by Samara Powers
Wait for a flood warning
by Sharon Tracey
hard bits and soft pieces,
bitter, sour, and sweet
places that have talked back
to me,
made me who I am,
made me ache from too much—
whittled me.
What we love, we love.
I have sipped from a cenote,
bitten a spur, savored fine strata
near the mouth of a river.
Swallowed decades of dust,
mere motes
in the soul of an eon.
I have settled in a valley
between green hills. Given birth
to a daughter in a world of a billion
daughters. Given birth to two sons
in a world of a billion sons.
I have sun-dried my hands.
Rumi said there are a thousand ways
to kneel
and kiss the ground.
I have lost count. I am counting.
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Sharon Tracey's poems have appeared in The Worcester Review, Mom Egg Review, Tule Review, Common Ground Review, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collections include What I Remember Most Is Everything (All Caps Publishing, 2017) and Chroma, forthcoming from Shanti Arts. See more at www.sharontracey.com.
by Megan Mary Moore
They take their white cotton masks off
and their honeysuckle breath blows
blonde strands that escaped from braids.
When girls group, they drape
themselves like satin, over each other.
Not to touch, to rest.
Quarantined together,
skin sticking, sweat living
in places razors missed.
Handing hairbrushes and lotion
back and forth and back again.
Limbs against limbs,
sleeping open-eyed outside.
Masks in the grass,
bare lips toward the clouds.
As long as trees last,
girls will be under them
shedding cloth and
asking the sun for more.
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Megan Mary Moore is the author of Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in Rattle and is forthcoming in Lammergeier and Plainsongs. She lives in Cincinnati where she teaches dance and talks to ghosts.
by Sonia Greenfield
I remove all underwires from my bras
then bend them into hearts and moons
use them like rebar for miniature cities
made from common household items
such as regret or pluck or as a key
for the lock to enter the door
to invisibility and yes my breasts
are still proud but ghostly tits under
a ghostly shroud how they haunt
the dreams of every ex-lover under
the cover of this sheath I walk
among you and buy pants with
elastic waistbands until everything
expands my soft belly the reach
of my life stretched before me
to a shore still too far for the eye
to see in the drugstore mirror
I spot silver in my hair like a seam
of precious ore running through
this crown of unearthly brown except
no one sees it but me because of my
(dare I say?) delicious anonymity I could
blow in the ear of a man under forty
and he would only hear a stirring
breeze I could try to catch his eye
but his glance bounces off or skitters
by some say Harry Potter’s magic
cloak was made from the skin
of a woman past her prime it’s my
time to shine as a white glow moves
through the orchard after dark until
a chill tickles the nape of your neck
and yes you could bounce a quarter
off this ass but I am passed have
The Cure sing of my demise or crank
some Gen X anthem to senora
ephemera taking up space between
the rain play haunting music
for madam phantom seen
through as a windowpane.
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Sonia Greenfield is the author of two full-length collections of poetry. Letdown, released in March, was selected for the 2020 Marie Alexander Series and published by White Pine Press. Her collection, Boy With a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize and was published in 2015. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review chapbook prize. She lives in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College and edits the Rise Up Review.
by Dawn Terpstra
Decay curled around your outbuildings like a wild thing claiming the yard. It squatted near the hedges beneath afternoon sun. Weeds grew, metal rusted. Old plows and tractors salvaged for parts piled like corpses. The house withered, then its joints gave beneath a sway-backed roof. Vacancy, except for a dozen Mason jars glistening in the window of the summer kitchen. Three neat rows packed tight with smooth-skinned pickles, dill heads bursting like fireworks against the glass. The artistry of your skilled hands passed from your mother, her mother. Beautiful beyond blight. Your husband passed quietly in his La-Z-Boy. A month later, flames consumed it all. A backhoe buried what you couldn’t. God knows the order of things. Earth, seed, rain, and heat.
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Dawn Terpstra lives in Iowa where she leads a corporate communications team. She holds two masters’ degrees and conducted fieldwork in Micronesia. Her poetry appears in print and online, including Third Wednesday, Neologism, Eastern Iowa Review, and Telepoem Booth Iowa. She enjoys explorations—landing in a new place, driving down gravel roads, or walking through the timber with her chocolate lab.
by Freesia McKee
In a few hours I’ll score
my loss and blessings
lying in bed like the cats
we count when we walk
the dog When I was a small kid
spring was palm fronds
shaking hands in church In the pew
I closed my eyes The green backdrop
behind the cat Misu hides
under the bench In this city
I’m supposed to be a teacher
Mispronounced a student’s name
for weeks Would we say something
again if we knew the other person would
change My
assumption
as Misu’s tail wraps around my wrist
I think of eating lunch once
when we got a phone call A friend
had died We thought we knew who
I stopped chewing I remember
the carrots in my mouth
The hunched shoulders the shudder
before a second phone call a miracle
from the person we thought was gone
It rained so hard when we drove here
A wet accident at the end of our block
Could have been her or us
The cat running past
Rubbing his soft head against
my calves Misu’s back
He’s re-appeared I’m want to tell
our neighbor Oobi
his cat’s escaped the trains cars
the predators this time Only loss
can redeem itself like this
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Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Elisabeth Blair is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and manuscript consultant. Her poems have recently appeared in Juked, GNU Journal, WomenArts 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—
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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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