by Sarah McCann
The jetsam gathers here, the violence of trash
by Brittney Corrigan
When all the news is bad or worse, my ears
ringing like a din of night insects—just swelter
and drone—I quiet my bones with the thought
of quaking aspen. Trembling Giant: grove
of thousands of trees, all with a single system
of roots. A million years old, bright fluttering
of gold against blue. And when I think I can’t
take in another sorrow—each a stone stacked
up like a cairn on my heart—I remember how
the jaws of a snake unhinge. Its mouth opens
and opens to enfold what’s impossibly large,
patient swallowing followed by a length
of rest. And when what we’ve done can’t be
undone, hope just a speck on the future’s
woolly back, I jumpstart my wonder with this:
the snow in Antarctica is sprinkled with the dust
of ancient stars. While we hunted and gathered,
the galaxy glittered and lay itself down in our light.
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Brittney Corrigan’s poetry collections include Breaking, Navigation, and 40 Weeks. Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture, is forthcoming from Airlie Press in September 2021. Brittney was raised in Colorado and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection. For more information, visit brittneycorrigan.com.
by January Gill O'Neil
I love a wild daffodil,
the one that grows
where she’s planted—
along a wooded highway
left to her own abandon,
but not abandoned.
Her big yellow head
leaning toward or away
from the sun. Not excluded
but exclusive, her trumpet
heralds no one, not even
the Canada geese—
their long-necked honks
announcing their journey.
She’ll be here less
than a season, grace us
with green slender stems,
strong enough to withstand
rain and spring’s early chill.
And when she goes,
what remains she’ll bury
deep inside the bulb of her,
take a part of me with her
until she returns.
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January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Previously, she worked as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and currently serves on the boards of AWP, Mass Poetry, and Montserrat College of Art. O’Neil has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the University of Mississippi, Oxford.
by Batnadiv HaKarmi
the sink is rancid.
A column of ants plunges in,
crawls out. The counter
roils. I wipe it with a damp cloth.
Spray vinegar. Sprinkle poison.
Once I said I wouldn’t damage a nest.
But there is no room. I scrub
my hands with soap again and again,
afraid to touch you with fingers of death.
Beneath the rose soap and detergent,
the rank smell of spoiled milk.
We stink feral.
I found the umbilical cord curled in your diaper
like a shriveled slug, yet still
haven't bathed you, dreading
the naked terror,
the screams
when you are exposed to raw air.
I hold you close,
skin against skin,
breathe in vernix and milk.
The salt of the sea.
An ant crawls in the crease between your eyes,
tracing your future.
I crush it, and feel another crawling
beneath my breast.
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Batnadiv HaKarmi is an American-born poet and painter living in Jerusalem. A graduate of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, her work has been published in Poet Lore, Poetry International, Ilanot Review, Fragmented Voices, and Radar Poetry.
by Melody Wilson
The borrowed projector continued to click
as I walked into the room.
I had a question or a problem—I
might have knocked. Maybe not.
My mother leaned against the headboard,
my father’s feet were on the floor.
He faced the window—some kind of anguish,
images flickered on the wall.
Things were strewn across the bed:
clothing, papers, wrappers; a drink
on the nightstand, sweated in the sweltering
heat. The projector case stood
on the dresser, its lid thrown open, plastic
handle rising in a stifled “O” above
the immaculate lining of the empty box.
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Melody Wilson lives and teaches near Portland, Oregon. She has one Academy of American Poets Award, and several smaller awards including a 2020 Kay Snow award. Her work has appeared in The Portland Review, Visions International, and Triggerfish Critical Review.
by Emily Shearer
You make me cry oranges,
my throat envelop stones.
Your honed-in focus rattles me
to bones. You could spend one whole poem
looking for a grain of sand in an ocean cove.
I dream of quiet boys poking around in a buried trove.
They listen like doves
to the sound of fruit growing
in my orchards and my groves.
You were roving, clamoring in droves.
I stove off cravings by piercing them with cloves
and left them boiling on the stove in copper.
Into the soup of us, I dropped a mote of x, a jot of o
a note of hex, a spot of no,
and blended it real slow.
To complete this stock I must roast
your host of bones.
Let it be known, the way we grow
together is the place where we don’t know
who’s choking on whose oranges
or whose stones.
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Emily Shearer is an ex-pat poet and yoga/French/writing teacher and creative consultant. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of”’s, and published in Kestrel, Silk Road Review, Please See Me, jellybucket, Fiolet & Wing, emry’s journal online, psaltery & lyre, West Texas Literary Review, Clockhouse, and Ruminate, among others. She is the Poetry Editor for Wide Open Writing. You can find her on the web at www.bohemilywrites.net.
by Anna Binkovitz
by Sarah Wetzel
A web full of baby spiders, each the size of a tear
drop, vibrating in place until blown on and then
falling down toward the end of threads
spun from their own tiny bodies, each crossing
over that of its siblings’. Yellow sac, brown
recluse, golden, it’s almost impossible
to identify what they will become—
poison or not. Hunters or gatherers.
A female wolf spider carries her eggs
in a silk sac on her back until the spiderlings
hatch, disperse, ballooning, kiting, releasing
their own gossamer lines to catch
the wind, traveling, sometimes, kilometers. Halfway
between New York and Napoli, ships report
spider landings. Mortality, not surprisingly, is high.
I am waiting to hear from my friend’s husband
if his wife made it alive through the night.
Meanwhile, the sun strokes the threads of the web
as if love and this, the start
of a long journey. I blow
softly on the web, watch the tiny things
tumble, watch them fly.
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Sarah Wetzel is the author of the poetry collection, The Davids Inside David, recently released from Terrapin Books. She is also the author of River Electric with Light, published by Red Hen Press, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, published by Anhinga Press. When not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is Publisher/Editor at Saturnalia Books and a PhD student in Comparative Literature at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. See sarahwetzel.com.
by Shareen K. Murayama
by Laura Passin
When the world ends, it will not
matter who, exactly, left it early—
the years shaved off the living
heart, the brain cells torqued
and plaqued by damaged genes.
It will not matter
that once the Cuyahoga lit up
like a factory dying, that the water bequeathed
to the Great Lakes by tired glaciers corroded
ships and fish alike. What we leave behind
is massive, minute: a layer of unusual soil
that circles a moment,
a diseased ring in the globe’s bark.
That’s how we figured out
what ate the dinosaurs:
a strange signature, everywhere.
No one will miss us.
We are the comet ourselves.
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Laura Passin is the author of Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe Press). She earned her PhD in English Literature at Northwestern and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Toast, Rolling Stone, Electric Literature, and Best New Poets. Laura lives in Denver with too many pets.
by Vicki Iorio
The geese take over the runway
when production of the F14 shuts down.
Long after their winged visas expire
these immigrants stay
on Long Island, finding the climate
kinder than Canada.
Clipboard in hand, heavy with you,
I waddle into the boneyard in search of scrap metal.
Nesting with her green goslings in a broken cockpit,
a gray mother hisses at me and refuses
to leave the pilot seat even after I flash
my Government ID. I put off the disposal
of this fuselage, while I wait for these fledglings
to become juveniles, for the military
precision of their flyby.
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Vicki Iorio is the author of the full-length poetry collections Poems from the Dirty Couch (Local Gems Press) and Not Sorry (Alien Buddha Press) as well as the chapbooks Send Me a Letter (dancinggirlpress) and Something Fish (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals including The Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, poets respond on line, The Fem Lit Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. Vicki is currently living in Florida but her heart is in New York.
by Lisa C. Krueger
Daisies for innocence, roses
for love—everyone speaks
a little flower, lexicon
of forebears. Dahlias
for dignity, rosemary
for remembrance: at birth,
my daughter is a bud
on the Flower of Life.
Not ill but daffodil, born
under summer’s golden moon.
I bargained for her!
Anything, I whispered.
Hardship. Illness—
I said it, I said it
on my knees in the garden,
leaves falling as I dug past light.
Daffodils for new beginnings.
I planted them everywhere.
Anemone: fragility. Did I buy
the wrong bulbs? What grew.
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Lisa C. Krueger is a poet and psychologist in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and others. Red Hen Press has published four collections of her poetry, most recently, Run Away to the Yard, in 2017.
by Lytey Kay
I wish there was a word
for the way sap leaves a tree,
the moment all the women in me
turned blood into life, teeth chattering
lightning into the sky and I remember their eyes
the moment life returned to it, rain.
We grind salt on salt, dip our teary faces
in seawater, spritz rosewater as if only
we could remind the earth,
pawing at dirt, pawing at bones,
muddy paws grabbing for roots, praying
for a haunting wind
that wraps our spoils in a raven’s wing.
Would you feel them? If it poured down on you,
body as prop? If the clouds burst to ash upon your face
every time you couldn’t see yourself in a body,
every time you saw a body?
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Lytey Kay is a Caribbean-American poet from South Florida. She received a BA in English and Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review and has been published in Coastlines Literary Magazine and Saw Palm.
by Mary Block
Any little bud of a baby knows
if it’s a girl or not. Forget me, Daisy.
My black-eyed baby, my pearl,
my dreamed-of daughter,
sweet incarnation of butter
and desert stars, blue asteroid
climbing a chocolate sky, go rise
in someone else’s east for a while.
Forgive me the crown, the chain.
Go be the sun for someone
who doesn’t need one.
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Mary Block lives and writes in her hometown of Miami, Florida. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications. Her work can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
by Emily Light
In my mother’s dreams, she would travel the country
recording all the Yiddish that remains in each broken family
because everyone has a yenta, but what about the keppy?
As in, let’s put our keppies together and stop being so farchadet.
My mother never went to Hebrew school because Grandma chopped off all her hair.
My mother never went to Hebrew school because she was too farchadet
because she had one too many brothers and the thunder in her brain
screams thunder, thunder, thunder over empty skies, thunder
passed down from the dark-eyed woman who broke with Russia
who taught my mother to clatter in the kitchen,
to clatter her tongue across her teeth,
to remind everyone that she had one too many brothers
and what about her broken keppy?
If she writes her dream dictionary
I hope she offers it to all the brothers and sisters—
a manifesto stitching the air,
the stormy, crackling air between them all.
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Emily Light’s poetry can be found in such journals as Inch, Lake Effect, Cumberland River Review, Paterson Literary Review, and others. She teaches English and lives in Boonton with her husband and son.
by Michelle Dodd
Black be the heaviest bond,
that will never leave you stranded.
Black be the sharpened knife when you
are cornered, with politics and slick mouths.
Black be the warmth of the sun,
when the world wants you to freeze.
Black be more than pride.
Black be the comfort of a womb.
Black be what newborns see before
they open their eyes.
Even stars lay on a blanket of black space.
What else could cover the universe with love, like black does?
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Michelle Dodd is a spoken word performer residing in Richmond, Va. Dodd was a part of an Emmy nominated commercial, "Colors of RVA", for NBC12 in 2019. She is a Graduate Fellow and on staff for The Watering Hole writing retreat. She has been a three time Winter Tangerine Fellow from 2018 to 2019.
by Bridget Bell
To reach the raised-bed garden, I drag my body through
the caterpillar grass and fescue until I’m at the cinderblocks
packed with dirt and the marigolds I grew
to ward off pests. The flowers failed. I take a rock,
pluck squash bugs from leaves’ pale
underbellies and smear their guts. Each insect
death is a heavy death, so I hush-wail
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The necks
of thick-rind squash curve: a yellow grin
or frown, depending on the way you see
the contour, and the tomatoes rupture, skin
split like a wound and the mint, sprawled green
almost to seed, spits out its minuscule purple flowers,
so tiny but tough as bullets.
______________________________________________________________
Bridget Bell teaches English at Durham Technical Community College in Durham, NC. She also proofreads poetry manuscripts for Four Way Books. Her work has been published in several literary journals including Eclectica, The New Ohio Review, The Los Angeles Review Online, and Folio, among others. Her poem, "Raising Mothers," was recently featured in a presentation called “The Trials, Tolls, and Triumphs of Motherhood: The Many Faces of Postpartum Depression," through the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas.
by Heidi Seaborn
~Beverly Hills Hotel, December 1958
Outside, hibiscus blooms
the color of raspberries.
We made her in this bungalow.
Tiny pink-throated hummingbird.
The doctor wore pink, I think.
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
The playwright writes the line.
It is dialogue; and I say, “Yes dear,
tea with bread and jam please.”
Then I remember jam spread
on the bedsheets.
In the cold of morning
I’ve held a hummingbird
like an egg, wings stilled.
______________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of [PANK] Book Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (2019), and the 2020 Comstock Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks. Recent work appears in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, SWWIM Every Day, The Cortland Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. See www.heidiseabornpoet.com.
by Michael A. De Armas
by Nicole Chvatal