i could never make you live here. 
the rain ankle-high an hour ago, and now the snow 
falling in sheets, and the heat keeps rattling,
and all the street signs are long cries,
and every phone call i make is punctuated
by a shakira song, and the neighbors’ footsteps
muscle through the ceiling, and every night when i turn off the lights
it’s still so bright. for months, the sidewalk impressionist with bird shit,
the four trees outside my window an entire city 
of birds. see, i am jealous of the birds
flying south to unravel the sky
above you. your name and mine come from 
the same root, meaning mercy. meaning: you are not mine,
only that i see myself
in a storefront, new york city
a cage around you. the trees
cannot tell birds where to go. my love,
let me mirror you in mercy:
there are rivers running elsewhere. go.

Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her poems appear in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Split Lip, Muzzle, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn. For more, please visit https://www.janelle-tan.com.

Emily Eveleth attended the Massachusetts College of Art in 1987 and recevied her Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College in 1983. Since the late 1980s, Eveleth has exhibited her paintings extensively in the United States, and her work is included in many permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, The Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, the Fairfield University Museum of Art, Fairfield CT, Smith College Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, and the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA. In 2010 the Smith College Museum of Art presented a twelve-year survey of her paintings. Her paintings have been featured in shows at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, The Neuberger Museum of Art, at SUNY Purchase, NY, AEIVA at the University of Alabama, in Birmingham, AL, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, in "All the More Real"at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, and the survey show "Painting in Boston 1950-2000" at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln MA. Her work has been written about in Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the New Yorker and the New York Times. Awards include grants from the Art Matters Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the French Government for the Artist-in-Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre. In 2002, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. You can find more of her work online through her website or through at Mile McEnery Gallery.