Dede Cummings Day Hike —for Sierra The snowshoe hare tracks have no trouble telling us the way. Our breath is hard and fast startling even the gnarled branches from their slumber. The etched mountain does not beckon from afar: rather…
Dawn Paul My Life as a Dog The boy with his crooked tooth, his dying mother, her face like a haggard angel, the scruffy, scratching dog. The boy and I astonished and sickened to watch the kindly farmwife jerk…
Megan Merchant Fallout Shelter “Multiple-vortex tornadoes can appear as a family of swirls circling a common center, or they may be completely obscured by condensation, dust, and debris, appearing to be a single funnel.” New World Encyclopedia Hideaway bunkered into…
Susan Rich My Mother Returns From the Dead to Appear on Oprah ~ after January O’Neil She will say that silence was my favorite response more than sure, why, of course, or yes. She will say she never understood…
Jennifer Jean Speculating Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding around the heath/ and the desolate fens. ~lines 103-4, Beowulf 1. Sometimes, Grendel is a fist— is 5 or so dicks digging into 1…
Megan Buchanan Diamonds Heat the House What you have is exactly what I’m always looking for, he said. How soon can you come by? Monday’s good, I said. And there go the Victorian diamonds worn twice in ten years.…
Danielle Jones-Pruett Elegy in Search of a Speaker I would like to explain how the house on fire is different than the house she set on fire. It’s cavernous. My mind can’t find the edges, the walls. Soot and…
Not for Mothers Only Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing Edited by Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff & with a foreward by Alicia Ostriker Not for Mothers Only collects poems on a range of subjects under the motherhood umbrella, some…
Alana Ruben Free and Akilah Mosley, Co-editors “Stretch Marks” – “Stretch Marks” is collection of poetry by a group of English language writers who have, temporarily or permanently, made their home in Israel. Whether born speaking…
At the end of the world, you turn left, not a complete left, more like a 45°. Now, this is not something you want to get wrong, because if you take a wrong turn, you might just end up back…
Every night when you go to bed a lonely old man is sitting in the corner counting the stars. A widow is living her life as if it is on hold. A homeless child is playing with poverty and hunger.…
my sister and I got them just from growing our thighs and breasts marked as if by tiger claws first they were bright red then with years faded to silver moonlight someone said it was because we were fed too…