The Undoing

by Millicent Borges Accardi

There is an impersonalness
to our touch, working backwards
from intimacy into being
mis-associated strangers,
what activities not to do any more:
touching cold feet in bed
or putting a washcloth to my throat.
Are these acceptable gestures
now that we are rewinding into
the opposite of lovers.
We have tried to face the wall
inside the tunnel that is where
we used to travel through on our
way to being together, and we have pressed
in a non-onward direction,
like switching from left to right,
forced to hold the wrong hand,
to relearn how not to. How not to throw
and catch awkwardly. How to face
with the other shoulder, how to bend
the wrong way into a triangle,
into a new limiting direction
that keeps you trapped and strangled
and lost. Everything from scratch
transforming into a scar,
the places when you used to know
things by heart. Time is putting on
your right shoe and steadying
yourself on the left, jumping
around to keep a sort of balance
in an irregular circular way
–as if you are fooling yourself safe,
back on the ground and can protect
the country from falling, becoming
a universal key positioned into
the lock of how new life has become
unremarkable, disappeared and a lot more ugly.



Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer is the author of two poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon Ireland 2016). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid emergency grant), California Arts Council, Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation. She lives in California. Nancy Andrews is an artist living outside of Philadelphia. Self taught in photography, she has been perfecting her images for over 15 years. Her subjects include abstracts, images inspired by nature, and observations of the world around her. Along with photography, she spends her days teaching art to little ones, playing ukulele and romping with her two little pups.

For Truth would be from a Line

Inspired by Gastão Cruz

by Millicent Borges Accardi

And, I would go, really.
And, is it about time we all got along,
but that was a no and the real answer would require
more sense than the crazy crisis
we are going through presently,
and the truth, ah. It would have to
be from a line
we used to know, an old phrase,
like a poem dealing with
trees I memorized, along with everyone
else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade
at Luther Burbank,
where the teacher handed out
pastel marshmallows
when we behaved.
For truth would have
to be untouchable,
like a hand we used to know,
to hold–
as if it were our own—
the left reaching
for the right, fumbling along thru
this magnificent universe we kind of
know, or at least pretended it to be so.

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of two poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon Ireland 2016). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, California Arts Council, Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation. She lives in California. Ralph Almeida is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and creates in Brooklyn, NY.