by Anuja Ghimire

in the year that I believe in anything
a boy whispers in school
lightning strikes parents if children lie
I climb into your bed in our flat
my cold back on the wall stained with rain
water releases smell of cement
you don’t fold me like the tucked in rupees
in the elastic edge of your petticoat
your breath moves in small clouds
night is long and lonely without dreams
death fills the room like mold
I latch on the crevice of your stomach
when the edge of your sari falls with the sky



____

Nepal-born Anuja Ghimire writes poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. She is the author of Kathmandu (Unsolicited Press, 2020) and two poetry books in Nepali. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she works as a senior publisher in an online learning company. She reads poetry for Up the Staircase Quarterly and enjoys teaching poetry to children in summer camps. Her work found home in print and online journals and anthologies in Nepal, U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Scotland, India, and Bangladesh. She lives near Dallas, Texas with her husband and two children.

by Emily Benson

Rainwater piles up at the foundation
Melting the mud and clay 
Into treacherous sinkholes
The branches of the Live Oak are slick and green,
Dripping, ball moss sprouts ferocious tendrils
While the vibrant rooster of mysterious origins
Which appeared two days ago
Hides from this late-winter deluge
And the raccoons on the roof are quiet in the chill nights
Down by the wild rushing creek
The prickly pears gulp what they can
But the little lime lizards are nowhere to be seen
Not enough heat in their rocks without sun
And while the swans with their great white wings
Glide the lake unconcerned,
The pigeons and I are miserable


____

Emily Benson (she/her) writes poems of humanity, longing, and nature. She lives in Western New York with her husband and two sons. Ms. Benson has previously been published by The Esthetic Apostle, Unstamatic, Airlie Press, Five Minutes, High Shelf Press, Sad Girls Club Literary Blog, and in Hey, I’m Alive Magazine. Her work can be found at www.emilybensonpoet.com.

by Leslie Grollman

                                                                      Frayed laces on my running shoes
                                                                A snagged sock
                                                     Too-long fingernails clicking keys
 
A sunrise tries
                                              A rain puddles the walkway

            Tighten the hoodie, the wind

Too early for traffic      never too late for loss

                                                                   As if another chance

A day begins that way

Gulls soaring in formation
A cloud here and there
                          dispersing as if to disengage
            As if I could kin a cloud

                               Overripe bananas on the windowsill, again

                                                Midnight Mac-’n-cheese-childlike-wonder

                   Still and all, breath

Breath of a hard return
                               A barely-there look     

                   Breathe

     Brie on sourdough
     Espresso, black and sweet

               The heat

                                  As if to clip coupons like they were an answer
                                  As if      a soluble vitamin brought the real sun
                                  As if              cobbles weren’t begging me stay
                                  As if                          mom-and-apple-pie sated                                     
                                  As if                                            the night fatigued
                                  As if                                                  it all won’t end




____

Leslie Grollman’s work appears in Yolk, Spoken Word Scratch Night, Writing Utopia 2020 Anthology, The Selkie, Together: An Anthology, Thimble, Nailed, Pathos, From Arthur’s Seat, other publications, and is forthcoming. Leslie was chosen to be a reader for one of Octopus Books’ open reading periods. She holds an MSc Creative Writing, Poetry, with Distinction, from the University of Edinburgh.

 by Leslie Grollman
  

To want the shape of your body in my hand


To rock as in chanting as in forgetting my name


A novice unsure of how unsure of timing


How to blue the bronze of can’t 
          into a summer’s moon, into a naked swim 
 

A sculptor carves too deep into the marble then a debt is owed 


How do I swim spiraling currents deep yet debt-free  


What if I retract one hand to your two extended


What if only half is honey is tongue is morning moss 


Sometimes I may mistake my Self for hightide


What if you are mantis and I want malachite


Sometimes I feel like mountain water: crisp and fresh, babbling 
        in small streams, bubbling between stones and grasses bulging


I leave a suitcase full in case an avalanche comes  


What if silk fails   



What if we repeat ourselves: what if we run out
         of stories: we are not Scheherazade


Sometimes I may mistake you for a sand-filled empty,
        abandon you on a red plaid blanket  


Then what if my forgiveness hasn’t forgiven me

 
When I place my hand on your plumed flesh, close my eyes, I see our end

                        
                        What is the half-life of a taste  


Then water rushes down a mountain, there is no time to hide


To weep is to wander in place


                        I brush my hair pretending it cascades

Leslie Grollman’s work appears in Yolk, Spoken Word Scratch Night, Writing Utopia 2020 Anthology, The Selkie, Together: An Anthology, Thimble, Nailed, Pathos, From Arthur’s Seat, other publications, and is forthcoming. Leslie was chosen to be a reader for one of Octopus Books’ open reading periods. She holds an MSc Creative Writing, Poetry, with Distinction, from the University of Edinburgh.

by Sara Judy

I will call you plum and overripe peach, 
I will call you a stone fruit, heart pit, bitter pith
sour flesh, burst apart fruit, sun warm fruit
I will call you cherry-that-scrapes-its-thin-skin-open,
apricot-so-sweet-it-offers-sweetness-to-the-air,
ready to pick now, just right now, three for a dollar the
market is about to close now, no time to feel with your fingers
every one in the box with the right pressure to know—oh 
the plums, the plums, the plums that bruise against each other
the plums that will not make it to the fridge the plums 
the plums that press back under my hand, an offering offering:

I will call you every summer ripe thing I will 
I will call you every juice running down
I will refuse to lick it clean

Sara Judy is a poet and PhD candidate in English the University of Notre Dame, where she studies contemporary U.S. poetry and poetics, and religion. Her writing has appeared in Adroit, EcoTheo Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @sarajudym.

Pirenópolis, Goiás

by Kim Sousa

I hold him in my lap. 
We play I spy, making shapes
of the rocks rising out of the water:
eu vejo um grande crocodilo, 
eu vejo um grande nariz—
o que ele ‘tá cheirando? 
Seus pés? Mas que chulé! 
I kiss his toes. 
His curls tickle my face 
when he throws his head back. 
He smells like coconut oil 
and wet earth. 
I made him from clay.
I can only look forward,
to wherever the water rushes. 
To the single palm rising up
as the tallest tree
against a cloudless sky. 
I can’t turn back, to where he isn’t. 
The monkeys above me 
chitter a warning, 
and a procession of neighbors
breaks through the mist.
Just like that, the child falls 
from my lap and down
into the rushing water. 
Down to where a man drowned, 
pulled by the current. Held
under by something strong
and invisible as teaching 
a phantom child his curls 
make a crown. His wet footprints 
still stamped on the rocks
as past-future improbabilities.
To know the current is there, 
to choose not to jump. 

Kim Sousa (she/they) is a queer Brazilian American poet, editor and open border radical. She was born in Goiânia, Goiás and immigrated to Austin, Texas with her family at age five. Her poems can be found in Poet Lore, EcoTheo Review, The Boiler, The Missouri Review, [PANK] Magazine’s Latinx Lit Celebration, Harvard’s PALABRITAS, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY, is the winner of Black Lawrence Press’ 2020 St. Lawrence First Book Prize and is forthcoming July 2022. Along with Até Mais: Until More, an Anthology of Latinx Futurisms (forthcoming, Deep Vellum Books), she is the co-editor of the limited-run anthology of immigrant and first-generation poetry, No Tender Fences, which donated 100% of its proceeds to the immigrant advocacy network, RAICES Texas. You can find Kim at http://www.kimsousawrites.com and on Twitter @kimsoandso and @LatinxFuturisms.

by Kim Sousa

Today the planets say Don’t do: 
inadequacy, assuming the worst, 
erosion. And I have already slipped
into some antithetical ether. See, 
at the blackboard of this country, 
I’m clapping erasers and choking.
Erasing my own name. 
However it’s pronounced here, I’ll stop
pushing back. All my friends
are brilliant and American. 
My country was mined 
for its emeralds and my kin. 
I’m still coughing up dust and bone. 
Before the first star, 
the river dolphin is still a man 
and my tio still kisses every tomb. 
All the uncles before him underground, 
passing palm wine and sweet bread
between their blue-lit palms. 
How was it my forehead never 
was kissed by an ancestor—not holy
water, either. Before my mud 
was fully baked—a border. 
They say when we cross
over, we wake in The River. 
My pockets full of simple stones, 
unskipped. My memory unrecovered, 
redacted and stamped by Some Government Seal. 
What if my crossings are already spent?
Already, the dead in the leaves turn away, 
their sibilant voices now only wind. 
And the witch moth that lands beside me
won’t answer: quem é? 

Kim Sousa (she/they) is a queer Brazilian American poet, editor and open border radical. She was born in Goiânia, Goiás and immigrated to Austin, Texas with her family at age five. Her poems can be found in Poet Lore, EcoTheo Review, The Boiler, The Missouri Review, [PANK] Magazine’s Latinx Lit Celebration, Harvard’s PALABRITAS, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY, is the winner of Black Lawrence Press’ 2020 St. Lawrence First Book Prize and is forthcoming July 2022. Along with Até Mais: Until More, an Anthology of Latinx Futurisms (forthcoming, Deep Vellum Books), she is the co-editor of the limited-run anthology of immigrant and first-generation poetry, No Tender Fences, which donated 100% of its proceeds to the immigrant advocacy network, RAICES Texas. You can find Kim at http://www.kimsousawrites.com and on Twitter @kimsoandso and @LatinxFuturisms.

by Linda Umans

Slingbacks and clingy skirt
clop-clopping toward the train
seeing myself ridiculous,
dressed-up horse on a
dusty Sicilian road.

Rolling hips, sexual
interest an absentee,
not shocking these days, but
vivid for the sad ride home.
Too bad I’m just recalling
a Leonard Cohen lyric,
now mine, the horror 
and comfort of I’ll
never have to lose it again.


Still 
maybe 
many clouds to come
for me
in the C train container
before it becomes a coral reef.

Or maybe 
this imagined end: 

I can take a seat, 
be a George Segal figure
reading eternally,
while sea bass, bluefish, flounder,
mussels, swim
attach around.

Linda Umans taught for many years in the public schools of New York City where she lives and writes. Recent publications include poems in Spillway, Composite {Arts Magazine}, DIALOGIST, The Maine Review, Gris-Gris, The Broadkill Review, 2 Bridges Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Seneca Review, and pieces in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

by Natalie Marino

That morning when the window
was so drenched with sun

we thought some things do last
forever, that our mouths

would not become
hard like bone.

Our red sleds rode
down  down  down

the slippery snow—
it was perfect

like California’s sweet
strawberries in winter.

Our bodies will remember
for us when we find our former

selves in the gray silence
of old photographs.

We will fill the empty spaces
with the loud colors of paper

marigolds.

Natalie Marino is a poet, physician, and mother. Her work appears in Barren Magazine, Capsule Stories, Dust Poetry Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Leon Literary Review, Literary Mama, Moria Online, and elsewhere. She also reads poetry submissions for Bracken Magazine. She lives in California with her husband and two daughters.

by Natalie Marino

for my mother, Cindy Marlene Marino

tiger stripes
made it halfway
between wild animal
and primordial tree.

You cut into
the red heart
of its flesh
and it called you

from the Mexican
summer, so hot
that the rain rose
above the street soon

after it fell.
You thirsted
for its cool water
even after

you were warned
of the dysentery.
Now the butterflies
start their migration

to fields of flowers,
leaving you alone.
You think back
to that season

of quiet eating
when no one
needed to discuss
the ends of evenings.

Natalie Marino is a poet, physician, and mother. Her work appears in Barren Magazine, Capsule Stories, Dust Poetry Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Leon Literary Review, Literary Mama, Moria Online, and elsewhere. She also reads poetry submissions for Bracken Magazine. She lives in California with her husband and two daughters.