by Sarine Balian
BY KATE SCHOLL
When I sit up to get out of bed in the morning,
suddenly my breasts feel the weight of gravity
New soft tissue pulled down towards the center of the earth
Suddenly having to deal with the day
and the responsibility of wakefulness and work
And so for just a moment there is such pain.
And yet the world is saying hey, you have those new things, wake up girl
The earth is reminding me of who I am every day, promptly
My own personal planetary wake up call,
pick me up,
pull me down,
embrace me.
BY ARIANNA SEBO
The moths have their own religion
one of colour and flight
fuzzy feelers searching for luminescence
not so different from us humans
following our flights of fancy
allowing our imaginations
to pave the way for our good intentions
not always fulfilled
but we try
with Sunday school children
and church bazaars
Sunday sermons and tapioca pudding
searching for heights
and falling from grace
like the moths
obsessed with the light
By J. Jules
Why did I pick up that glass?
Wine doesn’t sit well on an empty stomach.
And I’m allergic to sulfites.
I could have avoided it all.
The nausea, the vomit,
the horrified look on her face.
No excuses. I did. And boy,
did it make a mess to clean up
by: Kate scholl
This thing has three parts;
Three will be returned thrice more
One, two,
Three times…
There is the before time:
the boyhood, the uncertain masculinity, the obliviousness
The now time:
the girlhood, the transition, the finally finally figuring it out, the contentedness
And the then time:
the woman I will be, the knowing altogether who I am, the victory
By Martin Cossio
Matthew Zapruder is a poet, a teacher, an editor, a translator, and an accomplished guitar player. He is the co-translator of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, and editor-at-large of Wave Books (He edited Tyehimba Jess’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Olio). Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry—the second of which, The Pajamaist, was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award—and one book of prose on the art and craft of poetry. He is a professor in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California.
By Denton Loving
After evensong at the abbey, we walk circles
in the woods, weaving through deerflies
in kamikaze flights. The cerulean warbler
mates among these trees, we’re told,
so we keep vigil for blue flickers in leaves.
So far, nothing. On half-submerged logs,
turtles perch like hard-shelled gods—
We canoe to the deepest part of the lake
before we can talk about who we were
before the other existed as witness.
BY: KAIA Gallagher
Sirje Kiin is an Estonian writer, poet, and journalist currently living in South Dakota, and the biographer of Marie Under, one of Estonia’s best-known poets.
Born in 1883, Marie Under established herself as one of Estonia’s premier poets in the beginning of the twentieth century through her expressionist and neo-romantic poems. Her early poetry explored themes of happiness, joy, and erotic love. Later, during the 1920s, she addressed topics related to justice and death, with lyrics that merged dark, apocalyptic visions with a yearning for happiness and all-embracing love.
BY: Robert Beveridge
The needle at seventy.
The plains states pass,
one endless road and miles
of crops. Now and again,
corn becomes barley.
You, next to me.
The heat was too much;
you cropped your hair, left it
at the last rest stop
hundreds of miles ago.
Your t-shirt lies
on the cooler.
Seat half-reclined
window topless
seventy-mile-an-hour wind
dries sweat before it forms.
BY: J. Markowitz
The physicality of Mag Gabbert’s poetry and essays is dreamily overwhelming. We enter a twilight through the medium of a body—her body—which her craft makes so palpable that it could be our own. Via the sensations of her vulnerabilities, Gabbert delivers us to the liminal spaces between pleasure and shame, power and exploitation, existence and the body. She takes us to the edge of her mortality, because it is there that we are most aware of our own aliveness.