PLANTING SEEDS

Dariana Alvarez

My first-grade self sits in a classroom

where light-colored haired girls stare at my arms.

I stare at their bodies.

These were the roots.

Thin girls who could bend like branches,

blonde girls with pale skin and hairless bodies.

You’re so hairy for a girl,

they’d say.

and my girlhood, strips from me,

parts itself like glue,

sticky, wet, and messy

as I pull down my sleeves.

Years later, I tell my mother how

my body is a garden that grows nothing but weeds,

how I seem to sweat yet

the fruits of my labor never appear

because the scale numbers stay the same,

how my period never comes anymore.

My doctor diagnoses me with

unkind hormones that grow massive

amounts of these prickly strands.

He hands me birth control, tells me that

it’ll pull out the weeds in my body.

Yet my eyes look toward the ceiling light,

women are beautiful, clean, but

my body is not.

The leaves of my body, cannot be fixed

by the bright light above me.

This cactus of a body

reminds me what I can’t have;

a small figure,

hair only in a certain place.

My large body always requests a shave,

a release of this pain that I will eventually

get tired of maintaining, stop taking the pill

that prevents my body from blossoming

into the wildflower it should be

that bathes in the sunlight,

and doesn’t mind its bold appearance.

 field notes from pilgrimage

Elsa Asher

I ate a cinnamon roll in Berea

in a colonial undertow of sugar

massacred ancestors

white ghosts

thick damp air

yarn and brooms and clay pots

it almost hurts too much to touch the earth

the soil like a lost love

a single malt essence of grief.

On the way to Germany

the veil between time

and memory got thin

every moment opening up

into a remembering

tumbling out terribly

the plane cabin became a chamber

the air smelled like gas

when we landed I was careful

to not lose sight of my friend

to not get separated

on the streets of Berlin

the small gold plaques everywhere

embedded in the cobblestones

inscribed with a name

a date of birth and the date they were caught

deported, sent to die

someone had laid flowers as offerings

the trees on the side of the road

are the ones I dreamt of all my life

running as I’m being chased

the trees remember what happened

if I am frozen in my experience

of being hunted

it is simple relational geometry

that another is frozen in their experience

of hunting

in this way we abide

in relationship

staring across at each other

bound in the gaze

an unbearable embrace

an intimacy of suffering

cast in camber

our liberation

bound up together.

Sitting on a riverbank in Breslau

the Oder river sang a song to me

I listened and sang it back.

We arrived at the front gate of Belzec*

just as it was closing for the night

when I saw the gate sliding shut I ran to it

thinking I would squeeze through at the last moment

not thinking what would happen after

locked inside, my friends on the other side of the fence

why was this my impulse, to run towards

the closing gate of an extermination camp

we walked down the dusty road

through the brambles and tall grass.

we stood, pressed up against the steel fence, looking in

names of towns, rocks strewn across the hill

representing all the people murdered there

we said Kaddish and sang and introduced ourselves

a guard came out of one of the buildings and looked at us

we walked quickly back to the car

we offered wine to the earth

the long suture line across my chest pulsed

all our scars hurt.

The Bug River flows through Galicia towards the Baltic

currently it is the border between Poland and Ukraine

we tried to cross the border in our rental car

but were turned back, Ukraine is out of the EU

so we drove to the river

stood on the soft bank

I took off my shirt and pants

and swam across

climbing up on the other side

I prayed and said hello

to my ancestors

whose bodies are the land

I gathered a shell for my father

and with clay in my hands

I swam back.

*Belzec is an extermination camp in eastern Poland where a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and

1943.

Elsa Asher is a queer and trans poet and practitioner of somatics and ritual, with a focus on narrative medicine and healing developmental and intergenerational trauma. They taught Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and their work has been published in Mom Egg Review, The Intima, and Matter Press. Elsa was born and grew up on Duwamish land, and currently lives on Lenape land. Find out more about Elsa at www.elsaasher.com and on instagram: @tendernessftw

Song

Priscilla Atkins

Hush, I thought I heard her

call my name.

It wasn’t so loud,

it was so nice and plain.

Eddie James “Son” House, Jr., “Death Letter”

The orange flame of a mid-September morning slipping

down linden, maple and elm. Your three-story, high-

ceilinged home. Your mama, almost eighty, spent the night

on the couch. She rises and searches the silent apartment

for you. No one wants to wake you since the brain

tumor scare. When she can’t find you, she phones Mark

already at work, I peeked in the bedroom—he isn’t there.

Since the surgery two weeks past, nights are so long, Mark’s

been sleeping downstairs. He suggests to your mother: Check

the basement—sometimes he putters around down

there . . . call me back, let me know. Her right hand shaky, your

old mama starts down two flights of stairs. Opens the door,

turns on the light, and sees you lying there.

She stumbles to her knees, already knows you’re dead:

in his clothes, a bag over his head. Home for lunch, the phone

rings, I pick up the receiver and the kitchen cups blur. Throw

nonsense in a suitcase and drive three hours south. Unbarred

a vital vessel breaks free. Piece of my mouth rolling down

a road towards a morning-washed room. What is that sound?

is it coming from you? is it coming from me? Hear it

there. Low slow notes. That barely move the air.

Benito

Minay Baltazar

The río balsas runs 479 miles long.

When my father was a child it was vibrant, full of life.

The older he got, the less its water flowed near his town.

The older he got, the less fish and more worry he carried.

The average person can hold their breath for 2 minutes.

Some hold their breath for an eternity.

But Benito was valiente, younger, and he’d jump

right into the rapids, hold his breath.

Or maybe he was just menso, for leaping like that

without thinking of his mother, his father, his brother

standing there watching.

Once, he didn’t come up like usual.

My dad stood, fear seeping through his palms.

He drowned, didn’t he? The river took him.

What will I tell ama?

It sure felt like eternity.

Another stubborn child,

a few months prior had.

So why would this be any different.

All brown boys who are valiente

end up dead anyway

one way or another.

Sweat dripping from my father’s temples,

the glistening light of a scorching summer afternoon,

river waves crashing.

This little boy, pensando lo peor,

would never imagine that besides

his precious river

his menso little brother

his tierra caliente would also

be dying,

dwindling away slowly.

A new river forming,

479 miles of bullets and blood,

carrying the weight of all the people

who also held their breath.

And others would simply look at his tierra

with disdain,

and he would just watch, from 2,000 miles away.

¡Y que por fin sale Benito!

All the anger, worry, pain, eternity,

replaced by innocent chocolate colored eyes again,

a goofy smile from ear to ear.

¡Ándale métete guey, está bien rica el agua¡

While We Stay at Home

Charles Becker

I want to be the one who sets table with white cloth

then lights candles in yellow saucers,

the one who puts the spoon next to a knife,

centers plates, then folds the napkin,

I want to be the one who pulls out your chair

touches your back, and smiles, the one who speaks

of gardens, grows tulips and hydrangeas

gladiolas with hollyhocks, and then becomes

quiet enough like sunlit spring azaleas

to bring charity with handpicked bouquets.

I want to be the one who whispers

about coming health and easy breaths

where they hide and how they will abide.

Life stuns, you know, when it suddenly does

what we didn’t expect, taking away, ending,

and then starting again with changed landscapes.

Today we are lucky, though, as we slowly fold

laundry, make a sandwich, walk from room to room

holding hands, and share. I am the one who sees

a new moon cupped between clouds, and expects

you will always know the safety of camellia petals

by palm trees, neatly broken fronds or scattered

showers of pollen, steel gray hills edged with blush

and winter desert dry, night’s first stars through

open windows, sparkling specks of sundown,

and of course honeybees, faithful worker ones

who crawl inside the mouths of fully readied roses

to teach us what will likely happen next.

Seed

Elizabeth Bolton

Along with most of the world’s

trustworthy people I behave as if

an avocado seed cannot be cracked.

Not only is it too slick with green, oily

meat to grip but the thing looks

to be made of solid, polished wood.

I used to live alone and dust my studio

multiple times a day.

I used to line my books and papers up so their edges

would either intersect at a perpendicular

or never, ever at all.

My desk used to be untouchable

(my hands would hover

just above it);

it still is, though pressed into a corner now.

Pressed into a corner and untouchable is how it earned the name

altar. My work sings now

as does the ignored kettle

the hole in the spout intentionally small

as it is for all mothers and I am well aware

that I built this prison, too, piece by piece, just like I dusted the last.

My husband chomps broccoli stalks

like a giant tearing up tree trunks.

“You can eat them,” he boasts,

“most people don’t know that.”

He locks the avocado seed between his molars

and the pause before the crack

terrifies me, not knowing

whether seed or teeth will give first.

The thing hatches crawling yellow innards

soft as stomped dead wood.

“Extra sharp teeth in the back,” he explains, “grip it in place,”

and I think I love him not because I am good

but because I am not, and because Gary Snyder said:

the Dharma is like an Avocado!

and I understood him. It might be

my favorite poem. I wonder sometimes

if I should not tell anyone that. I wonder sometimes

if what I’m doing counts as anything

if these words are not too easy

to be called brilliant and if brilliance might also be

crushing things between your teeth and scaring everyone.

Fireworks

Beth Boylan

The fireworks go off in Asbury,

perfectly timed to another hot flash, another pill,

startling me as though I were right there on the boardwalk,

though I have not yet returned—like everything else we shared

still too hot to touch.

I can’t tell what’s worse, losing my insides or us. Your hands

keep appearing in my dreams of wrong trains and crying babies,

silver-ringed half-moons orbiting mine.

This mattress sags from grief

as I trace the surgeon’s handiwork

and wonder how long before the raw red lines

fade to scars,

if parts left behind

shift into the void,

why we can still see the fireworks

after they explode.

Birds of Paradise

Leah Browning

In the months since I’ve seen him,

he’s grown a full beard and had his hair

cut in a different style, so when he materializes

outside the mechanized glass doors

barricading the secured area of the airport

in a brown corduroy trucker jacket

with a faux-sheepskin lining,

it takes me a moment to recognize him

amongst the other passengers flowing

past me on the way toward the baggage claim.

He is no longer my son in that moment

but a man I don’t know, a stranger,

striding toward me as anyone might,

as if our relationship up to this point

has been erased from both our memories

and we are two tenderhearted adults meeting

for the first time and falling unexpectedly

into a kind of love, and so I embrace and take him

home with me, the car sailing through the dark past

the landscape of palm trees and unseasonable flowers.

From the Starbucks at Safeway

Laura Cherry

For Molly

My friend, awake two nights without

her breathing machine due to a "planned"

power outage, ninety minutes from the nearest

hotel, no generator, no gas, no ice, no rest,

messages from the supermarket wi-fi to say

she is intact, grumpy, lonely, fine. It's just

climate change, wildfire prevention, corporate

malfeasance, the sacrifice of one kind of safety

for another. It's murder. It's complicated.

Who am I to complain, says my friend,

weeping at the news from Syria,

just trying to sleep and to keep breathing.

The Shortest Poem in America

Linda Collins

after Jaswinder Bolina

1. Everyone was Spanish and breakfast was a vast omelette with the chunkiest fries, broadest

mushrooms, slabs of bacon, fried tomatoes wide as an orange, oh, and the toast – mountains

of fat white bread with fancy grill marks, the bounty of butter across it like sunshine

on my first day in America.

I was flying through Los Angeles to England from home in New Zealand, tucked at the

bottom of the Pacific, with not many people, an apology of a nation, even the national flag

borrows from other countries, no star-spangled banner proclaiming how many states?

New Zealand is so small that it does not even have states. One America state

would gobble the whole country and ask for more cornbread.

Growing up, I had heard the West Side Story, I Like to Be in America,

on the radio,but that was not the story I understood. I was a Kiwi kid in a tract home in a

wisteria lane of no wisteria; our neighbours were Māori, tangata whenua, people of the land,

now diaspora in it, belonging to no tribe, nowhere, not even to their rental house next to ours,

and I was drawn to their words, their easy movement, ours so uptight white bread,

and I thought the song was, I Like to be in a Māori Car,

which I did, I liked to be in their backyard of car wrecks, to sneak by the trellis fence when

Mom was not looking (‘Don’t play with Them’), we the naughty children with our secrets,

scars, hunger and terror of grown-ups, would sit at the steering wheels and race each other.

all our little split-open lips laughing.

2. Why was everyone Spanish in America? Of course, they were not Spanish, I know now,

but Latinex. At the meet’ n greet at the airport, driving the van to the hotel, replenishing the

buffet, cleaning the rooms? It wasn’t the America I saw on TV, like I Love Lucy, though later

in life I found she was married to a Cuban.

Displaced, I was at home in transit in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to fly to London, to the

strange place where some ancestors are from. My hotel overlooked Sunset Boulevard, the

right place to die if you have broken dreams. Well, I had a broken heart – that first big love

story that wasn’t. I kissed a new soulmate, Bushmills, drank the whole bottle.

I thought, this is how young people are supposed to die, like you’re in an American movie,

drunk and glazing over, over to that Boulevard where stars bleed out on the pavement.

Next day, a housemaid found me, and the biggest heart in America saved me from a

short life. ‘Housekeeping,’ I heard her call, as I lay on the carpet. ‘Yes,’ was what got out,

and she came in, with the squeaking wheels of a trolley, rattling mops, buckets. A ‘what have

we here?’ and she held me like I imagine some mothers might.

My poem is too short a poem for such a big act. But while it is too

short, could it ever be big enough for her? For her familiar brown eyes, her outdoor skin, her

soft singing telling me not to lose myself? And the echo of neighbours who taught me how to

escape grown-ups, to drive cars with no motors, no wheels, ha-ha.

The last breath

Chanice Cruz

The news was a storm

that crashed through our kitchen,

and in the eye of the tornado

relief escaped my lips.

I was happy you were gone

Finally, you’re free from the cancer

who held the noose,

wrapped

loosely

around

your neck,

the stool

you balanced under your feet kept

you alive, kept us together.

The years were a waiting game,

for weight to be shifted too much on

one side,

cancer watched for you to

be unbalanced.

He did this patiently from behind

the tree, tiny pieces of the bark still

punctured in his palm to this day.

There were so many days he lost

waiting for you.

In the eye of the news I

wanted to laugh at your death

unlike my sisters, who wailed like

spoiled children

Who couldn’t see the bigger picture.

when we saw your body laying

on the hospital bed, on your

terms, still a Queen

A smile on your face.

A last curve Death.

I looked in your eyelids,

and you showed me your last breath

a reflection of me

relief escaping our lips.

When he told us of your death

you died

miles and hours apart.

we exhaled.

Quiet as Chickens

Carlos DeJuana

My wife claims she can smell them —

tell them apart even.

But I only smell green apple

when they wash their hair

and blueberry explosion

when they tell the truth

about brushing their teeth.

The little one has a demon inside

that I don’t know how to cure.

Tells me I’m quiet as a chicken.

How do I respond?

The older one, she whimpers at night

and suffers inexplicable terrors.

But they pass, as all things do,

and for a moment we are once again

quiet as chickens.

Tennessee Twilight

Alfred Fournier

I’m tending weeds in the place he dreamed

we’d have, far from home. A modest piece

of wooded green, where we could be ourselves,

he’d say. It’s getting hot. The air is thick

with past decisions and the day etched out.

I’ve sorted through the papers now, the legal

work is done. No more long drives to doctors.

It’s mealtimes I dread. Shopping for one.

A question circles without rest: Who was I

before he came, tall and sweet? The night

we sat inside his Mercury and he

spilled over me, a saltwater shower,

until morning drowned us in the certainty

we’d be together for the rest of our lives.

Coriolis, 2005

Jamie Gage

Get up, country.

New Orleans is calling collect

but George Jr. chewed through

the cord so the charge is reversed

and the answer’s still no.

Go ahead and read the note

at the end of the dock: gone fishing

for lunch, with Rove in the Gulf

where it’s all bluefin and craps

and neocon Noahs on moby patrol.

Up there’s Trent Lott, cocked in the

crows’ nest and laughing, snapping

bottlecaps at Condi as she lines up

her shot. Starboard,

hundreds of miles from

the eye of the storm

they’ll dine on fish eggs & clam bellies,

tenderloin lamb with a neon mint glaze,

sip Cristal from a Waterford glass.

Meanwhile onshore

you’re still mired in shit,

in the sewer of Canal Street

as we watch through the screen

from the satellite dish. Get up, country.

Fire your President.

Playing God: A Fun Game for Kids

Steviee Geagan

Granddad’s thick, tree root fingers seized the strands of Spider-Man’s webbing strewn onto the

worn cotton of my pajama shirt and heaved my grass-smeared slippers up the moss-padded

cement steps to where my little graveyard lied.

Below the patio table, a row of halved worms rested peacefully. Each one with their own

headstone crafted of syrup-stained popsicle sticks. The jokes (respectfully) scratched out with

Crayola.

A gust of wind entered through the hollow in Granddad’s face. Why exited.

To see if one half could live without the other.

His roots unearth from my shirt.

I sucked the dried mud from under my fingernails.

Steviee Geagan is an emerging writer born and raised all around the Western Pennsylvania area. He has appeared in Pulp, The Siren, and was a finalist in the Roadrunner Review’s 2019 Writing Contest. When Steviee isn’t reading submissions for BatCat Press or Pulp, he desperately pleads with his well-loved Mr. Coffee to brew enough joe to last the night.

Cold Pastoral

Crystal Gibbins

I.

We wait for ice-out—

a release of winter,

the shiver thawing out

of our skin. The lake

lays open as a grave

between the land, buoys

the dead to rock edge

and the tide scribes

its first words in sand.

II.

Birch trees skeleton

the sky—divide sun

into tiny shreds of light.

Plump birds wobble

on branches, hulling

seeds until the feeder

empties. After snowmelt

husks pile up like tailings

of a slag heap.

III.

In a tangle of alders,

we find a bird

nest resting

empty—twists and twists

of dry grass,

nettle, and twigs.

Silent, bristled, and weathered

like a Monet

haystack in shade.

IV.

The lake takes wind

up like a woodpile

soon to be flame

and smoke. We watch

the old tire hang

itself from a tree,

swaying in the breeze.

Not even a snapped branch

can grow back

when it’s broke.

V.

Deer rise from shadows

in the woods when sun rolls

over the hill. Black flies and frog song

fill the bog. Moonlight halos

the lake, slips through gaps

in our windows. Moths flutter

against the glass. When the lights go out,

their ghost wings fall away like snow.

Ablative of Place from Which

Charles Grosel

Laudabam, Laudabas, Laudabat.

Each syllable rolled

off Daniel’s tongue like a ball bearing

slapping the tiled floor, a litany

more pleasing than a priest’s.

Laudabamus, Laudabatis, Laudabant.

He was in it for love not prizes:

software engineer turned graduate

instructor in Classics.

When things got dull he turned

to naughty Catullus. He’d recite the Latin,

then the book’s translation,

then his own, giggling at the lines

he made contemporary.

Mentulla is pitchforked by the Muses,

in Daniel’s teasing voice was rendered

The Muses poked him in the ass.

We had taken the class

for different reasons—

graduate students, freshmen, science

majors looking for breadth

requirements—but none of us

for fun. That was Daniel’s gift.

Near the end of the term,

the classroom’s heat

went on and stayed on,

as it always did

when we didn’t need it anymore.

The back row fanned themselves

with their myths. Sweatshirts came off.

The room smelled

like a vacuum cleaner bag.

Even the student unshaven

and bookless in the corner

took off his jacket of scraped

black leather. The tee shirt gripped

his biceps like centurions’ arm bands.

Slow getting started that day,

talk turned to the next quarter.

Keep going, Daniel cried,

eyes on the new centurion.

You can do it. All of you.

Someone called out,

What are you teaching next term?

He looked at his notes, then

turned to the board and wrote

Ablatives of Place From Which.

I won’t be here, he said.

Pens thumped desks,

almost as one. Notebooks shut.

We took it personally, this

betrayal, the way any group does

when their guide turns back at

the threshold.

C’mon, he said to the

silent rebuke. What?

He rolled up his sleeves,

until then kept tightly sweatered.

His glasses roosted on his nose

like chicken wire, his face

gone narrow as a man’s pelvis.

Had we missed the metamorphosis?

Or had it come in an instant,

as in the myths he assigned us

for translation?

The melanoma crusted his arms

like continents in relief.

I’ll do Latin on my own, he said.

No, I will. His grin curved stiff

as the leather watchband

loose on his arm.

the water never scared me but the boys

Jennifer Hambrick

had something about them I wasn’t allowed

to have. that summer I met a guy at the pool.

a friend knew someone who knew him so

they knew each other and so I knew him too.

my friend and I hung out at the pool a few days

in a row, laying out in bikinis on towels

and pretending not to care while we watched him

banter with some guys. he came over to us

now and then and knew when to leave

to make me want him to stay. there was

something in my mind back then about

the girls who met guys at the pool. they took

the musk of sweat and suntan oil and scant

clothing and full bodies and budding desire

with them beyond the chain-link fence

to parked cars, to the dark under bleachers,

to basement rec rooms when their parents

weren’t home. in my mind they let those guys

do all kinds of things to them lying down

on the floor with the dark all over them

and ending up pregnant and dropping out

of school and working at the shop-n-save

and chain smoking their lives away. I wasn’t afraid

of drowning, probably because of the lifeguards.

he walked me home from the pool one day,

down the long street, cutting through the church

yard, my hair half wet and frizzed and bleached

from sun and chlorine. now I know he hid

his nerves behind a mask of raw abandon

and his hands rushed for my hips and a crackle

of fear surged inside when his mouth found mine

and that day as the sun burned us I let him do it.

July 2019

DJ Hills

It was the last summer of being a boy,

holding that lie in my mouth careful not to

bite down too hard. Every Saturday,

I scraped the hair from my body because he liked it smooth

and I gave up on eating to remember how good being empty felt.

We were our own private disaster; gorging on Tito’s mixed with White Claw,

rubbing his neck while he puked, and laughing while he cried,

Why does nothing love me the way it used to?

My limbs turned hollow and weightless as bird bones;

buckling against every man-sized hand that squeezed my hips until I gasped.

I spent hours of that summer on my back, collar bone pointed at the sky in hungry accusation,

daring the sun to torch my skin so I’d feel a little less invisible.

My silhouette regressed to a warped reflection of adolescence

and the ridges of my spine were rubbed raw

against the arm of the basement couch as we fucked,

hands over my mouth so his husband didn’t hear.

I was never alone that summer. There was always a body

coming through the door or down the stairs.

That summer, I let him call me anything

which, in my rough translation, often turned out to be whore.

Every gesture seemed fixated on how small I was,

how light, and airy, and capable of collapsing

into him with no real consequences.

I was as wispy as the onion grass we yanked from his yard,

fingernails strained brown, our palms straining against the earth.

In the end, he told me the secret

to a flat stomach is to give up on being happy

as I curled my thumbs under my ribs and pushed and pushed

trying to make my body understand that this was the way it had to be.

 My Father-in-Law

Tiffany Hsieh

My father-in-law was an ear, nose, and throat doctor who liked his steak and potatoes. He died of natural causes in his sleep the year before I met my husband, so I was one year too late in meeting my father-in-law who drove a Jeep and liked his steak and potatoes. And beers, my husband says. What about Chinese food? I ask. Did I tell you, we used to have Chinese takeout once a week and he’d cook his own steak and potatoes? my husband says. I didn’t know you had Chinese takeout once a week, I say. He’d eat steak and potatoes for breakfast, too, my husband says. His father was late for breakfast one day. That was how my mother-in-law found him in his room one morning. She got Alzheimer’s after that. By the time I met her it was too late to call her Mum, a word that bypasses her when my husband visits and she lights up at the sight of the spitting image of her husband. Your dad looked just like you? I ask. I guess I look just like him, my husband says. What was he like? I ask. Did I tell you, when we were kids, he ran over the cat? my husband says. I didn’t know you had a cat, I say. My husband looks up from his laptop and says, We did, and I saw my father pick it up and put it in the trash can.

Tiffany Hsieh was born in Taiwan and immigrated to Canada at the age of fourteen with her parents. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Salamander, The Shanghai Literary Review, Atticus Review, Poet Lore, Sonora Review, the Apple Valley Review, and other publications. She lives in southern Ontario with her husband and their dog.

 Nouns

M. Jennings

My sister sends me

our grandmother's scarf when

I get cancer, for courage, she says

I am the strongest person

she knows yet I remember her

taming snakes, beating

back the blackberry bushes, flushing

rats from toilets, disappointing

herself and living anyway.

Our grandmother's scarf is

pink, lavender, and purple, a swirly

sixties design, signed by Vera, likely

something bought at Woolworth's.

My sister doesn't know I collect Vera

scarves, so this heirloom arrives

uncannily. I do need courage.

I loop the scarf around my neck before the radiation

donut and worry the corners during the PICC install

as the plastic tubing wends through

my arm, shoulder, aorta. Later

the anti-nausea drip ticks and

drips, ticks and

drips.

Injection port, roller clamp, trans-pal, Alaris

PC Model 8015, Made in San Diego, smartly

like so many machines I've written about—

to Reset, press Off twice. I'm pressing.

The chemo has a name, but I forget

it because I can't think

properly anymore. This noun

is called chemo

brain but feels like a verb

I can't get to, can't name. I know

it's there but I can't

find

it anymore,

forgotten

where it lives.

There

are two chemos. This

is the first, dripping.

The second comes home

in a fanny-pack, a 24-hour pet

with battery to drip

in my arm. It sings

a clicking song in the night like

the crickets that drove my grandmother

crazy summer nights in her housedress

tugging the washing

machine from the wall to discharge

them. Writing poetry

in the cancer

ward is bleak. The women, why are

we all women, doze. Men—husbands,

sons, fathers (no boyfriends here)—read

their phones in adjacent chairs while

machines chirp.

Awake, I take in my husband

as if I've been away years.

He's aged, fragile. I don't want him

to suffer. I reach up and

the scarf is still there

and I am still here

 At the Funeral We Ate Lasagna

Susan Johnson

After months of C rations in Algeria came Italy:

fresh tomatoes, hand made pasta, aged cheese.

We went back for thirds, my dad said. That did it.

No matter his Norwegian mother, Swedish father,

from then on he was Italian, Saturday afternoons

transforming our kitchen into a cucina. He became

that Roman chef feeding skinny soldiers, skillets

of sizzling peppers, onions, oregano, enlisting me

to grate imported Romano until my knuckles bled.

Because food transforms us. Sometimes we are

the water roiling, the garlic & oil gasping in the pan.

Other times the over ripe tomato bleeding through

the bottom of the bag. It all counts, nothing wasted,

everything goes into the ragu that goes on everything.

And it didn’t stop there. As a teen I watched embarrassed

when he sucked Thai shrimp, licked hoisin off his

fingers, breathed in fresh onion bialys, tucked into

biryani, brats, bangers & mashed, pickled pigs ears.

He’d eat anything, be anyone, except the dried salted

cod he’d grown up on, that his mother served boiled

with potatoes and her famous orange jello for dessert.

Susan Johnson received her MFA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she currently teaches writing. Poems of hers have recently appeared in North American Review, San Pedro River Review, Steam Ticket, Front Range, and SLAB. She lives in South Hadley MA and her commentaries can be heard on NEPR.

 surface audience

Alicia Byrne Keane

// snow-blind bulge of water

surface helical or like a

funhouse mirror //

on the hudson bay a pod of seals surround our boat

in their hundreds: i am worried the whole time in a way i can’t

describe: the presence of so many heads turned

in our direction, coming to their polite points. and earless too. (or I guess

the they have

ears but)

thing about that wait is you cannot locate a word in

it; you cannot strain light through its more porous

parts, it is just a clutch of individuals knotting their fear

and the sudden sharpness of promontories in the distance.

i won’t remember anything else about that day, except the

interior of a restaurant cavernous and spaceship-like, there

is always such a feeling of accelerated doubt when you put

your first foot on to a moving vessel. i always think i can

rehearse the motion, plan for it, or calculate how much the

waves would plunge at a greater speed, so those first few

seconds are horrible.

Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study problematizing ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the writing of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, and Entropy. Twitter: keane_byrne

 Conjure

Hiram Larew

Pretend that there’s a symphony behind this

Pretend there’s a wide-open humming window right here

or a whistle weaving in and out with the passing trees --

those kind of sounds

Imagine that there’s a color background

the springtime kind that can’t wait to be touched

A color so clear that it sees around corners

Imagine that

Or conjure all of this

while recalling the smell of an afternoon corn-storm

which is what happens when highs and lows collide

inside such confined vistas

And with fields in mind

wonder what would it be like to have

all of this carried away by crows

or wished for

eyes closed

over the picnic cake

Larew's fourth collection, Undone (FootHills Publishing) appeared in 2018. He leads an initiative to bring poetry to the anti-hunger cause -- PoetryXHunger.com. He can be found on Facebook at Hiram Larew, Poet.

Pitty Sing 

Katharyn Howd Machan

“I can fancy a character like the Misfit being

redeemable....”—Flannery O’Connor, in a

letter to John Hawkes, 13 September 1959

When she closed me into the basket

and hid me in the car

I was hers completely.

All along the country roads

I heard the grandchildren whine and grunt,

the only son snarl hotly at the wheel.

The daughter-in-law, that pale intruder,

offered a faint stench of roses.

But all of them were of no consequence.

She was the only one who gave me

fish and cream, and the sinful herb

stuffed into tiny bags she stitched with ribbons.

We were as one; our silent cunning

triumphed over the rest.

But that ride went on too long.

I grew cramped and thirsty,

and when her feet moved I broke loose,

needing more than our conspirators’ pact.

A long dry yowl, claws to the neck,

and the driver flipped us into a ditch

miles from safe civilization.

She, traitor, cowered beneath the dash

as he threw me out against a tree,

poor kitty that meant no harm,

Grandma’s defenseless companion.

I went boneless, limp in the grass,

waiting to feel her arms rescue me,

to be consoled against her willing bosom.

As always, together, we would triumph again.

It was then the men with guns came

and took the others to the woods.

I heard her question the one who stayed,

whose eyes burned answers in the air.

Jealously I watched her reach for him

as she’d never reached for me before.

Then she lay still, blood in the dust,

and the strange-eyed one stared at his gun.

What could I do? I need fish and cream.

I cut my losses, carefully moved

through the heavy heat of that afternoon,

willing now to be his completely,

to grace his ankles with perfect fur,

purring, purring, purring blithely

for our mutual redemption.

Katharyn Howd Machan writes poetry on her dragon patio when weather allows and everywhere else when it doesn’t. As a full professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College she mentors students in fairy-tale-based creative writing courses. Her most recent publications are What the Piper Promised (AQP, 2018) and A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020).

 Why We Needed Iceland

Rebecca Macijeski 

When we got married my gift to you

was crossing an ocean and climbing a glacier.

We traveled the country all day by bus

to put spikes on our feet

and cramp them down in the ice with each step

as if to say look how strong and bold we are.

Look how we shatter what used to form on our hearts.

Look how the volcano with its hot ash turned cool

settles in the distance beyond us,

watching as we lean into a stream

and drink the fresh melt of the world.

And the ash gathered behind us in dark pyramids

marking where we’d been. One wrong step

and we would have fallen down the ice’s thin slice

toward the earth’s rumble, our bodies

slipping back to geologic time.

Even today your I love you comes like this—both

a surprise and a glacial promise—like this whole time

we’ve been riding the world toward each other,

and have only now begun to arrive.

Rebecca Macijeski holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She has also worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Potomac Review, Storyscape, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, and many others. Rebecca is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. Visit her online at www.rebeccamacijeski.com.

 Quarantine Inventory, March 28, 2020

Brian Malone

They have ceased

construction on the

three-story apartment

complex I can see through

the barren trees. A crane towers

over the scaffolding, its little hook

weighted by a ball swaying like a haywire

metronome. There is a flag

atop the crane, American. The crane lights

up at night to alert low-flying planes

arriving or departing the airport ten minutes away.

There are fewer planes these days.

Everything looks tired

now, the soil damp. Last

year’s withered grasses

in the overgrown rented garden

path have not realized

the snow is gone. They are

weighed down but nothing weighs them down.

Filtered in gray light, the landscape

sighs for days but forgets to inhale.

There is the slow, irregular

circling of the crane’s hook.

There is my expiring

debit card, my rent

due,

a new lease signed,

dishes, disheveled

hair, birds

somewhere.

There is crystal,

ink, smooth

stone, lakewater,

prismatic

light refractions,

glistening,

orgasm somewhere.

There is this silent

phone, this lingering

cough, this final

roll of toilet paper, still-clean

clothes.

I will not die my grandmother

will not die my students

will not die my at-risk mother

will not die the family

I lived

with in Spain will not

die I will not

die nobody

will die. Someone

inhale somewhere.

Brian Malone is a writer from New England who is currently based in Moscow, Idaho. This is his first poetry publication, but his nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Storyscape Journal, Glassworks, Waxwing, and Blue Earth Review.

 Mrs. Peter Warburton Dreams of her Grandparents

C. B. McClintock

For JJR

They didn’t believe me when I told them

I never wanted to get married

because I was twelve when I said it

with all of the wild will and surety

of a girl at twelve.

So I wrote it on a piece of paper:

a contract, between my self then

and my future self, a pact

that stretched into the unknown:

“I do solemnly swear that I,

Allison, will never ever get

Married. Ever.”

And then my signature, still stiff

with the new knowledge of cursive.

I used to think they didn’t believe me

because of my youth, but now I wonder:

Perhaps they didn’t believe me because

everyone they knew was married

and perhaps they didn’t believe me because

they had been married for 45 years by then

and their marriage gave them, eventually,

the thing they loved the most:

Their marriage gave them me.

And even though I kicked down and against

Marriage as if it were a pursuer

chasing me up a ladder

or a bear

chasing me up a tree

(my strong, climbing legs pausing only

to kick it in the face

my heel grinding against its nose)

eventually it caught me

And I wed.

My wedding gift from them was what

they had saved without me knowing:

a frame, and in it

a simple slip of paper

a declaration worn soft

and signed by my small, sure hand.

By day I am professor of literature and women's studies and have been for fifteen years; by night I am a writer working in various genres. Most of my publications up until now have been academic in nature, though I have had several monologues published by Heinemann and performed internationally. My academic work in literature and women's studies strongly influences the poems published in this issue, which identify women only by their husbands' names but give them a private voice from underneath this name. I am grateful for the opportunity to share them here. I can be found on instagram @c.b.mcclintock.

Reverse Angels

Megan McCormack

1.

I see the man beyond the fence

pants to his knees

I stand beside the swings

as he touches himself

slowly

his eyes dull

as if he is in a trance

is he looking at me

or the other kids

some of my classmates notice

and laugh, pointing

he waves with his free hand

he is saying something

the recess monitor is beside me

telling us

“he doesn’t know any better

don’t look

he doesn’t know any better”

2.

the new boy’s hair is the reddest hair

I’ve ever seen

so many freckles

at first, I thought his skin was just orange

he can’t breathe out of his nose

so every recess

when he chases me

I can hear him wheezing

right behind me

his breathing sounds wet

like he has too much spit

in his mouth

then suddenly

he catches me

in the corner of the playground

pins me to the ground

he kisses me everywhere

as I scream at him

hit him

push him

he wheezes in between kisses

one hand grabs at my body

like he forgot what he was looking for

but knows it’s there somewhere

the other presses me harder

into the mud and grass

when he is done

he says nothing

runs off towards the twisty slides

I stare at the grass and mud stains

on my hands

on my legs

on my dress

4.

I let the Hot Tamales candy

burn my lips

my friend and I pretend it’s lipstick

“we want red lips”

she says

we have a crush on the new recess monitor

everyone calls him Elvis

he always has candy, always cinnamon

he sings to us as he watches us play

he calls my friend “Hot Tamales girl”

Hot Tamales girl and I

swing our bodies on the guard rails

of the cement steps

Hot Tamales girl can do flips on them

twirling

I want to be like her, small and graceful

my hands slip

my head hits the concrete so hard

I see only white

Hot Tamales girl screams for him

Elvis carries me to the nurse

I listen to him singing

my ear against his chest

deep rumbling

his arms hold me too tightly

my head feels like it’s trying

to hold lightning inside

I focus on his music

the warmth of his chest

I want to stay this close forever

5.

I tell Mom about Elvis

she keeps asking me

the same questions about him

like I have the wrong answers

when I go back to school

we have a new recess monitor

an old lady

she stands by the door

the whole time

she blows a whistle when it’s time to come in

6.

the snow is so deep

it reaches my knees

I walk with him

boy with long blond hair

to the edge of the playground

where the snow is untouched

it’s ours

we stop and let our bodies fall

face first into the snow

we call it

reverse angels

I am buried

I look for him beneath the snow

eyes open

it stings and all is white

quiet

for a moment

I am alone

I am happy

I feel a hand grab my hand

he pulls me up

before I can tell him

to stop

we stare at the shapes

we’ve left behind

I hear a whistle.

Megan McCormack’s poems and prose have appeared in Vagina :: The Zine, The Bluest Aye, Thimble, and Janus. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Missouri—St. Louis and her MA in Literature from the University of Missouri—Kansas City. Megan is an upper elementary teacher at a Montessori school in Illinois. Instagram: pear_and_thyme Blog: https://pearandthyme.wixsite.com/pearandthyme

Last Summer

Robert A. Morris

Taking shortcuts that lead us nowhere, driving down tree-shadowed

curves, Heather’s leg against mine, freckled and cool. Drew, my best friend,

saw her first, but I really knew her, those green eyes reflecting on the gulf,

singing along with the Counting Crows, drowsy and discontented,

we wasted our summer while Drew mowed grass to buy a Harley. Wading

out in the shallow water, an undertow urging us deeper, our lips touching

then pulling away then moving together again, feeling guilt and relief, we

surrendered in late July, parking the Chevrolet by an evangelical church,

kissing surreptitiously, my hands tangling in her hair, and the hours unraveling

out into sleep. Afterwards, we talked feeling the resonance of the other’s voice,

beautiful nonsense, buying a house on Orange Beach that neither of us could

afford. Then we were silent. The gray wind prophesied rain. Tall grass bent and

revealed sun-bleached graves, lives forgotten. We returned home with no

words left. Drew ran his bike headlong into an eighteen-wheeler the day he bought it.

Wandering all autumn, trying to stand in a spot of sunlight, I heard him every

time headlights screamed past. I called Heather, but silence hung heavy in the air,

her phone unanswered. Only speaking in passing, I saw her in flashes of every

waitress with green eyes. She was the ghost who hovered in my memories--

collecting seashells, making eye contact in the rearview, parked in the cool wind before

the high weeds parted. She married a soldier six months later and left for San Diego,

driving out on I-10, passing the cut fields, the crumbling churches, the winter

white stones counting days cherished then buried, languid and lazy then stone.

Robert A. Morris lives near Baton Rouge and works as a teacher. Besides poetry, he also writes fiction and bashes out the occasional song on his blue Stratocaster. A recent poem of his has been selected to appear in the upcoming Lummox Poetry Anthology. His work has appeared in The Main Street Rag, Pear Noir, and The Chaffin Review among others.

every cruise ship has a morgue

emmy newman

and that seems worrying particularly considering

your own lack of vacation days and how little time you get to yourself

with the kids running around and drawing on the walls

or the nihilistic voices in your head complaining about existence

don’t we go to the sea to start over

everyone knows that that’s why they like to take pictures

as you board the ship as you run your fingers over the railing

isn’t that why they have lifeboats and fire drills and cabin doors

lockable from the inside only sometimes it is still not enough

three to seven seems the generally agreed upon

count of bodies that can be stored aboard a ship’s morgue

but on a trip from Fort Lauderdale to Lisbon

the chef found an excess body in the freezer

counting the dead seems like picking a good melon

you can never smell the ripe sweetness in the store

cataloguing is the mortician’s duty but no one really mentions

who comes into that job aboard the ship

it would get boring for a true professional I imagine

sitting on the lido deck waiting for someone to die

sipping a breakfast smoothie waiting

for someone to die watching the shuffleboard tournament

waiting for someone to die staring out

into the waves waiting and dozing and waking pleased briefly

that no one has died meanwhile emailing pictures of sunsets to their mother

worrying about fire or a snorkel malfunction

or getting left behind as the ship pulls away from port

as the rest of your life noses out of the harbor and catches a good breeze

isn’t that why you took to the sea to hold it all together

here is your bed your sunset view your chocolate fondue tower

your place to rest your dinner plate your last pillow mint

Emmy Newman is a MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Yemassee, New Ohio Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and currently serves as the poetry editor for Fugue.

In the Black Widow’s Web

Meisha Rosenberg

After the divorce, my mother took me often

to the Boston Museum of Science

in search of culture that my father, set

on the plains of Canada where she’d left him,

could not provide. Knowing her lair,

I’d zoom to the basement to find the black widow; or rather,

two of them: The papier-mâche rendition three feet in size,

strung upside-down from the ceiling,

bulbous abdomen shining near her spitball egg sac,

and her twin, a specimen in a display case. “Most venomous spider

in North America,” the display swore,

the male Lactrodectus consort an afterthought—

not dispatched as often as rumor had it,

but vulnerable when captured in a lab cage. “There’s no reason

for you to fear her, no black widows in Boston,”

my mother determined in sharp reason.

She said we could have made this widow

ourselves, in the kitchen with flour-glue,

as many other times we’d crafted masks for fun.

She’d be borne in on the same cold wind

Salem witches rode, pierced balloon inside.

I studied her maquette of newspaper shell, wiry legs,

pikes of cast iron, unerring as New England’s rusting muskets.

Then, steeling myself, I walked over and pushed

the red button on the glass case lighting up

the real arachnid, dead, telltale red hourglass

on her belly, tiny bride pinned

to her sterile cushion.

Look how a mother makes her traps

from softest silk—the black widow

exhumed for me, at age four,

the poisoned marriage, victims envenomed

against their own neurons. She bound me—

her art, her daughter—

with sticky threads to that sculpture,

then to the feared bulb—death’s

seed—knitted to every thought.

Meisha Rosenberg is a nonfiction writer and poet whose arts criticism won an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Award. Published in AlterNet, Bitch, the Women's Review of Books, Literary Mama, Salon, the Rumpus, SLAB, the Saranac Review, Cold Mountain Review, Caesura, and others, she earned an MFA from New York University and is currently at work on a jazz biography. For more information, go to: https://meisha-rosenberg.squarespace.com/

root

Maui Smith

the thing about three am in fourth grade?

it’s like discovering you can pause time

provided you can keep the TV volume

below twenty-five. i met her there

on HBO after dark, the only black girl

in the softcore porn i visited nightly.

i heard the word gay before but it didn’t

have anything to do with me watching the

girl i liked fake fucking other girls

on my tiny sticker covered silver TV

so it should surprise no one I thought I was

a boy before I thought I was a lesbian.

eighteen years plus one point five,

as in one decent year and four months

so awful they should count as six with a

white boy - a white boy! – i had never

been in love before but I had been loved

before so I knew what a kiss from plantain

sweet lips felt like and still chose wrong

but when I stopped pretending to like

hockey and started being myself it all

fell apart and oh, the freedom in losing it

all! i shed masculinity and danced and

danced out of spring and into summer days

of kissing brown nipples in the park and

intertwined brown hands and black women

loving black women under an almost black

night sky and I thought to myself: how

did I ever pretend to like men?

Maui Smith is a junior studying Information Science and Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. They are currently working as a Technical Writer Co-Op at ANSYS Inc, and a Spring 2020 intern at Study Breaks magazine. They are currently based out of Pittsburgh, PA, but are originally from Maple Heights, Ohio.

ALL MY LOVE, JULIA

David Spicer

“My dearest Scott,

I would spend ordinary

days with you, thirty years

of them and thirty more.

Your friendship is my

life poem.”

Each time I read the inscription, Scott,

I wonder if you felt the same way

she did, whether you brought her irises

on an overcast day when she seemed

like a blue jay flying into a window,

if you gave her a keep-forever gift

like the Billy Collins book

she wrote in as she thought of you.

I wonder why it’s in my mailbox

years after the birthday

or private dinner, or whenever

it was she presented it,

after I paid Amazon three

dollars. Whether you liked it

enough to keep or thought

your friend insincere as a sales clerk.

Or did you lose the book on a park bench

after reading for an hour?

Maybe someone stole it, thinking

Ballistics might discuss bullets.

Or the person you loaned it to

sold it or donated it to a library sale.

The kind reason may be you died:

your estate sold it plus the watch

Julia gave you to honor the time

you shared. Whatever the reason,

I own this book with her message

in red. It reminds me of the collection

of Neruda love poems a friend

inscribed forty years ago:

it vanished during a party,

lost in my memory until now,

as I wait to receive the answer

to the letter I sent her.

David Spicer has poems in Tipton Poetry Journal, Santa Clara Review, Reed Magazine, The Literary Nest, Synaeresis, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart. He is the author of Everybody Has a Story, Waiting for the Needle Rain, and six chapbooks.

A Friend in Sri Lanka Leaves Hotel 30 Minutes before Bomb Explodes

Michelle Tokarczyk

What kicked your jet-lagged, tired-ass body

out of your barely disturbed bed

in a tropical paradise 5-star hotel?

It was two days after Passover that you didn’t observe.

You came not for bitter herbs, but for cinnamon.

You came to research and write about a spice

that transformed trade and dinner tables.

It was Easter, and you woke early. Walking

you saw church-goers dressed for a miracle.

You were dressed to escape the humidity

and the sun’s strengthening rays.

Leaving early, you escaped the bomb that shook

the breakfast tables in your hotel. Bombs

exploding in other hotels and churches.

Killing 250. Reverberating world-wide.

Your doorway was unmarked. No swaths

of lamb’s blood stained your bags or clothes.

But the Angel of Death passed over you.

Or some angel spared you. Maybe

the same one that steadied the robber’s hand

as he held the gun at my head, took only my money.

Left me able to cry and report a crime. Call it

luck, or fate, or God’s will, we live.

Michelle M. Tokarczyk has published two books of poetry: The House I'm Running From (West End Press) and Bronx Migrations (Cherry Castle Publishing). Her poems have also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; including the minnesota review, The Literary Review, Masque & Spectacle, Unearthed, Chelsea Community News, and For a Living: The Poetry of Work. Tokarczyk was born and raised in New York City in a working-class family. She earned a doctorate in English and for many years taught at Goucher College, commuting between Baltimore and New York City. Now retired, she lives and works full-time in New York. Her twitter handle is mmtokarczyk1. For more information on her work, see mmtokarczyk@wixsite.com/mysite.

When it Rains

Sarah Valeika

mother says she just can’t take it

anymore, like the rain was just that thoughtless hand which

overfilled her cup, and the hot tea came splattering down on her

innocent thigh as she sits

in her chair

at the kitchen table

close to tears.

she bites into a muffin,

picks the raisins out of it,

tells me she just can’t take it

anymore

and I wonder at the anymore

whether there ever was a time when she could take it

or whether this rain is the only thing she needed

for the courage to show us the burns marks

already along her body

and to tell us how much they hurt.

mother is hurting.

I don’t know what to do.

Orecchiette

Michael Weber

I visited Bari in my early twenties,

because my mother said you should

visit the places of your family’s roots,

but only remember the elderly women

seated outside Arco Alto rolling snakes

out of dough. Masterful cuts—simple

knife, quick flick revealed how to create

tiny ears, or orecchiette, native to Bari,

or my Grandmother Mary.

Today my mother and I visit Mary

in her new home—Greater Binghamton

Psych Ward. We aren’t fooled, we know

nothing’s great about psych wards,

so we bring her Good & Plenty despite

diabetes & old Vogue’s in vain of claims

she forgot how to read. Mary claps,

ah caramella e moda, you know me well,

I prefer this over, sweetie I can’t remember.

It wasn’t always like this.

She didn’t always call me other names.

Most visits now I’m Robert, her eldest,

or like today, Herman, her only love

after my grandfather. Spent entire visits

as other people despite my mother’s censure,

but this might be our last, nurses say, so

she’s adamant I’m me. Mom, It’s Michael,

your grandson. Mary smiles on recognizing

concave earrings dangling from her drooping

lobes. Well, if it’s today, sarò Bellissima!

Bellissima, my mother repeats

before nurses beckon to talk privately

about Mary’s health, stealing memories

from another patient’s vanity, or dried-out

butterflies resting on her windowsill. Mary

lays shrunken, a Vogue masking her face,

flicking pages. She’s surely forgotten

I’m here. I see beyond each cover, golden

orecchiette—no sign of snakes. Coiled

at the edge of her bed, massaging childish

feet in non-stick slippers, I look curiously

about her room—a zoo of the captured

animals in bingo victories, a nightstand

battlefield of candy wrappers, emaciated

magazines that now decorate her walls.

Apart from a certificate hanging above,

Congratulations on turning ninety!

I’d believe I was visiting a child.

We are quiet on our drive home, maybe

it’s all that greatness we just witnessed,

but today, startled by our own ignition,

I begin a provocation for the trip’s duration

until my mother agrees to teach me tradition—

dirtied in flour, scolding, Michael pay attention!

When I’m gone you’ll have to do this yourself.

Distracted by certainty, instead of process—

I watch tiny ears being flung into a deaf pile.

Michael Weber is a poet from Binghamton, New York. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa and MA in English from Binghamton University. Prior to graduate studies, he savored a career as a professional hockey player in Turkey and New Zealand. His poetry has appeared in Driftwood Press, Oberon Poetry Magazine, and Great Lakes Review.

Strawberry Gravel

Angelica Whitehorne

Growing face hits man // made pavement // gravel and blood // dribble chin // cry like an alarm

clock // ignored, girl // ring // wake up the neighborhood // ring // strawberry ice cream in // my

collarbones // pooling // like the tears my eyes // I did ride five blocks over after my mother said

// always, always stay on the street of our home // her fault // for taking her eyes off me // the

bicycle splayed behind me // tires still rolling // ring // think they’re going // somewhere // like

girls in deep sleep // in winding dreams, waking to a paved path // ring // sidewalk disaster //

clean up on Wabash St. // a girl cries // can’t be snoozed // ring // blood // everywhere // before it

becomes a monthly natural // the first time I am far enough from home // to maybe not make it //

back // I still wonder how // I rode // so fast with so much joy // when the ground was // so hostile

// so close // asphalt’s burning threats // rising up under pedal // and yet I did! // even after this

fall // and all the others // long after I healed and was opened up again // I rode // both hands off

the handle bars // arms waving out like licorice twists // my scar speckled face // giggling into the

brunt of it // huffing resilience into the air // teeth // red // tongue // pink // stretching // further //

further // never bothering to look

// down //

Angelica is a recent college graduate who writes for the Development department of a refugee organization in New York. At home she writes her poetry and stories with her 10 plants as backdrop and her future on her tongue. She has forthcoming work in the Magnolia Review, Crack the Spine, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and Amethyst Review. Instagram: @a.w.ords Website: https://angelicawhitehorne.myportfolio.com/

 Poetry by Willie Wilson

Beats

When I think about getting older,

I think about something I read online

that said listening to loud music

can cause permanent hearing loss

& when I think about that kind of loss,

I think about how when I put on my Beats,

I can muffle any background sound & then

I think about losing myself to music

the way that Marvin’s symphony of smoothness

can move the eardrums in the direction

of sugar, how an old soul

can sprout from the tunes of a classic

& then I think about how all those years ago

I wish I had some noise cancelling

headphones every time my father

would beat my mom

with his words because somehow I always

knew his hands would find a way to cut in;

that time dad got mad when he thought

mom wasn’t listening the exact way he wanted,

I imagined myself covering my ears

with Barney’s I Love You song because that night

I needed to extract the idea of love by any means

or maybe I just needed to turn the sounds

of knuckles slamming into flesh

into the idea of listening to Marvin,

to transform the tracks of her broken

idea of a husband into something else

back then I only wish it were as simple

as slipping on some Beats by Dre

& washing away everything

I never wanted to see.

The Total Sum of Squares

(can be written: Total SS = W + B

can be imagined as: Total SS = White + Black)

Written after thinking of Eric Garner being killed by a policeman for selling loose cigarettes/squares

The first time I said I couldn’t breathe

he pressed the sum of his weight

around my neck so hard I thought

I could hear my spine scream. Crazy

how the direction of a soul can be slingshot

from a chokehold. I couldn’t breathe I said—

in the center of the oblong. circle

he created, while the eyes of cell phones

watched without blinking. I can’t breathe. I said it

again, and his heavy breaths taunted me.

How silly it all seems. Truth is:

if I could go back to before whatever

circumstance pulled me close to the suspicion

spun around me, I would. I can’t

breathe. I remember how it felt, inside

that carousel of hate, just before I felt my selves

begin to double— I gave my breath to the white

of heaven, seared, raw and permanent.

Willie Wilson is a graduate student at Old Dominion University. He hopes one day to have a collection of poems to read to his children's children. He views poetry as a way to connect to all aspects of the human spirit. He has previously been published in The Barely South Review.