Issue 14

July 2024

Photo by Dakota Roos on Unsplash

Notes on a summer kitchen floor

Shreds of parmesan cheese and hardened
cake crumbs crust to my socks after I step
in another half-melted ice cube. I rage
against summer’s entropy. The day’s needs
are pouring through me, but I’m a sieve
with too large a weave to hold 

 the meals 
      the boredom 
        the messes
 	                the heat.

Dropped crackers sing a siren song 
to the ants in the baseboards. I wash and fold,
wash and fold, but the kids say they have nothing
to wear. I stare into a screen, wishing
I had time for my real life until
I realize maybe my real life is noticing
the pattern of my sheets as I fold them back, the scent
of rice absorbing coconut milk, the gentle
scritch of unmowed grass against my dry heels,
tugging at my rough skin, saying
you are here, you are here. 

Lorren Lemmons

Things No One Says to Me 

(After Kate Baer)

You should work harder 
You know how to rest 
You make it look so easy

Rebecca Marie

The Gulf’s Gift

Emerald water stretches, 
folds over herself
like dimpled baby thighs.
Runs like a child,
foams at our ankles,
laps our feet, trying to hold 
on while she freefalls.
Our toes sink into playdough.

She retreats and reveals
a half-hidden white seashell. 
My son bends and digs. 
Droplets cling 
to the bottom of his lobes. 

He plucks the shell,
places it in my palm. 
I turn it over. A perfect curve 
mimics his ear. Its silky interior 
like stroking his cheek.
The back ridges like his fingerprint.

“Come on, Mama, let’s jump!”
The wind carries his voice,
and he races into crashing waves.
I clutch the seashell in one hand
and run after him into the water. 

Alyssa Silvester

Common Milkweed

I admire common milkweed. 

With all the traffic she attracts, 
bumblebees, 
wheel bugs, 
back-to-back box elders, 
flower beetles, 
and all variety of flies besides,

I hardly think she’s common.

It’s said she’s named for her milky, sticky sap.

But I’d sooner suggest it be all about 
her fragrant, flowing elixir and the feeding 
of the billions—from pockets 
of backyard buffers and Monet-like medians.

She buoys a bunch of soft, purple globes, dense with almost-adipose blooms, and she asks only to be 

scattered.

What

a

gal.

Her version of a lot could never beeee too much, for it wouldn’t beeee possible to feel full without her.

And then we need consider 
the marionette of the shrinking meadows,
the one that hangs by a thread—

the monarch. 

Its reign could fade. 
And ancestral souls could cease,
minus the milk of the matriarch.

This butterfly could just flutter by—
the vapor an orange dot, 
inked into some botanical print, 
about some cautionary tale, 
about how we the forgot chorus 
to the tune

of life.

Megan Sciarrino

Like a prayer

How many lives 
is one life worth? 
Is what I’m thinking 
while I sit in the food 
court of the mall and wait 
for H&M to open on a Sunday 
morning to buy clothes 
I don’t really need,
but will make me feel better. 

Across town a preacher 
is dealing out certainties 
and absolutes. 
He claims the prophecy 
is being fulfilled. 
He is praising god 
for saving the one. 
He does not mention 
the many. 

I don’t believe 
in that kind of god 
anymore, but in 
the sanctuary 
of the dressing room 
I say something 
like a prayer 
and hope it ends 
up somewhere. 

Michelle Windsor

Cannonball

I hurl my body into the blue water 
to the delight of my children 
while a friend receives word 
of a heartbreaking disappointment
cannonball
I jump in tandem with my daughter 
as my watch buzzes with breaking 
news from an ocean away: 
“Over one thousand dead…”
cannonball
The next time I resurface 
I check on another friend with sad news
cannonball
In a moment of blind confidence my son jumps 
into the deep end with no floatie
cannonball
I reach him in a second
cannonball
He resurfaces, he flails, he struggles

And then

He swims

cannonball

Amy Grass

You know what I love?

People who love something,
who wear their devotion
like a scarf curled around 
their neck, pinned to their chest 
like a scarlet letter, the most
bodacious boutonniere, the most 
cringey corsage. Devotion is a little
black dress, darling, 
it always slays.
And anyway, why be a flicker 
when you can be a firework? 
Why play it small
when you deserve 
the whole damn sky?

Jillian Stacia

Instructions for Hoping

Give it time. Before anything else, 
remember what it is to live

in your one, soft body. Put away
your ruminating mind 

and all the things you know 
about knowing. All the things 

you believe about believing.  
Every morning, introduce yourself

again to the idea of yourself. 
Every morning, take roll call. 

Say out loud the names 
of all the ghosts of you 

lined up at your bed. 
Then feed yourself words, 

a whole language, 
maybe some toast.

Listen for the hoofbeats
of your own galloping heart. 

If, after all this, you still despair, 
do not lecture yourself. 

Remember how hope 
comes in a little at a time, 

like the sparrows singing 
in the backyard brush. 

First one, then two, then 
so many at once, 

you can’t quite remember 
what the world sounded like

before they began to sing. 

Krista Drechsel