Catherine French and Lisa Dominguez Abraham

Catherine French's first book, Sideshow, was published by the University of Nevada Press. She graduated with an MFA from the ASU Creative Writing Program, and teaches at community college. She has published in various journals, including Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, and Ekphrasis, and won the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation. She enjoys living by two rivers and is spending the summer working on multiple writing projects and painting watercolors.

What I Like about Frank

I suppose I like how it’s not as if the world will die
if a line goes wrong the point is to let the day
have its way with you, not fight it or god forbid
not even see it, enjoy it like a party, a Constellation
of People appearing like small pinpoints that get
stronger and allow buoyancy, beauty and also mess
Incorporate the unfinished quality, embrace it even
You can almost feel the molecules getting happy
and lust, how it creeps through the land, the grasses
And because of all this, he levitates sometimes

Lisa Dominguez Abraham’s poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Review, Poetry East, Puerto del Sol and COMP: an interdisciplinary journal. Her collection Mata Hari Blows a Kiss won the 2016 Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, and her 2018 book Coyote Logic was published by Blue Oak Press.

Before You Become

The particles of you vibrate
in separate subatomic worlds.

One photon drifts in the tidal wash of fog
spilling over Mt. Tamalpais.

One quivers in the trill of a sparrow
perched in chaparral.

Soon your parents will hold each other’s gaze,
gauging a leap. Then multitudes will swirl,

magnetized toward them, each the trace-note
of a universe. Love will arrange

the luckiest into melody.
Your song will begin.