Vinita Agrawal reads “A Place Both Inside and Out”

This land is not a map but a slow erosion.
Stones grow softer than the skin
that once read their braille.
Rivers change their minds
and forget where they meant to go.

Trees are historians of wind,
their rings a captured tremor,
a chronicle of thirst.
Their roots remember a colder water,
a deeper dark.

I am learning the grammar of rocks:
how a cliff is a paused avalanche,
how a valley is the earth’s own sigh,
how a field holds the shape of a lost glacier
beneath its green consent.

The light here is a different species.
It does not fall, but settles—
a fine pollen on the pond’s still page.
Shadow is not the absence of light,
but its oldest dialect.

Something is always leaving:
the tide’s resigned withdrawal,
the seed’s small exile from the pod,
the scent of pine 
departing the bruised needle.

Something is always arriving:
the patient lichen’s grey citizenship,
tender leaves on stark branches in spring 
the moss that fills a footprint’s 
hollow argument.

I build my home 
from what the weather discards.
A roof of discarded birdsong,
walls of intercepted rain,
a foundation 
set on the quiet compaction of years into shale.

The birds here do not fly away, 
but inward,
their songs become roots,
their nests become fossils
in the cathedral of the thicket.

They sing a geography of return
to the place they called their own last year 
a tune only the stones can fully carry,
a note sweet enough to ripen the night
to tip xylem-phloem, get it flowing in the trees. 

My hands are no longer hands,
but soil and stream-bed.
My breath is not my own,
but borrowed from the damp air
between the ferns.

I am not becoming a place.
A place is becoming in me—
its borders drawn by root-tip,
its skies composed of wing-memory,
its only citizen this endless, changing weather.

Bios

Vinita Agrawal

Vinita Agrawal has authored seven books of poetry and edited two anthologies on climate change. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024, and the Proverse Prize Hongkong 2021. Her work has been published in Gallerie, Global South, Canary, Tabula Rasa, Tiger Moth Review, and Indian Literature among others.

Fareh Malik reads “A RIGHT HOOK, IN FIVE PARTS”

I remember					the first time			someone called me a Paki,			Paki 
not the sweetness				I’d come to know		not how my mother would say it, but	from volcano mouths like 
my cousin got, just			this malice,			with the kind of hate that lives		in hot, fissured lips— 
his lava spit,					my knuckle’s imprint	in a broken cheek—				my friends say 
he shouldn’t have				ran off his mouth		with nowhere to go, but			it’s okay because he 
needed to learn				from a fist that flies	through his teeth, and				swings his tongue 
how a hook is swung—			better,				I suppose,						with experience 
he was a child, just surviving—	I imagine,			out in the world					same as me 
delicate						as an open hand		just trying to hold onto something;	we aren’t so different.

Bios

Fareh Malik

Fareh Malik is an author from the Greater Toronto Area who is also an experienced spoken word poet. He has been named the 2023 winner of the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, the 2022 PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, and his debut book Streams that Lead Somewhere was the winner of the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Fareh has been included in Best of the Net, Best Canadian Poetry, and Poems in Passage.

Faust B reads “Between Stops”

The bodega kid stacks cans at dawn
before school, learning inventory
the way I learned ḍād and ẓā—
letters that don’t exist in English,
sounds you shape by holding your tongue
against the roof of your mouth
until the air finds its own way out.

On the platform at 179th Street
a man teaches his daughter to count stops:
Parsons, Sutphin, Briarwood, Kew.
She repeats them like multiplication tables,
like prayer, like any knowledge
you don't understand yet but memorize
because someone you trust says it matters.

The Quran says Iqra—read, recite—
before most of us knew how to do either.
The first word a command to learn
what learning even is. I watched
Yusef explain this at the store,
tracing Arabic he can’t read
but recognizes the way you recognize
a relative’s face in an old photograph—
familiar, distant, yours.

Between Parsons and Sutphin
the train stalls in the tunnel.
Emergency lights. Silence.
Then someone’s phone plays Quranic recitation,
and the car fills with a sound
half the riders know by heart
and half have never heard before,
and all of us sit in the strange grace
of not knowing which matters more—
the knowing or the listening,
the understanding or the being there
when understanding happens to someone else.

The kid at the bodega
stocks shelves in an order I don’t see.
But I’ve watched him long enough to know
there’s a system, that he’s learned something
about how things fit together
that he couldn’t say in words yet
but his hands know. His hands know.

At Jumu'ah prayer the rows form
without instruction—we just know
to stand shoulder to shoulder,
foot to foot, filling the gaps
like water finds its level.
I don’t know who taught us this.
I don’t know when I learned it.
But I know when the imam says straighten the rows,
fifty men shift in unison
like a single breath, like we’ve been
practicing this our whole lives,
which maybe we have. Maybe
every time we stood in line at the bodega,
every time we moved aside on the platform
to let someone pass, every time
we made room without being asked—
maybe that was the lesson all along.

The daughter still counts stops out loud:
Parsons, Sutphin, Briarwood, Kew.
Her father nods at each station
even though she’s got them right.
Even though she’s known them for weeks.
Even though the knowing isn’t the point anymore—
the counting is. The saying it
is. The proof that someone bothered
to teach you something small
and trusted you'd see what it opened into.

Bios

Faust B

Faust B is a Muslim-American poet from Queens, New York. His work documents working-class life, faith, and urban witness without explanation or apology. He is published in Blue Minaret and The Scene Magazine. He is currently completing two manuscripts: “The 99 Names” and “Crude Listeners.” poetfaustb.com

Listen, I’ve been so long alone
I mistake the dishwasher for conversation.
You list hiking. They all do.
I live on an island. There’s nowhere to go
but in circles. Maybe that’s what you mean.

I’m trying to remember what touching feels like without using the
word sand. Once, a man stayed with me for seven years. He left on a raft
made of compliments. Do you build things?

The lighthouse down the coast
got automated in 1991. It runs.
Nobody told the birds.

You’re the third today to ask
what I do for fun. Fun
is what happens to other people
while I sort shells by the ache
they make against my teeth.

This morning I deleted
forty-seven pictures of the horizon.
They all looked the same. Like you,
actually. I'm not trying to be mean.
I set the phone face down on the counter.

You want to know my deal—my last love spoke only in departures, even his breathing sounded like 
goodbye, even the way he poured coffee was already leaving, the mug set at the edge of the counter, 
and I kept pushing it back, and he kept moving it, and one morning neither of us reached for it. Are
you still there?

I used to weave. Now I unravel
sweaters from the thrift store
and call it hope. You want to know
if I have daddy issues. Mine
watched the same channel every night.
I don’t know which one. I never asked.

Once I watched a documentary
about octopuses. They die
after mating. The narrator
called this natural. I changed
the channel. It’s on weather now.

Oh, you’re deep. You’ve read The Odyssey. The grease stain above my stove has been developing 
since March. It’s almost a face.

Sometimes I make toast at 3 AM 
and pretend it’s an event. Today
I burned it. Even the smoke alarm
has given up on me. You say
you’re looking for something real.

Real is sand in the sheets.
Real is forgetting which century
I last felt beautiful. You want
to meet for coffee. I don’t leave
this island. The water knows why.

Your profile says entrepreneur. Mine should say collector of departures, which I keep in drawers 
with batteries that might or might not work, and sometimes I shake them the way you’d shake a gift 
you already know is empty, holding each one to my ear, listening for the click that means 
something still moves inside. Nothing happens.

The typing bubble appeared, then didn’t.
You haven’t written back.
That’s the most honest thing so far.

Yesterday I threw a bottle with a message into the sea. It said stop
bringing them here. The sea sent it back with seaweed that spelled
no.

Fine. Ask your question. Yes, I’m immortal, no, it’s not what you think,
it’s dishes and Tuesdays and the same gull stealing the same sandwich
and the olives in the fridge that outlasted the man who bought them
and the profiles the app shows me again.

Swipe left on immortality.

The last one said I was too intense.
I was watching ice forget
it was ever water. He left anyway.
They all do.

I’ve started naming the silences: Gregory, who lasted three
messages. Thomas, who wanted nudes of my soul. Michael, still
typing after two days. I’ll wait. I have time.

Today I caught myself hoping
and killed it like a spider.
By morning the web was back.

Stop asking what I bring to the table.
I’ve been furniture so long
I dream in polish, I was here
when the lighthouse got automated,
when the birds kept circling anyway,
the mug stopped getting pushed back,
and the batteries died in the drawer
and the channel stayed on weather—
still here. Men arrive like meals
reversed: they start with leaving,
work backward to the hunger.

If you must know: love
was a man who left me
the same way soap leaves hands.
Now men arrive already
practicing their departures. 

My mother used to save
twist ties. Every drawer
had hundreds. After she died
I threw them all away.
Now I save them too.

Bios

Jennifer Manuel

Jennifer Manuel writes literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her first novel, The Heaviness of Things That Float, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She was a 2025 CBC Poetry Prize Finalist. She lives on Vancouver Island on the traditional lands of the Quw’utsun Tribes.

Patricia Caspers reads “Daughter of a Dead Addict Learns to Brine Olives”

In the beginning, folks made oil of the bitter. 
Later, the fruit—spilled in the sea 
and discovered salt-softened—became sustenance. 
No one knows whether this is true.
Later again there was lye to quicken the ripening the way pitocin 
hastens a birth—and something is sharpened. 
 
As a child, olives were a way to pass time— 
one black bowler hat capped 
each waggled finger—until at fourteen 
my father sent me home with a jar 
that glowed buttery gold, a secret delicacy, mine alone.

He lived in orchard country then, hiding, he said, 
from the mafia. So dramatic: 
the mafia?—Anyway, he stole money or borrowed money
or borrowed to return the money he stole. 

I wouldn’t learn the half-broken 
truth until he was gone. I wasted hot days on a dirt bike, 
raced through the aged grove like a mosquito 
in search of blood instead of beauty—the slight, silver leaves 
in sunlight, the green promise.

Without the burn of lye, brine is slow, 
the drupes prone to mold, saltwater in need 
of rinse, of replenishment, and I can’t 
see him there, in the pale morning kitchen, sober, 
attentive, as he lifts the lid, 
washes away the bite. 

Bios

Patricia Caspers

Patricia Caspers is an award-winning writer and the founding EIC of West Trestle Review. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently, The Most Kissed Woman in the World (Kelsay Books, 2024). Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Ploughshares, Pithead Chapel, and Cimarron. 

Faust B reads “P’s & Q’s”

The imam says minding your P’s and Q’s
comes from the Qur'an—the careful watching
of your prayers and your recitation,
not from some British pub keeper
tracking pints and quarts on chalkboards.

I half-believe him because language
does this: carries double, moves
in two directions at once.

At the bodega on Parsons Boulevard
the Yemeni owner corrects my Arabic
while counting change. I say shukran,
he says shukrān—the difference
a lengthened vowel, a held breath,
gratitude versus gratitude performed correctly.

My nephew learns to code-switch at eight:
As-salamu alaykum at the masjid,
what’s good on the playground,
both greetings, both genuine,
both requiring he know which room he’s in.

This is the P’s and Q’s they don’t teach
not politeness but precision,
the mind’s pivot between languages that claim you.

The elder at Jumu'ah tells the story wrong,
says mind your P’s and Q’s means
pace and quality, the rhythm and substance
of your prayer. I don’t correct him.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe every idiom
we inherit gets to mean what we need it to.

I’m minding my P’s and Q’s:
my prayers in the break room at work,
my Qur'an on the F train home,
my politeness with the cop who stops me,
my questions I save for later.

All of it careful. All of it watched.
All of it meaning more than one thing
depending on who’s listening,
depending on who I need to be
in this particular American minute.

Bios

Faust B

Faust B is a Muslim-American poet from Queens, New York. His work documents working-class life, faith, and urban witness without explanation or apology. He is published in Blue Minaret and The Scene Magazine. He is currently completing two manuscripts: “The 99 Names” and “Crude Listeners.” poetfaustb.com

Lauren Peat reads “Self-Portrait as Elena Greco”

I watch her from my window
as she draws a dark silk robe
around her body. She steps out
onto her balcony, lights
a cigarette, disappears into
the black hole of her phone.
We do this every morning,
though I do not smoke
and cannot seem to vanish.
Even in orgasm, or high with friends
on a day by the lake,
a small hard kernel of me
remains—a bit of plastic
that never degrades.
A car door slams. Six crows
explode off a power line,
all at once. She does not
look up. If she does, she will
make real the rope that runs along
the parking lot between us.
If she does, I will become
important. I want
nothing more, I am terrified,
of becoming important.
When she stubs out her
cigarette, I move to go inside,
as she does. I feel we have
done this forever. But there is
another woman, watching
us both, who would have me
stay a little longer—so what I am
alone in this moment
may develop. A Polaroid
put on the fridge, then
in a drawer, then discarded.

Bios

Lauren Peat

Lauren Peat is a poet, essayist, and translator from French. Her writing appears in local city buses, international magazines, and the repertoires of acclaimed vocal ensembles across Canada. Her debut poetry chapbook, Future Tense, was published by Baseline Press in 2024. She lives in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Roman Johnson reads “Starlight Tour”

It can happen anywhere: Saskatoon or Minneapolis,
masked men empowered to harm, badge-hidden,
in state trooper or ICE uniforms, ask your name
make you guess which birdsong—the nighthawk or the house sparrow—
lights the asphalt night that pierces your hazel irises frozen
like a common pinecone or a tangle of bush.
You will guess wrong and they will leave you there alone
in the belly of the forest until you feel the edge
of your blunting ankles and left fingers go numb
as they pull warmth from your brown blood.
It can happen anywhere, Minneapolis or Saskatoon,
cold beating you to an inch of your life.
Reports writing you out of history declaring
your drunkenness so you say you want to go home,
think how sorry your family would be if they find you
in the coming snow.
But you want to live like the elk watching the whole thing
in the forests that always record: muddy boots
kicking you in the back of your head.
Your yellowed ID card, the one in your wallet
whose leather still smells on your wet palms,
the one your brother gave to you as a gift
packed in a basket with the others in the back
of their car, van, or truck.
To reach a station, a park, or anyone
hoping for help, stripped of your clothes.
Tiny twigs thin as needles, scraggly rocks that tear
between the skin of your big toe, the longest one,
that points along the road where you can’t rest
because no one may find you but turkey vultures
and the blue light of the morning.

Bios

Roman Johnson

Roman Johnson, PhD, is a writer from Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently a second-year Master’s of Fine Arts student in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University. He has a Ph.D. in Medical Sociology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a M.A. in African American Studies from Georgia State University and obtained a B.A. in Political Science from Morehouse College. He is the co-founder of the New England Hoodoo Society. He is the winner of the 2026 Michael S. Harper Memorial Prize in Poetry from Brown University, Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press,  a past winner of the Clark Atlanta University Poetry Prize and has received fellowships and residencies in poetry, fiction, and science from Harvard University, Northwestern University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Brown University, the National Institutes of Health, Breadloaf, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. His work can be found in Arc Poetry Magazine, American Literary Review, Obsidian, African Voices Magazine, and elsewhere. He can be found online at his personal website: literaryhoodoo.com. He believes the real work of writing is living well.

Chimedum Ohaegbu reads “The New Birds”

The angels booked this room for 11:11, so I’ll be quick.

To the tiding of magpies,
To the parliament of owls,
The host of sparrows, the lamentation of swans, 
And of course, to the murder among us,
I welcome you all to our two-millionth annual general avian meeting.
I’ve gathered you all here today in this elevator
to teach you gravity, since I cut the ropes. No, I joke: 
I have other ways to let you down.

Starting with roll call. Magpies, owls, finches, you’re all accounted for.
I’m here to represent the splendid fairy-wrens, obviously.
So. Haast’s eagle? Not here.
Moa? Not here.
Dodo bird? Not here.
Passenger pigeon? Not here.

Despite the refreshments I’ve put out, as you can all hear,
Our meetings get smaller and more intimate by the year. 
Which leads me to our agenda item: we need new birds.
The old ones—present company excluded—were too delicate, flaky, flighty,
susceptible to bribery, perishable under pressure, inferior to forest fires, 
unsteady fliers when the air was wretched with smoke.

Worse: they don’t even come to meetings
—passenger pigeon? Not here—
So I propose that we grant membership to some of those on our list.
I move that we state:
1.	When a lilac is wrinkled, rolled, and crushed between two pressures, the scent the flower 
	exhales is a bird;
2.	Virgos, Pisces, Tauruses, and Cancers are all birds; 
3.	The sound of a baby’s laugh has been claimed by the angels, like this room will be at 
	11:11, but the sound of an old woman’s laugh has not been thus claimed.
	3.1.	The angels say they “exist outside of spacetime” but I think you’ll agree that this 
		sudden failure of greed indicates that the angels are ageist. 
	3.2.	So a grandmothered laugh is a bird.
4.	A window is not and never will be a bird, a window should DIE!
5.	Hope is quite literally the thing with feathers, I’m not arguing this further. Bird.; 
6.	Lastly we have a self-nomination from someone who attended our last information 
	session. She used to be a lake, she says, but she’s evaporating faster than she’s fulfilled 
	so most of her is in the air now, anyway. She says: her last tadpole died gasping, and if 
	she’d only had as many lungs as we, she could have breathed him back to life. Right now 
	she’s water and doesn’t know how to unstrangle anything. She says: if we grant her 
	wings, her every other ballet will block out the sun, so her cousins the rivers can 
	replenish themselves, and never learn loss as she’s lived. In this case, the lake, too, is 
	invited to be a bird.
I realize these nominees are unorthodox. You realize these are unorthodox times?
The bluebird was claimed by a social media website.
The penguin poached by a publishing conglomerate.
Are you restless yet? I can keep reciting our diminishment. 
We have been taken for mascots! Our feathers are thinning! We’re bald as the winter!
We’ve been bitten so bad we’re transparent yet 
when the meteorite lay its head down in the Yucatan 
did we or did we not practice our pretty until
the ashen earth couldn’t bear to twirl without us?

We adapted before and will once more.
We’ll vote now, because I hear angels at the door, 
booking confirmation held in their Biblically-accurate teeth.
All in favour? But no, let me do roll call again, for any late arrivals.
Haast’s eagle? Not here.
Moa? Not here.
Dodo bird? Not here.
Passenger pigeon? Not here.
[Here, the poet should release a two-toned whistle from an ocarina, inquisitive and 
showing, up with the lilt of it, an endling in search of a mate who never got to be born.] Not 
here.
It’s 11:10. We’re out of time.

Bios

Chimedum Ohaegbu

Chimedum Ohaegbu resides in Moh’kinstsis. A three-time Hugo Award-winner, she is Room Magazine’s managing editor and loves insects, birds, and dancing. She’s published in CV2 and As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, among others. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council have supported her work on her novel about co-victims of divine disregard. [Photo credit: Sierra Warrick]

Most of my friends have dabbled in romance
copy editing at some point. It beats waitressing
or taking the bus out to the Bridle Path
to tutor an unbridled kid in a frigid mansion.
The world headquarters of Harlequin
is in Toronto, by the way, which is relevant
to this poem. None of them last long.
My friends, I mean. There’s only so many
times you can read the word tumescent
without developing a tumour. Not that they die
of copy editing! It’s a metaphor or an allegory
or whatever (the copy editor will sort it out).
Their desire to work in publishing dies
(along with their desire to write), and then
Harlequin finds another English graduate student
to take their place. Most of these friends leave
Toronto to go to more erotic places, such as
anywhere else in the world. Toronto is the world
headquarters of detumescence. I’m working
on a novel of my own about a lonely archivist
who goes to northern Ontario for the summer
and has sex with a bear. Just kidding!
That novel is called Bear and was written
by Marian Engel in the 70s and is so rowdy
and precise and potent that it inflames minds,
and after they read it, throbbing students
throng to tree planting jobs up north,
jostling for the most outrageous sexual awakening.
And that’s what my novel’s really about:
two tree planters trying to pay off their student loans
who fall in love over their mutual love
of the novel Bear (there are some obstacles along the way,
such as, who is the bear in the relationship
and who is the lonely archivist and can their relationship
survive a relocation to Toronto?). I’m calling it
Roughing it in her Bush, an obscure half-joke
only a copy editor at Harlequin could possibly get.
I hope they let me keep at least one tumescent.
No synonym quite captures the unbearable
swollen feeling of going into debt in a city
all your friends have left. Each day, a lumpy
tantrum, a comic bloat. Which reminds me:
did you know that when the Harlequin character
moved from commedia dell’arte
to Toronto he lost his vitality
and became a burnt-out buffoon?
I think something like that
might be happening,
might have happened
to me, too.

Bios

Catriona Wright

Catriona Wright is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection Continuity Errors (Coach House Books, 2023) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the poetry collection Table Manners and the short story collection Difficult People.