Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to present Nicole Alston Zdeb’s poem “She wants shimmering scales” as our first monthly featured poem from a full-length book for Issue 12: Summer 2026. You can find more poetry in her book, The End of Welcome, available from Airlie Press.
She wants shimmering scales
Grand passions
once gaudy flowers
rooted in decadence
like leash walking a handsome pig
along the promenade
declaring nakedness
a disguise
and progress
banal as a meadowlark
but naked indifference
remains deliciously elite
though the woman bores easily
with moral decline
and transforms
for pleasure
into a glimmering trout
About the Poem
‘She wants shimmering scales’ is a love song to Symbolism, Yeats, and the Decadence movement—all heady influences when I was emerging as a poet in the 90’s, finding my genetics, and tuning in to the fin de siècle aesthetic. The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well – ‘Grand Passion’ was the name of a local band in the New London scene. I had a thing with the drummer. And the end movement of the poem, transforming into a fish, Aphrodite did that to escape the father of all monsters, Typhon. I love ingenious escapes and sly goddesses.
Author Bio
Nicole Alston Zdeb is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. She holds a MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Bedouin Press published her chapbook, The Friction of Distance. Recently, she’s had poems, photographs, and short stories accepted by Driftwood Press, Lana Turner, SWWIM, and other journals. Learn more at www.nicolezdeb.com.
From The End of Welcome
The End of Welcome sinks a blade into the loam and crust of human experience to unearth fresh layers of feeling and meaning. With wit and wordplay that suture and transcend time, these singularly voiced poems travel underground and underwater through intimate landscapes to mysteriously surface in the universal. By turns comic, absurdist, and poignant, this collection holds grief, resilience, and joy as a shell held to the ear holds the sonic image of the sea, the heart holds the fallout of a suicide, and the body holds defiant against and bends to the machinations of progress.
Available now: Airlie Press
Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”
Three Poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn
“Children in these circumstances are deprived of love at a formative stage and learn to immediately behave like adults without the benefit of the learning path of childhood.” Read three poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn, our second biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Conkers.”