by Shikha Malaviya


In your fruit we find
a lover’s tart kiss, magenta lipstick
as we gather you by the fistfuls
conspiring dreams beyond
glass studded boundary walls
a doctor’s white coat, a poet’s fountain pen

In your shade we offer morning prayers
to Saraswati, the goddess of learning
daya kar daan vidya ka, hamein parmatma dena
it is from Her mercy that we receive this knowledge
of tiny seeds housed below our bellies
and how we must guard them zealously
by crossing our legs. Hungry & young
we hold your fruit in our palms
salty with sweat, our lips parched
from desert dust that water doesn’t quench
nibbling on your flesh, we spit out seeds
into sand from which nothing sprouts


*Jamun-Java plum/Indian blackberry; a sweet yet tart fruit that leaves a purple stain when eaten

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Shikha Malaviya (www.shikhamalaviya.com) is a South Asian-American poet and writer. She is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship model press publishing powerful voices from India & the Indian diaspora. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in PLUME, Prairie Schooner & other fine publications. Shikha was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California, 2016. Her book of poems is Geography of Tongues.

by Taylor Byas


We discover home-grown autotune and yawp
our Vaselined lips mere inches from the box-fan’s
lattice—the flowered blades compute and swap
our breaths for robot, monotone. When our friends

sardine the porch and ask (y’all coming out?),
we let the screen door boomerang back to chop
the wooden frame, our dizzy laughter cutting out
our grandmother’s kitchen edict—close that door and stop

letting my air out this house.
All bark, no bite.
When we return, our shadows race the sunset
back to the earth. Inside, we doff our white
tank tops and blue jean shorts, our naked silhouettes

like trophies welded in summer’s afterburn,
hot metal cooling to things for her to love—to spurn.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor 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 PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, and others.

by Dion O’Reilly


The ghost is complaining,
her memories are a wind

I can do nothing about.
Pale ghost. Skinny ghost. Bird ghost
who gorges on drunken berries,

leaves a body smear on my window
I can’t bear to clean. Exhausted ghost.
Felon ghost. Ghost who lived with me

beneath the same ribs. Carved my past
like a glacier. Melted and left me
a burning sea of dust and playa.

Ghost who curled with me
inside our mother,
whom I took into my blood

in order to survive.
Did she die inside me?
Let me cough her up,

razor myself open.
I want another chance.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events, and she Zoom-facilitates ongoing workshops from an artsy farmhouse in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

by Jeanne Foster


On the other side of the plate glass window,
they sipped coffee, chatted—her mother had a smoke—
relaxed finish to a Sunday morning breakfast
under the signature orange roof,

Howard Johnson’s, Biscayne Boulevard, Old Miami.
Bug-eyed, boxy cars parked at the curb, her space
just a strip of sidewalk, a little plot of St. Augustine grass
neatly mowed, and the predictable manicured shrubs

close to the window. It was good enough,
a watchful presence with space around it
for the little girl to play in. She forgot them,
alone with a bush that sported brilliant red seeds.

She plucked off a seed. Up close she could see
a shining black eye. With the preoccupation
of a scientist or an artist, she put the seed
between her teeth to see if she could crack it.

“Don’t eat that seed, little girl,” a voice
fractured her private world. “It’s poisonous.”
She stumbled indoors to her mother’s side—sobbing,
“That lady told me not to eat it. I wasn’t going to eat it,”

the red seed with the shining black eye still clutched
in her folded palm, which her mother gently opened.
“Did you eat the seed, chickadee?” “No, I just
wanted to see how hard it was.” “Then it’s okay.”

On the other side of the plate glass window,
the lady, her husband obediently behind,
got into the car and drove away.
But the fear stayed.

Not of the poison. It was the stranger’s voice
that followed the little girl out into the world,
in which Howard Johnson’s under the orange roof
would circle the globe, then go extinct.


_______________________________________________________________

Jeanne Foster’s latest poetry collection, Goodbye, Silver Sister, was released by Northwestern University Press, 2015. She is also the author of A Blessing of Safe Travel, which won the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award, and co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor, an anthology of poems by women (BOA). Her most recent book is The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, which won the Northern California Book Award in Translation. Her poems, critical work and memoir have appeared in Hudson Review, Triquarterly, North American Review, Ploughshares, Literary Imagination, and American Poetry Review. Professor Emerita of English Literature and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, she divides her time between Berkeley and Le Convertoie, a medieval borgo in Tuscany. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is also a Unitarian Universalist minister. 

by Michelle Matz


It isn’t necessarily true
that it will all work out in the end.
One door closes but another opens?
Maybe. Maybe
not.
It depends on architecture.
Material matters. And
construction.
A draft can make a house
feel several degrees colder,
drive up your heating
bill.
Caulking helps.
It’s about adhesion
and sash locks.
The man at Home Depot
said properly done,
5 to 10 years. I don’t know
if that’s a lot or a little.
Sometimes I feel so much
sorrow my heart needs propping
up. I don’t know
if it’s a design flaw
or if I lean too hard against walls
never meant to sustain such
weight. Even the best plywood,
the man tells me,
can start to buckle.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Matz’s chapbook, Atilt, was published by Finishing Line Press. She won the Mary Merritt Henry Prize for a group of poems, was a semifinalist in The Ledge Press Manuscript Contest, and was awarded an Individual Artist Grant through the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her poems have been published in numerous journals, including The Berkeley Poetry Review, Rainbow Curve, So To Speak, Natural Bridge, Cider Press Review, and Lifelines. She lives in San Francisco.

by Samantha Duncan


into swaddled narrative
tendon stretch, neuron-wide fall.

My garish cartoon life-gap
caulked your bones with milk

and drowned my landscape,
made of decades
a simple cutout smile.

Disappearing is an easy
stake in the ground, but here,

hunger doesn’t have to know
a mouth. May your character

awaken in a few years,
quench me with clay or ash
or blood. Meanwhile, I fold

my bones into their most
welcoming meridians,

where everything’s expectant:
mother, waiting, void.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016). Her work has recently appeared in BOAAT, decomP, Kissing Dynamite, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is an Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Journal and lives in Houston.

by Shannon Hozinec

And what is a woman
but a cathedral of wounds—

fostered in nacre and nightshell, is it any wonder
we learn the red of our mouths so quickly?

Each morning I wake to find fresh reserves of cruelty
within me, like flakes of dried blood lingering

underneath a torn fingernail. Was this the gift you intended—
a black pulse, endlessly beating through the stitches

with which you wove me together, from neck to navel,

collar to cunt, an electric web of malintent
so tightly constructed that to pluck

a single hair from its nested brethren
would bring forth instantaneous collapse.

What crumbs could I gather
from the thicket of my mind
that did not fall from your mouth?

I may call myself silver echolatory prayer,
eschatological tug-of-war, but I know I am

what you have made me. A throne of arrows.
Gentle rasp of come-hither.

A chandelier of antlers,
glistening in a dark room with no windows.

I pour all the slivered glass into a jar,
call it holy, holy, whole.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Thrush, The Adroit Journal, Deluge, Dream Pop Press, and elsewhere.

by Elisabeth Blair

I gave up all, went into the wildlands.

I was last seen on the peninsula.

I was caught in a storm, cast adrift.

I and my ships waited in a cave.

I became lost in the clouds.

I disappeared during a descent.

There is some evidence my disappearance was voluntary.

I left hints.

I was depressed, walked out with just 30 dollars.

I bought a book.

I got on a train.

I went down into a sewage canal.

I was presumed to have drowned, but I may have survived.

Several women came forth saying they suspected they might be me.

I was found at last, abandoned, partially submerged, listing heavily.

They tested me and found incontrovertible proof:

no one is related to me.

_______________________________________________________________

Elisabeth Blair is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and manuscript consultant. Her poems have recently appeared in JukedGNU JournalWomenArts Quarterly Journal, and Feminist Studies. A chapbook, We He She/It, was published in 2016 by Dancing Girl Press. Another chapbook (Ethel Press, 2020) and a full-length collection (Unsolicited Press, 2022) are forthcoming. Since 2018 she's been honored to be the poetry workshop leader for the Burlington Writers Workshop in Vermont. www.elisabethblair.net

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—

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.



________________________________________________________________


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.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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)


____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.