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

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Winter 2024 • Vol. XLVI No. 1 Poetry |

What the Exiled Are

History’s blood crumbs; prisoners 
on the other side of the gate;
a geographical oxymoron; 
what the printer omits on its own;
margins of plain paper; where on a map, 
a named city doesn’t exist, 
only a remembered one;
             the negative space 
the art teacher says to trace against;  
a special kind of alibi: 
I am not where you think I am
     I am everywhere
                        —  we are everywhere  —  
you think we’re not.
Photo of Sara Abou Rashed

Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian American writer, speaker, and creator of the one-woman show A Map of Myself, which she has performed more than fifteen times across the US. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the anthology A Land with a People and the grades 9–12 English Language Arts curriculum from McGraw-Hill as well as in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, Arab Literature Quarterly, Pleiades, The Rumpus, and The Nation, among others. From Columbus, Ohio, Abou Rashed earned her BA at Denison University and her MFA at the University of Michigan, where her manuscript won first place in the 2023 Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award.

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