TO ALL THE IMPRISONED CHILDREN

by Julie Weiss

Hold on. You´re a rabbit, clever

and bold, galloping free through

tomorrow´s boundless grasslands.

Hold on. You´re the most extraordinary

lotus, blooming through cracks

in your country´s polar ice caps.

Hold on. They may have grounded

your body, but your mind

can fly a thousand glorious kites

in the rising winds of resistance.

Your will, sharp enough to slice

a prison guard´s insults into fluff.

Hold on. Right now, you may feel

more like a beetle climbing

a mountain under a crush of boots

than anything human, but you´re not

alone. You´re the song we sing

when the notes in our throat

have lumped impossibly together.

You´re the rainbow colors we use

to airbrush our hope across the sky.

You’re the poem we bellow at every

demonstration. Imagine! Your beauty

flowing in epic proportions.

You´re our brightest star, the one

that anchors us to our place

in the universe. Hold on. Without you,

we´d all be hurled deep into space.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection Rooming with Elephants was published in February, 2025. She was a finalist for Best of the Net, won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award, and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Recent work appears in ONE ART, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, MER, and SWWIM. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. 

KAMALA: A SANSKRIT WORD MEANING LOTUS

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

 

This morning I realized I was feeling something

I hadn’t in a long time,

though the cedar and spruce may not have noticed me,

themselves dancing in the cool late summer breeze,

nor the robins threading the grass with their beaks,

seeking worms, nor the sky the color of humpback

whale milk, or so I’m told, nor the river that listened

to the plucky birds, but the wind, perhaps, intuited,

suddenly glistening as if the air were filled

with thousands of tiny silver glass beads,

and the robins hopped, 

and that feeling I barely recognized, hope, 

hope rose from the back of my throat

like a love song I wanted to croon to no one in particular,

or to everyone, proclaim that all is not lost,

rain is coming, and more sun, and worms are wiggling

in the ground, some not to be found, living on,

and the lotus continues blooming in our pond,

all is not lost, not lost, not lost,

not even the darkness that holds the stars together

in this glorious poem of a shared cosmos we call home.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor of three small presses, writes over a garage in coastal Oregon where she lives with her husband and several fur babies. Her latest collection of poems, just released from Fernwood press is The Autobiography of Rain.