Tag: girl

Miracle Girl by Julie Weiss

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Miracle Girl
              –Adamuz, Córdoba, January 18th, 2026

Six and barefoot, you falter
along the rails like a phantom

in limbo, though you´re very
much alive. Virtually unscathed,

reporters will say, despite
the wreckage around you.

Despite the bodies, writhing
like unanswered questions,

or still as a billion-year-old
mountain. The bewilderment

of limbs you crawled over
to reach the broken window.

At what point in your search
for your family does your mind

ramshackle, fracture under
the dead weight of despair?

At what point are your thoughts
launched off their tracks?

Maybe when a barn owl
screeches, or a big rig thunders

past the tragedy that will define
the rest of your life. Soon,

all of Spain will illuminate you
in halo. Miracle girl, they´ll say.

As a civil guard leads you
away, maybe you hear voices

among the debris—your cousin,
your brother, mostly mamá

and papá. At what point will you
understand they´re phantoms

now, crashing towards you
from the wrong side of the divide?

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

Girl with a Red Ribbon by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Girl with a Red Ribbon

Inspired by “The Red Ribbon,” by artist Abby Warman

This is not so much a girl standing on a sandy
beach, but the impression of a girl—

one who wears a white dress that is more
like a canvas upon which the rising sun paints

its roseate glow, its pale reflections of blue
water. She is carrying a straw hat and striped

towel. Tied in her hair is a bow the color of ripe
strawberries. Pausing in a pool of purple

meant to be her shadow, she is surrounded
by streaks of light as bright as an ivory gull’s

feathers. Yet, it is the rich, red ribbon that calls
to women who remember well the pull

and tug of tying, our mother’s hands as soft
as satin against the nape of our necks—how we,

impatient to be gone, barely felt them—would
give almost anything to feel them now.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of six collections of poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest (Press 53), winner of the 2021 International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Healing the Divide, How to Love the World, Poet’s Market, The Christian Century, The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2019, The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many more. Awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Nautilus Silver Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.