Rachel Neve-Midbar In the Union We never ate the mollusks nor wore away at the sepulcherean seal. We joined forces with the many, arms woven through the crook of our neighbors’, we made our way forward. And where was…
Natalie Marino Blue The temperature today is above one hundred degrees. The horizon is a hot violet while I pack the car to take my children to the ocean. The freeway will be full of other riders. I will…
Suzanne Edison Spells and Prayers Before Antimatter Suzanne Edison’s first full length book, Since the House Is Burning, by MoonPath Press was published in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be…
Marisol Cortez Don’t Wanna Tell 1. I don’t want to tell my 13-year-old about Adam Toledo I told him about Daunte Wright the other day but since then, Adam from Little Village, barrio not unlike our own, was killed…
Christy Lee Barnes I hear the sound that could have been a gunshot but definitely wasn’t so we keep walking. but could have been but wasn’t You bounce ahead, oblivious as you ought to be and so,…
DeMisty D. Bellinger On Raising Black Kids in a new century when the civil rights movement seemed ages ago and one, learning about the Rev. Dr. King, asks me if Grandma is Black and yes, I say, she is…
Alise Alousi I Am Not Your Mother after reading “Whose Mother is Nature Anyway?” Annabel Kennan, Hyperallergic November 2022 I am not your mother. I can’t carry you along the eroding beach nor across the dirtied river. I am…
Elisabeth Weiss Detention Camp Children skateboard into the sweetness of what cannot last. Rachmanes derives from the word for womb. That little violet face shut in a cage. Palms grow hard in a border town where everyone is afraid.…
Jenn Givhan Apples Fall We ride into the orchard at the edge of town my children on hay bales beside me, bumping along. What does it mean to fall, my daughter has asked me for a poem she must…
Ingrid Andersson Nova Stella I knew from the out-of-the-blue lull that can befall hard labor, bestowing sleep, that she was fully dilated: I pronounced her complete. The woman roused, turned dilated eyes to me and said—with blinding depth…
Danielle Jones A Love Poem Without Subtext Because sometimes the best way to say a thing is to say it: a river is as wide as a river, a knife as sharp as a knife. My love for you…
Judgment “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” — “Rating” Mothers “Are you a good witch or a bad witch,” Dorothy asks Glinda, who has no problem naming herself as good. When we apply the…