by Jennifer Jean
the whole interview’s about her girl.
by Sherry Rind
“You will have a warmer bed in amongst the goats than among the sheep.” Aristotle, History of Animals
We press up during sleep, all dreaming
of new leaves. The kids’ legs twitch in play.
Against the cold and the roaming panther
we need each other and the shepherd
sharing our warmth.
We bring cheer to horses,
who grow anxious about all they do not recognize;
a fallen branch is a snake,
a blown rag at the edge of vision,
the paw of a wolf. Among us,
their eyes stop rolling
and they bend their long necks to the grass.
We find the wild lands
better than dreams.
We climb high on a hill, high up broken boulders,
testing our clever feet.
Although buzzards hang above,
they are flies to us.
We do not fear these untried places.
Far below, olive trees wave silver and green,
whisper with the small birds
who never settle to their thoughts.
The shepherd comes after us, muttering,
watching her feet slipping among rocks
instead of looking out
where we look,
until we take pity and go to her.
We butt her legs gently, press up
until she lets go her human fears
and we return home as one.
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Sherry Rind's previous books are The Hawk in the Back Yard (Anhinga Award) and A Fall Out the Door (Confluence Press). Chapbooks are The Whooping Crane Dance and A Natural History of Grief. She has received grants and awards from the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions, Pacific Northwest Writers, National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. Her next book is Between States of Matter (The Poetry Box select series, 2020). See more at https://sherryrind.wixsite.com/writer.
by Amie Whittemore
waited for me
at the center
of a frozen pond.
Beneath my feet
I could see the witless
gaze of frozen fish.
A low winter sun
razed the fields,
entrenched in snow
and the cold burden
of being alive
yet waiting.
The owl did not
spread its wings,
did not tap the ice
with a talon, only
watched me
equivocate between
praise and retreat,
its gold eyes
tarnishing me.
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Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection, Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press). Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
By Anastasia Vassos
September is the best month for dying. Sun’s blade sharpens its point.
Birds stop declaring they want to stay. The smell of rain pervades.
Leaves from old-growth trees leave permanent tattoos on the pavement.
Were I to shoulder my grief into the folds of my favorite sweater,
you would tell me to remember how much you loved me. You insisted.
We were finely stitched, edged in bone and blood. Now my hindsight unravels
its tangled net. A keen knife slices night from day. I remember,
as you could not, your words before you left us for those porous borders.
Remember how you made us learn prayers in ancient Greek?
Syllable by syllable. We clenched our teeth to God. We gave him a name.
Say maker. Say middle distance. Cold shudder in my ear. Sense
could not be made. Autumn unleafing, then, the stinging time of year.
If you get another chance, please name me Moira. For bitter. For fate.
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Anastasia Vassos is a Greek-American poet. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio and currently lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including Thrush Poetry Journal, Gravel Mag, RHINO, Haibun Today, and Comstock Review. Anastasia is a poetry reader for Lily Poetry Review. She was a BreadLoaf Contributor in Poetry in 2017. Her poem “Tinos, August 2012” was named Poem Of The Moment on MassPoetry.org. She is a long-distance cyclist.
by Jessica L. Walsh
The ratio of tributes to handshakes
tipped earlier than we’d imagined
At times we say remind me
and the list of what happened
is the list of all we loved
the lake the lake the river
a Ford truck
on gravel or mud
on open road with deer
or wild turkey with Wild Turkey
the lying frozen lake
the rip-currented outlet to the lake
When it’s Oxy or tar we say sickness
and talk about times we drank with them
at bonfires by the lake
or flying down dirt roads in the back of a pick-up
What we don’t say is we could all be here
every one
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Jessica L. Walsh is the author of two poetry collections, most recently The List of Last Tries, as well as two chapbooks. Her poetry can be found in Tinderbox, RHINO, Stirring, and elsewhere. She teaches at a community college outside of Chicago, where she lives with her family.
by Carol Alexander
I asked for you and now you are here.
There's enough, a rumble of thunder snow,
along with the burnt toast smell of steam.
The spare room is untidy, like my disbelief.
A trellis, a welter of wrens, hard-shelled beasts
scrambling for succor, whatever can cling.
It isn't perfect here. Pinned by an internal map,
wings flit darkly, stray again, plummet blue.
I'll leave the walls without a tin roof,
let the curious snow infringe a darkening sill.
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Carol Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Environments (Dos Madres Press) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press). Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press. Alexander's poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals such as The Common, Cumberland River Review, The Healing Muse, New Verse News, One, Poetrybay, Southern Humanities Review, Rise Up Review, Stonecoast Review and Third Wednesday. New work is forthcoming in 2020 in Aji, Chiron Review, and the The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
by Iyanu Adebiyi
Why are women who fly called witches?
If they have wings, aren’t they birds?
Come and meet my father who leaves his beards
Dangling like feathers.
He is calling me to read the Bible in the sun.
I have taken flight.
Is it true the sun is the face of God?
What then is a shooting star? How many bullets does it have?
& why do we pray to a gun?
My father buried his rib under the belt of Orion
Before he began the trek to hellfire,
said, there is nothing in this body
That deserves salvation except my wife.
In hell, I found my poetry ablaze.
I touched the raging fire and wondered,
Isn’t God burning too?
If God is the sun, then who is hellfire?
If God is the sun, then who is darkness?
Of what use is a light so bright it blinds the eye?
The song of the universe is mostly a solo
& only a blind woman can see its waves
If she dares to sing along, will her tongue sprout wings?
If she dares to fly, does that make her a witch?
If God is the sun, will fire fall down from heaven
& consume her?
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Iyanu Adebiyi is a Nigerian-based writer, poet, and performer. She works as a lawyer at a local firm. Her poems have been published in several publications, including Odd Magazine, African Writers, and elsewhere.
by Sandra Beasley
Landing at the Sea of Tranquility,
the clock calls for breakfast—
eight squares of bacon, coated in gelatin;
dehydrated peaches; apricot cereal cubes.
No salt on the loose, no spice,
fifteen cups of coffee per astronaut.
All this fine-tuned in the eight years
since Gemini pilot Joe Young’s pocket
revealed a corned beef sandwich
courtesy Wolfie’s of Cocoa Beach,
which he offered to Gus Grissom
as the crumbs broke away and floated
toward the fickle innards of the ship.
Now, everything bound into bar or pouch,
cocktail shrimp hand-selected to squeeze
one by one through the tubing.
Inventing the space taco will take
another two decades. Sturdy tortillas
will be fortified for shelf life,
glued together by creamed onions.
In 2008, Korean scientists will perfect
how to prepare kimchi
without the lactic bacterial fizz
that might, given cosmic rays,
just happen to mutate.
But we are not there yet,
and for days the Apollo 11 menu
has asked them to imagine one paste
as beef, another as chicken;
to discern first tuna, then salmon.
As they ready to step outside
the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin unscrews
a tiny vial drawn from his private pouch,
and the wine drapes at one-sixth gravity.
His fingertips grip a tiny chalice,
while the other hand places
a wafer on his tongue. During all this,
NASA cuts the feed. Soon they’ll return
to regularly scheduled acts of faith,
releasing hydrogen and oxygen
to mix inside the fuel cell:
from that, a gathering of water,
and from that, a chowder of corn.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sandra Beasley is the author of Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir about living with disability. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. "Pigs in Space" is from Made to Explode, her fourth collection, forthcoming with W. W. Norton & Company in early 2021.
by Lucia Leao
you arrive and unpack
in the middle
of me.
In the kitchen, tea
labels you unglue, kid-wise,
unearthing the organic
flavors of fair-trade gardens.
I offer what I have,
basil, ginger, pink pepper,
and fizzy water,
the yellow kettle—
a fountain.
Your clothes unrest the sofa,
thinned jackets, gentle shoes,
multiple shapes of ties,
your exhibited emptiness
the space I can hug,
dispatch denials.
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Lucia Leao is a Brazilian-American translator and writer. She has a master’s degree in Brazilian literature from UERJ (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism from University of Miami. Her poems in English have been published in the South Florida Poetry Journal and in Chariton Review.
by Jude Marr
old lady, as you twirl your candy cane at fractured
worlds, kick up cracked heels: while reason leaks
steal what scenes you can—
Chaplin in a blue nightdress and battered curls, worn
slipper-soles tatter-flapping as you clown-walk
down your dust-cake road toward a vanishing—
through limelight flicker, flash one last, lewd smile.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jude Marr teaches, and writes poetry, as protest. Their chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds (Finishing Line), was published in 2017. Recent credits include Wend, Minerva Rising, and Eye Flash Poetry. Follow them @JudeMarr1 and find more of their work at www.judemarr.com.
by Stacey Balkun
We lived in a house made of honey, me and you,
drip in the walls never wavering, a poor fit
for a fatherless girl and a widow, the shimmer of sun fading into
torn wallpaper, yellowed with age. It was supposed to be sweet, but me,
I would shiver to stay warm, fearing your sting, like
a little bee. One fat summer day, I found a
wet stain on the kitchen ceiling, swollen as a hook
dipped in plaster. Mother, remember how we stared, fret locked into
our knuckles and lips, watching a neighbor unholster an
old power drill, eager to find for you the leaking pipe? Closed eye,
we sprinted out of the heavy house, down the drive as a
swarm of bees poured from their hive between stories, leaping like fish
and I wanted to leave right then more than ever but feared your hook,
the funnel of fury, windows darkened with winged bodies, an
apocalypse of fleeing to sunlight, exodus through the open
front door. I knew then I could no longer trust you. Never since looked you in the eye.
—after Margaret Atwood (a golden shovel)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Stacey Balkun is the author of three poetry chapbooks and co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest as well as Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, and other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft. Visit her online at http://www.staceybalkun.com.
by Kindra McDonald
Heaven
is the moon swinging
hand under hand
just to hug the ground
with light strong as knots
Bright egg
dance gingerly
dance delirious
a swan drowned
a half thigh
a lemon pout
moon a lit firefly hum
in my ear
This is a found poem using erasure from pages 260-264 of Andrews, V. C. Flowers in the Attic: the Dollanganger Family Series # 1. Pocket Books, 1979.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kindra McDonald is the author of the poetry collections Fossils (Finishing Line Press) and In the Meat Years (Aldrich Press), both in 2019, and the chapbooks Concealed Weapons (2015) and Elements and Briars (2016). She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and her BA from Virginia Wesleyan University. Her work has appeared in Rise Up Review, Twyckenham Notes, Muddy River Poetry Review, the anthology The Nearest Poem, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Bettering American Poetry. She lives in the city of mermaids with her husband and cats where she bakes, hikes, and changes hobbies monthly.
by Dion O’Reilly
I have been waiting like a crooked coiled snake in the corner of my life.—Monique Ferrell
I have a cashmere poncho and a beautiful son,
a husband who watches my shadow
as we walk, sees a nimbus
crowning my head.
My daughter is a bird. She hoots
night into my ear.
I’ve been carried over and over
to the creek like meat to be cleaned
before eating.
Been in double jeopardy.
Sinned the same way more than twice
been exonerated due to luck and money.
Let me put it this way: I was deviled
by my childhood. My sister would beg
to beat me. I was an animal
my mother ate to fortify her blood.
And so I mistook the punctures in my throat
the sudden energy of lovers
when they walked out
as a kind of marriage. I felt bedecked in white
the very center of attention
until the pump and surge of blood
flooded my lace.
How did I change? Not choice.
More like lightning taken by a tree
because the tree learned to tower.
I stopped believing Paradise
is a place I used to live, neglected the itch
to bolt when I wasn’t the feast.
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Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, will be published in spring 2020. Her work appears in The New Ohio Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her work has been shortlisted for a variety of prizes— most recently, The Charles Bukowski Poetry Prize. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts about poetry in the Monterey Bay and around the world.
by Zoë Ryder White
There is a fractaled edge of land,
inlaid and resonant, just beneath the one
the plane flew over, getting here.
Just so: the size and shape
of solitude is the size and shape exact
as the real chair encased
in the seen chair, the real hand inside
the hand held, the real lake sunk
into the lake we strip to wade.
So it is. So it is,
isn’t it?
Bone at the bone?
Cell’s cell, atom at
the atom’s dark core?
All this time spent trying
to pull sidewalk off sidewalk,
peel porch from porch.
Bite towards each nut’s nut.
Sometimes, we collide,
and then half a hitch later
the ones within each one
collide, too. That’s how
love is. Neither word
nor word inside
can get it right.
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Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Thrush, Hobart, Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others. She co-authored a chapbook, A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Their second chapbook collaboration, Elsewhere, is forthcoming from Sixth Finch in March 2020. A former public elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.
by Patrycja Humienik
the townspeople name the mouth delusion
i.
who raised you?
stumbling into the meat of the
afternoon downhill uphill
kettle left howling on the stove
that mouth running into evening
with a sciomancing tongue
ii.
if the poem is a mouth the
kettle a burning bright apricot
held softfirm like syllables
which is to say there’s something
ripe and howling in my mouth
iii.
somewhere/someone/follows
the rules no questions asked
iv.
the bathtub filling up with milk
somewhere a shipwreck
all honey-roses-styrofoam
7000 plastic ducks
traveling into the high arctic
i try to remember which pill on which day
every day seven+ cargo ships sink
v.
somewhere/someone/shuts/up
vi.
here i am/glistening/in this plastic fleet
old-growth vines ensnake the tub
little limbs i soak in balmy time
i sugar scrub the dead things
such that shedding is no litany
sugared no softer doing what you say
and you didn’t have to say it out loud
vii.
the you is imagined
though the mouth could be
yours the poem is not owned
it runs uphill downhill not
away from us but toward
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Patrycja Humienik is a Polish-American writer and performance artist based in Seattle, WA. Her poetry is featured/forthcoming in Passages North, Yemassee, The Shallow Ends, Hobart, and No Tender Fences: An Online Anthology of Immigrant & First-Gen Poetry. She has performed at events including Titwrench Festival, Film on the Rocks at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and REDCAT New Original Works Festival. Find her on Twitter @jej_sen
by Jennifer Funk
Not like a tap turned on and not like a match struck
and certainly not like flicking on a light, it is not sudden.
It is barely sweet. Ripe? Hard to tell. Fingers
pressed carefully into the skin, imagine say, a pear,
green, faintly so and tenuous, as though the green
were a blush, as though the pear at the prospect
of being plucked from its tree so many weeks ago
flushed a shade that recalls grass dying in the fall
or the barest beginnings of scallion stems.
Sometimes you tell the story in fits, sometimes
one line at a time.
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Jennifer Funk is native Californian currently proving her mettle in New England. A graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers, she has been a scholarship recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place. Her work can be found or is forthcoming at The Cimarron Review, Four Way Review, The Boiler, SWWIM, and elsewhere.
by Genevieve Kaplan
and I find myself susceptible
to flashes of light, soft water, detours
of current, the chill of sand
I’d never left a home
without leaving a note or
some responsible party behind
who would spread the word
the water trickles and
its rivulets make deep
cuts in the beach, sometimes
inches, mostly feet, and I
am required to step through or over
getting down to low to see
the breath holes of bivalves
the three-toed tracks
of birds, how bits
of each have been lapped
away by waves I see
some wholeness to
the world, down low
and looking up and it
is tan and brown and blue
and bright with air
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Genevieve Kaplan’s work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Cherry Tree, POETRY Magazine, TinFish, and South Dakota Review. She is the author of (aviary), forthcoming from Veliz Books in spring 2020 and In the ice house (Red Hen, 2011), as well as three chapbooks.
by Catherine Abbey Hodges
At last and all of a sudden,
here it is: the afternoon to turn
summer’s last tomatoes,
some on the sill and others still
on the vine, into soup to freeze
for the months to come.
You take the chipped blue
bowl from the high shelf
and we head to the garden.
Overhead, what someone
called a buttermilk sky, sky
banking left from the long
bright days toward winter,
which is to say a mortal sky,
sky-sign of endings, death-
facing sky, lit still
with summer’s last syllables.
We fill the bowl again
and again with tomatoes
warm and heavy in their skins.
Later, we’ll listen
to what we can bear of the news,
and I’ll refuse the violence
that won’t end and must end
a place at the table
of this one poem
while the tomatoes burble
in their complex juices,
fragrant with the further
complications, complicities
if you will, of garlic
and rosemary.
We’ll look at each other.
It’s too much, you’ll say,
or I will—we take turns
like we used to tell the children
to do, and I lose track. Maybe
we’ll step outside where the early
stars will aver for the hundredth
time that the dark overtaking
the sky is another kind of light.
Though we’ll shake our heads
as always,
maybe this time we’ll pray
that somehow they know
something we don’t.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of In a Rind of Light, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in February 2020. Her previous full-length collections are Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press 2017) and Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press 2015), the latter selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Learn more at www.catherineabbeyhodges.com.
by Linda Dove
The woman declares there are no more chickens,
none, in the coop, in the yard, on earth. What she misses
first are the eggs, then the feathers, because a world
without eggs might mean you are hungry, but a world without
feathers means you can’t fly. Chickens can’t fly, the man
reminds her. Right, she thinks, putting away the shears
that she used to clip the flight from their wings. It was small
flight, she reminds herself, but at least the chickens
could clear the fence. She has the same resentment
towards the fence that the birds did, but she doesn’t try
to get away. She moves from room to room in the house,
touching the things she’d have to leave behind.
She always stops at the grandfather clock with the moon
in its face. How to pack up time? she asks to no one at all.
How to manage something so tall, how to lock its door?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. Her books include In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.
by Allison Cundiff
I first learned love by watching two parents who hated each other.
My mother clinging to the paperback, the cover torn off,
the veins in her legs from years of standing in that bookstore.
My father clinging to the other women,
their strange bodies in strange bedrooms.
So many nights she washed the lipstick that wasn’t her color
off his collars. The glances between them a sonic panic
that even I, their half-deaf kid, could hear.
When the house grew too loud with their silence,
I walked instead into the forest with the old beagle.
She had watched all her litters handed away,
and she let me follow her trails.
I’d watch the light change to low in the sky,
the waterbirds swim to the shore to nest for the night.
I’d watch the mosquitoes land on my forearm,
watch the proboscis needle under my skin.
In school they called me hard of hearing, but I could hear.
I heard the tritone ringing in my ears, heard the classroom chair
scratching over linoleum, all this over the teacher’s voice.
And when they’d sit me in the back of the classroom,
her frustrated hands steering heavy on my shoulders,
I did not mind. They’d put me back by
Mark Palachek in the dunce’s hat (they did that in school)
and I did not mind like Mark did.
Mark who now works in Chicago and married the too-beautiful woman
as though to say, f*ck you, Sister Cristine,
Mark, all the money he made, for Sister Cristine,
all the cars he drives, for her too.
Years later I asked him, my father,
why he did it. Why did he hurt my mother like that.
“Because I could, I suppose,” he said, guiltily,
the age hanging in his eyelids, the skin on his hands.
“She could not leave me.” And we stood in the rocking boat,
me reading lips, and him admitting his secrets.
At night he stands before his dresser,
taking his keys and wallet from his pockets,
loose change, a bullet maybe, but not the shame.
That’s coiled inside him now, twisted around his smile,
it’s an organ now, an old forever bird on his shoulder
whose small black wings spread wide as it squats on his chest,
all heaviness in his sleep, the white of his old undershirt
marked with ink from its feathers.
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