Stretching open I feel exactly how I want to. The fear makes me tremble but want feverishly.
The moon is not full. I am not wild now. I wake and I roll into memories that daze me. I feel my mouth still full of kisses and sweet fruit.
The loneliness is both cruel and dear.
Can I be your earth for a while? Can I feel shared instead of taken? Please There could be merriment and fire as deep as bone.
Opaque
Burying my cheek between your shoulder blades the cold mud seeped through the feet of my stockings. They watched in heat and horror our swift, mocking dance and ran their tongues along the roofs of their mouths.
In hindsight we were not each other’s lovers at all. we were each only lovers with shifting words for human nature and one shivering heart.
Shady Evenings in Early Spring
Drenched in rainwater pressing cold fingers to cold necks
Heartbeats strong and foreign small thighs sticking to your ribcage.
-The leaves were in my hair for days –
Morning was especially dank, but my daffodils finally bloomed by the beach trees.
Shakti Sackett is a Virginia-born and raised writer and photographer, based out of Antigua, Guatmela, Guatemala. She writes material typically drawn from dreams and those memories so thin you have to grasp them as gently as they come to you to write them down.
Image by Michal Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Author photo by Bienvenido Cruz.
A security guard follows me
while I visit Lalla Essaydi’s photography,
paintings, and multimedia art exhibit in DC,
with close pursuit in latticed space
he asks me what these harem girls mean
Odalisques? with all the writing on their bodies,
if I think they’re pretty, lying there seductively,
even if a little angry in the face
how do I like her pose?
They’re better in the gallery
down the street, he goes on, you know the ones
typically shown
not by this Moroccan woman
who forgot to take off
all their clothes.
Bible Museum
I: In the Doors
In the beginning there were words of many letters foreign dusty shapes projected sculpted painted engraved embossed gold-plated hewn inked stained-glassed fêted admired in opaque forms and primary colors of connotation
Rendering nothing and everything
Uncommentaried, simplified, uncontested, artfully untranslated bookworship without conversation in tour guide dictation
II: Elevators
Play oud music from the region while saturated hummingbird flits in and out of occupation Lift a people beyond questions of providence and provenance into elation
III: History of the Bible – Translation
To solve Biblical translation millennia of speech-to-page transit though history geography politics linguistics Draw a line, peel a pomegranate, Merely spin the wheel to assign any indigenous idea from the ends of the earth to the correct English designation
IV: Bible in America
Display The Woman’s Bible closed. Too dangerous to read, or open.
V: History of the Bible – Biblical Names Naming is an act of love Forgetting tribes conceived in strife: son of my sorrows, judgement, my struggle or a woman who named herself bitter
VI: Stories from the Bible – Animation An immersive experience: Eve dances naked until pregnant Hagar is absent while Sarah dissolves Deborah brandishes a knife in flames accomplices Jael and Barak behind Orpah, darker than Ruth, has no name Naomi matchmaker presides Bathsheba conspires to become queen There are eight women in the Bible
VII: Children’s Experience
Roll ping-pong ball [sex-slave] Esther to [abusive tyrant] King Xerxes!
Use magnets to guide Joshua’s spies [to the brothel]!
A ball toss game: Maim “enemy combatants” before you cut off their heads!
Pose for pictures as [terrorist] Samson, about to kill [civilian] Philistines at a party!
VIII: Stories from the Bible – Theophany
Shhhhhhh… Further still listen and hush
Did you hear the voice— the voice under the voice— a woman’s speaking from the burning bush?
Elisabeth Mehl Greene is a writer and composer working in the DC area. She is the author of Lady Midrash: Poems Reclaiming the Voices of Biblical Women, and was the founding editor of Untold Volumes: Feminist Theology Poetry. Her work appears in VoiceCatcher, Mizna, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and the anthologies Erase the Patriarchy and District Lines IV.
Image by Chajm Guski, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
It befalls a man to journey down into a macabre land without warmth of sun. carrying doubt but blinded by youthful passion. The shores of the Styx are lined with drowned daughters, grasping for things they can never possess Across the water is an alluring green hue.
Specters begin circling. The artist is surrounded by his former pride. They bow and depart as it starts to rain. Beneath the breast he cradles his grandfather’s parting words.
At the gate are three hounds, Upon approach the titan rises and releases a foul howl, it is bestial and benevolent, it is protective and vulnerable.
In the lurid halls of the underground king, The lyre beseeches the gods with words both true and kind. Its music cries out and is answered with deceit.
Reunited they scoff at the fool chasing a boulder, blind to an inevitable fate Across a decrepit field Elysium passes, growing smaller in the distance
Nearing the end now The aspiration calls with words both familiar and cold. He fails. Turning to face the meek voice but she is gone. a long silence fills the air, there is a weight to every breath
Madness feeds on the weakness as it does all men. Thoughts of home attempt to strengthen the will but the internal screams are too loud. He fails. The sea of sounds is overwhelming, it’s powerful waves gift the drowning man a lifeboat. The voice of Linus becomes a guide, take one step, now another. Arising from the pit Seeking the same purpose
Emerging covered in scars, the light has a soft touch he has returned from death. I am alive.
.
Marc Gull writes: I am submitting my poem titled, “Orpheus.” This is a poem about the Greek hero Orpheus’ journey into the underworld to be reunited with his deceased lover. I imbued a lot of myself in this poem as I wrote it at a very volatile point in my life where I felt isolated and depressed. I had just begun therapy and had also lost a close family member. This writing experience was very cathartic for me and I hope to share those emotions with the reader.
Marc Gull is a graduate student from East Northport, New York. This is his first published work. He is inspired by the works of Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, and Tom Stoppard.
Image by Helen Stratton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Best Poems About Shenandoah Have Already Been Written But
misty clouds float over mountains carpeted in green like angels breath hovering over the mossy forest floor sky and earth transform from impenetrability to transparency everything is full of holes up close
when fog is on mountain drive carefully the white expanse punctuated by lines scrawled across the sky the green by bales of hay mid roll turn left onto skyline drive (as you approach)
cars sit still at the overlooks holding their breath god’s sighs heaving as they stretch white waves rolling over green
when you walk through a cloud you’ll hardly know just a kiss on your cheek and a hand in your hair it’ll be cooler than you imagine and less soft love doesn’t need to be solid to be real
there is absolutely nothing like the ocean
sunlight tantalizingly dusts your eyelashes white frothiness on the edges
you rise sleepily at first like gentle silk devoutly praying rocking back and forth rolling a cautious sheen glimmering on your cheek then blistering caravans become jagged mountains fiercely escalating drawing from endless deep plains a sweeping salute and then you sift down jaggedly vibrating fierce and fleeting
sheens of silver seep into sand turquoise allblue mirror sunlight green you don’t have a single face
The World Burns and i Tie My Shoes
A new plague variant sweeps the continent i walk to the lake with my friends
Storms and fires ravish the west of the country i make pasta at midnight
People sleep on the train every night i call my mom before bed
Abortion is about to be banned i kiss a girl in the alley behind my house
The government kills relentlessly i read books about different galaxies
Companies steal data i sleep till 11:00 on the weekends
By 2050 all of Miami will be submerged i buy a new umbrella
The world burns and i I wake up every morning
Rana Bickel (she/they) is a queer Jewish poet from Maryland. She is a recent graduate of Barnard College where she was a member of the slam poetry team. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Jewish Literary Journal and Thimble Literary Magazine. She loves books, community, and rainstorms.
Image by I, Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
Every time I look down, there he is— thick disease-ridden hooves for nails,
dad’s gift to me. I’ve resented them my entire life. Briefly the blame fell on walking barefoot in
manure as a kid, that was my mother’s guess. Now I realize it’s my inheritance, this
hideous prize; a reminder of the old man’s genetic magic.
Every time I clip, curse and polish these yellow crustations of crumbling
decay—my only wish is to kill this crap. What if, with dream-like desire I could
inadvertently resurrect the dad I had. We could dance a two-step on our peasant feet!
I remember the doughnuts
I can never go back there; I know this is true because I visited the old neighborhood just last July and it’s simply gone, a ghost not a community, filled with boarded up shot-gun shacks, broken sidewalks, dirt for lawns, and condemned signs. The old 7-11 is a building that lies gutted with a sign in the front fractured window that reads Easy Taxes 1 2 3. When I was a kid, I emptied the coin jar early on Sunday mornings and walked three blocks to Daffy’s Donuts on the corner of Evangeline Throughway in the throbbing heat and bought a dozen day old for 79 cents. When I returned dad would have chicory coffee brewing and my sister would slice an orange or apple to share. We three sat on the back deck under the giant pecan tree grinning like fools. This was the life! I remember thinking. To this day I cannot eat a fresh hot doughnut—it just tastes wrong.
Nicole Farmer is a reading tutor living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in The Closed Eye Open, Quillkeepers Press, Capsule Stories, Sheepshead Review, Roadrunner Review, Wild Roof Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, Great Smokies Review, Kakalak Review, 86 Logic, Wingless Dreamer, Inlandia Review, In Parentheses, and others. Nicole has been awarded the First Prize in Prose Poetry from the Bacopa Literary Review and has just finished her first chapbook entitled Wandering Not Lost. Way back in the 90’s she graduated from The Juilliard School of Drama. You can find her dancing barefoot in her driveway on the full moon at midnight.
Image by Arnold Gatilao from Oakland, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
