Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 28

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

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

Davon Loeb, "Like Gladiators"

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.

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

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