monarchs

By Ivy Raff

Issue 52 • Fall 2025 • Poetry

when we met i cracked my breastbone

open vertically & extracted from the cavity a mountain in michoacán.

the monarchs had found their way, again, from canada and turned

trees orange as october in vermont.

you said my return north would open

unfillable gaps in your small house so i promised to come back

& later, i did. you knew me so well. a year, now,

has passed— you call me careless. i ill-fit

the lid on the rice cooker, let commercial guarantees lapse &

get stuck with shoddy electronics. some days

you grow cold. we share our home, our Sundays, lunches

cooked in a single skillet. where do you go when you go away &

leave your body here?

Ivy Raff

Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains/Qué queda (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2026), a bilingual English/Spanish poetry collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Pulitzer finalist Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.” Poems and translations appear in such journals as Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, and International Poetry Review, as well as anthologies London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023). Her Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Experimental Poetry Award and the New Writers UK Prize, along with support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and Under the Volcano. Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Digital Systems Strategist. Read more at www.ivyraff.com.

Amuri Morris

Amuri Morris is an artist based in Richmond, VA. She recently graduated from painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. Throughout the years she has acquired several artistic accolades such as a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and has participated in over a dozen exhibitions. She aims to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience. You can find more of her work at www.murisart.com.