Poems by Grace Novacek

Confession

you can’t tell me / to reconcile / all the being i’ve done / kneeling at a pew / lined with past lives / i’ll think i’m there to celebrate / to sing / i won’t know / the difference / between doubt and readiness / if it congeals to me / like a shadow / but what can we do / well, let me rephrase / since i’m trying to stop assuming synonymy / what can i do / besides ask questions / and expect divine answers

Tire Swing

i’m thinking about / what it feels like / to be upside down / which is to say that / i’m hoping to take up new space / and be forced to think / about why / i left some things / up the road / in the summer / five years ago / and nothing scares me more / than remembering them / except for maybe forgetting / everything else / and what i mean is that / time has a funny way of holding me / back

Grace Novacek is an interdisciplinary creative living in illinois. She has worked as an editor, writer, researcher, illustrator, and designer. She is always looking for ways to synthesize her interests across sciece, humanities, and social justice. She can be found on socials @gnovs.

Check out her zine here.

Poetry by Clayre Benzadón

Thrum

You are harmless without antlers,

rare amidst hard tusk-teeth, raiding

essence of alpine, lichen, a musk

fang puncturing

the small muscle

of a poached

vulnerability.

Clayre Benzadón is a third-year MFA student at the University of Miami and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook Liminal Zenith was published by SurVision Books. She was awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for “Linguistic Rewilding”, has been published by The Acentos Review, Kissing Dynamite, Hobart (as well as other publications), and also has a translation forthcoming in The Blue Nib.

Poems by Sarah Taylor-Foltz

Good Luck

I can see four-leafed clovers in the grass because

I have magic in my blood.

My parents would say it’s because

we were Irish before we were American.

But I know when school

concealed the knife in a cloak of milk, mystery meat, and graham crackers

sat us all in neat little rows

then went about murdering the magic of the other children,

severing it from them before they realized what was happening—

I slipped mine into my pocket—

fed her bits of bread and Emily Dickinson

when she was hungry.

For years we did that

fed each other, kept each other alive.

She is still with me

because I refused to let her die.

Grannies

There is nothing brief about briefs.

Cotton hugging your buns,

the softness of knowing:

briefs have got you covered.

People call them “granny panties”

with a scoff and a wrinkled nose.

Full coverage underpants are undesirable,

gross and unsexy, worn by unfortunate, homely women.

You can turn up your nose,

let your stomach churn,

but the fact remains: your sweet dimpled bottom,

and your pretty pink pussy will be fortunate, lucky to get old.

When I think of my granny’s panties,

I think of White Shoulders perfume, a plastic shower cap,

talcum powder patted on with a poof, and vitamin E oil.

Nothing undesirable, nothing gross about that.

Pale blue protection from my waist

down my behind,

with nothing poking out.

Underwear that knows what’s right.

Bigger is sometimes better

and though we have been conditioned

to think of grannies as gross,

where would we be without them?

As you scorn the granny panty,

remember that your body

is the result of something

that took place in your granny’s panties.

That is part of what makes them extraordinary.

Briefs hold you and you take them for granted.

They might poke a bit out of your waistband,

a small embarrassment, because they love you.

There’s a garden in my grannies.

A full bush blooming, rich with a history that I honor.

Holding me as my buns grow flat,

lips thick with stories.

Sarah Taylor-Foltz is an MFA candidate at Wilson College and a teacher of English. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Prometheus Dreaming,Rogue Agent,Quail Bell,Moria, and Mookychick. When she is not teaching or writing, she paints, upcycles thrifted clothes, hikes, and hangs out with her large brood of rescue animals. She often wonders whether she is a good witch or a bad witch. 

Poems by Jericho Hockett

SWARM

Girls sometimes roil

with fear they say

we’d do anything

to avoid a sting run shrieking

like our mothers but they

mishear buzzing for screams

a whole hive’s secret vocabulary

warning of danger they

misapprehend our movement’s

motivation our agitation is

no worry we are a swarm

and this hysteria

a riot

fear is a mask mothers wear

shouting our skin is

vulnerable to pain

but stings are rarely

deadly our running stirring up

by eagerness to make fire

smoke insects out roast and eat

some of their young

lay our own eggs

in the bodies

of others

SNAKE

they hiss sneer venomous

as if crawling belly

to the ground in these times

were so absurd I’ve heard my kind

referred to as vile

seen the shovel’s shadow fall

smelled the writhing nest scorched in flame

and for what?

there was no sin

before sin I slithered in moonlight

through lilies

basked in a thousand birds’ songs

in the sun I even flew

on opalescent wings it seems a dream

now dire to conjure even using words

as my very tongue is synonymous with “lie”

so not mute but muted I cast my eyes

up to the fruited branches green I

wish that I could taste and know

the truth to be set free to fly

but the sky is too full of dangers

jealous gods lurking in the clouds

but if I could reach the fruit

I would still share it now

with those gods’ children

that they might cease their angry

stomping through the grass

Jericho Hockett is a partner to Eddy, mom to Evelynn, poet, social psychologist, teacher, forever student, and dreamer, who is most whole among the trees. In work and play, she quests for meaning and identity, inspired by relationships among the living (and the dead), resisting oppression, and empowering self-determination. Her research appears in various academic journals, and her poems appear in Snakeroot: A Midwest Resistance ‘Zine, Ichabods Speak Out: Poems in the Age of Me,Too,SageWoman, and Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance, and Solidarity, with more works always brewing. 

Poetry by Ivy Robb

there was a gap 
in the heart
where maybe 
my finger
could have fit,
i was told that if it looked 
like this
then  
it was wrong
that i would need mending

that i made it with the beads of a rosary
picked up from 
school halls
in a black gown

outside the chapel,
yet somehow i have yet to rename
myself
or
question the creator
of this muscle
who turned me into a sonnet
then a paragraph
then back again
while the sisters watched me 
put myself together

laughing.

Ivy Aloa Robb is an emerging poet and artist living in northern Minnesota. She is published in Ephimiliar Journal, VampCat Journal, Ailment journal, and is forthcoming in the Lindenwood Review. She plans to further pursue a writing career, but when she isn’t writing she is brewing tea, practicing yoga, or bird watching.

I went insane with pain, and then you came along (the day you came to say how much you loved me) and restored me to sanity!

Anaïs Nin, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

And perhaps when you have exhausted all wars, you shall begin one against me, and I against you, the most terrible of all, against our own selves then, to make drama out of our last stronghold of our ecstasy and romance.

Anaïs Nin, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller,1932-1953

What is so strange is that together and alone we are so human, so softly warmly human

Anaïs Nin, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

There could be no better end.

Anaïs Nin, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

All this torments me and paralyzes me.

Anaïs Nin, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

I have come here to be us, to be myself and to choose you,

Alice Notley, from Certain Magical Acts

My great battle is over. I have just come home.

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

I want to damn you and to love you at the same time

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

I don’t want to go on living in this nightmare.

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

because the quietest people like me are those who do the most unexpected and violent things.

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

I have come too close to you. You may say I am fighting a destiny, something which cannot be fought like this. But I want to try.

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

Awareness, too much awareness.

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you.

Anaïs Nin,A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death.

Christa Wolf, from Cassandra; A Novel and Four Essays, tr. by Jan van Heurck

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Circe’s Torment

I regret bitterly
The years of loving you in both
Your presence and absence, regret
The law, the vocation
That forbid me to keep you, the sea
A sheet of glass, the sun-bleached
Beauty of the Greek ships: how
Could I have power if
I had no wish
To transform you: as
You loved my body,
As you found there
Passion we held above
All other gifts, in that single moment
Over honor and hope, over
Loyalty, in the name of that bond
I refuse you
Such feeling for your wife
As will let you
Rest with her, I refuse you
Sleep again
If I cannot have you.

Louise Glück