spring 2021
Table of Contents
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The Year We Considered Foster Care
Sunni Brown Wilkinson
The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet
Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016
Lauren Turner
The Guilt of Not Wanting
Ashley Prince
Drought
Flash Flood
Samantha Jones
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
Fits and Starts
Natasha Pepperl
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes
Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem
Lisa Richter
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum)
Coyote (Canis latrans)
Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus)
Jordan Mounteer
arma virumque cano
Revelation on Baptist Hill
Libby Maxey
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night
L M Schmidt
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel
Melissa Eleftherion
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum)
The narrator pauses.
There is no way to soundproof herself
from the weight of being the last
of anything. Her voice drops an octave as if
delivering a terminal diagnosis. To risk saying it
out loud is to risk knowing it completely.
The camera pans down to a pair of snubby lips
working like an anemone on a patch of grass.
The cretaceous skull as solemn as a tractor.
It lugs its own gravestone. The grey horn
a bent arc in the moral task of remembering.
Footage alone is a neutral apparatus.
The narrator wonders at her role,
suspects there are important lessons
on how to meet the weight and velocity
of extinction that are taboo.
Too susceptible to language watering down
their wisdom. Imagine crafting eulogies for friends.
The challenge here is one of poetry,
capturing wholeness with scarcity.
A life with words. Like filling the ocean into jars
and running out of ocean.