by Deborah Gorlin
October still holds this one bloom
by Rose Strode
Against the darkness they are so white they seem to shine, these scabby dapplings
on your smooth-as-a-peeled-egg skin, your deeply pleated throat, the edges
of your fins. Once free-swimming larvae, barnacles adhered, then calcified in place.
Now as you grow your flesh swells round them but is also drawn inside in increments—
one cell at a time—until you are embedded in each other, thus proving nothing
is free of parasites. I can’t say if they cause you pain or if they itch, can’t say they slow you down, can't say
you know that they are there, can’t even say precisely
why this bothers me. Deep in the basement of the museum, I cataloged the skulls
of dolphins, thousands collected, flensed, labelled from a century of strandings.
Cleansed of the past, under the lights, they were pure as cast-off shells, yet laced
with osteolytic tunnels where nematodes burrowed through the bone. And back
in my room at home I locked the door when I heard my parents fight. My father’s blows
made the whole house shake, or maybe I was shaking; either way the sounds wormed
into me like the path to Hell, and stayed. O whale! Your name’s a song your mother sings,
but I recognize you by the pattern of your barnacles.
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Rose Strode’s most recent (2021) poems appear in Sugar House, Dillydoun, and the Buddhist Poetry Review. She is a managing editor at Stillhouse Press. When not writing, or helping others with their writing, she wanders around the woods, rehabilitates overgrown gardens, and attempts to learn the mountain dulcimer.
by Heather Dobbins
No one my age hasn’t smelled death before.
Down by the rail beds and Devil’s Weed, the tracks stand on their sides
like fences. Receding waters means a dozen bodies
are lined up. Suitors. Soldiers. Husbands, maybe mine.
Broken levee speed, current carrying a new darkness, mud weight.
The smell of what we’ve come to claim is another animal.
These weeks, there has been my ring and the shoes he gave me,
leather waiting to dry, the hems just browning again after I dress.
Today, will there be any of me remaining after I look down into mud?
The living walk in a line. Our job is to recognize who we can, but
there are so many. I don’t know if I ever saw them without a hat.
Aren’t any hats here. Waiting prayers are desperate, but where
does the seen go but inside? Remember the old joke? What has
four eyes but cannot see? What the Mississippi sees is forever.
I want to stay a young bride. I want to sew a baptism dress,
have barbecues where we all wear white. What do I say to the man
with a long list and a pen but our courting song years ago? Yes, sir,
that’s my baby. No, sir, I don’t mean maybe. Yes, Sir, that’s my baby
now. Bravery is looking down at what I can’t see. River lungs. Mud
tongue. His stomach swole up with his own decay. I nod.
My teeth tear into my handkerchief to swallow the sound.
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Heather Dobbins is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of two poetry collections, In the Low Houses (2014) and River Mouth (2017), both from Kelsay Press. She graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her poems and poetry reviews have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fjords, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. For twenty years, she has worked as an educator (kindergarten through college) in Oakland, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and currently, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Please see heatherdobbins.net for more.
by Mia Ayumi Malhotra
for A.
How the days passed, suffused in summer
light, your curiosity caught by every clover-
filled crack in the sidewalk, every brick
alcove in the parking lot, where I said
now be a duckling! and you fell in line
behind me, quacking, every moment,
a bright Bonita peach, bitten and dripping
down the chin, because soon our family
would be four, not three—for you, age two,
an uncertain concept, four fingers lifted
to mean possibility beyond measure, which
is how I felt, too, soaked in the sweetness
of our play, make-believe in the backyard.
Unlike two, which we’d mastered, or three,
a flight you felt coming, claimed each time
you reached farther, higher, whenever
we swung you, one—two—three! into the air,
sandals flying in the face of the unknown.
I can’t know, you used to say, which was
far truer than you knew, each number
counted to its end, our life just begun.
______________________________________________________________
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She teaches poetry and tends a hillside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
by Katrina Hays
As if God kicked her
from the lip of Heaven,
she falls.
Talons spread,
she cuts the dawn
with her body.
She should slice the lake,
wrap the trout
in the hard bands of her claws,
be off and away, leaving
silent circles
behind her body.
She falls. Misses.
Grace gone,
she flounders.
Brown-and-white wings
flailing unsleeked—
a terrible bundle
fighting to free herself.
Look: she shakes off
the clutch of the lake, rises
into daybreak.
I will walk back to our home,
rouse you from sleep.
Ask for pardon.
______________________________________________________________
Katrina Hays' writing recently appeared or is forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, The Hollins Critic, Hubbub, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. She lives in Bend, Oregon. See katrinahays.com.
by Pam Crow
by Holly Mason
by Ruth Dickey
I keep thinking this line from a play: it takes the body
18 years to replenish every cell. We are literally new
every 18 years. When my niece turned ten,
she whispered to me on the phone that ten
was different, she and her friends had special
rituals and wishes. At ten, you knew things,
we knew things. I remember ten: tea parties
under apple trees, in my great-grandmother’s
beaded dresses with my cousin, promising
we’d spend the day before our weddings
together. Forever seemed like soft bat wings,
sweeping and diving. My marriage was 18 years;
my cousin was not there. I am as never before,
am literally new. The sky is full of clouds
settling down like hens. Morning is the time
for hunger. When I can’t sleep, I count backwards,
count beads, count hungers, count orchards.
______________________________________________________________
Ruth Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. Her first book, Mud Blooms, was selected for the MURA Award from Harbor Mountain Press and awarded a 2019 Nautilus Award. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth is an ardent fan of dogs and coffee and lives in Seattle. More at ruthdickey.com.
by Anne Marie Macari
We’re small now, small
as fish in our tiny school,
kayaking toward booming
spouts, flukes
and shadow-backs
breaking the glassy sea—
All around we see, hear,
whale, and drift, reckless
to encounter them rising,
ethereal tons
unstitching
the surface—the sea
a nether-world I dream into
but can’t know, where
a fin rises
like a black door
then disappears—
I’ve come here to be lost
in the blue center, rocking
on the brink of wet
darkness, the sea
swelling with beings, two
miles out, waves
picking up
______________________________________________________________
Anne Marie Macari is the author of five books of poems, including Heaven Beneath (Persea, 2020), as well as Red Deer (Persea, 2015). In 2000, Macari won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, chosen by Robert Creeley. Her poems and essays have been widely published in magazines such as The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and The Massachusetts Review.
by Geraldine Connolly
Find the red flower
and the hummingbird hovering.
Find the bee
inside the tiger-colored blossom.
Don’t close your eyes.
Find the berry below the leaf.
Find the stacked stone wall
and the tremor inside the wall
and all of the tiny insects
who thrive there.
Find the stray seed
that turned into a melon,
the vole burrowed beneath
a mass of sun trumpets.
Beauty happens all around us.
If you find the owl
perched on the branch
listen and wait.
And if you hear the leaf speak,
don’t move.
Soon the coyote will howl
down from the mountain
and the flower will greet you,
its face on fire.
______________________________________________________________
Geraldine Connolly is the author of four poetry collections: She received two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Georgia Review, and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180 and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is geraldineconnolly.com.
by Jennifer Jean
Rain blessed the county this year
& the Los Angeles River
flushed out nearly 13,000 pounds of
mattresses, carts, turpentine,
steak knives, bottle caps, opioids,
& bald, eyeless doll heads
onto shorelines as far as Seal’s Beach.
All that the Valley had chucked was laid bare,
was picked through by a volunteer Cleanup
Brigade—like readers parsing a gnarl
of poems. Even primordial Styrofoam
from my decades-old Walkman box
was exposed—the dirt over the white
had finally eroded. Even this piece of former me
mingled with the rush, the beached.
Then—Jim on the crew
stabbed & stuffed it into an orange bin,
fed the full bin to mealworms.
Then—some county hand
fed that toxin-less feedstock to fowl,
to farmed fish. Oh! I remember hurling it
from mom’s Nova—at her live-in boyfriend
invasion: at Mustache Tony & Butch,
at the young guy I worked with at Home Depot
& Red-Head smiles, at Old Cowdude
& Pathological Paul. & when Pathological
Paul moved out—a rush of tears
blessed my face & began to dislodge them all.
______________________________________________________________
Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include Object Lesson (Lily Books) and The Fool (Big Table). She's also released the teaching resource Object Lesson: A Guide to Writing Poetry (Lily Books). Her poetry, prose, and co-translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Waxwing Journal, Rattle Magazine, Crab Creek Review, DMQ Review, On the Seawall, Salamander, The Common, and more. She's been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a Disquiet FLAD Fellowship from Dzanc Books, and an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. As well, she is the translations editor at Talking Writing, a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, and a co-translator of Arabic poetry and organizer for the Her Story Is collective. Jennifer is the new Manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's Online Writing Program.
by Gail Newman
A woman sleeping in the burned-grass patch of lawn
in front of my parents’ house, beside the Bird of Paradise’s
beaked flames, a flicker of dream-sleep under shut-lid eyes.
Beside her body the wire cage of a shopping cart,
rubbish piled high like graveyard dirt,
the earth we lifted, each of us, then passed
the shovel to the next in line, to fill my father’s grave,
in front of which, because she was old
and could not easily stand, my mother sat,
shading her eyes with dark glasses.
It was a good turnout, they later observed, as they knifed
cream cheese onto onion bagels. My mother sat,
in the tradition of the tribe, on a low cushion
to bring her close to the earth under which he now lay,
in a suit of her choosing, his best tie knotted at the neck.
Let her sleep there, he had said.
She’s not hurting anyone.
______________________________________________________________
Gail Newman's poems have most recently appeared in Canary, Prairie Schooner, Mom Egg Review, Calyx, Hiram Poetry Review, Spillway, Prism, Second Wind, The Doll Collection, America, We Call Your Name, and Nimrod International Journal. Her poem, "Mishpacha," was awarded Bellingham Review's 49th Parallel Poetry Prize. A collection of poetry, One World, was published by Moon Tide Press. A new collection, Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for publication by Marsh Hawk Press, was published in 2020. Gail has worked as San Francisco Coordinator for CalPoets and as a museum educator at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. She was co-founder and editor of Room, A Women’s Literary Journal.
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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