The Anatomy of the Phoenix’s Fruit

i. The mango’s form is an inversion of anatomy. Its heart and brain merge around what acts as both a spine and a sternum, which do not have the motivation to extend itself into the bars of a rib cage.
The mango has nowhere to fly to, and therefore, it has no need for wings. It is full with the sun’s nectar, and is imbued with the spirit and majesty of a Phoenix.

Forever an egg, it is grown.
As its own womb, it bleeds and sows the ground
once the branch it is anchored to lets go.
Sweetness slowly rots and melts into the soil
for the smaller organisms to gather round
and receive some of the goodness sought by humans for free.

The unwanted rot feeds the overlooked beings
that help our world run on the scale that is closer to the ground
and farther from the direction of the human gaze.

ii. Mangoes are first adorned with the skin of a newborn
smooth, flawless, and unmarred
with the hues of a canvas capturing the sunset
in all its bright flame and gentle blur.

As it is left to weather under time and nature,
it gains its first scars
or perhaps,
additions to healthy birthmarks
then it becomes the leather of aged flesh,
fibers ripe and sweet
and palm lines meet the wrinkled casing of a golden heart.

Sewn together, the scraps create the feathers
of new birds
waiting to fly into the horizon
at dusk.

iii. The concept of growing is just as inherently female as the concept of destruction is inherently practiced by man.
Patience, acceptance of change, and the nature to nurture are all inherently motherly.
Time, the grandfather, is stoic and looks on, but helps her discreetly. He favors the consistent.
To grow and ripen and rot is a cycle dictated by nature
but all fruit can fall at different times
in different ways.
We start by looking up to the sun,
then realize the humanity in appreciating the roots that hold us up
and allow us to reach towards the sky.

Soul Mold

Imposter syndrome takes place in nature-
Nature takes its course in sickness and in health-
‘Til death, they do part.
The parting of halves is not always clean and pretty.

Mottled skin and churning insides,
a mango mangled in the mold pushes itself farther and farther away from the family tree-
to avoid infecting the rest of the fruit- !

The parting of ways, from people and from tradition, are met with much protest.

She begs for the harvest to come before she falls,
the sickly scent of her rotting attracting attention
of her kin and of her kind;
you can never be too kind, but this too, is a curse, she finds in like minds.

It is (in) vain to fain unaffected while trying to attain change.

She wishes to revert to an early budding flower to avoid the heavy, anchoring weight
bringing her closer and closer to the ground
but never closer to peace.

Rotting and prodding, the flesh has never run and ached and burned
Basking in the ecstasy of change and screaming greed
not knowing the right way to ripen, since nature was never meant to be controlled.

The Earth’s face appears still and composed as its molten plates spl|it, s h a t t e r, cl at ter
as they shrink away from the universe
She asks if her neighboring planets suffer from the same cacophony,
while the rest of the solar-child-to-adult-pipeline-system wonder why Sister Earth frets
with her marble exterior and Goldilocks nature.

Like that perfectionism and greed, there must always be a flaw and never an ending
A perfect egg of gold, the soul tries to finalize its shape
in search of something more valuable which she automatically tires of
deemed worthless and thrown into the basement,
will she ever escape the prison without losing the key?

Or by the end of the harvest, will she find that the sun has graced her with a Phoenix’s cocoon,
from which she shall burst forth?
And the beginnings of a wildfire,
Waiting for her to visit her wildflowers of passion with her new set of wings,
as they finally bloom?

Felled Trees

Words on the page scatter, first in lines then clumps then every one for their self
to be saved from the impending crash
as the writer’s head falls onto their work.

Letters turn into legs and ants emerge from what could have been woodwork,
had we not felled trees and skinned layers of their flesh
like cold sashimi on ice.

An invisible executioner stood by
and with the release of tension in muscles behind calloused skin,
a guillotine’s blade came down
fencing said writer off from reality.

Ears now hollow from isolation, from the human voices they wish to imitate interpret and translate,
are now exits for the insects searching for somewhere to go.
Lacking torches and guided only by their clicking,
each body makes its way into channels carved long ago
by the war between nurture and nature;
trenches etched with hieroglyphs connecting one passage to another,
firing meaning into each cell
to puppeteer the body the ants are now making their Tree of Life.

In the brain they build their new nest,
using all the material already there
to cement what the narrator attempted to capture,
but could never orate:
guilt, regret, and memories rewritten over and over
to the point that the original is no longer intact
now eating away at the what-could-have-beens and the should-haves and have-nots
that left this poor writer turned bystander
to rot.

Ruchel Limbos is a poet and emerging writer who uses her voice and Filipina roots to grow stories in the soil of fantasy, mythology, historical, speculative, and realistic fiction, and poetry. Ruchel has been and will be writing for her entire lifetime. She experiments with introspective and poetic storytelling to carve out the multiplicity of truth in her oeuvre. Her work has been published in 1455 Books Young Poets Anthology, AmLit literary magazine, and Maryland Voices (volume XIII.)

Featured image SnapMeUp, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It should be simple:
പ്പഴം.
One of our favorite fruits,
an excellent source of potassium.
But my “r” sounds white instead of brown.
Hilarious to the looming figures around me,
like a circus animal forced to do tricks.
Embarrassing.

They knew what I meant,
and now, what I am not:
one of them.
To my parents, this is home—
the soil of my ancestors.
Yet here, the food of the gods feels like a shameful word when I speak it.

Strange noises come from my mouth.
I am a creature from the white man’s land.
I speak a script gilded in the dollar.
I see my people, but I know that they are not mine.
In Lake Zurich, I am an outsider.
In Ottapallam, I am an outsider.
Where am I enough?

​​Achyuth Sarath is a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., studying Political Science and Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government (CLEG). He was born in Illinois but currently lives in Texas and is the son of two immigrants from South India. He writes poetry in his free time.

Featured image of Bananas by Wilfredor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

How do you not give up your wholeness

How do you
not give up
your wholeness,
in a world that
writes words
that
erase people
while also
erasing people
who
write words?

We are enrolled
in a class called
“How to Be Your Whole Self”
and the assignment is
to be whole
in a world wielding wishes
to slice against
one side
or
another.

We are
living poetry;
constraints on words
honing our stanzas
while
constraints on worlds
hone what we stand for.

Dear Friend

Dear Friend,

I write to you from
where I stand,
alone
in The Land
of Nuance,

from whence
I entertain
two friends of mine
who are enemies
but
who cannot see
each other
in the room
at the same
time.

They speak
in unison
saying
the same things
in reverse order

expecting that
I
agree fully
with
them.

While I sit here
soaking them in,
holding multiplicity
leaning toward myself –

brokenhearted
by the noise
and the
indivisible invisibility
of what is
more True:

My two friends
most need
each other.

Dr. Joanie Terrizzi is a writer, grief coach, and mind-body medicine professor who is fascinated with depth, human potential, and healing. She is a former school librarian who can still often be found with a book in her hands, and she is blessed with too many hobbies, so you can also find her gardening, baking, meditating, writing, painting, hiking, swimming, or snuggling with her puppy and/or a pair of foster puppies. She dwells in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina, taking in the beauty and peace of the land around her, and avoiding getting eaten by a bear. You can learn more about her writing here: https://proseandcontents.wordpress.com/

Featured image, “Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina”, by Villaida, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Everyday Yizkor

The rocks of remembrance upon your stone
Heave with the weight of loss of all those who come here for you.
This spot is the anchor,
Wherever you may be.

I study them.
These rocks bring the world to you:

Mexican limestone, Croatian dolomite, Alaskan quartz,

Entrada from Moab,
Rhyolite from Montana,
Pyrite from Colombia,
Granite from my driveway in the foothills of North Carolina,

Common where they laid
Precious where they land.

The places you hoped to see and some you did,
Each telling a story of others living lives

You no longer can,

Bringing both comfort and pain,

Still, lovely that so many carry you with them and
Carry back a piece of themselves to you.

Perhaps you know?

Yahrzeit Blooms

The daffodils and the pear trees bloomed while I was away for just a few days.
I left with a coat to shield myself from the
End-of-winter chill,
And now, just four days later, I have come home to a breeze hinting at the humid warmth so soon to follow.
A first-of-season gnat alighted in my sink,
Flitting away quickly as I turned the faucet sprayer in its direction.
The Carolina wrens are at it again,
Building their nest atop our solar-powered, movement-sensitive outdoor lighting on the corner of the barn,
Despite last season’s blowing away

O spring.
It’s you again.

Amid the bevy of the early spring awakenings, I feel my chest tighten.

Very soon April 1 will come along, anniversary of the date of his recurrence—
No longer a remission from stage 3b, but now, almost inexorably,
Moved to the new square on the cancer chessboard,

Stage 4.

Then onward to early June, his shared birthday with his twin brother—
The birthday,
But also the day we all found out about a large shadow on an x-ray that was a definite

“Something”

Each year a reminder of the trauma of revelation, and of absence,
But also, that his twin continues alone, yet
Another year violently parted from this core part of his identity.

The tick-tocking calendar trudges on…

We soon arrive in July—Independence Day ironically enough—when he knew more treatment was not going to do more for him, and we then began
Eight weeks in the brutal universe
As he held court for all those who came to be with him for their last time

Once for each of them, over and over again for him.

They, feeling and revealing the shock they could not mask from their faces as they sat listening to his weakened voice, but with his beautiful mind and soul still emanating from his ravaged, in extremis, body.

And we sat with him throughout the too-short days and the difficult nights,

And watched him dissipate beyond what was comprehensible but, still, he arose from his bed every day and communed with people who came to sit and be with him,

And then it was the end of August and
He died.

And we sat with him throughout the pre-dawn hours, before calling the nurse to pronounce him and set a time of death and then call for the funeral home to come.

And I told them do not close the bag over his head as he departed the house,
For him—to have the sun on his face one last time.
For us—because having him zipped into a bag was just too unbearable.

And on September 1, we buried him and I can still (always) see him being lowered into the red Memphis soil, and hear my involuntary, out-of-body wailing and feel the heaving of my diaphragm;

And I hear the thumps of that Memphis dirt as it fell onto the polished wood of the casket his dad and I had chosen for him weeks earlier.

And I don’t dwell on those thumps of earth or the sharper, thudding sounds of rocks embedded in that dirt also falling upon him.

I don’t dwell, but
I never forget.

And then there were the various visits and reverberations of both deeply felt and perfunctory condolences and the range between those experiences, for a few weeks beyond that,

And then, like so many other grieving families in the world,
We entered the part that only the family knows:
The rest of our lives with the
Gaping everyday hole in all things.

And now,
Somewhere in the late August-early September timeframe,
The match is struck on our yahrzeit candles.
His name is spoken in front of the community and collectively,
He is remembered.
With intention.

This is our annual and forever season of loss…April through September.

O spring,
Why are you here again?

Brona Pinnolis is a mother of four children, grandmother of one, partner, and dog mom. She is retired from careers in both law and public policy and has long been a writer in these and other segments of her life. Currently, focusing on her creative strengths, she participates in regional art fairs, exhibiting her paintings and photographs of atmospheric landscapes.

After losing one of her children at age 28 to cancer, Brona returned to the written word, and has had poems published in the annual Bards of North Carolina Anthology, Local Gems Publishing, 2024 and 2025 editions. She also participates in local poetry reading venues in her local community in NC. Her debut chapbook, “Writing to the Ground, Poems on Grieving the Death of a Child,” is due to be published in September 2027 by Finishing Line Press.

Featured image Uberprutser, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I sometimes forget

I sometimes forget that I was created
for a purpose, a purpose
I sometimes forget
that I have been called here,

said yes to the call
to be here
at this time
in this life

knowing it wouldn’t be easy
knowing I might sometimes forget

that my soul said yes,

my soul said yes
I am the one for this life.

I have been called to create,
to shine, to savor, to be a reminder
to others of their light.

I have been called
to be a light,
to be a light unto others

even in such dark times
I refuse to let
the pilot light go out
even when the wind is blowing so strongly.

I remember
I was created,
I said yes to this life.

In a dream I hear her whispering

In a dream I hear her whispering
“What you see depends on what you look for”

There are patterns in the sky,
look up and dot them together.
Each one of us, a star too.

In the night, there are moon rainbows.
Like light, refracting through a prism, bending,
like we all do, when we let ourselves.

Your symbols are everywhere
when you see them for what they are
and not just what they are pretending to be.

The snake in the tree, the synchronicity,
The playfulness of the Universe and me.

I see…

The tree from below is so beautiful,
The way the sky paints the
spaces in between the leaves
and the Tree is with me, within me,
and in the center is the star
and the Tree, Eitz chayim he,
She is a tree of life, la’machazikim bah,
for those who hold fast to her.

And when you think you know,
you may blink and forget that
knowledge is built on
wisdom and understanding.

And when we center in the mind alone
we forget to stay open – to the place
of knowing that is not the mind,
the place below the archway that says

“Open Your Self Here…”
I am the doorway to the Divine.

And the apple is not the end, it is only the beginning.
Look through the leaves and we are all trees
Rooted in the same earth
Reaching for the same sky.

And we meet together at the center.

And the wind blows through, like we all do.
When we see through the leaves and complexities,

We are all of water and earth, sun, moon and sky….
A spark of light of the Divine refracted
through this point, through this life…

And we are all carriers of light
and crosses, messages and stars…

and when we open here we see that
we are all archways and bridges
and doorways…

And the door is open.
If you choose to walk through.
The door is always open to you
If you see it.

Do you see the signs?
Do you know what to look for?

She said “What you find depends on what you look for”
Are you seeking to remember or seeking to forget?

If you are seeking to remember than you will see
that to see is our nature…and to know is our nature.

For we are meant to be like the tree
And to not be afraid of snakes.

Sometimes out of nowhere, the soul awakens

Sometimes out of nowhere, the soul awakens
as if a light has been turned on
though the bulb has always been there.
We didn’t know how to plug it in and turn it on.

In times of darkness it is even more essential
that we remember that we are light,
that we remember to plug ourselves in,
perhaps with the help of others,
and that someone knows how to help us
find the switch if we can’t find it on our own.

We are meant to be a light unto others,
to make the world a better place.

Yet the world feels so dark right now
and we may feel so unseen and misunderstood.

Yet we must remember, it is precisely
in this time of darkness that
we must remember that
We are meant to be light.

Amy Melrose is a longtime DC resident, poet and arts-lover. She grew up in Philadelphia and attended a Jewish day school from K-8 where she was instilled with a love of learning and an understanding of the power of the spoken word. She started writing poetry in her teens and moved to DC to attend George Washington University, where she received her degree in psychology. She later participated in the Transformative Language Arts IMA program at Goddard College where she focused on poetry as a tool for self expression, empowerment, healing and transformation. In the fall of 2007, she founded the events site Free in DC, which ran until the pandemic began in March 2020. Amy is a Life Coach and certified Dream Coach supporting HSPs, empaths and creatives. In the fall of 2025 she participated in the Jewish Community Mental Health Initiative’s Writers Group, which reawakened her love of writing poetry and helped her to feel less alone as a Jewish poet in a post 10/7 world.

Featured image Jules Verne Times Two, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My Grandmother Sits on Her Front Stoop

What you notice is the petunias: The light and dark profusions of six extravagant planters bursting into a summer day a few years after Armistice, their scent honeying the warm Berlin air. Petunias are annuals, planted only by those with means enough for the disposable; the bold display is both tasteful and showy. Their tendrils soften the home’s imposing facade of beveled limestone blocks and provide a hint to the subdued extravagance within. There are lace curtains, a piano, a German maid. There is a set of plates just for fish; there are horses to ride in the stable; there are potted lemons in an upstairs orangerie. Even though the immigrant family’s fortunes were not yet even 20 years old, the solid home has the air of forever. It says, We belong.

Almost dwarfed by the flowers, a small German-Not-German girl named Margot passes languid hours with a friend and their pampered dachshunds. She is wearing a light-colored rich-girl frock and matching clean, white shoes with a flower tucked behind her ear. There are other photographs of her as she grows, riding horses and bicycles, going to the sea on holiday, posing in fancy dress for hijinks at a costume party—even one of her as a teen, wearing a corsage and a dark satin gown, greeting guests of a forgotten soirée on these same steps, flanked again by extravagant pots of petunias, the blossoms that bloom without end until winter.

She is mostly unwilling to discuss these days with me and shushes my grandfather whenever he tries. But I am allowed to look through her scrapbooks in her living room in Leisure Village East, the precious, unburned memories secreted across the ocean and occasionally annotated in her spiky but loose Sütterlin script, the writing of a once-carefree girl. She is quiet yet has always woven people together as deftly as she sews a tight seam, and I see her boisterous sledding parties leaving tracks in the deep snow of the Grunewald, boating trips whose riders lift their steins and shout Prost! on the Spree. She would label only the what, never the who, so obvious and unforgettable for her were all those faces flowering in the late Berlin sun.

After high school, she doesn’t have to work but wants structure and purpose, stitching and gluing what she thought would be her future at a tony Kaufhaus hat atelier. When she is 21, after being fired for her blood, Margot will leave this place forever to sleep on the hard couch of an aunt in the Bronx and support herself with millinery piecework. Soon after, her family will pull the heavy wood double doors of their three-story manse closed and never return, not even daring to try to sell the beautiful house or the well-polished furniture within; the less they are noticed, the better. Her brothers will come to look for their home when they are old, but the cold land will hold nothing but ghosts and a faceless gray high-rise, not a petunia to be seen.

As if they were never there.

Petunias

No longer a gangly sprout starved for attention, I arrive an adult at your duplex in Leisure Village East, 982 square feet that enlarged my world.

Each childhood summer I escaped entropy in your strict orbit, the only vacations I ever had. I floated with you twice daily in the community pool, ticked through the sundial with your soaps and game shows, swayed with you and the other softly accented bubbes at weekly circle dances, ate through your repertoire of pot roast and baked chicken at 6 each day—consuming all you had to offer.

You gifted me days as well-crafted and even as the stitches of the sweaters you would make for me, row after row of perfectly knitted and purled weeks. I dreamed easily at your house, recovering from a weariness I never knew I had; I let the golden eyes of the African violets in their pools of amethyst and magenta that lined the long sills of your picture windows watch over our orderly days like a constellation of tiny suns instead.

Petunias shimmering with care turn their faces up to greet me at your small entryway—the only bit of America you would ever own—the sweetness of their candy-purple perfume fitting for all I would find within. I compliment the flowers. “Such grateful little things,” you say, as if your hours of watering and deadheading were not the source of their beauty.

I grew up in the center of your eye, even though I was no more promising than a flat of annuals wilting in flimsy black plastic at the grocery store. I cracked concrete with my weedy shoots, sheltered from the sun by as much cooling shadow as a tiny German seamstress could cast.

I could never make my own African violets bloom for long, nor could I ever make my hands copy yours: my stitches were clumsy, uneven, impatient. But that did not mean I did not absorb your every lesson.

As your own darkness approached, I failed you, when you badly needed my tending. But when you could no longer see what you planted in me, I became a mother who knitted and purled love on schedule, handed it out on plates with simple food right on time, buckled it in the car to go floating in the community pool, swayed with it dancing in the kitchen with my daughters.

I will never be done opening my old wounds like blooms now that it’s too late, to show you what a grateful little thing I truly am.

The Macher Convinces the Head of Blue Cross to Pay for My Operations

Hello, this is Sigmund Rottenberg. Again. R-O-T-T—never mind how to spell it! I need to speak with your supervisor. Or his supervisor. Or better yet, your president. I am not going away. I will haunt your phone lines until Hugh Hefner joins the priesthood. I will eat your firstborn. I will fly through the night like Batman to deliver justice. Or maybe you prefer Superman, or Captain America, or Spider-Man, or the Avengers—or any of the other guys we Jews invented that my sons wasted their time reading about in comic books. I am an active member of B’Nai Brith. I know Henry Kissinger. I am descended from the Meir of Rottenberg. First the hospital doesn’t let anyone see my granddaughter for three days after she’s born, and now I read this ridiculous letter saying that you won’t pay for her operations? How can a baby have a preexisting condition? Everyone has a preexisting condition: it’s called mortality; it’s called being human. She was born that way, and she can barely even drink a bottle. Do you want her to die? Are you a Nazi? Only a Nazi withholds health care from children. I have survived the Nazis, and I can survive you. Are you a man, or some kind of no-goodnik who steps on the necks of honest working people everywhere? She only needs another small operation or two! I will call the New York Times and Walter Cronkite and personally expose your outrageous abdication of duty. Do you not speak English? I can carry on this conversation in German, French, Yiddish, or Hebrew. Please decide. I am an American, and I know my rights.

Lori Rottenberg is a writer who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She has shared her poetry and flash non-fiction in many journals, anthologies, and even podcasts, most recently in december, Pleiades, and Viewless Wings. She received Honorable Mention in the 2024 Passager Poetry Contest, one of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition and appeared on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. Some of her writings about Judaism have appeared in Poetica, Minyan, and the Jewish Writing Project and have been shared nationally on the Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness website, https://uuja.org/resources/. She holds an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to Honors College students.

Featured image Екатерина Борисова, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons