by Catherine Abbey Hodges
by Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen
Crow’s feet. Pointing
in directions taken. All wrong.
Spring fling melted
into a slow summer tango—
a liminal romance &
you offer me ways to live:
creams and vapors,
a softer place to lay.
And as we entwine, cradled
like crabs, limbs clutching
the cardio echo of the other,
I ask if you might be kept.
And rocking, breast against breast
you confess your fear of cages.
I toy with thoughts in an adjacent room;
you are a better hostess than I,
admiring self-reflection in tall grasses,
the dandelions gone to seed,
insects, a surrounding conundrum of beauty,
cicada static: variations on a theme &
you emerge. Like a child’s
fascination with what is not within the box—
we pour ourselves into ill-fitting molds
until cracks appear.
Count the futile attempts before the clay holds
true to its design and we discover intent.
Pretense or predisposed,
prepositional and packaged like ladle and broth:
cupped hands and waiting lips
reaching for the reciprocated gift.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen is a poly-artist and humanitarian residing in Utah. Her poetic work has been featured in Quarterly West, Rust+Moth, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, CrabFat, Peculiar: a queer literary journal, and the anthologies Broken Atoms in Our Hands and Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. She blogs sporadically at secondsetofwings.com and provides regular taxi service for her four children.
by Leah Mueller
You’re jealous of everyone,
even when they’re doing things
you don’t want to do,
because they’re not sitting
at home, feeling jealous of you.
In photos, everyone poses
in glittery frames, grinning
into the kaleidoscope.
At home, the dishes pile up
in the sink, and creditors
won’t stop calling.
Don’t you want to jump
into a car and keep driving,
over mountains and rivers
all the way across
the Atlantic, to a place where
nobody knows your name?
Can anyone blame you
for trying to disappear?
You finally hear
what your voice sounds like,
strong and quiet as trees.
Then one day, you
have a sudden urge
to switch on the computer,
and the whole goddamn thing
starts all over again.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Leah Mueller is the author of two chapbooks and four books. Her most recent book, a memoir entitled Bastard of a Poet, was published in 2018 by Alien Buddha Press. Her work appears in Blunderbuss, The Spectacle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and many other magazines and anthologies. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest.
by Grace Gardiner
after Marty McConnell
I hide behind a waterproof shadow
and red matte lips. You say I can’t hurt,
though you ignore me on our dead-end street.
In the tub at home, I scum pink, peel strings
of pus-puckered skin clean off my nail beds.
I don’t cry. I wait, tuck the bleed under
my tongue, clot pain with spit. In your Ford’s
patinaed backseat I collapsed our altar.
Its centerpiece was me: stripped and naked
and thin as the skin at the wrist, the back
of the knee. I’m not sorry to say the wrong
words for the right reason: I never wanted you.
There are worse things I could do when leaving
is not enough, when leaving is still too much.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Grace Gardiner received her MFA in Writing from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is a former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, burntdistrict, and Mom Egg Review. She’s currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she lives with her partner, the poet Eric Morris-Pusey, and one too many brown recluses.
by Anastasia Jill
She has a home,
A beautiful home,
Inhumed on the pages
Where she draws—
She was never good at history,
So we recreate our own
Laced in paint,
Like on a cave,
In various colors.
There are rocks in my blood
To be unearthed,
Martial secrets
Stowed inside her kidneys
That can only come out in a lie.
We can’t lie to each other.
Instead, we settle for truth.
And this, right here, is my truth:
She is lawful, and that scares me.
What’s more, she senses the chickens
Poking fun at my marrow with their beaks,
Giving my shadow room to breathe,
A chance to escape.
She sees the other girls
Who’ve left me alone in bed,
The men who’ve forced me
To stay in theirs.
She sees that I feel unlovable,
Undeserving of her crafts.
She picks up a pencil,
She sees me, still,
And continues to draw.
The woman on the page is strong,
Virtuous as a helmet.
There is aftermath that’s not my fault—
I am standing tall, but that’s not
The real focus.
There are walls behind me,
Two arms, and a roof.
There is nothing holding it up.
We are all free standing structures.
This home, it is beautiful.
She made it just for me.
This may be just a story,
But it’s one she tells
Until it's our truth.
Fabulist me;
I want to hear it one more time.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Anastasia Jill is a queer poet, fiction writer, and aspiring filmmaker. Her work has been published or is upcoming with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, FIVE:2:ONE, Ambit Magazine, apt, Into the Void Magazine, 2River, Requited Journal, and more.
by Susan Barry-Schulz
An unruly row of forsythia / barbed wire/ a brick wall / those orange and white barrels in construction zones / chicken wire / a split-rail fence / a split-rail fence with chicken wire / a picket fence /a chain link fence / a thick chain drawn across a driveway / invisible fence / electric fence /wrought iron / railroad ties / shadowbox / cinderblocks / stockade /rock walls / lattice work / firewalls / the sound barrier / the great barrier reef / the thin screen to which the stink bugs cling / an even line of Italian Cypress / the phospholipid bilayer membrane of the human
cell—
so many ways we won’t be kept
from one another.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Susan Barry-Schulz is a healthcare professional with a special interest in incorporating Mindfulness and Tai Chi into her practice. Her work has been published recently in The Five-Two, The Wild Word, and Minute Magazine. She is a member of the Hudson Valley Writer's Center and the Mahopac Poetry Workshop. She grew up outside of Buffalo, NY, and now lives in a lake neighborhood in Putnam County with her husband and one or more of her 3 adult children. It all depends.
by Hilary Varner
running up, down
remembering, forgetting my
phone, a sweater in case when
already two minutes late I
pause with one foot
over the threshold
glance at the back door still
open and take in
through the shut, left-side
blinds, something white,
waist-high amid the ducks chipmunks
squirrels stuffing in
the patio’s thrown, bird food—
child in white shirt
bent over, feeding critters too?
I dash and peer
and the morning
stills: A tremendous
white-as-unfolded-paper
rooster is eating sunflower
seeds on my back porch
with his florid wattle and comb
bulging almost indecently
full. At his feet, a rabbit
keeps munching, but he
spots me staring
and stands up, two-and-a half-feet tall,
his head going back
and forth (like someone
told him it should),
as his yellow pencil legs
and six hotdog toes staccato
up and down
next to our grill
where we cooked
his many, packaged wives
before he turns and
takes off in fearless
strides around the hedge
with his tail feathers,
too fluffy for such
a ravishing male, twitching
back. How can I not,
even in heels, open the back door
further,
scatter the fur there to follow? He
glances back, struts
past the neighbor’s purple flowers
and I think, Roosters
don’t fly, remember my phone
in my hand while he watches
and must understand
because he really
runs now, reaching
with those crazed legs
that are too cartoon
to support such white weight,
let him soar between bounds,
or arc around the last row house and
out of the shade
—all lit
engorged red, lifted white
and skinny bursting yellow—
with such grace
I feel we should
watch roosters race
instead of horses—
as he leaps to the left
out of sight.
He was never afraid. His running was
more like showing off or
like he was leading me
into the sun
and to his last place
in the wide, hot grass
to stand, pondering his point
while insisting
and giggling on the phone
that there was a huge, white, gorgeous
rooster
just jogging
behind our houses.
I knew then he was laughing
back, but remembered that
to appear
as a white animal
to only one woman
is something
gods used to do—
that thank god his visit
did not leave me
knocked out and
up as such visits
tend to, but still it struck me
as an impossible wink, meant
just for me, something I had
to run after, to see,
before I was so late for this lunch
with my sisters, the one where I whisper
I am getting married tomorrow.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Hilary Varner received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her poetry has appeared in The Collagist, The Fem, Juked, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, three kids, and a rabbit, in Plainfield, IL, where she freelance edits for money and bakes good things for joy.
by Summar West
for Anya and Anne
When you’re on the run
because nobody’s shown
in a handful of Sundays
and churches come and gone,
you sweat and listen with
earbuds blooming the whole
orchestra, waiting for the
salvation of what feels
like the godforsaken piano.
But wait, isn’t this
a piano concerto you’ve put
on for just this occasion?
Your feet meet pavement
and push off from one thought
to the next anonymous wave
and deeper into knowing
that August is dying and
all you smell is the sea
and all you taste are tears.
You remember that now
another poet-friend, sick too
long, has died too soon and
will not write again about a God
whose many names she called.
And you remember still more:
the pastor-friend whose grief
will go beyond every instrument,
every song for her son who
a year now is gone.
O Brahms or Bono,
Nina or Aretha,
give us some sound
from the pain suffered
down to the finest point,
where then we are asked,
who are you?
I run and remember
that autumn will arrive
and October will remind me
of when my grandmother died,
of all her lost words and letters,
and how inside my house
back then I played on repeat
an acoustic version of Losing My Religion,
or maybe I was listening for
the trumpet’s blaring,
Love Rescue Me.
This season, I’ll go out to run
that memory down and see another
maple flame out to ash, another
bag of leaves taken to the road,
and all the recyclables headed
for Redemption. Even then,
especially then, may I
remember, remember,
what she wrote to me
on a scrap of paper before
she died: being born again is
likened to the working of the wind.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Summar West’s poems have been published in a variety of places, including 491, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Ellipsis, New South, Prairie Schooner, Still, and Tar River Poetry. Born and raised in east Tennessee, she currently lives in coastal Connecticut with her partner and their two daughters.
by Jennifer Met
a cento for Max*
The moon was dark.
She had eyes, I could see them—
eyes like blisters.
She described an orgasm
is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets—
small, precise, and a little wicked.
The hilarious moon—
part bone, part me—
your gift for gab is of cosmic import.
Made of shadow
with white chalk,
your lips, right after mine, form a crescent.
In our bed, in the dark,
when you smile, every tooth is a perfect O
staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.
Look at me and bore me—
to ever be bored
under the light of the moon.
Listening to you makes me naked,
my body lit up—
not sleeping, for who can sleep
beyond the door, in the realest bed
where we levitate—
true not only of the world, but of perceiving it.
*A circular cento using lines from different poems in Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016), starting and ending with “The End.”
Title: “Appeal to my First Love”; 1 “The End”; 2 “Plush Bunny”; 3 “Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York”; 4 “Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture”; 5 “The Senses”; 6 “Lyric Complicity for One”; 7 “Universe Where We Weren’t Artisis”; 8 “The Watercolor Eulogy”; 9 “Poem in Which My Shrink is a Little Boy”; 10 “The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess”; 11 “The Blimp”; 12 “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect And Me Being Afraid”; 13 “For Crow”; 14 “Poem Set in the Day and Night”; 15 “Dawn of Man”; 16 “Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal”; 17 “The Curve”; 18 “Troy”; 19 “Hi, Melissa”; 20 “Afternoon”; 21 “The Big Loser”; 22 “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying To Criticize the Universe”; 23 “Poem To My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”; 24 “The End”
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published or forthcoming in the Comstock Review, Gravel, Gulf Stream, Harpur Palate, Juked, Kestrel, Moon City Review, Nimrod, Sleet Magazine, Tinderbox, and Zone 3, among other journals. She is the author of the chapbook, Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press, 2017).
by Kindra McDonald
How long is the longest breath
you can hold? How long the grudge
of silence? How do you fight buoyancy
so well? Swelling your lungs with birdshot—
The slow rain bends the stems
of the tall weeds like piano keys.
In the steeple of your hands we lean in again
of the tall weeds like piano keys
the slow rain bends the stems
so well swelling your lungs with birdshot
of silence, how do you fight buoyancy?
You can hold, how long the grudge,
how long is the longest breath?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Kindra McDonald received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is an adjunct writing professor and doctoral student. Her work has appeared in Rise up Review, Plainsongs and others. She is the author of the chapbooks Concealed Weapons (ELJ Publications, 2015) and Elements and Briars (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016). Her full-length book, Fossils, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives with her husband in Coastal Virginia where she bakes and wrangles cats.
by Rachael Lynn Nevins
It’s possible to go wild again, says the woman sitting next to me
over breakfast this January morning at the monastery.
There are neurons in our hearts and guts,
and we fail to heed them because we’ve filled our minds
with language.
I’ve just met this woman
sitting here at this table by the ox-herding pictures.
She tells me she’s a farmer and that she speaks to the earth.
Getting messy is my dharma. The soil is alive
and it wants us to listen.
I live in the city where, I confess, my fingers never touch the soil.
I have to seek the wilderness inside, among
our cups and bowls and my children’s many
miniature cars and trucks. My dharma is simple.
I wake in the dark to write poems by hand, and the words
rise up from inside of me, unbidden.
They want me to listen.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Rachael Lynn Nevins is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer whose poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. She teaches Online Advanced Poetry for The Writers Studio.
by Jessica Jacobs
“Other lovers want to live with particular eyes
I only want to be your stylist.”
—Pablo Neruda
Who needs Rumpelstiltskin, when such treasure
abounds: her gold woven
around my bike gears, tangled in my toothbrush,
vining every drain—even, sometimes, found
in my mouth upon waking. And just
this morning, from the bathroom, she called me in.
My mama’s the only one who ever
brushed out my hair, she said. But you’re
my wife. You should know.
I began at the bottom, her curls separating
with the thick sound of good cloth tearing.
Do you see why I had no friends
when I was little? she asked. Mama
brushed out my hair each day before school.
I eased my fingers, for the first time,
all the way through; asked how that felt for her.
Vulnerable, she said.
Shimmering out beneath the overhead light—a climbing
of kudzu, a symphony of trumpet vines—her hair revealed itself.
It was like Velcro, she said. Anything would stick in it—
bubble gum, spitwads, pencils. I’d come home crying
and Mama would hold my ugly, frizzy head
and say, Baby, they’re just jealous.
As though her love could make the lie so.
When it comes to her, her mother and I
have this kind of love in common. Only now, the lie
has come to pass. My wife, whose hair
is the shade of farm-fresh yolks, the color of things rich
on the tongue. Whose hair sings the plaintive song
of bed springs. Whose hair is the drifting
smoke from a village of chimneys, corkscrews
enough for a thousand bottles of wine. A ski slope
of s-curves, a grove of twirling maple keys,
every playground slide
worth sliding. Before a rapt audience,
a company of ballerinas cambers their hands
to trace out, in the air, your hair; my dear angora
goat, my cloud of bats spiraling from the cave.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her second collection Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2019. She lives in Asheville with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and serves as the Associate Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. You can find more of her work at www.jessicalgjacobs.com.
by Dayna Patterson
Grief wolfed me from the inside gnawed my
spine and I could roll over and suffer or dig a
pit and bait it flay the beast on my marriage
bed I chose the shovel I chose the hunter’s
knife to slit grief scrotum to throat and no I
didn’t know I took a murderer as husband
and please keep in mind married so long I’d
acquired the habit of twoness two minds two
crowns two pairs of eyes the worst word in
any language alone
and letting go I felt
formal as a stone splitting and a brother-in-
law’s suit was a solution to my un-halving
yes frailty if frail is to bury my dead and seize
fruit growing over the grave and if I had to
do it again perhaps Polonius this time yes
even in his fussy grandiloquence I tell you
remarriage would’ve still been overhasty still
a thorn to my son still this old heart’s
cleaving
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Dayna Patterson's creative work has appeared recently in Hotel Amerika, So to Speak, Western Humanities Review, and Zone 3. She is a former managing editor of Bellingham Review, founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, and poetry editor for Exponent II Magazine. She is a co-editor (with Tyler Chadwick and Martin Pulido) of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (Peculiar Pages, 2018). Connect with her at: www.daynapatterson.com.
by Julia B. Levine
Say it and it will be so.
Say there are borders that cannot be broken.
That science is an expertly shot horror film
we are wise to avoid before bed.
Say that an executive order
has unshackled our lives from natural law,
our flesh from the entwined entire.
That, in time, we do not vanish.
Say that the first week you know it's terminal,
I bake bread and bear it warm,
swaddled in paper towels, against my chest.
Outside, your husband picks lemons
shin-deep in a lawn gone neon-green.
In pictures above the table,
your two boys shine.
Say that I’m not sick too
of love as the original congress on loss.
Of hope handcuffed to habeas corpus.
Say blue for your eyes, black for your hair,
wren for your twitching hand in mine.
Say that it’s not happening
so that it won’t, the world no longer turning
at the speed of betrayal, a little sunlight instead
sown across your kitchen floor.
Say that we are poised to enter spring
and in the alt-truth all around us
it's smooth sailing, easy peasy,
nothing but the blast furnaces
of the almond orchards fired up,
exploding in a sudden, ethereal snow.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Julia B. Levine’s most recent poetry collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press 2014), was awarded the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her awards include the Tampa Review Poetry Prize for her second collection, Ask, and the Anhinga Prize in Poetry and a bronze medal from Foreword Magazine for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven. Widely published, her work has been anthologized in many collections. She lives and works in Davis, California.
by Issa M. Lewis
The weight of his gunmetal tongue was staggering.
A projectile of marked velocity, propelled
by an explosion—in this case, uncontrolled. I had deflected—
turned a shoulder to his trigger finger, left a strand
of hair that must have tugged in just the wrong way—
just enough—or not nearly—depending on which of us you asked.
The sex we never had made him twitch. Someone told me later
it was because he liked me so much
that he wanted me to vanish. That he wanted to do the vanishing.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press, 2017). A runner-up in the 2017 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize and 2013 winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in journals such as Jabberwock, Pearl, and Naugatuck River Review.
by Beth Gordon
Hungry for asparagus and honeysuckle, damaged forsythia,
the thick persistent dandelions which have also just arrived, we sit
on the unswept deck and drink the last of syrupy Christmas wine,
ready for clear liquor and citrus, lemon or lime or tangerines,
for violets to emerge from the muddy ground, purple and naïve
to our impatience, our forced hibernation, our weeks of unpredictable
temperatures and hurricanes where there is no ocean.
Mockingbirds repeat our hungry cadence and wait for baby
foxes to respond, the white cat bathes in half-damp dirt, letting newborn
field mice escape his precise claws, today is not a day for murder
or lightning, he looks the other way because he knows where
to find them in morning darkness, he will always find them no matter
the season, the barometric pressure or category six tornadoes
or possible ice in the first full days of May.
A train groans its winter song unaware that crows and lesser birds
are disoriented, dizzy with pollen, unable to mimic the sound
of February frost, of legal gunfire, deadly force, of inconsolable
mothers, on this late April evening when the sun promises to bloom
until midnight, swaddle us like abandoned babies on Viking ships,
our sun-starved skin ready to shed, to metamorphose
into living creatures who need no touch or care.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Beth Gordon received her MFA from American University a long time ago and was not heard from again until 2017 when her poems began to appear in numerous journals including Into the Void, Outlook Springs, Verity La and After Happy Hour Review. Landlocked in St. Louis for 17 years, Beth has taught several local writing workshops, and is co-founder of a poetry reading series in Grafton, IL. She is also co-editor of Gone Lawn.
by Jude Marr
a treachery of flesh and bone: hope no
wider than a walking cane: pain
no killer will cross—
fear this pain
back away, back
away
or stand: take a stand: fake
it till you make a stand: broken but (not)
bowed: knotted but (un)frayed: laid
out flat—
no, not that—
fetal curl: furled fern leaf: ammonite
or amber shell: trunk or tusk: snaking
root—
from brain to base, a cord—
strength is curved, not straight: I make
myself into a curve—
bear this pain
wait, wait
wait
the turning gyrus cingulate
will motivate
a slow uncurl—
my spine and I reintegrate—
courage is pain
(don’t) resist
curve your brain
into a fist.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Jude Marr teaches, and writes poetry, as protest. They are currently a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and their first chapbook Breakfast for the Birds (Finishing Line), was published in 2017. Recent credits include Nightjar Review, Weatherbeaten and Punch Drunk. Jude is also poetry editor for r.kv.r.y.
by Chloe Martinez
Nimbus: droplets in air, cloud-thought word
that rainbows at the right angle, as along the
stair-step artificial river where the rainbow
trout start small, just gently making their way
upstream—but if we proceed to the first little
waterfall place, we see the bigger ones making
the leap, some failing and one caught mid-
evolution for a moment, gripping with one fin-
arm the tiny fence, falling back—but they keep
flinging forward their slick slight bodies, as if trying
to demonstrate a principle, as if God made them
to show us what effort is. A real river is rushing,
after recent rains, beside us, but the rainbows
don’t even know or care, or do they? But at the top
of the fake stream, the wall is higher, so
the biggest fish leap up again and again but cannot
cross over—but the breathless curl of their
fan tails, but the wild and doomed enterprise of them—
but we lean forward, watching, as if our bodies
might lift theirs into the air, but a little higher—
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Chloe Martinez lives with her husband and two daughters in Claremont, CA, where she teaches on the religions of South Asia at Claremont McKenna College. A graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Waxwing, The Normal School, The Cortland Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is at work on a scholarly monograph and seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection.
by Melissa Eleftherion
I am trying to understand you, moth
Your brown blink of dun fur dotted white buzzing
You, dead on my office floor
You, taunting me on the house porch
Who do you carry?
The Internet tells me you bear a skull on your thorax
But I see a smiling pig snout as if you welcomed the down and out and muddy
Do I know you? Did we meet on the beached fishing boat in Monterosso?
I sense you have a message transcending statistical data
We are both honey-named short proboscis Medusas
Larvae for the undercurrent’s meat
Taxonomical aberrations
Pierce the wax, damage the fruit
The myth of my Italian heritage says I may have the malocchia
To be stalked by a death’s head moth
To be stalked by wings I must carry a horn
Stout tongue of the stigma
If the oil forms an eye, your fur is mine
Myth says moths are dead souls
Your body was as intact as a specimen
As I set you in the wastebasket
Where is the apparition you’ve been carrying?
I want to talk to her.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She grew up in Brooklyn, dropped out of high school, and went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from Mills College and an MLIS from San Jose State University. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018) & six chapbooks: huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (Dusie, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (poems-for-all, 2017), green glass asterisms (poems-for-all, 2017) & little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Founder of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange for San Francisco State University, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she works as a Teen Librarian, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series at Ukiah Library. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
by Marjorie Thomsen
for Wendy DeGroat
a seedling pushing through ash is worlds away
from morning’s lawnmower, neighborhood turkey vulture
and its shock of magnificence above children
rapt with a small ball. Her lines bring a woman’s
hands to life: cayenne onto the chick peas. I ache
for the mundane but come evening, will try to woo
something celestial to my open and undraped window.
Deep-end blue napery on table, swaying wildflowers
in a funky-shaped vase. I swear I’ll make nectarine-cardamom
jam to sing into the deep bowl of morning. Before bed and dreams
without words, there’s the private act of serene ablutions—
lather of warm water and rose soap. Her poems.
_______________________________________________________________________________________