☀ Editor's Choice: Zaina Alsous "Naturalization"

There was occupation, a market for tracing, clouded October and open fire, there was text flattened into macabre telescope, an orchestra of stolen petrified skulls, there was tombs made civic hand-drawn cattle splayed in spectrums of gray, there was afterword—New World Order of sunsets, a sugar plantation and a French slave master’s son, there was a fixation of birds, there was a hobby of arranging murdered muses with wire to be painted exactly like this, there was a book of the dead named Birds of America, an incident of canon, there was grove air, there was turpentine, orange and harvest, and piles and piles of indentured coiling, there was Syrian Christians petitioning against Yellow to better own houses, there was stacks of pledges and dictionaries without song, a refugee crisis and a father with a flag pin, there was a daughter and her pages of class mobility, there was hours of wrists and balconies and inadequate protest, there was an inquiry into how the green lawn occurred, there was a poet trying to retrace a book of the dead, she entered many cities portending a crow in spring, wearing a dress glimmering of sweatshops, she asked the tarot reader in New Orleans for clues: The corpses in you are damaged, but they have a lot to say.