by Cornelia Channing
I forgot to call that hotel where we stayed in White Sulphur Springs
Cornelia Channing is an MFA Candidate in creative writing at Stony Brook University in Southampton, NY. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Public Pool, Method Magazine, and The Stethoscope Press. A chapter of her forthcoming novel will be published in East Magazine next month. She lives in Bridgehampton, NY with her dog, Tucker.
by Laura Grace Weldon
I fainted in a little NYC store.
Came to
and there was Allen Ginsburg
patting my arm.
Embarrassed, I asked,
How long have I been out?
He answered, Out?
Most people are out all their lives.
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Laura Grace Weldon has published two poetry collections, Blackbird (Grayson 2019) and Tending (Aldrich 2013). She was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2019. She's written poems on the soles of children’s feet and painted poems on beehives but her work appears in more conventional places such as Verse Daily, One: Jacar Press, Neurology, J Journal, and Amsterdam Quarterly. Laura works as a book editor and teaches community-based writing workshops. See more at lauragraceweldon.com.
by Carolina Hospital
In our sticky plaid uniforms and loose pony tails, we skip and jump,
pocketing minutes from the cool soft twilight, rushing all play before our
mother hails us. The front lawn is a wide field on which we collapse,
bruised knees, roll and roll and roll, sprawled in damp greenery.
I run my finger down
the silken green blade
a gentle snap.
Along its vein I unzip
the leaf, so thin it curls
like a lover’s smile.
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Carolina Hospital is a poet, novelist, and editor. Her books include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press); The Child of Exile: a Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press); the novel, A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books); and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press). Her works have appeared in the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; Florida Literature, and Longman’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.
by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter
After the photograph by Dutch artist, Rineke Dijkstra, from her series of portraits of los forcados. In the final event of a Portuguese bullfight, young men known as los forcados use their bodies to exhaust and subdue the bull in a kind of dance called pega de caras.
It was me or the bull
as it always is. The bull
with his brute-breath
and steam, fear that smells
of a father’s knowing
his smaller son can take him
and will. Offer to bow
to the beast. Offer the dreams
in your skull, the Praia
de Benagil sunlight flaring
through a hole. Time is a boy
I can almost reach—
a kite flown, the blue-tiled floor
of my faraway mother
stampeded with footprints.
I came here for the question
answered by the crowd’s
ovation: a man now, must
I have blood on my face
to be seen.
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Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness. Her poems have appeared in RHINO (winner of their Founder's Prize), Pleiades, 32 Poems, Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, ONE, Sugar House Review, Nashville Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among many other places. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women. See more at www.laurenslaughter.com.
by Julia B Levine
You are otherwise each time you dream. The train arrives in Nice. You reach for your suitcase
& the aborted baby tumbles down alive. Into your arms, his milky breath. His uncanny reach.
Drought’s engine picks up speed. Rivers, once a ligature of sheen, smear to grease. Lord,
bless the not-yet-arrived. Wildfires unwilling to be touched. Forests dying as they reach.
That’s all I wanted, he says. Your body crumpled like a day-old corsage. A raven shrieks.
He zips up his pants. Pockets the gun. Wild bird of your before, perches out of reach.
Wingless, we invented music. This first morning of rain you can believe again
in a cappella green. Joy to lift the body’s stone. Fog to lower the sky’s snowy reach.
All being is fenestra. And the mind a churchyard, a market, an orphic meet-&-greet. This
world wrecks us, then it enters. The body leaves. The soul is fallout, drifting far outside of reach.
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Julia B Levine has been widely published. Her latest full-length collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), was awarded the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She has poems forthcoming in Calyx, Southern Review, and Third Coast. In her everyday life, she loves to swim!
by Leonore Hildebrandt
Sky is a woven rug, a measured opening—
a “window,” from wind eye.
Hinges are smooth as ligaments,
and her fingers leave oily prints.
You may wear this tale
like a hat, a wondrous little hat
from the pelt of a mouse.
A canopy of swallows. The river’s steep banks.
The girl runs with the boys, then hides
in sprawling hedges—beech and rhododendron.
She knows a place to slip into—
lower the bridge, walk the sheep and fox,
cows and knights in procession to the fields.
The moat deepens. Look, poor Rapunzel’s
long braids uncoil from the sill.
The girl is looking under leaves
for mice and spiders.
She rips her sandwich for the dogs,
calls them her strays.
On a narrow sidewalk,
a little hairy man blocks her way
with his scales and knives.
She tries to run, sand sucks at her feet,
she stumbles, falls into the air's updraft—
her dress spreads like a sheet.
A girl is a cloud of dust.
In the yard, metal posts are sunk into holes.
On rainy days, they fill with water and bugs.
She hears of storm petrels, lit as lamps—
oily flames mounted on sticks, a wick shoved down the throat.
Things one can not pronounce another way.
Clamor in the street—voracious brooms
suck in leaves and garbage.
The many worlds are falling—the seven brothers,
three sisters. She hides, counts her fingers.
This is the dry tongue of utterance.
But the second son still goes out into the world
to learn about fear. At night,
bronzed in smoke, the seven ravens return.
The girl slips through a fence.
She is falling toward the upon-time,
dark against the luminous wind eye.
Her dress is woven into the sky.
In the sallow wax of morning,
street lamps are bright nebulae.
The window’s stern eyes relent
to swirls and river snails.
Worms scatter holes,
bored in the wooden frame.
She blows the dust, pulls up her hair.
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Leonore Hildebrandt is the author of the poetry collections Where You Happen to Be, The Work at Hand, and The Next Unknown. Her poems and translations have appeared in the Cafe Review, Cerise Press, the Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Harpur Palate, Poetry Daily, RHINO, and the Sugar House Review, among other journals. Winner of the 2013 Gemini Poetry Contest, she received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Maine Community Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. She was nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Germany, Leonore lives “off the grid” in Harrington, Maine, and spends the winter in Silver City, New Mexico. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and serves on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal.
by Annmarie O’Connell
is killing her. I sing this to you once:
killing her. She is
the bowl of a spoon dripping
tobacco and trailer park,
a roar of diesels
runs over her breastbone.
All the mountains
in my life
are fists of my mother.
I do not waste one drop
when I see her voice taken
out of her body and put
in a stunted star
that always moves
away from me
in a night that twiddles my hair
by the root no matter
where I go. I braid a trail
in the dirty South Side
street. This is a daughter
carving a path off to God
then kicked to her knees—a psalm
hung from her big mouth.
Flag her in
from the dark. Tell her
where to go.
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Annmarie O’Connell is a lifelong resident of the South Side of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Sixth Finch, Juked, Room Magazine, Verse Daily, Slipstream, SOFTBLOW, Vinyl Poetry, Thrush, Escape Into Life, 2River View, and many other wonderful journals. Her first full-length collection of poems, Your Immaculate Heart, was released with Trio House Press in 2016. Her third chapbook was released last year with Yellow Flag Press. See more at annmarieoconnell.com.
by Geraldine Connolly
she listened in the hall
seldom crossed thresholds
baked dark cakes
with spirit-soaked raisins
dug with a trowel
at the edge of deep woods
dropped to her knees
to examine a caterpillar
rinsed windows with vinegar
while inside
intrigue twirled and spun
she loved
interruptions
which nothing could silence
or calm or cool
___________________________________________________________________
Geraldine Connolly is the author of a chapbook and four poetry collections including the recently published Aileron (Terrapin Books). Her work has appeared in in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review and The Cortland Review. She has taught at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, The Chautauqua Institution and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council and the Cafritz Foundation. Her work has appeared in many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students and A Constellation of Kisses. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. www.geraldineconnolly.com
by Nicole Markert
The first time, teeth grind. My knees are
on holly leaves, scream
to the God:
I will breathe life into his dust
even if it means to scratch and peel
the layers of my forearm like onion skins.
I gnaw my raw lip.
I only stop when we drive away.
The next time, I carry crosses with my mother
and listen to repeated winds
of passing cars on the highway & the crush
of pinecones on the shoulder. We bear
with the whizz of screws into the crosses
pressed to the pine bark and the choked-up mutters
of the Our Father.
The most recent time, I watch the sunset while fingers freeze.
My lips taste lukewarm watery hot chocolate.
I pray even when God never fills
the chasm in my sternum.
I place my hand on the pine’s bark.
I breathe exhaust fumes like fresh air.
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Nicole Markert is a Senior English Writing and Literature major at Eastern University in St. David’s Pennsylvania, although, she originally hails from New Jersey. She is the Editor-in-Chief for Eastern’s literary magazine, Inklings, as well as the Managing Editor for the student-led newspaper, The Waltonian. You can find some of her other work at nicolemarkert.com.
by Jennifer Greenberg
She could have meant the light that falls
in the west, or a bird catapulting himself east
when she told me the story of a boy
leaving me for the empty sky. The night
she asked where babies come from, I told her
the truth: how they come to find bodies
inside our bodies, how they bubble
out of fat and shed their mother’s skin. Some
only visit—like sun spokes through a rainbow,
temporary, too weary to make the trip.
She might have meant we are all brothers
in this life. The dying light, the innocent bird.
I could have said, No, I've never met that soul,
just heard his name in my sleep. But I didn't
correct my daughter when she said, My brother
goes up there, motioning her hands
into a piece of ribbon unfurling up
and up above us, then floating away
like a balloon, buoyant, bodiless.
Jennifer Greenberg is a Florida native pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida. When not at the office, Jennifer enjoys writing in her sleep and jazz. Her words have been featured in Literary Mama, Homology Lit, Sonder Midwest, and Chomp, and are forthcoming in Coffin Bell.
by Leslie Leonard
Color spreads up the hillside in a deep, blushing rash,
the leaves around the thin evergreens
puffed out like the spores of a great orange mold.
The birches have flaked their skin, sudden and snake-like,
and now reach up
like bone-carved totems from the earth.
We use the nights to press our feet together, bare and numb,
or covered thinly in your running socks.
Inside, the water spreads
in Rorschach figures down the wall
from the hole you said you’d fix. Outside,
the trees are leaking down leaves like water droplets,
standing still and many-armed in their rough-skinned nakedness.
I must admit that I stand in the heat of the shower
and imagine sloughing myself clean
and anchoring myself with a solid, immovable tap root.
We may crunch the leaves beneath us, with our shoulders
bumping like old friends. But I am thinking
about the effortlessness of letting something die.
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Leslie Leonard is currently pursuing her PhD in American Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is hard at work on her dissertation. Her occasional poetry centers first-person experience and feeling. She lives in Western Mass with her partner where she teaches both literature and academic writing.
by Barbara Daniels
Someone new turns the bass up.
It vibrates through my fingers
and feet. This body—It’s open
though I’m swathed in a sweatshirt
and jacket. Is this dance music?
Friends laugh and move,
the lights so low I can’t see
who I am. Your scent
on my clothes, your hand
up my blouse. We ran through
cornfields to get here. Not really.
I’m walking wet sidewalks
in our neighborhood, pink petals
falling, their skin to my skin.
So many scars on this body.
Are you sleeping? Wet petals fall.
Your sweet breathing, our big bed.
Music like madwomen typing.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Barbara Daniels’ book, Rose Fever, was published by WordTech Press, and her chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen were published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
by Geraldine Connolly
she listened in the hall
seldom crossed thresholds
baked dark cakes
with spirit-soaked raisins
dug with a trowel
at the edge of deep woods
dropped to her knees
to examine a caterpillar
rinsed windows with vinegar
while inside
intrigue twirled and spun
she loved
interruptions
which nothing could silence
or calm or cool
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Geraldine Connolly is the author of a chapbook and four poetry collections including the recently published Aileron (Terrapin Books). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and The Cortland Review, as well as many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students and A Constellation of Kisses. She has taught at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, The Chautauqua Institution and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council and the Cafritz Foundation. See www.geraldineconnolly.com.
by Tania Pryputniewicz
It sits in a flimsy pie-tin of crimped and corrugated silver,
wrapped in a paper towel my daughter wets three times
a day. My son tells her to chop it, one eye per chunk,
bury it in the yard, then dig it up. But she’s like me,
needs to see it grow. It’s an Idaho potato, nothing special,
useful under the right cut of meat in the crockpot. It withers
in toward its center, wrinkling a bit, like me, color
sucked from my hair’s roots by—I don’t know—this—
arguing—over why potato eyes are called eyes when
they’re seeds: Put down the knife. Leave her project
be. She’s not sure she wants it now, like the time
I saw my 12-string guitar in the hands of the mover
my husband hired—My lucky day, he said and smiled,
my husband right behind chirping, She never plays it, take it
away. What do they know of the grad school hours,
the ways it saved me from myself, useless in a house
of crying babies—I see, with my blind potato eyes I see
and from behind them I dream of guitars washing up,
like parts of me, like plastic shovels of the hotel tourists,
reds, blues, mostly primary yellows, days’ children
long gone, sandpipers taking back the shore.
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Tania Pryputniewicz, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014). Recent poems have appeared in America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience and NILVX: A Book of Magic (Tarot Series). “Two Gardens," is forthcoming in Rockvale Review and won Tania a residency in Tennessee at the Rockvale Writers' Colony. She teaches poetry at San Diego Writers, Ink and lives in Coronado.
by Jules Jacob
And she lets the river answer.
—Leonard Cohen
When I question the river, a chorus
of invisible frogs chants where, where, where.
When I let the river answer, she sets
a baritone soloist in the tall
still weeds beside me. There, there he insists,
familial home, gliding trails of kayaks,
siblings, father. Air, air, I plead. Waves slap
against the concrete cobblestone boat path;
wind breathes my will. Sings, I’m bending your way.
Swallows dip in September light, droplets
collect in my palm. Her hair shiny brown
and wet to her knees, my mother backcasts
and effortlessly cracks the whip before
introducing her nymph to the water.
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Jules Jacob is a contemporary poet who often writes about dichotomous conditions and relationships between humans and the natural world. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Plume Poetry 8, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Frogpond, and elsewhere. She’s the author of The Glass Sponge, with select poems featured at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s Le Moulin à Nef in France. Visit julesjacob.com.
by Marisa Crane
expect to run into at least six or seven exes.
maybe some girls who wouldn’t dare call you
an ex, not even to make someone jealous.
it’s easy to tip the scales
when your stomach is heavy with secondhand prayer.
what’s that in the blonde’s mouth?
it shimmers like liquid mercury—
only here, none of us has the chance
to rise. they want you down & out
& on the prowl. Gossip, home of the
three-finger pour & finger-me Fridays,
looks like a home if you were born
where gravity forgets to breathe.
I’ll take something I regret for 1,000
we say to the bartender, her hair
short & wavy beneath her snapback.
we give the straight couples the side-eye,
the you-could-have-gone-anywhere-else face.
we fight about what it means
to be inclusive when oppressors crowd
your space. in Gossip, everyone’s smiling
but no one’s happy. we dip our noses in
our beer, we do the bro lean, we do the
head nod. in ten year’s time we don’t want
to still be drinking here but for now, we don’t have
any reason to resist the plunge. in Gossip, we break
our own hearts & pretend to like it. we grow
a million hands & point them every
which way. our own ancestor clocks gone
haywire. the lights turn down low.
we are at once turned off & turned on.
they say that lesbians want to pair up,
that when two women get together
they’re twice as dramatic, three times
as emotional—but I’ve been here since nine
& haven’t seen a single emotion
that didn’t have a gag in its mouth.
in Gossip, there are no undercover cops.
in Gossip, we aren’t afraid for our lives,
but that doesn’t stop us from
calling tomorrow an indecent fantasy.
we hate to consider what shape we take
in someone else’s memory. our exes aren’t
very forgiving & who can blame them?
these bashful desires aren’t so bashful
anymore. it’s terrifying to be a person
when the whole world’s watching.
a regular vomits in the bathroom, another
in the trash can behind the bar, another
in the plant out on the patio. we dig into each other,
hoping to come away with a set of blueprints.
or at the very least, evidence of our disconnect.
what can we say? disappointing ourselves
is our favorite way to delay the responsibility of joy.
two-for-one drinks. swipe & swipe & swipe
& edit bio & upload new pic & curse Tinder &
anyone who has ever used it. what is the use
of earnestness? no one here can say for sure.
the sky outside is black & blue like my knuckles
back when I punched that dude for hitting
on my ex-girlfriend. ask anyone in here & they’ll say
that they want something real but when you ask
what constitutes real, all you get are puffs of smoke.
in the early mist of morning, we crawl from Gossip’s depths.
we blink at all the tiny cars & monstrous clouds.
when the sun comes up, we wait for something
extraordinary to happen. for something to justify our cagey hearts.
one by one, we become our own emergencies.
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Marisa Crane is a queer, non-binary writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, Wigleaf Top 50, and elsewhere. She is the author of Our Debatable Bodies (Animal Heart Press, 2019). Originally from Allentown, PA, she currently lives in San Diego with her wife.
by Catherine Staples
The slander was a lie, but when whispered
In her ear it held, echoed.
Endless as a rock-pool brimming, a hidden
Spill of water, sounding a cave.
She listened though she knew it wasn’t true.
She shook her head.
The lie rose like yeast, like six seeds
Of pomegranate in the distraction of grief.
Ruined, it whispered and winter
Swept the small room.
But the floor was lined in stone, old
Rock from a long gone inland sea.
The dark lines of fossils woke her—
The still beauty
Of curved spines and wings,
Birds. Ferns. Whole ferns survived
Exact even to the dark spores on fronds.
A river bank and a bay tree.
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Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, and others. Recent honors include a Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writer’s Conference and the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Award. She teaches in the English and Honors programs at Villanova University. Please visit at: www.catherinestaples.com.
by Stacie M. Kiner
“…this voice was never mine,
nor even yours.”
—Lawrence Raab
Our world slowly spinning
unbuttons itself—
this is a difficult home.
And you, the reason for this telling
the way memory and subtraction fool us,
a sun-warmed key lime
sliced in half
its juice on your tongue.
Your husband gone
taking your child for shoes
and you, eyes closed;
falling straight to the heart of God—
the smooth slide into the back
of a cooled taxi’s leather seat.
But maybe everyone is always
almost drowning;
and maybe this is all
you want to be.
Like the mailbox as a child
I stuffed with snow,
you could not receive a thing.
Stitching back up
the blood you lose each month,
forgetting the march of happiness
down to your toes,
forgetting our world still spins
with its nature of hope.
So I ask for everything—
I don’t know where to stop.
Hands tight on a wheel
one fine turn away—
and all the ways to want things;
and all the things
we shouldn’t want.
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Stacie M. Kiner is a former Fellow at The Vermont Studio Center and Hannah Kahn Memorial Award recipient. Her poems have appeared in The Charlotte Poetry Review, Madison Review, Comstock Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and Apalachee Quarterly as well as other journals and reviews. Stacie's work has also appeared at Palm Beach International Airport, Art in Public Places. A former moderator of a poetry talk show on Channel 17 in Miami, Stacie is currently an Associate Editor of The South Florida Poetry Journal.
by Jennifer Jackson Berry
Antique store find: this aphorism on a trivet.
I buy it for irony. I could hurt him
with a thunder thigh squeeze, a motorboat suffocation.
I’m debating whether to hang this as a makeshift plaque
or place every hot pot on it.
I joke when I sit around the barn, I sit around the barn.
When the barn door opens, so plump.
There is harm done sometimes
taking the pressure off,
like once the body knows crush—like every time I ask he says—
the organs are rearranged—no, you’re not hurting me.
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Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of The Feeder (YesYes Books, 2016). Her latest chapbook, Bloodfish, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2019 as part of the Keystone Chapbook Series. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
by Sarah Audsley
We flipped through
the magazine and didn’t recognize her
in the glossy spread, the lighting just right, hair shiny black,
cheekbones round, dark eyes glinting back at us.
Lucky. Selected for Asian Beauty. I wanted to be her, chosen
right off the streets in New York for Vogue.
Yes, vanity. But, what if I am always five, always
running from the coach’s son who’s shouting
“Flat face!” at me, and I’m always questioning, don’t
recognize the feeling of my fingers touching my nose
(not flat), the contours of a face reflected in mirrors.
Coveted forms of Asian Beauty—
bound tulip-sized feet, docile or timid,
thin yet unbreakable—of course, of course.
Let’s line up all the fetishes
in rows like hardened pearls.
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