by Diamond Forde
“hoes said they wish a bitch would, & I’m a genie” -Megan Thee Stallion
by Jill Kitchen
what if you are your own secret affair
the warm breath you turn to in the ticking
dark of a sleepless night the liquid glow of skin
you take into the shower in the afternoon
pj harvey's rock and roll strum her low
full-throated whisper pulsing against tile
what if you are the one who finds your own shape
attractive struck by the moonglow from within
who sees your own silhouette undressed and
takes in everything that this body has been through
all the ways it has grown into this knowing
wise against the silt edge of the world
wind-brushed and beaten by sun
eyes crackle-creased by laughter
the buttered pear of mothering, this near mane reaching
toward earth, these guitar curves of hips
you have become the one you wear red lipstick for
buy the black lace edged underwear for
dance the flamenco for, pulling imaginary apples
from low tangled branches over and over
with a trill of long, piano-loving fingers
you have become the one you write sonnets for
the one you sing for with your widest-sky voice
against these soft outer walls of snow
fragile with the still broken spring
you are become this woman that you built
from treebark and the hidden stones of other countries
from salamander sheen and desert crossings
from the way each different language feels on your tongue
in the just waking tremble of your mouth
in the oracle of your heart muscle, once struck silent
you are become this woman you burned for fought for
drove across the continent in the middle of the night for
this green-eyed woman mirrored back
who summons her city within
you are still writing this woman song
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Jill Kitchen's work appears in FERAL, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Trestle Review, and is forthcoming from HAD. She has a B.A. in Romance languages from Colorado College and has studied creative writing at UCLA, Columbia University, The Poetry Project in New York City, and with Hollowdeck Press in Boulder. She lives in Boulder, Colorado where she can be found rollerskating on the creek path while searching for great horned owls. Twitter: @jillkitchen.
by Melissa Studdard
And my body is a collection of rivers
that think they are bones. I love my blood
the way I love pink cherry soda, the way
I would nibble on my own earlobes
and call it good breeding. According
to Eduardo Galeano, the church says
the body is a sin; science says it’s
a machine, and advertising has tried
to make it into a business, but the body
says, I am a fiesta. That’s why both
my elbows think they are wishbones
and all my knuckles have decided
to be opals, increasingly iridescent
with every change of angle. That’s why
every glass of pinot grigio I drink
is a toast to the diamonds in your and my
and Maya Angelou’s thighs. Big, small,
and all the in-betweens are perfect
to me. Even when what I see in the mirror
makes me want to cry, I remember the glory
of the aqueducts that would deliver
those waters from the vast countryside
of my insecurity out to the glamourous
cities of my cheeks, and suddenly my body
is an event to be marked by festivities,
the best year yet of an award-winning
vineyard, a half-century-long firework
display, a pilgrimage, a parade.
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Melissa Studdard is the author of two poetry collections, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and Dear Selection Committee, and the chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings.Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and has also appeared in periodicals such as POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, New Ohio Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, SWWIM Daily, and New England Review.Her Awards include The Penn ReviewPoetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize from Winning Writers, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and more.
by Micah Marie Johnson
My figure is a constellation
Bright sparks shining when I open
I am the map and the destination
Rippled and soft bellied laughter
I’m a five pointed star ready to be gazed upon
Breasts buoyant and strong
My form takes up space
The expanse holds me all night long
I feel for the void and splatter
Each mark on my body: a galaxy
My freckles are love poems to read
I’m kept in orbit to be worshiped
Rounded edges and subtle rubbing thighs
So I say a prayer in the mirror
Then my body becomes the light
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Known as an upbeat, eclectic, and vibrant writer and artist, Micah Marie Johnson creates for creation sake, but has also appeared in a poetry and short story anthology titled Journey’s End by Two Friends Publishing. Recently Micah has completed their first children's book, Finding The Future, which was a commissioned project to commemorate the opening of the Cybrarium Library in Homestead, Florida.
by Lúcia Leão
that moves on a surface,
someone scratching
with a fingertip the picture
of existence.
Up the stairs, down a ladder,
horizontal, dreaming,
mudding the air with its breathing.
A tunnel of insides no one sees,
but feel, there is a texture
of dance, traits that attempt
the borders.
All my scars are feminine.
______________________________________________________________________
Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, South Florida Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, and Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia’s poems in Portuguese have been published in literary magazines in Brazil.
by Michele Kotler
by Lara Payne
The baby imprints
her face to your face
forehead to forehead,
mouth to mouth, blowing raspberries on
any soft part of you.
Embrace fleshiness
thick legs strong.
Carry the four-year-old on your back,
the one-year-old on your hip.
Your arms
surround these children
who press themselves
into your body.
Boundless love,
a great acceptance of you
as you are right now:
disheveled, mussed, tired,
unsung in any circle
but this one.
______________________________________________________________________
Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poem “Corn Stand, 10 ears for two dollars” was a winner in the Moving Words Competition and was placed on buses in Arlington, VA. Recent poems have appeared in the Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Mom Egg Review.
by Mia Leonin
My maker unfastened the branch from heaven’s hinge
And with that branch,
She pried open the three-poisoned god in me
And from that god,
She shook out the three-cornered sack of culpability in me
And from that sack,
She produced a three-pronged compass that unmoored the navigator in me
And from that navigator,
My maker ungendered the tri-phallus, triple-breasted woman in me
And from that woman,
My maker stippled a three-cornered quilt of kindness in me
And that quilt
Comforted the three-chimed loneliness in me
And that loneliness
Tuned the three-tongued oratorio in me
And the oratorio
Reverberated in the beak of the three-trilled bird
Who reached me just in time to tell you that
In the garden’s conjugations of war, envy, and greed,
You are beauty
And the infinitive of beauty is
to be.
______________________________________________________________________
Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press), Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, and others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
by Cindy Veach
You make me think of pewter, sticky on the inside
thrift shop pitchers—all those years of accumulated
gunk that no sponge or bottle brush can reach.
You make me think of heavy sow-belly skies,
100% humidity—the weighty weight of it all.
Grey, you are the antithesis of bougainvillea,
cheery saccharine packets, gyrating disco
balls. You are a stinking hot breeze
rifling the old neighborhood. You are wilting
breasts, senile angiomas, vaginitis, osteoporosis.
Oh little bitty grey moth plastered to the grey door frame
who thought yourself invisible—I see you
and raise you three parts 506 to one part 505
to equal parts peroxide.
______________________________________________________________________
Cindy Veach’s most recent book is Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, 2021). She is also the author of Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book, and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, The Journal, Salamander, and SWWIM Every Day, among others. She is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is co-poetry editor of MER. See www.cindyveach.com.
by Mary Block
Having coalesced around you, how I love you.
You are the one I breathe through the night for.
I take flesh in my mouth each day and chew
it into something that serves you, something more
than I can give you. I try to teach you what I know,
adopted child, about the past. The hunger and grief
of the bodies that taught you to survive in snow
you’ve never seen, to bare your teeth
at anyone getting too close to your kids
or your sweet, soft life. And all the times I endured
your laxatives and relaxers, I knew that you did
it to protect me, to make less of me to hate. Be sure
that I love you. And, of course, that I’ll outlive you.
And you haven’t asked, but of course, I forgive you.
______________________________________________________________________
Mary Block lives and writes in her hometown of Miami, Florida. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mudfish, Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications. Her work can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
by Yashasvi Vachhani
After Patricia Smith
Don’t shroud them, your thunder
thighs. Unsack & air your thunder
thighs. Hoist them up. Setubandh
to the sun—an offering, not a blunder
thighs. Release them. Rainbows
in an oil spill, formerly asunder
thighs. Peacock them. In the streets
wilderness of wonder
thighs. Tandav a revolution. Oh Yash!
Unshackle. Your thunder. Thighs.
*Setubandh is the Sanskrit name of the bridge pose.
*Tandav is Lord Shiva’s dance of fury.
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Yashasvi Vachhani is a curator and facilitator of children's programmes in Mumbai. Her poem was recently published in Of Dry Tongues and Brave Heart, an anthology for women's poetry. She loves, reading, writing and the colour yellow.
by Ruth Williams
Grandma's
stretched the quilt
around the hoop.
Her needle's rhythm,
a casual puncture.
Across the cloth, holes
you can hardly see.
I have always wanted to sew,
but my hands knotted,
couldn't follow.
When I was young,
I wished hard to be measured
by a man's hands.
A biblical knowledge,
no woman could explain to me.
The thread fills the space
the fabric makes for it, as if
it too had waited its whole life
for a grander design.
It wasn't what I thought.
Grandma says,
trace the tree’s motherline: my body
to my sisters' to my mother's to my grandmother's
just as the thread’s green spreads
to the leaves' jade tips.
Our shadows,
a knowledge
I can cool my need
beneath.
______________________________________________________________________
Ruth Williams is the author of a poetry collection, Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and two chapbooks, Nursewifery (Jacar Press, 2019) and Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at William Jewell College.
Or I Want Brown & Black & Queer Joy To Be Ubiquitous: Or What We’re Made Of Connects Us, Fuck: Or I Am Writing This Poem When I Should Be Out Protesting So This Poem Is A Protest Instead
by Felicia Zamora
I wonder about vulnerability. Envisage. How my third metacarpal
smacks into wood & the purples surface skin long before tender
before my eyes package up the scene for nerve cells to detect
in a type of mystery only cells talking solves. I carve a love poem
to my body inside the skull, in hopes all eyes roll back far enough
to read my inscription in shitty penmanship. In maturation outside
the womb, to explain our thinking means a study of brain chemicals,
electric signals, neurons as neighbors—cityscapes under flesh. Our
thoughts propagate in neuron fire. Waves of waves of waves—signals
of us, compounds in coalesce. Peel us back to reveal a galaxy of burning
hydrogen & helium & churn of nuclear forges in our guts; heaven
held in the pin pricks of pin pricks. My body a constellation of elements
of stars gone supernova—transient & astronomical my atoms—stellar
fusion gives me assemblage in a last evolutionary stage before explosion.
______________________________________________________________________
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, April 2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
by Therese Gleason
This is for the twin hinge,
hardest of bony workers,
gatekeeper of body and mind,
guardian of the toothed cave,
vestibule for breath and sustenance.
Puppeteer behind the scenes,
you crank the red drawbridge
open and closed, sheriff of the mouth,
keeper of speech, teacher of suck
and kiss, clamp with damp lips.
Is it any wonder you yawn
and ache? You are Sisyphus
of swallowing, Atlas of the mouth’s
gummed palate, tamer of muscular
tongue and teeth. You are chewer
of words and meat, mandible
and maxilla in a marriage
of opposites, chomping till death
do you part: holy equation of catch
and release. You are holder of tension,
detritus of language and emotion
ground down by the tectonics
of the molar ridge. Tender buttons,
jointed joist of bone on bone,
clenched or unseated in sleep
you rouse the three-headed dragon,
trigeminal and terrible, to unleash
a shower of darts shimmering
from eye socket to cheek.
O simple machine, mother
who feeds, domed cathedral
of human want and need. O
sacred portal that falls open
at rest when the soul
is released.
______________________________________________________________________
Therese Gleason is author of two chapbooks: Libation (co-winner, South Carolina Poetry Initiative competition, 2006) and Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021). Her poems appear/are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, America, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Literary Mama, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, KY, she lives in Worcester, MA with her spouse and three children. A literacy teacher at an elementary school, Therese reads for The Worcester Review and has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Find her at theresegleason.com.
by Louisa Muniz
by Jennifer Greenberg
After the summer’s geography
of bodies, you are ribbed
seashell
stripped to moonlight,
mistaken for nautilus,
the antediluvian
Venus carved from her own bone.
Those tight-lipped mammary
cells abandoned, sour
milk in the sand, hot oceans
to undress in, and all
my fantasies buxom.
When the waves split
their tongues, I lie naked
in the surf and wait
for a second adolescence;
for bud-tipped breasts
to unearth
miniatures of mountain—
bluff, bulwark, weathered
arches carved teat to teat.
This is what’s left of God’s clay,
the unmolded archetype,
a female animal
undone, her gills turned to lungs
and set to walk upright
in the waning flood.
Those who see you will say prairie,
but you are hearth. They say empty,
but I say flower—
all petal, pistil, stem of you
bursting for touch.
______________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Greenberg is a Floridian poet living in New England, and an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her writing appears in several online publications and was awarded the Joe Bolton Poetry Award in 2020.
by Kathy Jacobs
My friend won’t go sleeveless
because of her Czech arms.
She means her meaty upper arms,
arms like Ruben’s beauties,
artful arms that remind me of fictional
southern belles, mamas and grand-mamas
with flesh like bread dough,
moist and heavy.
I admire my friend’s solid arms
and her line of women who worked them
over a washboard.
Used them to wield a hoe and whip oxen;
assemble artillery casings and drape
over a flannel shoulder while
doing the two-step or polka.
Arms like mine from eastern Poland,
where they dug beets and potatoes.
Made the sign of the cross
and lit Sabbath candles, both.
A generation and two later
they wrung chicken necks,
planted gladiolus bulbs
and a daughter in the ground.
Learned to turn a steering wheel,
hurl a bowling ball
and carry a suitcase
away from a marriage.
Arms, in this life, that taught on a
blackboard and rocked some babies,
reached up at family weddings
to dance the YMCA, washed a father
on his deathbed now jiggle and flap
when I wave goodbye.
Today I’ll put on a sleeveless shirt,
grab my trowel and a bag of mixed bulbs.
Today I’ll plant gladioli. Row after row.
______________________________________________________________________
Kathy Jacobs is a retired nursing professor who recently left the fellowship of gifted and generous Nebraska poets and is at play finding others in the Twin Cities. Her poems have been published in Plainsongs, The Comstock Review, and several anthologies from The Nebraska Writers Guild, including How It Looks from Here: Poetry from the Plains.
by Cynthia White
I root around in the box, wanting
to wear my mother’s pearls again
before I die. Or the tiny diamonds
my husband bought to court me,
veined turquoise from Taos,
amber, any amount of silver,
clip-on rhinestones—gorgeous
but sheer murder. One hot morning,
Bernadette the freckled, the brave,
plucked a ripe plum from her yard,
held it fast to my skull as she steered
a sewing needle through my unspoiled lobes.
I would have suffered worse—
and did, in truth—
to be a tramp in my mother's eyes.
Among sailors, a pierced ear once signified
the wearer had crossed the equator,
voyaged far and wide. I don’t know
who moved on, or away. I only know
that when I bled, she stooped
to swab the ruby drops with iodine,
gold hoops swinging.
______________________________________________________________________
Cynthia White's poems have appeared in Adroit, Narrative, Massachusetts Review, Grist and ZYZZYVA among others. She was a finalist for Slapering Hol's 2021 Chapbook Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
by Susan Rich
Before the first quarter note
from the chorus you sing
delivers me musicals or psalms,
the day may irridesce
into an island razzle dazzle—
another Barukh atah Adonai
or a category six hurricane.
In your timbre: the certain heartbreak
or heart remake raging
at the end of a cordless line.
Doctor, may you be my once and only
dip into oncology and may this late
afternoon callback signal
our final sentences together.
Between us—the lamp of my life and
the diagnosis marks where I exist—
readied to return to the illuminated trees.
And so I set the phone to silence—
watch the kern as she crash-lands into the sea.
______________________________________________________________________
Susan Rich is an award-winning poet, editor and essayist. She is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. In addition, she co-edited, with Ilya Kaminsky, the anthology The Strangest of Theatres, published by the Poetry Foundation. Rich has received awards from Peace Corps Writers, PEN USA, and the Fulbright Foundation. Recent poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland, and World Literature Today. Her fifth collection, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, Spring 2022. Visit her at poetsusanrich.com.
by Heather Lanier