Genre: Poetry

Maia McPherson

"She is hungry / her son is hungry her husband / is hungry so they sit at the table / and blink at each other / over quick-boiled pasta / and jar sauce."

Travis Hoyles

"We'd drive all day in dad's Dodge Shadow, / dodging shadows that the road spat forth at dusk;"

Travis Stephens

"In our forever mix tape Melissa / shouts, Rhiannon croons and / even Bonnie growls a bit, the / velvet of their voices bourbon / straight."

Naomi Dean

"The pantheon of life guards keeps tabs, / Banana Boat haze drifting down to mingle / with band-aids & chlorine, mildew & promise."

Norma DaCrema

"I’m trying to find the ravine around the bend, / the borrowed cars parked along the alfalfa / with all of us at sixteen making love by AM radio"

Norma DaCrema

"It's hard to breathe in here, / overwhelming warm like a Hallmark store, / heavy with mint and Miss Vance's Aviance."

Cerulean Walker

"I didn’t / even cry at books until this year, / let alone a world I don’t really even want to be a part of."

Elsa Valmidiano

"Now with the news all over the internet/you want to put me away/and call me a cursed woman./Can you now see why/I never told you?"

Adele Evershed

"don’t expect them to talk / of the suffering of women / they are not interested in the plight of the born"

Nicole Desjardins Gowdy

"Ophelia has words for her pain / she calls herself / survivor / she rises from the ashes of her former self"