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If you are a poet, prophet, peace-loving artist, if you are tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between;

if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl; if you value the humane treatment of every creature

and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo seeks your best work.

What do we mean when we say "your best work?" Or that we seek well-crafted poems that are thematically complex, emotionally nuanced, or "in your face,"

filled with images that excite wonder, mystery and dread, and challenge the reader to question their assumptions?

We hope you will enjoy reading this issue as much as our editors enjoyed answering that question by selecting these works.

November 2022 Issue # 27 Poetry

Rebekah E. Bartlett * Willy Conley * E. J. Cousins * Phil Goldstein * Lola Haskins * Sara Henning * Jenn Hollmeyer * Paul Hostovsky * David Kirby * Lisa Lewis * Julia Lisella * Ellaraine Lockie * Kristin Marie * Joseph Mills * Juan Pablo Mobili * Tim Moder * Marilyn K. Moody * Mary B. Moore * Bee Morris * Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo * Alexander Pérez * Sarath Reddy * Nicole Santalucia * Lynne Schmidt * Tyler Robert Sheldon * Gail Thomas * Monica Lee Weatherly

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Rebekah E. Bartlett

Company Will Replace Map Image Man Says Shows the

Body of His Slain 14-Year-Old Son

Zoom in to the furthest down square on the map

and there he is: white shirt, white sneaks, tan pants.

He lies near a curved track. Four boxcars wait

to the east, on the straight track his was set to meet.

To the south, warehouses and empty lots.

North and west: wasteland and more trains.

Between the tracks, three men in brown and

khaki wait. As far as they can get from it.

Another walks to a dusty cop car

away from the body, which looks

small and flat and casts no shadow.

The legs are poker straight, splayed,

the waist is tilted slightly. You could swear

there's no head, but hope it's the angle.

After all, what can be seen from space?

Not blood surely nor wounds, only this:

A place one might want to know about.

And so this day, this hour, this second, a satellite passing,

merely making a map, clicking a camera, and capturing

a dead boy near tracks, and four long shadows.

Rebekah E. Bartlett is a consulting editor, writer, photographer, and amateur astronomer. She lives near and works in Boston, MA and has a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts.

Willy Conley

Willy Conley's most recent book is The World of White Water. His other books are Visual-Gestural Communication, Listening Through the Bone, The Deaf Heart, and Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays. Conley is a retired professor and chairperson of Theatre and Dance at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Prior to becoming a professor, he was a Registered Biological Photographer for five years at some of the top medical centers in the U.S. For more info about his work, please visit www.willyconley.com.

E. J. Cousins

E. J. Cousins lives, teaches, and writes in Denver, CO. Their poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Bombay Gin, The Collapsar, and elsewhere.

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Phil Goldstein

​The Science of Losing

1. Black, sporty prescription sunglasses, left on a Metro train

2. My favorite wool sweater, in some cabin in West Virginia

3. A dying Fitbit, in a hotel room in Seattle

4. My innocence, not technically lost, but stolen

5. My first love, lost to the physical manifestations of my deepest wound

6. At least two wallets in the backseats of cabs, before the days of Uber

7. Mint green prescription sunglasses, in a wave off Maui (you idiot!)

8. Countless phone chargers, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere

9. A matryoshka doll set from my great-grandmother, in a move

10. Ownership of my body & the ability to discover it for myself

11. An elm tree, consumed in an August wildfire

12. A ragdoll cat named Lincoln, taken far too soon as a kitten

13. My brother, the monster of my childhood, who pulled me onto the gray basement floor

14. A bumper sticker that read, The fact that no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist

15. The sense that I knew what would come next, gone like snow one March morning

16. My parents, though still living, distant as Europa

17. A whole chapbook full of poems, discarded but not forgotten

18. My wedding band, in a resort pool, found by an 8-year-old in goggles

19. My desire to be the perfect son, gone forever

20. My sense of shame, buried at sea as the dawn kissed my forehead

Phil Goldstein's debut poetry collection, How to Bury a Boy at Sea, which reckons with the trauma of child sexual abuse, was published by Stillhouse Press in April 2022. His poetry has been nominated for a Best of the Net award and has appeared in The Laurel Review, Rust+Moth, Moist Poetry Journal, Two Peach, The Indianapolis Review, Awakened Voices and elsewhere. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Jenny and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

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Lola Haskins

Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville. FL. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines. She has published 16 books, 13 of which are poetry. Her most recent collection―Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)―was featured in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America. She serves as Honorary Chancellor of the Florida State Poets Association.

Sara Henning

Sara Henning is the author of View from True North, cowinner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. Her latest collection of poems, Terra Incognita, won the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was released by Ohio University Press in March 2022. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

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Jenn Hollmeyer

​AMERICAN MOTHERHOOD

I tell the kids we’re not going to the fireworks

because of the storm, but really it’s because the

fire might come from guns and nothing

works in this country anymore.

Lightning looks like muzzle flash,

wind feels like downwash,

shaking fledgling doves from their nest.

One lands dead on its back, neck cracked,

the other drops unscathed like a river stone.

The mother tends both until the flies get bad

and now she sits over her only

in clear view of predators,

her mournful eyes

wide, wary, weary.

Jenn Hollmeyer writes and paints in the Chicago area. She won the 2019 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for her story collection, Orders of Protection (University of North Texas Press) and won second place in the 2021 Hal Prize competition, judged by Lan Samantha Chang. Jenn’s writing has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah, West Branch Wired, Juked, and many other journals. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Read more at jennhollmeyer.com.

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Paul Hostovsky

His Last Poem

It was just a tiny thing,

a handful of unrhymed couplets

about the warm tears

of old men,

tears that bless everything,

help nothing, no one–

each line like an empty clothesline

with a few orphan clothespins,

no clothes, no colors flapping

in the breeze, just the sagging

line with its suggestion of a house

on one side, a tree on the other,

or two trees and no house–

then the clothespins flying away.

Paul Hostovsky's latest book of poems is MOSTLY . (FutureCycle Press, 2021). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. Website: paulhostovsky.com

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David Kirby

David Kirby’s latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information (LSU Press, 2021) and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them (Flip Learning, 2021). He teaches at Florida State University.

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Lisa Lewis

The Governor of Oklahoma Signs SB 612

The women of the panhandle are weaving god’s eyes of fatherless mohair

to dangle above their beanpots. They don’t know a hymn

to sing into them for their unwanted children, and the wagon’s

wheels are broken beneath the wooden box, there is no escape.

I was in an artificial room with women when the governor signed

the document in a real room with men. There were six women

too, I don’t want to look up their names. There were smiles and poses.

There were claims of widespread support. In the artificial room

a woman described a woman’s bitter jokes as “playful.”

It meant she wanted her to stay safe. We were blowing soap bubbles

like accordions, like applause, like the rough skin on our elbows

we try to salve away. I don’t know if the other women had heard

the news because it wasn’t safe to speak of it. Those meetings

might be recorded. What do we think about socks? What do we think

about suicidal fathers? What do we think about where we go next?

Already I have heard myself whirring as if I screamed into fan blades.

I sound like an ostrich, I sound like a dove, I sound like a dead canary.

The woman who says “playful” when she means “cruel” is pregnant,

so she might be safe, and I am old, so I might be safe, and I might be

lying because we don’t know what safety is or we would’ve named it

and fought for it. There isn’t even a sign on a dirt road. There isn’t even

the thinnest of pamphlets, a folded sheet of lined paper. There isn’t

a code scrawled on skin with a ballpoint pen. There is no ink

and there are no ears, just heads shaped like bullets or basketballs.

When I say I am beside myself, I see the unmistakable shape of me

next to me, holding on. We are thinking about how we got here,

to this artificial room in this real country where we do not belong,

the medical procedures, the professionalism, the joy of starting over.

We are afraid to say any words that get too close to the fact of lives

we thought we had. When I ask about dark humor, I get startled looks.

This isn’t funny, this is the last day, all the answers have dried up

under the rocks, and we are the rocks. I want to pack my bags,

but when I open the closet door, they’re already gone, like an odor

and I am suddenly one of the damaged ones, whose brain lost its bulbs

for sensing, and it’s legal now for me to speak of nothing, only

a particular nothing, there long ago when I didn’t want it to be.

Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (The WordWorks, 2018) and a chapbook titled The Borrowing Days (Emrys Press, 2021). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in New Letters, Florida Review, Isele, Posit, Interim, Diode, Agni Online, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor of the Cimarron Review.

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Julia Lisella

What I Didn’t Tell You an elegy for C.R. (1961-2021)

All night a rising where rest and dark should be,

the star is in my throat emitting a wakefulness,

the grit of Lenten ash across my body.

In my shadow hands, the ones I bend toward in dream

I hold the thin pages of your letters that surface

your libertarian rants, your greetings, the love

in the cursive of your teenage fingers. Later

our friendship, I’ll call it love, was locked into long FaceBook messages.

They are there and I can read them if I want,

each comment to a post of mine like a sweet wink,

a laughter. You were right not to recognize

how crazy I was for you at 17, as you knew so well

you could not return it. But in your death now

you’ve taken that girl who could not have been who she was

without knowing you. It’s a weird component of death―

the little death it creates in the living, the pieces

missing or misplaced. You were one person, I think,

who liked to imagine me sitting here, writing.

Julia Lisella’s most recent collection, Our Lively Kingdom, (Bordighera Press 2022), was named a finalist for the Lauria/Frasca poetry prize. Other books include Always (WordTech, 2014), Terrain (WordTech, 2007), and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized, and have or will soon appear in The Common, Ploughshares and Nimrod.

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Ellaraine Lockie

Ellaraine Lockie’s chapbooks have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England and The Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. Ellaraine serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine LILIPOH. She lives in Sunnyvale, CA.

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Kristin Marie

LSAT Logic Problem: Abortion Edition

Four women, C, D, E, and F, seek abortion services. The women live in the United States. F and D live in the same state. C, D, and E have other children. F and D are survivors of sexual assault. All are legal adults.

1. If F drives two states away and has to wait twenty-four hours for an appointment, the following must be true:

A. F lives in Mississippi.

B. F should be charged with murder.

C. F will receive written materials on fetal pain.

D. F’s provider must conduct a fetal ultrasound and describe the image to F.

E. Roe v. Wade has been overturned.

2. If C is threatened and stalked outside the clinic, the following must be true:

A. C is a whore and she deserves it.

B. C’s state does not have a protestor-free buffer zone to allow safe entry into the clinic.

C. The Church forbids abortion.

D. First Amendment rights of protestors are always of supreme importance.

E. It’s an ordinary Tuesday outside an abortion clinic.

3. If D is told that abortions are linked an increased risk of breast cancer, the following must be true:

A. D needs to know the implications of her actions.

B. D’s doctor is board-certified.

C. D’s abortion must be performed in a hospital facility with three doctors present.

D. Texas bans abortions before most women know they are pregnant.

E. D lives in one of eight states that disseminate false medical information about the link between breast cancer and abortion.

4. If E cannot afford an abortion, the following must be true:

A. E is lazy and promiscuous.

B. E’s health insurance does not cover abortion.

C. E lives in a state with a seventy-two hour waiting period.

D. E is first and foremost a vessel.

E. We are all fucked.

Kristin Marie is a writer from New England who currently resides in South Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University and her work has appeared in The Seventh Wave, Saw Palm, and Voices from the Attic.

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Joseph Mills

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published multiple volumes of poetry, including Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance and This Miraculous Turning, which was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

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Juan Pablo Mobili

To understand your father's sky,

don’t look upward but bring

your gaze down to the soil

that was disturbed,

the small hill rising over

what my father buried

and covered hastily

because dictatorships

are not ideal times

for gardening, and the books

to which he gave their sepulture

had to be hurried from my shelves,

driven in a taxi to the garden

at his father’s house

where he dug the cold earth

with an old shovel that resisted

and then conceded to be a grave

for the texts of revolutionaries,

only months after I left my country,

his company, and the garden

where once my brother and I played,

and only the magnolia roots

lived under the ground.

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Worcester Review, Otoliths (Australia) Impspired (UK), and Bosphorus Review of Books (Turkey)among others. His work received an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net, in 2020 and 2021. His chapbook, ​Contraband, was published this year.

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Tim Moder

An Entry Is A Door In A Notebook Where Sometimes I Lie To Myself

I didn’t look for you, but I wondered, at first, where you went

when I didn’t see you, but I didn’t look for you in the cupboards

unevenly hung between cracked studs. I took the drop ceiling down,

partially-, I tore most of the rug from the kitchen floor. I didn’t want

to move the gas stove or fridge, although I took all the pictures from

it’s perfect white face, and the magnets of the states I drove through

mostly sober mad grin on the highway just the semi’s and I, owl night.

And of course the alphabet letters that spelled out only “why” in

mismatched colors, those are gone. There’s a lone black magnet in the

center of the sly surface saying what I know I’m thinking, waiting for,

I find it upstairs in a dozen books. It ought to be a law, it ought to be the

declaration of our independence. It says the barns burned down now I

can see the moon. And I saw the moon before. I mean I really saw it,

when I looked, which was seldom. Not never, but hardly at all. I painted

all the hallways blue, and not a blue that would have been a compromise,

a blue that makes me think of Mayans, and the virgin Mary, for all three

coats of paint I used the smallest brush that I could find that I could use to

make it mine. I moved the everything that used to be a place and now that

place is somewhere else. The hardwood floors are all the same. The closets

didn’t want to give up, so I let them be, but then I tricked them into folded

shapes which made them want to play and now they’re all away. At first

I wondered where you were. I wondered but I didn’t ask the dust that

covered all the steps that led down to the street.

Tim Moder is a member of Lake Superior Writers and The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. His poems have appeared in The Sinking City Review, The Coachella Review, Door Is A Jar Magazine, and others. His chapbook All True Heavens came out with Alien Buddha Press in 2022.

Marilyn K. Moody

Marilyn K. Moody is a poet from the Denver area. She was selected for the 2021–2022 class of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective. She has published work in Rise: An Anthology of Change, Progenitor Art & Literary Journal, andChiaroscuro: An Anthology of Virtue & Vice.

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Mary B. Moore ​

​Mother Worry

“An infernal angel passed in flight

just now along the avenue

in a crush of thugs....”

—Eugenio Montale, “The Hitler Spring”

Can I exercise-exorcise

mother worry, father doubt

walking the April park?

A mile away, I-64’s

never exhausted tires

whish, thud, whish, bearing goods―

rakes, carburetors, doll-

babies―and whole

families driving, still able

to wish themselves elsewhere.

Thugs shot songbirds in the woods

last week, and torches

marched not long ago―

pitch, spit and tar-hiss,

boot thump, the winged

maple seeds―samara, they’re called―

crunched like bird bone

underfoot. The men carried

the confederacy’s skewed

red-white-blue

and Hitler’s four-winged

god symbol.

​We’re thugless today.

The air is bearing a crowd

​of pollen, of futures.

Enlarged in photos,

they’re spheres, ovoids,

porous and spiky,

some like miniature

land mines. They’ll explode

into what I don’t know:

my daughter’s bouts of lupus,

my ornery heart tripped up,

torch-light’s jump dance.

Don’t worry, be happy,

says a dead man in my head.

There’s dogwood, the crucify-tree

in the legend, blossoming.

Touch the buds, and they nod,

clutches of green buckshot

centered in the blood-stained

sepals, as if flourish

were all, or kill. Wary

aims forward too,

darker than wish. Portent

flowers everywhere. Aware

is its mother, thud its bad god.

Mary B. Moore is a native Californian who lives in Huntington, WV where she was a professor at Marshall U. Her five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books, 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award; and The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, and the chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Her poems have appeared lately in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, NELLE, Terrain, and more.

Bee Morris

Citizen Permutation

I am not usually a dizzy man. I have dodged the nights that urge me

not to leave with my life. I am the son of a son and a daughter. I am

awash in some desire of novice appeal. I have noted the solid craft of

my windshield wipers. Retribution snakes around me like a forgone

disease. There is a knot of apricots fraying in my skull. I know that I

am neither normal nor extraordinary. I live on the contrary side of town.

I have smoothed out my body under bossa nova sunlight. I have wandered

down soggy paper trails in the rain. I believe that every border should be

replaced by a big sloppy kiss. My chopped hair is shaped into a monument.

I have aired human sacrifice on television. I have wound a procession of

rope around willing lovers. I have viewed the profile of my body through

the eyes of a satellite self. I have signed my own petition to consider a

new set of primary colors. Spontaneity cannot be overstated, but nothing

is really momentous anymore. My heart is a hidden beach in central

Arkansas. I have ripped away the perforated part of my soul.

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Bee Morris is the author of Alive on Planet Earth, released as part of Ghost City Press's 2021 Summer Series. Their recent work appears or is forthcoming in Wax Nine, Poet Lore, Underblong, Hobart, and elsewhere. Bee also runs the newsletter Blackout Fascinations: blackout.substack.com

Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo

A Threnody for an Unknown Body by the Sea

You don't know what it means to die in a place not the place of your clothes,

Like Ibadan mortuary, you would only recognize people by their last clothes,

Bodies ragged by putrefiers, eyeballs becoming cloud, slim boys

Becoming a father of obesity, a teacher of mine becomes my nightmare for months,

Bodies without tags, in a tray were the heads of infant boys, boys

Who ran away from chaos to meet their doom in a garbage called mortuary.

At Lampedusa, bodies, torsos bitten by ruin to be examined at a morgue,

No one would come looking for them, the doctors in a theatre of horrors,

Bodies as spring of worms would spoil their rest at night too, tomorrow

Their bodies would be rushed into a kind of unmarked grave,

For record purposes, here is the grave of a hundred and three

Transgressors found with seven dairies, numerous dolls,

Ladies trinkets, plastic bottles, torn life buoys, doorless mouths stocked with languages of silence,

Black roses self-swimming to Europe, dead flotillas, withered hyacinths at the coast of Lampedusa.

Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet and the author of a micro-chapbook; Sidiratul Muntaha (Ghost City Press, 2022). His work has been published or forthcoming at Ambit Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Obsidian; Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Oxford Review of Books, Stand Magazine, Roanoke Review, Louisiana Literature, Olongo Africa, The Citron Review, The Night Heron Barks Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.

Alexander Pérez ​

Alexander Pérez (he/him/his), gay, Hispanic/Latino, in 2022, has published poetry in Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, New Note Poetry Magazine, Variety Pack Literary Magazine, Literary Yard, The Voices Project, and Whiskey Blot.

​

Sarath Reddy

What Goes Around

I could not keep pace with grandfather’s strides

through ancestral fields that measure seasons crop to crop,

where as a child he whittled sugar cane, scaled mango trees.

Voices from his past, a swarm of mosquitoes.

He makes the circular journey back

to his childhood home, replastered facade gleaming,

an ancient bougainvillea planted two generations ago

ablaze in fuschia.

His white pancha dampened with afternoon,

hem bearing the stains of morning walks

he sits in prayer, cross-legged chanting mantras,

tossing marigolds onto a portrait of Lakshmi,

slowly rotating a silver plate piled high with bananas and guava

over camphor-fueled flames.

Grandmother pours herself into a grinding stone,

rice churned into batter, spices sputtering in oil,

wipes sweat away with her sari’s fray.

Their lives move like wheels of a bullock cart

a slow wobble in the wake of scooters and lorries

all racing nowhere, spewing clouds of exhaust.

They belong to a different time―

mornings music of bleating sheep, lowing of cows.

With nightfall, Bollywood gyrates on a rabbit-eared television.

They fall asleep on jute cots beneath the blur

of fan blades, long for the slow spin of stars.

Sarath Reddy enjoys writing poetry which explores the world beneath the superficial layers of experience, searching for deeper meaning in his experiences as an Indian-American, as a physician, and as a father. Sarath's poetry has been published in JAMA, Off the Coast, and Please see Me. His work is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry East, Hunger Mountain, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.​ enjoys writing poetry which explores the world beneath the superficial layers of experience, searching for deeper meaning in his experiences as an Indian-American, as a physician, and as a father.

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Nicole Santalucia

Lesbianism washed over me like a saint

in the last thirty seconds of childhood. I learned how to swallow in the nick of time. I had a lump of alcoholism stuck in my throat. Literacy was a big red dog tied to a fence, a stack of medical records taller than the tomato plants in my backyard, and the fear of pregnancy followed me into the locker room. I never swore in front of my parents, but I did cook ketamine on baking sheets that were passed down to my mother from her mother and from her mother. From her mother. Moral judgement is missing an ear. It needs a mouth, but that’s missing, too.

The subtext of memory has very few words and no hands. When I unload the dishwasher every morning, I use both hands. I also use both hands with my wife. Two hands to water the plants, to drive my car, to deposit money in the bank. I think in terms of tricks and bingo rituals and VHS tapes and the absence of power and books I never read and the kitchen sink and cooking fresh from the garden and what it means to face danger with confidence and how to cut baby heads of cauliflower at the neck and boil them whole. On beautiful days in September, outside my bedroom window, dozens of blow-up clowns deflate in the middle of the street. This is how I’d describe 5th grade, which is when I learned how to read and pull my pants down in school.

My earliest memory of reading is the same as my earliest memory of lying. The first time I cut my own hair and rebalanced my father’s checkbook and jumped off the curb of every street corner in town and shaved with shaving cream and imitated a rotisserie chicken and held my breath the longest without blinking. It’s easy to remember what it was like to be ten when I had a crush on Mary Tyler Moore and my 5th grade gym teacher and my softball coach and Becky and Mary and the science teacher, Ms. P, and the girl who sat in front of me in English, and when she’d stand to say the pledge of allegiance, use her fingertips to pick her underpants then place her palm on her chest. I wanted to get inside books that deleted women and wave my hands above my head to get her attention.

The refrigerator door in my childhood kitchen didn’t close all the way and the phone cord curled around my torso, tied my hands behind my back and my feet to—My mother, who was always cooking a chicken. I remember. My grandmother’s red lipstick. She drank herself to death. I sucked a dozen beer cans in the back seat of a 1989 Chrysler. We had a picnic in the graveyard. It was a beautiful day. Clouds dappled with pink and orange light. And the breeze just right. And the ragweed in bloom.

I think I think we both have to die, I think. The problem with this sentence is the thinking. And the timing is terribly off. I haven’t even mentioned you. You, my brother. You, shame. You, washing dishes. You, the birds in my backyard. You, the worm. the tomato. the suffering. Your square head and missing teeth are connected to my guilt bone. My guilt bone is connected to my courage bone and tailbone and hip and ribs and shoulder and jaw. And this is my voice stuck in my cheekbone and my nerve. And my whole face is pink fruit fermenting on the stem about to fall.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Diode, as well as other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

Lynne Schmidt

Lynne Schmidt was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, the winner of the 2021 TPQ Chapbook Contest, & 2020 New Women's Voices Contest. Lynne is the author of SexyTime (TPQ 2022), Dead Dog Poems (FLP, 2021), Gravity (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2019), and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West, 2020). In 2012 they started the project AbortionChat (@AbortionChat) which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers her pack of dogs and one cat to humans.

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Tyler Robert Sheldon

At the Donut Shop

as I wait for breakfast, one cashier side-eyes the other,

tells her that her brother’s coming. The other groans.

He’s coming here? She grabs a bear claw, bags it,

grabs another. No, not here, the first one says,

through gritted teeth. But I can’t let him in my house.

He can just lay his head down somewhere else.

The other cashier rings me up. You have a brother?

No, not anymore, I tell her. Good, she says.

Their talk continues as I leave.

Tyler Robert Sheldon’s six poetry collections include When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He is editor-in-chief of Mocking Heart Review, and his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Sheldon earned his MFA at McNeese State University. He lives in Baton Rouge.

Gail Thomas

Giving Up the Keys

Until

he was almost blind, my father wouldn’t do it.

Driving home at night, he pulled over

for who knows how long, my mother said,

until

he could see. She, who

peppered the house with Post-It notes,

was losing her memory, but she cued

him from the passenger seat

when the light changed.

Until

we haggled for months, he asked

her to drive, his impatient keys

cradled in a glass bowl.

Until

the day in the driveway when she

froze―mascaraed eyes focused

on the strangeness of dials and tiny letters.

She whispered, I don’t remember

how to start the car. He told me

over the phone, It’s all right,

she doesn’t go very far.

That night I dreamt of my young lover

who kept driving her red truck

after brain surgery,

until

a seizure

propelled the truck into a yellow crosswalk.

She killed a man in a blue shirt, and

her dog’s back legs were paralyzed.

From 300 miles away I drove

to ask their doctor to file a report,

avert a tragedy. No luck.

Until

I buried my mother’s keys in my bag.

At home I imagined

how she would scour each room

until

she forgot what she was looking for.

Gail Thomas’ books are Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press, Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read. ”New books forthcoming in the fall are Trail of Roots, the A.V. Christie winner from Seven Kitchens Press and Leaving Paradise from Human Error Publishing.

http://www.gailthomaspoet.com/

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Monica Lee Weatherly

MY DADDY AND THE ABATTOIR

On the side of the river

along the railroad tracks

my daddy worked in a slaughter house

The Bottoms housed

carcasses of hog, and sheep, and cow,

some of which my daddy had cut from

throat to bottom

I was four when my mother took me there

to bring my daddy lunch

He appeared from behind the doors of a concrete building

covered in the blood of the once living

like it was normal to be cloaked in the remains of the dead

I stood in horror at the sight of it all, but

my daddy was immune

probably because he was born in Mississippi in 1941,

the same year as Emmett

He knew what an open casket of youth and flesh

and terror and murder looked like already,

so a hog’s sorrowful face in a packed train

waiting to be unloaded and subject to a violent death

was nothing to gaze upon day in and day out

Bodies on hooks for someone’s pleasure

Liquid pools of life at his feet

The slaughter house was as familiar to my father as

the killings of Freedom Summer

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It felt like Mississippi

It felt like home