by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Mar 26, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Brine I leave everything on shingle, meet surf like a sibling, crest over playful breakers and chase the moon’s tail. There was salt in my kisses. It preserved us for a while, resisted the putrefaction. Skin on sea-stained sheets. My mind’s water,...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Mar 25, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Hurst Reservoir In the sharpness of a January wind we stepped down, feeling with neoprened feet for the safety of the edge. Bags and clothes huddled on a plastic picnic sheet. We launched, lovingly into dark and silky water unknown yet benign....
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Mar 24, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Sanctum Without God You did not ask for knees — They found the floor themselves. Not from command, But gravity. Your name became architecture. Something vaulted. Something echoing. Something built to make small sounds feel holy. I stopped calling...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Mar 23, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Buried That winter the snow kept rising, a slow white wall climbing the windows, each morning untouched, the whole world muffled under it. A hush so complete it felt like a hand pressed gently over the mouth. I pulled on my snow pants, my jacket....
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Mar 22, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Bureaucracies of Water I’ve been reading about ghost apples. They are a real phenomenon, like how everyone we can see on the wide street outside this building is still living, managing thus far, attending appointments, the fissures in their...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Mar 21, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
THE APPRENTICE OF GROUNDHOG DAY I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle he laid as mortar on a wall. More bricks, more weight. I’d watch...
