From the Inaugural Issue of Lily Poetry

 

For an Orchard Suicide

Anthony G. Amsterdam

 

Yours was not the world’s end.

You thought it was, but when you’d built

your gallows of an apple tree,

a gold and onyx bee

buzzed about your dead hand

languidly.

 

Before the migrant workers came,

the tree had seen

snows, rains, rains,

rivulets of silt

and blooms.

 

Until a hump-backed beggar woman, all alone beneath a crescent moon,

plucked you down still green

and took you home and

fed a healthy infant your ripe milk.

Model Home

Eve Linn

 

A glacial hive

 

all passages       frozen

 

surfaces slick corners

 

sharp a door   a peephole    a glass

 

fisheye   faces   looked at me

 

we were the Shape-Me-Family

 

Father   Mother     Big Sister     little sister  

 

Father outside on the painted grass     Mother in the tub

 

with no water

Via Negativa
July Westhale

Broken like a double-yolk
in a skillet, I have found
vision, o lord, and I,
your weary chef coming off
a night shift, the diner neon
and palpating. Plastic flowers
in their vinyl booths
bring to me the most acute
sense of jealousy, jaundiced eye,
paralyzed by my own flesh-failings:
they’ll never perish, but move
from Bakelite vase to sodden
gravesite, how arduous and changing
their bereavement, I cannot know.

Ode to The House Dress

Maria Sebastian

 

And so even the children of hard-to-like mothers

find secret comfort in house dresses

reminiscent of those Mom wore to lean out

her warning-window for dinner reminders

 

the polyester kind never show signs

of opening pickle jars or beer bottles

lace trim frames housework as joyful
from cupboards to carpets to catnaps

few can tell when I pair one with heels

and wear it to work where students

may not recognize a house dress

until projected like a pop-culture skylight

peeking into kitchens of sitcom sweeties

and no matter our feminist findings

we miss our hovering TV honeys

who always fixed us a bite to eat

or a one-liner ready-to-serve hot or cold

ghetto-gowns glow in city courtyards

lean over laundry lines by Chinese tea houses

in floral patterns of long-gone gardens

 

grouped by color and hanging wall to wall

in Salvation Armies across America

house dresses wait like surrogate mothers

waving flags of forgiveness for everyone

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