by Cindy Veach
You make me think of pewter, sticky on the inside
by Mary Block
Having coalesced around you, how I love you.
You are the one I breathe through the night for.
I take flesh in my mouth each day and chew
it into something that serves you, something more
than I can give you. I try to teach you what I know,
adopted child, about the past. The hunger and grief
of the bodies that taught you to survive in snow
you’ve never seen, to bare your teeth
at anyone getting too close to your kids
or your sweet, soft life. And all the times I endured
your laxatives and relaxers, I knew that you did
it to protect me, to make less of me to hate. Be sure
that I love you. And, of course, that I’ll outlive you.
And you haven’t asked, but of course, I forgive you.
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Mary Block lives and writes in her hometown of Miami, Florida. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mudfish, Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications. Her work can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
by Yashasvi Vachhani
After Patricia Smith
Don’t shroud them, your thunder
thighs. Unsack & air your thunder
thighs. Hoist them up. Setubandh
to the sun—an offering, not a blunder
thighs. Release them. Rainbows
in an oil spill, formerly asunder
thighs. Peacock them. In the streets
wilderness of wonder
thighs. Tandav a revolution. Oh Yash!
Unshackle. Your thunder. Thighs.
*Setubandh is the Sanskrit name of the bridge pose.
*Tandav is Lord Shiva’s dance of fury.
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Yashasvi Vachhani is a curator and facilitator of children's programmes in Mumbai. Her poem was recently published in Of Dry Tongues and Brave Heart, an anthology for women's poetry. She loves, reading, writing and the colour yellow.
by Ruth Williams
Grandma's
stretched the quilt
around the hoop.
Her needle's rhythm,
a casual puncture.
Across the cloth, holes
you can hardly see.
I have always wanted to sew,
but my hands knotted,
couldn't follow.
When I was young,
I wished hard to be measured
by a man's hands.
A biblical knowledge,
no woman could explain to me.
The thread fills the space
the fabric makes for it, as if
it too had waited its whole life
for a grander design.
It wasn't what I thought.
Grandma says,
trace the tree’s motherline: my body
to my sisters' to my mother's to my grandmother's
just as the thread’s green spreads
to the leaves' jade tips.
Our shadows,
a knowledge
I can cool my need
beneath.
______________________________________________________________________
Ruth Williams is the author of a poetry collection, Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and two chapbooks, Nursewifery (Jacar Press, 2019) and Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at William Jewell College.
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
I wonder about vulnerability. Envisage. How my third metacarpal
smacks into wood & the purples surface skin long before tender
before my eyes package up the scene for nerve cells to detect
in a type of mystery only cells talking solves. I carve a love poem
to my body inside the skull, in hopes all eyes roll back far enough
to read my inscription in shitty penmanship. In maturation outside
the womb, to explain our thinking means a study of brain chemicals,
electric signals, neurons as neighbors—cityscapes under flesh. Our
thoughts propagate in neuron fire. Waves of waves of waves—signals
of us, compounds in coalesce. Peel us back to reveal a galaxy of burning
hydrogen & helium & churn of nuclear forges in our guts; heaven
held in the pin pricks of pin pricks. My body a constellation of elements
of stars gone supernova—transient & astronomical my atoms—stellar
fusion gives me assemblage in a last evolutionary stage before explosion.
______________________________________________________________________
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, April 2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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