Mud Season ReviewSonnet for Fat Purple Figs by Michelle Hulan After Sylvia Plath If the figs on this tree represent a life left unexplored, I’ll pluck dozens, dropping the fat purple ones in the folds of my shirt. I will sit in the shadow of the branches & let the juice rest on my tongue, drip down […]
Poetry by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí
False Jasmine
By Christine Butterworth-McDermott
Think honey./
Think suckle./
They say if you dream/
of such blooms, it spells/
good fortune in love/
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To Drink
By Tomas Nieto
The raft of my two hands/
slide together, knuckle to knuckle,/
buckling. The cool water collects/
in the center. I lift this small sea…
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Ennui for Scenes Garnered While In Bed
By Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Are all of us birds enough?/
There is a glowing kindness in my eyes if you look well./
I don’t want to be that boy imprisoned by conscience…
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Wow! Signal Dredging Light
By Joel Peckham
When it comes, it finds me shin-deep in our creek as I bend my knees, lock elbows/and strain to dig down and in, and/lift the tall grass from the water, heavy…
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After Waking
By Karthik Sethuraman
Flame, hushed to embers, exhaled into a final/syllable of smoke. Can I call this a prayer? A wet/wick, sesame oil, matches under straw, and/when I lock the door to the house, I remind myself…
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Language
By Nadia Alexis
The ocean swallowed a father./My father’s father whole. His father ate/ too many hearts of chicken & women. He ate/his children. My father, one of them./By the time my mother & father walked…
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Nude Study from Life, Lee Krasner, 1938
By Lisa Beech Hartz
Crossing 8th Street in the rain Igor laughed, /
dropped your hand. I like being with an ugly woman. / Angle of the streetlight, silvering everything, even / his careless mouth. It makes me feel more handsome.…
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Where it Hunts
By Kelly Weber
On a day still half-winter, I hike a trail through the short grass prairie on the edge of town named for / a woman who willed that it be preserved. Meadowlarks whistle yellow holes in the air from the posts / rising out of the ground. Ripples circle outward from the mallards floating in the shallow pools…
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It Makes You Wait for It
By John Leonard
I feel like I’m stuck in a rural Texas town
with no gas money to get myself home,
and if I kept walking until I found a new town,
it would probably be the same town…
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Shoshana’s Mother
By Joshua Sassoon Orol
אמא של שושנה
How does a mother teach a son
about the body of a woman?
A teen in need of a shave
I pop open
the microwave…
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Mother Darling Visits the States
By Alexa Doran
It’s not that the sky here isn’t blue
but that something has to asphyxiate to turn that hue.
I was so sure New England would fit like a skin… Read more
Obituary for Gerald
By Arjun Parikh
Gerald went by Gerald even when he was young. As a boy he set out to read the entire encyclopedia. He was adamant about doing only one thing at a time. In his twenties he played Russian roulette on Sundays…
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The Apologetics of Leaving
By Naomie Jean-Pierre
a leaving
begins in the
calluses on my feet
calcium, hardened on my teeth
laughter ghosts
a smile in disguise beneath my nose…
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Weathervane
By Kristin Macintyre
I am so far away I write you
a postcard from the next room,
say there is a whole
grove of plum trees
on the rooftop – neat little rows of stones
fruit above the washroom…
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Drape the Mirrors.
By E. Kristin Anderson
Two months had passed –
the bed was all made;
the doctor on the phone
made an art of simple speech.
Back from the dead
a tiny voice reached…
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THE YEARS COME A-TUMBLING
By Urvashi Bahuguna
It took long hours to fashion a set of wings
out of cardboard and silver foil, to pour glue
out of a blue bottle, paint with a flat brush
to the very edge. My mother punched holes,
slipped drawstrings borrowed from petticoats
and tied them on my back…
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FORDING A RIVER ON HORSEBACK AFTER HEAVY SNOW-MELT
By Robert Rothman
You have to knee her forward, down the sand
embankment, shoes clattering like silver dollars
on the river rock, encouraging words mixed with
spurs, into the freezing wash, the surge…
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After the Antidepressants Stopped Working
By Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad
There is a phrase we use in Farsi
in despair or desperation:
joonam beh labam reseedeh, or
my life has reached my lips,
and how I wished it were true…
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The Small Book of Virtues
By Sandy Coomer
a bitch
in pain knows no better
than to bite the one
that lifts its broken body…
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Ice Cream and Blood
Chromatography was our best chance,
to separate blood from
the ice cream. I see there’s little oil
in the world
to make this love go round…
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A Girl Who Was Born Without a Mother
She could be progeny from another
universe where metal coalesced
with blood and salt—she emerges
with a scattering of nails and rust,
chewing gum and baby hair…
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Unsolicited Advice (About That Boy)
My roommate stops me from tossing
the bananas, already browning,
the rot makes them better
for the stomach to digest…
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Helios
In the smoke of morning, she takes
off the sun’s clothes for me,
holds them up by two fingers,
before letting them fall upon
the earth…
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