by Catherine Keefe
A boy stands in the holding pen
by Kara Lewis
I counted days, waiting for you to cry so that I could call you baby.
I tell you our love lives in my body, that it feels like being born.
Love lives too long in my body: stillborn, an irritant, like an onion,
acid against sclera. Still, my tears protect me, the way I yearn for strangers
to unpeel me. The praying woman turned from Mecca toward my strange, acid rainstorm
when I screamed on the phone, praying mascara clouds storm your whitest shirt.
I feel holiest in someone else’s shirt, holding a phone while it’s still ringing, or crying in public.
Tears hold the same holy hormone as breast milk. You say you can’t cry, but you stand publicly
shirtless. You say you can’t hold me when I’m like this: Hormonal, unholy, milking
you for some type of mourning. I shoved on a shirt and went to visit the elephants
because I read of their matriarchy and their weeping. Every mother knows a type of mourning like
sleeves through which she can’t reach, like a trunk that can’t close around trumpet or breath.
I reach for you like breath, a sleeveless dress, like everything I would let close to my body.
We counted the wallpaper elephants and waited for an elegy to name baby.
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Kara Lewis is a poet and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in Stirring, Sprung Formal, Pithead Chapel, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the John Mark Eberhart Memorial Award for a collection of poetry, as well as a weekly contributor to the Read Poetry blog. Her work will be anthologized in the upcoming Aunt Flo project. You can follow her on Twitter @kararaywrites.
by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade
A pair of spectacles washes up on the shore,
the lenses still intact. I pick them up and try
to see the world through salt-spackled glass.
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a fish
or even a mermaid, which seemed sexless, safe,
no legs to spread open, only a tail to slap.
These days I’m filled to the gills
with rage. So many things to protest,
my voice muted under my mask.
If only this were a persona poem
set in another time—how I would testify,
my writer-self knowing future outcomes,
relying on dramatic irony: In Century 21,
I stock up on Levi’s vintage denim.
I refuse contacts, wear Steinem-inspired
Aviators, make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Bellbottoms return, and The Bell Jar remains
on syllabi. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Sylvia
in the biopic, though I favor Great Expectations,
Paltrow’s Estella spurning her suitors.
Were my own expectations great in 1998?
Pre-9/11, 2008 recession. Pre-COVID-19,
10 years of stop-and-frisk. MAGA
hat as metaphor in Spike Lee’s new movie.
In 2020, hindsight is just a hashtag like
its former use, the pound key or number sign.
So much we should have seen coming, should have
met his crazy with our fury, should have
refused to dignify with answers later dubbed “fake news.”
Sociopath or psychopath? Narcissist or sadist?
Careful not to say his name, I simmer in euphemisms—
accepted norms, unprecedented times. How will we
un-mike the maniac, unflip the panic switch
that’s gripped our gut these past four years?
Long walks on the beach fail to assuage my fear
of the climate crisis. The only mask he wears
is his own face, bed-tanned and sand-blasted,
atop the red ire in his brow and cheeks.
When I try to change the channel, his voice
booms through imitators, late-night comics
whose parodies only enhance his power.
The white half-moons under his eyes
must be waning, though—I need to believe
America will wise up, rise up, that we’ll see
something new in the dawn’s early light
with 20-20 vision, this year’s namesake.
Christians speak of a Second Coming,
and novelists invoke deus ex machina.
I guess intervention always seemed a given.
Monuments toppling at last, the Supreme
Court swerving at the last second like a car
avoiding a cliff that hangs over the sea.
Is it wrong that I still long for a savior
with a bagful of miracles, multiplying fish?
Century 21 Christ is most likely vegan,
a savior to cows and chickens and pigs,
a slender brown man who rides his bike
wearing yellow Dollar Store sunglasses
and a God Made Dirt So Dirt Don’t Hurt
t-shirt. When a truck cuts him off,
he says “Bless you” as if the driver had
given him a hummus club sandwich.
Century 21 Christ works at Goodwill,
sports a “Radical Feminist” ball cap.
His blue apron pocket holds a small adze
to smooth any furniture’s rough edges.
If this were a persona poem, he’d tell
you how he loved carpentry, restoring
old wood and reclaiming discards
from families—drunks, homeless teens,
atheists and Bible-thumpers alike.
He’d turn water from Flint faucets
sweet as ambrosia, Confederate flags
into BLM banners, rifles and pepper spray
into bran muffins with coconut butter.
Who would be his Judas? Too many
to name: a supervisor at Goodwill who,
for $30, turned him over to ICE;
a kid from youth group who heard him
speaking Spanish, grew suspicious.
Another heard him singing a Farsi
party song “Qataghani” in dark shades.
And what about that time he gave directions
to Hollywood Beach, then asked for a lift?
Century 21 Christ ran the Rainbow 5K
and prefers to be known as “they.”
Non-binary, anti-racist, multi-lingual, pro-
choice. As the human face of a Trinity,
they are dismantling the Tower of Babel
in hopes that everyone will understand
simple messages of safety and compassion.
Frog & Toad is selling “Just Be Nice” tees,
an honest cotton compass always ready to wear
with a smiley face mask to protect others.
I use the soft shirt to wipe these spectacles
of empathy, hoping the person who lost them
has goggles instead, or perhaps can see underwater.
When I hook the temples over my ears, I can see
where the ocean bows to the sky as if in prayer.
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Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade are the authors of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, published by Noctuary Press in 2019. Their collaborative poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Together they were awarded the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their co-written lyric essay, “13 Superstitions.” Duhamel and Wade both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.
by Diamond Forde
As a girl, I fingered the penises
in Momma’s copy of The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies,
a habit, dragging my finger while I studied
blister and boil, admiring the penis’s profile
glossed in primary colors, or the uterus, a red yawn
widening, those doodles, my most detailed lesson
of the bellow below my belt, the grammarless
clamor of sex, of blood, of a mother
who I would one day see in this exhibit,
her belly a cabinet shelving the striations of her bell-
shaped uterus. In a month’s time, I will be slit
sinew from skin, doctors clefting the webbed
fat wickering my womb, then snip
my fibrous knots, I must admit then
it will be the only way my uterus is worthy
of exhibition, my muscular cauliflower
so unlike the drawings thumbed
on my childhood floor, my uterus lumped, bruised.
When the anesthetic quilts over me
I will dream, as I witnessed, what could be:
ovaries polished as jade stone, the glossy bauble
of my fundus, wonder clutched in a perfect wound.
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Diamond Forde is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her debut book, Mother Body, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books in Spring 2021. She is the recent recipient of the Furious Flower Prize and a Tin House and Callaloo fellow. Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Tinderbox Journal, and more.
by Elizabeth Hughey
I eat a piece of paper with the word honey written on it and give my son the word toast and he eats it whole. I cover the windows with the words white sky, red brick and 7 AM, though it still feels like night, so I write to the weak sunlight, let us feel worthy of your love. We do not feel worthy, bound in our clothes made of paper with clean written all over them. We go out into the streets with our post-its made of fire and stick them on everything. Nothing burns. I take a note to my son’s teacher that says help and she gives it right back with her red ink covering mine. Help. On my forehead, I write, What? I write on the school walls, I hate you words. You are not worthy of my love, anymore. And the words are quiet. So, I say them out loud. I yell all the words I can yell. Walnut! Suitcase! Pistol! Wastebasket! I keep spitting words trying to rid them from my mouth.
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Elizabeth Hughey is the author two poetry collections: Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Guest Host (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). She is a co-founder of the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, where she teaches poetry in the public schools. New poems have been published or are forthcoming in Open Letters Monthly, The Bennington Review, The Hunger, and Tinderbox.
by Samara Powers
After CA Conrad’s (SOMA)tic Poetry Exercises
Wait for a flood warning
that comes 10 minutes before you’re
meant to leave for rehearsal, or the supermarket.
Instead of leaving, stay. Take your shoes off.
Stand outside next to a tree or a flagpole and
make yourself an outlet. Plug in. Feel the
rage that the rain is trying to douse, let
it burn out your grounding wire.
Call down the lightning with it,
light it up inside you like dynamite
in your hand. Wrap your arms around
the tree/pole for dear life, know
that the lightning with spark through
the roots under the dirt, under
your feet, a neon tree of life
burning up the earthworms and
beetles, the sky will spit its forked tongue
and the earth will boil but like seeks like—
they say you can’t survive
seeing g-d, but you will try.
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Samara Powers is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in Bird’s Thumb, The Christian Century, Inflectionist Review, and others. She has two children and works in marketing and design. She returned to University in her 40s, completing her BA in Poetry in 2018. More at www.samarawords.com.
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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