The Body by O. Darcy

The body moralised.
The body politicised.
The body pathologized.

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The Burning Bush by Tiffany Firebaugh

Love drearily calls out the wrong names
but I always remember yours.

The healer cautions that there is a difference
between the pain of injury and the pain of something leaving
that should go

Selfie with Nostalgia and Optimism by Lisa Summe

I fantasize, as we say goodnight
in your driveway, that we won’t
get used to anything, won’t take
each other’s company at breakfast
for granted, won’t become a pattern,
one that runs as regular
as the blood circulating our veins,
won’t become tallies in each other’s bedposts,

2 Poems by Melissa Atkinson Mercer

Come let us enter the body

All your bones are women, my mother said, a scaffolding of ghosts.

Could I be inevitable, the sum of your first confessions?

Godmother of the wild orchid: teach me to riot,
to light long candles in the rusted trees, in the cadavers of my saints.

Matriarch of departure: be my tongue, my steady guide,

2 Poems by Bailey Pittenger

Garlic Powder

Before the apocalypse, every man will passive aggressively talk to every woman who wouldn’t date him about Madame Bovary.

And every man will lose control of his bowels and slide in his own shit like a slug. Every man will wiggle and bend in either pain or constipation.

Before the apocalypse, every man will pray for a heaven. Every man will call to his dead mother for forgiveness.

And every man will lose his sight. Every man will evolve an acute sense of smell. Every man will look for his mother by following the scent of garlic powder.

I Know the Radio Is On by Jenna Cardinale

Inside Jokes by Emily K. Michael

A long draped table hosts five blind guests, two microphones, one moderator:
a last supper strewn with free pencils, insufficient paper, and clear water glasses.

In reaching for the only microphone that still works my partner threatens
to send his decorous goblet tinkling to the floor – its thousand shards

a dark promise for the paws of our assembled guide dogs. A second swipe
for the mic brings the glass an inch from peril, so he hands it to me.

2 Poems by Erin Sullivan

satan’s on our breath

breathe in the fumes
car exhaust so monoxide sweet
their respect is contingent
on our dress and our abstinence
but satan’s on our breath

tim curry in a thong
peers under the bathroom stall
another beast to slay with st. peter’s sword
(the sword is a gun)
will they only feel safe with us dead?

2 Poems by Monica Wendel

English Kills

I’ve been singing in a dead language
about the sun. The children know
it can come back to life; just ask the Israelis

who made up words they couldn’t find
in the Torah—t-shirt, rainbow.

But rainbow must have been there.
Maybe I’m remembering this wrong.
In my dream I was on a farm

presenting a PowerPoint.
One slide was a picture of a mother

kneeling by her child, the other a backyard
abutting the Newton Creek. In real life one of
its branches is called English Kills.

Write About an Obstacle You’ve Overcome (4th Grade) by Shelby Dale DeWeese

already learning to hate myself.
i wrote on blades
of grass, stamped them down
under rubber boots melted to my skin.
my body, the bouillon cube.
why did i keep looking
into mirrors? essay (verb): to try