For women body image can be fraught with conflict and cognitive dissonance. We are inundated with body images from the advertising and media world that are not representative of the full spectrum of womanhood … that don’t reflect the changes…
Dawn Paul VEINS My mother lies on her back on the big double bed lifts her right leg, straightens it, pumps her foot. See how swollen my ankle gets? Her ankle is smooth, shiny scribbled with thin red veins. She…
Virginia Chase Sutton CONSTELLATIONS On the skin inside my upper arms are galaxies of bruises, some as fresh as this morning, one or two for each day when Mother inspects to see if I’ve lost weight. I haven’t. She…
Kathleen Aguero SELF-PORTRAIT AS A GERANIUM Here’s all I’ve got: one showy cluster of red blossoms, fancy hat on a scrawny neck rising above bare stems and gently ruffled leaves with their dark inner border, peach fuzz. Leggy, untrimmed, I’m…
Michelle Reale THIS YEAR MY SORROW DROWNS ITSELF This year my sorrow drowns itself. I can’t be responsible anymore. Here is where I’m at: you’ve nailed my hair to the floorboards, and I lay quiet, all shallow breathing like…
Jill McDonough CAREFUL Josey kisses me Christmas morning in the kitchen and it’s so good we end up having sex on the floor. But we are old ladies now, laugh together while we stagger slowly to the ground, first one…
Kirun Kapur SPRING Then, through the window, I could just make out a cormorant immobile on a buoy, head high, wings fully open, a totem, black mark against morning. I was about to turn away when it shifted, twisting, slipping…
Tina Kelley I AM THE SEXY MUSEUM No more slow walking the sandstone edifice with marble floors that exhaust the feet. Within me, scurry from hall to hall. Who needs portraits of people bored past recognition? Have you ever…
Raising Jamie a mother & son poem for two voices “I can remember on this last trip out of New Bedford we ran into a hurricane off of Hatteras. I was in the rolling bed with my mother and the…
EILEEN CLEARY THE WAY WE FLED No branch silhouettes the snow. Tree limbs cut down by some bastard or buzz saw, chipped remains scattered afield around the stump as if they’d tried to escape the carnage, the way we…
ZEINA HASHEM BECK TRIPTYCH: VOICE Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her most recent collection, Louder than Hearts, won the 2016 May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, World Literature Today,…
REBECCA HART OLANDER FAWN From the age of fourteen, some weekends, I took the train from Gloucester, MA, where I lived with my mom, to North Station in Boston, on my way to my father’s house in Dorchester.…