Where words become tides, and every story finds its shore.

Three Poems by Steve Boyet

Terra Abençoada (2025)

The land of my forefathers
A century ago
The thread between us, frayed

Yet, I’m drawn to the volcanic stones
Like a salmon

I breathe in what they left behind
Their silence fills my lungs

I feel their salt in my eye
The burn of saudade

Yet, Terra Abençoada holds me still

Their voices echo from the breaking waves
Although I forgot, the stones never did

Angra (2025)

Coffee at Praça Vella
Where futures are imagined between drags of a cigarette
An argument stumbles out of an alleyway

Ruins hold their breath
History presses against walls
As jazz washes over ash and stone
The light of poetry laps at a bookstore window

Church bells toll over conversation
Yearning for recognition
Fado sneaks from a café

A girl slips ahead of her shadow
Not asking for permission
Time watches from an upstairs window
But does not follow

Mornings in Feteira (2025)

My mornings are a cup of coffee in a hammock
The kind that bites back
A novel in the wind
The snap of a biscoito

While the ilhéus stand guard from the beyond
Volcanic patchwork tumbles into the sea
Tile roofs scatter the landscape

At the stone house salt rides the air
Threading through clothes hung above a quinta
Time, unhurried, tends to the vines

Morning fog lifts to a barking dog
Yielding to the cooing of doves

A sea breeze dances with humidity
Each vying for the lead

Steve Boyet–American of Azorean ancestry (Photos also fro, the author)

Mission

Salt Lines: Cartographies of Return is a literary haven for emerging voices of the Azorean diaspora—an archipelago of words that echoes across the Atlantic. We seek to gather those who translate memory into rhythm and geography into emotion, who transform salt and distance into language.
Here, writing becomes both compass and vessel: a way of tracing one’s origin, of mapping the distances between language and home, and of discovering that every act of creation is a return.

---

Vision

We envision a living constellation of new writers and poets whose words form bridges of light between islands and continents—between the past that still breathes in the sea’s pulse and the future shaped by imagination.
The Azores, in this vision, are more than a place—they are a continuity, a resonance that endures wherever the Portuguese language finds renewal. Through poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, Salt Lines: Cartographies of Return celebrates the ever-expanding map of Azorean belonging.

---

Call for Submissions

Filamentos invites emerging poets, essayists, dreamers, and storytellers from all walks of life—whether born on the islands, descended from them, or simply moved by their tides—to share their work.
Send us your tides of memory, your winds of exile, your salt-written dreams.
We welcome poetry, micro-essays, and lyrical reflections in English or Portuguese that explore themes of identity, migration, belonging, and return.

Your words need no passport—only truth.
Every map begins with a story. Begin yours here.

Please send submissions to: dborges@mail.fresnostate.edu