by Lisa Mottolo
by Carolyn Oliver
Birch leaf undersides silver
the summer shimmer, rumbling.
Poppies wince closed, disperse
slow bees, and the black butterfly
too leaves the ochre-umber sunflower
for flicking flies to pick at.
Over them, over the new milkweed,
fragile stock and sunstruck phlox,
a round house made for sharpness,
paper lantern never lit. The nest—
size of a baby’s fist, if uncurled
room enough for a few dashed lines—
won’t sway in the wind, won’t say
who’s gone, left home, left behind
this vessel waiting to be miracled full.
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Carolyn Oliver’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, where she now serves as a poetry editor. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. See carolynoliver.net.
by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
1
Sex is in the brain; I’ve been training
mine for so long. Please don’t fail me now.
2
The sutures move,
pull loose and tight,
each stitch a closet
in the garment, a room
within a room.
3
Doctors make you beg
for the comfort of your own body.
They tell me my vagina has integrity
neither foreshortened
nor shallow, its walls intact.
As apparatus goes, there’s nothing
I lack. What their excises have decreed
let no woman question.
4
Ordinary motion presses
against the scar, life
a big toe stretching
and pulling the darn.
My stomach puckers,
pantyhose skin center-
seamed. By reflex, I reach
to take it off and realize
I’m already naked, belly
button to pubic bone.
5
Fifteen to thirty minutes
of visualizing—face under a pillow,
seam-side down, my partner rubbing
rubbing—and still
I catch no charge.
6
After so much probing,
mental inquiry:
If I am the sock monkey,
who’s my puppeteer?
7
When I finally orgasm, I think
I’ve escaped, and my body lifts
a finger.
______________________________________________________________________
Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers is a queer, nonbinary poet, writer, book critic, and farmer. A graduate of Penn State and Old Dominion University, their creative work has been published in venues such as Gulf Stream, IthacaLit, Menacing Hedge, and Peculiar. They were a 2018-19 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow, and their critical work has appeared in Orion, LitHub, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Millions, Foreword Reviews, and others. Find them talking about books and other passions on Twitter @murderopilcrows.
by Katharine Rauk
by Esther Ra
by Michelle Menting
She made it look so easy, my sister,
when she paused before the trail hollowed
into hemlock and oak, when she dipped
from her waist as if nothing but hinge of skin
and with fingers floating, grazing the patch
of dandelions, she stroked the back of a bumblebee.
We all doubt the real magic of this world.
For so long I questioned the insistence of beauty
in planted peonies, why so many maintain it's there.
How some might see a flower so wondrous of pink
and puce or heart-blossomed red, and I'd repulse,
reject those petals of tottering globes as full baubles
of stick shaped like cheap popcorn balls my sisters
and I made as a kids, corn syrup glazing, baptizing
our palms as we cupped and cupped, so desperate
for sweetness. But now I see those peonies
covered with ants and neighboring aphids, communing
or broaching something others think baleful: an orgy
of insects groping slick nectar so eagerly they'd think,
how unseemly. But don't you see the mirror?
Let's reconcile this religion of flowers—
believe me, this too is a psalm: to fingertip the felt
of an insect pollinating a weed is to praise
& partner in all the green wonder that we are.
______________________________________________________________
Michelle Menting’s poems and flash nonfictions have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Radar Poetry, New South, Fourth River, New Delta Review, and Glass, among others. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Leaves Surface Like Skin (Terrapin Books), and has received awards and recognition for her written work from Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the National Park Service, the Maine Literary Awards, and other conferences, residencies, and honors. She lives in Maine.
by Susan Zimmerman
by Rae Hoffman Jager
Not by hand of God despite what the old scholars say, not by fiery messenger, nor by fashionable angel in fur and pearls. Not by matzo ball soup my grandmother carries in a pot in clumsy steps from the stove top to the table set for twenty, with each sway a stomp, each stomp a sway, broth spilling over the edges. Not by candlelight nor prayer, sorry nor psalm. Not by exodus nor fast because not by body, for Christ’s sake, but what body does—open to the world and all those peculiar smells—ground white fish, horseradish, salt, copper hand washing bowl, digging into me its thorns all the days of my life.
______________________________________________________________
Rae Hoffman Jager is the author of One Throne (2017). Her book, American Bitch is forthcoming with Kelsay Press in 2022. Rae's poetry has appeared most recently in Juke Joint and The Moth. She has work forthcoming in New York Quarterly. Her work has been described as rambunctious, urgent, funny, and elegiac. Rae holds a BA from Warren Wilson College and an MFA from Wichita State University. For more information, you can visit her website at www.raehoffmanjager.com
by Lynne Barrett
The hard seeds I soaked and then forgot
till nearly rotten, and, oh well, pressed in sandy soil
that promised nothing, unfurl—surprise!—a pale green
fingertip, reaching toward a dangling string. Here
I’d hesitate, but at first touch she curlicues, two,
three, six, seven. So prettily lashed, she ascends,
then fans a leaf shape memorized among the Aztecs,
a heart extended. (Yes, I looked her up. The cuter
cousin of the sweet potato.) Gulping sun, she soon
finds the willow storm-wrecked chaise lounge
I’ve contrived into a lattice, attached (poorly)
to our nineteen-thirties stucco. A transplant
myself, I gloat over each sunrise’s progress. Pursued,
then overtaken by swarming sisters, the vine explores,
repairs, disguises. My mother told me I had no
green thumb, but that was in another state. In Florida,
any thumb will do. Fat glossy hearts cloak the wall
this morning, when the most ambitious climbers, finding
only sky to grasp, lift trumpets buzzing blue.
______________________________________________________________
Lynne Barrett is the author of Magpies (gold medal, Florida Book Awards) and editor of Making Good Time, True Stories of How We Do, and Don’t, Get Around in South Florida. Her recent work appears in Orange Blossom Review, The Hong Kong Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, River Teeth, and Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing. She lives in Miami and edits the Florida Book Review.
by Deborah Gorlin
October still holds this one bloom
though most dropped months ago.
Idle now, the bush rests from its densities,
when the flowers obliged bees, even a bird’s nest.
This single pom pom cheers me,
seats me miniature among its stadium petals,
and I am floral, plural, molecular, a spectator,
participant in the fading fireworks, the last
combustion, nurtured in equal parts
by waning light, water, earth, my true buddies.
We're growing old together. Me
and this has-been, a vintage matron
who hands out multiple towels
in the Port Authority restroom
or wags way too many tongues,
but still has her dry wit, her spent laughter.
______________________________________________________________
Deborah Gorlin is the author of two books of poems, Bodily Course, winner of White Pine Poetry Press Prize, and Life of the Garment, Bauhan Publishing, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She has published in a wide range of journals including POETRY, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, Bomb, Connecticut Review, Women’s Review of Books, New England Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Recent poems appear in Plume, On the Seawall, Chicago Quarterly, Trampoline, the Exphrastic Review, and New Verse News. Emeritus co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she serves as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.
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.
______________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________
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