In December, creative force Patrice Vecchione organized and hosted “The Power of Her Voice,” a benefit reading by poets featured in Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond (Gunpowder Press, 2025). George Yatchisin and I drove from Santa Barbara to attend. The auditorium was full, buzzing with energy. When Patrice gave her introduction, the room felt galvanized by the power of poets and healers, a collective push back against an Administration that seems determined to strip so much away from our communities. She generously gave permission for her introduction to be reprinted here (edited for context). To the power of poetry! —Chryss Yost The Power of…

Magdalene Purity songs are absent from this placewhere I am newly awake and infans, pre-verbal, body ringing with the echo of anight sitting up, before the morning call from county jail. Your eyelids flutter in sleep, now innocens,non-harming, before you wake to realize who you are, or what they say you are.Are these the right words? What right have I to call you back to life,from a sleep that graces you with lawless anonymity. Purity songs are absent from this place,the morning after a long night in a deep wood. But they are longed for,when life sounds like scripture: He went to work.He sat with a dozen friends. He traveled…

Come October The dry spell ended by deluge, my husbandis mowing the lawn again. Through the cross hatchof the screen door, he’s a kinetic mosaic of manand push mower. The red Briggs and Stratton,a Walmart special we’d bought togetherfor our first home, he’d heaved it offthe highest shelf in the garden department,buckled it into the backseat, and carried itover the threshold like our new bride.To make him laugh, while we put it togetheron the living room rug I had named it MurrayBerkowitz and squealed every time he tighteneda bolt. Now we’re showing our age, wheezingfor stabilizer and catching in stump ruts.I raise my hand, flat palmed in a frozen waveand…

November Constellations — 4 am Reflected through skylights — Jupiter in Orion.Neptune in Pisces. Pluto in Capricornus. I ignore the sign posted next to the defibrillator —No Lifeguard on Duty. Swim at Own Risk. (I’m not supposed to be here but I have a key.)Just this once, could I swim from one side of the Atlantic to the other? To kneel beneaththe pillars of my creation?                                    I know about their desperate escapes. From tsarist pogroms.The Nazis. In storms. Aboard the immigrant SS Presidente Wilson. SS Westernland.              …

December It has been December for monthsdark days and darker nightsan abyssal zone, no savior in sightno ox and ass snorting in a stableno wise men slogging from the eastworried about being latesneaking sips of strong drink to stay warmno crumbs of starlight in the skyshowing the wayas December’s teeth sink inbut over there under the olive treecan you see him? right there?a shepherd boy tending his sheepwearing a wool tunic tied with a ropeplaying his wooden flutefaint notes floating through the night Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review…

The Nameless Hours There’s a vortex of bees humming around my skull.Clock says I’ve only been sleeping a couple of hours.Something inside me falls off a shelf.I get up and take pills to quiet the hive,go into the kitchen and stare out the windowover the sink. Bats fly across the moon. Waitingfor the pills to kick in I watch the dim glow slideacross the leaves as the night rolls over in its sleep.The silence breaks into pieces I cannot hold.There are days ahead I know I’ll want to live throughbut not which ones or how far apart they’re going to be.It’s as much future as I’m willing to think aboutwhile…

On Sunday Everyone in Paramount Dreams the Same Dream:         After Mathias Svalina You are cruising the night down Somerset inside a Cheyenne,bajita como tus animos. Each time a corrido belico starts, youthrow your beer in the trucks bed, bump it, so loud the bass crushesverbs, scattering them along the streets. Then you notice anotherCheyenne, blindada, wax so bright contrabando reflects off thepaint. Los contrabandos follow you. You put the volume down.You intensify like the city’s drought. You make a right into theSans, thinking only the devil casts a shadow there at 3 AM. But thecontrabandos follow. You don’t know that’s their territory. Youdon’t know their presence…

Aside Myself My mind is not itself. Henri Cole During your heart attackI wore a mask in the waiting room watching as the capitol was breachedwhile they drew bloodand stuck terminals to your skin. They beat a cop with a flag andit wasn’t in the end a heart attack though the capitol fell and keptfalling and still falls. Now, I’m waiting in another hospitalreading an old New Yorkerreport on Iceland. So much lava and ruin and cortisol, butI’m no longer really reading. My eyes trace lines, words,letters until I’m only waiting,thinking of Cole’s line. Nor mine, I hear my voice answer.Nor even my voice. How little remains (I saysoftly to…

Living Kidney Vigil Instantly hypothermic the way peas frozenwith dry ice are or feet dipped into a winter lake,my son’s kidney looked exactly as I expected:chilled fist of preserved life, gobbed with yellow fat here and there, like something I’d pull from a hento replace with cubed bread stuffing and then bake.I hadn’t known the surgery would be streamedto our phones, that I’d see inside my child in a way that most surgeons usually did, but probably no parentever should. One year later this November, it’s a takethat still leaves me raw: two young men side by side,the organ transplant hush-slush machine a vat of salinated, silently held energy between…

When the Darkness Learned Our Names In this city, electricity moves like a passing ghost—brief, trembling, unable to anchor itself in our walls.When it appears,it startles the rooms into brightness,exposing everything we tried to hide:the unpaid bills,the sleepless nights,the faces we wear only in the dark. We scramble—charging phones, boiling water,capturing the momentas if light were a rare creaturewe might never see again. But the ghost tires easily.It slips away without apology,leaving the darkness to reclaim us,slow and certain,whispering our nameswith the confidence of somethingthat knows it will outlast us. Marvin Garbeh Davis Sr. is a Liberian writer and poet whose work explores the intersections of memory, survival, faith, and…