by Esther Sadoff
It is too late in the year to water the flowers.
by Abby Wheeler
I turn to the earth and do not ask for gold.
Just, Lord, please, no blood in the bathroom, the bed.
First blood sent me from bathroom to bed—
red in the bowl not the kind that meant children.
Red on my knees, ten years old, a child,
trials I hardly survived. Yet, we say blessed.
I have survived. We are all or none blessed.
People claim nothing grows in the desert,
so, we believe: Nothing grows in the desert.
We give women dirty names that mean empty.
Give ourselves dirty names that mean empty.
I have seen the New Mexico sky bleed,
I have seen the New Mexico sky bleed
into the earth! Have seen dirt turn gold.
______________________________________________________________________
Abby lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a community and staff member at Women Writing for (a) Change. She was a 2021 finalist for the Great Midwest Writing Contest, and has work published in the Midwest Review, The Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, The Watershed Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, In the Roots, arrives fall 2021 from Finishing Line Press.
by Sarah Bigham
1. The professor will never make eye contact with you
if you sit a tier below a student who wears
no underwear, and wide-legged shorts.
2. If the professor starts the semester by taking
Polaroid photos of individual students in
order to follow a name memorization technique
he learned at a recent educational conference,
you will be forever known as Bridget while
Bridget, who sits two rows ahead of you,
to the right, will be known as Sarah.
3. During office hours, when you arrive to talk about
an upcoming assignment, a professor may be wearing
a kilt and playing the bagpipes at full strength with
closed eyes and a claret-hued face as shiny as a beetle’s.
It is wise to leave the room at such times.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Bigham is the author of Kind Chemist Wife: Musings at 3 a.m. She lives in Maryland with her wife, three independent cats, an unwieldy herb garden, several chronic pain conditions, and near-constant outrage at the general state of the world tempered with love for those doing their best to make a difference. Find her at sgbigham.com.
by Sarah A. Etlinger
Twice now I have mistaken the winter light for sun.
Instead, thin shadows sigh
still as glass and silent
across the gentle clothesline of snow.
Sleeping branches stretch fingers into the cold
and pull my dingy memory out to wash and drape.
The white sheets shudder once,
then settle undisturbed, waiting for evening.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor who resides in Milwaukee, WI, with her family. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she is also the author of 3 books: Never One for Promises (Kelsay Books, 2018); Little Human Things (Clare Songbirds, 2020), and The Weather Gods (forthcoming, Fernwood Press 2021). Her work has appeared in Pank!, Spry Literary, and many others. Interests include baking, cooking, and traveling. Find her at sarahetlinger.com.
by Julie Marie Wade
A golden shovel for Maureen Seaton
When I learned we would meet that day at Giorgio’s, my
knees turned right then to strawberry Jell-O. Life
has got my number, I thought, & today Life has
called it up on the signboard—NOW SERVING ONE very
lucky me who, at 33, sat across a little,
wobbling table from you for a chance to
bask in your sprightly light, your generous laugh. O, do
you know what it meant to me to be with
you there, eating frittatas & queering the air all around us? Belief
has carried me farther than fear has slowed me down. O, do
you know how much I wanted to tell you,
though flushed & blustered, aslosh (your word!) with awe? O, believe
I’ve loved you longer than I’ve known you. Know your poems are home to me.
______________________________________________________________________
Julie Marie Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she has published 13 collections of poetry and prose, most recently Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021) and the book-length lyric essay, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020). Wade reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus and makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats.
by Skylar Alexander
a meditation on a drawing of the same name, hanging in the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa
It’s hard to tell whether
these outlines you’ve left
patterned in the snow
were meant to be fruits
or leaves—or maybe
even flowers; the thorns,
most definite, tell of blossoms
too delicate to hold
in human hands.
I would become a beetle
if it meant I could trace
your flowers to fruit—
if it meant I’d never
damage you or leave you
lonely.
I think of you, lonely
in our yellow house
freckled with ladybugs
robed in daffodils.
If I could be a bird flying
from this city to yours,
I would alight so softly
that the dew of your branches
would never know
I’d kissed them good morning.
You’re living proof
a red-breasted robin can dance
its whole life on eggshells;
can subsist on & resist
its own heart.
You’re living proof
I can love a shadow
of a shadow of a shadow of
a single moment
in a rose garden.
Now my palms wet with bird hearts
beating like beetle wings.
______________________________________________________________________
Skylar Alexander is the author of Searching for Petco (Forklift Books, 2021), a graphic designer, and teacher. Her work has appeared in many places, including Cutbank, Smokelong Quarterly, and Forklift, Ohio. She writes about pop culture, chronic illness, queerness, violence, travel, and about growing up in rural Iowa. See skylaralexandermoore.com.
by Paula Colangelo
Sometimes in meditation
I see a pinhole of light
in the distance. It disappears
and I can’t get it back,
can’t go to the place it’s leading me.
The same beacon from anchored boats
on a dark ocean.
I wake to light rising,
to thoughts of two sisters
in treatment together.
Jolted back to when
their pregnancies aligned–
Elated until
one lost the baby
eight months in.
Now the day is becoming
overcast. I stare at the clean
white rug, the table that once
leaned in a forest. Sunrise,
but I see no sun.
______________________________________________________________________
Paula Colangelo received an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her poetry is published in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and in Lily Poetry Review. Her book reviews appear in Pleiades and Rain Taxi. She has taught poetry in a healing-focused program at a rehabilitation center in New Jersey.
by Stephanie Lane Sutton
The other day, I reached
into the corner of my refrigerator and found
an entire bramble of blackberries. Before you ask, yes,
I did try singing to the plants.
Mother used to tell me
there's no use crying over your ilk. Meanwhile,
my dog isn’t getting any younger. Meanwhile,
to darn is to fix
and fitting a thread through a needle’s eye
takes the patience of an entire grandmother.
Like my fists had to grow
unclenched into a bloom,
less of a whir and more of a slow lick.
______________________________________________________________________
Stephanie Lane Sutton was born in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Anmly Lit, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Rhino Poetry, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. Her micro-chapbook, Shiny Insect Sex, is part of the Bull City Press Inch Series. She received a creative writing MFA from the University of Miami, where she was the managing editor of Sinking City. You can find her doing live interactive writing on Twitch as @AthenaSleepsIn.
by L.J. Sysko
they declare—
Regency heroines in climactic throes,
Victorian fainters, Romantic lovers—
in command of an iamb
even as they succumb to forces
greater than will alone. I’m undone,
we each announced this year
and last year and especially the year
that rent childhood’s seams for us.
You know the one. That did it.
Mine rises like a peony above a long fence—
heavy, layered with petals like organdy over satin over
petticoats and hosiery, enshrouding what’s underneath—
the done of undone
pulsing within memory,
breathing quietly, sipping from a narrow straw.
My peony survives because tiny ants
tend to her day and night like footmen
in foretelling livery.
Every spring, I bring my peony inside
and hold her head underwater
to drown the ants. Ritual
becomes her.
______________________________________________________________________
L.J. Sysko is the author of Battledore (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, Radar, Rattle, Painted Bride Quarterly, Moist, and Stirring, among others. A Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow and a 2022 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Thomas Lux Scholar, Sysko holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and has twice been awarded fellowships by Delaware's Division of the Arts; other honors include several Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards, an Academy of American Poets prize, and finalist recognition from Marsh Hawk Press, The Fourth River, The Pinch, and Soundings East. Her poetry has twice been shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize, judged by Billy Collins. She is a reader for The Common, lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and can be found online at ljsysko.com.
by Colleen Abel
by Barbara Sabol
The winters of my childhood live
in a globed kingdom, an unsullied world
of snow forts two heads higher
than we stood; long slopes
padded with flurried day upon
flurried day. Time a bright tunnel.
I am losing count
of the seasons
our snow blower languishes
in a corner of the garage, still
shiny red, its paddles at the ready.
Yet no great white sprays arc
to the lawn. No snowmen
or angels.
In this long interlude
since snow draped
from tree branch to roof
to street, since ice prismed
the morning, I miss the spell
of that particular blue-white light
borrowed from the skin
along a newborn's spine;
bottle of milk on a moonlit sill.
Paper-white, pure, that kingdom,
unmarked even by
woodland animal or tire tread.
Now that I am advised
to avoid extremes of heat and cold,
and any excess of excitement
I long for that commotion
in my chest, where my heart kicks
as I clutch the sides of a silver saucer,
plunging and spinning
at the same time toward
some steep, bottomless joy.
______________________________________________________________________
Barbara Sabol's fourth poetry collection, Imagine a Town, won the 2019 poetry manuscript prize from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her work has appeared most recently in Evening Street Review, One Art, Mezzo Cammin, Literary Accents and Modern Haiku, and in numerous anthologies. Barbara received her MFA from Spalding University. Her awards include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. She lives in Akron, OH with her husband and wonder dogs.
by Janna Schledorn
When camelias bloom in December,
her sisters sip iced tea under the silk oak,
lounging in winter sun.
With two hungry sons, she enters
the circle of seven sisters,
the stuff of their industrious crafts—
triangles of fabric, cylinders of candle wax,
terrarium moss, charcoals, watercolors—
warm rise of cinnamon swirl.
The things she needed.
Her hair brushed, feet washed, body
perfumed, anointed with bergamot.
Needful things
to escape plagues of locusts, gnats,
black death, endless demands of the law.
Her sisters surround her like sweet alyssum,
sweep her into their room full of dragonflies and song,
jalousie windows open to the east wind,
breezes of sea salt, laughter of life—
the del Valle’s piano resounds, a breath prayer.
She wonders why she ever left.
______________________________________________________________________
Janna Schledorn’s poetry has appeared in the anthology Mother Mary Comes to Me (Madville 2020) and in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Adanna Literary Journal, Amethyst Review and other journals. She is a co-winner of the 2016 Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize from the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Association of Florida and has poems in their journal, Revelry. She teaches composition and creative writing at Eastern Florida State College. For more visit jannaschledorn.com
by Mary Meriam
She’s a grinder, a hill of black pepper,
a deadly spice, no shrubbery in sight.
So my father and mother after the flood
climbed to bed to try for me once more.
We can’t think about the morning screwing,
the noon screwing, the evening screwing,
then the piggy baby pooping and peeing,
or the mountain of ground black pepper
on my mother’s mashed potatoes
and my father’s bacon sandwiches.
Then years of screwing the children,
not screwing like sex, but screwing out of,
not unscrewing the turn of the screw,
but the deeper screwing of the lid on the jar,
shouted damns in the hallway, damn it,
screwing out of the ordinary nursery,
the grinding of toys and dolls into rubble.
Look, you, at the sequence of lessons,
corrupted flesh and spirit, how screwing
is grinding, how little the children knew.
______________________________________________________________________
Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Her poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, Subtropics, and The Poetry Review. Her new collection, Pools of June, is due out from Exot Books on 2/2/22.
by Diane Hueter
We are sitting at opposite ends of our kitchen table—your right profile, my left—
to the wide picture window, when one morning Edward Hopper comes knocking—
rap rap rapping his knuckles on the plate of our dusty, bug-specked window. He squints
against the glare. Let me in! he mouths. I have my paints, my canvas, my easel!
Cupping his face in his hands, he leans against the glass like a snoopy salesman.
Do we hear his plea? I’m not sure. Is he remembering the time he painted us
in a Chinese restaurant in NYC? We were so pale then, not even yet married. Background,
untested, of limited interest. All that was visible of me was my mouth, my white nose,
a red beret covered my hair. You held a cigarette and bent over an ashtray or a teacup.
Smoking or drinking, I can’t recall. Your visage in shadow, your dark jacket muted, your neck and wrists
framed in white cotton. Does Edward Hopper see our insignificance, once again, as he steps back into
the sunlight? His brown felt hat flies into the pecan with a sudden cold and dusty updraft. The sun
blanketed by an incredible gathering of grackles. The beacon of our bright yellow tablecloth
fades. Our empty salad bowls float, become fishing boats returning to harbor. You say, Mr. Hopper,
Mr. Hopper, please come in. Like a dog licking peanut butter, I try to explain perspective,
the vanishing point, here, the lines in our cheeks, across our foreheads, an apt analogy.
______________________________________________________________________
Diane Hueter is a Seattle native now living in Lubbock, Texas—a place with very blue skies and very little rain. Her poetry has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Review. Her book After the Tornado (2013) was published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. Diane attended the Community of Writers poetry workshop (a truly transformative experience) and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
by Pui Ying Wong
For Connie
In an outer borough’s
vacant lot,
a bush of moonflowers
furl in the daylight.
They are sensitive to
the sun,
flaring high on the towers.
Beats of a season
boiling over.
Wait for the moon to rise
and dark rims of turf emerge,
wait for the noise to die
and the bedtime milk taken,
for muscles around the constricted larynx
to relax.
Like the fragile voices of poets’
they will open
in fullness,
in August’s cool shadows.
______________________________________________________________________
Pui Ying Wong’s new collection of poetry, The Feast, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2021. She has written two full-length books of poetry, An Emigrant’s Winter (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) and Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), along with two chapbooks. She has received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume Poetry, New Letters, Zone 3, and The New York Times, among others. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she now lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.
by Alicia Hoffman
“A poem should be palpable and mute / as a globed fruit”
–Archibald MacLeish
This poem slips through fingers swift like silk.
Shifts in breeze easy as pollen from a maple tree,
or those small clusters of gnats as they do whatever
gnats do before their short life blows them some place
else: into the ether, the air, some interstitial “out there”
that can’t easily be held in the hand like a pomegranate,
an apple. So much depends upon word choice. Globed?
Forget figs, then. Same for starfruit, strawberry, pear.
This poem is a banana. It passes oblong through
liminal space and won’t shut up. It clamors
its meaning up the banyans. This poem is so loud
people can hear its echo down the street. No one
minds. Silence is deafening and mute may be cute
for old men who’ve spent their lives blathering,
but women know it can be deadly. So this poem
will not sit still on the counter waiting to be
lunch. This poem carves its own bowl, thank you.
It unpeels itself. Carries words in its lines flighty
as a dowager. This poem is not a stationary set
to place on a tidy desk. It knows things: physics,
mathematics, astronomy. This poem could hitch
a ride to the Omega Nebula if it chose, is about to
go all supernova, cannot sit still as a wingless bird
or a dumb sleeve-worn stone eroding into nothing.
This poem finds its own groove, has a master plan.
Not motionless in time. This poem needs to move.
______________________________________________________________________
Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Her recent poems can be found in a variety of journals, including The Penn Review, Glass Poetry, Radar Poetry, The Shore, Journal Nine, The Watershed Review, A-Minor Magazine, and elsewhere. Her newest book, ANIMAL (Futurecycle Press) came out in March. Find out more at www.aliciamariehoffman.com.
by Lorelei Bacht
It may be time to revisit
My approach to flowers. Why not
Drop the scalpel, give the petals
A chance to charm, enchant, without being
Exposed—vulnerable to my gaze,
My haste to empirically demonstrate
How all things work: I pick, I cut,
I diagram. I make no time to see
The white orchid for what it is—
Is its whiteness un-pigmented,
Sun-bleached, or washed out, like a cloud?
What secrets would it tell
If I kept my hands tucked in my pockets?
The truth is: I am terrified.
And would much rather magnify, dissect,
Than let things be. I seem to have no use
For what I do not understand—a broad
Category, encompassing:
The orchid, my marriage.
______________________________________________________________________
Lorelei Bacht is a European poet who recently started writing again after moving to Asia, making two beautiful children and failing two marriages. Published last decade, under a different name, her previous work is no longer relevant. Her current work focuses on such themes as aging, motherhood, infidelity, and finding oneself as a nearly middle-aged woman. Some of her musings can be found on her Instagram feed @the.cheated.wife.writes as well as @lorelei.bach.writer.
by Siham Karami
When I was born, the brightness burned and I cried out;
the terror and the beauty of going inside out.
What early blackout brought me to your sea?
Your waves undo me, your moon’s blue aura pulls my tide out.
Why peer into the crystal sphere for reasons?
Why smother our own selves in cross-eyed doubt?
I keep swallowing hard and coming back
with my cloud of dust and bugs you shoo-flied out.
Half my heart is somewhere in Orion's belt;
the other half, monsoon, turns your riptide out.
Hunt me if you will. I am a hunter, too.
Your blazing doom cannot perceive my cool hideout.
I was a child of prayer, and still breathe that light,
but light cannot ignite the spot where the fire died out.
Just aim a little closer to perfect, you keep saying;
but this arrow's just about bull's-eyed out.
______________________________________________________________________
Siham Karami is the author of To Love the River (Kelsay Books, 2018), described as “a love story about life.” Her work has appeared in The Orison Anthology, Smartish Pace, Tiferet Journal, Able Muse, Think, and others. Third-place winner of the Beulah Rose poetry contest, and nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.net.
by Sarah Jordan Stout
Here is your hollowed out ride, complete
with smooth, plastic seat-back. Come, climb in.
Let the water touch you with its cold
breath, but please don’t
trail your fingers, like the lover in a painting.
Behind the set, you catch glimpses
unmarked doors to storage closets,
yellow safety strips, the crew’s pathways.
Hiding from the riders,
they wipe dust from the eyes of
each friendly, woodland animatronic.
The half-hidden skunk, possum,
pileated woodpecker. One, a bobcat,
skull thrust back—its busted tape recorder
caterwauls in heat. Enter Melancholy
in a beam of light and nightgown
like a waterfall. It looks like a woman
chasing a man in a circle all day,
holding a rolling pin over her head.
Your parents never told you
about love. Your mother’s hands only gripped
the steering wheel on the way to school,
If a boy tries to get you to, she starts to breathe
but doesn’t, go to bed with him,
don’t. Around the corner,
a lumberjack’s face,
and the two boys with a camera phone
snickering in the
dark. Here is Tangletown.
No wonder these rides are so sad.
The wax axmen pivot to banjo songs,
plaid backs bent over forest stumps.
One sleeps on a pile of pine needles,
a felt hat pulled down over his eyes.
The trees talk as a way to tell you
that trees don’t talk.
Another turn and this is the quietest part of the ride,
as the boat drifts back to shore, cloud banks heap
into beds of violets. The cyclorama sky cradles a storm—
far off and flickering, like a body shivers
deeper than the skin, or a face that will flinch
before it’s punched.
You want to say you’re not scared anymore.
But you were. You still are, a little.
After all it could never touch you,
but here it is, touching you.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Jordan Stout has had poems in Connotation Press, Rust+Moth, Sleet, and others. She is an associate editor for Stirring: a Literary Collection, and Co-Coordinator for the online reading series Poets in Pajamas. She has a masters degree in literature from West Virginia University, and lives and writes in Houston where she works at an environmental nonprofit fighting pollution and fossil fuel buildout across the state of Texas.
by Meghan Sterling