before i was named / woman i was not / close to a real man
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Graffiti Reflection by Kelly DuMar
Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator who lives on the rural Charles River in the Boston area. She’s author of four poetry collections, and her images are featured on the cover of literary journals. Kelly has been teaching creative writing for four decades, including the International Women’s Writing Guild and the Transformative Language Arts Network. She produces the Open Mic for the Journal of Expressive Writing. She’s also a certified psychodramatist who leads expressive arts support groups for psychologists in war zones.
Chittagong Chickrassy by Anisha Bhaduri
In the orbs of collaborative self-sufficiency that Hussein Shaheb, his mother and his wife lived in, in the permissiveness that went with accepting boundaries without distasteful confrontation and in the denial that the fatherless, adult man found himself in, he chose the entrenched tragedy of the past.
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The Position of the Sun by Neal Lulofs
I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if my father hadn’t been driving through that intersection at that moment. Would I have stayed in college? Would I have been a better person? What if I had done something the night my sister woke me when we were kids?
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Two Poems by Sean Cho A.
I once believed distance meant a lack of sound, / but lately silence screams like a falling leaf. / The morning emails offer no relief, / just time zones measured in lost and found.
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The middle of that night by Annie McGreevy
I figure I’m making it all up. I’ve been a wreck since he died—my appetite is erratic, my gait agitated, my posture defeated. So, sure—my psyche is probably conjuring him. But I welcome the visions because they soothe me.
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Two Poems by Carrie Shipers
Of the siblings / I can reach, one says we were lucky / to survive, and one gets stuck / repeating we were loved.
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James Garfield Junior High School, Westchester, New York by Michele Zimmerman
At school dances that are themed like blizzards and vampires and under-the-sea creatures, kids will hear phantom noises in bathroom stalls and other kids will scare their friends with screams. It will become generational knowledge that Johnny H. never left the bathroom stall in the hallway next to the small gym.
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When Fireflies Scatter by Rebecca Evans
This is the first time I shoot a gun, but not the first time I’ve held one. I wish I could tell you specifics. I can tell you what I remember.
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