spring 2021
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arma virumque cano
Revelation on Baptist Hill
Libby Maxey
The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet
Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016
Lauren Turner
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night
L M Schmidt
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes
Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem
Lisa Richter
Drought
Flash Flood
Samantha Jones
The Guilt of Not Wanting
Ashley Prince
Fits and Starts
Natasha Pepperl
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum)
Coyote (Canis latrans)
Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus)
Jordan Mounteer
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
The Year We Considered Foster Care
Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel
Melissa Eleftherion
Fits and Starts
—after Ilya Kaminsky
I live in the Rocky Mountains and I don’t know
whether these angles are middle fingers
raised to a silent god or palms open
in praise. You can call me a sinner
for this indecision. Given the choice,
a cat will sit within a smaller container:
an empty shoebox on the floor of a living
room. Maybe that’s why churches are
buildings that block sky—we have yet to beat
out our animal instincts.
Yesterday I watched an old man wearing a cowboy
hat and skater shoes and a bike pumping
past a pawn shop advertising CASH for
GUNS. Behind this building is an empty lot where a boy
lay as a discarded cardboard box, a boy lay
as a bruised fist after a fight lost. At the hospital, they told us
his brain activity was a 3. And after—the scale: 3 to 15.
Does hearing a holy number give families time to breathe
a silent prayer of thanks before they learn
it means silence? Now we are all raised
middle fingers, our bodies are waste
land. Mine didn’t keep
our baby inside. We scatter
her ashes so as not to contain her.