To the Barista, I Appear Harmless
I appear, to her, to be a fairly sedentary older
woman, busy with her poems. Docile. Nice.
But inside, I am riding horses, bareback.
When I wear out my horse, I mount a fresh one.
I am inwardly defiant, not at all reconciled.
I’m at the barricade, on top, hand raised.
Inside I am Chaos giving birth to Earth, Love,
Darkness and Night, all from one Cosmic Egg.
Inside I dance at the maypole, naked. I build two
bonfires and drive a herd of cows between them.
Yet all she sees is an old woman, sitting quietly at this cafe
table. Black cardigan. Sensible shoes.
Judy Ireland is the author of Cement Shoes (2013), a poetry collection that won the Sinclair Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Calyx, Saranac Review, Eclipse, Cold Mountain, Coe Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including the Best Indie Lit New England. She is a Poetry Editor & Reading Series Producer for the South Florida Poetry Journal, Co-Director of Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches, and she teaches at Palm Beach State College.
Gingerbread Mom
I like that part in Mary Poppins
(The book, not the movie)
When Mary takes the children to a gingerbread shop.
Mrs. Corry, the ancient owner,
Breaks off her own fingers,
Offers them to the twins to suck.
“Only barley-sugar!” she announces.
Though some days, she says, they are peppermint.
And I can think of no better example of womanhood
(Motherhood in particular)
Than the willingness to break off pieces of yourself.
Give your body to feed the hunger of others.
Let them devour your sugar-sweet skin,
Let them crunch you down to the bone.
Your body a gingerbread house
Children feel entitled to eat.
And no one ever feels sorry
For the old witch inside
Who wants to be left in peace
(Not pieces).
Who wants her house kept whole.
Mrs. Corry grew back her broken fingers
In a matter of minutes.
But for most of us
It is not nearly so quick and easy.
Eva Langston received her MFA from the University of New Orleans and is an instructor at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. She is represented by Ali Lake of O’Connor Literary, and her Substack newsletter for writers has over 5,000 followers. She is cohost of the podcast THIS MAMA IS LIT! (which features writers whose work has something to say about motherhood), and she will soon be launching a new podcast: THE LONG ROAD TO PUBLISHING.
Camerawoman: Indian Ocean
900 days on a bestial sea/Repeated birth of storms/Their constant spittle: an overbearing bully/This project has no end/On the sea I have become more woman than I ever thought/My synapses are fired/fried/Relentless beating of boat against writhing barges of water/The science that goes into keeping/our wooden box afloat: I’m done/I want none of it/Let this ceaseless, boundless quest be over/When I return to land let the only wild thing around for miles/be me/be me/be me/Let me be the gauzy dress untendrilling/the whipped-up wind/the sloping scree spilling downward/the dance recital of birds-in-love/spangled confetti loosed in celebration/explosion/upon explosion/of endless wildness/set free from me/while earth at my feet is firm and calm and home.
Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. She pens poetry, book reviews, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her work has been included in or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Sky Island Journal, Stirring, The Collagist, The Main Street Rag, Whale Road Review, and Windhover, among others. She hopes you one day find her poetry tacked to a tree somewhere in the Alaskan Wild.
In the World in Which We Loved
If our gaze never meets again,
And our hands remain in our pockets
On these cold winter nights,
Look for me in the world in which we loved.
Hold my hands in the stalks of wheat
And brush my hair down a fox’s back.
Kiss my lips through a summer peach
And look toward the trees to find my eyes.
I’ll find your arms in a warm woolen jacket
And your smile in the soft morning light.
Listening to your voice in the rumble of the sky–
Seeking your touch in the overgrown grass.
Find me in the moonlit rays, under a canopy of green,
And I’ll search for you in the darkness below.
Look for me in the forest,
Look for me where I love you still.
Hannah Bagley is a poet and writer from Southern Appalachia. She is also published in Appalachia Bare, Feminine Collective, and others. Bagley draws inspiration from nature, travel, and the human experience through a feminist lens.
How My Memory Works at Age 70
We were told not to talk about certain things,
but I don’t remember what they were.
It happened again today when I left the line
at the check stand to go pick up another product.
I forgot where I was going as I was walking down
the bread aisle thinking to myself
there are too many kinds of bread to choose from.
Suddenly the thought about the thing I was going to get
evaporated.
I knew I needed it, to remember it, like I needed
to remember the word for paper towel,
which isn’t called a rag, his mother reminded me
when I told her three-year-old boy to throw his rag
into the trash can. I kept repeating the rag, the rag,
as the boy stared up at me, mesmerized
by the turkey warbler skin that jiggled under my chin,
which reminds me, we ran out of ketchup,
that must be where I’m going, to get some ketchup.
Daniel McGinn’s work has appeared in Silver Birch Press, The MacGuffin, Nerve Cowboy, Spillway, Misfit, Meat for Tea, and Anti-Heroin Chic along with numerous other magazines and anthologies. His recent chapbook, Drowning the Boy, won the James Tate Poetry Prize for 2021 and was published by SurVision in Dublin Ireland. Fill Me With Birds: a free verse conversation written with Scott Ferry was published by Meat For Tea in February 2024. Two of his previous books of poetry The Moon, My Lover, My Mother & the Dog (Moon Tide Press) and 1000 Black Umbrellas (Write Bloody) are still available from your favorite bookseller.
And how
Ducked inside dusk’s blue grey hum
I step over sidewalk cracks
for a block, maybe two.
At the corner my mind turns
back to her, now decades gone,
And how she stood upright, unbroken
as her folks slipped through the vast
with one last look,
And how she stayed in her homeland,
little sister’s hand clenched tight,
soon a bride at seventeen,
by twenty-two a mom of three,
And how she left when no more
could abide and found herself another man,
swelling to proud mom of five,
unbroken still,
And how we moved from here to there,
there to then and back again, tiptoed through
unruly cracks, watching her negotiate
the permutations of her fate,
And how when her last love had died
and she could no longer read her books
nor body with her spirit jibe,
And how at sixty-one she broke
and sighed
a soft goodbye,
And how I miss her crooked grin
at each rise of each new moon.
Deborah Jang is a visual artist and poet. Her debut book, Float True, was published in March 2020 by Shanti Arts LLC. Her chapbook, Last Will and Best Guesses, was released by Finishing Line Press in September of 2022.
Fifty Cent Wedding
They married in the lower field, the one down by the pond with the rope swing, the one beyond the field of buckwheat, beyond the rows of kale and eggplant, beyond the herbs and the Sweet Annie. He wore a Mexican wedding shirt of hemp, and she had a backless linen dress and flowers in her hair, and the children who preceded her strewing petals were mostly tossing snips of Sweet Annie, because it smells of magic and the earth, and because her name is Annie. The string trio played Ashokan Farewell, a melody so haunting that I stop in my writing to find Jay Unger and Molly Mason and hear it again.
They wed on the full moon, in the field behind their farm out in Amish country, west of Philadelphia. I was there because my wife had been married to the bride’s father before he ran off with the bride’s mother and begat Annie, leaving behind his first three kids, one now lost to depression and a revolver. Regardless, the fact is that my wife’s two living children are Annie’s only brother and sister, and a wedding is a time for celebration and for family.
When we arrived a few days before the wedding there was a steady tapping coming from the barn. Annie told us that Sean, her intended, was making their rings.
He sat in the soft light of a barn loft where the sun filtered through the spaces between the vertical boards of the wall, slanting down in golden triangles of liquid light and drifting dust. He sat quietly, hunched over an anvil with a hammer in his hand, intently striking the rim of a quarter, turning it slightly, striking it again, turning it. My uncle, a clever and patient man, had made rings that way when I was a child.
The rings Sean made are truly lovely. They shine and have that hammered look that speaks to craftsmanship and care and human work. They cannot be found at a jewelers in a mall; they were not made by a machine; they are not a size 7 or 10 — they are the precise fit for two people who love one another. There are no two others exactly like them.
Roderick Bates edits Rat’s Ass Review. His own poems appear in The Dark Horse, Stillwater Review, Naugatuck River Review, Cultural Weekly, Asses of Parnassus, fēlan, Three Line Poetry, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. He also writes prose and won an award from the International Regional Magazines Association for an essay published in Vermont Life. He is a Dartmouth graduate and lives, writes, and edits in southern Vermont.
Invitation to Grief
Come to the ocean at Monterey, please
on a winter’s day. It will be wicked cold.
Come naked anyway. I want to understand
all of you. Want to wash us all over
in the water, let breakers push us off our feet
then conquer the undertow of the riptide
or else be swept out to sea and drowned to
resurrect as something new.
Brown pelicans will swoop over us
seals dance in the waves ignoring us. See
tiny shorebirds scurry back and forth, busy,
not noticing us. We do not matter
to the tapestry of life: are only
one creature among many creatures.
Perhaps we will come out of the water with
a banquet, built together on driftwood fire,
of harvested salt-rich superfood greens
and accepted bounty of shellfish
that died to feed us.
I read this into the wind
knowing you can hear me,
being everywhere and nowhere.
Take on a body, Brown like me
with too much unruly hair, and
come. Crystalize yourself out of the wind.
Soften and warm into life. Speak with me.
Explain the riddles of absence,
Hunger, need,
where there is plenty all around.
An ocean of plenty.
And if you don’t
the cold is bliss too. So, I tell you
I will practice feeling bliss in freezing. I tell you
do not mask the presence, immanence,
of that bliss with absences,
losses that mean, at the very core
there are things good enough to miss.
Worth the pain. Do not
dare try to make me forget this.
When you come, I shake.
Wind, no doubt. Or possibly awe:
knowing you have more power than I.
But knowing also the ocean will feed salt
life into me if we quarrel.
Shymala Dason’s writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, Hyphen, the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) post-9/11 war anthology, Duende, The Literary Review, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, The Gateway Review, et al. Dason is a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction collection award, and the AAWW & Hyphen short fiction award. A debut poetry chapbook, Carrying the Ocean, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
De- (strip, take away, remove, excise, render useless)
De-Choice
De-Womb
De-Voice
De-Power
De-Opt
De-Pleasure
De-Think
De-Color
De-Decide
De-Unify
De-Live
Destroy
De-World
De-Woman
no more
This is
De-Truth
In times of
De-Light
Regina YC Garcia is an award-winning poet and professor. She is the 2021 Winner of the DAR American Heritage Poetry Award, a 2021 and 2023 James Applewhite Semifinalist, a 2024 Applewhite Honorable Mention, 2024 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Honorable Mention, 2024 Charlotte Lit/South finalist, and a 2024 Pushcart Nominee. Her work appears in various journals,reviews,and anthologies such as Up the Staircase Quarterly, Litmosphere, South Florida Poetry Journal, Mid-Atlantic Review, Amistad, North Carolina Literary Review, and others. She is also featured in an Emmy-Award winning episode of Muse (UNCTV), as well as the Tulane University Sacred Nine Project. Her chapbook, The Firetalker’s Daughter (Finishing Line Press) was released in March 2023. Her first full length collection of poetry, Whispers from the Multiverse (Aquarius Press/WillowLit) was just released this spring 2025.
To No Longer Be
I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun,
Ulysses S. Grant writes in his last letter.
He signs his name, sees it detach from the paper,
float away. He is only sensation:
tremble, beat, breathe, fever, suffer, dream.
No longer can he see the self who once claimed,
I did this, I believe thus. And those he loved,
who love him still, sitting in his darkened room,
crying, Can you hear me, Please forgive me,
Stay with us a while longer—
who are they to him, now, passing?
Debra Kaufman‘s most recent poetry collection is Outwalking the Shadow (Redhawk Publications). She is also the author of God Shattered, Delicate Thefts, The Next Moment (all from Jacar Press) and A Certain Light (Emrys Press) as well as three chapbooks, many monologues and short plays, and five full-length plays. Recent poems have appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry South, and Braided Way. She produced Illuminated Dresses, a series of monologues by women, in Raleigh, NC, and recently adapted Paul Green’s 1936 antiwar play, Johnny Johnson, for the Paul Green Foundation. Debrakaufman.info
As Shadows Lengthen
As I go about my day,
making love to my wife in the morning,
drinking coffee in streaming sun,
sun drawing tree shadows on snow,
as I stand by a frozen stream,
as it begins melting—
widening portals of light through ice,
a bear invades a neighboring hive,
as Russia invades Ukraine,
rips its frames for delectable larvae,
munching as I watch from the other side
of a broken stone wall,
as I remember how Stefan escaped
the Russian bear, and Nazis’ predation,
stealing his parents, grandmother, sister—
his defecting to the West, when he married me.
As Russia invades Ukraine,
the bear coats its tongue with sweetness,
with no thought for the bees
made homeless in the honey-less air—
as I go about my day, as shadows lengthen,
two weeks short of spring.
Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, the Bisexual Book Award, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso, Poetry Society London, Red-Headed Stepchild, One Art and Atlanta Review. She lives with her wife and their two romping canines on the steep banks of the Connecticut River, in New Hampshire.
Dislocation
Cardinals, bluebirds
but also manufactured homes
open at the seams
yards of junk cars
Even this house, the bathroom floor tile
not quite meeting the wall
An almostness
The back of the outhouse next to the cabin peels
away, warp of moisture
Wanting to be near water,
I go to a nature area
A power plant commands the view
the neat gravel beneath it, on the river’s far shore,
a dissonance. Smokestacks
as would-be lighthouses.
A sign warns about cancer-causing
contaminants in the catfish, adjures
not to eat them. Across from it, a boy fishes.
A retraction in this place–I try
to open my heart against it.
Cloudy plastic bottles float
along the near-shore.
On the road on the way in,
Tennessee Valley Authority signs in front of the power plant.
All I could think of was the snail darter,
tiny fish used to fight a TVA dam in another part
of the state. Battle won and war lost.
The law altered to allow the dam. Yet the Internet says
the snail darter, relocated, thrives.
Ann Tweedy’s full-length poetry book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It was awarded a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was named as a Lambda Literary Award finalist and as a Golden Crown Literary Society Award finalist. Tweedy is also the author of three chapbooks—White Out (Green Fuse Press 2013), Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens Press 2020), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word Press 2020). Additionally, Tweedy has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and five Best of the Net Awards. Tweedy’s poetry has been previously published in Naugatuck River Review, Rattle, Clackamas Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Literary Mama, and many other places.
Besides writing poetry and essays, Ann Tweedy is a legal scholar writing on both Tribal governance and bisexuality and the law. Tweedy currently serves as a Professor of University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, focusing on Native American Law.
The Book of Stars
The book of stars has no ending
so everyone has a place to rest,
seek light in the darkness.
It tells nothing of the moment I lived
or died but the long path in between.
See me when your head lifts
or better, see your own aspiration
the immense height and bright of you
the burn in your steps
the impossible imbued life of gas
that is as real as your breath.
Rebecca Surmont lives in Minnesota and has a secret love of trains, corn fields, funk, dogs, and tiny things. Her written work has been featured in publications such as Stone Poetry Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Common Ground Review, Crowstep Poetry Journal, Ekphrastic Review, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Trouvaille Review, and the anthology, Seasons, by Trolley Car Press.