Poetry

Molly Zhu

Breakfast Prayer

I want to wear my memories like a steamed egg,
color of a pale sun, buoyant like a bouncing puddle. There were mornings I’d eat 
spoonfuls of ji dan geng from a blue-white ceramic bowl
always a few drops of soy sauce crowning its silky surface,
rich and unctuous dabs of sesame oil glazing the top.

On crawling Sundays, my father would concoct a noodle soup from thin air, 
the broth tangy, muddled with dark chingkiang vinegar and shaoxing cooking wine 
the noodles were slick like the tongue conjuring up a lost language, 
swimming in last night’s bone broth if we were lucky
and always adorned with the heads of cilantro. 

Some days, I want to turn on the lights the way
a pan sizzles and cradles flaky scallion pancakes waiting to be cut up 
and dipped in dark soy sauce, 
a crunch snapping, and the carnivorous sinking 
of teeth into a doughy belly, sesame seeds sprinkled like crackling offerings. 

My mother would buy you tiao for us from the Chinese restaurant 
at the suburban strip mall, re-fry them in a vat of oil 
until they were crisp and glistening once more,
wrap them in bing, slather hoisin sauce on like a salve, 
shower everything with green onion slivers. 

Some days I pray for those mornings to run like a punctured yolk,
a golden velvety river carrying yesterdays to my plate,
when the five of us would huddle around the formica counter,
heads down in chopstick-dotted silence,
when breakfast was a kind of worship.

Molly is a Chinese American poet and she lives in Brooklyn, New York. During the day, she is an attorney and in her free time, she loves thinking about words and reading and eating. She has previously been published in Hobart Pulp, the Ghost City Press, and The Bombay Review among others. In 2021 she was nominated for a Pushcart prize and she is the winner of the inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, hosted by the Cordella Press. Her first chapbook is being published by the Cordella Press this March. You can learn more by visiting her website: MollyZhu.com

Sophie Lefens

Texas Love Poem

Martin Luther saw a naked woman 
dance across his wall, threw ink bottles
at her until she disappeared. Did she sway
or shimmy her ghostly hips back and forth?
I am tempted to believe anything 
that moves me towards dreams
or madness. like the spooky womb
of Texarkana after dark, the wobbly air
you can drink, the anonymous sweetness
I sip until visions of snakes on the road 
appear and then fade. A palimpsest 
rattling beside semis and six lanes. 
Me and you and our little, hot hunger
drove through mirage ‘til the sun softened 
into burns on the thigh’s inside. 

Sophie Lefens is a writer from Chicago. She has poems, essays and reviews published in Third Coast Magazine, The Christian Century, Inscape and elsewhere. Instagram: @froniaxxl.

Sujatha Menon

Ligatures

Fatter, wider, longer we loom
as the bangles of our grandmothers shrink
to the size of a ring
that although old and borrowed
turn our fingers blue.

On the day I was bandaged 
in sari and gold
to stop the ways of the new from leaking,
a fine tinkle of a tune
wrung its song around my neck
and across the cut of each starving ankle.

Old blood and new money dripped 
step by step, fresh to the banquet filled with 
big bellies of rice freshly squeezed
into gastric bands that I wished were tight muzzles.

Surgery is not an option for the tug in my tummy
that knows knots are used for the preservation of life
as well as strangulation and the ties of tradition.

There are other ways to release our throats 
and fork our tongues
just as there are other ways to evolve and unravel
using scissors instead of a scalpel.

Sujatha is a poet and musician based in the Midlands, UK. Sujatha’s poems have been commissioned, and published in a variety of magazines and journals and Sujatha has just published a first full collection of poetry titled The Glass Puddle with Dempsey & Windle (Vole). Sujatha has also been songwriting and performing with the band Satsangi for 20 years. To see Sujatha’s latests poetry and music projects please visit: www.sujathamenon.com

Michael Quattrone

Yes, Ambivalence

I love you like a friend.

I want you like a state-sanctioned syringe of partial vaccine in the non-dominant arm
at the Westchester County Armory on Tuesday afternoon, surrounded by National Guard.

Like the Wednesday tulip sulking half beneath the ground,
its purple bud seamed shut and stuck within a sheath of husky green.

Like the measure of birdsong tweeted so often it's trending now,
three thousand times, one note, to alert me by 7:00 AM to what has sprung. Again.

I love you like I need the pool cover pump
to suck away the lukewarm rain before I even think of dipping in.

These things take time.

And I complain because I want you slower, almost unnoticeably, in my life
as when, weeks later, I see the sheerest film

of dust on the dashboard (mostly on the steering wheel column) of the car.
Ambivalence, when I drive I think of you and brake, get lost, or swerve

in my imagination, into the oncoming lane, where an orange moving truck 
blares the onslaught of summer, and in the quick wake of its passing, I feel alive.

Back home, I reach out to my passionate mailbox,
bursting with bright-colored reasons to live with less.

Less, less, Ambivalence, and more.

Michael Quattrone (he/him) is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006), and the song cycle One River (Wolfe Island Records, 2018). His work is included in The Best American Erotic Poems and The Incredible Sestina Anthology. Recent poems appear in Nixes Mate, Streetlight (Pushcart nominated), and The Shore. Michael curated the KGB Poetry Series with Laura Cronk and Megin Jiménez from 2007 to 2011. He lives in Tarrytown, New York. Read more at michaelquattrone.com.

George Witte

Bellfounding

In steepled space we quietly conspire
my waist and lip surround your tongue
indwelling   calm and reticent   it’s time
by wheel and pulley made to sway
are sounded   rung   but fractured through
each day   beyond repair until
the secret furnace of communion smelts
dross down to elements   slow-cooled   cast new
our flaw no longer silences
now sings and summons congregants who flock
beneath dew-heavy elms in finery
to crowded aisles where absence   is
contained like oxygen   or light
refracting humid colonnades of dust
all rise to offer willing voice
we echo and enhance   attuned   still un-
aware they keep such fervent company

George Witte's three collections of poems are Does She Have a Name? (NYQ Books), Deniability (Orchises Press), and The Apparitioners (Three Rail Press). His fourth, An Abundance of Caution, will be published by Unbound Edition Press in April 2023. New poems have been accepted by Atlanta Review, New York Quarterly, and Redactions. See more on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgewittepoet/ and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/george.witte.12/

Lorrie Ness

Rust Belt

Everywhere, gravel cushions the fallen —
lipstick prints on filter ends, pull-tabs, and cellophane

from stores where even disposable things are still swaddled
in wrappers. Peeling from the billboard,

the single bright veneer still clinging to this street is stripping
slowly as the asphalt shingle siding 

that transforms each of our walls into ceiling. In a home built
from upper limits, only rainwater runs away

from this block. We launch paper boats along the curb, 
grind shipwrecks underfoot. You and I, always

giggling as leaky pipes rot the studs,
as a little more Tyvek is lost to storms. Each plywood patch job 

reclaims a shaft of light from the roof. It keeps hope alive,
squatting in an abandoned lot 

to play a children’s game. We tell fortunes 
by tossing a ping pong ball on that gravel of fallen things. 

Every throw finds its fate. Every bounce tells a chapter of the story.
You throw. I wait to see what it hits.  

Glinting in the granite are beer bottles, condoms — 
two eggshells in a cup of grass.

Lorrie Ness is a poet writing in a rural corner of Virginia. When she’s not writing, she can be found stomping through the woods, watching birds and playing in the dirt. Her work can be found in numerous journals, including THRUSH, Palette Poetry and Sky Island Journal. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021 and her chapbook, Anatomy of a Wound was published by Flowstone Press in July of 2021.

Anna Jasinska

Выморозка на рекe Лена

We cannot breathe under water
or resist the stream.

We build a ship where fish spawn
under its belly as we cruise.

The abdomen is painted red
below the waterline – our special place

where we do not look, we do not touch,
as rust-ridden injuries build up and swell,

where cracks below the surface attract parasites,
dragging dirt until we become mired in the river.

Droplet with droplet entwined, bank to bank,
hard as a chain – deep ice.

In this thick plate, our ship is wedged,
and we can watch and touch its red belly.

In the crisis, I begin to scream from the top
of the bridge Cut, cut hard! because I no longer feel.

With ice saw and pick axe, we chop the ice,
digging out sharp blocks under the abdomen,

carefully, not too deep,
not to crack through the ice.

We bare the belly,
fractured, ripped, with black burns.

We stroke scars and probe wounds
with our gloved fingers.

Shivering, we carry on the rite
of freezing out the red—

we repair as winter deepens, frost-stiffened
and breathing out clouds.

Anna J Jasinska is a geneticist originally from Poland. She holds an MSc in molecular biology and PhD in Chemistry. She lives in Los Angeles since 2005 and now also in Pittsburgh, where she joined the faculty of Division of Infectious Diseases last fall. She uses poetry to explore the potential and driving forces of human life. Her poems appeared in the California Quarterly, Cardinal Points and Oddball. She received honorable mentions in the English and Spanish language categories of the Oregon Poetry Association’s contest. Twitter @ankajasinska Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anna.j.jasinska

Hilesh Patel

I'll See You In The Stars

& when we finally got to see you

war at peace (finally)
body unzipped & becoming the stars 

the priest walked in & we 
all looked at each other, ready to protest

amē christian nathī where as you 
hiding somewhere in the folds of the curtain

were more mischief. Leave it 
out of tune, you said & we bowed our heads

In the years that followed 
we would sing hymns while washing dishes & 

boiling water & grating ginger
we would find god in the English in ways we 

couldn’t find ourselves 
in the tongues we were given at birth. We would 

trade bhajans for homilies
the way you substitute milk for heavy cream. Even 

Raj Uncle, atheism in his marrow, 
would dance sometimes to the spaces in between 

the out of tune notes but
faith is faith is faith is faith, he would say, even if it's nonsense.

Hilesh Patel is a writer, consultant, educator, artist and member of the art group The Chicago ACT Collective. His writing investigates immigration, healing, memory and the idea of living memorials. He was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and has called Chicago home for most of his life. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter at @hilesh.

Devon Brock

[what angel will lift a man who died beneath the overpass]

it is up to the swallows
   to take him,
            skin by vein
into their beaks, carry him,
   arm by arm above the dull hymn
      of tires on a wet road.

it is up to the swallows
   to place him among the shoes
      lacing the powerline as a wren
                                              to the nest.

Chickens

Down at Willy’s Fill ‘n Go,
it takes a trunkload of chickens
to top the tank—a fair rate
of exchange. Willy’s.
Two birds a gallon.
For me it’s fifty sacks of feed,
forty spools of wire,
wood for the coop, nails—
one box of five hundred: 16D.
And straw, always straw.

Sometimes late at night,
I hear a fox siphoning
while the dogs are asleep.
Everything’s hungry.
In the morning I’ll scratch
in the dirt, count the loss
in grubs, fry up a wing or two.
Then I’ll run on fumes
to the pumps and beg Willy
for a bargain—pillows,
clean white pillows
I’ve stuffed with straw
and bloody red down.

Devon Brock is a line cook and poet living in South Dakota with his wife and dog. In this disrupted time he relies heavily on poetry, both the production and consumption of it, as a means of connection with the world and time. He is currently working on a dreamscape of epic length and several collections of published and unpublished work. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, The 2River View, and SPANK to CARP among others.

Amanda Morin

The Human Botfly

Botfly larvae parasite humans. They burrow,
make a fleshy home for a month or so 
and if untreated they wriggle and grow. 
Subcutaneous flesh volcanoes around them
but botflies are considerate parasites and keep the area 
free from infection for the weeks they live 
inside the host’s home. 

When I was still so young a surgeon I had met only once took
my uterus during a failed procedure. 
A stranger in a lab scored it gently,
layer by layer trying to solve mysteries
necrosis sanitized and reported back in Times New Roman
For nine months I watched it dissected from inside my eyelids

During this time, my son learned to crawl,
speak Mama

This fragile body will never gestate a human again
but I imagine welcoming a botfly in a kiln
of inflamed skin on my bicep
Waiting for the moment it’s ephemeral cocktail
tells it to writhe out and drop
where I will catch it in my palm as it falls,
hold it in a biohazard waste jar
until it has completed its transformation into

something mouthless,
magnificent, grotesque in flight,
full of life,
grown.

Amanda Boyanowski-Morin is a writer, homeschooling parent, disabled person and can be found in the vernal pools of her area or knitting on a tree stump, imagining she can watch the mushrooms grow.

Sierra Kruse

Shift Drink

There’s    cicadas   dead    on  the    sidewalk   and  in  the 
president's   plane.   Halt.    Tornado   warnings   in   the 
midwest.  I've   been  here  before  and   I  was happy.   If  
you’re loud enough they'll scream with you and  forgive.
the stress of the year.   My  favorite  mantra  right now is
show me how it gets better. Where do you go to cry when
there is no walk-in freezer.   I’m trying to answer myself.
Talk louder.   They'll scream away the seventeen years of 
skin  you aged  when things got bad last winter and you.
leaned  over the  kitchen sink.  I’m at the  jazz bar in late
summer  with  an  empty  crowd.   Hoping  no one  will.
 show up. That  they’ll send  me  home  early and tell me 
what's wrong with me. 

Sierra Kruse (she/her) is a poet and graduate from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has previously appeared in Hooligan Mag, Peach magazine and Rookie. In her work Sierra writes about sadness, girls, and summertime. Follow her tweets @sierra_kruse.

M. Mick Powell

good-bye, summer

august 25, 2001: where were you when you heard that Aaliyah died?* 

hot comb summer       singe of sweet straight            pretty girls       light     enough skin
good    untreated         hair      hot comb summer       spun in leather seat     my stylist today has 
hot pink nails              bejeweled & long that stretchhhhhhhh                       beyond my brow         
          my sweat         collects beneath them while she s e c t i o n s my scalp 
i don’t look                 in the mirror my blackcape is so plastic                     i hate plastic    i hate 
velcro   around my neck i close my eyes       my eyes are closed      i gotta crush on you 
and that is true indeed and she is my favorite and i love all her songs and oh she’s on and 
she’s on again and i press hard with my thigh bones into the chair i press harddd harddd i am 
eight and electric and Aaliyah is on and i love her harddd      and now there is a man        he is a 
white man     i can tell by his voice     and i mistake his voice for god         and my eyes are 
closed i’m eight        and god says                    that she’s dead that she died                i am                 
           eight    and my first crush is dead                     my first crush has died              i am     eight    
           in a hair salon              i am eight          and blkgrl still electricmy stylist today has hot pink 
nails    and                  i want to stick them into my eyes          i want 
to stick them into my eyes      i hate velcro               i hate velcro around my neck i hate this 
pounding        around my neck          between my legs         Aaliyah is dead                                   
            Aaliyah is on               on again          did i kill her   my mother is crying    my stylist is 
             crying             my stylist        has hot pink nails        i want to          stick them 
           into my eyes     i          don’t understand                     quite yet                                              
                       what it means                                      to be gone 

*  title and epigraph borrowed from the introductory chapter of Aaliyah’s biography, Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah by Kathy Iandoli (2021)

m. mick powell (she/her) is a queer Black femme feminist poet and an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Iterant, Voicemail Poems, Frontier Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Apogee Journal, and elsewhere. mick's chapbook “chronicle the body” won Yemassee Journal's second Annual Chapbook Contest and was published in March 2019. She’s currently the Art Editor at Stellium Literary Magazine. Keep up with her at www.mickpowellpoet.com or on Instagram @mickmakesmagic.art.

Daniel Edward Moore

God of Repeat

Imagine being rearranged by repetition 
taking the form of you in me, 
as Elton calls us Tiny Dancers, 
molecular ballerinas in leather. 

Imagine learning to twirl on the scratch, 
that two-inch grave in 70’s vinyl,
beginning on the dark edge of me and 
ending in the radiant center of you.

Imagine being wronged into song 
hearing our voices join a dog
starving to death outside a store 
where a neon sky blinks Safeway.

Imagine being heaven, an egg 
with a shell waiting for sperm 
to storm the coop and give
beautiful feathers permission to fly.

Well, there you have it, 
the god of repeat, that 
brutally, bashful, elegiac old chap
who never knows when to stop.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Front Range Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Meadow, New Plains Review and Temenos Literary Journal. His recent book Psalmania was a finalist for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry.

Jessica Lowell Mason

Back on Flower Street

“That family is the toughest family
in town; they throw people
right out the window.”

My grandmother’s boyfriend
doesn’t have any marbles but still,
he knows how to report what he heard
through the grapevine of excavators
in this rust belt suburb, still,
he knows how to harass a waitress. 

That family is my family,
an Eastern European mosaic,
the ones who open their doors,
the ones who open their windows,
the ones who sometimes throw you
right, through the glass, out of them.

“Is it true, I wonder,
did someone throw someone
out of a window on Paradise Road?”

I cannot get a solid story:
someone reports that my aunt
jumped out of a window to escape
my grandmother; someone else
reports that my uncle jumped out
of a window to escape my great
grandmother, after she punished him
for fighting back against a bully at school,
but that was back on Flower Street. 

“If you did something wrong,
you suffered the consequences,
Mama wouldn’t protect you.”

A story about St. Joe’s Collegiate emerges:
I take notes on napkins at a subpar
diner named after an olive tree:
a priest was mocking my uncle,
and he fought back, only to return home
to Mama in the kitchen, with words,
so he jumped out the window.

Suddenly, I remember what it is like
to need a window nearby, to need
the family fire exit within reach,
fragments from my high flying youth
leap out the window of my heart, 
socks on my feet, sliding down the hall,
across the wooden board, socks
running across the cement, socks
jumping into a moving vehicle, a girl without
shoes and with nowhere else to go.

“I bet it was that Cimato.
The Cimatos hated your grandfather.
They broke his sign and put their signs
up in concrete.” 

My grandmother is determined
to find the culprit and make him pay,
while I am still imagining every window
in every house we ever lived,
knowing what it takes to throw
oneself out a window, knowing
what it means to be thrown out.

“We shouldn’t have this bad talk;
it’s a Sunday. Today’s the Lord’s day;
we should only have nice talk.”

An old lecher’s senility is met
with my grandmother’s relentless
determination to always get
what she wants, like one of the Old
Testament issuers of an ancient brand
of morbid justice; I swig my orange juice.

“We’ll have nice talk, but not until
I find out who said that about our family!”

The juice spurts out of the window
of my mouth. In the justice system
of this family, the rules of justice
are always changing, the flux
of familial dynamics are always casting
us squarely in a tragicomedy. 

My gay aunt, climbing out of a window
to escape a beating, going on to give
her girlfriends busted eyes, my gay
young self, nervous about her punches,
reeling from sharp words being thrown
at home, throwing myself out
the door to escape the repetition
of history, wishing I could run all the way
past Flower Street, wishing I could soar
through all the flowers of the field,
instead of all of the shards of glass,
on my way to the yard below your window,
a girl with her arms outstretched
to the girl leaping from the window.

Jessica Lowell Mason is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at the University at Buffalo. During the 2020-2021 year, she was a graduate fellow with the College Consortium and the Coalition for Community Writing’s Herstory Training Institute and Fellowship Program, Teaching Memoir for Justice and Peace, a year-long program in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University. She is currently the Hospitality Graduate Fellow with the Northeast Modern Language Association and is a 2022 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award at the University at Buffalo. Jessica has an MA in English and has taught writing courses at Buffalo State College, Carl Sandburg College, Spoon River College, and Western Illinois University. She currently teaches courses related to gender, sexuality, culture, and public policy at the University at Buffalo. A writer, educator, and performer, Jessica has worked for Shakespeare in Delaware Park, Ujima Theatre Co., Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Jewish Repertory Theatre, and Prometheus Books. In 2014, Jessica was awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Some of her poems, articles, and reviews have been published by Sinister Wisdom, Lambda Literary, Gender Focus, The Comstock Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Lavender Review, Wilde Magazine, IthacaLit, Anomaly, The Feminist Wire, Mad in America, SUNY Buffalo’s Romance Studies Journal, and Praeger. Her first chapbook Woman in Disguise was published by Saltfire Press in 2013. Her first full-length book of poetry Straight Jacket was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. She is the co-founder of Madwomen in the Attic, a feminist mental health literacy organization in Buffalo, NY.

Mary Rose Manspeaker

Ghost Stories to Tell Around the Flames

 I.          Moundsville Penitentiary

How many times does the body fall from the archway—an exhibit
It was stabbed 32 times by the body trapped next door. Every Appalachian child,
we watch it dangle all stood in ourselves with our chaperones & tour guides
who swing the lever down & suspend us in a series of cracks.
Anonymous forms are public spectacle. They pointed as the corpse twirled 
limp & listing & crack said ain’t this crack how it is.

II.     Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

Ain’t it just—
so they make a performance of it

Make it a fucking haunted house.
Marked down on the patient logs from the 1860s:

a man at wartime committed for moral sanity
a woman admitted for novel reading

egotism & other shades of hysteria.
I turn up in my simplest costume—

black cloak & fangs.
It’s Halloween & we parade the snake pit 

where my psych teacher was an orderly
who scrubbed the halls while patients hurled shit at him.

Who could blame them?
Because tonight, broke college students dress in straitjackets 

& leap from strobe-lit halls.
This is where the cook died.

Close your eyes.
He’s the friendliest of our hundred ghosts. 

III.  Greenbrier County Courthouse

Friendly, like the haunt who would see you 
hang. You impotently wipe at the coal dust 
crusting your slacks

& know it will always remain.
You turn to the people forced to depend
on you: you crack.

I heard the story as the marshmallow on my stick dripped 
into the fire, then burst 
black & orange—like sweetness

is made to be possessed. Didn’t he know
I want to ask, all the ghosts I’ve met
can tell you exactly who made them like that?

IV.   Stonewall Resort

That’s why I’m counting the performances,
watching which actors tell our stories.
Which stories we act out like they mattered.
Is this about what was, what makes us feel better, 

how you could collect pain like fibers
on a spinning wheel 
& slam the wood down, weave the strands 
into dresses & cloaks & blankets &

you might survive the winter.
Or you could go golfing then take a skiff out on the lake—
but was there something I said
about being stabbed by the body next door?

V.    Coalwood, West Virginia

We map the wounds & label them birthplace.
You visit & see only scars.
A counselor stops me,
says they’re fond of the fact

my souvenir t-shirts act as records.
I wear them until the graphics tattoo the skin.
We identify the body by where it’s been.

I wave to all five residents loitering outside the church.

They speak only of the people who left

Mary Rose Manspeaker was born and raised in West Virginia. They are the author of the chapbook Small, Black Box (Bottlecap Features) and have received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference and Brooklyn Poets. Their recent work appears in Poetry Northwest, TYPO, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere.

Rohan Buettel

Semper Augustus

there is more beauty in the broken than the whole
an Attic vase               fragmented by long history
worthy of both creator and mender’s tender care
images incomplete                  the missing rendered blank
more becoming for the mystery

think of the pot           pinched from coils of clay
loving hands smoothing its irregular curves
unique             distinct            its form more interesting
than the radial symmetry thrown from the potter’s wheel
the mass          not manufactured        to specification

think too of the tulip               the intense saturated field
of its petals                  no match for those infected
with the mosaic virus              colour broken into two
red coals ignited in vivid yellow flames
or the spectacular lines of the Semper Augustus

crimson flares streaked on a white ground
a single bulb once worth five hectares of land
a whole new set of futures created
to recognise the value
of scarcity                   of difference 

Rohan Buettel lives in Canberra, Australia’s capital city. His haiku have been published in various Australian and international journals (including Frogpond, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest). His longer poetry appears in Rappahannock Review, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, Mortal Magazine, Red Ogre Review, Reed Magazine, Meniscus and Quadrant. He rides a mountain bike, paddles a kayak and sings in a choir.

Katherine Gaffney

GH: Family Tree

See the changes nature makes between drawing 
                                    and trudging. Your love will be there to fill in the aged, 
blank paper, to see how you would accomplish 
                                    this work of successive genealogy. He will be there, not 

behind the bulky camcorder in which your father 
                                    kept replacing with new cassettes as your mother never 
dilated, as she and the doctor prepared for an epidural. 
                                    The distance of experience through a lens. As you allowed 

the distance of the shift from coop to table to dodge 
                                    the imminence of life in an egg, brewing lives in the doe’s 
womb. The doe, the female rabbit, your grandfather 
                                    never meant to kill, the womb filled with kits not done 

stewing. All the potential shots your grandfather 
                                    wouldn’t fire. The brief fire in the shot down your mother’s 
spine, her only hope of extracting the one life 
                                    she carried this far. He took over the kits’ extraction 

from the now still life womb. His garage was a still 
                                    life, of hanging pelts and knives and skulls dried clean 
and milky. Unlived lives of this womb stopped, mid 
                                    cycle, not unlike the lives ranging from bloody mess to fleshy 

nut that fell from your mother over a toilet or pulled 
                                    from her on a table as your grandfather pulls the nutty kits 
from the doe. Remember your love, the one who shares 
                                    your bed will be there as your father wasn’t when the waxy 

blue paper wafted over your mother’s belly, 
                                    as the doctors sunk their scalpels past her muscles 
to the womb that had no escape and pulled you, 
                                    red, weighted as the rabbit you learned to skin. 

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Clayton Walker

triptych

conversations

i carry my father in a hunting rifle

his mouth is a loaded chamber 
  his tongue is a trigger

once a week i raise him to my shoulder 
  and peer down his sights

intimacy

sweat on my tongue, i am a doe

baited to the hunter’s salt-lick.
  nourishment is an arrow

feathered through rib to lung.

assisted delivery while quartering a deer

i found god                             in the stomach 
                   of a doe
and raised him                        as my own

Clayton Walker holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University where he was awarded the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize and an honorable mention for the 2021 James Hurst Prize in fiction. His work appears in Smut Butt Magazine Presents: Contemporary Biker Fiction Vol 4.

Eloise Klein Healy

If You Knew

Long time I’ve been writing and re-writing poetry,
but loving how I now understand
the brilliant loss of my language.

Amazing, isn’t it?
Saying what I’d thought I meant,
my little statements were not the right words.

How I work each day, crossing my fingers
that I got me here, I’m nervous a little and happy, but
I will never be the self I was.

Eloise Klein Healy, the author of nine books of poetry, was named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2012. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her forthcoming book, A Brilliant Loss, will be published in 2022. A note on Eloise's poetry: In 2013, Eloise, the former Los Angeles' poet laureate, developed aphasia, or the loss of the ability to understand and express speech, due to encephalitis. Through poetry, Eloise attempts to reconnect with the world.

An interview with Eloise Klein Healy and Matthew Sayers

To learn more about aphasia, Eloise’s writing process, and her forthcoming poetry collection, listen to Poetry Editor Andreea Ceplinschi talk with cognitive science researcher Matthew Sayers and with Eloise Klein Healy herself in this audio interview.