by Leah Umansky
Once you hear it all, once you dream past or burn through
by Amy Pence
Time deforms, both endless and too fast.
My daughter, hours from me, arrives by car.
Hours to drive, my daughter departs by car.
Red traces the map, a field fraught with poppies.
Contact tracing shoots maps with red like poppies.
Another week like a month, though months fly.
Weak in the mouth, months fray now and fly.
Invincibles ignore contagion, unmask.
Invincibility becomes contagious, a mask.
Without roots to ground us, time comes apart.
Without time to hold us, we space apart.
Goodbyes arrive too quickly, could be our last.
Goodbyes alarm me, who might be last?
Time deforms: both endless and too fast.
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Amy Pence authored two poetry collections, the hybrid book [It] Incandescent, and two chapbooks, including 2019’s Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press). Poems and fiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Oxford American, Juked, and WSQ. A full-time tutor in Atlanta, she teaches poetry-writing at Emory University and in other workshop settings. Links to other work: www.amypence.com
by Didi Jackson
With the leisure of the snow
falling like a Rothko silence
over the morning, I am astonished.
Although chic-a-dee and titmouse flurry
to the feeder, they do so as timid as winter light
which daily asks for a little more patience
in order to emerge from the frigid night.
The flakes tumble as slow as prophecy,
occasionally buoyant on an invisible breath.
I do not suffer insomnia. I prefer to beat
the dawn; but this I shouldn’t have to explain:
for the morning is naked and beautiful
and yawns many times before turning
on the light. I am there
to see. The birds drop in and out
like lures in a dark ocean littered
with loitering stars. What a drowsy way
to start the day with the silence of God.
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Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day. After having lived in Florida and Vermont teaching art history and creative writing, she will soon join the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Spring 2021 teaching creative writing.
by Maya Pindyck
Today I am my sister’s sister,
my father’s brow,
my mother’s squirm,
urging my spirit to light.
I touch my abdomen,
each daughters’ doorway
opened for a few fluorescent minutes
then sewn shut
for good, if not for now.
I remain here,
even when my form bruises, blooms,
or falls away, by way of what it does
or does not say.
Instead of saying It’s getting out of hand
won’t you say I need it in my hand
won’t you say
my hand
—a cardinal startles.
I do not mistake it for another red thing:
the flower on the soup bowl’s bottom
blurred by golden croutons.
With twitch of beak & eye,
the bird returns me to any tree,
a family.
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A recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Maya Pindyck is the author of two poetry books, Emoticoncert (2016, Four Way Books) and Friend Among Stones (2009, New Rivers Press, winner of the Many Voices Project Award). Her writing has recently appeared in Seneca Review, Barrow Street, and Quarterly West. She lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design.
by Rachel Marie Patterson
Mr. Tom and I walked the tree-lined field at the edge
of the playground where the music teacher went to smoke
her Parliaments. The day was so hot that the boys
needed towels to ride the aluminum slide. Mr. Tom
gave me a Sweet Tart necklace and said, If you were older,
we could go on a date. Do you know what people do on dates?
I used to daydream about having a bra and wearing jeans
on Picture Day. Mr. Tom put one finger down the neck
of my shirt and pulled. The other girls would be jealous.
But now he was so close, I smelled Old Spice and sour
breath. I blurted out, I’ll spit on you. He just laughed
and pulled me closer. So I did spit and ran down the hill,
and Mr. Tom ran after me. Get on the wall! he yelled.
On the wall, I braided limp stems of clover. He sent
me home with a pink slip in my backpack. That night,
Father removed his box of stationery from the locked drawer.
Mother told me to start the apology Dear Sir. I remembered
wet stains under Mr. Tom’s arms. When I was done,
they made me lick and seal the envelope.
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Rachel Marie Patterson is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. Her full-length collection Tall Grass With Violence is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, The Journal, Thrush, Parcel, Smartish Pace, and other journals. The winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her poems have also been nominated for Best New Poets, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2020 Rita Dove Award from the Center for Women Writers. www.rachelmariepatterson.com
by Erin Rodoni
by Shana Ross
Robins keep their nest tidy, manage to avoid befouling the twigs as the eggs rupture into
chicks grow in four days to fledglings. The how: worm in, tucked tidy into gaping hole,
I mean beak, I mean need. Shit out, worm the trigger, expel a solid thing that can be
grabbed and flown away. Scattered, I think, so no one can trace the waste back to
flightless children, to the safehouse. In my house I find myself. Yelling about the piles
on every flat surface, the ketchup I cannot find because no one ever, no one but me puts
things back, ever puts anything where it belongs. Even though it is the weekend I do not
feel like having the scheduled sex that sustains our hungry skin. In the hot shower, night
so shallow the sky is still blue above the tree shapes that close in on us like teeth, I laugh,
I laugh. I am on the verge of tears. Let in the music, new themes for
protection. Try to overwrite the earworm already tunneling. I beg new lines. Inflate like
a python unhinged, squeeze me like I imagine mother love, wrap me up to take the body
blows from me, for me. Look around, look around – how lucky we are... The robin feeds
cold blueberries to the babies, straight from m fridge, straight in a line I laid down on
the arm of a sunchair. She brings them a worm so fat and flailing I worry she has caught
a newborn snake. I worry about the birdlings. The news warns tatters of a tropical storm
will arrive soon from the Southeast, stroking the coast with wind fingers, rain fingers,
skimming over what is solid. My husband holds my hand as we fall asleep. He always
falls asleep first.
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Shana Ross bought her first computer working the graveyard shift in a windchime factory, then spent a good while authoring a stable life before finally turning her attention to the page in 2018. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Bowery Gothic, Kissing Dynamite, Writers Resist and more. She is the recipient of a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets @shanakatzross.
by Catherine-Esther Cowie
To Great-Grandpa
O hands that wound, even you grew flowers,
the red-petaled hibiscus, the soft trumpeting
yellow bells, even you grew banana trees
and the dasheen root, and we too
are your blossoms.
I am here, I am here,
Mwen la, mwen la,
the animal of my body
chants my praise. I strip
to my underwear,
press against the cool tiles,
let the sun trample my skin
let the light take root inside.
Tonight, I’ll listen to the unlit sky
teeming with rain,
tomorrow the hills will sparkle
emerald, and one day I will tell another,
these hills live in me,
Morne Fortune and Belle Vue.
And you too threaded this place through your bones,
abandoned the great house for a hut on the beach,
its lullabies, its dead fish.
We wanted Grandma to pepper
your food with crushed glass,
she called you, Daddy.
We thought she would tongue
your name, a curse,
she spoke of the coconut heads
you split, gave her the water to drink.
Who wants to begin in violence, we pressed
our fingers to our wound,
felt its widening mouth
chorus, we are ashamed.
O hands that wound,
no one sung this song to you,
no one rimmed your neck with shame.
But sew into a girl-child
what is hidden and hurts.
O dead man, with your ears
stuffed with dirt,
I string you into verse—
a vengeance,
an attempt at teasing out the light,
to bear witness.
I call you monster.
I call you father.
How this song blues the kitchen floor,
bloodies our feet.
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Catherine-Esther Cowie is from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and has lived in Canada and the US. She is a graduate of the Pacific University low-residency MFA program. Her writing has appeared in the Penn Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Forklift Ohio, Flock Literary Journal and Moko Magazine, The Common, Potomac Review, Southern Humanities Review and Portland Review.
by Hannah Silverstein
Some things you do not have to see
to know their meaning.
Some meanings you do not have to know
to see. Water, or ships in a crowded harbor. I dreamt
I was pregnant, and, also, a boy. I was a spy
on a mission in the Mediterranean. Imposter.
I did not watch the State of the Union. I clung
to the lifeboat, trying to remember
the country code
for my librarian, to ask
what to expect, if the baby
would live, or was a baby,
not a dream. The body moves and the mind
rationalizes after. I take a breath
because the air smells sweet—OK.
My chest squeezes cold; I must be afraid.
Yes? No? Google says
pregnancy in a dream
is sign of a growth. Is that good?
Manipulate the body with motion,
medicine, food, sex, but the mind
keeps thinking, what now?
I haven’t felt joy since—
How much is enough?
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Hannah Silverstein lives in Vermont and is a student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in LEON Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Terroir Review, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM Every Day, and The New Guard.
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.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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