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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


Pamela Wax

Talk Therapy

Oysshprekhn—”

my husband said

once, when I recited

my poems aloud

again and again

for breath

              and sound

                            and meter,

to trim the fat

and carve them

lean—


“after the camps—

the ones who talked

to themselves.”


He was not impugning

my mental health,

nor theirs. It’s how

they healed

themselves, he said.


“You remind me of them.”



Lightning Rod

for Jill


1.

My friend gets her hands dirty

in the public square, in tweets

and frays to the editor, stands

her sacred ground against liars

in wait, who phony up science

and rule of law. She absorbs bolts

of mobbed dissent, megaphones

our moby whales of grief,

echolocating, so we can hear

each other’s dirges

through acoustic fields of vision.


2.

In her private square, she plunges

to her elbows in honest dirt,

an asylum as cool as caverns

where stalactites drip; the moist

that earthworms inhale through skin,

so they can justice the plants

she’s mercied into pockets

of paradise. Outside the eye

of the storm, her field of vision

eclipses dirge. She can hear

a breezy hint of hum. It sounds

like whale. It sounds like bee.

Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have received several awards, as well as a Best of the Net nomination. An ordained rabbi, Pam offers online spirituality and poetry workshops from her home in the northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.

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