Space by Shiane D. Jacocks

Mountain Men by Michael L. Counter, Jr.

So you don’t get lost, cowboy:
ride the ridges of goose bumps.
Remember matches (it gets dark here)
and cigs.

From One Girl to Another by Vicki Iorio

And from that day on everything seems different. At first you feel new and strange…..the way a butterfly must feel when it suddenly discovers it has wings

Nine year old summer. I fall out of a tree. After disposal of buds and twigs, the cleansing of wounds, a deeper blood remains.

Girls have some crazy names for it: my friend, the monthlies, Aunt Flo, grandma coming to visit, falling off the roof, getting the pie

My mother tosses me a box of Kotex. Tells me to stay in my room.

2 Poems by Millie Guille

How to Make Jam

Take an orange.
Dig your knuckles into the skin.
Your mother has taught you
to be afraid of bruises.
Ignore her.
Stir to forget his fingerprints
on your sister’s face.
Sugar to taste.
Accept that you will be your mother.
Set in jars.

loving her everywhere by Claire McCulley

loving her everywhere

i. Here, there is sand in your mouths when you kiss. Sweat and long hair. A shared water bottle glinting in her hands. She finds a succulent plant and slices it open, drawing her finger through the clear gelatinous discharge it bleeds. She touches that finger to her cheek and glistens heavenly. You are dry heat desire and she is your oasis. You drink her with stinging eyes.

ii. In this place of neat grass and gridlocked streets, there is not much to do except make chains of wildflowers for her neck and yours. There’s no one around to hear you tell each other how you feel. You feel like a sparkler, so you say so. Like a lit match. Condensed brilliance. She holds your hand in the middle of paved suburban wasteland, squeezes it three times. You know what she’s saying. You say it back.

Flesh by Phoebe Nicholson

I have always suspected
for the most part
that when they pare me open
on the autopsy table,
I will leak clear water,
salt-smelling, the sea.
That I am all sponge and stone –
thick through, solid flesh.

2 Poems | Sarah M. Bess

Injection #9

Piercing muscle makes a dull sound
like ripping wet paper into thin strips
that dry in slowly coiling spirals
fragile monuments to this resistance

like a needle on a record
an inch deep in my thigh
whispering questions and condemnations
demanding citations
even as I bleed

It builds until it screams in me
insisting on a reality that denies my existence
an ontology of my nonbeing
the science of my erasure

A Prayer to St Dymphna | Danielle Perry

a golden charm of st dymphna
her name at the top
and at the bottom:
pray for us

–

she was just a girl
when her mother died
and her father – so lost
in his grief – decided
he would marry her instead

when she heard this was to happen
she ran, she ran, she ran
and he chased her

2 Poems | Devon Balwit

bodies

she hates the vulnerability of the body,
that the body can be broken, broken into,
that the body is a leaky bag with weak
doors, the thin eyelids, the seam of the
lips, the sex, the puckered sphincter,
she hates that things force their way in
and out without consent, that bodies so easily

Call me by my name | Rowan Brothers

Do not tell me that you know my body.

I don’t care if the callouses on your fingers are from caressing the dip in my collar bone or the chip on my shoulder. I don’t care if you’ve seen my guts splayed out bleeding black on paper or bright burgundy on the operating table. I don’t care if to you my birthmarks have become the birthplace of a home you never knew existed –