In the damp of rain, I swept leaves rusted with dying.
There wasn’t peace, there should have been peace—
still in the crevices another too-small child
scurrying across brick & bog. Where do children
rest? I could never answer, never satisfy, I clamped
each child for too long & when one by one they sustained
themselves, how I was held & how I was broken
& in breaking unchained
each song.
Alicia Elkort edited and contributed to the chapbook Creekside, published by Berkeley Poetry Review, where she also served as an editor. Her poetry was featured in the Ishaan Literary Review and has been published in, among other journals, Elsewhere Lit, Menacing Hedge, AGNI, Stirring, and Rogue Agent. She works as an accountant for film and television and is currently producing a documentary on global traditions of prayer. (updated 10/2017)
Jennifer Givhan, a Mexican-American and Indigenous writer from the Southwestern desert, is the author of five poetry collections and three novels, most recently the novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing, 2022), which received a Silver Medal in the International Latino Book Award’s Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category and was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and the U.S. Together We Read Book Club. Her work has also appeared in The New Republic, AGNI, The Nation, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices, Givhan is the 2023 Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at The University of New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque with her family. (updated 04/2024)