by Celia A. Sorhaindo
by Mary Beth Hines
You disappear up pull-down stairs
into cluttered gloom to search
for our mothballed cache of Halloween.
I pace below, wait for you to tender
taped up boxes, bins, bags bulging
with who knows what imagined treasures.
Nothing’s marked. For years we’ve stashed
kids’ report cards, trophies, dolls,
my mother’s hats, your great-grand’s swords.
One-by-one, you push, I pull, as our hunt-
and-retrieve job blossoms into cleanout.
We’ll tackle it now while we’re still able.
On our front steps I tear a carton open—
a jumble of frayed toe shoes, tutus, ribbons.
From inside the bin’s dank innards, silverfish
rush and reel in cold light, dart beneath
the porch, gone before I smash them, but more
come flash dashing from a bag of magazines.
Their teardrop bodies skitter, stippled pearl,
tick-tap to vanish, while we shake discarded
exoskeletons out from ancient book leaves.
Finally you find our Dollar Tree straw-strapped
scarecrows, witches, ghosts —all wrecked
but for a plastic pumpkin and one skeleton mask.
Side-by-side, on the steps, we decide we’ll toss
it all except for the one bin of fairy tales
we’d sealed up tight, the pumpkin, and the skull.
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Mary Beth Hines’s poetry and short fiction and non-fiction appear, or will soon appear, in journals such as Brilliant Flash Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, Gyroscope Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Literary Mama, Naugatuck River Review, and Rockvale Review among many others. Following a long career as a project manager, she writes from her home in Massachusetts and is working on her first poetry collection.
by Kai Coggin
There is a new song
that comes from my fingers,
a new vibration
as the sound
of my promise clinks
against the every day things
I hold and touch,
the sound my wedding ring makes
against a glass,
a tiny bell of hope,
the song it makes as I
swipe the sudsy stainless steel sink,
push wet carrot tops
and bean ends
into the garbage disposal
with this soft scrape of gentle forever,
I keep hearing
what I think are bells,
but it is just my
ring
singing
into everything.
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Kai Coggin is a widely published poet and author of three full-length collections Periscope Heart, Wingspan, and Incandescent. She is a QWOC who thinks Black lives matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated three times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
by Allsion Blevins
After the fall, I call out for my wife. I can’t cry. I can’t feel pain now.
I call out for my wife, aware my breasts and belly hang like some white
unimaginable fruit—inedible and overripe. I call out because I can’t rise
from my hands and knees until some witness lifts me on to my feet. I won’t
cry or feel until she is here with her arms around me—shame is the pain
I was waiting for. Wet and drooping, I’ve ruined sex night, I sob into her
shoulder. When I hobble from the bathroom, she is ordering a shower aid
from the medical supply store.
I want to fall, to watch your body bend,
pick me up, feel your bicep on my back, but you already cleaned the house
today. I want to ask you to touch me, but it is Wednesday—shot day—
and you’ve already loaded the injector, swiped in outward concentric circles,
pinched my stretched and marked skin between your thumb and forefinger.
No woman could expose herself to any more than your hands touching me like this.
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Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte. She is the author of the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), part of the Robin Becker series. Her book Slowly/Suddenly is forthcoming in 2021 (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press). She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Poetry Editor at Literary Mama. Her work has appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review, the minnesota review, Raleigh Review, and Sinister Wisdom. She lives in Missouri with her wife and three children where she co-organizes the Downtown Poetry reading series. For more information visit http://www.allisonblevins.com.
by Ahja Fox
There is a boy in the library eating
blue and purple erasers today
his smirk is an open wound
When he sits, an onyx rosary
swings from his belt
you can’t label this pain not yet
not in the presence of Jesus’ thorned crown
That is what your mother would say
that Jesus had it worse that he died
for the boy across the room who
holds your voice with his fist
(calls you "sister" which appears more distant than cousin somehow)
And he brands you bittersweet
as if your body is a Hershey’s bar
split diagonally
You will kill him in your thoughts
then put him back together again
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Ahja Fox is an avid reader, dancer, and researcher of all things morbid and supernatural. Her other passion is acting as co-host/ co-partner of Art of Storytelling (a reading series in Denver, Colorado). You can find her work published or forthcoming in Driftwood Press, Rigorous, Noctua Review, The Perch, and more. Stay up-to-date on her reading/performance schedule and publications by following her on Instagram and Twitter at aefoxx.
by Amanda Newell
How it sags under its own weight,
so much bigger
than the left. Asymmetric.
I take it in my palm.
Shake it a little.
What’s inside?
Microcalcifications.
A sack of marbles.
Maybe nothing. Probably
nothing. Still,
there’s potential
architectural distortion.
Could be a sign of—
“architectural distortion—
scared,” writes
Sarah2158. At sixty,
her breasts should not be
getting thicker.
And Nightcrawler
was just diagnosed
with ductal carcinoma.
Lately, I’ve been reading
cancer threads
on Reddit. Sometimes
women post updates,
sometimes not.
You can never be sure
who’s still alive
by the time you read them.
And the X-rays
of cancerous breasts?
Translucent globes
of streaming white
threads cinched
at the point of malignancy.
Almost beautiful.
I always wanted to be
beautiful. I have always
wanted too much.
If I’m lucky today,
I’m only lucky.
It’s frailty that scares me,
the slow rot.
Being spared long enough
to watch while the ones
we love the most
suffer for reasons
they cannot seem to explain.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Amanda Newell's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Gargoyle, North American Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place, she is Associate Editor for Special Features and Social Media for Plume. A resident of Frostburg, MD, she works as litigation director for a Washington, D.C.-based law firm and received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson's Program for Writers.
by Julia B Levine
Today in my garden the kiss of death tastes of delirium and dirt.
You must be teaching me everything that rises, portends falling.
You must be touching my memory of that afternoon
you piloted us into sky, grinning as we broke from the runway,
wobbled up over hills marked with animal tracks, over rivers
and farmland grids, out toward the sea with its buttons and graves.
Maybe I had to go this far without you to feel the rustle of blue
hospital gowns travel out as a breeze.
Maybe I had to ride down to the creek this morning
to know you are the trout I caught and scale and devoured,
and you are the net and lure and line I throw out each night
into sleep, only to be tugged awake by the world I love
as it is branded by the world I hate. So often I kneel there
at the dark seam you made in the cemetery. Even now,
at dusk’s appointed hour, after another day in quarantine,
we stand on our porches and howl, disembodied voices
in a wild call and response, summoning our living and dead.
Because we need each other. Because in that plane you rented
years ago, do you remember how the lurch up, the dive down,
made the air visible? And when the tower asked, How many ?,
you answered, Two souls aboard, and mine rose up in me
as if buckled into exhilaration and, for the first time, felt counted.
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Julia B. Levine’s awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press, 2014), and first prizes in the 2019 Bellevue Literary Review, 2019 Public Poetry Awards, and 2018 Tiferet Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms, will be published in 2021 from LSU press. She lives and works in Davis, California.
by Amy Miller
waves to her and whispers
while she suns and tunes out
the argument nextdoor. It hides her
like a small lost city. In it,
the wind sounds like money
or silk, depending
on her dream.
The committee
wants to pull it up, dig those
fisted roots and all
two feet deep of tendrils.
Grind it. Poison. Everyone’s
got it, everyone’s complaining,
shoots shoving up through earth
sixty feet away, fence and flagstone
pushed aside, the restless body
unburying.
It helps her
not to see. Rain runs
from leaf to leaf to leaf,
miraculous endless waterfalls
feeding the rivers
she knows are living
under her feet.
_____________________________________________________
Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She lives in Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal. She blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.
Blackout
by Natascha Graham
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Raised simultaneously by David Bowie and Virginia Woolf, Natascha Graham is a fiction writer, artist, and screenwriter who lives with her wife in a house full of sunshine on the east coast of England. Her work has been previously published in Acumen, Litro, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Yahoo News and The Mighty.
by Amy Poague
There are such hearts to remain
Inside; I circle this knowing, connecting point to point,
As direction accepts itself. I conduct this orchestra, see…whole
Gaggles of violins or kazoos. We sit circular
On our patch of grass hereafter. Random synthetic
Synthesizer reduces us to giggles. I pass the salt shaker
To the guy sitting with himself on the ceiling. His shaking
Opens him and opens sitting spherical. The vibratory remainders
Move all of our fingers to holding. His synthesist
Inclinations recline on all of these fold-up clouds. Point?
Yes, or yes—many. Roundness sufficient to circulation
Of the waking dream. We are all! Wholly
At the catered brunch on the most fragile landmass without holes.
Salt shakers, tablecloths lower themselves to shake
Above the table, then drop. The waiters are circumspect—
In waiting only. We dish up our own. What remains
Ends in the dog’s bowl. Nothing being lost. The remark pointed
Learns pointless. And carries it everywhere. Synthesize
Your globe and share and please don’t push synergy.
A few of us already folded our maps. We’re happy. Holistically
Speaking, we can all hug if we hear the ground shake apart from itself—point, counterpoint.
Point by point we compass encompassed. The Shakers were moved to shake.
The Quakers made oatmeal and waited for speech. Speech remains
Outlasting consciousness, translating each utterance. Listens beyond listening. Circles
When we land. Circles when we hover. I learn to circumambulate.
I do that when I’m happy and never bored. I like synth
With soul. To sweat over it with my careful heart and remain
Inside conducting four-four time. Re-figuring the holes.
I’d like to shake all the hands inside their shaking.
The hands of musical time point
To enfolded petals and stars held buzzing in place, on point.
The feast continues in the encirclement of circles.
Laughter catches at us in losing nothing. The sound shakes
Into the next shape: a deepening concentricity as safety. Whoever mans the synthesizer
Probably laughs too. The map in my pocket isn’t whole.
Not yet. But remains.
The circle arrived shaking.
O synthesizing O synthesizing hole into whole.
In pointlessness I hope we may remain.
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Amy Poague lives in Iowa and holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Figure 1, The Indianapolis Review, 8 Poems, Yes Poetry, Riggwelter Press, Juke Joint, The Mantle, Kissing Dynamite, and others. She can be found at amypoague.wordpress.com and on Twitter @PoagueAmy.
by Diana Whitney
Do they get caught? C asks,
wanting to know the end
from the beginning. Do they make it
to Mexico? Do they go to jail?
Do they get shot by cops
in cruisers and choppers?
Just wait, I say.
I’ve already messed up. I forgot
the scene in the parking lot,
the predator at the honky-tonk bar
slapping Thelma in the face, shoving her
belly-down on the hood of his truck.
The click of his belt unbuckling.
It was 1991. I hadn’t been raped yet.
I kept the thrill of the open road, Brad Pitt
strutting in cowboy jeans, Louise
fierce and bold in her gritty bandana
blowing up an 18-wheeler.
That was power, I thought back then.
Do they make it? C asks again.
She says the women are stupid,
they should switch cars, hop a train, stop
calling home to Arkansas. She is sure
she could survive if given the chance.
A is quiet. Oh, I know,
she breathes softly
as they near the Grand Canyon.
At the end the green car floats
above the earth, tears trace my cheeks
and I take the girls’ hands. Thelma and Louise
are holding hands too. This is the only way,
I try to explain. They have no choice,
not in this world. It’s the movies after all—
the Thunderbird suspended forever
in Arizona sky, a magic feminist
ride to the afterlife while we’re stuck here
on the ground, on the couch, in the house
where it’s dark dark dark
all around, the future pressed hard
against the windows.
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Diana Whitney writes across the genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. For years, she was the poetry columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, Green Mountains Review, and more. Her first book, Wanting It, became an indie bestseller in 2014. Her latest project is a diverse, inclusive poetry anthology for teen girls, forthcoming from Workman in 2021. Learn more www.diana-whitney.com
by Laura McCullough
Carlo Rovelli writes the difference
between the past & the future exists
only when there is heat. I like to watch
your body in the present. It makes me
know something about being here
inside this one, bowl of hips both
full & empty, a heat making tomorrow
possible for me, though watching you
& the dip of arm as bow against the violin
of the other appendage—also arm—there
is no sound but the heat slipping down
the body through breath. Is sound
a kind of heat? Sympathetic vibration
across energy that, when dense, is matter?
What is the matter, I want to ask? Do I
want to ask? As it’s apparent in your body,
at least in this moment, which isn’t the past
or future. Do you want to burn? I once did,
wanted to & also did, burning my way out
of memories into a future I didn’t know
was possible but longed for. Is longing a kind
of heat? Rovelli writes that “in every case
in which heat exchange does not occur…we see
that the future behave exactly like the past.”
When I push my hands against you, I’ll offer
what can burn. When I step back, will you ignite
me, please? I want to know what next is
possible, what is possibly next; I imagine
hearing some bell in an incendiary future
we can only seem to sound our way toward.
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Laura McCullough most recent book of poems, Women & Other Hostages, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence press. Her other books include The Wild Night Dress, selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Contest, University of Arkansas Press, Jersey Mercy (BLP), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP) , Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press). She has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (Georgia University Press, 2015) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poems and prose have appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, and many other journals and magazines. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA where she teaches poetry and critical theory. Visit her at http://www.lauramccullough.org/.
by Clayre Benzadón
tonight I wedge
the moon
into bottom
of glass
con cada luna llena
watch it erupt
leak teal
cuando llega
el atardecer
I can’t squeeze
Julieta Venega’s
“Limon Y Sal” out
of my head
only Clase Azul
finger-
tip swirling
salt around
the rim
of a shotglass
Evening brings out
the bluest part
almost half
of this lemonmilk
body is salted
by silicon
dioxide glass
created by meteoroids
hitting it
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Clayre Benzadón is an MFA student at the University of Miami, editor of Sinking City, and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook, Liminal Zenith was published by SurVision Books. She was awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for "Linguistic Rewilding." Additionally, her work has been featured in places including Pussy Magic, Kissing Dynamite, Hobart, and forthcoming in ANMLY, Fairy Tale Review, and Crêpe and Penn.
by Kate Sweeney
When she left home at 17, pregnant, and holding only a bottle of whiskey,
the neighbors wondered what had gone wrong.
I think it was that her father was her first boyfriend.
When I see family pictures, I still get uncomfortable, his arm pressed against hers.
I only said it out loud once, to my cousin, her favorite son. We were six.
He slapped me hard across the face, open-handed, and then kissed me with tongue.
His name was also Edward, just like my grandfather.
She started drinking water exclusively from a thimble the day after he died.
It was all she would allow herself, even on Friday during Lent.
She didn’t start smoking unfiltered cigarettes in defiance of her parents.
He got her hooked after he fucked her on lunch break. According to my mother,
she never did anything but fill an extra fridge in her basement with tubs of
orange sherbet, cartons of Lucky Strikes, and white chocolate Whitman’s samplers.
We shared a cigarette at my grandmother’s funeral. Were you ever alone with him?
I do remember once he took out his teeth as a game, but I never spoke to him again.
She nodded. Good, she said, picking the tobacco off of the tip of her tongue.
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Kate Sweeney has poems forthcoming in Adanna Literary Journal, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Ethel Zine. She is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a political marketing executive.
by Lois Roma-Deeley
“ Egyptian Woman Disguised Herself as a Man for 43 Years”
—New York Times
If you had asked me, I would have told you
why I dressed in these pants and tunic,
tied a green scarf around my close-cropped hair,
smoked cigarettes, spoke rough and low—
why I harvested crops,
hauled cement, lifted bricks,
cleaned the dust and dirt off a thousand shoes
with nothing more to think about but how the day would end.
My daughter survived and I
was never beaten again.
Now, walking through the maze of back alleys,
I set my back against the wind. I’m a ghost mother—
memories float me through time
to our small house, the one with two good chairs
and an old radio humming on the kitchen shelf,
to my little girl playing on the bare floor. I am
a pearl shadow,
standing at the stove, smiling
at pigeons simmering in the pot who seem to smile back.
I fill their stomachs with rice and herbs,
and now they bob up and down
on a roiling sea of cinnamon and cloves.
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