Collateral Journal

05/10/2026

It’s Mother’s Day weekend here in the States, and to be honest (and pleasantly surprised), our current issue has a strong maternal current through its poetry section especially. We love this particular poem from Anna Geoffroy and how it speaks to the relationships between mothers and children as well as this country’s government and its people. We’ve put the link in our bio—have a look.

“My poetry in the 12 months that followed the 2024 US presidential election explores the struggle of integrating a personal history of prolonged and sometimes futile feeling political resistance with the realities of aging, grief, and an undermining of the sense of self.” —Anna Geoffroy

Anna Geoffroy is a Massachusetts-based poet, propagandist and pope (non-exclusive). She is the co-host of the live-to-tape Contro-Verse open mic in Malden and editor of the Holy Nonsense project. You can find her art and poetry in a variety of online and print collections and a street post near you.

05/04/2026

Glad, and re-energized, to read this poem from Collateral Journal contributor Kathleen Hellen!

A bright cold day in April after Orwell    I’m looking out the window at black ice that took me by surprise, the remnants of La Niña, of Polar Vortex pushing south the bitter Arctic air. Ice that sheaths the fixtures, railings. Glistens in disguise, while I wait in early light for thaw. I won.....

05/01/2026

Collateral is officially ten years old, and our twentieth issue (10.2) is now live. The link in our bio will take you to these powerful pages, where you’ll find the political cartoons of Marty Two Bulls Sr. and poetry by Alice Bolstridge, Andrea Damic, Panika M.C. Dillon, Susan Eisenberg, Linh Flores, Anna Geoffroy, Oliver Khan, Zakeeyah Khan, Jennifer Lentfer, Sylvi Morgan, Tina Parker, Julián Verdugo, and Bänoo Zan; nonfiction from Kristen Keckler + A Letter from Iran; fiction from Ankush Banerjee, Dane Davis, Colin Sargent, and Olga Tikhonova; plus a new book review from Randy Brown.

Give yourself some time and space to take it in. We need these stories now more than ever.

04/27/2026

Collateral’s twentieth issue goes live this Friday, 1 May!

04/20/2026

In our soon-to-be-archived issue, you’ll find two new poems from Bunkong Tuon, each of them looking at what it means to survive and escape deadly regimes, then exist in safer spaces with those memories and uncertainties afterward. The concept of survival during genocide reaches beyond the physical body of a survivor and into their every relationship and action, no matter how tender, how loving. This poem, “Eating Donuts with my son at Dunkin’”, is a window into that reminder. Link to both poems is in our bio.

“As a child survivor of the Cambodian genocide, I grew up without parents. Now that I’m a parent, I raise my kids, consciously or unconsciously, in the shadow of Pol Pot.” —Bunkong Tuon

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize-winning poet, and professor at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. He is the author of several poetry collections. In 2024, he published What Is Left, a Greatest Hits chapbook from Jacar Press, and Koan Khmer, his debut novel from Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. He lives with his wife and children in Upstate New York.

04/14/2026

It’s National Poetry Month, and humans continue to learn about their world by making metaphors, whether they appreciate that reality or not. In this new poem from Ryan Calo, the idea of being notified, of knowing, is opened up and heard, like birdsong, like the bullets, like the morning news.

‘Notifications’ is a poem about waking up, an ostensibly peaceful activity. The belligerent language describing the natural world aims to foreshadow the chaos of contemporary life. The frenetic birds are waiting for us in our phones the moment we turn them on. —Ryan Calo

Ryan Calo is a law professor and amateur poet in Seattle, Washington, where he serves on the board of the literary organization Hugo House. His poetry appears in Wayfarer Magazine and The Stonefence Review.

04/06/2026

April is Arab American Heritage Month, and this new poem from Andy Young has come to life in yet another way, asking questions about how we see, value, and care for one another in a country whose government has isolated and targeted those whose Arab heritage is deemed, in one cold sweep, suspicious. People are people. Children are children. To read this poem in its entirety, see the link in our bio.

“This poem comes from my experience as a white North American woman married to an Egyptian man raising mixed children in a racist society.” —Andy Young

Andy Young’s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in October by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Greensboro Review, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages. Find her at andyyoung.org, or .

03/25/2026

The relationships we forge between seemingly distant cultures, genders, generations, and histories of war are the birthplace of human healing and accountability. So we protect them, cling to them, reflect on them. This new fiction from Wayne Karlin is a glimpse at what that reflection feels like, and we appreciate it especially now, when so much of our daily life and news consumption encourages us to isolate ourselves and avoid each other. Read it at the link in our bio.

“‘A Red Thread’ is one of a series of stories I’ve been writing concerning the cross-generational damages of war on families, triggered by seeing how some of my own experiences as a Vietnam veteran were echoed in the experiences of several of my students, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the period 2005-2010, while I was teaching at a community college. Several of those veterans had fathers who were also Vietnam veterans and I wondered what we had not been able to teach our kids, and our country, about how dear the cost of that failure was.” —Wayne Karlin

Wayne Karlin has published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and three non-fiction books. He has received several State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction.

03/24/2026

Thrilled for family member and his winning the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize from ... which means we all get to read more of his work! Our forthcoming print collection of flash craft essays will also include new work from Antony, so keep an ear open for its release later in 2026.

Congrats, Antony! [Image reposted from Noemi Press]