by Jenica Lodde
You’re forty years old
by Sandra Fees
by Suzanne Honda
I came here hoping to find water;
and in it, some prior-to-unknown truth,
some gospel in the stench of a headless fish
hidden beneath the weeds.
Instead, the fishermen in their boats bob on the waves
and the trilling blackbird with its red wing picks at the fish flies
already-dead, their dry bodies hollow on the concrete,
what remains of their cathedral wings
a refracted summer light.
That something so small could be holy
and, in consuming it, the papist bird made holy also,
a wholly sacred holy-making wherein men with nets
ducking their heads towards unseen fish
partake in an unspoken prayer—seeing this, I think
of how some of us are made to listen and some to speak.
The lucky get both: fish for words, scales for song,
fins in place of silent flight, however fleeting.
Above me, a lone gull soars.
Already the sun’s absence is an ache.
______________________________________________________________________
Suzanne Honda (she/her) is a poet and teaching artist based in Michigan, where she lives with her partner and their two cats. When she is not writing, she is either curating her wildflower garden, making playlists for friends, or experimenting in her kitchen. Suzanne is published in Bear River Review.
by Katherine Hagopian Berry
by Janine Certo
by Marjorie Thomsen
To get lost is to learn the way—
printed sun-yellow on my apron.
I didn’t tell the man get lost when he said
“Me Too! I’d like to have you in bed.”
He’d been drinking beers in the hottest sun
but I listened and listened to how he’s lost
and a little broken about mortality, its cost.
Perhaps stuck at age eleven when his mother died.
To get lost is to learn the way
eventually. The man is almost sixty.
Because I’m afraid to make sunchoke soup, my apron’s not gritty
and years ago I played it safe when I should have been alive
in a beloved’s bed getting lost
to learn the way.
To get lost is to learn the way—
printed sun-yellow on my apron.
I didn’t tell the man get lost when he said
“Me Too! I’d like to have you in bed.”
He’d been drinking beers in the hottest sun
but I listened and listened to how he’s lost
and a little broken about mortality, its cost.
Perhaps stuck at age eleven when his mother died.
To get lost is to learn the way
eventually. The man is almost sixty.
Because I’m afraid to make sunchoke soup, my apron’s not gritty
and years ago I played it safe when I should have been alive
in a beloved’s bed getting lost
to learn the way.
______________________________________________________________________
Marjorie Thomsen loves teaching others how to play with words and live more poetically in the world. She is the author of Pretty Things Please (Turning Point, 2016). Two poems from this collection were read on The Writer’s Almanac. One of Marjorie’s poems about hiking in a dress and high heels was made into a short animated film. She has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the recipient of poetry awards from the University of Iowa School of Social Work, Poetica Magazine, and others. Publications include Pangyrus, Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, and Tupelo Quarterly. Marjorie has been a Poet-in-Residence in schools throughout New England. She is a psychotherapist and instructor at Boston University’s School of Social Work.
by Gail Thomas
It wasn’t the ring-necked pheasants strutting across
the yard, lumbering ground hogs or deer splayed bloody
next to every road that told me it was time
to leave. Sprawled on Hawk Mountain boulders
I counted kestrels above dry quilts of corn
spread next to brick hotels, general stores,
stone farm houses, red barns with hearts
and horses. I played ring toss in every country bar
lined with jars of pickled eggs and jerky, shopped
farmer’s market stalls tended by pink-cheeked
Amish girls in white aprons, hair pulled tight
and braided under capped buns. They sold
stacks of scrapple and cheese, apple butter, pretzels
and pig stomach while horse drawn wagons waited
for bearded men and black-brimmed boys to drive
them home to Paradise, Virginville, Intercourse, bed
sheets flapping in the manure rich air. Inside my thick-
walled house, beams stained with ox blood, tradition
echoed in red ware pottery, pierced tin cupboards,
blue and white crocks with stiff-necked plump Dutch
birds, but there were no women like me.
Lured down highways splattered with billboards,
past the sprawl of malls and smoke stacks, I searched
for them in bookstores and meetings, women
who lived in disguise, a man’s wife kissing another
man’s wife. Let me be clear about this yearning,
its embers stoked by more than a juicy bite,
more than feminist books devoured like bread,
more than the company of other mothers alone
at night, their men working late. Body
and mind yoked to this cultivated garden
of my own sowing, I chose wilderness.
When I packed up my babies to leave,
fear came too, but I was never kicked out.
______________________________________________________________________
Gail Thomas’ books are Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press, Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read.” She is an editor and teacher who lives in Northampton, MA. See gailthomaspoet.com.
by Lynn McGee
His father cracked an ice tray in the sink and poured
another shot of vodka, kitchen table orange as lava,
placemats sticky, curtains snapping in the breeze.
I was twelve, my friend fourteen.
He tucked his hair behind his ears, which pulsed with red.
His father swayed, then slammed our glasses
on the table: Drink your milk. I looked away, inhaled
the scent of cigarettes and hickory sauce, and caught
the glance my young friend snuck me, prisoner smarter
than his guard. The big drunk lurched, and we both
twitched. He thrust his arm across our plates—it grazed
my face. He shoved the glass, a muzzle now,
on my friend’s mouth. Milk draped his chin. I chewed
my burger, wearily. My friend reached out
with shaking hands, to take the almost-empty cup.
I sipped from mine, to ease his shame.
______________________________________________________________________
Lynn McGee is the author of the poetry collections Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1997). Lynn's first children's book, Starting Over in Sunset Park, co-written with José Pelauz, came out in 2021 from Tilbury House Publishers.
by Dion O'Reilly
I
Then the ground was lit
by a sprawl of them.
Lily pad leaves, spiced,
sticky bloom. A flame
rushing the field.
II
Then, at home, a spark
struck me. My robe caught.
The belt, knotted, so I rose
as smoke above the roar.
III
Then the doctors peeled what skin remained. Laid pieces
of my parchment on the plains of grainy muscle.
(My breasts and back they wrapped
in corpses’ skin.)
IV
Then, months later, my face bland, glazed
from the grace of morphine, my body,
thin-limbed. Bent,
creviced like bark.
Fingernails, black,
rough to the touch,
crumbly as charcoal.
V
Behind my eyes, still,
the beaded leaves,
veined, shot with light.
Blossoms like bright mouths—
the needle-sweet tongues.
______________________________________________________________________
Dion O'Reilly has spent most of her life on a small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her prize-winning book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies.
by Maggie Wolff
by Beth Gordon
You loved me as sword grass, ungreen and venomous, my new
edges drawing scar, you loved me as heron, long-legged and coastal, as catastrophic forest
fire, blackened limbs and skin as translucent
as winter leaves, full dead and metamorphic, my awful knees
locking between your ribs without a single rattle or cicada song. You loved me as barren,
unable to flesh, as unhatched egg in April snow, as discarded nest, feathers and fur
dissipating at my death-moth touch. You loved me as teeth,
as fingernail, as bottled ship in an unforgiving ocean, as broken
mirror shards. You loved me as wanderer, desert-starved and waterless,
as scalpel-carved, without appendix or breast, you loved me as other,
hungry-boned and insubstantial, as half-remembered crow song, as ghost to my unfed self.
______________________________________________________________________
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been widely published and nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two previous chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, was published in 2021 (Kelsay Books). Her third chapbook, The Water Cycle, is being published by Variant Lit in January 2022. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books.
by M.B. McLatchey
If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden. —Mark Zuckerberg
In the cave, our histories are shadows
on a wall; our memories rote lessons
that flicker and mutate. Fall and spring,
then and now, captured and interchanged.
Friezes like post cards sculpted to ornament
the grotto, endure, resist decay.
When the shadows dance, we point, open
our mouths, as if for a split second, something
shifts, recalibrates. A glimpse of fire and lathe—
and shadow makers. Forms beyond hope.
Ideas like sirens singing. Cracks in a wall
that luminate, hint at another source: rivers,
flora and bursts of color, starlings with iridescent
wings, shrubs whose roots finger through mud
for something to drink. A world too fluid to dangle
from rod and string. How could we want its ranges, moon,
its chorus marking dawn, its feathered swirl confusing
predators, its messenger’s glad song? Why should we
mind the tether anchoring us; the flame that fixes seasons,
stages night and day, that orients us frontward, ever
frontward, and keeps the constellations in their place?
______________________________________________________________________
M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-published and award-winning memoir, Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, 2021). M.B. is the recipient of several literary awards, including the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review. Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County and Arts Ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she is Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at mbmclatchey.com.
by Christina Olson
When my father finally packs up his spaceship and returns to his home planet,
I wonder what he’ll take with him. The man was never one for nostalgia,
but these days I think he’s chucked it all, every artifact of the first sixty years
he spent on Earth. The yearbooks and deferrals I understand not keeping—
all shag and pain, ancient history. And while the man reads a lot, they were all library books,
no marginalia or ticket stubs to discover. Plus, you’d have to go to the movies,
and when we went to see Jurassic Park in 1993 he balked at the prices, admitted the last movie
he’d seen in the theatre was Superman. He was the sort of dad who collected
actual fossils, not old license plates for the garage. When his mother died, he set aside for me
a crystal beer pitcher. This is practical nostalgia. Productive reminiscence.
I’m not angry about these things even if I sound like it. First marriage long over,
children grown and gone—I almost understand the strange logic of not keeping
the markers of these basic, expected cycles. We take note when the leopard gecko
sheds it skin all at once, wriggles out of its too-tight suit, but humans too
cast off our skin constantly. We just call it dust, Swiffer it off our framed photos.
No, what concerns me is not the discarding but the cleaving. His Before Life
and his Now Life, how little they resemble each other, how nothing bleeds
through. Now Life is two houses, an Audi TT, a leather jacket, new wife,
her adult children the same age as my brother and I but somehow so much more
space-taking. It’s been twelve, no, thirteen years since my father turned into this alien,
so I’m pretty much used to it. When he texts me asking when my brother’s birthday
is again—I always forget—it’s only one day that I need to process my rage, only three beers
I drink that night. If I’m allowed into the house after he flies away, I wonder
what I’ll find. No hope for the little clay elephant I made, but maybe a couple photo albums.
Sometimes I daydream that I open a drawer and find the letters I wrote. But then I snap
out of it. Geckos don’t have eyelids—they lick their eyes to keep them moist.
They have tear ducts, but only to clean the cornea. How practical! If you didn’t know
the science, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a gecko could cry.
______________________________________________________________________
Christina Olson is the author of Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press, 2017). Her chapbook, The Last Mastodon, won the Rattle 2019 Chapbook Contest. Other work appears in The Atlantic, The Normal School, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University and tweets about coneys and mastodons as @olsonquest.
by Laura Donnelly
It takes almost a year for my aunt’s chicken Tillie
to start laying, the months-younger hens
outpacing her, and I remember being last
to get my period, freshmen year of high school,
which was bad but maybe not as bad as being first.
How we feared existing on the edges: E. starting
to bleed while being bussed to elementary
swim lessons. M. with armpit hair
at ten and the rest of us smooth. How narrow
the window of blending in. But the Ameraucana
is an elegant chicken, silver cheek muffs and a saddle
that shimmers like folds of slate taffeta.
Never mind laying season, Tillie starts in winter,
deep February. When I visit months later
she jumps on my lap, impossibly light
beneath all that fluff. She pecks weeds
from my hand and when beak touches skin
just a brief pinch of pain, no mark left.
Tillie’s first egg was a perfect, pale blue.
My blood looked rusty and I feared something wrong.
It was 1993, no Google to check. I waited a day
before telling my mom, made a pad from
toilet paper I checked between classes:
civics, earth science, what we learned at fourteen.
What becomes routine: decades of bleeding,
pills in shades my aunt’s chickens lay,
discs pressed from packs at the end of each day.
At night, the hens roost tight together, the alpha
supposedly tucked most in center. Usually,
it’s Esme, but not always. My aunt and uncle peer
at their sleeping to see how the clique has shifted.
In the dusty dark, the sweet animal smell. A hen
tucks her beak beneath wings and it could be any
of them or us: looking for a safe place, a self
place to fold among bodies almost like our own.
______________________________________________________________________
Laura Donnelly's second collection of poetry, Midwest Gothic, was selected by Maggie Smith for the Snyder Memorial Prize and published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2020. Her first book, Watershed, received the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and serves as Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego.
by Clayre Benzadón
In full sun, or cold
tolerance, asters grown in, all
charmed and untoothed, wild—
their star-slit petals cross
each other, aster-
isks, ticks, tisks
of remembrance.
There is a game
blossoms play
with each other:
besides the speckled
throats, plants choose
to dress, protect them-
selves in fox-
glove sleeves, thimbles,
during a game of tag, or touch
-me-not—
a half-life lasts a day.
I stare at the aster,
at its last finger of
pulverized breath.
It sheathes, sneezes
like a collapsed core
of a black hole.
______________________________________________________________________
Clayre Benzadón is an MFA graduate student at the University of Miami, managing editor of Sinking City, and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook, Liminal Zenith, was published by SurVision Books. She was also awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for "Linguistic Rewilding" and published in places including SWWIM Every Day, 14poems, and Crêpe and Penn, as well as forthcoming in ANMLY and Fairy Tale Review. You can find more about her at clayrebenzadon.com.
by Karen Morris
The sweet hour of prime. -Milton
Lesson one was stitched on skin
Like the carved flowers of my bodice.
There was more than one promise, love,
I have melted many, times twenty—
Exploded like stars and cross-pollinated for fun.
I was aroused by stitchery then.
Each time bound by rings
I opposed two involutes,
Fell into deep vats of indigo
And rinsed my flesh in the wind.
What should I say when you ask|
If I would do it again—
But stretch this silk by piercing,
Flame, and open to the vinery.
______________________________________________________________________
Karen Morris received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (NAAP, 2015) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press, PA). Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Plainsongs, Writers Resist, SWWIM Every Day, Stillwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, and others. She is a psychoanalyst by profession, cofounder and transmitted lay teacher for Two Rivers Zen Community in Narrowsburg, NY. She lives and works in Barre, Vermont.
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Lately I've been watching
the birds, the way the juncos
seem to know my home,
every stretch of the deck
railing they claim, the way they turn
toward me at the kitchen window
or are they trying to see
themselves?
Look, three sparrows
on the sagging wet wire of patio lights,
how they sway and hold on
to such a narrow perch.
They welcome the weight
of water. They have
their own atmosphere,
their own moon.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. 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). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. She has been a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press, nominated for Best of the Net, the Poetry Prize Winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a 2021 Finalist and Semi-Finalist in the Iron Horse Literary Review’s National Poetry Month contest. She lives in the hills of Vermont.
by Michele Sharpe
by Louise Robertson
There’s no point to
owning a fence. My bitch
chews under it, manic
for a possum. There’s
no point to the cross
beams reinforcing the fence,
my bitch parkours
to the top, to get at
a deer, her mud tracks
spattered up the planks of wood.
There’s no point to a leash, either,
when another dog passes.
My bitch bites the neck
of the strap and wrestles me.
Sure, she lies in the sun,
a quiet bitch next to my beach chair,
or gnaws (but gentle)
on my fingers. She must dream
of the jump that crests the fence,
or the tug that makes me drop the lead.
And maybe we both imagine that—
her stretching
in a dead run across the neighborhood,
terrifying and glorious.
Why the fence? Why the fence?
______________________________________________________________________
Louise Robertson serves as the marketing director for Writers' Block Poetry Night in Columbus, OH. She counts among her many publications, awards, and honors a jar of homemade pickles she received for running a workshop as well as a 2018 Pushcart nomination (Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters) and a 2018 Best of the Net nomination (Flypaper).
by Elline Lipkin