ISSUE 20 - DECEMBER 2019

CONTENTS

Cathy Cade: “Before the rainbow flag, lavender was associated with the LGBTQ community as a symbol of the blending of the gendered colors pink and blue.”

Carmen Rios: Popaganda: Real Talk with Feminist Trailblazers

Sarah Schulman: “When I started my writing career I vowed to have openly lesbian content in my work and I was warned that professionally this was ‘the kiss of death.’ My first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, appeared in 1984 and was almost impossible to publish. It had 61 rejections with warnings from publishers that the lesbian content would ‘offend librarians.’ And even now, I regularly see lesbian writers with no out content consistently being welcomed into categories of support and opportunity that still aren’t generally available to those of us who insist on our place in American letters. But today, THIRTY-FIVE YEARS later, Sophie finally made it to the New York Times Book Review.”

Amanda Montell: “When English speakers want to insult a woman, they compare her to one of a few things: a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut). That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. In English, our negative terms for women necessarily mirror the status of women in Western society at large.”

Cheryl Clark: “poets are among the first witches”

Terry Castle: “Thirty years after dinner with the Poet Lady, one still finds oneself staring into the won ton all too frequently, dismayed yet again at how invisible, literally and figuratively, lesbianism remains, even in the great rainbow-flag-waving cities of the West. Some of the smartest and most well-meaning straight people still don’t get it – in fact, don’t even see it.”

Mary Meriam, Editor

Lavender Review


Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shirt (2010)

ISSUE 20 - DECEMBER 2019 - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

JULIE MARIE WADE Women in Search of Balls, Circa 2009 ELLEN BASS Sometimes, When She Is Buried Deep VI KHI NAO Circles CHERYL CLARKE Legacy/Legends MAUREEN SEATON & LORI ANDERSON Music Piece NICOLE SANTALUCIA Ode to My Wife  MELISSA STUDDARD Glossolalia 8 MEG DAY Hanging Laundry in Sliema on Sunday  ALICIA MOUNTAIN Electrocardiogram CHING-IN CHEN from Houston in Compilation JESSICA JACOBS Joseph recognized his brothers JOY LADIN You Will Never See Me as Your Mother  STACIE M. KINER Letters of My Dead

NEVINE MAHMOUD A ball stripped bare (2018) PATRICIA CRONIN Aphrodite Reimagined (2018) AKAISER Queens (2019) ASHLEY REID African American (2016) HILARY HARKNESS Morning Glory (2009) RACHEL TRUSTY Heirloom (2019) KATE GILMORE Only One Like You (2013)  DAPHNE FITZPATRICK Shirt (2010) DEBORAH CZERESKO Oh God/Martina 59/9 (2019) AMANDA KIRKHUFF Sauna (2018) CHITRA GANESH Atlas (2013) LEONOR FINI Red Vision (1984) ANNIE GANZALA Atlantic's love (2019)

Julie Marie Wade

Women in Search of Balls, Circa 2009

My girlfriend takes a body-rolling class.
The teacher tells her to practice
10 minutes a night while watching TV.
The book tells her the series of pelvic
exercises will make our love-making—
anyone’s love-making—
everyone’s love-making—
more “pleasurable & intense.”
Who doesn’t want that?

I like the idea of more “pleasurable &
intense” love-making, but I don’t like
the word “love-making.”  What’s wrong
with “fucking?” I say.  Must we be so
pristine?  What’s wrong with a little
good old-fashioned fucking?

But the problem, it turns out, is not
one of nomenclature, but one of supplies:

“We need balls,” she says.

“Since when?”

“Spongy pink balls,” she says.

“Why?”

“For my feet—for my body-rolling,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, feeling sheepish.  Of course.



We scour the basement, but as it turns out,
we don’t have any balls—there, or anywhere.
We are a household entirely devoid of balls.
We have a combination lock that we don’t
know the combination for.  We have an ID
bracelet, a monkey wrench, a set of old Spy
Tech walkie-talkies, & a cat scratching post
with most of the carpet scratched off—

            but no balls.


We have—

            but no balls.




So I call up the store, & I say to the man
who answers—

“Sir, could you tell me—do you have
spongy pink balls?”

Click, the receiver goes.

So I call up a different store, & more
cautiously, I say to the woman who answers—

“Perhaps you could help me—I’m looking for a set
of balls—”

She is quick to intercept me—
“Then why don’t you grow a pair?”

“Don’t hang up—I need balls.”

Click.

“I’m looking to buy some spongy
pink balls—”

Click.

“It’s for body-rolling.  My girlfriend
needs balls—”

Click.

“We’re going to have to try the Internet,”
she says, so I type in what, according to
Ockham’s Razor, should be the simplest
location:  www.balls.com

It’s a blog site, but nobody mentions balls—
not where to get them, nothing.

The commentary goes like this:

i love to watch people suck their wieners

i like big wieners

i love to suck wieners all the time
i enjoy watching other people do it too

Want to contribute?
Join or sign in

(Site last accessed by author 7/12/09)

“I think we’re going to have to go to the store,”
I say.

“The real store—out there where the people are?”

“Yes,” I say.

“But I’m in my bathrobe, & I’m sleepy, & it’s Sunday.
Who goes to the store on Sunday to buy balls?”

“Someone who needs them for body-rolling,” I say.

“Are we going to a toy store?”

“I think we should.”

“Is a toy store the best place to buy balls?”

“I think it is.”

“On Sunday?”

“On any day,” I say.

“But won’t it seem creepy—that we don’t have kids,
& are trying to buy balls, just the two of us, without kids,
on a Sunday?”

“Good point,” I say.  “We’ll have to buy balls on
Tuesday afternoon.”

She agrees & pours more coffee.
“You can do almost anything on a Tuesday afternoon.”

---

Julie Marie Wade teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms at Florida International University in Miami. She received the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir for her first book, Wishbone: A Memoir In Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books, 2014) in 2011. Her newest collection is Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press in February 2020.

Nevine Mahmoud

Nevine Mahmoud A ball stripped bare (2018) 
Installation view at Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, 2018. 
Image courtesy Jeff McLane

Ellen Bass

Sometimes, When She Is Buried Deep

between my thighs, rooted there
like a tree is rooted, digging into
my earth-heart, dirt-heart, heart riddled
with need and decay, breaking
down, breaking the world so
it can bud again, I become
the girl I was long ago, just out
of the gate, new to the track,
but with a will to run, my muscles
rippling like banners, my rump a blessing,
my scapulae wings. I’m so young
I smell like amniotic waters.
I squander my hot breath, careless
as wind whipping litter and fallen
leaves, rumbling empty cans, disturbing
any rest. How surprised I am to find myself
here again, at this cusp of crumbling,
this last dissolve, surrounded
by such succulent skin, and oh,
how she opens me, how she lifts me still.

---

Ellen Bass’s poetry includes Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming 2020) Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002). She co-edited, with Florence Howe, the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her poetry has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, The Larry Levis Prize and the New Letters Prize. Her nonfiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies, I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Patricia Cronin

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite Reimagined (2018)
cold cast marble and resin, 30" x 8.5" x 7.5”, edition of 6

Vi Khi Nao

Circles

Last night the moon
Covers the mouth
Of the sun with
Her shy ethery hand
Pulled from earth’s shadow
As if atmospheric fucking
Is a sin
Overlapping each other
The sun & the moon,
Aching for transparency,
Are superengorged
Super enough to make
A sexual ambush seem like
Denial or a coconut bong
I long for my body to mourn into
Sound baked by wind
& compression
I long for the shape of your mouth
To renew its binary law
Though shifting away from
An orgasmic “O”
And, standing cum straight for the other
Binary “1”
There is transference
Where the moon’s shoulder is
Bent towards me
As if there is a rod of confection
Between her body and my mind
There is no despair between us
When her touch isn’t repairing
Your sun
We are both zeros or “O’s”
As you like to call it
Each year
When there is no anal eclipse
There is no anal eclipse
We are no binary lovers
The sun and I
The moon and you
We are a circle within a circle
A tongue inside a circumference
This is how dyke lovers
Do maths
In bed
A tongue inside a zero
Creating four infinities
Where lunar cunts and
Heliotropic breasts meet
We circle each other
Until a meteorite says
“No” to a series of zeros
We circle each other
Until a lunar sun
Says “yes” to a solar moon
We circle each other
Until the only
Circle left is the one
We left on each other’s body
Fading lightly away
From our center

---

Vi Khi Nao is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She is the current Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.

AKaiser

AKaiser Queens (2019)
Photographed on East River waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. No further identification available.

Cheryl Clarke

Legacy/Legends

suspended in a trance trapeze like
blankness at the red light
slipping to sleep from this hell
the thousand slights, slings, and piercing
things the children endure post-Brown
due to fortunes of color, the sneer of lips and snarl of larynx
fill my passenger window, on this overcast afternoon—

           ‘Ain’t you that integratin’ nigger?’

while I lift the Colt 45 from its place, and with a fool’s certainty
aim it between the pores of his nostrils:

           ‘And ain’t you that segregatin’ cracker I’m ‘bout to drop right here.’

---

Cheryl Clarke is a black, lesbian, feminist poet and author of five books of poetry, the critical text After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, and  her collected works The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry. Her writings have appeared in numerous publications since 1977. She was a member of the editorial collective of Conditions, a  Magazine of Writing for Women with an Emphasis on Writing by Lesbians from 1981-1990. She retired, after 41 years, from the administration of Rutgers University in 2013. She serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Sinister Wisdom, the oldest lesbian journal in North America and perhaps the world. She is a co-organizer of the annual Hobart (N.Y.) Book Village Festival of Women Writers, which enters its eighth year on September 11, 12, 13 of 2020.  Y'all come!

Ashley Reid

Ashley Reid African American (2016) from the exhibition White Power

Maureen Seaton & Lori Anderson

Music Piece

Lo was loud, I was soft, she had muscles, I had eyestrain, she wore superman, I wore black widow, she was fight, I was flight, she was a jokester, I was Ms. Seriosa, she was not careful, I was careful about every blessed thing. She was Gospel, I was Gregorian Chant. She’d found Jesus, I’d found Jesus. She’d lost Jesus, I’d lost Jesus. She’d gotten sober young and so had I. Oh, and she was the first lover I ever had who adored my ass. Bingo. I loved to dance and so did she. Double bingo. She was a few years younger but we loved a lot of the same music. We loved music. We love music. Love music. Her apartment in Harlem was music all the time, before, during, and after sex, before going out, after coming home, during every meal. Our life had a soundtrack. It was the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder, Pat Metheny and Marvin Gaye, Deep Forest and Luther Vandross, George Winston and Patti LaBelle. Joni and Barry and Smokey and Moby and CSNY. That was the beginning. So much music. I’m pretty sure God is music—not just in it, but it. I’ve also thought that it’s going to be okay to die because everything is music and when I die I’ll simply be in music all the time. Lo agrees with me. For the music alone, we were destined. If there wasn’t music somewhere in the house we were probably in trouble. I guess couples stay together for any number of reasons. We stayed together for music.

                                                                                                                                          (Maureen Seaton)

First time Mo and I

spent the whole night together

I asked her could she

see me in the nightlight dark?

Yes, she said, I can sing you. 

                                                                                                                                          (Lori Anderson)

---

Maureen Seaton & Lori Anderson have partnered on various magical projects (mostly the personal kind) for over thirty-one years. On the occasion of “Music Piece,” they put some words together then danced for as long as their knees held out. Anderson is a Brooklyn-born musician, sculptor, and writer. Seaton’s latest collection of poetry is Sweet World (CavanKerry Press, 2019). Her honors include the Lambda Literary Award, Audre Lorde Award, an NEA, and the Pushcart. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, 2018), in which Anderson plays a feature role under a highly recognizable pseudonym, also garnered a “Lammy.”  @mseaton9

Hilary Harkness

Hilary Harkness, Morning Glory (2009)

Nicole Santalucia

Ode to My Wife after Reading Anne Bradstreet at a One Hundred and Three Year Old Farm House

Between two clouds
and two seedless grapes
and two dandelions
there are days that fall.
Between two horses
or two farm dogs
or two blackbirds
there is breath.
Between two mice
or two lightning bugs
or two blades of grass
or two fallen crab apples
there is a silent place to love.
Between two yellow wildflowers
or two fox kits or two red oak leaves
there is energy that crashes.
Between two frogs and two trees
there are two rain drops and two gusts of wind
that blow through darkness
where two stars
and two far away planets
light up the sky.

If ever two were one
then today there is one light
shining through one cloud
and one wind
and one breath.
There is one affection
that stops the stars from falling.
The wild orchids’ deeply
bedded roots grow in pairs.
It is not desire that gives them life.
It’s the grazing chickens behind the coop
and the cattle that wander away from the herd.

---

Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books, 2020), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press, 2018), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2019, The Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, The Seventh Wave, The Florida Review, Lunch Ticket as well as numerous other journals and anthologies. Santalucia teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

Rachel Trusty

Rachel Trusty, Heirloom (2019)
ink and hand-embroidery on found photograph, 5.5” in diameter

Melissa Studdard

Glossolalia 8

In the shadow of the severing,

only a stuttering remains

because trauma is a syllable with its

mouth stitched shut. She dreamed the knife

bit the hand that was holding it. She dreamed

the man with the monocle

dropped his eye in the lake.
Now,
when she coughs up bullets,

the doctor says her windows

are still painted shut. She dreamed

the nightingale laid its eggs

in her throat. She dreamed the letter
she never sent

was delivered anyway.

Look, she says to the diary,

when the words pull me out of myself,

I stand in the center of them and cry.

---

Melissa Studdard's publications include the poetry collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and the young adult novel Six Weeks to Yehidah, as well as short works featured or forthcoming in The Guardian, The New York Times, POETRY, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, The New Republic, Ms. Magazine, Academy of American Poets, New England Review, Psychology Today, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She has received The Forward National Literature Award, the International Book Award, and the REEL Poetry Festival Audience Choice Award, among others. As well, her work has been noted in many best-of lists, such as Cutthroat’s Best Books of the Year, January Magazine’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, Bustle’s “8 Feminist Poems To Inspire You When The World Is Just Too Much,” and Amazon’s Most Gifted Books.

Kate Gilmore

Kate Gilmore, Only One Like You (2013)

Meg Day

Hanging Laundry in Sliema on Sunday

June 12, 2016 | Sliema, Malta

This body has never been enough.
All night I’ve been fighting
sleep, throwing leather just to stay
fit for dreams that swear I won’t
wake. And still I wake: another loss.
Somewhere in Florida, a man is still

driving. Here, in Malta, the sun is still
rising, the buildings sighing, Enough—
Their cratered faces cuss a soundless gloss
shared with the moon. (Who isn’t fighting
to be left alone?) The men in town won’t
blink—a long drink—til I do. Their hands stay

quiet the way I know a body can stay
quiet if you’re caught in the wrong one: still
but dying to get free. Sunday won’t
let anybody sip on me. Sunday’s enough
to swallow on its own. My neighbor is fighting
with the line on our roof—no slack to floss

it back through the pipe with viper’s bugloss
burring from the split, can’t make it stay
taut with want. She watched me fighting
a row of damp briefs last week: dead-still
& staring while I jab-cross-hooked enough
to know my morals let me tire but by hands won’t

sleep. Now we speak a language that’s wont
to say too much: I pin up underwire & she’s at a loss
for pronouns, squints at me hard enough
that I see in hers my own face in the mirror. Stay
I might’ve whispered to the shy boy still
hiding there, reflected inside—the one quietly writing

her selves unified—& to the one now fighting
his demons across Orlando county lines. Won’t
they both might reply. But if I just stand still,
here on this roof, so that whatever loss
comes carries the burden of proof that we outstay
our welcome to push the edge of enough—

Then enough—I snap a sheet. Enough—my neighbor beats a carpet still.
Pigeons blossom from the cathedral’s dome, scattering for a mainstay
& I keep fighting to hang bedsheets whose bloodstains I can erase but won’t.

---

Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, published in 2019 as a part of The Unsung Masters Series through Pleaides Press. The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College.

Daphne Fitzpatrick

Daphne Fitzpatrick Shirt (2010)

Alicia Mountain

Electrocardiogram

In the season of great triumph and worry
I feared swallowing my sutures
          and did,
kept toggling between pro- and anti-
          biotics, coughing and snotting.

The wet Portland night of many opportunities and successes, many-headed joy,
drove myself toward urgent care, behind the wheel with breath pain
          aching not to hurt anyone else on the road as I went.
Told the dispatcher I think it hurts where my heart is.

I was taking a lot of vitamins
          and things that couldn’t hurt.
And that wasn’t the problem
                    except for the way they held telescope
                    to my ableist fear of age and decline.

After searching every remedy page for solution,
          for assurance, I find
the closest diagnosis of all the ache at my center:
          there is no superfood or supplement 
          to cure your sprained thinking
                    that your body should be under your control. 

Days earlier in panic
I insisted my sister explain
every symptom of bile and gall
that foreshadowed her extraction.
          Even if something is wrong, she said,
                              it won’t be wrong always.

The general practitioner told me,
I can only prescribe these to you 10 at a time, without refill.
          Do you understand why?
And I understand why,
          which is enough to make me to worry
          about the addictions I don’t have.

And that version of me that sits, gown open to the front, alone at emergent care,
          not having told anyone I’m there.
That body with a wire to each ankle and wrist, six at my left breast
          to read into my chest.
She knows without being told
          that the EKG is fine—
                    that the phantom grip beneath ribs
                    palms sweating the steering wheel
                    sun-hidden skin under overhead light
          each owes much of its debt
to my cumbersome refusal to fall apart, even in small embodiments.

The new pain was the obvious certainty
that this graph of voltage and time would show no trouble.
Nothing to be fixed.
          That the attack acutely striking where my heart belongs
is my own incommunicable fear
of losing a life I have only just begun to love.

---

Alicia Mountain is the author of the collection High Ground Coward (Iowa 2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Thin Fire (BOAAT Press 2018). She is a lesbian poet based in New York and the Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver. Keep up with her at aliciamountain.com and @HiGroundCoward.

Deborah Czeresko

Oh God/Martina 59/9 (2019)

Ching-In Chen

from Houston in Compilation

15

in night with no memory, woman missing ear dries up on shore. yesterday, small knives hid in glimmer, melting where planted. dentist comes calling, opens all windows. over long and soundless night, chicken baked in moon, muttering man watching our progress. treasure here just slow-speaks its name clearly no reason for hurting with its tongue splayed open. we sent letters but reflections spit out anyway. the threading machine makes no effort even as growing stalk with no bounce. no reason to sit alone by staircase, prepping eyes for wideness.

---

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009); recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017; winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry); how to make black paper sing (speCt! Books, 2019); and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (forthcoming from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and a Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are a part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. They are currently Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

Amanda Kirkhuff

Amanda Kirkhuff Sauna (2018)
oil on canvas, 84” x 68” [unframed]

Jessica Jacobs

Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him.
                                                                                             —Genesis 42:8

א.
From the new lines in my sister’s face,
I know I’m aging. From the kids I grew up with,
with kids of their own and cruise photos
and split-level homes, I learn I’m middle-aged.

So when Benjamin told the Viceroy of Egypt
about the sons named as living memorials
to his lost brother Joseph, he had no idea
this official in linen and gold
was that same brother: Ashbel, for God
captured him; Ehi and Rosh, for he was
my brother and my head; Huppin, for we
were not at each other’s weddings… And
with each name, the decades
of Joseph’s exile—all those years apart
he’d reveled in—the absence
felt by those who loved him
became real, as did the man he truly was
beneath the title and clothes.

ב.
We strive so hard for independence
when interdependence is our fate
                         and fortune too.

Without the love of others, we are Joseph,
a person without reflection; we are Rachel,
mother of Joseph and Benjamin, dying
on the road from one place to another—
only with no origin, no destination,
always in that no-place of on the way,
with no measure of how far
we’ve come, of how far there is to go.

ג.
                                                        My origin
is the giants who raised me, and now that they’ve
stooped to human dimensions, humbled
by chance as much as by choices, now fumbling
through best they can, I see a possible
destination—gathering from my parents
both how and how not
to get there.
                   And from my wife, I see what it means
to have a companion on the road between, how
we mirror and mold each other in that going.

---

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), named one of Library Journal's Best Poetry Books of 2019. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Guernica, and The Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh, Atlas (2013)

Joy Ladin

You Will Never See Me as Your Mother

                    for my daughter


You help around the house
we've never shared,

sometimes singing, sometimes quiet,
sometimes ablaze with anger.

Apples burn in your orchard, the teapot shrieks
above your ring of fire.

You can't see me, but I'm there.
Love draws me toward you, love

you can't feel
in the midst of the conflagration

that's all that remains
of our life together.

After all these years, I don't know much about you.
What do you want? Who do you love?

What smells remind you of your childhood?
How did you answer the question

on college applications
about hardships you've overcome? Was one

the incendiary umbilical cord
whose burning still ties you

to me, the parent you refuse to see,
in whom you never grew.

Whose love still blossoms
in the midst of the flames. Blazes

like flame among blossoms.

---

Joy Ladin is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems and Fireworks in the Graveyard, and two Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration, and The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award. She holds the Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University.

Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini, Red Vision (1984)

Stacie M. Kiner

Letters of My Dead

Letters of my dead
carry leaves and dirt
to school
in pencil boxes;
miniature coffins
preparing us for lives
held underwater,
sand and earth
and beach chairs
washed away.

Twisting open Bahamian shutters
in a room in our favourite hotel,
I fold the map of your body
into my back pocket,
trying to explain
pull of earthly tethers,
flight of soul from matter.

If I were mathematical
I could calculate the meaning
of nights like these
unredeemed
rapture and grief entwine
as everything falls from the ledge
of a tilting planet

how far can wind carry you
when you won't let go?

Our world is held
in buckets of water
that fill on the floor
as clouds cast judgement
overhead.

The dead -
where aren’t they?

Your body pulls away
from itself;
as birds in a Cornell box
sing of assembled sculpture,
subway tokens, compasses.

Listen -
each life becomes
beaten to a thinness
radiant as air.

Take comfort in this

past to which you never
have to return,
shoebox tossed to the wind

and if there is any innocence left

punch holes in its lid
to keep it alive.

---

Stacie M. Kiner is a former fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and Hannah Kahn Memorial Award recipient. Her poems have appeared in The Charlotte Poetry Review, Madison Review, Comstock Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Apalachee Quarterly and SWWIM, as well as other journals and reviews. Stacie’s work has appeared at Palm Beach International Airport, “Art in Public Places.” A former moderator of a poetry talk show on Channel 17 in Miami, Stacie is currently an Associate Editor of the South Florida Poetry Journal.

Annie Ganzala

Annie Ganzala, Atlantic’s love (2019)