Jenny Molberg HEREDITARY – Yyvonne Deakins Collins, Elaine de Kooning, 1968 She spoke and the breasts heard singing. Heard song and called back. Fern closed in around her face. Without a word, the room brimmed lemon, lemon and veins…
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Kathy Nelson BEFORE I DIE Some great uncle passed it down, that curio, that heirloom, that tour de force— seamless wooden links lifted from the branch, whole, already interlocking, as if by magic, with nothing but a pocketknife. Let…
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor IBEJI A Fibonacci Poem The day after his birth she traced the blue hill ridge of his ear whispered Ibeji Light spilled in the streets of his grandfather’s ancestral home twin boy talking to trees. (In the Nigerian…
Curated by Karolina Zapal The birthing room is a liminal space. It changes us in ways we imagined and never could have imagined. In the room where I gave birth, I hemorrhaged and a midwife dove elbow-deep into my…
Jessica Barlevi [After the first child, I knew] After the first child, I knew. The prize at the end of the pregnancy is not the child. It is the stay. On the maternity ward. Where it is warm and…
Olivia Brochu When One Thing Ends We pull weeds. Grip their green leaves. Pry from their base. Hope to expunge their white, spiny roots. They reach out from their hosts like the fine and unruly postpartum hairs growing back…
Jennifer Case The Machinery Is In Order But We Are Still Fearful Jennifer Case is the author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World (forthcoming from Trinity University Press), We Are Animals: On…
Amy Dryansky Flowers That Bloom Early & Disappear They Call Ephemeral Witch hazel unfurls its ragged, yolk-yellow stars, ++++++& herons arrive, awkward bodies hunched astride their haphazard nests ++++++empty & silent for now, but soon— & robins return puffed…
Laura Foley A Trace of Smoke If I had a son who was forty-one and willing to listen, I’d call him on his birthday and say: I remember— the scent of wood smoke on a pale September morning, how…
Mary Fontana Delivered —an instant late we look where the gulls have gathered, shrieking, the shredded knot now drawing open, its center red and wet, the just-calved creature anonymous already, one more newborn on the seal-tiled beach: a stone heaved…