Tributaries:"Arkansas Anoles"

By Stacy Pendergrast

Before Daddy left us
for New York, he told me
if I could catch one of
those lizards its tail
would snap off.
Those critters
ran up and down
our house all day,
their true skin color
the shade of mortar
that held the bricks
of our home together.
So easy for them
to change from puke-green
to dirt-brown. I found out
later they weren’t
real chameleons.
When I grew up I discovered
I wished for the same things
my father wanted: time to read,
someone to talk to in the night,
and just once, a dream car—
that black Camaro he gave me
after he balded its tires.
He’d said he moved away
so someday I’d know
how to leave.
I remember the cold,
wriggling tail in my hand
as I watched the rest
slip under the rocks.



Tributaries: "Willow Grove, Acrostic"

By Abigail Wang

Walls streaked in tape was how we left it on the last day. A father’s pride is

Immutable, but at six, I swore I would never do the same when I had children,

Letting them plaster the walls with paper whales and caterpillars, grime

Languishing for later families, because this is how stickiness keeps—

Onerously, obviously, like love does. I came home from kindergarten each day

Wearing a large t-shirt matching the one my father never threw away,

Green and blue and pink, matching sea foam, matching candy canes, matching

Retired old houses in Florida and Pennsylvania that he would one day

Own. We worked alongside each other under incandescent bulbs casting a

Vignette on our scrubbing, soap on drywall, sliding to the carpet: my fingers

Ecstatic and raw, letting the tack have its own way in the gluey dust of an apartment.


Abigail Wang grew up in Bucks County, PA. She has spent the past four years in Pittsburgh and is trying to decide where to go next. Her work can be found in Words Dance and is forthcoming in DIALOGIST. She reads poetry for Persephone’s Daughters.

Tributaries: “We are the Ocean”


By Urvashi Bahuguna

A whale fall is the carcass of a whale that has fallen to the ocean floor,

& that sometimes creates complex, localized ecosystems supporting deep sea life.​

​We have learned to hold the drift ​

in our jaws, seaweed ​breathing

from a blowhole. We are the ocean

trying one​ hand at perpetuity.

Though we feel them reaching for

the place, ​flashlights rarely locate us,

a slight warmness percolating after

the fact. We have made a shelter

out of a shape. The men low

on oxygen swim down and marvel

at a sleeper shark exiting

a chest. We are reminded of a story:

a ship after a pod of minke whales,

driving them close, too close to

​shore. The men don’t resist running hands

along tails that have lost a sharpness.

​A​ squat lobster just startled them. We worry

they will not stay afraid very long.

Urvashi Bahuguna is a poet from India whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nervous Breakdown, Barely South Review, Kitaab, Jaggery, The Four Quarters Magazine and elsewhere. She was recently shortlisted for the Beverly Prize and the Windword Poetry Prize. She has a poetry pamphlet forthcoming from Eyewear Books (UK). She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at PartlyPurple, Bangalore (India).