by Candice Kelsey

Broken again, littlest
one throbbing
its fight song pink, loud
like hunger or identity
and the big toe shifts
like my father in a chair
at Sunday sessions
mandatory at the EDU
for a daughter in treatment
circle of silent wedges
father unhappy as
the neighbor’s cat Blue
who hates her home
bounds up cement stairs
where I sit with today’s
plate of oranges
halved she capsizes
a feline Michelangelo
painting the Sistine or God
and blots my toe
with a cool bingo nose
she too knows injury
touches the gnarled-speck
perimeter of my foot
now a flesh canvas
cathedral scene on a ceiling
and I am broken
by a hundred Adams
awful fools busy naming
the garden of my body—
it’s the world
that catches the fragile
on sharp corners
hobbles us unsuspecting
mid-step a broken cuneiform
tablet remnant
of private dislocations
and yet
like this little piggy
some of us make it home
somehow I make it
all the goddamn way

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist from Ohio and living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. Her work appears in Passengers Journal, Variant Literature, and The Laurel Review among others. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice is a mentor for incarcerated writers through PEN America and serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Find her at candicemkelseypoet.com.

by Susan Barry-Schulz

When I finally get my MRI report back the results
are unremarkable. No acute fracture. No soft tissue

mass. No evidence of disproportionate atrophy.
Vertebral body heights are well maintained;

lumbar disc contours preserved. Minimal this & that.
A quick nod to the exquisite forces of gravity plus

time and their combined inescapable consequences.
But nothing hitting a nerve. No indication

of anticipatory grief. No sign of a swallowed
sorrow. No traces of shrapnel buried in the heavy

muscle of the heart. No evidence of a course-
grained granite boulder wedged deep in the marrow

of the sternum. No suggestion of a foreign body
clamped across the frozen dome of the diaphragm.

No shadows of a crescent wrench cinched
tight across the base of the buzzing skull. Outside

the cool tube the technician inquires about my musical
preferences. No seventies, I say. I was a child

of the 70s. I don’t want to go back to those days.
Head-phoned and holding the squeezable panic

button close to my chest, I’m whisked in and out
of a thick thudding gleaming. On leaving, I want

to tell him I think it might be the undetectable
that’s killing me. What we can’t see. A holy

host of invisible spinning matter conspiring
to bring me to my knees.

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness. Her poetry has appeared in SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Rogue Agent, Shooter Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, Iron Horse Literary Review, West Trestle Review, and in many other print and online journals and anthologies. You can find her on Twitter at @suebarryschulz.

by Trishala Vardhan

once

i was a lion-cub

in the lap

of my country –

i was so sure

i knew what i wanted.

i was so sure

i ruled the world.

these days,

i can barely understand it.

these days,

i keep my claws

hidden,

soap-suds salting

my skin,

tap-water trauma

collecting

on my

collarbones.

i was so sure

i knew my place in the light.

i was so sure

of my roar:

its red red ricochet

under the sun.

these days,

i can hardly hear my own heartbeat.

these days,

i can barely make myself breathe.

Trishala is a 25-year-old Asian Indian who has lived in the lap of language for as long as she can remember. She believes in precious little save the gravity of grief, love, and memory. Words (and the silences that serve and surround them) have always been her way of life. She is on Twitter @sinsofsekhmet.

by Megan McDermott

You agonize over the list
of my must-haves: sex,
relationship, rings, the end
of weekly succession of birth control
patches smoothed onto body parts
(abdomen, butt cheek, upper arm,
back of shoulder), a point
in career conducive to maternity
leave, a home, a plan, a decision
to befriend things that can’t
be resolved, like fears
for a country or a planet.

Already there are so many dooms
you’d rather your hypothetical
children never know but no doom
defines like the prospect you
might only ever be a wisp
in a soul busied with other identities.
You’ve doomed me, you accuse.
To reside in the theoretical;
to mother longing instead of flesh;
to mother metaphors; to be one.

You beg: At least freeze
your eggs, do something.
And I tell you we have time,
cite my mother eight years
older at the time of our birth
than we are right now, though
at thirty-eight she’d already
had one child and sixteen years
if marriage. Still, I tell you
a lot can change in eight years.

Or nothing changes.
I’m sorry I wish more than plan.

In my own way, I am generous
if I keep you from your dream.
I’ll stay the one who loses while
you are kept safe from stakes
much higher than the grief
of what-ifs.

Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. Her first full-length poetry collection, Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, came out this year from Fernwood Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Woman as Communion (Game Over Books) and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating (Ethel). Connect with her on Twitter @megmcdermott92 or at meganmcdermottpoet.com.

by Rodd Whelpley

Let’s destroy the children and drive the neighbors
nuts. Let’s falsify no subtlety. Consume
each other’s anger. Try every hobby,
eat keto, and when that doesn’t work,
let’s drink too much and laugh at common foes.
Let’s buy the season tickets, but never see
the stage. Skip all the anniversaries,
the birthdays, and the like. And for God’s sake
let’s stop smoking. Again. And yet again.
Quit haggling over a divorce like stylish
couples do. Let’s claim we’re always good, and lie
in church, and lie in bed and never parse
the difference. Let’s fight fair for what is love.
Let’s argue, so not one of us can win.

Drawn from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 and Sondheim’s “The Little Things You Do Together”

Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have been nominated for The Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbooks include Catch as Kitsch Can (2018), The Last Bridge is Home (2021), and Whoever Said Love (2022). Blood Moon, Backyard Mountain (2023) is his first full-length collection. Find his work at RoddWhelpley.com. He is sheepishly still on twitter at @Roddwhelpley and on Facebook.