NIXES MATE REVIEW · Issue 38|39 winter|spring 2026

I love the lowly, the lost
And neglected, those things
Of little or no value, the found
Ephemerals this life affords me.

Down trails in early spring,
I wander uninvited, and listen
With hands-and-knees inspection
To Jack-in-the pulpit sermons,
An assembly of preachers growing,
Low in the upland wood.

Ever these refrains return,
The longest journey, just as I too,
Many times along this way,
Return, guided and guarded
By the newly risen emblems.

Fashioned in tubers, bulbs and corms,
I envy them, these rumors of glory:
Trout lily, toothwort, Dutchman’s
Breeches, the false rue anemone
Unaware of my affections.

So like time yet so fit for eternity,
Year after year they announce
The season, a new and perishable
Universe, an intimate dialogue
Between absence and presence.

Easy is their descent, the near dying,
But to retrace their steps, to return
Once more, that’s the true labor,
The source of all their strength
Always ahead of the parting.

It’s not that we’re called
To do so much, but rather, so little.
In the end, the only real regret
Is not to become a saint
And counted here among them.

You can draw the letter O, but you can never close the circle.

Your body aches for what feels like breaking? A breaking off, a splintering, a fracture, like snapping a turkey’s furcula for luck, the bone’s interior suddenly exposed to air. That weakness. That crack like tearing a consonant in two, forever altering language. More breathing room for O.

O, this beauty. O, this slipping. O, this vowel that’s a circle that’s a number that’s a sound that’s a place you know but can’t quite remember but want to graze with your fingers in the fissured dark all alone.

O like a mole rat and you, blind, dragging your dead into the communal latrine whose opening looks like a long O.

Fibonacci called zero the west wind, singular, a one that’s none, that’s nothing, a smoke ring in a smoked room full of smokers puffing out their Os for children who delight in each rising and spreading O.

O, this haunting. O, this slickness. O, this emptiness inside everything.

I would do the woman’s work of stitching your breasts back to your chest, that mending work. If only I could undo men’s violence, a god’s abandonment.

I find you in so many churches and museums, painted with a plate of perk breasts, as if serving a small feast, as women do. I admire the contours, shading, velvet folds. Men’s sensuous reproduction of their own violence in oil.

We will stop asking you for things that you cannot control.

Like breast cancer. Scientists’ work stops the cell multiplication when candlelit words cannot. I have faith in mammograms, doctors. I have faith in our idea of you to be reimagined: a woman’s hurt can heal.

If the radiation hits the calcifications, it    can /

will  create cancer.

An enormous quiet settles around us between gale force gusts. A snowplow has gone off course into a garden Fall planted with tulip bulbs; everything looks dreamlike covered with drifting white. I know the myth of normal times…I imagine being alone …there are things I should have done. A single robin lands on the mealworm bird feeder where she doesn’t quite fit constantly flapping her wings in the cold wind. Did her flock desert her? Was she blown off course? This single robin stays for weeks afterward in the cold sunshine still flapping whenever she lands back on the mealworm feeder. Is she afraid of falling even though she has wings?

thunder snow startles
I don’t want to be alone
dogs hide beneath beds

I walk down the brightly lit hallway inside you. The walls are white. The air is dry and cold. No one can be seen here, but I feel that you are listening to my footsteps. As I move forward, the end of the hallway moves backward into the heart of the night.

Your smell has sounds and colors, and poor memories. All you remember is one hundred seven roses you received today and one hundred eight roses you discarded today. One by one, the lights go out in the hallway. The vinyl snow starts falling outside you.

The half-born building
looked like a naked skeleton
without its exterior façade,
and the swimming pool was only
a hollowed-out groove with a concrete floor.
Recent winter rains had frozen over,
creating a make-shift hockey rink.

One morning I saw a man
in a hard hat and neon vest
guiding a hockey puck across the ice,
while skating around in figure eights.

each perfect against the sky.

Cased in clear, deadly ice,
red berry and dark twig are
so flawlessly captured

that if the branch, the berry, the twig
were to disappear
and only the ice remain
the vision would not change:

tree, bush, twig, berry
all held forever
in immortal stasis

until the final command
to waken.

For R.B.​​

I am not a machine but a field.
I must lie still so that I feel leaves
land and the moment they soften
and become me.
Grass and clover grow first.
Dandelions root in, holding me together,
protection from the marauding rain.
Without metal claws invading,
the mycelial spreads a rich white web,
unseen, underground.
Sometimes my eyes are closed;
sometimes they are open.
I see a V of geese against grey sky.
I hear the field mouse’s heartbeat
when the hawk’s shadow glides by.
I rest until the worms shimmy through,
hollowing me out.

On the phone
you were always breathless,
seductive, impatient,
a thousand miles away.

Outside my window,
I watch a honeybee fly
in lazy figure-eights
from bush to bush,

flower to flower,
drunk or brokenhearted,
as if it knows
the words I struggle

to put down on paper,
still missing—
like clockwork
I hide you in my poems.

Today, the law is on our side all day. From end to end, this community garden is closed off. We are together: potato salad, sangría, arroz con gandules. No question of who sits at the table, seating is ample. Pull up a chair, crate, or bucket. You can sit on the curb or on the grass if you choose. Despite the heat, these smiles give off a safe warmth because today, we are showered before the end-of-night shower. Our bodies smell good when body spray, gel, and shampoo electric slide with charcoal, sweat, and popcorn. Hugs and hands are sticky because safety is a magnet. For 24 hours, while hugging the block bochinche is dead. So when Sonia reminds Suzie about that secret she blabbed at the hair salon, someone passes them cold drinks with smiles, compliments them on their poppin’ lip gloss and big curls, any static held back by a beautiful headscarf.

Lying is a cooperative act.
—Pamela Meyer, TED Talk, “How to Spot a Liar”

Frankly, until her Ted Talk I didn’t know how to detect a lie.
I’m not any closer to the truth because I suspect a lie.

Shakira’s hips don’t, but maybe her hands and eyeless smile do.
Liars “leak” from cognitive overload. It takes intellect, a lie.

My mother commanded honesty and slapped me if I fibbed.
I ate lead paint chips, was a clear victim of child neglect: a lie.

My friend and I practiced on each other as kids. Don’t laugh! she said.
She told me my tell: my mouth stays open after I eject a lie.

The whole time I’m meditating, the tension never leaves my locked jaw.
I hear “relax” – loosen again – as my cue to resurrect a lie.

Love chews with its mouth closed, tongue hidden, and kisses with it open.
Among those who open up easily – extroverts – expect a lie.

Men bend the truth about themselves; women bend it to protect others.
That man who seemed to listen and felt my pain – did I elect a lie?

I don’t know what to believe anymore. Falsehoods: cells that divide.
There will be metastases even if you manage to resect a lie.

I tape my mouth shut before bed so I won’t breathe from it or snore.
Whether lips are parted or sealed tight, it takes two to perfect a lie.

w wa wat wate water
water wate wat wa w

water Water WaTer WaTeR
   Wa Te R Wa Te R

Swell, tides, wind-chop.
Cormorant rock.

When still, pear. Translucent
Massachusetts.

Crabs, seaweed, paucity of sand.​
Native land.

As many as a third of LGBTQ people who were arrested were denounced… [and] reported to the Nazis by their friends and family.
— Kate Sosin, October 2025

[M]ost Germans just did nothing to protect LGBTQ folks… I have not found one single instance of a straight person risking, helping, protecting a queer and trans person during this history.
— Jake Newsome, October 2025

If trans existence becomes illegal,
will you protest, or will it take

our arrests to make the violence
real? People say, if I lived

back then, I would have stood
against the Nazis. You are alive.

It is happening now. Shatter the pattern
or your silence means our death.

Keep going, you said.

more in a sequence of embellishments –

as a dragonfly on the flyleaf or a fleuron.
Printed on paper bereft of words

my ellipses trail along sugar maples,

a menorah of flickers which
refigure into folios. The unwritten

pages allow for the inevitable tide-change

as in Earthsea – only
for our pallid 21st century.

I watch detective novels from my mind’s library

then take myself to bed.
The page doesn’t need to know

what happens there

or where my imagination roams –
conjuring its own independent movie set–

its own stream of shadows.

I re-read the chapters on
the plastics of marriage,

mephitic chemicals, algae blooms.

I move away from a verso of couplings,
paint poems in indelible, invisible ink.

I color in the margins. I might even sing.

We eloped to Paris, and I acclimated

quickly and forgot faster –

the treachery of coins, stacked and traded,

how easily the ankle can twist,

how easily the skin can burn,

how easily children anchor

women to marriage’s prison.
I forgot how the senses can be subsumed

by wine, by art, by pleasure,

and that divorce is not easily achieved.

I was misguided,
s
ated in paradise, then awakened by the

Holy Cross burning my palms.


I escaped in time,

but Violet did not.
Regardless, I damned myself with money,

with glitter, with gold.

A recent study shows a burst of brain
activity follows medical death.
— Science

After months of sedation, your neurons
must have startled awake when your heart

finally stopped. Imagine their panic
coming to with so much still to be done.

You’d disdained the cancer long before,
but how could they know? And noticing

they’d run out of time, did they check the house
before leaving? Stove off? Doors locked?

When we die, cells grow toward each other
in case there’s something to heal, but by then

gamma waves cue up the finale and every day
of your life rolls by. It isn’t for me to propose

what you remembered last, but I hope it included
that dirt road where you rounded the corner

full gallop aboard a runaway horse named Cayenne,
green sweatshirt billowing like a sail,

hair trailing behind. When he finally stopped
and my pony caught up, he was huffing

and you were laughing. Did you see that? you asked.
It was just like flying, you said,

pulling strands of hair from your smile.

A recent study shows a burst of brain
activity follows medical death.
— Science

After months of sedation, your neurons
must have startled awake when your heart

finally stopped. Imagine their panic
coming to with so much still to be done.

You’d disdained the cancer long before,
but how could they know? And noticing

they’d run out of time, did they check the house
before leaving? Stove off? Doors locked?

When we die, cells grow toward each other
in case there’s something to heal, but by then

gamma waves cue up the finale and every day
of your life rolls by. It isn’t for me to propose

what you remembered last, but I hope it included
that dirt road where you rounded the corner

full gallop aboard a runaway horse named Cayenne,
green sweatshirt billowing like a sail,

hair trailing behind. When he finally stopped
and my pony caught up, he was huffing

and you were laughing. Did you see that? you asked.
It was just like flying, you said,

pulling strands of hair from your smile.

though you might not be able to see
the details of the rilles and valleys.

A sieve is not an item
you should purchase used

unless you plan to pan for gold.
Stainless steel stains, meat

grinders rust, and suits and dresses
pressed together on the tilting rack

still bear the stress of nervous dates.
At some point it will occur to you

that the pots and pans and all this stuff
will certainly outlast you.

Eppur si muove 

Doomed by desire, and denied
What your eyes craved by those
Refusing to see the divinely inspired
System of signs you discovered,
Who were you to see the unseen? 

Often in quiet rebellion,
You keep watch, consumed
By all the ways you understand
This world and imagine the next,
How the unreachable, near and not lost,
Planets revolve in laws of motion. 

Tonight, the freely falling stars
Happen upon you, ecstatic
For an instant, and just as alone
They seek their end, alone you indulge
The insurrections, the otherworldly
Incandescence, like a rhythm, interrupted. 

If in that tell-tale silence, they prove
More than one night’s wreckage, fleeing
Heaven as a matter of devotion,
It must be to make present
Meaning and mission, that which,
Without you, steals itself away, unnoticed. 

Like doing what’s right, even
When no one watches, they turn up
Where they’re least expected.
Let these, the star-shot atoms,
Alive in your own making,
Find you, accepting and accepted. 

Possessed with discovery’s
Possibility, their gift is redemption,
The greatest love, self-sacrifice.
Now in their escape, the stellar evanescence
Lends a kind of grace, beauty and belief,
To all the spent light touches.

an iron loom –
fragments rooting where light comes from,
then devouring new breath. I grow

but I do not belong to me,
not really.

My image was first captured
too close – nothing measurable.
Then, second sun bloomed
from absolute dark –

they said they understood –
dust-spark arms feeling blind.

When does ultimate enter you? And if you can’t
use that word, say purpose, and if that doesn’t work,
try address, or glory, or purpose again, or procession

– until the word finds its mystery in you, arriving,
and imagine yourself on knees of gratefulness –
and you are there. He wears a red shirt and holds

the door for me each morning at the neighborhood
store where I buy water and yogurt. If I have change,
I give it to him. Most days I don’t. He always smiles

as if it doesn’t matter – always polite. I never asked
his name. And I think how similar here and there are,
just a “t” separating us, each from each. “T” for time,

timidity, trembling, treacherous, until it’s just us
together in this tremendous-ness. I’ve opened my arms
to it – I think he has, and now you have, too, never

asking his name, knowing all the same it must be:
Triumphant. And, mystically, the door opens, the path
of directions discovers my face, bits of cooling, warming,

worn places and calm, burst of pressure tightening
and freeing me outside and in crevasses lacking strength,
arms in summer rush, and steps one takes with him

as my aid, companion, touching upon holiness, opening
hope into his hands: like red gumbo limbo trees, their bark
lighting a morning path as our offering and our procession.

in the nameless  narrator’s palm.  Learning to be wary

of lessons  especially the tight-fisted.  Never grasping

the shape of the parable  the pace  at which wings unfurl.

In this story  am I butterfly or breath  chrysalis

or unchristened  traveler or trembling?  Over weeks

snow coated the oak and walnut branches:  one good gust

shook them bare.  Does loss teach  of beauty

or beauty of loss?  A whole prudent year I have swallowed

morning and night  the bitter pills  and become nothing.

Looked strangers in the eye  and felt the opposite of falling.

The Institute for Sexual Science… opened in July 1919 by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jewish and gay sexologist and doctor. It soon… developed into a hub not only for researchers from all over the world, but also for trans people. The institute’s doctors [wrote] numerous reports and… helped some trans people receive medical care and legal recognition.

Spectrum of Injustice curated by Kai Brust*

If I could visit the corner
of Groβe Querallee where
the Institute once stood,

I’d want to feel haunted.
Now, the plot is on the edge
of a sculpture garden turning

the site of the former Kroll
Opera House that later
housed the Reichstag

into a memorial for victims
of Nazi Germany. The Institute
is not named, not counted,

not remembered. I would go
at night with a little knife,
kneel on the ground,

cut out a small circle of grass
and put it in a jar – a relic
of what grows from rubble.

— after Michael Palmer

Write this. Maybe we’re stars wishing ourselves into bodies so we can touch without burning what’s touched clean through. Maybe we’re burning the whole world as I write this, one warp string at a time, one row of soft weft, the smell of charred hair and feathers growing stronger. Maybe we’re what’s woven and woven again only different, unrecognizable. I used to tell myself the moon loved me. I wished God into it or at least a different father. I wanted love to cut through me like cold, like blue, bladelike and unapologetic. I wanted to run until I caught fire from everything I struck as I moved. I never did. There’s still time.

Rich in imagery, Monaghan’s five-part book is an homage to her female relatives, past and present. This book often reads like a dream sequence and offers the reader opportunities for deep contemplation. The intricately woven language produces a beautiful, spiritual tapestry. It tells the story of Marion, the poet’s grandmother whom she has reimagined as a Saint rather than a 20th century immigrant woman with domestic duties. Truly – historically, and presently – women whose main duty it is to take care of the home and family are the cement that holds the family structure together and are indeed, worthy of veneration.

In the first poem, “Opera Bag,” (p. 1) the reader travels back in time with Monaghan to see the small “soft-cowhide black inked” purse— too small for anything more than coins, but yielding great wisdom: I don’t know whether I tell the truth about the beauty of what is lost. The opera bag calls to mind the same kind of purse used to carry rosary beads, the object whose purpose it is to pray to Mary, Mother of God. Monaghan has a specific but delicate way of elevating individuals to saint-like mystics. Although there is no actual Saint Marion, her name is variation of Mary, Mother of God, in Catholic tradition. Mary is revered, though not worshipped in the same manner as God or Jesus. She is viewed as perhaps the most important female figure in Catholicism due to her strong faith and dedication to Christ. Grandmother Marion holds some of the same qualities.

In many instances, the poet’s description of colors is spot-on and puts the reader directly within the poem. In “Arrowhead Squantum,” (p. 17)the greens conjure a precise picture of this particular Native land:

I can hear them still pine on the hummock
in the deep, moss color of the pond across from the ocean.
The light in the sky reflects the endless loss
Of a milk green dream to get lost in.

Monaghan’s imagery is equally noteworthy in poems such as “Sonya the Dog,” (p. 40) where she describes an ordinary scene from everyday life:

Radishes sat in the crystal bobbed bowl,
nothing was turning out as planned.

And her color precision stands out in the same poem:

The dog was a mix of Shepherd and Lab.
She had a beauty mark like Liz Taylor,
black muzzle, ears and coat
the color of cinnamon.
Her paws were black.

This collection is replete with nature poems. “Eulogies for Small and Other Things” (p.52-3) is the final poem of the book, in which the poet recounts an imagined end for living things “entering the Kingdom of God.” It serves as a positive and refreshing ending for modern, uncertain times.

Lily Poetry Review Books, 2025

Tell Me is a poetry collection of a paradise come alive. Published by Lily Poetry Review in 2026, Deborah Leipziger delicately weaves together a series of poems bonded by elements of natural and cosmic delights. The reader is both empowered and nurtured by its potency in poems such as “Tell me, what are you most afraid of?” which guides the reader through the fears and anxieties of aging. If the pages were a canvas, then it is one slathered in vibrant oils. Leipziger gracefully imbeds herself into the flora and fauna of the earth like in “When I was a morpho butterfly” where she describes the awe of her “azure wings/made from crystals of light”. Throughout, Leipziger captures the almost otherworldly glory of nature. It manifests in the beauty of hummingbirds, the resilience of the turtle, in the illumination of the dragonflies. There is no creature on earth too small to be worshipped.

Even the simple act of sugaring a citron rind is described in such an honored and sacred way, appreciating the fruit whose outer layer yearns to be made sweet. In “Matriarchy of Marzipan” the toughness of the almonds becomes smooth and doughy. In a similar way, “How to Blow Glass” encourages the reader to trust the process of turning glowing molten glass into a work of art. These processes are like rituals. Step by step, something so dangerous is made delicate and new:

Strike the glass so that it severs from your blow pipe.
Then into the annealing oven at 960 degrees.

Glass is hard to rescue.

Speak the language of the sun
as you blow words into the gather.

Prayers.

These creations, small but refined, can also remind us of the ways in which people allow themselves to become vulnerable to great change. We may look back in time and ask ourselves how we have transformed into something so unrecognizable.
A larger theme of motherhood is also seamlessly intertwined in this collection. One of the final poems, “How Miracle is a Verb” is a story of Leipziger sharing what she had said to a stranger expecting twins instead of what she actually wanted to say as a mother of twins, comparing the two life forms, fragile and not yet born as “each other’s amulet” bonded forever and the birth giver, who has become both “Wonder Woman and Aphrodite”. In “Cento for my Daughters” she speaks to her daughter, who is a poem and psalm crafted through birth. She starts and ends this poem with the line “I hope that I have made you brave”. Its raw tenderness is as striking as it is soothing.
Creation seems to be the overwhelming theme. Whether it is the creation of life or a simple roll of marzipan, the final poem “I am offering these wildflowers to you” allows the reader to forge their own path and craft an entire world from a handful of seeds. There is existential dread, and then there is existential reassurance. Leipziger’s poems follow the ladder; they are in tune with the profound and timeless connections of the body and earth. It celebrates the things which gives us life beyond the one we already have.

Lily Poetry Review, 2026