Align

Isabelle Edgar

I wore lipstick that day.
Some on my cheek.
He said, I can tell it’s a costume.
I am not accustomed to seeing multiple planes in one sky.
I stood on his toes and watched clouds collide,
like crow’s feet, he said, lines seeping from moments,
a spilled glass of wine.
As he walked our two feet
he placed his fingers on my neck.
His thumb pulled a line of red from my smirk to my temple.

---

Originally from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Isabelle Edgar is a writer and dancer currently studying at Stanford University.

A Conversation

Caleigh Shaw

When I had him, my placenta was dry.
I went through a lot right before he was born.
My mom and I are at my brother’s basketball
game. My brother wasn’t the best player,

always the sixth or eighth man. His eyes
have astigmatism, and he’s always sick.
What happened? Our team has the ball
and sinks a jump shot. Your father and I

were going through some issues. She keeps
looking at the court to see if my brother
has been subbed in yet. I don’t know if you’re
old enough or ready to hear this. It may change

how you think about him. Our team keeps scoring
buckets, so it should be another easy win.
Their divorce was almost two years after
he was born. They fought. They spent time

coaching their own teams. There wasn’t a lot
of options to choose from. He cheated on you?
She nods. Two weeks before my brother was born.
My dad was acting strange, and when he confessed,

he put his head in her lap and cried—buzzer blares—
The woman’s husband knew, and he wanted to kill
my dad. She was a family friend. My dad asked
my mom to be friendly after the revelation—

my brother’s in the game, he misses a shot—He
asked my mom to take her to the mall, had my mom
switch out the pictures he and the woman exchanged
in the family’s mailbox—ball bangs against bleacher—

Remembering now is rewatching a drama,
wondering how the hell it all happened. Summer
at their house, while we played games
and headstands in the pool, my brother, only

a few months old, sat on their floor while others
doted on him—he gets the ball again, makes
a fade-away—One rainy day while driving,
my mom, mad about the woman, caused us

to spin on the interstate, to ram into the guard rail.
I was feeding my brother mushed peas as we spun
like a coin—he’s only in the game for a few minutes
—How much more was missing—buzzer goes off,

the game over—We continue to sit, and my brother
bounds up the bleachers, asking why we haven’t
walked down. My mom looks at him, a slight hint
of grief in her eyes. We were just having a conversation.

---

Author’s Note: My parent's divorce happened when I was 10 years old. When I had this conversation with my mother, I was a lot older — over ten years had passed since the divorce. I don't hold any resentment or ill will towards my dad about this occurrence for various amount of reasons, but what stood out to me as I heard this were the memories I had repressed and the newfound reasoning and connections I discovered behind these memories. This continued as I wrote the poem, and in a way, the poem and the conversations I had with both of my parents gave me an understanding or closure I didn't know I needed.

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Caleigh Shaw is a poet from Canton, Georgia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Oklahoma State University, where she is an Editorial Assistant at the Cimarron Review. She received her BA in Writing & Linguistics from Georgia Southern University and is the 2015 Brannen Creative Writing, Nonfiction Award winner. She is published or has forthcoming work in 8 Poems and in Ghost City Review. You can find her on social media @caleighcal14.

A White Bird While Burning Trash

Laura Neal

I think it may be a swan
standing yellow-
legged in our backyard pond.

At first, I wonder if I am inhaling too much smoke,
raking leaves into the flame,

but no, there it is, as soft and white as they are in film.

I stand, water hose in hand
trying not to move
though wanting to be closer.

It buffers its wings against its body.

Something breaks in the fire, loud and disturbing.
A moonshine bottle maybe.
An aerosol can.

The common explosion shocks me in this moment,
the swan flying away.

I go inside, tell everyone what I saw, but they don’t believe me. They say,

“there ain’t no swans down here”
“they don’t even fly this far south.”

Evening lowers,
I go back over the slope,
making sure the fire’s out,
and I see again the swan.
It returns. And soon after
another. This time, I keep moving
as if they were simple birds,
staring as I reel in the hose.

---

Author’s Note: I've been writing poetry for more than a decade and it all began in the swamp woods of South Carolina, swimming in the stories of my ancestors. In my work I strive to exploit the "everyday," the parts of life that sort of function like paper cuts. But my intention isn't a meditation on pain, rather a call for attention to things that go numb to us. I'm coming from a place that isn't trying to commodify but culminate a restorative narrative.

---

Laura Neal is an African-American poet from South Carolina greatly influenced by social and environmental narratives. She received her BA from Bowie State University and her MFA from the University of Maryland College Park. Her work is published in Academy of American Poets, Birmingham Poetry Review, Boston Art Review, FreeBlackSpace, Green Mountains Review, and Appalachian Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), CALLALOO (Providence, RI), Juniper Writing Institute (Amherst, MA), Hambidge Center for Creative Arts (Rabun Gap, GA) and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (Upperville, VA). She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas.

You Are Driving

Cassie Premo Steele

You are driving from now on
to the place beyond the maps
where there are no paths
and no police can follow you
because roads have no rules
and concrete is not allowed
and speed signs are not posted
because who knows how fast
you’re going when your eyes
are closed and the only exit
signs are those you paint
yourself with the colors of
what you imagine is possible
behind the wheel of your mind
and the body doesn’t mind
because she signed on long
ago to go along for the ride
and you realize you have arrived
since this road is all there is.

---

Author’s Note: "You Are Driving" was written during the pandemic year when my wife and I largely stayed in lockdown for the good of our health and the health of those around us, despite local ordinances that allowed free movement. One day, though, I had an intense urge to get in the car and drive. So I did. This poem came out after I looped back home after a hundred miles and realized that it was not an exterior road I was craving but a new way of being within myself - without the old maps.

---

Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is the author of 16 books, including 6 books of poetry, and her poetry has been nominated 6 times for the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of The Archibald Rutledge Prize and The John Edward Johnson Prize, as well as the Carrie McCray Literary Award for Poetry. She was a Finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award judged by the current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. She lives with her wife in Columbia, South Carolina. Her website is www.cassiepremosteele.com

Earthquake Myth

Monica Cure

In the moment I turned
from the kitchen to the hallway
I was shaken so violently
by a longing for you
that I leaned into
the doorframe, a reaction
maybe from earthquake training.
Palms against the post, I felt
somehow closer to you
as if an arch-eyebrowed god
in his version of pity
had transformed you into
the upright figure of stability
upon which everything hinges.
My forehead against
the back of my hand,
I exhaled slowly
and the lacquered wood
sent my breath back to me
like an approaching kiss –
or like knowing,
surrounded by rubble,
I’d survived.

---

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem as I was transitioning from living in one earthquake-prone city, Los Angeles, to another, Bucharest, and it was a time of great instability. The “myth” in the title is multi-layered. Many people still think the safest place to be in an earthquake is standing in a doorway. The myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses often involve transformations that are acts of poetic justice. We also have our own personal myths about who we are and what we can or can’t live without, which also shift.

---

Monica Cure is a Romanian-American poet, writer, and translator currently based in Bucharest. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Rust + Moth, The Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, UCity Review, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter @MonicaCure or www.monicacure.com.

Three Poems by Radoslav Rochallyi

So save me

---

Terrible

---

The black void of space

---

Author’s Note: Equation Poetry uses mathematical language as an organizational principle and at the same time uses mathematical symbols to describe intonation notation, or to define various types of specifications that are simpler or more efficient to express in non-text form. Mathematics and poetry work with symbolism, algorithmic basis, structures, formulas and symmetry. Comparable requirements apply to reading mathematical and poetic patterns.

At first glance, my poetry looks like a visual creation. But this is by no means an asemic writing or Dada. Every comma in my poetry equations makes sense. I try to combine mathematical formulas and equations, which I consider almost perfect, with my thoughts and feelings. In my opinion, art should be a razor blade, which cuts the reader's perception into thousands of pieces. And it should at least take readers out of "Heidegger's daily life" for a while.

Before the poetry of equations, I was fascinated by the Golden Section. In the collection of mathematical poetry Golden Divine, I tried to connect poetry with Fi (φ), and thus with the number 1 61 8034 in non-graphic form and with the golden section in its graphic form. I called this poetry "Golden Ratio Poetry.”

---

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1980, living in the Czech Republic, RADOSLAV ROCHALLYI has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, prose, and visual art. His poems have also been published in many magazines and anthologies. Rochallyi is a graduate philosopher, poet, and writer who writes mainly in English, Slovak and German.

You can find him on Twitter @RRochallyi and Facebook @radoslav.rochallyi

Wherein I Watch My Uncle at Thanksgiving Sit in My Dead Father's Favorite Chair

Francine Witte

Focus on the TV, I am thinking, but that’s how the trouble
starts.  A program about the year so far -- riots and looting
and my uncle harrumphing how this country has its ass in a sling.
We watch the shimmy of fire and flying glass. Instead of smoke,
we get the aroma of a turkey, same as last year. Same as every year
since I was a kid. I can still feel the stomach spin of my uncle lifting
me in the air above his head, and me an airplane. My father would
be sitting in his favorite chair, nervous until my uncle landed me
safely. Then we’d go in to eat.

Now, my uncle sits in my father’s chair. My father’s chair
empty ten years now. Heart attack from working so hard.
Chump, my uncle called him to my mother, getting jobs
for those animals, feeding their unwanted brats. My mother’s
brother and so we have to be nice, she would say. He’s blood,
she would say. Right now, I am a totter away from falling
off the fence I have always had to sit on. And when he starts
to doze off, wake me when it’s dinner, something in me snaps

like a Turkey wishbone, that favorite part of Thanksgiving,
me and my father, our elbows on the table and him letting
me get the bigger half. I’m thinking now what would
his wish be, so I jostle my uncle’s shoulder. Yes, he’s blood,
I think, but so was my father. My mother standing

in the dining room, bowl of broccoli in her hand.
Her mouth about to say something about family.
My uncle shaking the near-sleep off of him.
When I tell him “get up, this is my father’s chair.”
My uncle stands up like a statue I’m about to tear
down. My father’s ghost waiting to finally sit.

---

Author’s Note: I started this poem by thinking about all the division in families in the past few years due to politics. I'm not sure why this would be so true in so many cases, but it seems to be that everyone has an uncle, a sister, or someone they would never speak to again were it not for blood relation. I created this scenario of this poem based on that idea.

---

Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books). She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) was published by ELJ Editions in September, 2021. She lives in NYC.

Quail Meadows, USA

Brenna Collins O’Donnell

What if the world ended at the perfect, green limit of the hedgeline?
And what if this fact never bothered you?
Because you would never so much as wonder where exactly the world extended to,
or when exactly it stopped.

This home is a museum.
Antiquated dreams and petrified intentions of someday going back to California but never making it there.
Every clock in this house keeps a different time and the clouds outside are always blooming upwards and
billowing by, so it is easy to have life pass at the same pace and not pay too much attention.

For a reason removed from logic, dust does not gather on the surfaces here.
But the nectarines on the counter have started to rot from the inside. The Cadillac’s battery dies.
The lizards dart through the sun room.
The soda goes flat and the light bulbs burn out
and somewhere the world forgets, but I can’t.
So I don’t.

I am the only historian left standing, in the same white-tile kitchen, all these years later.
This is the place where I try not to outright hate myself over my mistakes because this house is home to
the ones I’ll never be able to take back.

The only calls that come to the house phone are from a man named “Matthew” who asks to buy the house
in cash. I say no. He takes two breaths, says nothing at all, and hangs up. It scares me. For more reasons
that one might think.

---

Author’s Note: Quail Meadows is the name of the neighborhood where my grandparents' home is located. My immediate family inherited the home a few years back and this piece was written while quarantining there in June of 2020.

---

Brenna Collins O’Donnell is a journalist and nonprofit worker based out of Alexandria, Virginia. She holds a BA in Writing from Ithaca College in New York, where she was Editor in Chief of the Department of Writing’s literary magazine, Stillwater. Her creative writing has a home on Instagram: @brennacollinsodonnell.

Art Class

A. L. Biltucci

I am hunched over a watercolor painting,
trying to find the right shade for a sugar maple.
He sits next to me watching. I am flattered—
my male peers usually don’t pay much attention

to me, a shy country girl with a pudgy body
since puberty. My lanky limbs and linear form
are long gone; I often miss that body—
its uncomplications. I paint two lavender

mountains and a few white-tailed deer.
I add a yellow duck in the middle of a lake
but soon realize adult ducks are not yellow
like the rubber ones I used to play with

in the bathtub. I remember a windup orca
whose flukes patted the bathwater, making ripples
across its surface. I should be painting an ocean scene.
A lighthouse standing sentinel, protecting hulls

of vulnerable ships. I feel his presence but concentrate
on erasing that duck with a few large drops of water
and my finger rubbing the thick paper so hard
I create tiny rolls of turquoise and seafoam.

He leans closer and nudges—no punches—
my left breast. Did they knock together? He laughs.
I snap back against the chair. Now with perfect
posture, I look him in the eyes. I should have said,

What the hell are you doing? Instead, I lean over
my painting again, this time trying to replicate
a mallard, its iridescent green head, its beige
and brown back. But I can’t. I leave the lake empty.

Later, he corners me near the sink where I’m washing
brushes, asks me to go out with him, which usually means
a movie in the gritty small town theater with sticky floors,
and sex in a dark and dank basement, or so I imagine.

I say no—again and again. No matter how much
I want my first boyfriend. No. Should I tell the teacher
he hit my breast? Should I tell my mother? Is it even 
worth mentioning? It’s no big deal, right? I say nothing.

Several years after high school, I hear he raped
a girl—level two sex offender. If I had told
someone, would that have prevented the rape
of a teenaged girl? No, a friend tells me. No? 

---

A. L. Biltucci is a PhD student studying English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. Her poetry has appeared in Blueline, Written River, Narrative Northeast, and Cathexis Northwest Press. A native of rural upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley and Adirondack Mountains often inspire her work.

Lord of the Dance

Kirstin Allio

I dreamed I had to hold
water without    
drowning.

                       
I couldn’t chew,
I couldn’t point
my toes to dive.

 
A courtly old ballet
master,
Death,

 
stabbed his Swan
Point, stood on
Ceremony, the last

 
stage, the light
from the columbarium
door the wedge

 
of a wedding train.
Barnacles of salt
had digested the stairs

 
down to the shore,
and the final
step left

 
a carbon footprint.
The sky was black.
A cormorant

 
flapped off,
spokeless.
I couldn’t speak,                                        

 
and I felt my ballet
training prevented me from breaking
into a natural stride.

---

Kirstin Allio’s books are Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa) and Garner (Coffee House), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc). Recent work is out or forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Fence, New England Review, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell.

Promise: October 17th, 2015, Mexico City

Sonya Wohletz

I.
I visited the Basilica of la Virgen de Guadalupe.
Your favorite advocation. It was your birthday.
The year was 2015. You had been gone
Four years already. I was alone. No one
Accompanied me there. The husband
I had married was no longer
My husband. I took the metro
From my rented room in Roma. I chewed
Pumpkin seeds, amaranth in honey. But
I wanted tortas, tlayudas, and swallowing
A new man instead. I told no one.

II.
How crooked and fragile the whole
City in its wide mouth seeming. Pink stone and
Planet tooth. Felsic laws of time and gravity
Broke across our shame and equity alike.
Unhinged the bud from broken stem, yet somehow sure
Of itself in boulevards and buried water,
Drilling history through its mandible.
Exhales ochre smoke
Into a butterfly
Sky.

III.
I loved that Daughter.
The sacred being vanquished on the
Plinth of time, shriveled breasts
And loose belly, bundled in her snake girdle
And the ringing bells of a broken church.
A gentle rain fell on us
Like feather down.

IV.
After lapping the templo mayor thrice and
Failing to gain entry to the National Palace
Where the most famous Rivera murals
Live in captive solidarity, I began to
Understand all of the songs I’d ever loved.

V.
On the city metro women
Can sit separately from the men.
It is easy to arrive at Tepeyac
From anywhere in the world, even if
You are a woman.

VI.
When
My turn came
I walked towards grief,
Purchasing t-shirts, bracelets, and
Figurines that I carried with me
Along the way for protection. I climbed
Up the stone roads to the highest point,
The origin story in its shroud of bloody petals.
I took a long indulgent piss and
Then washed my face in a dirty sink.
The woman to my right scoffs at me,
And I don’t want to say I know
Why she does.

VII.
I visited the baptistry and
The old Basilica museum. At this time
I was in graduate school studying colonial
Art. I was moved by what I saw, mostly
By a Villalpando that I’d never
Seen before—a solitary Santa Barbara
Frozen oil beside a stone well,
Quiet and soft in the Great
Green Poussin strokes
Of cloud forest.

VIII.
I attended the cult.
I took only the Body.
I purchased yellow roses.
I stepped onto a familiar locomotion
That moved us all a little closer to the center of the
Earth.

VIIII.
We were caught there
Between the sleek lathes of modernism
And the feathered speech
Of ancient understanding.
We were moved
And then moved along,
The pressing crowd and us.
I left the roses below,
Amid a catastrophe of promises.

VI.
I wrote post-cards to your friend Mary.
I used simple words and said next to nothing.
I flew away the next day.

---

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem about a trip I took to Mexico City to memorialize my mother who had died in 2011. My mother, although not a strict adherent to religious doctrine, had a deep appreciation for the artistic legacy and aesthetic of the Catholic Church. I share in this fascination of hers. The history of Catholicism in the Americas is complex, amorphous, and traumatic; I wanted to express something of how my own individual grief occupies similarly escapes easy explanation. The Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Tepeyac is now one of the largest pilgrimage sites in the world. And although my mother’s death, in many ways, devastated me, I felt comforted as part of a community that spans geographies, cultures, and generations when I visited this place. Grief is a journey, a pilgrimage that unites the bereaved—our regrets, flaws, memories—in the nexus of the physical and the mythic. We can release ourselves from time-bound narratives through this liminal procession. This poem reflects the intersection of my perceptions as related to my place as both subject and agent of this unfolding story, which includes both the fabric of the mundane, as well as the rituals of sacrifice, lamentation, and desire.

---

Sonya’s work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Sterling Clack Clack, Ghost City Press, and others. Her interests include tarot, bats, the weather; letters, and numbers.

9 of Cups: Contentment

Ami Patel

And now we have this. A sliver of a sliver
of joy we planted, in a plot full of loam
and pigeon croons. We wait, like we have
for decades in this life and centuries
of other lives. Our smiles are in sync
with the pulse of the moon, and the
shortlist of my desires becomes even
shorter now that you sit here with me.
Hands held loose enough so when
temptation overcomes one of us
we are free to plunge our fingers in soil
just to say we were here, and alive, once.
To claim this was so much, and just enough,
over and over again.

---

Author’s Note: While reading adrienne maree browne's brilliant book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, I was reflecting on feeling fulfilled with enough, even as modern capitalism tempts us with excess. This led me to think about how grateful I am to be blessed by the grounding magic of queer brown love. What was even more lovely was that shortly after I wrote this poem, our friends had a party for their 10-year partnership, and I had the honor of offering them these words as part of their celebration.

---

Ami Patel (she/her) is a queer, diasporic South Asian writer of poetry and YA Fiction. She is a two-time VONA alum and a Tin House alum. Ami’s poetry can be found in various publications, including Unchaste Anthology: Volume Two, Red Rock Review, Apricity Magazine, and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. Ami lives in Portland, OR, which gives her plenty of creative inspiration, from her garden to the mountains to the love of her life.

Scent of Autumn

Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo

Here, autumn owns the savor of a dying man, burning man

Man who has spent years on a journey searching for where to call home,

Yet do not know how long will it take to get home;

A brown leaf on the tree of life, waiting for wind to get him home.

Here, autumn retain the evidence of rapes in our camps,

It tastes like metal, a dry red blisters on the laps of girls,

Who only asked for something to save her life but what she got in return was a nightmare,

A voice that will fill her all her life, memories that will haunt her all night.

---

Author’s Note: Insurgency is a continental epidemic, in it the so called men run to where they might not find solace, they start journey which duration is unknown, only little with enormous effort reach their destinations and many only meet their death; on the desert or in the sea. It is so disheartening that many could not run. Their daughters become the center of attraction, survivors of rape and molestation, they are harmed by the soldiers who are meant to protect them.

---

Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet & a Veterinary Medical Student, whose first love is art making. He is an avid reader, who sees poetry in everything, with great interest in storytelling. His work has been appeared, or is forthcoming from: Olongo Africa, The Citron Review, Kissing Dynamite, The Night Heron Barks Review, Santa Ana River Review, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Collateral, Welter Journal, LEVITATE and elsewhere.

He tweets from @FasasiDiipo

Two Poems by Kelly O'Rourke

Menstrua Shun: [shun = (.)]

unlucky monthly / femin / posi / (.) /

uter / (impure) / ine / untouch / avoid men /

communal bathing / banned from the kitch / (.) /

swift ex- tradi / (.) / ex-communica / (.) /

in muddy blood huts / in lonely stone sheds /

in rocky closets / birth isola / (.) /

doors blocked from predators /

tiger / snake poison /

neighbors’ intru / (.) /

despite the hiding / curse apprehension /

cold / fire burning / (asphyxia / (.))

---

Baby Doe (State of Tennessee)

---

Author’s Note: Menstrua Shun: [shun = (.)] was inspired by news articles regarding the practice of chhaupadi: pronounced (CHOW-pa-dee), from Nepali words that mean “someone who bears an impurity.” There are few locations where isolation of the women away from the home is still practiced, and it is now actually illegal. I wanted to incorporate the sonic endings “-tion” or “-sion” of the words with the meaning of “being shunned,” and also the grammatical symbol of the period to represent this.
Source that inspired this piece: “Where a Taboo Is Leading to the Deaths of Young Girls”

After reading the collection Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, I used as source material for Baby Doe (State of Tennessee) a legal document shared on social media from the State of Tennessee’s proceedings against Purdue Pharma and others. I decided to crop excerpts and create erasure poems echoing themes observed in Whereas of how larger entities and structures impact individual lives, especially regarding access to healthcare and risk of mortality from unsafe living conditions, in this case, relating to the opioid crisis and its continuation through the life of a newborn, the next generation. Having been personally impacted on multiple levels through losses as a result of the opioid epidemic, I wanted to highlight the language points that reflect how this now decade and a half-long public health tragedy continues to intergenerationally affect our society and its future.
Source that inspired this piece: State of Tennessee (Circuit Court of Cumberland County at Crossville, Tennessee) and Baby Doe vs. Purdue Pharma et al, second amended complaint filed 4/1/19.

---

Kelly O’Rourke is a poet and teacher. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in the USA, UK, Italy, Hong Kong and Ireland, including in Crab Orchard Review, The Hong Kong Review, HCE Review, The A3 Review, Transfer Magazine, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and others, and can be found at: www.kellyaorourke.com.

Two Poems by Sheila Black

Recovery

Who would not want the ability to so transform?
Even the cost – terrible – not impossible, but terrible.
He cut off three of his own fingers in a state of inconsolable mourning
For what? Lightness, air, the speed of letting go
of the heavy body. It shouldn’t be so hard to love ourselves.
Here the autumn orchards, the earth—even the view from
the highway this morning. A cardinal floating between
two bare branches. I can’t give you the answers. I fill out
forms which ask questions that feel intrusive or shameful
or beside the point. Why have I failed to love you enough
to make you well? Only fairy tales offer consolation—their
long time frames, the palpable constrained style
in which great sacrifices are described and also enormous
cruelties. We can be different figures in these stories.
Today you are the girl who climbs a tree and refuses to speak.
I am the gray bird who was once a mother. I believe in the arrow
fired at random which nevertheless leads to precisely
the one path that will take you through this place,
which is to say I believe in the kind of engine that opens
inside you—a stuttering at first, but then a humming
for what is right here. We are walking the perimeter
this November morning—so many declinations of blue
in one cold sky. I hold my faith in wheels, in seasons,
in the fact that this morning you consumed without prompting
a half slice of dry toast. You drank a glass of apple juice.
You said you wanted more.

---

Demeter Remembers

Some things are only for spring:
the feel of new grass,

night falling like curtains.
the body practicing how it will walk out of itself.

She stakes her place in winter:
a woman in a field of snow, arms over her head.

calling to the dogs who run
awkwardly though the thick-packed wet.

She has sent them looking
for something she knows they will not find.

She tells her friend on the phone
of walking the liminal spaces of the hospital

where her baby in a blue incubator
angled for light.

She could feel the desolation of inside–what had been
torn or excised,

and understood in a kind of flash
the logic of vanishing.

She walked a long way
to the parking lot to pretend to smoke

and watch headlights turn on, engines purr,
and the chassis

drag away into plains dark.

It was a small Western city; the medical care
unexceptional. The baby made it,

but she was winter now, Starlings in their nests
under the eaves

tightly packed in snow.

---

Author’s note: Both these poems came out of difficult mothering experiences. My youngest daughter, who "Recovery" is about, struggled with an eating disorder as a teenager. The poem is about the helplessness I felt during that period but also the wonder of watching her recover and step back into her life. I think the poem focuses on the precarity of moving through the world - through light and dark passages of time. The second ("Demeter Remembers") applies the myth of Demeter to my experiences as a young mother with a child in the NICU. Again, I think I was a bit obsessed - perhaps because these poems were both written during early days of the pandemic - with how much living is a process of coping with uncertainty and the grave emotional rifts that all mothers face at some point almost as a matter of course.

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Sheila Black is the author most recently of a chapbook All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021). Her fifth full-length book, Radium Dream, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Spectacle, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She works for AWP and lives in San Antonio, Texas.

At the lifestyle center

Pauletta Hansel

two girls coming out of the underwear store stopped on the sidewalk, in the window behind them a couple of pieces of elasticized lace pulled up over a plastic crotch, and the one girl said to the other, “It was literally a contradiction, I mean it, not even a figurative one, it was a literal contradiction.” And I stop too, by the outdoor adventure store, pretending to look at the hiking boots on the footless, headless mannequin, trying to think up a figurative contradiction. I mean, people pay me money, sometimes, to point out the difference between what’s right there in front of them, or could be, and the unseen river that silvers through our dreams, but for the life of me, figuratively speaking, if that torso had had a smoking gun in its cold, lifeless hand, pointing it at me, I could not have said what it was.

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Author’s note: “At the lifestyle center” is a true story. I was (Literally? Figuratively?) stopped in my tracks by the conversation between the young women. I wanted to chase them down and ask what they were talking about, but that would have been rude, and maybe not as much fun as just writing the poem.

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Pauletta Hansel’s eighth poetry collection is Friend, epistolary poems written in the early days of the pandemic; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal and One (Jacar Press), among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.

In Journey & In Exile

Eugene Stevenson

We left, as they left,
our mothers’ bellies, theirs,
for a matter of breathing
chilled air with our lungs.
How clever we were
to put away our gill slits.
The way seemed so familiar,
the breach having been
turned about
out/into...

We left, as they left,
our fathers’ houses, theirs,
for a matter of
drinking wine by the bottle.
How clever we were
to put away our milk cups.
The way seemed so familiar,
the door having been
turned about
out/into...

中

the center.

Swept around & about
by the tide of seasons
& the flood of time.
Out/into... journey & exile.

Out/into... the night at jacob’s place
where our love’s
new body died, six
months before his birth
& our lips tasted of salt.

Out/into... the gate of heaven

where we buried, as they buried,
our loves’ ancient body, theirs,
& met again, breathing
& drinking our sameness
in the seasons & time,
in journey & in exile.

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Author’s note: This poem's genesis was a meditation on a particular point in time at which the cycle of birth & death was intensely felt, overlaid by the journeys of parents & grandparents, along with a struggle to understand my own journey & feelings of not belonging, hence exile.

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Eugene Stevenson is the son of immigrants, the father of expatriates, & lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. His chapbook, The Population of Dreams, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. His poems have appeared in After Hours Journal, Albany Poets, Angel City Review, Blue Lake Review, Chicago Tribune Magazine, DASH, Hudson Review, Loch Raven Review, The Poet, & South Florida Poetry Journal, among others.

Death of Justice

Santucci

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Author’s Note: This erasure is sourced from “Vacancy Turns the Campaign on Its Ear, Again” in the September 20, 2020 edition of the New York Times (NYT:9:20:2020:1 — article’s focus: the death of RBG).

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Santucci is a poet who lives near Cleveland and is always searching for poetry around him. You can find him on Instagram at Santucciartist.

A New Vocabulary

Rose DeMaris

Remember the old-time confidence of sons and daughters all chlorinated
in the summer dusk, under reliable stars, with popsicle-tinted tongues
uncurling, emboldened by sunburn, who steered themselves down steep
porch steps, flung their own bodies from bikes, screamed Daddy! Daddy!
for the pleasure of knowing Daddy — giant, beer-scented, sane — would
come, would carry them from the concrete, would repair. In the beginning
the word was a drug with which we hit ourselves again and again. Bruised,
we now wait for a new vocabulary. It is summer year round. Houses burn.
We admit he was never willing to run down the stairs for all of us. 1 in 4
birds have vacated the sky. From their cages, children listen to the elegies
of those who still sing, who carry poison worms to nestlings. We lie, having
lost our balance, with a bicycle on top of our body, with its bright chrome
handlebar against our throat, tangled streamers reddening, whitening, bluing
our mouth. In the silence, she opens her front door, that neighborhood lady
we never notice. She lifts us onto her bathroom counter, beside the orchids.
Water from her tap tastes rooty, like Earth pulling everything back to herself.
She tints our cuts with iodine, causes the staining that precedes the healing
of wounds, this woman we will go back to not seeing, the one
who comes when we are too choked
to call for help.

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Author’s note: I wrote this poem right after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I was also thinking about the murder of George Floyd, the pandemic, the detention of immigrants, the tendency toward nostalgia for our country’s romanticized, patriarchal, and in many ways problematic past, our climate and environmental crises, lost species, racism, discrimination, and femininity in all its manifestations, plus certain bicycle-related mishaps of my youth and an actual neighborhood lady who once picked me up off the street, as well as my own longings and some keenly-felt absences too personal to note, all topped by a sort of cherry of hope—the halved, glossy, almost fluorescent kind you find in a very American can of fruit cocktail.

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Rose DeMaris writes poems, novels, and essays. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Random House, The Millions, and Big Sky Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Fourth River, Cold Mountain Review, Asymptote, and Pine Row Press, and she was a finalist for the 2020 Orison Anthology Award in Poetry. She is currently earning her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University. rosedemaris.com

Read our interview with Rose DeMaris here.