Poetry

Elisheva Fox

aspic.

shabbat is coming
luminous bride with her pearls
her pomegranates

my heart cracks open
and a raven slips out
trailing a 
             veil of violets.

 
i shop for brisket and flowers,
close to the rose buckets
i see two 
           women 
whispering to each other:
secret grocery lists, maybe,
or
             the psalmist’s most earthly 
             promises.

 
they kiss
and i 
          shove 
my hand
into the roses’ thorny thick.

 
i shove the 
    meat of my want 

down
down

down.

i suspend 

myself

in a slick and jellied chill.

Elisheva Fox is a mother, lawyer, and writer. She braids her late-blooming queerness, Texan sensibilities, and faith into poetry. Some of her other pieces can be found in Touchstone Literary Magazine, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, 805lit, Screen Door Review, and Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade. On Instagram, she can be found as @elisheva.fox; on Twitter, @afoxmother.

Alexander Duringer

Niagara Falls

He drew power from his legs
& used it to hurl women
                                               at the studio ceiling.
Bones of steel. White birches cracked
from their roots. Asleep
he became a temple 
    of knives
where I learned to expose
my neck. Once in bed he said, I love
how average you are
                                & tickled
my potbelly, where his cum
                                            puddled,
slung like barrels over Niagara Falls. 
There is power in its water.
Lights cities, breaks bodies; 
      folds lungs into paper cranes. 
On a July afternoon
Joseph Avery clung to a trunk off Goat Island.
The summer sun paled with mist
& he—hugging the log tighter,
bark ripping between fingernails 
     & baby flesh,
        shoes yanked by the rapids;
toes & teeth feel the gripping suck rush
as his father’s gold watch keeps ticking—
felt his back in silhouette 
against the photographer’s mercury fumes, 
& knew that someone would remember
                  he was he, 
before the last lifeboat capsized
& gave him back to the tumult 
where he joined mist. With the sun, 
         I’d rake my tongue 
along the dancer’s stony abs 
to wake him.

Nothing Echoes, Nothing Crystalizes

***

I sat with your shaking 
body & thought of the last brain 
scan. A black dahlia 
upon its stem. 

***

In a room for the mourning 
I made calls. It was private
in a place alive with dying. 

***

In the flowers, a friend
saw you. Unplanned, 
welcome. She couldn’t name them.
Yellow & full, 
they caught dew;
drank from the broken day. 

***

M. doesn’t mention the heaves I make in the tub as my back becomes a sunset. 

***

The word ‘loss’ gets stuck 
like a toenail in my throat.
What I misplaced is less 
a body and more a self.

***

***

A swath of slick paper lifts away 
like the pant leg of a lover’s 
thigh. I rub my hand along 
the wallpaper. It’s damp 
& torn with dents. 

***

The emperor Hadrian deified 
his drowned lover, Antinous
& formed a cult to worship him. 
Artists fought for the privilege
to sculpt his nipples.

***

Talked to a social security rep
as Dad who still won’t speak. 
Couldn’t think of his mother’s 
maiden name. Was accused of fraud.

***

Francis Bacon described 
the glitter of the mouth; the music
of a scream. 

***

J. overdosed yesterday. 
He lived.

***

Wrote another poem about the sounds 
your ventilator made. Used onomatopoeia.
Please, let me write 
anything else.

***

***

When I was 21 a man put something into my drink.

***

Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, in his sperm coffin. Angel looks down at him 
and says, Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothin’ but surrender?

***

My social worker friend told a story 
of a man she found half-frozen 
beneath the Clinton Street Overpass. 
Blue brushstrokes turned bruise-black
as things were lost.
A finger, a foot.

***

On the floor, against the bathroom light,
cards were laid in front of me. V of Swords, Queen 
of Pentacles. The Fool. The reader remarked
how cool the night had grown.

***

Just read a poem about a rich woman 
who narrates her own embalming. 
Her skull was filled with cinnamon. 

***

Layers of ghosts
plastered over each other 
the way an artist gessos 
a used canvas. 
They pile at my feet.

***

Some posit that Antinous drowned himself as a sacrifice for Hadrian. Perhaps he just wanted 
an escape.

***

A shooter fired into my classroom. 
Bits of student hit my mouth.
One stared up from the linoleum
& blew a bubble of blood. 
I woke when I reached to call you.

***

I couldn’t stand
in your death’s short
tunnel.

***

M. plays a song about a woman who walked into the sea. He translates: What new poems 
were you looking for? An ancient voice of wind and salt.

*** 

What woman in her sixties
doesn’t feel like her back
is a twisted oak & dream 
of sleep? 

***

Through an open door I watched
an old man wheeled past, his arms 
windmilled against what came next. 

***

The room blooms with the loss of you.

***

Before Woolf put the rocks in her coat pockets she wrote Everything has gone from me, but 
the certainty of your goodness.

***

The schnauzer nests on your shoes
by the door beside boxes 
of lace-wrapped glass, 
Christmas ornaments, 
a hatbox full of your mother.

***

It holds: her death 
certificate that cites ‘DAUGHTER’ 
as the place of her last thought,
as if she died inside you;
fun home mirror,
womb reversed.

***

A student of mine found her mother face up
on their pinewood floor. She laid inside her 
drying puddle until the smell. 

***

I couldn’t look at your corpse, 
so quickly a noun to trap the nothing
that was once my mother. 

***

Barthes writes: I have reached the point of no longer wanting to travel in order to be here, so 
that the flowers here will always be fresh. 

***

M’s ass hole,
thicket of midnight,
invites me in. 
& still, you—

***

***

A man in Ohio sees with your eyes. 
They are brown chestnuts we’d search for, broken 
from spiked shells. I seek him out
in his corn field to crack them 
with my thumbs. 

***

I researched this procedure.
Only the corneas can be used; 
they get grafted to a recipient’s eyes.

***

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death.

***

Death is an empty 
china cabinet 
after a garage sale.
Its knicks & scratches,
unclosed sores.

***

Drove J. to rehab. After, I found many lost spoons, pens filed in half, a filled condom, a 
tourniquet, a picture of you.

***

Blue shade slides over the harbor as M. & I rest. 

***

Alone, I swam
at Sherkston shore
& left the water
with a perforated ear drum. 

***

Parrot lilies fill your etched vase. 
Light from the kitchen window 
catches their shadows.
Magnified by the glass, 
they shine against the wall. 

***

Acknowledgements:
Samuel Barber, “Adagio for Strings”
Patti Smith, “Land”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “The Dead Flag Blues”
Thomas James, “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh”
Mercedes Sosa, “Alfonsina y El Mar”
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Alexander Duringer is a reformed English teacher from Western New York currently living in Raleigh, NC where he studies as an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University with a concentration in poetry. He received his Masters in English Education from SUNY Buffalo in 2015.

Anna Chotlos

Survival

After the thaw, when I have put the wool hats
and mittens back in the box on the highest shelf,

 
when I have returned the winter pansies 
to the stoop, when I begin to believe that nothing more 

 
unbearable will happen this week,
(How easily every day becomes a funeral)

 
I notice how someone (I imagine a child)
has placed little bundles of dandelions,

 
mussed yellow crowns, sticky palm-wilted stems,
on the body of each bird who froze on our sidewalk

 
the week before, helpless feet curled, 
each robin and cowbird and finch adorned.

 
I thought I was prepared to outlast disaster,
but not stiff silence 

 
where there ought to be rustling and song.

Anna Chotlos’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sweet Lit, Hobart, Hotel Amerika, Split Lip and Quarter After Eight. She is a PhD student in nonfiction at the University of North Texas. Find her online at annachotlos.com.

Kolbe Riney

the neurotypicals tell me I’m cold but have you ever considered that you’re actually the cold ones?

this night, she fevers / hot enough for me to take a belonging / bag, fill it with ice, / lay it flush against her sun-split chest. / constantly, she threatens running / just a little too high to function, / proteins curdling, skin / reddening to a throat ripper / scream. / don’t know why / the fevers call to me, / why I think panic / under the ice. / If I were to ask for something else, / when they spoke I’d stop feeling / the weight of their belonging / on my chest. / I’d say, open your mouth. / open it. / tear my gown / and let me slice bare / and pale as the crescent / moon in the linens. / douse my body / in something cold and quick / drying, / that I may find myself / in the electric spring / storms once more, / a little girl / on the precipice / of a wild death. / or just after all / let the heat feast my brain; / for every time I open my mouth / it is gasping / a slow-choke death / under the freeze. / I am always / pressing my lips / to the floe / like a seal staring / up from a mirror. / breaking under the weight of it, / the way a the glacier calves white / births to the salt. / trying to tell you how / I’m holding a flint / of ice in my hand / and I can’t put it down. / I can’t put it down. / I can’t put it down,

Kolbe Riney is a queer poet and registered nurse from Tucson, Arizona. They hold a B.S. in Nursing from Northern Arizona University and work in critical care. They are a Best of the Net Nominee and were short listed for the 2021 Sexton Prize with their manuscript, “mythic”. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Watershed Review, the Chestnut Review, TinderBox, Passages North, and others. Find them at kolberiney.wixsite.com/website

Faith Ellington

The Gross Clinic Scalpel

I & the body bleeds. The body twists itself into her knife.
The lungs fill with pitch, cold water swelling deep &
I dream of forcing the body into sleep. Her dreams tinged
Red to the root, bloody fingernails on the hand. Pick a face
For the body tonight & I will match it. The body divides itself
Into healing. She walks in front of the speeding car & I watch
Over the body. Hold the body steady against memory of twinned
Face, I slip tears down her cheeks. I & the body choreograph 
Muscle memory of living. I & the body cannot wake
Her up. She & the body as surgical amphitheater. She carves
I & the body bleeds into she. Pick a self for the body
Tonight & I will match it. Blame redslick on our 
Palms, the self somewhere between, razored sharp. 

Faith Ellington is a PhD student at Louisiana State University. Her other poems have appeared in Fools Magazine, Sierra Nevada Review, and ASAP Journal. You can reach her at fellin1@lsu.edu.

Mark Rubin

How to Bring Them In

A polite 12 feet of shore between us, 
my neighbor and I are casting minnows
into Seymour Lake, then reeling them in.
His t-shirt rides the high mound of his belly.
A trout flops in a wet gunny sack at his feet.
What with his wife’s new diagnosis,
it’s fish or pray, another day not unlike
the day before.
                          Had he been someone else,
he might have heard her asking
from her leg trap, Dear, 
would you mind if I chewed off my foot?
He might have noticed her 
on knee pads genuflecting in the kitchen,
sweeping remnants of who she thought
they’d become. 
                          Tonight he’ll serve
grilled trout with a side of guilt
al dente. Their daughter will disappear
in the backyard, a sparkler in hand.
Look, Mom, make a wish.
I’m a falling star. 

Mark Rubin has published one book of poems, The Beginning of Responsibility (Owl Creek Press). His work has appeared in The Ohio Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A past recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he fly-fishes in Burlington, VT, where he works as a  psychotherapist in private practice. Reach him by email: marksrubin@gmail.com

Anna Leahy

Let’s Say There’s a Place

Let’s say you can be whoever you are
once you’re there—a long beach of broken bones, 

 
the edge of a bay splaying shoulders or 
legs, a hermitage of prayers for nothing 

 
or for nothing special. You can set down
a chestful of assumptions, a sackful

 
of someone else’s memories, an ear-
ful of supposed-to-be. The next person

 
to tell you, shut the front door so no one 
sees you, is the train’s whistle from the track 

 
running out of who you are told to be.
Your destination is no heaven. No,

 
let’s say you are the one place on earth worth 
saving, carved from someone else’s stone heart.

Let’s Say There’s a Place

Let’s say you can be whoever you are
once you’re there—a long beach of broken bones, 

 
the edge of a bay splaying shoulders or 
legs, a hermitage of prayers for nothing 

 
or for nothing special. You can set down
a chestful of assumptions, a sackful

 
of someone else’s memories, an ear-
ful of supposed-to-be. The next person

 
to tell you, shut the front door so no one 
sees you, is the train’s whistle from the track 

 
running out of who you are told to be.
Your destination is no heaven. No,

 
let’s say you are the one place on earth worth 
saving, carved from someone else’s stone heart.

Let’s Say There’s a Place

Let’s say you can be whoever you are
once you’re there—a long beach of broken bones, 

 
the edge of a bay splaying shoulders or 
legs, a hermitage of prayers for nothing 

 
or for nothing special. You can set down
a chestful of assumptions, a sackful

 
of someone else’s memories, an ear-
ful of supposed-to-be. The next person

 
to tell you, shut the front door so no one 
sees you, is the train’s whistle from the track 

 
running out of who you are told to be.
Your destination is no heaven. No,

 
let’s say you are the one place on earth worth 
saving, carved from someone else’s stone heart.

Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections What Happened Was:, Aperture, and Constituents of Matter and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her work has appeared at Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, Bennington Review, BuzzFeed, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She edits the international Tab Journal and directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University. More at https://amleahy.com.

Jeffrey Thompson

Habeas Corpus

The first thing you do is 
dig up the state court record.
The transcript will have the stale paper smell 
of old comics in a footlocker.

 
It will be the 90s, or 80s, or 70s. 
There will be human remains
scattered across a desert wash
or at the bottom of an abandoned mine.
There will be a lucrative printing business, 
crooked cops, and hitmen from Chicago,
double-crossed drug dealers,
a woman alone in a small town library,
a girl riding her bike.

 
There will be a trial
inadequate for every purpose but its own,
the cosmic wound already stitched over 
by time and process, questions and answers 
numbed by repetition, witnesses captured 
mid-action by disaster, grasping their scraps of story.

 
There will be a verdict, nothing more 
than check-marked forms and sets of initials.

 
There will be the unloved prequel, 
foreshortened plot and stock villains. 

 
There will be a sentence, 
a page or two read from the bench.

 
Blank spaces will begin to crowd out the lines,
a few last comments on remaining formalities,
as the bound volumes thin, then vanish
under the accumulating years.

 
What is saved is reviewed
elsewhere, off site and with the greater care
forensics requires. But there will be denials, 
crude as “The End.”

 
The case will be closed: 
sealed banker’s boxes, softened pages, 
faded blue ink, and waiting bodies.

Jeffrey Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota. He was educated at the University of Iowa, where he studied English and Philosophy, and Cornell Law School. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he practices public interest law. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Main Street Rag.

Emily Long

My queerness is a landscape

   after Adam Falkner

 
made entirely of lavender sprigs 
and gummy worms and pink hair-dye,
each rolling hill more gentle 
than the last, each mountain
peak more striking. 
My queer is a hyphen in a 
sunset of commas, 
parachute in the most
homesick skies. She is peach pits. 
Paleontologist. Finicky 
calathea. A heartbeat. Firefly 
whose wings ignite consolations 
like shooting stars. Heterochromia. 
She is boa constrictors
wrapped around me like
a hug I cannot shake free,
cannot want to. Braid 
of beginnings and echos
of endings, each one
tender and cerulean. 
Calla lilies blooming on the 
bridge of my cello,
she is harmonies and wishbones 
and nighttime freckles.
She is a riotous 
garden, a mercurial dreamcatcher.
Silt of the luminous. 
Verdant atrium.
Amethyst honeycomb. 
A dimple, a home.

Emily Long (she/they) is a queer writer living in Denver, Colorado. She is a winner of the 2021 True Colors poetry prize with Vocal Media & Moleskine. You can find her on Instagram at @emdashemi, and more likely, you’ll find her climbing, hiking, and paddleboarding her way through the Rocky Mountains with her partner and rescue pup.

Adrianna Gordey

My dear Heavenly Mother

I didn’t learn how to eat vegetables 
growing up; our dinner table was 

 
the backseat of a 1999 Pontiac 
Grand Am idling under two golden 

 
arches. Our mealtime prayers were salt-
stained, greasy but pure: I thank Mom

 
for this Happy Meal. We ate at 4pm
because her shifts started after sunset. 

 
I begged the moon to protect her clip-on
ponytail, the same texture as my Barbies’, 

 
to spare my mother the rough handling 
the Barbies couldn’t avoid. Feed our souls

 
on the sweaty fives men tucked 
into Mom’s G-string. Body glitter sparkled

 
on parentheses cheekbones when she yelled 
at the Pokémon stickers leering

 
on the Barbie deluxe kitchen set
one Christmas. I swallowed my stale,

 
day-old cinnamon roll along with the hope 
Santa existed. Help me do my part in kind words

 
and loving Mom. I stopped worshiping
powerful men -- Jesus, Santa, customers -- 

 
and revered my mother instead. I whisper 
Mom’s name before every meal, asking for 

 
Her blessing, Her strength. It’s all 
the sustenance I ever needed.

Adrianna Gordey (she/her/hers) is a writer based in Manhattan, KS. When she isn’t writing poetry, you can find Adrianna baking holiday-themed treats, reading young adult novels, and snuggling her dog, Rudy. Her poetry has previously appeared in Lammergeier, Touchstone, The Poeming Pigeon, and the Connecticut River Review. You can find her on Instagram @by_adrianna_gordey.

Christy Prahl

Throwaway

How many crows till it counts as a murder?
I tally them with each rotation of my pedals
riding along these misted roads as the sun pinks up.

 
Fields of chicory and milkweed to one side,
barns held by sodden boards 
and a hope for light winds on the other.

 
A fox crosses the road in front of me.
Small mirages make their way.

 
Ahead, what looks to be a dead raccoon 
turns out to be a plaid shirt, 
wadded against the berm, 
sponged with rain and road grit.

 
What a puzzle, I think,
how a plaid shirt lands on the side of a country road.

 
Discarded by a man too much in his heat,
counting to ten like his counselor showed him?

 
Then it dawns,
Why does the primacy of human thinking
always call to mind a man?

 
A woman, yes, coming to this singular conclusion:
Fuck it.

 
Temperatures tilt toward 90 as she tears 
at the buttons and frees her skin.

 
Bare breasts apricot in the full drape of the sun.
Head turns upward toward a rabbit in the stratus
as she dares any cop or church van 
or stabled lover 
to stop her.

Christy Prahl is a philanthropy professional, foraging enthusiast, and occasional insomniac. A 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, the Blue Mountain Review, Bangalore Review, Unbroken, Clementine Unbound, Boston Literary Magazine, Ghost City Review, Twyckenham Notes, The Drabble, and others. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and silos in equal measure. Find out more: Home | Christy Prahl (wixsite.com)

Pamela Wax

Elegy for the Lady on Liberty Island

                   A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
                        Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
                       Mother of Exiles.

                                    — Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

 
Curse that raised torch, quivering lips, the broken chain 
and shackles as good as whole at her feet, girding 
her womb. She wears the blue patina of sorrow, pregnant 
with dreams of home across the sea, parlez-vous?, 
and nowhere to go but a back alley in Queens, women 
crossing borders from Ohio and Missouri, frenzied escape 
from a fate that biology conferred. Hope scrambles 
for a foothold on slippery benches of high courts, 
while she extends her arm to the sky. Damn the pedestal 
on which she stands—ironic welcome to foreigners 
who come now by foot or air, rarely by sea, and a virgin/
whore two-punch to those who hold up half the sky. Damn 
the sonnet that Emma wrote that raised the funds 
that raised that pedestal on which she stands, branding 
her Mother. She would suckle all comers who want to breathe 
free, but instead coughs and gasps, herself bound by symbolic 
satire. Let’s raise cain and eyebrows, unplucked, 
bushy, link arms, chant: This is what it looks like,
kindle the torch until we are hoarse, until she is no lady.

Pamela Wax’s poems have received honorable mentions in the Paterson Literary Review Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, and the Oberon Poetry Prize and have appeared (or are forthcoming) in journals including Pensive, Heron Tree, Green Ink Poetry, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pedestal, Pangyrus, The Dewdrop, Naugatuck River Review, Oberon, Sixfold, Solstice, Mudfish, The Cape Rock, and Persimmon Tree. Pam’s first volume of poetry, Walking the Labyrinth is available for pre-order from Main Street Rag Publishing. Pam is a rabbi who walks labyrinths in the Bronx, NY and the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts and can be found online at www.pamelawax.com

Timothy Fox

what remained

the season done mama's daddy sat in his shed
and with what remained would
carve teeth into dice
cut and stitch hide into gloves

sometimes he’d boil down hooves to make glue
or form votive candles from fat

he hung a chandelier of antlers over the dinner table
and covered all the doorknobs in soft nut sacs

you gotta use every part he’d say

Timothy Fox is originally from Texas. He has received a Houston Press Theatre Award for his play ‘The Whale; or, Moby-Dick’ and a Vault Festival Spirit Award for his play ‘The Witch’s Mark’. His writing has appeared in Rumble Fish Quarterly, Levee Magazine, Westchester Review, Rubbertop Review and Gordon Square Review. He lives in London. Find out more on his website: www.timothy-fox.com

Michael McKeown Bondhus

I want to get arrested with you

and when they lock us 
in a holding cell, we two
male-presenting genderfuckers             will kiss and rub            our hands all over the bars and each 
                                                                                                   other, and

                                                            
                                                                 fuck our way from nasty cot to nasty toilet
                                                                             and when the guards yell “shut it, faggots!”
                                                                  you’ll turn and show them your tits
                                                                  and I’ll turn and show them my pussy
                                                                  and you’ll spread and show them your balls
                                                                  and I’ll spread and show them my nothing
                                                                  and my hairy hand will tug the bars
                                                                  and your hairy foot will kick the door     
                                 and the guards’ll
                                  laugh and say “no
                                  body gets out of
                                   jail free homos”            so you’ll shrink yourself

            
to the size of a coin
and I’ll shrink myself to the size of a dollar
and you’ll sprout fins the color of a coin
and I’ll sprout feet the color of a dollar
and you’ll have gills ridged like the surface of a coin
and I’ll have webs tissuey like the crackle of a dollar
and I’ll mount you on my back, where you’re
                                                    a sexy goldfish 
                                                    and I’m a horny toad
                and we’ll flush ourselves 
                                                                        to freedom.

Michael McKeown Bondhus (formerly Charlie) is a bigender (male/neutrois) Irish-American writer. He's the author of Divining Bones (Sundress, 2018) and All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), winner of the Thom Gunn Award. His work’s appeared in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. He’s received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland), and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (UK). He lives in Jersey City, NJ (unceded Lenape land) and teaches at Raritan Valley Community College. More at: http://michaelbondhus.com.

Ali Wood

What We Can Save

At the end of each month, it is fair to
be inconsolable. Groceries, debt. Fear of the next
cycle, a carved-out cubby diffused with incense and bath beads. 

 
Do it, mix oil and fire. Both 
evened out with water. Ruddy tub
filled with a body whose

 
goblet is your thirst and
hedonistic as you are, you 
impersonate a woman undone.

 
Jester, clown, we’re in the same cruel club,
kicked from the womb and so we
linger here. Sip the too-expensive-for-your-budget

 
Malbec. Alcohol can burn through years. Massage your own
neck—it’s easy to dwell on the dead
opossum on the highway last week. You tried to clean it up, but it wasn’t

 
perfect, its atoms already joining the atoms of 
quail, turkey, deer, dogs, cats, 
racoons, which are like cats but hateable, vessels to carry our own

 
sin.
Trashbags.
Useless.

 
Vermin, all. Abecedarian, who. None of us are good
waders due to our tendency to sink. Opposite 
xenia, you steal the roommate’s hot water and sit.

 
Your consolation is softer skin, at least until the ongoing lightning storm
zaps out the electricity, and you are once again powerless.

Ali Wood received her MFA poetry degree at North Carolina State University. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, Bear Review, Plenitude Magazine, and others. Ali currently lives and teaches in Raleigh, North Carolina. Find her on Twitter: @aliwood1596 and Instagram: @aliwood15

Shatha Almutawa

Ibn Sirin Tells Me What The Onion Means

ومن رأى: البصل ولم يأكل منه فهو خير، وإن أكل منه فهو شر
ابن سيرين

Although I yearn for it in my waking hours I do not eat the onion in my dream
I look at its perfect skin, smoother than mine, a beautiful pinkish bronze

 
I do not eat the onion, I do not pull back its layers, do not let it sweat
My eyes do not water, it does not touch my tongue, my stomach does not burn

 
I do not smell it as it sits quietly on my kitchen counter by the knifes, by the small red bowl
gifted to me by a friend who said red because it reminded her of a bull, me—my rage

 
From time to time I grow green onions in jars, watch them grow then fight with myself
I have the urge to eat them all at once—end the temptation—but I leave them to grow 

 
I watch and want, look up the onion of my dream, look for a medieval Syrian’s interpretation
I go to Ibn Sirin after every dream, and he tells me it will be alright

 
He says the green snake I saw will not hurt me, might even turn out to be a son
He tells me my husband will face difficulty, but I dream of a bucket of shit—good fortune

 
Had I eaten the onion, the dream would have foretold my death
But I do not eat the onion, I only look. I have avoided an evil that I wanted

Shatha Almutawa is an Emirati scholar and poet. Raised in Kuwait and Dubai, she came to the United States as a college student at the age of 16. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. She started writing poetry after working at Split This Rock, a nonprofit that cultivates poetry and social justice. She is an assistant professor of philosophy and religion at American University in Washington, DC. When she is not working with medieval manuscripts, she teaches courses such as Islamic Resistance to Colonialism and Imperialism. She tweets @ProfShatha and has a website.

Bonnie Thibodeau

I nearly love you

We disagree
about mangoes,

 
but we both understand the dangers
of trickle-down economics
and parents

 
who say
it doesn’t matter
when asked to settle
two children’s debate about whether
plants can feel.

Bonnie Thibodeau lives in the Laurel Highlands of Southwestern Pennsylvania with her partner and two dogs. The woods, rivers, and communities of Appalachia shape the most prominent landscapes of her life and poetry. Her previous publications can be found in Atlanta Review, Change Seven, Cathexis Northwest Press (featured poet), River River (nominated Best of the Net), Still: The Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Third Wednesday. Bonnie holds an MA in English Literature from West Virginia University. She works as a STEM education program developer, though her passion is for creative expression through visual and written storytelling. Connect with Bonnie by email: bonniethibodeau@gmail.com or follow on Instagram @bltdailyspecial