in the beginning here was heat and blood all questions or breastmilk any other was magic we lived to form our mouths into words into tools to fashion names to hold back the ache these pains in our ribs yomping all up in our ears such good students we would string up clear wire and puppet this world with myths to disguise it with Latin terms as though we could fare any better than the creatures we destroy in our crusade to map it all out to plaster these walls with exclamation points
Carrie Nassif (she/her) is a queer poet and psychologist of the rural Midwest. Her chapbook, lithopaedion (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming. Other poetry is in Comstock Review, Concision, and Gravity of the Thing; and anthologies including, Slow Lightning: Impractical Poetry, and Written There: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2022.
Guest editor Denise Low, MFA & Ph.D., was Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09. She won the Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award for Shadow Light. Other books are Wing (Red Mountain), Casino Bestiary (Spartan), and The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (U. of Nebraska Press), a Hefner Heitz Award finalist. At Haskell Indian Nations University she founded the creative writing program. She is a contributing editor to Essay Daily’s Midwessay project. She lives in California’s Sonoma County on Tsuno Mountain, homeland of Pomo people.www.deniselow.net
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 