spring 2021
Table of Contents
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Drought
Flash Flood
Samantha Jones
The Guilt of Not Wanting
Ashley Prince
The Year We Considered Foster Care
Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel
Melissa Eleftherion
Fits and Starts
Natasha Pepperl
arma virumque cano
Revelation on Baptist Hill
Libby Maxey
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum)
Coyote (Canis latrans)
Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus)
Jordan Mounteer
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes
Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem
Lisa Richter
The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet
Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016
Lauren Turner
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night
L M Schmidt
Coyote (Canis latrans)
This stretch of road becomes a fact.
Like permafrost, so obvious it underscores
all other assumptions about topography.
Maybe it’s the sigh of oncoming cars.
The Doppler effect of wanting company
that loudens as you near it and then
peters out. The drive-through coffee
at your elbow tastes like Styrofoam
and numbed cold hours ago, anyway.
Asphalt baiting you with all the tenacity
of a mother robin coaxing a predator
away from the nest. You survive
on skepticism. That what you’ll find
wherever you arrive will be enough.
Telephone poles nag at your periphery
as a reliable measure of distance.
You come to things by increments.
Friends. Felt years. Degrees of both.
At a gas station in the slush beneath
the powerlines, footprints of coyotes
tow northward like electromagnets.
The revolving of the planet in their ears
a neural magic. What frightens you
is their obedience. That being guided
by the invisible is too much
like the leap of faith that love is.