ISSUE 17 - JUNE 2018

CONTENTS

Congratulations to Sarah Schulman for the Publishing Triangle's 2018 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. I love these quotes from her acceptance speech:

Within a few minutes of entering a room I can tell who allows themselves to notice lesbian work and who does not because one person says “Sarah you are doing so much” and the next one says “so Sarah, what do you do?” It is this disappearance in plain sight that speaks, in some ways, to the state of our literature.

~

Many of my queer female peers who were also born in the 1950’s with talent and drive, made the decision to repress or marginalize the lesbian content of their work and point of view so that they could have viable careers. But I couldn’t do that because it was boring. People in struggle are the most fascinating people on earth. They produce new ideas and new formal strategies and transformative visions of social and artistic possibility that are the soul of new ideas in art and culture.

~

Unfortunately there is absolutely no relationship between quality and reward. And I say this as a person who has been rewarded and at other times eliminated. Most art that is rewarded in an unjust society is work that re-enforces that society’s operative values. And when you look at the LGBT work that has been canonized, much of it makes the dominant culture very self-satisfied. Occasionally something or someone that is actually of great value does gets rewarded, but usually not because of their real accomplishment, it’s usually because the person or the work also fits the agenda of the gatekeepers’ need to see themselves as liberal or inclusive. And it is important that we not be fooled by the allure of acceptance, as much as we all want it and should have it. For, too often the introduction of some queer person of great gifts into the reward system produces tokenism instead of cultural expansion, because that person’s individual success does not represent a paradigm shift, but actually enhances the gatekeepers’ power.

~

The Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Chapbook Contest is open for submissions till July 4, 2018.

Mary Meriam, Editor
Lavender Review

ISSUE 17 - JUNE 2018 - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

SAMANTHA PIOUS Midnight at the Musée d’Orsay LIZ AHL When She Comes Home From Camp KEATON ST. JAMES angel in a laundromat GIANA ANGELILLO Violence DEAN SYMMONDS dorothy gale goes home RACHEL LALLOUZ post-coital tristesse  ALAINA SYMANOVICH Note LAURA FOLEY Beyond SARAH CAULFIELD Last Mass for the Fallen BILLIE R. TADROS Twenty-six Words for “Vulva”: R is for Ravine RITA MOOKERJEE Umbrella Girl, Diamond Street EMMA JENKINS Santa Lucia; Divination LAURA S. MARSHALL Sarah RASMA HAIDRI Stopping by the Sea Before Catching Your Flight  ELIZABETH ASHE Romantic Poetry GINA ABELKOP I Like My Strong Thighs

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI Sleeping Venus (c. 1626) JEB Aime and J (1976) ABENA ADDO A Place in My Heart (1993) BETYE SAAR The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude (2010) ELISABETH KEYSER Resting at Dusk (1851-1898) KATIE O'DARE Dreaming on the screen (2013) LAUREL SPARKS Sestina (2016) LOUISE ABBÉMA Portrait of Miss Luppé on a Boat - detail (1858-1927) RUTH HOOPER Spider Grandmother's Web (1998) KELLEY BRANNON Vagina (2012) AMRITA SHER-GIL Group of Three Girls (1935) HILMA AF KLINT The Dove, No. 09 (1915) JOHN SINGER SARGENT Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1889) RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (2014) ANDY DIXON Expensive Painting (Dreamers) (2016) DEJA SAMUEL Loving Out Loud: Oxford MS (2018)

Samantha Pious

Midnight at the Musée d’Orsay

On the northern wall in the great hall
the gilt clock sounds .xii. chimes. A bronze lion
flexes, stretches his jaws in a silent roar
or yawn and leaps from his pedestal
to prowl the underground corridors
and restrooms. (If, next morning, one
of the security guards boasts of intruding gangs,
shows off the scratch marks on his bandaged arm,
the others will shrug, chalk it up to drugs,
and the boss will quietly arrange for his
transfer to the Hôtel des Invalides.)
Meanwhile, the busts of Virgil and Dante
continue their endless debate. A curve of light
skims past the statue of a shepherd girl,
who leaps to her feet in search of sword and banner
to become Joan of Arc. The clock slows.
Sappho stands, brushing dust from her lyre,
and in an instant she and the naked Eurydice
have joined hands and run upstairs
toward a sinuous Art-Nouveau bedframe,
where one of the curators has thoughtfully installed
a sturdy mattress. Lady Liberty,
night watchwoman, take off your robe and crown,
for once lay down that blessed ledger-book,
and, torch raised higher than the morning sun,
prolong the night!

---

Samantha Pious is the translator of A Crown of Violets: Selected Poems of Renée Vivien (Headmistress Press, 2017). Some of her translations and poems have appeared in Adrienne, Doublespeak, Lavender Review, Mezzo Cammin, and other publications.

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi, Sleeping Venus (c. 1626)

Liz Ahl

When She Comes Home From Camp

My lover wears a layer of dirt
more like a second skin than a shirt,
a layer of sweat-sealed grime earned
from chopping wood,
from evicting a mouse-ridden mattress
from a rarely-used cabin
and scrubbing away the aftermath,
from helping to haul and boil water,
from helping to keep the fire alive
beneath the blaring supermoon.

She glows through the dirt because
the weekend of skinny dipping and berry picking,
of sharing dinners cooked by women,
in the earthen oven made by women,
of drinking rum around the fire
fueled by good dry wood
chopped by women, a weekend
of silence at the crest of summer

has not merely painted the body I love
with this layer of soot and earth and dust;
it has also scoured something away,
revealing and polishing a layer beneath,
concealed in the day to day—something
wild and delirious in its happy appetites,
sparkling and strange, a little dangerous—
some name of hers I still don't fully know.

---

Liz Ahl is the author of the poetry collection, Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), as well as four previous chapbooks of poetry, including A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, which won the 2008 Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Bloom, Adrienne, Prairie Schooner, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.

JEB

JEB, Aime and J (1976)
© 2018 JEB (Joan E. Biren)

Keaton St. James

angel in a laundromat

the angel sits on top
of one of the washers, kicking
their not-feet in time
to the laundromat muzak,
humming along with
their guttural half-here
half-off in a distant
otherworld voice.

you’ve been watching
the angel for some time,
as they put their bloodied
robes & ragged sandals
on a spin cycle for delicates,
as they poured in soap
& counted out quarters,
but it’s only as you fold
your now dry duvet
that you realize their wings
are covered in a thousand
red eyes. you look at what
should be their face
& find the swirling
of the stars instead.

‘good morning,’ you say
as you pass them on your way
out. the angel grabs your arm.
their touch burns like ice
& makes you ache. ‘your son,’
the angel whispers, ‘tells me
that he is so so proud
of how you got sober. i placed
one hundred forty four
red roses in a vase
by your door. i will be back
next sunday should you need
to talk to someone.’

---

Keaton St. James is an American graduate student studying science who loves to write poetry and prose in his spare time. He has also been published in The Wellington Street Review.

Abena Addo

Abena Addo A Place in My Heart (1993)

Giana Angelillo

Violence

---

Giana Angelillo is a chocolate malt & late-sunday kinda girl. Currently hiding in Illinois, she likes to buy flowers for her friends.

Betye Saar

Betye Saar, The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude (2010)
Mixed media assemblage
54 x 43 x 20.5 in (137.2 x 109.2 x 52.1 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California
Photo Robert Wedemeyer

Dean Symmonds

dorothy gale goes home

when i turned sixteen, auntie em
invited a farm boy cousin to dinner
and laid out the bleached linens & silver-
ware & i knew it was time to witch

myself into a tornado & run
& flurry & fly & swallow miles
of heartland, all that dust & manure
curdling on my tongue like a boy’s

horse breath, & i prayed to mary
magdalene & virginia woolf
that a woman’s land would find me
& before i opened my penitent eyes

i could smell gold; & i saw a witch’s
peony-pink lips; & she said, welcome,
sweet girl, to the family that will unpit
your heart; & she reached into my chest

& magicked muscle to peach core to silver
shoe; & she slid them on my feet; & she said,
remember, you can dance with whomever
you love; & she left & i looked for the boys

who always prowl like exiles at the end
of any field i’m in; but i saw a lion,
a scarecrow, & a tin man as glistening
& newborn as my slippers, & i recognized

in them the same hunger for being: for a kiss
from the most beautiful mirror image;
& we left on our quest; & when we tumbled
into a poppy field, i saw a vision of a girl

braiding her nightstalk hair into starry ropes
that fell down each of her rounded shoulders
& she looked up & smiled & i knew her breath
tasted like cherries but i still crawled to her

to find out & when we kissed we danced
without thinking for years & hours,
our spangled slippers beating poppy petals
into pulp & i bled dyke red in those silver shoes—

i kissed her dyke mouth & stumbled awake
when the tin man & lion & scarecrow carried me
into the city; the dream of her had made me flower-light;
& we continued our quest with those witches

& munchkins & hot air balloons; & the pink witch
saw my red feet & hugged me & told me
to tap my ankles & i woke up tasting
tornado dust. i was late for dinner.

my heart again calcified into a peach pit
at the sight of my farm boy cousin waiting
with a ring. i couldn’t unravel all the wanting
in me for my poppy vision girl quick enough

to tell him no. i wanted another dance. i wanted
to dream up my own future. here’s
what i wish i could say: i went back.
i went back. i went back.

---

Dean Symmonds is a lesbian poet from the South seeking their BAs in Creative Writing and Religious Studies at Hollins University. They work as a Poetry Editor at Persephone's Daughters. They placed second in the 2017 and 2018 Lex Allen Literary Festivals, judged by Li-Young Lee and Cynthia Manick respectively. Their poems have been published in magazines like Yes Poetry, Bad Pony Magazine, Monstering, Crab Fat Magazine, Gravel, and The Album; their nonfiction can be found in Shakespeare & Punk. Their academic work on the Virgin Mary and Southern womanhood and their work on the Western, gayness, and violence were published on the Hollins Digital Commons in 2017 and 2018. You can find them on Twitter @poetpersephone

Elisabeth Keyser

Elisabeth Keyser, Resting at Dusk (1851-1898)

Rachel Lallouz

post-coital tristesse 

I am a catch of driftwood hewn over, hard and wet as the gray floorboards beneath us. In comes the cat, silk until she reaches the bed. You are asleep, and she curls around my head, bossy and butting my hands. I’ve never met such a bossy cat, never had such a hard bite into my shoulder as you make me your shadow, as we double, kneeling, on the bed. It is always over too soon—I could spend hours—but there is such a thing as sleep, I hear other human beings like to do this, and you ease into it with no hesitation at all. I hold on to the moments before, to the gray light and your panting which is both soft and completely uncontrolled, ragged in this poor bed: a bare mattress resting on wood pallets once holding boxes of spoiled fruit in an alleyway. You crack into the air, suspending dust motes, sleeping bags piled high on top of us. The light sifting in from the waxy window shows me the knobs of your spine as you keel over, become a snail for me again and again. I know we both make slippery tracks on the sheets, on each other, leaving trails of breath drying, and as you slip away from me, I understand the age-old cliché of tears after sex. Post-coital tristesse. A symptom. The ultimate form of sorrow, perfect as sugar.

---

Rachel Lallouz is an English graduate student at the University of Victoria. She has been published in Plenitude Magazine, Spectra Journal, Cactus Heart Magazine, and Crab Fat Magazine, among others. Rachel is the winner of Plenitude Magazine's Cornucopia Prize for LGBTQ* Fiction. She was a 2017 poetry participant with the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia, and recently returned from a writing residency at Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia (US). In March 2018, Rachel released a co-written chapbook, After Tbilisi, with New York poet Olena Jennings.

Katie O'Dare

Katie O'Dare, Dreaming on the screen (2013)
Glitch Art Vintage Lesbian Glitter Hologram

Alaina Symanovich

Note

The unbecoming begins
on an autumn Thursday.
You cross your legs, milk-blue,
and I throb because your knees look
meant for my protection.
That is all; that is everything.

Your shoe taps mine and everything
in my body begins
reverberating.  I think, I need protection
from Thursdays.
I wonder if my lover looks
at my green eyes and see yours, blue,

bluer
than everything
I’ve dared desire. Look
how quickly my defenses begin
to wither—the wait until Thursday
my last flaccid protection

from insanity. (Why lie? I’m protecting
nothing.)  I’m buried in the blue.
I can’t recover Thursdays;
everything
has begun
(long ago started) to crumble. Look

at my lover saying look,
we’re not okay; she wants to protect
what she and I began.
How do I tell her I’ve blued
us to nothing? Everything
we had, I gave Thursdays.

This Thursday,
give me a bricked look
that says everything
is as it was. Protect
me from the blue.
(Or, rather, conquer me. Begin

staining everything I’ve protected
the same sin as your blue
eyes.) Thursday: (don’t) let us look and begin.

---

Alaina Symanovich holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MA in English from Penn State University.  Her work has appeared in Sonora Review, Little Patuxent Review, Fogged Clarity, and other journals.  She currently lives and works in Maryland.

Laurel Sparks

Laurel Sparks, Sestina (2016)
Acrylic, paper mache, ash, googly eyes, glitter, ink, cut holes, metallic paper collage on woven canvas strips
23 X 23
Gallery Representation
Photo:
© Paul Takeuchi 2016
paul@paultakeuchi.com
Cell in USA: 917-674-7542

Laura Foley

Beyond

I don't think of her as woman, or man,
just as I don’t gender sunlight
on my face the first coatless spring day,
or wind lacing the waves.
The particular beauty of her eyes and gait,
the tilt of her head as she listens,
exist in a realm evolved beyond any words I know—
soul beyond any description of rose or peony—
the way she tends me as one would a flower,
so my leaves droop and petals wither
when she is away from me.

---

Laura Foley is the author of six poetry collections, including WTF, Joy Street, Syringa and Night Ringing. Her poem “Gratitude List” won the Common Good Books poetry contest judged by Garrison Keillor; “Nine Ways of Looking at Light” won the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, judged by Marge Piercy. A palliative care volunteer, mother of three grown children and two granddaughters, she lives with her wife and two dogs among the hills of Vermont.

Louise Abbéma

Louise Abbéma, Portrait of Miss Luppé on a Boat - detail (1858-1927)

Sarah Caulfield

Last Mass for the Fallen

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today, in honour of those who
burnt every last bridge, including the ones ahead. We anoint them with the ashes of
their fall from grace, and remind ourselves that even up to the last hour, God thought
Lucifer best and most beautiful of his flock. May I remind you all that in striking that last match there is no cause for condemnation; we are but children, and we are carved from error.

We will now sing hymn number thirty-four: you are the best failure you know.
The chorus is especially uplifting.

Dearly beloved, let us believe in a cure for the nights without end. Let us pray for those who live on the wrong side of an eclipse and tell themselves they have not yet suffered enough for the sun, who make happiness a currency enjoyed best and only by the success stories. A moment of silence, please, for the drop-outs, the boomerang kids, the all-nighter, full-fighter, half-bleeding-but-only-half:

for the kids who are told it will get better and go on into the good night on some barely-baked faith that it must be so,
for the kids who try and swallow their dark nights of the soul,
for the hungry starving raging lonesome,
the children with chips on their broken shoulders,
who choke on every feel-good story they try to take in,
who are yoked so heavily they cannot lift their heads to save their life:

Let us not make sutures a martyrdom, dearly beloved.
All who survive are fragile.
All who survive are miracles.
All who survive are deserving, all are angels up to the last hour.
There are no failures in this church.

Please turn to page forty for our offertory hymn.

Let us rise.

---

Sarah Caulfield is the author of Spine (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Lavender Review, Indolent Books, Voicemail Poems, and others. She has lived in Poland, Germany and the UK and currently lives in Japan. She tweets at @holden1779. Her Patreon is here.

Ruth Hooper

Ruth Hooper Spider Grandmother's Web (1998)
acrylics, glass beads, Mardi Gras beads, glass jewel

Billie R. Tadros

Twenty-six Words for “Vulva”: 
R is for Ravine

Point me to the narrows where the rush the rage the rip and rapid
rape and riven hollow runs how all you know of water is violence.

The river violet gerardia open-mouthed and asking while you lay
in your inner tube all wort and warning and vascular letting

the slow current channel you, your canal like tunnel vision
the way you depicted me in legs-spread reds so close and closing in.

This is my cataract, my counteract to your resurgence,
baby, you deserve him even though you engorged me

and swore up and drown you were never coming back out.

---

Billie R. Tadros is the author of a book of poems, The Tree We Planted and Buried You In (Otis Books, 2018) and two chapbooks of poems, inter: burial places (Porkbelly Press, 2016) and Containers (Dancing Girl Press, 2014).  Her work has appeared in The Boiler, Bone Bouquet, The Collapsar, Crab Fat Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, Gigantic Sequins, Horse Less Review, Kindred, Menacing Hedge, r.kv.r.y., Tupelo Quarterly, Wicked Alice, Word Riot, and others, and in the anthologies Bearers of Distance (Eastern Point Press, 2013), Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). She lives with her wife in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she will be teaching at the University of Scranton beginning fall 2018. Twitter @BillieRTadros

Kelley Brannon

Kelley Brannon Vagina (2012)
Smoke/Candles and Wax on Paper

Rita Mookerjee

Umbrella Girl, Diamond Street

Lightest of the cousins, her family smiles at New Year's: red
envelope, white hand, with a crow's foot and dark circles from reading
and sunchapped lips, but no brown on her cheeks
the umbrella kept her clean
because brown would be great-grandparents knee-
deep in field muck, brown would be butchering chickens
on wood slabs, brown would be the relocation
of continents: cha and chai both mean tea.

Brown reminds you, be a white Asian,
be a twinkie, a coconut, a rice
ball, a zebra cake, banana pudding,
IT-Apple-queen-savvy-engineer-
Asian-it-girl-big-apple-tristate-but-
don't-you-try-her-father-spelling-bee-
Princeton-bound-review-dermatologist-
do-better-with-headshots smirking down
ancestral family shrine, aren't you
so proud of me, incense poised, a pen
at the reception desk: write your English
name, not your family name, excusing yourself

from mixing with jungle Asians,
sand Asians, mud Asians, sweet and sour
sauce Asians, sesame Asians, Sesame Street
all of us who can't umbrella-duck our
way out of the side-comments
model minority takes the long
way home to buy rosewater and lemon
skips the fish market, the smell will linger.

---

Rita Mookerjee's poetry is featured or forthcoming in Hollow, Cosmonauts Avenue, Literary Shanghai and others. Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. She currently teaches ethnic minority fiction and women's literature at Florida State University where she is a PhD candidate specializing in contemporary Caribbean literature with a focus on queer theory. Follow her on Instagram @melanincholia.

Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil, Group of Three Girls (1935)

Emma Jenkins

Santa Lucia

Requiem, ave Santa Lucia.
Requiem for twenty three years on earth.
For what you have in one thousand, I have in only one.
As delicate as your skin.

Your paper hands and paper feet are as
bible pages now; leafed through, poured upon.
How lonely it must be in your glass tomb.
The burning lights, and eyes, and prayers scold you.

Ave ei your gilded mask. Ave ei
your gilded heart. For mine is as ash in
your alter fire. What a fitting vestige
to be incorruptible, twenty three.

---

Divination

Divining for my soul
where is this still water?
Is it buried deep?
My own Swordy Well
lays patiently impatient.
At the bottom of
the dark pit it sits,
motionless and cold.
Quiet and cavernous.
Aggressively stagnant.
Swarming with little
blood worms. Bending in
ghastly pirouettes.
I feel them inside
Their agonising contortions.
The dyke within groans.
I had built it,
to hide the swelling
waters. Pressure burns and
starts restlessly eroding.
I broke ground today.
Pierced the fleshy turf till
water springs, in full orbs,
up, out of my eyes.
Filtered throught
he silt of time.
It’s time to dry the well.

---

Emma Jenkins, originally from London, currently lives and writes in a sleepy village nestled in the hills of Kent where she worked alongside fantastic poets during her degree in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Since graduating, she has been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to live and work in Japan, teaching children English through creative writing, while also learning the art form of the Japanese haiku. Emma will begin a Master's in poetics at the University of London this September.

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint, The Dove, No. 09 (1915)

Laura S. Marshall

Sarah

she bounces, rolls like a boy
the swaying all in her shoulders and her boots
even when she isn’t wearing boots
and she skims the sidewalk, slinging

a grin over her shoulder, a dare
like the jacket she wears on one finger
crooked, each saccade staccato

quicker than my thoughts strung together
but lazier too—she might write them down
might hum them to the crickets
or she might not (there will always

be more thoughts, more crickets)—
one arm up, elbow pointing the way home
the other jangling at her side so you know

how hard she works to make weight
to make the world swell around her
without looking like she’s working
and later when it’s time to hit the hideout

she’ll swing a leg over and pedal hard
watching not the road but the sky
as she thunders through the clouds again

---

Laura S. Marshall is a writer and editor who lives in New England. She studied linguistics at Queen's University in Canada and at the University of British Columbia. She has studied writing at the Ashbery Home School, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst, and the College of Our Lady of the Elms. Her work appears or is forthcoming in literary publications including Sinister Wisdom, decomP magazinE, Califragile, Epigraph Magazine, Junoesq, and the Queen's Feminist Review, as well as newspapers and trade magazines.

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1889) 
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Rasma Haidri

Stopping by the Sea Before Catching Your Flight

We stay so long in the car
the windows steam over,
making a curtain that hides us
from red barn, rain clouds, gulls.
Mjelle’s red sand just visible
through the cleared circle
made in the window fog
by the mass of your brown hair.

---

Rasma Haidri grew up in Tennessee and makes her home on the Arctic seacoast of Norway. She is the author of As If Anything Can Happen: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2017) and three textbooks. She holds a M.Sc. in reading education from the University of Wisconsin and is a current MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her writing has been widely anthologized in the USA and abroad, and appears in many literary journals including Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Runes, and Fourth Genre. She received the Southern Women Writers Association emerging writer award in creative non-fiction, the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award, and a Best of the Net nomination.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (2014)

Elizabeth Ashe

Romantic Poetry

I do not send out poems about my girlfriend.
Not really, though we've been together five years.
The poems are too close to submit,
to launch at buoys in the night sky.
I want to hold them close.
Keep them close, wrap my arms around them
like I do her as we sleep.
Hum them unintelligibly, like the cats
purring their hearts at us.
I want to keep the poems together
because there are not enough of them,
for all the memories that remind me I love you.
Because I must write more down
and work them with attention.
Like our relationship. A mirroring page,
so that one day, I can submit them as a book.
A marriage in poems and in print,
an interlocked line of buoys in the night sky
to warm any who read them.

---

Elizabeth Ashe earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, and an MFA in Multidisciplinary Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was an Associate Editor for Fourth River. She is the Administrative Director and teacher for an arts non-profit. She is also helping relaunch the New Art Examiner in DC. Her art has recently been on view at Zenith Gallery and Art All Night. Her poetry has recently appeared Yellow Medicine Review, Lascaux Press, White Stag Publishing, and Red Ink International, among others. Ashe lives in Washington, D.C. with her girlfriend and their three cats. She has a studio only a few blocks away, which is nigh impossible in DC.  

Andy Dixon

Andy Dixon, Expensive Painting (Dreamers) (2016) 
56" X 42”

Gina Abelkop

I Like My Strong Thighs

I like my strong thighs
When I model them for myself

Sitting down, in front of the
teevee, enjoying the pulse of banal
comedy

It makes me feel ready.
A constant low charge.

Clea Duvall, heroine of my lesbian youth,
now plays all the lesbians on teevee

Nice, intense white lesbians

“You are
only as  dumb
as your horse-faced
friend

I’m sorry

Your horse-faced
friend is beautiful”

I want some things
over and over again

---

Gina Abelkop is the author of the poetry collections I Eat Cannibals (co.im.press 2014) and Darling Beastlettes (Apostrophe Books 2012). She lives in Athens, GA, where she runs the DIY feminist press Birds of Lace.

Deja Samuel

Deja Samuel Loving Out Loud: Oxford MS (2018)