Jaz Sufi (she/hers) is a queer Iranian American poet and arts educator. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Catalog of Shadows, is forthcoming with Game Over Books. She is a National Poetry Slam finalist and has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Watering Hole, and New York University, where she received her MFA. She is the current poet laureate of San Ramon on occupied Ohlone land, where she lives with her dog, Apollo.

“Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood” by Jaz Sufi is our Poem of the Week.

***

Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood

In my youth, I lodged complaints
with the wrong authorities.
When my classmates chased me
with sticks held high as God,
I spoke with the sticks instead,
sure they would see my side
and turn against the hands
that held them. True, they flew
like the branches had burst
into birds, but the bruises
they left took the shape
of bruises I’d borne before.
Some from other boys; some
from myself, my own biggest bully.
This was back when my brain
had first started its buzzing,
honey to be fracked from its folds
and my small body a swarm.
I knew something was wrong,
and so, it seemed,
did everyone else. Cruelty was simply
the universe revising me into my place.
By the time I got to love, I was
a slammed door with a broken lock,
hanging open on my hinges
for anyone to enter. And then . . . 

***

Author’s Note

I wrote this poem as part of a greater project, a chapbook titled Catalog of Shadows, focused on intimate partner violence and codependence. Considering the emotional logic and chronology of the chapbook led me to consider the emotional logic and chronology of my relationship with abuse. As an adult, I don’t think often about having been bullied throughout my childhood, and so it was a surprise to realize that my abuse later in life was not, in fact, a surprise, that it echoed dynamics I had encountered before.

Sonya Schneider’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Penn Review, Potomac Review, Raleigh Review, Rattle, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she’s been a finalist for the Laux & Millar Poetry Prize and twice for the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry. A graduate of Stanford University and Pacific University’s MFA in poetry, she lives with her husband and daughters in Seattle, Washington.

“Mystery Hill” by Sonya Schneider is our Poem of the Week.

***

Mystery Hill

Are we going uphill or downhill? Mom asks.
Rooster Rock towers to our right, all jagged-toothed

basalt, hairy with pines. To our left, the Columbia River
portends her Gorge. We’re going downhill, I answer.

It seems obvious enough, though she’s clearly
up to something. My uncle, her younger brother,

opens the door to his apartment,
his corkscrew curls, now completely grey,

are weighed down with shower water.
The look in his eyes is one-third love,

two-thirds confusion. He asks, Have you been here before?
Below, on the river, colorful kiteboards whip

in the wind. Three times before, Mom answers.
We eat chicken sandwiches under a portico

wound by wisteria, flowers long spent,
dark green pods rocking gently above.
 
This is a good sandwich! he says,
then, What is it? as if he hasn’t heard

the answer before. He remembers his three wives,
scuba diving in the Red Sea, the waiter,

Edsel Fong, whom he befriended at Sam Wo’s,
but he can’t remember what sandwich he’s eating.

Later, in the small hospital room, a kind,
long-fingered doctor explains the diagnosis

is dementia, Alzheimer’s. My uncle hugs
his arms and asks about ways he might improve.

He holds his hand like an airplane taking off
to show the rise he means, but the doctor

slopes her hand like a plane aiming
for a crash landing, calls it a progressive disease.

Progression seems a funny way of putting it,
he laughs, though his eyes shine with tears.

We help him write reminders on butcher paper:
renew car registration, check credit cards

for hardship programs, buy napkins.
When he waves goodbye, he shouts,
 
Look at those beautiful clouds!
As we pass Rooster Rock on our left,
 
Mom asks, So, are we going uphill or downhill?
I should say uphill—abiding by the law of physics—

but my sense of gravity has upended. When I shrug,
she smiles. Good, I want you to be as perplexed as I am.

***

Author’s Note

A mystery hill, also known as a gravity hill, is an optical illusion where a slight downhill slope appears to be an uphill incline. I didn’t know these existed until a recent trip my mother and I took to visit my uncle in Hood River, Oregon. She’d driven this road with my father before, and they’d argued over which direction they’d been going. On our drive—which was scenically stunning—Mom kept asking me, “Up or down?” At first, I felt certain of my answer, but the farther we traveled, the more uncertain I became. Not until I got home and began writing this poem did I realize the parallels of this phenomenon with dementia, and with existence itself.

I’ve always been close to my uncle. He’s led a fascinating life, including running a nonprofit for peace in the Middle East and writing and starring in a one-man show about Abraham Lincoln. Twenty-two years ago, he officiated my wedding (he had my husband and me laughing and crying under the chuppah). Learning about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and seeing its effects firsthand have been heartbreaking. But there is also so much of him that remains—his brilliant humor, curiosity, and love of nature. I think of the mystery of it every day.

“The Kidnapped Child” by Nicholas Samaras is our Poem of the Week.

***

The Kidnapped Child

What do you really want to know?
I came from a dark place called

before-memory-begins.
No one ever called me by my real name.

I never answered to the name they called me.
The only recourse was to walk on the rules:

you don’t ever talk about the torture.
There will always be worse torture—

a distant hole where the heart goes,
to which no calling sound reaches down—

not this knowledge,
not any beforelife.

What do you want to know?
What good will it do?

The first thing you learn
is that nobody believes you.

***

Nicholas Samaras is from Patmos, Greece (the “Island of the Apocalypse”), and at the time of the Greek Junta military dictatorship (“Coup of the Generals”) was brought in exile to be raised further in America. He’s lived in Greece, England, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Jerusalem, thirteen states in America, and he writes from a place of permanent exile. His first book, Hands of the Saddlemaker, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His current book is American Psalm, World Psalm (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014). He is completing a new manuscript of poetry and a memoir of his childhood years lived underground.

Leila Farjami was a 2025 poetry finalist for The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. She is an Iranian American poet and psychotherapist. Her debut poetry collection, Daughter of Salt, an Editor’s Selection at Trio House Press, is forthcoming in July 2026. She has received The Iowa Review Award in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and was runner-up for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for prizes from The Missouri Review, Noemi Press, Perugia Press, and Southern Indiana Review. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, AGNI, and Southeast Review, among many others. She lives in Los Angeles.  

“Blue Mouths: An Ending” by Leila Farjami is our Poem of the Week.

***

Blue Mouths: An Ending

An old photo   
     of my mother—  
holding an apple  
     and a knife.  
A sixty-two-year-old   
     object: Iran-made  
steel blade, 
     walnut hilt. 
 
Apples always  
     find her hands. 
Some picked   
     half-bitten, 
 before I knew  
     what half-bitten meant— 
curves long gone,  
     still breathing. 
She peels and slices   
     without end. 
Each bite becomes  
     my body: 
my heart, my spine.   
     Water divides 
in our bellies: flesh  
     of nebula and salt. 
 
Tomorrow, she dies   
     in the next room— 
a drunken ghost   
     wanders her mouth, 
head propped, 
     back powdered for sores. 
 
Look—the moon  
     flashes before it falls.  
 
The sea drinks us   
     in a single gulp. 

***

Author’s Note

Expecting the imminent loss of my mother, I wrote this poem as the final piece in a series titled “Blue Mouths.” It is both homage and requiem for a woman who gave birth to me not once but twice. An accidentally discovered photograph in a forgotten stack of old images returned me to her youth in 1950s Iran, an era that she and many others remembered as a moment of promise toward modernization and establishment of women’s rights, before the 1979 revolution extinguished those hopes under an anti-democratic, deeply misogynistic regime. Now, as we prepare for end-of-life measures, this poem is a daughter’s meditation on the moment where birth and death are equal, mirrored thresholds in the same cycle, holding grief and celebration at once. 

Kirun Kapur was a 2025 finalist for The Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize in poetry. She grew up in Hawaii and now lives along the banks of the Merrimack River. She is the author of three books of poetry: Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series; Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015), which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she directs the creative writing program.

“Live Fast Die Young Bad Girls Do It Well” by Kirun Kapur is our Poem of the Week.

Live Fast Die Young Bad Girls Do It Well

When the last days come, may I be driving 

too fast down the Pali Highway, swimming the bay 

in the dark, laughing and swallowing water. 

May my wet hair fly out from the back of a motorcycle— 

no need now for a helmet. May I wind my way up Tantalus 

to shout curses and blessings over the city 

where I was young and happy, young and harmed. 

Now, I’m armed with stars miles above.   

May I lie in a bed of uncapped pens, books  

with wrecked spines, my tea-stained drafts— 

all lost in the sheets when friends climb in beside me 

to read. In my last days, I want to take off my shoes  

in the middle of dancing, carry armfuls of peonies  

in from the garden, walk the neighborhood   

after a dinner, admiring the rectangles  

of lit up lives. In my last days, I want to remember  

how almost everything was better in the dark 

and at higher speeds, how I never regretted  

doing anything naked, flashing my middle finger,  

taking long unnecessary trips in cars, wrapping  

my arms around complete strangers, going 

up to the edge, then one step too far.  

***

Author’s Note

This is a poem about the wildness, joy, and pleasure that is sometimes unleashed in the wake of great fear or sorrow. When you know—really know in your bones—that your time is short, that you don’t have any more days to waste, what should you do? You might give the world the bird. You might dance in random places. Or lie in bed with books and beloveds. Or speed bareheaded through the night. If you could choose, what would you do with your last glorious bursts of strength and energy? It’s also just a poem inspired by a song.

Jarrett Moseley was a finalist for poetry in The Missouri Review’s 2025 Editors’ Prize. He is a bisexual poet living in Miami and the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024). His manuscript, Rehumanization Litany, was chosen by Major Jackson as an honorable mention for the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize and earned an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer fellowship. His poems have won awards from the Baltimore Review and the Academy of American Poets and have been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Individual poems have been published in Ploughshares, AGNI, and elsewhere. 

“Color Theory” by Jarrett Moseley is our Poem of the Week.

Color Theory

All the mangos 
are dying on the branch. 
Hannah calls 
too late to say 
she met a horticulturist  
who had a fix. 
The green fruit rots. 
Your face was fading 
from my memory 
until I saw you again 
last week. 
Graveyard opened 
to the returning Florida heat.  
A bookstore burning 
orange in the spring afternoon 
light. 
All year I think about color 
as a choice the mind makes 
to make sense of absence. 
Like the bright red blood 
I lose 
on the sidewalk 
when attacked by a dog 
a week after we part. 
I practice loss. 
I read a book that begins 
all the images will fade  
and become afraid 
of walking beneath palm trees. 
You do not call 
and offer me a brand-new calendar 
to tack up on my wall.  
On the document 
I send to a friend 
every comment I leave 
autocorrects to 
I resolve to love you 
like collecting . . . 
and I have no idea why 
or how to erase it.  
Did you hold me 
even after you couldn’t anymore? 
Even after you knew 
you couldn’t anymore? 
I collect colors 
in your absence: 
blue of the Miami sky 
green of dogshit 
red-brown of dying 
blossoms 
on the mango tree. 
Over the phone, 
my mother: 
you knew it would hurt. 
What’s hurt? 
The beautiful olive door 
downstreet painted 
a piss-bright baby blue? 
The humidity gathering 
like desire 
to chip away 
at the new paint? 
I don’t want to make you 
my enemy 
just to stop wanting  
to make you my enemy.  
And when I see you 
you tell me 
you were bit by a dog too 
and the same breed 
and the same week 
and I love you.  
We have lost blood 
without calling. 
All the colors will fade. 
Turn off the sun. 
I find myself 
speaking to no one, writing 
a letter to no one.  
And the mangos 
are not dying 
because the mangos 
never grew. 
And Hannah says 
cut away the branches 
cut away the leaves 
cut away anything 
that looks dead. 
I have no argument 
but to write 
the returning heat 
and read it as 
the returning heart 
and lie down on the grass. 
And lie down on the grass. 
And speak to you 
through a purple afternoon. 
Purple from everything 
all at once 
holding its breath.  

Author’s Note

When you experience a great loss, everything becomes imbued with its color. You try to ground yourself in the physical world only to find that the physical world has become charged with metaphor. The mango tree that won’t blossom is as personal as a dog attack. A repainted door takes on the same significance as advice from your mother. Everything points, somehow, back to that greater loss. The same way that “color” is actually just the light an object reflects—in other words, the light it cannot hold—the whole world becomes a mirror reflecting back to you what you no longer have.  

Mallory Rodenberg’s poems have recently appeared in Shō Poetry Journal and The Swannanoa Review. She was the 2025 artist-in-residence for the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation and the recipient of the 2023 Levis Prize from Friends of Writers. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she lives in Southern Indiana.

Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, was published by River River Books in February 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’s Snowbound Chapbook Prize and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She coauthored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family. 

“The dream says I am here to tell you” by Zoë Ryder White is our Poem of the Week.

The dream says I am here to tell you

The dream says I am here to tell you that bodies  
are not what you think. Swelled and ebbed nodes 
pocketed in your armpits, palmed at the groin:  
lymph is nothing to be ashamed of, the dream says. 
Tells how you bled so late you wondered if you were real, 
how you weren’t real, and you were, and you aren’t  
and you are, how anything that makes you  
gasp like that is good for you, how the scars collect,  
how you’ll flash them to your friends as their scars  
collect, how every call feels free now  
so you can go ahead and talk all night.  
The dream says the bunions are okay, just accept them.  
It doesn’t know why you want to press yourself  
into thickets of brambles all the time  
but it supports this behavior—mutters something about  
becoming one with, something about privacy.  
The dream says to buckle up because what’s coming  
is going to hurt. It calls you sugar  
and ruffles your hair, lays a thumb across your nipple.  
The dream has no body, suggests you use  
your own thumb. The dream is all body,  
keeps you company when you can’t sleep.  
Alongside the dream you affix a flower name  
to each letter of the alphabet. Why not the body  
of an aster, a bluebonnet, a coneflower. A coneflower  
suits you fine, with its bold and upright center.  
You like to tell the blood technician how good they are  
at finding the vein. One quick pinch and you’re   
both in the river; you’re swimming. 

Author’s Note

This poem is the first in an evolving series of “dream says” poems I started when I was in the midst of some mysterious health issues. The foggy brain that was part of that time made everything feel a little tilted, a little dreamy. I also wasn’t—am not, for now—able to run, an activity that generally makes me feel put together, settles the anxious mind. Somehow having the self jostled off-kilter in these ways, slightly unhoused, invited a different perspective. I like the idea of the dream bossing the body around—there’s something comforting in the dream knowing what the conscious mind can’t articulate, or doesn’t want to know. The dream accepting all of it: panic about aging, shifting mobility and relationship with the body, inevitable loss. The tenderness of truth-telling. I didn’t expect to keep writing these poems after this first one, but I kept wanting to hear what the dream would say, so I’ve continued on. 

Stephanie Choi’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and published in 2024. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. 

“Dear Polly,” by Stephanie Choi is our Poem of the Week.

Dear Polly, 

A corporation owns your home now. You’d laugh if you knew how much I paid for a seat on the jet boat upriver to your 27 acres. You’d demand the profits you deserve. Without descendants you gave your property to loyal neighbors, and they too without any offspring left this land to be sold. We dock on the white sand beach next to kayaks, rafts, taking a rest. Groups of people recreate where you once grew rhubarb, corn, potato; pass frisbees where you once picked berries. Under your catalpa our river guide repeats the lore of your life as fact. In China she was born Lalu Nathoy, her family sold her for seed during a famine. But you never spoke that name to anyone. You drowned your real name in the Pacific before ever reaching American shores. The nine other white tour participants nod while my cheeks flush apple red, catching their curious glances at me. I am the only Asian woman in this group. I do not correct him. This narrative that grips onto what sounds authentic rather than what is. Just terrible, how could you sell your own daughter, one woman says. In the cabin your worn belongings: coffee grinder and gun, wash pan and pots, eyeglasses and embroidery relics. On display too: a bronze replica of your shoes, which amuse some other visitors whose gleeful chuckle at your tiny feet adds to my discomfort. You planted your grave in your apple orchard. I bow three times with pressed palms. The guide informs me that scientists have identified these still fruiting trees as a lost variety, 

          a rare breed with no 
          genetic matches found on
          record I take one  

Author’s Note

This poem is part of a series of poems I’ve been working on that speak to and through Polly Bemis, a Chinese woman who was trafficked into the United States in 1872 and sold to a Chinese business owner in Warren, Idaho. She eventually earned her freedom and married Charlie Bemis in 1894. They moved to a mining claim on the Salmon River and homesteaded there for the rest of their lives. Polly is well-known throughout Idaho, though there are still myths and lore used to tell her story. Priscilla Wegars’ book Polly Bemis: The Life and Times of a Chinese American Pioneer dispels many of the myths around Polly’s life and gives a comprehensive and incredibly researched account of what we can and can’t know about Polly’s life. In these poems, I hope to navigate the connection I feel to Polly as a Chinese American woman writing in the twenty-first century and expand the dexterity of my own poetic voice.  

Alison Pelegrin is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Academy of American Poets. Alison’s two most recent poetry collections are Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022) and Waterlines (2016), both with LSU Press. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and The Best American Poetry 2025. While serving as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2023 to 2025, she founded the Lifelines Poetry Project, and her poetry outreach in prisons continues to this day. She is the writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.

“Summer Sadness” by Alison Pelegrin is our Poem of the Week.

Summer Sadness  

No one knows why slugs drown themselves
in beer, but I could make an educated guess.
With small talent it’s hard to perform
great services—Po Chu-I wrote that,
and I can relate. Kids gone, house a mess,
and all my poems are the same—
blah blah minnows in the ditch,
beneath the next blood moon I’ll be older.
At this stage I expected to be stirred up,
on some mission or other. It shames me
to admit that I love hurricanes. No one
comes calling and I can shelter in place
with bottles of wine, my only friends,
and the hummingbird which peekaboos
and maintains possession of lantana gone wild—
a total show-off—about the size and finish
of my uncle’s gold nugget pinkie ring.
An important, toupeed man of the realm
of Gretna he was—name in the papers,
always at some banquet or other,
lost to sadness after a slow demise,
with the white noise of LSU baseball all around.
He’s filed away with my father, who went quick,
in a no-frills mausoleum near which
the ugliest trees of the Westbank keep watch.
Nothing’s the same. My eyes water and I never visit.

Author’s Note

When I lived in Arkansas, I had a traumatic slug experience. Under cover of darkness, these things emerged from nowhere and devoured my double begonias. I knew how to kill them, but because I didn’t have it in me to set out a saucer of beer instead of flowers, all I had on the porch that summer were pots of dirt. By the next year I was back home in Louisiana, where I am continually pestered by cockroaches and mosquitoes, but never slugs. Still, summer uproots sadness in me. I remember Arkansas, or my boys when they were little, fishing in ditches, or my uncle or my dad, and how somber the day turned when we opened the aboveground tomb to make room.