By Louise Robertson

                 Sometimes I,   
                            I mean you,
                I mean I,
are
           like an advil stuck
in a pocket of my/your throat

           and I/you wonder if I,
                       I mean you,
           I mean I,

                       am dissolving there—
                                   easing the ligaments,
                       except the body

isn’t eased, nor ligaments
             hushed and I can still feel you,
I mean me,

                                    I mean you
                       there in the neck
                                   waiting, in fact,

hard as a choke.

By Louise Robertson

The Prius should make a noise
as it creeps behind school children
scattering across the road,
sunlight and leaf shadows waving
around them.
It should be, as one petition
suggested to Toyota,
the sound of the Jetson car,
a whirr and a dapple of a sound.
But Toyota has done nothing — nothing.
The cars glide out each year,
shark silent.

When I was 11, at the school trip to Kings Dominion,
standing next to a plastic statue of George,
Maria Framingham declared she
had lost a $10 bill and so of course I checked my back pocket
and of course my $10 bill slipped out. Maria
picked it up and said she found her
$10 and I made no sound
and slunk away, my inner petitioner
demanding, “Hey, make a noise!”
And my inner Toyota doing nothing — nothing.

By Melissa Bowers

5.
I am in a restaurant when I learn Rob has a wife. It shouldn’t matter, since I’m already a wife, too—Timothy sits across from me, cutting a chicken strip into toddler-sized bites between swigs of his craft beer—but something catches in my chest at the sound of Rob’s name. Maybe it’s because Timothy and I are hardly speaking at the moment, or maybe it’s because of the person delivering the news.

Amaya is supposed to be a ghost from the past. She is not meant to materialize inside the life I have now, this many years after college, as she exits Timothy’s favorite burger place. I don’t notice her until she sidles over and leans against the edge of our table, runs an invasive finger around its glossy tiles, slowly, as if she’s trying to seduce them one by one. We exchange pleasantries: Nice to see you. Yes, it’s been forever. What are you up to these days?

“By the way, Rob got married,” Amaya tells me. “She looks a lot like you, actually—brown hair, kind of wavy. They have a daughter.”

She winces a little when she says it, in sympathy or solidarity, as though we both have the right to feel jealous. Then she tsk-tsks and sets her lips in a thin, apologetic line, flutters her fingers over her shoulder: “‘Bye, honey.” The finality of her hips swaying toward the door.

“That was the Amaya?” Timothy asks through a mouthful of ground meat.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re fighting.”

By Matthew Tuckner

What Sappho calls 
the desiremind or the couragesoul  
I call the swirling Chesapeake Bay 
of my brain and sure
you could call the tugboat 
trawling through the brackish waters 
desire and yes 
you could call the striped bass 
sourcing speed from the tugboat’s wake 
courage and sure 
you could call the crushed beer can 
scything the surf the mind and yes
the soul looks like a blue crab
when I close my eyes to picture it 
aquamarine claw    olive-green shell
I can’t quite place 
the bird tipping its beak into the bay
to capture an absent worm 
absent because fields 
of eelgrass are emptied daily 
by giant pesticidal blooms 
heaps of dead fish 
falling upwards
towards the surface 
but in placing the bird
a red knot    a piping plover
one could easily mistake it for 
the faculties of the soul 
particularly the appetites
so many Plato doesn’t even bother
to tally them though he does
warn of their penchant for battle
the appetites who are hard to see 
when they stand still 
like the piping plover for whom 
they are often mistaken 
yes I’ve been out combing
the waters for a new bird 
one whose bright rusty throat 
and striped back better represent
those flightier emotions
not even Sappho 
has the words for 
is it the tundra swan 
with ass upended and neck submerged
searching for the eelgrass
that isn’t there 
the tundra swan that birdwatchers 
who don’t know better
call suicidal ideation 
maybe the tawny-throated dotterel
is the one for me 
if I cover my left eye 
and squint my right the bird looks like 
the dysmorphia that keeps me 
out of the view of most mirrors
just look at this dotterel
can’t you see the pointed beak
that just screams 
I want to be your worst best friend
a voice that sings
come breach that little bay
of yours come tie the sky together with
us birds a pointed beak that’s just dying 
to be the Orpheus
to your Eurydice the kind of bird
that wants to kickstart
your katabasis a word
that if I’m reading the Greek correctly
can be widely defined as a descent 
of any kind such as moving downhill 
the sinking of the sun
a military retreat 
clinical depression
a trip to the underworld
or a journey to the coast

By Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Any biography of Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1944), however short, should attempt to speak to her desire to define herself and her refusal to be defined by others. For her, social and artistic identity was something to be chosen and cultivated, but in the times in which she lived, identity ascribed by others was a matter of life and death.  Born Zuzanna Polina Gincburg in Kiev in 1917, she fled shortly after the Russian Revolution with her family to the border town of Równe in Volhynia (present day Rivne, Ukraine), which was at one point part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was about to become Polish again in 1920.  The destination was not accidental: it was the town where her Russian-speaking maternal grandparents were well-ensconced.  Yet this provincial capital proved too confining for her parents, who abandoned her to the care of her grandmother: her father leaving for Berlin when Ginczanka was three and her mother for Pamplona, Spain after she remarried.  Równe, a multi-ethnic city, was Ginczanka’s childhood home and it was there she attended a French pre-school and Polish elementary school and high school.  She adopted the name Ginczanka, and though Russian was her native tongue,  chose Polish as her language of poetic expression. Yet she was never able to obtain Polish citizenship and remained stateless throughout her life.

By Kelly Rowe

In the study that a child playing hide and seek
once called the messy room,
in a drawer, in a manila envelope, still sealed,
I’ve filed the police report on how you died.
It will stay put: it will age, though you don’t.
I’ll open it today.
I’ll never open it.

Here, photographs spill out of boxes, and you
return, a small boy perched on a stoop
in tiger pajamas. You grin, flashing
little white cub teeth; you claw at the blue sky
beyond a black and white world.
You are about to climb a tree, to grow
feathers, to rise, to become cloud.

By Hannah Marshall

The lives of the briefly famous, the fortunes
sunk into places rich people call home.
What they might tear down,
what they deem worth standing.

Perhaps it is their need for comfort
which makes these calls.
The dumpster departs,
and they are clean.

For me on Tuesday night,
it’s all hypothetical; I owned a house once
for a year, fixed it up, decided to sell.
I rent now, happy

to call the landlord when the shower handle breaks
or a tree falls on the telephone line.
Through all the places I’ve lived as an adult—four rentals
and that one home I briefly owned—

By Rachel A. Hicks

I’m an Appalachian beauty queen,
a capable kitten with smooth birthing hips.
Applaud the cinema kitty cat caught in the smoke ring.

I rule over Kentucky junkyards, zoom in as I sit on refrigerator thrones,
play pianos by the highway, cigarette-thin fingers give a tinkle tankle of a tune
perking ears that belong to someone twenty years ago.
The honeysuckle sweetness of my fingertips, syrupy sweet on the dirt keys,
greasing up the notes, F, E, B & so on.

Underneath the toasters & the books from all those rummage sales
sits some hot ghost of a memory. Smitten kitten, the smell of trash
makes me think of our place & the breeze outside is the same one
I feel at night when trains go by.

Stack the broken binds of hymnals for a stage, wrap, rip, some leaves, some dirt,
pack, perch, pack it all in, real tight, until the only clumps to fall
from my deciduous crown are intentional. A tap dance for you, a finale
with hula-hooping hubcaps & juggling light bulbs. I sing in a rusty tune,
decaying notes in the keys of D, C, G & so on.

By Danie Shokoohi

When the doctor found the tumor in his brain, when the surgery was first scheduled but not yet scalpeled, before the poorly fitted tracheostomy tube which introduced the sepsis, your father forbade you from coming to Connecticut. He didn’t want you to see him like that, he said. That when your grandfather died, your father could only picture him ill and threadbare in a hospital bed. He did not want that for you, if he didn’t make it. 

“No.” You lifted your laptop from the coffee table and clicked your internet browser. “Absolutely not. I’m pulling up Delta.” The ticket would be expensive from Iowa City, but you would pay anything to be there.

He told you that you could visit when he was well again, for Thanksgiving, maybe. “Look, Kimmy,” he said. “I got some bad apples, but we can still make applesauce out of them. It’ll be okay. The surgeon’s good. I’ll have to do some PT, but I won’t lose any cognitive function. That’s pretty good applesauce.”

You wanted to tell him there was nothing applesauce about a brain tumor. That you didn’t care how small, or how easy the recovery, or how experienced the doctor. You wanted to tell him that twenty-two was too young to be fatherless. If it was your Iranian mother, you would have had permission to scream and rip hair from your scalp and weep. But he wasn’t one for big sentiments, your father. He was American. So you laughed because you knew he wanted you to laugh.

After the phone call, you drove to the grocery store and picked out a jar of applesauce. It sat in your cupboard through his entire sickness, and you ate a spoonful a day as if it could keep him safe.

By: Mary Ardery

Driving the group back after a wet July week in the woods,
a week with a bulimia watch for a woman who’d trained herself

to purge so quickly, so quietly, she did it between numbers
when she counted aloud as she peed, we came across

a raccoon in the center of our lane. Run over, still alive.
I stopped the van. I knew the worst injuries are internal.

The raccoon’s eyes were moving toward glassy. Slow blinks.
Someone said, Mary, you have to put it out of its misery.

I considered the tires, my hands, the knife in my backpack,
then I gripped the wheel and guided us, slowly,

onto the shoulder instead. A wide, weak berth.
No one said a word. I glanced at the fading raccoon

in the rearview mirror. My worn-out body—
its overripe smell seemed suddenly sharper.

That night I dreamt a flood. A torrent of water, the street
a river. A child’s empty car seat rushed by on its side

while I stood at my window just watching. Countless times,
women asked me simple enough questions, but I was winding

through mountain roads. I was treading water. I was barely
afloat. I told them not now and I turned up the music,

spinning the volume knob like a planet about to break orbit.

By Leila Mohr

We are walking along the dunes at Corn Hill Beach with my grandfather, Baba. The sun is broiling our backs, and there aren’t any clouds. We smell like suntan lotion and laundered clothes. Baba breathes heavily as he walks. He wears clean sneakers with white socks pulled halfway up his calves. I have a new pair of flip-flops in one hand, my toes seeping into the sand. My brother runs ahead, an inflatable red lobster tucked under his arm.

We were supposed to leave the Cape a week ago to go back home to our mother, but we are still here. At night, after we’ve been bathed and fed, my grandparents fight about what to do with us. The day camp with the dreadlocked artist has ended; neither of us did well with tennis.                        

Wyatt is eight, and I am ten. We sleep in bunk beds in my grandparents’ renovated wing. When I close my eyes, I hear large ice cubes fill my grandmother’s glass, the freezer open and close. We have a whole dresser of new clothes they’ve bought us, some colorful toys in a wicker basket. If they yell at each other loudly enough, Wyatt sniffles and cries. “Be quiet,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t understand. On my back, I lie as still as I can be in the top bunk, pretending I’m frozen in glass. If my grandmother hears my brother cry and peeks into the room, she’ll think that I’m asleep.

“Over here,” Baba says, and we move toward the water. He’s packed a cooler with Goldfish and Milano cookies, juice boxes, and cans of Coke. His white hair sneaks out the back of his baseball cap. Wyatt throws his shirt off and runs into the water, thrashing wildly in the waves. Baba takes off his shoes and socks carefully. He looks far out into the ocean, his soft skin glistening in the sun. The waves crash onto the sand, and the wind twirls through my hair.

Last week, when I asked my grandmother why we weren’t going back home to our mother, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Your mother is busy,” she said. She was staring at herself in the mirror of her bathroom, fluffing her hair. “She’s writing a paper for her Statistics class.” My grandmother sprayed perfume on her wrists and then rubbed them together. Her gold bracelets slid down her arm. “She needs more time.”      

“Don’t you want to go in the water?” Baba says.

The truth is I am afraid of swimming, but I get up and walk slowly through the thick sand, sitting down at the water’s edge. Wyatt is pretending to be a shark, flapping his hands like fins and growling. We are two different islands; we almost can’t see each other.

*             *             *

By Jessica Pierce

And he admires that probability. It’s far more likely
than the chance of us being here as who we are; someone calculated that
as about 400 trillion to one. He admires this, too, and how the sun

sits on our shoulders right now. Under the eaves of that sturdy-as-hell roof,
the common ariel hornet tucked her nest for the summer.
I was about to describe the season as brief,

but that is only how my stuttering synapses
process time. So, I assure myself that my father will live damn close
to forever, with a quick sidestep to knock on the closest tree and shush

any wisp of a god still hovering nearby. The bit of sun moves,
so we move. Dolichovespula arenaria probably notes
where our ungainly grounded bodies take up space

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

I cut the crowd loose, I stack the deck twice
I feed you shrimp cocktail
I sort through the loose mail
When it rains, it worms and we blow the house down
Wishing on the wick
I am the boss of this clique!

My uniform is a pebble, my mouth
Hums trouble. All I do is stay inside
One-legged, I hide
In the clutter of my mothers
Turning red with permanent marker
Wasting hours with Colonel Mustard

Eating ring-dings for dinner
Singing happy birthday forever
On Facebook, searching father
Then deleting my browser
Faceless, I cower and wave to the mirror
Eating the angel hair of the dog

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

In the seventh grade we debated gay marriage. I was con.
I stayed home. Kept my hair in a braid and kept my braid
to myself. Tucked my name like a secret up my sleeve.
Wore hideous loafers. Ate full-sized boxes of Twizzlers.
Became rigid, a painting. Still Life with Social Studies.
My skullcap, full of doves. My face, a hot button.
Press it! Pierce my timid ears. In the bathroom eating
a turkey sandwich and Jenny dragging my zipper down
to see what was there. Con: my whole life riding
on a hyphen. Con: my hands blue with luck. An eyelash
on my finger. Two of anything can build a bridge.
The love makes me lonely. The love makes my family.
A slogan of roses. A crown of sugar ants
eating through the gymnasium floor.

By Alyssandra Tobin

paul says                                careful with the benzos  
& I’m like                                                  I think of you
whenever                 my therapist brings em up      &
he’s like aww                     dunno if sweet’s the word                     
but it’s nice                                        to be thought of   

okay    sure     let everyone see  my cute belly     let
everyone know                    I covet some people I’m
supposed to hate                       paul’s stupid meth’d
out calls unbearable       his empty bottles his days
& months       wild-eyed                  & away

once                                we wore each others jeans  
his tiny gold waist                   in my teen girl pants 
now    on the phone                      he says what’s up
ya fuckin guinea!           he teaches me to play iron
man      he gives me that   ninth step apology  that
making                                  of meandering amends   

me     so  scared  of  dying                &  him  always                                     
chest deep in it                          I sit so quietly       a
very good dog                        in her dim little room      
but he            gives me cocky courage                  he
gives me  warm love        that boston street salt
kinda love              that let’s never brawl kinda love    
that I’ll kiss your dirt love          that I’ll help you lie
to chicks love       that mall parking lot love      that
if I’m a blight                     you’re a blight kinda love    
that noogie     that cackle      that snakebite     that
augur        that    yeah                          I’ll call you on
your bullshit pastures               if you call me when
my dumb pig jumps her sty         off to somewhere
cleaner than both                    our loud green yards

By Alex Howe

–for Darcie Wilder

Turn to Kristen Bell and ask if you should do something a little
reckless. “You know the world is ending, right?” She’s not the
person you go to when you want to be talked out of something.
That’s what probation officers are for. Kristen Bell doesn’t think
people take yolo seriously enough. It’s tough to argue with her. She
says, “What’s a little reckless?” You tell her you’ve always loved
her. Love-loved. She laughs. “That makes sense. No offense.”
You’re starting to have second thoughts about flying this plane into
Exxon headquarters. You’re starting to panic. Name three objects in
the cockpit. Name an animal that cloud resembles. Estimate the
plunging angle of descent. As if sensing your turbulence, Kristen
Bell says, “Have you ever seen First Reformed? With Ethan
Hawke?” “Daddy,” you respond. “Exactly,” she whispers. “Daddy.”