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.

manifest legacy by Carrie Nassif

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