I Wake Up & Deja Vu

 

By Idman Omar

 

Will I always be black,

Muslim and a woman in this country

reading faces

shield against shield

in the long, cheap working hours?

Will there always be

these awful months of fear

when I am foam of the sea

chewed skin and

a low, slow immigrant who

whispers the call to prayer?

Originally from Somalia, Idman Omar is a British freelance writer based in London, England. Her poetry has previously been published in Southbank Poetry, Guernica, Wild Court and Rattle amongst others. Idman is a MA Creative Writing graduate from Birkbeck, University of London.

 

Nowhere To Run

 

By Olumide Manuel

 

After a documentary with the same title by Yar'Adua Foundation Production

 

It is either the dying of a country or the country of bodies

Stacking an unrest to the molecules of nature, agitated

 

To a song of buckets, buckets of overflowing plunder.

In my mother's nightmare lake Chad waned to a battleline,

 

The migration of ploughing hands to the thighs of rifles,

The cruor we butter into ethnic tensions, how the North

 

Pours toward the Middlebelt with hunger and strife.

Benue man will say, the desert you run from has ran

 

Into my harvest basket, and now we run into eachother

With blames and knifes. Down South, the fish bellies

 

The crude oil, and a child smokes it for dinner. Now fire

Glares the evening skies of Niger delta, a testament

 

Of how the wreckage of creeks has made black dragons

Out of boys, black widows out of girls, and a stained

 

devastation out of cities struggling to breathe underwater.

A pregnant croc had swam into our store before she awoke

 

From the slumber of nightmare, the flood has blurred

The boundaries of where the sea ends, where the land begins.

 

Where do we go from here? How do we safe ourselves from

The slumber that eats our country into a graveyard, overridden

 

With debris, under claws, inside the silent lament of voices

 Crow-walking the high walls of a weakened green body.

Olumide Manuel, NGP IX, is a writer, a biology teacher and an environmentalist. He is a nominee of Pushcart Prize, and the winner of Aké Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022. His works have been published on Magma Poetry, Trampset, Uncanny Magazine, Agbowó Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.

 

Mahsā

 

By Bhavika Sicka

 

Fold out the hems of history

as I emerge from its rolled edges

and I pass the priest who is a man

as he chants the prayers of men

and I pass the poet who is a man

as he pens the songs of men

and I ask the prophet who is a man

why he wrote a book for men

Fold out the hems of history

as I emerge from its rolled edges

and I offer my veil

to a fantailed

flame

Bhavika Sicka is a Kutchi Gujarati writer settled in Norfolk, Virginia. She has been a finalist for the Times of India's 'Write India' contest and a recipient of the Dickseski Fiction Prize awarded by Old Dominion University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Lunch Ticket, Pleiades, Waxwing, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, among other journals.

 

Once We Knew

 

By Corinna Rae Reilly

 

It’s as simple as this: once

we knew everything, then took

shape as human. Reeds woven

 

into basket, this container

that is your body. Simply: you

were born. You were born

 

to a lineage losing

its way. There were burned

maps, smoke inhaled

 

by sky, songs held in the throats

of our mothers, swallowed

& forgotten. But nothing can be

 

forgotten for good.

Know this: you are not

to blame. You were born

 

with the frantic pulse

of city in your wrists,

impulse to beat your own

 

heart, its persistent

unwelcome whispers to look

for something more. Once

 

there were stars, but our lights

made them lazy. There were birds

whose songs in springtime awakened

 

the dead,     and trees

who showed us how to give

ourselves over to the pull

 

of mystery we’ve been taught

to call the end. But nothing ends. Nothing

is forgotten. We were born to trace the maps

 

of our bodies toward the weak

beat in our chests, dig – dig –

dig – toward the faint songs

 

of our mothers held in our own tired

necks, toward the pull of mystery.

We call it the end but we were born

 

to remember: it teems

with beginnings, birdsong

Corinna is thankful to live surrounded by trees in New York's Hudson Valley where she shares her home with four wonderful beings - her husband, two dogs, and cat. While her poems have been published in Pleiades, The Submission, and elsewhere, that was about a decade ago. In that time, she has not stopped creating but has mostly kept her work to herself. After a long hiatus, she is once again nudging her work out into the world.

 

Presence

 

By Robin Turner

 

What falls away is always. And is near.
             – Theodore Roethke

They have been over and around us, above
and below us, reflected on water, all weather

and wonder, steadfast and absent, a storm.
They have been name-that-shape as we gaze

from the grassy banks, chariot for saints
and for sinners, soft cotton batting, friend,

apparition. Today they are the stuff of my mother’s
late dreaming. They flood the snug room

where she sleeps. God calling, she tells me
from this side of slow waking. Heaven

trying her on for size. She pushes Heaven away
with her hands, swats at God as she would a pest buzzing.

We drink tea honey-sweet, steep ourselves deep in the Here
and the Now. Mother’s clouds Holy Ghost it to the next town over.

I watch them gather, reconfigure in the near distant sky.

Robin Turner has recent work in Bracken Magazine, Ethel, River Mouth Review, and in the Dream Geographies project. A longtime community teaching artist in Dallas, she is now living in the Pineywoods of rural East Texas for a spell. She works with teen writers online.

 

Morning (Sabah)

 

By Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Translated by Aysel K. Basci

 

Open your window to the cool winds!

Look at that tree change at dawn

Watch the lightening of the horizon

Let your sleepiness glide from your eyes.

 

Allow the wind to play with your hair.

Don’t hide from it your silvery naked body

For it’s a different kind of spring.

 

Let captive lips touch and caress

Everything you have: neck, hair, breast

Since you are more beautiful than the night!

Serin rüzgârlara pencereni aç!

Karşında fecirle değişen ağaç,

Bak, seyret ağaran rengini ufkun

Mahmur gözlerinde süzülsün uykun.

Bırak saçlarınla oynasın rüzgâr.

Gümüş çıplaklığı bir başka bahar

Olan vücudunu ondan gizleme.

Ne varsa hepsini boyun, saç, meme,

Esirden dudaklar okşasın sevsin

Mademki geceden daha güzelsin!

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) was a Turkish poet and novelist, widely regarded as one of the most important representatives of modernism in Turkish literature.

Aysel K. Basci is a writer and literary translator. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Critical Read, Aster(ix) Literary Journal, Tint Journal, Bosphorus Review of Books and elsewhere.

 

Swift

 

Image Description: Birds flying away over a still beach. Blue sky with the sun streaming through the clouds.

By Sarah Fawn Montgomery

 

Hold me soaring love

like land splayed

beneath our beating

wings and bodies, flight

a vantage we use

like mating midair,

our beaks breaking

the skins of seeds even

though our mouths do not

attach to our throats.

 

Plummet free of time,

gravity a concept

invented by men

convinced love is an apple

or a woman in need

of being consumed,

but this love is avian

my swallow, my thrush

as ancient as hollow

bones in amber saved.

 

Love me quickly dove

thrash in our descent

eyes beaded with intent

as the ground swells closer,

and I will know we

matter when we scatter,

use our force to fly

away from each other

just before our entwined

bodies hit the ground.

Bio: Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery

 

Cold Reflections

 

Image description: The head of a kayak on a still river, trees on the skyline, sun reflecting off the water.

By Laura Remington

 

I dip the paddle right, swing it over and dip it left. My kayak glides across the still surface, slicing the mirror. Water dribbles from the paddle. Warps reflections. Only loons talking. Cold water. Sparkles like diamonds.

We were on that rafting trip on the Youghiogheny River, Rafe and I. Water shockingly cold. A recorded voice warned if you fell in you could lose the will to live. So dramatic. We laughed. Couldn’t stop laughing.

The ring. I paddle along the shore. Still seeking. Not finding. The water is warmer here near land. Warm enough to swim.

Not there. On the Youghiogheny. The rushing water was just as cold on shore. We dipped in and out. Fast. Laughing. Warmed each other up. They weren’t lying about the hypothermia. Tent for two. Small blue velvet box. Ring size.

Later, on the Boundary Waters, mosquitos were the size of lemons. Black flies more like cantaloupes. Both voracious. Water still and cold. We paddled all day. Mostly silent. Less laughing. Our tent was more elaborate. Comfortable air mattresses. A real cook stove. My finger bare. Sparkle gone.

The ring knew. It told me before he did. Has it found its way to Lake Superior? Is it on the muddy bottom below? In the middle of the lake, I set the paddle across the deck and slow to a stop. When I look down, I see only my reflection. I lean back and tip my face toward the sun.

Laura Remington lives and writes in Northern California, but at heart she’s a Yooper, born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her fiction has appeared in several publications, including Jabberwock Review, Barstrow & Grand, Third Wednesday Magazine, DASH Literary Journal, and Clackamas Literary Review.

 

My Mother on the Phone

 

Image Description: A backyard with a brown fence and large, looming trees.

By Michaela Brown

 

My mother on the phone with her mother flicks her tongue

the way she does when she reads me the single Dutch book on my shelf.

 

Down the stairs, she lumbers, phone pressed to ear, ear

absorbing the strung symphony of guttural verbs, short, sanded-down

 

declarations I know are such based on inflection alone.

My mother on the phone in our backyard, feet on an empty bucket

 

feet pretending they are standing on black, yellow, red land.

My mother on the phone speaking faster, my mother on the phone laughing,

 

my mother on the phone with her mother wants to “say hi”

want to envelope me in their language I do not know. Are they not always

 

using their mother tongues? Are they not always mothers

speaking? Three daughters on two ends of the phone and who has mothered

 

my tongue? I want to sing this national anthem,

I want to write this poem. Between Oma & me there is more than an ocean.

A recent graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Michaela is an EFL teacher currently based in Vigo, Spain. She is the first place recipient of the 2020 Marjorie Stover Short Story prize and has previously been published in Laurus Magazine, The Coop, and Dailyer. You can find her on Twitter @mikienbrown.

 

Wildland Urban Interface

 

Image description: Frosted blades of glass, close up.

By Russell Brakefield

 

Sharp clarity in the yard today.

A river of spring snowmelt

adorns my ankles in icy lace.

The dog moves like a mountain

beneath clouds of wrecked lilac.

There is no stink here, no char

or drab blankets of smoke.

A light wind turns chimes

on the porch. The box of mint

and Russian sage—braised

suddenly in bees—hovers above

the earth. And why am I so lucky?

In neighborhoods just north

a horse runs burning from yard

to yard to yard, it’s mane and tail

flickering in the fog, it’s coal-

black back saddled with ruin.

Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press, 2018) and the chapbook Our Natural Satellite (Harvard Square Press, 2022). He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.

 

I Don't Need Permission to Dirge But

 

Image description: three panels of wood, seemingly worn down with dark smudges.

By Amanda Gaines

 

on the hottest day of the summer, my body decides

to fucking lose it.        Wails

 

on a phone line to its beloved, daydreams

colliding into a brick wall at fifty MPH, abandons

 

the house of a best friend without explanation.         I wish I could explain

the fleas burrowing beneath my wood floors,                        the torn hole

 

in the tire of my lemony Volkswagen,          the accordion list

of unsent emails & academic protocols & untended sisters

 

a thousand miles from me back east, the partly part-time job

I picked up to keep the lights on.       My fear of being too much & never

 

enough.          Truth, a friend tells me, isn’t confession. Desire

usually does the trick.                         I try--I want to watch my man

 

bike down a black diamond

in sexy silver leggings. To play Two-Dots & eat ice cream, to give

 

my stretch marks beautiful girl names. To book it

back to Appalachia, to find a small cabin stocked with bath bombs

 

& cheese puffs & VHS copies of horror movies to help me

sleep.               With a disco ball & speaker system that bumps

 

Pinkshift on repeat.     With every stuffed animal I’ve ever kissed

on the forehead without shame.

 

In the real, rain plays withholding.     Girls I once dropped

it low with in hot pants get married to mediocre men.           My sister

 

buys her first car & I am not there     to witness her smile

overshadow the skyline.         My mother texts me

 

You can always come home.   I pull out

my hair in a feedback loop, leave evidence of loss

 

everywhere I go.         I want to scream

in an empty room until my esophagus splits its seams.         To pretend

 

I still have a say over my future.        To be held

like a child, to have nothing

 

to prove. To don stilettos & get in a bar fight with J.D Vance

knowing the right kind of hooked anger

 

can bring any bully to their knees. To feel the pressure of a tongue

between my legs,       look down

 

& find my man ordering take-out.      My idea of luxury:

not begging for what I need.   How luxurious it would be

 

to paint my nails with glitter in candle-lit room with friends & talk

art, fearless.     A luxury: a self-cleaning stove, a heart

 

that can give without breaking.          A storm cloud that lingers

over my Oklahoma threshold, promising

 

Not soon--now.

 

Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer and Ph.D. candidate in CNF in Oklahoma State University's creative writing program. Her poetry and nonfiction are published or awaiting publication in Barrelhouse, Willow Springs, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Superstition Review.

 

The Flock

 

Image description: Silhouette of a flock of birds flying across an orange sky with a bright sun behind them.

BY SWATI SUDARSAN

 

Siya had been holding a tornado in her gums for so long that it was more startling than relieving when the thrumming finally stopped. The tension in her mouth had released when she saw the predator’s jaw snap over a scarlet bird on her screen. She grew lamplit and silky beneath it, allowing her soup to splatter over herself and the floor. It was her first night alone in her old house. Her apartment was gutted -- the only things left inside were a desk, a mattress, and of course, the screen. It was a behemoth that took up almost an entire wall. Shawn had purchased it, despite her finding it stifling. Now its insularity allowed her to tread deep into the recesses of her thoughts.

The bird had landed cleanly without flinching. She had watched the scene frame by frame, comprehending the bird’s temerity. The camera panned to the cliffside where birds brooded along the rocks. Their home was a gate between the river and the clouds from which blueness peeked out, as if mirroring the water helped it materialize. The birds dove from their roosts, throbbing through the sky like ink splattered by a vortexing plate. They flew in abstract shapes, occasionally hewing off a bird or two. The flock didn’t look for them. Those birds were as gone to them as ashen stars on a cloudy night.

Siya paused the show. Her calves glowed blue beneath the screen, blending out her bruises. They were fading to a soft yellow that hardly showed anymore beneath the brownness of her skin. A few weeks ago her legs had been streams, her skin flowing over shades of peat moss and algae. After Shawn hit her, she had held herself up like a discarded carcass. A fragment of a shell.

The frozen screen showed the murky foam of the river’s edge where waves kissed onto the shore. This was where the predator lived. Still the birds dove down toward the shore to unbury seeds and crab remnants. Siya decided she did not feel sorry for the bird in the jaw. Instead she mourned the birds in the sand. They ingested whatever they uncovered, never seeking a life beyond the mercy of the beach. They could not understand the bird in the jaws, who left behind insistent purrs from the cliffside to finally experience its heartbeat in its throat.

Siya knew there were other birds like that one. Birds who pummeled chest-first into splintered rocks. They knew how to turn the entire flock like the fold in a banner. And birds snatched mid-air into an eagle’s claw. They knew the relief of being carried by the beating of someone else’s wings.

Siya played the show again. As the scene rolled forward, she forgot the ripples on her legs. She noticed between the flying birds were their blood red feathers, floating upwards. They floated slowly and unpredictably toward the clarity of the sky’s untouched blue.

Swati Sudarsan is based in Oakland, CA (Ohlone Land). She has received support from the Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. She was the runner-up of the 2022 So to Speak Contest Issue, and has work in McSweeney's, The Adroit Journal, Maudlin House and more. She can be found on social media as @booksnailmail

 

Omíyalé

 

By Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò

Lagos flood killed three siblings, four adults—NEMA

it is hard to imagine how water too can be a villain
wearing the face of soft rains. until there's puddles


until brothers on an errand is munched by a flood.
how swift it is for glee to alchemize into ruin without


sympathy for who carries the aftermath. when Okri
wrote famished road, he was sharing his massive


waterloo with avenues too. and sometimes, you step
on the road's tail too long you end up a bowl of dinner


somewhere far away where vultures busy themselves
with your guts. Èkó arómisá lègbe lègbe, i am learning to


escape every livid eye of the sky lest i fossilize in the calloused
palms of rain—a blessing shower i banged on God's door


once as a kid to gift me as if a parcel of birthday's present. a boy
down the street went to school some weeks ago and never returned.


they found his remains at the shore this morning. the sea that brought
him must have thought: you don't kill a flower and eat its tendrils.


or who gnashes teeth at the tiniest misery miracle of boneyard burial?

Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò is a Nigerian writer and a member of the Frontiers Collective. His works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in 4faced Liar, Rulerless, Perhappened, Kissing Dynamite, Lumiere Review, Temz Review, Afritondo, Fourth River Review and elsewhere.

Twitter Handle: @eniola_abdulroq

 

The Flower’s Grand Opening

 

Translated by Sekyo Nam Haines

                                                                     

Eyes barely open, I lean against the headboard, think of nothing.

 

Before burning down one candle’s shaft, the short summer’s night flees,

over the threshold stone, suddenly, the pomegranate flowers explode.

 

Inside the bud, a new universe, squirms to open! O, here

the silent vapor of the primordial ocean wets the petals.

 

The pomegranate flowers color my entire room.

I go inside the Pomegranate flower and sit. Think of nothing.

Original poem by Cho Ji Hoon

화체개현

 

실눈을 뜨고 벽에 기대인다 아무 것도 생각할 수가 없다.

 

짧은 여름 밤은 촛불 한 자루도 못다 녹인 채 사라지기 때문에

섬돌 위에 문득 석류꽃이 터진다.

 

꽃망울 속에 새로운 우주가 열리는 파동! 아 여기 태고 적

바다의 소리 없는 물보래가  꽃잎을 적신다

 

방 안 하나 가득 석류꽃이 물들어 온다. 내가 석류꽃 속으로

들어가 앉는다. 아무 것도 생각할 수가 없다.

Born in South Korea, Sekyo Nam Haines immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 as a registered nurse. She studied American literature and writing at Goddard College ADP and poetry with the late Ottone M. Riccio in Boston, MA. Her first book, Bitter Seasons' Whip: The Translated Poems of Lee Yuk Sa was published in April 2022 (Tolsun books). Her poems have appeared in the poetry journals Constellations, Off the Coast and Lily Poetry Review. Her translations of Korean poetry by Cho Ji Hoon have or will appear in Interim, Asymptote’s Tuesday blog, The Tampa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Consequence Forum, May Day. Her translations of Kim Sowohl’s poetry have appeared in The Harvard Review, Brooklynrail: InTranslation, Ezra, and Circumference. Her translation of “The Dire Pinnacle” by Lee Yuk Sa appeared in And There Will Be Singing /An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review. Sekyo lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

Born in 1920, Cho Ji Hoon is a canonical poet of modern Korea and a renowned traditionalist of Korean aesthetics. Although his poetry is written in a modernist free verse form, his poems resonate with the deep root of Korean literati Sijo and have an intense local flavor, imbued with the sounds, smells and colors of pre-industrial Korea.  In 1939, at age 19, Cho Ji Hoon published his first poem in the literary magazine MoonJang. In 1946, he published his collection of poetry, Cheongnok Zip (청록집)  alongside with the poets Park Mokwohl and Pak Doo Zin. They were known as “Cheongnokpa,” the Green Deer Poets. A professor of Korean language and literature at Korea University for 20 years, Cho Ji Hoon served as the president of the Korean cultural society affiliated with the university and president of the Korean poet’s association. He received numerous literary awards, published five poetry collections, and many books related to Korean literature and culture.

 

Elegy for the River in the Desert

 

By Jemma Leigh Roe

––after Natalie Diaz

I thought I would not live until the end of that summer

feeding on the creosotic air and the turquoise sky

when I thought the body was imaginary

when I thought that love was real.

But the monsoon came in September

to flood the arroyo where I deserted

my body night after night.

The coyotes who wandered on the mountain descended

and stayed up with me to watch

the silent sun rise from my sluggish heart,

rise through my dry-stricken throat that stung

like scorpion weed with blooms of amethyst stones

I wore to protect myself.

Only then, I felt the river flow through my veins

pulsing in the chaste aridity, beating the never-ending heat

during that summer of wildfires

when a white-tailed deer bowed before it and drank

ignoring the hunter’s gun

when I died in the brush

and came back to life.

Jemma Leigh Roe studied art at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Her poems and artwork appear in The Ilanot Review, The Fourth River, Thin Air, Canyon Voices, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and others. www.jemmaleighroe.com

 

Here is a Tree Without Leaves

 

By Claire Kortyna

stark, honed form, hunkered down, waiting.   

 

This week I write until hunger sickens me:  

roils of nausea, black-spotted vision.  

At five p.m.: melt into the couch, hibernate the remaining day. 

 

Here is what the leaves say when they arrive:  

Here is where we hold joy in our bodies: 

Here is how joy feels:  

 

A cat’s paw on a laser beam  

on rainbows refracted through the prism in my bedroom window 

Here are things the cat catches: 

Here are things never caught:  

 

The cat dies, the prism breaks 

If you want to find something, stop looking  

 

Where do we hold joy in our bodies? Can we say how it feels? 

When I try to make you feel mine, what am I missing? 

 

How do I hold it against your skin? Me,  

who only vaguely remembers.  

 

Remind me what I forgot:  

of the rising, welling,  

of something in the gut 

of a tension that releases  

of the lifting at the base of your skull 

remind me of leaves. 

Claire Kortyna's work has been published in Blood Orange Review, The Maine Review, The Baltimore Review, Jellyfish Review and others. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She reads for The Cincinnati Review. Her twitter handle is: @ckortyna

 

Small Globes

 

By Jen Schalliol Huang

Within is my body, and without

also contours my shape

like a sail: sometimes filled,

sometimes buffeted. Sometimes

we don’t get choices, only input:

temperature, pressure, nuance.

Deviation. Sudden and immoderate.

The body can be a leaf in wind

curled and scudding,

paper-thin toward the edges,

or petaled with decadence,

peony-crowned.

When the bloom is

too heavy for the stem,

it becomes the curving bow,

the head pillowed in dirt.

It becomes music. Song

in the most surprising places.

Jen Schalliol Huang is a disabled poet living pondside in Massachusetts. She reads for [PANK] and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Jet Fuel, the lickety-split, Sou’wester, Shenandoah, SWWIM, and others.

 

The Lizard

 

By Lúcia Leão

curls its tail, leaves

the summer

behind−where

do I straighten out

this longing?

Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, South Florida Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing.

 

Imagining My Own Death

 

By Ann Hudson

is what I do on my most

difficult nights, the lamp

clicked off, the book bookmarked

and set beneath the reading glasses,

pills, and glass. I just don’t want

to let anyone down. What if

there’s some warning sign, some

important pain I should act on?

What if I mess it up? I cleaned out

the pantry shelves today,

emptying down the disposal

the pickled beets, the pears,

the raspberry jam I canned myself

but never had the faith to eat.

Ann Hudson is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press) and Glow (Next Page
Press), a chapbook on radium. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab
Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, SWWIM,
and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO, and teaches at a Montessori school in
Evanston, Illinois.

 

Third Anniversary (or, First Anniversary After the Birth of Our Daughter)

 

By Lindsay Adkins

Into that skin:

a lone bull curls

its throat back to neck.

 

Arc of horn.

Empty gray fields.

Pink eyelid of morning.

 

In high school they rumored tipping,

sparse fences missing posts, gaps

wide enough for past-curfew bodies.

 

I imagined the feeling of toppled animal,

immobility, a spine in the dirt,

the quiet sting of mosquitoes.

 

Before fear, before boot thunder

and the impossible shotgun

there are true stars and fragments

 

of knowing no living

thing moves on its own.

 

***

 

My mother’s love was not

a manmade material. She bought

me leather shoes to walk in.

 

Your feet need to breathe, she’d say,

the tiny lungs in my heels huffing

while she pressed her thumb

 

on my toe to measure room for growth.

Thrilling, to be found, to feel

where my body stopped and started.

 

Many times I’d watched her

or my father sift through bins

of frozen supermarket meat,

 

looking at cuts, dates, fat.

There was always a right choice.

 

***

 

We can choose

rawness, then. We can

choose to have a choice.

 

Last year, cotton, next year,

fruit and flowers. Leather

between, but we’ve already seen

 

my body give and stretch,

breathe to cocoon another,

no exchange of coin.

 

How am I both

animal and its empty dried out skin,

both what I was and what I will be?

 

Our daughter lies here

rubbing her back into the carpet,

unable yet to roll.

 

We can show her how to move,

how to reach forward, pull back

without coming apart.

Lindsay Adkins is a Western MA writer whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, Narrative, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, great weather for MEDIA, and Sugar House Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers and holds an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton.