“August” and “Aubade” by Shaheen Dil
“Then, when the black nightingale returns to the forest,
when the audacious sun is high,
I wonder, beneath the waves,
where a few more wing beats would have taken me”
My sadness is very particular by Rebecca Faulkner
“I remember your scarf wrapped twice
around my neck on the Central Line I held my swollen stomach
felt first kicks & fresh strawberries we bought already softening”
’72 Datsun by Elizabeth Cranford Garcia
“Trash-can colored and rusty, it was a car all throat,
all fits and stutters, a guttural language
choked at every breakneck shift of gears,
a devil’s-in-hell kind of loud, so buzz-saw loud
you could feel the fuel catch fire inside it, its inner life burning
with something I was too small to name.”
Leavings by Nisha Atalie
“This is an elegy
for what can’t be undone—
a sky that sags heavy,
hand over our mouths
that forces us to breathe
with eyes
fingertips
every part we have left.”
Feminine Absurdities by Carly Brown
“It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth sip of tea this morning that I noticed Miss Nancy Carson was missing her eyebrows. I promptly set the cup down and stared at her across the breakfast table. I wanted to make certain she had not simply hidden her brows under too much white pomade. The girl is at an age where she has begun to prepare her toilette, and painting takes practice to master. But her brows were not covered up. They were gone.”
Where They Go by Joanne Durham
“I find them in the hollow place—
the friend whose heart collapsed
as the train pulled out,
the one whose daughter
didn’t call to tell me,
the one whose cancer
they said was slow growing
a month ago.”
Colliding by Julie O. Petrini
“I knew who Tim Davis was in high school, but I didn’t introduce myself to him until my mom ran him over with her car. And this is not some kind of “meet-cute” story, where her tires caught his foot as she slowly backed out at the grocery store or something. Rushing home on a drizzly November evening, from a place she should not have been, my mother mowed Tim down as he rode his bicycle to work, paralyzing him below the waist.”
Sonnet for the End of the World by Maureen Thorson
“The bluebirds that should leave each winter
now stay put, even as species after species
goes extinct. But who’d think of things like that
while those bright-backed, grump-faced balls
of brilliance flicker through our yards?”
Common Disaster No. 2 by M. Cynthia Cheung
“Today another patient
chokes: Don’t
let me die—
When her heart stops, there is so much
noise in the room—so many people
swarming, and then things
inserted—
Her legs jerk with every compression.”
Being AMANda and AMANDA to Be by Prison Poet
“An itch for HE-ness
SHE-ness cannot scratch.
Men are here who are reborn as women,
they swallow pills & take hormone-shots.
He-paint peeled off
so She comes toward void.”