108 Beloved Objects

Jeff Greenwald is the author of eight books, including Shopping for Buddhas, The Size  of the World (a journey during which he created the Web’s first travel blog), and Snake Lake. He recently co-authored The Nine Gifts with Christine Marie Mason, and Out of Nothing with Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey. Jeff is also the executive director of the non-profit EthicalTraveler.org, a global alliance dedicated to creating positive global change through travel. He lives in Oakland, California.

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.

Speeding Through East Texas

Despy Boutris’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston and serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, Guest Editor for Palette Poetry and Frontier, and Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

And I’d Just Gotten My Life Together

Willow Barnosky lives in Northern California. Her fiction appears in Severine, The Honest Ulsterman, Spelk, Ellipsis, The Write Launch, and elsewhere. She works as a Virtual English Language Fellow, teaching and training language teachers in Poland. She can be found on Twitter at onomatopoesia and at willowbarnosky.com.

Issue Delayed

Hi all, unfortunately we’re delayed in reading and responding to your work, and putting together the issue. As such, we’ll be postponing issue 4 until the Fall 2020. If you sent us your work, expect to hear from us by the end of August. We hope you are having a wonderful summer!

Outskirts

Jade Riordan is an Irish-Canadian poet, an undergraduate student, and a selection committee member (poetry reader) with Bywords. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Blue Nib, Cha, Cordite Poetry Review, The Miracle Monocle, Spittoon, takahē, Vallum, and elsewhere.

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.

Bruised

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Petrichor, Remembered Arts, Rigorous, Lunate, With Painted Words, The Dawntreader and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.

Three Poems of Korea

Dear Korea

and your dreamy neon lights,
Nascar cab drivers indifferent to my safety belts,
you’ve always given me a bed,
at times it’s been a park bench,
but if you couldn’t get me home you always woke me up
with sunlight.
Thank you.

Howie Good

Somehow we were always expecting something like this, a strange wind off the Atlantic, moaning and cursing and full of old hurts, tearing shingles from roofs and slamming birds against windows, threatening to fling us, too, into another country