January - Poem 8

caddis 4 / Haley Bosse

Note: This form takes inspiration from the larvae of caddisflies, which create protective shells for themselves out of the natural debris in their habitats. In each of my caddis poems, there is one personal line written by me, the poet. This true line is encrusted in overheard snippets and otherwise found pieces of language debris. Using this form allows me to say something that otherwise feels impossible, under the protection of scavenged language.

how to become lost  / Jess Bowe

find yourself in the forest, in the deep emerald, 
in the dirt of the night and the early 
rainy mornings. find yourself 
when the kids are with dad. 
when the world is quiet for the first time 
since sometime in seventh grade. 

find yourself when sunday mornings are empty 
and made for good coffee and a sunrise 
with a cat in your lap. when you can make 
mistakes and clean them up before the kids get home. 
when you can swing christmas and wrap gifts 
until 2 am. find yourself on a sidewalk on a date 
with yourself, hot chocolate made how you like it 
without anyone asking why, cold 
so painful your hair sticks to the corners 
of your tearing eyes, and yet, never complain, 
not once, because the lights are beautiful 
and people are singing somewhere 
around the corner and the entire world 
has itself unzipped and ready for you. 

find yourself in all your bright ideas. 
in your piles of notebooks. in your dreams 
and time for things like dreaming 
and painting and tv-less bedrooms. 

convince yourself, once, that you’re lonely. 
that you’re ready. come through the front door 
you forbid from any man and tell the cats 
you’re in love. do mushrooms under a full moon 
and when the clouds cup your face, invite him inside 
and forget which moon is yours. 

the nausea will overcome you. 
you’ll learn how to carry life again, 
half divorced, and when your broken walls 
in an already broken home are too shameful 
to look at with someone standing next to you, 
you’ll volunteer yourself for every job 
that mingles with potential disappointment. 

do all the laundry. every sock and tee and blanket. 
watch your children melt into puddles 
and forget to buy rainboots. 
cry in a barnes and noble when you remember 
you loved to read and look at the spot 
you’d sit in when you had time to be alone. 

cry in every empty room, in any empty moment 
left with a hint of your name on it. 
try to remember what color is your favorite. 
what flower, what song, what day of the week. 

write a letter you never finish, and start it nine times: 

dear me, if i ever get out of here, 
please remember this:

Remembering My First Anatomy Lesson  / Joanna Lee

            --after “On learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs1,” by Renée Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by ICE on January 7, 2026

Never before such helplessness

the exact baleful pale green of the cadaver lab’s doors
in line outside and feeling I may as well lie down
beside a body in its sloshy stainless cradle

as expect to pinpoint the location
of the medial-most
branch of the brachial plexus
in a strange corpse.

Every              
body is different,          do you see?
In a room of twenty,
the nerves will take on new appearances in each, im-
perfect facsimiles of some larger principle.
And so many! veins, muscles, fascial planes, all empty now, yes,
all dead, static, flat like a tire with its air let out

but God,

I’ve studied this stuff for weeks—late nights,
skipped dates, through Halloween and damn near to Christmas—and still
can’t bring a quarter of it back to life on a dime. The sheer volume

of detail drowns me, and I smell perpetually of the dead, pungent vinegar-pink which will haunt
my scrub drawer for decades. Yet it isn’t

the formalin that humbles,
but the wonder.
The body thus reduced a miracle of intricacy.
The niceties of our daily rounds revealed
as complex equations in mechanical tension& nerve transmission& chemical signaling. We are

amazing.
Our lungs so like ocean
floor sponges, what divine evolution brought us
to breathe? What tinker-minded plumber
fixed the pump of our hearts into four pliable chambers, what
statistical nearimpossibility is every     
single  
thought? each decision a chain of neurons
firing in succession to relay intention
to guts, to muscle, to skin,       quicker than you can blink
To write a poem.

To assess a threat.

To pull a trigger.

1 https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigs

Inaccessible    / Thomas Page

The world isn’t accessible // at least in a wheelchair // which isn’t fair // because we have to use the wheelchair a lot // a lot a lot // especially whenever we want to go anywhere // that isn’t the kitchen // or the fireplace room // (what she calls the room with all the windows // and // you know // the fireplace) 

I know that it isn’t fun // having me tower over you // as we roll un-merrily along // the undulating sidewalk // full of cracks // and fissures // rocking the red steel chair // into the air // you putting all of your weight // into the left side of my hair // trying to keep you afloat // on the sidewalk // and // me standing upright 

We have traversed over // ungodly huge door jambs // unwieldy accessibility doors // and unseen accessibility buttons // who knew how messed up // the world really is // for those who aren’t ambulatory // trying to navigate // to any public place // under heaven 

EMERGENCY PROCEDURES FOR 2026  / Sarah Paley

Please exit
to the right
of my brain

in an orderly
fashion. Step lively
and mind the gap.

No need to assess
outside conditions
before departing.

Just go.

Migraine Sonnet #4      / Amy Snodgrass

There is a world at the base 
of my head that gets disturbed 
from time to time. I tell everyone 
it’s a migraine and I don’t mean to lie, 

but I think that’s a cover. Things are
alive in there. A cluster of maggots, 
orange with rage, swarms a rat carcass 
that –surprise!– leaps up in still-alive fury: 

claws out, teeth aglow. Then –oh hello!– 
a pool of magma, fierce and mad, in a frenzy, 
and frankly just mean, pours down over the rat 
who fought so hard to survive, over the maggots 

just trying to do their thing. I become the rumbling bubbles of pain– 
I boil wild, I boil free, I spill over– we are gone, gone, me–gone–and the rat.