Issue 11

April 2024

Photo by Megan Sciarrino

On a Lonely Day, I Drive to Target

Do not pretend like I am the only mother
who funnels her toddler’s chunky thighs 
into the holes and snaps the buckle snug.

Do not pretend like I am the only one 
who weaves through the aisles, 
lifting items I will look at but not buy.

Do not pretend like Target is not full 
of mothers who are hungry for faces
and eyes and just one intelligible word. 

Every mother has had this moment, 
and every mother has, at least once, 
met an angel in the cereal aisle. 

Mine is a woman my grandmother’s age,
sitting in a cart with a seat just her size, 
the buckle fastened snug around her own belly.

She, too, seems hungry for faces, 
for eyes, so we smile at one another 
for a long moment and I think about 

how we all end up where we begin—
dependent on those who love us, 
offering nothing to the world 

but our own warm gaze, and still, 
how this is enough. All the way home, 
I take back every desperate thing

I’ve ever said about the world. 
All the way home, I try to name 
the thread that pulls together tight

all our humanity. All the way home, 
I feel for the hollow ache I brought 
through the automatic doors

and find that, even now, it is being held 
by the kindness of a stranger.

Krista Drechsel

Conversion

I fly too close to the sun

to maintain my figure
and forgive my sins.

The meat 
of my Fridays

just burns away.

And the ashes 
say something

about where I’ve been.

I kneel less.

But I pray more.

I raise my hand.

Divined by light,
I reach.

Because I don’t have 
the answers. 

Megan Sciarrino

Home

“Where are you from?”
the woman at the store asks.
An innocent question, but 
I hesitate before I answer.
Because I am from 
the plains not far from here 
where I ran with dirt 
on my knees and roots 
under my feet. 
But I’m also from 
the mountains that gave 
me escape and adventure. 
Then there is the sea - 
the water that healed 
and renewed me - 
the sand that grounded me
But this is too much to drop 
on a stranger in the bread aisle
so I just smile and say, 
“Oh, you know, I’m from 
a little bit of everywhere.”

Michelle Windsor

A dirge of chattering birds

My boys gift me strips of fine paperbark, 
and I hold it up to the golden evening hue,
behold a filtered light shine through. 

I’ve been alive twelve thousand, 
five hundred and eighty one days. 

As the day flees my frail fingers, 
we lay fleeting paperbark upon 
the little creek, watch it mould 
to the mottled ripples, fold 
with the breeze, and be farewelled 
by the trees. It floats downstream 
like a flimsy Viking longship.
The dirge is chattering birds. 

And there was evening, and there 
was mourning, my twelve thousand, 
five hundred and eighty first day. 

Rebecca Marie

When my Daughter Says Sometimes She Smiles So Hard Her Face Hurts

I know what she means

Maybe joy is a supernatural thing
An experience too big for our humble bodies

Like young love and triumph and sunsets and new babies and the perfect pair of jeans
Or warm bread with salted butter and toddlers dancing and a big stack of library books and when the tulips are in bloom
What about enduring love and French braids and a text from a friend and live music and standing on top of a mountain to realize your smallness in this vast beautiful, world

A smile can’t hold all that

Amy Grass

Baby Teeth

Each morning, I lift my son’s 
cracked molar from my jewelry tray, 
rub my fingers against the pearled 
enamel, thumb catching 
over the ridges. I find teeth 
everywhere, these days—
castoff shells as he ebbs 
and flows through the house 
like a tide. One on his desk, another
in a plastic bag on the kitchen counter.

You’ve heard of mothers-in-law gifting 
their sons’ brides with boxes or baggies
or necklaces of teeth, passing the torch
of loving his body, shaped so carefully
in the womb’s oyster shell, the grit 
of morning sickness and sciatica
rolled into a priceless pearl, 
fashioned cell by cell.

My mother kept my umbilical stump
in a plastic case on her vanity—
a wizened raisin, leathery 
with old blood. I tell the story
to laugh at the absurdity of mothers, 
our stubborn clinging to the driftwood 
of the past. But here I stand, 
unable to cast off his relics,
watching him grow tall and untethered. 

Lorren Lemmons

If God Was a Florist

If God was a florist
He would gift me a magical bouquet 
of fulfilled hopes and dreams,
instead of creamy pink peonies
and roses the color and scent of blood.

Am I too old for this fantasy?

The idea roots like a weed
in the sidewalk’s crack, 
desperate for light.
Grows in the dark space
between my amygdala
and prefrontal cortex. 

It would be guaranteed heartbreak

but 

sometimes it’s fun to pretend
a fistful of weeds is still a bouquet. 

Alyssa Silvester

A Prayer for Remembrance

(Or why I let my son run around with his shirt off, even though it's a douchebag thing to do)

My six-year-old has a thing about taking off his shirt 
whenever the weather is above seventy degrees, and I can’t help 
but cringe, can’t stop myself from remembering
a boy I knew growing up who always had his shirt off — 
his oozing arrogance outshined 
only by that chicken pox itch of desire, my very first 
exposure. 

I can still taste the want in the back of my throat. Can still remember
how he kept his chest bare, but our love covered
like it was some kind of secret thing best saved for shadows, 
patches of dark wood, brambles of thornbush. Already, the fairytale 
was fractured. Already, I accepted the break. 
I swear that back then, my heart was a windshield,
and this was the very first crack, spiderwebbing 
across my ribcage until the whole thing shattered
in on itself — a mess for someone else to inherit down the line.

And maybe that’s dramatic, but do you know how many tears I have shed 
over that boy? No, not him. Mine. The boy with the grass-stained 
pants and the wild smile that is already buckling knees. 
The one who smushes his face into the hollow 
of my shoulder with each and every hug, who tells me he loves 
me more than anyone in the whole entire world. The one who rips
off his shirt on the first spring day just because he likes the way 
the sun feels on his skin.

Lord, let this boy – my boy — be the handsome prince, not the monster
in the woods. When it comes time for him to uncover love, 
let him be the one who knows all things deserve to be held
in the light. Lord, when it matters most, let him remember
the sun. 

Jillian Stacia