Luchik Belau-Lorberg

Tethered Hearts

November 5, 2025 Dispatches

From Buenos Aires, Argentina

For Eduardo Rios Pulgar,

San Telmo rings through me, like an unlived memory from a distant past. All colors, linden trees, worn down buildings, from the last century and the one before it, next to towering cement. The Argentinian Peso crumbles like the Lebanese Lira. We collect its ruins at the casa de cambio, our American dollars grotesque in the face of this country’s protracted collapse. The city is angry with love. Its sidewalks echo Beirut, and a life there, long-forgotten, languishing in the rearview mirror. Everywhere I look, an almost-déjà-vu skims the walls of my mind. Buenos Aires is Beirut, is Paris, is an aubade to the lost and never found. Down by Recoleta, Haussmann buildings dot the avenues. Dregs of a time where French architects flooded the city and left their prints along its urban landscape.

Waiting for the Call I Am

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By WYATT TOWNLEY

Not the girl
after the party
waiting for boy wonder

Not the couple
after the test
awaiting word

Not the actor
after the callback
for the job that changes everything

Not the mother
on the floor
whose son has gone missing

I am the beloved
and you are the beloved

We’re all beside ourselves
as the phone is beside ourselves

One hand grips the menu
the other covers the eyes

Now the phone rings
it is singing on the table

To the dog across the room
to the waitress who is waiting

To the cat on the carpet
to the couple in the next booth

But the heart is in the cupboard
breaking the dishes

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Wyatt Townley is poet laureate emerita of Kansas and has published six books. Her work has been read on NPR and has appeared in journals from Newsweek to The Paris Review, and Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Commissioned poems hang in libraries including the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of the Hubble.

Ellen

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By ELSA LYONS

Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.

Anti-Aubade

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL

November 6th, 2024

I wake in the night, check the news. Watch you
turn in your sleep, rest your cheek on my chest.
How everything and also this: the heat of your skin,
hand wrapping my waist, the off-beat of our breaths
finding rhythm in the dark.

In the kitchen, I cry to the sound of my mother’s sobs.
Count the injections I have left before the vials run out.
There is no point in asking how, in asking why. Empire
does not answer questions. Genocide does not answer
questions—the answers were right there.

At the train station, the man next to me cries,
turns his face to meet my own. Somehow, the sun
is shining. A dog barks. Someone laughs. Everything
fragments. A mother & daughter step up to the tracks,
squeeze each other’s hands.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, nonbinary writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of Western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places.

Oblation

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By MATT W. MILLER

My dad could be tough and distant
and push a little too hard into what hurt

but if God pulled that Isaac shit on him,
saying “I want you to sacrifice your son

for me” it never would have got as far
as me strapped to some Moriah altar.

If I was nearby, he’d tell me to go inside.
Then, he’d resign, curtly quit, from God,

flick a Lucky at the old man’s feet, and
walk away. Later, I know he’d joke,

“That fucking guy? He couldn’t spell God
if you spotted him the G and the D,”

making me laugh even if behind his eyes
he was making peace with perdition.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Matt W. Miller is a poet, essayist, teacher, and author of Tender the River, The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus (winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry), and Cameo Diner. A former Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.

Castanets 84 | Being fond on praise

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Uncategorized

By ANNA MARIA HONG

for & after William Shakespeare

To your beached blessings, add this curse:
not making worse what glass makes
so clear but neither smoking the path
to your impaneled store, absconded
documents across your bathroom floor,
public security, national writ walled in
where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
glory and never break your bloated story,
without flourish, without wit,
everywhere the news grows: May you dwell
among cases evermore.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Anna Maria Hong’s books include Age of Glass and Fablesque and the novella H & G. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.

Death of a Hero (The Mosquito)

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation, Ukraine Portfolio

By VIKTOR NEBORAK
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN

The rusty hollows inside the old mosquito
reduce his soprano to dust. Down the pipe
of his fragile beak, the pumps are already weak.
And his blood flows through fossilized riverbeds.

His gas tanks empty, song silenced, not a drop
of compassion in him… Running on coal fumes,
the rusted engines deliver him to drill
one last buzz through the ears of the crowd.

A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons
on these civilians as on military echelons
and then been posthumously awarded

the highest orders! his name on honor lists!
banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks!
… if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Viktor Neborak is a poet, writer, literary scholar, and critic. He is also a founding member (along with Yuri Andrukhovych and Oleksandr Irvanets) of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group. His collection The Flying Head and Other Poems appeared in English translation in 2005.

John Hennessy’s most recent books are Exit Garden State, a collection of poems, and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych co-translated with Ostap Kin.

Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. With John Hennessy, he translated Set Change by Yuri Andrukhovych, and A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan.

The Sixteenth Brother

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By A. J. BERMUDEZ

The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.

Damascene Dream

September 10, 2025 Dispatches

By AYA LABANIEH

Anaheim, California, dreaming of Damascus, Syria — a place I have not been able to visit since the war began in 2011.

I had a dizzying dream last night. I picked up the phone, and called my grandma—my mom’s mom, the woman who raised me. She was laughing—I told her something about what I had been going through, I don’t remember what. I was being candid in a way that would be unthinkable in the real world; maybe I even told her about the ugly breakup with R. The warm acceptance on the other line astounded me. “Why don’t I call you more often?” I asked her.

“Wallah tayteh, I miss you, you should tell me everything.”

From IHOP

September 3, 2025 Dispatches

By LUCHIK BELAU-LORBERG

Photo courtesy of the author.

Shrewsbury, MA.

There’s a family seated at a window booth across the aisle from us; the youngest daughter keeps attempting to pronounce “syrup.” I wonder what she’ll remember of this breakfast in five years’ time. Maybe today she reminds you of me.

My earliest memories of an IHOP are sticky: the yellow walls seeping into the faux-leather booth seats; a stain on the carpet. All this beneath a crumpled-looking roof in a parking lot below the I-90 on the outskirts of Boston. Still, I could order as many blueberry-chocolate chip pancakes topped with creamy-fruity smiley faces as I wanted. The point wasn’t that I particularly liked eating the smiley faces, but that there simply were and could be smiley faces. And, in the meantime, before my hot cocoa (also with whipped cream) arrived, a crate of Smucker’s jam packets to stack and suck on awaited on the tabletop. This Ur-IHOP was sweeter than home, overtly abundant, happy, and these qualifiers felt, at the time, somehow synonymous. At home, mornings typically consisted of milky buckwheat porridge and cheese curds. Here, breakfast came with a set of primary-colored crayons.