by Connie Post
I was told my father
Connie Post served as first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California Her work has appeared in Calyx, Comstock Review, One, Cold Mountain Review, Slipstream, Spillway, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verse Daily. Her first full length Book Floodwater (Glass Lyre Press) won the 2014 Lyrebird Award. Her poetry awards include the Liakoura Award, and the Crab Creek Poetry Award. Her newest book Prime Meridian was released in January 2020.
by M.J. Turner
It’s a series of postures, executed
just fast enough to trick the eye
into seeing a single gesture. The uplifted palm,
the stilled foot, elongated
like the endless limbs of bronze
burghers hemmed in by the museum courtyard.
Chestnut leaves unzip in the pennyweight sun,
coat riding boots and walking shoes in the pea-gravel.
The local women narrow their eyes over tea and watch
two children with book bags poke at a fallen nest
made of steel wool and twigs,
the abandoned home of mechanical birds, beaks opening
to their mechanical caw. My knees sink down,
creaking sheet metal; sing in unison.
______________________________________________________________________________
M.J. Turner’s poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, Spillway, concīs, and I-70 Review. She lives in Massachusetts.
by Arden Levine
She held, in beautiful unadorned hands,
a hardcover book.
She read it, regarded the room,
reflected. Patient.
The hardcover book
sat closed and attentive
reflected her, patient,
as he explained to her the procedure.
Sitting close and attentive,
the light above washed her pale
as he explained the procedure
and what it would be like after.
The light above washed her pale;
her hair fell around her face.
And what it would be like, after?
She rested the book on its spine.
Her hair fell around her face
as she removed her clothes;
she rested the book on its spine
creased and split to center.
She removed her clothes
and became part of the table.
Spine creased, she split to center,
forefingers touching like a circuit.
Once her spine was part of the table
he inserted rods in her to open her.
Her fingers, touching like a circuit,
resembled the thin metal rods.
As he inserted rods in her to open her
she started to bleed. A machine
with a sound resembling thin metal rods
clattered like coarse wind chimes.
She started to bleed into the machine,
which extracted a condition from her.
And a clattering like coarse wind chimes
sounded in her body cavity. Emptied,
her face a confusion of threads,
extracted from the table, a conditional object,
emptied of sound, her body an aching cavity,
she arose. She arranged her limbs.
She held herself, beautiful and unadorned.
Someone had shut the book, her page was lost.
He had left, the walls were quiet.
She read the textured walls, regarded the room.
______________________________________________________________
Arden Levine’s poems have most recently appeared in Cream City Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Lifted Brow (Australia), and Zone 3. Arden lives in New York City, and her daily work as an urban planner focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development. Her chapbook, Ladies' Abecedary, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions.
by Sarah Law
In the summer of 1844, novelist George Eliot went to London to have her head “cast” by the eminent phrenologist James Deville.
Twenty-two-and-a-quarter inches round:
a very large head. See the lift
of the jaw as it draws a line
from the white throat’s side.
This lady, average-height, is gifted
with moral weight. Here, the bold
curves at the cranial base
sweep elegantly to the crown.
My dear, excuse me. Raising her locks,
the temple is—ah—luminous and smooth.
A broad pause in the circuitry
where her wordflow is suspended;
each side a mold for the pad of my thumbs
to rest. What pleasant symmetry;
such dimples are fashioned to be touched.
Here, though, are resistant ridges,
imaginative nodes we might cite
as a novel development. Forgive me
if I ask: is she lonely? Does she cycle
between moodiness and joy?
There is a plain along the brow
where her spirit has retrenched.
We could call it a reversal; faith
translated back into empathy.
I thank you, Madam Evans. I will
present more work to the society
next month. Until then
I shall remember the heft
and swell of your skull,
the worlds within it, which
I am honored to glimpse,
by dint of my hands upon you—
the passionate snap of your book.
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Sarah Law lives in London and is a tutor for the Open University. Her latest collection, Therese: Poems is published by Paraclete Press. She edits the online journal Amethyst Review.
by Julia McConnell
after Mark Doty
The fireflies are trying to teach me
their besotted evening ceremony
pulse blink pulse blink
coy in the tall grass
revealing their instruments
to the wrens,
to the weeping raspberries.
I am locked in my tantrum
of longing and unbelonging
clutching at constellations
unwilling to accept the imperfect.
My back turned, blindfolded,
two swords in my hands.
I am sweeping mud.
It is time to stop looking away
at the phantom place
neck deep in shadow.
Any small thing can save you –
the whir of trumpeting crows,
a vine winding its way up,
birds taking flight
struck into a conflation of joy,
clearing your throat while singing
at dawn or twilight,
rendering words from cloud bank
about to break into rain.
It is easy to miss these things.
What is your leap limit?
Have you tested
the winking shimmer
of season’s change?
Stasis is a lie.
A firefly lands on my belly
floats away.
______________________________________________________________________________
Julia McConnell is a queer poet and a librarian. Her chapbook, Against the Blue, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Her work has appeared in MockingHeart Review, THIS LAND, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Blood and Thunder, and many anthologies. Originally from Oklahoma, Julia lives in Seattle with her Jack Russell Terrier, Molly Marlova Magdalena McConnell.
by Samantha Grenrock
A drone flies twelve hours a day,
reading the Earth like thought.
In the blue light that cancels sleep,
I quilt the image back together,
count the tens of thousands
that have flown the crawfish farms of Louisiana
to settle in this river of grass,
still blush with carotenoids.
When asked, how do you want to return,
say a collection of wings beating each
at a different rate, that lower bodies
into water the same temperature
as air, strange to step through, like a mirror.
It's not clear when this will ever happen again,
when the cypress will bow with courtship,
and the recently paired will cross necks,
getting to know one another. A lunge and a grasp.
He shakes her by the head to show her.
I, too, like it when the male possesses strength
enough to hurt me.
A way of saying, you are safer
with me. They take turns on the nest.
Some nights I see splayed stacks of bony sticks
in the light-gassed lot, in the plastic bag
in the arms of a windbreak—cypress, too.
I see nests in kitchen cupboards,
a pale egg duo in the bowl. The stronger offspring
will push out a third. An appeasement.
Hence the phrase rain of chicks. A whole life
a moment alone in the water.
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Samantha Grenrock grew up in California and now lives in Florida. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Best New Poets, and others.
by Emily Ransdell
His father had taught him to dress it
in the field, to whet the blade
and core the anus, clip the balls
then slit the hide. Run the knife
pelvis to breast.
I watched him straddle the split thing,
struggle it off the tailgate, so careful of the rack.
He was fifteen, sheened with sweat,
desire as plain as the strain of each heft.
For a truck of his own, a job
after school, the impossibly soft hands of a girl.
One year older than me, he seemed
a man, his shoulders lit by the street lamps
of our cul-de-sac, an October moon rising white
beyond the vacant lot.
He said when you cut the windpipe right,
the insides slide out with a single pull.
Heart and liver, lungs and stomach,
everything linked like pearls on a string.
Some boys love death more than anything.
Some girls need to look.
The buck hung from the rafters,
its bent neck so lovely,
muzzle white, one chestnut eye
staring right at me. My girl-heart
caught in the crosshairs.
_________________________________________________________________
Emily Ransdell’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, River Styx, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Award, as well as the runner up for New Letters’s Patricia Cleary Poetry Prize. Emily has twice been featured by Ted Kooser in “American Life In Poetry.” She lives in Camas, Washington.
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
by Trish Hopkinson
by Mary Johnson-Butterworth
I need a new tatt,
a new tude act,
slink of that loathsome sting
circling my big-sass breast
like a nettled snake’s slither.
I need it resplendent and royal,
bloody barbed wire trapping
my mammary gland in violet,
a violent sleeve fending off feeders.
Hidden from my children, my tattoo
breeds power, protector
of no-longer-theirs nipple.
I need you to balk at my tatt
and walk away weakened, taken
aback by me, femme feral—
only to return risking barbs
to ravage my breast,
titillated by its wiry coronet.
_________________________________________________________________
Mary Johnson-Butterworth, a poetry opsimath, began to write "serious" poetry a few years ago after a lifetime of composing rhyming tributes and invitations for friends, heroes , and family. She was a founding partner of an image enhancement/marketing firm. Mary has been published in both Literature Today and The Birmingham Arts Journal.
by Kelli Russell Agodon
Because scientists have their fingers on our spines, we lift our shirts
to let their studies slap against our waves. Where are the sandpipers
of our youth? The house on the coast where I saw ghosts
of myself in every mirror. Sometimes I lust for a year
that has already happened. There’s no need to apologize
for hope because every year another kingfisher catches a fish,
because the herons pose like dark preachers talking about afterlife.
How often we forget what is holy, forget the holy in each other,
forget the tenderness of a stranger painting our grief
beneath the ocean in big brushstrokes, and for a moment
we walk around the dunes where families
of ants carry what crumbs they can find and we find a new trail
of wild strawberries and become beach citizens of found fruit,
become the P.S. I love you on the postcard we continue to write.
_______________________________________________________________
Kelli Russell Agodon’s fourth collection of poems, Dialogues with Rising Tides will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. You can write to her directly at kelli@agodon.com or visit her website: www.agodon.com
by Sharanya Sharma
Mom pronounces my name the same way Christian priests pronounce crucifix.
Dad and I pronounce home in utter alien tongues. Swallow vinegar, blister
with rust & go mute. He detests how I pronounce yesterday. I plead deaf to
verbs pronounced in future tense. Important to note that and is always
pronounced but. Indian and American. Faithful and menstruating. Angry and
loud. Freedom and mine. Pronouncing god correctly means pronouncing it
wrong. Culture wants to be pronounced like me & is pronounced like not me,
wait no, sounds like all? with a question mark. Family isn’t always
pronounced. should the i in family be silent? Grandfather pronounces my
name the way mom used to—in syllables that make god (am I pronouncing
that right?) a giddy toddler with paint-rivered fingers, smearing peach
horizons that seep into velvet starry blue. Laughter is pronounced like the hull
of a ship slicing through thigh-thick mist. These days dad pronounces my name
in mountain of granite rupturing from bullet’s kiss. Truth is pronounced like
palms hugging by a hospital bed. Earth is pronounced the way someone told
the first bedtime story ever dreamed. In white folks’ mouths my name trips,
an avalanche of basalt. Impotent molars split on volcanic syllables. Note: when
descendants pronounce brown like galaxy, linger. I whistle come long & slow,
in the space between foliage fluttering from trees. Yes, there is always a
pronunciation for them. Ghosts know the pronunciation of hunger. Some people
pronounce love with blood in their throats & some make it sigh in the dark. so what? Love
is pronounced however the fuck you want. On tongues labeled “used—like
new” my name sounds like memory—carousing vagrant, slanting sideways
towards sunlight. Hope sounds like rage & protest sounds like prayer, set to
your neighbor’s pulse. Important to note that in my mouth my name is iron-
spined, tall, mounted on a lion & weaponed for war, but I love most the way
my name is pronounced tomorrow: cavernous dark of temples before lamps
are lit; ocean waltzing, bridge of boulders draped like pearls on its back.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Sharanya Sharma a writer and teacher from Washington, D.C. with an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, The Margins and Black Warrior Review, among others. You can find more of her writing at www.sharanyawrites.com.
by Ronda Piszk Broatch
I put in radishes because they seem in such a hurry.
The garden weeded, free of buttercup, dandelion,
and I tossed out a whole sack of wildflower seeds
I’d hung onto for years, not knowing where to sow.
The birds must have looked the other way, busy
with new-laid eggs, the soil now covered with green stars.
Sometimes nothing happens.
Sometimes we have to shake the ghost globe,
ask the ancestors where they wish to travel today.
In the distance a dog barks. Sometimes my dead
remind me of stars I’d all but forgotten.
There were prisoners who drank poison, some
who threw themselves against the electric wires,
out of windows—they were so afraid of dying
somewhere else. This morning I water strawberry plants
fading in a black planter, worry about people I don’t know
dying in nursing homes, in cages along the border.
What if truth was loud enough, even the deniers heard
and began to believe? This morning I pull a snail
away from beneath the leaves of the bay plant, uncover
a tree frog beneath a pot of soil, and nothing growing in it.
The snail was beautiful. The frog was hesitant
to leave the bowl of my glove for the unknown territory
of a tulip leaf.
It’s what I’ll never know
sometimes saves me.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered,” among others.
by Lara Payne
written after the Las Vegas Shooting on Oct 1, 2017
I start the day not knowing much.
My children leave for school.
Their bright, ribboned voices
banner the chill air, and fade.
I turn on the news to get the facts.
I listen to the report and think,
At least it wasn’t a school.
I carefully do not picture my children
with a gunman in their school.
I fill the pan to boil the eggs.
I think of the word another
and the resignation that lives in those letters.
How words like legislation
and individual rights
are weighed beside one another.
The newscaster adds the word mass,
so now we call it a mass shooting.
They don’t tell me anything about the man
I think, At least he was white.
I don’t think, At least it was a man,
because I already knew that.
I turn the flame off and set the timer,
place bread in the toaster.
And then the numbers are updated.
Almost 500 people injured or killed.
One man with a gun.
I do not know if the shooter
is counted in that number.
I measure sugar and milk
by sight into my tea.
Today I will talk to my students
about when to use words that minimize.
My friend writes about responsible gun laws
and receives death threats.
The toaster chimes.
I want to write this poem,
but I fear who might read it.
I have children.
And I am a woman.
And my husband does not have the right
skin color. We are all targets.
I no longer think if
but when. My hands are shaking,
I salt my toast instead of my eggs.
I consider using a false name.
I wonder who will protect us,
who will be brave enough
to change? I do not
taste my mistake until
I’ve sat with my tea, egg
and toast. There is a day
waiting for me
and for now,
I must face it.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. She has been a resident of the VCCA and a semi-finalist for the Nation/Discovery Award. Her poem “Corn Stand, 10 ears for two dollars” was a winner in the Moving Words Competition. and was placed on buses in Arlington, VA over the Summer of 2018. Recent poems have appeared in SWWIM, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Mom Egg Review. Her poems explore the environment, motherhood, mental illness, and the hidden work of women.
by Amy Small-McKinney
by Joannie Stangeland
The Californica Plena rose
looks ready to bust out, bristling
with buds like tiny mouths opening,
small kisses or gasps, an emerging hunger.
When does enough become too much?
In its prickly nest, the rose will be sweetly
bedecked in pink ruffles fading to white
and the sunny stamens that sing the bees.
The rose is, on its rockery ledge, steadfast.
And this is what I want to be for you.
As my complement, you are balm
and barb, rose and sticker, laughter,
silence, and on some days, nothing fits,
like rosemary’s name coming from Latin,
the ros for dew, marinus, the sea,
while its green spears are kin to mint,
nothing to do with a rose, and this rose,
named Plena for full, will swell
into a high tide of teeth,
sharks in the garden. I can’t tell you
what scares me most—the virus
or your cancer or my penchant for gin.
All I know is that the rose must be chopped
to the roots to stave off invasion,
the tumors must be made to shrink;
the rose again will thunder green,
and this metaphor fails.
People keep saying, “an abundance
of caution.” I live in the caution.
I distrust abundance. All I know
for now is this impending extravagance,
reminder we’re still clinging here and whole.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Joannie Stangeland is the author the collections The Scene You See, In Both Hands, and Into the Rumored Spring, as well as two chapbooks. She received the 2019 Crosswinds Poetry Journal grand prize, and her poems have also appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, The Southern Review, and other journals. Joannie holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. By day, she works as a technical writer.
by Lisa Zimmerman
There is a murmur of faraway rain and we are
small in sleep’s corner, breath of the dog
dreaming a field and running—
there is time in a tin cup turned over
while all across the world’s steady body
souls press toward any window of release
any open door, any open, oh—
let’s not open our eyes right now, let’s wander
down the tunnel sleep carved from our breathing
break into sunlight warm as a hand
on someone’s forehead, song after song
of the untouched departed, how they keep ahead of us flying—
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lisa Zimmerman’s writing has appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Poet Lore, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Others include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives in Colorado.
by Natalie Staples
My father taught me to play defense.
Like watching men on the street,
I map the distance to keep.
I saw the ball coming down the field
before it left the striker’s cleats,
like watching men on the street.
A chest will lean right to move left.
Track the body not the feet;
I map the distance to keep.
At half-time we ate orange slices,
tore riblets of fruit with our teeth—
like watching men on the street.
My father whispered: put your body
between the striker and the goalie.
I map the distance to keep.
He stormed the field in his head
as the silver sphere flew into the corner.
Like watching men on the street:
goalie alone at the net, post unfriendly,
and the net taking its fish, fresh scales in its fist.
I map the distance to keep.
Once at the beach, too far into the tide,
I couldn’t read the wave’s curled undertow,
like watching men on the street.
Once the silver dance of studs dazzled me
away. As if vigilance could hold back a wave,
like watching men on the street.
I map the distance to keep.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natalie Staples grew up outside of Philadelphia. She received a B.A. from Kenyon College in 2014. After graduation, she served as an AmeriCorps member and Program Associate for The Schuler Scholar Program, a college access program in the Chicago area. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Oregon. She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in SWWIM Every Day. She is the Associate Poetry Editor for the Northwest Review.
by Ashley Porras
What I hope (when I hope) is that we’ll see each other again,
but you would never accept a voice like mine—you said I could have
anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.
There were (for example) months when I seemed only to displease,
frustrate, disappoint you—; so much light pulled off course. What month
was that in? What did you want from me? Actually, you said, Love, for you
—it’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.
How one walks through the world. Endless small adjustments of balance,
filled with endless distances (Longing, they say), the shifting weights
of beautiful things, the objects you busily name. One must have a mind of winter
to regard the frost; and have been cold a long time between the ribs
or where the dusk waits. It is a grace to be a watcher on such a scene,
from where even watching is an anachronism. It existed. It existed
[on a vine that grows up trees]. Perhaps there is a life here of not being afraid
of your own heart beating, for I too am half-spun
wishing you all the aloneness you hunger for. So much light
pulled off course. For even the Gods misuse the unfolding blue. Who’d believe
that what ends here. Continues. So much light. It’s senseless—useless
-ness is the last form love takes and yesterday
is gone. And I’ve had nothing to do with it.
In order of appearance: Bidart, Gluck, Siken, Bidart, F. Wright, Dimitrov, Siken, Scarry, Hass, Scarry, Gluck, Stevens, Dimitrov, C. Wright, Graham, Bidart, Sappho [trans. Carson], Mayer, Griffiths, F. Wright, Sealey, Dimitrov, F. Wright, Dimitrov, Graham, Kahn
_______________________________________________________________
Ashley Porras lives in Cambridge, MA. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and The Cimarron Review. She is currently a Poetry MFA candidate at Columbia University.
by Catherine Rockwood