OED, v.: 31. Followed by into or to, indicating the result of a change. a. (a) transitive. To cause (a person or thing) to become something else; to change, transform, or convert into something. 

Before this conversion we have to turn  
one’s body; turn foes against one another; turn  
a sentence toward a different cast; turn an instrument  
so precisely now for shaping. We must turn  
as the door turn upon hinges. We must turn thee  
hither, turn thee. We must turn for rest, trying 
each corner of my Bed, / To find if Sleep were there, but Sleep  
was lost. Before changing into, we must twist (an ankle) out  
of position (esp. by landing awkwardly); we must wrench, or  
we must sprain. We must first acknowledge that turning or 
peeling mushrooms is an art that practice alone can attain. 

We must turn about, and we must play. 

Why must progression start first with so much  
practice? Why must practice acknowledge before  
its process so much grief? A clumsy knocking against  
glass, music turned down soft? (Bed turned down; these rocks,  
by custom, turn to beds of down. A bed turned down.) 

What is that which I should turn to? Every door is barr’d 
with gold, and opens but to golden keys. 

This poem started off, once, as birds.

---

Prompt

Write a poem using as many senses of one word as you can.

---

Emily Kramer is an editor and miscellany living in Boston. She received her B.A. in English from Barnard College where she studied with Saskia Hamilton, and her PhD at Boston University’s Editorial Institute, where she created a critical edition of the poems of Arthur Hallam, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

“How could a place so fraught with historical
pain appear to be so ordinary?” 

– Sally Mann, on one of her photographs of
the Tallahatchie River, Deep South series

	
1. Spanish Moss

The dead walk here in the hours just before dawn – when the earth is cool and waiting. Their questions, like Spanish moss, hang in the mist, but there’ll be no answers today. And none tomorrow. That’s why they walk the wet ground – a ground that’s littered with former lives though there are no footprints here – nothing to give away the truth. I’ve heard them in the early hours. Unseen. Moving. I know they’re there. I’ve walked where they do – and I will.

		– after Untitled (Fontainebleau)



2. Something Hidden

I can’t seem to remember 1989. It’s become a lost year. I only remember the kudzu from that year – though I don’t know why. I’ve never done anything remarkable with my life – nothing to stand out – I’ve spent decades, one foot in front of the other – careful not to disturb, not to draw attention or too much scrutiny on my whereabouts or doings – and I’ve done nothing that is deserving of your conversations over coffee or a beer. There’s nothing to talk about here. But I’d give anything to remember. Why is it always ’89? and why kudzu? and the days, endless? Why does no one listen to me? Have I designed the universe this way? I can’t recall – I don’t. Why won’t you answer me? … Maybe the answers are the questions.

– after 1989



3. Cumulonimbus

A storm is coming. Your feet are heavy as you try to slip to safety. Words you wrote will follow you – their anger, perspective, and prediction – will find their podcast, voices explaining why this, why that, and what it all means. The storm is coming – you feel it in your leg. You trudge forward, at least you think it’s forward – though you’ve no sense of direction and no way to find the path because there is no path – only more bog. Snakes are here, but they don’t trouble you. Fog drifts the trees as if to say the message is constant change. You keep going though there is no other side. You are always here, moving, sloshing, but arriving nowhere. And though you can’t really see, the sky is shaping the storm. You know it. It’s coming.

		– after Untitled (Deep South #30: Boney Swamp)



4. Words to Say

These are the words I wanted to say … needed to say – and it’s not like I didn’t have chances to tell the both of you – I had plenty – though I wasted them all – words that you needed to hear but I needed to say, needed to hear them come from my mouth – as if fire had been discovered, as if life were found in deep space, as if clothes hanging in a forgotten closet were suddenly boxed, taped, readied to ship – but with no destination.

		– after Untitled (Fontainebleau Smokestack, Louisiana) 



5. What the River Carries

My deepest fear is a leaf, drifting under overhanging trees in late summer heat, beside a partially submerged, overturned boat (why did no one come back to help, to rescue, to clear) – drifting above smoothed stones and sunken timbers, with lights in windows at night, just beyond the banks, dogs howling in the dark – drifting into voices that are almost saying words. Cranes nesting where the current slows. Sometimes there’s music. A car drives by. Suddenly, I’m standing near a moss-covered path, leading to the river’s edge. I reach for the wet leaf – put it in my pocket. I walk away.

		– after Untitled (Deep South #22)

---

Prompt

View photographs by Sally Mann featured in a short video (13+ minutes) of her Deep South series ( https://youtu.be/5EiW9KIZy-c ). The clip consists of images only – accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Mann’s work in this series is highly evocative and reflective of emotional and psychological states. Select one or more photos and write a poem (any form, traditional or hybrid or narrative in verse) which connects directly or indirectly with the image in Mann’s work or is the result of your reaction to the photo; instead, you may prefer to use the image as the setting for your poem. If you select more than one photo you may wish to write multiple poems or write one poem in multiple sections. Your piece may include references to more than one of Mann’s works.

---

Sam Rasnake is the author of Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press) and Like a Thread to Follow (Cyberwit). His works, nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, have appeared in Wigleaf, Drunken Boat, Best of the Web, Southern Poetry Anthology, and Bending Genres Anthology. Follow Sam on Bluesky @samrasnake.bsky.social.

Give a bold 
stroke in brown
or black 

femme American 
traditional lines 

to uphold 
rizz, music 
bizz, key 

and sailor jerry
non-conformist 
moshy moves

and drag queens

give me the ink
give me the pin

up girls and panthers 
to say my body is not 

for you to see 
it is for the legacy 

art motif and canon 
been a looker

sexy circus queen 
been a suiter 

paint me up
in pinks and golds
lavender and rose 

serve a house
of kings down

and work a piece 
like Maud or Hull 
been transforming 

what you seen 
on the scene 
since before punk

before Captain Cook
but we tattoo it on
make it new

like baddies rollerskating
like butchy babes in auto
or factory and stems and studs

under the hood of my car
every kind of body for 
the artwork, for the ways

to say 

I am my own
home of tradition 

you’re just lucky enough 
to witness  

the heirlooms of fem tradition. 

---

Prompt

In a two pages, write a poem in which you explore your aesthetic traditions and reframe them as heirlooms, as part of your legacy as a work of art yourself. Consider your fashions, vernacular, home décor, physical maneuvers, and/or/all style choices. Use at least 3 allusions as well. Happy writing ❤

---

Lin Flores lives and works in SLC, Utah as a full-time poet and creative writing student. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of New Orleans and a reader for The Bayou Magazine. In 2023, Lin won the Andrea Saunders Gereighty / Academy of American Poets Award.

my heart feels like a clementine beating, 
all that dimpled skin sheltering the tender 
juice inside. I imagine the liquid bursting 
out someday like a geyser–too much
pressure built up. the sound so loud 

it bursts through my eardrums and I can feel
it deep within me. then I am in Yellowstone, 
dreaming of my ancestors, getting high, hearing 
the colors around me sway with the trees.

my heart is in harmony here besides a few 
flickering geyser thoughts. I tell myself 
get it together. why would you not stay
like this forever? one with the deer, one
with the leaves. one with the blah blah blah.

don’t you see that this is what it means to be
more than a body? you are spiritual in human.
all that clementine weight really takes a toll 
on you, huh? that’s alright, just don’t let it 

become a geyser. someday you’ll appreciate 
this, the contemplating and not knowing, 
the ancestors and anxieties with their obsessions
and protections. and one day all this juice 
talk won’t matter. it’ll be like it never did.

---

prompt

Write a poem centered in a location or place that you’ve never been before. Maybe that’s a famous landmark or city, maybe that’s a non-physical place, another dimension or realm or state of being. Somewhere you can research or imagine but have yet to visit. Think about what your speaker could do there, and brainstorm lots of options. Like the speaker of “clementine heart,” is your speaker getting high and contemplating? Or are they starting a fight, meeting a friend, noticing the natural world, etc. The possibilities are endless.

---

Amanda Conover is a writer based in Raleigh, NC who frequently discusses existentialism and spirituality. She’s the poetry editor for Carolina Muse Literary and Arts Magazine and is an MFA student at Arcadia University. Her poetry has appeared in places such as the lickety~split, Miracle Monacle, and the Atlanta Review.

draw me free
hand, flat 
against my chest, fingers 
laid across 
a scar, my life
line, bridged by shadow 
stitches crossing 
rivulets 

don’t draw what isn’t
there, absence
of weaponry, only 
sketch in filigrees of hair
delicate
as woven hope

shade my straight lines
queer, irregular
as pathways
seamed and patched
flagrant
as dancers’ soles
mid-leap

make your brush strokes
shameless, vivid
as my slicked and sweated 
connectivity, show 
what sinew can 
be 

seen from space, mind 
wired, every
taut line mapped, a body
transitory, still
transformed, a life
crosshatched.

---

Prompt

What does your body mean when seen from space?

---

Jude Marr (he, they) is a Pushcart-nominated trans poet, editor and teacher. We Know Each Other By Our Wounds (Animal Heart Press, 2020) is Jude’s first full-length collection. His work has also appeared in many journals and anthologies, most recently Masculinity: An Anthology of Modern Voices (Broken Sleep Books)

When you swing swift, open palm, to pinken
my upturned ass, I brace for the soft sting.
I take a sharp breath, then the ache stills me.
Your hands remind me to whom I belong.
 
You grasp my long hair, pull taut to tame me,
snare a whimper until I gasp your name.
Give me this reverie, animal urged
to break free. Break me. I beg, please, don’t stop.
 
I lose count and collapse, still obeisant
in your embrace. You caress where you’ve bruised,
where you’ve used skin to mark me your canvas.
You coax me back from the brink of spent sense,
 
Call me good girl, your leather-leashed darling.
I promise, I’ll be a good girl this time.

---

Prompt: Submissive Poetics

What do sexual submission and poetic form have in common? Restraints!

Write an erotic poem that is informed by formal rules. Use precise meter, repeating rhyme schemes, or received forms. In what ways might your obedience to a form or set of rules (or your break from them, you poetic brat!) mirror the erotic moment depicted? How might being forced into particular decisions (or positions) allow you freedom to explore? A multiple-orgasm villanelle? A sestina for your seven-person orgy, each line ending with the name of a new lover? An ode to your partner’s armpit sweat? An elegy for a vibrator that’s run out of batteries? In sex and poetry and poetry about sex, the possibilities seem endless.

---

Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She’s the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024) and recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

the first mistake was thinking              I 
was self made
not spat out               from my host rock.

I emerged with the same family traits.
same waving hands,                 like hers     
all along—  
                      that volcano of gestures
from a greater ring,           winking heat
along the Pacific.


I had assumed                     island status.
let myself drown               aspiring to be 
a stone that         makes      its        mark  
but I was smashed against. 
   
Forever marked                    
                                    by where I came. 

crossing that ocean  
did not change a thing. still earthbound,       

I was always         a     stone's      throw
from home,

my mother's                    spitting image. 

---

Prompt

We often think of ourselves as autonomous entities with the landscape as our backdrop, but how might land formations speak to and reflect how we move in the world?

Look at a map of your geographical area (physical or Google) as specific or broad as your imagination fancies. Take notes in point form about land formations (eg. bodies of water, mountains, prairie, etc.) and the actions associated with it. Perhaps the map’s shape is suggestive or tell a story about influence the elements such as wind/water current or tectonics. What are the primary features and how do they move? Hone in on action words and vivid descriptions. Consider your findings as metaphors for the way you move in the world. Allow the associations you make to “tell a story” that will generate your first draft.

---

Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a civil servant with an English MA and Creative Writing Certificate from SFU’s Writer’s Studio. Read her in The Humber Literary Review, Funicular Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Rose Garden Press, Crab Creek Review and others. She lives in New Westminster, BC.