Poetry

Anne Marie Wells

Relative to Ancestor

away.

inch

of an
thousandths
four
&

light years
thousand
from four
he watches
When I search the sky

its light.
embodying
&
Following the path of Alkaid

older than need.
that created it,
older than the deities
older than the hunters’ myth
Becoming

& to cells, to the life he lost.
To breath

A transition: relative to ancestor.
I felt him let go.

Anne Marie Wells (She/Her) of Hoback Junction, Wyoming is a queer poet, playwright, and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. In 2015, she published her children’s book, MAMÃ, PORQUE SOU UMA AVE?/MOMMY, WHY AM I A BIRD? (Universidade de Coimbra). She earned first place in the Riot Act Regional New Play Festival in 2017 for her play, LOVE AND RADIO (AND ZOMBIES… KIND OF), and earned second place in 2018 for her play, LAST. ONLY. BEST. In 2019, the Wrights of Wyoming judges blindly selected four of her theatrical works for the statewide play festival in Cheyenne. In 2020, her play LAST. ONLY. BEST. was selected for publication in The Dallas Review, and her 10-minute play, THE DOOR will appear in The Progenitor Art & Literary Journal. An avid storyteller, she performed in and won several Cabin Fever Story Slams and was selected by The Moth to perform in a ‘Main Stage’ event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2019. Anne Marie’s poems have appeared or will appear in In Parentheses, Lucky Jefferson, Unlimited Literature, Soliloquies Anthology, Muddy River Poetry Review, Variant Literature, Poets’ Choice, Meniscus Journal, Changing Womxn Collective, and The Voices Project.

Lilyanne Kane

Descendant

He waded into the coma as if it were ice water, slippery
consciousness sliding beneath his grip. Beside him,
she stood as inanimate as the lake.

She took his hands in hers—now the feeble ones-- folded
them over his lap in slack prayer. Shrunken in the hospital bed,
his grey skin cracked hide. He looked plucked.

Machines cricket-chirped out of sync with familial paths.
She kissed the damp, pallid surface of his spotted forehead,
one decades old pain growing tight below her ribs.

Lilyanne Kane

In Which He Paints the Brick Wall of Her Mother’s New House White

In the first days the honeybees showed up one at a time. He’d find one
bouncing off a window screen usher her safely back outside only to
find upon returning a sister in her stead fat head beating against glass.

Electric insects piled on top of one another, draping windows. Air swelled
communication vibrations, swarms skirting slack fists
trying to shepherd the mass outside to the open sun.

The exterminator shone their red light up the chimney illuminating
the hive laced along ashen bricks. The exterminators’ pesticide
produced dunes of bodies streaming from the fireplace.

Their bodies were weightless thorns in his palms. He sealed crisp legs
curling inward embracing empty space in resin, sealed in a mason jar.
He paid the exterminator for their service tipped five percent.

Lilyanne Kane is a non-binary butch lesbian poet and educator. They hold an MFA from the Mississippi University for Women. Their work can be found most recently in Mojave He[art] Review, Indolent Books: What Rough Beast, and Sonder Midwest, and has work forthcoming in SOFTBLOW and Open Minds Quarterly. They can be found on Twitter @PluralFloral.

Belle Minelli

Voicemails Left in Pool Noodle

sorry to bother
but if you have a spare moment to talk about how you’re killing me
okay
well
maybe i can call back later

hey there
me again
i’ve been wandering the bottom of this pool all week
touching the stones you placed in my pockets
trying to feel your fingerprints

if i can’t get in touch
how will i know to stop

i watch the world
suspended in spyglass sky streaked
bleeding beyond palms and porcelain tile

i know you say the view is better from down
here but my
bubbles
all
sink

i know you say not to make waves
i hate to do this to you on such short notice but—
later at your earliest convenience of course

are you busy is this a bad time
wrecked and waterlogged
i’ve never met a blunter object
than shame—
are you sure i’m not dead yet

hate to disappoint the blackened
slackened mouths opening wounds across my chest

maybe our lie
you deserve this

will slide off in droplets

maybe i’ll look at pools

without my bloated floated

self swimming beneath

either way

i hope this message finds you well

Belle Minelli

stop motion animation is the only communication i know.

i’ll say it all in slo-mo, start-stop hiccups
of honesty luring you to lean in close.

invest in me, i’ll dream of you in silver, screens
and turquoise, set on hips under small-town sun.

i’ll study the fireflies that make you queasy,
the butter-soft pads of your fingers,

the long elegant arc of brow bone to nostril.
i’ll watch how shadows cut the carats of your cheek

until you see what i see as i carve
one achingly, painstakingly tender blink.

Belle Minelli lives in a town of middling size and works for Corporate America. Her writing career spans back to slam poems in talent shows, garage sale posters, and chucks. She’s inspired by the incredible art developing in the world now, and wants to be a productive part of the conversation. She loves her dogs and the sun.

Ashley Rebhun

72 Hour Hold

The desk clerk, in her polished
blond hair, white suit crisp and
spotless. Name tag says: Nancy.
She hands me the phone, call
anyone she says, let them know
you’re here, she says. I stare
blank and she says all this with
her bleach white plastered smile
dark and gloom circle my eyes.
Mouth corners, black from the
milky surprise that awaited me
in the room full of light. So many
lights shining, peering, inspecting
me. Why? They whispered. Why?
they all kept asking me. Call any-
one. One. Call them, right now,
she says staring back at me. Me.

Ashley Rebhun is an OEF and OIF Navy veteran and emerging writer. Through her pen-to-paper journey, she has found her voice in an ear-splitting world and utilizes her studies to fully understand how writing can assist with PTSD and sexual assault trauma. Ashley lives in Norfolk Virginia with her husband, two children, and an exhibition of furry friends. Her work has been published in the University of Virginia’s MOSAIC and Penultimate Peanut.

Nimra Asi

Twenty-year Plan

You wore
a hopeful green dress
until your forties
Named a daughter
for early roses

Gave her a sister
to link elbows with
Two little girls
with a mole on their left cheek
in a kitchen, spinning

Your house
has been burgled. A thief
took: one of everything
Left. Open door hanging
off its hinges
Concrete windows
sheet covered ribs

You have soaked the nights
and wrung down. No rain
to cool your eyelids
fold sorrow
in each china lip

Which way is the waiting room
for lost sisters
halved mothers?

Fling hands, clap your back
to the sky
Find Ram, swing Sufi
Leave your shoes
at the mosque door

Leaven bread, salt rice
Set the table
for a meal cooked for three
But all the gods
have gone on vacation
cut off their ears

So we crouch
in an attic
with: books with no pages
stuffed birds
missing heads. Adrift eyelashes.
Half-sewn seams, wind-up toys
a chorus with no bridge

Clockwork mouths
spinning soap bubbles
out of dusty air

A one-handed drummer
What will he do
with this ripping beat?

Nimra Asi is a poet and scientist from Pakistan. She is pursuing a PhD in Biochemistry from Cornell University in NYC and believes in combining the strengths of literature and science to illuminate our world.  

Mariah Ghant

Kaleidoscope Insides // A Dizzying Dizain

Wake up. Just look at her. Lift up her arm
and notice your thin fingers interlaced
between her exquisite nails. See they are
chipping in chunks of cerulean paint;
clean and long underneath. Lean close and taste
whispers of coconuts, green apples. No
one has tried to love her like this. You sew
sunlight into her small coils of black hair,
fingerprints deep in her thighs soft as dough,
where her kaleidoscope insides lay bare.

Mariah Ghant

Clemency and the Whole Fruit Bowl

1.
A prayer for
forgiveness.
A prayer for
the space
between your eyes
where you feel
the migraine first.

2.
I think of Mercy, and
I find her right. there.
Soft fingers
and a streak of grey
running through her hair.
A mother or auntie
Of sorts, doling out
punishment between bites
of just ripened mango.

3.
We’ve been battling
for sweet fruits.
For more Mercy and
Humilty and Clemency and –

Ya know, I tasted
a clementine
for the first time
not too long along.
I thought of baby soft cheeks
and a syrupy tang of compassion.

4.
I’m looking for you
to do the same.
To hold the cross
to my forehead—
the space between my eyes—
while I am pleading for Clemency
to show herself
vivid and explicit
in a courtroom of our pears.
No, peers.
See, it’s the clementines again.

Clemency, she
has a way of appearing
veiled in the silence of a
stone-faced judge,
while all we have
is a prayer.

Prayers for paradise,
a release to Reality.
A land of Patience and Leniency,
milk and honey,
with nothing more
to sort through in
the whole fruit bowl.

Mariah Ghant (she/her) is a black, female artist based out of Philly. An alumnus of Vassar College, she studied Drama and English focusing specifically on Acting and Poetry Writing. Mariah enjoys creating and teaching art across various genres including theatre, writing, dance, and movement. Forever fantasizing on the phenomenal, Mariah’s writing explores relationships, identity, the cosmos, and attempts to explain the unexplainable. To see more of her work, you can visit her poetry Instagram @mariah.g.poetry.

Maria Kovalik Silva

My Mother’s Rescue Mission

This you only learn afterwards: the silence of the trigger
and the silence of the body are not the same. In Brazil,

we would talk for hours to camouflage the secrets spilling
from our chins, but now as we veined the suburbs, all veiled with grey

and fenced with flags, our tongues crossed us like needles. She took a plane
to the United States to tell me what happens to people who don’t eat. Okay:

here’s the drugstore, here’s the townhall, here’s the hole in the ground
to which I aspired. Which was the tour I should have given, mas para bom entendedor,

meia palavra basta*. Would she understand? I left a country cross-hatched
by alleys of boxed up children only to cleave myself a new slit of night.

But I promise, when I stood on the scale, the ledge that it was, I did not want death
as much as I wanted to make peace. Walking together around a frozen Boston,

I hoped in that New England, with its malnourished everything, there was a grief
she could comprehend.

Maria Kovalik Silva

In 1976, they painted Tower Bridge yellow; decades later you find it funny

My mother said she’d never felt this way
about a friend, especially not another girl.

I knew what she meant – when lying next to you
in bed, I would measure a body between our shoulders
to remind myself of our impossible children.

Before I apologize, I should tell you that’s not
how I loved you. Whenever we drove through Tower Bridge

in your Sacramento, I believed when the years hollowed windows
like knocked-out teeth, when the avenues paraded their wreckage,
the towers would still be scherzos of light in this once city,
and my bones sabers of heat. That was how. And yet, I think

that like tongue in tongue you were a confounded
thirst, an answer to misery that could only end
in misery. That the street lamps splinter nights in Old Town;
ever since I’ve achieved your absence,
I’ve known destruction does not belong to any god.
Still, sitting on a curb on any street reminds me of you,
and I will claw my hands on the asphalt as if to hold it.

Mari Kovalik Silva is a poet born and raised in Curitiba, Brazil. Her work is published or forthcoming in the California Quarterly, Lucky Jefferson, Blue Marble Review, DoveTales Journal, and the Two Groves Review. Mariana writes about finding her voice amidst  mental health struggles and moving to the US to pursue her education. She hopes to use her writing to inspire others in their healing journeys. 

Elinor Clark

visiting hour

pipes & white & papery gowns
propped on pillows

still a pile of Austen books
still Hello! & OK!
still a fount of mints no one wanted

charmed from her cardigan sleeve

I didn’t see the last days

so I see them now

& in the ward

she dances

over smooth linen beds chucking sweet confetti

as she prances between mattresses

waving her cardy flag

& then the ward is quiet

& someone turns her over

nabs toffees from her pocket

clears the bedside table

of Emma
& magazines
& wrappers

won’t leave buttermints
kissing the drawer

Elinor Clark is a copywriter by day, poet and avid reader by night. She was an Erbacce Prize 2020 winner and shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize 2020. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals including The Blue Nib, The London Magazine, Euphony, Bangor Review and Poetry Birmingham.

Angelo d'Amato, Jr.

A Son in Three Parts

I.

In another life, I spin stories for my mother's gravestone:
I have a job a wife a home a car a picket fence children
happiness.... that night, I step forward, fall, and flail against
the beastly rush of relentless water...

..."Stop!" but my father went ahead—
the red and brown stains on their wedding photo
complete the pleasing autumn scene.

II.

I told my first stories on my mother's lap.
She wrote them down.
I drew the pictures.

I knew he loved me because:
Legos and books and Legos and books,
gift cards and books and Legos and books,
tickets to France and Legos and gift cards and books.

III.

I step into my room. Coffee spills
from the Warrior-Not-Worrier mug.

It stains the scattered stories and tired
record sleeves and unread books,

while the Lego men look on,
smiling. Yes, Mother. I'm fine.

Angelo D’Amato, Jr. is a first-grade associate teacher based in Boston, MA. He holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Lesley University, and is working toward an MFA in Poetry from Albertus Magnus College. When he’s not writing, he’s either: thinking about writing, hanging out with his cat Bello, watching comedy sketches on youtube, or some combination of the three.

Jordan Tyler Temchack

With God, no. 1

I watched God crawl
in and out of a closet
through slats

of cattails, up
mudbanks, over
dresser drawers

like a tadpole. Hopped
down the hall across
pillowed lily pads. I lost a lot

of time floating atop indigo
carpet, stained darker shades
in places. A trail glided

down the hall, across
the living room
—the woven rug. A great leopard

slug cleaned after the dead. Down
in the vents. Above which I pitched
a tent made of quilts—waited all night.

Huddled like an ice-fisherman
drowsy-eyed, praying
for a tip-up to spring alive.

Jordan Tyler Temchack

With God, no. 2

I watched God swim like a carp.
In the big pond, hidden between strippen cuts,
out behind Connelly’s distributor. Usually
bought beer from Turner’s though. Went to school
with his granddaughter. His wife’s a notary. Nephew
—the sheriff. Never know who it doesn’t hurt
to know. Rumor was McKinney’s cousin buried
a gator in a duffle bag of meth two Octobers ago.
‘Cause he knew McKinney couldn’t wait and
he hated snakes. And cats—called them fuzz lizards.
McKinney never said shit to me about the meth, but he did admit
he’d actually liked to have kept that gator. If it wouldn’t have outgrown
the cast-iron tub in the basement. Judy told me he heard it
lived on fuzz lizards all winter. I don’t know if I believe that. But you can
get boxes of them for free in the back of the Pennysaver. I asked McKinney
about it once, when we were shooting pool at the Moose. He didn’t
answer. Someone else yelled “Cheaper ‘n kibble!” and McKinney smiled,
banked the nine ball, corner pocket. I spent most of this past July
laid-off, casting grasshoppers for bluegills. Sitting on the north
shore of the big pond. On that bench some folks stuck out there—a memorial
for the kid who drowned back in the 80s. Everyone always said
the minerals from the mine made the water heavy. And it sucked him
under like a large mouth inhales a grasshopper. I also heard he drank
a case of Genesee—did a gainer off the highwall. Where the mine co. pushed
all that shit they didn’t want to haul to the other side of the mountain.
I don’t know what it matters. Never saw that gator.
McKinney said he thinks last winter got him.
I wonder if he saw the size of the carp.

Jordan Tyler Temchack

With God, no. 3

And when they told me, / ‘God is dead,’

I answered, ‘He goes fishing every day…’

— Wendell Berry

I sucked the hard candy
where my throat got tight;
I couldn’t swallow, or spit, or breathe.

My aunt looked up from the bottom step;
I was blue—sinking. She pushed off
the floor; sediment shuffled like dust mites

or plankton. My eyes drifted after sparkles
and bubbles from my lips when I tasted
transformation. A nightcrawler wiggled

toward the horizon; the current carried me
My open-mouth snapped closed. Gnashed
my teeth. Thrashed my head “no” until my aunt

hooked my face open with her index finger
pressed to the roof of my mouth. Her eyes dripped
into mine like it was the first time she held me.

My ears rang like I was twelve feet deep or
they were still full of liquid thoughts until
she beat me on the back; shoved her whole hand

in my mouth and I kicked and flailed and flexed
my gills—she pulled the hot cinnamon marble out.
And I filled my lungs.

Jordan Tyler Temchack is a poet, singer-songwriter, and cartoonist with a B.A. in Letters, Arts, and Sciences from Penn State University. He lives with his wife and dogs in Central PA—where they garden and wander around the Allegheny Mountains trying to find the best ice cream.

Rebecca Faulkner

Mother Tongue

She is mine. My daughter.
In a few days she will go.
Long shadows, human & fragile.
Measuring flour & sand, miles & tongues
with hands that make and consume. I am
folding inward, her sustenance, my hunger.
Butter & eggs, the yolk separated,
salt & the taste of belonging.
Unwrapped this cake will smell like home,
turmeric bold. It will bring no ill will.
A ritual offering, my sacrifice.

After breakfast, with papers
in order & the tarmac hot, I wash
the last dish, the fragrance of limbs
citrus bright. At the airport,
miles & tongues, our hurried
goodbyes, no longer a child but mine,
still. She calls me when she lands, her voice
distant & raw. I learn the cake was lost
at the border. With his knife the guard
sliced it into human halves, golden & fragile.
I wonder if he ate it or if ants claimed it.

Rebecca Faulkner

Unmade

downstream at the edge

cattails bend

their shadows

colonize the lake mouth

my companion the vagrant heron
surveys my trespass
sentry of the dawn

eroding late summer
with each ignorant stroke
i am her waterlogged burden

my toes curl
against the current precise reckless
more fast than brave

hoarding pebble-eyed souvenirs
my skin awash
with reeds pocket-deep

she is born into spit and moss
algae and storm fronds adrift
her marsh bed unmade

above me her sudden
wingspan her contempt
i can hardly look

Rebecca Faulkner’s recent work has appeared in Quarantine Zine and Indolent Books online edition, What Rough Beast. She contributed to the 2020 Xenoteque International Poetry Festival. A London-born children’s rights advocate and climate activist, she holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of London. Faulkner lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Megan Rilkoff

Dutiful Daughter

Let me tell you how it is, he says.
I sink into couch cushions,
his captive audience of one.

A car passes by.
Growing, receding
like ocean surf.

It will pass, my father says.
I ask him, what will?
The violence, the outrage.

Whose violence?
Whose outrage?

The questions stick
to the back of my teeth.
I rise and go to the kitchen.

You’ll see, my father calls.
Things will go back to normal.
I’ve been around long enough.

I fill his Red Sox mug
with dark, bitter coffee.
Two creams, one sugar.

He takes it from my hands.
A shaky slurp.

A woman walks her dog.
Checks her phone
as the lab chokes on its leash.

The problem is people
don’t want to work anymore.
Want everything handed to them.

You know, I read…
Can’t trust the media these days.
Everybody’s got an agenda.

Two o’clock.
The idle squawking of the nuthatch.

Well, I heard that…
Anybody can skew
numbers to prove a point.

You’re lucky you know,
you’ve had it easy. But
I’d do it all over again.

I catch his eye,
my own hazel mirrored,
and look away.

Look, you’re smart but
you can’t change people’s minds.
Listen to me. Waste of time.

Outside, a man
cuts his lawn into strips,
clean, pale, and even.

Susan Michele Coronel has studied poetry with Yusef Komunyakaa, Annie Finch, Tina Chang, and Jennifer Franklin, among others. She has a B.A. in English from Indiana University-Bloomington and an M.S. Ed. in Applied Linguistics/English as a Second Language from Queens College (CUNY). She has had poems published in Newtown Literary, The Ekphrastic Review, Beyond Words, and Street Cake. She is beyond thrilled to be one of this year’s recipients of a Parent-Writer Poet Fellowship at The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Susan Michele Coronel can be found on Instagram: @susanmichele7 and at susanofthewoods@gmail.com.