Online Issues
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“ZOUNDS!” a review, and an interview with Aleksander Zywicki
by Rebecca Endres
ZOUNDS! does not lallygag. From the moment the raw, clear-eyed book of poems opens, Aleksander Zywicki brings religion and torn flesh to the forefront of his imagery. Consider the transmutation in “The Sign of the Cross” from the first section:
my dead father has risen
his arm to hang
the wrenching Christ
above our dinner table
& my eyes like wounds
are always opened
In this childhood memory, the father figure, who looms over early memories and haunts his son from the grave for the rest of the book,
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Sands (With Lyrical Entr’actes)
art by Catherine McGuire
by Derek Jon Dickinson
(for S.K.S.)
Parched wind snapping my clothes, shadow billowing like a black sail, or empty net—its taunting vacancy, useless as seawater.
a rook or a bishop, chess-piece
of the desert
The Atacama plateau—desiccated, rain-shadowed. When our bus stopped at the Chilean border, the young officer dropped my passport in the sand and,
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Patriarchy Rhymes
photo by Yasser Alaa Mobarak
by Johnna Schmidt
J.M. Schmidt writes poetry, short fiction, and plays, and lives in the Washington D.C. area. Their work has appeared in the Beltway Quarterly Review, On the Issues, The Rush, the Little Patuxent Review, and is included in Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction.They hold an MFA in fiction from University of Maryland, College Park.
Yasser Alaa Mobarak (b. 1993) is a multi-award-winning photographer represented by ZUMA Press from Alexandria,
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LIT 40, Summer 2025
Daring to plumb the source of elemental forces simmering below the surface of information / confusion, and illusion seems these days to be the work of Artists. Looking into what cannot be seen for the truth of existence and translating this into manifestation is the great work. Every day that we live and breathe we, all of us, are translators daring to art as intentional as an act of carrying water.
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About the Artists in LIT 40
Jacelyn Yap
(on the cover) Saphire Organic 01
Jacelyn (she/her) is a self-taught visual artist who ditched engineering to make art because of a comic she read. Her artworks and photography have been published by the Commonwealth Foundation’s adda, Chestnut Review, The Lumiere Review, and more. She can be found at https://jacelyn.myportfolio.com/ and on Instagram at @jacelyn.makes.stuff
Alessandro Avondo born in Milan, Italy in 1983, studies languages and then audiovisual production. He meets, at his first job, photography that accompanies him daily for 20 years. -
Letter from the Editors
Dear Reader,
Melting as we are in the in the heat of the Northeast, the world stage has run amok and our eyes always seem to be trained on another disaster, and another’s disaster. The bombardment of crises through the lens of all media doubles, triples, then exponentially shatters to a galaxy of views, skews, opinions, and news. We are overwhelmed by trying to hold fast and follow word salad narratives and fractured lines of logic not meant to carry any water, as another disaster or disastrous narrative breaks through the fore seemingly intended to disrupt and distract and we forget what it was that we were trying to understand in the first place.
