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.

Katherine Soniat

Broth

The night he dies I dream of riding boxcars,

the sparks flying.

Hear the bells     the crossing gates

coming down?

Red Xs stitch my eyes      shut.

Never has a conductor faltered so oddly.

Hills roll by in tired profile like the hours

he lay back    pushing away

spoons of hot golden soup.

Katherine Soniat's eighth collection of poems, Polishing the Glass Storm, came out from LSU Press (2022). Her ninth collection, Starfish Wash-up, was recently published by Etruscan Press in 2023. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 (LSU PRESS). The Goodbye Animals in 2014 was awarded the Turtle Island Chapbook Prize. A Shared Life won the University of Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of Year by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Notes of Departure was selected for The Camden Poetry Prize by the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts & Humanities in 1984. New & Selected: Authority (Poems, 1985-2025) was recently completed and includes nine collections and a group of new poems.