Friday Feature: 9/5/2025

Well-mannered Pass

Wrenched between want and what should be

please yield, give a microgram more—

take that mountain lane.

Thin air compresses thoughts to amethyst

slashes of maddening silence.

Tired of trying with a tightened jaw

not to unnerve.

A dissident season is brewing within

the cavity of my chest.

Verses flush with sound rumble over

soft palate, stream through spaces between teeth,

burst open the closed obedient mouth.

An emerald chorus swarms over blue aster

then cascades over awoken arms,

doused with the girl I was and newfound

capacity to be a woman that articulates.

From the Press:

In Well-mannered Pass, Lumina charts the uneasy transformation from restraint into release, holding the tension between being silent and articulation. The poem works in stages: through Lumina's imagery gives way to sound, color, and movement. In the shift from a jaw held shut to a mouth breaking open to a mouth breaking open, shows the act of speaking not as a casual utterance but as rebellion. The closing image, where the emerald chorus washes over the woman situates self-assertion in both natural and bodily landscapes. It is a striking meditation on our voice: how it can resist suppression, how it matures, and how it will always insist on speaking its own capacity.

About the Author:

Lumina has a BA in English from the University of Iowa. She enjoys the letting her imagination run rampant and would rather be outside. Her work has been published by literary magazines Black Mountain Press, The Write Launch, Fjords Review and others. You can find her on Instagram @luminamillerpoet and say hello.