Taking Off the Bandages After the Mastectomy The Jackson-Pratt drainhas thin, rubber tubingand a soft, round squeeze ballthat looks like a grenade. Bless the heart of my surgical nurse,who wrapped me in yardsand yards of gauze and tapeafter the surgeon did his deed. I do not bleed, just ooze,and all the drugshave not worn off yet,so the unwrapping feels like it’s happeningto someone else. It’s not the first time, so I know the pain will come—sharp, bright and other-worldly. For now, I just see stitches,like bird tracks in snow,like words penned by someonewho wants to survive. Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired…

When I return from visiting my newly widowed friend in Seattle, every wave swallowing the wet fringes of an empty beach mourns impermanence, how our nourishment depends on stealing others’ lives. Now they’ve documented the secret language of mushrooms under purple leaf litter, proved that even carrots, thistle are sentient, I don’t know what I can ingest without shuttering some voice whispering poems to the soil. At a street market in Japan, my arms winged a dialect of cranes & cuttlefish to bargain for an apricot & celadon vintage kimono, its flowering fabric scented with the history of someone else’s life. I’ve stopped complaining about my husband’s whistled snores on…

Before Zeta, the seventh hurricane of the season, hits the city my neighbor who waves at mewho I wave back to finally speaks this neighborhood used to be filledwith teachers teachers every block he’s lived on that spot all his lifewas on that roof for two days during Katrina watched the house on this lotwhere our house is now fill up with water water to that stop sign there just down Cadillacright over there on St Bernard—he points east— the old folks and folks with disability we had to helppull them out it was sad it was real sad he hates the unruly Loblolly Pine in our yardspends hours raking…

Introduction by Catherine Abbey Hodges Dean Díaz de León has spent decades creating in metal, wood, and landscape. Clean lines, textural juxtapositions, and elegant understatement are distinguishing features of his work. In recent years, Díaz de León’s artistic interests have opened out to include poetry, and it seems to me his experience with physical materials influences his poems and invests them with a kind of third dimension that rests inside the two dimensions of words on a page. I’m drawn to poems in which surface and depth share space, the metaphysical nestled just inside the physical—a version, perhaps, of William Carlos Williams’ “no ideas but in things.” Many of Tom…