Poetry

Andreea Ceplinschi

Peach Pits

My grandfather sharpens his razor
against a hanging length of leather
and Sunday morning shimmers
through the soap in his beard.
The cat is purring between his shins
as six-year-old me tries to chase it
with peach pit projectiles.
My mouth sticks with giggles and juice
inside the constellation of cat,
straight razor and peaches
where God tilts a backhand
and blooms blood
from my grandfather’s wrist.

I hold for the snap of leather on back skin,
guilt-wrapped in silence.

My grandfather never gets angry –
It could have been worse, thank God!
Laying the peach pits out on the sunny stoop
he shows me how to break them open
between two rocks. We eat the seeds
and litter the stoop with shards of wrinkled bodies.

Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-born writer currently living on Cape Cod, MA. Having only recently been reacquainted with the art of writing, she’s currently trying it all, from fiction to personal essay and poetry. Her creative non-fiction has won an honorable mention in the Women on Writing Q2 2021 Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Prometheus Dreaming, Prometheus Unbound, Into the Void and Fly in the Head.

Shira Atik

After Babel

Read this, my father said, jabbing his finger at a toothpaste ad 
in a women’s magazine. Isn’t this beautiful? This was one week after 
he’d bitten the hand that fed him and was rushed from the nursing home
to the hospital, where they tied his hands and feet and glutted him 
with sedatives until he was as wordless and pliant as a baby. 

My father, who had drawn blood, was the gentlest of men. 
When the old women down the hall heard him walking to the compactor,
they, too, had a sudden urge to take out the trash. They’d intercept him 
and ask him questions, and he would nod and reassure them 
until their legs got tired and they would shuffle back 
to their apartments. He talked sports with the doorman of his office building
in midtown, and he knew the names of the janitor’s children.

And he was a reader. I’d be in the living room studying for exams, 
and he’d call me over to show me a passage from a book by John Updike 
or Edna O’Brien. Read this, he’d say. Isn’t this beautiful?

Saint Lucia

In a few days, after you finish your rotation
at the crumbling hospital, you and I will visit
one of those resorts. Poolside, you will order 
a pina colada, and, for me, a tonic with lime. 
At night we’ll sleep deeply in our cool room, 
your hand on my swollen belly.

Tonight, though, it is too hot to touch.
We lie on the bed, sprawled alongside each other
like a pair of stranded starfish. Our room smells like sweat
and rotting mangos. It hasn’t rained in weeks, 
and everything that should be growing 
is parched. 

An ambulance passes, crimson shadows stain the wall.
Tomorrow, you will tend to more men, machete-shredded 
from drunken brawls or field accidents. 

Although our daughter’s name has been chosen,
we haven’t spoken it in three weeks. Death is everywhere,
and we tread carefully.

A ping against the window, the patter of a kickdrum.
The calabash and banana trees guzzle down the water.
Fat drops clog the soil, flush out the worms.

The islanders run outside and stand under the sky,
arms extended, palms up. The room cools,
and the frisky creature inside me settles.
Crickets and bullfrogs, mangrove trees and worms, 
the ambulance driver, 
even our shape-shifting promise of life –

every living thing
sings.

Shira Atik is a poet and a Hebrew-English translator. Her poems have been published in The Ekphrastic Review and Poetica Magazine, and were displayed at the Beachwood Jewish Community Center and the Nature Center in Shaker Heights, both in Ohio. In 2018, she and sculptor Alice Kiderman co-published Stone Words, a book featuring nine of Shira’s poems alongside the sculptures that inspired them. Beginning this summer, Shira will be pursuing an MFA degree in poetry at Lesley University.

Jill McCabe Johnson

On the Bus

Was it violence on the bus
when the drunken dude
unzipped to his tanlines
and bent a double exposure
close to my sleeping
12-year-old face?
     Was it violence
when his friends laughed
and goaded him inch in closer
fart in her face   shove in hard
so she can’t breathe?
     Was it violence
when the guy stepped back
to reposition and my one opened
eye caught both eyes
of the driver who stared back
at the highway?
     Was it violence
for my girlfriends across the aisle
to stare straight ahead, too,
to pretend they saw nothing,
didn’t know me, were just
minding their business?
     Was it violence
when I pretended no longer
having faith in humanity
was my only loss, my only injury?

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea. She aspires to call out the inequitable and express the ineffable more than writing the accessible. Recent works are published or forthcoming in Slate, Waxwing, Shark Reef, Book XI, and Crab Creek Review. Jill lives in the San Juan Islands on traditional Lahq’temish (Lummi) land.

Sarah O. Oso

North East Village

The women of Adamawa still will praise
     your strong young hands
Good for scouring stoneware
they will tell you     firm 
like your brother’s own

You can lift the pot over high fire
cut      hardgrass from cowpea
They will show you how to hide
     the blade    beneath a basket 
wrist bent and folded behind    the back
or at the hip
or tucked     just there
     into your long skirt

It is better to save your virtue
they warn     No body believes you 
even when      you scream

The sun bears a darker shade of red 
for us daughters     The beast is more hungry 
they say      And for us     the grief  more 
     wicked 

Sarah O. Oso is a Nigerian-American writer, poet, and storyteller. A first-generation immigrant and proud Atlanta young person, she commits to honoring the human experience through highlighting the importance of spoken and written expression. Numerous local readings and art events, including the annual AJC Decatur Book Festival, Poetry at Tech, Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival, and ArtsXchange have featured Oso’s work, and her poetry has been Pushcart Prize nominated, currently appearing in New Ohio Review, Rigorous, and Dragon Poet Review, among others. She is a recent graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mark Christopherson

Lower Thoughts

Your house is a tangle of wires 
and pipes tucked just below the siding. 
This is the best of all possible worlds,
according to Leibniz. Death used 
to live in their nurseries and still they 
believed it. Now our lives are a carriage 
of fluids and currents and ordinary people
are helpless to fix anything. Last summer 
in this best of worlds mobs congregated 
over fires in the streets, and we hid behind 
the walls of a house we don’t understand.
When it was over we drove the daylit roads 
to examine the cries in graffiti, to see 
in the ruins what buildings are made of.
What struggled through the timbers 
and broken glass might have been anything,
even our perfection. I am no genius, and my eyes 
contain the same suffering as yours. At home 
the furnace fires up and turns off again 
with no real understanding. The streets go dark 
and a squad roars by with flashing lights, 
and later in the night someone screams 
to an empty alleyway. Though I am living here
with all of you in the abode of God, 
my mind is tangled around the rebar
and humbled in the ashes.

Mark Christopherson is an attorney and writer working in Minneapolis. His work has previously appeared in The Dan River Anthology and The Dewdrop. He may be reached at Christopherson28@gmail.com.

Kelly Gray

The History of Spindle Cells

(Inspired by a lecture by James Nestor)

Let me start by saying that I am sperm whale. Understanding this part of my nature 
will set up this device which is a topographical map of hearts 

dismissed by divers more fragile than you because as a sperm whale, I can vibrate 
a human body to death with clicks and echoes gathered 

in my jaw. I spin belly up to see you floating towards me 
and yes, I know I can kill you, but so desperate is my need

to tell you that I love you, I let the waters rock
us, current, until you extend hand, and I try gentle not to render you deaf,

split your body where you cannot breathe, and let you swim
in the presence of my natural form. 

Kelly Gray (she/her) resides on Coast Miwok land amongst the tallest and quietest trees in the world, deep in fire country. Kelly has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Atticus Review and Best of the Net by The Account Magazine, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Pithead Chapel, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Normal School, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, The Inflectionist Review, and more. Her debut book of poetry, Instructions for an Animal Body, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press and is available for preorder on her website writekgray.com. You can follow her @_west_of_west to hear stories of critters, backroads and attempts at being a rational parent and partner.

Andreas Fleps

Because

the saddest of things are frequent things, and
one of my grandmothers loved a man during WWII
who got shot while she was in a Russian POW
camp, stomach bitter with potato peels eaten
from the mud, and I walked out of the hole
in the dead man’s head sixty years later. Because we can 
hardly look at each other since in a factory of the faceless
we see everything we have faced and still have
to face, and a void is never filled, but always full. 
Because a person can be so lost—their own words
cannot find them, and outside, the air is inhaling
sirens, and inside my brain, thoughts are thinking
in alarms, and emergencies are never far from a 
second. Because I am the night my mother has 
trouble sleeping in, and she was prescribed Xanax
to cure my anxiety, and I got tattoos on my forearms
first, considering it’s easier to cut through skin than a story,
and an empty noose is the closest I’ll get to a halo.
Because the mountain carved through by a river 
feels water as a knife, and loneliness can be hoarded,
and blessed are the burning for they know how to navigate 
hell. Because at some animal shelter in Downtown Chicago, 
a gorgeous female pit-bull is about to be put-down
at 2 p.m. and at 2 p.m., a friend messages me that
her father passed away, and sorrow is a leaking
faucet—drip, drip, drip—sometimes we all notice
each drop at once. Because the story isn’t wrung-dry of words
just yet, and we are more than our names like our hearts
are more than a muscle, and the soil is full of what’s 
been and is, while we are soil brimming with what can be.
Because we are trees that can hand each other our 
leaves, and voices can be flooring, and if we’re drowning
in our minds, we can come up for air in each other’s breath.
Because I’ve undressed the rain, and the back of our eyes
are the other side of the moon, and our feet are crowns
the earth wears—uneven, unsteady, and jeweled with ache.

Andreas Fleps is a 29-year-old poet based near Chicago. He studied theology and philosophy at Dominican University, and his debut collection of poems entitled, Well into the Night (via Energion Publications) was released at the end of 2020. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as High Shelf Press, Snapdragon, Allegory Ridge, Passengers Journal, and Waxing & Waning, among others. Battling Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder since the age of five, he translates teardrops. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andreas.fleps/ | IG: andreas.fleps | Email: flepandr@my.dom.edu

Laura Roth

Flame in Space and Female Nude

Flama en l’espai i dona nua, Joan Miró 1932

Divulges a pit the size of a fire among her breasts:
oddly-numbered, a broken pear and two apples,

small black seeds. A suggestion of mastectomy.
Though she is still too young to become her mother, 

to gracefully accept the shape of her change 
from a hospital bed. Her body is soft enough for a boy 

to put his fingers in and stir the coals. 
Her heart is impossible to place. 

That day, the yellow filters in on the ferris wheel:
at the peak an intense desire to stand up in her seat 

and lick the sky. Then a slow-motion plunge,
a microgravity colored in pineapple juice and rum. 

His thigh stirs and sticks to her own
while her lips loose their reservoir of thoughts

ordinarily reserved for the borderlands of sleep
when violence and strange bedfellows catch between the sheets.

From the roof, they watch the sun tuck in the corners 
of an unstarry night. Then the light transmutes 

to two-dimensional and she is flat on her back
and he is taking off his glasses. 

This is how a fire begins: a private moisture passed
to desiccation between two mouths, opening 

a seam along thoracic colliery, fever and also 
heavy breath, a congestion in the stovepipes

of her throat. While he runs his sandpaper tongue
along the uncut edges of her, she grits her teeth

and hopes he cannot taste the blood.
Locks it slick between her knees, in her heat

to swell like some phantom pregnancy:
sickness and raw appetite masking an emptiness 

potent as any parasite. The nerve endings
sharpen to an ache the body begs dislodge. 

But she knows how to hold a mouthful of blue. 
Knows how to burn without letting slip the smoke

and she will wait until the bathroom light
tunes up the white-hot throbbing in her head

before she unfolds: metastases of red.

Laura Roth is a poet and educator from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She earned a bachelor's degree in creative writing and opera performance from Northwestern University and will begin her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University this fall. Her musical background has been a major influence on the prosody that characterizes much of her written work. Laura can be reached at roth.j.laura@gmail.com.

Meghan Sterling

Luck

Only one lost to blood too early to have been 
more than a spark hopped from the woodstove, 
cooled to ash, swept clean by morning. 
Still, it was a wait until she took, cells tunneling 
and furrowing their way into the right places, 
fibrous bands and tissues and fluids weaving a nest 
for my little bird. I admit it, I was lucky—
I knew there was something wrong, 
pretended to cry to the doctor, who finally 
agreed to open me up and have a look. 
Surgery was on Grandaddy’s birthday 
when I walked a spring riverbank and spoke to his ghost, 
how I knew I was paving the way for her to come,
selfish as I was, fierce as the river, too. And ready. 
The thing was, I wanted more than water to hold her,
to fill the cup that fear had long capped close. 
Four hours of deft cuts and the way was clear.
She joined me soon after, burrowing into my belly
as an answer to sutures and stitches, the living expression 
of luck that held just long enough.

Meghan Sterling’s work has been published in many journals, including Rattle, Sky Island Journal, Glass: Poets Resist, Rise Up Review, Literary Mama, and Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest and is forthcoming in Thimble, Mom Egg Review, and many others. She is co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, was Featured Poet of Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 Issue, a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident in 2019. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press in 2016. Her full-length collection, These Few Seeds, is available from Terrapin Books. She teaches poetry workshops and lives in Portland, Maine with her family. Read her work at meghanterling.com or contact her at meghansterling36@gmail.com.