Hallie Waugh Invoking My Mother As I Sit to Write a Poem Winter nights I’d watch her at the sewing case, rolling thread between her thumb and forefinger. Out would pop a knot, as if mending the hem of…
Chelsea Fanning Virgin Mary as Teakettle Praise be to you, spattered with chicken grease and garlic fat, the cerulean of your enamel like a blue mantle, sanguine in its austerity. Down your throat holy faucet waters pour, impregnating your…
Tamara L. Panici Mama’s Lessons on Sarmale Uită-te, to make sarmale, you must understand the difference between wanted and unwanted. The key being a perception, a human invention. Do not forget. You are both wanted and unwanted. Seen…
RaShell R. Smith-Spears A Writer Speaks of Lineage My foremothers were magic. Their nimble fingers squeezed syntax into cauldrons of rhythm and rolled juju across pages that glared with our erasure; they poured images into white spaces defined by…
Eco-poetry: Nature Through the Lens of Motherhood We live in fraught ecological times, as unchecked-climate change threatens our planet. And though we—humankind—may be the invasive species, “we are,” as the poet Ashia Ajani writes, “nature, entangled in her movements.”…
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Love, Earth Mother Do you know how many times I’ve started over, without you, on my own? Once, in a beetle’s floral gown, I scraped together a semblance of a planet. I breathe so quietly…
Anna Laura Reeve Exile Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living and gardening near the Tennessee Overhill region,…
Catherine Esposito Prescott Black Creek Trail or Annual Bike Ride During the Pandemic When Our Usual Route Is Closed New Year’s Day, 2021 Every vulture in Miami congregates on the outskirts of this landfill, and we ride past their…
Maria S. Picone The world is my mother’s gift always from her hands to mine soil pouring through fingers blood letting self run from her hands to mine insect buzz incandescing from her hands to mine amethysts winking starlit…
Koss Untitled (Earth) mother earth, in her shifting plates and spinning transits her own aloof epic the slow weep of canyons’ wounds magnetic axis drawing in quiet defiance and divorces of continents and their denizens oh to be…
Jules Jacob Land of Collective Misunderstandings I wheel soil from a stranger’s yard. Steal clover to lure bees. Search online for mason jars and an apiarist willing to travel more than fifty miles away. I want chemical-free land but…
Lorraine Currelley Domestics (For: Domestics, Our Unsung Heroines) gentrification invades our eyes with its growing visual stench. our love putting food on our tables, cleaning invader’s homes. it is our need we hear, when their children call us by our…