spring 2021
Table of Contents
Return to Home Pagearma virumque cano Revelation on Baptist Hill Libby Maxey
Estela Elisabeth Murawski
The Guilt of Not Wanting Ashley Prince
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel Melissa Eleftherion
Drought Flash Flood Samantha Jones
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night L M Schmidt
The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016 Lauren Turner
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum) Coyote (Canis latrans) Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus) Jordan Mounteer
The Year We Considered Foster Care Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem Lisa Richter
Fits and Starts Natasha Pepperl
Estela
She’s old as Sarah in the Bible
when X-rays detect
a long dead fetus in her body.
Decades she was home
to this clump of bones and flesh
of their flesh. Surgery’s
risky. She must carry on aware
her womb’s a funeral urn,
that she’s a walking grave.
She begs her husband’s ghost
to find our baby’s soul.
Surely, a fetus has one?
Barren sixty years. She laughs
the punishing laugh
of the childless. She is never
without the ache. At night
it pokes her awake
like an infant’s foot.