Cincinnati Review

Two entries from Beth Gilstrap’s series “There Is News along the Ohio River” balance survival and awe.

Jay Julio’s “Leftist Love Song” pokes and prods at all the ways our current political climate has disappointed us, and peels back the mask of the “American dream” to reveal the devastation that lies beneath it.

“What small hand has / all my infant blood?” What begins as a meditation on the scars on the speaker’s back becomes a portrait of unfathomable pain in equally unfathomable grace.

Tanya Sangpun Thamkruphat’s poem examines and resists cycles of so-called improvement.

You make a run for it when the sky goes dark, waiting out the storm in the rental car, where at least you don’t have to whisper.