Tag: Love

Five Poems by Gloria Heffernan

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This Too Is a Love Story

She lifts the spoon to the lips
she has kissed for forty years,
wipes the soup from his white beard,
steadies him as he rises from the chair.

Ours too is a love story, she says,
especially now, so many years
after they said I do, lived each vow,
and now reside permanently
in sickness, not in health.

Ours too is a love story,
she reminds him
as she rereads his favorite poem,
retells stories of their shared past,
retrieves him from hallucinations.

Ours too is a love story, she says,
of the love that endures
even in moments when her face
is the face of a stranger.

Ours too is a love story, she says,
as she sits at the kitchen table
sips tea that has grown cold in the cup,
listens for his voice down the hall,
studies the nursing home brochure.

*

Deliverance

As I walk the long hallway to her room,
I hear the carts delivering meals,
the nurses delivering meds,
the televisions delivering news.

I find her sitting in the wheelchair that has replaced the car
she once used to deliver groceries to a homebound neighbor,
To deliver her grandson to Little League practice,
To deliver herself to the church where she prayed for eighty years.

I sit beside her in the stuffy room
Delivering a small bouquet of supermarket carnations,
Delivering a hand to hold while we watch a Hallmark movie,
Delivering the only thing she wants from me—
a loving presence that says you are not alone.

*

Future Tense

Some days, the future is too hard to imagine.
Today, standing at the sink rinsing the breakfast dishes,
my future tense stretches only as far as tonight’s dinner.

Perhaps tomorrow I will feel strong enough
to knit the edges of today into a promise for the future.
Perhaps then the gloomy shadows of dying light will break.

Perhaps I will recall some persistent but forgotten hope.
Perhaps I will make chicken instead of shrimp.
And perhaps something sweet for dessert.

*

First Reader
       for Jim

Is it the smell of coffee
wafting down the hall
that stirs you from your sleep?
Or is it the way my step quickens
as I carry the steaming mug to you
like a sacred offering on those mornings
when I wake you with a sheet of paper
still warm from the printer,
and thrust it into your hands
before your eyes are fully open?

Or do you already know what’s coming
when you roll over before dawn
and find my side of the bed empty—
A sure sign that I am up and working
on some poem that has poked my ribs
in the night and simply will not let me fall
back to sleep until I let it stretch its limbs
across the page.

Never perturbed by the abrupt awakening,
but never inclined to simply skim the lines
and say it’s perfect just the way it is—
even when those are the words I want to hear.
That is why you are my first reader,
the one who sees me
in all my unpunctuated imperfection
and still believes in the promise
of the poem taking shape.

*

Confessions of a Freshman Comp Teacher

There comes a time when every
red-pencil wielding grammarian
must wonder if she might
have single-handedly derailed
The American Literary Canon.

“Emily, what’s with these dashes?
Comma or period, please.
If you want to get fancy,
you can throw in a semi-colon
now and then.”

“Walt, these run-on sentences
have to go. Yes, I know
you contain multitudes,
But must they all be
in the same sentence?”

“And you, Allen, have you ever
met a comma you didn’t like?
Honestly, this essay
just makes me want to howl!”

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Hubble by Kent Kosack

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Hubble

I need a Hubble telescope to take
majestic pictures of your heart.
Galaxies drifting away. Dying suns.
A screensaver for when we’re frozen and
there’s nothing left to say.

*

Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Exacting Clam, Subtle Body Press, minor literature[s], 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more of his work at kentkosack.net

What You Were Saying by George Franklin

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What You Were Saying

If the world should end while we are on one of our walks,
I won’t complain or use my last minutes to imagine
All the places we could have traveled or all the things
I wanted us to do together. Instead, I would sit
On the pavement or lie back on the grass, and as the sky
Burst into white and red and orange, I would take
Your hand and tell you I could not have wanted
A better life than the one I’ve had by your side.
And if the dog should be with us, frightened by the noise
Of exploding stars, I’d unhook his lead so he could
Chase a cat or some ducks one last time before
The ground opens beneath his paws and we stare at him
Falling helplessly into eternity, which is the same
As nothingness or the past that no longer has meaning.
If the world should end when you and I are talking,
Remembering a Borges short story or a poem
By Thomas Hardy, I promise you our conversation
Will still have mattered. Our words, even if cut off
Mid-sentence, will hang there in our ears, more intensely
Than any declaration of love. The parking garage
At the mall will collapse, just like the new supermarket
Across the street. The ocean will rush back into the canal,
And airplanes will dive toward the earth like meteorites
Cast down from the stars. It will be an ending without
Angels or trumpets, without prophets or evil kings.
Just fate, petty, nitpicking fate, inexorable as arithmetic
Or the end of vacation. Poor, thoughtless fate,
Rolling across the green felt of the billiard table
As palm trees burst into flame. If the world
Should end during one of our walks, perhaps
In late spring when bougainvillea is blooming
By the sidewalk, and bleeding heart vine
Flowers red and purple, I would not look at either.
I would only look in your direction. Quick, mi amor,
Finish what you were telling me about Borges.

*

George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including the recent A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Individual poems have been published in The High Window, One Art, Solstice, Nimrod, Rattle, New Ohio Review, and storySouth, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day.

Three Poems by Edie Meade

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Coming Storm

fleeced inside the cell, undefined violence flashes purple.
still chain-smoking on his balcony as windows close for bed,
the new neighbor, a slapping flag, a Marine retiree vanity plate.
I know the barometric plunge, whipping white the maple leaves.
he snaps beer tabs, snaps at a family unseen, snaps at his dog.
lightning takes a long time lacing its boots downriver to us.
he’s not much older than me, and how I remember Fallujah,
old men and boys crying on the curb, the forbidden from leaving,
who never left. and rags after. low-res red. phosphorous Pompeii.
does he still feel under-boot the crushed chalk bone, insensible
explosions wherever he goes? snapping. memory a flash bang.
from my bedroom I monitor the first-degree face, mulch-pile
chest smoking uncontrollably, turned by pitchfork, drifting
wind over water. the storm rolls in on caissons of thunder.

*

February 14

I lay on the floor trying to unhear screams, the city
screaming into its elbows to stifle what it knows.
The neighbors rise fighting, and I’m afraid
to seek answers to the questions I have. Google,
can AR-15 bullets pierce a brick wall? How
do hiding mothers keep their children quiet?
Is the screaming in my middle ear or a fold
of nervous tissue? Is it me? Is it only me?
Car doors slam and engines ignite and I remain
on the floor, keeping close to the world without
beds, those born and born again shivering pink
each morning waiting to receive spring’s augurs.
Geese shadows labor over the window so low
I hear their wings threshing. None cry out.

*

Two-star Hotel, Myrtle Beach

look I don’t want to catch anything
don’t want to kill the ocean
creatures, only stare at my feet
for hours, collecting beautiful bones

be first, or fiftieth, to comb the dawn
beach while the water’s out
taking care of its salty business
is that too much to ask?

a domestic situation ends in handcuffs
pleas break the boardwalk
crowd outside the Bermuda Sands
but the lazy river goes on

Black & Milds in the kiddie pool, sandy beds
I rate this hotel five stars for the riff-raff
for they come by it honestly, no bugs
in my room— no, spiders do not count

barnacles barnacle, I shell shells, terns turn
over a pink plastic carnation decoy
bright as sushi, what once was
a revolution, plastic, now an island

in a vortex visible from space
how must it loom to turtles below
a jellyfish or ominous mushroom
cloud, the manmade tropical depression

named for each of us in time,
we’re attached to our disasters
if not multitudes, we contain
teaspoons of colorful beads

in our brains, micro-plastic’d, sad,
bedraggled as the streets after Mardi Gras
a man in the lazy river laughs like a cough
or coughs like a laugh, what’s the difference

at rock-bottom, where the party is a sickness
the sickness is a party

*

Edie Meade is a writer in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been recently published in Room Magazine, Invisible City, The Harvard Advocate, JMWW, The Normal School, and Litro.

Two Poems by Molly Fisk

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Salvation Menu

A biscuit with specks of black pepper.
Warm beets and cool plums together
under shaved fennel. Maybe you think
food is only fuel, as simple as shoveling
coal into the maw of a steamboat’s engine,
filling the brood mare’s trough with hay.

This isn’t wrong, but it misses so much.
Trout over steaming jasmine rice, crisp-fried
skin, the rosy flesh. A roasted red pepper sauce
swirled to coat the hollow-core lengths
of spaghetti, garnished with breakfast radish,
its sweet-hot circles magenta and white.

Broccolini, grilled onions. Maybe you think
food is merely domestic, utilitarian: good
for spouses, children, parents, cousins,
then clean the kitchen, that’s enough. But no,
there are places where sweet corn and meatloaf
are solace, comfort, illumination, where flavor

equals amazement, beauty, the whole an oasis,
a haven, a life where hands do the work of love
and plates are offered to everyone, spring
into summer, to fall, where the egg white
in a blackberry sour comes from a chicken
you may someday meet. This, too, is true

political action, devoted tenacious participation
in saving the world: every rinsed drinking glass,
each greeting to someone who drove quite a way
through an ancient landscape to get here, to sit
with strangers in company, weapons aside, joined
by slices of pear gingerbread doused in caramel.

                       — for Blake & Jen & Hells Backbone Grill

*

This is a Love Story

We are stripping lavender, two at the kitchen table,
thumbnails turning faintly green, while another shortens
the sleeves of a Chinese blouse at the shoulder seams,
close work, high summer, talking about whether kumquats
will freeze outdoors at our elevation and should be taken
in and he calls from the next room, having heard us
and looked it up: They’re good down to 20 degrees.
This is a love story. Shared work after a home-made lunch,
Saint André and fresh tomatoes, deviled eggs slightly
squashed on the drive through the river canyon,
our conversation threading among steady friends, needle
and golden embroidery floss, the lavender picked last week
and not quite dry so the oils explode as we pinch florets
from the square stems. Have you looked at lavender
closely, lately? English is better than French for scent,
French best for cooking. All four of us know that in nature
a grayer leaf means the plant tolerates drought, no one
has to look it up, we are well aware of the bigger picture,
our future balanced on El Niño and the continuing
bark beetle destruction of pines, hot north winds
and rainless midnight lightning. The ice melts in our glasses,
condensation beading to stream down the sides. Yes,
I asked him what the true name of lavender buds might be
and he looked that up, too, I wouldn’t have thought florets.
Some later day we will make sachets out of our cast-off
floral skirts, yard sale pillowcases from the ’40s, fill them
with lavender and millet to stretch it, eating whatever is ripe
at the time — maybe figs and pears — wondering when the first
rains are due, one of us wearing her beautiful Chinese blouse.

*

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her book of linked historical poems, Walking Wheel, will be out in early 2026 from Red Hen Press.

Two Poems by Gloria Heffernan

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Shopping for Sheets

100% Wrinkle Resistant
boasts the package of microfiber bed linens.
You pay extra for this feature
which promises a smooth surface,
but leaves your back sweaty
with microplastics that don’t breathe.

Bedtime is no time for resistance.
I move down the aisle to the cotton sheets
that will no doubt ball up in the dryer
and fit my bed like a 3-D map
of hills and valleys.

Wrinkled, but natural.
No artificial ingredients.
Cool in the summer,
warm in the winter.
Growing softer with time.

I take my purchase home
and wash the sheets before tucking them in
under my lumpy mattress.
As night falls, I feel no resistance
as I slide between the layers
of cool cotton fabric,
and rest in my wrinkles.

*

Love at First Sight

Forty years ago today
I looked through
the nursery window
and knew the tiny face
in the first row,
third from the left
was you.

To this day,
I don’t understand
how you made yourself known to me
in the midst of all the other babies
so indistinguishable from each other,
swaddled in their Lucite cradles
neatly arranged in even rows
like a dozen eggs in a carton,
identical in those first hours of life,
except for you whose face was yours
from the very first moment.

I don’t know what duet our DNA
sang to each other through the window.
I only know that when I looked,
I recognized you without a doubt,
the niece I would know
for the rest of my life.

A life story,
A love story,
that started with a glimpse
through the glass.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Love in People, Not Things by Laura Foley

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Love in People, Not Things

When my mother died, she left behind
few things in her one room
assisted living space.

Some clothes, of course,
and a worn black leather purse.
In it, I discovered,

wrapped in shiny silver paper,
a chocolate, with a message inside,
repeated in five languages,

a fortune candy,
Italian dark chocolate
crisped with hazelnuts, so

I ate it.
Alone in a room emptied of her,
holding almost nothing she owned,

I read and re-read
her last message to me.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, ONE ART, and included in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Everything Should Be a Love Poem by Steven Concert

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Everything Should Be a Love Poem

Awash in the warmth
of a morning sun’s sky,

row-on-row bloom
of white daffodils,

crunchy Cheerios
splashed with almond milk,

you inside a well-worn pair
of faded Levis,

deep inhaled scent
of sweet and sensuous lavender,

soft glow of a lighthouse
through coastal fog,

frivolity of a bubble wand
waved in summer sunshine,

open highway cruise
at 70 miles per hour,

pulse-through-my-chest beat
of rock -n- roll,

closeness
of a skin-to-skin hug,

glint of sand dollars half-buried
in dampened earth after high tide,

left-over lasagna
gently warmed in the oven,

orange kayak afloat on lake
hidden deep in Penn’s woods,

inhalation
of your manly sweat,

snow-covered everything
undisturbed the morning after,

smash-crash of glass
shattered on concrete,

each warm spoonful
of home-made sausage and lentil soup,

sensory deprivation immersion
into a Dali canvas,

paralysis of never-ending fear
of high places,

steamy mug of coffee
on a rainy afternoon,

gentle scratch of your facial hair
on my naked torso,

poetic verse
read before bedtime,

melatonin induced
relaxation,

cherished memories
of a life together,

revelry of truth
when it blindsides fiction,

silence of shared space
between soul mates,

the last rays of sun
in the evening sky.

*

Queer American poet, Steven Concert has lived in the same small town for most of his life. He is a long-time member of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society as well as other state poetry organizations (OH, MN). His work has been published by Agates, Fixed & Free Quarterly, and the River Poets. Steven can be found on multiple social platforms: Facebook @ Paperless Poets, Blue Sky @PaperlessPoets.bsky.social, and Mastodon @PaperlessPoet

Steven is the author of three chapbooks—Too Blind to See (1996, reissued 2024), Standing in the Chaos (2006), No Mortar Required (2013)—and the full-length collection, Steer into the Skid (2022)

Two Poems by Joseph Fasano

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For My Friends Whose Hearts Are Breaking

This is how it is: we live again.
We rise up
from the love-bed in our wreckage
and we walk again
and we open
every window,
and we live again, though living
is the cost.

Yes, my friends, I have a thing to tell you:

My story
is your story, on this wild earth:

I loved once, I was broken,
and I rose again—

and although I closed my arms
around my body,
although I said that darkened harp
was ruined,
the nights have filled my life with brutal music
that has taught me that we’re only here
to listen,
to hold each other awhile
and to listen,

and to carry each other
with the song of songs inside us
that is wiser, and is greater than our changes,
and that sings the way most wholly when we’re lost.

*

Love Poems for Our Friends

Where are the poems for those who know us?

Not for star-crossed loves,
for agonies of longing,
but words for those who go with us
the whole road.

How would they start, I wonder?
You let me crash
when I was new to ruin.
You came to me
though visiting hours were over.
You held me when my loves
were done, were flames.

Yes, we will lose a few
in the changes.
But these are the ones
who save us:
not the charmers,
not the comets of wild passion,
not the ups-and-downs of love’s unlucky hungers,

but the ones who stand
by our shoulder at the funeral
and lead us back to the city of the living
and put our favorite record on the player
and go away, and come back,
always come back,

with bread and wine
and one word, one word: stay.

*

Joseph Fasano is the author of ten books, including The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions). His work has been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages. His honors include The Cider Press Review Book Award, The Wordview Prize from the Poetry Archive, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living poet years prior to the award year.” He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, which offers instruction in several fields of study, including poetry, philosophy, and theology.

Two Poems by tc Wiggins

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I knew our love had faded

when the patch of land you picked for our picnic
was littered with insects—crawling and buzzing—
knowing my fear. But all was still pleasant then.
We sat under the long oak tree splitting in two
overlooking the lake and the loading dock
that settled into that silent view of everything.
Nothing had moved or mattered for some time.
Not the water clouding, the children, the skipping
of their stones. Not the geese or fish swimming gently
in their separate countries. Occasionally, we chatted
in our short phrases and held the other’s hand
like a stranger’s under the dimming sun.
Then a silence once more. It came and buried us
for many minutes and I believe it was then
we knew. At some point,
for some reason, I had asked you something
stupid, but true, at least true to me, along the lines of
Why do think that we—as people throughout history—
stake so much of our importance on our dead things?
and you, looking to the shallows of the lake, had said
nothing, but laughed
in a soft routine.

*

From the Bench Meant for Two, I Sat and Watched

as the four ducks—siblings, I presumed—
waddled through the whole length of
the public park. In their synchronous step.
Each head turning when one turned;
each resting when one paused to rest.
Them quacking and rocking and marching
until they had vanished into bush
as if it were air. I do not understand
my own division from life. Or
how even the feathered know family.
What I do know is of this silent
weight—of always watching, of always
writing. Of never walking with.

* 

tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His poems have appeared in Red Noise Collective, Every Writer, Small World City, Big Windows Review, Door is a Jar, and Diode.

If Only by Shaun R. Pankoski

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If Only

If only
someone would invent love
in powdered form.
I’d sprinkle that shit
everywhere.
I’d cut big, fat lines of it,
invite everyone to the party.
I’d put it in the food,
the water, in the gas tanks.
Hell, I’d make bombs with it,
drop it from planes.
I’d do anything, anything
to make us love
one another
again.

*

Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. A 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared here, Quartet, SWIMM, Thimble, Mackinaw Journal and MockingHeart Review, among others. She was selected as a finalist by Lefty Blondie Press for her chapbook manuscript, Tipping the Maids in Chocolate: Observations of Japan.

Two Poems by Heidi Seaborn

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I’ve Been Thinking About Love

as I read the news
gunning its engine

as it muscles
over the streets at night

as my neighbor tends
the rare rose of four percent
remission hope

as her wife touches
the belly of her cancer
and considers death—

as the soft sand of land
beneath our homes
slowly erodes.

Yes, I’ve been thinking
how love arrives like a bird
then becomes

a burden—
difficult to hold,
impossible to let go. Yet

as the world howls,
it is the bird I hear.

*

On the September Day I Help My Mother Move into Senior Living

Am I too quick? The days already foreshortened.
A glass of rosé passé.

We unwrap each plate, goblet, tureen—
a final shelving.

Yet, a vase of dahlias—.
Light traces the rooms

we sift through like memories.
The gleaming silver tea set—

heirloom doomed for crucible and torch.
I lift a file box marked IMPORTANT.

For when I die you say—
I place it beyond

reach. Then fold the linens,
make the bed, carry the empty boxes

out into a tarnished evening—
returning to the shimmer of you.

*

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com

Broken Wishbone by Steven Concert

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Broken Wishbone

The sum total of everything
brought you to me. We used

to break wishbones together.
Each time you let me win,

knew my wish would
be for us, not me,

and the happiness
of a lifetime together.

Two haiku, we were the words
that made it to the page,

and together we were divisible
only by the nothing that remained.

*

Steven Concert, gay American poet, resides in northeastern Pennsylvania. In June, Steven was elected 1st Vice President of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. His work has been published by Discretionary Love, Agates, Common Threads, Cracked Walnut, and Mad Poets Society. Steven can be found on Facebook @ Paperless Poets.

Picture Strip in My Underwear Drawer by Cynthia Ventresca

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Picture Strip in My Underwear Drawer

You, in a photo booth at a wedding reception,
wearing that navy-blue suit.
There are four frames and I study them: tilt
of your head, toy ukulele in your hands—
wonder where I was when light flashed
in your face. Because I cried
in the bathroom that night, after our fight,
balled up napkin in my fist, listening
to high heels click on the cold tile. I wanted
to disappear. And that feeling. Like the scar
I’ve had since I was a child, beneath my chin—
I’m forever touching it. The wound, it’s sear,

and always, the years. A counting of.
How many, how many now, have I loved you?

*

Cynthia Ventresca wrote her first poem at seven years old after receiving a typewriter as a Christmas gift. Publication credits include American Life in Poetry, Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, 3rd Wednesday, Dreamstreets, Glassworks, The Main Street Rag, Sky Island Journal and One Sentence Poems. Pending publication in SWWIM Every Day, the Bay to Ocean Journal, and Eunoia Review. She was longlisted for the 2023 Palette Poetry Rising Poet Prize and serves as an assistant poetry editor for Narrative Magazine. She is currently working on her first manuscript of poems.

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

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Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.

Self-love Letter by Kit Willett

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Self-love Letter

I love the way you laugh
when nobody is looking.
I love your voice, that rich
and mellow timbre
as it searches
for the right note.
I love your voice,
                  that melodic,
handwritten style that,
at times, can be both
casual and profound.

I am proud of your creativity;
I know you work for it.
                  I am proud of you
for not giving up on so many things,
and I am proud of you for giving up
on just as many. I am proud of you
for reading so much this year.

                  I love your hands:
piano fingers with alternating
pink and starry blue nail polish;
I never thought I would see
painted nails on myself—
or pierced ears—or a tattoo.

God, I love your tattoo.
                  I love every star
in every constellation
                  on your back,
even if I seldom see them.

I love being you,
even when it is hard.
I love closing my eyes
with you, and having you
with me when I open
                  them again.

*

Kit Willett is a bisexual poet, English teacher, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.

First Love Debunked by Andrea Potos

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First Love Debunked
               for Win

It’s the second love
I remember, the boy
who baked a banana cream pie
from scratch
for our first dinner,

played a Brandenburg concerto
and told me that,
with orange juice, it was the best
hangover medicine,

the boy who whirled me around Milwaukee
in his red convertible MGB, and,
like a cliche come true, ran out of gas
on our first date.

The boy who, whenever
he came to pick me up,
paused before his rearview mirror
to straighten his wind-messed chestnut hair,
a gesture a girl might do, I’d watch him
through the sunroom window, he wanted
to be beautiful for me,
he landed on my doorstep like a prince, written
in a better story.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, including Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. A new collection entitled Her Joy Becomes is forthcoming from Fernwood Press this November. Recent poems appear in The Sun, Poetry East, and Lyric. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Love Warrior by Alison Luterman

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Love Warrior

In the hard months after I’d split from my first husband
there were times when I could not bear
to listen to music at all and especially not
to Tuck & Patti
and my favorite album of theirs, Love Warrior,
with its refrain: “We give up on Love
so easily…” because Patti Cathcart’s voice always sounded
like it had been soaked in the dark rum
of requited passion for a thousand years,
whereas I’d been stripped down to the bones
of myself, and they were bare, honey,
they were dry as unbuttered toast,
so whenever I heard that song
I’d find myself in a sodden heap on the floor.
Patti’s voice was an infusion,
almost unbearable in its potency, a womanly call to rise
and face life’s entwined and ever-shifting harmonies,
syncopation of the sublime against a backbeat
of the real; the tune I needed to hear
with my whole shattered heart.
You can’t put that kind of art
on a staff with notes and a treble clef.
Who knows where it came from, what battlefield
she had to stagger through to sing it
with that kind of conviction, blood-streaked,
smoke haloing her curls,
yet clothed in a faith I let enter me
through osmosis, praying that someday its sweet echo
might find me on my feet again.

*

Alison Luterman’s books of poems include The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), and In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press). She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Five of her personal essays have been collected in the e-book Feral City, published at http://www.shebooks.net. She has also written half a dozen plays, including several musicals. She has taught and/or been poet-in-residence at California Poets in the Schools, New College in San Francisco, Holy Names College in Oakland, The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen and Omega Institutes, at the Great Mother Conference, and at various writing retreats all over the country. Check out her website http://www.alisonluterman.net for more information.

The Grapefruit by Bethany Reid

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The Grapefruit

In Matisse’s Violinist at the Window,
shades of ochre and orange
make me think of the grapefruit
my husband bought yesterday
at the market, and of the grapefruit spoon,
a Valentine’s Day gift,
that I used this morning at breakfast.
The song the violinist plays
is Chopin, a prelude, or a nocturne,
notes lifting from his bow
both sweet and tart.

*

Bethany Reid’s poetry books include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize (Big Pencil Press 2012), and The Thing with Feathers, which was published as part of Triple No. 10 (Ravenna Press 2020). She and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters. She blogs at http://www.bethanyareid.com.

Love in the Time of Sunnydale by Michael J Carter

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Love in the Time of Sunnydale
                                                      -for Steven

My love for you is like Buffy dusting
another vampire with her favorite stake,
Mr. Pointy. Or it’s like Buffy beheading
one more demon, sword slicing some evil
lackey with a relentless arc, stopping
or at least stalling the nefarious dealings
meant undo her. That’s love in action:
sharpening sticks for battle, frying the undead
with holy water all while punning
and finishing first year psychology
late into the night. Taking down a secret
government op with its brilliant leader
and Frankenstein creation who is only undone
by a combination of magic and guile conjured
under less than ideal the circumstances—
a hostile take-over of the whole world
by demons. This is one difficult life: apocalypse,
apocalypse, apocalypse. My love for you eats
them for breakfast all while wearing stylish
but affordable boots while battling the Bringers,
harbingers of the first evil, acolytes of the worst
of the worst with their eyes stitched shut,
two crisscrossed x’s like kisses.

*

Michael J Carter is a poet and clinical social worker. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College he holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MSW from Smith. Poems of his have appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Ploughshares, MomEgg Review, Western Humanities Review, among many others. He spends his time walking his hounds and knitting.

Unrequited Love by Ruth Hoberman

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Unrequited Love

I used to shun unrequited love.
Better to wait for someone
who could love me back.

But now the rocks ignore me;
the cedars, ruddy and disheveled,
lean away; the goldfinches flee

as I approach. Should I pretend
indifference? I study the robin’s
chirrup chirroo, the chickadee’s

yoo hoo, yoo hoo: the party-guest
no one wants to talk to, too dim
to understand the conversation,

much less join in. Still my silly skin
aches to love them all. This world
lays waste to reticence, upends

my glass, spills my wits,
my dignity, hangs my heart bare
as the binoculars splayed on my chest.

So, nothing returns my call.
At seventy I’ve given up
keeping score—willing

myself (at last) to love
what turns away.

*

For thirty years, Ruth Hoberman taught English at Eastern Illinois University. Since her 2015 retirement, her poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Smartish Pace, RHINO, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares.

Daily Greetings of Love by Martin Willitts Jr.

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Daily Greetings of Love

In the tight, compact storage,
there’s room for overflowing love.

Inside love, there’s room for all of us —
pearls of star-jewels, asparagus,

stuff we cannot even imagine,
objects we cannot even name —

firecrackers of love, the illusion of fire
from the arbor lights for returning boats,

stars that witnessed the Cretaceous period,
the whole periodical table of love.

*

Martin Willitts Jr. edits the Comstock Review. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections includes 2019 Blue Light Award “The Temporary World” and “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

Two poems by Carla Sarett

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They Made Wars

We drank sweet Turkish coffee
and talked long into the night
of mothers who lost children in cities,
who locked them out of houses in thick rain,
who foresaw snow on a warm spring day,
how snow fell after their words.

By dawn, we forgot which stories
we had told and which we had forgotten
in the eagerness of our first revelations.

By starlight, we whispered our terrors:
Giant mothers outgrew houses.
They made wars without anyone noticing.

We never mentioned fathers.
Those pale and harried men.

*

no one says it

Deirdre’s sending
love w/ exclamation points
love! love! love!
John texts it (love)
no point wanting
a love letter she knows
that’s not the #love
they’re sending
& that song
love love love
all you need is
not the #love
she needs

*

Carla Sarett’s recent poem appear or are forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, The Virginia Normal, San Pedro River Review, The Remington Review, Sylvia, Words and Whispers and elsewhere. Her novella, The Looking Glass, will be published in October (Propertius); and A Closet Feminist, a full-length novel, will appear in 2022 (Unsolicited Press.) Carla lives in San Francisco.

Four Poems by Mehak Goyal

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The Trophy

Late evening, I reach home
after tennis practice carrying
my golden trophy close to my chest.

Radha opens the door.
“Mummy, Papa- back from work?”
I ask, dismayed, not finding their car outside.

“They are having dinner with friends.
You must be hungry.
I will serve yours.”

My trophy tucked like a
teddy bear in my bed, I force my eyes
to stay open, but sleep catches me.

Next morning
Radha serves breakfast while
my parents are getting ready for work.

My school bus honks.
I stare at the golden cup one last time,
its gleam not reaching my eyes.

*

What was said when he fell in love

She can’t even cook Okra
She drinks tequila
Look! This guy is hugging her on Facebook
Short skirts. Hot pants—
that’s all she’s wearing
She likes her job more than you

You’re innocent
I have seen the world

Your love won’t last
Promises won’t be kept

You have had your fun
I only care about you and your happiness
I will choose someone for you.

*

What was said when she fell in love

He drives a Honda
He has been at the same company since the last 5 years
You will just be shifting from one rented house to another
My astrologer assured me that you would rule a business empire

Leave him

I only care about you and your happiness.

Stop crying, I will find someone.

*

Swimming Pool

Conforming to his moods
and schedule, I am his
personal swimming pool.

He dives inside me.
My coolness envelops him.
“You’re a blessing on a hot summer day,”

he says, coming out for air.
He plunges again—
strokes quicker

until he has finished.
His body leaves me.
“Another lap?” I splash.

“Work is hectic.”
He walks out, takes a
quick shower, changes clothes.

“Tomorrow, then?” I bubble.
“I will call you.”
Typing on his phone, he departs.

My waters still and murky.

*

A Computer Science Engineer with a Masters in Management from Imperial College London, Mehak Goyal ran a couple of profitable start-ups, before committing herself to becoming a full-time writer. Shortlisted for the Sakhi Awards and the Cinnamon press literature awards, her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, The Madras Courier, The Woman Who Roar, Muse, The Alipore Post and elsewhere. She is working on her first poetry collection.

Unwelcome by Ann E. Michael

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Unwelcome

The caller
was
a stranger
soliciting
I don’t
know what
I told her
this
is not
a good time
my father
is dying
and
I hung up.
Now
as night
recedes
I find my
self awake
I think of
him
dying
and how
I was
unkind
to that young
woman
in a call
center
a stranger
I failed
to welcome
into
my heart.

*
Ann E. Michael lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, slightly west of where the Lehigh River meets the Delaware. Her most recent collection of poems is Barefoot Girls. Her next book, The Red Queen Hypothesis, will be published sometime in 2021. More info at www.annemichael.wordpress.com

Love Poem by Kip Knott

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Love Poem

The paper heart that I’ve carried in my chest
has finally caught fire. It’s burned for six nights
now. There’s no snuffing the white flames
that flicker up my throat. Arteries and veins cauterize,
bones sizzle, a network of fuses feeding one
explosion. My mind glows, a new star hot enough
to fuse atoms. These words are its radiation.

*

Kip Knott’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca, Still: The Journal, and trampset. In addition, he is a regular monthly contributor to Versification. His debut book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is currently available from Kelsay Books. His second full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is due in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work can be accessed at kipknott.com.