by Allisa Cherry
Send me out into my ruin
by Sara Moore Wagner
I stomp my foot into the ground,
one, two, three, and the earth breaks
open like an egg. The viscous plastic
mantle, liquid, and I shake, shake,
shake, tectonic. Because you knew my name,
because you named me, I’m torn
in two, or I tear myself
in two, as some versions say.
But haven’t I always been split
between this world and my body, between
mother and father, between
sky and the center diamond
of this tiny planet: Diastasis
Recti. At night, I dance
around a fire chanting, “you will never
know me,” and by fire, I mean
the kitchen table I clear
into the empty trashcan, by dance
I mean conform to it. I thought
I was spinning this gold to weave
something beautiful, an elaborate wing,
thin and strong as chitin, sparkling
in the summer, handspun; but here
I am, caught now, trickster now,
and with both my hands, I’ll show you
what to do.
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Sara Moore Wagner is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbooks Tumbling After (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Rhino, Sixth Finch, Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review, and Nimrod, among others. Find her at saramoorewagner.com.
by Alana Baum
Too quiet to write you said it would be too quiet to write
Who you shutting up for?
Here with the perfect shapes and barely bloody blues and floor seats and a guest book with my phantom first two letters already filled in / she said something like we were waiting
What do other people pray for in such spaces? / I feel full on just a mouthful of what words I know
Silent and monochromatic
My longing for a silken suspension then this spiritual lift-off is as synchronous as the parking spot / as my dual-tone denim matching the all of this / as anything we’re willing to say was meant to be
How long did he spend on each and where does the red end and the gray begin and where does grief end and healing begin and what I would give to stay firmly lodged in a moment
Breathless realm / sacred shapes / symmetrical shadows / neutral god here for the dutiful and despondent
Soggy trifurcated murals thick with slow rhythms and intentional incidentals
You would have loved it I only think on occasion because at the end of the day there was plenty to deflate
Look long enough that the ghosts start looking back
Nothing to see here everyone says / no one means / never true / nearly blue
But the grown and growing heart / but the light shaft / but the whisper
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Alana Baum (she/they) is a queer poet from Los Angeles, currently living in Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Argot Magazine, Oatmeal Magazine, No Assholes Literary Magazine, and Yes Poetry. Alana also writes custom poems for strangers via @softcorepoetics. They are in graduate school to become a sex therapist.
by Barbara Crooker
I have painted it big enough so that others will see what I see.
-Georgia O’Keeffe
A fraction of an inch each day, through the long fall and winter,
this amaryllis bulb encased in wax—no water, no soil—has clawed
its way towards the light. You have been in the hospital since October—
heart attack, stroke, your aorta coming apart—inching your way back.
This smidge of green hope has kept me going. Some days, it didn’t seem
there was any movement, that the sun, in its shroud of clouds,
was not strong enough to coax some growth. I can only talk to you
on the phone; some days, a handful of minutes
is all that you can summon. This phone is so heavy. But now
the cluster of buds on the tip of the stalk begins to open, splits,
cleaves into six parts. Slowly, you gain strength, shuffling
with a walker, climbing four stairs, spooning blended food with your
shaking left hand, the right one clenched in a claw. Returning
in the smallest of increments. Soon each sepal will unfurl its flame,
flagrant as O’Keeffe’s painting, a radiant speaking in tongues.
I did not think you’d come back to me, but here you are, and here
is this flower: a trumpet fanfare, a red convertible, the molten sun.
Our little lives, so brief. But oh, the bloom.
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Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and author of nine books; Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, is the latest. Her awards include the Best Book of Poetry 2018 from Poetry by the Sea, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
by Sarah Carey
Our father knows all five of us
and shows he knows:
A hand, pressed. A nod acknowledging
each daughter here at last
as animals seek shelter in the cold,
as however lost or found we feel
or felt or will, we still seek home—
surviving selves in disembodied shells.
Chronos’s hand sweeps across
the moment kidneys fail. When blood flow
to the heart slows, stops—so
matter-of-fact. This is how we terrify
at symptoms from now on: each one
in light of layered diagnoses,
prismed in the glass, reflecting
on that sterile room,
our interrupted rhythms, who will come.
We listen as the nurse says
hearing is the last to go, and cling to this
as we whisper our testimonies.
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Sarah Carey's work has appeared recently in Atlanta Review, Grist, Yemassee, UCity Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Her book reviews of other poets' work have appeared in EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the Los Angeles Review. Sarah's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019) winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.
by Audrey Gidman
The hem of this dress is a secret
until someone sleeps beside it—
doesn't touch. A secret
like the old songs the earth-
worms recall in their trudging.
Tireless making and remaking
the soil, the undergarments, the womb.
Tireless the untying of knots,
belly of white pearls, a kind
of remembering. As if
the land knew the answer. As if
there was a question.
When I walked my feet left
red behind me—bloodletting
a root system, ankles
more like stems to bloom from—
branch-like, grasping. Singing
in the rubied dark. Singing.
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Audrey Gidman is a queer poet living in central Maine. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in époque press, FEED, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ogma Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her BFA from the University of Maine Farmington and her chapbook, body psalms, winner of the Elyse Wolf Prize, is forthcoming from Slate Roof Press.
by Sarah McCann
for the children of Latournelle
The jetsam gathers here, the violence of trash
flippant from a house, waste—not wasted—used to build.
Who knows what language to use here. We use here. Off-
key singing off mark, sponging trees stretch for the notes.
Arms out, hands out, fingers out. The sun coats us all
as we touch and clap and hold. You put your right foot
in, you put your right foot out, you put your right
foot in. Your right foot, stung large by an obese bee,
the barb pulled from your foot by a wisp of a priest,
ginger, spilling blessings with his reach. A thought of right
to water lost and forgotten like an ebbing.
We go to the well together.
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Sarah McCann earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is published in such journals as The Bennington Review and Hanging Loose. Her poetry appeared in Visiting Frost and the Academy of American Poets anthology, New Voices. She edited a collection of poetry, Tertium Quid, by the American poet Robert Lax. Her translations from Modern Greek have been recognized by the Fulbright Foundation and published in such journals as Words Without Borders and World Literature Today. Rose Fear, her translations of Maria Laina, was published by World Poetry Books. She has had one chapbook published, Peripatetica.
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.
______________________________________________________________
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