Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Landscape With Goat

Interior.  Not grazing, in the aisle,
intent.  Its father at the organ.  
 
All the bright pressed leaves 
were in the book; as far as scent,
 
they turned to pages.
It was all well-meant.  Someday it 
 
would return.
Not all were salvaged.  
 
Least of all – 
it didn’t want to go.  It couldn’t
 
stay.  There was a bit of joy,
it sensed, a major key.  There was a 
 
curve, a line of sun.  Beside the choir.  
Oh, vertigo.  It fell 
 
so high, 
as high as Babel.

Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom's poems and book reviews have appeared in several places including Gargoyle, Arsenic Lobster, Lines+Stars, and the Iowa Review.  She has published two chapbooks, Blue Trajectory from Dancing Girl Press and Minor Theodicies from Finishing Line Press.  She holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and in 2009 founded the online journal Melusine, which she edited until 2016.  She lives outside Washington, D.C., works as a freelance editor and is a graduate certificate candidate in Disability Studies. She tweets sometimes @jekihlstrom.

Uyen Dang

2002 

Was a California beach Ma took us to. Ba turned five months dead 
in Vietnam. I hadn’t yet learned English and things were silent
for a long time. I still hear the water, the country in there. 
 
Đừng đi xuống nước, Ma warned. So we kept to the backshore, and yet
the sea followed us inland. I saw it choke on my ankles, felt how cold it was. 
I don’t know what else has died in it.
 
Other kids were gliding around with small colored buckets in their hands. They shrieked 
when the water lapped their toes. They shrieked against the large sky. They shrieked 
as they flew. Now I wonder what spirits they shrieked at. 
 
Ma palmed the crown of her head with one hand, to keep from losing another
hat. The other, clenched inside the pocket of her jeans. Our shadows slanted, knocked 
by passing years. I’ve been wanting something to hold.
 
We walked for a long time, quiet, alive. The ground did its grounding, below us
still. Sometimes I could sense, for a moment, a presence behind me. Turning, I
see the ocean and the darkness, concealing a face.



*Nước in Vietnamese simultaneously means water, country, and homeland.

Uyen Dang is a Vietnamese American first-generation immigrant, writer, and photographer. She earned her BA in anthropology from Dartmouth College and currently lives in Saigon, writing about air and alleyways. Outside of writing, she's eating bánh mì and feeding the crumbs to birds. Find more about her at uyenpdang.com or on Twitter @_uyendang.

Paul Ilechko

Anger

There are stars locked inside her head 
at times     their light shines through 
the darkness of her eyes     
                                          she is becoming 
the storm     caught in the instant between
lightning and thunder  
  
                                       the birds in her
trees have fallen silent in the face of 
my anger     
                   even the owls are silent 
I mimic their unbeating wings     wrap them
around my own eyes     
 
                                      blinded by weakness
my tongue is on fire today     candle wax
dripping down my chin     
                                         in the photograph
she made     I appear to be a silhouette
my bones as brittle as ash trees in winter. 

Paul Ilechko is a British/American poet. Born in South Yorkshire, he now lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Louisiana Literature, Iron Horse Literary Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Book of Matches. His first album, "Meeting Points", was released in 2021.  

Angel Anchondo

I asked my parents, Why Houston? 

The synths of summer lay a mirage. 
A woman’s belt fills another corner.
 
Rain as smoke :: smoke as violet liquid.
A child’s plastic toy melts on the sidewalk.
 
Finally, it’s spring in Houston.
 
Seneca’s told the daisies his secret —
pin your dreams on the night & you will dream
forever. 
 
The mockingbirds, usual snobs, intrude & say, 
wrong. You’re a philosopher, not a dramatist. 
 
    A gust of sewer wind responds, 
what’s the difference?
 
The answer — a collision. Metal & fire 
clothe illusion. Metal & skin
 
ring the sirens. So a man lifts a woman
like a body of water lifts a sea cavern
 
    & the dark pins in the ground turn away,
    remaining indifferent in the matters of verse.
 
But the sun, too partial over the earth, lays her tongue 
& pretends to feed the other seven.
 
Soon delicacies, she thinks. Soon, I will be motherless
without my lapdog. 
   
        Look, she points with a flare — 
        they write to me as if it would spare them.
            How cute.
 
See — motion & sound :: imagery & curtains,
are all there is to the seasons, an aster says. 
 
I would know, she finishes. I was told lies.
Stoicism is bullshit. 

Angel Anchondo is a first-generation student at the University of Houston in Texas. A teacher in training, they are enamored with poetics. “Writing provides me with the language, platform, and creative liberty to speak on what I like to call the ‘paradoxical nature’ of existing and living. More specifically (and perhaps less pretentiously), I love how poetry can rewire thought & logical thinking patterns, fondle with language, and bring people closer to releasing themselves through it. It is, besides a nice excuse to burrow myself in words, a vocation to make great company with them.”

Louise Taylor

Handwriting

My mother popped up, or rather flowed in
from the ether. Her ashes dissolved years ago,
shaken from a small wooden box near a buoy called Penguin
anchored off waters where she grew up, tried
hard to be seen and loved by her parents.

Her handwriting distinctive, as if she were sitting next to me
by the fireplace. Her message, written out of context
on her recipe for butter crunch: “You’re such a clear thinker.”
How I have struggled with her love, so hard to feel,
and now, please come back so we can settle things.

Years after his ashes, scattered off the jetty my dad walked
as a boy, young man, then after the War—the tide slack or
ripping, ebbing or flowing, he reached me. It was just
a piece of shiny cardboard in my desk drawer. He’d printed something
funny in colored markers—his charisma as animated as popcorn.

And with my three friends, artists who left way too young,
their names penned in corners of paintings on my walls,
announcements for openings I saved in a cubby. Sometimes
all you can do is accept, find old letters written in cursive
like a fox’s trail crossing a field of snow, disappearing into the woods.

Louise Taylor earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. They have published four books co-authored with Barbara E. Cohen: Dogs and Their Women; Cats and Their Women; Horses and Their Women; and Women’s Best Friend: A Celebration of Dogs and Their Women. Louise is also the author of a collection of poems, Stones on All Four Corners, as well as a memoir, Nantucket Sleighride.

Jessica Sanders

Surgery

I am not a butcher
but a surgeon.
I have slipped the white latex over my fingers
and drawn lines in ink across my chest,
between my breasts,
where i will cut 
you
out.
Sorry for the pain
my scalpel will cause—
at least it’s not an axe.

Jessica Sanders is a native Arkansan where she has taught secondary English for twelve years. She holds a BA in English and a MAT in education. She has recently decided to take her own advice that she offers her students—to be bold, to take risks, to live their truth, and to write more.

Nicolette Ratz

The Sun, A Surgeon 

I went to the clinic 
for chronic chattering 
inside my head 
and do you know what 
the surgeons found?
 
Moths.
Can you believe it? 
Moths. 
Lunar like the sun remembers 
to kiss the moon 
 
on the forehead 
before sleep 
every night.
And I remember 
the sun kissed me too
 
before caressing 
a parhelic circle 
across my forehead.
It opened after that. 
My head.
 
Can you believe it? 
And I remember 
the surprise was so great 
the polar vortex 
dropped its bottom 
 
all the way 
to the jungle.
Snow dusted 
every winged 
being 
 
until 
I heard 
their crystal 
beats 
like chimes.
 
But only 
I heard it.
That’s the problem.
But you’ve got 
to believe me.
 
The moths flew 
around the clinic 
with the surgeons 
chasing 
after them.
 
They forgot 
to sew me up 
but the sun came back 
for another kiss 
to suture.
 
The surgeons 
never caught the moths 
as they faded to ghosts 
like the moon 
encased in daylight. 

Nicolette Ratz (she/her) is a Wisconsin-based poet currently working at Summit Station, Greenland assisting polar science. Her poetry embraces surrealism and imagination while exploring human connection to land, community, and consciousness.  

Gwen Roberts

tones // vibes // minimalist-boho-pinterest plants  

I’ve been reading the internet and have learned there are some classic tones you supposed to adopt if you are to be on it. when explaining anything from how to bake a paleo dark chocolate ganache cake to whether biker shorts are coming into style, you need to be 
funny / catchy / a source of phrases that could  
source movies, Mean Girls, memes, you   
are not allowed a boring sentence,  
any unknowing lines, you have to be  
self-deprecating and smartest, 
snarky, skinny,   
 
yet eat a lot. 
 
No acne     but no boyfriend. 
 
Cool alone but always 
 
       in a girl crew.       Flippant.      Classic. 
 
     Classic
 
girl you are         and know you are
 
     brave and wonderful  
 
         and worthy of every uncut ear, but still,  
 
you make sure at the end of your 
breakout Buzzfeed article  
next to some slight-funny bio, 
well-ratioed of 1:3 (weird:relatable) facts, next  
is you in picture, smiling, good hair day,
probably selfie (probably-lipsticked). 
  
I catch you on that day and I know it’s rare,   
worth commenting, abstract ecstatic emoji, and when  
I put myself in those days I too take a million selfies   
and make a music video over my bathroom sink and  
text my friends these things immediately after,   
 
                       me-so-fun to include them 
but really         me-so-safe, nestle nestle, 
     others can handle me, 
             oof yay saved-happy        
 don’t worry bb if you want   
 
to date an artist and hide in his off-label band,  
then you are on the right track.   
But worry child,   
your seed may never crack, might  
not meet the cold air   
or see the dark of night  
or know it was even a seed at all. 

Gwen Roberts is a Texan currently living and working in New York City as a consultant, which includes problem-solving, data analysis, and the occasional worry about using her master's degree in urban planning. She's been writing ever since she conquered her fear of chapter books and is grateful to all the creative and/or obligated people who have kindly given feedback.

Ronan Thompson

Unmasked

What is there to do
now that the allusion has dropped
the mask fallen to the floor?
 
When the clear, clarion 
calls of prayer 
bring to mind nothing but the gape-throated calves–
bleeding and baying.
When the air
once brine-sweet     all rosemary and lilac
is so heavy with smoke.
 
What do you do when the god has been fed–
and all that’s left are empty
husks, 
and the promise of a future hunger?
 
What do you do when the story ends–
not because of fate, or war, or wrath–
                                                                                    but because of the slow rotting of an empire?
A creeping, sneaking sickness.
 
Now that milk and honey words curdle in your stomach,
and I beg for a taste of fermented breath. 
 
I tried so hard to write a better ending,
    but that’s never how it goes. Sorry.
Orpheus always turns his head,
                            Dido always builds her own pyre. 
That’s what makes a good story–
    futility, fate, love.
          Always love.
 
They way Ovid tells it Eurydice doesn’t blame Orpheus
for turning around. 
    What could she complain of,
        except that she had been loved?
Well–
dying, for one. 
While he gets to keep on singing, 
                and singing. 
 
                       
Writing the same story over and over and over,
and still expecting a different ending.
                        Isn’t that the definition of a tragedy?
The only creature more defined by hubris than the hero is the poet.
 
But still we are back again–
in Troy, in Carthage, in Rome.
And still there is love, 
    and still it is not enough. 

Ronan Thompson is a 20 year old poet passed out of Ohio. He is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in English and Ancient Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University, and has previously been published in the University’s publication The Trident. You can find him on Instagram @wilber.ave.

Nicole Callihan

Dear doctor—

Spring came,
is here.
Was here.
 
Now gone.
Learned the names
of flowers.
 
Made bread.
Can’t come.
Now, summer.
 
Sideways rain.
Six months
turns nine
 
turns twelve.
My girl, eleven.
The other, eight.
 
Date night
at the dump.
Moon wanes.
 
Still summer.
Now gone.
Was here.
 
Now, fall.
Dear doctor—
must follow up

on follow-up.
On follow-up
must follow up.
 
Dear doctor. 
Moon waxes.
Dear doctor.
 
What now?

Nicole Callihan's latest book is This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023). Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com

Ingrid Cui

Taiyaki

When you waved the flag around
the riverbank, I was already gone
 
Into the water, to paint the waves
with my palette of aqua.
 
The nymphs playing in storm
stopped to watch, and with a 
 
Silly shake of their heads,
continued on. I have wondered
 
For many eons, if colour
could capture form; but you 
 
Simply smiled, and surrendered
into the wind. When we fish
 
In the eternal clearing,
it is almost as if dusk never settles,
 
But dreams till the morn. 
In my childhood, I picked plums,
 
And gave them to my mother, 
and that was all.
 
Today we must talk in images
but someday, perhaps;
 
I will reach out and grasp 
the heart of words, and liberate
 
This sky from blue. Then poetry,
unbecome tautology, will swirl
 
Around me, and reconcile land
with dominion. I once heard it said, 
 
You are like two planets in harmony
and I, looking from afar
 
See the world burning,
but keep on cutting my vegetables.
 
Please live this life for me,
and aching, I say yes;
 
It is but a thing
I exchange the daisies for,
 
The peddler’s song at the supermarket
seized in a fraught spring rain.
 
Stillness at high noon
and taiyaki sizzling on the stove;
 
There is so much love
in two oranges on the table.

Ingrid Cui is a student at the University of Toronto. You can find her on Instagram @charlatan_charlemagne.

Andrew Najberg

When the path forks ahead

If it doesn’t now, in the multiverse, 
your neighborhood burns 
from draught.
Flies crawl 
inside the glass.
 
A cold hand on your 
neck, an empty crib 
in a room 
you leave locked. 
 
There is silence in which your heart 
races and silence 
where it sits 
dead as a sandbag.
 
Find out how much silence one room can hold.
How that number increases in proportion
to the size of the family. 
 
Thus, I say, take hold. 
A brass doorknob.
A chair arm. 
The window frame.
 
It is, 
there. 
Real. 
 
Our rarity listed 
in the catalog
of quantum places. 
 
Let’s buy tickets.
 
The wait is long, but 
the show rewards.

Andrew Najberg is the author of the collection of poems The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and the chapbook of poems Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press 2007).  His poems have appeared in dozens of journals online and in print, including North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Good River Review.  His short fiction has appeared in Fleas on the Dog, The Wondrous Real, Psychopomp Magazine, Bookends Review, and the Colored Lens, and it is forthcoming in Utopia Science Fiction, Symposeum, and Prose Online.  An AWP Intro award recipient and the 2022 National Poetry Month Brain Mills Press grand prize winner, he received an MFA in poetry from Spalding University and an MA in creative writing from University of Tennessee at Knoxville.  Currently, he teaches for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Sam Baker

Leaving Louisville

meant arriving by train in the womb / of a womb / of a womb / sharing nothing in common but a
chin / leaving Louisville is familial treason because saying where you’re from has morphed / into
reassurance / Louisville is not the South / is not the coal mines—because the train tracks are
filled with asphalt / and lead to an eroded / sidewalk that asks you to stay / you wish they cut
back on the salt in the winter / you’ll wanna smoke the trail of cigarette buds / like a chimney
and call it / hearth smoke / like you know the shape of tobacco leaves / which everyone will soon
assume you had growing / in your backyard / what they won’t expect you to have is a lighter / or
shoes / leaving Louisville will make you wanna spread your legs and smell the ocean / as if that
was where they birthed you / but you only smell a river / even the water stays still / and asks you
politely not to leave: you think of the girl you said you’d marry / who you leave now for a girl
who has everything in common with you except Louisville / she’ll ask you about Kentucky / and
you’ll confess you’ve never been / to that one / you’ll take her to what she insists must be your
home / and you’ll read the tourist’s pamphlet / aloud to yourself / and she’ll think you’re reciting
/ she’ll be asleep in the back seat when you arrive / because she was waiting for the gravel roads
to wake her up / they’ve paved another layer since you left / she’ll ask you what to name the
baby girl / and you’ll say Louisville / so she knows where she was supposed to come from /
you’ll want to rub your palms with coal / and press your ear to the ground / to hear the train
coming back

Sam Baker is an author of poetry, fiction, and essays from Louisville, Kentucky. He currently reads for the Adroit Journal and the Kenyon Review. Baker's reads have been published in The Pinch Literary Journal, The Stockholm Review, and elsewhere.

Ava Chen

Gray Spaces

Last night, I dreamed you died. I went up 
to the cafeteria lobby and framed a 
television screen: a sober fuzzy image 
of your empty plum plush chair. 
A faceless worker dutifully scooped 
chives and tears onto your plate. 
Your teeth, dandelions. 
At my old school—
the one before you existed—
I watched your ghost untouch. 
There was no funeral, only
seams of generated friends.
Fishing line stitched their 
cheeks: smelting drapes,
vanishing at the cleft. 
 
I don’t think it would’ve gone 
this way if I had stopped my pace 
nine months earlier, extended 
a feathery platitude. Would 
I be outside right now, choking 
on crabgrass and loam? 
Would my peeling walls—
the ones saccharine with palm 
fronds and Photoshopped frogs—
dry of sorrow? 
 
When I come back from 
Montreal, Lodi, Ningbo,
I always tell myself it never passed. 
Foie gras, intrusive calligraphy:
signals wrangled from wrinkly flesh. 
The frothy egg my father beats:
an aerated palette, a shimmering edge. 
This is why I shake Descartes’ hand, 
why when I wake summer, I text you.
My sclera clouds by the hour, holding its breath.

Ava Chen is an emerging poet based in Massachusetts. She enjoys exploring themes of memory, dreams, and the mundane through abstract and experimental language. Her work is forthcoming in The Daphne Review. 

Brian Builta

Beautiful Thing, Aflame

the beautiful machine
intricate and wet
heated to boil and pop
as classmates play
in the summer sun

less than a month after sixteen
a month after confirmation
 
what would you like to do 
with the body?

play in the summer sun

body rotting in a box
would spark dark thoughts
 
we choose fire

a beautiful thing, aflame

a certificate verifies 
his ashes are his ashes 
not some large dog 
small cow or feral hog 
 
they arrive in a plastic bag 
inside a plastic box 
clipped with a metal tag: 
 

COMMUNITY
MORTUARY
6120

Rising, with a whirling motion, the person
passed into the flame, becomes the flame – 
the flame taking over the person

his bagged ashes 
remind me of  
Destin beach sand
 
the day we spent
building castles
and burying each other

suddenly

Father Jim 
provides 
an efficient 
hole-side 
ceremony

beautiful and unsatisfactory 

our lovework
reduced to a grey heap 
scatterable by breeze

was that his jaw?

the hole was too small 
the ashes not enough

ashes
rose petals
holy water
dirt

was that his skull?

skeleton in a box 
is nothing to fear 
 
we launched these bones 
with a kiss
 
our love
and a miracle

Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. He has recently published poems in Jabberwock Review, Juke Joint Magazine, and South Florida Poetry Journal, with poems forthcoming in New Ohio Review and TriQuarterly.

Ashe Nyburg

twin collared hearts

i wanna be the needle in your vinyl groove.

let me be your static-headed, flower-killing, star-eating, foreign-bedded bedfellow.

i’ll become the sandman in your dreams, just wait for me.

the jazz music ringing quietly that you don’t quite get.

feel this harsh and haunted wind.

take your tongue and stick it in.

 

a feral panther put into a too small cage.

a street special made frozen and mass-produced.

living in a house that drips blood onto your hair in the night.

crying beneath a starless sky because they’ll leave alright.

like a ouija board teasing out an answer.

like a finger teasing out your shy, little nipples.

 

it’s not a trick of the light.

it’s too murky for that.

swimming in unkempt ponds that refuse to stir like your stagnant mind.

coming up for air and finding the sky is an evil, starless ceiling.

this is our black lagoon.

and there’s a cat’s eyes staring from outside.

Ashe Nyburg is a student and poet currently based in Toledo, Ohio. Their work has not been published elsewhere. 

Artemisia Feral

Shift 

Hiking with my father 
I see a salamander.
Ochre and black I name 
 
the hues, as the light changes  
as my fingertips stretch 
and reach a shadow
 
over it’s slippery back.
My voice caresses softly 
like the way I touched your 
 
baby cheeks look here. 
Dark umber clings to my knees 
like lichen, his hair tangles
 
in the tops of the trees.
A boot shifts. Splashes 
in the ever-roaming shore.
 
And a lithe body 
shrivels to shrubbery.

Artemisia Feral is a writer based in California. She has spent her whole life writing but only recently has she felt called to share her work with the world. Artemisia can be found on Instagram @ravena_wrote. 

Lauren Endicott

Time On A Small Couch

The lobby air is lemon candy and womb sounds          I carry my friend’s 
body to the door     I ask for a single mustard seed    The man has a jarful 
but shows me an urn of his wife’s ashes               This time I come with a 
rotting tooth     I am the rotten tooth in the mouth of every room      Stop,
he says     She is called sixteen    She is aching at the root     The rot is in
her floor joists, see?     His beam finds a borer’s loopy tunnel    The pests
have long gone, he says   The damage is not structural   I didn’t know we
were talking about buildings    We aren’t—   Come, hold sixteen with me
Now he stands at the counter in a paper hat     Bloody prints streak across 
his white apron       He points with a blade       These two parts we can eat                  
The love heart and the animal’s death       The rest is for the birds       But
officer, there is a man sleeping in my bed     Yes, he is for you      And the
children, too?    Yes, and they belong to no one    Love carefully   Next is
the cave of spring   He meets me with a headlamp and water    I thought I 
was alone down here    Yes, you thought   Thought is as logical as dreamt
Any dream can slip between the mind cage bars    So be a child at the zoo
Admire these creatures       Do not bring them home       Some species are 
unfit to breed   Some leave behind only skeletons   I hear bones and know
I like this frame best   I point to a sample on the wall   He cuts four pieces 
to length, miters the corners      I breathe deeply      Here is the warm resin  
scent of my father’s woodshop   We press the original under archival glass 
and step backwards      See how it is a mirror    See it hanging in the lobby
beside a faded Gorky poster      You can cry     The window holds a citrine 
sun   (Reader, it is not so simple as all this   In real life, he sits kindly with
tea and crossed ankles   He says odd things like,    Take a walk through an 
old growth forest      Find the fallen trees      See for yourself whether they
are truly dead              And I return to the door carrying my friend’s moss)

Lauren Endicott is a long-time writer and a fervent lover of poetry and the arts. They are currently pursuing a masters degree in social work in the Boston area where they live with their spouse, two children, and adoring cat.

Juan Fernando Villagómez

Cannibals

There are arrows carved of human 

bone, in crooks
in caves, ritual hangings
 
on the trees—the flesh
of enemies. 
 
Isn’t this our history—written on the
    bodies as they’re put into the ground. 
Like the earlobe pendants, molar necklaces
you saw men wear on television. 
 
It was the ocean-salted skin of sailors 
 
That turned my people blind. 
High-speed blood bursting veins,
diabetic, comatose, 
 
becomes genetic over time.
 
Somewhere in the basement 
 
of my parents’ home, 
a hidden cave scooped 
out the mountainside
a coastal land devoured 
 
by the sea. Will you find
 
a spyglass, compass, undigested,
 
lodged inside the ribcage
 
of my great-great-grandfather’s 
great-great grandmother?
 
If you climb to the top of the hill, and stare
long enough, and if you have enough 
faith, it’ll make itself clear to you. 
 
A stain 
on the altar to the gods 
in the shape
 
of a savage brother’s
 
savage heart. 

Juan Fernando Villagómez is a writer from Houston, TX. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, The Acentos Review, and Adelaide Literary Magazine. He is a member of the Macondo community for writers and was a finalist for the 2021 Keene Prize for Literature. His writing has received support from the James A. Michener Center for Writers and the Crawley-Garwood Research Grant. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Texas in Austin where he lives with his dog, Abba and two cats, Brick and Ghost.

Audrey Nidiffer

Renaissance Painting in a Bathtub

I wish to be
As comfortable in my skin
As my eight-year-old niece in the bathtub 
She hasn’t understood the cruelty of
Fat
Eaten the word skinny till she bleeds it in the mirror 
No one has ever grabbed her stomach 
And stretched it out to show 
Every micro detail and mistake
As the light shines through tinted red
She hasn’t learned to forgive her body
For uneven boobs
Small unseen hairs on her hands
And hips all sigogglin
She hasn’t been an object 
She hasn’t understood what it is
To feel sin
Creep up your thighs as your mouth 
Betrays you
She is simply as innocent as if she were not alive
In this state covered in shampoo 
No shame 
For things she has yet to do

Audrey Nidiffer is an emerging Appalachian poet currently pursuing a BA in Creative Writing from Appalachian State University. While she has no fancy credits to her name she hopes to keep building her resume driven by the same passion that keeps her writing. She is proudly of the mountains, like her “shaped by time and language.”