My Mother’s Body
Julie Greenough
My mother does not look
at herself in the mirror
anymore.
Her eyes wander as she dresses,
sliding off her abdomen
that droops, fat
resting atop her dormant uterus,
hidden by a stretched
belly button.
She won’t glance at her thighs,
dimpled and plump
beneath each hip, streaked by puffy lines,
faded purple and blue.
Both fleshy breasts are already hidden,
swollen nipples
tucked away.
Her gaze remains unwavering
on her face,
peering from the spot she has wiped
clear of condensation.
When she is clothed, she will return
from the cracked bathroom door,
smiling while her eyes wash over me,
unafraid.
I do not tell her,
that they have found that a child’s cells
migrate through the mother,
long after her body becomes two.
Settling themselves in brain, blood, and bones.
I do not ask her if she knows,
we are still sharing
space.
Now
Driving in winter with the windows down
I can’t hear,
the wind a shocking testament to my skin
of the land I carve through for the first time,
the grass wavering with my breath.
Touch
I sit in my mother’s lap
nodding off,
her fingers in my hair
unweaving each curl
as my warm ears catch scraps
of stories wafting from her lips.
She sings me to sleep,
nails drifting circles
along my spine,
nightshirt pulled high
each finger cool and soft,
her palms the width of my back.
She holds my hand,
every knuckle skinnier than mine
but so many freckles,
I dab at the veins
twirl the two wedding rings,
pull at the excess wrinkles of skin.
Her age is in her hands,
and I am afraid
I will forget
what they feel like.
Julie Greenough is a student pursuing her Bachelor’s Degree in English with a focus in poetry. She was born in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia and currently resides in the piedmont region of the state. She strives to capture the unsaid and the forgotten in her writing.
Beautiful Goodbye
Devon Balwit
All the temples in the world, an impasto
of pressed palms, prayer and prostration;
the wedding tents garlanded with marigolds;
the broad river reflecting banked pyres;
the longboats pushed into currents cradling
sleeping kings; the ossuaries’
shadowy niches, a mosaic of femur and masseter;
and the chalk-barren barrows
aligned with the equinox, plunder-strewn
and chilled; the businesslike crematory
with its urn destined for the columbarium;
the gangway lifting from the boat;
all the hands waving as the loved one recedes
in a beautiful goodbye.
Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She is a poetry editor for Minute Magazine and has six chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry); and Risk Being/Complicated (self-published with the artist Lorette Luzajic). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, The Stillwater Review, Rattle, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, and more.
Power
John McKernan
When my mother found us on the darkened kitchen floor at midnight staring at the twin slices of Wonder Bread turning slowly from white to brown in the brand new Emerson electric toaster with forks in our hands and an unopened bag of marshmallows on the sleeping bag she knew she had to do something. She sat down on the linoleum floor and very quietly and patiently told us a long story about her Aunt Verna when she was seven years old who poked a fork “just like the one you have there” into the electric toaster to see if it would turn a glowing red color which it did not but instead Aunt Verna was jolted by an electric current so strong that her left eye “popped right out of its socket and landed in a pile of clothes her mother had just brought in to fold.”
The toast was delicious and the next morning when we looked up from our oatmeal at the slices of lightning crinkling the black sky we counted to seven to hear a boom rattle every plate on the table and every window in the house. The black cord of the toaster seemed to wag like the tail of some silver cat. When my brother would touch the cord he would close his eyes tight.
John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska – recently retired after teaching 42 years at Marshall University. He wanders hither & yon on his goat & broccoli farm visited nightly by deer in West Virginia where he lives in the summer and wanders the surf and glades where he lives in Florida during the winter. He has published poems in many places from The Atlantic Monthly to Zuzu’s Petals. His latest book of poems is Resurrection of the Dust.
Leaves Between Leaves
Terry Savoie
I hoped to hold
back a small part
of the year about
to close down,
wanting in
the dead
of winter
to see colors
of mottled, dry
leaves lingering
in their final hues
on the verge of going
away: autumn leaves in
an orangey crimson
conflagration just
barely hanging
on. I hoped
to hold each back,
pressed leaves in-
between the leaves
of the Bible, wishing
to see something of
how the leaves
might begin
to discover
a little of what
the Hereafter
might hold
in store
for us
left behind.
Terry Savoie has published more than three hundred and fifty poems during the past three decades in various literary journals around the country such as APR, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and The Iowa Review. The Bright Hill Press recently awarded his manuscript, Reading Sunday, the winner of this year's chapbook competition and it will be published later this year.
My Father’s Hands
Zeina Azzam
They were not large, but thick
fleshy workers in the garden
nursing eggplants and fennel,
okra and chard,
digging and tilling and weeding,
making the soil an obliging host.
Maybe that’s what made
his fingers rough in spots,
or maybe it was the constant leafing
through books: a loving lick
and a flip-flap of the page
in search of nuggets
that would be turned over and over
in his mind.
After he died
I found bookmarks between pages
carefully pointing
like tags next to seedlings in the earth:
These are the plants I hoped for.
These are the ideas that made me grow.
Zeina Azzam is a writer, editor, and educator. Her poems have appeared in Mizna, Sukoon Magazine, Split This Rock, the anthologies Gaza Unsilenced (Alareer and El-Haddad, eds.) and Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves (Fowler, ed.), and the forthcoming anthologies The Poeming Pigeon: Love Poems (The Poetry Box) and Write Like You're Alive (Zoetic Press). She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University.
Pronouns
Maya Wahrman
You heard things I never told him, sex dreams and daydreams
that never work out his body mass over mine how many
seconds would it take to flatten me no way out
all power in his arms his hips, you sat on the pool table
and told me in love you cede a part of yourself
I thumbed the pool cue, I told you she jumped she was pushed
how I grew and she did not, you spoke of two months
in Mexico City in my head they were sticky with sweat
the ex-exotic dancer I asked how do you change the world? you said
you look different from this angle on the pool table my
legs over the edge you said you’re comfortable with silence. I like that.
At five a.m. we warmed our hips against the radiator now close enough
to smell man on your breath we went out through the loading dock
into distilled night I wanted to say did you notice we only spoke in
pronouns? he, she, them, our lives we could have been anyone
roommate wanting drunk sex girl falling through stars a Mexican
ex-exotic dancer German hikers working night shifts at Mercedes a girl
in a mansion in Syria with chandeliers a forgotten matriarch
me or you over the dead sea sun beaming over the edge
the heat of God or just another he
to jump with the blackbird or grab a lance and become Don Quijote on his way.
Maybe one day you will learn to be a Dulcinea.
Maya Wahrman graduated from Princeton University's Department of History, with certificates in Creative Writing and Near Eastern Studies. She currently works at Princeton's Office of Religious Life on issues of faith and forced migration. She has had opinion pieces published in the English and Hebrew editions of Haaretz, and has had poetry published in The Copperfield Review, the Jewish Currents Poetry Anthology Urge,Sweet Tree Review, and Nassau Literary Review, with forthcoming publication in Fifth Wednesday Journal.
Elijah
Cassandra Farrin
Sere bends the light
where no dew pearled
this morning
and won’t the next—
and the moon glides in the moist firmament
Then fire blisters
wood, and coal forms, and slag bakes
under the scalded drum
and the rain comes
The Arrival
Whatever it is,
hold it like the pope
is bleeding in Constantinople,
like Pompeii
in the hungry hours.
Vesuvius is flaking
and nobody cares.
Gather the smoke skirt
about you like a mantle.
Swaddled or horned,
carry your gift
up the molten flank
until your body, too, becomes a white cask
in the arms of constables and archaeologists.
Cassandra Farrin is a writer, adoptive parent, and editor. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cirque, Frontier Journal, concīs, Sweet Tree Review, and elsewhere. More about her and her writing can be found on her blog Ginger & Sage (ginger-and-sage.org).
unbearing
Alice Beecher
a life grows in my stomach and
I snap it at the root--
tasted like pokeweed and persimmon,
like bitter, rough on the tongue,
an unripe forest,
an unbeating heart.
you wanted to make a mother of me,
hold me to the sea
like an oyster full of the ancients.
I steeped my belly in hawthorn and birch root,
drew you out like
sugar from a maple tree,
oil from an ocean,
a notion from
the lockbox of our lungs.
I curl my legs into knots,
trace the veins of a dead pine
against my winter skin.
It is too much,
holding all this water.
The bell jar bursts,
the blanket is ruby red.
The Kentucky moths whisper,
Bear holes into the fruit trees.
Homestead
we turn into the stuff of sediment,
bare hearts on brass mountains,
brew our coffee slow
and our closeness slower,
make it like waiting for the
redbuds to blossom,
for the cicadas to crawl back home.
my friends build stricter houses,
cover them with clay and dandelions,
don't let the cats out or the cops in,
fall deep into rivers
shivering against our small skins,
turn into crayfish and crawdad,
a hard shell host to flesh made tender,
made wet and full of wanting.
Anas says that if you
whistle too loud
inside a tunnel
you will scare all the ghosts.
these days I muffle my sugar steps,
breathe quiet as the mayflies,
stay close to bog and mud and root,
fill up my body with pokeweed and nettle
keep the bad men and the bad magic out.
Alice Beecher is an Appalachian Transition Fellow with the Highlander Center for Research and Education. A dedicated transplant to Appalachia, she grew up in New England, spent a couple of years in West Virginia and now lives in Whitesburg, KY. Her poetry has appeared in The Plum Creek Review, Then and Now, and many homespun-anarchist-zines. In 2016, she won first place in the West Virginia Emerging Writers Contest. You can read more of Alice's work at alicebeecherpoetry.org.
Waking Up
William Cullen Jr.
The grace of easy moving light
gently gains the ridge
pouring down manna
on this cornfield.
Blessed be the long shadows
of the scarecrows
who stood watch all night
until a rooster’s cry
says to stand down
and let the morning enter
still dark-lit souls
who believe that faith
only springs from the ground.
An Old Coal Mine
Descending into the night
of an old coal mine
our miner helmets' light beams
pick out the hundred year old bones
of donkeys who were born
and lived their whole lives
without ever seeing the light of day
hauling the dark residue of paradise
only so far as the coal train terminus
where the coal cars made
the final run to the surface
as white boys stood blackfaced
blinking in the sun
waiting for the anthracite to be unloaded
before dropping down again
into a purgatory
that even Dante wouldn't believe.
William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and was born in Petersburg, Virginia. He lived in Alabama, Georgia and Germany before settling down in Brooklyn, New York, where he works at a social services non-profit. His work has appeared in Canary, Concis, Farming Magazine, Gulf Stream, Pouch, Spillway and Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics.
River Walker
Suzanne Rogier Marshall
Below zero several days in a row. Half-crazy,
we dare each other to walk the frozen river.
Grabbing sticks, we slide down the bank
through knotweed tangle, hobblebush, snow;
poke at the surface, then step onto ice.
Before us, the river’s back – long and sinuous,
milky white like quartz; its mottled sky-gray
ridges, patterns of current and wind.
At first we test our footing, jab with sticks,
then, bolder, stride along its frozen spine,
ice snapping and groaning beneath our boots.
At the bend – boulders and deadfall,
brittle rings around the rocks, crackle-glaze,
and bubbles pushing against glass.
Beneath the cold, white surface, black water rages.
We come too close.
Even now,
sometimes I feel I’m walking on river ice,
hear that low, hollow moan – the sound
before the crack.
Suzanne Rogier Marshall taught English to middle school students for nearly forty years, publishing several professional articles and a book on teaching poetry. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Up North, Portage Magazine, U.S.1 Worksheets, Watershed Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Blood Knot, a chapbook published by Porkbelly Press in 2015. A few years ago, Suzanne retired to the mountains of New Hampshire, where she enjoys canoeing with her husband, tracking bobcat, and practicing tai chi.
Catastrophe
Mary Buchinger
what were the signs when should you have thought something that it might happen what was missed where were you looking how long had it been leading up a shadow change in the air intake of breath hawk shifting the river looks up says I only see what I see I show you everything I can there plain and clear the bare trees leaning across yawning limbs gnawed by weather ragged ice-broke branches leaking sap the absence of clouds a grey feather drifting on drafts
a mix of mud and dirt-ice beside the bank old boot tracks soften growing smooth reckless as the ground gives up its cold when will the worms feel it is time how will their churning change what is in the works the upthaw February sun holding each green-necked gander along the path in its hand equinox in sight everything lengthening opening of wings and whistles lacework of early leaf buds mirrored in the river see the water breathe away from reeds see the quiet current absorb city sirens what should a person where to look how drum of helicopter bus brakes sighing someone speeding listen acceleration
she was still smiling at that age still an easiness there must we always look back this place of warning what was missed a lull of caring a not attending what was needed to wish to have seen known even now the lateness of the hour the pastness of what was closing the ever not moving into being attend to what pay pay pay before or after
you will never know what seed fell from your boot what did you carry how will you know have known been knowing tenses fail not enough to say it was then and until now standing planted what stance quick on furred feet is that ready or not it already was is the thing missed is the coming in is the what’s above what’s below all that you didn’t know but if you could have or did or would then what because of how it’s little and little and long put together traps unannounced or in words unfamiliar
how do you catch on to the change before its wake of disaster when there’s time still time the red-winged blackbird just keeps on calling Okalee! My reed It’s mine It’s mine Okalee! My reed It’s mine It’s mine what o what does the soft brown rabbit know carried high up in a clutch of claw?
Mary Buchinger, author of three poetry books, einfühlung/in feeling (forthcoming), Aerialist (2015), and Roomful of Sparrows (2008), is President of the New England Poetry Club (founded by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken) and Professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University in Boston; her work has appeared in AGNI, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Salamander, and elsewhere.