art by Trevor Cunnington

by Tashiana Seebeck

Let’s tear open the oil paint
	 sky in Mariposa where you first knuckled the loam
		and said Let’s– 

	 I am afraid to tell God your name lest
he look up at your spruce face and unmake
		the tongue tip behind your teeth I’ve come

	to know well. December looms and lingers for a lifetime.
		The poppies know only hoar frost
			and woodsmoke. A man in the shape

	of your last lurched out from the doorway lacquered
		shut with dust and all the longleaf pines shuttered closed.

by Stephanie McCarley Dugger

A dove, waiting

                 in the elm outside the window,

calls.                Every day

            he searches for her,

                 listens        for her reply.      I thought

I would understand love by now.

                                    But, I am featherless,

                                          too careful, too

            finely tuned

        for touch.

                           Yesterday,

new buttercups lined the walk.

                                    Today, they droop–

art by Virgil Suárez

by Olivia Pierce Graham

  

 

this place looks like a house
       built to eradicate your memories
   into cobwebs wrecked with the breath
	     that I once felt
   when I shivered as if covered
       under the tatters of a blanket
where we were uncertain and
   potent and new and
        I was horrified
              human underneath you
          in an unfamiliar house
	

you’d live in with someone else
until they disintegrated
             from your gentle mouth
tearing at me
with a thousand spiders fighting
beside your bedroom wall
where I stained your pillow bloody and 
you refused to close your eyes
thinking about my body 
weighted down
and waking up alone

* The format of this poem changes on a mobile phone.

art by Beth Kephart

by Maggie Greaves

“One of the things that was funny about being in America was that so little of my past came up.”
––Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography

I fell out of my mother with the cord around my neck.
My childhood disasters were vague and intimate.
I snuggled them in the dark.

By my thirties,
I’m able to slice vegetables precisely while the children tug at my feet and scream.

This is something I’ve only seen mothers do in other countries.