life with so little 

and through steely strength, dumb perseverance, 
ignorant of what it means to surrender,
and a mustard-seed-like faith survive and even 
overcome, never becoming a failed statistic. 

I hope I'm filled with joy at the thought of life lived 
by a woman who never intended to be a Titan 
but simply slipped into the shoes and wore them.

---

Ellen June Wright is a poet based in Hackensack, New Jersey. She was born in England of West Indian parents and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attended school in NJ and taught high school language arts for three decades. She has worked as a consulting teacher on the guides for three PBS poetry series called Poetry Haven, Fooling with Words, and the Language of Life. Her poetry has most recently been published in River Mouth Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, New York Quarterly, The Elevation Review, The Caribbean Writer and, is forthcoming in, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week and was featured in the article, Exceptional Prose Poetry From Around the Web: June 2021. She was a finalist in the Gulf Stream 2020 summer poetry contest and is a founding member of Poets of Color virtual poetry workshop in New Jersey. She studies writing at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Ellen can be found on Twitter @EllenJuneWrites.

About this poem, she writes, “My mother was born in 1925, so she is just a few years away from being 100. I’ll be grief stricken when she’s gone, if I outlive her, but I hope I’ll also remember what a gift it was to have her live so long. Not many people get to have a life that spans close to a century. I am grateful for each and every day of her triumphant life.”