Tag: tribute

Dust Rag Blues by Nicole Caruso Garcia

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Dust Rag Blues
      For Renee Nicole Macklin Good (d. January 7, 2026)

Steadying the globe, I thumb Caracas.
We snatched Maduro and we seized Caracas?
Our Thug-in-Chief’s illegal orders mock us.

My index finger rests on Minnesota:
ICE shot a mom (unarmed) in Minnesota.
She dared stand up to goons who have a quota.

These men stretch latitude—our country reeling.
I clean the hemispheres, set gently reeling,
And smooth the strip of red: equator peeling.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia (she/her) is the author of OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press), which received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award, won a 2021 Best New Poets honor, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at the annual conference, Poetry by the Sea. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

When I Look Up at the Sky, My Eyes on Your Grave by Elly Katz

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When I Look Up at the Sky, My Eyes on Your Grave
For Daniella Moffson, killed at age 21 in a bus crash
after volunteering with Columbia’s Global Brigades in Honduras.
As in life, her legacy illuminates her giving nature.
Your death runs through me like my stroke;
whomever I become silhouettes in your color.
I am the world’s smallest stone.
Out the window, a sparrow the size of a pull tab.
He dispatches a message— all this loss, and you hanker for more nectar?
I am in a graveyard surrounded by words of pebbles.
Who would you have been beyond 2016, Daniella Moffson?
An esteemed oncologist? A beloved wife? A spider spinning silk to nowhere?
The cerulean at her temples once blossom, now wilt.
My eyes a fog of feeling.
*
At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).

After Googling Your Name I by Julie Weiss

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After Googling Your Name I
                –for Purple Pam

Plod to the kitchen, gather all the ingredients
and build a sandwich you would have extolled,
my knees weakening under the shock of lost
time. I´m famished for fifteen, for my first job,
how the earth never stopped orbiting your smile,
even when customers stained our aprons with complaints.
For one of your hugs, its galactic blaze, I´d slip my finger
under the meat slicer again. I remember how you
numbed my fear, wrapping your voice around my wound,
kindness everflowing like the hip hop lyrics you mixed, breast-
scratching your path from Foster City catering queen
to Bay Area DJ supernova. Every stage you crossed
radiated in your wake, I read. But I´m fifteen again, life
endless as the salads we scoop, chill as the swimming
soiree at our boss´s house, where you pull me in, your laughter
sparking mine. We glide side by side in a universe that never dies.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s Editor´s Choice Award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and Feral, among others, and is forthcoming in Rust + Moth and Trampset. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.