Minnie Bruce Pratt: “You can say to yourself that you understand time, death, partings. But the body only wants the person back. The body is like a faithful dog waiting at the closed door that the beloved person has walked through. The body just waits and waits and howls for the person to come back. You can’t tell the body with words that the person will never come back. The body doesn’t believe it. My body still doesn’t believe that Leslie will never come back to me. There’s no letting go with the body. What I’ve learned, now, at the end of these poems, is only time and sometimes poetry helps the body carry the grief.”
Judith Schalansky: “Men are not mentioned by name in the surviving poetry of Sappho, whereas many women are: Abanthis, Agallis, Anagora, Anactoria, Archeanassa, Arignota, Atthis, Cleïs, Cleanthis, Dica, Doricha, Eirana, Euneica, Gongyla, Gorgo, Gyrinna, Megara, Mica, Mnasis, Mnasidica, Pleistodica, Telesippa. It is they whom Sappho sings about, with tender devotion or flaming desire, with burning jealousy or icy contempt.”
Gertrude Stein: “You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
Josephine Jacobsen: “Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there’s going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There’s nothing mild and predictable about poetry.”
Elaine Seiler: “Mother energy is universal. It is the large expression of the sacred feminine that comes from spirit. It is embodied in all our biological mothers, but it’s not limited or confined to them. It expands beyond them to encompass anyone that is loving, nurturing, soft, accepting, receptive, embracing, and creative.”
Lesbian poets and artists, need a new muse? Here’s Melissa Carper singing her song “I’m Musing You.”
up four stained flights of stairs, worn marble drummed
with the signature of the imagined wound,
from knife, from nosebleed, fallen wine-dark crumbs,
their violence by recurrent footsteps numbed.
Still flush with the rush of living on my own,
I eyed this bloody way that led toward home.
Never before had I shared halls and walls
and though I had grown used to clomp and babble,
some stranger had now dropped these wine-dark crumbs
I was obliged to follow from tenement door,
step by step, to tenement fourth floor.
One night, when I was young, dread led me home
through a dark urban wood I’d called my own
to the double-lock, and the thrill of solitude.
Those drops tattooed my path. Each wine-dark crumb
scarred my tidy map, then led me home.
New York City—1974
R. Nemo Hill is the author of a novel, Pilgrim's Feather, and four books of poetry, The Strange Music of Erik Zann , When Men Bow Down, In No Man's Ear, and Magellan's Reveries. He is the editor and publisher of EXOT BOOKS. He lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his husband, where they make a subsistence living as indigo dyers.
way before they gave a shit. Back then there was Sylvia,
Marsha, STAR, and Christopher Street,
where people, mostly queers, slept.
Camp for the washouts and left outs,
the ones whose loudspeakers worked at rallies,
but were too unbecoming to invite home.
Forget the parties and parades.
Urban renewal swept away their cardboard homes,
their booze, needles, and teddy bears.
Beat it. Make room. Forget community.
Anything to kill the crime of unlovable poverty.
Cops harassed a world of disappeared drags and vagrants.
Gentrifiers cleaned up the mess. Forget the rest.
No one questioned the logic
of evicting homeless people.
E.F. Schraeder is the author of the queer gothic novella Liar: Memoir of a Haunting (Omnium Gatherum, 2021); and the story collection Ghastly Tales of Gaiety and Greed (Omnium Gatherum, 2020). A semi-finalist in the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Chapbook Contest, Schraeder is also the author of two poetry chapbooks whose work has appeared in many journals and anthologies.
Mel Sherrer (She/Her) is a writer, editor, and educator. She teaches and conducts Creative Writing and Performance Literature workshops. Her work is featured in SWWIM, Black Lesbian Literary Collective, Limp Wrist Magazine, Interim Poetics, The Racket Journal, and others. She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Samantha Pious is a translator, poet, editor, and medievalist. Her translations of Renée Vivien are available as A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2017); her translations of Christine de Pizan are forthcoming. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kathleen Kremins is a Newark, NJ native of Irish immigrant parents and a retired public school teacher. She is the author of The Ethics of Reading: The Broken Beauties of Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and Nawal el Sadaawi, and her first book of poetry, Undressing the World, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June 2022. Kathy’s work appears in The Night Heron Barks, The Paterson Literary Review, Moving Words 2020 project, The Stillwater Review, Lavender Review, Sensations Magazine, Divine Feminist: An Anthology of Poetry & Art By Womxn and Non-Binary Folx, and Too Smart to be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers.
Oil on Linen. 70 x 90 cm. from THE ALICE STAIRCASE, a bespoke commissioned project, comprising of an 8 interlinking canvas interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass.
Amy-Sarah Marshall, who graduated with an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, has published poems in the Wisconsin Review, The Dewdrop, So to Speak, and other journals. She has worked as a web writer and editor, content strategist, safe-space trainer, and founding president of the Charlottesville Pride Community Network, an LGBTQ+ community nonprofit. A Los Angeles native, Amy-Sarah grew up in a religious theater cult and now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her wife, 2 children, 2 dogs, and 2 cats.
Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. Author of two chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press) and THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), they have also had work in Bitch Magazine, Electric Literature, Sinister Wisdom, Luna Luna Magazine, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Cavar navel-gazes at cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.
Poem in Which I Remember My Dad Bullying Me for Being a Lesbian
I once thought I was a girl
and I liked girls and I still
like girls but don’t call me a girl.
Is this a poem or a confession?
Does my dad know all now,
beyond the grave? I want to write
a queer poem without his ghost
reading it over my shoulder.
I’m somewhere between girl and other.
I was never his daughter.
S.G. Huerta is a Chicana poet from Dallas. They are pursuing their MFA at Texas State University and live in Texas with their cat Lorca. SG is the author of the chapbook The Things We Bring with Us: Travel Poems (Headmistress Press, 2021). They are Porter House Review’s nonfiction editor and an assistant prose poetry editor for Pithead Chapel. Their work has appeared in perhappened mag, Kissing Dynamite, and various other places. Twitter @sg_poetry
Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is a lesbian, ecofeminist, mother, poet, novelist, and essayist who lives with her wife in South Carolina. The author of 16 books, including 6 books of poetry, her poetry has been nominated 6 times for the Pushcart Prize, and she was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award judged by the US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She also works as a writing coach to female-identified and non-binary writers from around the world. Her online summer writing program, Book Camp, begins in June; visit her website for more information.
L.J. Gallagher is a 21-year-old undergraduate student at Villanova University pursuing a double major in Finance and English with a minor in Creative Writing. She is planning on working in investment banking after graduation. Her work has also been featured in Villanova's Ellipsis and Moonstone Arts' New Voices. L.J. most enjoys writing about travel, nature, memory, and LGBTQ+ relationships. Her favorite poets are Seamus Heaney, Maggie Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Taylor Swift.
legs spread open and tongue anxious for your inner thighs, for your fingertips, your
earlobes and toes.
girl, I wanted you, but you took your leave,
and what is a woman without sex,
What is a woman without hunger?
this feels like a genesis, like you’ve pulled me all the way back to eden,
and we are both eve,
only I am made of your rib cage.
you were my point of origin and the only identity
I’ve ever known,
and you have taken leave of me,
and I have bitten into a great red and firm apple
in reminder of you, in aching for you,
and it has brought me to the brink of sexual revolution,
only I am alone now in a divine garden, in a predetermined diorama of love-lost and
nonconsensual grief, and all I've got for the rest of time is a half-eaten apple and a
wandering spirit,
and no forefathers and no bible for guidance;
there is no god in my eden,
and there is no you, and so I must go and find myself a new lover, a new and kinder
woman,
a doctrine of love and a ten-step guide to orgasm:
I know a biblical man who has never been touched, except by sheep and King-James-Ink
(chastity has taken his manhood)
and neither has he found love, and so he will join my traveling circus of sex-seekers;
we are soft-skinned and full-lipped and I have got rounded breasts,
and years ago on the road to Jerusalem
a pretty-faced king with mean eyes thought I was a thing to be conquered, and so
conquered me, though I am not much in the market for kings,
and still I have not found anything soft like you, anything divine like you,
and still I search for fingers like yours,
for a tongue like yours,
for scripture like that which we wrote together:
your body was full, and you tasted of salt,
and you were a creature of heat and holiness all at once,
and you have left me ravenous.
Aderet Fishbane is a young lesbian poet whose work is confessional and kind of obsessive, and explores things like sex(uality), grief, pretty people, and religion.
Love in Winter as Explained by Quantum Entanglement
Tonight, as the light snow falls, tell yourself
that you are loved even if you are not sure.
Our moon is out there, yes, & adored, but so
is her twin who is smiling in the cold, quiet,
nova pink light of another universe. No one
has seen her, except in the timeless dark
of dreams. She tells herself that someone loves
her—a child, maybe, who once fell from her
ridges & floated away & is out there with happy
memories of her & everything is connected, baby—
can’t you see it now? It’s so clear, like this snow
tonight & she’s out there humming a song you
once heard in a cathedral & that’s when you knew
that love is tethered to all times, old & new, & that music
is a cathedral of the faithful stars & let’s live now.
Jessica Jewell is the author of three collections of poetry, Dust Runner (Finishing Line Press), Sisi and the Girl from Town (Finishing Line Press) and Slap Leather (dancing girl press). She is the co-editor of the bilingual collection, I Hear the World Sing (Kent State University Press). She has published widely in both academic and literary journals. Jewell is the senior academic program director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, where she also earned her PhD and MFA.
Lucian Freud, of course, thought she was grotesque enough in an interesting way to paint
her as nude…
…And despite me, she
runs her hands through her curls and smiles.
—Samantha Zighelboim
I want to run
through them, kiss
them, ruffle
their hair, and ask
them about their day
as we sit in the garden
completely in the buff.
I lean over, help the red
head pull up her hair
before I tickle her belly,
read her my poems
and tell her my weirder
habits and kinks.
I un-filter around her—
She lets her skin pop
out, perfect and rounded
against the wild green. I wonder
if her eyes match...
Do I want her or want to be her—
I definitely know I want to be the Woman
in “The Blue Room,” serpentine
and half-alert on the couch,
not fat but satirically so—
just as much a part of her
as her brown brows or bow-string lips.
A man could never paint her,
fat women only wallow or frolic
in their eyes.
Men would never truly see her:
Cigarette in her mouth and no shits given,
she glows sex and danger and all things
women like me want.
Emma Ginader is a bisexual poet and editor from northeastern Pennsylvania. She recently graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Moth Magazine, Vox Viola, December, The Rational Creature, South Broadway Ghost Society, and FU Review [Berlin, Germany]. She has work forthcoming in Mantis, great weather for MEDIA, and They Call Us. Ginader previously worked as the online poetry editor for the Columbia Journal and as the social media editor & business reporter for The Daily Item newspaper in central Pennsylvania. Find her Twitter account, @EmmaGinader.
Kai Coggin is the author of PERISCOPE HEART (Swimming with Elephants 2014), WINGSPAN (Golden Dragonfly Press 2016), and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019), as well as a spoken word album SILHOUETTE (2017). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, Entropy, SWWIM, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Calamus Journal, Luna Luna, Blue Heron Review, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
