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FIVE POEMS | by Billie Tadros

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:34:33 -0400

FOUR POEMS | by Katie Longofono

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:21:00 -0400

Moth Instead of Mother

Moth’s apron is moth-eaten
from the time she ran out of food stamps a week early.

Moth only cooks TV dinners
and only for herself.

Moth buys me button-downs from men’s clearance
and doesn’t think I’ll notice.

Moth’s had the same haircut since 1962 (and has brought
the same men home since then, too).

Moth gives them the good stuff
and makes me eat government cheese.

Moth says if I hike up my hemline, I deserve
the nasty hissing that follows.

Moth is looking for a new husband; noises follow
her, too, but she likes the whistle.

Moth thinks this man will stay, but I found a spiny carcass
of the last one under her bed.

Moth understands only half
of “feast or famine.”

The Radiator is Still Broken

Hooray for cold men, snow men,
frost coming in. Let’s celebrate
the icy silence. Let’s highlight
space between our shoulders,
two deliberate inches,
an unfelt caress. Let’s not talk
about how you cried on the phone
last night, wished for your gun
but it’s locked in the pawn shop
on 6th Street. Let’s celebrate
bullets without a chamber,
its ringing, empty sirens.

Training the New Girl

Wear this blouse, these shoes, this hat.
Be satin and shine like fresh steamed milk.
Swirl behind the register.

Blend with crema: brown and white.
Rosettas and ferns. Hearts and flowers.
We are all plants and organs here.

Find your beating center,
learn to pour it in a cup.
Give yourself away for $4.19.
Give yourself away again.

Art requires precision:
build a cap of foam
and scrape it back to reveal
your rich, hot interior.

It Was All I Could Do

Because it was the last time.
I didn’t want to, but it felt good
and it was easy. I drank
to feel pity for a man
pouring drinks to see my tits,
so I could stare at the floor
when he wanted my eyes suffering
into his, so I could take his mouth
and give nothing back.

_____________________________________________________

Katie Longofono is a writer pursuing an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College; she received a BA in English from the University of Kansas. She is currently a poetry reader for Lumina and the poetry editor of Stone Highway Review. Her first chapbook, The Angel of Sex, was released earlier this year from dancing girl press; she also has a collaborative chapbook with Mary Stone Dockery, titled Honey and Bandages, forthcoming from Folded Word Press.

FIVE POEMS | by Laressa Dickey

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:53:00 -0400

POEM | by Crystal Schubert

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:48:30 -0400

Lost on the New Jersey Turnpike: A Pantoum

I bought outlet covers and a small stuffed rhino
with beady eyes and a stitched white mouth.
The vitamins churned my stomach—
I went through three bottles.

You have beady eyes and a stitched white mouth
in my dreams, but I cradle you like we just
went through three bottles.
Milk dribbling down your tiny chin.

In my dreams, I cradle you. Like we just
mistook the spilling blood and you get to have that
sweet milk smell on your tiny chin
like we imagined. But we didn’t

mistake the spilling blood; you get that
pinecone smell instead, from the rest stop bathroom.
We imagined, but didn’t
ever think we’d lose you on the Jersey Turnpike.

Pinecone smells and a rest stop bathroom
are the only gifts that I could give you.
He said he didn’t think we’d lose you. On the Jersey Turnpike
we pay toll after grisly toll.

The only gifts that I could give you
are outlet covers and a small stuffed rhino.
Now we pay toll after grisly toll;
the road rhythm churns my stomach.

____________________________________________

Crystal Schubert lives in Seattle with her husband and her two cats. Her poetry has previously been published in YARN.

THREE POEMS | by Emily O'Neill

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:06:00 -0400

Inheritance

I tried on Mom’s gown at fifteen; already
too small to zip past my hips. Paint it

red. Dining room birds of paradise. Cocktail
shrimp. Hawk’s tail. Brick or birth or a pick-up
you used to drive that we kept keys for. Paint it that living

color I see at “swelling”, “asphyxia”, “inheritance”. The check
arrived day before yesterday. One-thousand-eight-hundredand-nine

dollars (that red again) shotgun for the wedding. No father-
daughter dance. Confession: I had a baby once, can’t forgive
myself or the drink that bled him from me (and more wine)

what does the riverbed look like from the other side?
Could I walk to you? Will the tide turn our color?

The rains of spring swell me quivering;
flood devours our path to each other.
I am your daughter. I will not cry, can’t

unclasp my bones like fingers
falling to fist post-prayer.

~

Can’t Be Helped

Pretend this all a peep show—curve
fallen past hem, spit,
salt, your one good hand.
Let me dumb

down my legs. Call this war
time. Say “dynamite” and burn
comes. Say “honey”—I will melt without
stinging. I will pretend

I am not carrying groceries. No. Drowsy
eyes, fat lip. What would you
if I? Pretend your tiny

daughter can’t see this oily
dance. Pretend you are alone, sweating
sin into palm with a weak shudder. Did you
discuss with your brothers at breakfast? What

of the chauffeur who slowed
limo to leer? Yours. And
the one who pushed past
near the station, whispered how much
then again, and louder, and a third
time. Your blood too. The command

to smile, how it is no order
for mouth. How it wants to choke
strut from me same as dropping
one more quarter before
window is wall.

~

Negatives

My pictures are Polaroid
in the top drawer of a desk:
ass up on the unmade bed

reading some glossy, glancing
over my shoulder, sure.
Film an unstable widow’s web.

I found yours in the Vice
Magazine archives,
a night vision crime

scene, your breasts
smashed against
the pane of a Xerox

machine, your mouth
a green-gray smear
across fourteen pages.

When I am alone
in front of the mirror
I wonder at what might be lost—

if someone could carve that full
white curve from me and can it,
an unwilling ghost.

___________________________________________________

Emily O’Neill is a proud Jersey girl who tells loud stories in her inside voice because she wants to keep you close. Her most recent work is present or forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Weave Magazine, Whiskey Island, Paper Darts, and FRiGG Magazine. She edits nonfiction for Printer’s Devil Review. You can pick her brain at http://emily-oneill.com.

NOT THIS | by M Mack

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:31:00 -0400

Not This

this is not an act

Recent winter. Femininity in the form of warm clothing and crocheted accessories. Snow in a pretty, nonthreatening way. An evening like some kind of sitcom.

When I meet up with a man I am not-dating in the snow, I am hyper-aware of what is not happening. We are holding hands, and no one is watching. We are walking down the sidewalk, and no one is following us. Until, in a moment that I cannot believe, he pulls me to him amidst the crowd on the crowded sidewalk. I don’t know what he’s doing until he’s kissing me. People step around us, and they are not angry. When I hear yelling, I break away and brace myself for violence. People are smiling and cheering. Another straight-appearing couple is clapping. I am thoroughly confused. Later, he kisses me at his train platform. I enjoy this until I remember the last time I kissed someone at this train platform. This time, no one gives a shit. I tell him our privilege is showing, and I walk up the stairs to my platform. No one follows me. When I sit down on the train, an apparent woman sits down next to me. I, too, an apparent woman.

Not This

this that is not an act

An older spring. A collage. At a college. New job, new peers, same body.

I cannot easily forget the moments of a new job. A man in the front lobby hesitant to meet with me.“Obviously you only like to work with women,” he says, looking me up and down. His hand on my thigh under the table during our appointment. Me hesitant to tell my superiors. My superiors hesitant to tell their superiors. Me silent after that. Or co-workers in the back room unwilling to understand me partnered but not-lesbian. “Have you been fooling us?” “Is she an experiment?” I remember myself in a queer theory class one year prior, giving a presentation on transgender-exposé episodes of talk shows. I imagine myself in the trickster archetype, Sally Jessy rooting up photographs from my past. Me, carving out a space for myself, inside myself. These same new peers excitedly describing success for “gay marriage.”

Not This

neither act nor action

A recurrence. Friendly appropriation: How to intellectualize experience for an academic audience.

When my friend wants to describe what the word queer means in a political context meaning something different from gay, she cites an internet cartoon. An inked drawing: two white men in front of a white picket fence. The caption: “We’re just like you. Racist, classist, sexist.” My friend cites this cartoon and says, “Queer means not that.”I take this punchline as my own. In trainings, I define queer as “not that,” and then I proceed to define that. This works well until I think too much about implication, until I remember the reclaiming of the word through institutionalization, the assumed whiteness and actual privilege inherent in all of this. Nothing is good enough. I say as much. The university officials in the training nod.

Not This

an act or an action

Another older spring. To publicly negotiate gender in a same-sex not-divorce.

My new friends are beginning to implement what I have taught them about the vocabulary of genderqueer and trans* identity, about preferred pronouns. They observe her masculinity in their memory and accidentally support her in undercutting mine. When they ask how things are going, they omit pronouns, or they use a hesitant ze to refer to her. I smile. I state a simple, “She prefers feminine pronouns.” What I want to do is yell, She’s a she! What I want to do is admit, She’s a butch. She’s outside of your frame of reference because she’s outside of mine.

Not This

was this an act or an action

An older winter. Long day at a conference in a neighboring city. Impromptu dinner with this man I know.

I am on something like a date with a man who identifies as straight. I happen to be dressed as something like a man. When we walk close together down the city street, I hear shouting and I listen. We have been called fags. He is unaffected; he never felt called to listen. I guide us into a restaurant. The waiter exclusively talks to me. We have a nice meal.

Not This

enact or inaction

Recent winter. Traveling for a job. A room, two double beds. Three women and a not-woman. White linens. A desperate desire for sleep.

I share a hotel bed with a woman I’m attracted to. This is not for sex, but for economy. I am expected to behave straightly—chastely—not only as not interested in women but also as a woman—for this night. The thing about this woman’s body is that it reminds me of my not-partner’s body. When I get into the bed, she is already asleep. I am careful not only to not disturb her, but also to not touch her. I have been accused of hyper-sexuality before. Probably all of us have. I leave what I think is a one-foot trench in the center of the bed, but I often mis-judge the size of my body. I am not surprised, then, when I feel her against me. But I am surprised, violently, by the feel of her against me: the curve of her belly fitting into the curve of my back. The warm heat of this spreads to my entire length, like something that should be relaxed into; at this proximity, the gentle hairs of her belly pricking my skin. When I move away and away from her. When I start to slip from the edge of the bed. When I realize my skin is not exposed. When I know that I can’t possibly be touching her, but that I can still feel the warmth and the prickling. Only then do I start to understand the weight of memory. I move back into the bed. I attempt to remind myself of what is real, and what is not real. And when I struggle to sleep, I dream of her—not of the straight woman I am bedded with but of the butch woman she reminds me of—and also—thank you for the also—of a man I love. In the dream, he genders me correctly.

_______________________________________________

M. Mack is a poet and editor in the D.C. area. Mack holds an M.F.A. from George Mason University, where ze served as managing editor of So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art. Ze is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an explicitly inclusive feminist chapbook press. Poem-things from the same book project as “Not This” are forthcoming in Gargoyle.

5 POEMS | by Elisabeth Blair

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:35:00 -0400

Not a token or a key that became lost

but a sentence. Lost, completely lost under the trestle where you might once, at one time, have stood, leaning back in childhood’s pants, overcome by shyness. Might have waited, as you wait now, sundered from the play, the orchestra and crew and left now with only the audience whom you scatter crumbs to but who demand wine, or tofu – and the lilies that you used to tend have left you, to be tended by someone older and wiser or younger and stupider, and you’ve left the hyacinth simply to die. You have – as happy as it made you, it made you that sad. How to stand it? Sometimes, oh in the past, the answer has been dance, like it was just the ribbon needed to either tie up the present or to bind your feet – whatever was most culturally relevant and in seed.

The tragedy is in the making,

cellar-bound to wait with the jams in jars for some sunny morning when it will be called for, made use of. Industry. Hold onto the girl, would you please. She wiggles so. Brace her, like this. Put these two seashells in her ears – one apiece – she is easily convinced by the sound alone that we’ve returned her from the city, that she’s back where she feels she belongs. And guard the door in case compassion comes along, meddling in situations without bothering to learn the context, or troubling to see the logic. Bumbling as usual, and taking everything so personal.

Heartbreak on a side divan

– not even a main place, just a reference place, something to tag as representative. She clutched our hand so tightly and had a snake delivered to her. How the quiet gestation was embellished by a few remarks, a few small interactions, getting undressed in the dark, weary of the inconveniences of propriety and weary in general. And how she would never pick her points but would leave them buried with the mice behind the city prison – the one with the narrow views. (You can’t see them but they can see you.)

The fence, the faucets –

all the rendered parts of the house in full or partial bloom, extracted from the main by pulverizing the yard-woman’s written instructions. Oh what a process! The meal that’s required for the rendering – a paste – is dark and gloomy and has an effect on us. First, on our ponytails – it subtly changes the muscle caps of our brains so we may, if we wish, swish them without moving our heads. In short, we grow a rudimentary tail. Next come the secondary feelings which are hard to grant vocabulary to and upon which has been written a great deal. And when we are done and have sculpted the window-frames and toilet bowls (sometimes taking inspiration from the sea) and the handles and the formative walls, we can sit down. It is usually then and only that that we wonder what it was she had written.

Her voice is light

and moaning over there by the bar.
His march is interminable; the length he can go with the laces in his dress shoes.
Her goal is plantless, horned, a given.
His son is calling but he will go downstairs.
The band is playing.
The portion of her brain devoted to the passage of time is given no attention.
She concentrates on the always-changing pattern of the men’s legs as they come down into the room.
She sings on a stool.
Relaxes her many jaws.
Opens her body like a yawn, naked and in front of men.
He pauses, thinks of his children.

____________________________________________________
Elisabeth Blair is a writer, artist and musician currently based in Chicago. Her work has been published and/or is forthcoming in Drupe Fruits, Humble Humdrum Cotton Frock, The Literary Bohemian, Fortunates, Paramanu Pentaquark, zafusy, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Lilliput Review, Shampoo, ken*again, Be Which Magazine, and Acumen Literary Journal.

THREE POEMS | by Richelle Dodaro

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:40:00 -0400

A Meteor Entering Suburban Closets

When Mars was closest to the Earth,
divorce became the center:

Crooked spaces surrounded the family
room with beige lampshades tipped
over and red nail polish spilled
permanently where you sat
for a short time.

I thought I saw a painting hung and
massacred with bullet holes.
I tugged at my skin and saw that those threats on the wall
in truth were
more
similar to that of paw prints.

The reality makes tortuous sense
like the child and her first birthday
party: a clown with muscles,
a male stripper
hidden behind fantasy
brought only to entertain,
brought only for destruction.

Father’s Cooking

It smells like someone lit a match.
Yes, it’s you.

You yell so quickly like freezing rain.
My insides: heart, uterus, stomach

jump like bunny seeds,
blast and boil like your temperament.

Found in Part

Story of the door: cold, scanty, embarrassed;

contemplating
(Ivy)
(Blood)
what the two love in each other.

Though time has been created
she has her death warrant written
legibly upon her wrinkles.

I made sure she was insane.

I hope she has nightmares when I sleep.

________________________________________

Richelle Dodaro earned her BA in English-Creative Writing from Seton Hill University. Her work has appeared previously in Yawp, Mad Swirl, and Eye Contact. She is currently working on a full length poetry collection, Unrebel, as well as a novel.

FOUND | Lauren Treece

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:05:09 -0400

http://glass-orthodoxy.livejournal.com

POEM | by Jessica Ankeny

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:36:00 -0400

Inside the Balloon

A woman has two options: full or
not-full. The cavity contracts and empties.

I used to say: I break to make love.
I used to say: do so in remembrance of me.

Solid to spector: outside in: chocolate bunny,
doll head, paper lantern.

A body panics, a pattern of exquisite bleeding.

Go inside to find pleasure. Show me
I can cause it. That it’s findable.

The invite and leave. The repeat.
The take in and let go: The repeat.

My orgasms too, like a fish gasping for water.

I want to love someone with the fierceness I have while breaking.

______________________________________________________

Jessica Ankeny is from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and now lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Joni Mitchell. She has a chapbook about bullets and sex forthcoming from dancing girl press called One Simple Step to Keeping a Clean Gun. Her work can be found in Metazen, The Boiler, and scattered all over her desk.

FOUND | Annette Pehrsson

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:26:09 -0400

Annette Pehrsson

POEM | by Meg Johnson

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:45:00 -0400

Dance Marathon, 1931

Someone is combing my hair.
My eyes blink and blink. A lady
sponges my face. Too dangerous
to close eyes all the way. Keep
moving.

Crowds come and go. Jackets
and chatter. I don’t notice them
very much anymore.

Yesterday (yesterday?) a woman
had a tooth pulled on the dance floor.
No anesthesia. Keep dancing.

When he gets too heavy in my arms
I shake him. Sometimes he shakes
me, shakes me awake.

Bottoms of my stockings are bloody.
Dried blood and fresh blood. Reds
and browns.

The cots are behind the curtains.
Nurses in white. Someone died.

Could they find me here?
I… Oh…

Eggs and toast. Eggs and toast.
Keep moving. Swallow. Milk.

___________________________________________________

Meg Johnson’s first full length poetry collection is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press. Her poems have appeared in Slipstream Magazine, Word Riot, Stone Highway Review, Midwestern Gothic, SOFTBLOW, and others. Meg started dancing at a young age and worked professionally in the performing arts for many years. She currently lives in Akron, Ohio and is the editor of Dressing Room Poetry Journal. www.megjohnson.org

FOUND | Alicia Martín

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:50:39 -0500

Alicia Martín

POEM | by Lianuska Gutierrez

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:38:00 -0500

New Classic, Old Nestle

Yellow blue-eyed sponge in underwear, pants, socks is smitten

with a squid of nose like old-fashioned bike honk. Squidward

is a moody one on catching end of puerile SpongeBob’s chafing.

Usually sponge dude is a model of how to handle rejection.

For all the squid’s no and yell and push away, he tries and tries

again, and his love never wanes, and he laughs his singular glee-

sound that repeats like many geese up in the sky, unflappable, one

way. Few times does he really worry, wonder what his place is in

the sea-world if his desire can’t be homed. One time Squidward

did depress him, made him cry for many days. You’ve lost your

laugh-box, Squidward told him: you cannot laugh no more. Sponge-

Bob was flung into the barely-space of factory chickens in a battery

cage, as far as hope the sponge could peep; no roam of joy, any

turning, trap; not even able to turn. Then gloomy squid grew

a conscience- he just hadn’t seen that far, that sponge can do more

than cachinnate, that with such ability for ecstasy, there can be

hardest fall, for loss of a buoyancy not many know. So he said,

just kidding! You’ve got past life in your throat, you remain you.

And even this time, after such an other side of SpongeBob seen,

he returned, like a leafing tree. The cartoon is sweet and safe. For

what if Squidward had gone too far? Had caused a trauma in the

sponge, so that when squid tried to shake him back (restore of

computer, shard re-emplaced into perimeter of fallen porcelain

doll’s head), the sponge had remained sopped with tears, unsqueez-

able, no longer usable. Like the young woman whose politician mom

was killed before her by Mexican pandilla ‘men’, who was shown

on T.V. in a wheelchair, her hands raised and shaking like paper

cutouts hung from wire; where, how, to get back that girl, who

shows a severance to our wakeful eyes, a limb blown off, body

of a bug halved while his legs still twitch. What if SpongeBob

had gone to dark dream without knowhow of climb-out, like cow I

saw online in a one-way tunnel (helper records, garbed as straitening

killer, become bystander, to do the work; cannot interrupt, call

stop, so truth may out to those snug in no knowing), alley that did

not allow for turn; he tried, on sensing that on the other side

of nearing door that had gone up and come down a bit before,

cow before him met a pain, a terror. They whip him on the butt to

make him go: stop trying to veer, enter that door; and be no more.

_________________________________________

Lianuska Gutierrez is an English Ph.D. candidate and Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She was a 2008 Saltonstall Poetry Fellow. Other work can be found in Umbrella Factory Magazine, Eratio Poetry Journal, MadHat Lit, Corazon Land Review, and Counterexample Poetics.

THREE POEMS | by Lisa Hammond

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:50:00 -0500

The Goddess Loads the Dishwasher

Transferring vesuvian stacks of plates,
she arranges them as if deploying
an army of stoneware, china too slight
to do her bidding. Each warrior rigid

stands at attention, forlorn hope upright
in the tines of the lower rack, awkward
squad together with forks, knives, spoons,
all breaking ranks, haphazard silverware.

What must it take to be dishwasher safe?
She lines up battalions to see them fall.
They wait in silence: she shuts the door,
pushes pots and pans, spins the dial to start,
scours her lost legions with hot water, soap.
She lines up battalions, still fearing to fall.

The Goddess Eats an Apple

She likes Braeburns, firm pear-drop taste stronger
than bland Red Delicious, so mealy she knows
it could never have tempted her or the others.
She knows to be careful. Fruit’s so often a trap.

Perfect apples tossed to slow the runner,
taut pomegranates and tart strawberries,
plush invitations to fall. She tastes earth,
honeyed skin, moist flesh, pleasure and peril.

With every bite she remembers farther,
and sometimes she slices one, her knife quick,
thinking of that lavish lonesome Queen, buried
with grave goods, soldiers, ladies-in-waiting,
her headdress still shining, saucers of sliced
apples ready for when they woke, hungry.

The Goddess Reads a Legend

She sought this unimproved road, washboard sand
crusted frozen, no ranger-guided tours,
no boat ramp, no bike route, no trail loop, just
unlined regions, indefinite, unsurveyed.

In landscapes of legend, maps show distance,
intervals, never sky holding its breath,
never silence, small waters stilled by ice,
never absence, expanse of unmarked green.

There was the road at least, though setting off
she knew that forty days and forty nights
would not be long enough. She knelt to draw
the compass rose in frost, her cold hands chapped,
her heart the center, breath the fleur de lis
shone frozen in air, the promise of heat.

_____________________________________________

Lisa Hammond is the author of Moving House (Texas Review Press, 2007), which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Calyx, The South Carolina Review, English Journal, storySouth, North Carolina Literary Review, and Literary Mama, among others. A professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster, she lives in a small southern town with her husband and two children. To learn more about her work, please visit http://lisaghammond.com.

TWO POEMS | by Jessie Carty

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:20:00 -0500

Potential Titles for the Mermaid’s Memoir

How to fall in love with seaweed.
How my shadow looks on water.
Subtitle: How fish feed on it.
How to slice sashimi with a skate’s tail.
How to cover yourself if you are bigger than a coconut
Subtitle: Or smaller than a shell.

a theory of dampness

is that everything gets wet
fine china
ginger based sauces
hand cream
igloos, iguanas, ipods left in swimming trunks
jazz
the Kellogg’s variety of cereals
limes, leopards, leotards, lymph nodes
anything that’s masticated
net neutrality
onions under water
pleading again please not again
queries
redactions
sounds
tacos, tarps
unitarian ministers
valium on the tongue, down the sink, fished out of the trash
Wednesdays
the wings of a xeme or xenops
the rowers at Yale, or future bankers on Harvard yard
zebras
even rain adheres to rain
as it bounces off the bridge
where captains without boats careen on their toes

_________________________________________

Jessie Carty’s writing has appeared in publications such as, MARGIE, decomP and Connotation Press. She is the author of five poetry collections which include An Amateur Marriage (Finishing Line, 2012) as well as the award winning full length poetry collection,Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie is a freelance writer, teacher, and editor. She is also the managing editor of Referential Magazine. She can be found around the web, especially at http://jessiecarty.com.

THREE POEMS | by Deidre Price

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:10:00 -0500

The Kind of Woman Who Knits Well

Some women have a way about them,
with their hands on life at a perpetual ten and two,
a fixed and comfortable orientation to the world
which makes me look like,
in comparison,
a royal fuck up.

When a woman walks past, wafting her womanly smell,
a symphony of soaps and sprays and sex so strong that I
consider the costs of lesbianism,
I think her vain
when she’s probably just clean.

I eat another woman’s chicken tetrazzini.
“It’s homemade,” says the homemaker.
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I say, though she clearly does of me.
I feed my family in other ways,
in poetry and paychecks.
I make money, not casseroles.

The one who dances is a whore.
Dance is just sex with more fabric involved.

The one who is pretty can’t be clever.
If she’s pretty and clever, then she must be bad at blow jobs.

The one who knits well is vapid.
I crocheted once and broke the yarn.
I could never cast on again.
“Relax,” she’d say. “It needs room. Let it go.”

When we have to be determined not to let a thing beat us,
sometimes it already has.

Because Orangina Is a Drink & Not a Cross between an Orangutan & a Vagina &/or Angina

I know that you also
are not what you seem.

What I Writ[h]e About

The Aurora Borealis doesn’t need me
to tell you about it. Or her. Or him. Shim?
(What is the gender of a natural light display anyway?)

The moon doesn’t need me either.
She’s there, sitting in her stars,
pining for my attention, my affection, or maybe just my assessment.
(A waxing moon always makes me think of hair removal.)

Their milk jug is always on the top shelf, whether or not I am.
He’s always skim and organic and never enough for a bowl of cereal.
No poems here either.
It’s written its place on that shelf like an epitaph.

The yard will be uncut; the floors dirty.
We’ve refused domestic martyrdom in favor of music and sex and God and food and books and I’m telling you, the constants don’t call me.
Even though the dust has written its place, too.

So I write about the tremors in the bathtub
that ninth month
of nineteen.

I record a shaky palsy hand holding
a forkful of English peas and losing
them one by one.

I write of waking up to a bloodied canvas airbag and a face
full of dust and engine smoke, hearing, “My arm! My arm!” and thinking
it was “My heart! My heart!” from my father’s mouth.

I write about New Orleans and an insane man
crying, “I’m campaigning, you idiots!”—his blank sign,
an ill contrast to the heavy noise in his head.

I write about a Vegas wedding and someone
yelling “Spics!” at us and speeding away as we walked
to Denny’s for postnuptial pancakes.

I write about the man who said, “Poor child” when he saw
me in the obstetrician’s office, making me
wonder whether he meant
my baby
or me.

I used to write about this guy named Jeff
whom I wanted desperately to love me but who never did.
I used to write about being lonely and misunderstood,
never thinking that writing those poems made me lonely or misunderstood.
One time I wrote a poem for every girl in my sorority.
I left the names off, bound the book, and let them figure it out.
I wished I’d left in the names.
I forget things that other people feel are important to remember.
I’m not lonely anymore.
I get that you don’t have to be understood to be valued.
I’ve also learned that some people like weird and will pay you to stay that way.
I’m reminded of Jeff only when he wends his way into a bad poem.

I need to write about the way my Daina’s feet have caught up to mine.
We lie on the couch from separate sides, our legs tangling
into a mess of ankles, kneecaps, and calves while we read different books.

I need to write about Atticus’s cresting teeth,
the jagged edges like melted down TicTacs
pushing up through the Bubble Yum of his gums.

I need to write about my husband’s collarbone
after a shower, the warm drops of water
still settling into his skin

because today isn’t an Aurora Borealis.

It needs a poem.

__________________________________________________

Deidre Price teaches writing at Northwest Florida State College and serves as Poetry Editor of the Blackwater Review. She lives in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, with her husband, Jonathan, and two point five children.

POETRY | Dana Guthrie Martin

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:55:00 -0500

from Love and Cruelty

8

I know we are in trouble
when you move your electronics
into the guest room

and start sleeping in that bed.
When I find the dark sock
you ejaculate into

tucked under a pillow sham.
When you leave every drawer
you touch ajar in the morning,

every cabinet door open,
not because you don’t want
to wake me with their closing

but because you don’t want me
to wake up and demand
your attention. In therapy,

you talk about boundaries,
your need to maintain them.
The therapist asks why

you feel this way. I also want
to ask why, but for now I lie
in my bed each morning,

pretending to sleep in,
until I sense you’ve eased
the back door shut behind you.

::

9

For a long time I made up landscapes
because I didn’t know how to talk
about real ones — the red dirt
that stained my swimsuit

when I swam with water moccasins
in Lake Texoma, which wasn’t
even a real lake but one made
by and for men who wanted to fish

for fun, wanted to piss in the water,
to fall overboard in their work pants
and the cotton shirts that skimmed
their chests, which were flat, since

they spent their time behind desks,
not in the fields where their fathers
darkened in the sun each day
and at night revealed their light

foreheads, the bright skin hidden
by their sleeves. It was a privilege
to see that skin, fragile and untouched,
like snow-covered ground after

the season’s first snow. For a long time,
I made up landscapes because I wanted
to live inside them and to shout
from their hills and lakes that we

were in danger. Now I want to speak
from the Blue Mountains and the Columbia,
from sagebrush and western rattlesnake.
From silt and sediment and seed

and fruit, from scabland and butte.
I want to say that we are all in danger —
and that we are the danger. I want to be
a plane dragging a banner, a message.

::

10

At the border, the VACIS gamma-ray
machine has taken an image

of a truck carrying two stowaways,
along with a shipment of Styrofoam

trays, as it makes its way from
Canada into the United States.

Through the truck’s walls, the trays
appear as dark squares, almost

like dry-stacked bricks. The person
on the left stands, revealing a body

with sloped shoulders, which tapers
from its thickest point down

to ankles that disappear into the slats
which make up the truck’s floor.

The body on the right crouches,
knees pulled to chin, in meditation

or fear, or perhaps in boredom.
In the heat, probably. Or in the cold.

In the dark. Their shadows remind me
of thermal radiation, the snapshots

captured of victims in Hiroshima.
But of course this is not then or there.

This is here. This is the border.
Motherless, my own instinct

to protect kicks in. I want these
shadows to have privacy, to escape.

And since we’re being honest
about love and cruelty, I will

tell you that I want these two
to succeed, whoever they are —

the one standing and the one
crouching. I want, especially,

to check in on the one crouching.
That body is too thin and frail.

That body looks scared, a position
I know well. But most of all, I want

walls to be walls again. I want
curtains to be curtains and shrouds

shrouds. I do not want to look
past them with the same pervasive

eyes of my government in the name
of border security, as part of my

identity-creation, or as a way
of defining myself against other.

I do not want the vision of a thousand
scientists and technicians

that allows me to see into what is solid
in order to catalog the faces of the dead.

::

20

We need to update the stories
of coyote and hare. Neither outsmarts
the other because both are dead,

riddled with tumors, skin and muscle
coming away by the handful,
each body turned against itself

rather than toward annihilation
or evasion. We need to move
Adam and Eve from Eden

to the Gamma Garden, where atomic
seeds spill to earth and Eve’s
apple has amazing properties

conferred by radiation breeding.
We need to make that apple larger
and crispier, with a longer shelf life,

more sugars and more seeds,
maybe even conjoin two apples
in one fruit for fleshier specimens,

since flesh is where delight lies
and since we’re on the cusp of being
able to do just about anything.

::

23

I knew we were in trouble
long before I knew you,

when as a child I learned
of the white trains moving

across the country like ghosts.
I knew when I hid under a table

as my father talked about Russian
bombs and how the next world war

was coming any day. Somewhere
inside as I practiced my emergency

drill position I knew, knew already —
long before you were an activist

tapping on military jets in the name
of peace — that the war had already

come, silent like fog. Had moved in
and staked claim, settled into our water,

our dirt, been taken up in our food
and our bodies, encroached on

the animals we sometimes professed
to care for — whose destiny we

sometimes admitted was entwined
with our own. I knew there would

one day be walls that would offer
no privacy, that no concrete

could stop what was coming,
that no matter what we did

or did not do, we would be
nothing more than protesters

on the tracks, our legs severed
as the white train came and went

in the sheer quiet, leaving a legacy
not one of us knows how to live

with or beyond. Slowly we are
turning the entire planet, every

living thing, to frass. I’ve known
this for years because the devil

himself held me in his arms, pressed
his tail against my thigh and told me.

____________________________________

Dana Guthrie Martin’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Barrow Street, Failbetter, Fence, Knockout Literary Magazine, Pif Magazine, and Vinyl Poetry. Her chapbooks include Tomorrow I Will Love You at the Movies, coauthored with Jay Snodgrass (Hyacinth Girl Press, forthcoming), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2012), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). She edits Cascadia Review.

THREE POEMS | by Kayla Wheeler

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:55:00 -0500

Being Girls Outside Strange Brew

How do we know
how to throw things in the dark?
What’s the word for it?
What’s the word for having no expectation
but a kale salad and a toothbrush?
What’s the word for drawing a
triangle on a pumpkin, scraping dog shit
off your friend’s shoe in the bathroom
while a blonde pretends she doesn’t think
you’re someone’s accident?
What’s the word for speaking in transactions
about the best diners to throw up in?
What’s the word for walking by a place
where someone kissed you once?
What’s the word for writing ti amo on a building?
What’s the word for finding it?
What’s the word for pissing in a pet cemetery
while looking for a lost earring?
What’s the word for a doll head
in an urn on Sylvia’s birthday?
What’s the word for tramping in the park
two weeks before the dead girl’s body was found?
What’s the word for smeared lip gloss being
both permission and evidence?
What’s the word for dragging the lake
without a uniform?
What’s the word for Glinda’s bubble?
Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
What’s the word for being both?

spoiled/rotten

There is fish in the freezer
that reminds me of our rot.
It is not mine,
the way our rot was not mine.

I live with two people who are not you.
They drink pineapple vodka
and have mayonnaise on their grocery lists.
I don’t know if they have funny uncles

who would have got my name right the first time.
They ask me what I like in bed.
I do not respond with the way afternoon’s light
poured itself on your shoulders

when I was just the corner of your room.
My answer is a pile of tongues and groping words.
Two-thirds of us begin to laugh.
One starts to mention how kinky she heard Sarah is,
and I collapse a little that this conversation
is slowly not about me anymore.
I slip, again, into your mouth’s lack of memory.
Someone really needs to clean out the fridge.

Girltoy

We hide dirty kitchen knives
like the men we think we know
tuck their graces in the beds we make.
Vows were just a part of the show,
I didn’t know “something borrowed”

meant the neighbor’s wife.
He thinks that I don’t see her too,
that I’m blind to more than just his lies,
but, I saw her sex unveil itself before
he could blink twice in double take.
There is just so much more I know,

other than borrowed text from the
Hallmark anniversary cards
he tells himself I collect.
I will not become like the other girls,
who wrap receipts and laundry around their fists,
carry heavy heads to the liquor store.
Don’t tell me I have a drinking problem now,

or that I dress too sexy now,
I’ve always been this way.
These parts, illuminated as the excuses
you used to make for them fade to blame.
Your guilt changed your perception of me
like when Adam saw Eve naked after eating The Apple.
Original sin has come back to haunt you,

did your mother not bathe you enough?
Irreconcilable differences are silly.
Murder is not.
I will not pack your lunch for work again
for the sake of my own sanity.
How can I look at the meat of a pig
without wondering if your flesh would
taste the same between bread?

Don’t think I’m not hungry.
I eat only what I’m capable of
and I was told to never waste.
My love for you is packed on ice in the freezer,
can you hear it beating,
or have I really lost it?

Any Disney princess can become a man-eater
if you don’t kiss her the right way.
You used to kiss me the right way.
Did you lay me back down to save battery life
or was I just an overplayed with toy?
Our old friends tell me to be civilized as if

I committed the bestial crime, but
I’m an animal just like you.
My wedding band was not your
proof of purchase.
I used to be a little girl
who would flip through dictionary pages

where monogamy was next to mutual.
I know where you come from
they don’t teach little boys these things
but let me remind you,
until death do us part
is nothing to fuck around with,
a contract I will hold you to
if it kills me.

____________________________________________________

Kayla Wheeler is a poet/performer, activist, and ex-ballerina from New Hampshire. She co-organizes a poetry reading and slam called Rhythmic Cypher in Portland, Maine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Resurgo, Haggard and Halloo, The Zephyr, Write On!!!, and a chapbook on community and family titled Welcome Home. She cares about feminist things and being good.

FOUND | Photography by Caryn Drexel

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:51:24 -0500

see more at her website…