Nancy Hightower

Apparition, Easter 2019

Did you bow your head in repentance
as you passed the brown man with rough 
hands and callused fingers, the one who
 
rubbed oil on his mother’s feet, 
braided his sister’s hair and promised both
it was not yet his hour to die?
 
Or were you the one who called 911 
because a man like that spells trouble,
spells revolution, spells a meal
 
of fish and biscuits into holy communion
for the masses and believes healing
is a right not a privilege?
 
Who wouldn’t take cover when the soldiers came,
whispering suspect into their walkie talkies,
holsters already unclipped. Who wouldn’t run
 
knowing that man would soon
be crucified into different fictions
depending on body cam angles,
 
unless it was the women, the angry,
inappropriate women who demanded visibility
and wanted their murdered sons
 
raised from the dead? Who was going to
stop them from singing holy holy holy
as bullets nailed him to that tree?

Nancy Hightower has had work published in Entropy, Spry, Heavy Feather Review, Sundog Lit, Longleaf Review, and Drunk Monkeys, among others. Her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015 by Port Yonder Press. In April 2018, she was granted a micro-residency at the Strand Bookstore by The Poetry Society of New York as part of their joint Poet-A-Day Project.

Jennifer Maloney

Lilacs and Feathers 

I dreamt your mother died
in a room in your house that looked
like your room, but couldn’t be: this room
faced the back of the house, the creek,
the bridge, and sunshine poured
through billowed curtains. 
Your room was always dark.
 
I dreamt she died
in a bed who’s head
was just below the window
that looked like your window,
the window that we climbed through
to the porch roof. We’d smoke cigarettes and talk,
 
star-gaze, dream
try to lean out, grab the branches
of the tree in your front yard, 
see if we could climb down, sneak away. 
We never could.
We never did. 
 
I dreamt we stood gathered all around her,
your sisters, you and I. 
Then we heard noises past the bedroom door,
so I walked out to the hallway where
your brother,
handcuffed,
trudged up the stairs.
 
He stopped, looked up, 
and his eyes crawled over me hungry. 
I backed away. He followed.
 
When I came back,
you handed me the heavy scissors
and pointed to a lilac tree
somehow now within the room,
dirt still clinging to its roots and covered with blossoms, 
purple and white.
 
“Will you cut us each a sprig?” you asked,
and I tried
but with each clip the flowers trembled, fell
and disappeared. They would not stay
 
and your mother’s breathing bubbled
and roughened 
and then
 
you and your sisters grew wings.
 
You climbed out the window
that looked like your window
the sun streamed through the curtains
you did not need to climb a tree, you just
 
unfurled your wings
your sudden wings
and flew
 
and your brother, in irons, could not grow his.
 
He howled and shook
screamed his impotence
and the breath
in your mother’s body rose 
and fell
rose and fell
and stopped.
I looked down
 
my hands were full of twigs
my hands were full of twigs 
and feathers 
                   
my hands were feathers
 
the window was open

Jennifer Maloney writes and lives in Rochester, NY. She is the current president of Just Poets, Inc., a literary organization based in that city. Find her work in Aaduna.org, The Pangolin Review, Memoryhouse Magazine, the forthcoming edition of the UK-based blog, Celebrating Change (expected to be available online July 12, 2019), and in several anthologies, most notably in Volume 7 of ImageOutWrite, work from the LGBTQ+ community and allies. Jennifer is the founder and curator of Just Poets Presents! a reading series dedicated to listening to the voices of under-heard and marginalized poets, to breaking regional boundaries to bring these poets to the Rochester stage, and perhaps most importantly, to paying them! Jennifer is happiest when writing and when building community with other artists.

Stephanie Kendrick

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills S2:E21

Andy Cohen is high as shit in this one,

and wouldn’t he have to be? This is the one

where lip injections over-shadow a man hanging

himself in a bedroom merely feet away

from his daughter’s. And this is the one

where an argument over shoes weighs heavier

than a woman re-locating her jaw over her bathroom sink,

with her bare hands, to alter her husband’s handiwork.

This shit is dark;

and this silver-fox, white-toothed grinning asshole

gets away with airing this nightmare for the world

and providing brief interludes about tit jobs and

tell everyone who you’re wearing. If they were honest-

if they could be honest, they might say

that they are wearing bedazzled desperation, and

they might say that he had it coming, and they might

say that getting ripped apart and sewn back together

over

and over

and over

again, keeps them alive.

Instead, this is the one where they pretend

to be angry with one another,

so that they don’t have to be angry with themselves.

Stephanie Kendrick is a poet living in Albany, OH. She has had the honor of being published in Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak: 10th Anniversary Collection; Not Far From Me: Stories of Opioids and Ohio; Essentially Athens; Sphere and elsewhere. When she's not writing, you might find her working as a Case Manager for the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities, training Brazilian jiu-jitsu or binge-watching terrible television.

Samuel Swauger

Playground

I haven’t forgotten what we were like then,
when I couldn’t see over the kitchen table
and plastic sliding boards burned my legs.
We never thought about the discomfort, it happened
and off we ran with our make-believe soldiers.
 
It was instinct to take your hands and
rub chalk on the asphalt together,
laying on the rocky forgeries
of a Dr. Seuss book and
squinting at the animals in the clouds.
 
Our school has long since been derelict.
The parking lot is lone and level now,
eroded to graphite hues. 
At some point I learned to hesitate
and grew taller than my mother. 

Samuel Swauger is an author and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. His work appears in magazines such as Wordgathering, Bandit Fiction, and Front Porch Review. His website is samuelswauger.com and his Twitter is @samuelswauger.

Mia Herman

Toast

When my mother tells me she is afraid
she is bland, I feel my stomach squeeze
the way it used to when I was a little girl
and the fever was spiking and the salty taste
of saliva made my insides recoil
until my mother came into the room, insisting
I eat something to settle my stomach—
something bland like toast or crackers
or even tea, she would coo.
 
When I look at the silver hair and fine lines now
framing her face, I want to tell my mother
there is no greater power than the quiet comfort
of slightly-burned toast as you take a few bites
and it sets about restoring your heath.

Mia Herman is a writer and editor living in Queens, NY. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, F(r)iction, Literary Mama, and Third Coast, and her nonfiction work earned an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Tom Howard / John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hofstra University and serves as the Creative Nonfiction Editor for F(r)iction as well as the Outreach Director for Brink Literacy Project. When she’s not writing or editing, Mia is most likely a) curating road trip playlists, b) watching obscene amounts of reality TV, or c) setting her friends up on blind dates. Follow her on Twitter @MiaMHerman.