Spring / Joanna Grant
(cento taken from lines in Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems)
This newness, a little light filtering, flickering,
my eyelids heavy, forehead a beautiful blank,
my red furrow a wonderful future, my heart.
I reach, I luxuriate, my face a water flower,
My very hair a nimbus, Dawn’s rosy fingers.
I am crowned with figs and milk, blooms
at my beckoning wrists. I could grasp the sky
in my two hands. No cold planet, this. Heavy
as wet fresh-turned earth my valleys
glisten, they open. They echo heaven.
On the way to the promised land / Judit Hollos
the glow of memories in elf bonfires
the howl of banshees over silent ruins
flaming petals of almond flowers
the trickling of powdered ashes
a shed plume of the Milky Way
the severed tail of a dragoness
a fading haze of unspoken words
dark clusters of unhealed bruises
feasts enacted with plastic dolls
dawn curdling on broken tram tracks
first milk tooth lost on a sinking boat
on its way towards the promised land
a blood-stained linen
of aurora unfurls
in the summer sky
the locked memories
of a war-torn childhood
Decompose Mentis, With All Due Respect (which is to say, none) / Zach Hauptman
Decompose-Mentis-With-All-Due-Respect-which-is-to-say-nonemayflies / Brice Maiurro
we emerge on the surface of the brook
pray that our wings will dry in time
before life itself swallows us whole
we rise & fall in the air above the bank
pray that our love will find us there
spinning in sun like a whirling dervish
we return again to the water’s surface
pray that we birth a story that survives
our wings getting wetter each moment
our prayers are as ephemeral as we are
our invisible wings as delicate as love
still–this remains–the only way to live
Quick You Have 15 Minutes to Write a Poem About Hope / Kimberly O’Connor
Quick-You-Have-15-Minutes-to-Write-a-Poem-About-Hope
To My Wife on Her 40th Birthday / Michael Schad
When the stink bugs come,
you still scream and cry,
“It’s right there.”
And in our twelve
or thirteen years of marriage
we have made a pact concerning
the stink bugs – I kill
and you scoop up with a tissue
and flush in the toilet.
In tandem we move.
Together we exterminate,
at least we have gotten that
right.
starless / Kashiana Singh
the omissions in my story dilate into a gaze—
stillness of Buddha sinking into the deep.
the firmament hisses from the eye of a
compass: a seismic seizure tugging
at the needle of my existence.
brouillon
clouds form, unform—
a blurred horizon swallows so much noise
it becomes sound itself,
riding the wings of my airplane—
its tail a stanza stitched across the sky.
wilderness
a young girl wanders through arched doorways,
fingers scattering breadcrumbs
in the undergrowth of memory,
searching for a silence
that will speak her name back to her.
Puberty Happens / Elizabeth Wolf
Sad Girl wore a D cup
in 7th grade. That was bad.
Boys colluded in hallways
to cull her into corners and
paw at her body. A neighbor boy
she grew up with, playing tag and
hide & seek, sharing snacks,
sat behind her in a dark classroom,
hissing low in her ear, breathily,
below the clicking of a filmstrip:
Do you stuff? Do you stuff?
Do you? Do you stuff?
Do you stuff? Do you? Do you stuff?
Sad Girl did not know what that meant
(yet she was ashamed)
or who would do that
but once she learned, she was sure
no one NO ONE no one
wanted to feel like this,
trapped and hunted.
Grown men whistled and catcalled
a girl child. Hands snuck out
clamping onto her on crowded
subways and buses. Sad Girl
looked big and felt small.
It seemed like a large part
of growing up was learning
how little control she had
over her body
or her life.
