Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to present four original poems by Betty Stanton as our fifth biweekly featured poet of the Winter 2026 issue.
Poems
Requiem in Shadow
for Ollie, 1998
Death comes as something slower, older than the call of trumpets
or revelations, a winged thing dragging its shadows through
the darkness, breath thick with morphine and prayer. It moves
as something that has already memorized every name that will
tremble beneath its hand. When scant years should not be enough
to summon it, it unbuttons the sky above a boy’s body while
streetlights hum his dying hymn. It comes where veins sing
litanies through glass, where lips split open beneath the weight
of want, where skin barely remembers how warmth feels, it kneels
beneath the mattress, patient, its face beautiful and ruined, it whispers
don’t be afraid. It hums a low dirge that pretends to comfort.
Death comes barefoot, hair strung with salt, its robe trailing dust
and cigarette smoke, its mouth filled with rain. It walks corridors
wearing the smell of blood and milk, counting backwards from
eternity. When it reaches the boy and leans close to breathe a song in
his ear that weaves everything that could have been. There is no
deep loss in it. There never was. Only the body remembering earth
and salt and silence. It sings a song of bone and prayer and everything
that could be breath. It touches the fevered cheek and slowly sings it
beautiful, it takes the trembling hand and fills it with light that almost
feels like forgiveness. Death leans close and the boy, half dreaming
and half gone, finally remembers the name he has been waiting for.
Vein Song
The veins are singing their blue machinery, a low
electric prayer turning under her skin. Sometimes
it feels holy, sometimes like a warning, the blood
is humming a name it should not know. She dreams
in insects and open mouths, in the sound of wings
against glass, the slow spread of something invisible
moving through her, deliberate as mercy. She wakes
with a taste of iron and light, her body still tensed and
humming, her heart stuttering against the current in
her ribs, the river whispering the wrong name, too
wet, too human, a promise left unkept. Still, she kneels
to drink. Still, the water remembers her mouth. Blood
moves beneath her skin, slow and deliberate, a psalm
refusing translation. She feels it at her wrists, stuck in
her throat, the hollow of her back. A pulse beats, hers
and not hers, a rhythm that the doctor measured once
and called incurable. His voice tasted of rust and cool
rainwater, the first storm after diagnosis; metal, sharp,
alive. Each word he left behind glows faintly under her
skin, a lantern lit in quarantine. Her veins keep up their
singing, their machinery bright, unrepentant. What lives
in her now hums through every vessel, the fever spreading.
Building a Future Body
We draw what will come next and we begin
with bone, porous. We map the way light
pours through it when it is held up to the sun.
We add breath, not as lungs but as the sound
they make as they rise up together in chorus.
We sing the body soft and kind, make it small
to burrow into the comfort of other bodies.
We make it able to remember water even in the
middle of droughts, and the places in the chest
where mercy can breathe, the small spaces
lined with ash and heartache and small hopes.
When we finish, the body holds the world.
Prometheus In Open Heart Surgery
In the waiting room my sister’s heart stops
singing. She waits in the white quiet, seeking
sanctuary in this place where hearts stutter
and blood stretches with a vulture’s hunger.
Inside, she is tendered open like an offering,
heartbeat twitching against surgical steel.
Prometheus knew far less than this moment.
He had a mountain, chain. A liver that regrew
every dusk. Her sacrifice is much less gore,
just flame in the shape of devotion, vultures
with no feathers, no song, only gloved hands
and the careful whisper of antiseptic mercy.
Her chest is an altar. The ribs folded in on
themselves, the pages of a well-worn hymnal.
In the blood’s wet song there is ache pulsing
with something almost holy and almost gone.
Smoke rises from her sternum like feathers.
She carries the injured organ inside her own,
the gift stolen to make man love, and bleed,
and to name every small pain after its beauty.
His heart remembers that, still beating, it fed
vultures too. A muscle returning to memories.
No one remembers here how loud the silence is
once you’ve been opened, how long embers live
in the ruins of what cannot still be held in arms.
Prometheus was luckier. He knew what moments
he suffered for. My sister knows the endlessness
of heat, the dull thud of a heart trying not to stop.
About “Vein Song”
‘Vein Song’ grew, as several of my poems have recently, from the experience of being in too many hospital rooms with my mother and various other family members. My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.
Author Bio
Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and teaches in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She received her MFA from the University of Texas – El Paso and also holds a doctorate in educational leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review.
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.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.