I can’t hear you
anymore
talking
about how you
want your body
to look.
Tell me what your body can do
how it
stilled / mountain pose
hiked / hills
sprung / cartwheels
flung / itself
off of
a rock
or a high place
into
a body of water too cold and pure
for swimming
I’ll even listen
to the ways
you want
to train / your body
to learn / something new
to hear / bird songs
or play / chords
hitchhike / roads
navigate / streams
Tell me the miracles
How your body grew / life
healed / broke / recovered / danced / destroyed / cherished
Tell me the frivolous
That your chin / grows
one long dark curly chinhair
at random intervals
how when you are alone you allow
even your hard places to be soft.
Tell me how you slept / somewhere impossible
Or dangled / a toe into
a space you ought not to
How you held so still that some creature mistook your body for grass
And crawled / over you
Tickling
Tell me how it stung
Sang
Prayed
Mourned
Played
Created
Let me see your body in motion like the liquid machine it was meant to be
Jolting hurling throbbing exploring exploding
there are so many verbs
that are more interesting to put next to your body
than
shrink.
Don’t shrink.
Don’t tell me how you shrink.
Leah Rogin-Roper believes bodies are made for action. Some of her verbs include hike, snowboard, travel, and write. Some of those verbs are also nouns. Her work has recently been published in Progenitor, Blink Ink, and The Rumpus. She teaches writing at Red Rocks Community College and lives in the mountains west of Denver.
When I was five years old, I said to my mother, I want to be a frittata when I grow up.
No. she said. No, no baby. You can’t be a frittata. Why not? I asked. I love frittatas. I love cracking eggs, I love shredded cheese, and I love the little green bits that you mix into the bowl. Why can’t I be a frittata? Because you’re a Jew, baby. Jews can’t go in the oven, not ever again. Not a toaster oven? No. Not an easy bake oven? No. You can never think about being a frittata, nor write about being a frittata. If you dream about being a frittata, you must wake up and make yourself have new dreams. As Jews, we don’t use the oven. We don’t think about the oven. We can’t look at the oven. The oven is locked in a box, buried underground, and guarded by a man who swallowed the keys nearly a century ago. Those keys are never coming out. My mother put her arm around me and said, Just remember baby. The oven is buried so deep, no one can touch it again. You’ll never become a frittata.
I forgot about wanting to become a frittata. I thought about lots of things I could become instead. I was afraid of the oven, and I did not go near one for many years.
One day, I sat in my office and read that a man in a uniform rammed his truck into a protester’s leg and broke it. Before I could read it again, it was gone, his internal bleeding replaced with clickbait articles, the ambulance ride overridden by ten facts about a topic I could not remember. Four other protestors hit by the truck. An ad for a jacket to cover myself. Pepper spray to their eyes. An op-ed with comments that burned. The man’s uniform said: I-C-E. The protestor’s sign said: Never Again Para Nadie.
I opened my mouth, perched on the ledge of something I wanted to say. Before I could speak, eggs began pouring out. The yolk, wet and warm, dribbled down my lips. I collected them in my lap, and sat, waiting. I wanted an opening to grow in my computer screen, a hot gap I could crawl into. It just had to be large enough that someone else could climb into my body, sit swaying in my office chair, and I could become a frittata.
With each egg from my lips, I thought about a book I saw at my boyfriend’s house called Eggs and Cheese. It showed all the ways you could make eggs and cheese. An omelette, a souffle, a quiche, or a frittata.
My boyfriend did not have a book called Protesters and Cars, which showed all the ways protesters and cars could interact. A protester could ride in a car to a protest, or convince a car to honk in support. You could also hit a protester with a car, stop, then pump the gas pedal and drive through a line of protesters sitting cross-legged on the ground. These are all recipes in a book that has not yet been written.
There is no recipe for a protest. Just like my grandmother said, It’s all guesswork to decide which spices get simmered into the dish midway through. I have never read instructions about who gets to lock eyes with a Rhode Island license plate drawing close and fast.
My computer screen finally cracked open, and I found my grandmother sitting there like a settled stack of dishes. She said, Look up, there you are. She said,
If you want to use the oven then by the grace of God, use it. She said,
Before the existence of ovens, someone baked on hot stones outside and before there were hot stones, there was the sun on your back. She said,
When I bake, I don’t think about Jews and eggs and whether you’re allowed to crack open the ground and dig up boxes with keys in men’s stomachs. She said,
It runs down the back of your neck and trickles down your spine into new generations, then it spreads and sprouts on untouched ground. She said,
Your grandfather only eats cold cereal with milk because he is afraid of the oven. She said,
Breakfast is just news left unopened. She said, If you crawl in here with me you will find out that hiding from the oven is the same as hiding in the oven. The oven is made to be used.
I sat spitting eggs for three more hours, then I turned off my computer and made myself a frittata in my kitchen. I waited for my mother to get home.
Shoshana Lovett-Graff (she/her) is a white, Jewish queer writer originally from New Haven, Connecticut. Her work has been published in Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, The Flexible Persona (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Atlas + Alice, Poetica, Blink-Ink, and more.
Lining them up against the brick wall,
there is nothing for the sun to bleach.
Tinny, tenacious shrieks
pierce the air and emit an aria.
Metallic, it leaves a poor taste on the tongue,
the kind of putrid fur no scraper can peel.
The sound of bones primordial
against a backdrop of bold, fuzzy shells
hangs over human heads,
calculating, ruminating, no other than a bored specter.
One person struggles to find meaning,
but is left with the other cradling the saw.
Trapped within the jungle’s fury,
even the bones are not themselves.
Morgan Ventura is a writer and folklorist from the Midwest. Her poetry has appeared in The Raven’s Perch, Really Serious Literature, Ghost City Review and is forthcoming in Clockwise Cat, while her essays have been featured in Jadaliyya and Folklore Thursday. When she is not interviewing archaeologists, she enjoys podcasts, experimental film, and exploring ruins. She splits her time between Oaxaca, Chicago, and the forests of Connecticut.
My father had a VHS tape of Clan of the Cave Bear. It had that same patina of heroism of the Kipling poems I memorized bouncing on his knee, my fee for the most dependable kind of love I got as a kid: that look in his eyes at my ability to memorize his idols. But in this movie, the hero was a woman. A Cro-Magnon girl, who can learn and adapt, unlike the Neanderthals who adopt her after the rest of her clan dies. Her ability to evolve and be different is seen as a threat, and one of the things she learns that a woman just idn’t supposed to know is how to hunt. She uses this hunting sling and she’s better at it than any of the men and for 1986, I guess this was a pretty big feminist move even though she slings it wearing an off-the-shoulder wolf skin that bares more than it covers.
She’s played by Daryl Hannah who my Daddy loved with his penchant for leggy blondes, but she’s hated by her adoptive clan for her blue eyes and light hair. She’s also raped more than once by the one who hates her most at age 10; she gives birth to his son at age 11. His spawn’s big ole Neanderthal head almost kills her coming out. I don’t know if Dad knew the book it was based on was written by a woman, who at the age of 40 felt like she’d hit her glass ceiling and was pissed, but I know he was in it for the action more than the proto-feminist dystopian themes.
It had this moment, see, this moment where the woman is holding a baby. They’re being stalked by a cave lion, and she knows if the baby dudn’t quiet down, they’ll both be eaten, so she tries to hush the baby, keep them hid and she hushes that baby alright, she hushes it dead. And yet another moment comes just like this one later on in the film. Though it seems unlikely, this I get. This I get now that I lived long enough to know that moments and people, whatever we can’t swallow, really, repeats on us. She gets this moment with another baby, not her baby, but a baby and another big animal trying to eat ‘em both and the baby starts crying and she starts hushin’ and she flashes back to that other baby and you can feel her change her mind. You can feel that spark light like when she invents fire in another part of the movie and they’re standing by a fire this time and you can just about feel her think, “awh, HELL no, hell no, man, I ain’t gonna hush this one to death, too.” So she holds that baby up like it was Simba. She waves that baby in a circle like saying come on and just you try and take us down. Make all the noise you want, baby, be as loud as you can. We’ll make a wall outta sound. She tucks that baby onto one hip with one hand and she puts some fire on a stave with the other and she goes absolutely berserk. All her squallin’ ain’t for nothing; she scares lion-death away acting crazy like that.
And I guess that film left its impression, and I mean more than just for the images I can’t unsee of women hunched over joyless taking it doggy style from the men. I mean I figured as a kid, there’s two options: you lay down, ball up, get real quiet and take it or you bawl til your voice drags you up and out with it, til your voice barrels 12-gauge dead-on, deafening, whatever’s comin’ for you.
Stina French has featured in many venues in Denver and Boulder, Co., and her work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Punch Drunk Press, and on the podcast Witchcraftsy. She is scratching at the window of her body, writing poems like passwords to get back in. To get forgived. To get at something like the truth. To get it to go down easy, or at all. She wears welts from the Bible Belt, her mother’s eyes in the red fall. She’s gone, hypergraphic. Writes on mirrors, car windows, shower walls. Buy her a drink or an expo marker. She’s seeking a home for her manuscript, Also Arc, Also Offering, a Southern-queerdo, coming-of-age memoir, in flash non-fiction and verse. She leads somatic (body-based) writing workshops and retreats focused on empowerment through exploring archetype and unearthing the body’s hidden stories.
I ask my sons about dogs. Today, dogs in paintings: why a dark tail curls out beneath the monk’s robe as he strangles a dog. My sons don’t eyeroll, even the living one. They look at me the way dogs do, wet and directly.
My live son asks what’s inside a dog and my dead son says shit. No one nods because we’re now in a sculpture room. The dog’s pelt grabs little spaces. Maybe he’s a going-to-sea-dog: his nails scratch at a saint’s knees, shellish pelt wrinkling. My dead son asks for a spear and I say no violence. I lift an apple again or a pomegranate but it doesn’t go anywhere because stones aren’t hungry.
Outside in the city someone’s posed between wings –this time blue for the endangered scrub jay. They’ve stopped in the kitsch, shoulder-high thin spot. My live son says this is stupid but he’d do it for his child. My dead son says well that’s it for the bloodline. I stitch blue to each boy whenever the paint flecks.
Little mouths in a river tingle or twitch. Back in the origin myth I nearly fall down the same step. Someone asks why even go to term with an accident/ stormstrike/ deathray/ baby, but it’s always too soon to ask art.
I ask my dead son if he’s feral now. Because even cities get lost, even a toddler saint’s head except for one lone stone curl caught in St. Isabel’s dress. My live son knows about cutting because he’s needed transfusions. My dead son knows other things. Someone with a nosebleed leaves 6 votive kleenex.
The devil asks why he wants to be loved by boot on his belly or hand on his neck so much. Moonfaced and sad as he chokes? Call flat dog. Gut-wrenched around another stone boot? Try tide-coming-in dog. My sons hang “gone fishing” signs though one’s really out scoring weed. What’s up, asks a stair. This is the elimination round, scrub jays, so whistle whistle into the last blue city.
Terri Witek is the author of 6 books of poems, most recently The Rape Kit, winner of the 2017 Slope Editions Prize judgedby Dawn Lundy Martin. Her poetry often traces the breakages between words and images, and has been included in American Poetry Review, Lana Turner, Poetry, Slate, Poesia Visual, Versal, and many other journals and anthologies. She has collaborated with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) since 2005–their works together include museum and gallery shows, performance and site-specific projects featured internationally in Valencia, New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, and Rio de Janeiro. Collaborations with digital artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) use augmented reality technology for smart phones to poetically map cities and have been featured in Manizales (Colombia), Glasgow, Vancouver, Lisbon, Miami, Santa Fe and Orlando. Witek directs Stetson’s undergraduate creative program and with Lopes teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas. terriwitek.com
as i sit here fumbling with the things that colour mind, i saw that death in itself is not the absence of life but another phase of life where we experience darkness in its raw form. seeing how it could have being, the dead man in me sat there in silence waiting to hear the voice of an agile poet. the poet in me is long lost as i try to conjure words with eyes to see through me. i try to form verbs to charm and potions to give me the audacity needed to speak to this man. a grieving soul does not know how to sing, for his song is rendered in the shadows of his tears and shaking of his head. i’m not grieving, i just don’t allow happiness as a standard. i’ve seen people die but this dead man in me is wanting to be resuscitated to grow by my thoughts and flourish in the rivers of my eyes. though i have the eyes of the sun, my trickling energy will not rise a man of valour in bad deeds. my energy wave is trusted in the magnitude of my unhappiness. let alone in this position of a walking dead for i will strike you dead the second time. pray i don’t do that, for a second death will be the death of the mind and of time, which is the most painful death. i don’t wish for you anything in the face of time than a tick tock of you remaining dead.
Adedayo Ademokoya is a Nigerian poet who believes in the potency of words and writing from the heart. Adedayo is passionate about life, love, loss, family and anything that catches his fancy. His works have been published on Brave Arts Africa, Thought Catalog, Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, Wild Word, Indian Periodical and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
1500 miles from home ⎯ now the van was running funny ⎯ still a long way to go. Better not press our luck. A quick pause at a roadside rest stop told us all we needed to know. The long way got longer. I eyed the corn, into the shop with ye, Chevy.
We killed time in the best way we knew how, cold Cokes in the warm sun. Oh hey, an antique shop ⎯ let’s pop in for a quick look-see. Much cooler inside. Mom and I browsed while Dad chewed the fat with the old man. Dad was always up for a chat.
The room, perfumed in age… old woods, motor oil, tanned hides; filthy pine floorboards caked with grime; shelves amassed in knick-knacks of every kind; steamer trunks of a bygone time. Cobwebs clung to stacks of tobacco tins. In one case, a death’s head pin – how surprising to see such a thing. Spoils of war, collected from the corpse of a dead German – affordable for those who enjoy the souvenirs of sin. I imagined some middle-American named Bill or Jim telling the proprietor to “wrap it up with those Bakelite plates and that hurricane lantern.” How casually it sat, embossed with a rictus, that grin, a grim reminder to some, a display piece for him. No one else seemed to care. I pretended I didn’t either.
We walked out empty-handed and into the still-warming day. Repairs made, once more on our way… 1500 miles from home and double that back. One day I’ll return with my own children. Will the pin still be there in that case? And, if it were, wouldn’t it look better at the bottom of the river? We crossed over the mighty Miss. Onto Illinois and all points east.
Davey Adams was born and raised in Southern California to a family of actors. Lifelong student. Collector of Associates Degrees and part-time jobs. Writer. Poet. Singer. AKA The Good Doctor. You can find him on Facebook, Instagram, and Bandcamp.
C.C. Russell has been published here and there across the web and in print. You can find his words in such places as The Meadow, The Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, and the anthology Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone. He has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. He currently resides in Wyoming where he stares at the mountains too much. You can find more of his work at ccrussell.net
Sarah Jane Justice is a fiction writer, poet, musician and spoken-word artist based in Adelaide, South Australia. Among other achievements, she has performed in the National Finals of the Australian Poetry Slam, released two albums of her original music and seen her poetry and prose published in Australia and internationally. Find her at: on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
I got sick at Sunday School today—threw
up outside our portable building when
we got to that part in the Good Book where
Jesus raised up Lazarus from the dead.
I don’t want to die at all but when I
do I want to stay dead or I’ll scare Hell
out of everyone when I get up
on my feet again and all covered with dirt
and maybe blood and guts, depending how
I kick. And for breakfast all I had
was Tang and cornflakes and they came up all
over the spring-green grass where the spigot
leaks by the front porch, that’s as far as I
got before I vomited. If my dog
had been there he would’ve lapped it up but
I would’ve stopped him though still he’d try. I
asked Miss Hooker after class—she let me
sit on the porch while class was going on
without me sitting in our half-circle
(she’s my teacher and a lot to look at,
red hair and green eyes and freckles) if I
would go to Hell for getting sick in class
and she said, No, no, that I had gotten the demons out, meaning Tang and cornflakes
I guess, and I forgot the milk, maybe
it had soured, it came up, too. My stomach
was naked—empty I mean, naked is
a sin, I think, especially at church,
they don’t even bury dead folks that way.
I usually walk home but this time
Miss Hooker drove me after Sunday School,
it’s not far, a little less than a mile.
When we stopped in the driveway I got sick
all over again, but it was just love
that made me start to dry-heave and all that
came forth was air. Still, I got out of there
fast and barely said goodbye but I’ll get
my place in Heaven, Miss Hooker felt it
too, even if she’s 25 to my
10, and now I’m afraid to go back next
Sunday with her in my soul instead of
God but I think that’s how babies get made
and without them we wouldn’t have people
and no one else would ever rise again,
in Heaven at least, and live like angels
forever and never get hungry and
never hurl. And all because God hates us.
Simple
In Sunday School today Miss Hooker said that if
we have an enemy we should love him.
Or her. And if he wants to take our cloak,
to let him. Whatever a cloak is. Or
her. And to give him our coat, also. Or
her again. She says that Jesus said so
and He’s the Son of God. That’s good enough
for me, I guess. No wonder they killed Him.
They didn’t get away with it because
He rose from the dead. It took three days. Me,
if I had to rise from the dead, without
any help from God, I mean, I’d still be
trying to rise at the end of the world.
I’m small for my age. 10. Miss Hooker says
—and she’s our teacher and she ought to know
—that when I die my soul goes to Heaven
to be judged. She says that in our church that we
don’t think the soul just hangs around until
Judgement Day but that it goes lickety
-split to Heaven. I guess it hardly has
the time to know that it’s not still inside
a body. It shows up at God’s throne and
He asks an angel to pass Him the Book
of Life and the angel obeys, that means
he does what he’s told, or she, and God looks
through the Book and hunts up the name and if
He finds it you get to stay in Heaven
but if He don’t—doesn’t—you go to Hell.
She says it’s that simple. I wonder if
God wears glasses. He’s older than Father and
Grandfather and all the folks who’ve ever
lived and ever will. That’s powerfully
old. Miss Hooker says that we need to pray
everyday to be forgiven for our many sins. I don’t think I have many
but I’ve been wrong before, about plenty
of things. Like the one about the screen door
on that submarine to keep out the fish.
That made sense to me. It keeps out the bugs
at our house. But a screen door in a sub,
that’s short for submarine, would let the sea
Then the sailors would drown. They’re sailors
even though they’re underwater. Well, not
underwater all the time. But on land
are they still sailors? I rest my case. When
Sunday School’s almost over Miss Hooker
tells one of us to say the Lord’s Prayer
and we all say it along with him. Or
her. This morning was my turn. I stumbled
because I was thinking about the screen
door on that submarine. It might work out
when the sub isn’t underwater but
floating on the top. It would keep out birds.
Then there may be a fish who likes to leap
out of the water and back in again.
In that case he’d bounce right off it. Or she.
So I guess that I’m not entirely wrong, entirely means completely. Only sin
is entirely wrong, and I never pray
to be forgiven for being stupid.
If I die in being-stupid I won’t
go to Hell. If I die in sin, I will.
Someone might say that sinning is stupid
but they’re just mincing hares. Hares is rabbits.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Chiron Review, McNeese Review, Adirondack Review, Weber, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Arkansas Review, Poem, South Dakota Review, and many other journals, and has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.
Terri Witek is the author of 6 books of poems, most recently The Rape Kit, winner of the 2017 Slope Editions Prize judgedby Dawn Lundy Martin. Her poetry often traces the breakages between words and images, and has been included in American Poetry Review, Lana Turner, Poetry, Slate, Poesia Visual, Versal, and many other journals and anthologies. She has collaborated with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (
south broadway press 