I’ll Write You Letters

by Jonathan Duckworth

On birch bark,
with chicken bone shards
dipped in a pot of moth wing dust:
an ink only visible near bioluminescent seaweed.
I’ll roll and slip them into glass capsules
and load these onto hummingbirds’ backs.
You’ll know my words have reached you
when the wingbeats fill your ears,
and you’ll learn that love
sounds a lot like a lawnmower.

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Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University, where he serves as a reader and copy-editor for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction and poetry appears in or is forthcoming in Literary Orphans, Fourteen Hills, Sliver of Stone, decomP, Cha, The Penny Dreadful, Off the Coast, Gravel, and elsewhere.

A Word from the Editor

The 47 student volunteers on staff work hard to make this literary journal a safe and sacred space, from the manner in which we discuss submissions, to how we collaborate with one another. As we work toward our goal to foster equity in publishing, it became even more evident to me that material cannot be divorced from the process; that as editors, we must align our editorial conventions with this vision. During the making of this issue, it was not uncommon for eight or more editors and assistant editors of different genres to engage in a thoughtful discussion of any given piece. We leaned into each other’s experiences to inform editorial decisions. One such decision was refusing to provide a platform for those who work against or trivialize the pursuit of justice…