I was first on, I sat in back where the blacks

once had to, but I wanted to, and I wanted

nothing, to be nothing, black in a black hole,

less than black, softer, animal eyes in a forest

of springs and stuffing. I learned to read

by parsing out the lawless arabesques

of graffiti markers, math I got from the phone

numbers scribbled in desperation on the backs

of seats – and politics, which was just the

scrawl of promise appearing above or below

those numbers. I learned art, current events,

there is little that escapes you when you

tune your ear to the whine above the motor,

anthropology, physics. I learned biology,

worm gut, frog leg, snake eye, pig butt.

This afternoon I watched a granny

step off the bus, and as we pulled away

she drew up by some iron gates

to look back over a meager shoulder,

and what she saw was that nothing

had changed, nothing had changed

but the face of the clock, she saw a bus

in time and space, a rising stream of cars

and trucks. Like nations, near yet isolate.

I watched through burning windows,

my eyes fumed with her afterimage,

but fading, some action somewhere else,

and I turned then like a valve, hard,

away from transport, walkways, her.

Traffic was heavy. I did not trust my eyes.

BRUCE SAGER won the 2014 William Matthews Poetry Prize, selected by Billy Collins. Past awards include the Harriss Poetry Prize, with Dick Allen serving as judge, and the Artscape Literary Arts Award in poetry, chosen by William Stafford. He is the recipient of Maryland State Arts Council Awards in both fiction and poetry. His third book of poetry, The Garden of Earthly Delights, is forthcoming from Hyperborea Publishing of Ontario in late 2016.

In this picture we have of you

We pass around this family circle,

Four sisters, you the oldest we figure

Must be about eighteen; 

But  there are five sisters,

And we wonder where Juanita is.

Your funeral today;  we arrive early,

And rather than go inside the church we drive

In and around this small Iowa town.

We go past the cemetery, east another

Two miles or so, the road that winds around

Double Lakes, your father’s family farm.

Driving, I feel a stone roll around inside

My heart but then my uncle starts to tell

The story of the first time he tried snuff,

The golden wheat field he lay down in

Sick as a poisoned pup, wretching, cured.

Time flies, he says, the clock in his own soul

Saying he has just turned eighty.  Time flies.

In this picture we have of you,

You hold the youngest in your arms; 

My mother, the next to the youngest, stands,

Her arms wrapped around your legs. 

Leona has her back to your other side, looking away.

With the oldest gone, I think, who will

Save the younger from despair or haul them

Back from reckless indifference or lift

Them up each night when dusk comes and sleep

Un-hinders what has all day struggled inside them?

DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College where he taught for more than 32 years. He and his wife have relocated from Michigan to South Carolina.

My daughter was understood.

She wasn’t a flower or a bee

or tropical storm or anything

else you can name and study

as a science. She had anatomy

but it wasn’t textbook like they

want you to believe. There wasn’t

a season for her. A chart to track her.

A price for the color of her hair.

She wasn’t a gift.

I couldn’t plant her in the soft soil,

give her roots or extract from her

all the sweet that pleased me.

Nor could I break apart the trees

or build a shelter to protect myself

from the violent adoration she spun

in my chest the moment I conceived her.

There is no wood strong enough.

No house pretty enough.

My daughter was understood

but not because numbers named her.

They only measured the length

of her soft, padded feet, her cherub legs,

how tall she could have grown.

MEGHAN BLISS is a freelance writer from Coastal NC. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in Rust+Moth, Naugatuck River Review, A Poetry Congeries, and Mary Jane’s Farm, among others. Her chapbook, The Little Universe, was published in 2015 by dancing girl press. She is currently at work on her first novel. You can find more of her writing here.

When the wooden horse rolled in

and its side fell open, you braced,

stiffenening your muscles, but

no assault, only darkness

with a promise of surprise—

so you waited. Sometimes

you climbed up its flank and neck

looking into its eye’s cavern

and held your breath. It followed

on its ancient casters with creaky

warnings at the commissary,

the family readiness meeting,

the ring of your land line.

It followed you to the officers’ BBQ

and its wooden jaws cracked open.

She’s no moto wife. She doesn’t

even run. Her dog is just a tiny little thing.

She doesn’t plan to join the softball team,

and you saw the other wives

cordoned off inside the beast’s belly,

and your husband ate ribs and laughed.

LISA STICE received a BA in English literature from Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University) and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Arts from the University of Alaska- Anchorage. She taught high school for ten years and is now a military wife who lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. Her full-length poetry collection, Uniform, is forthcoming with Aldrich Press. You can find out more about her and her publications on her blog and Facebook page.

i. v=v0+at

we carve alphabets onto glass tabletops.

acidic veins. bunsen burner hearts.

physics coating our fingernails like nail polish:

a burgundy glitter. how glass chips

cling to our palms like moist sand.

how, when marker squeaks against whiteboard,

we pause, look up. molten glass dribbling

from our wrists to the linoleum floor.

speed, we remind ourselves. not velocity.

that is to say: directionless.

ii. x=v0t+½at²

that is to say: we have not rusted.

minivans under a forest canopy, windows splintered.

the fraying metal of playground swings whistling.

a shudder of oxygen. that is to say: dissembled

by time and all its squares. or maybe it’s distance.

walk the stretch between here and sunrise and maybe

you’ll understand. come sundown, count the threaded calluses

on the soles of your feet, rivers eroded from the grit of gravel.

see how your fate line cracks your foot in half

like vertebrae. watch the calluses break off into deltas

at the curl of your toes. possibilities, fault lines,

etched into aching flesh. lessons of the difference

between distance and displacement.

iii. x=½(v0+v)t

learn how to piece together torn fabric.

patchwork, sewn from the fragments

of acceleration: not stagnant,

but not exactly changing either.

a rearrangement of variables, equivalence

wrought from the firm-mouthed lines

of stitches. learn how to halve time

as you would cotton sheets,

the kind hotels wash once, then never again.

much like your own purged distance:

sunblock-stained time, margarita-washed velocity.

rice-paper thinness, porcelain fragility.

somewhere that is not here, there is a room

with glass tables and whiteboard markers.

iv. v² =v0²+2ax

you make mirrors out of glass tables,

out of foggy windows: an infinite display

of delicate things. one day

not so far from today, you’ll go and rub out

your reflection, leaving only

smeared charcoal thumbprints. like how time

was eventually scrubbed from your equations,

velocity expanding to fill its place.

you think of how stars are glued to the canvas of sky,

some you suspect are mistakes, splotches of yellow

dripping from the painter’s sleeve.

no cat’s cradle of a constellation knotted between them.

no andromedas pressed around the corners

like daises suspended between the pages of photo albums.

one day not so far from today, you know

you’ll be wandering back, kinematics stitched

onto the lining of your sleeves.

LILY ZHOU is a high school sophomore from the San Francisco Bay Area, where it is never quite cold enough to snow. Her writing has been recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing, has appeared in Phosphene Literary Journal and Textploit, and is forthcoming in Glass Kite Anthology. When not writing, she can be found drinking bubble milk tea, solving a sudoku puzzle, or playing the flute.

I hope you are a woman.

Your husband, newly wed, lives there too, but

you are a woman. Living, laced, in latticed brick,

you fill your cheeks with cherries on Cherry Street, Fredericksburg,

to prepare yourself for the sweetness waiting

to come with life in this home.

When cleaning the sticky cherry juice from

kitchen surface, do you wonder which lives got

unstuck from home linoleum? Which life broke

into your home, like my own, 1994?

Torn asunder from Motherland

to living fabric where

breath is taken on one’s own lungs’ terms.

Was your garden torn from Manahoac hands

in 1782 by gasping Motherland Europeans—

a few ancestors of mine—where you now plant and prune

roses in red, white, and blue? Have you ever found

those Manahoac bones in your housewife dig, to one day show

your son as dinosaur fossils?

Your son who will grow into the face

your husband inhabits. His bones, your eyes

gazing on son’s father:

like the world did on forefathers, playing power, 1775,

under Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The same umbrella under which my mother met my father,

Trinity Episcopal Church, built 1877,

harbored their love 1989,

saw the marriage ’92.

Dear housewife, have you ever been there?

When you traipse through the halls, running your hands

through the lingering, dusty air of what once was,

do you ever see the ghosts my parents say live there?

(In such an old town they’re everywhere),

and wonder which ghosts will move from

the moments passed in this Cherry Street home

to the haunted house of your memories?

My oldest ghost was sown, to prompt death,

in your backyard:

two-year-old fireflies, like

the golden dust stuck in your cherry-sticky housekeeping.

Have you heard of Fredericksburg’s Civil War haunt?

Will you take your family

to the battleground, 1862, for picnics, as mine did?

Brother (1996) and sister (1994) playing,

under siblinghood, next to the pasta salad,

over the memories, ghosts, bones of brother killed by brother.

Look at the nursery you painted yellow, 2015,

and remember my life.

Not the one that came to be, but the one that was

lost in this house.

fill y(our) home with past lives to be, and when you

discover your first child, bury your arms into the backyard’s soil

for a few days, next to the cherry tree. Let your arms root themselves

into the lives your plotted earth has known and mingle

your thin fingers with your child’s nourishment in

time.

LIZZY NICHOLS is currently studying English at Northern Arizona University, and her work has previously appeared in Prompt Literary Magazine and Cardinal Sins. She also writes for and speaks poetry in the band, The Grandpa Rosevelts. She has previously won the participation award in her high school science fair, and lives with her two randomly assigned roommates in Flagstaff, Arizona.