by Maria S. Picone—수영
my grandmother scrawls a poem,
by Katie Berta
that it in fact wouldn’t even save my face, and slowly my fervor
for it died. Stopped watching the videos in which women
would cup their hands into a white basin of water to simulate
their evening routine, to wash their faces of the colored wax
they’d applied to them just for their videos, of their detergents and oils.
Stopped patting the water from the shower into my cheeks,
tapping never pulling, patiently pressing. The cheek
a sunken cheek, the skin a gray corpsish skin. A cheek that
no hydrator can revive. And in the mirror I see a gray corpsish
face, the kind of face that, if found at the foot of a stair
or curled stiffly around the lily mouth of a toilet bowl,
would signal that its owner has ceased to be. Being
old is fine, if no one can tell. But they obviously can. Being
ugly has no particular meaning attached to it
until some other person enters the room. Hard not to
crumble under the gaze, knowing what they see. Or,
thinking I know. No, it is intractable—it is the direction
I’m moving in, intractably. A crepiness that turns
into something you can stick your finger through,
to your horror, and they’re marketing you argan oil.
Lasers. Telling you to roll out the skin under your eyes
with jade. Fuck it. Staring at yourself in the mirror
as you wipe it all on feels more like dying than dying.
Feels as ugly as you feel, feeling your doom as you are.
Looking out from its gelid eye.
______________________________________________________________________
Katie Berta is the managing editor of The Iowa Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. You can find her criticism in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an Iowa Review Award.
by Carlie Hoffman
When the dawn gulls call
we meet them near the wharf’s edge.
There is wind. The ferryman
gone, quarters scattered
along the dock. The sun a rusted
knob unhounding light.
Our landscape: blond hills stretch
into more blond hills. Our tongues
stunned in observance of white-tails in the field.
Everywhere, unflinching, the public
glare of August. Never have we been
so involved with our bodies, the risk
of them. A sorrow soft
and punctual as antlers in bloom.
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Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), which is a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. Her second collection is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award. Her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents, and other publications. Carlie earned her MFA from Columbia University and is a Lecturer of Creative Writing at Purchase College-SUNY. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal and lives in Brooklyn.
by Catherine Strisik
Say it. Say. While standing
on your head: the Greek alphabet,
and I will toss you pennies. Keep going.
It’s an alphabet. It’s the first alphabet.
It’s the alphabet said by Alexander the Greek.
Say it. Alexander the Greek. Say Alexander the
Great. History says we are related by DNA.
No, but we really are. We are.
See my crooked teeth. Twenty-four
letters, chant as though we always existed: Antiquity, Ovum,
Alpha Beta Gamma,
that’s three pennies for you.
An alphabet that cries, waves, swoons
in the air at Delphi circling the stadium,
everybody’s running the length.
We sing in the alphabet where it becomes sumptuous,
and the alphabet is melodic when striking ancient.
Crescent. A blue root. Over here, a copper cup
with water for drinking and water for bathing
the inside of your mouth
when you speak fluently. Hear, my voice-
silhouetted-dedicated-life force
a warmed shape resembling Omega.
Round your lips. O-me-ga
Early mornings, it’s the smallest birds that perch
around the feeders, pick seed. And song.
Say: Epsilon, Iota.
A full mouth. Yes.
The crown of your head lights up the room,
and now scattered pennies.
______________________________________________________________________
Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is Taos, New Mexico’s 2nd Poet Laureate 2020-2021; is a recipient of 2020 Taoseña Award as Woman of Impact based on literary contribution; is author of Insectum Gravitis (finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award in Poetry 2020); The Mistress (awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song, and a recently completed manuscript And They Saw Me Turn To Hear Them (semi-finalist, Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, 2021). Numerous publications span over 30 years, including awards and Pushcart nominations, and with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. See cathystrisik.com.
by Danielle Lemay
For a month, my father’s sister slept
on the furry, black sleeper couch, spilling
red wine, breastmilk, baby drool, and spit-up.
She pocked the black fur with cigarette burns.
Drunk, she bought a crib, to go where?
When the heavy box arrived, she drunk-pushed
the load into the hallway and a staple
ripped a skid-line into the new linoleum.
We dropped the ruined couch at the dump.
The scar in the hall remained. My mother
greeted that skidded rip each time she entered
the house and when she walked barefoot
from the garage with a basket of clean clothes,
she felt that rough wound with her toes.
____________________________________________________________________
Danielle Lemay is a poet and scientist. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 and has appeared or is forthcoming in California Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, New Verse News, ONE ART, Limp Wrist Magazine, Lavender Review, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She lives in central California with her wife, two children, and six chickens.
by Emma Bolden
Having kept a list of dangers living
sick in the back of my throat, having
numbered the entrances & exigencies,
having taken note of the exits at both ends
of the plane knowing one is always behind me,
having kept to myself secrets, hands, a series
of descriptions that involve the word blood,
having up-buttoned the blouse & up-stitched
the hem, having whittled a half-inch off each
pair of heels, having walked only outside
of alleyways & under streetlamps, having learned
by fistblow, by bladetooth, having found myself
inside & safe & asking my door’s lock if safety is a myth
I have locked myself into believing in order to step
from my bed, having slid from the bed & onto my knees
& there offered the blank called God both gratitude
& supplication, having wondered if there can be gratitude
without supplication, having nonetheless given thanks
for storm clouds, sugar packets, dust mites & silence,
having prayed that the war is ending, having prayed
that the war has not yet begun, having lost teeth &
the concept of virginity, having called the absence
God & God an absence, having raw-picked
the scab, having stone-packed my pockets before walking
out of the river, having thanked the night for hiding
the dumb wasted furniture of what I call a life, having given
my best plans & laid down in the rain, having noticed
in the oil an iridescence spectacular, having held a winged
insect in my hand & seen on its wings the same
shimmer & sheen before it asked its wings to fly
again & I stood watching, having after all this no choice
but to stay here, to stand & to marvel, to see & to see.
______________________________________________________________________
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State UP), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Press). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review. Her memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022.
by Crystal C. Karlberg
for my daughter
I would like to say something
about this joy I feel from knowing you
are alive in the world sometimes
in your bedroom other times the trees
alone acknowledge me but no matter
because you are
somewhere even without me
the lines of you not like smoke
like permanent marker the un-
mistakable shape, the shape of my love
the shape of my body not mothers
or sisters I share that only with you
There is a picture
I’m holding you next to the mailbox
There is a picture of you
sitting in the orchard just before
you tried to run
She’ll always come back, I thought
drawn in as it were by the earthquake
of my love shaking not
with fear but with delight
because you are. With your short hair
and your doe-eyed twinkle twitching
your way through some forest or other
some wooded haven I can almost see
my coiled love for you releasing and
releasing as sails fill with unfamiliar
air you cut your teeth on beach glass
remember deer tracks in the sand and
following to learn the story
look how deep the marks all night
I smash bottles against rocks so you
will always have something
to search for. The possibilities are
______________________________________________________________________
Crystal C. Karlberg is a Library Assistant at her local public library in Massachusetts. She is a speaker for Greater Boston PFLAG. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Nixes Mate, and Oddball Magazine.
by Momo Manalang
—for my mother
She wore a tongue collapsing between
a native ring and a Westerner’s thunder,
traced her name from a typhoon’s mouth–
its petrichor bearing Haiyan’s accent.
She married the maid’s broom,
cleansing boats across the Pacific’s lips
of marine backwash, backwash, backwash;
oceans warbling in English and Pampango.
Somewhere in the belly of her province
nanay lit votives, holy in glass sheath.
She was brought to the Americas without
a language to mother, absent of its flame.
What remains prophetic of the Immigrant?
Bodies of neighborhoods reimagined,
bodies of borders exposed,
origin melting into colorless waters.
______________________________________________________________________
Momo Manalang is a queer Filipino-American writer and community organizer. She is the Vice-Chair of GABRIELA New York, a militant women’s organization fighting for National Democracy in the Philippines with a socialist perspective. Her work entails waging local campaigns in defense of the Filipino people’s human rights and welfare. She currently resides in Little Manila Queens.
by Pam Sinicrope
by Sheila Dong
by Kara Knickerbocker
by Ariel Machell
There are no snapdragons to pinch, only sheets
of moss strung up on low-hanging branches
by the river where rocks shine red like meat.
The sun slivers through the veiny gaps, bringing heat,
and yellow lupine blankets the water’s edge in patches,
but there are no snapdragons to pinch, only sheets
folded twice on the bank for sitting, nice and neat,
where we’ve come this afternoon to eat our lunches
by the river where rocks shine red like meat.
The place has changed but smells just as sweet.
Pollen floats down to rest in our lashes,
though there are no snapdragons to pinch, only sheets
and ribbons of plump blackberries, which secrete
a juice that glistens like blood and splashes
by the river where rocks shine red like meat.
We remembered snapdragons, last time we came to eat.
They’d open their mouths when we’d squeeze at their latches,
but there are no snapdragons here to pinch, only sheets
of roaring river where rocks shine red like meat.
____________________________________________________________________
Ariel Machell is a poet from California. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2021. Her work has been published in Gravel, Verdad, Landlocked, and Up the Staircase Quarterly.
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Rise before the sun,
help it over the horizon,
sit in a silent room,
walk on the rain,
sliver the day
into breaths,
& swallow
desire.
____________________________________________________________________
Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. 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) with another book forthcoming in 2023. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com
by Jeri Theriault
by Traci Brimhall
by Olivia Torres
by Jen Schalliol Huang
Appearances deceive. You’d like to think
I sprouted, fresh with dew, unfurled, grew
toward the sun to pink my baby cheeks.
As if I was a thing of grace. As if
I didn’t bite. As if I’d never striped
malnutrition into my enamel
and raised the gumline sharpening my maw.
I teethed on paper ‘til I started fires
in my own dry-boned mouth and then exhaled
flames just like a dragon. Like a myth. But
real. Touch me. I’m not scaled, nor a
figment. I have loved myself to softness,
cauterized and kissed closed every wound
with my own tiger’s tongue. In forgiveness.
Invoking blessings. I am plush with them.
______________________________________________________________________
Jen Schalliol Huang is a disabled poet living pondside in Massachusetts. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her chapbook, Means of Access, was printed through the Kenyon Review. She reads for [PANK] and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her work has been featured in Cincinnati Review, Flock, RHINO, The Shore, Sou’wester, Shenandoah, and others. Twitter: @jenschalliol.
by Diamond Forde
“hoes said they wish a bitch would, & I’m a genie” -Megan Thee Stallion
ain’t got much ass but I’ma grip it
make him catch it with his hips
two of us ridin’ to the music I puppet
through my dips real hot girl shit
liquored & liking the magic I cast
when I throw it back fat & nasty
bought a floor length mirror just to catch myself
in its glances this heft this happiness
Megan you mother an era of girls
taught them to be savage
& scholar to admire their long pink
tongues—loud girls large girls
you knew before it happened
that men stay tryna make us dance
but we twerkin’ for our damn selves
musty bullet-proof unrepentantly hot
______________________________________________________________________
Diamond Forde is the author of Mother Body, with Saturnalia Books. She is a Callalloo and Tin House Fellow whose work has appeared in Obsidian, Frontier Poetry, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and more. She currently lives in Asheville, NC with her partner and their dog.
by Jill Kitchen
what if you are your own secret affair
the warm breath you turn to in the ticking
dark of a sleepless night the liquid glow of skin
you take into the shower in the afternoon
pj harvey's rock and roll strum her low
full-throated whisper pulsing against tile
what if you are the one who finds your own shape
attractive struck by the moonglow from within
who sees your own silhouette undressed and
takes in everything that this body has been through
all the ways it has grown into this knowing
wise against the silt edge of the world
wind-brushed and beaten by sun
eyes crackle-creased by laughter
the buttered pear of mothering, this near mane reaching
toward earth, these guitar curves of hips
you have become the one you wear red lipstick for
buy the black lace edged underwear for
dance the flamenco for, pulling imaginary apples
from low tangled branches over and over
with a trill of long, piano-loving fingers
you have become the one you write sonnets for
the one you sing for with your widest-sky voice
against these soft outer walls of snow
fragile with the still broken spring
you are become this woman that you built
from treebark and the hidden stones of other countries
from salamander sheen and desert crossings
from the way each different language feels on your tongue
in the just waking tremble of your mouth
in the oracle of your heart muscle, once struck silent
you are become this woman you burned for fought for
drove across the continent in the middle of the night for
this green-eyed woman mirrored back
who summons her city within
you are still writing this woman song
______________________________________________________________________
Jill Kitchen's work appears in FERAL, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Trestle Review, and is forthcoming from HAD. She has a B.A. in Romance languages from Colorado College and has studied creative writing at UCLA, Columbia University, The Poetry Project in New York City, and with Hollowdeck Press in Boulder. She lives in Boulder, Colorado where she can be found rollerskating on the creek path while searching for great horned owls. Twitter: @jillkitchen.
by Melissa Studdard