Ava O’Brien looked out the window of her compact sewing room in the back of the family’s small house. The summer afternoon fog was thinning and maybe, just maybe, she would see the sun before it set. She was hand stitching the collar onto a new dress for her middle child, while waiting for her firstborn to join her. Earlier that morning, the two had made a two o’clock date. For several days, Bethie had been asking for a new story, from long ago, “from Fernie, Mommy.” Although Maggie and even younger Joe were usually part of her audience, Ava realized that Bethie may be ready for more of a lesson. About her mother’s life, yes, but also about life in general.

When the twenty-four-year-old Paulo Mendes was first moved from the sports department to the hard news department at the O Sol newspaper, he did not expect that his first assignment would be to interview three illiterate shepherd children or that the subject of their discussion would be the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary. On June 13, 1917, the three youngsters – Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, Francisco Marto, aged nine, and Jacinta Marto, aged seven – had reportedly seen a lovely lady dressed in white, resplendent as the sun, appear in the sky above the hollow of Cova da Iria to give them a message.

In a crowded refugee camp in Bethlehem, Echlas chain-smokes her way through a pack of cigarettes recently purchased by her nine-year-old neighbour. Small for his age, and always smiling, he drops by often to ask whether she needs anything from one of the small shops in the camp. As she talks, smoke fills the small room. Outside, the imam’s faithful call to prayer competes with the shouts of the children playing soccer.

At thirteen, she wanders
fields near razed homes in Bucha,
hears echoes of cries eerie
in shattered walls. She shelters
in hollows of a hospital turned home.
Once upon a time, she was a child
with eager eyes in search
of trinkets in a greenhouse—

On June 21, 1941, forty-four year old Frida W., a resident of Kyiv, dropped a hand-held mirror, which shattered on impact. This happened around nine PM, at the end of a hot and sunny summer day. (On the evening news, the radio announcer had shared predictions of a record wheat harvest). The mirror fell as Frida was brushing out her hair, which was still black and full and hung down to her lower back.

in this poem i will assess all the winding routes to betterment

examine my inner workings
and optimize them
make another list
a financial report
break down my existence into simple word problems

She sits up and the duvet glides across her torso, only covering her body waist down, the humid chill within the room penetrating through her exposed right shoulder where her husband’s T-shirt, which she dons as nightwear, hangs loose. She can’t see clearly because the moon’s a crescent, and it barely lets light into the narrow corridor leading from the walk-in closet to the part of the room that contains their bed

On October 10th, 2025, the one-year anniversary of my daughter Abby’s funeral, I awoke at our cabin in Northern Minnesota and got ready to drive the 15 minutes to Balmoral golf course. The year had carved me into an emotional relief of pain, guilt, sorrow, gratitude and wonderment, and I wanted the day to be a reflection on the yearlong emotional tempest that spun my life in all directions.

I read Virginia Woolf’s novels and her famous 1929 lecture, A Room of One’s Own, at the University of Cambridge during my master’s from 2021 to 2023. At the time, I did not realise how deeply her words would follow me into life beyond the classroom. At first, it was simply a part of my curriculum, something I had to study for the exams and pass the course. But gradually, as a writer, it began to permeate my daily existence. Woolf writes about a woman who needs a place of her own to write.

Grandfather’s clock struck at dawn when Father woke me up and said:
“Today you are a man.”
I was twelve years old.
With nothing more to say, Father left my room, leaving me to the morning rise.
I sat up and swung my legs out of bed—my feet had been able to reach the floor in this position ever since the previous summer—and with shaky sleepiness, I rose to standing in my embroidered linen nightgown.

if the world continues on
long enough, past
you and me and everyone
we know, will every
house be a house
where someone famous once
lived, every home a museum, except maybe ours

The waitress didn’t call me honey when she set down my bowl of clam chowder
but said she liked my cheap sunglasses,
and looked at me strangely when I made some graceless joke about them,
utterly unprepared for a compliment

The unpaved, bumpy red clay roads are throwing dust onto my windshield. The air is thick from the summer humidity. The sweat on my forehead rolls down my nose and onto my top lip. It is July in the small southern town of Leesburg, Georgia. Passion fills my soul. I am looking for a woman. Her name is unknown to me. I will know her when I see her.

Think for a moment of your childhood home. Your bedroom, where you slept, played with your dolls and cars, and sludged through homework. Your kitchen, where your mother hovered over the stove, stirring chicken noodle soup. Your living room, where you watched TV with your siblings, decorated the Christmas tree with both breakable and paper ornaments, and sat in the corner, sulking in time-out.

I step out of the doorway of my building onto the morning street under the grey ash-toned sky.
A woman is jogging down the sidewalk, her feet leaving footprints in the ash film which covers everything. A man who I see so often on my street (yet whose name I do not know) waves to me and enters a darkened car. Then he silently goes on his phone, while sitting in the driver’s seat.

When did my hands become my mother’s?
I took the time to really notice them, finishing typing the last words of a text to my daughter’s babysitter to let her know I would be a little late due to a train delay. Smooth and yet slightly leathered from years of harsh Chicago winters and humid summers. Knuckles crosshatched and indented. Small wrinkles appear here and there, wrapping around my pudgy fingers.

My hanging basket of geraniums dies
on my front porch, soil in a pot
surrounded by three sides of bricks.
I leave for work, come home every day,
thinking I should clean this thing out,
put something new in its place.

In a low-slung stone building
commas return like monks, slightly
drunk after sipping Trappist Ale.
They have taken a vow of silence
and do not hum between titles of hymns,
films, foreign phrases and blessings.

The family cruise had been Aunt Jane’s idea. Always the organizer, she sent a group text with a link to the cruise line’s website and a caption that read, “Kleinfelters Take to the Seas!” One month later, a gaggle of family and I were booking our passage on the Festivities II for a five-day Caribbean cruise. Including spouses, partners, and kids, there were twenty of us. My sister Lizzie, four years older, had volunteered to design reunion T-shirts

Conjure a faun in the middle of field.

There’s a cabin in the distance, homespun
& brown, & the thick-torso’d wild turkeys
march a few feet away, leaving dinosaur
tracks in their wake.

Don’t let any of this stop you.

The smoke runs thin
by mid-morning

The river is once again
worth waking for

I approach the water,
spread my arms,

wade,
then rise