by Marcella Benton
ceiling lights multiply my shadow to shiva
a bastardized anglicized version
my many arms stretch across the tiled floor and up the shower wall
snaking over the shapes in the fake marble pattern
sinking into the bleached grout
we’re living in a dead woman’s house
fifty years it was hers
our shower tile is laid directly over hers
if we pull it down the wall will likely crumble
from mold or mourning
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Marcella Benton lives in Lakeland, Florida with her husband and pets where she and her husband run their screen printing and embroidery business, Whatever Tees. Marcella's previous work can be seen in Black Fox Literary Magazine and Deep South Magazine.
by Mary Meriam
I grabbed my witch’s broom too late to sweep the earth
under the rug. The watchers came to creep the earth.
How could I hide my eyes, and which way turn my feet,
without them watching, hand in grave, to reap the earth?
I put my spell on frothing crowds to pacify
the very rocking waves that ride and leap the earth.
In open sky, I leave the clouds, the jets, the stars,
the everlasting icy wind and weep the earth.
To battlements, I cry. Or just begin to cry.
Where is my girl’s green jacket? She will keep the earth.
Return my trees. Bring back the rocks and rooks, my treasures,
and all streams, swift or slow, the fields, the sheep, the earth.
When my true army carries wounded home, I’ll soothe
and heal the crippled seas, the silver deep, the earth.
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Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics.
by Ashley Cline
bring your own body. call it back from the
forest, call it up from the sea floor & watch
how the garden blooms her shipwreck tongue:
lilacs & oceans & isn’t it funny how everything
tastes of riptides this spring, you’ll say. & the
caramel spades you’ll make of my tongue, &
the salted currents you’ll lay along the flower
bed—listen how the garden sighs with her antler
fuzz & trapper fur trimmings left somewhere
among ankles & winter & isn’t it lovely how
a hungry mouth cares for such reckless lips?
you’ll say. & the tides you’ll prune; the
shark-toothed carrots you’ll pull from their
tender-earthed home & place, gently, belly
up, in the basket perched on your feral hip.
she’ll wait for you, there, i’ll say. this body
made of bouquets & drownings & the moon’s
magnetism. & oh, how you’ll undo my
cheeks along your palm—& watch
how easily the jaw sings of god.
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An avid introvert and full-time carbon-based life-form, Ashley Cline crash-landed in south Jersey 28 years ago and still calls that strange land home. Most often found listening to Carly Rae Jepsen, her essays on music and feelings have been published by Sound Bites Media, while her poetry has appeared in 404 Ink, Third Point Press, and Francis House.
by Taylor Byas
The camera lingers for a moment on the black
flame of O-Ren Ishii’s hair in the snow, just sheared
by the bride’s Hatori Hanzo, and I think
about what it means to draw hair in a fight. To hitch
a braid or a track from another woman’s scalp.
What would our grandmothers say if they knew
we’d forsaken the old proverbs—where is my Vaseline?
or Bitch, hold my earrings. These days, victory depends on:
· Grip-strength, how well we crook our nails
beneath the cornrows, how much we loosen
the black thread holding the extensions
· The strength of the first tug
· Drag-distance
· The size of the hole the asphalt eats
into the other girl’s jeans.
Somebody yells out Worldstar, starts recording,
and the crowd’s collective flash is hot as stage lights.
Someone’s nose is knuckled to spit and blood.
A lip bellies around a cut. A black girl’s bruises
grey under white light. And when they’re pulled
apart, pieces of themselves left behind
on the other’s shirt like O-Ren’s slit of blood
in winter’s fresh down, the judges must decide
on a loser. The phones record a tracking shot
to the clump of hair or braids on the pavement,
zoom in. The cameras linger on the weave yanked
from owner and updo, and the crowd’s uproar
is something like exit music. But we know
this is no samurai’s death. No one lives this down.
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Taylor Byas is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a first-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.
by Kate Polak
My grin isn’t what you think it is: joy
finds no quarter in the creaking teeth edged
between my lips. My smile is weltering
rage: it’s a stage of grief. It isn’t laugh,
delight, or any recognition that
would please. It’s what my face does when told
it offends, what I gird myself with
and against: it’s armor more than interior.
Am I not my face? If not, what can I say:
my mouth an unfilled space, hollow but for what?
The hope a glance will grant me deference,
the flesh of men. Not our twitching jaw at all, no:
It’s the gracious smile, an unthreatening skin
that you demand I clothe my disappointment in.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kate Polak is a professor and writer. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Plainsongs, So to Speak, In Parentheses, Barzakh, and elsewhere. She lives in Yellow Springs with her husband and five familiars, and has painted her house to resemble a jack-o’-lantern.
by Laurie Kolp
Bark mulch armors me brave.
When I separate its matter, I am defenseless
in the mounds I have made around me.
I become my mother: mattressed in living
room, all puffed up and naked, months like
meddlesome weeds.
Breaths are muffled grunts
because still air is too humid, hands
the only things movable in this
present moment. I rush
to disentomb mismanaged mess
until I reach moisture. There, the ashen soil
provides comfort I can admire.
Soon, I will cover the ground back up
with mulch knowing Mother
would want it that way.
_________________________________________________________________
Laurie Kolp’s poems have appeared in Stirring, Whale Road Review, Pith, and more. Her poetry books include the full-length Upon the Blue Couch and chapbook Hello, It's Your Mother. An avid runner and lover of nature, Laurie lives in Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs.
by Cyndie Randall
I am eating a waffle
He follows the wood grain on the table with his
trigger finger I wonder if I should
direct my questions there When
animals are hungry they hunt and
moan When they are hurting they cower and
moan When any need arises they moan never
deceiving themselves on the road between
gut and throat We just looked at a house
yesterday I say Laughed
with our friends in this room
Next we plead the regrettables: Is there someone else This will
make your mother happy What about our daughter I don’t
want you
Don’t want you
I type husband said he wants a divorce into the search bar
The results instruct me not to beg to look and be the best wife no
sweatpants or lying in bed I find it difficult to fold our laundry
with a bomb strapped to my chest remote in his hand
tracing tracing the deep-seated grain
Conversations like these don’t end they die
hungry I go outside to scream My moaning hits our home
and echoes back to me Do I cut the red wire or the blue
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cyndie Randall's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Love’s Executive Order, Whale Road Review, Boston Accent Lit, Okay Donkey, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere. She works as a therapist and plays among the Great Lakes.
by Susan Aizenberg
What I took to be a slim wire
lost on the pavement
turned out to be a tiny snake
that whipped itself around
the panicked toe of my kindergarten
saddle shoe. What I believed
the smoke from a swallowed cigarette,
burning in a young bully’s belly,
turned out to be only the mist
of his breath rising on the chilly air
of a foreign cold snap one rare
North Miami morning. It turned out
to be a stone outside our window,
not a dead deer curled
beneath the oak, and that cry
through the bedroom wall
was not a hungry baby, but only
our neighbor’s cat left too long alone.
That bite from some nasty bug
off the Smith Corona floor blackening
the skin beneath my jeans turned
out to be a third-shift splash
of the sulfuric acid it was my job
to dip the metal parts in,
and that closet I discovered,
jerry-rigged from textbooks,
around my son’s third-grade desk,
a small prison his teacher’d built
to wall him off when he couldn’t stop
talking out of turn. It wasn’t a starburst
we saw that summer evening as we left
the theater, just a woman’s sun-struck
hair. At first we’d thought it was snow
falling on the camps and trains
in the famous movie, those ashes
I learned were the words a friend
would speak one day, explaining to me
the transgressions of the Jews.
And what I thought the face of love
forever turned out to be heat
shimmering like water on a distant
blacktop, tar rising and then cracking
like my own lustful, fickle heart.
—after Stern
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Susan Aizenberg is the author most recently of Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015) and editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP 2001). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in blackbird, Summerset Review, NAR, Bosque, and elsewhere. Her new chapbook, First Light, is forthcoming from Gibraltar Editions in 2020 in a limited, letterpress edition. She lives and writes in Iowa City and teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
by Theresa Burns
Sometimes I wanted to crawl into a cave myself
when I watched the unfortunate baboons
palming their mangos at the zoo across the street,
then trying for hours to lick the stick off themselves.
I felt sorry for them as I felt sorry for the birds
in their high windowless cells—what good all that
red iridescence, all that sky-pitched soar?—
but not as sorry as I felt for myself that spring.
Nineteen and alone, no dancing in boîtes along
la Huchette, no fine-boned boys walking me
back to my room where I kept a knife
and a hotplate and a penlight so I could open
the right door when I visited the bathroom late,
my hand along the wall when the timed light
timed out, the hallway that held the most amazing
smells, crêpe and sleeping animal, pissoir and coffee.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Theresa Burns’ poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, America Magazine, New Ohio Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the author of the chapbook Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). The curator of Watershed Literary Events in New Jersey, she teaches writing in and around New York.
by Deborah Bacharach
—a duplex after Jericho Brown
Girls get one thousand a day. The extras,
like him, get a hamburger with fries.
He’s like a juicy hamburger with fries
without the courage to ask for a dance.
Without the courage to ask for a dance,
The Wall Street Journal says men don’t marry.
The old Journal runs the pro/cons of marry
for men against just getting the sex for free.
Men against just giving sex for free
ask for the basic beat they’re supposed to know.
Ask for the basic beat you’re supposed to know.
Even Questlove, with his music certainty,
knows in the quest for certainty, love,
he’s no Prince, but he can delve down deep.
He’s no prince, but he can delve whale ear bone-deep,
give day girls his one thousand extra selves.
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Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). She recently received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention and has been published in journals such as Adroit, Poetry Ireland Review, Vallum, Cimarron Review, and Poet Lore among many others. She is an editor, teacher, and tutor in Seattle. Find out more at DeborahBacharach.com.
by Laurinda Lind
Stuck between panes and walls,
here is a prophet poet in a church
so packed I can’t reach what
he says from inside myself
in the rain, though I stay, steal
charity under a strange umbrella.
Geese have been going all fall,
full of themselves up the sky.
Within, white coals seem to hiss
along the floor, heating someone
else’s heart. Even wet, the light
from the real world also is religion
so I suck it in like air till it
saves me under my skin.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Laurinda Lind, a former journalist, lives in New York’s North Country and teaches English composition classes. Some poetry publications/acceptances have been in Anima, Antithesis, Artemis, Blue Fifth Review, Bombay Gin, Chautauqua, Compose, Comstock Review, The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope, Jet Fuel Review, Josephine Quarterly, Kestrel, Main Street Rag, Mobius, Moonsick, New Rivers Press, Off the Coast, Passager, Paterson Literary Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Soliloquies, Sonic Boom, Triggerfish, Two Thirds North, and Unbroken.
by Emma Murray
“Well she was an American girl / Raised on promises /
She couldn't help thinkin' that there / Was a little more to life / Somewhere else”
— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “American Girl”
Sisters and I left our fingernails in the Badlands,
our teeth along a Wyoming roadside,
and our skin in Big Sky Country—
a syzygy of bodily offerings for the road gods.
We summited the Idaho Panhandle
and fortified our naked spines
with pieces of the Rockies.
Dad’s calls were red pushpins
metastasizing in our wake,
asking us to heed his advice—
Buy a bat.
By the time we reached Quilcene
we covered our bodies in succulence
the Olympic Peninsula offered us.
We pitched our tent on a bed
of fern and moss while the boombox
played Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’
“American Girl”
and reimagined the promises
we were raised on, the destinies
preordained by fathers.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Emma Murray holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and received an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2016. Her works have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Territory, Pilgrimage, The RS 500, and The Collapsar. She currently lives in Iowa and teaches at Iowa State University.
by Katie Manning
The sign behind the lighthouse
says sea otters used to live
in the kelp forest below until
accidental over-hunting made
them disappear. Now the sea
urchins run wild without
the otters to keep them at bay.
This majestic view—cliff, wave,
and sky—would be all the more
magical with a few otters at play,
slick bellies glinting at the sun.
I can almost see their ghosts
shining in the surf. I can almost
see your ghosts, too, reading
this sign with me and exclaiming
over everything: the otters, the water,
the lighthouse, our boys. I could
place another sign here—
The Ghosts of Missing Parents—
to explain how you also used to
come to this place, how you
would be here now if not for one
accident, a terrible moment.
How my grief runs wild
when I stand without you
and stare across the bay.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and her fifth chapbook, 28,065 Nights, is forthcoming from River Glass Books. Her poems have appeared in Glass, The Lascaux Review, Stirring, THRUSH, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.
by Ana Maria Caballero
time
and small children
time
to think too much of
it
the child plays
you
squat and ruminate
time
disbursed as mother
apart
from yourself the child
wants
park with you only
you
you travel to park here
child
scrambles you ponder only
me
me but also them only
them
the other mothers who
smile
or do not it does not
matter
now now the minor
face
gapes down the major
slide
does not ask to be
caught
does not beckon
you
climb but you must
watch
for the slide to matter
is
the child right another
query
dashed at the
park
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ana Maria Caballero was born in Miami in 1981 but grew up in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s a student of poetry at FIU, where she was runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 2014 her collection Entre domingo y domingo won Colombia's José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize. Finishing Line Press published Mid- life, her first chapbook, in 2016. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, Sundog Lit, and CutBank.
by Suzanne Swanson
when it blunders into the boardwalk, the second-
rate jellyfish, we are not sorry for it, watch amused
as it bumps and bumps the piling, finally getting
the angle right for escape, a vagrant pulsing against
the tide, blurring toward the atlantic, purples subdued
to brown under gathering grey. the cormorants
don’t notice or boredom sets in: they have seen it
a hundred times, know no reward comes from a morsel
of rubbery flesh. somewhere in this salt marsh, tide
runneling dark water, is a salt marsh sparrow, easily
confused with the Nelson’s or the seaside, look close
for the less buffy chest, the strong markings—white
stripes down the back. seeing means letting
the day turn away time, splitting with patience
the spartina from the sparrow, adjusting the eyes
to capture the rustle that turns to one, two, three
possible specimens, lifting off towards another swale
backs to us as if offering binoculars the perfect
perspective for accurate ID. our fantasy. we know
they don’t care, their devotion only to each other, to
the insects and spiders of these muddy flats, to the tiny
spineless marine creatures, the merging of inlet with sea,
how each pulls and pushes the other every single day,
a borderless survival never stopping, not stopping ever.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Suzanne Swanson is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and in the Land Stewardship Letter. She rows on the Mississippi River and is happiest near big water.
by Dawn Leas
Tempel-Tuttle takes her time orbiting the sun.
Slow, but fierce. Leaves her signature
and when Earth crosses her path—
an orchestrated show of light.
Just before dawn,
you lie on the concrete sidewalk
five hours behind the East Coast,
a symphony of birds
singing the morning awake.
You snap pictures of Jupiter, Venus and Mars,
the distance between immeasurable with just the eye.
Then Leonid's radiant falls through the constellation Leo
and the shower changes everything.
I ask when you'll be home.
You answer, right quick.
Just after midnight,
I lie down on a cold driveway,
dead leaves scratching its surface.
Above me, pines and red oaks tip-toe
their way to the northern sky.
My Scorpio lives by the moon.
Has a hard time forgetting.
Your Aries lives close to the edge of Mars.
We will forgive each other for this every day.
The comet lumbers along.
The meteor shower comforts.
Mother Earth spins.
Right quick takes on new meaning
in space. Thirty-three years to orbit
just once? We are experts at waiting.
_________________________________________________________________
Dawn Leas is the author of Take Something When You Go, (Winter Goose Publishing 2016), and I Know When to Keep Quiet, (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, San Pedro River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Her work won an honorable mention in the 2005 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She's a writer, editor, and writing coach. For more information, please visit www.thehammockwriter.com.
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.
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