Image description: a collage of circles, spheres, swirls, and spirals. Some of the circles are eyeballs. Some are made of words. Two circle are blue watercolor stains.
ISSUE 84
CONTENTS
MARCH 2022
Michelle Seaman
Yanita Georgieva
Lorrie Ness
Barbara Daniels
Sherine Gilmour
H. Lee Coakley
Wendy Drexler
Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
Camille Lebel
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
CONTRIBUTORS
Michelle Seaman
ALLIGATOR, SLEEP
Alligators know the power of a straight line only on land.
When they slide into rivers, they keep rhythm
with the current, tails propelling, one with the sway.
Eyes even with the water line, snouts surfacing,
they breathe like this, brine in and out, trusting
a saline solution to stay afloat.
I will hold this in my body
when it is time to trust others to handle my brain,
slow my heart rate, keep me alive.
When it is time to trust chemicals to wake me up,
with the ease of floating,
a full circle meditation, the beginning
perhaps the same as the ending, going under
belly sinking to sediment,
saturating, absorbing all, I will write this,
try for comfort, feel it, spirit.
When an X-ray marks the fracture,
when it is time for splintering and replacement,
I will pray:
Alligator mississippiensis, Alligatoridae,
Let me listen like a mother,
my bones, my child
tapping, ready
for a new world.
Invoking from my skeleton,
grant me the tooth
to crack and evolve, crack to evolve...
Yanita Georgieva
WALKING HOME ALONG THE FREEWAY
I heard a wailing buried
under thorns and bushes.
I don’t know what it means
to be a mother, but it’s true:
I was hysterical. I raked and raked
and peeled through spikes
—and nothing. Then
I realised that I could speak
its language. I stood there, wailing with it
two voices reaching for each other
in the dark. When it appeared,
it looked at me like something holy.
Around us cars zipped past
clouds gathered and I held it,
blood gushing through my palms,
desperate to save something.
Lorrie Ness
FROM BEHIND
Tell me bottoms up baby.
Tell me you’re the only one
nursing from a tumbler full of breath.
I’ve learned to knock it back, to swallow
every drop of bourbon, crush a cherry
between my teeth. What’s it make me
if my shoulder blade tattoo is the only face you know?
If I wear a bridle of damp hair
but I’m still looking for a bit? Your thumb
presses into my ink — pulls the corner of her mouth
closer to my spine. She cannot turn
away, and I cannot decide
if she’s someone I take with me
or someone I’ve left behind.
I need you to slide your hands down,
and find a grip around her throat
to remind me that I still breathe. Slap your palm
across her lids so I remember how to see.
My eyes are at my back. My eyes
are at my knees.
Barbara Daniels
LIKE A BODY
I am lost trees. Am dirt
on the window.
My hand drifts of its own
accord. Wanders away from me.
I am the clock that fell from the wall.
Tocked. My little hand waving.
Perfume of evergreen. Wafted.
I am a ghost tree. Clipped,
chipped. Put to the ground.
I am the scorpion, feared,
freighted. Touch me. I sting.
In this heat I fall to the grass.
Black. Out. Sweat heroically.
Bird. I am bird. The wind
speaks of wildfire.
Ceiling down. Fever
so high I am losing.
What rocks in the water
there? So like a body? Friends
newly dead rot in the ground.
Furred, frantic, my little
hands paddle the dirt.
Sherine Gilmour
SHE-BEAR
1.
When I first felt the blood clot’s
warm cherry pit behind my knee,
I did nothing. I thought
about going to the doctor or urgent care.
Instead, I scooped coffee.
Cleared the plates and said goodnight
to my son and paid our bills.
I did this for days.
2.
Tongue, a stinging legend.
Gums, a Rorschach red.
Wrinkled nose, small eyes
peering over the land she owns.
Fur like fog, like willow mulch.
The she-bear stalks the house. Like Keats,
who once wrote “Darkling” for his
evening-ending nightingale,
I think of her. I used to walk
early mornings hoping for a glimpse.
But now, doped up
on blood thinners and steroids,
I’m frightened of everything,
the twig’s snap, the nurse’s needle.
3.
A week passed, a few days more.
Driving on the highway, a thump
skewed in my chest, then a sideways
ringer beat-half-beat later.
My stomach curdled. Without thinking,
I reached down to my leg,
and felt for my clot, so much smaller,
barely there. Did I really need
to drive to the hospital?
If I walked through those gaping doors,
the nurses would just
show me I am powerless.
4.
More than ever, death is everywhere,
the sky and the waters.
The mailbox, the school yard, the next slip
of medical paper in my hands.
There are many deaths,
and each day asks what death I would like.
5.
The first time I tried,
I could not make it up our driveway.
The doctor explained my blood
had thinned. I would adjust.
A few weeks later,
I took my son out on his scooter.
I tried to run, just
a few steps, and ended on all fours,
a bright Saturday morning, my son
too far up ahead for me to help
if something happened. My knees on a stranger’s grass,
light-headed, blurry-eyed, panting.
6.
There was a time, as a child,
when I thought I was going to die
at the hands of my stepfather,
and I taught myself how to walk, heel-toe,
through the house,
from my bedroom to the bathroom,
even as he bounded his full weight
up the stairs, or paced the hall with a meat
tenderizer in his hand, or stood in his
underwear blocking the door and cracking
his fingers over and over again.
I would not give him the pleasure
of a fitful squeal. I tried not to stumble or fall.
No. I would not even try
to run. Now, with the blood clot
still in my leg, I take the dog for walks
and pretend to talk to the bear.
In my head, a constant message.
I tell her how I used to walk
content in my own power.
I tell her inside me
is an endless No.
7.
She slides from shadow into shadows.
She slips between. Her brown against
the brown of trees.
When I finally saw a slip of her, a moving curve,
Slow as a glacier, old as the world.
I thought: She is sick of herself,
sick of her own eternity.
Ready to live or die.
I am sick of the question, too.
8.
I want to glimpse her again,
hear her teeth tear garbage
or meat or rotted trees—
smell her nit-infested opulence.
Last summer, she broke a neighbor’s shed,
cracked another’s hive. Swatted
a garage door, her thick paws
wracking it over and over.
I, too, have wanted
to tear down houses.
9.
Darkling, I still want
to hear your husky breath,
smell rumors of your stench,
find clotted fur mounded with fleas
on the base of clawed-out trees.
and yet I’m frightened.
I want to turn a corner,
see your teeth-spires, drizzle and drool.
Slow as a glacier, old as the world.
I want to see you lick
rancid animal fat from your lips
because I am nothing
but filled with memories
too boring and brutal
and other people’s words.
Promise me:
Your jaw on my jaw,
your strength against my strength,
your paw on my chest,
and I promise
I will try to have courage again.
H. Lee Coakley
ADMISSIONS PAPERWORK
the most disgusting thing i can think of
is when i ate three quarters of a tray
of brownies in twenty minutes &
then put the rest in the trash &
poured dish detergent over them, as if to say enough
& then sat down,
because i knew it wasn’t.
& then after a little while i got
back up & went to the trash & pulled out the brownies & ate the rest of the tray
that tasted like lye - like how i imagine acid corroding metal
feels for the metal.
& to be honest, i’ve always felt that way,
barely managing not to ooze my life out of these
tiny, ragged holes,
but never as much as i did shivering on the tile,
watching half-digested brownie & soap flush away,
watching myself stay.
it seems obvious, but
it’s only lately that i’ve realized
there must be a different way
of watching time
than the through eyes of this
body bound
to persistence & disaster,
where morning after morning
i wake to find soft wreckage.
& i, the only survivor.
Wendy Drexler
IMAGINARY INTERVIEW
—after Jillian Weise
Q: How old was I anyway when you had me smashed to pieces—my cilia, my septum, my nares, my vestibules, my bridge?
A: Just 16.
Q: I filtered the air for you, I smelled cheese pizza and Hershey’s kisses for you, I moistened, I air-conditioned, I cleaned out foreign debris. Why did you hate me?
A: I was young. It was the thing to do. That little bump on top bothered me. Assimilation was tacitly understood. In my defense, do you remember Bobbi Glick, Marcy Leiser, Jodi Weisberg, or my cousin Marian? The popular girls all did it.
Q. But your boyfriend Ron liked me and tried to talk you out of it. I made you look distinctive, he said, not like everyone else.
A: I thought he’d like me even more. I thought everyone would like me more. I thought I’d like myself more.
Q: Why did you skip out of town for this?
A: My mother booked the best doctor in Beverly Hills. Known for his pure profiles, no artificially stretched skin. Nothing pug like a Pekinese, the way some girls turned out.
Q: The last thing I remember was inhaling that sickly-sweet smell. After that I was toast. I heard you were black and blue and bloodshot for days after in that hotel room.
A: Yes, all true. My mother applied cold compress after cold compress. My eyes were Zombies.
Q: Can you say plastic surgery got you what you wanted?
A: In college I could pass. The WASP sororities all wanted me. But then Theta found out I was Jewish and wouldn’t take me. I never knew how they knew. But Kappa Kappa Gamma chose me! Kappa was la plus ultra! All Mainline. Private schools. Gold circle pins. Pappagallos. Eye candy. Can you understand? Candice Bergen was my sorority sister! And the boys . . . everyone in SAE wanted to date me!
Q: Am I supposed to feel happy for you?
A: I dropped out of Kappa after two years. I wasn’t like them after all.
Q: Don’t you feel like you’ve abandoned your tribe? Who you are?
A: My family wanted to be only a little Jewish. So it wouldn’t show. So we wouldn’t stick out.
Q:
A: My mother was blond and had a cute little button nose.
Q: Have you forgiven yourself?
A: I want the rabbit to live, but the hunger of the hawk is always turning inside me.
Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
YELP REVIEW OF THE MOON
Came here to get away and true
to what I heard there was nothing.
No strip malls or liquor stores.
The moon’s invitation said BYOB.
I got dust-drunk and lonely, picked up
handfuls of rock and watched out
over the sagging horizon
of my abandoned planet.
Which is what I wanted.
I came to the moon to be alone,
which is the only thing you can be
on the moon.
There are no other lunar occupations.
Alone on the moon there is nothing
to love except borrowed light and slight
gravity, an elevator drop
in your stomach when you walk
or think about the reasons you left.
Camille Lebel
LAMB TO LIONESS
I.
There was a promise,
presented and inscribed on
chaste, pre-pubescent hearts.
Etched into sterling silver, encircling a finger.
Her first bondage--
a reminder that her body is not her own.
Spit. Thick and stringing,
it lands in a cup passed from boy to boy.
Pastor, Father, Brother--
sleeves rolled, hair gelled.
Reflecting pious approachability,
he lifts the makeshift young womb into the air,
deeply tarnished.
“Would you drink of this cup?”
II.
On her wedding night,
she thinks of that cup and
fingers the strange bits of lace
meant to adorn, accentuate.
A garnish for the lamb.
She shudders, trying on another’s skin.
Sheep are promised instant transformation;
Soft wool, snow-pure, is split open into
the lithe, sure sinews of the insatiable lioness.
Fierce and fearless.
She’s never been good at acting.
III.
Garish, glossy print,
tucked carefully under modest clothing in a drawer,
promises ten steps to rapture.
But she remains solidly stuck on Earth.
Inexperienced fingers searching, hesitate.
The child plucking out Chopsticks
desperate for a sonata.
The trapeze artist reaching, stretching for the bar,
Fingertips just brushing.
A body falls,
never reaching flight.
IV.
Years later,
she still prefers her label-maker to her vibrator.
Both whirring softly,
One creating a certain, crisp result.
Clean-cut perfection in black and white.
Orderly and predictable.
The other struggles to an uncertain end.
Gray, aching paths through forbidden forests,
shame stubbornly hanging moss-like from branches.
Frantic, she searches for absolution.
V.
The four letters on her lips now,
once rebellion, tried on for size,
ill-fitting, washed clean by a bar of Ivory soap
She’s learning to use her words.
Hold the letters firm on her tongue.
Offer up the word as a prayer.
As a request. A command.
Fuck.
She smashes glass against walls,
rips moss down from trees, takes a chainsaw
to the entire forest.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
DREAM, BODY, DREAM
All my memories begin after two deaths,
after my mother cleaned up the remnants
of the dark and dirty house.
***
My parents were as temperate as a winter’s sun
beating through a cloudless sky on an empty field:
all of the burn, none of the heat, all of the chaff,
none of the wheat.
***
I don’t know what I survived,
but my body remembers—
no—relives—no, is living.
Issue 84 Contributors
H. Lee Coakley (they/she) is a Queer poet & nutritional healer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. They hold a BA from New York University & an MSPH from Johns Hopkins University. Their work has been featured in Lavender Review, Red Eft Review, Utterance Journal, The Voices Project, Blueshift Anthology & The Mad Farmer Reading Series.
Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, The Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She’s the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, and programming co-chair of the New England Poetry Club.
Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian journalist raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She is an MA candidate in Poetry at Royal Holloway University and lives in London with her cat, Eugene. You can find her work in Hobart, Alien, HAD, and elsewhere.
Sherine Gilmour has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Her work was nominated for Best New Poets 2020 and a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have been published or are forthcoming from Cleaver, Jet Fuel Review, Mom Egg Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Redivider, Salamander, Third Coast, and other publications.
Brett Elizabeth Jenkins lives and writes in Indiana. Look for her work in The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI, Mid-American Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, originally from Columbus, Ohio, lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she edits confidential documents for the government. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Pleiades. Her chapbook, Fine, Considering, about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She helps with publicity for the Poetry Witch Community.
Camille Lebel lives on a small farm outside of Memphis, TN where she enjoys horse whispering and singing to her chickens. Mother to seven, she largely writes poetry in her minivan while waiting in the school pickup line as a way to process special-needs parenting, adoption, evangelical deconstruction, and more. Her work is published or forthcoming in Inkwell, Literary Mama, Sparks of Calliope, Sledgehammer Lit, and Black Fox Literary Magazine. You can find her on Instagram @clebelwords..
Lorrie Ness is a poet working in Virginia. Her work can be found at Palette Poetry, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Typishly and various other journals. She was twice nominated for a Best of the Net Award by Sky Island Journal and she was a featured poet at Turtle Island Quarterly in 2021. Her chapbook Anatomy of a Wound is being published by Flowstone Press in July of 2021.
Michelle Seaman’s poems appear in Two Hawks Quarterly, 3Elements Literary Review, Entropy, Urban Tree Festival and forthcoming in Swamp Ape Review and Porkbelly Press. She performs and records poetry in collaboration with musical projects, The Dwindlers and Half Wild, and her work has been recognized by fellow nature writers at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Michelle has a Master’s in Interdisciplinary Art, and she loves to bike or wander in the woods.