ISSUE NO. 25: ROUND TRIP
April 2025
This issue of Pearl Press features work from:
Suzi Grossman, Insley Smullen, Emily Liu, Adam Thorman, Bella Reiss, L.M., Nate Smallwood, Macy Castañeda Lee, Robin Percyz, Kody Zenger, George Freek, Dimitri Karakostas, Evie Huang, Merry Reimler
Cover image: Nate Smallwood
Curated by: Delilah Twersky
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My Grandfather's Stairs, 2008: Suzi Grossman
Marshall County, Indiana, 12.23.23: Nate Smallwood
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Pescadero (2), 2025: Emily Liu
Rock Portrait, Bean Hollow State Beach, Pescadero, CA: Adam Thorman
Rock Portrait, Bean Hollow State Beach, Pescadero, CA: Adam Thorman
NOTHING NEW
We both cried a hundred times and only one of us got mean. I stared as she slept and when she woke, we did our grief introductions, started gloom orientations for our lowly class of two secret students. She asked what I was thinking, as lovers do. I whispered nothing new, so of course now I think of growing old together, of being a pair of sneakers by the door called my wife and I. We’re in London and we’re fifty years in the future, sea levels way up, the end in sight, barely. And the both of us: grey, chubby, smiling, and outmatched in everything, in football, by teenage grandbabies. I ate a huge orange after the ordeal was through. I peeled it myself, drank my coffee sweeter than normal, and put on my walking shoes. Everyone here has a Doodle now. Everyone, but only you.
Bella Reiss
Ghost House: L.M.
Marshall County, Indiana, 07.10.24: Nate Smallwood
Neurodivergent, New York: Macy Castañeda Lee
IF YOU CAN MAKE IT HERE
They say you can’t go home twice, I resent that.
I’m back in New York after a decade away, I’ve fallen
in love twice, once with someone I’ve never even met.
Not only am I home but I’m more alone now than ever
another home. The body understands emptiness the fuller
it’s been and I’m starving walking the streets of Brooklyn
watching hands filled with other hands. Parents & children,
lovers, not mine. I want so much to be happy but I’ll take less
even the safety in knowing there is less
loneliness down the road if I walk long enough, maybe even love.
I said I wouldn’t ever move home, that I love New York
more than any place, almost as much as
I love leaving her at the end of the day. I take that back.
It turns out you can change your mind about most anything
even love & I’m here to tell you I’m in love with her
& I’m back home, how da ya like them apples?
The world is on fire, my home is on fire all while I masturbate
thinking about a stranger from the Internet.
My marriage is unmarriaging in a slow suffocation.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the smoke.
I’m doing my best which happens to be my worst.
All the pregnant grief never stops giving birth.
There’s too much love and not enough people
I want to change that.
I’m building
a fire escape
out of my poems.
All of it is true
& I
in my
furious fire
am pouring love
down.
Robin Percyz
Untitled: Kody Zenger
My Grandfather's Stairs, 2015: Suzi Grossman
Untitled: Kody Zenger
The Dance: L.M.
Rusalka: L.M.
THE WINDS IN DECEMBER
The distant mountains
are blanketed in snow,
and seem to creep closer,
as the northerly winds
howl like the gasping
of some dying creature.
I measure my endurance
against this elm tree,
standing tall and firm
in every kind of weather,
and I reach to the moon
with my eyes,
and in my mind
to the shores of the sea,
but as I huddle by the fire,
I’m hit by reality,
and I’m still bitterly cold,
hardly able to move,
and I lack every desire.
George Freek
Repressed Memory Roadtrip: Dimitri Karakostas
Ghost Image and Others: Insley Smullen
Untitled: Kody Zenger
Untitled: Kody Zenger
DEAR YOU
I wish I could tell you about all the ways the world has been whispering to me since we last spoke: in that plant’s shadow lounging idly on the wall of Rachie’s apartment, and in my band’s harmonies during the Spanish chapel, and in the little poem I found about magnolias outliving dinosaurs—but maybe, what I mean to say is that I want to return to the quiet moments of running our fingertips along gaps in the aged bricks and flowering trees as we walked back sleepy-eyed from cafes across town, and to that one night in the dim living room when we should’ve been writing our research papers but ended up talking for hours about suffering and being present and God, and to the times you would smile so gently at me while saying goodnight before going upstairs; and please, please, I want you to tell me everything: how your job is going, what school is like—but, those are boring questions, so tell me instead about the bugs you’ve adored, and the fried eggs you’ve cooked, about songs that make you cry, and the people who are your home;
I’m sorry for my silence, but sometimes I’m afraid that if I tell you everything, the words will spill over, and I may confess that I want to feel your fingers intertwined with mine as if love will somehow cascade through my skin into your’s, to cradle your face and make sure you know you are always welcome , to lay on a picnic blanket together and read, or craft poems, or softly strum my guitar while you draw, to gaze at apricot sunsets in a backyard and stand transfixed at their mundane Beauty, to walk by your side again and know that I am safe, that I am wanted—by dear you.
Evie Huang
Untitled: Kody Zenger
Taelyn, Louisville, Kentucky, 03.31.22: Nate Smallwood
Number 3: Merry Reimler
Number 30: Merry Reimler
Repressed Memory Roadtrip: Dimitri Karakostas
Ghost Image and Others: Insley Smullen
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Delilah Twersky
Pearl Press
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