Barbara Conrad Beauty Queen Her shoes are bolted to the linoleum floor. Practical flats, black and rubber-soled. In a top drawer next to the sink, fistfuls of used tin foil — no waste, no wishes. Before she swapped her…
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Breena Clarke Mama Ascended I have communicated with those who would know. Mama and Papa and Harold and Alice were welcomed in the afterlife, following their harrowing deaths. Their souls were luminous. They said that Mama ascended in the…
C. Jean Blain The Road Called Home She knows this life is round because she keeps coming back. First born of the last born. The only daughter of the only son. She is always brown and braided. Ten toes…
Dayna Patterson God the Mother Speaks of Coprophagia with a line from Maxine Kumin A star implodes and feeds a nursery of new lights. My design. A latrine fly, hungry, presses spongy mouthparts to brown liquid, also mine. There’s…
Holly Iglesias OH DEAR Holly Iglesias is the author of three collections of poetry, Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World‚ and a critical work,…
Janel Cloyd Bloom There are some days I forget how to bloom how to unfurl my leaves I forget how to open my velvety petals to the welcoming of the sun There are some days I forget that I…
Keshni Naicker Washington Blue To whatever two-legged and four-legged souls that walked by, I must have been a spectacle. A grown woman lying face down on the beach. Hadn’t even made it to the waves. My zigzag trail of…
LeConté Dill Growing Tired after Erica Garner Us Daughters Dutiful Heart broke open You Can’t Breathe either Sleeping Beauty—no kiss can wake you, Mama, can make you whole. No maternity leave for activists, name you “warrior” The real revolution…
Lisa Wujnovich I Want to Come Back as a Live Oak Quercus Virginina, curvy southern hardwood, fooling the ignorant, like me, thinking she’s deciduous and sheds her growth. I want to come back with wise beards, hung mossy from…
Melissa Coss Aquino Visions of the Mother We Need (excerpt from the novel Carmen and Grace) We put the holy water on our foreheads in the sign of the cross from the small marble basin at the entrance, as if…