Cell

            by Daisy Bassen

            It’s not the end of the world,
            She always says, removing herself
            From conversations like the sparrow
            Alights from the branch, conclusively.
            Except it must be, sometime, the end
            Of the world. It has been already, only ask
            The coelacanth, the survivor of thousands
            Who were the last. This place is littered
            With fossils and riverbeds run dry,
            Shipwrecks, chests of coins in currency
            That won’t buy a stick of gum,
            As if you could still buy it that way, stacked
            Like a Japanese sensu, slatted with ivory.
            It’s the end of the world every day,
            But who’d trouble herself to say anything?
            No one will listen or worse, they will,
            Cassandra all over again. Mockery, crude
            Dirty, and for what? Being true doesn’t make it
            The truth. The phone in her hand is a terror,
            A tether, it’s simple as a spoon.
            It’s the consequence of the sly devising
            That lets me watch my grandmother flickering
            As a young girl, kissing her mother good morning.
            She played the upright piano like the one in my house.
            A world that should begin to be beyond
            Remembering. The streets now are filled
            With people walking, their ears stuffed like olives,
            Listening, listening. Perhaps they will grow
            A third eyelid, like a lizard, to let them see
            What they hear. We’re not sure what comes next
            But it will. We won’t. My grandmother’s hands
            Played a scale, I recognize that; I know the interval
            Of the notes, how to sing it, how it climbs away.


* * * * *

Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, and PANK among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.

            Explaining to myself who you are

            by Daisy Bassen

            I didn’t love you, never once,
            Not your bright male beauty,
            Striking as the swan’s white throat
            Against the dark water of a lake,

            Not the eagerness of your desire
            That I have not known again.
            But these years later, measured
            In your children and mine, not ours,

            I am still angry that you left,
            That I was not the first to leave
            Like the singular swan wanting
            A true mate, another white cloud

            Hovering on the black skim
            Of the water’s painted glass, gliding
            Beneath an old bridge, in pursuit.
            You were resistible, but I was not.

            When you smile at me now, I think
            How much we’ve wasted, vastness,
            How I can’t remember even your first
            Terrifying kiss or its last companion.


* * * * *

Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, and PANK among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.

 

Body Love

by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick


my body loves its soft silences
equally its loud exhales. My body loves
moaning against my chosen partner
as it rains, as it sun shines, as it hazes over                                       
my body loves its escapes
like the involved concentration
in growing new flowers
the lost way I feel for soil
the crumpling of dried leaves
and unwanted snails

the discernment this body allows—
to choose this to pluck a plant to its death
to allow the grasses and clover to grow
to burn and water

I was born under one sign
yet can play with that besides fire

I water the sunflower my partner planted
how tall there now
I dig at the old-weeds planted two generations ago
without thought for the future
gather stones and crystals to bring to our home
I blow out the candles year after year
proving to faraway planters
the care it takes to still be here

to care temporarily for my little blip in time
so I can pass this space on to the next
so I can say this spot is cared for
so I can condense into my own grain of stardust
passing through hourglass

do not miss my long hair
miss me


* * * * *

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a queer, disabled, bilingual, poet and a columnist for Los Angeles Poet Society. Disabled with scoliosis at a young age, their poems often focus on trauma, shedding light on this isolating experience. They are a Lead Collaborating Fellow of The Poetry Lab and founded the micro-press BindYourOwnBooks. Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net nominated, Kelsey’s forthcoming microchapbook, Bone Water (Blanket Sea Press, September 2021) and their first full-length poetry collection, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press, January 2022), focus on their decades surviving with scoliosis. On the gram @theexquisitepoet and online at www.kelseybryanzwick.wixsite.com/poetry.

     

In my Nearly Nine Years Applying for Disability Recognition

by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick


The notices come at random.  Just another slip of paper
Determining my fate, or what my fate is worth
To all the lever pullers out there, all those gear grinders
Chewing their bitter lives, pointing their long fingers at me
Trying to pull through it all on less than 10,000 a year
In LA where all my doctors live. Their offices all top floor offices
Where I wait with my thumbs twirling, taking in the views
With the tears at the back of my eyes ready to spill
At the news. 

What pain, another day, and yet my bones are kinder
Than those that continue to deny me my meager portion
Just a sliver or slice I ask, and only from the richest pie on the planet
Grubby hands that are made to beg on top of caring for myself: more wound
Than body. After looking at all my naked diagnosis, every slice                            
And stitch, all they do is send me another survey
To ask, but how do you really feel?


* * * * *

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a queer, disabled, bilingual, poet and a columnist for Los Angeles Poet Society. Disabled with scoliosis at a young age, their poems often focus on trauma, shedding light on this isolating experience. They are a Lead Collaborating Fellow of The Poetry Lab and founded the micro-press BindYourOwnBooks. Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net nominated, Kelsey’s forthcoming microchapbook, Bone Water (Blanket Sea Press, September 2021) and their first full-length poetry collection, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press, January 2022), focus on their decades surviving with scoliosis. On the gram @theexquisitepoet and online at www.kelseybryanzwick.wixsite.com/poetry.

 

Chrysalis

by Tamara Madison


Newly freed from high school
my daughter spends her evenings
alone in the living room
with Grey’s Anatomy. Life
is so different now, classes
at odd times, friends scattered
like jacks. Opaque as ever,
a deep well, she rests on the sofa
in blue TV light. I can almost see
her wings developing, intricate,
folded like an origami moth
within her close cocoon.

* * * * *

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook The Belly Remembers, and two full-length volumes of poetry, Wild Domestic and Moraine, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, The Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac, and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she is thrilled to have recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school, and more thrilled still to be awaiting a second grandchild into the world.

8th Grade Field Trip

by Tamara Madison


The sun never came out that day on Mount San Jacinto.
We drove up in buses to hike around in fog, our teachers
taking a break from teaching so we could run free.
Greg was a magnet for us. We didn’t know why,
but where he was, we needed to be. Tall, seeming older
than the rest — Adam’s apple, shadowed upper lip —
he must have known some things that we needed to learn.
We followed him down trails, behind boulders, everywhere
losing him to the scarves of fog that curled around tree trunks
and filled hollows. What was this ache I felt, this pleasant
lump in my throat, this poignant longing? It wasn’t the boy
exactly, or the fog, but somehow the fog and the boy together,
the fog and the boy and the mountain, the fog, the boy,
the mountain and the trees all dark and wet and shadowy
like the future drawing me in to its mysteries, the past
behind me a sunny path I would never walk again.


* * * * *

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook The Belly Remembers, and two full-length volumes of poetry, Wild Domestic and Moraine, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, The Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac, and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she is thrilled to have recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school, and more thrilled still to be awaiting a second grandchild into the world.

Blessed Are the Inks of Alchemy

by Jeannie E. Roberts

—inspired by a painting of the number eight

 
Neither prime nor semiprime, though lucky, 
you shape the gateway to infinity. 
As if the Beatitudes buoy above the crown 
embed blessings in the soul star chakra 
where subtle energy unlocks the portal 
to grace, somewhere between blue 
and green, somewhere inside the grains 
of sand and sermon, enlightenment 
awakens the sleepy ways of humanity 
and optics reveal the kingdom, hold clarity 
in eights, in the inky alchemy of the artist’s vision.


* * * * *

"Blessed Are the Inks of Alchemy" appears in Jeannie E. Roberts' newest poetry collection, As If Labyrinth - Pandemic Inspired Poems.

Jeannie E. Roberts lives in Wisconsin, where she writes, draws and paints, and often photographs her natural surroundings. She's authored five poetry collections and two illustrated children's books. Her newest collection, As If Labyrinth - Pandemic Inspired Poems, was released in April 2021 from Kelsay Books. She’s a teacher, an editor of an online literary magazine, and is listed in Poets & Writers. She’s an animal lover, a nature enthusiast, and an equal rights advocate.