Publia Cantos I

July 18th, Anno Domini 2026

         A healthy ecosystem requires diversity and tension. This is something we know from our love of the outdoors and believe just as firmly about literature. Publia Cantos does not intend to agree with everything published here. If a piece has vitality it will live here, regardless of where it sits artistically or politically. This is truest in Il Profeta, where we would actively welcome voices from the fringe in all directions. Like Fiume this is a place for artists of all natures to exist all at once, to form a choir of dissenting differing voices all determined in their own way, it is named after The Cantos, a sometimes rambling collection from a single mind, but here made many.

This first issue leans heavily on Il Vate. Good essays have proven harder to track down than good poetry, and the submissions to the poetry section have been exceptional. We publish what is ready.

Il Vate

Letter to an Old Friend; By M.P. Strayer

Day by day the years deepen the distance between us

and it’s been so long now since I’ve heard your voice.

What do you sound like, friend,

whose laughter still peals through my dreams?

What do you think about, distant brother,

when you wake in the morning,

whose sleeping countenance I saw first at my side

through the daybreak of how many years?

Is it the imminence of rent?

Or do the cries of an infant I’ve never met

coax you from the blankets of a lover’s arms?

And what does she do? And how did you meet?

You who taught me friendship have grown now

into the shape of the man you would always be

and I’ve done the same and it seems impossible

there were weeks we never worried once

about which bills to pay.

Through your father’s guidance, I who never had a father

gleaned my earliest and most enduring model

of the responsibilities of strength, the necessity

and courage of masculinity—

but I loved you long before that, little brother,

as you loved me.

I loved you across the decades of schoolyard pavement,

across meadows of soft and flaxen grass, over fields

of confectionary snow. I loved you

through rivers, through forests of shaggy trees,

through the flickering dreams

of a thousand horror movies, in theaters

since torn down.

I loved you as we splashed, chasing trout in the shallows;

as we ran, hounding jackals from their hidden dens.

Do you remember the stars, old friend, and how

they used to be ours? On flights of fancy

our brotherhood leapfrogged the lumens

of the Milky Way. On rocketships

we vaulted sleeping countries, from

the Sierra Nevada to steaming everglades,

I loved you in the spume of the Pacific,

I loved you in the sunshine of the Gulf.

Once I saw you pull a shark from the sea.

In a boxing ring with the adrenaline bleeding from my brow

I looked across the canvas into the eyes of a stranger

and took heart because close at my back

I heard you calling my name.

When I remember you

I see fantastic landscapes peopled with faces

forever gone.

Do you think of them, friend, our ghosts?

Do you think of me?

When I remember you

I feel the wonderment of adventure:

you were my comrade through deaths,

heartbreaks, journeys, delusions, fights,

mistakes; and I feel shame, now,

because in your eyes I perceived a hero

and I never let you know

it wasn’t one-sided;

I feel shame because I dominated our lives,

because I could be so blind, so selfish,

so capriciously

cruel;

because I loved you

and I think I hurt you, yes,

I think I hurt you,

I did.

Silence for laughter.

Memories for presence.

Days becoming years becoming

familiar voices heard through a phone

and cemetery grass.

Text messages for campfires.

Friend, brother, if

through me you could not learn yourself,

if, in spite of me, you nonetheless grew,

I’m sorry I wasn’t better,

I’m sorry I’m such a coward,

I’m sorry I let time build a wall across our lives.

You, to me, are inextricable:

woven through my skin, your light;

in your eyes my brightest days

and specters of a time

we traveled the stars,

when we rode on the back of that bear in the heavens

and carried comets in our palms…

But, I should mention, you know

it wasn’t really a shark you caught that day,

that’s just how it looked as you reeled it in—

it was a king salmon

and it weighed fifty pounds

and you were twelve years old and you carried it

back to our campsite like a man

the spoils of a slain leviathan

and gave it to your dad

and he grilled it over an open flame

and there was no war

and there was no race

and that night I tasted the magic of fire

in a bite of scorched and coral flesh

gifted me through the will of your hands.

Bury Me Under the Yew Tree; By Jordon Elings

The end has come for the heartbeat's song

Now I hear the ringing of the holy seraph's sacred gong

As soul departs and flesh must fade

Place me under wild wisdom's shade

Let ravenous roots feast upon my echoes

So the sage's seed may rise up from below

Let the winds be blessed by the earth's great majesty

And the weary birds be given beautiful sanctuary

My bones now serve as new life's womb

What better place could be made to serve as my honored tomb?

This Kind of Immediacy Has Got To Be Archaic; By Mila

Terracotta bird #4

Athens,

Said the label. Athens—

In a case, in clean dust

Caught behind glass pane

Caught in painted

Urn-mouth, small enough

For an open palm.

Bird #4, as if there had been

Others with red paint

Under one wing

Under one wing: red

Catches. Catches, a hook—

A hook in an eye

Slowly opening.

A bird is a difficult thing to keep

Still.

A difficult thing; the keeping

Of a small thing alive

Like a reddish red robin when it’s still—

Well, as if naming could keep it

From falling out

Of trees. Or out

Of name.

The light moves across the museum plaque.

Archeology: to go through

And through the dirt, unearthing

what’s left for keeping— I am red-handed.

Red-handed, I am sieving through

And through time and there’s a bird beneath it all— there’s a time

I found a baby robin

All open pink beak, all beak, all open

Taking whatever I offered within

The day it lived.

There— separating the bird under old, old glass

From the bird in the palm of my hands— clay

Beneath some tree, some stone, some earth.

The eye remembers it is an opening.

Il Prosista

Nil

Il Profeta

Lone Star Divination; By Koresh

Texas is very interesting, and I’m not just glazing my own state. I’ll be honest, I genuinely despise the climate here. The southeast is subtropical, which makes summer hellish from about nine to six every day. The west is a lame arid desert. The only decent part, the north, has nothing going on in terms of human development, since it’s pretty much a steppe. But I do think Texas is going to play a key role in the future of America, though I’m not sure yet whether it’ll be for better or for worse. There is immense potential there for an extraordinary amount of change in demographics, whether ethnography or population size, as well as in culture, religion, and economics.

    Consider that there are not one but two Orthodox priests I’ve found operating out of Texas with large YouTube channels. One is Fr. Peter Heers, whose “Orthodox Ethos” channel leans heavily into a scholastic approach. He likes to do deep dives on different subjects and to be more academic about things. The other, Fr. Moses, leans much more into cultural elements and memes. When you see a worldview synthesizing radically different streaks like that, in my opinion, that’s when you know it’s going to be popping off in the near future. 

    An example would be the explosion of Nick Fuentes into the mainstream. His views spread the way they did because they were both intellectually rigorous and because he’s able to speak to the current culture and tap into what people in their twenties actually think. If NJF never told jokes, he’d be nothing. If he only told jokes, he’d be nothing. 

    The same is true for the leftists. I would say they kind of peaked in the 2000s, after a solid few decades of dominating the cultural marketplace. But in the 2010s they lost their touch. At first they started to break down academically. Really this began long before the 2010s, but it broke into the mainstream when people like Jordan Peterson, soft spoken and inoffensive scholarly types, were castigated as though they were planning a genocide against trans people in Canada. That’s when it became clear the left was no longer confident in its own presuppositions. After that, they rapidly became incredibly unfunny and disconnected from vast swathes of the youth. Movies are such a good example. There is a genuine difference in vibes between the early 2010s and the late 2010s. 

    Which brings me back to my original point. Texas is going to be essentially an ideological battleground over the next decade. You’ve got the demographic churn, the money, and the sheer size of the place, and on top of that you’ve got these competing worldviews already fighting to synthesize the rigorous and the popular, the academic and the meme. That’s exactly the kind of recipe that produces whatever comes next. So Texas will be somewhat ahead of the curve in seeing what’s “in” and what’s “out” because it’s the place where all of these streaks are going to collide first and hardest. When the rest of the country finally catches up to whatever’s coming, odds are it will have already been tried out in Texas.

Il Fabbro

In lieu of any living artist giving us something to work with, here is an artist both fitting for the 250th 4th of July and whose vitality has yet to dim.

Thank you for being here at the start. Publia Cantos is new and small and intends to stay small enough to maintain our vitality, one good piece at a time. If something in this issue moved you, check out the artist who did the moving. If you have work, send it to us.

None of this exists without the writers who trusted us with their work. Our gratitude to M.P. Strayer, Jordan Elings, Mila, and Koresh for being the first voices in this journal. Find more of their work at the links below.

M.P. Strayer       https://substack.com/@mpstrayer
Jordan Elings     https://substack.com/@millenialpoems
Mila                    https://substack.com/@milsmeloche
Koresh   

All works published in Publia Cantos remain the sole property of their respective authors. Republication without permission of the original author is prohibited.