ISSUE 18 - DECEMBER 2018

CONTENTS

From a recent article at the Poetry Foundation: “Perhaps female creative potential was always squandered because its full reception and nourishment was culturally impossible.”

Tee Corinne: “The lack of a publicly accessible history is a devastating form of oppression. Lesbians face it constantly. The impact of this on art is that lines of development are obscured, broken, sometimes destroyed beyond reconstruction…”

From Two Augusts in a Row in a Row by Shelley Marlow: “Betsy is a leader of a whole region of witches in the north, while Susun has a coven of lesbian rabbi witches south of here. They have faith.”

From Lone Stars by Sophia Healy: “The lack of boundary, the apparent aimlessness, is actually a tactic, a motive. I want my paintings to look totally without presumption, to flow without pomposity, like a river without end, on which events pass simply and serenely. . . All I care about is nakedness, simplicity. I want a painting to be absolutely naked. . .”

Headmistress Press will be at AWP/Portland/2019 Bookfair. See you there!

Mary Meriam, Editor

Lavender Review

Liz Collins Embrace (2015)
Acrylic on canvas with stitched rayon yarn
Courtesy of artist and LMAKgallery

ISSUE 18 - DECEMBER 2018 - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

AYŞE TEKŞEN Nilay GINA MARIE BERNARD apogee JULIE WEISS Mission CRIS IACOPONI Love Me like a Mountain DEBORAH SALTMAN Valerie and Lucy get civil RUTH LEHRER Unicorn; Murmuration  REE SHERWOOD Daydreams of Faraway Places E.F. SCHRAEDER No Peacock Feather KALI LIGHTFOOT At Roslindale Station EMA BELL Black Lavender ANNE MYLES Double Suspension, Adirondacks VIANNAH DUNCAN Eurydice TIFFANY SANTOS Cracked Code GABRIELLE HOGAN poem to be read as a eulogy GEMMA COOPER-NOVACK Once on a Ghost Ship (6) B.A. O'CONNELL This is how I let you down EMMA JOHNSON-RIVARD Spoken Word LYNN STRONGIN I Hold the Pen of Akhmatova in My Hand

KAY NIELSEN East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914) PATRICIA CRONIN Aphrodite Reimagined (2018) JULIA CUTELLI the bodysuit (2018) DONNA GOTTSCHALK self-portrait of Joan and me, NYC (1969-70) STEPHANIE SKURA Surreptitious Preparations. . . (2018) CORINNE TEED invocation (2010) SHELLEY MARLOW Photographer Unknown (c. 1993) MARISSA BLUESTONE Dykes and Their Modernist Objects (2016) ELIZABETH BISHOP Cabin with Porthole (1911-1979) GEORGIA O'KEEFFE Series 1 No. 8 (1919) ALIX DOBKIN The Woman in Your Life  (1973) THELMA WOOD Elephants in Tall Grass (c. 1927) DEBORAH BRIGHT Untitled from Dream Girls series (1990) ANGELA DUFRESNE The Lonely are the Brave (2018) JUNO ROSENHAUS Mendocino Reflection (2016) ALICE O'MALLEY LES Trio, NYC (1993) ANDREA GEYER Time Tenderness (2015) LIZ COLLINS Embrace (2015)

Ayşe Tekşen

Nilay

Nilay doesn’t know
I’ve been watching her,
dreaming about
her skin of pearls
and her hair
darker than
the nights of Arabia.
My eyes drinking
her delicate hands,
her silver polished fingers
typing lucky letters
on her gold iPhone.
How my heart leapt each time
she dropped her phone onto the desk!
Could she have noticed
how much I wondered
what made her so angry and unhappy,
how much I wanted to erase
all that sadness from her eyes?
For three whole hours,
I looked for a chance to tell her
how cute she looked
with her new haircut.
I know you will not
read this little poem,
but maybe one day—
if unicorns really exist,
this can happen too—
you will read all my poems.
Maybe one day
you will be mine.
As the Poet once told me,
a poem is a whisper to no one.
But this time
I want this to be my whisper.
Only a glimmer of voice
sent your way.
Or maybe not.
Maybe there’s even no Nilay.
Or Nilay is actually an Aleyna
or a Serdar.
Maybe the speaker is me
or maybe Him the Poet.
Does it even matter who is whom
if you’re not mine, Nilay?

---

Ayşe Tekşen  lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, and Dash. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Sincerely, The Courtship of Winds, Mizmor Anthology, and Deep Overstock.

Kay Nielsen

Kay Nielsen, illustration from East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914)

gina marie bernard

apogee

i lie in bed reading Moby Dick.
through an open window, drafts of charmed

spindrift riffle pages buoyed in the space
between my breasts. i sail again

into dream—a nautilus surfing gray currents of time,
whose combers the Ancients coursed by star.

i plot loss—charted from kelp-choked depths
where she first swam from our firth,

and swept onto rocks once rolling molten
into thundering seas.

i’ve since tacked across worlds unharbored
and between the endless fetch of distant dawns,

certain only in the curved step of my saffron spine
tumbling through heavy surf.

---

gina marie bernard is a heavily tattooed transgender woman, retired roller derby vixen, and full-time high school English teacher. She lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, own her heart. Her chapbook Naked, Getting Nuder was a finalist in the 2018-2019 Glass Chapbook series, and is under contract with Clare Songbirds Publishing House. Her chapbook i am this girl was a semifinalist for the 2018 Charlotte Mew Poetry Prize, and has been published by Headmistress Press. Her work has recently appeared in The Hunger, Waccamaw Journal, Anomaly, Riggwelter, and The Real Story.

Patricia Cronin

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite Reimagined (2018) 
cold cast marble and resin, 120" x 32" x 36"

Julie Weiss

Mission
                        —for Olga

Let's just say
for the sake of supposition
that it was a Sunday afternoon, mid-mission
and I was standing in our kitchen
chopping tomatoes, cucumbers, onions for salad,
frying chorizo, flipping a tortilla española,
olive oil and tears splattering my face,

recalling the way your voice
with its twirling r's and sensuous Castilian lisp
would lure me out of sleepy Sunday reverie,
how your kiss would elicit a wellspring of desire
in those places aching to be touched.
I renounced lunch and reached for you, then.

What I grasped was:
an image of you, clad in camouflage green,
curly hair pulled straight into a band,
bent over an injured soldier
on a base somewhere in Afghanistan

and all at once
I grew dizzy from the void
as if it were a maelstrom
in the middle of a boundless sea
whirling me downward,
to the epicenter of solitude.

Let's assume the air swelled with smoke,
smothering me, and I swooned.
Later, you will say:
did that really happen?
And I, shedding layer after layer
of your uniform, will say
all of it and none of it.

As we retreat to our bedroom
I will pull your hand to my breast and say,
listen: the language of my heart
doesn't distinguish between fact and fantasy,
it only knows love and loss
and the solace of return.

---

Julie Weiss received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Jose State University. She’s a 44-year-old ex-pat from Foster City, California, who moved to Spain in 2001 and never looked back. She works as a telephone English teacher from her home in Ciudad Valdeluz, where she lives with her wife, three-year-old daughter, and one-year-old son. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist Series), Stonecoast Review, and Down in the Dirt Magazine.

Julia Cutelli

Julia Cutelli, the bodysuit (2018). 
Julia Cutelli is a Melbourne-based artist who has been photographing, documenting and collaborating with Dawn Dawson since 2003. 
Instagram: @julialikestopaint 

Cris Iacoponi

Love Me like a Mountain

I want to kiss a woman like a mountain, like a mountain.
My sign says ‘Must be this butch to ride’ and oh, she was.
I was moved                                                    like a mountain, I was
dragged willing with teeth to where I didn’t know I could feel that good.
I picked the burrs out of my socks for her,
soaked each callous in mango juice.
In this den, I learned to be soft.

After the weekend, we agree to stay in touch.
I run light fingers over a map, over Pittsburg.
I text her, “Would you like to talk on the phone sometime?”
The read receipt sits through the night. I didn't know I could still be this scared.
I remind myself “I have always been brave.”

I want to spin words like a child, just like a child. I
want to write a love poem no trauma in sight. I
refuse to say the words but it exists between these lines. “I
have always been brave,” is the motto it’s implied
in the absence in the always there is history of pain:
I have always               been               brave.
I had to be                     too                 brave.

Trauma’s patter feet across letters, behind kerning, around lean.
Running up and down the halls of my mind at night, intertwined with thoughts of her.
Her said like a new sunflower, like “make me cum” but murmured,
her said like hands gesturing on high like above your head like yes, we’re high.
Like something big something vast, tectonic plates moving, like coconut oil on warm skin.
Her said like “I think you deserve a love poem that's all about you and not how much I burn.”

But oh do I,                burn.

The cherry blossoms are blooming outside Dominos.
I think of picking some for her and hanging them up to dry but I always forget my scissors.
I am scared the flowers will die in the next frost.
They have died, before.
I think I have to do it now if at all.

---

Cris Iacoponi is a Philadelphia-based queer poet. Her work focuses on aspects of Surviving: mental illness, trauma, capitalism, and loneliness. Add just a touch of sexy gossip and that's a wrap. She has been published in seven magazines including Rhythm & Bones Lit, the Awakenings Foundation, Crooked Arrow Press, and Claer. You can reach her at miacoponi@uarts.edu, or stay up to date with her work @crispoems.

Donna Gottschalk

Donna Gottschalk, self-portrait of Joan and me, NYC (1969-70)

Deborah Saltman

Valerie and Lucy get civil

Lucy is rowing upstream
In the river of Valerie’s heart
Stroking new hope
And clearing away
The brackish thoughts

She is snug in the office
With two of her three girls
Sacha and the Munchkin
And besides Valerie is near

Valerie is unravelling Bolero
Her hands are on the keys
But her mind
Is restless
Crescendoing towards their tomorrows

And besides Lucy is near
Snug in her office
With the Sacha and munchkin

Sleep well tonight Valerie and Lucy
Let your vows
Roll the rings around your fingers
Like in rowlocks
Turning and tapping them
Again and again

Then in all the tomorrows
Be comfortable and converse
With your transformation
Marvel at the power
Of yourselves on a new road
And both say to this still earth: we flow

---

Born in Australia, Deborah Saltman is a lesbian doctor living and working across the Atlantic—London to NYC. After a scientific hiatus she has returned to her young adult love—poetry.

Stephanie Skura

Stephanie Skura and Eva Karczag in Skura’s Surreptitious Preparations for an Impossible Total Act (2018). Jim Coleman photographer.

Ruth Lehrer

Unicorn

The dentist strung wires
and rubber bands and told me
if I was patient I could be
solved. Years of my life
given to the goal of being
straight.

The eye doctor
measured and re-measured
and told me I was broken
but could be fixed
with plastic and string
and with refraction
of light I would see
straight.

My parents they wanted
me and my strange loves
to be fixed and solved
and reglued and they sent
me off to be broken
again and again

But my eyes my heart
even my teeth
They were unfixable

And they were definitely
not straight.

---

Murmuration

I saw the blueberries first

and then the bluejay

and then, the crowd of starlings

And the starlings said,

We are not a crowd we are a host

we are not a host we are a party

They were in the lowbush blue

They were in the heather but

I couldn’t hear well

I couldn’t sing back

since I was on the one side

and they were on the other

They knew that too

since they said it again and again

We are a host we are a party

and you

You are alone. 

---

Ruth Lehrer is a writer and sign language interpreter living in the western Massachusetts. She is the author of the poetry chapbook TIGER LAUGHS WHEN YOU PUSH, available from Headmistress Press. Her debut novel, BEING FISHKILL (Candlewick Press) is described by Entertainment Weekly as, “...the year’s most heartwarming, heartbreaking teen novel.”

Corinne Teed

Corinne Teed, invocation (2010)
transfer, graphite, acrylic
18.5” x 20”

Ree Sherwood

Daydreams of Faraway Places

I grew up to be alive in a little town
house in a little town where I tried
not to look too much like a dyke
in my men’s watch and combat boots
                                              I walked
a thousand miles this year
just to lay on my comforter
with your cheek under my fingers
your voice like thread
                                  you stitched
into my shoulder blade to say
                                    this house is warm
we believed it       happy and
tucked into our little corner

                    I took a breath one afternoon
had never breathed before
dreamt of sunshine sitting
along a fountain’s edge // life passing

through (a pigeon     a child)
wind knocked over a café chair
every heart beat at once

a single swing to a bass drum
we were all aware // all alive

---

Ree Sherwood’s work is published or forthcoming in Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, OUT/CAST, and Rivet. Currently, Ree is pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and reading for Carve magazine.

Shelley Marlow

Photographer Unknown, Shelley Marlow (c. 1993)
@marlow_shelley 
Author of Two Augusts in a Row in a Row reviewed at Cutbank and Wildness
Read about Marlow's trip to Siberia to meet shamans here.

E. F. Schraeder

No Peacock Feather (for the Student Who Wants to be an Adjunct)

Hands crack open my ribcage, excavate hidden meat.
Fingers plummet to muscle, claw the hair from my scalp,
tugging apart the skin. Don’t fret, I’m leaving soon.

Life is short in the study of this, the science of that, the theory of everything.
No special knowledge required for anything but surgery, take this gift:
you have learned something, swallowed it whole.

Whatever attracted you, sweet moth, know that the tower roars in flames,
roasting data, creeds, books, and canons. Departments bow and coo.
Your paper wings still moist, anointing you Icarus.

Paradigms shift. Clever memes and likability replaced mastery
with posed pictures of scholarship. Education is an appetizer.
Remember, it’s not Imposter’s Syndrome to the imposter.

Learn, I gasp and choke. Trust me, the College
will gladly hire you, consume you, digest you.
Welcome! Sit down. Please take my place, and enjoy.

---

Ethicist, poet, and speculative fiction writer E. F. Schraeder is the author of two poetry chapbooks, most recently Chapter Eleven (Partisan Press). Schraeder’s creative work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Sinister Wisdom, Mystery Weekly Magazine, Birthing Monsters, The Feminist Wire, and others. Currently an MLIS student, Schraeder holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. emphasizing applied ethics. Dr. Schraeder’s current projects include a queer monster’s coming of age novella and a full length manuscript of poems.

Marissa Bluestone

Marissa Bluestone Dykes and Their Modernist Objects (2016)
67 x 48, oil on canvas 

Kali Lightfoot

At Roslindale Station

You who never arrived in my arms,
beloved, simply missed the train, again.
I believe instead that it was something
I said, or did, or did not do, or should have
thought about if I had been smarter.

But you say your old rusted piece
of shit car just finally died and you
were running late as usual—I am
only one of the most recent thousand
things that capture your attention—

but not for long. So, at this moment
and from this moment to the next
that lives within it, I pledge to forgive
myself from responsibility—
not you, not yet, but myself.

There will be no further thought,
self-recrimination, or rehearsal
of guilt as I re-live the misery
of that train chuffing into the station,
beloved, and you not arriving in my arms.

After “You Who Never Arrived” by Rainer Maria Rilke

---

Kali Lightfoot lives in Salem, MA. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won Honorable Mention from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Kali has written reviews of poetry for Bookslut, Broadsided Press, and Solstice.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Cabin With Porthole
Watercolor and gouache

Ema Bell

Black Lavender

I have an inclination to touch your mouth.
When you speak I can think of nothing.
Yeah sure, I agree.
I have no idea what you are saying but keep talking.
I have an ardency for your demeanor.
And when you are settled into yourself
Is when you are the most attractive.
But this is all subjective.
In reality kismet is work.
They never tell you that.
And love has lost its meaning.
I hate the way it looks on the page.
You’re not in l-v-e.
You’re rushing to an endpoint
That will lead you to the beginning of yourself.

L-v-e is treacherous and omni.
And it will leave scars,
The most beautiful scars
That have the pulchritude of a peacock feather.
You have me. How do you keep me?
In a box or deeply rooted
Like an oak tall and aching for sunlight.

No, in a lavender field
As your hands reach for me and I’m not there.

---

Ema Bell received her MFA in Theatre from CalArts. She is a poet masquerading as a playwright and a screenwriter. She has written a coming of age feature about a lesbian college student titled Portrait of a Girl. Her short film influenced by her feature, Playing Alice, was accepted into the Chicago International Blowup Film Festival in 2017. She is presently working on a book of love poetry that does not use pronouns. She resides in Los Angeles.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series 1 No. 8 (1919)

Anne Myles

Double Suspension, Adirondacks

An old champion greyhound runs with his daughter
in the ruins of Fort Crown Point. Two women watch them

hearts lifted above their chests in common wonder.
Sun glitters on the steep embankments, on Champlain.

Twenty-five years ago I drove north on the New York Thruway,
heart pounding, to tell another woman I loved women too.

Light over everything that weekend, the world leaping with promise,
Alix Dobkin blasting from the car as we headed for Lake Placid.

I studied how she and her lover walked, dressed, laughed.
Beautiful otherness, only hours from where I’d lived.

They showed me John Brown’s farmhouse, high and plain,
birds twittering over the grass and graves of those willing

to take resistance as far as it could go. Later, I would be the lover
in the old camp on the hillside running to the shore

where once I saw the lake monster’s back roll through the water.
Where one day she would snap and scream and sever me,

and I would drive south numb and blinded, then move to Iowa,
rounded fields like a woman’s hip, a different spaciousness.

And now I am back, realizing how I have kept these trees,
these mountains holding their breath under the mist,

these starved farms and ramshackle houses, cabins and canoes,
this smell of pine and wood and wool. These bark eaters.

The younger greyhound sniffs into the ruined rooms
of the wars that made the country my grandparents would come to.

Now we are at war again, invisibly, inside this very phone
I raise to take a picture of the dogs for posting, mine and hers,

two introverted women who know each other online mostly.
The old fort is a bowl of green inside its earthworks;

the sky presses down into it, full of hunger and release,
the same sky a soldier gazed on once as the last thing.

---

A graduate of Bryn Mawr and the University of Chicago, Anne Myles is associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. She began writing poetry again within the past year after having lost her voice for decades. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of publications including Ghost City Review, Ink & Nebula, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Crosswinds Poetry Journal.

Alix Dobkin

Alix Dobkin, The Woman in Your Life, from the album Lavender Jane Loves Women (1973) 

Viannah Duncan

Eurydice

Take me with you
when you go into
the underground
where the walls are cool
to the touch and
the darkness seeps
into my eyes

Take me with you
into the sun
where all my terror melts
away and it is
day even at night

Take me with you
when you step
into your tragedy
where few can follow
where I can give you
new skin

Freeze your days
set fire to your nights
let me mold for you a new life

Do not look back
for me
for I have not
followed you

---

Viannah Duncan writes poetry and creative nonfiction. A professional editor, she holds an MFA in creative writing and lives in the Baltimore area with her cantankerous cat Cleopatra.

Thelma Wood

Thelma Wood, Elephants in Tall Grass (c. 1927)
7" x 8 1/2". Black and white. Silverpoint.
Courtesy of University of Maryland University Libraries. 

Tiffany Santos

Cracked Code

Diaphragm-deep inside a bad trip,
I enter the club, stoop, hand to land,
then stand safe, mean lack-lean machine,
a sheen of haggard happiness
along my jaw as I inch deep inside.

Then pelvis to velvet pelvis we meet
in the middle of the dance floor—
the yellow-violet bruising of one night's love.
I whisper my wishes through my teeth,
my words caught in the music, her hair,
like the weight of water on a beetle's back.
Her drenched yes dredged up
from the bottom of her rum & coke.

We creak back to her place,
a patch of steel on a southeast byway,
a scratched out rattrap stolen
from old apple orchards. We are cherry ripe,
lifted, drip-dried in the rain, dope-ripped,
walking, at last, a wrack line of possible love.

---

Tiffany Santos – a Western Maryland native, Tiffany 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 was the co-founder and editor of Black Hat/ Black Tree Press, which featured a short-lived but experimental local reading series in Cumberland, Maryland. 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. She is also a proud Madwoman, having taken the poetry workshop with Jan Beatty. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have been published in several literary journals including Backbone Mountain Review, Voices from the Attic, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel Journal, Lavender Review, Wicked Banshee Press, and Dionne's Story: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose for the Awareness of Relationship Violence. She currently resides in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Deborah Bright

Deborah Bright, Untitled from Dream Girls series (1990)
Silver gelatin photograph
Courtesy of the artist

Gabrielle Hogan

poem to be read as a eulogy

there’s a dog who barks like a woman being stolen, & then, suddenly,
doesn’t. i ask if its teeth are rows of streets, in a neighborhood

where you do not know my name & do not call it so soundly
into the orange velvet of an autumn where we sing happy birthday

to a ghost. here i wait for the answer as one waits for the mute to speak.
tell me, father, how do the mute pray? how do they repent for these

thrust-upon sins when viaticum is sought through a feeding tube?
dr. katz said there wasn’t one believer in the whole divinity school,

god as whipping boy with urbane chicagoan flourish—
& i say illinois is not a home, missouri not a bang

but a whimper, a whispering of carcinogens in hollow, deliberate disguise.
tell me, father, where do you go when even the hospital kills you?

when a pope dies, we replace him but i cannot replace
my grandmother’s vatican of couch cushion, quilt, tv remote.

i cannot replace the echo of a laugh she leaves behind
at a funeral, in a church, where i’m supposed to praise you

for allowing me to keep the loose skin she leaves behind for the living.
tell me, father, how do i believe in you when you unhinge her jaw

& tell me it is a sin to have no mouth?

---

Gabrielle Hogan is a poet from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Spiral Orb, LEVELER, and others. In 2017, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem “pools.” Currently she is in her last year of undergrad, with plans to pursue her MFA after graduation. She hopes you’re rooting for her because she’s rooting for you. Twitter @Gabigail97

Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne, The Lonely are the Brave (2018)
oil on canvas. 42 x 62½ inches.

Gemma Cooper-Novack

Once on a Ghost Ship (6)

It was just like that time
on the train, but saltier: her curls fanned
easily where my thigh met upholstery,
all of her under my lip. Also, it went on
for weeks, then weeks. Everything was wood
and leather here, meant to be hardy in sea air;
she told me everything she knew about beaches
and she could have been insulting
me or adoring me, the way the vowel
spread the length of her tongue. She whispered
into our cold clear dark you love me?
you love me? and I answered with stars,
stars by the thousands, like salt where we folded.

---

Gemma Cooper-Novack’s debut poetry collection We Might As Well Be Underwater, a finalist for the Central New York Book Award, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than twenty journals and been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Gemma was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship; she has been awarded artist’s residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund. She is a doctoral student in Literacy Education at Syracuse University. 

Juno Rosenhaus

Juno Rosenhaus © 2016 Mendocino Reflection
Queer Artists Social Media

B.A. O'Connell

This is how I let you down

not slowly
not between soft breaths
but hard—
like concrete meeting the back of the head—
your disappointment may be lethal.

I may stop breathing in the night for sympathy to your pain—
I no longer look in the mirror,
there is nothing new to be seen,
nothing to be changed;
my heart beats like pouring rain.

I do not love you. I cannot let you go.

My arms are rusted iron cables on a suspension bridge
one storm away from collapse.

---

B.A. O'Connell lives in Nowhere, Texas. They have two very lovable cats and insatiable appetite for poetry. They have dabbled in witchcraft and believe firmly in the power of words.

Alice O'Malley

Alice O'Malley, LES Trio, Clit Club Soho Invasion, NYC 1993

Emma Johnson-Rivard

Spoken Word 

Shake me, shaken to the
bone and know rattle
shakes, girl−

How did you start?
How do you bend without
cracking? Cold,

it lingers. Our shaking song.
Fear, love. Loathing, too.

Sing me your poetry, girl.
Sing.

---

Emma Johnson-Rivard is a Masters student at Hamline University. She currently lives in Minnesota with her dogs and far too many books. Her work has appeared in Mistake House, the Nixes Mate Review, and Moon City Review. Twitter: finalgirlz

Andrea Geyer

Andrea Geyer, rehearsal photograph for Time Tenderness (2015)
performers: Omagbitse Omagbemi, Lily Gold and Lee Krasner (1908-1984), The Seasons, 1957. Oil and house paint on canvas

Lynn Strongin

I Hold the Pen of Akhmatova in My Hand

Every day I wake to receive the world, as a little child.

One’s fragile inner life drawn taut by emotional conflict

Snapped on occasion.

The open secret of androgyny cast its luminous light its glow over all objects in the room.

My girl in mahogany

Lips pressed to another on a beach this side of heaven

I am drawn forward

Like burgundy thread from a spool.

How keep it cool?

My girl in oversize jacket, wing collar up around ears

Lighting a cigarette she appears, smaller than the jacket.

The memory, the grief, the wars

The dot of fire

Sparks my own memories:

Anna Akhmatova seems to hold my pen:

You will be a great Jewish poet, my great uncle from Romania said.

His words ring in my ear

Like a cymbal

As the grief

Like grayish Ukrainian rain comes down:

Her arms circle my waist:

Time stops while our kiss clocks in.

---

Lynn Strongin, born in 1939 in New York City into a middle-class Jewish family, contracted polio at age 12. She attended the Manhattan School of Music, Hunter College, and Stanford University, where she earned a Master of Arts in literature. In the 1960s, she lived in politically active Berkeley, collaborating with Denise Levertov, who described her as a “true poet.” Stongin has published more than a dozen books and her work appears in 30 anthologies. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Association of University Women, and PEN American Center. Countrywoman/Surgeon was nominated for the Elliston Award in 1979 and Spectral Freedom for a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Headmistress Press has published two of her poetry collections: The Burn Poems and A Bracelet of Honeybees.

Liz Collins

Liz Collins Embrace (2015)
Acrylic on canvas with stitched rayon yarn
Courtesy of artist and LMAKgallery