A Poem by Carrie Nassif

we had been born free footed made from frothy cascades

had ourselves borne chains we had never before named
mother or daughter simultaneous particles and waves
 
suspended lights burnishing in the texture the harmonics
 
of one dilating chord that approaches   pulses   and   ricochets
splays through and lashes staccato shivers into shade
 
you may walk as brisk as you like while we haunt this earth
everyone must wait on the tides
 
clenched teeth foaming at our ankles
burgundy points of sea urchin spine
 
they tell me perspective is a vanishing line

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.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.

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Two Poems by Jo Angela Edwins

 July 4, 2022
 
 
The homemade sign draped from the railing
of the interstate overpass
had twisted over itself in the wind.
 
I could see the word “no,” the word “body,”
and so many dark lines between
that were the building blocks of letters.
 
Letter is a word in this language
that can mean a symbol of a sound
or a message sent to someone you can’t see.
 
In a matter of seconds I drove beneath
this message that no one could read,
this banner of words that made no clear sound.
 
Still, someone spent the time to speak
before the wind stole the sound of a voice.
Someone bought the canvas and the rope and the paint.
 
Nothing in this maddening life is free.

“The Girls He Had Been Involved With”
                 —a quote from an interview included in a program entitled The Butcher 
                     Baker: Mind of a Monster about an Alaskan serial killer 

 
How a retired cop on a true crime show
described the women murdered
by a serial killer who made pastries by day
and killed dancers and runaways at night.
 
He murdered at least seventeen women
and came close to killing others.
 
This poem isn’t very poetic, and no one should care.
 
Just remember that the killers live in a world
that reminds them in one way or another each day
that women are girls, that girls are expendable,
that raping us and slitting our throats
is no more and no less than “being involved” with us.
 
So we carry our keys like a weapon.
 
So we keep our lights burning all night.

Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in various venues, including recently in Bracken, Inscape, and Mom Egg Review. Her chapbook Play was published in 2016. She lives in Florence, SC, where she serves as poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina and teaches at Francis Marion University.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review.  Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor.

Two Poems by Jo Angela Edwins

Inside the Purses

of women who stand in line to vote
are lipsticks and compacts,
gum packs and tissues,
wallets, loose change and key rings,
and pens and pencils and papers,
yes, don’t forget, lists and bills and
sometimes even poems.
 
And bottles. So many bottles. Bottles
of lotions and aspirins and pepsins, bottles
of rage and sorrow and unnurtured hope,
bottles of “don’t you look pretty
today?” Bottles of “it wouldn’t hurt you
to smile.” Bottles of “you know I meant nothing
by that joke, by that insult, by that hand
on your body, by that tongue
in your throat.” Bottles of smirking or leering
or perfunctory gatekeepers
in white coats, in black robes, in three-
piece suits. Bottles of “you aren’t
a mother, so you don’t understand.”
Bottles of “children will ruin your
career.” Bottles of “you must have children
whether you want them or not, whether
they will kill you or not.” Bottles
of “you have to stay with him.”
Bottles of “why do you stay
with him?” Bottles of “but how can you
live without a man?” Bottles of “God
would want you to do
what this or that man says
God wants you to do.” Bottles of
“don’t wear those pants.” Bottles
of “don’t wear that skirt.” Bottles
of “good girls don’t wear make-up.”
Bottles of “why don’t you wear
a little make-up?” Bottles
of “sorry, you aren’t qualified.”
Bottles of “listen, let me
explain it…” Bottles of “don’t play
the victim,” bottles of “don’t
be so sensitive,” bottles
of “don’t be an ice queen,”
bottles of “you’re such a bitch.”
 
Bottles of “don’t walk alone
after dark.” Bottles of “carry
your keys like a weapon.” 
Bottles of “count yourself lucky
to reach old age without
fist-shaped bruises on your skin or
razor cuts to your spirit, without
a hole like a wound in the earth, your mother,
dug neatly, just for you.”
 
Yes, the purses we carry are heavy.
Nevertheless, we carry them.
Nevertheless, we keep standing in line.
Nevertheless, we keep standing.

It's a Man's World

No one teaches us what stories go unspoken inside us
every time we hear phrases like equal pay,
victim’s rights, my body my choice,
each rock a hard-fought year tossed atop the last, each ladder
rung threatening to buckle underneath
the weight of so many shouted or silent No’s,
hands touching what they shouldn’t, slick tongues
echoing old men’s lies, as if there
lies within falsehood a truth true only for those born with parts
essential for the living of it. The rest of us
sit in gossamer cages, pretending these invisible bars aren’t
strong as our gullets, holding down what we’re forced to

swallow. Mule and minister, angel and whore, we are everything but
human, so say the judges, so say preacher and priest and politician,
expert at argument meant to
 
penetrate the mad hearts of old-style patriots suspicious of
education and anything complex enough to
render them enlightened or feeling the least bit guilty,
since what we were taught to trust can’t possibly
inflict harm, can it? Don’t worry, they tell us, you must
stay busy. You haven’t the time
to vote, or speak, or lead. It is the
eyes of the children that gaze on the future. There lies your
devotion. The future. There. Our devotion. Lies—

Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in various venues, recently or forthcoming in Schuylkill Valley Journal, LEON Literary Review, Capsule Stories, and Rabid Oak. Her chapbook Play was published in 2016. She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, and the SC Academy of Authors and is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. Edwins teaches English at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina, where she serves as Poet Laureate of the Pee Dee region of the state.

Guest Editor Latorial Faison is the author of Mother to Son, the trilogy collection, 28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History, The Missed Education of the Negro, and other titles. This Furious Flower Poetry Center fellow, Pushcart nominee, and Tom Howard Poetry Prize winner has been published in Artemis Journal, West Trestle Review, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, and elsewhere. Forthcoming work, Mama Was a Negro Spiritual, was a semi-finalist for The CAVE CANEM POETRY PRIZE. Faison is married, has three sons, and teaches at Virginia State University.

Hysterika is uterus by Jess Macy

in Ancient Greek
Hippocrates calls her a 
sentient beast.

She wanders her host,
blocks passages,
obstructs breathing,
induces disease.

Others say she floats,
a cork 
down
internal rivers.

The womb, a female viscus,
a little beast, 
moves herself
hither and thither 
along the
woman-flanks. 

She brushes 
past the liver, 
runs her fingertips
over the spleen, 
rubs her haunches
across thorax cartilage, tickles
the diaphragm. 

	She’s 
erratic. She delights in 
pitcher sage,
runs the skin of snakes
down her cheek, 
basks in the translucent
blue of the moon. But she is
cold, cold, so very
cold. 

To warm her up, 
they say, 
she needs doctor-fingers, or
your penis, midwife-hands,
or the scoop, the grip, 
or the spatula
some kitchen utensil, 
repurposed.

They call it “The Widow’s Disease”
this animal 
within an animal,
because her semen is 
venomous unreleased.

They call it “The Suffocation of the Mother,”
because maybe 
she’ll be driven
into witchery, 
into cannibalizing her
own children, 
rotating them on spits
over the coals of her hearth, 
driven
into slurping her men, sizzling,
down her throat. She’ll 
smack her lips,
suck her fingers clean, 

and then she will
use her 
own hands to
warm her body 
back up 
again.

Jess Macy was born and raised in the suburbs of Kansas City and received her BA and MA at Pittsburg State University. Following a particularly nomadic decade, she has finally settled down (for now) in Chicago to pursue her MFA at DePaul University.

Guest Editor Lori Martin is an associate professor of English at Pittsburg State University. She’s had both poetry and fiction published in magazines like Prick of the Spindle, The MacGuffin, (parenthetical), The Little Balkans Review, Room Magazine, Grass Limb, The Knicknackery, The Tampa Review (forthcoming), and The Maine Review. Martin is poetry editor for The Midwest Quarterly.

Through the Ages the Eternal Yes by Diane Wahto

Do we remember, after so long ago
our yeses, to one and all?
Yeses to the lions on the wall?

She borrowed the white linen dress
from her tall blonde friend
and made its low-cut neckline her own.
Now she knew even the men who thought
her too plain to ask to the dance before
would look at her twice that night.

But under the moonlight in the garden
she danced alone among the flowers
holding only the wine that she sipped.
That night only one would touch her in the     garden,
only one that would open her like a tiger lily.
The white dress on that summer night.

Do we remember, after so long ago
our yeses, to one and all?
Yeses to the lions on the wall.

Diane Wahto’s book of poetry, The Sad Joy of Leaving, is available at Blue Cedar Press.com. Her most recent publications are “Persistence,” at Ekphrastic Review, and “Empty Corners”, in Same. She and her husband, Patrick Roche, live in Wichita, Kansas, with their dog Annie, the Kansas Turnpike dog.

Laura Lee Washburn, Guest-Editor, is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review‘s microchap prize is named in her honor.

A Blank Sheet of Paper: A Poem in Free Verse for Free Women . by Diane Wahto

Lawmakers etch their restrictions on sovereign bodies,

obliterate women out of existence, into servitude.

Lawmakers scribble laws, sentence women to a word

web of confinement. Lawmakers in marble halls

of statehouses, pillared halls of Washington, raise

their voices in pious tones, invoke a fantasy god

of their own devising as justification for their laws.

Lawmakers spout platitudes of concern for women,

their safety, their health, then doodle laws to bring

harm upon women. Lawmakers pray to their gods

to end abortion, lawmakers who would punish

providers, lawmakers who send their daughters

to accommodating doctors, doctors who would

never utter the word “abortion,” who instead

say, “D &C.” A woman will say “abortion,”

will say the law of her own conscience will

guide her, a law not written anywhere

but in her sovereign being. A law

on a blank piece of paper, a law

written by each woman who will

decide how she must fulfill her destiny.

Diane Wahto received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University in 1985 and has been writing poetry ever since. Her latest publication, “Empty Corners,” is in the spring 2017 issue of Same. She was co-editor of 365 Days, an anthology of the 365 Facebook page poets. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband Patrick Roche and their dog Annie.

Guest Editor Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review.  Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri.  She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky and is one of the founders and the Co-President of the Board of SEK Women Helping Women.