Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Crossing I-75

It’s been a long first quarter

of violence and disappearances.

I’ve never felt so aware of God

and so reluctant to attend an Easter

service. I putter in sudden traffic,

hit the filter button. Exhaust

wafts up. There’s been, I'll bet,

an accident somewhere ahead,

which I’ve read happens more

on Texas highways than just

about anywhere. My last crash

was nine years back. The stats claim

I’m due to have the air smacked

out of me again. I wish I could

say I’m compassionate, but,

losing dollars off the clock, I, too,

start to fume, hear my own brain rot

that somebody better have paid

with his life to make us wait

this long. I punch off the radio,

which is trying to tell me about

an innocent man held in an American

concentration camp in a country

named for Jesus. Finally, Christ,

the flash of lights, the tow truck’s crucifix.

We cruise slowly on the loop.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran is an emerging writer who has over 40 published poems and essays—most of those within the last year. She studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor University and the University of North Texas, writing critically, in her master’s thesis, about apprompted poems with "Lines by Someone Else." Her recent writing appears or is forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Baltimore Review, Passages North, Porter House, Third Coast, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, and elsewhere. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas. She is working on her first poetry manuscript, tentatively titled The Voyagers. Instagram. Bluesky. https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/kdawngibson

Kathleen Hellen

respect, you know (just a little)

okay, she’s not pretty

she’s not butter icing on the cake

but you

loaf of funky chicken. you

stale baguette. a stew of i-can’t-help-myself— you

speak of “my girl” Bernadette. pretty selfish. you

happy when she’s twisting off the lids. mashing the potatoes— you

just want someone to do that thing to bread. make a loaf

that isn’t you. Truth is: you

lucky she’s not fed up with your

elbows on the table. fed up with

that toothpick in your grin.

Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pedestal, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, SmokeLong Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. www.kathleenhellen.com

Juan Pablo Mobili

Dignified

The body glowing inside the clothes

—William Stafford

I was young then, and troubled with being young

standing at a corner, waiting impatiently

for the light to turn as green as an emerald

at the widest avenue in the world, when I saw them

holding each other’s hands, elated as if they were

waiting for Saint Peter to welcome them to Heaven.

The father wore a suit so often worn, it shone

brightly under the sun of Buenos Aires,

the mother, accustomed to long waits in

our native Purgatory, seemed calm gazing

at the sidewalk at the end of the long crossing,

and their daughter was breathless, staring at

a vast avenue in a city that bequeathed them so little.

Each of them proudly wearing their Sunday’s best,

dignified— their eyes glowing like a candle

behind the sole window of a modest rural church—

next to the young man I was, brooding to appear

profound and serious. I remember the man shone

like a bashful sun, his wife turning patience

into a necessary art, and that little girl greeting

her first epiphany, that opportunities would not

come by easily, feeling the ember of her power.

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose Magazine, Louisville Review, and The Worcester Review, among others, as well as publications in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. He’s a recipient of multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, and an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival. His chapbook Contraband was published in 2022, and in January of 2025 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York.