by Joshua Zeitler
I Need to Grieve a Little Louder
When I was a child, my mother could have whirled
the world like a lollipop, tongue-wet and color-spun.
Instead, she hid all the candy. When asked,
my father said, What candy? Only now do I understand
that this was the beginning of understanding.
I used to think the universe was called the universe
because it was the universe. Now I know
we are housebroken. Doomed to repeat
our masters’ lavish patterns of affect. Excuse me,
before I can shut the door, I need to grieve a little
louder. When I grow up, I want to be tall and twisted
like licorice. When I grow up, I want to be a moon pie
because moon pies never grow up, stuck in a squat circle
of friends that won’t stop gossiping. Naïve to have believed
a single verse could contain it all, but then there’s Blake
and Baudelaire, begging to take one last crack at it; Jiménez
sculpting a chisel to someday chip at the granite silence;
Keats pleading: sweet voice, sweet lips! Gone. All gone.
Poet Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, diode, Nimrod, Shō, and elsewhere.
Artist Josiane Kouagheu (she/her) is a journalist, writer, photographer, painter and poet from Cameroon. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, African Writer Magazine, Kalahari Review, Frontier Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Nomad review, Apricity Magazine, Al Dente Journal and elsewhere.
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