by Shannon Finck
I’m watching a girl who looks like my sister write lines of poetry in a Moleskine notebook during the presentation on Frank Stanford, the “Swamprat Rimbaud.” This is exactly what I imagine my sister would be doing. She doesn’t dig poems about outhouses and knives. My sister would turn from all this and write a love poem. She wouldn’t see “The Snake Doctors” as a love poem, even though they ride each other again and again in the dark. What do I know? Maybe it isn’t a love poem. The girl who looks like my sister raises her left hand to ruffle (v.) her whimsical pixie cut. Ruffles (n.) on her sleeve flap in the air conditioner, and the auditorium fills with fiddleheads and frog song. The watercolor bluebirds on her blouse soar and land on the backs of plush theater seats. Her right hand stops. She looks up. My right hand stops and I look up. The presenter talks about the consistency of blood.
by Cynthia Bargar
Luckily, the night ends
with a calm over Valparaíso.
Neruda’s chair a cloud,
they tell themselves.
A boat muffles
the sound of sleep.
An old woman sighs.
From her fullness or
freedom. From tears
beading the sky.
He might have fled
to Mexico before dying.
Children play &
bend their bodies
in these streets.
Until they scatter
like stars upon the mountains,
their chatter & rattle,
like so many questions
from the withered
flowers around the corner.
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Cynthia Bargar is Associate Poetry editor at Pangyrus. Her poems have appeared in many journals, most recently Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, Driftwood Press, and in the book, Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021). Her first poetry collection, Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room, came out from Lily Poetry Review Books in January, 2022. Cynthia lives with her partner, cartoonist Nick Thorkelson, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
by Mónica Gomery
Jess brings all the plants into the bathroom. Countertops glow neon jade,
the tub sprouts palm fingers, fiddlehead fig. Waxy verdant cloister
in the sink, emerald dog tongues tonguing porcelain. There’s so much life
to tend to. Jess turns each measuring cup’s silver ear into the brown world
beneath it, the water listening for where it needs to spread among the roots,
the soil offering a welcome. They know each variety’s preference—
some take water from the tap, some bronze at touch of chlorine—so they
patiently filter batches and distribute, pot by pot. When I crack the bathroom
door in the middle of the day, I walk into a glasshouse. Room humming green,
vines corkscrew across the windowsill, faces bright with chlorophyll and drying
in the sunlight. I can hear their drip and sigh. After bathing. After being fed.
We’re trying to discern whether we want to become parents.
A thing you have to work for. Money spent, biology precision-tinkered
in a lab. We take turns lifting the question with our hands, passing
the question between us like it’s already our child; you hold her now,
this fleshy question mark, you pat her on the rump, you wash her hair.
You walk her through the rain. It’s hard to feel like we’re enough, our bodies
settling earthbound into thirty-six. We thirty-six our way through
the supermarket, trying to cut back on sugar. We thirty-six our bed,
sleeping in a limb-knot with the dog. Our knees thirty-six us on our runs
through the neighborhood. Chasing nothing. A teacher of mine
sends a message: I’m looking forward to failure. We thirty-six
the conversation after dinner, me perched on the kitchen counter,
Jess pressed into a stool, the rubber tree ten feet tall reaching raw hands
around the night, around our biggest questions. We’re surrounded
by what greens us. We nourish veined and growing things. The future
a metallic ear tilted toward the potting soil of our hummed and sighing lives.
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Mónica Gomery writes poems about queerness, loss, diaspora, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her second book, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, and is newly out from the University of Nebraska Press. She has been a nominee for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and a graduate of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Black Warrior Review, Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and other publications. Read more at monicagomerywriting.com.
by Vasvi Kejriwal
after Chen Chen
With Rumi in my purse (I’ll be
in the waiting room a while). Without
waterproof chappals. With Bandra in monsoon.
With Fem21 powder mixed in cold-pressed
celery for a morning routine—chaste berry
ashwagandha. Without last month’s savings,
now replaced by Fem21. With periods that arrive
like my anger: always late. With child-wed
great-grandmothers whose angers
could not afford to be on time.
Without a tongue that knows Marwari but loves
to French. With Dadi saying zits are the worst
thing that could happen to a woman. With a face
full of pockmarks. With Dr Siddhu’s voice
in my head: that happens when DHEA is high.
do sport. move. Without knowing how to swim.
With idiocy enough to raft in the Relli’s
high tide in an ill-fitting lifejacket.
With Spotify looped to "Running Up That Hill."
With a father till 391 days ago. With my mother’s
anger at her mother. With an ache to make myself fall
in love with my body. With chipped burgundy shellac.
With a childhood of hearing you have piano fingers.
With a love for eating dosa at Sunday breakfast
with my piano fingers. With a love for eating dosa
at any time. With a secret sisterhood shared with
Chughtai’s post-colonial daughters: from wanting
to forever veil my face like Goribi to wanting to bat
my lashes at every man who owns a house
in our hood, like Lajjo. With Dadi scrubbing
masoor, malai on my skin—to make it
white. With a Google search for Dali’s shapeshifting
phalluses in yesterday’s web history. With Regé-Jean Page’s
trench-deep voice, toasted like a husk of tobacco,
lulling me to bed at 4 a.m. Without enough
melatonin. With telling myself I’d never get a guy
like Regé-Jean Page. With an ache to have faith
in God. Without a single god (from our thousands)
to call out to when called whore
in public. With knowing it’s no better
in private. With 13 years of muscle memory
that cannot erase the Odissi squat. Without a single
headstand. With knowing my privilege
to buy into self-care as I squeeze a drop
of copaiba under my tongue. Without a mirror
from which my Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
does not stare back at me. With telling
& telling & telling myself that I am not that.
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Vasvi Kejriwal received her LLB from Queen Mary University London in 2019. She has been a previous winner of the RATTLE Ekphrastic Challenge. Her works have appeared in Mekong Review, The Alipore Post, and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021-22.
by Athena Kildegaard
There is that within—a burl, a knot, a lie—
that gets in the way of forming a perfect union.
But just as the onion contains itself within itself,
hidden, so does each of us hide within our union.
At breakfast the children tell crude jokes, and laugh,
and spit seeds. This is the consequence of union.
In the orchard, the orange grower speaks of scions
with whispered pride and strokes the bud union.
Aspens wear their wedding clothes and clack
in the wind. Between ice and cloud, an uncanny union.
“Behind the door you pull on the rope of longing,”
wrote Nelly Sachs. How rash the desire for union
and how persistent. It wears a hair shirt and a cloak
of dew held together by silk thread—a taut union.
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Athena Kildegaard's sixth book of poems, Prairie Midden, has just appeared from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have found homes in Beloit Poetry Journal, december, Ecotone, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
by Sherry Shenoda
by Shelley Wong
by Zeina Hashem Beck
by Victoria Chang
by No'u Revilla
by Ada Limón
by Opal Palmer Adisa
by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
by Victoria Redel
by Anni Liu
by Gianna Russo and Jenny Carey
by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated by Fady Joudah
by Erika Meitner
by Su Cho
by Diane Thiel