Assistant Editor Kate Jayroe: As writers, we learn to accept that much of our drafting and crafting happens in solitude, so it was a fun surprise to encounter a collaborative prose poem by three writers! In “Yonder,” there’s a delightful union of the unexpected and the subtle. We, the readers, find ourselves traveling with this collaborative piece as it wends through its brief but resonant adventure. While the piece is sharp and cohesive, there are unexpected turns that could only come from generating art in community. 

Listen to the writers read the poem:

Yonder

Let’s go for a walk. I know a trail starts behind a gas station. Sun hits at intervals, yellow soil. We’ll miniaturize and live entire lives on horseback down there—everything we understand fits in a leather pack. When we drink cool water from our flask, we’ll really drink that cool water. Desert blooms like sea spray across the rocks, like your arm as you gesture to me, approach. There’s a point where storm clouds curdle over the land. A little before, there’s the typical show of heat, how it wavers and bends, but when the sunrays hit the lease of the land underneath and sky where the billows make, everything shimmers. There’s an opening I know in my heart everything rides on, that I haven’t released myself to. As we ride, my Stetson corrals sunlight. Flask empty, in need of whiskey, water. I stare at the neon sign in the distance. My heart has a pig valve. I chuckle as the thought occurs to me as I guide our horse back toward the gas station to buy pig ears, water, and booze. Folks putting gas in every mode of transport. We dismount. I tie our colt to a pole and it stands tied. My gun holster & six-shooter on my person. We come out. I tip my hat and say, “Ma’am,” to a lady in a Mickey Mouse shirt as she walks past us. You wait patiently as I roll a cigarette. Everything grows small as clouds begin to slowly engulf us. 

Steve Castro‘s Conejo y Gallo was a finalist for the National Poetry Series competition (2024). He’s a Costa Rican surrealist whose poetry was most recently published in 32 Poems, Image, and The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Laurel Review, and Bayou Magazine.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). Christopher lives in Syracuse, New York.

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo.

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