Kitchen Idyll by Robyn Groth
“Bored, my children open me up, like a fridge,
to find out what’s inside. I glow and show them
leftovers, mostly, some of them over a week old.”
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Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita/You Look Prettier With Your Mouth Shut by Amelia Díaz Ettinger
“The expression that rubbed Luz raw was the one her mother used more often than all of her Ave Marías and all of her Ay Benditos—and she said those a lot. The one proverb that always made Luz feel ill at ease—and she was not too sure why—was: Con la boca cerradita te ves más bonita: you look prettier with your mouth shut.”
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To Hanna Komar, Minsk, Belarus, September 2020 by Mary E. Kollar
“Your voice slips like smoke
between prison bars,
a jailer lights a cigarette,
considers the burning stub.” -
Last time I saw my sisters by Angela Patten
“one was peering at a recipe
for risotto, the other
at the microscopic script
in an obsolete telephone book.” -
I come from women who made love by Molly Pershin Raynor
“Each with a man
that stuck, waxy & scarlet as their lips on my
cheek, anointing me with gentle warnings &
measurements for the perfect chicken soup.” -
Subject to Change Without Notice by Barbara Saunier
“You salt the egg anticipating
the salt. Count on the hill
for the view, and, when you get to the top,there’s the view.”
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You, I Said by Jennifer Pratt-Walter
“This is a place, I thought,
where words cannot bring us
safely back home.” -
As If the World Might Hold Another by Allison Adair
“We approach
middle age as undiscovered country when
really it’s the same old alley, the bowling pin
that wobbles like a drunk but won’t go down.” -
Toward Evening, Teton River by B.J. Buckley
“Polyglot wind: her too many voices,
her tangled tongues,
all of them sharp.” -
Lake Macbride by Kathleen Maris Paltrineri
“In quietude I feel I am everywhere at once—my own body rehearsing its wintering act, too. I look up from the table to the far side of the lake to see a buck limping, his hind legs sixteenth-notes in the dry leaves. From far off, a shot sounds like an encyclopedia falling to a wooden floor and like the echo of its striking.”
