by Michele Parker Randall
I pray like someone who gardens in Florida. Plots begin
by Jackie Craven
At the rear of the drawer,
an argyle without its mate
nuzzles something turquoise,
fuchsia and polyester,
which it wouldn't ordinarily do
but the brightly-striped creature
also lost her mate
and now they're a mismatched couple
smooching in a booth
at an all-night café.
She leans into his woolen comfort
and traces careful stitches—
How precisely they intersect the diamonds!
How dependably the diamonds repeat,
the pattern moving from wine to stone
to wine again, all the way to heel and toe,
which are gray and reassuring
and impossible to endure.
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Jackie Craven has recent poems in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and River Styx. She's the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016), winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Award. www.JackieCraven.com
by Patrice Boyer Claeys
by Beverly Burch
A fevered time. Waves of heat, dread flashes—
the female body’s sheet lightning.
I’m a remote star on the fade. I run the big fan
all night and God I love how its breezy fingers
ply the midnight swelter. Ferry off flushed days.
Its motor, an elegant crooning thing
turning darkness around, wings that furrow air.
By morning I’m bare beneath a blanket, knees bent,
hands together, a supplicant. The rhythmic
white whirr has cut the room adrift. Airborne.
O body, and your seemingly solid hold,
just a gossamer thread tethers me.
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Beverly Burch’s third poetry collection, Latter Days of Eve, won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize and will appear in 2019. Her first, Sweet to Burn, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Gival Poetry Prize. Her second, How a Mirage Works, was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Poetry and fiction appear in Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Willow Springs, Salamander, Tinderbox, Mudlark, and Poetry Northwest.
by Samantha Auch
Your momma should’ve known better.
She was a teenage girl once too
with a fascination for
the foreign ripe-ness of a peach
or a pomegranate.
(What is it with women and fruit?)
She should’ve warned you
girls don’t tell their own stories;
we stand in the wings as they
unravel around us.
And if you could, what would you say?
When they asked you
why you stayed
which truth would you tell?
You were an open wound, and you thought he could fill it.
You liked the way he made you taste of rosebuds.
You were dying for a snack.
Oh, Persephone,
go on. Blame gravity.
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Samantha Auch is a poet, filmmaker, and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. When not writing poems about Greek goddesses, she co-hosts the podcast, “Revenge of the Final Girl,” which can be found on Spotify, Anchor, and Google Podcasts. For more about Sam, check out www.thisisauchward.com
by Marjorie Maddox
Her eyes blur with what once was;
gray matter tinted with doubt.
She remembers her skin
before her face was lifted,
and the cheek her son kissed
as a toddler in the morning light,
but this rearrangement by age
and scalpel claims a scenario
skewed, old photos just off center
of today’s snap-click, her daughter’s
nose not quite hers anymore—
and the stories she hears,
settling in ears that first knew a few
centimeters of shift when the slack
of neck was stretched up and over—
even this alters the telling
of the yet unfolding; reframes
the refractions of light as she leaves daily
her down-sized apartment
through its unbreakable glass door,
which now shimmers her familiar
reflection alongside such new
strange questions: Is this
the face her children remember
when remembering before?
Or is it the other?
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Winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist)—the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Readiing Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards), I’m Feeling Blue, Too!—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor). Her book Begin with a Question is forthcoming from Paraclete Press in 2021. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com
by Ann Hudson
You’re not dead yet. Not dying
in any urgent sense. Though some evenings
you are all urgency, your skin hot
and damp. It’s more than weather,
though it’s early summer, the gnats
fierce against the screens.
And who knows what your regimen
of pills induces. Mom calls this
agitation, and yes, you’re driven
to be in motion, more Bacchanalian rave
than a sure-footed dance, more
frenzied wildness around the fire,
except instead of footwork you’ve got
limbs churning in your wheelchair,
the parking brake on. And instead of fire
to dance around, you’ve got a growing emptiness
which I imagine as a whitening spreading
in your brain like ice. Or like tree limbs
that you only discover in summertime
are dead, persistently gray against
all the buzzy, feverish frenzy of green.
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Ann Hudson's first book, The Armillary Sphere, was published by Ohio University Press. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Rhino, and teaches at a Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois.
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