Poetry Winter 2023 fiction all issues
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Cover
Susan Wilkinson
Selena Spier
Red From The West
& other poems
Pamela Wax
Talk Therapy
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Honey Water
& other poems
Mark Yakich
Necessary Hope
& other poems
Bridget Kriner
A Few Lies & a Truth
& other poems
Keegan Shepherd
Silver Queen
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
Sacred Conflagration
& other poems
George Longenecker
Those Who Hunger
& other poems
Hailey Young
Ball Room
& other poems
Sébastien Luc Butler
Aubade
& other poems
Savannah Grant
Ever Since (v.2)
& other poems
grace (logan)
Dynamic
& other poems
Samantha Imperi
A Poem for the Ghosted
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Limerence
& other poems
Kayla Heinze
Stop checking the score
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Chasing Through to Dawn
& other poems
Alex Eve
A moment
& other poems
Robert Michael Oliver
Prison Hounds
& other poems
Samantha Imperi
A Poem for the Ghosted
This is a requiem for
the first fly I dismembered,
pulling limb from thorax and how easy it was to
separate round-body from spindle-leg. It is
difficult to catch a fly, it requires
patience, a steady hand.
Watch as I hold the gossamer
wing, disconnected at the joint
refractive shimmer glittering in the
florescent light, I wonder how many
pieces I can remove before it expires.
I imagine that I can hear it
screaming. Without legs and wings, it is not
a fly. It is a shining, metallic green-gold
shell that decorates my shelf. Without
legs or wings, the fly is both alive and dead.
If I loved anything, I would have
slid my thumbnail between the thorax
and head, severing the connection.
Certainty is a luxury. If you
want to know if the fly is dead
you have to kill it yourself.
Always.
I find you in my empty spaces.
I find you among the fallen leaves.
I draw you in the back garden.
I find you with a knife in hand.
I taste you in the salt and sugar.
I find you in bodies of water.
I find you in my empty spaces.
I see you with the blackbirds.
I empty you into a shoebox.
I dissolve you in a glass of gin.
I find you running in the darkness.
I hear you in the creaking and the groaning.
I find you in my empty spaces.
I find you in the dark corners of my closet.
I find you on a dusty bookshelf.
I wash you out of my hair.
I find you in the sand.
I toss you into the ocean.
I lean against your shadow.
I find you in piles of dirty laundry
I find you in all of my empty spaces.
I eliminate every trace of you, but still,
I find you.
2022
Kilgore Trout turns off the television after twenty solid hours of CNN
He opens Twitter to a stream of feminist liberals complaining about the legislation being written about women’s bodies.
He puts his phone down.
He takes out his laptop and writes a story about an alien who is raped and impregnated by a human male.
The alien returns to its home planet where it gives birth
to the first human/alien hybrid the planet has ever seen.
The child grows up to be a great leader on its planet, but after learning the truth of its origins, it orchestrates an invasion of Earth.
The aliens kill every male on Earth.
Earth’s women are left with the sperm in sperm banks to artificially inseminate themselves to create a new generation of men, raised exclusively by women.
Women are finally allowed to make decisions about their own bodies.
No one ever reads the story.
Eliot Rosewater is long dead.
This is how I find you:
naked in the kitchen cracking eggs into a pan.
I turn on Saturday morning NPR and sit
at the kitchen table in my robe and watch you.
Time is a car I drive
from one memory to the next
and I pause at this one long enough to take a picture,
to remember you there
with your hair a mess
and your flaccid penis inches from the edge of the hot stove.
Your God followed you
from the bed to the kitchen to the table
with two plates in hand
and made you beg forgiveness before breakfast
for the sin of loving me last night.
I believe instead that the Tao will nourish me but so will
these eggs.
From them I am born and to them I will return.
So says my god: I am one with everything
even you and your flaccid penis.
Turn off the radio, I say lets go back to bed.
But you leave it on.
You want to love me to the sound of Peter Sagal
and a live studio audience.
Later, at the grocery store,
I buy butter, bread, milk, more eggs.
I forget this moment.
I’m fine
(CW: Rape and Violence)
She says
Rape is a piece of rotten meat,
devoured by flies. Did you know that
flies that bite you are just trying
to eat you? We’re all just a breath away from
rotten meat.
She says
I still don’t know what it was.
He loved me. He was angry. I had hurt him. He said I
deserved what I got. I know that’s bullshit but still,
I never said no.
She says
good and evil are a
spectrum: what’s the inherent evil in the act
of reading the newspaper versus raping
your girlfriend? Who got hurt? I’m
fine.
She says
every knot he tied
to bind me after that was a noose
strung to an ancient oak tree. He never
knew because I never told him.
She says
our intimacy became a pile of dead things
on the floor of our bedroom. I hated the feel
of his spit on my lips, the taste of his breathe in
my mouth.
She says
you know, he stopped on
his own, when he realized he was hurting
me. How does an angry, volatile man
draw the line between kink and rape?
What if I was afraid of him long
before he decided that an
invasion of my body was an
adequate punishment for infidelity?
She says
I still don’t blame him. I don’t
blame anyone. It’s just a thing that happened
a long time ago. Like I said, I’m
fine.
Samantha Imperi
is a Ph.D. Poetry student at Ohio University. She received her MFA from the NEOMFA program at the University of Akron in 2023. Her work can be found in Wild Roof Journal, The Great Lakes Review, and the Festival Review, among others. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @simperi08 or visit www.samanthaimperiauthor.com for more information.