2 Pieces | James Treat

These found poems are drawn from interviews with elderly citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation recorded in 1937-38 and archived as part of the Indian-Pioneer Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

In a Hollow Tree 

2 Poems | Penelope Gay Dane

The Sweet Valley Twins Discuss Me

Jessica admired her tanned legs in the mirror.
“Lizzie, don’t you ever wish we were a little taller? Maybe
5’8”?”
Elizabeth’s perfect size six figure sprawled
across Jessica’s unmade bed. “How do you live like this?”

Jessica dug through the clothes on her floor.
“I think these pants make me look taller.”

2 Poems | Sara Quinn Rivara

Letter From the Underworld

Sometimes I think you’ve forgotten me here
in this small house, snow piled in grey heaps
by the door, snow drifting like fallout past

the windows. Even the birds have stopped
coming to the feeder. The house smells of marijuana
and mildew and the baby chews my breasts.

2 Poems | Jacqueline Last

The Spiral Staircase

2 Poems | Lauren Yates

Dog Whistle Effect

Over dinner, she asks if I have ever been to Uncle Tom’s Taco Shop. “You mean Honest Tom’s?” It becomes painfully obvious that we are two women—one black, one white—on a date in a “Mexican” restaurant. I look at her pork belly banh mi tacos, my own shrimp tempura tacos with tom yum aioli. This neighborhood used to be affordable. Now the coffee shops sell vinyl and breakfast sandwiches with names like “The Notorious E.G.G.” Uncle Tom aside, she has asked me if I have been to a restaurant three blocks from my own house, as if I won’t pass it on the bus ride home. She eats her “Vietnamese-Mexican” tacos, calls herself an “activist.” A war cry only I can hear.

3 Poems | Nathan Wade Carter

WET SANDWICH

A lot like birth.
A boa constrictor coils around me.
Not crushing.
This mortal snake
slow dips me into the ocean.
A wet sandwich.
A naked man to not look at.
We delete in new ways.
Charged and expensive.
Written by a chicken.
The muse tosses you an anvil.

2 Poems | Olivia Libowitz

She Hems

Her long, bent fingers pull relentless. She holds the suede skirt
against her knees. “Everything you ever tear, bring to your Grandma.”

Grandma learned to knit outside Brookside coalmine, the men inside
the tunnels, bringing her worn slacks, and socks, and she obliged.

Obligingly she takes my split seams between arthritic knuckles
And mends them patiently, pausing to brush my hair before bed, a hundred times.

A hundred times she sat beneath the mountain, and toiled smoky hours
with a needle and thread, singing Jean Ritchie and sewing tarry trousers and cotton.

2 Poems | Amal Rana

the taste of freedom
(for my father, for all muslim fathers)

this morning a father sits in jail
I sit in the garden
this morning a father is put into solitary confinement
darkness his shroud before death
I lie back
bathe in the endlessness of blue skies
this morning a father is tortured with water
skin breaking over damaged bones from too much pressure
I turn on the garden hose
luxuriate in escaping sprays of coolness on sun-heated toes
water gold orange red tomatoes
this morning a father has tubes shoved down an already shredded throat
breakfast forced into a brown body
like tiny serrated blades catching on flesh not meant to be pulled from itself
I sit down to the first meal of the day
savour each bite of eggs

5 Poems | Lorraine Caputo

2 Poems | Hilary Varner

On Writing Vows

I would never tell you why I collect
on slow treks to your usual stashes
under the bed behind the hanging quilt,
beside your desk’s grease stains,
and in the form of carefully balanced piles atop the curio

the dishes that you leave, nor would I
sum up for any invited, seated crowd,
why my fingers, filigreed,
swirl water over the blue plates you like
for their unusual flatness, and I