belief system on good days

by Magdalena Styś

my body is loud laughter and arms to help you move house before
a stone on a scale or a pearl in a glass case.
i fish out glitter in blue eyes and soften frozen lakes. glacial
things can be softened. ancient tablets remember that they,
like me, once melted under devoted fingers. when
hurricanes take the palace, shuffle cupboards, there is a heart
of a basement i can run into eyeless.
there are many good people and many hard-working people,
and sometimes they’re even both. there’s a god living somewhere,
and of its face and location i don’t think on the good days. there’s
enough of it, too, to last us through the bad days:
it keeps the bodies electric when we don’t feel like singing


Magdalena Styś is a writer and organizer currently based in Amsterdam. Their work has previously appeared in Moonday Magazine, Also Cool Magazine, and elsewhere. They were nominated to appear in the 2025 Best of the Net anthology. Find out more about them and their work at magdalenastys.com.

Joshua Wait

Joshua Wait studied English at UC Berkeley. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on the relationship between art and poetry in the New York School. He received a Masters in Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has served in programs for children, youth, and college students, in an organization addressing climate change, and in the tech industry as a CTO. He currently divides his time between his family and his artistic practice.

https://www.bluerivers.org
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Glaciers From Above