by Dawn Leas
Tempel-Tuttle takes her time orbiting the sun.
by Libby Maxey
slow with the communion Alleluia
like I've forgotten even at the grave
we make our song
we bending to the pews
feel the organ quiver in the wood
the wrinkled grain impressing us with age
they remember how the boy walked the fence rail
as his mother watched unbreathing, how he
leaped down running, wild to reassure
how he, insistent, called himself a crowd for all adventures
making good every swift, unearthly choice
like going into water in the dark
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Libby Maxey is a senior editor with Literary Mama. She has reviewed poetry for The Mom Egg Review and Solstice, and her own poems have appeared in Crannóg, Emrys, Pinyon, Pirene’s Fountain, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Kairos, won the 2018 Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her nonliterary activities include singing classical repertoire and mothering two sons.
by Elizabeth A.I. Powell
Be like a flower that gives its fragrance even to the hand that crushed it
Ali ibn Abi Talib
Was what my mother called sweating. We spritz, we don’t sweat.
What about skank? So exotic. Rules for nice girls— Don’t wear nylon
drawers. The smell of white cotton panties, fresh
from the line is best. Go for nuance of honey and cumin. Don’t be catcalled—
catfish. Arousal is a communication the body makes. As a child the smell
of mud and cinnamon soothed my sunburns. Now at night when
tendril musks bloom patchouli, my body does the lindy.
Whatever signal my respiration plus heartbeat plus endocrine
chemicals publicize, I attract strange bedfellows. Even the bees
pollinating roses and jasmine for endnotes know
the olfactory signatures of their own group. We communicate
through scent, we don’t walk blindly toward the plank of love.
Trigger identification, primordial emotion: Big brother knows
how to market that in synthetic pheromone molecules.
Once, I tried smell dating: Wore a T-shirt three days and nights,
then took it off, sent it to Smell Dating Central,
where they cut the shirt in pieces, mailed out to prospective suitors
for them to smell, identify which appealed, see if my choice matched theirs,
voila, ode to our limbic system cha cha cha over a martini or espresso
in a darling bistro where pheromone baits trap gypsy moths.
History shows my ovulation triggered spermatozoa wars.
In the mornings washing with Cashmere Bouquet,
I make it new like a car. In my kimono and red lipstick
I read the papers in bed. But at 9:51 a.m. I go back to the idea:
Perfume is the feeling of flowers, a prayer burning
like brandy down the gullet. Poor flowers,
how shall they avoid their feelings? I read Glück’s “The Wild Iris,”
study their voices. I keep scents I never wear
like “Love’s Baby Fresh” circa 1976. It’s like keeping a specimen
of a lie in a bottle. Forcing yourself to love a perfume
is like forcing yourself to love someone you don’t.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.
by Adina Kopinsky
The revolution will not
be televised—chronicled
instead in college notebooks,
composition, spiral, leather
bound. Give me your eager,
your broken words
yearning to scale free—breathe
an ellipsis, break a dash,
lie down in a grave
of your own first drafts,
climb on top of cars
to cry for cease,
for fire, for the UN
to haul the click-clack of
red pens away, wash yourself
in a bath of ink, lay your body
on an A4 paper and spread
snow-angels, peel words
out of your skin, slough yourself
into the irregular lines of your mind
music, drink the wine
of your subconscious and sleep with
its multiverse, its nonsense, its huddled life: listen
to Walt Whitman tell you all the world’s
a poetry slam; he’s chanting through
a megaphone on the rooftop,
an audience of letters is breaking the fourth wall,
streaming through the theater, thrown
at the actor’s feet howling
for a chance to shine, to skip, to halt,
to stream like light until the end of the line.
Dream songs, inscape, break out
of Amherst in your white dress
sprout wings from your scapula
cry for revolution—
put down your spades, your keyboards,
your codes and locks, leave your cubicles,
your lawnmowers and yoga mats,
park your trucks
on the side of the road because
the time has come—hand in hand—my friends,
the tyranny loosens and in each
child’s hand a notebook is open
to the first blank page
and the sky sings hope—
the epic of tomorrow is written,
word by word,
in your hand today.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Adina Kopinsky is an emerging poet living in Israel with her husband and three sons. She has work published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications.
by Nadia Wolnisty
When I knew you, everything I owned was chapped.
A wooden fence around my yard,
white with brown beneath.
Do you know that ache?
The dust covers of my books went peely.
My face did it too—
nose a terrible melon, mouth like Pompeii.
Not the crumbling but the moment before.
Like stepping on the lip of a canyon.
My insides went fluidic. If you
were to open my stomach, an ocean
would fall out. A deep-fried human
with something undercooked between skins.
But I am making the journey to smooth.
I no longer know your name.
Look how I become unfeathered.
My torso is runner's knee before the gun.
I am tooth; I will bite air.
When I knew you, I shook, unable to paint,
or smile, or stand. A polyphony of poor taste.
I thought it was nerves, but it was just
my skeleton starting to hatch.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nadia Wolnisty is the founder and editor-in-chief for ThimbleLitMag.com. Her work has appeared in Spry, Philosophical Idiot, Apogee, Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Pepper Review, McNeese Review, Paper & Ink, and others. She has chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, Punk Provincial (forthcoming) and a full-length from Spartan.
by Emma Trelles
2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
And sparrows unthread nests, bring their young nothing
And shadows best seen inside the pitch of a cave
And three men stabbed on a train because of courage
And jacarandas flick cinder and blacken the ground
And the harbor horn is a creature roping hulls to the reefs
And the reefs gleam with chrome and absence
And absence is welcome
The bullet is welcome
The malignant cell is welcome
The gray faces and their merciless tongues are welcome
And a father is reptilian in his regard. And a mother stitches
Her lips like a wound. And the wound smells of silence and its blaring
And a child lays hands on a mine. And a man swallows his lies without measure
And a woman is told she is less than him she is less than the bodies left
Behind, less than the unmade, the never-was, the dirt forgotten by the tracks
And I no longer care about the losses. I no longer care if the last
Bit of bark is stripped from the earth, if the starved possum survives
The road, whether my neighbor coughs blood while she drags off a red
Or the hand turning the knob means me harm. I no longer fear
The inexorable diagnosis, the oceans rising to such heights
In my dreams they are monstrous but we are all still running
Towards each other, in this latest hour, refusing to shutter our eyes.
_______________________________________________________________
Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, Best of the Net, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Salt, Zócalo Public Square, the Colorado Review, Spillway, and the Miami Rail. A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she lived and worked for many years as an arts journalist in South Florida and now lives with her husband in California, where she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.
by Kim Harvey
(Poem for Myself Reading Pema Chodron in a Parallel Universe)
She’s been living a linear equation,
the product, the sum of what came before,
the difference, in this place where she
was figured in, where she ended up.
The iron in our blood was formed in stars,
billions of years ago, trillions of miles away.
Soft shuffle of newspapers in the park,
rhythmic squeaks from a swinging pair of
lovers under a thinning canopy
of trees. One-legged sparrow hopping
across the bus stop where church-light limns
a stained-glass lamb held in robed arms.
And when we die, the four elements dissolve
one by one, each into the other, and finally
just dissolve into space.
What if there is no absolute Truth,
only infinite possibilities
happening all at once so you’re always
left feeling you need to be somewhere
other than where you are?
Something inside her begins to
stir. She can feel her limbs twinge.
The process of generation occurs
in this order: air, fire, water and earth.
What if we are just quanta of matter colliding,
then breaking apart?
She hates to run because her legs never move
at the speed of her heart.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kim Harvey is a queer SF Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. She is the First Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the Third Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. See more at www.kimharvey.net.
By Rebecca Aronson
Because I never saw the butcher take down even one skinned rabbit
from the line hung in the window, I did not believe
that somewhere up the road was a crowded hutch
in which they huddled. I did not picture the soft ears
laid flat while a hand groped into the straw-dusted recesses.
Nor did I as I might expect allow the image of steam rising from a shallow white bowl
or those slim flanks braised on a plate with parsley sprigs and spring potatoes. I looked
at the rabbit-shaped bodies suspended on silver hooks
in the clear shelf of the window, the pane wiped clean I guess
each evening, and the sun bright on the glass
in which was reflected the wispy boulevard trees just now blossoming
above the passers-by, and saw across the street three blue awnings
blurred with sky, their flapping
like a flash of something disappearing fast into tall grasses.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rebecca Aronson is the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has poems recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, Tishman Review, Sugarhouse Review, Baltimore Review, and others. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.
by Sandy Longhorn
The moon, Sister, bright disc upon which
we spent our wishes, has reset itself to zero.
Nothing now but an empty dish in the flat,
black night, and we are left to sleep in fits,
as we did in that wild room of our youth,
woken by creak and snap, the machinery
of shadows, a juvenile oak standing
sentinel outside our screened window.
Your breath was my barometer. I drifted
in its steady current, tensed at its quickening.
Tonight we rest a thousand miles apart,
exchange quick texts in the dark to wrestle
the madness of our father’s mind, these words
no surrogate for your hand reaching across
that dark space.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sandy Longhorn has received the Porter Fund Literary Prize for Arkansas authors and the Collins Prize from the Birmingham Poetry Review. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Alchemy of My Mortal Form. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches at the University of Central Arkansas, where she directs the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference.
by Farnaz Fatemi
He had salted the wings of the red-tailed hawk
to see what would become of them. Had stumbled on the bird
where it died. Where he was exploring a new trail.
He knows death. He was no taxidermist.
But he wondered what a crate of salt could do
to keep what he had found. The bird
in his palms took him back to the year
he learned how to look at field marks.
How to find the head of the bird in binoculars
and break it into quadrants with his eyes, extract
the top of the bill from the bottom and let them
stay that way: one sooty, one golden. Hone in
on the cere, the flesh that holds the nostrils.
He remembers, now, the boy who didn’t
know the word cere. Didn’t even know
there was a part on the head of the bird
that needed a word like that one. The rush
he felt, that other parts might need names,
all that might be learned. He draws out the wing
base to tip and dips it in the salt
then scoops the thick crystals with his palms
to cover what he can. Every time he thinks of death
—train full of boulders on its track—he wonders
whether there are parts he will recognize.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Farnaz Fatemi is a poet, editor and writing teacher. Her poems and poem-essays have recently appeared in Grist Journal (ProForma prize for a poem-essay), Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A recent lyric essay was awarded the Honorable Mention for the Penelope Niven Prize for Non-fiction from the Center for Women Writers in 2018; another was a finalist for Best of the Net. Farnaz taught Writing for the University of CA, Santa Cruz, from 1997-2018. See more at farnazfatemi.com.
by Laura Foley
Because I heard the wind
blowing through the sun,
I left the lecture on mathematics,
found myself scaling a mountain,
so I could see beyond
the limits of my mind
numbed by numbers,
but was stopped by an old birch
crashing across my path—
its limbs and crown
bouncing a little, before settling.
Was this a sign, perhaps,
that I shouldn’t have left?
The expert is my friend, after all,
teaching patterns of numbers,
energy and fractals,
how full we are of space.
This I heard from her lips,
before the wind called me out
and nearly hit me, but I stepped over
the fallen birch,
like a comrade in subtraction.
When I reached the summit,
I saw my geometry
multiplied in the whole
of the world below,
holograms of my deepest space.
________________________________________________________________
Laura Foley is the author of seven poetry collections, variously honored with the Foreword Book of the Year Award (Silver), finalist for the NH Writer’s Project’s Outstanding Book of Poetry, and the Bisexual Writer’s Award. Her most recent book, Why I Never Finished My Dissertation, received a starred Kirkus Review and was among their top poetry books of 2019. Her collection It's This is forthcoming from Salmon Press in 2021. Her poems have won numerous awards, and national recognition—read by Garrison Keillor on “Prairie Home Companion” and “The Writers Almanac.” At Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Master Chorale performed composer Dale Trumbore’s “How to Go On,” based on her and two other poets’ work. She has a B.A. from Barnard College and an M. Phil. in English and Comparative Literature (Everything But Dissertation) from Columbia University.
by Marissa Glover
So this is the phone call, the email
in the dark hours after everyone’s gone
to bed, glass of wine on the nightstand still
half full, words important as air.
This is the song Kings of Leon sings—
the melancholy one, the one that ends
with a smile, the one your wife plays
in the shower because she doesn’t know
what it means. This is the apology—
an I’m sorry to appease the angels,
bypass the flaming swords barring us
from Eden, put the fruit back on the tree.
This is the sold sign planted in mud,
telling Shropshire the flat’s been taken.
This is the job ad for a man who loves
making plans, who teases fact from fog
the way chefs on Chopped cook complete
meals from whatever mystery ingredients
are in the basket, the way Fred Astaire
dances on the ceiling. This is the history
book teachers warn their class to read
with suspicion, eyes in search of bias
that leads to lies, penned by a poet
compelled to change the past, certain
a few good lines could write the future,
certain a future waits to be written,
certain the only story that ends happily
is the one that never ends.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Marissa Glover teaches and writes in Florida, where she is co-editor of Orange Blossom Review and a senior editor at The Lascaux Review. Marissa’s work appears in Rust + Moth, Mothers Always Write, Okay Donkey, and Whale Road Review, among other journals. Her debut poetry collection LET GO OF THE HANDS YOU HOLD is forthcoming from Mercer University Press in 2021. Follow Marissa on Twitter @_MarissaGlover_.
by Rita Mookerjee
from spending too much time in white
space which alternates between cradling
me and squeezing my guts out and some
time ago, I reached back and felt them
there, blinking under my dark ponytail.
When I don’t use them, they crust with
lymph and old skin. I have to rub
to coax them out of my tendons, knotted
and taut. Open, my eyes all itch as though
the air around me is forever spiked with
goldenrod, and for this reason, I cannot
process comfort: a place where my odd body
ends and the world begins. Eyes three and
four don’t react much to light, but they water
in lust, squint at intimacy, bulge at rejection.
They narrow each time that someone deems
me an alien. A problem. An anomaly. A bitch.
In white space, my body shrinks because I
can never extend my limbs to fit the shape
assigned to me. I wish that all four eyes
had powers like heirloom amulets: two
lookouts always on high alert for temptation
and fraud, and two to guide me from niche
to temporary niche until the day comes that
space has been made for my odd brown body
so that I can rest all four eyes and expand to fill
my space. Sometimes I profit from my many
eyes, however swollen, however sore. In white
space, people line up to gawk at the back
of my neck. They nod together to appreciate
my vitriol and scorn. They buy my books, then
pull me from any niche I try to claim as mine.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Aaduna, GlitterMOB, Sinister Wisdom, Berfrois, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is the author of the chapbook, Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). She is a poetry staff reader for [PANK].
by Charlotte Hughes
*please click on title to see the poem in its proper format
I do believe that an arrow unsung still does its own kind of singing
by singing I mean sorrow and by sorrow I mean the kind of perdition
& limbo you saw from the temple walls, the kind that knocks outside
your brass & teakwood door saying love-lost, honor-country, duty-glory, and when
you open the door it wedges its foot in the crack & won’t be
on its way until you’re on your knees speaking Aeolic to the marble &
I’m on my Persian carpet furiously solving SAT math problems
to keep from crying. One part of me would look at the lot of us, the crying
groundlings, wouldn’t even think of pity—no that’s you who
cannot hear the sound of a plastic bag whipped in the interstate wind, who
cannot switch the channel to the news with a dry face—you are yourself
& the reason not even your mother & father will believe when you prophesize
that the Trojan Horse whispers in Attic & when a wooden panel is screwed
loose there will be an outline of an eye in the belly of the horse.
The other part of me would be absolutely wretched.
I would consider myself ungraspable like the wind, I would throw
my shoes in a heap in one corner of the temple,
run with Cassandra on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea until the sand
caught my feet & I came down headfirst on charred sand,
& at 2 AM on the shore I would drop my chiton run
into the sea like Aphrodite except this time I wouldn’t be carried
out of the water on a conch-shell pedestal but would lurch out howling &
baying with Cassandra. & I would leave apples & oranges & a tub
of water outside the temple for anyone and call that resistance.
Look, I care imperfectly & Cassandra would care imperfectly
but still I carve my fingers clean & make a silly girl out of
myself at family gatherings, just like when Cassandra told Troy to stop
with it already & her family thought they’d better take
the mulled wine away. I even make little sacrifices out of my USAA card &
the time I have left. I stay up far past a girl’s bedtime. But speaking of
sacrifices, I keep circling back to this one: Cassandra snoring on the persimmon
mosaic of the temple. Myrrh. Anise. Anti-shadows of snakes
stretching around Cassandra’s earlobes, lacing through locks of apricot hair,
flicking tongues in her ears while whispering that she’ll have prophecies
no one will believe. She tried to wake up from the dream
but her eyes were already open.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Charlotte Hughes attends high school in Columbia, South Carolina. She has attended the Iowa Young Writerʻs Studio and is an editor for Polyphony Lit. Her poetry can be found in The Louisville Review, Lunch Ticket, and others, and was a finalist in the f(r)iction Summer Poetry Contest.
by Cat Dixon
I.
This is the quiet section so we whisper as we sort—
my pile has 50 poems. Yours, 30. With a red pen,
you slash through entire stanzas, draw arrows—
move this here, move that there. You say the last line
must bait the hook for the next. Each piece must
be tethered by the invisible push and pull
of the current. This table, floating in the corner,
with a view of the parking lot, now spins,
caught in a whirlpool. I get seasick easily,
but you, chewing on a pen cap, shuffling
manila folders, do not seem to mind the spray
of the water, the carousel of silver sharks,
the dented eel that slithers in my lap,
the shaky hand I use to take notes.
II.
It seemed like a good idea all those years ago,
to salvage our lost letters, poems, and emails
to construct a lifeboat. All that wasted
emotion and time put to use—to make
something to pass the hours, something
to busy our minds, something
so lopsided and ugly that it would
never carry its passengers to shore.
The anchor latched to my broken ankle
guarantees I’ll be pulled under
and you, forever captain, former martyr,
the hero hidden in every book,
are destined for the lighthouse.
Just a little farther.
III.
On my laptop, I create a Google drive—
organization will be so much easier.
We cut and paste and insert a new page break,
but the words smear the screen, my backspace
button gets stuck with seaweed. You
insist we work on paper. Forget
the computer, the cloud that holds
the secret of what happened to the sailor
who didn’t drown, didn’t abandon
ship, didn’t kiss my mouth and then spit
seashells in my face. His siren call
keeps the rain away, plugs the holes,
and I believe I can hold my breath
for as long as it takes.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cat Dixon works full-time at a church and teaches creative writing as an adjunct at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Cat is the author of Eva and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016, 2014) and The Book of Levinson and Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2017, 2015), as well as the chapbook, Table for Two (Poet's Haven, 2019). Her poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous journals including Sugar House Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Coe Review, Eclectica, and Mid-American Review.
by M.B. McLatchey
As if in an endless rehearsal,
I packed and unpacked. The challenge,
you said, was to take no more
than I’d need. Tenderly, you followed
the track of a storm moving in from the east.
In bed, a wrinkled map across our laps;
you circled a town and highlighted a road.
A yellow, satiny, path. When we slept,
you tried the path, left markers
you had kept for days like these.
And the markers were keys. Clues
in a moonscape of dust-covered things –
a pair of gloves with suede tips; a scarf;
a ring. Ruins like proof of a marriage,
a story’s skeletal sheen, small deaths, small
victories. Maestro, my mourning dove,
another chance? Put me back in that place,
with its signals and gestures and promise
of more mistakes. And I’ll show you
the hurtful lessons lovers make.
_______________________________________________________________
M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-completed educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing (2021). Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, M.B. is Associate Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com
by Cynthia White
Because I’ve slowed
to a tempo I used to dream of
back when my children were children,
I’ve taken up new pastimes—
crosswords, birds, obituaries.
Mornings, I walk a narrow canyon
that leads to a graveyard,
practicing my skills.
Black-headed grosbeak? Warbler
or wren? What’s a four-letter word
for end? I won’t call them golden,exactly, these moments.
Picture something darker—
light struggling through trees,
finding its way.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cynthia White's poems have appeared in Narrative, New Letters, Poet Lore, ZYZZYVA, and Grist among others. She's been both finalist and semi-finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize and was the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
by Amy Miller
What grew in the wrong direction,
what’s blocking the light—I’m trying
to be kind here, your missteps, misshapes
bloated by last year’s rain. Long handles
and a small steel tooth lop off beauty
sometimes too—I’m sorry
if you thought you were perfect.
You were killing yourself.
Wrong ladder, saw too short, I wake
the neighbor’s hangover cracking
through branches. Crazy-haired tree,
wild profusion frozen in the air—
I see now that you dreamt the hell
out of summer while I slept,
my elbows bound in grief.
Some warm afternoons—I remember—
I woke to the sound of bees
singing little farmer songs,
working in the sudden acres
of your bloom.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She lives in Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal. She blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.
by Mary Morris
is an ocean. Her breathing,
a storm at sea. My mother
is having a tooth pulled today.
This sweet tooth she has had
since she skipped from her tenement
to buy strawberry ice cream
for her parents, running
home before it melted.
That same molar bit into rations
during poverty in war
and through the feathery
wedding cake her mother baked.
One eyetooth drew blood
from the flesh of a midwife’s arm.
El otro diente, another tooth
cracked on an apple last week.
One by one, my mother is losing
all of her teeth. Now I understand
what this means:
someday she won’t be hungry.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Massachusetts Review, and numerous other literary journals, Mary Morris received the Rita Dove Award and has been invited to read at the Library of Congress. She recently won the 2019 Mountain West Prize from Western Humanities Review and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2020. Her book, Enter Water, Swimmer, was the runner-up for the X. J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas A&M University Consortium through Texas Review Press. A second book by the same press will be published in 2020. Morris writes book reviews, teaches poetry, and lives in Santa Fe New Mexico. See more at www.water400.org.
by Candice Kelsey
A friend beams to me
about the ASL class she’ll take this spring
and I feign delight
while swallowing the secret
that my parents taught me
sign language early:
I became fluent in their dialect
of disapproval and blistering
syntax of spite.
My friend will learn
the international sign for Happy Birthday
a grimace for that tastes funnymaybe a full-body expression of jubilation;
I was raised to read impatience
in a double finger snap
gnarled lips of disgust
and the finger wag shame on you.
Perhaps she’ll stumble
through the first conversations,
get tutors for finger spelling, or join
a study group to increase speed.
I was an apt student
enrolled in the total immersion program
though some signs I never learned:
I am enough.
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