by Natalie Martell
April 2020
unable to sleep, i stare at blue light
late into the night—death tolls, ransacked shelves,
bleeding maps. poison, but also remedy—
abby’s message about violets & morels in her yard,
your photo of a home altar: red cloth
holding oak cross, water & flame, dried lavender,
cedar, a rosary of small moons. i think of your craving
for touch & ask the moonlight to brush fingers
through your hair in seattle. soak you in glowing
until you drip with it. somehow, mom, the days keep
breaking. spring is a myth every year
until it unfurls. still, my body is a molting tree—
at the slightest wind i flake shards of myself
to the dirt, falling a hundred times over. instead of working,
i read about microbial life surviving in frozen lava
beneath the ocean floor. inside microscopic fissures
& the pressure of atmospheres, the cells shiver,
alive. i gaze at van gogh paintings
on the met website. the full image shows a fused
landscape, but mom, in the close-ups, the scene
shatters. iridescent movement blooms in wet ribbons,
writhing like fish. i can witness each reckless flight
of the artist’s hand, rendering cypress & wheat
from tangled ochre, titanium, ultramarine. all is illuminated:
the anguish of his gestures, the quivering gashes of darkness
where time has fractured the strokes. why does beauty
make me ache? the brushstrokes sing & grate
against my bones. mom, i saw your bird again
today. i believe you sent it from cherry-blossomed streets
lined with boarded-up windows. on a branch outside
my room, a black-capped chickadee’s two-note song
bends down as though to mourn, as though in prayer.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natalie Martell is a queer writer living in southern Minnesota and working with adults with different abilities. She received her MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Flyway, and elsewhere.
by Natalie Martell
April 2020
unable to sleep, i stare at blue light
late into the night—death tolls, ransacked shelves,
bleeding maps. poison, but also remedy—
abby’s message about violets & morels in her yard,
your photo of a home altar: red cloth
holding oak cross, water & flame, dried lavender,
cedar, a rosary of small moons. i think of your craving
for touch & ask the moonlight to brush fingers
through your hair in seattle. soak you in glowing
until you drip with it. somehow, mom, the days keep
breaking. spring is a myth every year
until it unfurls. still, my body is a molting tree—
at the slightest wind i flake shards of myself
to the dirt, falling a hundred times over. instead of working,
i read about microbial life surviving in frozen lava
beneath the ocean floor. inside microscopic fissures
& the pressure of atmospheres, the cells shiver,
alive. i gaze at van gogh paintings
on the met website. the full image shows a fused
landscape, but mom, in the close-ups, the scene
shatters. iridescent movement blooms in wet ribbons,
writhing like fish. i can witness each reckless flight
of the artist’s hand, rendering cypress & wheat
from tangled ochre, titanium, ultramarine. all is illuminated:
the anguish of his gestures, the quivering gashes of darkness
where time has fractured the strokes. why does beauty
make me ache? the brushstrokes sing & grate
against my bones. mom, i saw your bird again
today. i believe you sent it from cherry-blossomed streets
lined with boarded-up windows. on a branch outside
my room, a black-capped chickadee’s two-note song
bends down as though to mourn, as though in prayer.
_______________________________________________________________
Natalie Martell is a queer writer living in southern Minnesota and working with adults with different abilities. She received my MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Flyway, and elsewhere.
by Lupita Eyde-Tucker
I don’t need anything
from your trip across town
though I always wrack my brain
for that elusive thing
that might complete the chore,
the day, perhaps my life.
I don’t need anything
from the store, nothing
that can be bought or sold
definitely not one more thing
to add to the pile of things
filling up my closets now.
I don’t need anything, really,
except a moment of your time
to look at this picture of a duck.
It’s not a great picture,
But that’s not the point,
you see, I am the duck.
Indulge me a moment longer.
to look at the duck a different way.
See something new?
It’s also a picture of a rabbit.
I am the rabbit. Yes, I can also be a rabbit.
I don’t need anything. Nothing
bought or sold, but thanks
for taking time to look at my picture,
which is really what I want most.
But please—don’t get stuck on the rabbit.
I am still, and will also always be, the duck.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lupita Eyde-Tucker writes and translates poetry in English and Spanish. She's the winner of the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize for Poetry, and her poems appear in Nashville Review, Asymptote, Columbia Journal, Raleigh Review, Women's Voices for Change, Yemassee, and Chautauqua. She's currently translating two collections of poetry by Venezuelan poet Oriette D'Angelo. Lupita and her husband live and homeschool their children in Florida. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Florida. Read more of her poems at: www.NotEnoughPoetry.com
by Mary Block
A little bitter, like eating a grapefruit
with my grandfather,
with his tiny, toothy knife
designed specifically for the job.
A father of daughters,
he’d learned how to eat without wincing.
He knew how to leave for work
or whatever.
To leave the girls at home.
The boys catch sharks and barracuda
in a boat roaring back at the ocean
cracking against its rigid hull.
This city was built to defy the weather.
It was pulled from the sea
by boat builders in exile—
people raised with the knowledge
that pigeon and dove are two shades
of the same bird.
Between my dreams I tried to remember
the name for a lookout.
Nest came back to me first, then crow.
I blessed my boy with the flesh
of a sour fruit, with salt,
with the sign of the cross.
The school has hired a guard with a gun
but still.
I fed my boy my body
for so long.
_______________________________________________________________
Mary Block is a Miami-born, Miami-based poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Sonora Review, and others. Her poems can be read online at SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net finalist, A Ruth Lilly Fellowship finalist, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. More at www.maryblock.net
by Natalia Conte
Like all dark moments, their entrance
begins with cello, a low grating C
like the bow of a ship digging into ice.
I know there’s danger in the rippling
of sound, the way the air seems to boil
with urgency. Of course, this signals
their arrival, the aliens, their bodies like hands
reaching from halted wrists.
Dr. Banks keeps her hands close
to her body to stop them from shaking.
She scrawls the word human
on a small whiteboard, points inward.
Drawn in dense billows of ink,
their language chases its own tail
does not distinguish between beginnings
and endings. We cannot write with two hands
synchronously, our mind can’t know
where the phrase may go if given the chance
to roam. I am more conscious of my hands
than ever before, the way they hang, palmy,
like nothing good. I wish I could stop
their tendency to reach for everything,
try to cradle every moment in case
it’s the last of its kind, a near
extinct species. Moments of sharing
sweat with strangers under concert light,
bodies being stirred into movement by the
same beat. Empty gestures of goodbyes
when we knew we would see each other
soon. Touching hands without glass between.
I’ve never wanted to hold anything like I want
to hold language like a mathematician
break its parts into sequences
and make small moments
mean more. I want an algorithm
for the feeling of fearing
your own kind, a lack
of variables in the equation
for compassion. I want
to touch each syllable where the
meaning lives, watch them quake
under the tug of my pen, its little billow.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natalia Conte is an MFA candidate at NC State University for Poetry. She has been previously published in So To Speak Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, and others. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and is an assistant poetry editor at Narrative Magazine. She works at a busy coffee shop in Raleigh, NC where she also resides with her tiny black cat Zen.
by Maria Teresa Horta translated by Edite Cunhā and M.B. McLatchey
São os versos
os crepúsculos
são os dias
são os mares
a saliva
a mão aberta
na luz de bruços
ao meio-dia
são os gestos abissais, a dor incerta
São os verbos
os segredos
a alquimia
são os doces
lábios
e o seu excesso
os impulsos do gesto
onde se erguia
o contorno do corpo mais perverso
São as vozes
singulares
as melodias
são os rigores
das formas
mais diversas
a inventarem-se só
porque impediam
uma ansiosa posse tão incerta
São as sílabas
intactas
as utopias
o torpe
o passado
o pesadelo
sonhado durante
a alvorada
o suor alagando o meu cabelo
São as dúvidas, possivelmente a noite
no labor da escrita desatada
tudo aquilo que é táctil e por dentro
se enovela no fio da madrugada
Por vezes surge ainda um gesto mais sedento
e em seguida o voo, o golpe de uma faca
no lado voraz do pensamento
quando o amor não quer dizer mais nada
They’re the verses
the twilight
they’re the days
they’re the seas
the saliva
the open hand
in the back-light
at noon
they’re the abyssal gestures, the uncertain pain
They’re the verbs
the secrets
the alchemy
they’re the sweet
lips
and their excess
the impulses of the gesture
where rose up
the contour of the body most perverse
They’re the voices
singular
the melodies
they’re the rigors
of the forms
most diverse
inventing themselves simply
because they prevented
an anxious possession so uncertain
They’re the syllables
intact
the utopias
the clumsy
the past
the nightmare
dreamt during
the dawn
the sweat drenching my hair
They’re the doubts, possibly the night
in the labor of unfettered writing
everything that is tactile and internal
entwines itself in the thread of dawn
Sometimes an even more thirsty gesture surges
and then the flight, the stroke of a knife
to the voracious side of reflection
when love has nothing more to say
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Teresa Horta was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1937. At 82 years old, Horta continues to be recognized for her association with two fellow poets, Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa. In 1971, during the fascist Estado Novo regime, the three women (known thereafter as “The Three Marias”) wrote a collaborative work entitled Novas Cartas Portuguese (New Portuguese Letters). The book was banned, resulting in a trial that attracted worldwide attention and identified the three writers as feminist icons. In 1974 the regime fell, and the charges were dropped. Nevertheless, the imprint of an oppressive regime endured for Horta—both in her consciousness and in her poetry.
Horta has always considered herself, first and foremost, a poet. She has published 21 collections of poetry. She has also worked as a journalist for several Lisbon publications during the 1960s (one of the few women to do so) and interviewed such renowned literary figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Christa Wolf. She edited the magazine, Mulheres (Women), and wrote plays and fiction pieces. She is most renowned as a poet and political activist. She lives in Portugal.
Edite Cunhā is a writer, artist, and activist who believes that creativity can transform the individual as well as society. She leads multi-media art and writing workshops for people of all ages. Cunhā has a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Massachusetts.
M.B. McLatchey earned her graduate degree in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, her Master of Art in Teaching at Brown University, and her B.A. from Williams College. She was awarded the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal; she won the 2013 May Swenson Award for her debut poetry collection, The Lame God (Utah State Univ. Press), and Finalist Place in the New Women’s Voices Competition for her book Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). Her most recent book, Beginner’s Mind, will be published with Regal House Publishing in 2021 and explores the question, “How should we educate our children?” Currently serving as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, she is an Associate Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com.
by Katherine Fallon
I kept finding your things: a drop of blood
that took root in the carpet of your bedroom,
your mother's antique trivet, the Beta fish
we got together. He was red, or violent blue,
and lived in a canning jar. He was the seven
swift cuts along your arm when he swam
like a whip toward his food, was the current
at thaw, the sound of ice floes crashing
against the river’s still-frozen banks, the days
we forgot him for each other. I loved him
more with you gone. One night I left him
by the window too long and he grew a suit
of hirsute frost. In places, he glowed through
the dull rime, lustrous as mineral, much like
the way your makeshift tourniquet—
bleached white dishcloth I held with one hand
as we rushed through town in the snow—
had bloomed into showmanship.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Katherine Fallon is the author of The Toothmaker's Daughters (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Juked, Meridian, Foundry, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. She shares domestic space with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.
by Jessica Cuello
I turned five years old
forty years ago and sat
on the back steps waiting
for my father for a visit
Waiting for his last visit
my back to the house
on the gravel steps
where the railing rusted
loose in the cement rusted
off and the house was
condemned When the landlord
died the metal and gravel crumbled
back into earth crumbled
into dust except the basement
stayed behind still intact
Even in the ancient
world outlines of ancient
houses stay Tourists kneel
on the ground to touch the sites
Mostly they make a single visit
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jessica Cuello is the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. New poems can be found or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, On the Seawall, Jet Fuel Review, Tinderbox, and Image. She is co-poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review.
by Emma Miao
He’s twirling three feet
ahead of the reporter’s yellowed boots,
searching for prey before migrating south.
Someone’s thrown rotten cheese into
the lake, leftover from pasta night, a fuzzy
cube half-buried under pebbles, visible
in the moonlit clear. The catfish eyes it, brushing
with its silver whiskers. A twitch later, it’s gone.
It has been a month since I could taste anything.
Catfish find aromas irresistible,
unlike me, eyes closed, struggling to remember
the taste of charred chicken. Catfish have a hundred
thousand taste buds within and around
their blue-black bodies, while I lay here, lemon
juice running down my chin, aching for a fizzle
on the tongue, to peel
back this numb, wet mouth,
the promise of zest dancing on the wind.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Emma Miao is a Chinese-Canadian poet from Vancouver, BC. Her poems appear in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Emerson Review, Rising Phoenix Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. The winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest 2020 and a finalist for the Yemmasee Poetry Contest 2020, Emma is a Commended Foyle Young Poet 2019, a COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Fellow, and an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Her spoken word + piano album, Oscillation, is forthcoming this winter. Tweet her @emmaamiao.
by Geula Geurts
I used to be the wind, not the veil fluttering in its path.
I used to be the veil, not the woman obscured, a white flag
waving over her face, surrendered. I swore I’d never marry
& here I am, pressed into a delicate dress, twelve weeks
of fetus simmering inside. I am hemmed
into a laugh, drunk under the scaffold of canopy, smile
bright with heartburn. Has anyone noticed?
I used to have one heart, not three trembling all at once.
The lilies in my bouquet are just another smell I can’t bear.
One more week & I could’ve let my mammal loose.
I used to suck in my tummy for fun. What is a façade
without the bones behind it, the bedrock upon which we stand?
I want to grab the microphone & say it: there was no will you
marry me? My love looked beyond my skeleton and said:
will you be the mother of my children? A proposal that ended
in unprotected hunger. The rest is a spectacle of wedding.
For family, friends. The ring is the umbilical cord, the placenta
is the vow. I count three flashes of jagged light
when I close my eyes. One for each of my animal hearts.
The happiest day of my life? I was so ravenous I could’ve eaten
the groom. I didn’t, and that is called sacrifice.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Geula Geurts is a Dutch-born poet and essayist living in Jerusalem. She is a graduate of the Shaindy Rudolph Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Her mini chapbook, Like Any Good Daughter, was published by Platypus Press. She was named a finalist in the 2018 Autumn House Chapbook Contest and a semifinalist in the 2020 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, The Penn Review, Blood Orange Review, New South, River Heron Review, Tinderbox Editions, and Counterclock, among others. She works as a literary agent at the Deborah Harris Agency.
by Elizabeth Vignali
Clouded sky, a huckleberry moon
hidden up there somewhere. It’s night
nearly all day. I think about you
and your pocketful of paper matches
gone damp in the rain. The convocation
of flares we left behind. My pocketful
of cigarette butts, my pocketful of ash.
How many hearts broken between us
and pasted back together with the sticky
remains of rum and chewing gum.
Once I thought your voice would save me.
I’m sorry for that. In the dark I walk
the labyrinth lined with pebbles
and seashells and smooth broken
bits of green bottles and remember
July’s light: campfire, a setting sun,
flashlight beams stravaging the trail,
waves shocked into bioluminescence,
each flame struck tender and vincible
and in a flash extinguished.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Vignali is the author of three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press 2019), and the forthcoming poetry collection, House of the Silverfish (Unsolicited Press 2021). Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works as an optician, produces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading series, and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review.
by Esther Sadoff
Like windows between windows,
solid air encapsulates the space between us.
A faint shadow separates sight from occurrence.
My thoughts overflow into the distant
horizon like Rapunzel lingering in extremity,
weaving last-minute silk into ladders.
Her tears restored vision
to a prince who still felt far away,
as if touching a thing meant you could keep it,
as if the world were made of balconies
spilling onto other balconies,
as if all you had to do was let your hair
down and see who climbed back up.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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 The 2River View, The Bookends Review, River River, SWIMM Every Day, Marathon Literary Review, Sunspot Literary Journal, West Trade Review, and River Mouth Review.
by Chloe Firetto-Toomey
Three sections inspired by eco-documentaries
Mum and I visit the Sistine Chapel and agree
it is one ornate question: cherubs with spears,
gold-threaded shadows, massacres in the tapestries.
People gather like crows or cells or clouds, taking pictures.
Michelangelo’s distant fingers
so high, the altar so small.
Recall Sagrada Familia, doves chiseled in the masonry.
Gaudi’s lungs of light, harnessing
every hue in stoned-carved hallows—
This is how man should capture everything.
Witness the body’s departure
:: shaped by wind, carved into the mouths of birds ::
:: a pyre flickers on still water ::
two modes of reckoning.
Snub-nosed monkeys
in robes, munching lichen.
A circus of parrots in the canopies.
Jellyfish, immortal, unless eaten.
Is death another word for home;
departure or arrival?
:: :: ::
Walking with the archeologist
along the old river line
scanning for clam-shell clusters,
conch spines, divots in the bedrock.
He stops to select an oblong object
from the dirt. Coprolite, he says,
fossilized human shit, and holds it up for me.
A dark and slender root which he places in a Ziploc.
We wander to the edge of Little River,
:: glimpse the water :: as you might glimpse ::
patches of sky from a New York alleyway.
Styrofoam icebergs dissipate to snow balls::
mint flotsam, peppered and oiled;
an abandoned washing machine
embedded in the riverbed.
All our empty packages
tripped up-wind,
to crowd
gutters,
to settle
here on surface
and seabed.
Then, movement: a paddle-tail
disturbs the rubbled water,
dislodges plastic bags and bottles—
two manatees surface, wastelands bob
against their large grey bodies.
It could be a clip from an eco-documentary, I say,
manatees return home as guests. [1]
:: :: ::
There's nothing wild. There's no wilderness. It's all home [2]
A freighter ship trundles through the arctic sea
dwarfing icebergs
black bow
arrowing the hazed water
:: a polar bear curled on the black rocks
hind legs tucked
to elbows
head bowed
on fore-paw
mourning the vibrancy of glaciers ::
Did a wild and invasive species take refuge in us
while we were sleeping?
Gannets nosedive
for the secrets sardines keep
while the world binges
on moon pies, medias, and
food-shaped candy,
heads turned away from the window.
90 percent of the goods we consume are brought to us by ship. [3]
[1] “24 Snow” directed by Mikhail Barynin (Environmental film festival)
[2] Ray Reitze in “Guided” directed by Bridget Besaw (Environmental film festival)
[3] "Freightened: The Real Price of Shipping " directed by Denis Delestrac
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Chloe Firetto-Toomey has an MFA degree from Florida International University. She taught nonfiction at Everglades Correctional Institution (pre-lockdown), and is an author assistant. She is a two-time finalist in Tupelo Quarterly's Prose Open Contest and a finalist in Diagram's chapbook contest. She won the 2017 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry and 2020 Scotti Merrill Award for poetry. Her chapbook of poems, Little Cauliflower, was published in 2019 by Dancing Girl Press.
by Preeti Vangani
Strip the cloak of clichés
you've buried yourself under,
there are better graves to ghost.
Look, the gray whales are dying,
socialism has been aborted
in an American womb,
and your father isn't your father
like he used to be—less stone, more salt.
If you must gin, give it lime
& spine, don't permit grief
to whitewash you
in the suburban gloom
I worked 24/7 to repaint.
Zipline on the rift of
my unspent anger. Our unused
skillet shines for you, kiss
its engraved initials, PV.
Could be me, could be you.
Record the seasons I couldn't:
isolation, Internet and TikTok.
I hear they have a dimension now
which can bring any wild animal
into your room through a screen.
Make me a tiger. Grow taller
than monsoon grass. I'll walk
through you and nobody will know.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet and personal essayist. Born and raised in Mumbai, she is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions), her first book of poems (selected as the winner of RL India Poetry Prize.) Her work has been published in BOAAT, Gulf Coast, and Threepenny Review, among other journals. She is the Poetry Editor for Glass Journal, a Poet Mentor at Youth Speaks, and holds an MFA (Writing) from University of San Francisco.
by Natalie Staples
Allure leather, sequin blue tube top,
velvet whimsy 115 shoes,
I let my heart go where it wants:
the dizzy twirl of the rack
spinning, how we’d flip through blue
mining for the glint of power.
I miss the ease of climbing stairs to your door.
You aren’t here to tell me the right fit—
good gold heel with the violet clutch,
lipstick print nightgown, the red dress on sale
with a tire-like stain. What lasts after dust.
This is not our mad rush, J.Crew to H&M,
Forever 21’s slit dress, how I learned,
began to learn, about beauty, lace at my torso.
Sky blue with gold buttons, a pair
of steel bones, I find a bustier: what we’d wear
in our girls’ apartment. How we gathered:
love and a flat iron in your hand,
what is a face mask? Does this go?
Eyeshadow and glitter flickered on the carpet.
You brushed my face with quiet attention.
We make do with borrowed things,
holding their shine on our cheekbones.
The heart flies to delicacy like this.
Friends staring into a vanity mirror
or black velvet bows, those whimsy shoes,
how we fall in a dark twister:
this daze of color and cool texture:
where wind knocks thick glass,
windows rattle in their frames,
and a hard blast lifts the house,
clear off the foundation to its own wild design.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natalie Staples grew up outside of Philadelphia. She received a B.A. from Kenyon College in 2014. After graduation, she served as an AmeriCorps member and Program Associate for The Schuler Scholar Program, a college access program in the Chicago area. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Oregon. She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This is her first published poem.
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
“I’m returning in three days. Don’t wash.”
—From a love letter Napoleon sent to Josephine
I touch myself so I can savvy what you rut in. Bring my fingers to my mouth, imagine you in our bed, returned from the three-day fray, redolent of the weight of the world, and me, your dirty, dirty girl, naked, eager, as you make your way down, breathing in my hair, my lips, the sweet spot where neck meets collarbone. I’ve made a religion of your fantasies, a science of what you desire. That ferine moan, my always startled gasp at first thrust. I angle, cocked hips, a bit askew, arched for maximum penetration. Our bed is a rocket launch, a bacchanal, a pelican’s steep dive into the sea. For Michael, my first love, I used the freshening wipe before I arrived, so as not to offend. I spread myself wide on his bed, confident, watching the top of his head (black curls) as he explored me — that fear of not being Summer’s Eve™ fresh, worried my pussy might disenchant, the musk of me — all wiped away. He raised his head. Next time, Michael said, don’t wash.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Cleaver, Diode, SWWIM, Poetry East, Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s authored five poetry collections, most recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019). Her sixth collection, EROTIC: New & Selected, publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. See more at www.alexisrhonefancher.com.
by Michele Troutman
Jim Crow. Jimmy Buffet. Jim Bean
crack
-corn
white waters
rafting
black and brown bodies
sink
mama never taught me how to swim
frivolous work
endeavor another day
Jimmy
paddles
in the deep end
laughing
-sans duress
laps round’ rope
me, I
keep on keeping on
questioning strokes
for bodies made to float
_____________________________________________________________________
Michele Troutman is a Maryland native living in Boston. She is a proud Black woman. She is also a lover of science, coffee, fundamental rights, and her stout cat “Brady.” This is her debut.
by Susana H. Case
Remember Nim Chimpsky,
in his red knit sweater,
the chimpanzee that thought
he was human, learned to sign stone
when he wanted to smoke a joint?
Not made for complex language,
later he lived alone,
sad and immobile, inside a pen.
He asked for beer and oranges.
Give orange me give eat orange me eat
orange give me eat orange give me you.
You may be going blind,
my doctor’s words bite me:
yellow deposits of drusen in the eye,
and I rush to order the nutrients
he claims are my only hope,
capsules too big to swallow.
I shuffle between writing directives
for when I am dead, and wanting
to bonfire the papers.
If I were a pine, my rough barked arms
would stretch toward the sun.
I wouldn’t worry about eyes or words.
They’re selling pods now,
to grow death’s ashes into trees.
Give capsule me give swallow
capsule me swallow capsule give me
swallow capsule give me you.
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Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train in 2020 from Broadstone Books, in which “Sign” appears as the final poem. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. She can be reached at www.susanahcase.com
By Emma Wynn
I brought the sheet from home
but not them—
the little one who pinches my breasts
with cold fingers and
pushes the blankets off us both
even as I pull them back,
all night long.
And the bigger boy, rolled
in his own blanket with his face
to the wall,
who kicks me in the darkness
with untrimmed toenails.
From their parted lips, the slow
sweet breath of corpses.
In this stranger’s thin bed
I keep waking,
arms hanging off to emptiness
on both sides, while
on the floor, the white stripes of dawn
brighten like steel
and lie heavy,
as if I could hold them
the light
in both hands.
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