NIXES MATE REVIEW · ISSUE 36/37 SUMMER/FALL 2025

of the Octopus
after mating

—after Ezra Pound & Li Po

Not beautiful. My honey-
colored hair was fine
and wouldn’t grow past my shoulders
which caused me shame. I played
with boys and girls, myself an imp. Compliant
so others liked me, I was a liar
and a thief and I always laughed.

When I was nine my father
disappeared onto highways
with a woman just out of her teens.
I began to scowl and beat myself
on the head. My breasts
were just sprouting. Crows
and bluejays shrieked from the trees.

A banshee and slut at twelve
and anyone could partake of me.
Our yard was overgrown and though
I tried to weed and rake, my mother
wasn’t there to teach me. I loved
too much or not enough.

When I was sixteen my mother left
me on the verge of grown. This hurt me.
I grew older. Over sixty now,
I’ve come to meet her.
This is our river. These our butterflies.
I’ve come all this way
to meet her in the sorrows.

For mine I’d embroider an apple tree, chainstitch a chalice and a
scythe, choose green for a scene of mourning and white pine. I
wouldn’t deny anything. My needle would follow it all, and there
wouldn’t be a frame or battening, so that when I was out walking in
the woods, I could carry my handiwork with me and sit on a granite
boulder in light rain. Once, I rubbed my hands and clothes with dirt
and leaves to remove a stain. I was twelve. I was desanctified. There
I was, passing back and forth among outlines and shapes that were
boys and men. This is hard to sew, to say.

I was taught that the word will – as in,
I will see you in the fall when you visit back east–
is a future-tense marker.

But it is not. No such thing in English.
Will – along with can, may, and must –
belongs to a little mood-marker clan.

May is permissive.
Must indicates probability.
Can suggests potential.

When flipped into the past tense, the sentence
becomes – I could be seeing you in the fall
because you should be visiting back east.

Would, might, should, and could.
These mood markers indicate only a hypothetical –
a possibility, not a guarantee.

Shingling: there’s a breeze in the air.
The substrate is flat and fair.
Should you find a quirk, resisting
the incline, be careful where you step:
it might just be divine.

room you’d like
  to swim in, while Jake cuts
  your key, the duplicator rumbling

from your feet
  into your chest, when you feel
  your father steady your hand

on the machine
  and you are earning your allowance
  learning ropes and keys because he planned

to pass Montclair
  Hardware to you, and you wanted it
  then – his magic of inventing colors

in the mixer
  while trading bawdy jokes with men
  whose names were embroidered in red

on pockets
  splotched from the last wall
  they’d painted, the clink of metal

as he poured
  screws or nails onto the scale to sell
  them by the pound, his lumbering up

the rolling ladder
  to the exact drawer for an eye bolt,
  or sending customers up the road to Ace

for the fuse
  or crescent wrench he didn’t have in stock –
  and you didn’t always recognize

this shape-shifter,
  deft in banter, know-how,
  and bonhomie at the store,

the one who simmered
  at home, dead by coronary
  at 70, still wed to work because

you’d scorned
  the inheritance long ago, before selling
  it for inventory, even those high

wooden drawers
  full of galvanized treasures, and the ladder
  you still dream of scaling

1 The writer Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) became popular in the 1970s when his aphorisms were embraced by the so-called counterculture promoting a pervasive humanism. Well-known quotations include, “Your children are not your children….they are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself.” and “The deeper sorrow has carved into your soul, the more joy you can contain.”

2 Employment as a salesman has been profiled in several literary works, among them Glengarry Glen Ross, a play by David Mamet (1984) adapted into a film in 1992, and Death of a Salesman, a play by Arthur Miller (1949). In the Mamet play, real estate agents use lies, flattery, bribery, threats, and even burglary to sell undesirable real estate. In Miller’s play, the aging salesman, disappointed with life and unable to distinguish his memories and expectations from reality, argues with family and with life over truth, betrayal, and the American dream.

3 Filial piety as explained in Confucian texts such as The Book of Rites incudes physical care, love, service, respect, and obedience. “Children should not bring disgrace upon nor disgrace their parents.” [emphasis added] For example, visits to parents should include activities both can enjoy, but the parents should not be challenged. The time for that is long past.

4 In the United States, aging parents often “downsize” – clear out the house where they raised a family and move to a smaller home, a necessity when the larger house represents the parent’s sole worldly resource. Besides “downsizing,” other names for this clearing out include sorting, unmixing, and death cleaning.

A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,
And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.
— Marie Howe

Apparently the language of birds
is perfectly clear to other birds

at least in terms of “Hawk/flee”
which is a multilingual squawk.

It would be helpful, no it is probably necessary
for us to interpret each other’s warning songs

and the meaning of broken glass strewn in the street.
I’m missing the dictionary of Bless your heart

while I relearn the honks of Brooklyn.
My whole life I’ve wanted to be multiple

holding more places, more languages –
Now even with the help of a guidebook

the denizens of the next town confuse me.
So I listen to the sparrows and the pigeons.

Vienna Ghazal, 1974

That Austrian summer our bodies always smelled of cake.
In Wien, Baroque Gebäude are over-decorated cake.

The baker’s clothes went straight to the bathroom tub,
stomped like grapes to oust the stickiness of cake.

Wintergarten tourists heard Wagner under glass
eating famous Sacher torte, a German word for cake.

Queued crones caned the Ausländer at the fleischerei,
The war, they thought, should have been a piece of cake.

Each sunrise our radio played Radetzky’s March.
Out the window the Riesenrad revolved – a spinning cake —

and Red Zone women sat on sills across our little street,
working girls not wives home baking cake,

speaking just to men who passed them by,
their faces smeared with rouge and Kohl and cake.

Auf Deutsch, the landlord said: I saw London but only from the air;
Cäecilia, it’s true, he laughed, guzzling coffee, eating cake.

But this is still a story about grip. In the year 300, every German carried a wooden stick called a kegel, as a multipurpose tool or weapon. The clever priests invented a test of faith: set the kegel on end, then roll a stone to knock it down. Call the crashed kegel heide, heathen, unbeliever of the outer lands. Call yourself edelweiss, pure. Even today if you watch professional bowling, all fast-spinning balls and sin-slamming faces, you’ll hear it, she’s a real kegler. Press play on a VHS tape from the year 1989 and hear me chirp I LOVE bowling to my mom behind the camera, my little German Catholic fingers gripping a heavy ball. A heide in hiding. I really did love it until a man took the bumpers away and the game reverted to test. How to turn and face my witnesses? How to celebrate if I’ve taken myself down just right? Or shrug and say next time, if all or most of me is still standing.

September 15, 1963. Birmingham, AL. San Lorenzo, CA 

The bomb exploded about the time I was waking up.

I ate Cheerios and dressed and walked along Via Bregani
to Via Vega where the Kathy Bowen lived.
Five minutes on a street so quiet I did not see another person.

The sirens wailed all morning.

Like all the girls across America, we dressed up for Sunday School:
black patent leather Mary Janes, snow white anklets, homemade dresses
hemmed below the knee. White cardigans.

We held hands and chatted, walking through the sleeping tract.
We didn’t smell the smoke.

We waited for the green light before crossing Grant.
No shouts nor screams getting louder.

At Paseo Grande, we turned left. When we arrived
there was no crowd of people congregating as close
to the church as they could, pressing up against the barrier,
pushing up against the police – some who were Klan,
some who thought about the funerals to come, the overtime.

We walked past the church entrance to the back.
Waved to the greeter. Down the stairs to our classroom.

No decapitated child, rubble, or blood.

We sat at small tables in small chairs.
Our teacher read a story about a Good Samaritan,
let us sing our favorite song.

NOTE: On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four white men, members of the KKK, planted 19 sticks of dynamite in the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham Alabama and murdered four Black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denice McNair.

Night opens the book,
reads it in silence.
The only sounds: trucks roar by the station,
idling, a child cries in her sleep in white Cape
across the street, and my own breath.

What do I have to say to you now,
alone, sitting in my car,
window down, no music, cigar cold?
I will leave for you this silent night,
torn maps, hand-lotion bottle, half-empty,
pocket Thesaurus.

Our language is spoken
only in the city, rarely visible:
bell tower, scarlet flower beds,
barbed-wire fence,
red brick school building,
tank on the pedestal
from the forgotten overseas war,
home with parents asleep,
together again,
as if nothing happened,
flag with hundred butterflies
on the desolate square.

I will leave the directions
and when you get there
you will understand the language,
mine and all those,
who passed through the city.
There are as many tongues spoken there
as transients.

I light up my smoke, start the car,
put on Abbey Road,
and head for the city.

It’s 5 am. I’ve been awake since two.
The northeast corner of our continent
begins its long and arduous wintering.

My sink collects half-emptied cups,
spoons stained from instant coffee. I keep house
haphazardly as any college sophomore.

You texted yesterday from thousands of miles away:
words that embraced me, found me, helped to heal
soul-wounds I didn’t even know I had.

Accept this sleep-starved blessing, Kat:
your heart steadfast as only those can be
who’ve known harsh spells of weather and survived.

after Guido Cagnacci’s Maria Magdalena

It makes the most sense, doesn’t it? For ecstasy to be synonymous with leaving – how could I blame you, then? Drawn as you are beyond the body, toward the playground where we could take turns aching for absolution, for a darkness named unflinching. It is in recline that we may best train the eye: imagine a woman, imagine her famine, imagine me combing sins of umber till they sprout wings, find your feet like the Sibyl’s leaves. What would they read, darling? Will they tell of spontaneous armageddons? Stutter the rotten brinks to which you sent me? Or shall they tell of how I tore this flesh so that you could lap with ease? It is written that after death I will persist as a wild dollop, a kingdom inching toward undone. I will break the news to you: I cannot begone until you cut out your twisted pretty tongue.

I want my bags packed lightly.
Stacy’s not all there but she gets it.
Inez the cashier gives me the receipt,

“Enjoy the rest of your day.” Rest
of my life . . . I think. I could take
a dirt nap going home, I could croak.

“You have a good team with Stacy,”
I tell them, dumb me. Stacy turns red.
The light’s on but nobody’s home,

her face like a saint’s in a Giotto painting.
Have I embarrassed her? Would she understand
if I said, Sorry, I’m not wrapped too tight?

1.
Useless to look for what you cannot see.

Something was going on and I didn’t look for it.

Flowers encode stripes and dots that only bees see.

I didn’t know except when I knew that I didn’t know.

2.
No bleat from the hinge when the man opened the door.

I was eight. I needed glasses. My mouth was too small.

My mother spoke firmly, as if she had control.

Two teeth pulled, I walked home, cotton wads filling bloody holes.

3.
A craven heart unfolds – a solar panel snatching energy.

After she died, my father often said that she had had no control.

How does the flower trust the bee will know where to land?

Under a shrub I made a miniature garden with a seat for a miniature person.

4.
Experimentation with the fruit fly has resulted in five Nobels.

A 50-day life cycle allows gene splice, alter, recode through generations.

Any story sounds like a story because people look to sunrise and sunset.

Why does a room contain light?

5.
The fruit fly has 75 percent of the same genes that cause disease in humans.

With vitelliform macular dystrophy, a person cannot see what’s in front of them.

I liked stories with a beginning, middle, and end, like in books.

Peripheral vision is unaffected– you see out the sides.

6.
In the 2-inch zebrafish, 84 percent of genes are kin to those for human disease.

Shouldn’t a room be dark around all the objects, the way space shows black around all the stars?

Its transparent embryo develops outside the mother, making zebrafish easy to experiment on.

Easy-going and playful, zebrafish are quite active and will spend their days darting throughout your 20-gallon aquarium tank.

7.
The zebrafish regrows parts of its heart if damaged.

The zebrafish sees infrared light.

In the hallway sisters conspire.

Everywhere in the house, fruit flies.

Tell a story of Providence. Fully aware your words – a glass bottom boat – will not slow, but ease, her ebb on the river out of this life.

Start with the first warm day, a year ago. A do-nothing Saturday, so why not day trip to Beavertail Lighthouse (weeks before the tourists), climb out onto the rocks, coat open to the sun, knife’s blade of wind a kiss at the land’s edge?

Tell her the banality of it: two hours’ drive, occasional bridge, looping overpass, four-lane rotary, some audiobook a drone for mile upon mile of open highway till approaching the Welcome to Rhode Island sign, a field made yellow with daffodil. As if the line dividing the Bay and Ocean states was portal separating grayed and rusted rooftops, bare-limbed trees still glazed, partially, in ice, and the first fire of a season’s bloom.

Tell her, in an instant, how you pulled off the highway, planned destination abandoned. Parked your tires onto the lip of concrete separating dirt from paved road, blocked traffic – hazard lights, a blinking metronome timing your attempt to photograph the field made yellow with daffodil.

Tell her your glee, sitting there. Half in half out of the car, one foot on the brake, the other propping open the driver’s side door, Nikon purchased from a Plymouth pawn shop – too good a picture-taking machine for your journeyman skill – heavy in your unstable hand.

Tell her you removed your glasses, blinked back tears, trained the viewfinder, angled the lens so the sun sat left of field, your breath stilled, and pressed the shutter.

Tell her you thrilled in this field made yellow with daffodil – seed heads facing out, green stems leaping skyward in prayer – a small grace, this proof of life the year we marched to cease the breaking of bombs over buildings and bodies a shore away, while tumors exploded her ovary, breaking the bowel wall and brain, incurable.

But this photograph of sun – of canary of saffron of mustard of gold – you will pin to the white fence leading to her door for the hospice nurse to collect and deliver to her dying bed.

Sign the back in your fragile script –

O, Karen, what will become of us gals after the wars, poems and their conceits silenced, wine drunk, and final waltz of breath danced? Maybe music and light?

Heather Nelson’s debut poetry collection, Motherland, takes the reader on a tumultuous but honest tour through periods of motherly life with both humor and cleverly crafted moments. I was lucky enough to catch Nelson reading at Grolier Poetry Bookshop recently. Tom Daley introduced Heather and so accurately said, “every poem
in this book talks to every other poem.” This conversation becomes clear from the connection between the first poem, “How to Fall” with the last poem, “Number One Bus,” which you will read about later.

Nelson also includes references to teaching, a different form of mothering. Anyone who reads “Ode to Teacher Shoes” will come away with a hilariously exact slice of teacher life. One can both feel the exhaustion and humor in these words: What drudgery to hold my old trudging feet, to work in common with their pedestrian peers on daily
sidewalks…”

Themes of hunger also repeat throughout this work, like in the candid moment in “Turning Fifty-One,” when Nelson concludes

I am always being followed on these walks.
I walk slowly, knowing it’s my hunger.

The idea of being followed by one’s own needs gives the reader a unique view into mothering loneliness, which many of us can relate to, but seldom discuss. Again in “Fresh Pond, Fallen,” the poet muses

I’d tend to my hunger if it weren’t
always there, its reminder jockeying
for my attention with my husband’s voice,
thrown like a stone in the water.

The hunger references encapsulate motherhood, from the literal responsibility of feeding children to putting oneself second regarding many personal needs. The poet takes a self-deprecating, but light-hearted stance on bodily changes and hunger in “Self-Portrait.”

I fill the entire bedside mirror, floor to ceiling. Each morning
My borders shift as I acquire more territory…
Outside the YMCA,
My belly speaks in a voice that’s deep, rumbling sonorous
Underfoot like the subway passing beneath the swimming pool,
beneath the undergrads, the yoga instructors, the spin doctors,
and this year’s models, sucking everyone down.

The poems in Motherland will capture your attention through the poet’s one-of-a-kind observations, like in her title poem, when she notes that motherhood is a type of Stockholm Syndrome. Or in “Flower Talk,” when Nelson reflects on the resilience and hope of motherhood through flowers:

Spring flowers mirror
each other
they’re the voyeurs
of my aging
of my youth,
of my life
read consecutively.

The final poem, “Number One Bus,” links to the first poem in this collection. In the first poem, “How to Fall,” the poet considers her own mothering and its deficiencies:

despite the kind advice you offer, the kind of advice

you wanted, but never had.

The poet acknowledges that despite the difficulties (cranes loom…dark clouds mass over the river), she will persist and find joy in the ordinary:

I feel fine, because when I arrive in Cambridge,
I meet Whitney out on the wet sidewalk
and we talk, about wanting work, and finding it.

By the end, the poet accepts and finds comfort in familiar surroundings and people, circling back to her first poem by taking her own advice to welcome the circumstances in mother life. I am looking forward to more of Heather Nelson’s poetry and her dry wit and pithy observations.

Kelsay Books, 2025

K Prevallet’s A Varied and Tender Multiplicity exists entirely in its own league of botanical spirituality. Her poetry uses a multitude of narrative throughout, shifting perspectives from herself, to the reader, to other memories, to the cosmos, and to the very earth itself. Published by Station Hill Press in 2025, this collection of poems from 2002 to 2024 includes works which have either been rejected or never published. Because of this, there is no connection between the poems, rather each poem is a connection between itself and a plant that has been assigned to it. Instead of being trapped in a void, Prevallet unleashes them all here in this book, a garden cultivated by decades of research and worship. Although the poetry deals with themes of loss and grief, the tackling of memories and letting go of the past, it also includes hopeful aspects of strength, healing, and the love which plants offer us, whether it is in our everyday lives or in times when they are needed the most. 

Original titles have been replaced with corresponding plants and Prevallet delicately arranges each one to bring the wisdom of materia medica to the surface, bursting through from each page like roots shooting out of the ground. Some poems have subtle nods at the plant, others more in your face while some works do not mention the plant at all and simply recall the feelings of the plant’s effects on the human body and mind. This fascinating layout also invites an opportunity to read the collection backwards: reading the poem first and then the description. In any case, the parallels between each poem and description reveal the close intertwinement between human existence and flora, begging a possible question: Were we always meant to exist hand in hand with plants, drawing from their energy? 

Take notice in how each description avoids the use of “it” where Prevallet takes great care in not reducing plants down to their inanimate selves (since they are much larger than that) as well as “uses”, since plants do not exist in a one sided relationship with humans, reminding us that they can and have always existed without the aid of mankind although “Some say plants go where they are needed, following humans in an effort to help them”.

These descriptions provide context for these poems, almost as if each line evokes similar emotions from the reader that each plant would upon ingesting it. “Wormwood” for instance, a hallucinogenic and addictive plant, reads as a fever dream with all too real feeling. Wormwood’s power in nature of expelling parasites may be seen as the purging of our past traumas and fears. Prevallet does not hesitate to incorporate the supernatural into her words. Descriptions not only share properties and effects, but also mythical and biblical lore, such as “Pomegranate”, drawing from the tale of the underworld in a short and powerful burst, almost as if biting into the seed itself, a tart and intense flavor radiating throughout the senses. Elements of the real and fantastic are merged to reveal plants in a new light, such as the “Nettle” and “Hawthorn” which seem almost otherworldly. The hawthorn’s ability to become a “portal to other worlds” reminds us to ground ourselves. The poem itself wrestles with an intense yearning for completion and an aid to a broken heart. The lines “trying again and again to make words make sense of a world that will / never again feel complete…” can resonate to those who could benefit from a cup of tea from the hawthorn berries. 

As plants come in many shapes and sizes, so do these poems, where every page is taken out of a traditional lay out and contorted to form structures unique to itself. Some feel like a dream, others are read like a spell or trance. One of my favorites, “Aster”, includes a particularly interesting layout. Separated into three sections, one as an existential question, the second a recollection of a cosmic dream and the third, a single line which reads:

“Astonishing Screen Tapestries Erase Rage Ablaze Eternity” 

Almost as if a secret message to the stars, the first letter of each word spells out Aster.  Similarly, in “Rosemary”, words such as “loss” and “remembrance” are inserted in between existing words to give lines even more depth and dual meaning. 

Another favorite of mine, “Rhubarb”, relies on repetition, where each line begins with “he”. This goes hand in hand with the way Prevallet personifies Rhubarb: stalky, broad, perhaps not the most intelligent out of the bunch. But this imaginary “he” is an enigma: 

He comes in many colors, but only one pronoun. 
He upright, evolutionary, struggling. 
He longing for projected ideal; he subconscious lethal

Repetition, as Prevallet points out, is associated with the Rhubarb plant (the word repeated is used by actors to create background mumble!) 

One of the last poems, “Aspen” is the only one in the collection which uses symbols and images. The plant which shoots through groves to intertwine with trees like birch and fir “allows whatever is ready to surface to come through”. It feels like the actual essence of the Aspen takes over this page, speaking to the reader like an undeciphered riddle. 

Other poems throughout the collection, such as “Anise” which are more personal and tender, seem to not only be an ode to the plant but a message of catharsis and reassurance. Plants go beyond healing and can allow us, if we choose to keep our minds open, to gain an understanding of our place in the universe alongside flora. Here are all our “Flowers to reveal the cosmic patterns that weave all living things together…”

Prevallet does not shy away from the mystical aspects of the botanical world, touching on themes of alternate dimensions, portals to different worlds and plants that open our third eye. 

The collection ends on “Sage”, a poem which feels like a guided meditation to dig up our own souls and uncover past memories which have been buried within ourselves for far too long. It calls for us to finally let go. Reading these poems feels like the work of divination, each one a horticultural incantation strung together by memories and spirituality. Prevallet’s collection adds an extra layer of appreciation to those already immersed into the world of botany, but for those such as myself who have yet to familiarize themselves with plants, A Varied and Tender Multiplicity walks us through all the connections we share with the materia medica.

Station Hill Press 2025

In Christine Bess Jones’ Limb of Water, we are submerged into a tender and idyllic space of aquatic nirvana. Published in 2025 by One Bird Books, Jones thoughts are written over the course of her years of swimming in every water imaginable and exist on the page as fragments of memory, existential questionings, and feelings of simply being in the water — moving, observing. Because “the poems didn’t like the traditional container of poem after poem” and “needed space to breathe”, they are arranged seamlessly across the pages, lacking titles and ends. Read as a whole, they instead resemble “one long swim”. In this way, the layout also echos bodies of water. Where does one wave begin and another end? With each line we are pulled into the tides and forced to succumb to our senses. 

The salt

the salt

of-the-earth brine teethes

virgin feet splash frilly round 

again again

In the water, Jones is at her most vulnerable, but she is also at her strongest point. Time slows down and there is an admiration for the waters, the vast ecosystem it carries and for life itself. Brought back up to the surface, she turns to the “sun messenger” for spiritual guidance. While visually stunning on the pages, the deliberate spacing not just between lines but the words themselves begs for the poetry to be read out loud: “Wind means/air means spirit/ means I’m leaving/to exist as/as a gull.”

The illustrations provided by Connie Saems are also interesting; the way words are brought together to create coral, sun rays, water droplets, waves, unraveling… and a particular one of my favorites on page 38: seagulls made up of the words “& my mother /with her rock-about memory corduroy cushioned / close to a window’.  These words not only come from the poems, but they exist as another abstract vessel to capture these feelings. Throughout these moments where she holds space for the waters, both the fantastic and unknown aspects of it, Jones also reminds us of our finite relationship with the water: 

I was thinking Ocean

What you must think 

Of us 

Within this 

Green + gray existence 

Swimming the shallows 

Drunk on 

Bottomless

Mimosas 

We spend so much time worrying that the finite parts of ourselves remain finite that we do not get to enjoy the moments in between. Jones ends this one giant swim with some strangely comforting words: “& the sun’s squint / reassures / you exist / if only / for this breath.” We as the readers maybe already know this or maybe time has been moving so quickly for us, suffocating underneath our never-ending to-do lists, that it helps to be reminded. 

with Drawings by Connie Saems

One Bird Books, 2025, ISBN: 979-8-9898147-4-9

In Cindy Veach’s Monster Galaxy the reader is taken through a collection of poetry with potent memories that have come back up to the surface years later in an entirely different light. If we could rewind time, where would we want to land? What moments do we wish we could relive forever? Divided into three sections, Veach’s poems grapple with grief, misogyny, fears, flawed childhood, motherhood and femininity. “A Partial Catalog of My Monsters” comes before these sections, setting the stage for a time capsule of tender memories. Inside Veach exist monsters like “the Devil Dementia”, “the good girl”, and “the bone vampire”. These fragments come together to reveal the complexities of simply being human and the bitter truth of not being able to choose which moments we remember and which we forget. Like rifling through an unlocked diary, the past retold by Cindy Veach is spectacular and palpable. 

The reader moves back and forth between various stages of Veach’s life. Childhood poems like “Girlhood” and “Even Now I’m Ashamed” bring up young insecurities and the desperate want to be like other girls. Old memories like watching “Lost in Space” every Wednesday night begins to carry a different weight. Growing up, moving so often, the speaker also questions her sense of self and lack of ties to a singular place. In “When They Said We Were Moving Again I was Silent”, she yearns to belong: “Another chance/ to reinvent myself? Tell me, what is it to be grounded, /to be from a place?” Other sections deal with the unavoidable change that comes with age and having to overcome this stage in solitude: “My body’s gone soft. Limbs ache / but I keep this to myself”. 

Veach also bravely takes on the challenge of revisiting and reviving painful memories. Reading the back-to-back poems “All Over Again” and “The Father’s Daughter, Who Sprang From the Head of Zeus”, Veach opens up about grieving for a parent despite their flaws and the unintentional hurt they’ve caused us. She remembers the good parts of her father such as his collection of cast iron skillets and his home cooked meals but also the bad parts like not being able to say I love you and his own misogyny, remembering that because he was a father, he was also a man. In learning to let this go, we can remember our family for the love they had for us despite their shortcomings. Grief also comes to us uninvited and ordinary moments awaken significant ones, such as the one in “The Ghost”:

I ran into my father’s ghost at the supermarket fish

display. Squid + colossal shrimp + cherrystones = his famous paella. 

I try not to shop with him in my head.

Veach stops to ponder these moments and to wonder why they’ve manifested for her in the seafood aisle. How dare this grief creep up with no warning. 

In the poems where Veach wrestles with looming misogyny, she takes a moment to pick apart the definition of Aglaecwif: a word meaning “a monster-woman, troll-lady, wretch, hag” while its masculine counterpart means “hero”. This poem vocalizes the frustrations of a world in which women are shamed for the same reasons men are praised for. Veach has achieved what many of us can only dream of: She has stopped being a people-pleaser. A yes woman. The daughter who will do whatever it takes to be perfect. “I’m becoming what no man or woman wants, / a hive of my own making”. Stepping into Veach’s galaxy of monsters, we heal and remember alongside her. Together, we come out with a lighter soul and emptied baggage. 

Moonpath Press, 2025, ISBN 979-9899487-9-6