Poetry Summer 2019 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Antoine Petitteville
Laura Apol
Easter Morning
& other poems
Taylor Dibble
A Masterpiece in Progress
& other poems
Julia Roth
Lessons From My Menstrual Cup
& other poems
Jamie Ross
Ceaseless Wind. The Drying Sheaves
& other poems
Nicole Yackley
Mea Culpa
& other poems
George Longenecker
I’m sentimental for the Paleolithic
& other poems
Taylor Gardner
Short Observations by Angels
& other poems
Greg Tuleja
No Thomas Hardy
& other poems
Joanne Monte
War Casualties
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
Potato Harvest
& other poems
Steven Dale Davison
Wordsmouth Harbor Founder
& other poems
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
How I Named Her
& other poems
Greenheart
sunny ex
& other poems
Ashton Vaughn
Through the Valley of Mount Chimaera
& other poems
Linda Speckhals
Borderlands
& other poems
Lucy Griffith
Breathing Room
& other poems
Steven Valentine
Written
& other poems
Emily Varvel
B is for Boys and G is for Guys
& other poems
Jhazalyn Prince
Priceless Body
& other poems
Marte Stuart
Generation Snowflake
& other poems
S.J. Enloe
Kale Soup
& other poems
Meghan Dunsmuir
Our Path
& other poems
Meghan Dunsmuir
Where Do I Begin
tell me
where do i begin
was that normal? was
that the right way t0 grow
up into the spaces before i even
knew what shapes would be emerging?
you supported me with an infrastructure we
called love but you would still encourage
me to smile sorries every time i cried
because really everything was fine
because belly worms are really
stagnant butterflies hiding
within the spiralling
infinite expanse
of my mind
glowing
Ancestor
when i was born
the pathway
lined the sky with light
splitting once again
soon the centre
of my circle shifted
and the faces beyond my mirror
were hauntingly familiar
perhaps i am the ghost
of your ancient home
decade after decade
not the other way around
a cobweb history
unborn and reborn anew
expands in form
into the sphere
so much bigger
than us
Dreamtime
last night i went to bed
praying i would wake up
somewhere deeper
than today
i closed my eyes
and i saw roots soggy
with millennia of ancestral currents
still the same level of damp
the rainforest greeted me
from my cotton coated vessel
my head touching ground
holy, undiscovered
the creatures gathered ‘round me
and i asked, politely
how the time is treating them
in infinity
they said
the midnights are darker than oblivion
and the summers brighter than newborn eyes
but i mustn’t stay too long
so
despite the hypnotic
coloured mist
beckoning
i woke up
in morning
to start another
present day
Our Path
we’ve been walking
down this path a lot these days
mostly because we have realized
it’s the only place left to go
i spent the majority of last night yelling
about something
someone did
(very far away)
to someone i do not know
(will never know)
you simply stared
back down the now-empty path
thinking about the last fir tree
cut down a while ago
since then we’ve just been walking
and finding peace when i’m not yelling
at all those stubborn ghosts
here and nowhere
17 Years
i lived within
a tiny pale pink universe
where I have cut my hair to fly
beyond the walls that kept me near
this everything space, this nothing space,
a curvature of plaster swirling the same air
over and over, my own foggy reflection
was slowly appearing; cracks revealed
we’ve been floating side by side
together we would learn,
hope, grieve til
the circle breaks
Meghan Dunsmuir
is a white, queer identified woman of settler descent currently writing from her current location of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, known today as Halifax, Canada. Born in Tkaronto (Toronto), she crossed the country to attend the NSCAD University, where she is in her final year of study. Her interdisciplinary degree has had a focus on textiles, specifically weaving on the loom. Through both art and writing, Meghan aims to return herself and others to the creative spirit within us all, traversing otherwise divisive and limiting borders.