by Connie Post
I was told my father
played baseball in school
and “had an arm”
until he started smoking at age 13
and was expelled from seventh grade
for fighting
he had an arm
that reached across the kitchen table
and backhanded us
he had an arm
that reached beneath our skirts
and inside our pants
he had an arm
that extended
around the bend of the hallway
and into our messy rooms
I always wondered
if I was stronger
or faster
or even thinner
if I could have escaped that arm
these days
I spend time
on autumn afternoons
immersed inside the batting cages
oiling my mitt
warming up my shoulder
taking each
grease-tinged moment
and throwing it back
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Connie Post served as first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California Her work has appeared in Calyx, Comstock Review, One, Cold Mountain Review, Slipstream, Spillway, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verse Daily. Her first full length Book Floodwater (Glass Lyre Press) won the 2014 Lyrebird Award. Her poetry awards include the Liakoura Award, and the Crab Creek Poetry Award. Her newest book Prime Meridian was released in January 2020.
by M.J. Turner
It’s a series of postures, executed
just fast enough to trick the eye
into seeing a single gesture. The uplifted palm,
the stilled foot, elongated
like the endless limbs of bronze
burghers hemmed in by the museum courtyard.
Chestnut leaves unzip in the pennyweight sun,
coat riding boots and walking shoes in the pea-gravel.
The local women narrow their eyes over tea and watch
two children with book bags poke at a fallen nest
made of steel wool and twigs,
the abandoned home of mechanical birds, beaks opening
to their mechanical caw. My knees sink down,
creaking sheet metal; sing in unison.
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M.J. Turner’s poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, Spillway, concīs, and I-70 Review. She lives in Massachusetts.
by Arden Levine
She held, in beautiful unadorned hands,
a hardcover book.
She read it, regarded the room,
reflected. Patient.
The hardcover book
sat closed and attentive
reflected her, patient,
as he explained to her the procedure.
Sitting close and attentive,
the light above washed her pale
as he explained the procedure
and what it would be like after.
The light above washed her pale;
her hair fell around her face.
And what it would be like, after?
She rested the book on its spine.
Her hair fell around her face
as she removed her clothes;
she rested the book on its spine
creased and split to center.
She removed her clothes
and became part of the table.
Spine creased, she split to center,
forefingers touching like a circuit.
Once her spine was part of the table
he inserted rods in her to open her.
Her fingers, touching like a circuit,
resembled the thin metal rods.
As he inserted rods in her to open her
she started to bleed. A machine
with a sound resembling thin metal rods
clattered like coarse wind chimes.
She started to bleed into the machine,
which extracted a condition from her.
And a clattering like coarse wind chimes
sounded in her body cavity. Emptied,
her face a confusion of threads,
extracted from the table, a conditional object,
emptied of sound, her body an aching cavity,
she arose. She arranged her limbs.
She held herself, beautiful and unadorned.
Someone had shut the book, her page was lost.
He had left, the walls were quiet.
She read the textured walls, regarded the room.
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Arden Levine’s poems have most recently appeared in Cream City Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Lifted Brow (Australia), and Zone 3. Arden lives in New York City, and her daily work as an urban planner focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development. Her chapbook, Ladies' Abecedary, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions.
by Sarah Law
In the summer of 1844, novelist George Eliot went to London to have her head “cast” by the eminent phrenologist James Deville.
Twenty-two-and-a-quarter inches round:
a very large head. See the lift
of the jaw as it draws a line
from the white throat’s side.
This lady, average-height, is gifted
with moral weight. Here, the bold
curves at the cranial base
sweep elegantly to the crown.
My dear, excuse me. Raising her locks,
the temple is—ah—luminous and smooth.
A broad pause in the circuitry
where her wordflow is suspended;
each side a mold for the pad of my thumbs
to rest. What pleasant symmetry;
such dimples are fashioned to be touched.
Here, though, are resistant ridges,
imaginative nodes we might cite
as a novel development. Forgive me
if I ask: is she lonely? Does she cycle
between moodiness and joy?
There is a plain along the brow
where her spirit has retrenched.
We could call it a reversal; faith
translated back into empathy.
I thank you, Madam Evans. I will
present more work to the society
next month. Until then
I shall remember the heft
and swell of your skull,
the worlds within it, which
I am honored to glimpse,
by dint of my hands upon you—
the passionate snap of your book.
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Sarah Law lives in London and is a tutor for the Open University. Her latest collection, Therese: Poems is published by Paraclete Press. She edits the online journal Amethyst Review.
by Julia McConnell
after Mark Doty
The fireflies are trying to teach me
their besotted evening ceremony
pulse blink pulse blink
coy in the tall grass
revealing their instruments
to the wrens,
to the weeping raspberries.
I am locked in my tantrum
of longing and unbelonging
clutching at constellations
unwilling to accept the imperfect.
My back turned, blindfolded,
two swords in my hands.
I am sweeping mud.
It is time to stop looking away
at the phantom place
neck deep in shadow.
Any small thing can save you –
the whir of trumpeting crows,
a vine winding its way up,
birds taking flight
struck into a conflation of joy,
clearing your throat while singing
at dawn or twilight,
rendering words from cloud bank
about to break into rain.
It is easy to miss these things.
What is your leap limit?
Have you tested
the winking shimmer
of season’s change?
Stasis is a lie.
A firefly lands on my belly
floats away.
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Julia McConnell is a queer poet and a librarian. Her chapbook, Against the Blue, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Her work has appeared in MockingHeart Review, THIS LAND, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Blood and Thunder, and many anthologies. Originally from Oklahoma, Julia lives in Seattle with her Jack Russell Terrier, Molly Marlova Magdalena McConnell.
by Samantha Grenrock
A drone flies twelve hours a day,
reading the Earth like thought.
In the blue light that cancels sleep,
I quilt the image back together,
count the tens of thousands
that have flown the crawfish farms of Louisiana
to settle in this river of grass,
still blush with carotenoids.
When asked, how do you want to return,
say a collection of wings beating each
at a different rate, that lower bodies
into water the same temperature
as air, strange to step through, like a mirror.
It's not clear when this will ever happen again,
when the cypress will bow with courtship,
and the recently paired will cross necks,
getting to know one another. A lunge and a grasp.
He shakes her by the head to show her.
I, too, like it when the male possesses strength
enough to hurt me.
A way of saying, you are safer
with me. They take turns on the nest.
Some nights I see splayed stacks of bony sticks
in the light-gassed lot, in the plastic bag
in the arms of a windbreak—cypress, too.
I see nests in kitchen cupboards,
a pale egg duo in the bowl. The stronger offspring
will push out a third. An appeasement.
Hence the phrase rain of chicks. A whole life
a moment alone in the water.
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Samantha Grenrock grew up in California and now lives in Florida. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Best New Poets, and others.
by Emily Ransdell
His father had taught him to dress it
in the field, to whet the blade
and core the anus, clip the balls
then slit the hide. Run the knife
pelvis to breast.
I watched him straddle the split thing,
struggle it off the tailgate, so careful of the rack.
He was fifteen, sheened with sweat,
desire as plain as the strain of each heft.
For a truck of his own, a job
after school, the impossibly soft hands of a girl.
One year older than me, he seemed
a man, his shoulders lit by the street lamps
of our cul-de-sac, an October moon rising white
beyond the vacant lot.
He said when you cut the windpipe right,
the insides slide out with a single pull.
Heart and liver, lungs and stomach,
everything linked like pearls on a string.
Some boys love death more than anything.
Some girls need to look.
The buck hung from the rafters,
its bent neck so lovely,
muzzle white, one chestnut eye
staring right at me. My girl-heart
caught in the crosshairs.
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Emily Ransdell’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, River Styx, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Award, as well as the runner up for New Letters’s Patricia Cleary Poetry Prize. Emily has twice been featured by Ted Kooser in “American Life In Poetry.” She lives in Camas, Washington.
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
by Trish Hopkinson
by Mary Johnson-Butterworth
I need a new tatt,
a new tude act,
slink of that loathsome sting
circling my big-sass breast
like a nettled snake’s slither.
I need it resplendent and royal,
bloody barbed wire trapping
my mammary gland in violet,
a violent sleeve fending off feeders.
Hidden from my children, my tattoo
breeds power, protector
of no-longer-theirs nipple.
I need you to balk at my tatt
and walk away weakened, taken
aback by me, femme feral—
only to return risking barbs
to ravage my breast,
titillated by its wiry coronet.
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Mary Johnson-Butterworth, a poetry opsimath, began to write "serious" poetry a few years ago after a lifetime of composing rhyming tributes and invitations for friends, heroes , and family. She was a founding partner of an image enhancement/marketing firm. Mary has been published in both Literature Today and The Birmingham Arts Journal.
by Kelli Russell Agodon
Because scientists have their fingers on our spines, we lift our shirts
to let their studies slap against our waves. Where are the sandpipers
of our youth? The house on the coast where I saw ghosts
of myself in every mirror. Sometimes I lust for a year
that has already happened. There’s no need to apologize
for hope because every year another kingfisher catches a fish,
because the herons pose like dark preachers talking about afterlife.
How often we forget what is holy, forget the holy in each other,
forget the tenderness of a stranger painting our grief
beneath the ocean in big brushstrokes, and for a moment
we walk around the dunes where families
of ants carry what crumbs they can find and we find a new trail
of wild strawberries and become beach citizens of found fruit,
become the P.S. I love you on the postcard we continue to write.
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Kelli Russell Agodon’s fourth collection of poems, Dialogues with Rising Tides will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. You can write to her directly at kelli@agodon.com or visit her website: www.agodon.com
by Sharanya Sharma