ISSUE 70
CONTENTS
JANUARY 2021
V.C. Myers
Sloan Asakura
Len Lawson
Megan Nichols
Mikki Aronoff
Lucy Zhang
Michele Sharpe
Paul Ilechko
Constance Bourg
Peggy Hammond
CONTRIBUTORS
V.C. Myers
PAPIER-MACHE
I befriended the red paper wasps
flying around my garden. I sang
as they circled me. I watered the
flowers they pollinated. Such
camaraderie, such peace. Such
subtle symbiosis. Eventually I
no longer noticed them. I forgot
they were ever there. When I
felt a strange weight on my leg,
I looked down to see the wasps
attaching their honeycombed,
fibrous nest to my lonely skin,
making a new home of my body.
I watched the nest grow bigger,
consuming one leg, then the other,
swaddling all of my limbs, creeping
up my torso like an invasive vine
curling around a dying tree. The nest
cocooned my throat so I couldn't
breathe, sealed my mouth so I couldn't
scream, covered my eyes so I couldn't
see what too much trust made of me.
Sloan Asakura
SELF AS GIRL
was i ever really a girl?
when you’re young, “girl” means
purple swimsuits, shiny mary jane shoes,
tiaras, and ballet class,
it means stealing your mom’s makeup,
shaving off your eyebrows
dreaming about scissors
it means you carry other titles
“daughter” “sister” “princess”
no one wants to tell you what “girl” really means,
but a mother’s job demands it
so she sits you down with your two sisters
and raises three fingers,
her red nail polish like split flesh,
one in three. it happens to one in three girls.
which means it will happen to one of you.
she did not know it would happen to two.
the word “girl” is made of glass,
i could break it in my palms
like a christmas ornament
let shards fester in the muscle
and push them back out, the body
rejecting shrapnel, always seeking
to have only what fits.
girl meant the world could slice me open
meant starting at age twelve,
i was owned by men
meant the night it happened was
inevitable
girl means when?
girl means why?
girl means i was a shadow
trailing behind my mother’s memory
reaching toward the sun while it cast away from me
a blue girl with a blue dress
lay flat against the asphalt like a dream
i lick the puddles as i follow
and watch the body which had become of me
five feet tall with wide hips, broad brown shoulders
black hair mid-waist makes for an easy handle, a leash
i beg the body to cut it off
beg the body to untether me
but the brown girl walks on, her feet mirrored against mine.
Len Lawson
ELEGY FOR CHADWICK BOSEMAN
The Black Panther lives forever
His mantle passes from generation to generation
But this, this was a man
Flesh and bone
Breathing among us
Living, smiling, crossing his arms at his chest
For us, for all of us with melanin souls
For the spirits in our black chests
Our Ambassador of Blackness
When our own country allows our genocide
When our protectors keep blasting
Our bodies into the ancestral plane
A hero who gave us black icons on screen
Instead of black blood canvasing pavement
Lambs dragged to brazen altars at traffic stops
We beheld his CGI glory descending in Endgame
Second coming from a morning star portal
With every African regality, ancestor, and deity
Filling his chest and healing arms with valor
We salute
Fists raised
Eyes lifted
Hearts heavy with vibranium
Megan Nichols
IMPROMPTU VACATION, DON’T WORRY, SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS
We’re not being hunted but we are animals unfit
for city water is calcifying our arteries or maybe our bones
just can’t keep hold of what we crave most. Like love,
microscopic yet so abundant we’re sick of it leaving
stains in the sinks and shower doors open to our agony
why can’t anything stay clear. We’re not being hunted
but I hide us in the cedar for half a moon. What fortifies
you poisons me. In spring water filtered through oak roots,
I hide us from our loved ones. They don’t believe me
when I say I don’t deserve you, I mean I’m unable
to carry more sediment in my veins. Every sip weighs
a body down. For a while, we can resist the salt lick,
just in case we love the wrong ones and their offering is the trap
I cannot stop suspecting it is. Don’t remember this as ritual
into our history. For you, this is simply summer break. For you
we’ll return to tap water, we’ll lap it up and accept the apples
over the fence. I am not being hunted; I am not heavy
with all of the things I cannot prove are floating in the glass;
I am not contradicting myself; I am reciting a spell.
Mikki Aronoff
THE BIG SLOW
This is not the tiny bone-safe I emerged in,
wrenched from wet into light, all scream
and resist. Eleven seven-year itches, cells
in grinding recycle, bones already in rot.
I leaf through a grimace of photos, trace
a tidy bell curve, chime to peal to knell.
My fingertips drag through the fat of old
feasts. It tastes of function and scuffle,
conjures old couplings. These days I locate
in a spaniel’s eyes liquified with worship,
in the sibilance of a moggie’s arched hiss.
Shelter there. Learn the art of tug and beg.
Like a slowing-down top wobbling over
its center, I spin to repair, over and again.
What I relished about my sinew was its irony.
Not this plunge from breast-stroke
to slump, from sweat to parch. Days I tip-toe
so as not to offend. Nights I stay up late,
contemplate hemlock’s potential.
Lucy Zhang
ICE CREAM TRUCK
I knew teacher didn’t side with me when she
kept braiding the brunette’s soft, long locks,
kept calling out our orders for the ice cream man
parked in front of school that June,
all the girls giddy for pink gumball-eyed Powerpuff girl–
stock ran out real fast, left girls on the end of the alphabet
sucking Ninja Turtle or Batman not that I knew anything
with only PBS kids on the telly at home.
I took out my Rubbermaid container of room temperature
rice mushed with chives & eggs & marinated pork ear.
What’s that, the kids asked & I waited for teacher to rush to my defense.
No one else was being asked
what’s that
I said nothing, not even rice and stuff,
still watching teacher weave these long locks of hair
wishing my own hair went past my neck, thin like tissue paper
& the kids, sucking at the corners of Batman’s ear or Blossom’s sorbet bow,
shifted their attention to devouring bubble gum eyes,
sucking out the sugar & ink like mosquitoes.
Finally teacher tied the neat braid with a red, sparkly scrunchie.
The brunette hopped off her chair to the ice cream truck
where the ice cream man sat with his arm resting over his yoga ball stomach.
I nearly didn’t hear when teacher told me
there’s enough leftover change, would you like an ice cream
yes, yes I would, but the brunette took the last Powerpuff girl
(turns out one was still left, lost and found just for her)
all that remained: an ugly Spongebob whose mechanic laughter scared me so
dad would have to sleep next to me, rubbing my feet gently
until I made it past the nightmares into dreamless oblivion
no, no thank you.
Michele Sharpe
PATERNITY 615243
Back before the truth was more
important than how I would
feel about it, my mother’s back
was against a wall, the man writhing against
her tiny body.
She was not yet grown,
in the moments my cells began to grow.
We would have been more
like sisters if my body and her body
had been her own. I would
have grown up with her, against
her, behind her, talking back
to my own image, giving back
what I could once she’d grown
old. But no. She was a child against
adults and no more
in charge of me than of what would
happen to her own body.
The man was in charge of his body,
though. He can’t take that back.
What else would
you like to know? He was grown,
ten years older than her. Maybe more.
She didn’t fight against
him. Her family didn’t act against
him. Some parts of my body
or soul must be like his, or more
like his than hers. The curve of a back
bone. The internet found him. He’s grown
old, in his ‘80’s, living in his wood-
frame house in Garden City. I would,
when younger, have raised my voice against
him. At least a voice. But I’ve grown
careful of my body
and my soul. I might head back,
stop by his yard, comment on nothing more
than how his back-yard garden seems more overgrown. He’d say,
Who the hell are you? I wouldn’t tell him. A secret kept against
the powerful is power. I’d smile. I’d take my body back.
Paul Ilechko
AVOIDANT
Avoidant
is a state of being
that I would never choose
but merely exist within
you counter me
with anxiousness
or therapy
before us the dirt-tracked field
leaching into soy
or chicory
the thrusting stalks of corn
before us the winding humpbacked road
silver star gray
and pebble-dashed
lineless within an imaginary grid
forced into closeness
holding tight to our composure
ahead the implausible village
beyond that light
a ruby consecration
exploding into peach
as we turn towards darkness
and a life that must exist
beyond the shadows.
Constance Bourg
THE PROBLEM
feels torqued
I slip, a virtuoso
too obscure to peg into a puzzle board
my bumbling body
converts skies, lands rainwater
it pools in statistics
symptom conversion
disordered illness as shadow puppets
I was overlooked
corroding acronyms
symptoms to reframe my dis-ease
then there's the neglect
women accused
of playacting, the lead role
director, you weren't that convincing.
This poem is a found poem based on an essay by poet and science writer Kate Horowitz entitled “Performance of a Lifetime: On Invisible Illness, Gender, and Disbelief.” The original article is here: You can find the article here.
Peggy Hammond
SURFACES
A half-day from here
there’s a field that knows
each letter of my name,
knows the sinews
that catch and stitch
my bones one to the next.
Neither of us
will forget the other.
Even here,
inside this dark sleep,
I bolt upright;
blind as a mole,
I bump and clatter
my way out
to answer the call,
to stand
in thick moonlight
dripping through
early morning air.
Beside me,
in a gooseflesh breeze,
a chimney stone-stacked
and leaning
brushes at lichens rooted
to her granite eyes.
We comfort one another,
each the lone survivor
of what once was home,
each unwilling to crumble.
Issue 70 Contributors
Mikki Aronoff’s work has appeared in The Lake, EastLit, Virga, Bearing the Mask: Southwest Persona Poems, Love’s Executive Order, bosque9, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, SurVision, Love Like Salt, London Reader, Popshot Quarterly, and elsewhere. A New Mexico poet and Pushcart nominee, she is also involved in animal advocacy.
Sloan Asakura is a poet and memoirist originally from Los Angeles, now braving the Pacific Northwest. In their freetime, they can be found cooking comfort food, doing critical analyses of Korean dramas, and obsessively cleaning their bathroom. Asakura has previously been published in Rigorous and Jeopardy Magazine.
Constance Bourg lives in the Flemish part of Belgium, where she volunteers at her local library. She also dabbles in the art of collage. Her poems have appeared in Blanket Sea, Pink Plastic House, Paper Dragon, The Poetry Shed, Frogpond and an anthology of poems about illness by Emma Press (UK). She always says that she leads a part-time life because of a chronic illness called ME/CFS.
Peggy Hammond grew up near Raleigh, North Carolina, and now resides in the mountains of her home state. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in The Lyricist, Oberon Poetry, High Shelf Press, San Antonio Review, Inklette, and West Trade Review. Her full-length stage play A Little Bit of Destiny was produced by OdysseyStage Theatre in Durham, NC.
Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks Bartok in Winter (Flutter Press) and Graph of Life (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Juxtaprose, As It Ought To Be, Cathexis Northwest Press, Thin Air Magazine and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.
Len Lawson is the author of Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and others. His poetry appears in Callaloo, African American Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Len is also a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
V.C. Myers is an Appalachian poet, the author of Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019), and a Contributing Poetry Editor of Barren Magazine. Her work has been displayed in ekphrastic exhibits, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and appeared, or is forthcoming, in literary journals such as Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, Five:2:One, Coffin Bell, and Yes Poetry. Her website is vcmyers.com.
Megan Nichols lives in the Ozark Mountains. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in FEED Lit, Pretty Owl Poetry, Versification, Variant Lit, and River Mouth Review.
MIchele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear most recently in The New York Times, Witness, The Washington Post, and Poets & Writers. Poems can be found in Rogue Agent (Issue 66), B O D Y, Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review. More at http://michelesharpe.com.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in SOFTBLOW, Atticus Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.