Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: The measured sonnet form is a perfect fit for “Aloes,” a meditation on longing and containment. The plants in this piece, which feel entirely sentient, are both ancient and forever renewing themselves.

Listen to Edward read the poem:

Aloes

We are sitting on the porch, staring
At our respective screens, pixels
Constructing disparate scenes
In our cortices. The aloe vera
Beside us busies itself with flowering,
Much of its many resources redirected
To reproduction. One day we’ll adopt,
We told ourselves while hiking between
Prehistoric-seeming ferns and longleaf
Pines. Us and them for miles. Now I’m ripping
Out the stalk whose growth occurs only
When an aloe matures: encountering a thing
This permanent takes years. Faced with fecundity,
The inconsiderate fact of it, I grow throat-tight.

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet and critic from Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in Pleiades, Waxwing, the American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.