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…
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…
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…
Mireya Pérez-Bustillo Everything You Need to Know About the 5th Grade She knew that the vision would come on the corner elm tree because she was so good in school she heard that Our Lady came to the three…
Pamela L. Laskin Shared Room: A ghazal To Elissa, 64 You sixteen and me eighteen we shared a room college and its chaos inside our room graduation, jobs, a wedding in bigger rooms after came the babies no longer…
Sherese Francis She Who Is The Image of God There’s a holiness that She carries in Her hands, like a Moses budding a kaleidoscope of butterflies fluttering to freedom. She crafts with a mother tongue whispering in Her body,…
Jane Yolen Grandlings Between us, we have eight, all of whom but one, have a fall of decisions before them. Only one is out of school. How ancient our own concerns of education now seem, new shoes, a date…
Serena Agusto-Cox Remote Work Home office view of the quiet yard. The birds bang their heads into glass, a moment of blindness. Mating songs, angry tweets, territorial posturing on feeders. Perhaps, my office is not soundless. Elementary school streaming,…