by Michele Sharpe
by Louise Robertson
There’s no point to
owning a fence. My bitch
chews under it, manic
for a possum. There’s
no point to the cross
beams reinforcing the fence,
my bitch parkours
to the top, to get at
a deer, her mud tracks
spattered up the planks of wood.
There’s no point to a leash, either,
when another dog passes.
My bitch bites the neck
of the strap and wrestles me.
Sure, she lies in the sun,
a quiet bitch next to my beach chair,
or gnaws (but gentle)
on my fingers. She must dream
of the jump that crests the fence,
or the tug that makes me drop the lead.
And maybe we both imagine that—
her stretching
in a dead run across the neighborhood,
terrifying and glorious.
Why the fence? Why the fence?
______________________________________________________________________
Louise Robertson serves as the marketing director for Writers' Block Poetry Night in Columbus, OH. She counts among her many publications, awards, and honors a jar of homemade pickles she received for running a workshop as well as a 2018 Pushcart nomination (Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters) and a 2018 Best of the Net nomination (Flypaper).
by Elline Lipkin
Knobby onion,
crisped edges
a thin scrim
around circles
that cinch
the center seed
Matroushka’d
deep within.
Quiet in water,
until white hair
a Medusa’s head,
tipped and dowsing,
tangles its snakes,
while thin green legs
bean up in pairs
as the glass holds
their hips, forced.
The burst is sudden,
a petaled shoe
kicking off wafts
of civety musk
so that heads turn,
not knowing
from where.
______________________________________________________________________
Elline Lipkin is a poet, academic, and nonfiction writer. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award. Her second book, Girls’ Studies, was published by Seal Press and explores contemporary girlhood in America. She is currently a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women and also teaches poetry for Writing Workshops Los Angeles.
by E. Kristin Anderson
I:
When I’m Empty
This is where I go nowhere, live in the home I have—
I see time as a tired burn and surrender these embers
to you. I’m calling inside the black and blue to give
it a twist. Here I’ll take a halo from that delicate wire
let it taste my hands. Disenchanted, I ghost the dance
try it on and lose my grip; here I find a life as passerby.
Pleasure is in these prayers. The same old heart, the rust
and again I’m waking up. Mend it: Give me loud tonight.
A ring of fire outside is my overdrive, my ghost
is one to pass through. My head is worth keeping
and two strangers turn to song and turn the screws.
And friend, I swear, I swear, the years fucking burn.
It’s a life of rope and wrist and here I open wide;
stuck spilling night, we know a lullaby understands.
II:
Two Strangers
Stuck spilling night, we know a lullaby understands
halo by halo into the years. Home is in your fire,
a whisper for yesterday—here I’m waking up loud
and sick with overdrive. I let my rage have the stars.
Blame it on confession, damned and disenchanted,
the bearer of bad news waiting on the motorway
The ruse starts breaking up, dreaming just to hide
I let down my sleeve. I’m part death and part sky
waiting for the chance to burn through grace.
We breathe, we breathe low and long, feel the rope
of a delicate world, give it a twist, pray in the rust.
I turn over the years, they keep coming back up.
Wheel out the sun, chase it deep in the heart of a friend
I twist and disappear in the dance, breaking the road.
III:
Let It Turn
I twist and disappear in the dance, breaking the road
keeping back the strangers in their masks, the embers.
You’re spilling over me, a ring of sky for growing old
and I can choose to taste the ghost; we breathe in years.
My ruse is a reason to bleed, my heart and wings apart,
everything I’m not spilling, spilling—a one-way flame.
Love is shame. And in my hand there’s a burn bright
enough for ignition—a new day rising down for one.
And I hate waking—a lullaby breaking at the wrist,
a vacant town for rust and song. I’m a little empty,
blues and stars the same, a taste around my screws.
I’m a motorway for the down and out—come play,
hold the rope one more time. We stand in the leaves—
this is where I go nowhere, live in the home I have.
Note: This is a found poem. Source material: Foo Fighters. One By One Roswell/RCA, 2002.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and her work has appeared in many magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Porkbelly Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Porkbelly Press. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on Twitter at @ek_anderson.
by Laura Stott
I am not Deinonychus, early Cretaceous,
scales or feathers on my elbows, ankles,
a fan of color around my eyes, claws that can tear out the jugular
in any neck free of armour. Beating heart. Hunger.
Fountain of blood spilled on the mud.
And I am not Mammuthus Primigenius.
The smell of beastly body all earth and urine,
on a damp forest floor. A forest larger than any country or map.
Oh, to see what the sky was like back then. I am a woman
watching time from a hot air balloon rising.
I can see all the moments below me.
Each one getting smaller, crater from an asteroid,
the dust bowl rolling away, the towers’ fall,
the houses I once knew, I can see them too,
tiny dots, faces gone to a blur of color
I can’t distinguish. Voices rise as far as we may fly. 42 years. 500.
There, that lake is now a small jewel, fluid stone.
Water we dove into, we because it isn’t always I,
eyes shut, nose plugged. Feel your body float
out of summer. Open your eyes and there is the wide mouth
of the bass, coming at you.
______________________________________________________________________
Laura Stott is the author of two collections of poetry, Blue Nude Migration (Lynx House Press, 2020) and In the Museum of Coming and Going (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2014). Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in various journals and magazines, including Barrow Street, Briar Cliff Review, Sugar House Review, and Mid-American Review. She lives with her husband and daughters in northern Utah.
by Jenny Molberg
I am not a lucrative person.
In 1996, at Enterprise City, the kids
got job titles: banker, business owner,
marketing director. Me, I was t-shirt maker.
I stood alone in a closet feeding cotton
to lasers. What I can’t tell is how
each of my loves is a reaction to the last:
daisy-chain of cruelty and false kindness.
Under my bed I used to keep a Mega Bruiser
Jumbo Jawbreaker and lick down a layer
when everyone else was asleep.
Beneath the chalky splatter-paint coat:
a planet of color, magic eye inside.
At work I suit up in my blazer and the guy
in back slams shut his textbook
to ask me if I’ve ever heard of T. S. Eliot.
I like the feel of a t-shirt that swallows.
I like to hold no one too close.
Almost yearning, my friend says, raising her wine.
Finally I decide to get down to the heart.
______________________________________________________________________
Jenny Molberg is the author of the collections Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (forthcoming from LSU Press, 2023). She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, West Branch, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com or on Twitter at @jennymolberg.
by Esther Sadoff
It is too late in the year to water the flowers.
I let them dry and char under the wheel of light.
I envy the leaves of the Rosy Periwinkle,
still growing as day stills into fresh parchment.
At night, the crickets and locusts are in cahoots,
their song sizzling like a live wire, a spark to light the sky.
I smell wood smoke and damp weed.
A dark chirp, renegade as a storm of leaves.
When the day rises, I reinvent the sun,
dawn of ironweed and stubby brush.
A deer tiptoes across my brow.
They tell me it's the age of mums.
______________________________________________________________________
Esther Sadoff currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches English to gifted and talented middle school students. She has a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied literature as well as a Master of Education from The Ohio State University. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Marathon Literary Review, Sunspot Literary Journal, West Trade Review, River Mouth Review, and Penultimate Peanut, as well as other publications.
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