Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 28

Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 29

I tried and failed to write this poem for seven years before I realized it needed to be a zuihitsu. Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior and Tina Chang’s Hybrida contain my favorite examples of this Japanese form. In Hybrida, Tina Chang writes that the zuihitsu’s unfettered, collage-like, and fragmented form leads to “the liberation of imagination,” which is “the body’s response to dominance and containment.” The zuihitsu helped me access and record my experience of having been dominated and contained by the limitations of my bipolar II disorder for many years before effective treatment.

Eugenia Leigh (she/her) is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (forthcoming via Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late-Night Library’s 2015 Debut-Litzer Prize in Poetry and finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Website: EugeniaLeigh.com
Photo credit: Ted Ely

Eugenia Leigh, Bipolar II Disorder: Second Evaluation (Zuihitsu for Bianca), poetry

"Jesus Wears Bermudas" was born from a dear friend's retelling of a past traumatic event that shaped her life. I crafted the piece with her bravery in mind as guided by a process of deep imaging and subconscious excavation, while much of the piece is rescued from my own memory bank of childhood. Overall, the piece explores how wounds can continue bleeding, clouding the lens of emotional perception in relationship and intimacy. At the heart of the story however is love, as the work shows how trauma leads to transformation with the courage to open and share our truths. 
Photo credit: John Tobias

Emily Jon Tobias obtained her MFA in Writing from Pacific University Oregon and has had work featured in literary journals such as Santa Clara Review, Talking River Review, Flying South Literary Journal, Furrow Literary Journal, The Opiate Magazine, The Ocotillo Review, Jerry Jazz Musician (story nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Typehouse Literary Magazine, among others. 
Website: emilyjontobias.com

Emily Jon Tobias, Jesus Wears Bermudas, fiction

“Nine Lives” is a love letter to the women I teach at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College and have taught at other institutions—brilliant women who are tough, self-actualized. Their eyeliner, at once mask and accessory, tells you everything you need to know.

Darci Schummer is the author of Six Months in the Midwest (Unsolicited Press) and the forthcoming novel The Ballad of Two Sisters (Unsolicited Press), and she teaches writing at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. 
Website: darci.schummer.com; Facebook: darcischummer; Instagram and Twitter: @darcischummer

Darci Schummer, Nine Lives, flash nonfiction

Chanel Brenner, Open House Night, nonfiction

Jane Hirschfield has written beautifully about how her poems often come from juxtaposing two or more seemingly unconnected images or observations. That is how this poem came to be. My sister, a cellist, read a National Geographic article about humpback whales’ mating songs. The article included parts of the songs in musical notation and when she played the melodies on her cello, my eighteen-month-old son started imitating them. In this poem, I tried to express the strangeness and beauty of hearing my child—who had until so recently resided in my own body—mimicking the language of another species with an entirely different relationship to time and space.
Photo credit: Jon Barrows

Lisa Rosinsky is a Boston-based poet, novelist, educator, and children's book author and editor. 
Website: lisarosinskywrites.com, Instagram: @LisaRosinsky, Twitter: @LisaRosinsky

Lisa Rosinsky, Whalesong, poetry

When someone you love is suffering, but geographically distant and quarantined away like all of us, the limits of your usefulness can feel oppressive. How can you help? Even if you were there, would you have the right tools to help? This poem-as-spell tries to counter a few layers of individual despair and frustration by summoning into the circle of attention a wider, shared world. By arguing, tentatively, that we are not in fact alone—or at least, soon will no longer be. I think this argument, even after we've embraced it, enriches with the repeating.
Photo credit: Heather Ainsworth

Dan Rosenberg's most recent book, Bassinet, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2022.  
Website: danrosenberg.us

Dan Rosenberg, Another Spell for My Sister, poetry

As a graduate student at UC Davis, one of my professors challenged me to compress my work into as small a form as I could imagine. I became obsessed with writing 100-word stories—and eventually wrote 100 of them. I love the economy and impact that each word has when limited to such short forms.
Photo credit: Mimi Carroll

Julia Halprin Jackson is the co-founder and publicity director of Play On Words, San Jose’s collaborative literary perfor- mance series, and a 2021-2023 Lighthouse Book Projecteer Website: juliahalprinjackson com, Twitter: @Juliahj

Julia Halprin Jackson, A Posse of Parables, flash fiction

When I was in high school, I started writing a piece about suicide that I quickly abandoned—it just made me too uncomfortable. Since then, I’ve had several very close  relationships with people struggling with depression. It’s a dynamic I’ve had a hard time grappling with, and one I wanted to try writing about, so I salvaged a small part of that high school piece for this story.

Kalila Holt has been previously published in wigleaf, Salamander, and The Los Angeles Review, among others, and also produces the podcast “Heavyweight.”
Twitter: @kalilaholt

Kalila Holt, How to Die, fiction

This story grew out of my interest in exploring how mental illness can shape the way we construct (and destruct) the realities around us. I was drawn to the challenge of rendering the voice of a character in an altered mental state within the confines of a realistic story in which that character is our only conduit of information. I wrote “The False Prophet of New Beginnings” to embody the hope, excitement, and desperation of a character simultaneously experiencing mania and striving for a fresh start.

Mark Bessen is a queer writer based in Austin, Texas.

Mark Bessen, The False Prophet of New Beginnings, fiction

This story began as the opening chapters of a novel I wrote about three teen girls with unique criminal talents who over the course of one night form an alliance to hunt for a missing girl. I was inspired by the Greek
myth of Danae, the young woman whose dad puts her to sea in a box when she gets pregnant after Zeus rapes her. After all that, she ends up mothering a hero and founding a city. I’m inspired by anyone who finds creative ways to subvert the abuse of power, but especially young women. They are the real heroes to me.
Photo Credit: Evan Hartzell

Maureen O’Leary lives in California and is a graduate of Ashland
MFA.
Instagram & Twitter: @maureenow

Maureen O'Leary, The Arsonist, The Bully, and the Thief, flash fiction

The poem was inspired by the actual event explored in the piece. I am constantly amazed by the close quarters that sadness and joy inhabit.

Matthew Lippman’s latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, is published by Four Way Books, 2024.

Matthew Lippman, Conflagration of Joy, poetry

I grew up with a boy who scared me—he was troubled and inappropriate. At seventeen, he was brutally murdered. Years later, far from the wetlands of Massachusetts where we lived (and he died), I was haunted. I felt compassion for his ghost, and even something like regret. Living near freight lines, I learned of the signs left by Depression-era train hoppers as warnings or guides to their fellow outsiders. The two images collided, and I wrote the story to puzzle through all the ways we try and fail to understand—and to care for—the strangers in our midst.

Megan Savage is a queer multi-genre writer living in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing and helps coordinate the Carolyn Moore House, the first and only writing residency housed at a community college.

Megan Savage, Tell a Pitiful Story, fiction

Arian Katsimbras reads his poem, "Growing Up, All the Mobile Homes," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 2, Issue 1, April 2015.

Growing Up, All the Mobile Homes, by Arian Katsimbras

I write poems to root down into the truth, like a mole. I burrow and extract. Sometimes, the truth is so painful and uncomfortable, I don’t want to look at it. When that’s the case, writing the poem forces me to shine a light on places I would rather pretend aren’t there and helps me understand my terrors. This poem is one of those.

Meghan Sterling (she/her/hers) is a Maine writer whose recent collections are These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize), while her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart, (Lily Poetry Review Press) is forthcoming in 2025.

Meghan Sterling, Three Things, poetry

I thought I was writing a book about the baritone roles in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. But it became increasingly clear that I was writing a book about myself. So I turned it into a memoir, the story of my mid-life coming out, the refashioning of my marriage, my coming to terms with misogyny and toxic masculinity, all told from the perspective of opera. This chapter is about one of Verdi’s rare baritone good guys, Simon Boccanegra. I use his story to explore the death of my mother and my relationship with my children.

This is an excerpt from a longer essay that can be read in full at https://tahomaliteraryreview.com/selections/daddy-baritone/

Mark Mazullo is Professor of Music at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where he has been teaching piano and courses in the history of music since 1999.

Mark Mazullo, Daddy Baritone, nonfiction

This piece came from watching a few historical dramas and reading a short story collection around the same time, which all coincidentally happened to have foot binding as plot points. (Hello, universe, is that you?) I’d always been obsessed with why I never measured up to everyone’s standard of beauty; in retrospect, it was a diabolical hyperfixation that needed a lot of time and experience to break down and understand. (Also, the fact that I wasn’t even allowed to date until I was sixteen never deterred anyone from the boyfriend question, and I clearly haven’t gotten over it.)

Kristi Wong is a genderfluid-y, Canadian-born writer of Chinese-Malay descent, whose work is informed by a stubborn fascination with complexity and nuance, their intersectional identity, and the retroactive grief, joy, and discovery of late-diagnosed ADHD.

Kristi Wong, Bound, flash nonfiction

As a Winnipegger myself I have an adversarial but also nostalgic view of my native city. Generally, I find it more fertile to set my stories and essays on neutral soil, but here I went directly into the belly of the grizzly. Needless to say, the youthful philosophers and scalers of buildings feature prominently in my heritage. Undoubtedly, sprinkles of myself and friends have ended up in this story, though its exaggerations and fantasies are products of Winnipeg alone, that Northern breeding ground of dreams.

Currently a resident of Nashville, Tennessee, Marcus Spiegel’s fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize XLVI anthology, Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Chicago Quarterly Review, Midwest Review, Boulevard, North American Review, Santa Monica Review, and other journals.

Marcus Spiegel, The Dualists, fiction

I’d like to talk about the style first. It was gotten from Zaynab Bobi’s Finding My Way Home. Before the piece itself, I’ve been nurturing the style inside my head but I didn’t have a fitting body for it. (No) thanks to my friend who sunk my heart with his words (he didn’t even know), I got the body for the style. As we’ve all known, some incidents you thought you’ve outlived are oozed out by another and stretch to more wrecking thoughts. So, I make a line for my built beliefs/promises and the following line for obvious realities/surreal things.

Abdulbasit Oluwanishola, SWAN V, is a young Nigerian creative writer who writes from Ilorin, Kwara State.

Abdulbasit Oluwanishola, A poem where I play and backward my sorrow, poetry

My earliest memories are of my grandfather and uncles lovingly caretaking their parrots, cockatoos, doves. Companion memories include other family members absolutely hating those birds. I was fascinated by the birds and the drama they inspired. Naturally, I grew to be a devoted collector of anecdotes and facts about countless species—bees and humans included.

Rocio Anica is committed to seeing all of the U.S. by way of a bike, an electric vehicle, or her short, little legs.

Sting, Rocio Anica, fiction

Maya Jewell Zeller reads her poem "The Oriole Outside My Window Reminds Me," first published in Tahoma Literary Review volume 2, issue 2. 

The Oriole Outside My Window Reminds Me, by Maya Jewell Zeller

Steven Sanchez reads his poem "Joshua Tree," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, volume 2, issue 2. 

Joshua Tree, by Steven Sanchez

When my son Austen was undergoing palliative treatments for DIPG–a rare, inoperable, nearly-universally fatal pediatric brain cancer–in the fall of 2022, he tried to make sense of his growing immobility through every means possible. Which animal mirrored him the most? The sloth began as simile, then became metaphor. Every time Thomas, my son’s best friend, came to visit, he handed Austen another: a cozy, fleece blanket or a stuffy courtesy of his mom. Each had a sloth motif. By the end of his life, Austen was surrounded by an army of furry supporters—and love from every corner.

Co-founder of SWWIM and Editor-in-Chief of SWWIM Every Day, Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, 2023), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.

Sloth by Catherine Esposito Prescott, poetry

This piece is part of a larger project called “My Prayer a Slit Throat: erasing the inheritance of war.” In early 2021, I was revisiting The Iliad with its mixture of startling clarity, tenderness, and horror. I was interested in exploring how this attitude still shapes our cultural narratives around war. My source materials come from war ephemera in the Western canon; different modes of erasure are explored with each source text. Guidebook for Marines is erased by chapter, but I allow myself to swap out the chapter name, so the chapter “small arms weapons” becomes “babydolls.”

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) and teaches writing at Hunter College.

Small Arms Weapons as Caretaking Baby Dolls by Ellen Kombiyil, poetry

“Poem Ending with a Line by Deborah Digges” is an elegy and an homage. I have been greatly inspired as a writer by the work of Deborah Digges, who died by apparent suicide in 2009. She was a professor at Vermont College of Fine Arts while I was studying there for my MFA in Writing. Her last two collections of poetry, Trapeze and The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart (published posthumously) are particularly breathtakingly beautiful and risky. The last line in “Poem Ending with a Line by Deborah Digges” is from her poem, “Lilacs” in Trapeze.

Katharine Whitcomb is the author of three full-length books of poetry, the most recent being Habitats, published by Poetry NW Editions.

Poem Ending with a Line by Deborah Digges, by Katharine Whitcomb, poetry

“The Dead” arrived one morning after I set down Marie-Claire Bancquart’s astonishing collection, Every Minute Is First, to pause and look out the window. It’s that kind of book. It generates a lot of looking out to see the world, which she has suddenly made new again. Or noticing the wonder of a leaf in sunlight, or a single slice of bread. She doesn’t waste a word in those poems, which marry an incisive acuity of vision to a remarkable lightness of spirit. The first line of “The Dead” just came to me, and fortunately a notebook was on the coffee table, and I tried not to waste any words as well.

Michael Bazzett is the author of five collections of poetry, including his latest, Cloudwatcher, winner of the Gerald Stern Prize, forthcoming from Copper Canyon in December, 2025.

The Dead by Michael Bazzett, poetry

In 2023, I spent ten hours on a European bus journey that was supposed to take four. Because of the teeming post-Covid crowds, we were stuck at the borders between Croatia and Montenegro. With hours to reflect, I noticed that everyone else on the bus was a twenty-something traveller, and I considered my own life-changing travel experiences in Europe in my twenties. I’d always loved the collective “we” voice and envisioned this story as an energetic chorus presenting an ode to the magic and struggles of future European travel.

Jillian Schedneck has published a memoir with PanMacmillan, and other work in a variety of journals, including Brevity, Redivider, Fourth River, and elsewhere.

#lasteuropeansummer by Jillian Schedneck, fiction

I was channeling Gwenyth Paltrow when I wrote “The Ocean Floor.” Remember that movie? The sliding doors of the subway train. I feel like the older I get and the stranger the world becomes, the more in tune I am with the multiverse. Or maybe everything just feels slippier? I love language and its capaciousness. In an era when fact and fiction and space and time all clang together like a dime store windchime, the short story form feels particularly satisfying.

Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories; her most recent collection of poetry, winner of the Alma Award and published by Saturnalia Books in March 2025, is SLIP.

The Ocean Floor by Nicole Callihan, fiction

“Bear” is a short, nonfiction piece that came from me and my family making it through the winter of 2025. By any means possible, that’s what we were doing to get through these both literal and figurative dark times.

Melissa O’Neil is a mom, auntie, poet, and writer who believes that the real magic happens when we connect with each other.

Bear by Melissa O’Neil, flash nonfiction

The origin of the story is my ongoing fascination with language’s ability to be two distinct things, one being a finite, logical, objective form of communication, and the other being human connection given a tangible form, a form that happens to be infinite.

Siamak Vossoughi has published two short story collections, Better Than War and A Sense of the Whole.

Hamid Oskou's Father by Siamak Vossoughi, fiction

This story began in a workshop two years ago where we were asked to write a sentence, then highlight words in the sentence that we were drawn to. After that, we were asked to free write a list of 25 words using the words we had highlighted as inspiration. My list (and original sentence) revolved around the seasons, food, and eating. I decided to structure the story around the seasons, and soon after, the idea of how we feed or starve ourselves emerged, but it took me several revisions to understand Lara’s hunger and desire.

Kelly Pedro is a Portuguese Canadian writer whose fiction has been published in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, Moon City Review, and elsewhere.

Preserves by Kelly Pedro, flash fiction

My poem, “Jackson Pollock,” is part of a manuscript-in-progress that interrogates famous men in the visual arts and their talented partners and wives who have been overshadowed, silenced, or lost to history. Confronting systems of abuse and addiction in my own family history, these poems intend to queer ekphrasis, gazing back at patriarchal systems in the arts through the lens of women, queer love, or even, in this case, the violated body of the canvas as a sentient being.

Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Court of No Record.

Jackson Pollock by Jenny Molberg, poetry

In the scrappy, early days of Hollywood-based singer-songwriter venue The Hotel Café, a permanent placard prohibited covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Jeff Buckley had pretty much nailed it shut with his 1994 version, but that didn’t stop aspiring songsmiths from favoring early audiences with their take. More homage than hubris, the endless renditions that dominated the tiny, red-curtained stage constituted a form of worship. Years later, with lyrics translated for the funeral of a friend’s mother, the song tsunamied me into a portal of my grief at the loss of my sister, and once again knocked me over with its grace. 

Amy Raasch is a Los Angeles-based poet, musician, and performer. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. She writes about what haunts us.

Broken Sonnet for the Phone Call I Didnt Pick Up by Amy Raasch, poetry

In my life of care, rare disease, disability, and interdependence, I often wonder what I can say to offer parents who are new to disability. How could I begin to summarize and write something useful when all our lives are unique? So I ended up writing a sort of letter to my younger self, to the self in the beginning of parenthood who was both terrified and deeply committed to learning how to parent our incredible child. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to time travel (yet?); I offer it out, hoping some part of it resonates with readers, whether they are parents or not.

Krista Lee Hanson (she/her) lives in Seattle, home of the Coast Salish people, with her partner and two incredible children; her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Normal School, and The Write Launch, among other publications.

Show up Late, Show up Early, Show up Uninvited by Krista Lee Hanson, nonfiction

When I found out my birth father died, I didn’t talk about it for weeks. I was surprised by the depth of grief I felt for someone I’d never known. My interest in theoretical science, especially quantum mechanics, gave me a way to make sense of the things I couldn’t name. This essay explores unspoken longings, sorrows that don’t adhere to conventional narratives, and inhabiting an identity that defies definition. It’s about the moment myriad possibilities collapse into one outcome. As South Korea reckons with its complicated history of international adoption, I hope my story adds to the conversation.

Tiffanie Kim is an artist and emerging writer based in Hudson, NY.

Schrödinger's Father by Tiffanie Kim, nonfiction

Davon Loeb reads "Like Gladiators," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 3, Issue 1.

Davon Loeb, "Like Gladiators"

Benjamin Harnett reads "Yahoo! Answers," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 3, Issue 1.

Benjamin Harnett, "Yahoo! Answers"

Siobhan Phillips reads "It’s summer, but we can find plenty of ways not to care," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 3, Issue 1.

Siobhan Phillips, "It’s summer, but we can find plenty of ways not to care"

Janet Bowdan lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and sometimes a lovely stepdaughter or two.

Tahoma Literary Review actually started me thinking about the challenge of the long poem: what could sustain a poem, a poet, a reader for that amount of time? I thought a letter could be both friendly and expansive. Obviously this poem has its soundtrack. The Broadway musical has conventions, like the “I want” song, but it also follows a story form (exciting beginning, neat wrap-up) that comes full circle.  But the poem is now, where we have no clear path or outcome, so it must go forward.

Janet Bowdan, An Open Letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda in the Key of Trump

This piece began as a reflection on the idea that our woundedness—the unhealed places within us that drive us apart—may ultimately be redeemed. In particular, I was interested in the idea that the process of redemption transcends the individual. The process of making whole not only elides our conscious direction, it touches each of us simultaneously. We are all made whole at once, in essence. This
piece was part of a series that I wrote to explore the movement of grace in our lives—to examine those moments when we lose ourselves, only to find ourselves.
Photo credit: Jen Calivas

More information about Michael may be found at michaelmarkauthor.com and on his blog at embracingforever.com.

Michael Mark, Restitution, fiction

This piece came about as a writing prompt I was given this past summer at the Kenyon Review Fiction Workshop. I drew the Devil card from a Tarot deck—fellow workshoppers called this “apt,” for what it’s worth—and endeavored to bring to life the card’s themes of entrapment and domination, danger, and duplicity. The characters are significant members in the (dare I say grit lit?) novel I am currently writing, which is set in the rural Midwest.

Renee is a writer-teacher-mother-wife and hoarder of books who lives in her very own little house on the Kansas prairie.

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