Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

Read

Fall 2015 |

One of the Ways that We Show Our Age

And you vibrate the littlest bone in my ear    pretend drive
from the couch    flipping air radio knobs until out belt
your white teeth    violins grinding against
each other    You echo in my chest hole    say,    whatever happened
to that surgery channel will happen to us all
eventually—    Like I could ever look
at all my friends the same    when not a single one responded
to my mass text    maybe we’re all just birds
trapped in an airport    Why I can’t stop scratching
the back of my ear    and a cry for help every time I flip
the channel but    you tell me pretend    parallel parking
is harder than it seems and your hands circle
the air like a buzzsaw    You,    spitting slightly
when you speak and me    smiling    holy water    holy water

Peter Twal, a Jordanian-American and an electrical engineer, earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he received the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Poetry Award. Currently, he is at work on a manuscript titled Like a Sales Force into the Night, which investigates how memory and nostalgia are a sort of violence against the body—both past and present. Other poems from this collection have appeared or will soon in Ninth Letter Online, The Journal, Booth, RHINO, Yemassee, Forklift, Ohio, New Delta Review and elsewhere.