A splinter pierces my left heel

but I’ll stay in these woods

for you, Alice

Pick dirt from under fingernails

flick crescent crusts

at two kissing snails

They dance so quietly

for each other

They dance like us

Three years ago

I wrote you poems for

Valentine’s Day

Scraps of similes

on receipts and Post-It notes

You glued my love into your

red leather book

with an A on the cover

More Scarlet Letter

than our initial to me

I take cover under snail shells

as the rain rolls in and

tell the two lovers how

my mother 

spat Whore when

I kissed your cheek

Lightning rips trees

down in one strike

Snails ask about

the A sewn into my hem

My mother used to sharpie AW

on my daycare shirts

so no one would steal them

I steal glances at two lovers

kissing in the rain

The snails are lesbians

I can declare this because

in this poem I am God

Did their mothers ever

initial their swirling 

shells for safekeeping 

or pinch them in church 

for being too loud?

Alice, you were my wild treetop

mossy root religion

To snails I am not God, just

a fragile giant filled with

You aren’t allowed to see her again-

Don’t tell the neighbors-

Shame

I tuck one lover behind each ear

let them nibble at my neck hairs

Yes, Alice, I am selfish but

these snails have never seen the sea

So I am taking them 

there to you

walking splinter-footed 

towards your boardwalk

Amanda Wolf

This morning the

cat lays on your back as

I count the freckles 

on your shoulder. They

cover you like glitter, 

like raindrops, so

delicate I’m afraid to 

touch you, lest I 

disrupt the cat or your freckles. 

Your face is turned away 

from me, and 

it is raining, tapping gently 

on the window.

Last night it 

was pouring, slapping 

against the window. 

We kissed so hard

we tasted 

blood. You kissed your 

way up and down 

my body we tasted each 

other, and you 

killed me, we 

both died only 

to be resurrected by 

the cat’s demand for food.

Olivia McKnight

A girl flickers by. 

She skates skillfully over the ground slick. 

The lights are burnt out, but still, she skates. 

Her head tilted towards the sky and stars, 

She lifts her hands up and in and she twirls, 

The world around her a snowy blur. 

It is cold, but she can’t feel a thing skating above the clouds.

 

Leaving trails of frost, 

She twirls in sync with the constellations 

And all the empty space in between 

And she is lost in the beauty of it all. 

She and her partner, 

A searing cold star, 

Glide across the rink. 

Hand in hand. 

In a slumping house hit hard by a winter storm, you might just find

A grinning girl in her warmest winter socks 

sliding over newly mopped wooden floors

With a glowing handheld lamp to guide the way.

Caroline Quan

The baby began to kick halfway through the service. Olivia winced with every spasm, hoping others would interpret her pain as grief. As she bent down in front of the casket, the baby administered its hardest kick yet, causing her to cry out sharply and fold forward across the body. Aunt Jean rushed forward to guide the young woman away, murmuring condolences through wrinkled lips. Olivia’s eyes watered from the pain, and she let the tears fall, composing the best melancholic expression she could manage. Just pretend, she reminded herself. A couple more hours, and you never have to see him again.

After the service, an unending stream of faceless people passed by her, squeezing her hand and uttering “I am so sorry for your loss,” or “Your husband is in a better place,” between perfumed hugs. Olivia could barely breathe in her black wool dress. From the punishing kicks coming from her stomach, it seemed the baby couldn’t catch its breath either.

Sixteen days later, the boy kicked his way through her body and into the world. Purple and screaming, he flailed and beat his tiny fists at the doctors. Just like his father, Olivia thought, barely conscious and covered in blood. His final goddamn gift to me.

***

In the cemetery, a young woman walks towards a fresh grave. Placing a small, squirming bundle in front of the tombstone, she unleashes an agonized wail. The unwanted bundle echoes her cries, their two screams vibrating off each other like bats hunting in the night. The woman scratches at the marble lettering of the new tombstone. “You forced this into me, now take it back!” she sobs, looking at the bundle with hot hatred. The man in the grave does not answer. Hanged men never do.

Amanda Wolf

I wonder: 

Is this a new story, or a very old one? 

Send your rain in a square envelope 

The color of a paint swatch — 

Skyfall Oslo Cobalt Misty Blue. 

You can have 

my sunrise. We cover our mouths but not our eyes.

Check your mail for a square envelope Solid and

warm to the touch 

And full of light that distance never dims.

Grace Regnier

Carolina Jaime Chinchilla

Ruth Nelson

red lights 

                       run–through foggy nights dripping

                a million pieces cut 

                                          supercuts superglued hot breaths   

      can’t remember can only feel seatheaters and 

deep blue 

                                arctic wind crawling down 

                my neck raised skin sending chills into fingertips 

                                        my fingers in his frosted tips the frost 

                     on the tips of his headlights beaming across chapped lips 

yellow 

      hair. blonde boys thick strands 

                            stranded in a fraction of golden memory

                and how much he actually cared lost 

                                   in the quotient of curled chest hairs questioning how much was taken 

in those green 

                     eyes I can’t see but can never quite unsee 

       an empty field so wide I still can’t find him unless 

                                                I look less and remember the radio playing

                            me when I looked into those emerald studded eyes pupils polished stones swirling black 

                how I long for him 

                            to still text me tells me that he 

     feels it too when lying still in the darkness enshrouded 

                                        by me by him by reminiscence still next to me 

                when my eyes close and I can’t see–that 

                            it was always 

                                          us

Matthew Buxton

Priyam Mazumdar

Shell-born,

Every chick is a raptor Venus

Hatched, blind and bleeding

From a whirlpool of straw and feather,

Interweaving.

 

The salty sea of the amniotic sac

Glazes our shell-pink, alien limbs

As we crack, trembling and radiant,

Into life, to rest upon eggshell carnage,

Spent, our panting like so many hymns

To the oak in whose arms we lie —

The oak, true husband of the mother-bird.

 

She, in graceful homage

Will weave through His branches.

The whisper of her wing-wind spells worship.

The tremors of her feathered throat —

Tap your smallest finger —

Such is her frail movement

As she croons crying in the night.

(We forgive you, Mother.)

 

Soon,

Like angry petals,

We fall wings flapping,

Parched with an open-air thirst

Born of egg-shell claustrophobia.

We tumble into the sky

To the rustling of sapling clapping

And sweet autumn stink.

Their leaves blush too, with pride.

 

Anne Clark