Mrityunjay Mohan : on Pillars of Sand

 

 

 

 

I began writing the poem in 2021, a year after my father’s death, and a year before I began my medical transition. The poem was meant to remain as a relic from a period in my life I wasn’t comfortable with recording in any other way. It could only be detailed through the voice of another person, a child, a shadow of myself from years past cast onto the present. A part of me, however unintentional, was infused into the poem, and it took on a life of its own. The red bird was formed in part when I was still a child, already aware of what it means to possess an innate difference in the way I experienced and interacted with the world. The boy was formed even before.

When I was around eight or nine, my parents brought two pairs of birds home. I had never wanted to have birds as pets, but my parents weren’t aware of that, and since I had pestered my parents for a pet, they bought the four birds from a local pet shop. It was from the insistence of my father that resulted in the choice of four birds and two betta fish. As a child, I rarely thought of birds in captivity, and I was consumed by the notion that flying was the closest thing to freedom one could ever get. Having the ability to disappear entirely from the ground, even if only for fleeting moments, was particularly enticing.

In the days since bringing the birds home, I developed a notion that the birds had to leave the cage, and despite my initial disinterest, I grew fond of the birds soon after their arrival. They were allowed to leave the cage and roam the house when my parents were at home. I attempted to train the parrots, but I was impatient and undetermined, and I had already surrendered to the birds’ inevitable departure or eventual escape.

I had believed that any entrapment of a bird’s ability to fly was always temporary, as long as the bird remained uninjured, that they would always find a way to return to the sky in some capacity. The possibility of eternal captivity eluded me until I was faced with four birds looking at me through the bars of a cage, perched atop a piece of metal, its existence experienced entirely in captivity. These birds, I realized, had never had the chance to exist in a world that wasn’t concealed behind steel bars, and they might not even remember or understand freedom. The birds, if released into the wild, might not even survive. Their existence was experienced entirely through what could be seen from within the cage. I realized escape from captivity wasn’t always a guaranteed outcome, and as much as books and movies had me believe in the inevitability of an escape, I knew such a certainty did not exist.

As I watched the birds inside that cage, I began to view captivity in a profoundly different manner, their wings still large enough to sustain flight, unclipped, and yet any opportunity to escape did not guarantee freedom or ability to survive in the wild. The isolation of being trapped seemed worse than the loss of free movement. I viewed the captivity I felt in my own body differently as well. Their isolation felt reminiscent of my own confinement in a body I couldn’t yet understand. I imposed, unintentionally, my own feelings of desolation onto the caged birds. Although I could never know what they must have felt inside that cage, I felt kinship with the confined beings, and it allowed me an opportunity to understand myself.

It was around this time that I began reading more poetry at the library, and formed a vague and child-like idea of freedom that I had tied to my own oppressive captivity in a body that felt alien to me. In an attempt to make myself human, to feel some sense of a lurking freedom in a faraway future, I began to reshape my feelings into ideas I could capture from around me. I could see myself as a bird inside a cage, a mind unable to withhold the entrapment of an unchanging body. That was when the red bird was formed, although it wasn’t a red bird then, and it had no real story attached to its existence.

Although I no longer had to view my experience in fragments, I wanted to write about it from the perspective of a child that wasn’t allowed to have a childhood. When the birds finally escaped, I was not the one who had left the cage unlocked. Still, I watched the sky waiting for a glimpse of the birds from outside my house, the cage left on the ground beside me, open.

 

 

 

Mrityunjay Mohan is a queer, trans, writer of color. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Indianapolis Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Fourteen Hills. He’s a Tin House scholar, Lambda Literary fellow, and a Brooklyn Poets fellow. He was a recipient of the Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference.

Emily Shafer : I found looking: from Poetry on the Porch

 

 

 

 

On June 1, 2025, after receiving an unexpected invitation to Jennifer Firestone’s Poetry on the Porch reading, I made the trek out to Midwood from Manhattan with my partner Jessica—whom I often drag to readings, despite her general disinterest toward poetry that’s not mine—to hear Eileen Myles and Charles Bernstein read. We arrived early, sat on chairs positioned in the grass before a beautiful blue house. Strangers walked behind us on the sidewalk, looking over, curious about what the event was.

I settled in, observing the crowd gathering. I spotted Eileen and a family friend and now poet friend of mine, Michael Ruby, getting food at the hors d'oeuvre table. Too shy to go up to them, even though I’d spoken with them many times before, I took in the surroundings, a tree-lined street with massive houses (in New York City!)—ours, blue with white trim, a wraparound porch supported by gorgeous white columns atop a wide white and brown staircase. On the porch, a few seats, some books for sale, a bench swing, a lone mic centered above the stairs, and tons of people I’d never seen before.

I saw one of my professors from Brooklyn College, Mónica de la Torre, arrive. —What are you doing here? —What are you doing here? —Eileen invited me, I ran into them at the Poetry Project a couple of weeks ago. Mónica proceeded to run around, say hi to friends and colleagues and grab food. After a few minutes, Jennifer took the stage, asking everyone to sit and prepare for the reading. At that moment I saw Michael again, said hi, that we would talk after. Quickly, he showed me his new book, Sounds of Summer in the Country. In it, a poem titled “A Cricket”—a page full of “ti”s and asterisks indicating cricket noises and pauses. That was the whole poem. We laughed. I thought it was genius. I didn’t know you could do that.

Eileen read first, reading a long poem for the recently passed Alice Notley, shedding pages from their stack onto the floor as they read. The audience was in awe. While Eileen read, an unknown (to me) toddler kept approaching them with snacks that he had taken from the hors d'oeuvre table that they were definitely not going to eat—they probably fell on the floor or were in his mouth before he handed them over. The audience laughed.

Before the reading, Eileen mentioned that a hat was going around the audience for babysitting money for their new dog, Charlie, that they wouldn’t have been able to come if they hadn’t got a sitter, that it cost $40. I had two dollars in my backpack that I found on the ground a few days earlier. I put them in the hat.

After Eileen, Lila Zemborain read in Spanish, with her son Lorenzo Bueno translating her work into English. Charles read third, commanding the stage as usual. I wondered what it would be like to be invited to read among poets such as Eileen, Charles, Lila, surrounded by an audience of poets who are close friends.

Following, Jennifer mentioned that there was a film and artwork by artist Astrid Dick inside. After chatting outside for a few minutes, everyone made their way inside to a long table in the entryway holding Astrid’s zines and paintings. We listened to her tell us about them, and eventually make her way over to the projector in front of the bay window in the living room, where we watched her experimental piece including sound and text. She talked about it after, before dismissing the audience. On my way out, I took a zine from the table. I thought it was genius. I hope to make zines one day. I hope to make art films one day.

Once outside, I ran back into Mónica and Michael. Mónica introduced me to Lila and Michael introduced me to his friend, the Executive Director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Sean Munro. We chatted for a bit: —How is your program? —What are you doing in New York? —Will you come to the New Orleans Poetry Festival? —Here have my card. —We’re best friends, Sean is staying with me for a week. I felt a strong connection to the New York City poetry scene, then. I felt as if I were a part of it.

Throughout the day, I took notes in the Notes app on my phone. I wrote the poem I found looking from my notes shortly after. It didn’t take long and hasn’t been edited much since. In the poem, you can find Mónica (her), Sean, Michael (you), Charlie the dog, the unknown child giving Eileen snacks, Astrid’s (art maga)zine, as well as my longing to be a successful poet like Sean, Mónica, Michael, Eileen, Lila, Charles. I was an observer during that event, but also, by being there, was becoming part of something.

 

 

 

 

Emily Shafer is an incoming MFA candidate in Image Text at Cornell University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Brooklyn College, and teaches first-year writing at CUNY. She is the author of it’s too early for poetry (Proper Tales Press), I found looking (above/ground press), and publications in poets.org, The Brooklyn Review, periodicities, and more. Born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., she lives and works in New York City. @emilyshaferwrites / www.emilyshaferwrites.com

Elena Zhang : on My Little Sister

 

 

 

 

This chapbook grew out of the poem, “Lemons,” first published in Frozen Sea. It’s a little fictional account of a narrator losing their little sister, and after writing it I found myself wanting to continue exploring this fragile relationship between siblings.

I’ve always found this familial connection interesting, reflecting on my own experiences with my siblings, and just thinking about the idea of what it really means to be siblings. How can children grow up in the same household, yet have completely different childhoods? What truly keeps siblings together? How do they reflect each other’s personalities? How would siblings relate to each other if they were strangers? Siblings are sort of forced together as children without any choice in the matter. How does that impact their relationship? Would siblings choose each other as adults?

I didn’t necessarily want to answer these questions in my poems, but rather evoke these ideas through imagery and feeling. It was also fun to play around with different lines and forms, which I hadn’t done much before since I had mainly written prose poems. Some of the poems also came from much longer pieces of flash fiction that I felt weren’t really working, but ended up feeling much more impactful as tiny poems.

I hope this chapbook ends up resonating with a wide range of people, not just those who have siblings, but also people who think about the weird nature of friendships, found family, and invisible bonds.

 

 

 

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. She is the author of the micro-chapbook The Moon, My Heart (tiny wren lit, 2025) and My Little Sister (above/ground press, 2026), and her work can be found in HAD, Wigleaf, and X-R-A-Y, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and 2026.