ISSUE #21
Elizabeth Bradfield
First Love
Today, adjusting my jacket
in strong wind, I look down
to the hem, remember the neat
way she’d pull up the bottom
zipper—quick, decisive—to open
a gap for her hips….
Christine Delea
Around Back
After summer, brown gulls and red cardinals
bring autumn inland, slowly,
on their salt-sprinkled backs, wings pumping
with chill. I pull my scarf around my neck
like a noose, billowing air blows leaves…
Jose Hernandez Diaz
A Wednesday in Autumn Where I Turn into Pinocchio at the Local Library
I was teaching an online class at the library on the decay of western civilization when the librarian rushed in and told me my time was up. I pleaded for another five minutes in vain. I was just getting to the good stuff. The petite librarian proceeded to get me in a headlock and escorted me off the premises. She told me I was a bad seed…
Faith Gomez Clark
After Your Birth
…the pure white walls your father his chair began to bleed into each other pain pressing my head into the belly of my pillow oh no they said time to mother the mother so the room birthed darkness magnesium flowed ice cold through my veins…
Carolyn Martin
My Mother Is Dead
1924-2022
Afterwards, when relief was still
relief and regret for words
I never said pushed grief aside,
I forgot to forget her red-raw hands
unpinning frozen shirts
clotheslined across the yard…
Sam Moe
What we share
What we share
A love of pinecones. Forgotten swan
feathers, now encased in river ice
not to be confused with your obsession
with ocean ice, temporary and lovely
the sea ice is jagged, the river ice…
Ellen June Wright
After Learning of His Castration
grieved I the eleven year old / born just before the end of slavery / who needed a home / needed a protector / so agreed to castration / so he would be no threat to his protector’s daughter / so he would have a roof and access to learning / I grieved for George Washington Carver / all that genetic genius gone down into the grave /….
REVIEW: Susan Jo Russell
Review of In the Shape of A Woman by Lily Greenberg
From the intriguing cover to the final poem of this book, Lily Greenberg explores what it means to find one’s shape, as a woman—shape that is not so much physical as what I might call spiritual, the shape of self. The opening poem offers an image of resolve, “I am a geyser/in the shape of a woman, and the time/has come to never be murky again [p. 3].” But as we move through this collection, we learn how elusive that clarity is. How can a woman’s shape, Greenberg’s poems ask, ultimately be shaped by her own hands?…
Neil Barrett
Talk Dirty
Turn over my lost,
sustained pauses like couch cushions.
Fold me into something audible,
something more.
Lock the door.
Spread that shirt about your clavicle,…
Susan Barry-Schulz
Articulation
nobody says your name out loud anymore I’ve forgotten the sounds that it makes the gentle turn-back of the tongue a nod to the throat
the breathy ah the deliberate collision of lips at the end the plosive…
Steve Fay
Guarding Plovers
…She is older by a decade in her dreams,
or sometimes two, and it has always been
And so she dresses like her mother’s
friends: dull-colored gingham aprons
and bright scarves to keep her hair from
flying in the wind…
Anne Graue
Dear Frank
I couldn’t have known you
your oranges gone moldy
wrapped in fuzzy green
and I miles away
from Fire Island
when I was 4
and you 10 times that…
Tori McCandless
Seven-hundred Percent More
One hundred years ago
there were one-seventh the amount of people
in the world than there are today
so when Lorine’s voice in a flooded marsh wrote:
head, write something!
there was less noise…
Daye Phillippo
If recollecting were forgetting…
I both would and wouldn’t recall looking out the south window,
March, midday while talking on the phone and seeing
two deer and then two more, loping in from the south field,
each, in turn, leaping over the gravel drive
where it curves as if it were a rocky riverbed flowing around
the unfenced field, posts and barbed wire pulled out…
Hillary Sallick
April
…It comes pouring in
a wash a wave gentle
filling basin cove bay
inlet of backyard
narrow driveways all the airy spaces…
Henry Hall
Only Shorter
Dawn’s cool milk, dusk’s sultry stew,
and in between, the roar of work
and traffic jams for armored me and you.