Poems & Micros We Love!
One thing the staff at Split Lip Magazine loves to do is read other literary magazines! Supporting the literary community is an important element of the Split Lip mission. Today we’d like to share some favorite poems & micros from our lit mag reading adventures. We hope you enjoy these works too! If you do, please reach out to these authors & magazines to let them know or share them on social media or with your friends.
SG Huerta, SLM Marketing Co-Director, loves the poem “Palestinian” by Ibrahim Nasrallah & translated by Huda Fakhreddine in Protean Magazine because of the way it lingers hours, days after reading it, reminiscent of the ongoing, decades-long fight for liberation. The poem opens “I was silent and nothing came of it. / I spoke and nothing came of it” and ends “And the filthy world asks me: / All this…what of it?”
Janelle Bassett, Co-Fiction Editor, loves Catherine Ji’s poem “we dream of something, here” in The Commuter because it’s full of mess: sweat, hairballs, vomit, bulges, tears, and doubt.
Gem Arbogast, Poetry Reader, loves “Wings” by S. Fey in Voicemail Poems because it holds humor, heartbreak, and acceptance in the same small container. This poem’s clever voice knows just when to directly invoke bell hooks, when to subtly reference Aretha Franklin, and when the pain of letting someone go makes itself necessary. It’s also accessible in voicemail form thanks to this online mag’s rad format!
Dawn Miller, Flash Reader, loves “Essay for my Five-Year-Old-Daughter” in River Teeth by Michael Torres because of the deft use of language (and economy of language!) which still manages to express big things, for the honesty in the piece (That day I thought I could be a good father…), and for its emotional resonance.
Maureen Langloss, EIC, loves Jackie Wang’s poem, “I Found My Soul at the Bottom of the Pool,” in the Yale Review. I am always a sucker for repetition in poems and micros, and I adore how the repetition in this poem builds and shifts and plays. I love the poem’s humor, as well as the way the bleak and the whimsical exist side by side at the bottom of this pool. The poem doesn’t take itself too seriously; it starts with the lofty idea of finding a soul, but ends with a toilet portal! I am obsessed with doors and windows, and this poem sure takes the concept of the portal somewhere entirely new and surprising.
Christina D’Antoni, Flash Reader, loves “God, Grant Me a Mercy Machine” in Wigleaf by Janelle Bassett, mainly for how Bassett's sentences often swerve into the absurd. For example, the unforgettable opening line, "As a child, Sami was sweet, gentle and forgiving, like a person who has no idea what the hell is going on." I also love the scope of this piece, and how childhood and adult Sami seem to meet each other in the end, at the tanning salon. So good!
Anna Cabe, Co-Fiction Editor, loves “Andy and Mago” by Renny Gong in MudRoom, not only because it stars a cat but also because of the way it unravels from the first line: “Last week Andy shat in Mago’s litterbox just to prove a point and since then things haven’t been the same between them but whenever Andy calls from the kitchen—come here! you slut—Mago still comes skidding around the corner to slurp greedily from Andy’s palms.” I adore the way the tight, precise accumulation of details tells us the story of this threesome—and how these relationships, painfully and suddenly, rupture.
Robin Van Impe, Flash Reader, loves “Beach Avenue” by Fatima Jafar in The Cortland Review. Jafar’s poetry captures such a wonderful sense of place. Every time I read her work, I want to be in the place she’s describing and cry.
Ruth LeFaive, Treasurer & Senior Flash Reader, loves “Miranda” by Tara Campbell in The Commuter. Campbell brilliantly offers each reader multiple experiences with this diagram-hybrid work that transcends genre. She invites our gaze to journey around the page. Her specificity is at times humorous, other times biting. Her use of erasure is so smart and deeply gut-wrenching.
Carolina Mata, Marketing Co-Director & Flash Reader, loves Brynn Saito’s poem Numbers Game in The Rumpus for last year’s national poetry month series. It’s an honest exploration of IVF and the internalization of watching one’s own mother decline, knowing the earth will decline, and the fear of the unknown X’s of life—X’s that seem so much heavier than the numbers assigned.
RL Wheeler, Editorial Assistant & Poetry Reader, loves Noor Hindi’s piece, “The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions,” in The Margins. This poem evokes the immensity of tenderness and of distance: across family, lineage, and geography. Hindi balances a frankness of language and a luscious lyric that compels one to read the piece again and again. She writes, “You: Everyone I’ve ever mourned. I believe less & less of sunlight these days. I won’t die alone. To awaken crying is to awaken displaced. Ghost of your joy in the bathtub.”
Molly Andrea-Ryan, Fiction Reader, loves “Volunteering” by Hedgie Choi, published in Okay Donkey. The image of the candy, some oozing and some with teeth marks, is so visceral but still sweet, no pun intended. The exchange at the end is both funny and heartbreaking, and it feels true to the cognitive changes a dementia patient goes through–there are moments of joy and humor and absurdity to be found in the midst of what is ultimately a cruel disease.
Ai Li Feng, Fiction Reader, loves "Last Spring" by Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong, published in Only Poems. Jeong writes with unflinching clarity on self-destruction as the narrative shifts, in a single sentence, across the terrain of rotted fruit, citrus trees, and the house fires that render them the same. The return to these motifs as they gain meaning through the poem's grief is reminiscent of Richard Siken's best work.
Teri Vela, Poetry Reader loves “From the River to the Sea” https://lithub.com/from-the-river-to-the-sea-a-poem-by-samer-abu-hawwash-translated-by-huda-fakhreddine/ by Samer Abu Hawwash, translated by Huda Fakhreddine, and I don't have much to say except read the poem. I've started paying more attention to list poems, and I ask myself, why does listing feel so urgent as of late? Today I saw satellite images of destruction from Israeli attacks on Gaza's largest hospital, Al-Shifa. This is why we need lists. To name what is lost. To name what can be saved. To name what will one day be free.
Youngseo Lee, Assistant Poetry Editor, loves “Good Dog” by Steven Duong in lickety split. The entire poem is based on an obvious untruth, which the reader suspects the speaker is also aware of, but it is also based on affection. There’s a nearly heartbreaking desire to be good and see things as good, whatever you call it.