Aleppo in the Heart of the Living Room Every soul needs a proper chaperone to say nothing of a champion. Especially after sloshing around this broken world. My heart lacks a tenant, though each chamber stands wallpapered and ready for…
Origami I’ve read about women who say they can’t write New mothers, their arms a cramped night, crescent They hold what they cannot yet tell. My baby was milky paper to me then, a smooth sheet, the inverse. But I…
IDENTITY A folio edited by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach The poems in this folio consider the “Mom” identity from both the mother’s and child’s viewpoints and speak to the complicated relationship that exists between the iconic Mom and…
Laurette Folk Retreat She came in the guise of my dog to lure me away, as Apollo lured Achilles away from the walls of Troy. I saw her from the window running through the marsh and had a choice…
Elisabeth Weiss Lost Mother Beautiful one of long ago who knelt with us when the house filled with a veiled peace useless to resist, when we knew the smell of your dress in the folds of sleep, in and…
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…