ISSUE 10 - DECEMBER 2014

CONTENTS

Issue 10 is dedicated to the hot writer, editor, author Michele Kort, who signed me up for a 12-month gig on Ms. Blog, where I am thrilled to be “subverting the girlie calendar” with lesbian art. Thanks, Michele.

With sadness over her death, and gratitude for her writing, I also dedicate this issue to Leslie Feinberg. These lines from Adrienne Rich's poem "Quarto" remind me of Leslie:



No one writes lyric on a battlefield
On a map stuck with arrows
But I think I can do it if I just lurk
In my tent pretending to
Refeather my arrows

I'll be right there! I yell
When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus
To recruit me

Crouching over my drafts
Lest they find me out
And shoot me

Mary Meriam, Editor
Lavender Review

ISSUE 10 - DECEMBER 2014 - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

ALYSE KNORR May Support Life  ED BENNETT Confessional HOLLY MITCHELL We Need the Boat of Love, Not the Boat of Tolerance J.K. DANIELS Genealogy JOY LADIN How Much LESLÉA NEWMAN Looking at Her MARVA ZOHAR Our Winter PAT M. KURAS Denise, Biking in Boston PELEG HELD Luna Moth, the Seventh Night  RACHEL ROSE A Wedding Ghazal SHAWNDRA MILLER Blackbird TIFFANY SANTOS Annual Ritual THE FERNY MEANING Selection

LADY CLEMENTINE HAWARDEN (1822-1865)  LOUISE ABBÉMA Matin d'avril, Place de la Concorde, Paris (1894) LOTTE LASERSTEIN by Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski (1930) FRIDA KAHLO Frida Kahlo, Nayantara Sahgal, and Rita Dar (1947) AGNES MOOREHEAD Shirley Temple's Storybook (1958) MARY DELANY Convolvulus Purpureus (1781) BERNICE BING Untitled (1988) JUDITH Z. MILLER (ZELDA) Golden Fingers (2008) SHELLEY STEFAN Primary Cock (2010) RIVA LEHRER Alison Bechdel (2011) ANNA-STINA TREUMUND Frieda and Sabine (2012) HENRIETTE HELLSTERN-KJØLLER L.H-K. (2013) SUSAN SHORE Hidden Child (2014)

Alyse Knorr

May Support Life

Double the size of the Earth, 600 light years away,
Kepler 22-b has the climate of a balmy Key West day.
Fleck on a telescope, wobbled light in a star’s pinprick,
caught like a small bee in the snare of a child’s net.
In the artist’s depiction, Kepler 22-b looks modest,
embarrassed, even—cloud-swirled sky bowing down
at a tilt in the painted nebula. NASA named it after
the telescope that found it.
                                           If I had a planet, I would
resist the urge to name it at all. My planet would drag
moons to it like great weights at the ends of large coiling
chains. Its years would last days and its days, years.
The oceans of my planet—there would be only oceans,
no land—would slither with possibility and pull back
and forth with the tides of many, many moons. And with
each grand, sweeping arc around its sun—which would
also, of course, remain nameless—my planet would pick up
speed—enough to hurl itself out of the solar system
and toward a planet blinking in the distance behind a lens
the size of a skyscraper—a planet staring up, taking notes,
looking for a new habitable zone as the end hurtles dead ahead.

---

Alyse Knorr is the author of Copper Mother (Switchback Books, forthcoming 2015), Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013) and the chapbook Alternates (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, Drunken Boat, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia (Texas Review Press, 2012), among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University. She serves as a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press and teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Lady Clementina Hawarden

Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865)

Ed Bennett

Confessional

Bless me, father, for I have sinned
because my heart will not forsake me.
My words, my deeds, my deepest thoughts
conjoin me to a shadowed world
because I seek to love beyond
the precepts of your ancient strictures.

Find me, father, for I am lost—
a sojourner in a hostile land
condemned because I dare to seek
a touch or solace from a lover’s kiss
when pain belies my strength
and I seek love beyond your divination.

But most of all, because I am human,
unable to form a firm purpose
to amend my ways, find the path
where my soul is compatible
to your edicts from the past, beyond
the hellfire of your visions.

I cannot resolve this life,
these impassioned moments where I am
condemned for the heat of my flesh,
to the shackles, you wish to bestow.
Forgive me, father, for I will sin
because I am God’s child,
                     not His chattel.

---

Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in Touch: The Journal of Healing, Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment, and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine and the author of “A Transit of Venus.”

Louise Abbéma

Louise Abbéma, Matin d'avril, Place de la Concorde, Paris (1894)

Holly Mitchell

We Need the Boat of Love, Not the Boat of Tolerance

We meet our galleries
           between barrels of oil, the photographs

survivors alone in the dark.
           We hear the mermaids

drumming on the bridge, the steel water
           from my childhood sink. We remember quilt

squares sewn unfinished, magic carpets
           sailing on the East River strait. We flow

blood to our Moby Dick of hearts,
           a four-chambered family

of questions in brine. We don't need
           THE BOAT OF TOLERANCE

anchored not far from shore. We won't die
            if this kiss remembers us

from a gutted past. The risk is
           if it forgets our blood, our love

subsumed in the shallow
           alter-world depths, art.

---

Holly Mitchell lives in New York. Her poems can be found in several journals including Ishaan Review, The Feminist Wire, and The Bakery. 

Lotte Laserstein

Lotte Laserstein painting her large work "Evening over Potsdam" photographed by Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski in 1930.

J.K. Daniels

Genealogy

Under this sun, hung this day so low and close,
you raise your hand to shade your eyes,
which are not suns or jewels but what they are:
brown-gold irises, pupils contracting:
the sun? or are you underwhelmed or angered
by what I’ve said or done? Might it be my
leg jiggling under this picnic bench or the angle
at which I look like your mother or that phrase
I used that reminds you of my ex, plucking
the fruit from the low hanging branch? I raise
my hand to better see. In your own created shade,
you say, again, it’s nothing, it’s not you; it’s me—and turn
away, lifting your hand from my knee, to give me
your ear, which your genes have carved so delicately.

---

J.K. Daniels’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014); Best New Poets, 2011 (UVA Press, 2011); Beltway Poetry Quarterly; Calyx; ILK; New Orleans Review Online; and others. She holds an M.A. in Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing-Poetry from George Mason University, where she edited So to Speak: a Feminist Journal of Literature and Art. She teaches at Northern Virginia Community College and reads for The Northern Virginia Review. 

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo, Nayantara Sahgal, and Rita Dar in Kahlo's house in Mexico City in 1947

Joy Ladin

How Much

I could talk about being sick, but I always talk about being sick,
because I'm always sick, but today I'm sick
and happy, stuffed with fried artichoke, reggiano, gnocchi, and the glow
of knowing my name will be forgotten
when those who knew me are gone,
though of course I'll be remembered by God,
but will God remember the fennel salad and fried rice balls,
the candle on the table reflected in the wine
and the little flame when our fingers brush,
and how much I love the woman who loves me,
how much I love,
how much?

---

Joy Ladin is the author of six books of poetry, including last year's The Definition of Joy, Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration, and Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life; her seventh collection, Impersonation, is due out in 2015. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in many publications, including American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, and has been recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University.

Agnes Moorehead

Agnes Moorehead dressed in costume as a witch for the "Rapunzel" episode of the television show Shirley Temple's Storybook (1958)

Lesléa Newman

Looking at Her

Yes, I was looking at her
Yes, I knew her very well
Yes, I had lived inside of her
Yes, I had lived outside of her
Yes, she had fed me and clothed me
Yes, she had rocked me and soothed me
Yes, I had brought her much pleasure
Yes, I had brought her much pain
Yes, we had fought with great fury
Yes, we had kissed and made up
Yes, I had moved far away from her
Yes, I remained very close to her
Yes, that day I was looking at her
Yes, she was stiff and unmoving
Yes, she was dressed in a shroud
Yes, her two lips stitched together
Yes, her two eyelids sewn shut
Yes, I bent over her casket
Yes, I applied her pink lipstick
Yes, I brushed blush on her cheekbones
Yes, the farewell the departure
Yes, the silence the longing
Yes, I was with and without her
Yes, I was looking at her

---

Lesléa Newman is the author of 65 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections SWEET DARK PLACES, STILL LIFE WITH BUDDY, NOBODY’S MOTHER and OCTOBER MOURNING: A SONG FOR MATTHEW SHEPARD (novel-in-verse). Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. From 2008-2010 she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, MA. Currently she teaches at Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program. “Looking at Her” is from Lesléa Newman’s newest poetry collection, I CARRY MY MOTHER which will be published by Headmistress Press in January 2015.

Mary Delany

Mary Delany, Convolvulus Purpureus, from an album (Vol.X, 19); var Rosea, Blush convolvulus major. Eng. 1781 Collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, on black ink background

Marva Zohar

Our Winter

That winter, our winter, your breasts hung from your
collarbone like a white mismatched pair of socks left on
the wire.

I remember how your shadow climbed all the way up the
ceiling when you made that first entrance into my trailer.

You took off your uniform like a cucumber peeling itself,
your skin so pale it seemed green.

You said I'm not going back there if they grab me by my balls.
I never knew a girl who talked like you.

I bathed you outside with the hose under the winter sun,
and I clothed you.
My own private refugee.

It was unthinkable for you to wear any of my dresses.
I gave you pajamas.
You were happy to wear them regardless of the hour.
You were happy, I think, even though you were very sad.

You made it sound magnificent as if you were running
from an entire army, not just that one officer who liked to
grab your ass.

You showed me something about touch—
there was no other way I could have learned,
I wasn’t ready to know it, and it hurt.

With money I had saved for the summertime, we bought
two goats from a shepherd in the Valley of the Goddess.
We brought them home hitchhiking. I know that sounds
impossible now, but this is the way that it was.

One was wet with milk, and we named her Frida
because of her eyebrows. The other was pregnant,
and we called her Persephone, but I can't remember why,
no matter how hard I think of it.

At night I smelled the fear dripping from your pores
and guessed the things that were done to you
according to the imprints your tossing and struggling
left on the mattress.

In the morning we tried to milk the goats, our hands
learned the gesture of closing on the warm, grainy sack
one finger at a time, milk squirting on our smiles.

We packed apples and sandwiches and tea and headed,
the four of us, out to the meadow.

Soon Frida would die of a snake bite. We would carry her
heavy body into the trunk of a borrowed car.
I was laughing so hard my stomach was hurting.

Soon Persephone would be attacked by a pack of wild
dogs. She would deliver two dead baby goats.
The army police would come for you soon.

But that winter, our winter, when morning came we went
out, the four of us, after the milking. There were so many
flowers, it was wasteful, painful to watch.

You just wanted to scream at the earth—
save a little for later, save some for the season of decay.

I knew every new flower was marking the coming of
summer, the annual season of death when the earth aches
for rain, and the generals of the Middle East would start
growing impatient.

Everything was so flammable.
Sooner or later a fire would start, and village men would
run out to hit the flames with blankets.

Out of the flames the snakes and scorpions, the yellow
and the black, all of them will come running toward us.

In the warmth of winter sun we cooled our feet in the
puddles as if each foot was a bottle of champagne.
Floating leaves snuck up and touched our skin,
our feet jumping up, startled every time.

We stayed out there in the meadow while the kale and
chard in our garden grew bittersweet. When the jackals
called out from the valley and the sky began to turn, we
walked home.

Home—where the long goat tongs would sip water
from rusty pots and we would do our best
with the little human tongs we had been given
to sip all that was ours for sipping
for the duration of our winter.

---

Marva Zohar is poet, homebirth-midwife, and feminist activist. She has practiced midwifery in the U.S., Uganda, and Israel. She is currently completing her MFA in poetry at Bar-Ilan University with an emphasis in poetry documenting gender-based violence. She is the winner of the 2013 Andrea Moriah Memorial Prize in Poetry. Her poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Ilanot Review, Brickplight, Cactus Heart Press, Tule Review, Gag, Ynet, and Midwifery Today Magazine. Marva lives in Jaffa, Israel, by the sea.

Bernice Bing

Bernice Bing, Untitled (1988) 
mixed media on paper mounted on canvas
24 x 18

Pat M. Kuras

Denise, Biking in Boston 
for DS

Chance brought us together,
Longfellow Bridge,
me in my battered blue Plymouth,
Denise, whipping on wheels,
bright clothes,
pistachio-shell helmet.
We slow for the
bottleneck rotary.
She slides up beside me,
waves.
Light changes and
she’s wheeling up
Cambridge Street past
Mass General, Sporters,
Holiday Inn.
Threads through traffic.
Even the incline
can’t stop her.
Legs pumping,
rises past Old West Church,
rounds the corner
into Government Center,
free and easy.

---

Pat M. Kuras is a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in The Gambler Mag, Right Hand Pointing, and the anthology Drawn To Marvel (Minor Arcana Press, 2014). She has written two chapbooks of poetry, The Pinball Player (Good Gay Poets, 1982) and Hope (forthcoming from I.W.A. Publishing Services).

Judith Z. Miller

© Judith Z. Miller (aka "Zelda") Golden Fingers (2008) 

Peleg Held

Luna Moth, the Seventh Night

The web is flush with flitgreen,
the chalk of wings
where the struggle rattles
morning to descend and drink
the dregs of flight
now thickening in the cup.

Cradle, cradle, spinnerette
and eyespots crying owl,
the patterdrum of night struck vows
fashioned at the zenith.
Unscaled, veins washed by light,
the eight armed blue tipped turns us home
beneath the shining tapetum,
into the pupal hum.

---

Peleg Held is a writer who lives in Portland Maine with his partner as they conspire towards homesteading Down East. He is a carpenter and a father and but the general state of wildness in his children have led some, his partner among them, to question this designation.

Shelley Stefan

© Shelley Stefan, Primary Cock: Finale (2010)
From Series: B is for Butch
Medium: Oil
Size: 48x36 in

Rachel Rose

A Wedding Ghazal

A man loves a man in a silent room.
A man holds a man in a breathless room.

What is the price of an afternoon?
A man holds a man in a breathless room.

The light is gone, but a slender moon
sheds its silver in a breathless room.

The day of blessings is coming soon
when boyfriends become husbands in a sanctified room.

What family blessings can shift to make room
for two men vowing true love in a sacred room?

In spirit I walk with you through roses' perfume
as a small girl throws petals in a joyful room.

Take up your pride. Let freedom bloom
as two men become married before a witnessing room.

Let them dance! Let us dance! Let the groom and the groom
love and be cherished in a radiant room.

---

Rachel Rose is a dual American/Canadian citizen whose work has appeared in various journals in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Japan, including Poetry, The Malahat Review, and The Best American Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies. Her most recent book, Song & Spectacle (2012) won the Audre Lorde Poetry Award in the U.S. and the Pat Lowther Award in Canada. She is the winner of the Peterson Memorial Prize for poetry and the Bronwen Wallace award for fiction, and the recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize. She is the Poet Laureate of Vancouver for 2014-2017.

Riva Lehrer

Riva Lehrer Alison Bechdel (2011) 
Charcoal and dimensional collage on paper, 30 x 44  

Shawndra Miller

Blackbird

In the blue ocean-sky above the Great Basin
swim birds who own immensity,
their hollow bones and feathers made to rise,
to know the far horizon.

Still some are otherwise inclined.

A blackbird lights on the rent screen of my door, his daily visit.
He’s torn the mesh to make a parted curtain, a raveled lectern—
this hole the work of weeks or more.
He all but clears his throat, then:
His first note fogs the glass with hot beak breath.
His shoulder blazes quiver at the trill.

He taps his bill on the glass.

I think he means to strike an enemy only he can see.
Will he work the glass till it too cracks under his beak?
Each day he turns his back to the blue,
chooses to pick at his own image
while just behind him breathes infinitude.

What say you, Blackbird? Your song’s in my ears from dawn to dusk.

Do you call me to hammer an opening
of my own making? Or do you mirror my foolish face,
reflecting made-up threats I cannot quash
while ocean-sky—my birthright too—invites me, laden as I am,
to swim for that horizon?

---

Mennonite by birth, mystic by nature, Shawndra Miller is a writer who lives in Indianapolis. Her work has appeared in Farm Indiana, Acres USA, The Boiler Journal, and other periodicals. She is currently working on a nonfiction book about community resilience, while blogging about the world's remaking HERE.

Anna-Stina Treumund

Anna-Stina Treumund, Frieda and Sabine (2012) 

Tiffany Santos

Annual Ritual

I am aware of each hair
on my bushy, unshaven legs
sticking out from underneath the dress
I only wear when attending my mother's church.

I still remember all the special words
but they don't mean anything anymore.
No. They mean
a rising heat in my face & an urge

to tell everyone in the room:
I like to fuck women / have four tattoos / a nose ring
hold political opinions / a bachelor's degree
think their god is a lie.

But I sit quietly, heat rising
off the tops of my ears,
sing the hymns.
Once a year, the fallen daughter returns

to the flock, a naked wolf
who fidgets in her seat,
claws at the door, head up,
eyes open during the prayer.

---

A Western Maryland native, Tiffany Santos is an avid poet, writer, cinephile, new media publicist, event planner, producer, and educator. She has taught various types of writing classes for summer programs, colleges, writers’ retreats, and community schools. She is the co-founder and editor at Black Hat/ Black Tree Press, which features a local reading series. She graduated from St. Mary's College of Maryland with a Bachelor of Arts degree in gender studies with a minor in Asian studies and has completed some graduate-level work in poetry from Carlow University's low-residency program. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have been published in several literary journals including Backbone Mountain Review, Voices from the Attic, Lavender Review, Wicked Banshee Press, and Dionne's Story: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose for the Awareness of Relationship Violence. She currently works as the Community Outreach Coordinator for the Allegany Arts Council.

Henriette Hellstern-Kjøller

© Henriette Hellstern-Kjøller, L.H-K. (2013)

The Ferny Meaning

Barter
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

---

Eurydice
VII
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1886-1961)

At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for a light;

and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

---

To My Cup-Bearer
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

A lady or a tiger-lily,
Can you tell me which,
I see her when I wake at night,
Incanting, like a witch.
Her eye is dark, her vestment rich,
Embroidered with a silver stitch,
A lady or a tiger-lily,
Slave, come tell me which?

---

Say What You Will
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
The roots of last year's roses in my breast;
I am as surely riper in my mind
As if the fruit stood in the stalls confessed.
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more.

My branches weigh me down, frost cleans the air,
My sky is black with small birds bearing south;
Say what you will, confuse me with fine care,
Put by my word as but an April truth,—
Autumn is no less on me that a rose
Hugs the brown bough and sighs before it goes.

---

Daffodils
May Swenson (1913-1989)

Yellow telephones
in a row in the garden
are ringing,
shrill with light.

Old fashioned spring
brings earliest models out
each April the same,
naive and classical.

Look into the yolk-
colored mouthpieces
alert with echoes.
Say hello to time.

---

King's Mountain
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

In all the cities of this year
I have longed for the other city.

In all the rooms of this year
I have entered one red room.

In all the futures I have walked toward
I have seen a future I can hardly name.

But here the road we drive
Turns and enters upon another country.

I have seen white beginnings,
A slow sea without glaze or speed,
Movement of a long lying-down dance.

This is fog-country. Milk. Country of time.
I see your tormented color, the steep front of your storm
Break dissipated among limitless profiles.

I see the patterns of waves in the cross-sea
Advance, a fog-surface over the fog-floor,
Seamounts, slow-flowing. Colors. Plunge-point of air.

In all the meanings of this year
There will be the ferny meaning.

It rises leaning and green, streams through star-lattices;
After the last cliff, wave-eroded silver,
Forgets the limitations of our love,
These drifts and caves dissolve and pillars of these countries
Long-crested dissolve to the future, a new form.

---

The Transgress
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

That summer midnight under her aurora
northern and still we passed the barrier.

Two make a curse, one giving, one accepting.
It takes two to break a curse

transformed at last in each other's eyes.

I sat on the naked bed of space,
all things becoming other than what they seem

in the night-waking, in the revelation
thundering on tabu after the broken

imperative, while the grotesque ancestors fade
with you breathing beside me through our dream:

bed of forbidden things finally known—
art from the symbol struck, living and made.

Branch lifted green from the dead shock of stone.

Susan Shore

© Susan Shore, Hidden Child ( 2014)