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Prose & Poetry
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Julietta Bekker / At bedtime, you pull orange curtains close / around your head. Sun hair mom, the only / nickname I’ll ever love.
Julietta Bekker / Fear kisses me awake. The panic of other / bodies, suddenly exposed,
Sofia Abbas / flushed homesick for Whimsy of that I forage while grazing / loose limbs through meadow, where I tug each blade to wed
Bart Edelman / I’ll get the hang of it soon. / Learn a trade well enough / To support me through
Bailey Quinn / Zinnias, proud and full. / Tender spine pressed flat, / leather scrunched and / well-loved,
Emilie Mendoza / when the asphalt is more water / than stone. I know rain / more than I know language.
Noralee Zwick / I count my lifetime in eggs. Today we eat three / for breakfast and move like wind.
Noralee Zwick / what you were looking for, yesterday night, with your keys dangling falsely / still by your fingers—
DC Restaino / BORN Nov. 22, 19XX —They leave behind: three sisters, born first, never met;
DC Restaino / Once, you broke out / of a fluid-filled shell— / a twin-fisted heart separating
DC Restaino / In the cast-offs of the yard shred / buds from root as Father’s harvesting taught / you remove unwanted/unuseful/unbountiful
DC Restaino / […] and our spawn’s spawn’s spawn, raised on the sermons of our feasting of her body,
Beth Sherman / In the first one she’s Sweet Sixteen at the Red Lobster, expecting gifts, balloons, a dozen friends shouting “Surprise.”
Sonya Wohletz / The idea of heaven, like the real thing— / being only a posteriori— / or perhaps described best in the / bureaucratic terms, after the fact
Sonya Wohletz / The old military fortress suffocates / into the flanks of the interstate / like a stuffed lung pressing against the ribcage,
Sonya Wohletz / The mornings of illness accumulated / in swelling globes of light within your belly. / As though you were gravid with miracle, / as though the miracle held illumination.
Sonya Wohletz / Precision can save your life, or it can destroy / you according to its simple sequence— / one protein misplaced, over.
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