by Clayre Benzadón
tonight I wedge
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by Kate Sweeney
When she left home at 17, pregnant, and holding only a bottle of whiskey,
the neighbors wondered what had gone wrong.
I think it was that her father was her first boyfriend.
When I see family pictures, I still get uncomfortable, his arm pressed against hers.
I only said it out loud once, to my cousin, her favorite son. We were six.
He slapped me hard across the face, open-handed, and then kissed me with tongue.
His name was also Edward, just like my grandfather.
She started drinking water exclusively from a thimble the day after he died.
It was all she would allow herself, even on Friday during Lent.
She didn’t start smoking unfiltered cigarettes in defiance of her parents.
He got her hooked after he fucked her on lunch break. According to my mother,
she never did anything but fill an extra fridge in her basement with tubs of
orange sherbet, cartons of Lucky Strikes, and white chocolate Whitman’s samplers.
We shared a cigarette at my grandmother’s funeral. Were you ever alone with him?
I do remember once he took out his teeth as a game, but I never spoke to him again.
She nodded. Good, she said, picking the tobacco off of the tip of her tongue.
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Kate Sweeney has poems forthcoming in Adanna Literary Journal, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Ethel Zine. She is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a political marketing executive.
by Lois Roma-Deeley
“ Egyptian Woman Disguised Herself as a Man for 43 Years”
—New York Times
If you had asked me, I would have told you
why I dressed in these pants and tunic,
tied a green scarf around my close-cropped hair,
smoked cigarettes, spoke rough and low—
why I harvested crops,
hauled cement, lifted bricks,
cleaned the dust and dirt off a thousand shoes
with nothing more to think about but how the day would end.
My daughter survived and I
was never beaten again.
Now, walking through the maze of back alleys,
I set my back against the wind. I’m a ghost mother—
memories float me through time
to our small house, the one with two good chairs
and an old radio humming on the kitchen shelf,
to my little girl playing on the bare floor. I am
a pearl shadow,
standing at the stove, smiling
at pigeons simmering in the pot who seem to smile back.
I fill their stomachs with rice and herbs,
and now they bob up and down
on a roiling sea of cinnamon and cloves.
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Lois Roma-Deeley's full-length poetry collection, The Short List of Certainties, won the Jacopone da Todi Poetry Book Prize, (Franciscan University Press, 2017). Her previous books include: Rules of Hunger, northSight and High Notes, a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Roma-Deeley has published widely in numerous poetry anthologies and literary journals, nationally and internationally. She serves as Associate Editor of the poetry journal, Presence. For more, see www.loisroma-deeley.com.
by Yvonne Amey
& I’ll give this poem a gutsy title—
one with real Alanis-Morrisette-backbone &
place it in the Poconos
& there will be a flashlight in the poem & I’ll pour
moonlight into the forest
& the poem will wear an autumn-orange woodsy tone
& the three of us will be on fire—figuratively
brother G & me with dad alone together & alive
safely tucked inside our sleeping bags & tent & I will place
burping bullfrogs &lake water lapping a shallow shore
& I’ll watch dad & G fall asleep in rhythm with this poem's mood
which is always November & rhymes with how much I love them.
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Yvonne Amey is a poet living and teaching in Florida. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Pleiades. JUKED, and elsewhere.
by Jane Zwart
If it were me blindfolded, I would fumble the honeydew too,
but Sarah’s aunts, formidable, do not let their charges roll.
Cindy pins and denudes a decorative gourd. I swear she is set
on scouring the warts from the squash along with its Jiff spackle.
Anyway she has not even reached for a diaper when Mary mugs
with her Pampered cantaloupe. She holds the fruit with two hands.
Sarah, though, lets go her clingstone to clap and it rolls, it cracks
at her feet.
I am not the kind of mother I wish I were,
the kind to hear a melon open against the ground and laugh.
The kind to sit down on the lawn, a hemisphere of summer in my lap
and a picnicker’s spoon in my hand.
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Jane Zwart teaches Engilsh at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Threepenny Review, as well as other magazines.
by Kory Wells
All week his hands on my body and I cannot
think of anything but your body
on a silver table in a cold room awaiting knife
and gloved touch, awaiting fluid or fire,
a final ruse that the course of dust to dust
is ours to rule. Oh, to be doctor,
coroner, undertaker, god of blood and muscle
and nerve. Oh, to understand. The impossible idea
your body was done with this world.
So much now fills me with grief,
even the way my husband gazes into my eyes,
urging me toward love.
Love, the last thing
you did was decorate the tree. I want
to pack up the entire season, nestle
my broken ornaments in an attic box.
The thin jagged glass will always remind me.
All week I’ve turned him away.
Now I look to a cottoned sky and practice releasing your name.
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Kory Wells is the author of Sugar Fix, poetry from Terrapin Books. Her writing has been featured on The Slowdown poetry podcast and appears in James Dickey Review, Ruminate, Stirring, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. The recent inaugural poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Kory nurtures connection and community through her writing, storytelling, and advocacy for the arts, democracy, and other good causes.
by Jaya Stenquist
there's no sound
so beautiful as my footfall
in the dark / sound of myself / alone
milky light hits my tusk / the only touch
I permit / when I stand near the rocks
I am a rock
the earth and I
steady circle onward / I’ve never
hit anyone / never / committed violence
against my own species / sitting here
Christmas music blasting / little blonde
children running into my legs
I would like / the joy
of solitude / not the wanting
of your hand close enough to touch wine
in your parent’s living room / sliding
home on the ice / there’s no creature
more violent to itself than me / if I saw a reflection
I would paw the black dirt / white light
tuck my armored chin I’d
charge
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Jaya Stenquist is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Mid American, West Branch Wired, and in English and Icelandic in ICEVIEW. She is currently developing the poetry program for Vermillion Ink Press, a collective dedicated to increasing representation in independent publishing.
by Jude Marr
cross oceans cross borders cross
lines of demarcation to infiltrate fine-print
dictionaries: old lingos trade
in silks and spices: they masquerade
as coffee and chocolate—
new words colonize (curses
as fusillades, masculine endings
at war with the uninflected): unprotected songs
can bombard as cannon, while liturgies
slash and burn—
some words travel stealthily, tense
but not declined, with or without
portmanteaux: others are trafficked, objects
purloined, passage by passage: names
may be pulled aside, chopped
and changed, subject to
minute scrutiny—
lines tighten
around abbreviated
dict(a): letters
bundle
into acronyms: un-
wound syllables
stutter
from mouth
to mouth—
kiss-word-kith-word-kin
not babble
not bible
survival.
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Jude Marr (they, them, their) is the author of We Know Each Other by Our Wounds, forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in November 2020, and the chapbook Breakfast for the Birds (FLP, 2017). Jude’s day job is Director of the Reading-Writing Center and Digital Studio at Florida State University. Follow them @JudeMarr1 and find more of their work at www.judemarr.com
by Christine Jones
is what you said Sunday,
over the phone, speaking
from your small room where
all meals now are consumed &
lukewarm—half-pint milk cartons
collecting in the mini-fridge.
This, too, shall pass
is what you say, is
what you always say in times
like these, except now
to be positive means
something negative, means
you cannot leave & don’t know
if Delores, your friend, will be okay.
It means hours of Solitaire, visits on Zoom,
your nightgown worn late into the afternoon.
But notice the daffodils, you’d also say.
Their abundance. And look at the herring run,
you’d insist. The wonder of their will.
Your appetite has passed, and so has your penchant
for praying, giving way to sleep. You, today
in a hospital room, tired of tests, of tubes.
Still, you say This, too, shall pass.
And the goldfinch on the thistle.
His jaunty lisp.
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Christine Jones lives, writes, and swims along the shores of Cape Cod, MA. She is founder/editor-in-chief of Poems2go, a public poetry project, and an associate editor of Lily Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including 32 poems, cagibi, Sugar House Review, Mom Egg Review, Salamander and elsewhere. Her debut book of poetry is Girl Without a Shirt (Finishing Line Press, 2020). cjonespoems.org
by Casey Knott
Imagine you’re in China Town, San Francisco—
the year doesn’t matter. You’re eating Dim Sum
in a small café. From the window, the sidewalk
is a glinting drum upon which the children
smile. Buckets carried on brooms on the backs
of elders. The ceaseless pockets, the sea of spices
and dried mushrooms curled like tiny octopi.
A bottle of Sprite sweating on the counter.
And now a woman a table away telling you,
you should try this one—some rice and things
rolled in a banana leaf and steamed, the history
she shares of these little nooks of rice
tossed in the river after Qu Youn tossed his life
into that river in some poetic lament against
his kingdom some 2000 years ago. The rice to feed
the fish so that his body would remain under stars
upon stars. They worship the dead in their boats
shaped like dragons, their offerings of rice.
And the pride in her sockets for the story
that pools in her bones and forms her name.
Ours is a lineage we wear like a locket that knocks
against our breast in some form of hope.
Imagine loving your body.
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Casey Knott is the author of Ground Work (Main Street Rag, 2018). She edits The Wax Paper literary journal and her poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including Gulf Stream, Storm Cellar, Harpur Palate, Red Rock Review, Cold Mountain Review, Midwest Quarterly, Alternating Current, The Meadow, and Rumble Fish Quarterly. She lives on an urban farm in Des Moines with her husband and three kids.
by Luna Dragon Mac-Williams
(after Terrance Hayes)
As soon as this all is over, I can’t wait to have dance parties again.
Just like this. My mom said, and my dad pulled her in close. It was
10:32 on a Sunday night and the blue light bulb he screwed in
tight was leaking liquid mercury on our white-tile dining room floor.
Not actually. Let me begin again. Sergio Mendez and Ciara.
Michael Jackson and Roy Ayers. Don Omar and Daddy Yankee.
Sean Paul and a DJ called Spiller. Chanteuses and crooners
crowding that track that never got credit for voices that haunt these
Chicago house-built houses. I unscrew myself and let my elbows fly.
I think, you could track a lifetime in songs stuck on repeat. Hermanita
next to me, all bones and limbs and lithe aliveness, says, this is why
I love this family. Ma and Pa forget the fight they’ll probably have
later, let love bubble up without catching in their throat, let their
bodies catch light from the other’s smile, and I see the couple who
kicked off the floor, so they always say, at every club, every party,
and I see where I get my abandon. At 11:11 I wish for a lifetime of
impromptu dance parties. Let me begin again. At 11:11 I wish for
a world of dance parties. Let me begin again. At 11:11 I wish for a
dance party so good it deconstructs self-interest. For a groove to
catch, a beat to drop, and it all to shake down okay. With this verse,
my mama praises the patients she’ll wake up and take to tomorrow.
With this chorus, my dad pushes back the attacking signs that he
might have colon cancer (?). With this bridge, hermanita says, I
miss this when we go too long without. I spin her like we learned in
dance. My dad says, you could be twins. He says, Luna, you could
lead those cha-cha lessons on cruise ships. My hips, boyish but
heartbreaking, laugh. Tracks later, Pa trickles off y hermanita
también, and Ma and I are belting about twenty-something sadnesses
she hasn’t grappled with in some time but I’m wading my way through
presently. Between taking her hair down and kicking off her shoes
she says, baby, you deserve the world, and I almost miss it.
If I get this world, I will bring it back to her.
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Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a playwright, poet, actor, dancer, jeweler, editor, educator, and undergraduate student at Wesleyan University. She is a proud Chicagoan, born and raised. Her one-act, “Good Strong Coffee,” premiered at Chicago Dramatists through Pegasus Theater in winter 2018. She has recently been published in Ariel’s Dream. She believes in sweet coffee, wishing at 11:11, and helping youth honor and share their personal narratives.
by Therése Halscheid
We went where the wind insisted across the frozen river
to reach an abandoned fish camp, a desolate place.
The hat I wore was of wolverine fur — it was like that
in the arctic — for the tribe I stayed with used every part
of what they caught, and the animal was blessed for everything
it offered, and what it gave of itself went well beyond food.
Up river, twenty-some miles, we parked the snowmobile
to climb an embankment but our boots sank suddenly
we were thigh-deep in snow. Couldn’t lift out. Needed to
grab hold of something, though there was nothing to cling to
only firm gusts of wind and a fistful of flakes.
Our hands went down to balance our weight, to lift
our boots from the depths of the windblown drifts,
hoping the snow would hold as we crawled like wild animals,
Kim and I, like a wolverine might have,
had one been there. There were imprints in snow
that Kim said were lynx tracks. When she mentioned
they were fresh, a fear came coursing through. Still,
we inched along while the snow held us, it held as we scaled
to the spot where some cabins were. And where the racks were
for smoking salmon in summer, and a frozen field was,
and behind the field a forest of enduring spruce.
Their boughs were weighted by snow
but beyond that nothing could be discovered.
The lynx that came had gone.
Seemed the land wanted nothing upon it but winter.
It could ward off anything by what it wore.
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Therése Halscheid’s poetry collection, Frozen Latitudes (Press 53), received an Eric Hoffer Book Award. Other collections include Uncommon Geography, Without Home, and Puddinghouse Press’s Greatest Hits chapbook award. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Tampa Review, Natural Bridge, among others. She has taught in varied settings, including an Eskimo tribe in northern Alaska. She lives simply by house-sitting, as to write on the road. Her photography chronicles her journey.
by Margo Taft Stever
My body opens
like a telescope
from bed, always
groping for
blood, for oxygen,
for stars, for
points of light,
for little idio-
syncrasies of light.
Sphere, cylindrical,
press near
my ear, my tongue,
move sinews—
snap, slap,
the skein of skin.
Hawks, dogs,
everything runs
the other way,
the end-stopped rain-
drops, little tablets,
their curved
bellies slap and flop.
Below, the ship
enters—boat,
prow, and bier.
The hill is my bed
and I lie down, seasick—
suddenly, a woman.
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Margo Taft Stever’s collections include Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019); Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019); The Lunatic Ball (2015); The Hudson Line (2012); Frozen Spring (2002) and Reading the Night Sky (1996). Her poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, poets.org, Verse Daily, Plume, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, upstreet, and Salamander. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York (www.margotaftstever.com).
by Joan Kwon Glass
When my father left,
his old leather couch
kept his shape.
When I climbed up
in my Sunday dress,
it was safe.
His absence held me
like a throne.
He was dead, or gone.
My mother saw me, or not.
Jesus was coming
or he wasn’t.
Eventually, it didn’t matter.
What mattered was my body
perched on the hill
behind our house
atop the emptying field
in spite of everything,
What mattered were the unseen
creatures that burrowed
beneath the hill, grinding forward
in the darkness.
What mattered was the familiar
hum of my own hunger,
how long I could go
without
as somewhere else,
loaves and fishes
multiplied.
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Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial (Korean/Caucasian) second generation American who lives near New Haven, CT. Her poems have recently been published or are upcoming in Sublunary Review, FEED, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Review, Rise Up Review, Dying Dahlia Review, Black Napkin Press, Vagabond City Lit, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Literary Mama, the print anthology Shimmer Spring, and others. Her poem “Bathing Scene” was featured on the Saturday Poetry Series: Poetry as it Ought to Be, and her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The Arc Light
by Kylie Gellatly
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Kylie Gellatly is a poet living in Western Massachusetts and a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College. Her chapbook The Fever Poems is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in Malasaña Magazine and Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, with book reviews in The Rumpus, Adroit Journal, Green Mountains Review, and Pleiades. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Green Mountains Review and is a reader for Pleiades and Anhinga Press. Kylie has been awarded the Factory Hollow Press Scholarship to the Juniper Writing Institute and has received two fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center. For more, visit www.kyliegellatly.com
by Millie Tullis
Mary
always framed
in folds
my mother
too wore
loose dresses
in church
her body
old wonder
working
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Millie Tullis is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Ninth Letter, Juked, GingerbreadHouse Literary Magazine, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. She serves as the Assistant Editor for Best of the Net and Poetry Editor and Social Media Manager for Phoebe. She lives and writes in Northern Virginia.
by Susannah W. Simpson
Psychiatric Ward, Bed 23 Window
When pleaded with to finish
your dinner tray, you say:
I am contemplating the virtues
of the mind vs. the sins of the flesh.
You believed, to feed yourself
fed all Evil in the world.
As war news blossomed on TV,
you became thinner, then cadaverous.
A doctor’s son, you had been stuffed
full of promise, Catholic school and Latin verbs.
Lamb of God—you take away
the sins of the world, have mercy.
Soon your crisp, plaid shirts and khaki
pants hung and billowed, sails on the mast,
and your speech came like purple loosestrife
along the expressway, unexpected bursts of color
shuddering from the sheer force
of what passes by.
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Susannah W. Simpson’s work has been published in The Homestead Review, North American Review, Potomac, The Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum, SWWIM, Xavier Review among others. Her poem “Lily” was anthologized in Full Moon and Foxglove by Three Drops Press, UK, and her book Geography of Love & Exile was published by Cervena Barva Press (2016). Susannah holds an MFA from Bennington and a PhD from SUNY/Binghamton. She is the founder and co-director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Reading Series and an Associate Editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal.
by Annie Breitenbucher
is more slow
waltz than hip hop.
A stretch at first is more
awkward lunge than shiny ballet.
I’ve dropped from first to ninth in the
batting order—and so stand at the batting
cage among those who cannot envision that
movement requires effort. Thinking I’ve earned
either their admiration or pity. Wondering if
they’ve started to smell the leather and
grass, hear the pop of the ball in
the mitt, feel the slight breeze
that slows the heart beat,
see the dirt it hurts
so much to leave.
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Annie Breitenbucher is a technical writer living in Minneapolis; she previously worked for the Star Tribune newspaper where she covered the sports of running and triathlon. Her first poetry collection, Fortune, was published by the Laurel Poetry Collective. She has also had work published in two anthologies: Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press) and The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal by Minnesota Poets (Nodin).
by Hayley Mitchell Haugen
at least we are safe in our homes.
She thinks of her own mother
during the Blitz—four kids,
and bombs dropping, sandbagging
the incendiaries, the rationing,
evacuating to awful conditions,
and the “doodlebugs?” I think of shabby
Ohio hotels, the lice my sons brought home
from preschool. But really, the Nazi missiles
looked like small planes, Vengeance Weapons,
they called them, buzz-bombs, fired
by the hundreds into south-east England each day,
their jet engines whirring like a field of common insects:
when the motors cut out, the bombs fell.
Imagine having that fear constantly,
my mother says. Once, my Nana heard
that tell-tale stop and her body did the thinking:
she threw the infant—my mother—
into the indoor shelter just before the blast,
just before the glass doors exploded.
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