by Mia Ayumi Malhotra
How the days passed, suffused in summer
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She teaches poetry and tends a hillside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
by Katrina Hays
As if God kicked her
from the lip of Heaven,
she falls.
Talons spread,
she cuts the dawn
with her body.
She should slice the lake,
wrap the trout
in the hard bands of her claws,
be off and away, leaving
silent circles
behind her body.
She falls. Misses.
Grace gone,
she flounders.
Brown-and-white wings
flailing unsleeked—
a terrible bundle
fighting to free herself.
Look: she shakes off
the clutch of the lake, rises
into daybreak.
I will walk back to our home,
rouse you from sleep.
Ask for pardon.
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Katrina Hays' writing recently appeared or is forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, The Hollins Critic, Hubbub, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. She lives in Bend, Oregon. See katrinahays.com.
by Pam Crow
by Holly Mason
by Ruth Dickey
I keep thinking this line from a play: it takes the body
18 years to replenish every cell. We are literally new
every 18 years. When my niece turned ten,
she whispered to me on the phone that ten
was different, she and her friends had special
rituals and wishes. At ten, you knew things,
we knew things. I remember ten: tea parties
under apple trees, in my great-grandmother’s
beaded dresses with my cousin, promising
we’d spend the day before our weddings
together. Forever seemed like soft bat wings,
sweeping and diving. My marriage was 18 years;
my cousin was not there. I am as never before,
am literally new. The sky is full of clouds
settling down like hens. Morning is the time
for hunger. When I can’t sleep, I count backwards,
count beads, count hungers, count orchards.
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Ruth Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. Her first book, Mud Blooms, was selected for the MURA Award from Harbor Mountain Press and awarded a 2019 Nautilus Award. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth is an ardent fan of dogs and coffee and lives in Seattle. More at ruthdickey.com.
by Anne Marie Macari
We’re small now, small
as fish in our tiny school,
kayaking toward booming
spouts, flukes
and shadow-backs
breaking the glassy sea—
All around we see, hear,
whale, and drift, reckless
to encounter them rising,
ethereal tons
unstitching
the surface—the sea
a nether-world I dream into
but can’t know, where
a fin rises
like a black door
then disappears—
I’ve come here to be lost
in the blue center, rocking
on the brink of wet
darkness, the sea
swelling with beings, two
miles out, waves
picking up
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Anne Marie Macari is the author of five books of poems, including Heaven Beneath (Persea, 2020), as well as Red Deer (Persea, 2015). In 2000, Macari won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, chosen by Robert Creeley. Her poems and essays have been widely published in magazines such as The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and The Massachusetts Review.
by Geraldine Connolly
Find the red flower
and the hummingbird hovering.
Find the bee
inside the tiger-colored blossom.
Don’t close your eyes.
Find the berry below the leaf.
Find the stacked stone wall
and the tremor inside the wall
and all of the tiny insects
who thrive there.
Find the stray seed
that turned into a melon,
the vole burrowed beneath
a mass of sun trumpets.
Beauty happens all around us.
If you find the owl
perched on the branch
listen and wait.
And if you hear the leaf speak,
don’t move.
Soon the coyote will howl
down from the mountain
and the flower will greet you,
its face on fire.
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Geraldine Connolly is the author of four poetry collections: She received two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Georgia Review, and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180 and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is geraldineconnolly.com.
by Jennifer Jean
Rain blessed the county this year
& the Los Angeles River
flushed out nearly 13,000 pounds of
mattresses, carts, turpentine,
steak knives, bottle caps, opioids,
& bald, eyeless doll heads
onto shorelines as far as Seal’s Beach.
All that the Valley had chucked was laid bare,
was picked through by a volunteer Cleanup
Brigade—like readers parsing a gnarl
of poems. Even primordial Styrofoam
from my decades-old Walkman box
was exposed—the dirt over the white
had finally eroded. Even this piece of former me
mingled with the rush, the beached.
Then—Jim on the crew
stabbed & stuffed it into an orange bin,
fed the full bin to mealworms.
Then—some county hand
fed that toxin-less feedstock to fowl,
to farmed fish. Oh! I remember hurling it
from mom’s Nova—at her live-in boyfriend
invasion: at Mustache Tony & Butch,
at the young guy I worked with at Home Depot
& Red-Head smiles, at Old Cowdude
& Pathological Paul. & when Pathological
Paul moved out—a rush of tears
blessed my face & began to dislodge them all.
______________________________________________________________
Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include Object Lesson (Lily Books) and The Fool (Big Table). She's also released the teaching resource Object Lesson: A Guide to Writing Poetry (Lily Books). Her poetry, prose, and co-translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Waxwing Journal, Rattle Magazine, Crab Creek Review, DMQ Review, On the Seawall, Salamander, The Common, and more. She's been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a Disquiet FLAD Fellowship from Dzanc Books, and an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. As well, she is the translations editor at Talking Writing, a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, and a co-translator of Arabic poetry and organizer for the Her Story Is collective. Jennifer is the new Manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's Online Writing Program.
by Gail Newman
A woman sleeping in the burned-grass patch of lawn
in front of my parents’ house, beside the Bird of Paradise’s
beaked flames, a flicker of dream-sleep under shut-lid eyes.
Beside her body the wire cage of a shopping cart,
rubbish piled high like graveyard dirt,
the earth we lifted, each of us, then passed
the shovel to the next in line, to fill my father’s grave,
in front of which, because she was old
and could not easily stand, my mother sat,
shading her eyes with dark glasses.
It was a good turnout, they later observed, as they knifed
cream cheese onto onion bagels. My mother sat,
in the tradition of the tribe, on a low cushion
to bring her close to the earth under which he now lay,
in a suit of her choosing, his best tie knotted at the neck.
Let her sleep there, he had said.
She’s not hurting anyone.
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Gail Newman's poems have most recently appeared in Canary, Prairie Schooner, Mom Egg Review, Calyx, Hiram Poetry Review, Spillway, Prism, Second Wind, The Doll Collection, America, We Call Your Name, and Nimrod International Journal. Her poem, "Mishpacha," was awarded Bellingham Review's 49th Parallel Poetry Prize. A collection of poetry, One World, was published by Moon Tide Press. A new collection, Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for publication by Marsh Hawk Press, was published in 2020. Gail has worked as San Francisco Coordinator for CalPoets and as a museum educator at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. She was co-founder and editor of Room, A Women’s Literary Journal.
by Zoë Fay-Stindt
In the desert only small, stout flowers
impossible to avoid, whose heads I clobbered all day
then watched night freeze them up. In the morning,
the steam rising where I puddled myself behind a bush,
the coyotes woke with me, calling across the valley
to another family, or their own—it didn’t matter
that you weren’t there. It didn’t matter that the superbloom,
which I had flown a thousand miles to find,
was too far south to reach from there. Instead,
big hunks of quartz to hold in my lap,
which I let charge themselves into my palms,
though I had never learned what exactly it was
or how, really, to let it work through me.
Eventually, I think I absorbed something—the steady
oath of solitude, the authority. The impossibility
of blooming love in any body, except my own
dusty gut. And I did: chin lifted
to the Joshuas’ white snakehead of an opening,
the crows huffing, shuffling as the sun
raised herself through the boulders,
propping her tired elbows on that frozen earth,
the night-stiffed flowers straightening
their thin spines.
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Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/her) is a bi-continental writer with roots in both the French and American South. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, EcoTheo, Muzzle Magazine, and others.
by Annie Stenzel
A building on X Street is gone now.
What did it look like, now that it is gone?
My memory for some things is excellent.
For some things my memory is no good.
After those nights in the hospital, the doctors
were satisfied with my condition. Am I?
All those years in which I saw the body as a mere
vehicle to transport my mind to new places.
Now this: the body contains my eyes;
the eyes that harvest joy for my spirit.
The body contains my ears, eager to hear the song
of water as it rushes through an empty valley.
And the body contains a beating heart; these flutters
draw my hand to my chest like a magnet.
Write about me on a piece of paper, fold it
and then open it up. Is it blank again?
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Annie Stenzel (she/her) was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., from Ambit to Trampoline Poetry, with stops at Chestnut Review, Gargoyle, Nixes Mate, On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM Every Day, Stirring, The Lake, and Trampoline Poetry, among others. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she now lives within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.
by Sharon Tracey
there is a place remote and islanded, and given
to endless regret or secret happiness
—Sarah Orne Jewett
We hiked the island, shaped like a maple
seed and brushed with wild blueberry,
crunched stones along the carriage paths
then climbed the crest of Cadillac Mountain.
A raft of clouds sailed by. A crew of hawks.
Blue pierced the day with its harpoon, I swear
I saw a breaching whale. You could see the land
bridge far below, the narrows sharp and cold,
and everywhere you turned, the pointed firs.
No tree is a country. No woman an island.
You hit the road, and yet, things follow you.
We stay until the world turns darker blue.
______________________________________________________________
Sharon Tracey is a poet and editor, and author of two full-length poetry collections: Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2020) and What I Remember Most Is Everything (All Caps Publishing, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Terrain.org, The Worcester Review, Mom Egg Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. See sharontracey.com.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Problem was, she felt too much
or not at all, a practiced yearning
that had no name. Her kids grown,
gone, forty years behind her,
fields rutted, shutters listless,
the barn propped and cock-eyed,
all those young bride prayers wasted.
Creatures like sheep, used to traveling,
know about moving on, guided by
the compass of their will, boredom
an affliction that can’t be outrun, desire
a grassy knob worth dying for. How
utterly a body is overruled by heartache.
Outside red oaks thrash, tangled
in root and bird song and whatever
might fall from the sky.
Her last undoing was to set her sassy
banties free to peck and roam,
scratch out a destiny of their own.
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Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and Serving. Her poems appear in numerous journals including Verse Daily, Rattle, The New York Times, and on her website: karigunterseymourpoet.com. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak, volumes 1-6. She is Poet Laureate of Ohio.
by Michelle Turner
Back then I thought
interstate meant no-state,
unlikely and lonely
as deep space.
I slept with one fear:
the falling away
of motion, a pink shell
pressed to my ear,
then broken.
Our ’83 Chevy,
brown on brown,
jerked to the shoulder,
shaking.
This was the first poem:
a window rolling down,
disappearing. Look:
(the officer coughed)
headlights, taillights, stars,
so soon, streaming.
______________________________________________________________
Michelle Turner’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Slice, Sixth Finch, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she works as an editor, writing coach, and academic advisor. Read more at michellemturner.com.
by Allisa Cherry
Send me out into my ruin
where every twig shoots like a pistol
and every branch cuts like a sword.
Free me from chores and let me
maraud the undergrowth
in a swimsuit the color of hard candy.
Sweet and deadly, let the morning glory
strangle the grape arbor
and the ants overrun the clusters.
There was a time I thought I could
pull enough weeds to earn my keep here,
lay enough sandstone or scrub enough floor.
But the praise of labor
is always answered with more labor.
This life doesn’t quit
shoving green growth down my throat.
The fruit trees, bearded with lichen
and bees, deafen me. The pansies
muscle past paving stones
and wreck the paths.
With each minute I tarry
I can hear my father
tabulating what I have cost him.
The space I occupy is borrowed
and will soon close over me.
Left too long,
the bittercress goes to seed.
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Allisa Cherry was born and raised in the rural southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to Portland, OR, where she works as a writing tutor and small-scale urban farmer and has recently completed an MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Her work has received Pushcart Prize nominations from San Pedro River Review and High Desert Journal, and is forthcoming in Westchester Review and Tar River Poetry.
by Sara Moore Wagner
I stomp my foot into the ground,
one, two, three, and the earth breaks
open like an egg. The viscous plastic
mantle, liquid, and I shake, shake,
shake, tectonic. Because you knew my name,
because you named me, I’m torn
in two, or I tear myself
in two, as some versions say.
But haven’t I always been split
between this world and my body, between
mother and father, between
sky and the center diamond
of this tiny planet: Diastasis
Recti. At night, I dance
around a fire chanting, “you will never
know me,” and by fire, I mean
the kitchen table I clear
into the empty trashcan, by dance
I mean conform to it. I thought
I was spinning this gold to weave
something beautiful, an elaborate wing,
thin and strong as chitin, sparkling
in the summer, handspun; but here
I am, caught now, trickster now,
and with both my hands, I’ll show you
what to do.
_____________________________________________________________
Sara Moore Wagner is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbooks Tumbling After (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Rhino, Sixth Finch, Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review, and Nimrod, among others. Find her at saramoorewagner.com.
by Alana Baum
Too quiet to write you said it would be too quiet to write
Who you shutting up for?
Here with the perfect shapes and barely bloody blues and floor seats and a guest book with my phantom first two letters already filled in / she said something like we were waiting
What do other people pray for in such spaces? / I feel full on just a mouthful of what words I know
Silent and monochromatic
My longing for a silken suspension then this spiritual lift-off is as synchronous as the parking spot / as my dual-tone denim matching the all of this / as anything we’re willing to say was meant to be
How long did he spend on each and where does the red end and the gray begin and where does grief end and healing begin and what I would give to stay firmly lodged in a moment
Breathless realm / sacred shapes / symmetrical shadows / neutral god here for the dutiful and despondent
Soggy trifurcated murals thick with slow rhythms and intentional incidentals
You would have loved it I only think on occasion because at the end of the day there was plenty to deflate
Look long enough that the ghosts start looking back
Nothing to see here everyone says / no one means / never true / nearly blue
But the grown and growing heart / but the light shaft / but the whisper
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Alana Baum (she/they) is a queer poet from Los Angeles, currently living in Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Argot Magazine, Oatmeal Magazine, No Assholes Literary Magazine, and Yes Poetry. Alana also writes custom poems for strangers via @softcorepoetics. They are in graduate school to become a sex therapist.
by Barbara Crooker
I have painted it big enough so that others will see what I see.
-Georgia O’Keeffe
A fraction of an inch each day, through the long fall and winter,
this amaryllis bulb encased in wax—no water, no soil—has clawed
its way towards the light. You have been in the hospital since October—
heart attack, stroke, your aorta coming apart—inching your way back.
This smidge of green hope has kept me going. Some days, it didn’t seem
there was any movement, that the sun, in its shroud of clouds,
was not strong enough to coax some growth. I can only talk to you
on the phone; some days, a handful of minutes
is all that you can summon. This phone is so heavy. But now
the cluster of buds on the tip of the stalk begins to open, splits,
cleaves into six parts. Slowly, you gain strength, shuffling
with a walker, climbing four stairs, spooning blended food with your
shaking left hand, the right one clenched in a claw. Returning
in the smallest of increments. Soon each sepal will unfurl its flame,
flagrant as O’Keeffe’s painting, a radiant speaking in tongues.
I did not think you’d come back to me, but here you are, and here
is this flower: a trumpet fanfare, a red convertible, the molten sun.
Our little lives, so brief. But oh, the bloom.
______________________________________________________________
Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and author of nine books; Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, is the latest. Her awards include the Best Book of Poetry 2018 from Poetry by the Sea, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
by Sarah Carey
Our father knows all five of us
and shows he knows:
A hand, pressed. A nod acknowledging
each daughter here at last
as animals seek shelter in the cold,
as however lost or found we feel
or felt or will, we still seek home—
surviving selves in disembodied shells.
Chronos’s hand sweeps across
the moment kidneys fail. When blood flow
to the heart slows, stops—so
matter-of-fact. This is how we terrify
at symptoms from now on: each one
in light of layered diagnoses,
prismed in the glass, reflecting
on that sterile room,
our interrupted rhythms, who will come.
We listen as the nurse says
hearing is the last to go, and cling to this
as we whisper our testimonies.
______________________________________________________________
Sarah Carey's work has appeared recently in Atlanta Review, Grist, Yemassee, UCity Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Her book reviews of other poets' work have appeared in EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the Los Angeles Review. Sarah's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019) winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.
by Audrey Gidman