February Afternoon, after Berthe Morisot    

by Joan E. Cashin


The bare trees drink down the light
As the sun sets,
The windows reflecting the red lacquer 
As the color swims madly down the glass.   
A tall thin man walks down our street.
His hair making a trailing blond rag,
And his breath like tiny white ferns in the air.
He raises his grey eyes and smiles.
Winter will end, he wants to say.
Love may not last, but spring will come.


* * * * *

Joan E. Cashin writes from the Midwest, and she has published in many journals, most recently in MONO, VITA BREVIS, MONTHS TO YEARS, and LITERARY YARD.

 

Couple in Winter

by Joan E. Cashin


Night: original snowfall, the thick curtain
Falling between us.  
We pace home, two lone scouts brooding,
Two vapor trails disappearing in the dark.

We step out into a crater of street-light,
Faint orange hues with the light humming,
Reverberating, flickering, he says, as if from a magic wick underground.

Morning: fresh drifts, vulnerability.
First step at the front door, plunging
Through more snow 
Before we hit the brick walk. 
We venture out to find paths in the white terrace,
Egos pared back, spirits expanding. 


* * * * *

Joan E. Cashin writes from the Midwest, and she has published in many journals, most recently in MONO, VITA BREVIS, MONTHS TO YEARS, and LITERARY YARD.

Freyja's Distaff

by Lisa Creech Bledsoe


It sometimes begins with the sound of bees, or the breathless silence
after Maria Callas finishes Casta Diva. It doesn't take an oracle—

or Emmylou Harris wending her way through Poor Wayfaring Stranger—
to conjure death's proximity. Freyja says their names as she chooses half

of all the dead, though she's not a stickler for rules and often
brings home more. She never/always sees the forces amassing

against someone she loves. Remember that night in the 24-hour
doughnut place, back when they still let truckers smoke inside?

We staked out the back corner and drilled him until we believed
he'd make it through finals, hours away. We arrived in the exam hall

reeking of cigarettes and sugar, throbbing with immortality.
Later we smoked a celebratory bowl with a friend whose bong

had a Norse name. Fenrir or Frida, I think, but it's been an age.
She loved him like we did, and the shock of finding him flung, boyish

and broken at the crossroad, never made any kind of sense. Neither
did the other, who kept marbles in a jar to mark a journey of two years,

then four, then six, before it ended/began. That one was surrounded
by every sort of petition. Freya hardly notices the presence/absence

of prayers or offerings. Most religion is horseshit, anyway. Try Just Plain
Love for a change. Remember how we hooted through Shaun of the Dead,

loved the way he and Liz got back together in the face of a zombie apocalypse?
What it takes to keep a relationship together all these years, despite

a shocking amount of collateral damage. Did you ever wonder why
there are two heroic paradises? Valhalla gets a Brückner painting and

Led Zeppelin, while Fólkvangr gets pretty much nothing. Another man/woman
thing, Freyja muses. Conquerors write the history. She sings their names

as she chooses half/all the dead and directs them toward warm, capacious
barns where her cats stretch in the sun, and the milkwort hasn't been renamed

for a virgin, or Freyja herself recast as a whore by holy men. I wept
when I heard my grandfather sing Man of Constant Sorrow under the stars,

years before he died. Somehow he untied time, pulled it loose from the needle,
and now it is wonderfully cast in every color on the floor of the universe,

leading everywhere/when. Immortality doesn't mean never dying. It is
a pile of work, like gathering up the dead. When sheet lightning flickers

over the mountain, I think of them all, and especially you. How we will
hear bees, and the song of our names, and it will be right now again.


* * * * *

Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. She is the author of two books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has new poems out or forthcoming in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Chiron Review, Otoliths, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, among others.

Website: https://appalachianground.com/ 

 

The Woman in the Mirror

by Grace Hickey


Last night
I smashed
the patriarchy
out of my mirror
broke it into a
million pieces
so that it can no longer
project lies
unto my being
                                                 
I allowed the shards
 to make my hands bleed
                                                         

                                                            watched
in spite
                                                            of myself
                                                            as my humanity
                                                            spilled out all over the place

I wrote
a new narrative
with it






one they will probably call
radical
scrawled it down on a piece of paper
recited it to every being I know
shouted it to my ancestors
                                                                         I wanted to remember
                                                                         the person
                                                                         I was before
                                                                         I mistook
their expectations
                                                                          and longings
                                                                          
for my own



wish I could crawl in
and go looking
for that young child
bring her back
to what she always knew
to be
true
                   

               there
                        is
                              a
                                 little
                                         girl
                                                in
                                       there
                                       somewhere
 

longing for validation
       only I can give to her
        if only she could
                                                see
                                                       me
                                                               now

                                                                                       
shattering stereotypes
with my existence
using my words to speak truth
my heart to heal
my mind to make art
and most days I am too focused
on making the world beautiful
to even care
if the world is looking at me
any sort of way
that shit is irrelevant to me now
                                                                                           until the internalized misogyny
                                                                                           creeps into the hollows of my brain
                                                                                           sets up camp
                                                                                           in the place I used to live
                                                                                           but these days
                                                                                           only visit
                                                                                           now and again
                                                                                           


each time I return
she is always there waiting for me
filled with empathy
and compassion
for only she knows
what I have
unlearned
dismantled
and rebuilt




                                                                                          to be able to look at my reflection
                                                                                          and see the mosaic
                                                                                          that is she
                                                                                          in all of her complexity
                                                                                          and multidimensionality
                                                                                          someone I love so deeply
                                                                                                       

the woman in the mirror.

* * * * *

Grace Hickey (she/her) is an emerging writer from Fredericton, New Brunswick, located on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq and Peskotomuhkati peoples. She is currently a fourth-year student at St. Thomas University in the Bachelor of Arts Program. Grace loves to be creative and has always enjoyed expressing herself through her writing as it helps her connect to her truth. You can follow her work on Instagram @graceelizabethhickey.

 

A Walk with my Almost-Four-Year-Old Grandson

by Brooke Herter James


He gathers questions as we stroll
down the pebbled beach,
why the ocean is deep
and where the moon sleeps,
why clams need water,
why hot dogs are called hot dogs,
where the fire goes when it goes out
and Why is this periwinkle orange?

He doesn’t seem to mind my I’m not sure
as he plops treasure after treasure
into his red plastic pail.
Later, as he arranges them
on a blue-striped beach towel,
a seaside display he calls his museum,
he waives the mussel shell entrance fee,
promising he will teach me about everything for free.


* * * * *

Brooke Herter James is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Widest  Eye (2016) and Spring took the Long Way Around (2019), one prose poetry/photography collection, Postcards from Montana (2020) and one children’s book, Why Did the Farmer Cross the Road? (2017). Her poems have appeared in Mountain Troubadour Poetry Journal, Tulip Tree Review, Orbis and Rattle, as well as the online publications Poets Reading the News, New Verse News, Flapper Press, Typishly and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. She lives on small farm in Vermont.

 

Surfer Boy

by Alexis Rhone Fancher and Dion O'Reilly

 

He taught me to eat raw fish, to mix wasabi and soy sauce into a thick green slurry, use ivory chopsticks to dip the sushi without severing it from its rice bed. Clumsy at first, soon we were feeding each other morsels of mackerel, a bite of raw shrimp, salmon sashimi, slippery on the tongue. Easy then to slip into his bed, already besotted with things raw and delicious. Those were the days I was free for the taking, men schooling around, and me, the wide open sea.   He began at my feet, told me not to look at him; I stared at the mirror on his closet door, watched his reflection devour me like bait. You have a beautiful cliTORis, he marveled. It’s pronounced CLItoris, I said. There was a wetsuit in the closet. A surfboard rested next to the bed. On the wall, pages torn from Surfer Magazine — mammoth, lapis lazuli waves dwarfed lone surfers as they shot the curl. A metaphor. We drank a bottle of saki, and then another. He showed me the St. Christopher medal around his neck. He was named for that patron saint of wanderers, but he stayed put until November, when the surf turned cold and the money ran out. Christopher sold off his stuff for traveling cash; dishes, linens, the radio. I like to travel light, he said.   A few nights before Chris left for Maui’s Banzai pipeline, we spent my last fifty on tequila and limes, invited a few of his surfer buds for a final aloha. Before the night ended I went down on one of them while Chris watched. All of us, bombed out of our minds. That guy kept calling, telling me how hot I was and how he wanted to “return the favor.”   Just drop me off here, Chris said when I pulled up at the Hawaiian Airlines terminal at LAX. He removed the long, silver chain with the St. Christopher medal from his neck, placed it over my head. Hey, he said, his lips brushing mine. It’s been real.


* * * * *

"Surfer Boy" was first published in Interlitq (spring 2021). Written with Dion O’Reilly.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Cleaver, Diode, Duende, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry East, Pedestal Magazine and elsewhere. She’s authored five poetry collections, most recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), and EROTIC: New & Selected (New York Quarterly Books, 2021). Another, full-length collection (in Italian) by Edizioni Ensemble, Italia, was published in 2021. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. www.alexisrhonefancher.com