by Sara Eddy
Tucked up
by Athena Kildegaard
My mother kept a saucepan with no handle
and a tarnished spoon for her wax.
Wax the color of pond muck
more brown than yellow, but green
the color of having once been organic.
The pan she'd set on a low flame
and when the wax had melted, she'd lift
the spoon, the convex part up-facing, covered
with wax, which would begin to congeal
and this thin smear she'd wipe onto
her upper lip, one swipe above the left side
and one above the right. Then she'd light
a cigarette, a filtered Raleigh purchased by the carton,
the S & H Green stamps set aside for a matching
platter to the table-settings for eight
she'd already amassed. She'd deal us each
six cards and we'd play cribbage. She would claim
my missed points, didn't care that I was eight.
She liked to win. Her eyes squinted when smoke
flared upward. When she'd beaten me, she'd
tear the hardened wax away in two swift yanks.
Two curled petals, smooth on one side
and hairy on the other. Two little animals.
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Athena Kildegaard book of poems, Prairie Midden, is due this fall from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, december, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in western Minnesota.
by Anne Graue
by Carly Sachs
Wood floors and built-in bookshelves
were our non-negotiables,
gift of trees, like Bacchus and Philomena,
death will always make life.
The floor holds the things we own:
Calico and stereo, a library.
Words we knew before we knew
each other.
The chair, Grandma’s. The chair, green
where lions roar wooden grief,
curled feet and ears where
patterns are not patterns.
The record player spins but music
is nightfall, a tabby’s pink, pink paws
and mapped markings,
the area rug is a mandala
that does not know it is.
Metal flowers on the chandelier.
We make what we cannot keep.
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Carly Sachs is the author of The Steam Sequence and the editor of the anthology The Why and Later, a collection of poems about rape and assault. Her poems and stories have been included in The Best American Poetry Series and read on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is a writer, yoga teacher and lactation consultant based in Lexington, Kentucky.
by Brandel France de Bravo
Do you know the show’s premise? A real
estate agent, interior designer, and a couple
with a checklist of needs who must choose
between a new house and their old remodeled.
Pull up stakes? Or reframe the past and forego
a never-inhabited future? I’ve been trying
to let go of habits that linger like garage-sale
remains: the need to patch your roof, fix
your flashing. As though we could fool the rain.
Some rooms are unlovable. I could redecorate
(call this hunger “fasting”) or move somewhere
with an open floor plan, no wall between
how I’m feeling and what you’re seeing. Every
criticism, judgment, diagnosis, expression
of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet
need. Every time your face says “stop talking,”
and I want to leave—how do I decide if I don’t
even have a list of boxes to tick? One partner
on Love It or List It always asks for a giant
laundry room, where the systole and diastole
whoosh of the washer-dryer masks any sound,
a gentle sac for the release of secretions, where
I can float among the folded piles, warm and
soothing as a mother’s voice muffled by viscera.
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Brandel France de Bravo is the author of two poetry collections, co-author of a parenting book, and the editor of a bilingual anthology of Mexican poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in various publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Green Mountains Review, and Gulf Coast. She is a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training,© a program developed at Stanford University.
by Nicole Cooley
by B. Fulton Jennes
reseeded in your garden each year, growing
wider and wilder, enlarging their realm.
If I did not dig out their spiny seedling in spring,
they would have become a field of uncontained fury.
Others mistook their effusion for beauty, but I knew
the poppy’s poison all too well, just as I knew yours:
black eyes of contempt, heavy head nodding
in silence, affirming grave disappointment.
How often I tried to please you with a bouquet
of brilliant spleen cut fresh from your garden,
set upon your dinner table to brighten
the dismal spell of our grim gatherings there.
But the petals always dropped like fiery angels
tossed from heaven before the meal ended.
Years later, I learned to singe the poppies’ cut stems
with a flame, to cauterize their wounds, to seal
in their dour blood, to keep their judgmental heads
nodding through an entire eternal meal.
But by then I was done with what seemed a good,
right thing to do. By then, I set the flowers aflame.
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The Poet Laureate of Ridgefield, Connecticut, B. Fulton Jennes serves as an educator and poet-in-residence for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where she develops poetry programming and special events. Her poems have or will appear in The Comstock Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Stone Canoe, Connecticut River Journal, Night Heron Barks, and other publications. Her chapbook, Blinded Birds, was published in the fall of 2021.
by Chloe Hanson
First
there was a woman. There is always a woman,
a sum of parts: hair, hand, breast.
Then there was a river,
the water over stones immaculate
despite the mud banks. Shore-reeds whispered
to one another of the woman,
nude, wet, and dark as the earth
the water caressed.
If she lived
today, she’d sing “Unchained Melody,”
mouth the perfect o
of a skipping stone. If she lived
today, she’d hide the planes and ridges
of her form in soft green grasses,
because her mother always told her
to be modest.
Tonight, my husband forms an o
lips pursed over pan pipes. He plays
earth and wind and water old as creation
in each breath, and I remember
a story old as creation, a story my mother read me:
Syrinx’s arms frothed with sweat,
and legs hot as worked horses
pushed her to the water’s edge, where the reeds
kept the memory of her songs. Pan, pursuing
threw back his head and howled.
Her sisters made her delicate limbs hollow and green,
easy for the wind to carry, a grounded bird
and buried her by the river, where she roots
even now.
This is how I first heard of a man
taking a woman, cutting her
and fashioning her into an instrument
to be called upon for music, to sing
I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time
when touched, whether she means it
or not.
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Chloe Hanson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, where she teaches English. Her work has most recently been featured in Cimarron Review, Third Coast, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and The Rumpus.
by Eileen Pettycrew
A life should leave
room for pain.
Like the daughter
who was angry and wrote
a note to her mother:
I am never talking to you again.
The mother wrote back:
I am sorry to hear that.
What about the bedtime story?
The daughter wrote back:
Okay, that is the one thing.
In the kitchen, a life could leave
a loaf of freshly baked bread
to cool. The fragrance
could waft upstairs,
where the daughter
has picked out a book.
The mother could think
that bread is love
as she sits next to the daughter
on the daughter’s bed.
But the mother is
thinking of the pencil
on the daughter’s desk,
how one pencil can
draw a line 35 miles long.
How she could trace
the line to its end
and still not know
where the daughter
came from or where
the daughter is going
or how long
the daughter will lean
ever so lightly
on her shoulder.
The first line of the poem is from “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan.
______________________________________________________________________
Eileen Pettycrew lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in The Normal School, Slipstream, CALYX, The Scream Online Dreams Anthology, South 85 Journal, Watershed Review, Gold Man Review, and others.
by Kathleen Hellen
who doesn’t love the monarchs briefly
halloweening? the cloudless sulphurs licking at the tips?
the chrysalis in silk? the instar self devouring?
in the garden where she used to sit,
the ants like indras
soft paraded toward the lizards’ sacrifice of tails
the crotons clowned like pagliaccis
the squirrels trapezed, death defying. The four-o-clocks
at three applauded wanton breezes
who doesn’t love the snake, the lost umbilical,
rising to the flute
of garden birds, even as she
slipped from consciousness?
______________________________________________________________________
Kathleen Hellen’s collection Umberto’s Night won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize for poetry in 2012. Hellen’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Her credits include two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Her latest poetry collection is The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin.
by Josslyn Turner
After the poetry reading,
I join a friend at the bar
on 12th St. We haven’t seen each other
in a few months. I missed the quiver
in her lower lip
as if on the verge of tears.
Her fingers flirt
down my arm,
but she speaks non-sexual things
into my ear
over the music
& cacophony of chatter.
On the dance floor,
I try to mimic
her undulating body
to ’90s music.
In the ladies' room,
I help unzip her
black & red jumpsuit.
Glimpse of white skin
like new porcelain,
shoulder
hip
thigh.
As she sits,
I look away
into the mirror,
brush away a curl.
My cock would be hard now
if it had enough testosterone.
Instead, it remains quiet
in black cotton panties.
My friend slips
back into the jumpsuit.
Full breasts I wish to have
ripple like Jell-O in maroon bra.
I zip her back up.
Two girlfriends wait for us
in the hall,
one of them is also trans.
The bar is now crowded.
With caution, we shuffle
through mountains of men
with stoic faces.
After taking my friend home,
we say goodnight
with an embrace
almost like lovers.
Later, when I lay in bed,
I feel a drop of wetness,
cold between my thighs.
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Josslyn Turner is a trans poet and abstract artist. She is currently an English Major at CSU, Stanislaus. Her poems have appeared in The Vitni Review, The Lily Poetry Review, Journal Nine, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere. She lives in Waterford, California where she co-parents two awesome boys.
by Lindsay Rutherford
Our tour group huddles
in the cave’s cool damp interior,
jostling to spot jagged outlines
of stalactites in the dark.
“Anyone feel a drop?” the guide asks.
“They say if a water drop from the caves hits you,
it’s good luck.” Voices murmur, “I felt one!”
“On my nose!” “Yes!” I am surrounded
by luck, yet remain decidedly dry.
The guide leads us through the dark,
which has grown darker, down a perilous flight
of slick stairs where he conjures a wooden rowboat
from the black void. We step in one by one,
silent, uncertain if we should trust the boat,
but having no other choice. With a lurch,
the guide pushes off. Above us, the ceiling twinkles
with hundreds of glow worms, which, we learn,
are not really glow worms at all, but larvae
of the fungus gnat. We float on an underground river,
through thick, still air, and darkness broken
only by these tiny blue larval glimmers.
There is some small comfort in surrendering
to the journey. Faint gray light swells in the distance—
the world in all its brash daylight, waiting.
I’m not sure I’m ready.
A water drop hits my neck, trickles down my back
in a trail of goose bumps. Another lands in my ear,
rolls into my ear canal, leaves me dizzy.
Is this what luck feels like?
The pager on my lap vibrates.
My husband takes my hand.
The surgeon is ready for us.
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Lindsay Rutherford is a writer and physical therapist in the Seattle area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Literary Mama, Lunch Ticket, The MacGuffin, Mothers Always Write, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
by Cat Dixon
It’s night on a gravel road—the dead-end sign lit up by headlights, so I throw that mother into reverse. The tires squeal as I hit pavement yanking the wheel to find another street. Every light is green so I accelerate—what else can I do?—racing to the next stop. When the light flashes yellow, I don’t slow down—time is short—I have to make it. I drive seven years straight. When the sun sets, the headlights from other cars blind so I look to the yellow line on the side of the road and follow it—an arrow pointing to the next house I will call home. When I enter, I know the place—black leather couch, dusty book shelves, kitchen counters lined with empty water bottles and I set to work—polish, wipe, recycle—a mindless charade. When he walks in the door, I call him the wrong name. Who could blame me? They all look the same. Another fight over the car keys—my arm left aching from his grasp—another chance to be in the driver’s seat. Back on the road, I brake at the stop sign, stare in my rearview, and head for the well-lit taxi stand at the airport. I hop in the cab, shout “drive” and he merges into traffic—just another pair of eyes shining into the night.
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Cat Dixon's new poetry collection, What Happens in Nebraska, will be out later this year from Stephen F. Austin University Press. Recent poems have appeared in Whale Road Review and Rise Up Review. Her website is www.catdix.com.
by Amy Miller
She hides in the east shadow
of a thirty-foot wall. She might
remember damp hands
of ivy, but now she tangles
only with herself, limbs
on fractured limb, sparse leaves
cupping small swallows of light.
What can she say, embarrassed,
when pink silk shoots out
from her every cleft in April
in—yes—the rain’s warm lick.
______________________________________________________________________
Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press, and her chapbooks include I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). She lives in Oregon.
by Mistee St. Clair
by Estelle Bajou
You’re busy.
Your eyes are leaking.
Your mouth is screwed up with realization: your folks are getting old and it’s
up to you to take care of them and you don’t know how and can’t afford it
anyway.
You’re in love with a pretty girl. Young and pretty.
This is not your Jesus year. There is no magic transformation around the
corner. You haven’t even figured out how you’ll die.
This is the year to float, shining like a dead star in the empyrean.
To kiss her mouth two hundred and twenty-four times and never again.
To heal the family wounds.
To burst.
To beckon.
Not everyone figures it out. How to look forward without looking ahead.
You’ll miss the end. Walking out to the garden of a Sunday afternoon.
I hope you play your trumpet and drums in the morning.
I hope your pretty girl makes a good memory for you.
I’m sure I see you, days later, arms full of plates, coming through the swinging
doors, smiling.
______________________________________________________________________
Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Variant Lit, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cathexis, Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, SoFloPoJo, Middlesex, The Abstract Elephant, The Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. Her first poetry chapbook, I Never Learned to Pray, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2022. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.
by Elaine Sexton
Naturally, something that calls itself small
wants little to do with attention. Geography
called small is a quiet gush of light, tides
that pool in small sand-banked reservoirs,
and discreet stands of pines, the trees
not small, but their conversations are.
Hush of seals, their heads rise out of small
waves to gaze at each other and walkers
on the beach. Small snaps of seaweed,
and here on this slender (small) point
of stone and sand, a peninsula, almost silent
but for small bird calls. And you, present
in your skin, and your skin, dry, and
the wind, dry, small. And you, John Marin,
driving small points in long strokes, water
in your paint, the sea in your here, now.
on John Marin’s “Small Point, Maine”
______________________________________________________________________
Elaine Sexton's fourth collection of poem, Drive, will be published by Grid Books in 2022. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and magazines including the American Poetry Review, Art in America, Five Points, Oprah Magazine, Pleiades, Plume, and Poetry. She teaches poetry at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She serves as the visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly. See www.elainesexton.org.
by Frances Donovan
by Jennifer Roche
We’re pouring through the sieve of summer.
Mother and teen son traveling north
to camp drop-off together.
We fold into twin beds
with benign choreography:
Electronics, plugged in.
Brushed teeth?
Double good nights
clipped by the light.
The rightful bricks mason
themselves between us:
I used to admire him in his sleep.
______________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Roche is a poet, writer, and text artist who lives in Chicago. She is Pushcart Prize-nominated and the author of two chapbooks: The Synonym Tables (The Poetry Question, 2021) and 20, erasure poems from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Alternating Current Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Storm Cellar, Tule Review, Footnote: A Literary Journal of History, and Oyez Review. She was named a “Writer to Watch in 2019 & Beyond” by the Guild Literary Complex.
by Abby E. Murray