Hippocampus
“I couldn’t breathe. No one was to blame. / It was spring. Buds were busy / mocking me, proving we could live / through many deaths.”
Isabella DeSendi
—3rd Place Winner of the 2020 Spotlight Award—
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Narrative, Leveler, Small Orange, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Her chapbook Through the New Body was selected as a winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship and is forthcoming in 2020. She was also selected as a finalist for The 2019 Frontier Digital Poetry Chapbook, the June Jordan Fellowship, Narrative Magazine’s Annual Poetry Prize, and Palette’s Previously Published Poem Prize. Isabella holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in New York City where she currently resides and works in finance.
America’s First Female Muslim Judge Found Floating in a River
“In April we will find her body. / It is March. New York is gray, in between / seasons like a heart undecided / between new love and loss.”