by Dion O'Reilly
I
by Maggie Wolff
by Beth Gordon
You loved me as sword grass, ungreen and venomous, my new
edges drawing scar, you loved me as heron, long-legged and coastal, as catastrophic forest
fire, blackened limbs and skin as translucent
as winter leaves, full dead and metamorphic, my awful knees
locking between your ribs without a single rattle or cicada song. You loved me as barren,
unable to flesh, as unhatched egg in April snow, as discarded nest, feathers and fur
dissipating at my death-moth touch. You loved me as teeth,
as fingernail, as bottled ship in an unforgiving ocean, as broken
mirror shards. You loved me as wanderer, desert-starved and waterless,
as scalpel-carved, without appendix or breast, you loved me as other,
hungry-boned and insubstantial, as half-remembered crow song, as ghost to my unfed self.
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Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been widely published and nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two previous chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, was published in 2021 (Kelsay Books). Her third chapbook, The Water Cycle, is being published by Variant Lit in January 2022. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books.
by M.B. McLatchey
If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden. —Mark Zuckerberg
In the cave, our histories are shadows
on a wall; our memories rote lessons
that flicker and mutate. Fall and spring,
then and now, captured and interchanged.
Friezes like post cards sculpted to ornament
the grotto, endure, resist decay.
When the shadows dance, we point, open
our mouths, as if for a split second, something
shifts, recalibrates. A glimpse of fire and lathe—
and shadow makers. Forms beyond hope.
Ideas like sirens singing. Cracks in a wall
that luminate, hint at another source: rivers,
flora and bursts of color, starlings with iridescent
wings, shrubs whose roots finger through mud
for something to drink. A world too fluid to dangle
from rod and string. How could we want its ranges, moon,
its chorus marking dawn, its feathered swirl confusing
predators, its messenger’s glad song? Why should we
mind the tether anchoring us; the flame that fixes seasons,
stages night and day, that orients us frontward, ever
frontward, and keeps the constellations in their place?
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M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-published and award-winning memoir, Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, 2021). M.B. is the recipient of several literary awards, including the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review. Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County and Arts Ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she is Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at mbmclatchey.com.
by Christina Olson
When my father finally packs up his spaceship and returns to his home planet,
I wonder what he’ll take with him. The man was never one for nostalgia,
but these days I think he’s chucked it all, every artifact of the first sixty years
he spent on Earth. The yearbooks and deferrals I understand not keeping—
all shag and pain, ancient history. And while the man reads a lot, they were all library books,
no marginalia or ticket stubs to discover. Plus, you’d have to go to the movies,
and when we went to see Jurassic Park in 1993 he balked at the prices, admitted the last movie
he’d seen in the theatre was Superman. He was the sort of dad who collected
actual fossils, not old license plates for the garage. When his mother died, he set aside for me
a crystal beer pitcher. This is practical nostalgia. Productive reminiscence.
I’m not angry about these things even if I sound like it. First marriage long over,
children grown and gone—I almost understand the strange logic of not keeping
the markers of these basic, expected cycles. We take note when the leopard gecko
sheds it skin all at once, wriggles out of its too-tight suit, but humans too
cast off our skin constantly. We just call it dust, Swiffer it off our framed photos.
No, what concerns me is not the discarding but the cleaving. His Before Life
and his Now Life, how little they resemble each other, how nothing bleeds
through. Now Life is two houses, an Audi TT, a leather jacket, new wife,
her adult children the same age as my brother and I but somehow so much more
space-taking. It’s been twelve, no, thirteen years since my father turned into this alien,
so I’m pretty much used to it. When he texts me asking when my brother’s birthday
is again—I always forget—it’s only one day that I need to process my rage, only three beers
I drink that night. If I’m allowed into the house after he flies away, I wonder
what I’ll find. No hope for the little clay elephant I made, but maybe a couple photo albums.
Sometimes I daydream that I open a drawer and find the letters I wrote. But then I snap
out of it. Geckos don’t have eyelids—they lick their eyes to keep them moist.
They have tear ducts, but only to clean the cornea. How practical! If you didn’t know
the science, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a gecko could cry.
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Christina Olson is the author of Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press, 2017). Her chapbook, The Last Mastodon, won the Rattle 2019 Chapbook Contest. Other work appears in The Atlantic, The Normal School, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University and tweets about coneys and mastodons as @olsonquest.
by Laura Donnelly
It takes almost a year for my aunt’s chicken Tillie
to start laying, the months-younger hens
outpacing her, and I remember being last
to get my period, freshmen year of high school,
which was bad but maybe not as bad as being first.
How we feared existing on the edges: E. starting
to bleed while being bussed to elementary
swim lessons. M. with armpit hair
at ten and the rest of us smooth. How narrow
the window of blending in. But the Ameraucana
is an elegant chicken, silver cheek muffs and a saddle
that shimmers like folds of slate taffeta.
Never mind laying season, Tillie starts in winter,
deep February. When I visit months later
she jumps on my lap, impossibly light
beneath all that fluff. She pecks weeds
from my hand and when beak touches skin
just a brief pinch of pain, no mark left.
Tillie’s first egg was a perfect, pale blue.
My blood looked rusty and I feared something wrong.
It was 1993, no Google to check. I waited a day
before telling my mom, made a pad from
toilet paper I checked between classes:
civics, earth science, what we learned at fourteen.
What becomes routine: decades of bleeding,
pills in shades my aunt’s chickens lay,
discs pressed from packs at the end of each day.
At night, the hens roost tight together, the alpha
supposedly tucked most in center. Usually,
it’s Esme, but not always. My aunt and uncle peer
at their sleeping to see how the clique has shifted.
In the dusty dark, the sweet animal smell. A hen
tucks her beak beneath wings and it could be any
of them or us: looking for a safe place, a self
place to fold among bodies almost like our own.
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Laura Donnelly's second collection of poetry, Midwest Gothic, was selected by Maggie Smith for the Snyder Memorial Prize and published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2020. Her first book, Watershed, received the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and serves as Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego.
by Clayre Benzadón
In full sun, or cold
tolerance, asters grown in, all
charmed and untoothed, wild—
their star-slit petals cross
each other, aster-
isks, ticks, tisks
of remembrance.
There is a game
blossoms play
with each other:
besides the speckled
throats, plants choose
to dress, protect them-
selves in fox-
glove sleeves, thimbles,
during a game of tag, or touch
-me-not—
a half-life lasts a day.
I stare at the aster,
at its last finger of
pulverized breath.
It sheathes, sneezes
like a collapsed core
of a black hole.
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Clayre Benzadón is an MFA graduate student at the University of Miami, managing editor of Sinking City, and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook, Liminal Zenith, was published by SurVision Books. She was also awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for "Linguistic Rewilding" and published in places including SWWIM Every Day, 14poems, and Crêpe and Penn, as well as forthcoming in ANMLY and Fairy Tale Review. You can find more about her at clayrebenzadon.com.
by Karen Morris
The sweet hour of prime. -Milton
Lesson one was stitched on skin
Like the carved flowers of my bodice.
There was more than one promise, love,
I have melted many, times twenty—
Exploded like stars and cross-pollinated for fun.
I was aroused by stitchery then.
Each time bound by rings
I opposed two involutes,
Fell into deep vats of indigo
And rinsed my flesh in the wind.
What should I say when you ask|
If I would do it again—
But stretch this silk by piercing,
Flame, and open to the vinery.
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Karen Morris received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (NAAP, 2015) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press, PA). Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Plainsongs, Writers Resist, SWWIM Every Day, Stillwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, and others. She is a psychoanalyst by profession, cofounder and transmitted lay teacher for Two Rivers Zen Community in Narrowsburg, NY. She lives and works in Barre, Vermont.
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Lately I've been watching
the birds, the way the juncos
seem to know my home,
every stretch of the deck
railing they claim, the way they turn
toward me at the kitchen window
or are they trying to see
themselves?
Look, three sparrows
on the sagging wet wire of patio lights,
how they sway and hold on
to such a narrow perch.
They welcome the weight
of water. They have
their own atmosphere,
their own moon.
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Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. She has been a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press, nominated for Best of the Net, the Poetry Prize Winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a 2021 Finalist and Semi-Finalist in the Iron Horse Literary Review’s National Poetry Month contest. She lives in the hills of Vermont.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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