by Elisabeth Blair
I was found at last, abandoned, partially submerged, listing heavily.
no one is related to me.
by Vismai Rao
Two months of sunless winter
emperor penguins huddle to conserve heat—
it’s how a thousand-petalled black marigold
stays abloom the icy Antarctic
until the arrival of spring. Three oceans away
my half-blind grandmother
is discovering for the first time water
halted by its own limitations:
icebergs, frozen seas, glaciers. I pause the movie
to tell her there are places on this planet
that don’t see sunshine for six months & she fixes
her one good eye on me, bewildered—Soon,
the view of Eurasia from outer space
fills our screen and I tell her
this is Earth, the thing you’re standing on, a part of me
worried if the heart at 72 can absorb
the shock of such revelations.
Amamma devours the season
as we binge-watch six episodes in two days:
Mushrooms inching out of tree bark. The jaw of a croc
snap-shut on the leg of a wildebeest. Or a million snow geese
like heartbeats emerging
out of my grandmother’s chest, a flutter of wings
so furious it decries every notion
of flightlessness, amamma’s feet
twitching inches above the stone floor—
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Vismai Rao's poems appear or are forthcoming in the Indianapolis Review, RHINO, Salamander, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Parentheses Journal, Rust+Moth, The Shore, & elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She lives in India. Find her on Twitter @vismairao.
by Anne Barngrover
because he demands hothouse eyes and delayed
manifestation. He requests my best side
hidden then flipped upright, wetly visible
only for his decree. Look at the golden ring
and cherry topping, retro and crystalized
as living room stained glass. I serve my god
clementine cake made from ground
almonds and six eggs. It’s easy to lie
about how many oranges I can go through.
It’s a cake of pulp and rind, a stepping stone
to the potential he knows I can reach
if I just concentrate on what he wants from me.
I serve my god lemon poppy seed cake,
zesting over a bowl until my shoulder aches.
Three times the glaze pools on the yellow flower
plate. Three times the base falls apart.
But the taste—so tart, so sweet. I suck my cuticles
and plead. I serve my god a carrot cake.
It’s clogged with nuts and raisins, and I can’t
move after grating roots with a rusted tool.
He is most displeased. The icing, too thick
or will not thicken. Layers collapsing like a cave.
I serve my god his birthday cake. I research
all night long. Its buttermilk, well shaken.
The batter’s air bubbles slapped away. Its flour
comes from a red box with a picture of a swan.
His favorite icing, chocolate sour cream. My god
wants and wants from me. I make it perfectly
but still he doesn’t believe me when I tell him
that pineapple comes from the ground
despite how I point to the row of blue-green spikes
growing in acidic soil. He wants me to show
him what I mean, to get down low. Maybe then
I can prove to him what it is he already knows.
He says, I always had faith you could do it. He says, welcome.
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Anne Barngrover’s most recent poetry collection, Brazen Creature, was published with The University of Akron Press in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Award for Poetry. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida.
by Diane Hueter
I paint a bowl, mounded with limes,
leaves cast shadows on the tablecloth,
candles flicker, flames draw a moth,
then another, and one more, and in time
all memories gather, listening to the moon.
I paint a bowl, steaming with stew,
potatoes, meat—I would feed to you—
peas, carrots—morsels that justify the spoon.
A painting or a dream, a wall of clay
bending to the wind, my bowl. Twigs
fill it. Lemons and limes, currants and figs.
Feathers of fledglings before they fly away.
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Diane Warner (publishing as Diane Hueter) works at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library of Texas Tech University, where she is curator of a manuscript collection concentrating on contemporary writers of place. She received a BA and MA from the University of Kansas, an MLIS from UT-Austin, and a PhD in English from Texas Tech. Her poetry has appeared in Isotope, BlueLine, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and PMS: Poem Memoir Story. Her book, After the Tornado, was published by Stephen F. Austin UP (2013).
by Tina Carlson
Say excavation, exoneration.
My mother’s mouth, washed out
with soap. In that cool cocoon
a salmon caught in stones.
Bird flapping in a trap. Cheek
swab, sea snail. Show me
how a smile hides argument
behind its teeth. Ask her,
what words made your
crimes? She ate wood,
sampled leather. Grazed
the back yard of her alphabets.
Grass cats lumbered the clods
of her thoughts. We tumbled
through her silent gardens
filled them with noise.
To untether the tongue,
say frenulum. Say frenzy.
A simple snip and a drop
of blood. Let her taste
peaches, warm June. I imagine
my mother is more than apology,
flag planted in her throat
unfurled past mumble and scorn.
Poplar at dawn, she is lingual.
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Tina Carlson is a Santa Fe poet. Her most recent book, We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press), is a book of poetic epistles written in collaboration with poets Katherine DiBella Seluja and Stella Reed, in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Her first poetry book, Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM, 2017), explores the impact of war on a family when the veteran does not receive adequate help for their trauma.
by Sarah Carey
for my father
In the latest projection, Irma creeps
up the spine of the supine peninsula.
We lie sober in our safe room,
foundation beneath us, rooted to the soil
doors and windows shut tight, radio, flashlight,
extra batteries and covered shoes at hand
so we can run from room to room
between gusts, snaps and thuds
as if we might save what we’ve built
from intrusion, elements we’ll never escape.
As the fluids left my father’s body,
he tracked my moving mouth, a salt river
smelling of seaweed and grief.
His good eye would see me through
my slips, the mopping up
I’d always do when storms swept in
then out with who we were,
so sure we’d not be hit again.
When I was as tiny as a country
seen from light years away,
he held me high above the swirling sea
that was the beginning and the end of everything.
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Sarah Carey's work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Grist, Yemassee, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. A Pushcart and Orison Anthology nominee, her new poetry chapbook, Accommodations, received the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award and was published in June 2019. Sarah's first chapbook, The Heart Contracts, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. She works in communications at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.
by Annette Sisson
An empty wooden frame, years
layered like rings of oak, the painting
discarded—a turbulent sea and sky
scarcely divided, streaks of gray
mimicking a choleric body of water.
This strife—a chaos, a suffering.
You consider a new canvas, how
it might be stretched, fitted—perhaps
a mossy kayak, a river, its creeping
tendrils and fronds jacketing mud-
slick banks. From the mullioned
window of a rural farmhouse, black-
slatted fencing bisects fields
of grass, rusty-feathered weeds.
Crows light in tree tops an acre
away. Jabbering ducks aggravate
the sky. A northern mockingbird scats
a rhyme, and coyotes shriek into night,
their scraping laughter sandpaper on slate.
The old tumult swells.
But ducks spread their wings
on rivers of air—like paddles turning,
countering surge. The canvas beckons
these birds, this kayak bearing you
through woodlands, copper fields patched
with fencerows, crows calling from threadbare
trees high above the chalky floodplain.
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Annette Sisson is a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Besides teaching, she enjoys traveling, hiking, baking, playing piano, singing alto in choir, watching birds, and being with her family. In the last year, she has published 15 poems in 13 journals and a chapbook, A Casting Off (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She was named a BOAAT Writing Fellow (2020), won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize (2019), and received honorable mention in Passager’s national poetry contest (2019). She is currently at work on a full-length book of poetry.
by Sally Rosen Kindred
like the first
1. In your throat now when you speak, I hear the seed-cries of blue blooms from the dining room walls you papered over when my father left. In your throat it’s night. A meadow frosts and hardstars.
2. In the meadow we meet. Here our bodies are paper blooms, only the widows of actual larkspur, actual flax. Still, we lean.
Mother has spoken, like
3. Here in your throat, cold wind, a wreath of stones. Roots lit blue by skin, by your fury, break through the ground beneath me. How did I get here. How do I leave.
4. I keep telling you not to die, but you do. Meadows ago, we sang flax hymns in a candle room, wrapped in the paper of his unremembered breath.
the wet garden
5. Now the meadow sinks beneath blackwater. It is the Edisto River. Leaves fringe overhead in shards, blue pulp. Your arms tread and drip. Your Girlbloom face in the water could open.
6. There is nowhere for you to swim from here.
Praise for the singing
7. Meadows and meadows ago, you made me into skin from flax and chicory. Breath strung, the sepals yours, star to star, wet lace. Now I have no throat, only a blue paper tower in which a mother sits, cupping a river. It’s getting dark in there. I have no bones but the ones that crack through the violet grass.
8. Through the violet grass, leaning away from threats of light.
where his feet pass
9. I keep telling you not to die but you do. I tell him to stay but his voice peels from the walls, the blue beads behind it drip but don’t speak. O soft leaning. Praise with elation. I am waiting in a meadow where the candle breaks and there is no wax but waiting, no skin but ink unbeading. There are no hymns but his feet, no walls but your throat: the frost of black, unblossomed stars—not pulsing, never morning.
(Words in italics from “Morning Has Broken,” Eleanor Farjeon, 1931)
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Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of two poetry books from Mayapple Press, Book of Asters and No Eden. Her most recent chapbook is Says the Forest To the Girl (Porkbelly Press). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online.
by Kelly R. Samuels
like teeth. Close up and two dimensional, as they are.
I sit in the chair with my bib. He’s gesturing,
pointing to what I often conceal—never smiling
broadly, or: only when forgetting. Here is the canine,
he says. Like a dog’s, he says. And the molars
with their two-pronged or fused roots.
All is white and gray and a deeper gray, the darkest
parts not even teeth but the sinuses like storm clouds.
I see a child’s toes after a long bath.
Tulips bleached of all color. But more:
of the sea or cave—what is found where
there is little light and delving is necessary.
Farther north, that lake I love and the crystal
ice structures formed in its wet, wind-rocked caves.
Somewhere other, the white sand anemone without
its magenta—so disparaged, so delicate.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, The Pinch, DMQ Review, Salt Hill, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
by Lisa Creech Bledsoe
When the day pours down in a silken glaze
the great bear walks up
and up each milk-white step of noon
leaving the restless woods
and her green cave of weeds
emptying her pockets of berries, roots, and grubs
climbing past the crows in the lemony air
above the hornbeam and chestnut oak
between cloud and mountain.
She slowly shakes aside the heavy rug of her fur
and muscle of her body
letting go
memories of grievous winters
boom and howl of the wind and weight
of each cub, before it was born
wending up the stairs of the night chorus
into the embrace of grandmother sky,
with bones as light and fierce as polished suns.
I tell you this so you won't be surprised
if the scent of pine sap drifts down
with milkweed, and memories of wild fat summers—
if you too
are stretched out in the field watching
for the rise of the great mother.
Remember your enchantment:
every day is a doorway
every moment is the world revealing itself.
Death is not waiting at the end,
but is here, vibrating with promises
of wider horizons and songs in different languages.
We are not waiting, but are
constant and becoming as we climb
listening for
learning what the river wants
and how the plants became healers—
letting go of our bodies
slowly, carrying nothing else into
the black and silver night
but the great shining we came from, and are.
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Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019) and Wolf Laundry (2020), and she has new poems out or forthcoming in American Writers Review, The Main Street Rag, Jam & Sand, The Writer’s Cafe Magazine, Cabinet of Heed, and Front Porch Review, among others.
by Joy Roulier Sawyer
Cup your hands like this, I said,
and when your arm comes out of the pool,
just roll your head to the side for air
She giggled, slurped water, puffed her
chipmunk cheeks and squirted me
through gaps in her teeth
Later, we climbed out and dangled our feet,
her baby fat pooched over her swimsuit
like white-flour dumplings
Then we heard two pool workers picking up Coke cans behind us
They bought another Rolls Royce yesterday.
Makes me sick
Wonder how many little old ladies
paid for that
They laughed like the shrill whine of the pool’s vacuum
I turned and looked Tammy Faye's daughter straight in the eye,
but she'd disappeared—
gone scuba diving in Maui,
enough oxygen strapped to her back
so she'd never have to surface
again.
________________________________________________________________
Joy Roulier Sawyer is the author of Lifeguards (Conundrum Press) and Tongues of Men and Angels (White Violet Press). Her poetry has appeared in LIGHT, Lilliput Review, New York Quarterly, St. Petersburg Review and many others. Joy teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she also facilitates the Hard Times workshops for people experiencing homelessness, poverty, and other difficult life issues. She also leads the Writing to Be Free workshops for women transitioning out of incarceration. She is the recipient of both the National Association for Poetry Therapy’s Distinguished Service Award, as well as the 2019 Lighthouse Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.
by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
On the road that opens
to mountains and snow,
away from the houses cramped
in their quarters like too many socks
in a drawer, the eye of the eye
inside of me opens.
All the years of children
I loved and feared
would kill me.
Not their brightness
or the electric thrill of their skin
next to mine, not even the crying
that pried me from sleep
but the dormancy of a wild
inner life I loved and knew well.
To survive, it left me. I cared then
for other wild things. Now in silence
it’s returning. I turn a corner
to a doe and two fawns. I know you. I too
live like this. The body
and the spirit are a bicycle
you ride carefully
and uphill
and for how long?
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Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and winner of New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three young sons.
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
From their long white trunks
brighter than winter air,
their dark eyes watching,
motionless, without judgment
as I walk the rough stone driveway.
I know these eyes are wounds
healed over, or scars
from branches lost.
And I know the language
between us is untranslatable.
But for the entire three-mile hike
I sense their eyes behind me
holding me, as I might hold
an over-full glass of water,
meniscus trembling in the winter sky
measuring me as I grow smaller
by the mailbox, letter in my hand.
And though at a great distance
I can feel them taking in
the loops and dips in the black script
of the address and its return,
as I might observe
without distinction wreaths
of moss around their trunks
if I were focusing on something else
or everything at once.
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Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ “poem-a-day” series, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume editions/MadHat Press in March 2018.
by Melissa Fite Johnson
A garden born beyond my window. Not my
backyard, my neighbor’s. Before
coronavirus, before isolation, she and I
didn’t acknowledge each other.
Every night my dogs spilled
from my back door, and she sat outside with a
glass of wine listening to—something. I’d
hush to spy but could never tell.
I imagined long-distance love, her voice
joined with his. Maybe Rosetta Stone, too low to
know what language. No wave, no hello.
Little pots line the wooden deck,
matching sprigs of green. A tarp covers
nothing, for now. She tells me, You’re the
only person I’ve seen in days.
Planting’s like praying, both
quests for communion. We
receive stale wafers on our
shining tongues, gather
tomatoes fallen off the vine too soon. I’m an
unbeliever who only pulls weeds, puts
voids in the ground instead of life. But
witness this small miracle: she was
X in her yard, I was
Y in mine. We’re still rooted in these
zones, but now our voices soar over the fence.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Melissa Fite Johnson is a high school English teacher who lives with her husband and dogs in Lawrence, KS. She is the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Sidereal, Stirring, Whale Road Review, Broadsided Press, and elsewhere. See more at melissafitejohnson.com.
by Kyle Potvin
Pink mucket, wartyback, catspaw.
We are all endangered:
Your mother, mine, a young traveler
who never makes it home.
Just check your phone,
filter feeder of grief.
Ming, a bivalve mollusk,
lived 500 years.
I weep
for his longevity.
This earth is ringed
tight as a mussel.
Forgive me: I have been thinking
of death nearly since birth.
I am soft-bellied.
Take me first.
Don’t leave me burrowed.
Gasping for air.
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Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press, 2012), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in September 2020. Kyle lives in Southern New Hampshire.
by Geraldine Connolly
—after Neruda
I walk into the kitchen stores empty of desire
for Dutch ovens, silicon mats, tart pans.
In the grocery stores and farm markets
I am cold and still as an iceberg.
Recipes bore me. Bathtub rings disgust me.
The smell of bakeries brings me to tears.
I want no more dust rags or oven cleaners,
no more spray starch or furniture polish.
I want to swim in the cool lake of indifference.
That’s why the days unroll like heavy carpets
covered in dust and dog hair, bearing
discarded seeds and crumbs,
the lost nickels and pennies.
I only want to slip
like a grain of sand into the ocean.
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Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of four poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), Aileron (Terrapin Books). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert:A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com
by Paige Sullivan
In the dark with my eye doctor,
amongst tools and contraptions
to measure
how much light comes in, where it
wrongly refracts, misaligns
with the retina, she warns
Here comes the bright part, a white-gold
glare filling my vision, an ache—flame,
warmth, sun through
my wide-open windows, so brilliant
that book spines are sapped
of their hues—Keep
those eyes wide open, she murmurs.
Splotches of leaf-filtered afternoon
litter my dashboard
on the drive home, past the Victorian houses
and women in athleisure
briskly pushing strollers—
thinking of my friend and her dog
put down that morning, its toys
now immobile on the rug—
the precious and the perilous lit up,
irrefutable, and how does one
get better at staring
straight on at that blinding
all-of-it, not screw their eyes shut,
to lose it unbearable?
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Paige Sullivan is a poet and writer living in Atlanta. A graduate of the creative writing program at Georgia State University, her work has appeared or will soon appear in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, RHINO Poetry, and other journals.
by Jennifer Franklin
Fear fills my neighbors’ sunken eyes—
their mouths obscured by make-shift
masks. All week, contractors in hazmat
suits dig temporary mass graves
on Hart Island, where the first victims
of AIDS and abandoned disabled
children were stacked when nobody
wanted to think about how easy it is
to hide illness and imperfection.
The daffodils look old-fashioned
this spring, like ruffles on dresses
my mother forced me to wear
in grade school. My sick daughter
walks beside me, not knowing
the world is wounded. I prompt
her hands back to her pockets again
and again so she won’t touch anything
even in the park. For seventeen years,
her disease has kept us inside
our apartment more days than we
ventured out into the city. I used to think
of Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.”
This is worse. The sun shines
but we cannot go outside to feel it.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Franklin (AB Brown University, MFA Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books 2018) and Looming (Elixir 2015). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, Paris Review, Plume, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She currently teaches poetry in Manhattanville’s MFA program. She is co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and teaches manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City.
By Lisa Zimmerman
By then she was pretty much always drunk by the time I got home from school and the mall was too far by bike but Woolworth’s was close so my best friend Dina Peters and I rode our three-speeds to the Circle K first and bought a pack of Kool Menthols and smoked one out front getting lightheaded as workmen descended from their huffing pickups and eyed us before stepping inside the sealed cool interior. It was hot for April and we both wore tube tops and cut-off shorts, neither one of us had much of a bosom though my long blond hair always got a wayward glance and I’m not sure now if I bought black fishnets that day or just borrowed Dina’s, probably a hand-me-down from her older sister who had real cleavage and a boyfriend with a wolf tattoo who drove a beat-up red Camaro and never looked twice at Dina or me.
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Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Trampset, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. Her first poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. Lisa is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
by Erin Cisney
sterile, cold, and stirruped
opposite side of the protest line
in my knee socks, black eyeliner cool.
this is a minor inconvenience,
waiting for a green light, a refill.
the doctor tells me to lie back and relax.
there’s a poster of Barcelona
on the ceiling. I think I’d like to see Italy
some day before the world ends.
I think I’d feel less complicated
in a country where I don’t understand
the language. just be young,
pretty and confused, that’s all they’ll ask of you.
isn’t this easy? yes, this is soooo easy.
lie down and be a good girl,
take your pills at the same time every day.
I think the doctor hates me, the way
her callous fingers dig in, rough,
while I grip the metal table, grit my teeth,
think of Barcelona, Atlantis, deep space.
I am anywhere else. I am nowhere.
inconsequential, could never be
more than a supporting role
in another's tragedy. with her back turned,
she tells me I won’t be leaving here
with my paper bag of pills, I’ve become
the worst part of her day at the office.
she suggests I go south, cross state lines
where a problem like mine can be solved
(and she doesn’t mean Barcelona).
I’m as hollow as an x-ray, could see
right through me. I’m a split lip, bled dry.
I have a pink paper folded in my back pocket
when I leave, it’s got an address in Maryland,
it’s got a doomsday countdown. a signholder
says this is no place for a kid like you.
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