Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to present five original poems by Colleen S. Harris as our third biweekly featured poet of the Winter 2026 issue.
Poems
Si No Sana Hoy, Sanará Mañana
Little girls, like ghosts,
haunting corners and learning lessons:
Sana, sana, colita de rana…
Get that face off before I smack it off.
Te calmes o te calmo.
You’ll eat it and like it.
Me vale madre lo que hagas.
A quiet girl with bad skin and good grades
goes rogue, leads one hundred and fifteen
public school choir kids with well-trained lungs
in a clap-game in a high school cafeteria
while an orchestra plays on used instruments
for parents on a rickety stage across the hall.
The urge, upon stepping into a store
of modern angles holding breakables
on every chrome shelf to unleash herself,
to throw the stubborn meat of her body,
to charge into glass displays and clatter them
all to the ground like so many broken bones.
The red butterfly mask flames across her face:
white blood cells so hellbent on heroism
that they torch it all, scorched earth,
destroying healthy tissue, too—just in case.
Inflammation As Girl
Exposed to infection or injury,
the body’s mast cells release a rush
of histamine, of prostaglandins
that open the doors wide
-eyed, the first
time she falls. Her father’s patience
is shorter than a teenage summer.
He shoves the pink banana-seat bike
hard from behind, the thumb-ring bell
clangs against asphalt, she skids
on her chin in the empty elementary lot.
Dilating blood vessels increase
blood flow to the affected area
of a triangle
is one-half the base times the height.
A girl who stands five-foot-three
with a base of New York, divided
in half, equals Kentucky. In September,
she is also the square root of cheap rum
minus common sense and fear,
an equation eighteen-year-old boys
freely admit they can’t solve.
The additional blood flow calls white
blood cells to the site, they release
enzymes to kill harmful bacteria,
viruses, damaged
goods. Fire leaves her eyes to flare
in her gut, cervical vertebrae, down her spine,
into the SI joint until each step lights her up,
a jackpot no one wants to win.
Once the threat retreats, or is removed,
most bodies repair the damage.
Fibroblasts produce collagen
that forms scar tissue, firm spackle
closing
the door on her old life, opening her arms
to the hounds that share her bed, that warm
themselves against the everburn beneath her skin.
Spivey’s II
Look the place up to get it right
in a poem learn Spivey’s closed
that it hadn’t been called “Spivey’s”
since the seventies when it was a rough
railroad haunt There are no photos
to prove you danced there in 1999
in high heeled boots at three a.m.
while onions hissed and blackened
on the flat top It’s been twenty-six years
Jason is in the wind Shara died young
and you can’t call Mazie because
she has two boys and bad nerves and might say
You must have dreamed it, Colleesue.
And it could have been a dream
the drunken late-night stumbling
over unpatched roads the lights the grill
the locals whose eyes never quite focused
on us the thin film of oil over exposed skin
that made a hangover shower feel like
shedding yourself to become something
new finding only yourself underneath.
Mothers
They watch us stumble
over the jagged edges
of life’s unpaved roads
with the patience of skin
stitching itself closed.
Can you feel how being
close to her weakens you,
makes you want to love
small fangèd creatures
and hug your nieces,
as though none of these
will grow up to bite?
You cannot stay long,
or the effect might be
permanent. Your flight
leaves before dawn,
but she will be the one
to take you to the airport,
to check that your papers
are in the proper pockets,
to make sure even when
you run the wrong way,
you are set on the safest path.
Brentwood’s Daughter
She waits on the corner while Brentwood
mulls what it will be today the dull
glint of sullen sun in air powdered
with sugar from the Entenmann’s
factory mingling with cigarette smoke
from high school kids killing themselves
quickly as they can before homeroom starts
She is lucky like a quarter found beside
the tracks she likes the feel of cold flat
coins against her palm the smokestack
stench of a just-passed train that could be
going east to Ronkonkoma or west
to Penn Station and from there anywhere
you want that isn’t here She skips school
and walks the tracks counting ground-out
cigarette butts, dodging scuffed peddlers
offering tiny baggie-wrapped trips to heaven
from lice-infested pockets, Only fifteen dollars
for you, girl. Or ten? Just for you. Just today,
just this once. This is not the most dangerous thing
Brentwood has to offer Sometimes the girl
dreams about the eerie elk-bugle of train cars
jolted from the safety of their straight rails
dreams about the way warm metal tastes like
an open-hand slap against her mouth like
a new copper penny beneath her tongue like
the too-rare steak her father slices in a fury
when her mother takes too long to bring home
milk and the family eats in blue-collared
silence behind wood-paneled doors
About “Inflammation As Girl”
As someone who lives with chronic illness, I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other. ‘Inflammation as Girl’ was a personal exercise in mapping memories and feelings to the stages of physical discomfort my body goes through each time I have a flare.
Author Bio
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and works as a university library dean in Texas. Author of five poetry collections and four chapbooks, her most recent work includes The Discipline of Drowning (winner of the 2025 Broken Tribe Press Poetry Book Award, forthcoming 2026), The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025) and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025) and The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025). Her poetry appears in Berkeley Poetry Review, Wild Roof Journal, The Louisville Review, and more than 150 others. Follow her writing at https://colleensharris.com
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
“I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other.” Read five poems by Colleen S. Harris, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Inflammation As Girl.”
Chapbook Poem: Offering by Richard Jordan
“In my mind, the narrator recognizes that Harper’s fate could very well have been his own, and I hope that readers can relate, in the sense that we all have done reckless things, especially in our youth…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Offering,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Passage by Paul Hostovsky
“When she’d call me on the weekends, I was high half the time, impatient with her, and unforthcoming. It’s one of my greatest regrets. The tears well up just thinking about it. I didn’t grieve her properly. I’m grieving her now.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Passage” from Perfect Disappearances by Paul Hostovsky, along with a few words from the poet.
“The poem captures us both there in the dreaded check up appointment: me clenching crinkling paper, scared of what the lab reports say; him…lab reports in hand like some mysterious document…” Read three poems by Mary Whitlow, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Examined.”