#poetry by womxn
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.
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.
