2025 Frontier OPEN Finalists Part Three: Shane Emery and Mahal Garcia Liu
In “Wheel of Fortune,” Emery’s command of form reveals how horrors can exist in isolated silos of devastation, weighing heavily on the mind — yet they blur at the edges, bleeding into one another until they become something incomprehensible, vast, and personally dwarfing.
“NEGROS BLEEDING-HEART” is a heartfelt letter to ancestry — a quiet reckoning with the unseen labor, love, and loss passed down through generations. It lingers in the shared, everyday moments: melting crackers, game shows, hand-sewn pajamas. These fragments trace the unspoken resilience of our mothers. And their mothers. In grief, in food, in silence, the poem asks how we inherit strength — and who we will become for those who follow.
Both poems confront tragedy — not only its weight when carried alone, but the invisible work done across generations to shield us from its sharpest edges through quiet, steadfast love.
Enjoy their poetry below.
Wheel of Fortune
by Shane Emery
NEGROS BLEEDING-HEART
by Mahal Garcia Liu
Shane Emery (he/him) is a writer and educator living in rural Michigan. He teaches English language arts to a diverse and exceptional group of high school students in an early college program.
Mahal Garcia Liu’s work orbits questions of systems—ecological, bodily, political—and fractures that make them visible. Her writing draws from her lived experience navigating cultural worlds, chronic illness, a near-death experience, and the ongoing devastation and resilience of our natural environment. She explores ways humans ache for healing. Her roots in Southern Oregon, time in the Bay Area, and lived experience navigating both conflicting and complementary cultural worldviews have grounded her in bioregionalist thought. Her poetry inhabits the intersection of environmental rupture, reproductive tension, and inherited mythologies, often using birds and natural disasters as recurring metaphors for containment, transformation, and dissonance. Her poems emerge from a place of obsessive observation—of weather, of breath, of connection, of losses that loom and those long since absorbed. Mahal Anacleto Garcia Liu has been recognized by the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), the nation’s oldest multi-disciplinary arts organization for women, and awarded a generous National Parks Artist-in-Residence grant to further her writing practice.
