by Gail Newman
A woman sleeping in the burned-grass patch of lawn
by Zoë Fay-Stindt
In the desert only small, stout flowers
impossible to avoid, whose heads I clobbered all day
then watched night freeze them up. In the morning,
the steam rising where I puddled myself behind a bush,
the coyotes woke with me, calling across the valley
to another family, or their own—it didn’t matter
that you weren’t there. It didn’t matter that the superbloom,
which I had flown a thousand miles to find,
was too far south to reach from there. Instead,
big hunks of quartz to hold in my lap,
which I let charge themselves into my palms,
though I had never learned what exactly it was
or how, really, to let it work through me.
Eventually, I think I absorbed something—the steady
oath of solitude, the authority. The impossibility
of blooming love in any body, except my own
dusty gut. And I did: chin lifted
to the Joshuas’ white snakehead of an opening,
the crows huffing, shuffling as the sun
raised herself through the boulders,
propping her tired elbows on that frozen earth,
the night-stiffed flowers straightening
their thin spines.
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Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/her) is a bi-continental writer with roots in both the French and American South. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, EcoTheo, Muzzle Magazine, and others.
by Annie Stenzel
A building on X Street is gone now.
What did it look like, now that it is gone?
My memory for some things is excellent.
For some things my memory is no good.
After those nights in the hospital, the doctors
were satisfied with my condition. Am I?
All those years in which I saw the body as a mere
vehicle to transport my mind to new places.
Now this: the body contains my eyes;
the eyes that harvest joy for my spirit.
The body contains my ears, eager to hear the song
of water as it rushes through an empty valley.
And the body contains a beating heart; these flutters
draw my hand to my chest like a magnet.
Write about me on a piece of paper, fold it
and then open it up. Is it blank again?
______________________________________________________________
Annie Stenzel (she/her) was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., from Ambit to Trampoline Poetry, with stops at Chestnut Review, Gargoyle, Nixes Mate, On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM Every Day, Stirring, The Lake, and Trampoline Poetry, among others. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she now lives within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.
by Sharon Tracey
there is a place remote and islanded, and given
to endless regret or secret happiness
—Sarah Orne Jewett
We hiked the island, shaped like a maple
seed and brushed with wild blueberry,
crunched stones along the carriage paths
then climbed the crest of Cadillac Mountain.
A raft of clouds sailed by. A crew of hawks.
Blue pierced the day with its harpoon, I swear
I saw a breaching whale. You could see the land
bridge far below, the narrows sharp and cold,
and everywhere you turned, the pointed firs.
No tree is a country. No woman an island.
You hit the road, and yet, things follow you.
We stay until the world turns darker blue.
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Sharon Tracey is a poet and editor, and author of two full-length poetry collections: Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2020) and What I Remember Most Is Everything (All Caps Publishing, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Terrain.org, The Worcester Review, Mom Egg Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. See sharontracey.com.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Problem was, she felt too much
or not at all, a practiced yearning
that had no name. Her kids grown,
gone, forty years behind her,
fields rutted, shutters listless,
the barn propped and cock-eyed,
all those young bride prayers wasted.
Creatures like sheep, used to traveling,
know about moving on, guided by
the compass of their will, boredom
an affliction that can’t be outrun, desire
a grassy knob worth dying for. How
utterly a body is overruled by heartache.
Outside red oaks thrash, tangled
in root and bird song and whatever
might fall from the sky.
Her last undoing was to set her sassy
banties free to peck and roam,
scratch out a destiny of their own.
_____________________________________________________________
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and Serving. Her poems appear in numerous journals including Verse Daily, Rattle, The New York Times, and on her website: karigunterseymourpoet.com. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak, volumes 1-6. She is Poet Laureate of Ohio.
by Michelle Turner
Back then I thought
interstate meant no-state,
unlikely and lonely
as deep space.
I slept with one fear:
the falling away
of motion, a pink shell
pressed to my ear,
then broken.
Our ’83 Chevy,
brown on brown,
jerked to the shoulder,
shaking.
This was the first poem:
a window rolling down,
disappearing. Look:
(the officer coughed)
headlights, taillights, stars,
so soon, streaming.
______________________________________________________________
Michelle Turner’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Slice, Sixth Finch, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she works as an editor, writing coach, and academic advisor. Read more at michellemturner.com.
by Allisa Cherry
Send me out into my ruin
where every twig shoots like a pistol
and every branch cuts like a sword.
Free me from chores and let me
maraud the undergrowth
in a swimsuit the color of hard candy.
Sweet and deadly, let the morning glory
strangle the grape arbor
and the ants overrun the clusters.
There was a time I thought I could
pull enough weeds to earn my keep here,
lay enough sandstone or scrub enough floor.
But the praise of labor
is always answered with more labor.
This life doesn’t quit
shoving green growth down my throat.
The fruit trees, bearded with lichen
and bees, deafen me. The pansies
muscle past paving stones
and wreck the paths.
With each minute I tarry
I can hear my father
tabulating what I have cost him.
The space I occupy is borrowed
and will soon close over me.
Left too long,
the bittercress goes to seed.
______________________________________________________________
Allisa Cherry was born and raised in the rural southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to Portland, OR, where she works as a writing tutor and small-scale urban farmer and has recently completed an MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Her work has received Pushcart Prize nominations from San Pedro River Review and High Desert Journal, and is forthcoming in Westchester Review and Tar River Poetry.
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.
_____________________________________________________________
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
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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