by Jen Ryan Onken
for Nicole Chvatal
by Nancy Reddy
by Jessica Freeman
the sunlight bowed down, and the lightning
bugs weren’t yet out. The city lights just on, we threw
our whiffle ball bats in the lush yard, and ran between this
world and that one, taking two steps at a time up to our
steamy back porch where last year a hummingbird had trapped
herself inside a plastic bucket of bleach left outside the door,
her green and purple wings shimmering and bent as she buzzed
inside the soppy solution next to a scrubbed rag made
from dad’s old underwear. On some nights like this one,
when we knew we were driving to the river house in the morning,
mom had us take turns in the bathtub. My brother went in first,
singing The Beatles in his blue bathrobe, a towel swinging from his hand.
A slush of water welled through the pipes, shaking the walls
as it nearly ran over the bathtubs edge. From the couch in the next
room I yelled and told him to shut the faucet off, afraid there wouldn’t
be more of that tepid-ness for me to run through
my mud-caked hair. This night, he emerged, a frightened look
on his face. I rushed around him to get to my Cinderella bath powder.
He said to tell Jesus hi. An instant, his words shrouded the room,
coloring the air, burning it and making everything smell electric.
I knew he believed what he was saying, I knew he was too old
to imagine it, I knew that here was yet another thing
that he knew well that I did not.
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Jessica Freeman has work published in Mississippi Review, The McNeese Review, Third Coast, Foothill Journal, UCity Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has received an Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets. She is a former winner of the Joanne Hirschfield Memorial Poetry Prize and a Slattery Arts Award. Currently she teaches poetry at The Women's Center in Carbondale, IL,and English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she is an MFA candidate.
by Heather Bourbeau
We were smaller once.
Our bones thick, our breath heavy from hunts and hungers.
Still we distinguish the piss of humans from cats,
the mark of dogs from the musk of lovers.
In dreams, I smell brine and baleen, the slow drip of resin.
Mantis shrimp see more colors than any animal on earth.
We see blue and red and green, and call it a rainbow,
pity the dog with only yellow and blue.
Shadows play on the backs of our closed eyes.
There once were hippos and lions on Trafalgar Square.
Now the last male northern white rhino has died
under armed guard, unable to breed.
Marsh tits fly through a Paris airport, feast on our debris.
In Quedlinburg, a wooden house bears graffiti
“No Hope” and lovely cakes of six layers nearly hide
racist caricatures on antique coffee tins.
We marvel and mock the feathered dinosaur.
The browning camellia blossom, fallen mid-storm,
with folds of pink and ochre, long past prime,
calls my fingers to learn the geography and beauty in dying.
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Heather Bourbeau’s fiction and poetry have been published in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cleaver, Francis Ford Coppola Winery, Short Édition, The Cardiff Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and Chapman University Flash Fiction competition. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.
by Hannah Craig
For Bill
I dreamed of an earth in the body. Sky
pulling back into eyelids, adjourning.
Oh, those colors, the green aquarium
of how I come into the morning.
A girl, and mortal, and dumb
with sight. I wish I could keep this
sweet. That there was not ash sown
into the rust, into the water.
Into the leve green of breath,
the flight of birds away from the body,
home to the body. The first warm
night in so many. That I am tired
of dignity, that I have received so much
of it, more than my due,
and like the mourning dove, I now call
mostly from the bridge of the world's
black night. Untaught, I've lived.
Smoothed it out, like the lilac's
wild hair, like her high, high violet hat
and head. I wish that I could keep this sweet.
That, in her tender gray neck
there was not a buried burr,
a barb, a knot of wire, rusting.
That the borrowed sumac
was not poisoning the entire lawn,
casting his wide shadow of harm.
That we were not so hungry
all the time. Impatient with
one another. Burning one another,
wet branch by wet branch. The smoke
of one another lilting, covering
the valley, like a threadbare sheet
lofted over the bed. Christ, it's true.
I dreamed of the snuff-colored ground,
the burnished erosion, the neck
and harp and tension of the cords
in the voice. Its twang and century.
How, like a she-bear, I have licked
this language into shape, and now
the fat lies aside, white and leaved.
Now the body lies aside, for a moment.
Then lifts itself to go on working.
————————————————————————————————————-
Hannah Craig lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of This History that Just Happened (Parlor Press, 2017). Her work has recently appeared in journals like Copper Nickel, Occulum, Mississippi Review, and the New England Review of Books. See hrcraig.com.
by Mara Jebsen
by Margaret Ray
I am undercover at the grocery store.
I am behind enemy lines and the line is adulthood.
I am standing here, pretending I am not
a child teetering on stilts under a giant overcoat.
Do you ever have trouble finding your dead letter drops?
No, probably not, you are the cover, there’s nothing under,
the way you talk here is the way you talk in real life,
but I have to pretend to mean things all the time.
Pretend that I feel at home in this life,
say convincing things like I’m going home now and mean
the place where I live with a man who scares me. I can’t remember
why it matters so much to wake up at the right time
but I have to do it with gusto just like my many colleagues.
I have gone to the grocery to fill in the gaps in my backstory
and I am standing in the home goods aisle asking myself
how much copper plating do I need in my kitchen
to shore up my cover? Will this this shatter-proof
plastic stemware give me away for the broken-hearted child
I really am? I am standing holding an apple corer, realizing
they don’t have anything I need here.
________________________________________________________________
Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. A winner of a Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America and the Third Coast Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in New Jersey. See www.margaretbray.com.
by Sonia Feldman
I haven’t been scandalized in months.
I wish I could see your face
when I tell you a very good secret.
I wish I could smell your fake tan
getting dressed in a locker room.
I want to show up at your house
unannounced and make your brother
let me in. I want to buy you
a sushi dinner and have a good cry.
How better to remember the ferocity
of our love than by breaking something
together (say, a brown glass bottle
on the bathroom floor)? Once I cursed you
for peeing on me in the shower.
Now I’m baking my own
lemon birthday cake longing
for the filth beneath your fingernails.
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Sonia Feldman is a writer living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Washington University in St. Louis and then the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) at the University of Chicago, where she studied English literature and creative writing. She runs a poetry email newsletter, Sonia’s Poem of the Week, which reaches an audience of more than 1,500 readers every Friday. Her poetry has been published in Rattle, Juked, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Pembroke Magazine.
by Lisa Shapiro Flynn
Awake at 3 AM, I want
to plunge my fists into something, but don’t
know how to bake the bread
that others bake. The lilac light is hanging
as the droplet-shaped bud clusters
in my small yard, the plant I didn’t know
was there until my daughter
pointed out a bee-strafed bush. This spring is
lush, the hemlock and holly bursting. Even
the giant fir that shadows my child’s room
seems to be thriving, its trunk wrapped
in finger-thick vines and climbed with ivy.
I know the tree is dying/needs killing, for mercy
or to save my home, but I don’t know how
to take it down. Instead, I keep my daughter
in my bed, twined in my arms every night,
my eyes open and dry as I listen for impact,
the explosion of wood and glass.
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Lisa Schapiro Flynn has poems in or forthcoming from Birdcoat Quarterly, The Tishman Review, Radar Poetry, Bluestem, The Crab Creek Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, and others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry, and she received Honorable Mention for the 2018 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize judged by Maggie Smith. Lisa has an MFA in poetry from Emerson College and has studied at Bread Loaf, VQR, Eckerd College, and others.
by Caroline Plasket
by Jean K. Dowdy
If time is truly a fixed and linear construct
(marching from one beginning or another towards each ruled end,
rank-and-filed across calendar pages and appointment books
and chronological memos stuck to the refrigerator door),
then how is this:
that just now, in this still room,
your mother’s slow slip into oblivion
is measured instead by the ebb and flow of a pulsation softly spherical;
something breathily more round and pliant than you could ever imagine
—————————————————————————————————————
Jean K. Dowdy, a displaced Appalachian horticulturalist who lives, works, and gardens in the relative wilds of northeast Florida. Her publications include the occasional gardening/food column in local periodicals, a contribution to Oberon Poetry Magazine, and a couple of flash pieces featured on John Dufresne's "Flashpoints" website.
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.
________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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