Something in a pelican reminds me / of a woman who knows she’d look regal / if only she can keep her skirt down.
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Selections from Babyland By Hadara Bar-Nadav
The walls at the infertility clinic are lined with babyheads. Thousands and thousands of babyheads.
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Two Poems by Guillermo Filice Castro
On the first day of the New Year
I got a taste
of what my heart thirsts for,
iron now laced with apple.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM By Kayo Chang Black
When I was 18, I crashed my car for the third time. My mother shook her head and said, “I should have listened to the fortune teller. He did tell me not to let you drive."
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Contagion by Mary Mandeville
Before, we knew where he was. This time, birth mom also had no idea; he’d run away from us all.
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Beauty by Steven Kleinman
A little spittle of pink
fell from the bag of organs
High Mom by Danielle Privitera
When my son is old enough, he won’t care, because it saved our family.
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Cannibal by Jennifer Sinor
I am eating myself, slowly, from the outside in. Salted skin and blood.
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What to Look for by Cassandra Rockwood-Rice
You’d pull a jackknife from your / shirt pocket and shave the bark, shallow then deep
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Shock, Honey by Megan Goss
Mother tries to talk, to reassure her eighteen-month-old daughter, but she can’t get her voice loud enough. Baby’s wails keep cutting out.
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Contrition is possibly for fools by Mercedes Lawry
Nothing is better / than sleep, where you’re anchored. / Otherwise, you tell yourself little / spoonfuls of facts about this life.
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Siento By Sarah Capdeville
I forgot, when it came down to it, that I existed.
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1989 by Lee Ware
My mother always says: I wish you would have known your father before the accident.
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Eclogue Domestica by Samuel Piccone
I don’t tell you how much it hurts when you finally open / your blouse and speak of tiny bones—
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Three Poems by Rick Bursky
We take turns dying. / Goddamn it, I think to myself, goddamn it.
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Just Waiting on a Dude by Michael McAllister
He pats the bed and you slide in. You follow his lead—you always will.
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JAC by Joseph Rakowski
There isn’t a code to yell when a 12-year-old tries to commit suicide in his cell. You just yell help.
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Two Poems by Emma Murray
People who talk shit about trailer parks / have never listened to the Titanic sound- / track in a double wide—
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A Man To Occupy My Mind by Elizabeth Morgan
I call them my grown-up friends because these women have translated all of that A-Honor-Roll energy into successful careers as lawyers, engineers, and doctors, while I recently ate more slices of deep dish pizza than my brother and dad combined.
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Josh & Rach 4ever by Rachel Ratner
Perhaps their bodies sensed the heartache ahead, the disappointment that waited—that they couldn’t hold onto this version of reality. So they let go of it. All over the theater floor.
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