Jennifer Jean NATURE Zuma Beach We crowded the ice cream truck. Sweat & took a dip. Crowded the boom box. Messed with some words to Jackson’s Human Nature—why, why? (cuz they screw us that way!) We ran over there with…
Quinn Rennerfeldt Goodwill in the era of girls Her pink pen etching hearts into the top of my hand during our high school math class. End of semester. Breath peach- sweet and warm on my arm. The drone…
Mary Lou Buschi Spotting I found myself in the passenger seat of Colleen McGowan’s car doing donuts on the grass in the make-shift park hidden by overgrown Bayberry—Janet Jackson’s Pleasure Principle on volume 10. I had always thought Colleen…
Susanna Rich Last Night Before Viet Nam Ron and Skipper drive a base Jeep from Fort Dix to Ocean Grove, walk the boards to the neon lights of Asbury Park, find Mindy and me queued up for sundaes, ask…
Nicole Callihan summer sorrows all spring robins everywhere but now most mornings mostly mourning doves on the wire or the wires and my left eye bloodshot in the mirror because I went to the car to cry told Eva she…
Lindsay Adkins Untitled Shoreline unmoored from ship: everything here must help. Coloring books, supervised showers, phone calls might fasten me to myself. Poems. I’m tired. Last night my father became visitor, sat with me in the dayroom. He said…
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards Nectarine When they appear at the market, heaps of them, shoulder to shoulder in their smooth, sunny jackets, summer’s in full swing. My mother turns one after another in her long fingers, scanning the skins for…
Jessica Purdy The Elephant’s Child “Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.” — Rudyard Kipling On Cape Cod even rocks have a scent. Resonant as if the…
Kyle Potvin The Clock Turns Back 1965 Birth mother, my first mother. Small, startled breaths. How did you learn you were pregnant? * In the cruel November air, did you pray, hand on womb, dread pounding your unmarried…
Jane Muschenetz Lviv, Ukraine Long before Reuters and BBC reporters signed off from it, Lviv, Ukraine was my hometown, I knew it by another name—Lvov, Ukrainian Republic, USSR is, like anyone’s childhood, I suppose, a dot on the map…
Karolina Zapal My Future Daughter During Adolescence My mother is crazy She passes out copies of her favorite poetry to us every morning with toast. She says I am just like her We both stick our noses in our…
Marie-Célie Agnant from Balafres translated from the French by Danielle Legros Georges EUMÉNIDES My body holds the habits of delirious torrents of rumblings of earth in rebellious jolts Revolt in the body fastened since the first dawn humanity’s tongues…