by Martha Silano
but now I know a mother can work in her garden for ten hours,
by Jennifer Poteet
She twiddles with the camera on her new Smartphone,
showing how much the undergrowth has overgrown.
Primrose, jasmine, and even rhododendron
bloom at night. Amy shares with everyone
a battered old basin that sinks to its lip in mud,
her garden, pummeled by an unexpected flood.
The steepled roof of the house angles down
like a brocaded, whale-ribbed wedding gown.
It’s not a husband whom Amy pines for
as she slips beneath the soffit in the downpour,
lights a fat Cohiba, seeking refuge from the showers.
Where is Ada, Madonna of the evening flowers?
_________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Poteet lives in Montclair, NJ. Her work has been published in The Cortland Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Paterson Literary Review, Clementine Unbound, Whale Road Review, and others. Her chapbook Sleepwalking Home was published in 2017 by Dancing Girl Press. Jennifer's website is jenniferpoteet.com.
by Anne Panning
Boys at eighteen grow cereal bowls full
Of loose change on their bedside tables.
Crumpled dollar bills tumbleweed into
Future haircuts, first and last months’ rent,
an education sealed under glass. Boys at
eighteen come and they go. They leave traces
of sleep on bed pillows. They whisper their
goodbyes in the tinkling of empty hangers in
abandoned closets. Their shoulders carry the
weight of XL. They drive borrowed cars to
the point of distraction. Their big shoes left
floating by the door like empty boats waiting
for high tide. Boys at eighteen leave gurgling
aquariums in the care of mothers and fathers
who feed consistently. Never once forgetting.
_________________________________________________________________
Anne Panning published her first memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss (Stillhouse Press, 2018). She has also published a novel, Butter, as well as a short story collection, The Price of Eggs, and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor's Choice. She is currently working on a second memoir about her late father, a barber and addict. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.
by Cindy Veach
When is leaving justified?
One-part eggshell to two-parts love?
Two-parts eggshell to one-part love?
None of the above?
My head is full of noise.
My head is a hung jury.
My head is a congregation
seated on hard wood benches
while outside the Chinese maple
is on fire and worth a sidelong glance.
Who can resist? The urge,
irresistible—
I cast my eyes knowing
I could not look back.
Those leaves escaping
the tree, sparking the air
made me think of lightning bugs
when I hadn’t thought
of lightning bugs
since Bloomington
since the rental on Bender Road.
I raced my sisters
across that dark yard.
I wanted to capture
all the light.
It wasn’t a secret.
There were people
who drove down our road at night
to dump unwanted puppies
from car windows.
How could they do that?
And yet.
How could I?
_______________________________________________________________
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming 2021), Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book, and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Phillip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is co-poetry editor of Mom Egg Review. www.cindyveach.com
by Therese Gleason
The abdominoplasty scar bisects my body: thin red equator feathery at my hips,
mottled rope above the pubic bone. Before motherhood, the world of my belly
was flat, a blank page. Now, its vellum is etched with ancient cartography:
scrawled stretch marks, evidence of the body’s wisdom—joints cranked open, sinew
softened, cartilage and bone expanding, ribs and pelvis making way for one, two,
three souls to grow in a saltwater globe, faces pressing the womb’s porthole.
My first, a girl, measured ten pounds on the ultrasound, just shy of nine at birth.
I cried when I heard c-section—what about my doula, prenatal yoga, marathoner’s
endurance, migraineur’s pain tolerance? My midwife great-great-grandmother
who, having borne eleven children, assisted the country doctor at her neighbors’
home births? My own mother, who delivered my sister and me, footling breech
twins, with no anesthesia? I wanted to surrender to instinct, the primal power
of the birthing body—but my cervix refused to dilate past a fingertip, my firstborn’s
head too large to pass narrow, novice hips. Three years later, I submitted to the scalpel
again: boy/girl twins who disintegrated my abdominal fascia, its gossamer no match
for two amniotic sacs, placentas, humans. After, my guts protruded through a ravine
between the rectus abdominis, bellybutton punched out. At the postpartum checkup,
baby feet poking the tender cavity of my deflated torso, the doctor said I can palpate
your aorta and your viscera have no protection. It made sense, this defenseless
underbelly, love having blown me wide open at my prime meridian—at times I wanted
to tuck my children back inside for safe-keeping but a mother can’t live with an abyss
at her core. So the surgeon sliced my belly hip to hip, tenting the flap of skin
to stitch me stem to sternum along the linea alba, fixing the umbilical hernia, sucking
fat from flanks, trimming a hemline of excess tissue and puncturing a button hole
for my newly crooked navel. For ten days, drains at my groin siphoned honey-colored fluid;
for four weeks I hunched like a crone; for more than a month I couldn’t cradle my babies’
sweet heft or cuddle my toddler, my thrice-cut incision bandaged and weeping,
but O blessed be my stomach’s scarred art, fleshy omphalos that parted
for three blood-streaked heads to dawn.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Therese Gleason, a Pushcart nominee, is author of Libation (2006), co-winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative’s Chapbook Competition. Her work has recently appeared/is forthcoming in The Worcester Review, America, New Ohio Review, San Pedro River Review, Literary Mama, Psaltery & Lyre, Halfway Down the Stairs, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Mass Poetry’s “Hard Work of Hope/Poem of the Moment” Series. A literacy teacher, she lives with her husband and three children in Worcester, MA.
by Jennifer Garfield
Confession: I forget to smell the flowers.
There they are, white and soft, nestled
in that green I can’t identify. Language
returns from 10th grade Biology—stamen,
ovule, filament. The words feel good. Always
better than the real thing, a weight in my brain,
like I might hold them, a memory bouquet.
There was the formaldehyde on frog day,
and my lab partner’s wintergreen gum,
his adam’s apple bobbing beneath
a hemp choker. It was a confusing time.
What should one want—to tear into
the frog’s embryonic skin, flacid and gray
when I poked with a knife? Or should I
recoil, let the lab partner do this manly
work? I was learning how to be female,
to dissect each moment for clues. Directions:
To dissect is not to ‘cut up,’ but to ‘expose
to view.’ I was learning to reveal myself in parts—
dorsal, ventral, lateral—a lifetime collection
of rules. If you have a female frog,
remove and place the ovaries in the tray.
I was learning to conceal. We worked
together, the lab partner and I,
and made it to the triangle-shaped
heart before he ran to the bathroom
and threw up. I pressed on, forceps
and probe. Our ovaries were filled
with eggs. Reflect: Notice the heart
has 3 chambers. How many chambers
does your heart have?” I answered
everything that was asked of me,
and double-checked my work.
What should one want
to be obedient, or to be free?
But that was many years ago,
and I am writing about beauty today,
not dead frogs, not the way a heart
builds walls. I bend to smell my flowers,
and can already see they are past
their prime. The milky flesh turning
to yellow-brown, the faint scent
I hope to redeem me thick with rot.
I tug a petal but the stem protests,
and my palm unfurls like a hug opened.
What am I trying to save? Not the girl
told to observe the relationship between
organ and function. Not the girl who didn’t
say no. Conclude: What insight do you have
into the relationship between life and death?
I leave the last question blank.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Garfield's work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including Salamander, Threepenny Review, and Sugar House Review. She was a finalist for the Frontier Poetry 2019 Open, and has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing Parent-Writer Fellowship. She is a high school English teacher near Boston.
by Dara-Lyn Shrager
We FaceTime just before sunset.
After, you’ll thread the hills, look
down over the basin and catch what
you will of yips and howls. With
the hazards, maybe you won’t crash
the Jeep. It’s something we share,
a thoroughly modern way to be mother
and son. The dead hour at In-N-Out
Burger then home to your half of a rented
bed. You can’t remember what I did,
climbed into the star-strung crib with you
and napped a little, on a late afternoon
in the weak winter light, together, just
like this, you craning toward some invisible
edge and me, still bleeding blades some
three months later. Hush, now, never.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dara-Lyn Shrager lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. Her full-length collection, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee, was published by Barrow Street Books in 2018. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a BA from Smith College. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals, including Crab Creek Review, Southern Humanities Review, Barn Owl Review, and Nashville Review. Her articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Philadelphia Magazine. Learn more at: www.daralynshrager.com.
by Mary Johnson-Butterworth
recalling a ten-year-old girl’s play in two acts
Act I
Barbie, blonde locks billowing, aproned in shadows
Once, on this same checkerboard kitchen floor,
Steeled herself for Ken’s return in his crimson Corvette,
Like the one in the happy couple photo by my parents’ couch.
“Your Lover Boy’s home,” he announced in my best bass.
“What’s for dinner, Sweetie?” “Swanson’s finest,” I Barbie-chirped.
“TV dinners again, B-word?” his plastic hand slapping her
Perfect face. I hoped Dad would spy her bolting backward, rubbing
Her plastic cheek, then inflamed by red Crayola marker,
Or Ken removing his faux leather belt
As Barbie lay ironed against the baseboard.
Act II
Hearing the plink of ice cubes drowned by Jack Daniels,
Barbie sloppily hummed “You Are My Sunshine,”
Willing Mom within earshot.
Ken abed, Barbie weaved
Unsteadily to their made-up bedroom and mumbled
Her way into the miniature four-poster,
Only to be rebuffed by my gruffest, loudest Ken,
“Get away from me, you miserable drunk!”
Her back to him, Barbie slurred,
“You son-of-a-B-word!” before passing out.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mary Johnson-Butterworth, a poetry opsimath, did not begin writing “serious” poetry until recently. A longtime rhymer of tributes, invitations, toasts, and celebratory raps, Mary also co-founded and penned copy for her image enhancement/marketing firm. She now embraces publishable poetry as her wannabe genre. She has been published in both Literature Today and The Birmingham Arts Journal.
by Camille-Yvette Welsch
The cold blows in like ice water, a gulp in an open throat, the longing for drink when surrounded by water. How you want a cool sip when the hot shower runs down, how you want a shower.
The cold tastes like somewhere else, not this room, its claustrophobic mess of laundry and flange, eddied sheets, trembling bassinet. The ceiling fan stutters, only the window can speak in smooth syllabics, the wind a language of ease.
The cold sounds like nothing, it is just a feeling in the air, an ache as the cartilage constricts. A welcome pain, one above the waist and the breast bone. An ache tethered to nothing else.
The cold feels like a thread, pulling you into the chair, the warmth, the circlets of belly and flesh. You are tethered to the baby and the only association you have is the tetherball from recess, beating it over and over again, your whole body behind the whelp of your arm and the ball furling and unfurling again and again, the clang and slap of the ball against the metal pole, and you working at it until the bell calls you in.
No bell here. Just the repeated motion, the unstoppable, circling ball.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Camille-Yvette Welsch is a Teaching Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University where she directs the High School Writing Day. She is the author of two books, the chapbook FULL, and the full-length volume, The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, her work has appeared in Zone 3, Menacing Hedge, Atticus Review, Indiana Review, Cream City Review, and other venues. You can visit her website at www.camilleyvettewelsch.com.
by Mary Ardery
Tipped on its side, the glass jar houses women
in miniature. They hike the waxy spine of a long
rhododendron leaf. Each woman lugs a pack
and strapped to the bottom, a rolled sleeping bag
the size of a pill. What nightly warms her body
sealed inside. They reach a sage-green river
of Old Man’s Beard, a lichen too scraggly
to wade through and risk tangling their legs,
so together they build a footbridge of copper
pine needles. When night falls, they stitch the sinewy
strands of poplar bark through heron feathers.
They huddle beneath the makeshift tarp. Still,
a jagged rock of rose-quartz blocks the jar’s opening.
Their only way out is to climb up then squeeze
through a sliver of air. Hiking for as long as it takes
to re-emerge in the world that brought them here.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mary Ardery is originally from Bloomington, IN. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,” Fairy Tale Review, Cincinnati Review’s “miCRo” series, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. You can visit her at maryardery.com.
by M Soledad Caballero
by Lannie Stabile
The monster does not always appear on screen swinging an axe. He holds
the door open like a gentleman. Pays the check. Tells jokes so funny they
make you cover your teeth self-consciously. Impresses your friends with a
story about that time he met Mick Foley at a Bob Evans. Your brother gives
him the If you break her heart, I'll break your legs speech but is absent when
your sweat pants have fused to the couch and the only
conversation you’ve had in months is the press of your finger on the remote
when Netflix asks Are you still watching? Yes, bitch! You are still watching
your family misunderstand your depression. You are still
watching them theorize and deduce and come to wrong conclusions about
why you no longer hug your uncle. Or brother. Or any male relative. You
could have explained everything last Thanksgiving, when you drove out
for the long weekend. But come Friday morning, you were gone before the
frost kissed the grass. And you did not kiss your mother good morning or
good-bye. You figured a tale of violation would spoil her breakfast. The
only thing she looks forward to these days are that black coffee, those over-
medium eggs, and the times you come home. Maybe you used to trust
people enough to tell them ugly things. But the first time someone
followed I’m so sorry that happened to you with That just doesn’t sound
like him, your body became a chopping block. Heavy. Scarred. A once
thriving whole, pieced out for its usefulness.
*This poem won Second Place in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, Strange Furniture, is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.
by Patrycja Humienik
i keep close the intonation of my name
spoken in my mother’s voice. there was a time
i let people mispronounce it. i don’t
remember the sound of my grandfather’s voice. i’ve lost
the word for the flower i could be, impatient
blossom, used to never wear lipstick, now i smear
shades of azalea on my lips, i kiss everything, i leave
a mark. invocation. as in: a prayer i want
to repeat. the physicality of it: prayer, kissing, echoes
of a younger me. trying to be approved of.
i’m not saying i am better now. i look up how to say
anchor in my first language. once i didn’t need
to search. kotwica. my mama gave birth to me
a month after my parents arrived in the states.
nie mówiła wtedy po angielsku. it was
her first time on a plane. i know nothing
of ground, of letting the ship sleep.
i fly for hours to visit. if i could
bind myself to a place, put cut flowers in a vase,
i would thank my mother that way. instead
i pour the petals out.
*This poem won Third Place in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer & performer based in Seattle, WA. Her poetry is featured/forthcoming in BOAAT, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, Hobart, Four Way Review, The Boiler, Sporklet, and elsewhere. Patrycja is a 2021 Jack Straw Fellow, and was a fall 2020 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Find her on twitter @jej_sen.
by Richelle Buccilli
The crackling of fire? No,
acorns that sound like footsteps,
animals in the trees. The other world
from which we stay grounded.
My son sifts through leaves
and sand, a yellow shovel
in his hand. What kind of thoughts
must he have? The kind of life
inside, behind trees? The maple
in our backyard, her strong bark
as we looked, searching for birds
or a squirrel, then the wind as if
moving my thoughts, an acorn
breaks the skin of my right hand:
how it mirrors the bumped
lines and bruising of the bark,
that tender layer, which, according
to my mother, can tell a lot about
a person, what kind of work they
do, how smooth or cracked, if
anything delicate is left—
Please tell me about mine.
I can’t distinguish from what’s both
a new gentleness and a brutal tolerance for love.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Richelle Buccilli holds a BA in Creative Writing from Seton Hill University and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sweet Tree Review, Yes Poetry, The Main Street Rag, Rogue Agent, Wicked Alice, and elsewhere. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son.
by Robbi Nester
to Richard
We start by laying out the tiles,
the deluxe set your mother bought
one Christmas long ago, the one
with off-white tiles, like teeth, matching
brackets to lay out the words, metal pegs
to tote up points. Best of all, a board
that we could spin to face us, each
in turn. We couldn’t wait to pick out
letters, ponder combinations, gnawing
on your mother’s peanut butter cookies
till the board stuck to the table and the
buttermilk was gone. The others hated
playing us. We always won. Now, it’s you
and me, the kid grown up and moved away.
Worthy partners and opponents, curators
of words, we challenge one another.
You lose a turn, then I do. I’m stuck
with the x; too many vowels. You find
a clever way to use the Q. There’s no one
here but us. It hardly matters that some
tiles are missing. We don’t mind the gaps,
forget for just a moment empty streets
and dire statistics. Let’s make it last.
We’re pondering the choices we still have.
Everyone we ever played stays in the game.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry, a chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012) and three collections: A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019). She has also edited three anthologies--The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014), Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees (published as a special issue of Poemeleon Poetry Journal in 2017), and a new one that hasn't yet found a home. She is an elected member of the Academy of American Poets, and her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.
by Heidi Seaborn
O fat
and dumb
and white—
O precious tickets
to a carnival.
Cotton candy.
Disneyland Matterhorn
roller coaster.
O show stealers—
main stage act,
I’m your back-up singer.
O tricksters—
how dare you
pretend
to guard a heart.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of the award-winning debut collection Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019) and two chapbooks. Since Heidi returned to writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as American Poetry Journal, Frontier, Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review and as the daily poem in The Slowdown and SWWIM. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. www.heidiseabornpoet.com
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
You Ferrari baby. You Lotus Elan. You dream man. Smooth moves, always some sleek bitch on your arm, and me side-kickin’, just afterthought. So I shoot you, replicate you in oversized prints spread out on my be d like facsimile. Those blown-up biceps, fine-tuned torso, face up on my pillow, your perfect pores. How the camera loves you, baby, those smoldering, Billy Dee shots aimed straight at a woman’s vulnerability. How you juice them, seduce them, your voice dropping an octave when a woman calls. And you get all Barry White. You’ve kept up the upkeep. Changed the oil. Sleek. Toned. You Alfa and Romeo, baby. You candy apple. You metal fleck. The wind buffs glitter all around you. That night at my studio after one too many Hennessy, we stand toe to toe, and I turn my lips to yours, ask, why not me? You grab my ass with two hands, squeeze, and shrug. Baby got no back. And I flash to that chorus line of sloe-eyed beauties you’ve bedded, each one bottom-heavy, riper than I could ever be. As if derrière were the measure of a woman. Let’s get back to work, you say. You rev up your engine. I flick on the lights. Oh, baby, you shimmer, you gleam. Stand up, I tell you. Pull the shirt above your head. Now you can’t see me for real. You, who can’t see the Beemers for the beaters. You, who wouldn’t know love if it bit you on the ass.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
Photo Credit: Photo of C.W. by Alexis Rhone Fancher, 2016
________________________________________________________________
Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Poetry East, Hobart, VerseDaily, American Journal of Poetry, Duende, SWWIM, Plume, Diode, PedestalMagazine, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, and elsewhere. She’s authored five published poetry collections, most recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019). EROTIC: New & Selected, from New York Quarterly, and another full-length collection (in Italian) by Edizioni Ensemble, Italia, will both be published in early 2021. Her photographs are published worldwide, including River Styx, and the covers of Pithead Chapel, Heyday and Witness. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com
by Janice Northerns
Red Jello in the ice box—a constant—
no dimpled copper mold, but the Pyrex
dish, clear oblong glass shimmering
with the cheap glow of sugar, gelatin,
and red dye #40. In her shirtwaist
and crisp apron, she opened that white
enameled door, where sustenance shone
in iced light, glossy housewife’s magazine
ad, animal sacrifice in fine print:
gelatin from collagen of boiled bones
and hide, ground down to magic powder,
instant 1950s sheen. She bought it
by the box. She gobbled it by the bowl.
In place of pearls around her neck, she strung
holes she’d dug in the dirt where she’d buried
her words. In place of high heels, she inked
Bible verses on the soles of her feet,
trailing smeary hope and admonition
as she walked across the damp linoleum
of her just-mopped floor. Want congealed
under her tongue and rotted, along
with teeth—all false by 1964.
After years of gnawing with a porcelain
smile she’d been told was good as a real one,
her jawbone worn thin as their bank account,
she could no longer chew the bread of life.
Behind that shining white portal—the blood
and the body, the ruby sacrament.
She rose in the night, her longing so faint
all it took to fill it was a bowl of sweet lies.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including Ploughshares, The Laurel Review, descant, The Chariton Review, and Southwestern American Literature. Awards include a Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, and the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University. She and her husband live in southwest Kansas. Read more at www.janicenortherns.com or follow her on Twitter and Instagram @JaniceNortherns
by Sarah Stockton
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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After various stints as both staff and adjunct professor in urban universities, raising two kids, and years of freelancing in the online world of editing and writing, Sarah Stockton, MA now lives in the Pacific Northwest and is the editor of River Mouth Review. Sarah's poems have appeared in Glass Poetry, Rise Up Review, The Shallow Ends, SWIMM, Kissing Dynamite, and Crab Creek Review, among others. Her debut chapbook is Time's Apprentice (dancing girl press, 2021).
by Dion O'Reilly
From the baselines in Big Sister’s
bedroom, from the longhairs
necking with her
in the backseat of the Lincoln,
or stuck together
like dolphins in the deep end,
I knew something of sex,
but I suffered
a nervy pulse I couldn’t decipher.
Wires crossed and fizzed.
Their crux flickered
a teensy bulb, center front
of my hairless cleft.
Crowning bitty head
in a wimply fold.
Tight whorl that needed
soothing. Clenchy itch,
which pressed me to straddle
the edge of my third-grade chair.
glide side to side
on a hidden pin.
Mommy’s lip curled
with what looked like desire.
She pronounced me Dirty. Swarming.
Big Sister and her boyfriends
snickered and scorned.
Still, as I sipped my tea in bone
china with bloody roses,
as I looked at the naked
ceiling pulse, I pushed
my center fire.
Poked and poked to keep it quiet.
When I lay down, it grew louder.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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