Eunoia Review

I’m twenty-five, and it’s a regular Thursday when you turn up at the bookstore. You look so much like when I saw you last, I think for a second I really have to be dreaming. I’ve had plenty of dreams like this. You bring in the smell of the rain, the world outside cobweb gray, and you have this expression like you’ve woken up from a nap. Like you’re still a little dazed. It’s been ten years since…

My mother’s autopsy report is kept in a Thom McCann shoebox in the closet. It was put there by my father, where he kept other documents. Five years later he dies of a heart attack when I am 20. There is no autopsy for him. My two younger siblings and I remain in the house for years. When it’s time to sell we divide up the furniture and mementos. They want the birth certificates and marriage…

when offering sunflower seeds one needed patience: only approaching your offer in earnest with careful apprehension was possible: much like the cautious blue jays taking crumbs from the old man’s extended palm on the park bench: he was always saying things like “moonlight seemed more natural than an overbearing sun no one need disturb things in such blazing brightness” Dan Sicoli lives between…

                        “I wear green for the sake of the kingfishers.”                                     —Alice Oswald, Dart I wear white, grey, and black             for the sake of the clouds. I wear a transparent raincoat             for the sake of the storms (apologetic that it’s plastic             and purchased online). I wear green for the sake             of the anoles in the…

Even when I tore and crumpled the paper the outline of the words that I offered to you remained on the next page. Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles writes from Carmen, Cotabato Province. He has been a fellow for poetry at IYAS La Salle National Writers’ Workshop. His work appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Bangsamoro Literary Review, Ultramarine Literary Review, SunStar Davao and Dagmay.

can you hear the coyotes cackling? familia. sharks are older than fire and trees and saturn’s rings. ancient ancestors. hold my hand. and maybe breathing is an art, an invitation to sit there listening to the dark, so sit there in creosote and juniper, in the whinny of flushed mountains, in a long life with you, in now, in two more grey hairs, in smoke from incense, in experiencing a…

not a grave, adirondacks             rain and mama coalesce through summer, through years             on loan maple, blueberry, wild bergamot, marsh marigold,             and choice. she sees her everydays collecting             wonder as abuela ages. same room bending back trying to             catch some joy like sugaring through her journals tapping open             what it means to be. Sorrel…

Attenuated men and their weary, warring wives slump in front yards drinking from cans. Broken dolls complain-brag on the street, hands over their hearts. I know them as intimately as my bed. Learning their language saddens me. But closing a window, turning away feels like a boy’s answer. In the evening there is chatter, thumping ball games; neighbours tinker with a car engine. Doors slam. And in…

At the open door of a Stone Age burial chamber, I peer into the mossy gloom and whisper ‘hello.’ Rain clouds mass above the tomb. The trail does not end here: a path zigzags along the coast. I can go farther. This place is an open hand, offering itself. David Belcher is a cleaner who lives in North Wales, in the UK. His poems have appeared in journals and magazines, online and in print, and he…

Pilgrims on the island speak of a Welsh saint and her sacrifice. Her church has no roof. I look for hidden spaces, following the faint tracks of old men who know the island’s secrets. Through a cleft in the cliff, the sea slips in and slips out below a ledge where a pilgrim might stand and speak their thoughts to a saint, her God, or a solitary gull. A spring seeps into a pool. I drop a copper…

I want everything I can have warm milk in the morning a washing line stretched across an airy yard, shirts drying in the sun to step on and off a train with a little money jingling in my pocket I lose my keys and panic, then, with a neighbour’s help I find them again and feel grateful. I want that. A mother in a nearby street calls her boy’s name. He walks slowly. I can see he does not want to go…

Once upon a time, my dad hit his head on the ceiling of mysticism and I sprang out of his scalp like Athene with gooey black hair and a Cretaceous cry. Dear hypothetical fetus o’ mine, kick around if it suits your fancy, but the wet trapdoor is off limits. Please proceed to my scalp, which will hatch like a ripe ostrich egg while I putz around like a cranky circus animal. Pop! goes the weasel,…

Knife-edge walking on the ridge stone-cold mountains sharp cut intake of breath glue back a ridge forms in the skin. Sara Stegen is a Dutch poet and non-fiction author who writes about land, family, nature, and neurodivergence. Home is a boulder-clay ridge in the northern Netherlands where her bike shed contains 8 bicycles and where she is working on a memoir about apples and autism and her first…

I was seven when my father slapped on the horse’s flank, making it raise its front hooves, the world lurched as the taste of fear formed a thin, metallic film on my tongue. I gripped the leather reins so tight that I didn’t fall—I couldn’t fall. At school, I saw the faint questioning in my teacher’s brow & crossed performing arts off the list and wrote swimming instead. I was meant to be the good…

1. frost-bitten and endless, the train carves through winter fields, carrying me back to 宣化, a small town near Beijing, a necessary translation. the town greets me with dust on my tongue. street vendors tending their fires, starch-sausages sizzling in gutter oil, synthetic sweetness braiding through the air. which self am I bringing back? the one who’s never left, or the one who only remembers…

Amy You is a rising senior at Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California, originally from Beijing, China. She has published a literary anthology, earned recognition in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and placed work in literary magazines. Her academic interests center on creative writing and research in history and anthropology. In her free time, she loves to sing and play piano.

She used to know the split, the opening, to find sweetness. Dappled light between us now: the garden still grows small sweet tomatoes. something sharp beneath the vine. Openness was once a thread we didn’t notice. Now I see where it was sewn, the gaps it left when it unraveled. Yeye’s voice is a boat crossing water in the fog. Nainai stands on the other shore, reading smoke. She says: we are old…