Poetry

Virginia Chase Sutton CONSTELLATIONS On the skin inside my upper arms are galaxies of bruises, some as fresh as this morning, one or two for each day when Mother inspects to see if I’ve lost weight. I haven’t. She…

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Kathleen Aguero SELF-PORTRAIT AS A GERANIUM Here’s all I’ve got: one showy cluster of red blossoms, fancy hat on a scrawny neck rising above bare stems and gently ruffled leaves with their dark inner border, peach fuzz. Leggy, untrimmed, I’m…

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Michelle Reale THIS YEAR MY SORROW DROWNS ITSELF This year my sorrow drowns itself. I can’t be responsible anymore. Here is where I’m at: you’ve nailed my hair to the floorboards, and I lay quiet, all shallow breathing like…

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Jill McDonough CAREFUL Josey kisses me Christmas morning in the kitchen and it’s so good we end up having sex on the floor. But we are old ladies now, laugh together while we stagger slowly to the ground, first one…

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Kirun Kapur SPRING Then, through the window, I could just make out a cormorant immobile on a buoy, head high, wings fully open, a totem, black mark against morning. I was about to turn away when it shifted, twisting, slipping…

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Tina Kelley I AM THE SEXY MUSEUM No more slow walking the sandstone edifice with marble floors that exhaust the feet. Within me, scurry from hall to hall. Who needs portraits of people bored past recognition? Have you ever…

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EILEEN CLEARY THE WAY WE FLED No branch silhouettes the snow. Tree limbs cut down by some bastard or buzz saw, chipped remains scattered afield around the stump as if they’d tried to escape the carnage, the way we…

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ZEINA HASHEM BECK TRIPTYCH: VOICE Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her most recent collection, Louder than Hearts, won the 2016 May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, World Literature Today,…

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REBECCA HART OLANDER FAWN From the age of fourteen, some weekends, I took the train from Gloucester, MA, where I lived with my mom, to North Station in Boston, on my way to my father’s house in Dorchester.…

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LESLÉA NEWMAN #MeToo piano teacher sitting beside me on the bench sliding his hand beneath my behind; dentist reclining my chair all the way back and resting his tools on my chest; friend of my father’s pulling me onto…

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IDRISSA SIMMONDS DAWN PRAYER CALL on the line with my dying mother i choose words that land soft as fingers in the sweet of her scalp. sometime ago I became her patron saint of hope and faith a calm…

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