by Michele Parker Randall


I pray like someone who gardens in Florida. Plots begin
small & manageable, carefully footed, flagged, strung,

chalked. Then the first crop matures. Then the feasting
festival of possums, or raccoons, or bugs, or rats, or birds

leads to bigger plots, to grow enough for us, too. Stakes
stretch out a bit each season until heavy machinery turns

out to be necessary & a fulltime job feels intrusive. Early
morning, before the sun turns leaf edges & saps my energy,

there is a pull, I suppose like the ocean feels toward the moon,
to walk each row in a daybreak celebration of night-

survivors, all blossoms & young fruit. This morning, I let
my feet wonder if my garden will shrink with me as I age;

when growth plans are scrapped. What answers bloom
if we break containers, let runners root & wander?


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Michele Parker Randall is the author of Museum of Everyday Life (Kelsay Books 2015) and A Future Unmappable, chapbook (Finishing Line Press 2021). Her poetry can be found in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.

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 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.

________________________________________________________________



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.