Jael Montellano

Volume 120 of Poet Lore Magazine, with its red-polka dotted cover, lying atop a wooden table beside a leafy plant.

While I am not at #AWP26, the POET LORE Mag team is!! Go find them at booth 937 and pick up a copy of the newest issue, which features poets Patricia Lockwood, jason b. crawford, Jenny Molberg, Dorothy Chan, DeeSoul Carson, and little old me 😎

And now my day feels like a dandelion seed…

My mother dreams of whiteness by Jael Montellano

"European men, who loved me for my curves, my / ice-water eyes."

"My mother dreams of whiteness" by @gathcreator.bsky.social

psalteryandlyre.org/2026/01/12/m...

Thank you @alinaetc.bsky.social for the inspo! Thank you @psalteryandlyre.bsky.social for giving it a place to live.

Title card reading “My mother dreams of whiteness” with an image of turquoise-colored ice, under which reads the poet’s name Jael Montellano

Literary crush means when I read @alinaetc.bsky.social’s “My Father Explains Why They Left Me Behind When Defecting” last year I had to try its form out for myself! The results are my poem “My mother dreams of whiteness” which pubs today at Psaltery & Lyre: psalteryandlyre.org/2026/01/12/m...

Thanks where thanks are due—thank you to Executive Editor @eaholla.bsky.social , the entire Poet Lore editorial team, and my friend, teacher and first reader extraordinaire @jsalowe.com !

The purchase link 🔗 www.poetlore.com/buy-single-i...

Photograph of Jael Montellano with blue hair holding a contributor copy of Poet Lore Magazine Volume 120, with its polka dotted red cover.

IT’S HERE!!!! POET LORE Volume 120, Summer/Fall 2025. The company I’m in, y’all!!!! Award-winning poets, a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib, PABLO NERUDA, are you kidding me?? And on page 39, little old me with a poem I wrote the summer of 2024, “Aranya (Rêverie).”

Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem. Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune: [An ICE agent] s…

“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...”

A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today.

lithub.com/renee-nicole...

Upcoming publications! I wanted to note that I’ll have two poems out soon, so please keep watching this space! 🖋️

Book mail from Insight Editions, @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social and Cardboard House Press!

Wheat paste poster that says the all the world is dying and the new world struggles to be born now is the time of monsters. There's a picture of Elmo

Morning walk

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

Zhao Dexun

Cr: 【澄怀咫尺】赵德勋

Blue-lit full moon behind clouds half-illuminated

Blood moon shining red over dark water

I’ve been taking a workshop this summer with @jsalowe.com and it’s been such joyful work! I’m coming out of this class with so many new poems and I’m thankful for every minute. I’m proud of myself, of this summer, of the work I put in.

Here are the full moons that occurred these weeks 🌕

I look at myself
and see myself
a distance

Gorgeous!!

When the muse wakes you at 4am, you listen.

Fantastic, @scribblermiller.bsky.social ! Congratulations 🍾

Going to see this amazing human today, and it’s going to be profound 💙

#oceanvuong

Nothing is
the way you think it is
going to be.
Take this little flower
from me, and let it go
into the way you think of it.

- Ron Padgett, “American Cowslip”

all i want is more time to read

For context, my day job is technical editing, and this piece went through various editing stages, beta readings, before even being submitted for publication. My word choice is very deliberate.

I appreciate the apology. Maybe start with the compliment next time? 😝

Not a typo, and now you’ve offended me. Congrats.

I wish I could be in two places at once 😭 Please record!

“What if the poem refuses to satiate our expectation of conclusiveness?”

Your summer #poetry course is ready! Drop into my #interview with @alinaetc.bsky.social on her latest collection MY HERESIES, replete with syllabus: hypertextmag.com/nothing-less-t…

#newbooks #WritingCommmunity #amreading

Orange buds and blossoms amid lily pads in a Chinese-ink-style painting.

“There is no secret to longevity so long as one’s mentality is good.”

110-year old painting by Yan Jiyuan

Cr: 中国书画诗词院

The grief. How far-reaching like the desert sun. Writers and editors in the literary landscape have long spun gold from straw and we shall persist. Nevertheless, I want to name the loss of NEA funds that have supported publishers, programs, & writers I work with and benefit from. I’m sorry, friends.

‘I entered into motion because …I was not put here to prove I could endure the terrifying, brutal things humans do to each other. Because there are flowers in bloom that need my attention… Because “one wild and precious life.”’

Be sure to support a fine writer and a fine cause.