Issue 5.2
Spring 2026
Sarah Rosenthal
Reflection
I decided to write a book investigating death. Then I had a vision of a red box the size of a jewelry or restaurant take-out box, which appears in a dark, gallery-like space. Over time, I discovered that embroidered on the box’s lid is a poem that comes into focus for a time, eventually to be replaced by a new poem. As each poem appears, the narrator questions its possible meanings. This is one of those red-box-lid-sewn poems.
Untitled
Before you are
punished by
the storefront
mindmaster for
leaving class
you step to the
door out
into pearlgrey
dusk as clouds
of butterflyflowers
or flowerbutterflies
formed of folded
paper slowburst
from small planes
drift ever so
slowly down
printed with text
in tones of pomelo
peridot sea star
orangutan violet-
backed starling
you could if you
tried or maybe
not decipher
these driftmissives
now children run
from daycare onto
sidewalk stare
ecstatic what-
theymade drifting
down so slowly your
punishment will
never come
Sarah Rosenthal’s books include Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024) and, with Valerie Witte, One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (Punctum, 2025). She has collaborated on two dance-poetry-music films: We Agree on the Sun and Lizard Song.
Being Reflected Upon, by Alice Notley
Voyager, by Srikanth Reddy
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of
Riotous Black Girls,Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, by Saidiya Hartman
The Red Book: Liber Novis, by Carl Jung, translated by Mark
Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, and edited by
Sonu Shamdasani
The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of
Property, by Eunsong Kim