Category: Issue 18

BLACK GRANDDAUGHTER CALLS JAPANESE GRANDMOTHER I hold the phone and my hand shakes.I ask her why is it I’m not invited.  She has no answer. I’m too black to be shown.  I knew before I asked her.I knew she didn’t want to show me to her neighbors. Now hear the dial tone.  My mother danced…

I don’t know how close I was. I was not paying attention to him or his raised middle finger, whichhe was tired of holding up, his face lowered out the window at me,glass down, even though the air  was freezing in upstate Vermont.I have sped past, unthinking, it’s true. I have sped past so many things.How…

The Threesome Quintessence Puritanical Life Korrebrug Kafka These Sisters

Everything Connects, ink on paper, 18×24″, 2018 Meditation XXIII (open heart), ink on paper, 18×24″, 2020 Everything Connects, watercolor on paper, 9×12″, 2018

but I’m just this tiny little thingthat was too quiet to become a prophet myself. In the ocean, I’m not bothersome. Above it,I exist and pretend not to. You forget who you are after being swallowed. It’s weird, thinkinglike this. You say things like home to a whale who has already found one. In the…

let the wind take care of it  crack the door, a window, let the air crack            open the books stacked & strewn, too many to read in the clutter of one life, let blast into the burnt expanse of forest             in my mind: each…

KIN                                            (after Joseph O. Legaspi & Larry Levis) Mother and smother are such similar words,I can’t help but wonder if it’s by coincidenceor design. Same goes, I suppose, for father and farther, though I’ve tried with…

How he reads the paper, his frailthen firm exhalations gliding along each word,breath dancing a sentence’s waltzand driven spin just below my ear,swaying in the quiet of a houseotherwise buried beneath the din of my thoughts.The labor of my own reading is silent,corralling all of these book’s voices in my head,refusing to let any out…

I left the sky forever and becamenurse to fish that frequent muddy water. I buoy everything lonely and pregnant. my family was here before legsor seawater carried them. some leapt earlyto be reborn under my skirts. others were tossed. I am headless without my children. my mind is the moon.I am an aching creek, a…

She named us Yuri and Sergei and Boris. The first verbs we learned were to smoke, to drink, to live. We were thirteen years old. We learned  through repetition. I smoke, you smoke, he or she smokes. We live. She named me Masha, Mashinka when I was good, Mashka when I was bad,  which was often. We memorized charts of…