Pamela Annas
The Light Designer
The critics only notice if you fuck up. Hey you! I’m talking to you, sitting there, 5th row center, and you in the left balcony. Pay attention…
Mary Buchinger
At Twenty
I loved your room on the top floor
in that rangy grey house, drawings
torn from magazines tacked to the wall
above your crowded desk:
Too loose, Lautrec!
Eden Chicken
The Arnolfini Portrait
…My eye to her full hand,
white flesh and bone bunching cloth
which covers more flesh
which covers more bone.
A mother, I call her, but I am wrong…
Julie Esther Fisher
A Rib Becomes a Branch
A rib becomes a branch
an earlobe an acorn
my teeth, the serrate edge of a leaf
See my feet, club moss
Even my dandruff appears in
dusty lichen…
Charles Kell
Dead Moth
In the black left eye a tiny musician plays
a tiny violin, notes so subtle they’re barely heard.
The violinist has no legs; his lower half swallowed
in the black lake of the moth’s eye. This luck
brought about by a horrible time…
Suzanne Langlois
Everything I Know About Love I Learned From My Cat
Like how to make a show of tending to myself
How to perch in hard-to-reach places
How to curl into a self-contained shape
How to feign disinterest
How to refuse to be picked up
How to refuse to be carried
How to refuse…
Margaret LeMay
Wakes, stumbles the haze out of
routine borne not out of need
but aloneness, an algorithm, a furnace
of switches and clicks, footfall
and rose clippings. Wakes at a voice…
Kathy Nelson
Abecedarian: My Great Grandmother Writes
All riotous and flaming, I remember wild azaleas
burning coral, copper, nearly crimson,
coy among the leafing birches and sugar maples.
Does the dogwood still bloom?
Everything seeks sunshine…
Luci Huhn
Pot Luck
I hear, some mornings she comes downstairs in a dress.
I hear, she has a boyfriend. I notice the young ones sit together,
the thin ones sit together. I hear, I love living near my mother.
I see black cowboy boots, the upturned toes. I notice a scarf…
Ann Pedone
from Joan: An English Poem in Exactly Twenty-Three Rondeaux
Out Of Much Hysteria/From Whence I Pass
Joan conspicuous Joan is grammar
Conspicuous or
So slender the way Joan a saint no
Saint is private but faulty…
Angela Siew
I Want To Be My Mother When I Turn 75
praise the watermelon
its rosy blush
the surprising paleness of the inner rind
the crack when it splits open
just so much water
its ability to cool me from the inside
juice dribble or seed…
Shannon Winston: Review
Review of Megan Merchant’s “Hortensia, in winter”
…Hortensia, in Winter is a beautiful and compelling work of recovery and discovery. Through prose poems—many in epistolary form—Merchant reconstructs Hortensia’s complex history, addressing her directly and questioning a figure both familiar (an “ancestor,” 18) and enigmatic (a “glyph,” 18)….