My Therapist Shows Me How to Write in the Affirmative or An Alternative to Writing “Don’t Kill Yourself”

We're proud to feature this poem from Maya William’s chapbook Feminine Morbidity, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as the winner of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

stay kin       stay kin       stay kin       stay kin
stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive
I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to
stay alive stay kind stay    be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kind be alive     I want to be kind I want to be
alive I want to be kinder   I want to be alive   I want to be alive be kinder
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
   be alive stay alive  be alive stay alive be    alive   stay
alive     be     alive stay  kind  be alive    be kind    stay alive
be kinder to my  self be kinder to my  self be kind be alive
I want to be kind I want to be kind I want to be kind I want be kind I
    want to be alive  be kind be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kinder to my   self stay kinder to my   self be kinder to my   self stay
kinder    to my    self
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
be alive stay alive be   alive stay  alive be   alive stay
alive be   alive    stay kind be a live   be kind    stay a live
stay a live   be a live   stay a live   be a live  stay a live  be a live   stay
a  live.   be  a     live   stay a     live be a  live   stay a live be
   a live     stay         a live be
a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Sweet

We're proud to feature this poem from Christina Hauck’s chapbook An Angel and Other Poems, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

I cut my hair short as a boy’s and lounged
by the river with other naked women,
all of us laughing and talking with hands
and with mouths, wading in and out of the water,

shining. Your eyes took me in. I sifted,
sand through my fingers, soft and warm.
You peeled a mango, slipped dripping slices
between my lips, tasted sweet strangeness

on my chin. O sweet the days we played
by the river and sweet the nights in your room,
mornings when don’t go you’d unbutton
my blouse, gather me in.

The day you showed up late wearing leather,
chain-smoking unfiltered Camels, I guessed
what you would say hours before you would say it,
your tongue loving the sound of her name: Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. Same as my grandmother.
I cried a little, driving home across the bridge.
I remember you wore a red beret and I was always so
impatient at your before-the-mirror adjustments

sometimes taking minutes. Sweet, sweeter
than anise, I remember your lower lip caught
between your teeth as you rose from the river
silver streams of water pouring from your hair.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Still Wondering if You Made It

We're proud to feature this poem from Jed Myers’ chapbook Our Use of the Stars, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

I’ve been able to miss you, without knowing     
if your silence began at the grille of a truck    
on a state route at dusk, or with a secret               
decision, or in sudden sickness I’d never learn        
the first thing about, but about the first thing
you told me—you were already in love 
with the bristlecone pines. Their twisted praise
clawing the sky, agonized and ecstatic
in their spare clusters and pairs, catatonic 
manics in wait for the rapture they look like
they’re in. You’d need to go stand among them
you said. And though it took tearing your roots
from the sea-level riverbanks where we lived—
though it meant never seeing your wish
for us to wrinkle up slow into faithful twin 
writhings on our slope of years—you did, 
on one forgettable argument’s thrust, set out 
for Utah I guess, to walk up the ridge
where you hoped you’d find them, bare ancient 
wood warped and gouged and goldened 
in the late light, alive. They’d stand by you,
silent but for wind brushing their skin—
presences surer than this one who misses you
and still imagines the horn-blast, the brights

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Parietal Operculum

We're proud to feature this poem from Kristyn Snedden’s chapbook Urchin to My Shell, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

       Lessons from my husband’s neurologist

I listened while he unfolded every millimeter
of the cortex that cuddles up to the insula,
all that integration. His voice was driftwood

full of holes and swirls. Simon Lacey says the parietal
operculum is where we sense texture through touch,
even if all we do is read it somewhere, our brains

light up on the machine. Someone said your skin
is like velvet, which produced only a worn out
glimmer in the region, but when I touched

you I was myself full of ocean nettles, scalpels
and scythe, yellow and deep rose, forest green.
I was a wilderness captured by the dune,

waves ran over me in the sea of you
and no thought lingered, just the colors
and touch of mossy dark, the taste of brine.

Adrift in that damp sea, that gentle tide,
every minute as sweet as the sting
of the Atalla jellyfish, as bright as a supernova.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Ars Poetica with Amateur Tarot

We’re proud to feature this poem from M. Ezra Zhang’s chapbook Self-Portrait with LSD and Mirror, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

While my lover the tarot reader is comatose
in the bedroom after a night of talking to a god
I could not taste or touch, I scatter
the cards across the living
room like spores
into darkness. Yesterday
under the domination of that god, my face
thrummed in my hands as if
I were wielding a bucket of light. Recoiling from its glare
I was disgusted to find that it followed
me everywhere.

Knowing nothing
about divination I pull three cards:
the moon, the tower, the devil.
If you, like me, don’t know the interior of these
cards, I beg you not to look for them.
It will only make things worse. Look at me
instead while I tell you something true:

One night you are moving
under the hot wet animal of the moon.
You coil upwards a couple hundred
spells until the horizon drowns into the earth
and abandons. At the eye of the tower you become the
eye of the tower. The black grass from below
swells heavenward and then you
become that darkness too.

Today on earth, the living
room window transfixes me
for hours but I find no tranquility in the scene
of the people of the world arriving
at where they need to be.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Rex

We're proud to feature this poem from Van G. Garrett’s chapbook Chinaberry Constellations: Odes, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Big Mama’s house was two floors
of adventure:

A library of memories
A storehouse of stories

A patchwork of possibilities

Walls with hidden treasure
Creaking steps
A haunted attic

Photos and old records

In the summer
we swiped at the sun
laughed until our sides hurt

Brave as kids could be
Except for when we hard-sprinted
from a German Shepherd
with amber-colored eyes
named after a dinosaur

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

On the 56th Anniversary of My Father’s Death

We’re proud to feature this poem from Elizabeth J. Coleman’s chapbook On a Saturday in the Anthropocene, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2025.

I decide to join the resistance against negativity.
To celebrate that cancer is a chronic illness now.

And that an old family friend will be able to live
with his blood cancer, stage four. In my mind,

I bestow on him the joy of knowing his sons’
spouses and children. Then, just as I do every day,

I empty our compost bin into our building's
larger one. Tuesdays the sanitation

department picks the compost up, and, after
a while, the resulting soil will go into New York

City’s parks, or so they say. The songbirds
are returning to Riverside Park, with their

capacity for human speech. My beautiful brown
dove is back, just four feet away, on my office

windowsill, watching me work.
Later we’ll head to Central Park, and, I hope,

come upon the saxophonist playing under
Graywacke Arch. My grandson

will skip over, put money in the case.
Last week, my freckled granddaughter

sold me a hand-painted bookmark
at her Ukraine fundraiser, with pink and blue

flowers, a sun, and a sky of paper white.
And today the woman who owns the frame store

between 95th and 96th on Broadway told me
she wants to go to outer space, as she smiled

from behind the counter in her little shop.
I pictured her en route in her white top,
leopard print leggings and black flats.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.