by Cat Dixon
It’s night on a gravel road—the dead-end sign lit up by headlights, so I throw that mother into reverse. The tires squeal as I hit pavement yanking the wheel to find another street. Every light is green so I accelerate—what else can I do?—racing to the next stop. When the light flashes yellow, I don’t slow down—time is short—I have to make it. I drive seven years straight. When the sun sets, the headlights from other cars blind so I look to the yellow line on the side of the road and follow it—an arrow pointing to the next house I will call home. When I enter, I know the place—black leather couch, dusty book shelves, kitchen counters lined with empty water bottles and I set to work—polish, wipe, recycle—a mindless charade. When he walks in the door, I call him the wrong name. Who could blame me? They all look the same. Another fight over the car keys—my arm left aching from his grasp—another chance to be in the driver’s seat. Back on the road, I brake at the stop sign, stare in my rearview, and head for the well-lit taxi stand at the airport. I hop in the cab, shout “drive” and he merges into traffic—just another pair of eyes shining into the night.
Cat Dixon's new poetry collection, What Happens in Nebraska, will be out later this year from Stephen F. Austin University Press. Recent poems have appeared in Whale Road Review and Rise Up Review. Her website is www.catdix.com.
by Amy Miller
She hides in the east shadow
of a thirty-foot wall. She might
remember damp hands
of ivy, but now she tangles
only with herself, limbs
on fractured limb, sparse leaves
cupping small swallows of light.
What can she say, embarrassed,
when pink silk shoots out
from her every cleft in April
in—yes—the rain’s warm lick.
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Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press, and her chapbooks include I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). She lives in Oregon.
by Mistee St. Clair
by Estelle Bajou
You’re busy.
Your eyes are leaking.
Your mouth is screwed up with realization: your folks are getting old and it’s
up to you to take care of them and you don’t know how and can’t afford it
anyway.
You’re in love with a pretty girl. Young and pretty.
This is not your Jesus year. There is no magic transformation around the
corner. You haven’t even figured out how you’ll die.
This is the year to float, shining like a dead star in the empyrean.
To kiss her mouth two hundred and twenty-four times and never again.
To heal the family wounds.
To burst.
To beckon.
Not everyone figures it out. How to look forward without looking ahead.
You’ll miss the end. Walking out to the garden of a Sunday afternoon.
I hope you play your trumpet and drums in the morning.
I hope your pretty girl makes a good memory for you.
I’m sure I see you, days later, arms full of plates, coming through the swinging
doors, smiling.
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Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Variant Lit, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cathexis, Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, SoFloPoJo, Middlesex, The Abstract Elephant, The Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. Her first poetry chapbook, I Never Learned to Pray, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2022. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.
by Elaine Sexton
Naturally, something that calls itself small
wants little to do with attention. Geography
called small is a quiet gush of light, tides
that pool in small sand-banked reservoirs,
and discreet stands of pines, the trees
not small, but their conversations are.
Hush of seals, their heads rise out of small
waves to gaze at each other and walkers
on the beach. Small snaps of seaweed,
and here on this slender (small) point
of stone and sand, a peninsula, almost silent
but for small bird calls. And you, present
in your skin, and your skin, dry, and
the wind, dry, small. And you, John Marin,
driving small points in long strokes, water
in your paint, the sea in your here, now.
on John Marin’s “Small Point, Maine”
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Elaine Sexton's fourth collection of poem, Drive, will be published by Grid Books in 2022. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and magazines including the American Poetry Review, Art in America, Five Points, Oprah Magazine, Pleiades, Plume, and Poetry. She teaches poetry at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She serves as the visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly. See www.elainesexton.org.
by Frances Donovan
by Jennifer Roche
We’re pouring through the sieve of summer.
Mother and teen son traveling north
to camp drop-off together.
We fold into twin beds
with benign choreography:
Electronics, plugged in.
Brushed teeth?
Double good nights
clipped by the light.
The rightful bricks mason
themselves between us:
I used to admire him in his sleep.
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Jennifer Roche is a poet, writer, and text artist who lives in Chicago. She is Pushcart Prize-nominated and the author of two chapbooks: The Synonym Tables (The Poetry Question, 2021) and 20, erasure poems from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Alternating Current Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Storm Cellar, Tule Review, Footnote: A Literary Journal of History, and Oyez Review. She was named a “Writer to Watch in 2019 & Beyond” by the Guild Literary Complex.
by Abby E. Murray
I’d rather you climb to the top
of an apartment building and pour
an orchestra down its stairwell,
just let it fall like rubble through
a trash chute because I’d rather listen
to the necks of violins shatter
and cellos crack open like walnuts
in fistfuls of sheet music and splinters
than sit still for another apology
composed to sound exactly like
the truth, I’d rather hear a piano
trample eight floors of tubas and horns
against its will, its hammers smashing
luminous brass bells like pop cans,
I’d rather absorb every second
of something marvelous being
crushed mute than your confession,
I’d rather count the resounding
bellows of timpani skipping off
concrete walls and tumbling over
the steel nosing of steps that seem
to bound on and on toward a bottom story
because it’s there, in the basement,
where all this noise would pile up
like words that once had meaning,
words that were instruments of living
instead of recital, and if you were
to do this, I would take it in
from start to finish and I would be
moved, technically, having never heard
such an unrepeatable arrangement
of disaster pronounced that way before,
a symphony of wasted language
that owes me, as you do, some art.
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Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She served as poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and recently relocated to Washington DC. She teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
by Julie L. Moore
Bobby pin, button, lozenge, dime.
Souvenir, emery board, obsession
with time. Lay them down.
Phone number on a slip of paper,
you can’t remember whose.
Your aunt’s old postcard from Galapagos,
your inability to choose. Lay them down.
The angry words you want to speak,
the grudge you work so hard to keep.
Your petty predilections, small
& senseless premonitions. Lay them down.
The marriage you thought would last
your whole life, dreams you once had
as his faithful wife. I tell you: Lay them down.
Unburdened as you’ll later be, relinquish
one more thing: the birth name you gave
your younger child because now she says it’s dead.
Though it stretch the string between your heart
& head, though it nearly snap in half,
give it up, let it go, lay it down, too.
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A Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her poetry has appeared in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, and a dozen anthologies. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.
by Susannah W. Simpson
The Fountainhead Studios, May 2013
Deep in Little Haiti—skirting historic homes, Section 8
housing and Big Sam’s Minimart, you have hung a universe
of jeweled galaxies on whitewashed walls. Jupiter balanced
on Seattle’s Space Needle and in the Taj Mahal’s
reflecting pool, Mercury embedded below cobalt resin.
Resin, ancient sealant. Cohesion, a natural law.
Modern alchemist, malleable pigments, you conjure
paint from vats of elemental properties. Shah Jihan’s
unfinished tomb winks back from in-laid mica flecks,
from snowflake paint, from twig—from Venus—
from the shimmering rings of Saturn
from the embellished edge of your grandmother’s sari
gold threads woven
from the physics of a new century.
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Susannah W. Simpson has work has been published in The North American Review, Potomac, The Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum, SWWIM Every Day, and Xavier Review, among others. Her book, Geography of Love & Exile, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2016. She is a hospice nurse and the Founder & Co-Director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Reading Series.
by L. Shapley Bassen
“…looking at tattoo biopsies under the microscope, scientists saw macrophages laden with ink globules, and the story of tattoos became one of the immune system."
-New York Times
It’s ancient, likely prehistoric,
your skin hieroglyphics,
as unwelcome in the human body
as baryonic matter in the universe
where we are altogether graffiti.
Was the Beginning then a Big Tattoo,
a signal bugle of sound, not light?
Matter becomes mind we don’t know how.
Nevertheless, the scrawl that appalls
macrophages who engulf, engorge,
but are eventually replaced themselves,
echoes your tattoo. I lack kinky ink
myself. I’m penned with scars.
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L. Shapley Bassen’s grandmother was a telegrapher on Wall Street a century ago who taught her to read and tapped messages to her in Morse Code on the wooden arm of a chair. She sees the world bi-focally through science and art. A New Yorker living in Rhode Island, she is a multi-published & prize-winning author of fiction, poetry, & drama. She is an editor at Craft Literary. See more at lsbassen.com.
by Claudia M. Reder
It is said that marriage becomes a third character in a relationship.
The one I think of as an ibis.
The long curvature of its bill
plucks sorrow from mud.
Its long neck,
slender spoon of a beak
serves us freshly made chicken soup with greens.
White wings edged
with black like an elegant dress
skim the surface of the waters
with other marriage birds, such as the blue heron.
One night by accident, we shut the door on you, mid-flight.
Your wing cape bristled.
Beneath your favorite olive tree
I toss bird seed. Weeks go by. Or is it five days
when I spot you,
the white noise like a heartbeat.
We curve around our favorite reading couch
under the dining room window,
the one where the red Maple marbles our afternoons.
These days, I hear you
as part of the Pacific, its long tongues of salt,
the plumed head of each wave
hit with sand, crab droppings.
I pass through the stench: half-eaten
oysters that drop into a gull’s mouth;
pass the terse arguing among terns.
A sea lion sprawled on the wood pilings
bites the pelican’s beak who shakes him off.
I kneel to gather that odd bit of shell,
watch the crackled glass of sunlight on the water.
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Claudia M. Reder is the author of How to Disappear, a poetic memoir, (Blue Light Press, 2019). Uncertain Earth (Finishing Line Press), and My Father & Miro (Bright Hill Press). How to Disappear was awarded first prize in the Pinnacle and Feathered Quill awards. She was awarded the Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize from Lilith Magazine, and two literary fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council. She recently retired from teaching at California State University at Channel Islands. For many years she has been a poet/storyteller in the Schools. Publications include Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, and Healing Muse.
by Elizabeth Cranford Garcia
please, to honor our dearly departed
dinner, this slick pink mess which was once
a chicken. Let us honor what skill was lost
with granny, who could clean and cleave
the whole bird, could butcher with the best.
And let us mourn the passing of that word’s meaning:
the fumbled punchline, the aria off-key, these
insult the butcher, who, prophet-like, can part
the fascial sheath, the silver skin like ribbon;
divine invisible lines of Hereford, of Sea Bass,
culling shapes, naming—the loin,
the sirloin flap, the clod heart. Can pop
the socket, peel the keel, avoid the coracoid—
oh priest! Approach the infinite!
Divide, divide, divide!
You are never left with nothing.
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Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s work has appeared in publications such as Boxcar Poetry Review, SoFloPoJo, Mom Egg Review, Psaltery & Lyre, several anthologies, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart prize. She is the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. Her first chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2015 through Finishing Line Press. She’s a SAHM of three in Acworth, Georgia. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.
by Robbi Nester
After Brendan Constantine
From an antique rug beater to a flamingo
We have never met, but I want you to know how much
I envy your feathers, pink as a cloud at sunrise, nearly
weightless, with their hollow shafts, capable of carrying
you great distances. For myself, I go nowhere except
out into the dusty yard, where the maid channels
her resentment by smacking the master’s Persian
carpet till it yields years of ground in sand, blown in
from the beach. I am all knots, woven of bamboo,
while you arc in one tapered sweep, your neck
and wings, your beak, curved as a church key,
streamlined and graceful. I stay at home alone
and dream, while you travel yearly with extended
family, noisy but amiable, through skies of seamless
blue, landscapes of cloud, knowing beyond question
the exact location of the beach in Tunisia where you
were hatched. I would love to ride on your back,
tucked between your wings, though I am afraid
to lose my job, beating the world clean, a task
we have great need of these days, but if you ever
wish to come out of the cold and damp, to dry
between your toes, I invite you to stand with me
by the fire, each of us balancing on one long leg.
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Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent being Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019) and editor of three anthologies, including The Plague Papers. Her poems, reviews, articles and essays have been widely published. Most recently, they have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Verse-Virtual, North of Oxford, Inflectionist Review, and are forthcoming in Spillway, Tampa Review, and Gargoyle.
by Ellen Austin-Li
This palette of oak grows
with a marbling of pale green
lichen to frame its pain.
Sculpted on a trunk, two swirling burls,
a bulging body and a face
with the tough skin of bark.
A dappling of color to offset despair.
And what of the ivy that twines
towards this sight? An Almighty mind-
shift against survival of the fittest?
The unseen hand scrapes beauty
out of wounds, injury as medium,
near-death the instrument of the master.
The features poised uppermost
on the tree express wonder broken-free
of the soil at her feet, eyes half-closed
in reverie, mouth open in an “O”—
Oh, I’ve known this sort of wonder,
metal staples holding together the skin
of life, this scar I wear on my torso.
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Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rust + Moth, and other places. Her first chapbook, Firefly, was published by Finishing Line Press (2019); her second chapbook, Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic, is forthcoming (FLP 2021). A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship in Poetry, she is an MFA candidate at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
by Diane Hueter
Cicadas sing—
thrum and wheeze
from the mulberry trees,
a row of knotted trunks hugging the fence
between pole beans and dandelion lawn,
the highest, greenest leaves dusty from weeks
of our passing back and forth on the gravel drive.
I stand on our unpainted, sagging porch,
holding the baby's cup and her dress,
clean and crisp as Chinese poppies
flaming in a summer portrait.
Cicadas begin their song again
as if they had stopped
when the screen door slammed,
stopped and breathed in,
their eyes like orange beads
and their wings like chaff.
They sing even within the walls
of my human chest, they sing
in the rooms of my eyes and lungs,
in the struggling chambers of my heart,
and the trembling of the blood in my wrists.
When I stand in the sweet humid air
holding a cup of water and a red dress,
I foresee their bodies’ husks
emptied, clinging to the trees,
shells of lace,
I wonder what it will be
for my fragile daughter and me
to shrug our dresses, our skin,
like linen from our shoulders,
confused or blessed by music of our own.
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Diane Hueter is a Seattle native now living in Lubbock,Texas—a place with very blue skies and very little rain. Her poetry has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Review. Her book After the Tornado (2013) was published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. Diane attended the Community of Writers poetry workshop (a truly transformative experience) and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
by Joanna Solfrian
Mid-breath I think of her and whether she’d consider my mothering well done.
Mid-breath there’s a hitch and I debate crying, just to get rid of the hitch.
Mid-evening and—just to fuck with the mid-breath—I shove out a sigh.
It is still mid-evening’s deciding point: Google forms or dishes?
Mid-evening and sex is off the table: cramps and barbed synaptic fangs.
Everything is failure. Mid-poem and I know nothing.
Mid-poem and I think of breasts, mine mashed into a sports bra,
a friend’s replaced, another friend’s grazed with my lips for show, like the cigarette—
it’s all just an original wanting, isn’t it? The bleak midwinter is both the fore-
and background of wanting. Monday: snow on snow, and mid-pandemic I
leave the apartment with my bagged heart. A gift for a stranger, for anyone
who’ll take the gutted beating thing and pat it, saying,
there there, it’s not so bad.
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Solfrian’s first collection, Visible Heavens, received the Wick First Book Poetry Prize, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her second collection, The Mud Room, came out last year from MadHat Press. She has also published a chapbook of ghazals with Finishing Line Press called The Second Perfect Number. Solfrian lives and works in New York City.
by Ashley Somwaru
by Emilee Kinney