by H.E. Fisher
I wait for cherries
by Connie Post
I was told my father
played baseball in school
and “had an arm”
until he started smoking at age 13
and was expelled from seventh grade
for fighting
he had an arm
that reached across the kitchen table
and backhanded us
he had an arm
that reached beneath our skirts
and inside our pants
he had an arm
that extended
around the bend of the hallway
and into our messy rooms
I always wondered
if I was stronger
or faster
or even thinner
if I could have escaped that arm
these days
I spend time
on autumn afternoons
immersed inside the batting cages
oiling my mitt
warming up my shoulder
taking each
grease-tinged moment
and throwing it back
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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.
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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.