by Sally Keith
1.
by Carol Muske-Dukes
The pure amnesia of her face,
newborn. I looked so far
into her that, for a while,
the visual held no memory.
Little by little, I returned
to myself, waking to nurse
those first nights in that
familiar room where all
the objects had been altered
imperceptibly: the gardenia
blooming in the dark
in the scarred water glass,
near the phone my handwriting
illegible, the patterned lamp-
shade angled downward and away
from the long mirror where
I stood and looked at
the woman holding her child.
Her face kept dissolving
into expressions resembling
my own, but the child’s was pure
figurative, resembling no one.
We floated together in the space
a lullaby makes, head to head,
half-sleeping. Save it,
my mother would say, meaning
just the opposite. She didn’t
want to hear my evidence
against her terrible optimism
for me. And though, despite her,
I can redeem, in a pawnshop
sense, almost any bad moment
from my childhood, I see now
what she must have intended
for me. I felt it for her,
watching her as she slept,
watching her suck as she
dreamed of sucking, lightheaded
with thirst as my blood flowed
suddenly into tissue that
changed it to milk. No matter
that we were alone, there’s a
texture that moves between me
and whatever might have injured
us then. Like the curtain’s sheer
opacity, it remains drawn
over what view we have of dawn
here in this onetime desert,
now green and replenished,
its perfect climate
unthreatened in memory—
though outside, as usual,
the wind blew, the bough bent,
under the eaves, the hummingbird
touched once the bloodcolored hourglass,
the feeder, then was gone.
_______________________________________________________________________
Carol Muske-Dukes is a former Poet Laureate of California and the author of poems, novels, and essays. Her ninth book of poems, Blue Rose, was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
by Devon Walker-Figueroa
by Tiana Nobile
Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polaroid, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what’s the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. I’ve spent my whole
life in orbit of other people’s light, celestial satellite
in ceaseless wane. How much can you learn
from a stranger’s surname? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the very first time.
______________________________________________________________________
Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Recently named one of The Gambit’s “40 Under 40,” her poetry debut, CLEAVE, was released by Hub City Press in 2021. She is a finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, and her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives in Bulbancha, aka New Orleans, Louisiana.
by Maggie Smith
It sounds like someone wound up the wrens
and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn
like cheap toys, and from here an airplane
seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely
chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world
that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs.
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more,
and it’s not waxing pastoral. There is too much
now at stake. The skeletal rattle you hear
at the window could be only the hellion roses
in the wind, their thorns etching the glass,
but it could be bones. The country we call ours
isn’t, and it’s full of them. Every year you dig
that goddamn rose bush from the bed, spoon it
from soil like a tumor, and every year it grows back
thick and wild. We say in the grand scheme of things
as if there were one. We say that’s not how
the world works as if the world works.
______________________________________________________________________
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
by Achy Obejas
The March
I am about to step outside, I am about to step outside
to the elements and my anticipation is a long inhalation
that covers the world upon release. This is the beginning
of a movement based on facts and not on sentiment
or pronouncements, though both sentiment and
pronouncements are useful and worthy. As I begin to lift
my left foot, my sartorius muscle allows my knee to move
up towards my body. I am joined by others, however
they can join with me, others who have suffered and
are not afraid to continue suffering. What we seek is a
new majority rooted in justice for all whose conscience
is committed to ceasing wrongs and doing right. What
we want is nothing about us without us. What we want
is for each individual to define their own identity and
expect that society will respect them. We shift our weight,
unlock our knees. Arrange our bodies in the best way for
each of us. For an instant, most of us are standing on one
foot. We are not in a hurry. We are not dreaming. We are
ready to give up everything, even our lives. We shall do it
without violence because that is our conviction. What we
want is freedom, what we want is the power to determine
our destiny. As my left foot comes down, it is coordinated
with my right and they match the equivalent movement of
those who have joined me, and with whom I am joining.
We are firmly rooted. Whenever possible, we let our limbs
swing in a natural motion and keep our heads facing
forward. What we want is the complete elimination of
military forces, not just from this or that territory, but
from every corner, every outpost, on earth. What we
want is full and meaningful employment. What we want
is decent, safe housing. What we want is an education
that teaches us our true histories and their consequences
on the present. As each of us lifts our right foot (or
makes the equivalent movement to ambulate), we are
now a perfectly synchronized force, even in our
differences and occasional disorder. What we want is an
immediate stop to state brutality and the assassination
of black people, and native people, and disabled people,
and queer people and trans people, and women, and
children, and mothers and fathers who can only do so
much because they are shackled by the very state that
seeks to kill them for having foolishly believed they
were free. What we want are the doors flung open to
Folsom, Riker’s, Guantánamo, San Quentin, San Juan
de Lurigancho, ADX Florence Supermax, La Sabaneta,
Attica, Camp 22, Pollsmoor. It would be fatal to overlook
he urgency of the moment. As we advance, we are a
thunderous thrum. Some of us will run under the rain in
Seattle, and toward traffic to block Lake Shore Drive
in Chicago. Others will flood Wall Street and more will
storm the port of Oakland. There will be one lonely soul
in snowy Bethel, Alaska, and clusters in Little Rock,
in sweltering Ferguson, in Tallahassee and Flagstaff,
Baltimore, Detroit, Honolulu, Boise, in ancient Salem,
Wichita and Northampton, Oklahoma City and Spearfish,
South Dakota. Nerve and muscle adapt to the rhythmic
stimulus of our own noise, the noise we make together.
It is true that when in the course of human events, it
becomes necessary for one person to connect to another
and another and another in order to defend our equality,
our difference, our dependence on one another, then
Le marcha
Estoy a punto de salir, estoy a punto de salir a les
elementos y mi anticipación es une largue inhalación
que cubre le mundo tras soltarse. Este es le comienzo de
une movimiento basado en hechos y no en sentimientos
o pronunciamientos, aunque ambes sentimientos y
pronunciamientos son útiles y dignes. Cuando empiezo
a levantar mi pie izquierde, mi músculo sartorio permite
que mi rodilla se mueva hacia mi cuerpo. Me acompañan
otres, no obstante pueden unirse conmigo otres que han
sufrido, y que no tienen miedo de seguir sufriendo. Le que
buscamos es une nueve mayoría arraigada a le justicia
para todes aquelles cuya conciencia está comprometide
a poner fin a le mal y hacer le bien. No queremos nada
sobre nosotros sin nosotros. Le que queremos es que cada
individuo defina su propia identidad y pueda tener le
expectativa de que le sociedad le respete. Desplazamos
nuestro peso, desbloqueamos nuestres rodillas.
Disponemos nuestres cuerpos de le mejor manera para
cada une de nosotres. Por une instante, le mayoría de
nosotres estamos parades sobre une pie. No tenemos
prisa. No estamos soñando. Estamos dispuestes a
renunciar a todo, incluso a nuestres vidas. Le haremos
sin violencia porque ese es nuestre convicción. Le que
queremos es libertad, le que queremos es le poder para
determinar nuestre destino. Mientras mi pie izquierde
baja, está coordinado con mi dereche y coinciden con le
movimiento equivalente de aquelles que se han unido a
mí, y a les que me estoy uniendo. Estamos firmemente
arraigades. Siempre que sea posible, dejamos que nuestres
miembres se muevan de manera natural y mantenemos
nuestres cabezas hacia adelante. Le que queremos es
le eliminación complete de les fuerzas militares, no sólo
de este o aquelle territorio, sino de todes les rincones,
de todes les puestos fronterizes, sobre le tierra. Le que
queremos es trabajo plene y significative. Le que queremos
son viviendas decentes y segures. Le que queremos es une
educación que nos enseñe nuestres verdaderes historias
y sus consecuencias sobre le presente. A medida que
cada une de nosotres levanta le pie dereche (o hace le
movimiento paralele para moverse), ahora somos une
fuerza perfectamente sincronizade, incluse en nuestres
diferencias y desorden ocasional. Le que queremos es une
detención inmediate de le brutalidad estatal y le asesinato
de les negres, y les indígenes, y les personas discapacitades
y les personas trans, y las mujeres, y les niñes, y las
madres y los padres que sólo pueden hacer ese tanto
porque están encadenades por le mismo estado que busca
matarles por haber creído absurdamente que eran libres.
Le que queremos son les puertas abiertas a Folsom, Riker,
Guantánamo, San Quintín, San Juan de Lurigancho, ADX
Florencia Supermax, La Sabaneta, Attica, Campamento
22, Pollsmoor. Sería fatal pasar por alto le urgencia de
le momento. A medida que avanzamos, somos une ruido
de trueno. Algunes de nosotres correrán bajo le lluvia en
Seattle, y hacia le tráfico para bloquear Lake Shore Drive
en Chicago. Otres inundarán Wall Street y otres más
serán une tormenta en le puerto de Oakland. Habrá une
alma solitarie en le nevade Bethel, Alaska, y une puñado
en Little Rock, en le sofocade Ferguson, en Tallahassee
y Flagstaff, Baltimore, Detroit, Honolulu, Boise, en le
antigua Salem, Wichita y Northampton, Oklahoma City
y Spearfish en Dakota de le Sur. Le nervio y le músculo
se adaptan a le estímulo rítmique de nuestre propie ruido,
le ruido que hacemos juntes. Es cierto que cuando en
le transcurso de les acontecimientos humanes se hace
necesarie que une persona se conecte a otre, y a otre, y a
otre para defender nuestre igualdad, nuestre diferencia,
nuestre dependencia le une del otre, entonces
______________________________________________________________________
Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer, translator, and activist whose work focusing on personal and national identity has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
by Nikki Moustaki
My neighbor comes at one a.m. in her night
clothes to say my toilet’s screaming in the pipes
through her walls, and before I can turn her
away or tell her to joggle the handle she’s got it
disassembled, got her hands wet, and now I
hear the water too, wanting away in our old
shared pipes, trying to spin some long mystery,
filling and refilling the basin, writing with rust
in perfect lines, wasting while the whole town
sleeps, water incognito; my neighbor yanks
the chain, bobs the rubber stopper, the water
rests at last, my neighbor drags her damp socks
back to bed. This embryonic Tuesday flutters
in its darkness around me like a new moth;
crickets; an ambulance; my steam heat ticking
its own old pipes with some other ancient code—
I try to decipher sleep again, hearing the air
above my bed scratch its legs against the ceiling,
realizing I was smothered a little every night
by my toilet, of all the ridiculous things, renegade
water, or some tired bit of rubber permitting
the innocent water through, the hushing music,
like a friend saying don’t be lonely, or I’m lonely too.
______________________________________________________________________
Nikki Moustaki, author of the memoir, The Bird Market of Paris, holds an MA in poetry from New York University, an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, and an MFA in fiction from New York University. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, along with many other national writing awards. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various newspapers and literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks, including The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Publishers Weekly, The Village Voice, and Miami Herald, and her work has been featured in Glamour, O, the Oprah Magazine, Elle, and on NPR. She is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry and the poetry collection Extremely Lightweight Guns.
by W.J. Herbert
herself…
well, nothing, really. It’s me
she wants to talk to but she doesn’t know how,
and I can’t help her. Sarah,
a counselor is saying, now that my daughter’s
finally opened a brochure
which lists follow-up services
hospice provides. Sarah…
this stranger is saying,
not gently, or slowly, or softly
the way I would have,
and now I’m picturing the brittle
filament that runs from his landline
to the receiver she’s holding:
Sarah, he’s saying
with a clipped “ah” at the end of it,
as if this syllable is that filament
about to break—
as if he is the one who is breaking it.
______________________________________________________________________
W. J. Herbert’s work was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize and was selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California where she earned a Bachelor’s in studio art and a Master’s in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York, and Portland, Maine.
by Carlie Hoffman
Just now a woman in a yellow
dress and matching hair bands enters the train
holding a plastic microphone,
and, because at midnight she turned fifty-two,
will sing Happy Birthday through the eleven
screeching stops home. Happy birthday to me
she is stomping her suede purple heel
as she sways from one end of the car
to the other. Happy, happy
birthday, even in the elevator as I
make my way toward the subway exit, her metal cane
tapping against cement like a drumstick.
I don’t know if she is drunk on gin or some other
almost upper that slowly ends in disgust,
though that is not my story to tell.
Somehow it is autumn. Somehow, yesterday,
I managed to wash my sheets. Like you,
I do not know if happiness
is anything more extravagant than a goal
to shape our lives toward, and it’s
too early for the rest of our lives.
______________________________________________________________________
Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Her second book is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Boston Review / Discovery Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, and her work has been published in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Boston Review, Jewish Currents, New England Review, and elsewhere. Carlie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. For more, visit www.carliehoffman.com.
by Jill Bialosky
lV. Snow of childhood
Snow of childhood,
of dreams, of our poems
& discontent, snow of our memories,
some distorted,
forgotten, trod upon, rendered
to a whiteout, snow that dusts
bridges, highways, roofs,
that tastes of rust
& weighs on the branches,
O don’t forget them,
insufferable snow that falls
on the pots that hold
the pods of the dead
in the brilliance
of the outdoor gazebo
we see from the window
of the care home for the aged,
to praise our matriarch,
our boots wet, snow in our hair,
look how pale she is, look
what she has bore, those veins
in which flowed the blood
that flowed into us—
LXXXIV. The winter where the sparrows quieted
The winter where the sparrows quieted, in which the snow
would not stop, in which the rats would not come out,
in which we feared for our safety & snow covered the bereft shrubs,
homeless (here I am, I am you) sought shelter, fearful stockpiled
water & provisions. The winter a strain of virus
quarantined us far into spring, in which another teenager
somewhere in the city is locked in a soporific fog,
helpless, forgotten, isolated in aloneness, landscape
shrouded in an unreasonable mask, winter of the symphony’s
grand crescendo—seats of council, judges, assemble to form a decree
citizenry run amok is not a matter of the individual, but society,
timpani, cymbals, snare drum, family of percussion.
______________________________________________________________________
Jill Bialosky is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Players; three critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Prize; a New York Times best-selling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life; and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Paris Review, among others. She coedited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. Her work has been a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize, The Patterson Prize, and Books for a Better Life. In 2014, she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She lives in New York City.
by Shara McCallum
May 2018: for my grandmother
When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.
______________________________________________________________________
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for Madwoman), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for The Water Between Us). She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. She hosts the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU.
by Tibni Reth
In the midst of a worldwide pandemic,
life and work were expected to be perfect.
Out of nowhere, an enemy came
unseen to create a “passing” problem like magic.
From which in the ultimate,
a person should have much gratitude.
Then, all mandated isolation and hunker-down
orders evolved into forced domesticity.
While all the stores which feed domestic dreams
go bankrupt like wild.
Unthinkable that everyone turned
into a housewife, even the species of male.
Gone are home stores like Bed Bath and Beyond;
also Pier One, all gone like magic.
Revealing in secret that the one crying the
hardest & loudest is the manly male!
Perhaps, then, he won’t be required to be
a king of domesticity.
He is to accept what he is turning into with gratitude.
When all he wants to do is to attend
happy hour and go hog wild.
As everyone knows what a boy considers
days or nights that are perfect.
When the homebound guy is…
well, home, he won’t think it’s wild.
To look up what sestina means, even when it sounds like
another ‘s’ word that’s perfect.
With one too proud to ask for directions—
quite like the typical male.
Whatever is not found,
he still finds it best to have gratitude.
What’s so twisted is his idea of domesticity.
Became a search for sestina that’s invisible in
the dictionary, fantastically thinking like magic.
Okay, Okay. This is not a day of bashing the male.
Neither is it a day to criticize the virtues
of vices of domesticity.
And it is ever a day for perfectionists to
strive to be perfect.
Like the saying that declares you can’t be too
rich or too thin—you can’t have too much gratitude.
Believe that the thought is not too wild.
In a world that does not believe in magic.
A typical guy is too logical to believe in magic.
The quintessential “tough dude”
is averse to domesticity.
They must love order that’s wild.
What he deems perfect.
Most females cannot regard with gratitude.
So for any other,
it’s most difficult to define what’s male.
For all my bitching and complaining,
I miss my brilliant friends who are male.
When I cannot resort to magic
I am left with a strong dose of gratitude.
The perfect panacea for what in the
world is not perfect.
One day, I plan to go wild.
In the most tranquil & harmonious domesticity.
What I wrote is my idea of a perfect home —
so full of magic.
Of a loosely-defined and chaotically-ordered
wild domesticity.
Shared with a bright male type who has
in the heart much gratitude.
______________________________________________________________________
Tibni Reth is currently serving a 36-year sentence for second-degree murder in the state of Alaska. She was born in Bandung, Indonesia 57 years ago and became a naturalized citizen at the age of 12. She grew up in Southern California and graduated from Loma Linda University in California as well as from Aurora University in Illinois. Before coming to prison, she worked in health care, social work, commercial fishing, commercial driving and aviation. Among her many hobbies are cooking and travel having visited four continents and eight countries. As of this writing, she still doesn’t know what to do when she grows up.
by Teresa K. Miller
I don’t listen for you now, your crow step,
so eager to say my own piece. How does it
start. The ants came to tear my house down.
I went to bed thinking of them, woke plotting
against them. I did not dream. A legion of men
that summer, none could bear to let me
speak. They focused over my shoulder,
the vacant corner a more willing
conspirator. Where will I lay you, wright,
smith, climber cutting to the node, choosing
a new leader.
***
Lured back, I spun myself a shiny aluminum wing—
but in the afternoon, she put on a new face.
Those you love will evaporate before you, leave
their slack-jawed wind-up bodies lying in the yard.
Nicotine-stained filters reeking in the kitchen garbage.
Here is the next moment of your life: You spent it
in my crooked song.
______________________________________________________________________
Teresa K. Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, Borderline Fortune (Penguin, Oct. 5, 2021), was selected as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by former California poet laureate Carol Muske-Dukes. A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.
by Denise Duhamel
I record my mom singing “A Bushel And A Peck”
and send it to my nieces to play for their boys
who are all under 12, the age they need to be
to visit her in the ICU. My mom has a bandage
on her nose from where the ventilator cut her,
and clear tubes of oxygen in her nostrils. Blue
veins squiggle her forehead as though her youngest
great-grandson has scribbled there. The boys
barely notice and send back their own videos—
Ben, Nick, and Max say, “We love you!”
then their mother pans over to the dog,
“And Ringo does too!” Zach, Brody, and Alex
sing “You Are My Sunshine.” My mom
always hated our cell phones, the way they
distracted us away from her. But now she wants
me to hold my screen so she can see, so she can hear
the boys’ song over and over again, her head
gently bopping back and forth on her pillow.
______________________________________________________________________
Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
by Amanda Gomez
April and a morning shower blankets us, covers
the shed out back where my father’s fishing equipment
is stored. On mornings like this, he searches
beneath rain gutters for worms loosening the earth
with his hands, sifting it back and forth; collecting
each body he finds in old crusted Tupperware for bait.
Sometimes, when there isn’t enough, he cuts them
in half. How concerned he is, ensuring there’s enough.
It’s the silence he likes: the solace of being alone,
standing on the bank holding his fishing rod, watching
nothing but the tug of the line against the current until a fish
takes the bait. Most days when he brings home a good catch
I like to watch my mother clean the fish. I stand
by the kitchen sink staring at her blood-covered hands
as she tugs their heads backwards, stripping
the skin from its flesh: this new kind of nakedness.
______________________________________________________________________
Amanda Gomez is a Latinx poet from Norfolk, Virginia. She is the author of the chapbook, Wasting Disease (Finishing Line Press). She was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International Journal, a finalist for the 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review, and a 2017 recipient for the Academy of American Poets University Prize. Her poetry can be read in print and online journals such as PANK, Tupelo Quarterly, and others.
by Erika Luckert
When it rains, bloom waxy crystals on the cuticle of a leaf.
When the fertilizers wash in from the fields, bloom algal.
Bloom the slag and iron in the midst of being wrought.
Study coffee grounds or gelatin in water.
When making arrangements, consider color, scale, the life
expectancy of each bloom, their vessel.
Most flowers are imaginary. Somewhere below the surface of Turner’s oil seas
zinc turns to soap and blooms the crests of waves.
Bloom by folding small, syndrome of chromosomes fragmented
while the cancers grow.
Given phosphate, given water, fog, smoke, heat, dust.
In certain seasons, jellyfish bloom and gather.
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Erika Luckert is a poet, writer, and educator. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, CALYX, Tampa Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA in Poetry, Erika has taught creative and critical writing at public schools and colleges across New York City. In 2017, she was awarded the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Erika is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
by Patricia Zylius
Onion’s skin very thin,
Mild winter coming in;
Onion’s skin thick and tough,
Coming winter cold and rough.
—Gardener’s Rhyme
Take this one on the cutting board—
it sneers at the knife, gives up its skin
one smidge at a time.
I’m late-autumnal too, and so thin-skinned
I swathe myself against the chill.
Whatever’s nicking away at the layers of my life
is doing it mildly, fragment by fragment,
slowly prepping me for the winter stew pot.
O for a thick covering to save me
from this niggling disintegration.
And when the season’s cold and rough
let a big knife strip it off
suddenly and whole.
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Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook, Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Passager, Sequestrum, Juniper, Ellipsis, Natural Bridge, Red Wheelbarrow, and other journals, and on the Women’s Voices for Change website. Her poems have also been included in Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, In Plein Air, Women Artists Datebook, and The Yes Book.
by Stephanie Tom
Say the universe didn’t begin with a bang
but with a whisper. Say the stars were
crystallized by their fear of being forgotten.
Say there was life outside of our solar system;
somewhere in a pocket of secrets is a planet
no wider than we know the sea to be deep &
there lives a child that only knows how to
bury seeds but not how to water them.
It believes in nature not nurture, & believes
in the moon. Every night the sunset fades
into silk & silence as it appears, pockmarked
& partitioned into ruby red craters like a
pomegranate. The child stretches onto
dewy grass & reaches upwards. In his dreams
he can cradle the moon in his palms & pick
a jewel out of each crater. They melt on his
tongue & he swallows the heart at each center.
He laments the bitter aril that surrounds each
one & wishes that they would not choke him
every time. The stars don’t know how to tell him
that the bitterness is born from the seeds that
he buries, & that he is only tasting the fruits of
his labor. A seed can only grow when it’s watered
& a jewel can only bloom into sweet syrup when
it’s rooted in remembrance. But he never learns.
In his dreams, the child plucks the craters clean
& loses himself in a solar system without stars.
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Stephanie Tom is a student at Cornell University studying literature, communication, information science, media studies, and psychology. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2019 Poets & Writers Amy Award, her poetry has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sine Theta Magazine, Hobart, and Honey Literary, among other places. Her debut chapbook, My Heart is a Mausoleum but Only Out of Necessity, is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in 2022. When she’s not writing she dabbles in dance and graphic design. You can read more of her work at tomstephanie.weebly.com.
by Eileen Rush
Uncultivable mycelium runs her strands
through the loam of low-lying woodland.
She sleeps most of the year. Treasure-fish.
Sought by pigs. Hungry kids comb woods
in early May, around Derby Day. Every old
hand has a trick for finding them: go
to the widest tree, the poplar or the cottonwood,
and look among its south-facing knees.
Go after a full moon, go after two days of rain,
go when the sun returns and the moon winks.
When I heard someone say, I'm just not inspired
by nature, I smelled dirt. Layers of rot. Last fall's
oak leaves. I want them to hunt with me,
briars tugging at our ankles, spiderwebs
in our hair, for a thing so precious no one
can grow it on purpose. Honey, I want you
to taste pure luck on a spring morning
when a giant lifts her head from the earth
and, like a miracle, overnight bears up
sweeter than the flesh of any fish.
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Eileen Rush is a queer writer, poet, and narrative designer raised in Appalachia and living in Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She's got her a garden and lives on a farm with, depending on who you ask, too many chickens.
by Anna Lena Phillips Bell