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POETRY

The Judas Tree

Erica Wright

What kind of betrayal blossoms,
scatters its pink across the road?

The only kind I’ve known burns
like grease from a frying pan,

the only pink the skin left behind.
Today I plant rows of beans

in a sun so hot I get a little sick.
Then the sheriff ’s helicopter

passes overhead. Another
escaped convict hunted

like a wolf in a place
where wolves can be hunted.

I’m thinking about the friend
I never call back, her voice

on the message stranger
with each passing year.

Is this betrayal, too?
Forgetting who we once were?

It’s not as hot under the trees.
I can wait here until I’m found.

"View of a colliery at the edge of town," attributed to George Price Boyce
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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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