My cousin accompanied her daughter for the chemo even though, she said, it made her queasy. Not just witnessing the therapy and its ineradicable confirmation of the cancer, but the waiting room so crowded with terrified hoping people. Waiting. I understood what she meant.

I drove my brother to be irradiated, 

and I sat with him intubated 
here with drugs 
there with nourishment, 

but when he wanted a pack of Camels—
I refused to go along. 

—Short-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

James Penha

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. A collection of his adapted folk tales is due to be released later this year. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

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⚡ Political, But Not a Screed, micro-cheribun by James Penha in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 25, September 2024); long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s second Cheribun Challenge