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.

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

Courtney Denelle is a writer of short fiction. She lives in in Providence, Rhode Island.
“Which You” pivots around moments of recognition: the idea of meeting ourselves in the woundedness of another. First-person narration carved out the space to explore this theme with honesty—to occupy the culminating effects of trauma and mental illness in the present tense. The narrator drifts through the story world as both victim and perpetrator; steeped in her experience of homelessness; stripped of any insight processed through the lens of time. In kind, her full and particular account reveals a slippery truth: Resilience never looks the way we expect it to.

Courtney Denelle, Which You, fiction

TahomaLiterary

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