by Lena (Sunada-Matsumura) Newlin

“Some years, an afternoon hail storm passes through, stripping the leaves and fruit down to their stems, and within minutes I lose everything that I have cultivated. But our stomachs don’t know the pangs of hunger”…

by Kathryn Wilder

“I stand beside this pool and you ask what I think when I see a pool like this.

‘The pool and my body,’ I say”…

by Margo Chávez

“I have always been lured by the call of the “there.” And I have been lured by the call of the “here.” Torn between the two. Stay or go? Go or stay? I have gone far away”…

by Crystal Bevers

“As I look at this girl-child through the lens of memory, I am awed by her. I only now remember she existed—born of bones and desert and life and death—herself powerful, glorious, and untamed“…

by Ana Consuelo Matiella

“At night, I yearn for a dark sky blasted by stars. At dawn, I yearn for the coyotes that lived so close to my house on the mesa I could hear their yelping“…

by E.M. Sloan

"Had I conceded, I would not have enjoyed spouting a few rounds of Billie Joe McAllister up on Choctaw Ridge as I cruised American Ridge. Or savored the pleasure of that knoll-top residence reminiscent of Tuscany, edged with this fall’s dazzling Lombardy poplar trees stabbing the sky"…

by Emily Arntsen

“The act of passing out is familiar to me, though I’m still mystified about what we pass out of and where we pass into when such incidents occur.”