Or I Want Brown & Black & Queer Joy To Be Ubiquitous: Or What We’re Made Of Connects Us, Fuck: Or I Am Writing This Poem When I Should Be Out Protesting So This Poem Is A Protest Instead
by Felicia Zamora
by Therese Gleason
This is for the twin hinge,
hardest of bony workers,
gatekeeper of body and mind,
guardian of the toothed cave,
vestibule for breath and sustenance.
Puppeteer behind the scenes,
you crank the red drawbridge
open and closed, sheriff of the mouth,
keeper of speech, teacher of suck
and kiss, clamp with damp lips.
Is it any wonder you yawn
and ache? You are Sisyphus
of swallowing, Atlas of the mouth’s
gummed palate, tamer of muscular
tongue and teeth. You are chewer
of words and meat, mandible
and maxilla in a marriage
of opposites, chomping till death
do you part: holy equation of catch
and release. You are holder of tension,
detritus of language and emotion
ground down by the tectonics
of the molar ridge. Tender buttons,
jointed joist of bone on bone,
clenched or unseated in sleep
you rouse the three-headed dragon,
trigeminal and terrible, to unleash
a shower of darts shimmering
from eye socket to cheek.
O simple machine, mother
who feeds, domed cathedral
of human want and need. O
sacred portal that falls open
at rest when the soul
is released.
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Therese Gleason is author of two chapbooks: Libation (co-winner, South Carolina Poetry Initiative competition, 2006) and Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021). Her poems appear/are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, America, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Literary Mama, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, KY, she lives in Worcester, MA with her spouse and three children. A literacy teacher at an elementary school, Therese reads for The Worcester Review and has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Find her at theresegleason.com.
by Louisa Muniz
by Jennifer Greenberg
After the summer’s geography
of bodies, you are ribbed
seashell
stripped to moonlight,
mistaken for nautilus,
the antediluvian
Venus carved from her own bone.
Those tight-lipped mammary
cells abandoned, sour
milk in the sand, hot oceans
to undress in, and all
my fantasies buxom.
When the waves split
their tongues, I lie naked
in the surf and wait
for a second adolescence;
for bud-tipped breasts
to unearth
miniatures of mountain—
bluff, bulwark, weathered
arches carved teat to teat.
This is what’s left of God’s clay,
the unmolded archetype,
a female animal
undone, her gills turned to lungs
and set to walk upright
in the waning flood.
Those who see you will say prairie,
but you are hearth. They say empty,
but I say flower—
all petal, pistil, stem of you
bursting for touch.
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Jennifer Greenberg is a Floridian poet living in New England, and an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her writing appears in several online publications and was awarded the Joe Bolton Poetry Award in 2020.
by Kathy Jacobs
My friend won’t go sleeveless
because of her Czech arms.
She means her meaty upper arms,
arms like Ruben’s beauties,
artful arms that remind me of fictional
southern belles, mamas and grand-mamas
with flesh like bread dough,
moist and heavy.
I admire my friend’s solid arms
and her line of women who worked them
over a washboard.
Used them to wield a hoe and whip oxen;
assemble artillery casings and drape
over a flannel shoulder while
doing the two-step or polka.
Arms like mine from eastern Poland,
where they dug beets and potatoes.
Made the sign of the cross
and lit Sabbath candles, both.
A generation and two later
they wrung chicken necks,
planted gladiolus bulbs
and a daughter in the ground.
Learned to turn a steering wheel,
hurl a bowling ball
and carry a suitcase
away from a marriage.
Arms, in this life, that taught on a
blackboard and rocked some babies,
reached up at family weddings
to dance the YMCA, washed a father
on his deathbed now jiggle and flap
when I wave goodbye.
Today I’ll put on a sleeveless shirt,
grab my trowel and a bag of mixed bulbs.
Today I’ll plant gladioli. Row after row.
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Kathy Jacobs is a retired nursing professor who recently left the fellowship of gifted and generous Nebraska poets and is at play finding others in the Twin Cities. Her poems have been published in Plainsongs, The Comstock Review, and several anthologies from The Nebraska Writers Guild, including How It Looks from Here: Poetry from the Plains.
by Cynthia White
I root around in the box, wanting
to wear my mother’s pearls again
before I die. Or the tiny diamonds
my husband bought to court me,
veined turquoise from Taos,
amber, any amount of silver,
clip-on rhinestones—gorgeous
but sheer murder. One hot morning,
Bernadette the freckled, the brave,
plucked a ripe plum from her yard,
held it fast to my skull as she steered
a sewing needle through my unspoiled lobes.
I would have suffered worse—
and did, in truth—
to be a tramp in my mother's eyes.
Among sailors, a pierced ear once signified
the wearer had crossed the equator,
voyaged far and wide. I don’t know
who moved on, or away. I only know
that when I bled, she stooped
to swab the ruby drops with iodine,
gold hoops swinging.
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Cynthia White's poems have appeared in Adroit, Narrative, Massachusetts Review, Grist and ZYZZYVA among others. She was a finalist for Slapering Hol's 2021 Chapbook Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
by Susan Rich
Before the first quarter note
from the chorus you sing
delivers me musicals or psalms,
the day may irridesce
into an island razzle dazzle—
another Barukh atah Adonai
or a category six hurricane.
In your timbre: the certain heartbreak
or heart remake raging
at the end of a cordless line.
Doctor, may you be my once and only
dip into oncology and may this late
afternoon callback signal
our final sentences together.
Between us—the lamp of my life and
the diagnosis marks where I exist—
readied to return to the illuminated trees.
And so I set the phone to silence—
watch the kern as she crash-lands into the sea.
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Susan Rich is an award-winning poet, editor and essayist. She is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. In addition, she co-edited, with Ilya Kaminsky, the anthology The Strangest of Theatres, published by the Poetry Foundation. Rich has received awards from Peace Corps Writers, PEN USA, and the Fulbright Foundation. Recent poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland, and World Literature Today. Her fifth collection, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, Spring 2022. Visit her at poetsusanrich.com.
by Heather Lanier
There’s no popcorn for this movie,
no artful angles or Hitchcockian symbols—
the light fixtures show no likeness to boobs.
The boobs are boobs, splayed like sand-
filled socks over her belly, and a head, a head
is caught between her thighs, awaiting
the incredible task of the shoulders next,
and you who signed up for this can look
no more. The stack of blue birthing balls
condemn your averted gaze. What kind of mother
can’t watch one being made?
The camera stays faithful to the half-born
babe, at the point of no return but not turning
sideways so he can slip out. All things in due
time, says the nurse, and, He’s not breathing
but that’s okay, because he’s still got the cord.
No need to pry with metal a flower’s
unfolding. You get it. You’ve read the Tao
Teh Ching, love a good float in a pool,
but not today. You’re the panicked director
commanding hands—a doctor’s? a baker’s? —
to enter stage right and yank the baby out,
bring him into this world, this ornery,
full, fiery, seething, impatient,
oxygenated, awful, odd
beautiful world. Get him crying.
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Heather Lanier is the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks along with the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Her TED talk has been viewed over two million times. She works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University.
by Ann Dernier
by T. Le
by B.J. Buckley
Forty-eight frigid hours in a row
lambs fall bloody into wet fog
and snow, twins, triplets, fast one
on another—a hundred ewes bleating,
mounds of afterbirth, earth churned
to mud, dogs nervous and circling—
coyotes are out there, silent, waiting—
and how quick we must be to sort out
the dead, skin them to cover with sad
bloody shirts the rejects whose mothers
nosed them away—we shove the imposters
towards grieving ewes, crooning, here, here,
here's your sweet one—our jeans frozen
dark and wet to our thighs and our hands
red ice and the tired sheep tonguing
wet lumps of wool till they wobble
and stand to nurse.
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B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has taught in Arts-in-Schools/Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for over four decades. She has recent or forthcoming work in Sugar House Review, Whitefish Review, ellipsis, and Calyx. Her most recent book is Corvidae: Poems of Ravens, Crows, and Magpies (Lummox Press, 2014).
by Lisa Marie Oliver
by Richelle Buccilli
Cut apple, my son says.
He doesn’t understand the work of a blade,
why the male cardinal becomes September
in a tree, showing off his bold flame
like men on the street who whistle at me.
I always wanted a son. Now that I have,
how do I have a son and make him
the kind of man I want for a daughter?
Is it in the field of daisies I say to smell,
but not pick? Is it in my voice
as I comfort him, never demanding to be
a big boy, but instead yes, that hurt.
Is it the way he already knows to kiss
a baby doll made of plastic, her flimsy
eyelids and lashes shutting then opening
faster than seeing any wrong thing?
Maybe it’s in the love I want for myself.
The kind that holds promises like a child
does a pinecone. Small, and always wrapped
in a soft fist. Protecting, but never
diminishing. As if the child knows
something this primal can always be taken.
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Richelle Buccilli holds a BA in Creative Writing and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent, NELLE, Uppagus, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and Rattle, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son.
by Leslie Sainz
Our dwindling pink,
something like sovereignty,
our pillows stuffed
with fables.
We were acrobats
too young to fathom the constraints
of the body—your bad knees,
my selfish need to rise.
Outside, the crabgrass spreading
like scripture. Our father will abandon
this land too, will call it unsaveable.
Still, I stretch
my arms as if receiving.
You nest in hush,
and lift.
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Leslie Sainz is a first generation Cuban-American, born and raised in Miami, Florida. The recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Yale Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, AGNI, jubilat, Narrative, and others. A two-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received scholarships, fellowships, and honors from CantoMundo, The Miami Writers Institute, The Adroit Journal, and The Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. She is the managing editor of the New England Review. Her manuscript in progress has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series twice (2021, 2019) and a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, and the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.
by Merie Kirby
by Samika Swift
If I enter the Other Kingdom
before you don your own crown,
burn my earthly shell, that fleshy husk
and anoint the Superstitions with my ashes.
(so much paper to write postmortem poetry)
Make sure the watchful eyes of the guardians turn
toward my dusty remains which dance in desert crosswinds:
Shimmy, shimmy, serpent arms. Circle, reverse, pose.
I will bury my own bones inside
open flowers reaching from their needle beds;
cactus bees with pulsing wings of no more substance than
my diaphanous undercarriage will fly me from the nectar,
carrying a little of me back to our Texas
where I can sit with you on the front porch.
You can’t expect me to leave without you.
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Samika Swift writes from the huge fantastic city of Denton, Texas. When not restricted by a pandemic, she leads summer writing workshops for incarcerated youth. Her poetry can be found in Illya’s Honey and Dallas Poets Community’s anthology Cattlemen and Cadillacs and is forthcoming in Belt Magazine.
by Sara Eddy
Tucked up
in a strange blue bed
under the eaves
the mind of this house
by the lake has me held tight
like a gem in its mouth,
it has me close and new
and I’m making only
memories of this house.
Sears-built and funky,
hand-rigged cabinets in every room,
none of it is professional
none of it quite square or normal.
I’m a fresh new thing here;
made for this moment—
the tool at hand.
Outside the lake freezes
and my car crouches in the drive;
friends sleep narrowly
in the rooms below me,
but I’m in the rafters.
I’m unhooked from life.
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Sara Eddy's poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in the Threepenny Review, the Baltimore Review, and Spank the Carp. Her chapbook of poems about bees and beekeeping, Tell the Bees, was released in October of 2019 by A3 Press. Another poetry chapbook, Full Mouth, was published by Finishing Line Press in November 2020. She is Assistant Director of the writing center at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in nearby Amherst with a teenager, a black cat, a white dog, and three beehives.
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