by Jean K. Dowdy
If time is truly a fixed and linear construct
by Nicole Greaves
by Sandra Yannone
From the pages of all those Tiger Beat magazines
you purchased with your allowance, I became more
like sugar with each poster you pulled
from the centerfold’s staples. I never liked
that my crotch was always pinned to the crease,
that girls tugged at my sleeves, ripped off my clothes
and shredded what was left of me at my concerts.
I was hoping to be a firefly that feasted
on night flowers, leaving my scent behind
with my original songs, the ones no one heard
over the din of those pop hits that ABC’s money moguls
shoveled into my mouth. During boxed lunches
on the set, I had to sign thousands of postcards
to girls I’d never meet. I was drowning, Sandy,
in the fountain of teen idol fame, and I didn’t know
how to swim. Who does in that kind
of water? So I vanished into those cheap
newsprint pages of 16 magazine. I became a paper
ghost and only the drugs and sex told me
that I was alive. What can I say? Why am I risking this
from the great beyond to share with you? I think
you know better than the lyrics to “I Think I Love You.”
Every poem is a spotlight that shines the light
back into your eyes. You need to keep them open
to honest desires. Don’t get caught underneath
the undertow of the trap door’s weight. Come on,
you know how to escape, to get happy. You almost do it
every day, except you act like it’s your shadow side.
You never let yourself fully embrace the miracle of you.
I sang all those songs on those albums that I know
you still sing, when you are alone or driving with your sister
in her van. I know you gave a private concert to Tara Hardy
in your living room, that you have two microphones
at the ready to practice when you feel inspired by my lips
open to songs you wore down the needles
on your record player to hear over and over again.
I wasn’t ready for everything that came next
after the gold records and the show’s opening credits
dressed in mod. I should have shaken off that Partridge
Family tree sooner, but this isn’t my ending;
this is your beginning. So come on, stay happy, swallow
my songs, my prayers for that girl long ago
who loved me as no one could. Retire all those faded
fan magazines; you know you are happier
when you are locked inside the glass house
where you’ve been waiting your whole life to sing.
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Sandra Yannone published her debut collection, Boats for Women, in 2019 and will publish The Glass Studio in 2022 with Salmon Poetry. Her poems and reviews have appeared in print and online journals including Sweet, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters, Women’s Review of Books, and Lambda Literary Review. She currently hosts Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Facebook via Zoom on Sundays. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com.
by Loisa Fenichell
There has been little recently in the way of myself. The body manifested by a loneliness that predicates my questions. My queries release themselves unanswered. But textured, like the icy fog hanging in dense form above this earth. It’s the desire I have to wane, to disappear into the dusted-over horizon like a peck of icing. In the hospital I missed the deer the most. How they trampled with the ease of hydration over the grasses. I loved those who came and went, dis- and reappeared with the fainter hues of the grasses. Say that was what got me there, to that strange place of low lights and no valleys. That I survived on cinnamon for the length of a winter. Took in the ocean, breaking apart like bone, come spring.
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Loisa Fenichell's work—poetry and a review of Alexandria Hall's Field Music—has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications, such as Winter Tangerine Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Voicemail Poems, Sundog Lit, Poetry Northwest, Guernica Magazine, and DIALOGIST. Her debut collection, all these urban fields, was published by nothing to say press. She is an MFA Candidate at Saint Mary's College of California.
by Victoria Sanz
of resolution
is to agree—
every bearer of life
gives a gift to the mouth
of a dying
We level
I move in one traceable direction
so sure of nothing
Then Mondays
grim mornings
full of turnstiles clicking
and the silence of strangers
how that silence is a contract
between us
none of us wrote
My mother translates for me:
So what you’re saying is
life carries us
No. Yes? Wait.
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Victoria Sanz (Garcia) lives and works in Miami. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU, and holds degrees in Creative Writing and American Sign Language. Viki is an educator, activist, and doula-in-training. Some of her work can be found in Smoking Glue Gun, Phantom Limb, and Columbia Poetry Review.
by Diane LeBlanc
For almost two years, a butterfly kite hung in the upper branches of a maple tree on our street. At night, its yellow wings soaked in the glow of street lamps. By morning it was a caution sign, a bow of light, a blinding amendment to leaf and trunk. It bleached in summer heat and wintered over like a blown shell. After storms fractured the rods, its forewings collapsed onto hindwings. Blue and pink markings faded to old bruises. Near the end, the kite dangled from a branch like a butterfly clinging to a torn chrysalis. It rocked and spun, but there was no great release, no flapping off with the monarchs. One morning it was simply gone, disappeared like a species of one.
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Diane LeBlanc is a teacher, writer, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She has published four poetry chapbooks, numerous poems and essays, and a history of women in sport, Playing for Equality: Oral Histories of Women Leaders in the Early Years of Title IX. Honors and awards include the 2019 Fineline Competition award from Mid-American Review and the 2020 runner-up award for the Donald Murray Prize in Creative Nonfiction. A poetry collection, The Feast Delayed, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in 2021. To learn more, visit www.dianeleblancwriter.com.
by L. J. Sysko
Pollock might’ve said when he splattered summer’s last shiver, satisfied, sweating, searching for his Pabst blue ribbon among his cans arrayed in the garage before beer pong’s rush was amplified by Smells Like Teen Spirit and we parked our Ten Speeds for good and then an English teacher said Nothing’s as it seems about Macbeth about men becoming forest and forest becoming men and birth wasn’t quite being born and that’s when the first sledgehammer struck, when This and That crashed together, when a wall meant less than its damage, when negative space solidified and we got used to its bitterness like what’s burnt on a marshmallow or Jagermeister’s licorice grimace. Now, we’re older, now we’re mom, the same age now as she was the summer we begged for a treehouse: Let’s make a fort under the willow tree instead, carrying loads back and forth, In to Out and back again, after roller skating in the basement listening to records Donna Summer Toot toot hey beep beep or Stevie Nicks Just like the white winged dove Sings a song Sounds like she’s singing Who baby who perched on a dark limb with space between for us to twirl You go first around the lally column around the willow’s trunk around the treehouse we never built but we imagined would’ve felt like floating on a raft borne by a cloud or winging like an owl among the boughs gliding through our canopy’s fractals to circle circle circle our tree with invisible thread like spun sugar thrown by a baker sloughing rain like paint benevolently from above with a can in hand and from that vantage point flying likely looks the same as September’s first leaf signing the wind’s name
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L.J. Sysko is the author of Battledore (Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published in Ploughshares, The Pinch, Best New Poets, Rattle, Painted Bride Quarterly (forthcoming), Slush Pile (podcast, forthcoming), and Voicemail Poems, among others. Sysko has earned an MFA in poetry from New England College and won honors such as several Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards, an Academy of American Poets prize, and an Emerging Artist’s fellowship from Delaware's Division of the Arts.
by Julie Murphy
And now my mother is the person I call
when I can’t get out of bed and it’s already
after ten, where I am now, at the end
of the second year, when I’m not crying
every second but wish I could. And when
she says I know, her tone is so kind,
as if all of the kindness in the world is concentrated
in the quiet timbre of her ninety-three years.
As if it’s turned to roses, pink—like her cheeks
and her cashmere sweater—its fullness
the honeyed petals of the Peace Rose,
the spicy center of the flower, and then
there’s a bit of rough edge somewhere down
near her voice box that tears at her words
like thorns would. And because the whole flower
of kindness is in her voice, not some sweet platitude,
I can get out of bed—late as it is—careful to mute
the phone so she doesn’t hear the covers
turning over or my steps on the stairs,
the coffee canister opening. Muting and unmuting
as we remember our dead husbands, the nights
rolling dark and numberless before us.
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Julie Murphy’s poems appear or are forthcoming in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Atlanta Review, Written Here: Community of Writers Poetry Review 2019, Massachusetts Review, The Buddhist Review, CALYX, Common Ground Review, The Louisville Review, Red Wheelbarrow, and The Alembic, among other journals. A licensed psychotherapist, Julie developed Embodied Writing™, a somatic approach. She teaches poetry, as a volunteer, at Salinas Valley State Prison. Julie lives in Santa Cruz, California.
by Shannon Sankey
by Cynthia Knorr
No one remembers you at the party.
You’ve made yourself too small.
Not small as in a miniature dachshund or
a tea rose but small as in constrained.
Without warning, your mind goes blank.
When you speak, your words,
if remembered at all, are attributed
to someone else. If you drop your glass,
people ask afterward, who was that person
who dropped her glass?
It takes skill to vanish your one hundred
and thirty pounds of self into thin air—
a stillness, a downward gaze,
a traffic cop-like dexterity for moving
out of the way, a throwing back of attention
from whence it came
much as ventriloquists throw voices.
You have no switch to turn your skill on
when you need it, off when you don’t.
It is stamped onto your psyche,
which makes things difficult when
your need for safety lifts, which it did,
long ago
so long ago
you wonder now if you made the man up,
if your mother was right,
if the eyes that pierced you were your own eyes
turned inward, if the whisper in your ear
was your own blood coursing
through your veins, if the oily scent
that hung over your bed
was from your own unwashed body,
if the weight on your chest
was the breath that you held
and hold still.
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Cynthia Knorr is the author of the chapbook, A Vessel of Furious Resolve (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Café Review, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, Healing Muse, Chiron Review, and others. After a career in medical communications in New York City, she relocated to Strafford, New Hampshire. She was awarded First Prize in both the New Hampshire Poetry Society’s national and members’ contests, and is a regular participant in the Frost Place Conference on Poetry.
by Maria Nazos
Bartender, my pussy is a shoebox locked up like Fort Knox.
Play that country song on the jukebox, about a girl
on death row with nowhere to go. You can do
anything, said grown-ass men like you when I grew
mountains for breasts. Tonight, I don’t need a Ouija board
to know this is one haunted-ass place. Still, I’m staying
until you shove me out. Back home, my walls nail-scratched.
Bedposts carved with so many notches, they’re whittled
down to toothpicks. I contain starving multitudes and keep
giving back. My crown droops so low I can barely see you.
Maybe it’s better this way. You remind me of that woman
in the park asked to leash her dog, who shrilled her vocal
pitch, pressed cell phone to cheek, and called the cops.
It’s hard to tell if you’re even in danger from anyone but yourself.
It’s raining. I’ve gone wishing and have to reel myself back.
The problem with letting men like you in, is you keep coming
and breaking me, again and again. Boy, it’s time you grew
up and learned to speak for yourself. My thighs thick as tree
trunks, though black elm grows up around me. You can’t
cut me off. This land is your land, this land is my land,
but Dutch Elm disease is everyone’s sickness. To say
I’m unhopeful doesn’t mean I don’t have hope. I’d like
to pass this torch, but I won’t. You’re family, like the flat
earther uncle. Every day, I stand at the estuary, wondering
if I should gently pitch in. I want to bait and feed you
to my fish. I want to cry you a river of tears. I hate you.
I love you so much I can barely stand.
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Maria Nazos' poetry, translations, and essays are published in The New Yorker, Cherry Tree, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, and Mid-American Review. She is the author of A Hymn That Meanders (Wising Up Press, 2011) and the chapbook, Still Life (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Maria has received scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives with two crazy cats and a patient husband in Lincoln, Nebraska. You can find her at www.marianazos.com.
by Eve Grubin
Walking through summer
towards the hair salon in Primrose Hill
two women drift by, one saying to the other:
I have always wanted to do two things:
learn to play the electric guitar and
the other desire lost
among voices and the space
between their mouths and my blue skirt
trembling around my ankles.
I cross the bridge, men and women
speaking on cell phones, running to the train,
their longings unknown,
sharp, pressing into the ground, your longing
hovering somewhere between my fingers,
mine in the heat just above the pavement.
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Eve Grubin is the author of Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press) and The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press). Her poems can be found in American and British literary publications such as American Poetry Review, The North, PN Review, The New Republic, and Poetry Review. She teaches at NYU in London. See www.evegrubin.com.
by Laurie Klein
by Jennifer Martelli
lay spread eagle on the sidewalk
bleeding out state after state: airless blue deep red.
(The men will come with chalk to trace her shape: white edges like hooks,
some like small penises, or a single mitten, and some crawl through the desert
and under a river.)
Three times the country screamed:
the first scream, an old car’s shrill brakes;
the second, a lovers’ spat, but the country knew the man who slapped her around, perhaps
she asked for it;
third, could’ve been a dog in heat or in want.
And the lit windows were spaces between jack o’lantern teeth, backlit by a fat candle
nestled inside the scraped-out shell.
Honest to god, it could’ve been stopped. Rain-
storm after rainstorm barely washed the blood off this crime scene:
off the hot top, off the granite, off the pitch.
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Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), as well as the chapbook, After Bird (Grey Book Press, winner of the open reading, 2016). Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, The Sonora Review, and Iron Horse Review (winner, photo finish contest). Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in poetry. She is co-poetry editor for the Mom Egg Review.
by H.E. Fisher