Of All Things that Pounce & Alter

In addition to That hum to go by (Mammoth books), Jeff Schiff is the author of Mixed Diction, Burro Heart, The Rats of Patzcuaro, The Homily of Infinitude, and Anywhere in this Country. Hundreds of his pieces have appeared in more than a hundred and thirty publications worldwide, including The Alembic, Bellingham Review, Cincinnati Review, Grand Street, Ohio Review, Poet & Critic, Tulane Review, Tampa Review, Louisville Review, Tendril, Pembroke Magazine, Carolina Review, Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Southern Humanities Review, River City, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and Southwest Review. He is currently serving as the interim dean of the school of graduate studies at Columbia College Chicago, where he has been on faculty since 1987.

Coming Home Sounds Like

Namrata K is a poet, nitpicky editor, dancer and vocalist who lives with her madcap family in Bhopal. Her work has been published in Poetry with Young People, The Kali Project and an upcoming anthology Shape of a Poem. Her best award has been her son’s “Your poetries are beautiful”. Poetry and music, for her, are two sides of the same coin—expressions of our deepest, most unnamed ways of being.

Abdulmugheeth Petersen

Abdulmugheeth Petersen has a passion for anything that is related to language, literature and social justice and so, naturally, teaches High School English. Much of Abdulmugheeth’s writing portrays, and is inspired by, a world as seen through the overlapping lenses of life as an esoteric, a nonconformist, a muslim, a gay man, and a South African. He enjoys hiking and touring, but also snuggling up to movies or books with his partner and any cats they can find.

Eratz Israel

Gerard Sarnat is a retired physician who has built and staffed homeless and prison clinics. He was also a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. As a writer, he has won First Place in Poetry in the Arts Award, the Dorfman Prize, been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards, published four collections and appeared in Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Pomona, Brown, Columbia, Wesleyan, University of Chicago periodicals as well as in Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, American Journal Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, LA Review, San Francisco Magazine, and The New York Times.

as long as you want

K. Eltinaé is a Sudanese poet of Nubian descent, raised internationally as a third culture kid. His work has been translated into Arabic, Greek, Farsi, and Spanish and has appeared in World Literature Today, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Many Muslim Worlds (Penguin), The African American Review, About Place Journal, Muftah, among others.

An American’s Babushka, R.I.P.

by Wallace Kaufman

Concorde

By Lucy Ferriss

Learning to Speak

Learning a new language at fifty
is like learning ballet at seventy.
I love the music of new words
the dance of new thoughts,
a drumbeat of names:
Pevek and Anadyr, Roytan and Wrangel,
Larisa, Volodya, Valya and Slava,
Pyotr, Victor, Ludi, Villi, Yuri.
I want to come back to the north
and talk with you about polar bears,
and the ice floes, about icebreakers,
and the long night,
and the flowers on the tundra,
about where you came from
and where you are going,
and if the arctic will still be white
when our children have children.