Tag: abuse

Evaporation At the Scenic Overlook by Emma Goldman-Sherman

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Evaporation At the Scenic Overlook

Footsteps as the truck moved on. I turned to see him
walking toward me with a big red Slurpee.
You left me at the hotel, he said. You don’t wanna
wake up beside me? I said, I never woke up beside you.
I had to leave to wake up, a joke he didn’t get. I kicked
at the sand on the blacktop with my boot.

Well, you’re stuck with me, he said.
I don’t believe that anymore, I told him.
You can’t leave me out here, he threatened,
I’ll dehydrate. Fat chance with that Slurpee
sweating and dripping sizzles onto the asphalt.

In the steam of that liquid rising I saw my marriage evaporate.
All the dishes, the vacuuming, dusting, the washing and folding
taking care and making sure, the having everything
in case he might desire and the sex without pleasure.
The silence. The kind that made me wish for noise.

Gone. I wouldn’t get in the car with him again.
I’d find another way into the desert onto the rocks, down
the steep drop. It’s good – you want some, he offered
but I wasn’t thirsty. I felt different, on my way somehow.

Take the car. The keys are inside. And leave you here? Are you crazy?
I thought things were good. We slept under the stars. We were together.

I stood firm, no hip shift, no head tilt, no smile
after so many years lying. I bit my cheeks
refused to please. What is it? he asked
as if he could fix it. Don’t come any closer, I told him.
I release you. I’m gonna live in the desert-garden
green and lush. He started to pace with impatience.
There’s nothing green here. Let’s get in the car.
You don’t know anything about the desert.

How we lash out when we cannot get our way
to minimize, infantilize, we turn our language into knives.

*

Emma Goldman-Sherman’s poems are forthcoming in Bellingham Review (finalist for the 49th Parallel Award) and the chapbook, “Dear Palestine,” (Moonstone Press). Their work has been published in Quartet, Strange Horizons, Toyon, Eckleburg, Gigantic Sequins (1st Prize), Ghost City Press, Best Microfictions (2025 & ’26) and others. They support writers and artists at BraveSpace.online.

When I Turned Sixteen by Lisa Low

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When I Turned Sixteen

And achieved some of the greatness young girls
aspire, outgrowing my childish body—that lanky,
long-thorned thing—and became a woman,
with hips and thighs and cup-able breasts,
enough to fill a grown man’s hands, my mother
bought me a new pair of pants. My father
must have been drinking that day, for when
I tried them on, he grabbed me from behind
and screamed with a shrill, excited, bird-like
call, sliding in his socks behind me, as if
I were a carnival. I twisted free, fled upstairs,
and locked myself in my room, spending
the rest of that friendless night alone, my face
wet against the pillow, bereft in a comfortless dark.

*

Lisa Low was first runner-up for the Shakespeare Prize at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work has been shortlisted for Ploughshares and has appeared in or is forthcoming in many literary journals including The Adroit Journal, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Southern Indian Review, Conduit, The Hopkins Review, and ONE ART. She has been nominated for Best New Poets 2025. Her chapbook, Late in the Day was issued in July 2025 from Seven Kitchens Press.

Four Poems by Hilary Sideris

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Treatment

If not for that need
I took for love & then

that shove, I wouldn’t have
married & divorced &

owed five years
of maintenance to my ex-

spouse whose accent
I found sexy till I didn’t.

I wouldn’t have been awake
at 3 AM to see that bug

traverse our coverlet
& watch the blood—mine?

his?—gush as I crushed it
between finger & thumb.

The toxic squad
wouldn’t have come &

sprayed our bed, treatment
for which I also paid.

*

Testosterone

Ground down like a soft
graphite stub in a hand-turned

sharpener, at night I count
backwards to the beginning

of divorce till boredom
overcomes remorse. How many

have been fired since cancer
research stalled? Fools in charge

confuse transgenic mice with
transgender men. My lawyer

Venmos a reminder to replenish
his retainer. U-Haul boxes

accrue dust, pile up like debts
beside my bed. Should I have

tried testosterone, purchased
a magnifying mirror, plucked

my upper lip & wanted sex
with my husband?

*

Shove

My cute nephew, a studious child,
has joined a frat, lifts weights,

drinks protein shakes. Last week
he shoved his mother when she

got up in his face—my little sister
isn’t asking for advice. I offer none.

Now’s not the time to say the man
I married hit his mom. What’s

worse, a husband or son’s shove?
She hopes he finds a girlfriend soon.

* 

Boomer Beach

I’ve only met you once,
for Thai, but you live on a beach
& I watch waves to meditate,
so I lie to my therapist,
drive to your gated community.
The surf, gnarly before an early

Nor’easter, churns up the Jersey
shore, its seawall higher, reinforced
since Hurricane Sandy. I take a picture—
not of us—of the wild rose hips,
their easy sway that says we’re all
fair game, but we’re still here.

After two glasses of Sancerre,
you talk at length about containing
hydrogen—not arrogance, I think,
just a man lost in his work.
You say you levitated in your youth,
show me a star-shaped scar

in your left palm, stitches between
finger & thumb, tell me about
the house in the California hills
you didn’t want to sell,
but the wildfires
burned closer every year.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016) and Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014). Originally from Indiana and a longtime Brooklyn resident, she is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program within the City University of New York.

That’s on you by Sophie Frankpitt

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That’s on you

watch her fade away
her gaunt cheeks and
hollowed eyes, once
bouncing hair now in
tendrils, cheekbones
jut in sharp lines and
wrists that look too
fragile to touch, watch
her punish herself for
all she is not

that’s on you
all you taught us
all the pictures
the waist-touching,
leering, the men on
the street who shouted
at fifteen-year-old us,
the boys who lined us
up on the playground,
the dates women didn’t
come home from, the
streets we can’t walk
down, the live location
always on, hit by hit –

hit by hit –

scream by scream
deafened by other
women’s pleas
she fell to her knees
praying that her own pain –
the pain you so ironically
call self-made –
would distract her
from lifetimes of yours

*

Sophie Frankpitt is a poet and linguist from Somerset, England, having recently graduated from the University of Warwick with a Linguistics degree. She is a newly emerging poet, though she regularly performed spoken word in Amsterdam during the year she studied there.