By Tracey Knapp

1. Tell your online boyfriend your real age.
2. Sweep the seeds and leaves from the porch. The winds were harsh last week.
3. Practice sneezing more quietly. Stop the throat-scratch hacking. Who
   could sleep next to that?
4. Why are you still single? Ask your friends. They know everything about
   your failures.
5. Dump your shitty friends who can detail your failures verbatim back to you.
6. Do the dishes. Remove your socks from the bed sheets.
7. Bobby pins are not Q-Tips. Baby wipes are not bathtubs.
8. Commit to eating like a person. With other people. Stop wasting your
   money on wine and prepackaged food at the 7-Eleven.
9. Spend more time talking to yourself outdoors at night when stoned.
10. Stop drinking wine. Stop drinking. But only when alone. Except if you
    were drinking with people beforehand, and you came home to your dog.
11. Watch less TV. Except, re-watch the movie Frances Ha. You are a dancer,
    and you have dreams.
12. All those goddamn books you buy and barely open.
13. Make the world more beautiful! Take one earring, preferably dangled and
    missing its mate. Hang it from an old nail or forgotten hook. A quiet,
    lucky place.
14. Quit losing earrings. Quit earrings. Quit things.
15. Put your old jeans in a box and then the attic. And someday when you
    move into a new bright house with a new love, you’ll pull them out, thin
    and mothy, you’ll delight: I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! THEY ALMOST FIT!
16. Grow things. Give away things. Give away your neighbor’s excessive
    lemons. Your tight jeans.
17. Recycle more. Stop hoarding the little gifts that someone gives you when
    they kind of liked you because they barely knew you. The broken ceramic
    rabbit isn’t even emblematic.
18. Appreciate your one good knee, your moisturized cuticles, and the hair
    that grew back on your head after you got rid of that fucking IUD.
19. Reach into that folder of old letters pull out the one with the nicest paper.
    Don’t read it. Just touch it and let it be the cramp in the gut of all the
    people who used to love you by hand.
20. Celebrate your old-man dog. In the following order, give him: a walk, a
    scratch, a bath, a treat, a nap, a brush, a walk, a treat, a nap.
21. Write down a list of what you could do to be your best.
22. Narrow it down to ten.

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By Kathleen Loe

The gravelly edge of the old macadam
crunches when Daddy Man veers, slightly over
his two-cocktail breakfast limit—whoa!

And Mama’s all, “Bi-ill!”, sherry sloshing
in her Dixie cup, me and my altar-boy brothers
welded to the backseat of red Chevy summer

vinyl, our own trinity, looking and not looking
for a tiny worn-out sign set meekly back
from the scorching road—St. Lucy’s Catholic Church,

faded and falling away, not the go-to
for the church-going in this neck of the north
piney woods. Far from a hundred cathedrals

sinking in the soft black silt of New Orleans,
we aim toward a single consecrated
gray rectangle stuck in the Chitimacha’s

red clay of North Hodge. Lucky pagans,
or even Methodists, might miss the turn
and be flung past the money-stench

of the paper mill, or further still to actual
wet towns with no need for Jubilee—
Jubilee, cross-dressing bootlegger

come to wax our floors and pocket the cash
and slip my mama her black-market hooch
every week in our dry-as-dust little podunk town

in East Jesus North Looziana, the pure
whitewalled tires of her luscious pink
booze-bought Caddy cutting trenches

in the sweet St. Augustine grass
of our front yard. It ain’t me that’s drunk
in this story about having to go to church

every damn Sunday morning all summer long,
no matter how crazy hot, no matter
if my best friend Bernadette is fixin’ to go

waterskiing on Black Lake instead,
worse thing about that being the snakes
you might wake falling in the wrong spot,

but I’d still pick some dozing water moccasins
over this weekly ecclesiastical misery.
Any minor road accident would be welcome

I pray, I pray we hit a huge nine-banded
armagorilla if it means I don’t have to go
to Confession today, having traded

The Examination of Conscience last night
for finishing Catcher in the Rye under the covers,
accompanied by muffled laughs from Johnny Carson

in my parents’ bedroom. Okay. Pinched
my brother, lied to Mama, ate my best
friend’s Twinkie. Wished and wished

that I was the pretty one, instead of her.

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By Sydney Lea

An old man sluggishly waves a hand.
He looks spellbound, as if by an apparition:
A stranger, me, in a place few visit.
I’m sidetracked into my own odd spell—
Both sadness at bleakness and fascination.
There’s a sign in another dooryard, bizarre:
Atrini, World’s Finest Files.

A softball arcs on the blistered common,
A father pitching, a son at bat.
One newer car, a Buick, glitters
Like gemstone in front of a postage-stamp store.
Back lots full of witch-grass show unwheeled pickups
Dead amid whips of lilac and sumac.
I drive out of town past further signs:

BECKYS TRUCKERS HEAVEN ONE MILE
COME IN AND HAVE A “CUP” WITH BECK
BECKYS CLOSED FOR RENOVATION
Its windows, boarded over with wanes,
In brush beside it, a bedspring, a dryer.
I notice a black cat eyeing a bird
On its roof, too high for him to consider.

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By Nancy Miller Gomez

was after the memorial, her laptop propped on the table
cluttered with half-empty teacups and books
as her mother’s body was buried two time zones over

in Louisiana. After the eulogies and prayers,
and the few people standing graveside walked away
and all the others clicked off, there was nothing to do.

But she couldn’t bring herself to close the screen.
So she sat a long time watching her own face
looking back, and imagined she was her mother,

and watched to see what her mother would have seen
if she’d been there, and in her expression
she could see the love she knew her mother had felt

that last time they’d talked. And then she was crying
and watching herself cry—as if she was her mother,
and the connection was like a counterweight

she could carry, as though an infinity mirror
had opened inside her. It didn’t matter then,
if she hit the red button that said “End.”

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By Nancy Miller Gomez

I used to keep old black-and-white photos in my wallet.
They weren’t people I knew, just snapshots of strangers

fished out of a shoebox at a junk store: dark-eyed men
in bomber jackets leaning against muscle cars, or sitting

astride a tractor wearing khakis and an undershirt, a pencil
of mustache above their lip. Women with cat-eyed glasses,

dressed up in feathered hats for a night of gin rickeys,
arms draped across each other’s shoulders and angling

for the camera. Even in grayscale I could see their cheeks
were rouged and their lips were slick with lipstick.

Sometimes I would take these people out and show them
to someone I’d just met. This is my family, I’d say

and watch as they shuffled through the pile of strangers
politely noting how nice-looking they were.

I don’t know why I did this. But it felt good
that all anyone could ever know of me was what I was

willing to show them. This heavyset blonde posing
on the steps of a California bungalow wearing a fur coat

in the obvious heat of summer. These children splashing
in a kiddie pool on a lawn cluttered with beach balls

and hula hoops, a spray of water suspended mid-air
as the camera clicked on the girl’s congenial scream,

her brother’s swashbuckling grin, while father watches
from a folding chair, a beaming fat baby on his lap.

I keep them ready, these people I don’t know. That’s me
I say, pointing at the fat baby. I was happy then.

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By Nancy Miller Gomez

—a mi esposo

I appropriate your tongue,
your lips, your teeth, the smooth
inner skin of your cheek.

I appropriate your rolled r’s,
and soft v’s, the way you say
wolf without the letter L

(the plural of which is wooves).
I claim the patch of hair
in the small of your back,

your brown skin, your mother’s molé.
I appropriate your mother,
rename her La Loca. I appropriate

your appropriators, the conquistadors
who came with their archangels
and saints, Our Lady of Guadalupe

with a chisel of moon
at her feet. I descend the ladder
of your lineage, past missionaries

and rancheros to inhabit your ancestors’
ancestors, the Nuhuatl gods
with feathered names I’ve learned

to pronounce. Coatlicue, the mother
of mortals, Huiztlilopotchli—
the hummingbird patron of War,

Tialoc—he who makes things sprout.
I appropriate sugar skulls and mezcal,
Día de los Muertos. Your pyramids

and painters, your Kahlo and Orozco.
Your poets, Octavio and Carlos.
I take your lowriders

and La Raza, the happy/sad
ting of mariachis singing.
I appropriate each sweet bite

of pan dulce and tres leches
and eat your street tacos
smothered with guac and tapatía.

I’ll take la plaza with its bandstand
and white ibis, the man selling
balloons and churros. And words,

nights filled with appropriated
besitos y sonrisas. Abrazos
and the rest of the Mexican lexicon,

all mine. I’ll take your lime and salt,
your fire and fault lines. And our son,
see where I have appropriated

your blood, your eyes, your love
of basketball, the sport you say
your people created, a game

played by the victors
with the decapitated heads
of their victims.

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By Nancy Miller Gomez

A songbird mimicking the sounds
of emergency sirens has been
caught on video . . . —CNN

A starling has taught himself to sing
like an ambulance. Now the air is filled

with emergencies. Whee-o, whee-o, high and low,
a fire truck rides out of a mockingbird’s mouth.

Grackles impersonate police cars. They dive-bomb
the precinct parking lot, bashing their beaks

into the rearview mirrors of their rivals.
The magpie knows a lovely air raid. Now

she trills like a helicopter, next a chain saw,
then an AK-47. The quail stop, drop

and cower. Take-CO-ver they cantillate.
Whee-o, whee-o, high and low. Juncos,

pass to Vireos. Catbirds steal the flow.
The chickadees have gone on lockdown.

They bore like bullets through the bleeding bark
of the cedars. Crows reload from rooftops.

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By Emily Wheeler

A romance developed in my sixtieth year,
which gave me hope, perhaps inane,
surely extreme, especially in my verse,
and affirmed principles of affection and cheer.

My lover was tender, our love serious, useful.
It was as if in the afternoon, gray, crepuscular
an angel had arrived! And we both so secular!
Of course we never spoke of death, its easeful

nest, or the unlikelihood we’d ever alight
together in the tall trees or, quivering,
fly off at the same moment, but that was alright,

because, whenever new or found or at least not lost,
desire adds a drop to the earth’s thousand rivers
and briefly greens the grave, its bed of moss.

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