Poetry Summer 2023 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover
Joel Filipe
Kristina Cecka
Rabble
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Uncivil War of Love
& other poems
LuAnn Keener-Mikenas
Skunks at Twilight
& other poems
Alyssa Sego
Passage
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
Forest of One
& other poems
Brent M. Foster
Ode to Darwin
& other poems
Jack Giaour
trans man is feeling blue
& other poems
Alan Gann
how strange
& other poems
Richard Baldo
The Privilege
& other poems
Michael Fleming
In
& other poems
Holly York
As it turned out, there was no bomb on board
& other poems
Celeste Briefs
Late Poppies
& other poems
Kayla E.L. Ybarra
Goose Song
& other poems
S.E. Ingraham
Leaving to Arrive
& other poems
Rachel Robb
Molting Scarlet Tanager
& other poems
Bruce Marsland
Sauna by a Finnish lake at Midsummer
& other poems
Ellen Romano
Seven Sisters
& other poems
Greg Hart
False Coordinates
& other poems
Greg Tuleja
Shanksville
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Southern Charm
& other poems
Rachel Robb
A Luna Moth Is Not a Swallowtail
That night I saw a luna moth
as big as your open hand,
sunning herself in the
back porch light. A
woman’s wide-set eyes
in a green winged face stared
back—brimming with new
dark & roiling ideas. They
say your saint chooses
you, not the other way
around. I sketched her on
napkins & in hymn books.
Declared my love
over coffee with fair
weather friends. My
far-seeing Rorschach
flown right out of the
canopy to anoint
only me, not you.
I marvelled.
& at night dreamt of
striding around town like
some vainglorious queen
in a dress of her wings
sewed together.
Then it was my birthday
& a party that required
much planning and the
laundry piled up in
little knolls,
and the car needed
new tires and the baby
split the night wide open
with his cries, clutching
his sore, shell-like ear
in the dark.
& how quickly
I forgot about the promise
of those green wings!
Red Dahlia
I.
Darkly involute florets. Deep red
of a young person’s
blood.
Faultless head.
II.
I could grab rough
hold of its pom-
pom blossom.
Stand between it and the sun it seeks. Crush it in my hand, when I’m sure no passersby are behind me
with their shopping bags
& her tender
gardener is asleep
in the house, unaware.
A pulling down
What has been built,
Grown. A destroyer of
Worlds on a Tuesday
morning.
(The first frost will
win anyway, so perhaps
it barely matters.)
III.
I am stronger than it,
this flower. Red Dahlia
Beauty.
And this poem is a decree,
a flag planted in the
dirt:
The choice to walk away
must count for something.
Molting Scarlet Tanager
Blood spattered
Yellow bird
On my October
Maple. Avian
Lieutenant
Come from
The Crusades—
Tail feathers
Open like a hand.
Everything is
Contrast
I’m learning:
Beauty is
Contrast. Red
Against
Yellow breast—
Bird King of
Hearts. Bursting
With old love.
I see we are all of
Us moving
Through the
World like this.
Some more
Cloaked,
Disavowing,
Than others—
Rachel Robb
is an English teacher living in Toronto. She placed 1st in Hamilton’s 2014 gritLit festival for a short portfolio of poems entitled, Notes from the First Year and 3rd in the 2016 Bridport Prize for flash fiction. In 2018, she graduated from the Humber School for Writers under the mentorship of Cherie Dimaline with a Letter of Distinction. Most recently, she placed 2nd in the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story (2022).