by Paula Bohince
My birthright
by Lauren Milici
I bleed for the first time in two years. I tell everyone. Someone close to me says, wow, it’s like
you’re a real woman again. Amenorrhea means no children, or children if you’re lucky. The
Latin translates to no moon. I am a moonless woman. The Pollock painting does not depict me.
Often, I think of the infertile wife & the husband who leaves her. How nobody wants to admit
they’ve been left. But I’m a real woman now. Someone will keep me. Someone will look past the
other things. The insomnia. The compulsion to pick holes in freshly healed skin. I can cook, too.
I can clean. I can read to kids at night, even if they aren’t mine.
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Lauren Milici is a Florida native who writes poetry, teaches English, and is currently getting her MFA in Creative Writing somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia. When she isn’t crafting sad poems about sex, she’s either writing or shouting into the void about film, TV, and all things pop culture. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @motelsiren.
by Diane K. Martin
The night is almost too quiet.
His snore is the exhaust of a semi
roaring down the two-lane. The dog
at her water bowl is a summer lake
lapping the silt beach. And the woman
—big glasses, denim jeans, hair
pulled back with a scarf—holds
a yellow pencil in her teeth.
The woman is the poem.
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Diane K. Martin has published work in SWWIM Every Day, American Poetry Review, Field, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Plume, and many other print and online journals. Her poems have been included in Best New Poets and have received a Pushcart Special Mention. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published in 2010 by Dream Horse Press. Her second book, Hue & Cry, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in September, 2019.
by Kristina Bicher
a prison spoon, sharp teeth, a rosary
and chicken feet, a compass rose, magnetic blood
TNT, equanimity, and a diamond file for a finger;
jeweler’s glass, rubber suit, passport stamp
kick in the ass, the right shoes, the North Star
a shiv and an ampule of musk; sulfuric acid,
wooden mask, litmus test, laughing gas, atom bomb
doctor’s note, hammer of Thor, a metaphor,
a stronger rope, a longer hope, a golden tongue
le mot juste, safer roost, divining rod
echolocation and a sleeve of magical staves.
But in order to exit, I first had to step over the body.
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Kristina Bicher is a poet, essayist and translator; her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review ,Plume, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, Barrow Street, The Atlantic, Harvard Review and others. Author of She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again (forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2019) and Just Now Alive (2014), she earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Harvard University.
by Angela Narciso Torres
Her sadness is coarse and thick as a horsehair overcoat.
As a child I tried it on. Its heavy folds engulfed me.
I learned to balance the weight on my head the way
fruit sellers carried baskets of mangoes on their crowns.
Mornings it cloyed to my throat like the hairy pits of drupes.
My eyes teared. I tried to spit. It insisted, impeded my breathing.
I swallowed the bitter seed. Washed it down like the whale
who gulped a grown man and kept him in darkness for days.
As a child I learned from an aunt:
if you swallow a seed, a tree will grow in your stomach.
I nurture her sadness like a sapling.
Decades of summers pass. The tree fruits.
Lay your hand on my chest. Feel the heft
of sour-sweet drupes my mother’s tears have fed.
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Angela Narciso Torres, author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry), has recent or forthcoming work in POETRY, Missouri Review, Bellingham Review, Quarterly West, and Cortland Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she’s a senior and reviews editor for RHINO and serves on the editorial panel of New England Review.
by Maureen Seaton
I parted my own sea and you came to me: sort of unscripted, sort of splendid.
A loose bolt in the imagination—the very one that got me in trouble sipping
lilac wine (stolen from you five minutes ago). Remember? You were breaking
in your ukulele. All those tiny hand movements. I glued myself into a collage
and you flew. There was something old school about us. Or scientifically
unsound. We made faces at Czars. My eyes were browning then, and yours
were shaped like starfish. You never know who you’ll run into as you sweep
the sea with a slender stalk. I’ve carried my life inside me for so long now,
never knowing where it would take me, so irretrievable, so stark raving mine.
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Maureen Seaton has authored twenty poetry collections, both solo and collaborative, most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019) and Fisher (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her awards include the Iowa Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Audre Lorde Award, NEA fellowship, and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), also garnered a “Lammy” and was recently reprinted in paperback (2018). ). With poet Neil de la Flor, she edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). Seaton teaches at the University of Miami.
by Kristin Ryan
She is bruised by sunlight.
Uncertain hands
move towards
a tea cup full of grapes.
She remembers it being easier this way.
Bowls are simply too much:
they can trick you into filling them—
what if you can’t stop—
Listen: sometimes a girl can’t eat,
becomes afraid of kitchens and knives.
The way the air presses skin, through
blood into bone, into the marrow.
No, it’s better to stay here
in the living room where blues and yellows weep
from the starry nights, the sunflowers,
the wheat fields on the walls. She wonders if
this room will become her wheat field—
if his face will become her gun.
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Kristin Ryan is a poet working towards healing, and full sleeves of tattoos. She is a recipient of the Nancy D. Hargrove Editor's Prize in Poetry, was listed as a Write Bloody Finalist, and has been nominated for Best New Poets. Her poems have been featured in Glass, Jabberwock Review, Milk and Beans, among others. She holds an MFA from Ashland University and works in the mental health field. She tweets @kristinwrites.
by Dion O’Reilly
Appetite makes them keen
when they scan the tunneled field
for shivers in the dead grass.
Their vision sharpens, pupils dilate.
From a mile away, they see
their feed, and they take it.
All my life, I’ve stowed my stories
like a box of banned books
under the bed. Each one, unforgiven,
an arc of trouble and want.
They quicken my hunger
for what I’ll never have
or never have again—
a mother mainly, certain men,
but a sister and brother too, a city
I walked in with hot paper cups,
my lips foamed with cappuccino
as it rained and rained.
Oh, the world feels tidal
when I get like this, when l can’t stop
hunting for something intimate and filling.
I see it lift from the soil.
The sun, a muzzle flash,
turning the meadow bright, burning
off the haze. I soar in, see it magnified,
everything itself only more so.
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Dion O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Canary Magazine, Spillway, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review and a many other journals and anthologies, including a Lambda Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts and a variety of prizes and contests.
by Erin Wilson
My mother did not bear me to metaphysical platitudes.
She pushed me out like a package through her purple crucifix,
her luxurious black fur a bramble at earth's door.
I spend my years recycling energy through this flesh flap.
And yet somewhere in the branches of the greenish-white sycamore
that grows stubbornly from the crescent of my mind, sings a bird.
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Erin Wilson has contributed poems to The Adirondack Review, San Pedro River Review, Split Rock Review, and Minola Review, with work forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, Juked, and Kestrel. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.
by Crystal Stone
There are yellow skies and no
storm sirens. The hail bursts
large enough to break my window
and I think about letting nature in,
to clean my carpet. The thunder is
a heartbeat, mine. My eyes June
with longer days. They warm
and lengthen. The prairie grasses
outside look blue because my eyes
want them to water beaches
instead of streets. I want my bed
to boat my body on the coast I miss.
My hair is spring, blooms flyaways.
I’ve lost so much. Many poems, always
listening to others. They tornado my mind
empty of my words. I don’t want
to sound like the men I’ve talked to.
Only the women. Only the earth.
Only the grasses, wind, hail and sky.
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Crystal Stone's poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in New Verse News, Occulum, Anomaly, Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, Poets Reading the News, Jet Fuel Review, Badlands Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Her first collection of poetry, Knock-off Monarch (Dawn Valley Press), was recently released on Amazon.
by Mary Block
I want some loneliness justified by my location.
I want to purchase a piece of the earth.
I want to be in on that giant joke.
I want a fence around my family.
I want the burden of aging infrastructure.
The urge to complain about all the things
I own. I want the place to look overgrown.
Like, potted plants in the bathroom.
Big buxom banana leaves. Ferns.
I want an alarm. I want to love a place
so much I install a siren.
I want a gut renovation.
Maintain some original details
without all the darkness and wasted space.
I want some land. I want the earth
and the sky above it.
I want the mineral rights, the air rights.
I want the right to take legal action
if someone encroaches on my boundaries.
I want to be right when I say
this whole damn thing is mine.
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Mary Block lives and writes in her hometown of Miami, Florida. Her poems have been featured in Nimrod Journal, Sonora Review, Rattle, and Conduit, among other publications. She is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
by Cara Waterfall
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
the belly of this hardscrabble street growls under bald acacia trees. smoke from the
cooking fires uncoils from metal roofs, riddled with bird shit. in front, the floodlit
disarray of rickety chairs and tables, sticky with bissap. bottomless bass of the radio
rumbles, static bumbles from the football game.
a rooster’s scabbed feet dart between plastic tablecloths. an untethered dog yaps, taps its
stumpy tail, skinny strings of saliva swinging from jowl to jowl.
a woman hovers over the grill. wrists darken with the spatter of palm oil and the gasp of
chillies. her fingernails rap iron. the air seethes with diesel, raw onion, singed feathers.
her thoughts simmer in dusk’s orange silo.
the calabash spits, a runny yolk hisses. she jabs an eggplant with a blunt knife. her fingers
palpate braised catfish. she splits gray snails from their shells with a hammer. flies
wreathe her nose, mouth. dull pear ls of attieke crumble in a plastic bag.
evening brims with the blather of hungry customers. blond globules of ginger beer blister
red straws, young throats. truckers loll, quaff Drogbas, trawling for gos.
she untwines one memory, and then another; they brine in the swelter.
kids giggle, trip in and out of the shadows, spindly as seedlings. night ferments. smear of
cloud, scratch of stars.
she emerges, serves lukewarm plates. her head-wrap unswaddles as she gnashes through
the flak of dust and bug, the din candling her nerves.
a baby bulges in the small of her back, eyes shuttered against the fat moon.
Notes:
maquis: an outdoor eating area in Côte d'Ivoire; also means “scrub” or “bush”
bissap: juice made of dried hibiscus leaves, sugar and mint
attieke: a side dish prepared from fermented cassava pulp.
Drogbas: the beer “Bock de Solibra’ is nicknamed “Drogba” after the celebrated, Ivoirian footballer.
gos: young women
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Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based, Cara’s work has been featured in Event, The Fiddlehead, and The Maynard. She won 2018 Room Magazine’s Short Forms contest, and second place in Frontier Poetry’s 2018 Award for New Poets. She was shortlisted for PULP Literature’s 2017 and 2018 The Magpie Award for Poetry prize. She has a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU, and a diploma from the London School of Journalism.
by Molly Sutton Kiefer
this is what we saw: deer
with shucked hides, exposing the marimba of ribs
and red muscle—others, burned black
from rubber’s horrible offices or so scattershot
with flies as to be costumed in moveable scruff.
There are the bloated boats and ripped-aways.
Bird tatter, chipmunks made into flapjacks among
curls of tire, black spinnerets.
When they came upon the dead deer in the woods,
she had to press one hand into another, as if in prayer,
stayed against the lifting the tongue
back into the cave of its mouth,
keep her from plucking the hungry burrs.
He remembers too, the startle of sudden stopping—
that New Year’s when the shock of deer
scattered like pool balls in the crust of snow.
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Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the full-length lyric essay, Nestuary (Ricochet Editions). She has published three poetry chapbooks, and has work in Orion, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, Fiddlehead Review, Ecotone, South Dakota Review, and The Collagist, among others. She is publisher at Tinderbox Editions and founder of Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She lives in with her family in Minnesota where she teaches.
by Anne Price
Now when I see old cane
stiff and leaning off from the wall
of the stalks that thrived, I wonder was this
what the English-speaking teacher
used on my grandparents
when she called on them in words
they couldn't understand to stand?
Eyes can be lowered; what to do
with two-tongued mouths but keep
the one hidden behind the stalk
of the other, hushed under the cane’s
whipped down whistle. Now when I see old cane
I see the frayed cover
of the Cajun dictionary my mother
took out from her drawer only when
no one was looking. I confess
I stole that book, hid it behind
hung dresses, thinking I too
should learn like that, kneeled
behind the dresses
invisible knees
sewn for women who
hold raw cane and the unraveling red
binding of a dictionary
with the same two-handedness.
Thinking it had to be hidden,
which is another way
to forget, so that
when I remembered I too should learn
and went with both hands looking
the big red book
had gone, stolen back
or muttered away
like the seated woman
mouthing two or three
strange words at a time,
repeating herself at the wall.
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Anne Price was born and raised in southern Louisiana. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland, where she was awarded the Stanley Plumly Thesis Award. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
by Laura Romeyn
The jeep with its soft-top up
shreds past two small girls.
They are rushing the tallgrass
in matching violet nightgowns.
Wisconsin late summer.
Sun going down,
day like a bobbin
so warm. The air drags
low, circles its holdings
drifting there, then back
above. One of the girls,
the smaller one,
she kneels just in front
of the rhododendrons.
She has found something
in the green. A mid-section
undone, scratched open
to loosebelly softened
to the arbor of bone.
Grazed remains.
The lanes of the rib cage
carry their sidemeat,
fixed as the cold
of a silent and empty nave.
Put it in my hand
the older sister says,
and the younger one
reaches down and does.
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Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship (forthcoming spring 2019). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2015-2017), her poems have appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, and The Yale Review, among other journals. She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
You said you wanted no more than this
thin black dog draped over our feet
propped heel to heel and thigh to thigh
and fingers curved around a white mug
in whose coffee lilts a sweeter version
of the milky way bridging dream and dawn
and questions about the prayer mountain
I climbed as the daughter of strangers
made of incense and stones and returning
with nothing but the memory
of finding footholds in the musky earth
of a mountainside
without you & before us or the dog
who now lifts a red-lidded eye
as vast as stars just starting to spin.
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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Award. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, The New York Times, and more. She serves on the advisory board for the Sundress Academy for the Arts and is a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. See www.marcicalabretta.com.
by Cynthia Atkins
It has been steam cleaned
in 10 states. Slapped by a mother
spat on by a boss. This is how
everything is fine until it is not.
It changed its mind
like umbrellas brought
on all the wrong days.
It wore shoulder pads and burned
a husband with a curling iron.
It called 911. It did what it had to do.
It held your bag of hygiene, oily
perfume, rotten teeth. Joy and pain
live on the same street.
It has an expiration date.
It hung in the closet like a bad check.
It flagged all the pools of blood
and the grief of mothers.
It was a dirge of old wars and vacant
parking lots. It was the place I sat alone
and cried all nightmare long.
It is a junkyard clock
with dog-chewed hands.
It is God mouthing the anthem
I never learned. It gnawed
at the wind shield, made of rain.
It sat in a diner all night long, waiting
for the lord or the guy with a day job
to take his knife home.
This is the lake that lives within the skin,
that lives with an illness that dangles
like a yo-yo on a string. And another body
beget out of mine, long and wide
as the Rio Grande. The body just wants
something loyal and divine,
a dog’s eyelids fluttering in sleep.
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Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event of Full Disclosure, and the forthcoming collection, Still-Life With God. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Diode, Florida Review, Flock Lit, Green Mountains Review, Le Zaporogue, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Rust + Moth, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of The Net. Atkins teaches creative writing at Blue Ridge Community College and lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County VA with her family. See more at www.cynthiaatkins.com.
by Feral Willcox
In the place of cisterns
swaddled in cobra lilies
spawn of cloud seed heals
the moon of its infected swelling.
A heat dissipates to crystal, gaslit
in the aging night. You were
a slip of a boat set off in a slit
of wild waters, two down
no rudder, no oar. One love
travels in tides, in elliptic swirls
hot to cold, then back again.
The other, a faucet, a cup
a tinseled lake warming
in a metronome of sun.
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Ferral Willcox is a U.S. born poet and musician currently living in Pokhara, Nepal. Ferral’s work can be found in Per Contra, concis, Peacock Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry was featured in the Q-Street venue of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and she is a regular contributor to the Plath Poetry Project.
by Michelle Bitting
We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world. ~ The Band
When I should be asleep
but stay up anyway
step outside to sneak a smoke
behind the recycling bin
froth of soda cans
grass green bottles
spent water from France
a silo of silent witnesses
once effervescent
their colorful labels
torn and scraped now
glass shadows
cast to a rubber raft
under stars
the soft swish
of listing palms
that lean down
but can never reach far enough
lend a hand up
to new dignity.
We are not all in the same boat.
The lucky
find reinvention:
shelf sentinels
curiosities
emerald knickknacks
maybe something more
than holding someone’s luxuries.
Who knows.
Is there a purpose for everything
behind the human grind
beyond the shade
of blameless recycling?
Strangers in a truck
redeeming emptiness
sanctioned on the side
the traffic of coins
sputtered back
at disreputable living
a huddled shimmering
flatbeds
shuttled off in the dark
wet necks
liquid eyes
that glitter the night
shivering as their captors walk
fast from sight
pockets laden with gold
and don’t you just want to
turn them on their heads
shake them hard
til they break
til they shatter
like stars
spilling back
all that stolen brightness?
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Michelle Bitting won the 2018 Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, and a fourth collection, Broken Kingdom, won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, Plume, Thrush, Raleigh Review, the Paris-American, AJP, Green Mountains Review, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, (including Pushcart 2018 and Best of the Net 2018) and recently, The Pablo Neruda, American Literary Review and Tupelo Quarterly poetry contests.
by Minadora Macheret