Submit

show us your work

Subscribe

to the publication

ProForma

enter contest

Submit

show us your work

Subscribe

to the publication

ProForma

enter contest

POETRY

New Year of the Mind

Jonathan Dubow

Let’s eat tongue and ginger
and as much cinnamon as we can pick up with a fork.
Let’s have good relationships next year too.
Let’s get our teeth and vehicles cleaned.
Let’s rethink this.
Let’s do something to influence the past.
Let’s ascend to Berlin (or wherever).
Let’s live a long time.
Let’s engage with the interminable contrary.
Everybody read a bit of Kafka.
Everybody carry an olive.
Let everybody make a fuss.
Open the tongue-arteries and chest-arteries.
Open the lungs!
Let’s know when to stop.
Let’s continue with our heads.

Artwork by Felix Quinonez

Born in Paraguay, in 2007 Felix Quinonez moved to NYC to attend Hunter College. There, he studied journalism and art, graduating in 2010. His writing has been published in the Hunts Point Express, My Culture Magazine, USA Today, and various online publications. Currently, he resides in Brooklyn with his amazing cat, Mancha, and badass rat, Rancha. The three of them make comics, battle zombies, watch movies, and listen to records.
Jonathan Dubow has recent work in the Crab Creek Review, Coal Hill Review, Ethel Zine, Jewish Currents and elsewhere. He lives in Schenectady, NY and teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany-SUNY.

More Poetry

Issue 16

The Judas Tree

Erica Wright is the author of seven books, including the poetry collection All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (Black Lawrence Press) and the essay collection Snake (Bloomsbury). She was the poetry editor of Guernica for more than a decade.

Read More »
Issue 16

If I Erase My Body

Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet & educator from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. She is the author of the poetry collection Eveningful (2024), which was selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2022 Lightscatter Press Prize. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Glass: A Journal for Poetry, The Boiler, & elsewhere. She previously served as writer-in-residence at Texas State University’s Clark House and currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Read More »
Issue 16

When I Grow Up I Want to Be the Culmination of Things I Took for Granted

Hiba Tahir is a YA author and 2022 graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.

Read More »

More Poetry

The Judas Tree

Erica Wright is the author of seven books, including the poetry collection All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (Black Lawrence Press) and the essay collection Snake (Bloomsbury). She was the poetry editor of Guernica for more than a decade.

Read More »

If I Erase My Body

Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet & educator from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. She is the author of the poetry collection Eveningful (2024), which was selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2022 Lightscatter Press Prize. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Glass: A Journal for Poetry, The Boiler, & elsewhere. She previously served as writer-in-residence at Texas State University’s Clark House and currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Read More »

When I Grow Up I Want to Be the Culmination of Things I Took for Granted

Hiba Tahir is a YA author and 2022 graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.

Read More »

Angels

Susannah Sheffer’s poetry collections are This Kind of Knowing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2013), Break and Enter (Kelsay Books, 2021), and a new book forthcoming from Cornerstone Press’s Portage Poetry Series in early 2025. Her nonfiction books include Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013). She lives in Western Massachusetts.

Read More »