Fall 2016
The Flag Series: Fingers tracing Places of Aspiration
My work often involves the human figure, body pressure, and audience participation. It is propelled by a love for color and movement. These elements are an autobiographical link to my family’s history in the Caribbean Islands, New York City, and Central Virginia.
Two Poems by Sarah Bates
I remember myself in parts. November
morning without snow. Dusty footprints,
no brakes. I remember nothing.
Two Poems by Dorinda Wegener
If Your Family Owned a Mausoleum, then This Poem Would Make More Sense Your sisters have found corpses: beautiful one in the bath, the
Three Poems by Michelle Lewis
Animul/Flame Animul owned the sun that beat the back of the gavel-nosed deer. Around us, sweetbread mountains with their anatomical stone stone stone. I
Rat’s Nest
My mother said, my hair was like a rat’s nest, a rat’s nest plucked by a black capped chickadee for another nest or the start
Two Poems by Kathryn Merwin
Body Composition You wanted me to make you art, capture the way you breathe stars from the sky, disappear into the folds of my
Primitive
Primitive Now you want to make her faceless fling the greedy spit of acid splatter domination through iris and cornea gouge socket and cartilage
Two Poems by Sarah Escue
ON NIGHTS WHEN I AM MOTHERLESS Through the limbs of an ash tree, ash filters, reminds me of the nights we watched the storm
Amputee
Amputee The first time I witnessed my son’s boner, I gasped, then pretended not to see it, proceeded to help him into Spiderman underpants
Two Poems by Anne Champion
SALLY RIDE WATCHES THE CHALLENGER EXPLODE I know what it is to be boxed in hot light, ushered into more darkness, pinpricked by the
The Healing
When the half-moon, past a half night bent its light on the red-brown building,the misery, it quickened, the despair, it doubled, grim thoughts like fiends
Traveling Alone
When Patrice Hughes turned forty, her gift to herself was a week in Paris, alone. It was the Eighties, when the married women she knew
House Guest
I saunter slowly through the aisles of annuals and poppies, past flowering cacti and tiny Christmas trees following Michaelene in the Lowe’s Garden Center on
For Coq au Vin
Chef’s Knife The knife shriek shriek shrieks against the rod. Fluorescent light, bouncing, highlights the grain, smearing brightness on the white subway tiles. We are
Mar y Sol
Marisol’s daughter, Jaquelin, turned 19 yesterday. She and her 15-year-old brother have been pacing the pea-green fluorescent-lit hallways of the intensive care unit for days.
Searching for Her
I knew you were drunk last night. Not by the smell as much as the three times you called me beautiful. By the talk of
Essays on Production
I. That winter, I took up writing in an attempt to forget the countryside. My first play, carefully parsed out into eight acts, took place
The Disappearing Woman
We scrub March sludge, soak up
marsh chorus in our shared porcelain
tub under cloud-clad sky. We dive in
to the rain-clad quarry with naked acrobats.
I notice my body does not match.
Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath
Floating, supported in her mother’s
arms, the two
bodies crossed in eloquent
echo. Look and look