by Ann Hudson
You’re not dead yet. Not dying
by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
We thought it would be gone by now.
Not so. November
the skyline has begun its ice grey
emptiness. We are still
protectors in masks.
The scaffolds, city, cold gunmetal blur.
I pull my scarf closer & coil
my arms around my wire & glass body.
You stand at a distance.
I don’t say anything real
about us because it’s too windy & raw
to sit outdoors on the bench with the view
of the Brooklyn Bridge glooming.
The noon sun too buries under a cloud cover.
You remember how much
rain fell the first time we walked across.
I squint to search the small worried brown wells
that are your eyes. Your brow
a single horizontal line
sure & straight as a tree fallen across a forest bed.
I wish you would come closer.
I used to be able
to see the long creek winding in your smile.
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Bonnie Jill Emanuel is a recent graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at The City College of New York, where she received the 2020 Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Stark Poetry Prize in memory of Raymond Patterson. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Midwest Review, Love's Executive Order (poems on the Trump presidency), Chiron Review, and other fine journals. Born in Detroit, she now lives and writes in New York.
by Sophia Al-Banaa
the women dress in black,
their swarovski-crystalled abayas float
through the breeze of diwaniya doors
as they lean to plant two symmetrical kisses on
edges of each face. collarbones are singed with
blessings of bukhoor smoke, smudged in honeyed oud
known before its bottling by tom ford. umi’s body was
washed the day of her death, wrapped in a white cloth
purer than praying hands of men who memorized
the feel of a woman’s bare skin. when she was buried
they cried for 3 days, kohl dripping from eyelids,
marking hollowed cheekbones, offerings
of chai haleeb refused, mourning lips shut.
when a woman dies where does she go? she sleeps
on pillowing clouds: a bleeding sunset, jannah stained pink,
a garden of never-ending rivers, her thobe replaced by threads of silk.
instead she is told, it is to Him
we return.
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Sophia Al-Banaa is an Arab-American Muslim woman, whose work intimately explores her dual identity & the human condition as a whole. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Stone of Madness Press, Ghost Heart Lit, dreams walking, Versification & elsewhere. Her twitter handle is @safeeyiah, and her website is sophialbanaa.com.
by Joni Renee Whitworth
Now is the time to make things. You got the hot jazz you wanted, 30 reams, a bay window, my lower belly, and that large art deco piece. Now the goal is to drink better and better bottles of wine, so when with smart colleagues, never hoot, “Best wine in the world!” It gets better. Ignore massive, mounting pain. Focus on getting a job in your field. Only one of us did, and it's not scary talking to inmates, she says, because you're just Skyping with them really, they don't even know your full real name. The bed is finally the right size, still most nights we just fall in shivering with our three-step regimens and rarely you touch me. Costa Rica is on the fridge like a branding iron on my flank. There are too many splinters in my new desk and me.
If I call out, I want to use my full real name.
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Joni Renee Whitworth is a poet and community organizer from rural Oregon. They have performed at The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Marina Abramovic. Whitworth served as the inaugural Artist in Residence at Portland Parks and Recreation, Poet in Residence for Oregon State University's Trillium Project, and 2020 Queer Hero for the Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest. Their writing explores themes of nature, future, family, and the neurodivergent body, and has appeared in Lambda Literary, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Proximity Magazine, Seventeen Magazine, Eclectica, Pivot, SWWIM, Smeuse, Superstition Review, xoJane, Inverted Syntax, Unearthed Literary Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Dime Show Review, and The Write Launch.
by Susana H. Case
after a Mapuche creation myth
When there was only air,
its spirits,
no good or bad,
I fell to earth for you, my love,
who could shoot desire
from your eyes,
turn everything into rock
and mountain, turn humans
into fire
burning the sky.
Did you not know the star
you took for yourself
and made into a woman
was me, so new that walking
hurt my feet? I grew
the grass to soften
the ground; I tried to soften you,
created birds and butterflies.
We were naked
when the planet shook
and volcanoes spewed,
making me tremble
with their ringing cracks.
We were naked when it was cold
and dark. It was a mistake
to listen to the anaconda’s deceit,
that creature formed
from the hair
of an evil spirit’s head.
When the moon
opened a hole in the sky,
I should have been careful
about who could hear me singing.
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Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, 2020 from Broadstone Books, which won a Pinnacle Award for Best Poetry Book. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and she has also been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City and can be reached at www.susanahcase.com.
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.
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