by Sonia Greenfield
In that each day I cycle through
by Sherine Gilmour
I run the Black and Decker
over the car’s upholstery,
press into seams, shove the nozzle under seats.
Every other Saturday
when my father had custody,
I’d sit between shadows
on the lawn and watch
as he vacuumed, then took
each and every piece of carpeting out,
washed it with a hose and special soap.
Sometimes I’d lean inside the car,
admire his face, gleaming
pink with effort,
and ask if I could help
and would be given a rag and told to buff
the glove compartment, at which point,
he’d promptly move somewhere else,
the trunk or the hubcaps.
While I could never be angry
at the cars themselves,
too beautiful, too glorious,
I could be angry with him
and was for years
and still am.
A man who left me when I was eight,
packed up whatever car he had at the time, the Pontiac,
the junky Chrysler, or the apple red Ford,
and drove across state after state after state.
But here I am at the sink, using a little dish soap
to scrub pine needles
out from the ridges of the plastic floor protectors.
What can I say?
I like the new car smell. I like
when the upholstery looks brand-new.
It’s nice to pretend I get to keep something perfect.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming from American Journal of Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, River Styx, So To Speak, Tinderbox, and other publications.
by Patricia Caspers
(Here I am where are you?)
for Kristen and Lee Anne
Into this silence
I want to howl
Mariah Carey lyrics,
inhale 80s sitcoms
with each deep pull
of clovesmoke,
sweat rum
into couch seams.
Instead, the canyon
beyond the TV screen
is sobering pink stormlight.
Turkeys wander
the garden,
their bronze feathers
shimmer rainbows
and fall to August-
yellowed grass.
Flocks roam the neighborhood
seed-scouring the earth,
unconcerned with the romance
of October twilight.
I wake to the turklets’
three-note whistle-and-yelp
in the starless night.
They scurry the fence line
in search of a path
long buried with foliage
of other autumns.
There’s no word
for the hunter’s practice
of calling a hen to his shotgun
with the cry of her lost poult.
There is no word
for what we are now.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Patricia Caspers is an award-winning poet, columnist and journalist. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares, PANK, The Cortland Review, Sugar House Review, and Quiddity. She won the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, and her full-length poetry collection, In the Belly of the Albatross, was published by Glass Lyre Press.
by Theresa Senato Edwards
of what was,
draw circles counterclockwise /
worry the body is / weight
dessert / just ice.
And the dead shouldn’t
circle its breaking.
But I was born with superstitions
in the gift shop / of / personality
change / not my mistake.
And my body will never be still
in the memory of my parents’ home—
father building basement walls
teaches me, his last daughter, to paint
thin layers with each coat,
ration the paint as if my life depended
on each stroke of color saved
/ to position
a nail like a flagpole,
steady / straight,
fear of missing the small, silver target
unable / to not wanting to /
build away
an attic crawlspace: a safe gap
for a little girl before sorrow
metastasized.
_____________________________________________________________________
Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received creative writing residencies from Drop Forge & Tool and Craigardan, and is Poetry Editor of The American Poetry Journal (APJ). For more, see her website: https://theresasenatoedwards.wixsite.com/tsenatoedwards.
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
How shocked I was
as a child to learn
that the architecture of life
included death—a frightened fire
starting inside of me fueled
by containment.
I have watched people die,
held their cool hands
as they exhale a last breath.
Each time is a lessening,
an echo—the way veins
of a fallen leaf are a faint imprint
of the tree or the inside whorl
of a shell holds onto the sea.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form of writing with conscious linebreaks. She has three poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.
by Hannah Jones
tobacco fields stink
worse than collards
greenish brown
windows down
muggy breeze
fingers reaching out to touch
nearly touch
the cotton balls
as they fluff by
because if you touch
perhaps you will know
what your foremothers knew
ages ago
down in the Cackalacky
the dirt road
stationwagon
rickety, creaks
with the grease of fried chicken
in spotted napkins
and thighs, sweaty
sticking to hot leather
two angry sisters in the backseat
lips smarting from the pinch
of reprove
and stewing from the heat
cold tomato slices
say Goodbye
and every 200 miles
you might stop
at a tiny gas station
where there’s a single attendant
and your father
vanishes
and emerges
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hannah Jones is a child clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay by way of Virginia. Dr. Jones also leads social justice oriented didactics. She has always used written word as an outlet to integrate her academic and artistic identities. Dr. Jones writes to articulate silenced hopes, dreams, anxieties, fears, and experiences. Her work has been featured by Split This Rock and My Whisper Roars and is published in TAYO Literary Magazine.
by Rosie Prohías Driscoll
Abuela Aida was obsessed with whether
her daughters would sprout las orejas de torreja
de Abuelo Cesar y José Basilio, those ears
that induced Sisa to tie a blue ribbon around
Tio Raul’s infant head (even if people might think
he was a girl) to prevent them from smothering
him in his sleep. She gave thanks to God when
Mami and Mina each emerged from the womb
with ears well-proportioned for wearing a proper
moño, and again years later, when we her nietos
also managed to escape the elephantine curse.
So when our first daughter is born the women
of the family swoop down ceremoniously to dissect
her baby body. Mami proclaims que la niña tiene
las sortijitas pegadas a la cabeza like my father,
though the strawberry blond hue of her ringlets
belong to Abuela Rosina. Most importantly, her ears
are perfect, tiny caracoles de nacar. Lying in her moisés,
la niña gazes at her father, not yet able to recognize
the amused smile taking shape as he strokes the reddish
stubble of his beard, while I fix my eyes on hers, wanting
to believe it’s true, that a little piece of ourselves
can live in the precise curve of a fingernail bed,
or in the pupil of the bluest eye
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rosie Prohías Driscoll is a Cuban-American educator and poet. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband and greyhound. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Acentos Review, Más Tequila Review, Literary Mama, Blue Lyra Review, Temenos Journal, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant and First-Generation American Poetry, and Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders.
by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
I think careful cooking is love, don't you?
~Julia Child
Isaac's not mentioned
once replaced by the ram,
only his sparing. Not one
ounce of disappointment,
not one question
about an unfit parent,
only people singing.
Show me how we prevent
fathers from sacrificing
children to honor
Gods with offerings.
Show me a mother
who wouldn't bind
babies to a stranger
to recover an hour
over the fire alone.
The "card-carrying carnivore,"
Julia Child's just one
whose sacrifice—
hers to Boeuf Bourguignon—
was childlessness.
My son and daughter
bound to rock-like seats
in the sanctuary, augur
their own dismay.
To feel God in my hands
what wouldn't I give away?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems) and three scholarly books in education. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman Award for Professors Who Inspire, and a Fulbright for the nine-month study of adult Spanish language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, she's served for over ten years as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism, judging the ethnographic poetry competition. She blogs at http://teachersactup.com.
by Kunjana Parashar
In the 1990s, diclofenac was used to treat cattle diseases. Many
vultures started dropping dead after feeding on the medicated carcasses:
Gyps bengalensis, G. Indicus & G. Tenuirostris: they took a hit so badly,
that later, the Parsis planned to build vulture-aviaries for the traditional
departure of their dead. I was born in that decade–somewhere around
the confirmed end of Javan tigers. Since my birth, there are others who
have gone extinct–birds, civets, rhinos. And yet, countless anurans hide
in the Western ghats. Turn this shola, peatland, lateritic plateau–and you will
find a species still willing to live, shy only of the blessed grace of taxonomy.
When my mother asks how I want to celebrate my birthday this year,
I say quietly.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kunjana Parashar is a poet living in Mumbai. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, The Indianapolis Review, Parentheses Journal, UCity Review, What Are Birds, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.
by Emily Banks
The first breaking story I remember
hearing as a child, wide-eyed between my parents
on the couch as we ate ice cream, watching
the six o’clock news. I’d never seen one before,
except in a quick flash, a boy my mom tutored
in his closet laughing though I didn’t understand
why it was a big deal. I knew boys had one
and I hated boys. How I imagined it,
there was no blood. Just a pale limp organ
like a peeled banana snapped softly in half.
I pictured her tossing it out the window
into a dark pile of twigs and driving off.
Why she did it was unimportant to me.
I’d seen my mom get angry
at my dad and believed women
were always right. It was the ’90s. Wives
were a punchline. Their thighs
were too fat and they were too old
for their belching husbands whose stomachs peeked
out from their Buffalo-sauce-stained tees:
Take my wife. It would have been a fair conclusion
to any family sitcom, honestly: the husband
in the den, remote in hand, snoring gently,
or at the kitchen table with his other husband-friends
gawking at the sixteen-year-old nanny over poker chips,
none of them even good at poker—then wife
enters with butcher knife. The news anchors
never explained how he hurt her. Entered her
body in ways she could barely whisper to the court.
Never said he promised to kill her.
The penis was the story as, I would soon learn,
it always is. But still I liked how it made men,
even the grown-up ones on TV, squirm
like little boys with mothers scrubbing
the backs of their necks for Sunday, scrubbing
harder than they needed to, like it was more
than dirt their rough cloths sought.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Cortland Review, The Southampton Review, Memoir Mixtapes, Glass (Poets Resist), Superstition Review, New South, Collective Unrest, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University.
by Joan Colby
She half-stood after dinner, said
Six words and seized
Like the old Packard following
The shrieking squad car
With Annie in the back seat,
Her appendix rupturing, the oil light
Coming on, unnoticed.
Gabriella said Your mother is dead now,
We trundled her to her room,
Laid her down. I could swear
She was still breathing, but it was
Just the final bodily functions
Shutting down like gears freezing
Ungreased, the rattle of the
Radiator hissing its last
Exhalation. What was it she said
Standing there, surprised,
Her voice gone thick.
Last words. You expect
Profundity. Or an image:
The spiritual bird on an updraft.
Surely, I think now when the light suddenly
Flares and dims at the archway to
Something or nothing, in that ancient
Turtle mutter, a primeval tone
Before civilization mustered
Columns of rationality,
She might have enlightened us.
But there was nothing
Significant. Nothing to bequeath.
No evidence. She said
I want to go to bed
So firmly there was no denying
The order. We shouldered her
Into the darkness.
__________________________________________________________________
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her recent books include Her Heartsongs from Presa Press, Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press, Elements from Presa Press and Bony Old Folks from Cyberwit Press. She has another book forthcoming from The Poetry Box Select series titled The Kingdom of the Birds which should be out next August.
by Beth Gordon
When physicists in Oak Ridge swung the door
wide to glimpse the negative of narrow
existence, a snail with wet wings emerged,
leaving a contrail, and then hummingbirds,
sluggish and attracted only to shades
of white, and called by metaphysical
choirs to reunite with God and my
father appeared, his oiled brain in clockwork
order, to decode triangulations
of weeping willow funerals, lightning
bugs and vanishing tar pits, but did not
know my face, my doppelgänger long drowned
in mud waters and no one through either
mirror knows if it was an accident.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks: Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press) and Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbird Publishing). She is Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.
by Sara Quinn Rivara
My son tells me to stick my finger
in an open anemone though it might sting.
On Haystack Rock, tufted puffins return
each year to lay eggs and raise their young.
Cells divide but not forever.
Mom, do you remember before me? The tide
is coming in. He’s wet to the knees.
I think I have always been here.
My new husband and his son make sandcastles
while we watch starfish slip beneath the waves.
The sandcastle goes under. There is no before,
no after. The boys trace stars into the sand,
run into a crowd of gulls. How do jellyfish live
without brains? they ask. We eat ice-cream
for dinner, walk barefoot back to the hotel.
The boys talk until midnight. Our bodies taste
like salt. Tree frogs sing through the open window.
My husband hums and puts the boys to bed.
To call a thing by name is a kind of spell:
Mom, Sara, love. Even so, the past wolf-whistles
bitch, unloveable. Fog rolls in, smears the panes.
Today the ocean is calm. Tomorrow,
the weather will shift. Big rollers, north wind.
One rogue wave could swallow us.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of Animal Bride (Tinderbox Editions) and Lake Effect (Aldrich Press). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, West Branch, Dunes Review, Blackbird, RHINO, and numerous other places. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
by Paula Harris
Butterflies in my pants
Got ants in my heart
Supergroove “You Freak Me”
bees in the belfry
bats in my bonnet
a drop in the rough
a diamond in the ocean
hell in a pod
peas in a handbasket
true fact:
one of Saturn’s moons
looks like a round ravioli
(not a square one)
all that glitters cannot change its spots
a leopard is not gold
a little knowledge is a joy forever
a thing of beauty is a dangerous thing
in for a barn door, in for a pound
shutting the penny after the horse has bolted
true fact:
the average cloud weighs
the same as 83 elephants
(a small cloud is 2 elephants)
let’s press into shape
come, lick me into service
let’s make pie while the sun shines
come, be my hay in the sky
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paula Harris lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rialto, Barren, SWWIM Every Day, Diode, Glass, Aotearotica, The Spinoff, and Landfall. See more at www.paulaharris.co.nz.
by Michele Sharpe
A dog, maybe a coyote, splashes up a shallow, rocky stream.
The shame carried deepest in the body is the shame of being fooled.
The dog, maybe a coyote, sheds droplets from its fur. They shine.
The shame of being fooled means we can’t trust even ourselves.
Say it: There is a stream. Sunlight. A coyote. Some things have names.
The dog, maybe a coyote, raises its muzzle as if smelling, even tasting the breeze.
You could say the same of getting fooled. First, the scent. Then, you taste it.
Later, nothing is certain until bitten, until its fur comes away in your teeth.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, and The Sycamore Review. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review.
by Lisa Zimmerman
In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God Saint John of the Cross
Your father married for love
an orphan below his noble station.
Discarded by his wealthy kindred
they say your parents nurtured you in poverty—
and the bread was as sweet as any bread
and the days offered their shiny hands
and their little streams of water
singing in the glades.
I see you wandering happily as a boy,
the sun a crown on your small head,
your bare feet scuffing the dust.
God chirped like a wood lark
in the throat of afternoon
and the lonely months in prison
were far ahead beneath the great shadow
of the future.
I try to follow you there, O mystic,
to watch you defy your greedy brethren
monks who will reject your reforms, your love
of less, of days returned to prayer and fasting.
Fat and threatened, they silenced you
in a narrow stone cell, one tiny window
like the one in the soul where day after day
the voice of God pierced your suffering.
Out of emptiness, a full heart—
out of abandonment, a poem of seeking—
out of utter darkness, a gleam of pure light—
love’s last trembling boat waiting for you
to get in, and row.
_______________________________________________________________
Lisa Zimmerman’s poems have appeared in Cave Wall, Colorado Review, Natural Bridge, Apple Valley Review, Chiron Review, Trampset, and other magazines. She has published three chapbooks and three full length collections. Her debut poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.
by Amelia Martens
And ask me to put a Christmas pompom in your hair
along with a maroon bow to hold your bun in place.
There is all of breakfast and night across your face
when we leave the house; when we cross the street
your sister wants to talk about gravity
and I am doing math involving trajectory:
if two daughters and their mother step off
this curb now, will they arrive on the other side
before that blue pick-up truck explodes
their bodies in clean clothes and homework?
Why don’t we fall off the surface of the Earth
as our planet spins through space, why don’t
we feel the spin, here on this plate? I make
metaphors with my free hand and conduct
two half conversations at once, without
success. We cross another street and don’t
die and yet, I always feel the sunshine
as a potential threat, my body
your bodies, always under the weight:
a certain level of force exerted to hold us
to the ground, as we are more
dangerous in our space.
I let go your hand, and you run
up the school steps, free radicals.
I turn home, thinking of ice animals
floating off the poles at each end of this ball.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016) and four chapbooks, including Ursa Minor (elsewhere magazine, 2018). She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She met her husband in the Indiana University MFA program; together they created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters.
by Tiana Nobile
my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?
you say,
dazed under the haze of hospital lights,
your arm tethered to an intravenous drip
charging like a box to numbing light.
You’re twenty-five, adrift in anesthetic fog
floating through the white sea of hospital hallways,
and you think of me, the living package
that changed your life. On the day of my arrival,
you were a month away from turning four.
While the buzz of anticipation swirled
around the airport terminal, your small body
perched high, anchored in the crook of our father’s arm.
So this is how babies are born,
you thought, and everything was yellow.
Scuffed linoleum tile. Blur of fluorescent lights
hovering above you. How you must have imagined
my body rattling in the box during transport
as our mother scurried
to the airport bathroom to snap my joints
into place. Today, we laugh about what you said.
We laugh until we forget why we’re laughing.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tiana Nobile is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a poetry fellowship from Kundiman. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Georgia Review, among others. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.
by Virginia Kane
beside the lake, you asked me to rub sunscreen
on your hard-to-reach places. this was
foreign territory. West Virginia. two weeks
without parents or church service. this meaning
all of you, in a Target bikini,
strawberry popsicle juice staining your lower lip.
you played lacrosse in a sports bra & spandex,
sang loudest during bonfire & knew it.
there were bumps on your shoulder blades
where i squeezed & spread the lotion,
bursting where mosquitos fought
for tastes of you. you & i & every creature
on that campground famished in the
Blue Ridge mountains. she’s bisexual,
Carroll told me in the shower house
one night. you know what that means,
don’t you? how your eyes must be glued
to our bunk bed-sized bodies so
we clutched our towels tighter to our
dandelion chests. but what did it mean
if i wanted you to stare. longer than
it takes to fall asleep under
twin sheets in July. your palms
releasing lighting bugs to
each phase of the moon. your tongue
spitting watermelon seeds through the
volleyball net. so in this version,
there is no boyfriend you made plans
to move in with after graduation,
only baby hairs on the back of your neck.
in this version, i ask where else i can
lather lotion & there is no oil
or guilt on my tiny timid hands.
in this version, i sneak to your cabin
after lights-out & climb each
metal rung barefoot. in this version,
your body matches mine down to
its heartbeat, & i am gone through
your screen door by morning.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Virginia Kane is the author of poetry chapbook, If Organic Deodorant Was Made for Dancing (Sunset Press 2019). A sophomore at Kenyon College, she was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and a 2018 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Gold Medalist. Virginia has held internships with the Kenyon Review and Split This Rock, performs with the Kenyon Magnetic Voices spoken word poetry team, and serves as Managing Editor of Sunset Press.
by Dayna Patterson
The big things, obviously. Birthdays, and how old. Anniversaries, and what number. When to pick up the beloved child from school. But the small things, too. Field trip permission slips. Planetarium tickets. Watering the philodendron, its tumble of parched foliage like yellow banners signaling distress. When my mother came to visit, she wiped six years’ dust off each leaf using her thumb. Now it can breathe, she said. How could I forget? Match our minds to the task of ticking every box, even the ones in the basement crawling with roaches. Among all the to-doing, let us not forget the pink dogwood. Even if we tread in dog shit, Lady, let us not forget to look up when we pass. Colonoscopy. Mammogram. Dentist. The email, or letter, or text, or line of a poem we’ve been meaning to write. Tie a scrap of yarn around our wrists. Inscribe reminders, impermanent tattoos, in the sail of skin between pointer and thumb. A red asterisk for meteor shower. A black L for library, late fines mounting up to catastrophe. Prick our memory from its slump on the couch, so we recall: How to rouse for a blood moon. How to release the trapped animal of breath. How to steal the tooth-pearl tucked beneath our children’s dreams.
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