It is October, the blush of autumn arriving wherever you are alive. The last two years have been fraught with despair and horrors, and we are somehow still attempting to remember the movement of resistance. I write to you from a time full of ecological, social, and political violence and uncertainties. As Celia Lan tells us in “Polyphony,” ‘The tree we’d mourn exhales no final breath. / Secrets carve no rings, only a gaze left in silence.”
It is in ANMLY 41 that we continue weaving threads of poetic resistance, in all of its dimensions. In “Adjustment Difficulties,” Mikhail Leshchanka reminds us of revolution, the beauty in change as the trees flood their spring leaves onto the earth for nourishment, that the “windows had been smashed out & stained glass was mounted instead.” Dear reader, this line reminds me of the desecration of the 1914 portrait by Philip Alexius de László of Lord Balfour, which was on display at Trinity College, part of the University of Cambridge. Arthur James Balfour was the key signatory and colonial collaborator for the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
In Emmanuel Ferdinand’s “Exile,” we are asked to “See how a country cuts through a home”—the absurd artificiality of borders, of the nation-state project which has continued to fail our communities. Hashsham Khalid’s “Words After Departure” peers into the abyss of these fault lines and the jagged density of their violence, asking, “who grows here, in this new arrangement?” as Diana Bai Fu completes the stanza in “re-ma/pa-triation,” asking, “statelessness / where are you from? / how do I explain the textures of soil / my mother tilled to feed herself.”
It is from the same absurdity—the heat of resistance in all its embers and flames—that Samia Saliba writes to us: “we carefully sweep them up, so that the birds will not swallow them, though this would be poetic too!! mechanical cannibalism!! against the artificial!! we never utter a word!! when the creature is smashed there is no more sound!! when we walk down the street it belongs to us again!! that night we hear music pouring out of every window!! in every language!! the rhythm of every song sounds exactly like: hammer, rolling pin, BAT!! hammer, rolling pin, BAT!! when we crawl into our beds, we can finally sleep at night!! we can finally sleep at night.” Will you grab your bat, your rolling pin, your hammer? Will you sleight your hand against the breadth of devastation as it stampedes us all under the bloodless paradigms?
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey arrives in an interruption against the technological despair, pulling a weaver’s thread in “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” “then the sunshine hits my bloodstream / like the inverse of hallucinogen / and it’s a lie—how could everyone love the sunshine / when global capitalism has weaponized the sun?— / (it’s called gaslighting, it’s how ideology works) / it’s called atavism, this opposite of evolving, / this want to unlearn humanness, / to predate logic, to lie in a field under the sun / with no invisible rules laid across your body (impossible, / I know, I know).” We return to the pastoral, the rudiments of selfhood and community, as we are taught by our poets to measure distance.
Bex Hainsworth brings us into our ecology: “the rush of the familiar: curves of rock, / the womb of cave with foetal eel, anemones / clotting beneath the pubic curls of seagrass. / The reef was a woman, vibrating with life. / My body was / her shadow on the surface, / our salts mingled, thighs waving.” We are in the sea’s depths, watching from underneath its currents as the sun continues to splinter through the water’s opacity. You are here and you are a part of this world.
And so, like Vanessa Rose instructs us, “barefoot, / i dance / on broken vows, / transmuting lead / into gold. / this body – a portrait: / time cracked / the frame, / sketched in stillness, / now / erased / in motion.”
Ally Ang brings us into the fullness of Bex Hainsworth and Vanessa Rose’s imagery, as they hold the opacity sun-up, telling us firmly, “this is what love asks / of me: to accept every gesture of care / no matter how humiliating it feels, / to let myself be witnessed in all / my unkempt, abject, leaky, embarrassing / glory,” in “Poem Beginning with You and Ending with Everything.” We are embroiled together in our commitments to each other in global solidarity; we are alive together as human beings. Our survival and joy is intrinsically linked; our love, a barter for a better world.
Our world needs us. Yes, a ceasefire in Gaza has been announced; and yet, we know from history the chances of the Zionist-Western imperial project breaking the ceasefire is great. It is in our martyrs, our prisoners, our resistance, and our love that we continue to push through the protracted and prolonged middle. It is in Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Turtle Island, Afghanistan, Palestine, in every home and people that are quietly pushed to the side. We owe them our courage, our love, and our voices. We owe it to them to listen to their calls and put our money where our mouth is.
Liberation is a freedom and a despair in its violence. t.r. san tells us, “begging godgodgod please make me happy here, at the least, if you won’t want to take me out. & so i found myself waking to no movie– it was such regret, the most peace i was ever at, a mourning.”
We have grieved so much under empire and capital. Hassan Usman encapsulates this, “while I went on with bleeding. / Did they not see— / my jutted joints, my unsealed cuts, / my heart, near moribund— / at the ritual ground?”
“i knew your name, but at first could only think to find my own fugitive hands, and lay them on your wet cheeks to dry them,” says James Miller. Fugitivity has long been in conversation; Fred Moten and Stefon Harney, in The Undercommons, discuss fugitivity and its practices. We must undermine and move beyond the institutions, they write, dismantling colonial logic through work and practice.
As Daniel Echezonachi and Ernest Ohia tell us respectively: “When you come, stand at the door of my dreams, and in your cotton-soft voice / whisper, come let me take you to a home made of love.” Ohia joins the symphony, “in the absence of love or loss, what else is there to occupy you?” Love is a fuel of world-building.
The world is always ending; the world is always beginning. We have to choose where we stand. This is our invitation for ANMLY 41, from our team and our poets to you.
In Aida Bardissi’s words, “the whole world will become a memorial / the whole world already is.” As JC Paz reminds and urges us: “& the mirror looks back at you but you are not looking at it.”
Do not be afraid to look. Sometimes, it’s good to be uncomfortable. This issue of ANMLY is lush with each of these poets bringing us inside their worlds. Each poem is a beautiful offering, and I hope when you read them, you find parcels of yourself, your commitments, your loves, and more.
In gratitude and solidarity,
leena aboutaleb
October 2025
Featured in this folio:
- Victor Hugo Mendevil
- Vanessa Rose
- Thi Nguyen
- Tashiana Seebeck
- t.r. san
- Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador
- Samia Saliba
- Rebecca Hawkes
- Olaore Durodola-Oloto
- Mikhail Leshchanka
- McLeod Logue
- Kanda Zinguri
- JC Paz
- James Miller
- James Joy
- Hassan A. Usman
- Hashsham Khalid
- Gabriela Valencia
- Ferdinand Emmanuel Somtochukwu
- Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey
- Ernest Ohia
- Diana Bai Fu
- Desiree Remick
- Daniel Echezona
- Celia Lan
- Bex Hainsworth
- Apollo Chastain
- Ally Ang
- Alanna Tan
- Aida Bardissi
ANMLY #41 Poetry Team
Sarah Clark, Poetry Editor
Ebony E. Chinn, Editor-at-Large
Sonia Beauchamp, Assistant Poetry Editor
Willow James Claire, Assistant Poetry Editor
Allison Thung, Assistant Poetry Editor
leena aboutaleb, Poetry & Nonfiction Reader
Iyanuoluwa Adenle, Poetry Reader
Ashish Kumar Singh, Poetry Reader
tripp j crouse, Poetry Reader
J.L. Moultrie, Poetry Reader, Nonfiction Reader, & Assistant Fiction Editor
Aylli Cortez, Poetry Reader
I Echo, Poetry Reader
Eros Livieratos, Poetry Reader
Bishop Navarro, Poetry & Fiction Reader
Shranup Tandukar, Poetry & Nonfiction Reader