Miranda Beeson – XX/XY
XX/XY first blood flows you think it’s a cut not realizing it’s the unkindest cut of all you can bear children now you are an ungrown grown up you are 12 years old ducking into unknown toilets to unpin & pin tape & untape blackened blood its mild stench you know everyone knows the bus […]
Molly Fuller – Breath is the Measure
Breath Is the Measure 1 My body is flickering. I wake up make sure I am breathing. I want to write you and say I don’t want to die. My cold hands fold underneath my pillow. Once, you wrote to me I saw you there and my heart thumped. I saw you there I read. And my heart […]
Hayden Saunier – This Horse
This Horse (after “Horse,” a cyanotype in sixteen panels by Carrie Witherell) Its white bones float on blue, its meat a ghost around the bones, an afterimage pegged to a wall with silver tacks. * Whether the blue is the blue before dawn or the blue after dusk, no way to know. Magritte blue, streetlights […]
Natalia Conte – Miracle Child
Miracle Child Before me, nine years of fallow, nine babies conceived, then lost before the first finger formed: my grandfather told my mother to call when she had good news to share. What my mother called a miracle, I called ten pink fingernails perfectly intact. What my mother called God’s hands, I called blue latex […]
Patricia Caspers – Juera
Juera I whittle your life, Agapita Cervantes, from ink stamps, history books, photographs as brittle as the wings of a sun-bleached fly on the sill. I trace your path, as you crossed yourself, the border, crossed and crossed again, a baste stitch needling the seam as quickly as war tore at the threads. Was it […]
