Joan Kwon Glass I Ask the Pearl Diver to Bring You Back From the Dead Joan Kwon Glass is author of How to…
Dara-Lyn Shrager Twenty-One My child no longer calls this place home but my name is mother. I drive toward his apartment in the metal north, into the clang of a city with its trapdoors and sooted drifts. A…
Sarah Dickenson Snyder What is Unseeable and Real That vibration in the space between me and someone I love or maybe not love or maybe not even know, like a stranger sitting next to me on a plane and…
Rebecca Brock Chocolate Heart, Valentine’s Day 2018 Unfurling small fingers, loosened with sleep, I find a fistful of melted chocolate—a heart: heated, sweet. I am careful. I warm the water, fold the cloth, and try to clean the cup…
Lorraine Currelley A Woman’s Legacy ancient women dream of love, passion, tender touch and thirsty kiss. we’ve known murdered rainbows and aching bed. there is no escaping naked heart and mourning. this legacy we carry as women. we know…
Skip Renker A Widow Honeymooning near the rim of a volcano, who wouldn’t catch fire? She laughed when he re-phrased St. Augustine: “Better to marry and to burn.” She stopped smoking. He didn’t. In restaurants, diners at other tables…
Christine Stewart-Nuñez Excess Rex My preschooler fears fire, typhoons, and lightning storms. He doesn’t chatter about the Prairie School gas station we scrutinized on vacation; he asks about the wildfire described on the plaque across the street. The burn…
Ann Fisher-Wirth Lebkuchen There is more and more I tell no one Jane Hirshfield Once a week, my mother brought me home to make Lebkuchen, my passion all that fall because it would ripen while I was gone…
D.O. Moore Mother’s Day Visitor My hours hover in abeyance—not the hummingbird suspended in a C before my window’s trumpet-flower feeder. Instead your pause, assessing me. You, turquoise purse and heels, waiting for me to sleep or at least consent…
Catharine Clark-Sayles Yahrzeit Moon Full moon at 3 AM, bright and round, ducking through fast-moving cloud, wind wuthers through the chimney, moans across the downspouts, rattles trees, the house a creaky ship in storm-frothed seas, across the valley – scattered…
Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali Miracle Again we split open and don’t die life crowns from within every woman every where Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali is an actor, director, playwright, and producer. She has worked off-Broadway and in…
Barbara Conrad Beauty Queen Her shoes are bolted to the linoleum floor. Practical flats, black and rubber-soled. In a top drawer next to the sink, fistfuls of used tin foil — no waste, no wishes. Before she swapped her…