Mud Season Review
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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Illegal
Imagining a landscape is easy
What is not
Is grappling with its spirit and pull.
In the Piazza del Signoria…
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Fragments
Under the deepest, darkest sky,
I drive home. Only the stars
tacked across its bruise-blue
surface keep it from falling,
collapsing around me like a sheet…
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Two Poems
The whisper
Wicks from her lips.
A soothing salve.
She bends, twists,
Feet touching the walls…
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My mom found my condoms
I’m eight hundred miles away
and my family is painting over the red
walls of teenage bedroom/boudoir,
boxing up
the contents of my flower-knobbed…
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A bowl of oranges
with you away
I sleep a lot
and not often alone.
my bedroom is a bowl of oranges…
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Two Poems
Even the creeping myrtle
doesn’t stand a chance against
the lily-of-the-valley
as it storms the lawn, a cluster
of dark-green lanceolate leaves…
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Snowdrift
It’s dark when she wakes
darker than she has gone before.
It’s not a blanket or a cage
but rather the stark dissent
of all that’s missing…
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My Sister Posing in Front of the Arno
If it weren’t for the scrunchie
around your wrist and the teal
water bottle in the picture,
you could be Botticelli’s
Venus. Tawny hair swept…
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Chthonic
By Jonathan Louis Duckworth
How soothing to picture
my grandfather planted like a seed
in the crust
of the other continent
we call the older one…
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Defense of Dysfunction
By Crystal J. Zanders
My brother and I used to fight over the remote.
We would spend hours after school
before Mama got home, arms locked in battle.
If you let go, you lost…
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