by Maryann Corbett
by Mel Sherrer
My friends and I are downing dollar drinks
and gabbing about the possible
effects of lockdown on
symphony venues and
concert halls.
My attention keeps spilling over to a table nearby.
I am being called in by the baritones and
buttery tenors of the group of Black men sitting there.
Someone nudges me, asking about another round.
Someone mentions teaching classes online,
but I am drawn back to conversation
which bears no trace of the virus.
The men laugh into their plates,
forks still poised in their hands.
Each of them has something remarkable:
fists as big as coconuts,
a perfect plum of a knot in his tie,
an easy demeanor, leaning back in his chair,
intricate waves in his hair,
shoes with buckles,
a purple silk shirt.
I want to say to them all,
Come home with me and laugh as my father might have.
Teach me how to smile in my skin.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mel Sherrer (She/Her) is a writer, editor and educator. She is a proponent of women’s learning institutions having received her B.F.A. from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia and her M.F.A from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She is the Social Media Editor for South 85 Literary Journal, and she teaches Creative Writing and Performance Literature. A few of her recent publications appear in Recenter Press and Deep South Magazine. She has poetry forthcoming in MORIA Literary Journal and Headmistress Press. She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.
by Lori Lasseter Hamilton
an orange
an open mouth
cerulean blue Faberge egg
scoop of ice cream
a spoon
a teardrop
baby’s pink rattle
a pillar candle
red balloon childhood promised
a pearl
a bath bomb
Ferris wheel
a glass paperweight
a stove’s eye
magnifying glass
eyeball with red squiggly lines
round wedding cake with 3 tiers
pressed powder compact with puff and mirror
a lollipop
alarm clock
the red tip of a match
a doll’s head
a red Dixie cup to get her drunk
a porthole window
rusted out barrel where the pearlescent pink button on a wife’s sweater pops off in the flame
a cotton ball
a gold wedding band
chicken pot pie
a Christmas wreath
the starlight mint that broke my teeth
bowl of cherries
the sewing tomato Mom’s needles were stuck in
a pink velvet pillow
a soccer ball
lavender-hued birth control pill dispenser
the dial on a rotary phone
Queen Elizabeth’s crown
King Jesus’ crown of thorns
the zero in 1980
the letter O
a communion chalice
Pilate’s handwashing bowl
a paper cup holding Welch’s grape juice
the slot for a cup on the back of a Baptist pew
the hazardous waste bin in UAB’s operating room
a Gobstopper
a Jawbreaker
a kaleidoscope
a snowball
the white parachute we’d hold above our heads in third grade gym
as the music played and half the kids tried to cross before the music stopped and the parachute fell
kindergarteners singing ring around the rosy holding hands in a circle
my rapist’s palms around my neck
the summer sun in Vacation Bible School as I stepped in an anthill wearing sandals
a moon pie
can of RC Cola
a portable compact disc player spinning The Smiths
my uterus pregnant with a 13-pound fibroid the size of a baby’s head
a hot air balloon I flew up in after a distant relative’s funeral
before stopping in an ice cream shop with cousins on my mother’s side
as Air Supply sang “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you” over the speakers
an egg
a pocket watch
an earring
a bracelet
a blueberry
a peach
a Coca-Cola can
a pink nipple
a clown’s red nose
Sweet Tarts
an offering plate holding my chump change
a charcoal grill where Dad grilled hamburgers and hot dogs on the Fourth of July
the ice cream maker Papa would pour Morton’s salt into to make the banana ice cream
my dog Domino would eat
the tennis ball Mom cut a round hold in to sneak toothpaste so Domino’s breath wouldn’t stink
and his teeth wouldn’t rot
the round hole in his heart the worms carved out
the face of the grandfather clock in Momommy and Papa’s living room
as it chimed doom doom doom
_________________________________________________________________
Lori Lasseter Hamilton is a 50-year-old breast cancer and rape survivor. She works as a medical records clerk in a local hospital. Lori has competed in Montevallo and Birmingham poetry slams, and was a member of Montevallo's poetry slam team that competed in Southern Fried Regionals in 2003, 2005, and 2013. She is a member of Sister City Connection, a collective of women poets, spoken word artists, and storytellers in Birmingham, Alabama. Some of Lori's poems have been published in Steel Toe Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. One of her finest poetry slam moments is when she got to pet a bulldog named Bam-Bam between slam rounds at Eclipse Coffee in Montevallo.
by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
After Magritte’s The Tomb of the Wrestlers
Eyes in the roses you sent me, eyes in the roses you didn’t send.
We are in the moment before the breath or after the breath, but not
The breath. // These flowers wink and breathe;
Their plush mouths touch everything unsaid, vowels roll
Round their mouths, fringed petals surround the pupil
That speaks for us: what is white, what is yellow,
What is red. // Our love said and unsaid: rose petals floating in a bath
Of herbs and holy water to wash off the year, fistfuls of gardenias torn
Off a shrub and flung onto the sidewalk, daisies tossed
Midair gathering on a carpet and trampled underfoot, plumeria
Threaded into a necklace or crown, the tendril’s unfurling green,
And, other days, tulip buds wilting in a vase. // Years, all we planted pushed
Against soil and rose up. Was gathered, bound, wired and tied
With a ribbon, wrestled into a vessel. We tried our best. // Each day
The sun arcs across the sky, colors fade, smells wane, wrinkled
And brown, edges crimp, blooms limp, and shatter in one breath. // Now,
The flowers’ eyes are unblinking, a silence we wade into. Can we linger
Here, waist-deep, lean back and float beneath these clouds? My lips open
To receive you. // The rose marks a before and after, grows large,
Then larger, petals push against four walls, bears down on the floor, spreads
Across the ceiling, until there are no more words, no room
For us now but this blossoming.
________________________________________________________________
Alexandra Lytton Regalado is author of Matria, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). She is a CantoMundo fellow, winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction among others. Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more than ten Central American-themed books. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com
by Camille Carter
1.
What was true before
was always true
2.
[The Europeans report, Il n’y a pas de quoi]
A French tongue will
taste its own elitism.
3.
A waiting man shall don many masks.
4.
Were Rilke here, he’d have something
To say about your loneliness.
5.
To sanitize: pour a drink,
Dip your hands.
6.
When a woman mutters “animals” at the
Back of a grocery line, only then: exhausted hope.
7.
In the sick times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
About the sick times.
8.
But that’s an epigram!
I’ve had it with proverbs,
I’m starting to get bored.
9.
To drown: pour a drink,
Dip your head. Don’t
Come up for air.
10.
No one cares about your dog.
11.
Torn toilet paper, torn-up heart.
12.
Sick man, poor man.
13.
Bourgeois wife, aggressive shopper.
14.
Historical analogies
Will not measure up.
15.
Build a house, wish you hadn’t.
16.
Were Rilke here – wait, is he here?
I thought that. Just checking.
17.
A masked-up mother mutters.
18.
You will soon have
Had your fill of
Uno and Parcheesi.
19.
Rilke might have something to say
About my loneliness.
But you, dear? You do not.
_____________________________________________________________
Camille Carter is a poet, writer, and traveler. Her poem “Torch Song” was featured in the most recent issue of Hotel Amerika. She has studied at Loyola University - New Orleans, the University of Chicago, and KU-Leuven. She currently lives and works in Harlem, Montana, where she teaches at Aaniiih Nakoda College on the Fort Belknap Reservation.
by Martha Silano
but now I know a mother can work in her garden for ten hours,
not know it’s her last day alive. Now I know
no one’s there to deadhead the zinnias
and the fever few. Even though the world is filled
with injured geese and gulls, millions of acres
of smoldering trees,
I still love cantaloupe, how it sits on the kitchen counter
waiting for my spoon to scoop its firm and juicy flesh.
Even after I saw a photo
of my mother’s casket draped with one of her mother’s quilts,
I still loved hearing about the field of white daisies
down the road from her grave.
The world is both the wheat plowed under to make way for strip malls,
and a sunset like spilled orange juice above a gray lake.
Joy resides in the mountains
of Styrofoam and Ziplocs, while sorrow suffuses my mother’s backyard,
its cardinals and finches, its hummingbird perched in a plum tree
that lost nearly all its branches in a terrible storm.
________________________________________________________________
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. Co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, Martha's poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. She teaches at Bellevue College and Seattle's Hugo House.
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.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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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